Eye to Eye Read online

  Atlanta’s A-list, invited to the theme-wedding of the new Millennium, were instead treated to a surprise ending. The grooms letter, found moments before the bride was to walk down the aisle, allegedly reads: “Maggie Mae, I always loved you. But this isn’t what I wanted. And I can’t stand Scarlett O’Hara.” The bride could not be reached for comment.

  I could hear Toni opening and closing my cabinet doors, probably looking for a mug. Below the rest of the article was a long and detailed list of the expenses, most of which were of the decidedly nonrefundable variety. Whomever Maggie Mae’s Rhett Butler-Jones was, he had screwed her and her family over in grand, passive-aggressive fashion.

  “It’s a cautionary tale for bridezillas everywhere,” I comment. “You think he decided it just wasn’t worth the money?”

  “I don’t know,” Toni hollers. “It definitely gives one pause. Or maybe there was some Ashley Wilkes out there that no one yet knows about. Maybe she should have read the whole book before she planned the wedding. She could have seen this coming.”

  Toni emerges from the kitchen and sits on the sofa with her coffee and a Pop-Tart.

  “You want to be even more grossed out?” she asks. “I just heard that three literary agents have already contacted her for rights to the story—how she’s going to ‘carry on’ in the face of it.”

  “You’re joking? Tell her to try working for a living to pay off the wedding herself. Now that’s a story I’d like to see. Did anyone let her know that there were moments that even Scarlett O’Hara worked for a living?”

  Toni shakes her head. “You mind?” she asks, lifting the Pop-Tart. “I couldn’t resist. You have strawberry frosted.”

  “I know. Some people talk to their inner child—I just buy mine sugar food products.”

  Toni takes a bite of the Pop-Tart and closes her eyes in a state of bliss.

  “God, I love sugar and hydrogenated fats in the morning. Best thing about being broken up. My ass can go temporarily to hell.”

  “So you want to talk about this crackhead,” I say, pointing at the paper. “Or you want to tell me what happened with Tino?”

  Toni leans her head against the back of the sofa and rolls over on her side.

  “It was gothic. It’s still gothic. I decided the best thing to do would be to rip it off, like a Band-Aid. So we went out to the Atlanta Fish Market because we’re always cracking each other up about the big fish in front, and dinner is so good, and I’m sitting there thinking about how much I like him and how much I hate him at the same time for being such a bigot underneath it all, and I…”

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

  “This is so nuts,” she says. “It’s embarrassing even to say. I start crying, not blubbering, but start sniffling there in the middle of the restaurant. Then, I swear, it devolved into some of the highest melodrama ever, where sometime between the valet and my apartment, I was like, I’m black, and you don’t even know who I am, and you won’t even date black women, and who do you think you are, and the hell with you, and door slam, pounding on door, Lotto in the background yelling, ‘nice can, beeatch.’ It was five-star shitty.”

  She puts the coffee mug down and heads back to the kitchen.

  “You mind if I have another Pop-Tart?”

  “Please. I only ever eat them in pairs.”

  “I tried going on an other date, but I just hate everyone right now. And he’s left, like, ten messages, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Did he have anything remotely sensible to say for himself? Not that there’s anything that would make it better. I’m just curious.”

  “Doris. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I barely even gave him the chance to speak. I mean, who isn’t fucked up about race in this crazy city, in this crazy country? The last black guy I went out with in Atlanta, he was always going on about how ‘Asians can’t drive’ and I know he just liked that I was light skinned, even though I didn’t call him out on it. Why do I pick this guy to eviscerate? The one guy I like.”

  She breaks the Pop-Tart in half and picks at the filling.

  “Well, if that’s your concern, you can at least let him say his piece. Just for the sake of really knowing.”

  She finishes hollowing out the Pop-Tart, and wraps the edges in her napkin.

  “You’re probably right,” she says. “I’d better get changed and head to work. Thanks for hearing me out.”

