The New Math
Part II. Parallel Lines
by Rachel Levine

    
1) I gave David a button.
2) David said to me that we create meaning by giving care and attention to small things.

    “My husband said that to me,” I said to David.
    “You were married?” he asked as if it were inconceivable, incredible. “What happened?”
    “I don’t know, but now it’s someone else’s story. I just know the details better than anyone else.”

    I was reflecting on everything in my life that needed care and attention while jogging around the neighborhood at the bottom of the Montreal mountain, St. Henri, when I found the button. A button is such a small thing, I thought, an object in need of care and attention. I picked it up so I could give it to David as if he were the one who had lost it. I carried it in my sock for the rest of my run, then strung it around my neck with yarn from an unfinished sweater and carried it that way until I found him at work. He wore the button as I had, around his neck, on the string.

    “You were married.” he said, laughing.
    “I was married,” I said. “I know a lot about unhealthy relationships. Things went wrong.”

Things went wrong. One time Jacob didn’t talk to me for about three weeks. No argument, no perceptible cause. He stopped talking. Just like that. It started after he watched Seinfeld one night, the Soup Nazi episode. I was in the kitchen, reading, and I saw him get up and sit down at the computer in the study. “What are you doing?” I asked, coming into the room, curious, running my hand along the bookshelves. He kept his books in alphabetical order by subject and publisher. He collected works of Japanese fiction, Victor Frankl, and Graham Greene. I asked, “Are you okay?” He glared at me. “Well, okay,” I said, sort of snarky, but not seriously, “Be like that.”

I retreated to my own study upstairs. We each had our own study because we lived in an enormous apartment. I kept a futon in my study, as I liked to lie on my back and watch the shadows from the leaves of the trees dance on the wall. I began methodically reviewing our interactions from the day, the week, the month to try and find the cause for the cold treatment. Had I done something specific? Nothing seemed obvious. Just hours earlier we had been talking about whether Toronto should bail the Caribanna festival out of its debt, the character of the landscape in a Tarkovsky movie he had rented the night before, our neighbour’s persistent nudity, and whether Dr. Campbell was right or not to explode at the Introduction to Art History class for being rude and immature. But then we had drifted into our own spheres, as was typical. In fact, by all reckoning, everything had been blissful for as long as I could think back. I decided to leave him alone. He would eventually reach the conclusion of whatever had come down on his head.

He didn’t come to bed, didn’t leave his study. As far as I knew, he just sat at the computer.

The next morning, I tried again, “Hey, are you okay?” I asked, this time with care. “Should I be concerned? Do you need help?”

He looked at me and then went back to what he was doing. His silence continued on into the next day and the day after. I didn’t get angry, but I tried to become softer, kinder, gentler. I thought he might be in trouble and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do. I didn’t raise my voice or try to force him to speak. I brought him tea and cookies. He remained silent, eating the cookies slowly and mechanically, never taking his eyes from the computer screen.

I was worried he had lost his mind, but then I heard him telephone Kate to substitute in for his classes. He didn’t explain why, he just told Kate what he last did and what Kate should cover in class. He laughed at something Kate said and answered, “It’s complicated.”

At the end of the first week, I tried one last time to speak to him. “Tell me what’s going on. Whatever it is.” He glared at me, an intruder. I left the room and waited. What was there to do? I sat outside the door of the study with my head against the frame. I think I sat like that for hours. I remember my parents calling and asking what was going on and I smiled even though they couldn’t see and said, “Everything’s great.”

In the third week, he left the computer at 11 p.m. and returned every morning around 4 a.m. He didn’t come to bed. I don’t know if he slept.

Finally, I was exhausted with the situation. Maybe he had lost his mind and was dangerous. Maybe he would kill me while I slept. As soon as I realized the potential for violence, I couldn’t stay anymore. Sometimes it has to be me and not you, I thought, and I’m not going to get angry. But I was angry. I was afraid. And, mostly, I was sad. I packed a bag and rolled up the rugs and piled them against the wall of the living room. Then, I went to work at the library and brought my friend Anna some cheese from Whole Foods Market and organic red grapes and crackers because she liked cheese and grapes. Her husband drove me home in their brand spanking new two-week-old Volkswagen Beetle with the fake plastic daisy on the dashboard, just like the commercials.

When I went upstairs, Jacob was standing at the top of my steps, waiting with my bag and a packed bag of his own. “Don’t leave me,” he said. “Please.”

