Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline
“Yeah,” Kathryn murmured, thinking aloud. Paul, Professor Digby, and the rest of the class turned to look.
“Was there something you wanted to add, Kathryn?” the professor inquired.
She looked down at her notebook, blank except for a shopping list and a few mazelike doodles, and shrugged. “I just agree. That’s all.”
After class Paul caught up with her in the hall. “Thanks for speaking up in there. I’m so sick of these old-school professors who won’t engage current theory.”
“Mmm,” she said.
“So,” he said, loping along beside her, “do you really agree with me, or were you just annoyed at Digby?”
She stopped. “I pretty much agree with you. Though I’m not sure it has much to do with what he was talking about.”
“I know. I just wanted to bring it up. So few professors at this place are really grappling with the imperialist, almost fascistic hold of Western so-called literature over—”
“You know what?” Kathryn broke in. “I’m late to meet someone. I’ve got to run.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“I love your shoes,” she said. “Well, see you later.”
By the third week of school, Kathryn had begun to loathe the English department. She hated the thick burned coffee in the makeshift student lounge, the sign-ups for reading groups on arcane subjects, the desperate tone of the grad-student newsletter, the tense, pale faces of second-years waiting to find out if they’d made the cut. By the end of the first month she decided that she wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
“I’m getting the master’s and getting out of here,” she told Paul. They had begun meeting after class and walking across the Lawn to the College Inn, a student hangout, for coffee. “All I’m really interested in is the reading, anyway. I’m no good at the criticism part.”
“So you don’t want to teach.”
“I don’t want to teach enough to put up with all the bullshit.” They walked up the white marble steps of the rotunda. It was late afternoon on a hot day; leafy branches drooped over the wide marble porches extending from either side of the dome. “And besides, I’m sick of being poor and undervalued and anxious all the time. What kind of a life is that?”
“But it won’t always be this way,” he said. He sat on a bench overlooking the grounds and started playing with a large, yellowing leaf.
“Oh, no, not always. The next step is to fight to get a spot in the Ph.D. lineup, then to finish an overly cautious and politically correct dissertation, then to get a job at a mediocre college—somewhere in the continental United States, if you’re lucky—then the whole tenure nightmare, then departmental bickering and backstabbing …”
“You do make it sound pleasant,” he said.
Kathryn sat against the wall, her legs up on the bench. “Well, what about you? What do you like so much about it?”
He started to tear the leaf into little pieces. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Though they had little in common, Kathryn and Paul got along well together for a time. She appreciated his passion for his work—he was so definite, so confident in his opinions. Surely some of that would rub off on her! And though he would never admit it to anyone but her, he secretly admired her disdain for the program, her unwillingness to play the game. It helped him keep perspective when the pressure got too much. They were constantly arguing and making up, which Kathryn mistook for a good sign. After all, her parents had never fought, never so much as raised their voices, and look at what happened to them.
Paul’s parents, WASPs from Main Line Philadelphia, were cordial but stiff with Kathryn, and her parents didn’t know what to make of Paul. “Are you sure he’s not gay?” her mother whispered worriedly after meeting him for the first time. “He wears those odd shoes. And remember, you thought Will was straight, too.” “I think I’d know by now,” Kathryn said, laughing, but the question kept her up at night. He could be; how would she know? When she finally asked him, he took the question more seriously than she would have liked. “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he said, “and I can honestly say that no, I don’t think I am.”
By now, despite her misgivings, Kathryn had grown to love him. When he took her hiking at Rockfish Gap and presented her with his grandmother’s engagement ring, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. They were married a year to the day after they met, in a tiny stone chapel on the edge of campus, in the middle of a rainstorm. Kathryn wore a long white vintage dress and pearls; he wore a tuxedo he owned and a bow tie made of kente cloth. At the front of the church on the right sat Paul’s nuclear family; Kathryn’s mother and brother, Josh, sat at the front on the left, and her father and stepmother sat in the middle. A scraggly bunch of their grad-school friends, bearded and bespectacled and pale, filled the middle pews. Rolling thunder drowned out their vows.
After the ceremony they raced across the wet lawn through pouring rain with tux coats over their heads toward the cars. Josh rode to the restaurant with Paul’s siblings, Maura and George.
Paul and Kathryn, following behind them in Paul’s ten-year-old Saab, watched Maura pull out a joint and hand it to Josh over the seat. “They’re smoking pot,” Kathryn said, incredulous.
Paul nodded.
“I can’t believe it.”
“They’re celebrating, Kat.” He turned to look at her, and she noticed that his eyes were glazed and red.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re high.”
He shrugged and put his hand on her knee. She pulled away. “Oh, c’mon, Kat. Lighten up,” he said.
Kathryn dropped out of the program six months later, after abandoning a master’s thesis on the topic of “[Gyn]Ecological [W]Rites of Spring: Edna Pontellier’s Rude Awakening.” Paul made the cut three months later and headed off into the thickets of the Ph.D. program, exploring D. H. Lawrence and Zola and their depiction of miners as working-class heroes. His working title, he joked, was “Mining the Great Minds’ Mines.”