  “I thank you for the newspaper. And don’t hesitate to knock when you need to talk. Let me know what happens.”

  The best part of being an academic is having the occasional weekday afternoon entirely at your disposal. And since the park trails are now safe, I decide to take that as an opportunity to try jogging. I lace up my New Balance running shoes and stretch as if I can go more than half a mile without wheezing. I think that I make it about seven city blocks before I have to downgrade to power-walk, which thankfully, is embarrassing only to me. More embarrassing only to me, my iPod is blasting some scary old Duran Duran, and I am cheeseball enough to wish that I’d downloaded the entire album. Strapped to my other hip is my cell phone, which vibrates gently against my leg just as I’m about to pick up the pace. I look at the display. Zach.

  “Hold on,” I say. “I have to turn this down.”

  “What? I don’t hear anything.”

  “‘Girls on Film.’ It’s my favorite part about not dating you anymore. I don’t have some music snob rolling his eyes every time I break out Journey’s Greatest Hits, or crank up the badass Duran Duran.”

  “Then that would be both of our favorite part about not dating anymore.”

  I seriously think about throwing the cell phone on the ground.

  “You know you’re interrupting my exercise regimen. Got a good reason?”

  “Just saw on the news they found that Altanta bride. I told you that marriage does stupid things to people.”

  I now have a little unironic Air Supply kicking in on my right ear, and the god of cynicism echoing in my left.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t hear you over ‘Lost in Love.’”

  “Doris,” he says, “do yourself a favor and destroy that CD. Do everyone a favor and destroy it.”

  “Why? Because your shriveled little heart has no room for marriage or Air Supply? I know you think marriage is a bankrupt institution of state control and blah, blah, blah. Do you know how unoriginal that is? From an academic? It’s so predictable it’s like guessing country music lyrics when you’ve got the first half of the rhyme. And I think we had this argument about a million times already.”

  “Fine,” he says. “I just wanted to tell you that I’d been thinking about you.”

  “Were you thinking that you’d like to come down to Atlanta and tell me that in person? Or that you’d changed your mind and wanted to work things out?”

  Long pause from the other end.

  “Zach,” I say, “I have so much on my mind right now. I don’t even know if they like how I’m doing my job. I can’t do this other thing right now. I just can’t.”

  “I have to go,” he says.

  “You called me. I have to go. I have laps to jog.”

  I click the phone off and, motored by sheer annoyance, make it a mile around the park without stopping.

  Much as the story of Maggie Mae Mischner annoys me, on a gross-conspicuous-consumption level, I think it bothers me even more after talking to Zach. I tend to err on the Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally side vis-à-vis men and marriage. In other words, if a man tells you that he “just doesn’t want to get married” or “can’t move to be near you right now” it generally means “I sure as hell don’t want to marry you” and “living closer to you is my idea of hell.” Ronnie disagrees with me on this, as she has no desire to be married, to Earl or anyone else. That, and she accuses me of being overly dramatic. I told her that I think she has a latent Y chromosome somewhere in there affecting her thinking, and she told me to stop reading so many women’s
magazines. But I can’t help it. I loved the idea of Zach and I having some (nicely furnished) half-hippie homestead where we wrote, and had some kooky bratty kid, and he knit booties for the kid, and I mail-ordered inappropriate clothing from Bluefly to wear around our hippie home. When I got my job, however, the dream shifted. It became more practical. Would Zach be willing to take a step out of his comfort zone for me? Could he be the person who followed me to a new town, and let my career take the lead for a year or two?

  I was actually the only one of us who ever mentioned marriage.

  I believe I said something like, “Why don’t we just get hitched and move to Atlanta?” Very, very romantic.

  Zach let me know, in no uncertain terms, that he respected my views on marriage almost as much as my taste in music. “It’s as though you’ve never seen an actual marriage,” he said back. “Marriage isn’t a bandage. It’s not going to make us get along better, and it’s not going to make me want to move to Atlanta.”