I pushed past him into another room. He followed me, carrying both bags, while I walked from room to room, pacing and enraged.

“It isn’t what you think,” he said, answering a question I didn’t ask. “I lost track of time.”

“That was mean,” I said, turning around.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. It was mean. You’re right. But it wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t about you.”

“I don’t want to stay,” I said. “That was really mean. I want to leave. And I especially don’t want to see you.”

“If you leave, then I am going to leave with you.”

All the weeks of rage that had been sublimated bubbled up in me. “You know what? That wasn’t mean. That was fucked up,” I said. I grabbed my bag out of his hand. “You’re really fucked up,” I said, “That was the meanest fucking thing anyone ever did to me. How could you not talk to me for three weeks? I don’t want to see you ever again.”

He didn’t say anything, but started to cry. “Don’t leave me,” he sobbed. “You can’t leave me.”

“I can leave you,” I said. “You are a fucked up bastard. And that was really, really fucking mean. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on with you and that was total and complete bullshit.”

“Please,” he begged. “I don’t know. But don’t leave. What can I do to make you stay?”

“Nothing.”

I stomped down the stairs. He began to cry louder, like a child. I cursed him in my head. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I stopped. I padded myself up and down because I had forgotten something. I had forgotten my keys and I wouldn’t be able to drive the car or get back into the apartment without them. I dropped the bag and kicked it. I would have to go back upstairs and find the keys. I would have to talk to him again.

I stomped up the stairs. “Do you know where my keys are?” I asked.

“No,” he said, sniffing, “Wait. They’re on the kitchen counter, next to the dish thingy. You always forget your keys.”

I took the keys and walked into the bathroom and shut the door. I looked at myself in the mirror and put my head against the glass and started to cry. I could hear Jacob slumped up against the bathroom door, weeping. Listening to Jacob cry was making me sick. I sat down on the floor and began wadding up the toilet paper. Where was I going to go? The damage had been done. It was over. I could have left at any point, but stayed. I’d taken the worst and it was over. I couldn’t undo it. I could only assure myself that I would never go through it again.

I opened the bathroom door and went downstairs to get my bag. Jacob followed me. He carried his bag with him.

“I’m not going to leave you,” I said.

We drove up to Barrie at 3 a.m. and bought 80 Tim Bits and waged war on one another in the parking lot around a tree and a fire hydrant. Then we sat in the car and listened to the radio and looked at the sky. Finally, I said, “I want to go home,” and we drove back and went to sleep. He always slept curled up around me, and his arm was always too heavy. I almost forgot that story, until now, until I told it.

    For eight years, from the day he moved into my room at University, which would be the day we got together, to the day I told him to leave, Jacob and I loved each other, but it was a damaged and difficult love. Think alcoholism without the alcohol. Think drug addiction without the drugs. Think physical abuse without physical violence. Think emotional abuse, but without the abuse. I suppose that leaves emotional, but maybe there was no emotion and it was all abuse. Love and abuse inhabited our home, a tension, coexisting like the roots and the leaves of a tree, one below and one above, each one nourishing the other. When people ask me what happened, I’d say it just went wrong, preferring not to think of myself the kind of person who tolerates an abusive situation. Or maybe not wanting to remember. Or maybe not wanting to explain.  Things went wrong.

    On paper it never should have failed. We were even astrologically compatible if you believe in that kind of thing. In a parallel universe, we are still together. I do not live in Montreal. Jacob works for an NGO related to AIDS patients. I teach at the University of Toronto. We are both writing books. We have sunny dispositions. We live in a house with yellow walls in the south part of the Annex, by Central Tech on Harbord Street. We have a big tree on the front lawn that sheds all its flowers in two days at the start of summer. We go to the film festival every September and watch 30 movies that are never released in theaters. Friends sleep on our couches and come to our outrageously homemade gourmet dinner parties. I have an enviable garden with tulips from a catalogue and sunflowers and we even grew heritage tomatoes this year. We want to buy a summer home or maybe go to India. I catch myself thinking, “I am so happy. How did I get here?” Perhaps I am even bored. When I long for an exciting life, a different life, a troubled life, I envision the parallel life that I could have led, but then I remember that you have to work damn hard to have a balanced life and it is no small achievement in this world.

    When David asks me again, “What happened?” I continue, “I don’t know what happened.”