As Paul’s research took him deeper beneath the surface, Kathryn found herself gliding contentedly along the top. She’d been writing occasional articles for the News-Sentinel, a weekly newspaper run out of a tiny office in the basement of a warehouse, and when she quit the program they asked her to edit the arts page full-time. The job didn’t pay much, but it was enough to live comfortably on and start paying off her student loans. Her life quickly settled into a pleasant routine. She went to exhibits and openings, poetry readings, play performances. She bought fresh vegetables at the farmer’s market on Wednesdays and warm bread at the gourmet food and wine shop on Market Street in the afternoons. As she got to know the town beyond the university, she found that much of the population consisted of grad-school dropouts like herself who had come to Charlottesville for an education and never left. Looking around, she saw overqualified writers and artists and historians and architects and educated faculty spouses competing for the same menial jobs, and suddenly she realized what people were talking about when they said they stayed in this scenic college town for the lifestyle—they wanted to be around people like themselves, hardcover-book-reading, museum-going, white-wine-drinking underachievers. Playful yet pragmatic, liberal yet sensible, they reveled in the pleasant weather and the beauty of the place, they had exquisite dinner parties and took occasional trips to local mountain inns. They recycled (paper, plastic, and aluminum), they petitioned for carpaccio at the local supermarket, and they subscribed to The Washington Post.
For the next two years life was good. Life was comfortable. And it began to terrify Kathryn. She saw herself at fifty, living in a house on Altamont Circle or perhaps out in Keswick, publishing seasonal poetry in the literary supplement of The Daily Progress and serving cocktails and grilled shrimp to the backstabbers in her husband’s department who were scheming to deny him the chairmanship. She felt a desperate urge to escape. It was as if she had arrived in hell and found it to be a pleasant, comfortable, even interesting place. The only way you knew
Paul, meanwhile, had become friendly with three hard-edged women from the English department, and several undernourished men. He played guitar in an all-male rock band that called itself Sons and Lovers, and soon developed a little following. People would call the apartment and, when Kathryn happened to answer, hang up. “It’s your groupies again,” she’d say. “Or one of the three harpies.”
“Don’t call them that.”
“They’re depressing. You only like them because they have crushes on you.”
“Sounds like you’re jealous.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Should I be?”
“Oh, please, Kat,” he said. “God. You know, ever since you quit the program, you’ve been nothing but nasty about it.”
“I have not,” she said, her voice rising to an unnatural pitch.
“If you have such disgust for what I do, then why did you marry me?”
“Because I liked your shoes. And because you promised you’d finish in three years.”
He lifted his chin, an old prep-school gesture, and said coldly, “Let me explain something to you. Writing a dissertation is not like writing a six-hundred-word story for the arts section of a lame-ass weekly newspaper, with its bullet points and catchy little hooks and Monday-afternoon deadlines. This is my fucking profession. This is my life. And if you don’t like it …”
“If I don’t like it, what?”
“You can go to hell,” he said.
“I’m already in hell! This is hell!” she shouted, laughing maniacally.
“Well, you know what Eliot said,” Paul said dryly. “Or maybe you don’t. ‘What is hell? Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections.’”
The marriage lasted another six months. Paul confessed to having slept with one of the harpies (“She bolstered me,” he said. “She helped me find a piece of myself I’d lost”), and Kathryn confessed to being bored to tears with the minutiae of his academic research. Neither of them had much in the way of assets, so the break was fairly clean. The only sticking point was their dog, a pug named Frieda they’d bought in their first year of marriage from a Turkish rug dealer on the downtown mall.
“I should keep her,” Paul said. “After all, you’re the one leaving me.”
“Only because I’m leaving,” Kathryn said. “You wanted the divorce.”
“You suggested it.”
“Oh, come on, Paul. You were the one having the affair.”
“Let’s not go into all this again,” he said. “I think we should think about what’s best for Frieda. I can provide her with stability. You don’t even know where you’re going.”
“Yes I do—I’m going to Maine.”
He snorted. “You think your life here is hellish, wait till you spend some time in Bangor. You’ll be out of there by the end of the summer.”
Kathryn relinquished the dog. They didn’t fight over wedding presents; Paul kept the ones from his side of the family, his friends, and she kept the ones from hers. The day before she was to fly out of Charlottesville for good, she packed her meager belongings into boxes and drove into the countryside to the UPS command center to drop them off. As she stood in the front office, watching her brown boxes ascend the ramp on little rollers and disappear over the top, Kathryn felt a great weight lift from her. She didn’t care if she ever saw the packages again—in fact, part of her wished that she’d given a false address. It would be fitting, she thought, for the boxes to be stuck in limbo, riding around in those big brown trucks until somebody figured out that there was no destination. She was, for the first time in a long time, free of baggage. She felt as light as air.
Chapter 5
The next day, after sleeping late again, Kathryn decides on an impulse to drive out and see her father. He lives in Hampden, ten miles from Bangor, in a modern home with a swimming pool on twelve acres of land. A partner in one of Bangor’s largest accounting firms, he drives a forest-green Miata and a Jeep Wagoneer and keeps bottled water and fresh-squeezed juices in the refrigerator. When Kathryn was in high school, every time she went to visit him there’d be music on the sound system wafting out to the driveway and back behind the house to the pool—the kind of music that she and her friends listened to, REO Speedwagon and Jefferson Starship and the Bangles. Hearing it as she walked up to the door always made her wince.