  To hear him tell it, marriage was nothing if not work. A long extended battle for solidarity punctuated by huge losses, small victories, and an ongoing march forward. He made it sound less like raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and more like trench warfare. And I know that Zach is half-right. When Ronnie talks about Bita and Charlie, I think, “Yes, that is what marriage does to two perfectly happy people. It makes them strangers. It reduces them to sneaking around a house they share.” Yet, I still have to think that some people make it work, some people can love and support each other, some people feel joy for making the plunge.

  Maggie Mae Mischner is a cautionary tale about romance writ large. I don’t really think that Maggie Mae Mischner deserves a book contract because I can’t imagine she has anything much different to say than any other woman spoon-fed decades of wedding stories and celebrity nuptials. This is where Zach never understood my point of view—he would have put me in the Mischner camp, but I was advocating something different. Not romance, but love. Not weddings, but a life together. Not white dresses and picket fences, but a person who knows you totally and has your back. And that, on occasion, requires sacrifice, from the man, as well as the woman.

  None of the romantic comedies end with the couple loving each other but wanting different things. I don’t recall seeing Meg Ryan end a movie with, “I’m sorry, but I’ve worked too hard to get where I am, and I’m just not ready to give that up yet. Maybe I’m just not sure.” Conversely, what is the Tom Hanks of the real-not-romantic world supposed to do? It seems that when couples hit a crossroads, there’s this whole check-and-balance system of whose dream matters more. I know that in my real-life scenario, I’ve been slightly fascist about this—my dream matters more because I stayed in school, because it makes more money, because I stuck with it, because it was harder to come by. But really, is that a fair way to look at things? Is Zach supposed to change who he is because it doesn’t suit my lifestyle? Just because I don’t understand what he wants, and honestly, I do not, does that necessarily make it wrong?

  By the end of most films, the characters have reached a paradise that looks nothing like compromise, and chucked whatever veneer of individuality they had for that most elusive of romantic ideals: love. Their two become one so, so seamlessly.

  But normal men and women? For normal men and women, hard choices with unsatisfying ends are what we deal in all the time. And it starts to feel like a lot of half-baked choices that aren’t so much choices as forced hands that have you checkerboarding across the country, possibly losing the people that you truly care about. The people who made your life what it once was: special. And am I expected to go on like this for the sake of an academic career, coasting from place to place, from person to person, feeling slightly more detached at each juncture? Or worse yet, getting good at it?”

  Given my general level of grouchiness, it’s probably best that the end of the week is the actual day of my date with Maxwell, which brings me back to the one place where romance still thrives. The poetry classroom. Paige Prentiss and I are engaging in an uneasy standoff. I try to pretend that I don’t know or care that she’s possibly sleeping with a man old enough to be her grandfather and also, perhaps, studying my liberal tendencies and reporting me to the university higher-ups in a so-called attempt to protect her right to an apolitical education. She tries to pretend that she never saw me in the hall with Antonius Block that day, let alone reported me to her conservative coalition.

  This week we’re discussing sonnets, and I don’t even pretend that all this nonsense hasn’t gotten to me. I could have brought in biting social commentary by Claude McKay or Gwendolyn Brooks. The sonnet transformed into political statement, divorced from its romantic roots and rejuvenated for the twentieth century. That, of course, runs the risk of discussing actual issues, so I settle on Edna St. Vincent Millay, also on occasion political, but politics aside, one of the definitive writers of the anti-love sonnet.

  As I’m collating today’s packet of material to hand out to the class, a tall, tanorexic woman who looks close to my age, but of an entirely different genus of female, enters the room. She’d probably be pretty were she not wearing a full pound of makeup, salmon-colored skirt-suit in a size four or six, gold dripping from her neck, wrists, and fingers like she bleeds the stuff and started to hemorrhage before class. Her hair is dark and professionally blown out. The supershiny lip gloss is a trampy nude. It’s one of those outfits that is supposed to signal money, but mostly signals a complete lack of taste or judgment.