As if I hadn’t thought about it. From time to time, I would pick the situation up and examine it, like a specimen preserved in a jar of formaldehyde, and then finding nothing new, leave it on the coffee table as a curio for visitors. The Wrong in the marriage could not be broken down into explanations. Volatility was its indivisible essence. An elementary particle.

    Yes, I really was married, I tell David. Stop smiling at me. I want to wipe that fucking smile off your face. No, that’s not true. Keep smiling. I never would have met you if I were still married. I wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t gotten married either. Even this moment is one of the countless alternative lives I could be in.

    I know why it worked, when it worked which was most of the time.
    We thought about life the same way.
    Life is meaningless.
    There was no master plan, no reason for existence. An accident in the primordial soup. We should have been despondent, but instead, as we were both fans of Plato rather than Camus, we had a salutary myth, an invented belief or a system that guided us in the absence of anything else. We believed in our own lie for lack of another explanation:
    Life’s meaning was where we assigned it.
    Is it any wonder that all the small things were of tremendous symbolic value?

    We survived so many things together. Deaths. Births. Illnesses. Recoveries. Injuries. Miracles. Accidents. Excuses. Promotions. Demotions. Job Losses. Friends. Lovers. Moving across borders. Fights. Reunions. Trips. Fires. Burglaries. Packing. Unpacking. Traveling. Pets. Parents. Siblings. Gatherings. Bad Televsion. Newspapers. Phobias. Panic Attacks. Depressions.

We had a motto. It’s you and me against the world.

We had our own greeting and departure rituals. To greet each other, one person would say, “Hey, hey,” and the other would respond, “What, what?” Our departure ritual was superstitious. I always left first, but I would turn back to look and wave. Jacob would watch me walk out of sight and recite his litany of protection for me, some lines from a poem by Rumi. Then he would count 7 steps precisely, recite his litany again, and take steps 5 more.

We had our own language. There were words for things that only we understood, acronyms. PORWM was Pastrami on Rye with mustard. FTWMSAS was French Toast with Maple Syrup and Strawberries. We liked nonsense words. Frigglewop. Intchian. Kantadellic. We had our own codes. We had our own games. We both liked the game “Read My Mind.” What song am I thinking about? What number am I thinking of? We were really good at that game. 7 or 8 times out of 10, we were able to guess.

Oh. The. Clutter. Everything was important. Everything had value.

We bought a set of 6 heavy glasses with blue rims from a Mexican store that was up the block from our apartment in Toronto the week we moved in. We jokingly argued over who would get to keep them if we broke up. Since there were 6, we would each get 3. These were our first glasses, as compared with unmatched cast-aways from friends and family, the plastic cup with a half-faded He-Man figure from a 7-11 promotion.

All objects, though, have finite lives. All goes to dust and atoms. The first glass broke after being removed from the dishwasher. I poured cold water into the hot glass and it cracked in my hands. A second chipped at the rim. They fell like brave soldiers until only two glasses remained when we broke up and they ended up with Jacob.
He packed all the things he was taking with him into LCBO boxes in the living room. He filled two whole rooms with cartons of books and papers and clothing, the spices from the racks, the art, the dishes, the stereo, the television, the computer, the CDs, the DVDs, rugs, shampoo, extension cords, the rubber tree. Ours split into his and mine, separate but equal.

Ending it was my choice, although it didn’t seem like a choice to me. Every force meets its equal and opposite force, and as far as I was concerned, my action was reaction. These consequences were outlined. If this happens, then the result is. “I am leaving you this time,” I told him, “There is no debate. The discussion is over. You made the decision for me.”

When I found out about his other life, I reduced to a state of sub-xistence and washed everything in grey and stuffed my ears with static. I was under water and gasping for air. I took up residence on the couch and did not leave it except to go to the bathroom or walk the dog. I didn’t shower, didn’t eat apart from a bag of oreos, didn’t respond to questions or answers, didn’t sleep. I lived for that month with goods amassing in boxes in the living room beside me as he worked like an ant to clear out. Methodical and slow, just like he ate cookies or read books. Once, when he was gone for the day at work, I weakly poked in the boxes, looking for indications and signs that this decision was the right decision, that love had been more in my head than in my hands.

    The simple answer is that Jacob had a fidelity problem.
    “That isn’t love,” David says.
    “No, it isn’t,” I say. I am only being agreeable.
    We are often at our worst with the people we love the most.

