It was the wholesale destruction that hit me first. All the beautiful plants uprooted, the butterfly bushes and lavender flung across the lawn, the daylilies and impatiens trampled underfoot, their leaves mashed into a green pulp. There was something so raw and naked about the damage, such a statement of annihilation. The patio was littered with tender white rose petals, the bushes strewn across the bricks like debris. It felt like madness had been let loose in the yard.
And there was Tony ripping the remaining plants from the soil, screaming at Owen that his work wasn’t appreciated, that Owen didn’t deserve such beauty, that Owen was selfish and self-deluding and treacherous.
And there was Owen screaming back at Tony that he didn’t want this kind of craziness, that he had the right to decide what kind of life he lived. And then Tony whirled around and for a moment the two men faced each other, no more than two feet between them, both breathing hard, and then Tony spat out, “Coward!” and turned and continued to destroy all the beautiful work he had done.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. What I was witnessing was ugly and vindictive, something no one in their right mind would want to experience, and yet … and yet … the very air in that small backyard seemed charged with portent, the way the atmosphere feels before a storm, ions scattering and reassembling with restless speed. And the angry words, the screaming voices were the lightning strikes across the sky — sizzling, burning, and crackling with energy.
As much as I believed Owen as he screamed—“I don’t want this. Get out! Get out of my life!”—I knew without a doubt that what I saw before me went to the core of who Owen was. Not the angry words, nor even the craziness of it all. Not the ugliness. No, I knew Owen well enough to be sure of that.
But it was the intensity of the connection, that’s what I finally understood. Owen was tied to this beautiful, provocative person in a way he would never be to me.
I turned, went into the house, and put Bandit’s leash down on the dining room table where I knew Owen would find it and know that I had been there. Then I got down on my knees and buried my face in the bountiful fur of the dog’s neck and whispered over and over, “I’m sorry.… I’m so sorry,” until finally I could stand and let myself out through the front door for the last time.
OVER THE YEARS, I HEARD THAT OWEN had moved back to New York, then Texas, for some reason. I went back to school and got a master’s in creative writing. The discipline of those two years helped me finish my short story collection, and the master’s helped me land a teaching job at a California State University campus where many of my students were bilingual.
I met my husband there. He was teaching political science and we both stood up at the same time during a faculty meeting to protest the plan to slash the Chicano studies department’s budget. This was in the early 1980s when the cultural expansiveness of the sixties and seventies had run its course.
Soon after we married, our daughter was born, and my life was so busy — new baby, new marriage, a full teaching load — that each day felt like a mountain to scale. But I was happy. I had married the right man. I was besotted with Grace, our daughter. When I thought of Owen, it was hard for me to remember the young girl who walked dogs for a living and loved a charming, graceful man who wanted to love her back.
And then he called me. My daughter was just turning four, and we were having a discussion about whether she could wear her party dress to preschool when the phone rang. I was distracted when I picked it up. We were late, the discussion had gone on too long, and I was just about ready to give in — what difference did it make if she wore her party dress to sit in the sandbox?
“Anna?” is all he said and I found myself reaching for a chair, my legs giving out under me.
“Owen.”
He laughed. “That was quick,” and immediately I thought, I’ve missed that laugh.
“Would you be able to have lunch with me?” he asked. “I’m in town.”
“Yes.”
ON THE DAY WE HAD ARRANGED I made sure Gracie had a playdate after preschool, and I drove to the restaurant in West Hollywood with a certain amount of trepidation. More than ten years had passed. We were at the end of the 1980s. The country had changed. My life had changed radically. I was bound to two people I cherished beyond measure — my husband, Alex, and our daughter. I had no idea how Owen had spent the past decade and what changes those experiences had wrought within him. Would we even have anything to say to each other?
I parked my car — a young mother’s car, a safe, sturdy Volvo — on a side street and walked down Santa Monica Boulevard to Crespi’s and then stood outside trying to gather some calm into my racing heart. The restaurant was a small place with a dark green awning and the sleek lines of a modern café. I knew the person at the reservation desk was going to be young and thin and wearing black and would show me to our table with a slight swagger. As it turned out, I didn’t even notice who that was because when I walked into the restaurant, Owen was already there, head down, reading the menu.
Oh, how much older he looks was my first thought. He was thinner. His face was gaunt, but when he looked up and saw me, his smile transformed his face and I saw the Owen I remembered.
I walked toward him with my heart hammering again, but when he stood and opened his arms and gathered me in, all the ten years of absence evaporated. My body still knew his body and something within me instantly settled.
“Beautiful still,” he said with his arms encircling me.
I shook my head as I pulled away and we both sat down. It was something I never believed about myself except for those months with Owen.
At first all we did was look at each other, without a word, just looking to take in the other’s face, to make sure we could find the person we used to know so intimately in a face changed by a decade of living. Without the smile, the face I examined looked vastly changed. I wondered if he felt the same way about me.
We didn’t make small talk. We ordered to get the waiter out of our hair and then we put our hands on the table and began.
“Did you bring pictures?” Owen asked. Somehow he knew I had married and had a daughter. Maybe through Michael, whose dogs first brought us together and who subsequently became a friend. I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
I had brought snapshots of Grace and handed them over. “She looks like her father.”
“Oh,” he said, “I’d never get tired of looking at this sweet face.”
“I know,” I said, so grateful he saw what I did in Gracie.
And then over lunch I told him one Gracie story after another. How she insisted on cutting her own hair when she was two. How she wouldn’t go to her best friend’s birthday party because the little girl had “said a mean thing” to her. How she spent an entire year wearing only pink, even her shoes had to be pink. He listened in that absorbed way he had listened to my recitation of Bandit’s outings, with complete interest, his eyes never leaving my face.
I felt like I was rattling on too long, so I finished with the unnecessary declaration that my daughter was strong willed and sure of herself and that she has been teaching her mother to be a bit more flexible and mellow.
Owen raised his eyebrows in disbelief and I knew instantly what he was saying—Anna, flexible? In what universe? — and I laughed even though he hadn’t said a word and told him I had qualified the statement with “a bit.”
“Now you,” I said, “tell me.”
And he did. Years back in New York working as a dean at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, a second house in Texas because the state has no income tax.
“Really?” I said. “There’s more to the story than that.”