  “Ms. Weatherall,” she starts.

  And then Paige Prentiss corrects her, “It’s Dr. Weatherall, Mom. Don’t be an idiot.”

  Paige Prentiss has a mother. An actual uterus from which she was no doubt ripped. A tacky, clinging to her twenties, clearly overchurched (this judging from the hubcap-size cross hanging prominently between her pushed up breasts), probably twice-divorced mom. Ms. Prentiss looks slightly stung, but immediately overcorrects with a hyperwide smile and officious shrug of the shoulders.

  “You don’t look like you could be more than twenty-five,” Ms. Prentiss says. “I do apologize. I spoke to the dean, and your department chair, and they said it would be fine for me to sit in on your class today. Just to write up my own little report, part of the parental front line in the classrooms. Showing concern for the students, my little girl.”

  Ms. Prentiss removes her suit jacket, revealing a white tank top with red piping, and inexplicably, a red bra that all but glows through the material. Paige, for the first time since I’ve met her, looks potentially suicidal. She refuses to make eye contact with me or anyone else in the room.

  “Jesus, Mother,” she finally says, adjusting the bright red bra strap peeking out from Ms. Prentiss’s tank top.

  “Praise the lord, Paige.”

  Paige cringes.

  “Ms. Prentiss, I assume. No one, but no one, told me that my class would be observed today, although you’re welcome to sit in.”

  “Actually, I’m Ms. Cartwright. I never even was a Ms. Prentiss, but thought that Paige shouldn’t suffer for my mistakes.”

  She’s polite, but examining me from head to toe like Rocky sizing up the opponent before stepping into the ring.

  Paige tugs at her mother’s arm. “Class is starting.”

  “Now you be quiet, Paige,” she says without a hint of authority. And then to me, as though we were suddenly co-conspirators, “I know that you received a letter about my coming some time ago, and I apologize for being so late with my visit. I’ve been planning a wedding, and it takes so much time. I always try to be sure to say something positive in my write-ups.”

  Ms. Cartwright puts her arm around her daughter, who pushes it off like someone attempted to drape her in last year’s Banana Republic irregulars. Ms. Cartwright looks embarrassed, but then starts doing what she clearly does best. Smiling like a monkey who hit the banana motherload.

  I make a mental note that if I survive the afternoon, I deserve not only a ticket to Los Angeles, but the
luxury of investigating first-class airfares.

  Ms. Cartwright is quiet the first twenty minutes of class, while I give a thumbnail sketch of the sonnet’s history, form, rhyme and meter, and the value of using something as antiquated as form in the twenty-first century. I read some Shakespeare that we’ve all heard before, and we discuss ideas of romantic love, the love object, etc. Ms. Cartwright even sits still while I read the first of Millay’s poems, fiddling with her bracelets instead of looking at the page like the rest of the class. Paige is understandably quieter than usual, answering only the most innocuous of questions. Then we move to the first of the “love” sonnets, Millay’s “I shall forget you presently, my dear.”

  I start by asking an obvious question or two.

  “How is this different from, say, what we saw going on in Shakespeare’s poems? Look at the first line, does it seem tonally similar?”

  Two hands go up, but before I can call on either, an unsolicited, “So what exactly is the woman saying?” comes from the mouth of Ms. Cartwright. “Is she saying that love just doesn’t last? I think that’s a rather hateful thing to have young people reading.”

  “Mother,” Paige hisses. “It’s ironic. Millay is using irony.”

  “Good,” I jump in, “in what way is she using irony, Paige?”

  Paige gives me a drowning look. She’s caught between the good mommy and the bad mommy, and even she has no idea which is which anymore.

  “In the difference between feelings, the fact that they are impermanent, and a drive for sex, which is underneath the feelings, and how the two confuse each other.”

  “Good.” I ask, “Can anyone else elaborate on that or clarify what Paige just said?”