    When I caught him of cheating the first time (because he cheated many times), I found a love letter from the girl tucked into a book. She drew a chain of hearts along the edge of a piece of stationery using two different pens. She signed the letter XOXO. I was offended, not just because he had an affair and had deceived me, but mainly because I thought she was an idiot. She signed the “i” in her name with a big circle. Her name ended with the letter i and it made me hate her. The affair was probably over, but it didn’t matter. There are consequences. There are reactions. Even if he never cheated again after her, I might have ended it anyway. Catalysis can be slow.
    I called his cell phone and told him to come home. He was in class, teaching, and he had all the students say hello in unison. They all knew who I was because he told them about me and he passed a picture of me standing in a towel around. Sometimes they came by the library and said hello. “You’re Professor Hill’s wife.” “Yeah, That’s me.” “He talks about you all the time.” “Really?” “He’s the best teacher I ever had.” When he finished teaching his tutorial, he came home with groceries for dinner – a baguette, steak, cheese, tomatoes.
    I gave him the letter and said, “This is yours. I have to leave.” He didn’t explain. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “I don’t know. I’m leaving,” I said. I walked down the stairs and down the street. Everything green had turned red and the sky fell on me, an oppressive weight of the world. I kept reciting poetry I had memorized in high school to myself. Nature’s first green is gold. I sing the song of myself. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I stepped into the streets without looking, unaware of cars and people and buses. I walked down to the waterfront and then out to the beaches and then across the city on the Danforth and up to North York on Young Street. I walked half the perimeter of my city, not even my real home, but now my city. I was a foreigner, and I had only come for him. I can leave in the spring, when I hear back about where I’ve been accepted for the Ph.D., I thought. I can go to Yale, maybe, or Johns Hopkins. I can leave him and it will hurt. I sat and watched birds. It was dusk, then it was night and then it was daybreak and I saw three stars. I was cold, so I went back to the apartment. Something smelled wrong and thick as soon as I opened the door, but I didn’t run up the stairs. While I was out, he cut his wrists and wrote words on the walls of the bathroom and the hallway with his blood. I found him sitting in an empty bathtub, holding his knees. He had attempted to bandage his own wrists with ace bandages, which were soaked through with blood. I went into myself and dug through possible explanations until I found one that was useful. I can get through this moment and so can he. “I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “Stay. Don’t leave me.” It didn’t seem crazy, just a bad moment, just a bump, a gap, a shuffle in our history. “Were you trying to kill yourself?” I asked. “No,” he said, despondently. “You made a fucking mess,” I said. “I’ll clean it up,” he said. “I think you need to go to the hospital,” I said to him, and we did.
We sat in the waiting room and all around us were pregnant women. They gave him 8 stitches on each arm, painkillers, an anti anxiety pill, and a prescription for Zoloft.
    While he slept, I began to clean the bathroom. The whole thing seemed quite funny when I realized that he’d written the lyrics to Neil Diamond’s Turn on your Heartlight.  

    I found the Mexican glasses and hid one in the bathroom.
    Mine.
    Jacob and I did not like to separate pairs.
    This was defiance at its highest, a complete rejection of our superstition about pairs, an act of movement against my façade of will-less-ness, and a claim on our history.

    When the boxes were gone, Jacob came back that night. He sat on the bench on the porch. He sat for hours outside. I tried to ignore him, but I could feel him in my body anyway. I let him in the apartment and he climbed beside me on the couch and held me.  
    “I don’t want to leave,” he said, crying into my hair, snot running down his face into my hair. “This is my home. You are home,” he choked again, “Not like this. Not for this. I have to tell myself that I’m coming back. Tell me I can come back.”
    “Okay. Is that what you need to hear? You can come back,” I said. Flat, dull, a straight line on the monitor. “Maybe later.”
    “Can I call?”
    I did not respond. I wanted the earth to swallow me and turn me into a tree and a myth.
     “Look at me,” he said, and I faced back to him.
    He stroked my hair. “I always worry about you. You know that. You know I worry about you all the time, the minute you are out of my sight I start to worry. I don’t know why I hurt you. I wasn’t thinking at the time of the consequences. I didn’t even think there would be consequences because I didn’t think you’d know. It was a double life. I was living a double life. And I never thought it would end for us. They didn’t last. And we could overcome anything. I need to know that you’re going to be okay.”
    “I’m not okay. Just go away. Go away. Just go,” I said. I was tired and closed my eyes.
    Jacob left and I….