Kathryn used to wish she had one of those fathers who was around at night and on weekends, who’d help her with her homework or toss a ball with her in the park. Even before he moved out, her father wasn’t like that. He never quite seemed to be part of their family. He was vacant with them; he kissed her mother on the top of the head when he came home from work, holding her, literally, at arm’s length. Kathryn and Josh pulled back and watched. When he left the house in the morning, they watched him dither about when he’d be home; they saw the look on their mother’s face when he called to say that, yet again, he’d be working late.
Margaret Fournier had been Kathryn’s father’s secretary. She was also, on Saturdays, a gymnastics instructor at the Y. Most of the girls in Kathryn’s middle school had, at one time or another, taken gymnastics with Miss Fournier in the cold, cavernous gymnasium at the West Side YWCA. They were in awe of her—in her brightly colored leotards, her hair pulled back in a bun, Miss Fournier looked like a star. The first time Kathryn saw her in street clothes, ill-fitting jeans and a baggy acrylic sweater, drawing on a cigarette as she waited for the bus, she was shocked at how she looked: scrawny, mean-faced, cheap. Kathryn remembered this image when her father came to tell them he was leaving.
It took her mother years to get over the hurt. “Did you know about it?” she’d ask Kathryn or Josh, trapping them in the hall as they left for school. “Could you tell?”
They’d shrug and squirm away, embarrassed at the naked pain in her eyes. When their father called the house wanting to speak to Josh or Kathryn and their mother answered the phone, her voice, calling their names, would take on a tense, high-pitched quality. They’d pick up the receiver without looking at her and answer their father’s questions like prisoners under duress. Their mother became intensely busy; she volunteered at the hospital and was elected president of the PTA. Before the divorce was finalized, she binged on shopping; Kathryn would come home to find boxes of shoes piled up in the hall, transparent makeup bags filled with tubes and vials on the table. She redecorated the living room and had the yard landscaped, charging it all to her husband’s credit cards.
One night at dinner she told Kathryn and Josh that she had decided to become an interior decorator. “So I’ll be taking night classes,” she said. “And I’ll need you two to do your part around here.”
After that, everything changed. When their father left, their mother had continued to run the house pretty much as she always had. She fixed the kids a hot breakfast before school, picked them up on time when they had to get to piano lessons or track practice, and put dinner on the table at six. But now that she was a student, too, the old family structure crumbled. They ate cold cereal standing at the sink, and Kathryn and Josh arranged rides to after-school activities and learned to do their own laundry. Kathryn started cooking dinner, strange and creative combinations of whatever she could find in the fridge. On the evenings when her mother was home, the three of them did homework together at the kitchen table.
Now that she was out and about, their mother became known as one of the cool moms, the type who wore brightly colored turtlenecks tucked into Guess jeans and flirted with the coaches at their kids’ baseball games. She always looked stylish and put-together—a lot more put-together than her kids did. She often complained, half jokingly, that she was the kind of mom who should’ve been rewarded with cheerful, straightforward children who organized bake sales and homecoming rallies, instead of the bookish, reticent ones she got. “I don’t understand you,” sh
“I’m reading, Mom.”
“Don’t you want some exercise?”
“Maybe later.”
“Are your bicycle tires pumped up?”
Kathryn would sigh exaggeratedly, a finger marking the place in her book. “Don’t know.”
“I’ll check,” her mother would say brightly. “It’s a nice day for a bike ride. Maybe I’ll go, too.”
Josh became very protective of their mother. He even refused to visit his father and Margaret, but Kathryn dutifully went when they called. When she visited them in their stark new house with its vaulted ceilings and hot tub on the deck, she felt like a nun in a bordello. She disapproved of everything.
“For chrissakes, Katy, lighten up a little,” her father would laugh at her cloudy expression. “Did you bring a swimsuit? No? Maybe you can fit into one of Maggie’s.”
Margaret was wary around her, careful to be polite. She made perfectly balanced dinners out of gourmet cookbooks, substituting juices, she explained, for the salt and fat. Kathryn became a spy, searching for clues about what it was that made her father happy, what he had found with Margaret that he couldn’t get at home. Margaret, she discovered, was trying very hard. The shelves of her nightstand were full of titles like Wine Made Easy, A Beginners Guide to Classical Music, and Understanding Opera; home-decorating magazines with pages pinched down were arranged by month in the kitchen. Jars of vitamins lined the kitchen counter. Under the sink in the master bathroom Kathryn found a variety of douches—Lemon Fresh, Summer Sunshine, Floral Breeze. In Margaret’s dresser were lacy negligees, silk teddies, sheer French-cut underwear and a see-through black merry widow. Kathryn fingered the pieces slowly and then shut the drawer, imagining Margaret on top of her father in that outfit, moving her lithe gymnast’s body, completing the fantasy he’d constructed for himself out here in the countryside, far from the ruins of his life with them.