    It took time to wake up, years, but eventually you come back to yourself and get strong where you need to and find your way. I eventually left Toronto. I still have the glass, which has followed me to Calgary to Victoria to Montreal. It is my favorite glass. It has different meaning to me now. It is a glass of survival, from Jacob, from depression, from change, from all the forces that conspire against me. I still don’t quit on the things I want, but I try to be choosier about what I want.

    The first night I brought the button to give to David he was not there. Instead, his friend and fellow art-studio-mate-moonlighting-as-bouncer Albert was there. We talked about photography, about my desire to start an internet company. Albert has two kids and a girlfriend. His parents watch his children. He is exceedingly busy. There is something tiring about that kind of life, the family life. Sometimes it is easier to take care of one person and it’s not half an existence to be alone.
    “I really wanted to give David this button,” I said.
    “He’ll be back tomorrow, I am sure,” Albert said.

    I don’t know why I stayed with Jacob through these kinds of things, but I did. I keep him with me even now. When facing a difficult situation, I ask myself, “What would Jacob do? What would Jacob think?” He had a clearer mind than I did. He could reason things out. He could see the big picture. He didn’t panic. He didn’t have panic attacks. He wasn’t plagued by insecurity or purposelessness. He could see the end of things in a way I never could. He dealt with the landlord who was a lecherous. He fielded phonecalls from my parents. He was the other half of every conversation. I ask the Jacob of my mind to accompany me when I am walking by myself, so I am never alone. When I am at the end of things, I can hear his voice in my head saying the only words I ever needed in an unpredictable, quasi-meaningless existence, “Everything is going to be okay.”

But, since him, the colors of the world changed subtly, my heart shifted, my well deepened. Even he changed. He was no longer of flesh and blood, but a visceral, psychic presence, an invisible cord of energy that stretched from my abdomen or sometimes my back, stretching across space and plugging into the real him. I always pick up his static. He picks up mine. At times, I picture myself hacking this psychic cord with a machete, but it grows back. So, I wear it like I wear the plastic ring around my ankle.
Jacob always resurfaces. He is not happy being just an imagined presence and I am his addiction.
    He calls.
    “I don’t know if I’m ever going to finish my thesis,” I say.
    “Of course you will. You’re closer than I ever came. You’ll get there. Don’t let your parents bully you.”
    “I think it’s going to take a week longer than I thought.”
    “That’s a drop in the bucket,” he says. “One week to seven years.”
    “Two weeks maybe.”
    “Semantics.”
    “I think I made a new friend here.”
    “Who?” he asks.
    “A photographer. He moonlights as a bouncer. I don’t know him that well. It’s a weird friendship”
    “Why?”
    “We don’t get along that well. But that’s okay. He gets annoyed at me. But I think it’s good for me to know him. Maybe I’ll learn to be more careful about what I say. Besides, it’s not what you take, it’s what you give and I have a button for him.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I’m not sure. I don’t want to freak him out. Or take it the wrong way. But I kind of think he’d get it. He’s an artist and other things.”
    “Like what?”
    I want to tell Jacob about my life these days, but I don’t.
    “He’s a guy. He plays basketball and baseball,” I say. This seems like a neutral observation. “I think he said he was a shortstop.”
     “Then he can’t be that bad,” Jacob says, “I was a pitcher.”
    “That’s right. I forgot.”
    “Remember when we broke the mirror of the car throwing rocks in my backyard.”
    “Shit. In Beaverkill. At your parent’s. Of course I do.”
    I start laughing, recalling the thunk of the rock and the sound of the glass breaking and tinkling to the ground and then us running to hide behind the garage and laughing until we were both lying on the ground crying. It was spring and dandelion fluff was snowing in the air. Blue sky. Green lawn. White clouds. Sheep on the hills. Flowers, air, sunshine. We had some beautiful days, Jacob and I, some moments in other beautiful lives.

    The next night, David is back and from a distance, I can see him smiling as I am walking on the street. Maybe Albert told him I had the button for him. When I am close enough, I put it around his neck.
    “I found it while running,” I say, “And I was thinking about what you said. So I had to give it to you.”
    He holds it out and looks at it.
    “This is the best thing anyone has given me in awhile,” he says.
    “I held it in my sock while running,” I say proudly.
    He makes a face.
    “What are those things?” I ask about his other necklace. It is a cord with two leather pieces one attached at opposite ends.
    “Those are my saints,” he says, “They watch my back and they watch my front.”
    “I think I need some saints,” I say, “I could use someone who watches my back.”