She watched me with infuriating calm. “Matt, it has everything to do with why you want to write…” She ticked off her fingers. “Because you view it as your inheritance, your birthright, your entitlement. It is your prerogative to look across the human condition and describe it through your ears and eyes, all while you cluelessly disregard what those ears and eyes are attached to. And more than that, you ignore the long chain of affluence that allows you the time to read and write and dream. You’re ignorant of how your dad came to build those golf courses he builds, of the water it takes to maintain them, of the carbon they’re responsible for that’s rapidly destroying the biosphere. None of it’s even remotely a part of your worldview.” As she was saying this, my smile was growing larger and smarmier. “And I guess that’s why I’m not all that interested in reading some Paris Review rip-off about you wagging your dick around a North Carolina prep school.”
I laughed abrasively to show her that this was not the case, even though, eerily, it was.
“You got me, Kate.” I didn’t want her to see the fear of my own empty center. Because of that fear, I felt like I had to score a point, and I reached for the only arrow I knew, the one all men learn at an impossibly young age. “Maybe we should do dinner some other time when you’re not being a cunt.”
As soon as it left my mouth, I felt how childish it sounded, and I loathed every male example who’d taught me that this was how you wound a woman. I could tell Kate was only embarrassed for me.
She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. “This is a stupid argument. I’ll call you later this week when work calms down.”
After she left, I ate by myself in front of my computer.
It wasn’t until Lucy introduced herself to me in the library a week later that I understood the summer in the proper context. Our fight behind us, I was determined to expand my reading list with Kate’s recommendations. I had just pulled Margaret Murie’s memoir Two in the Far North from the shelf when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned to see Lucy. She didn’t mince words.
“You’re hanging out with Kate Morris now, right?” I said that I was. She nodded like this was exactly what she expected and it mattered nothing to her. “Yeah, small town here. Word gets around. She do the thing where she brings some brick of a book on the first date?”
She didn’t sound jealous. Only curious. I said, “Arendt. Men in Dark Times.”
She laughed and rummaged in her backpack. “Man, what a total crazy. You, me, probably another guy or gal somewhere in between this summer. I honestly wonder how she keeps all the plates spinning, you know?”
A coldness crept over my skin, but I smiled like I was in on the joke.
“Hey.” She finally found what she was looking for in her backpack. “I actually have this of hers. Give it back to her for me, will ya?”
She handed me my copy of Hocus Pocus.
“Yeah,” I said. “No problem.”
The next time I saw Kate, she told me she was leaving. She’d been offered a job with a new organization that would focus on political races vis-à-vis global warming. “Climate justice, but with sharp elbows. Really fucking people up,” she explained. I could hear her trying to keep the undercurrent of excitement out of her voice and failing. “I’ll be coming on as organizing director. It’s a pretty amazing gig.”
I told her that was great while my gut bottomed out. The job was in D.C.
“So I put in my two weeks both at the Cowboy and the Bison Project.”
All of it came crashing down then. Maybe I should have understood this moment as inevitable—she’d never led me to believe otherwise—but I hadn’t. This is how I ended up bringing up Lucy. The artillery I had wasn’t working so I reached for the napalm. She took in that I knew she’d been seeing other people unfazed.
“I didn’t think I could have been more clear with you.” Her voice clinical. “On how I feel about being possessed. I’m not yours to tell who I can and can’t see.”
I fumed into my own crossed arms, unable to even look at her now. “You honestly spent all this time with me, and it didn’t occur to you that I’d care that you were fucking someone else?”
She smiled. “Kid, I don’t go in for slut-shaming. Not any more than I go in for the bullshit notion of possessive monogamy. I doubt there’s any way I could’ve made that more apparent to you short of texting you every time I got off with someone else.”
Trent, the big beefy cowboy made more sense. When I saw him twisting his whiskey at the bar, he was probably just going through what I was going through now. “Were you seeing Trent while we were together too?”
“So what if I fucking was?” Kate exploded. “Who are you to judge me for him or anyone else? What century did you grow up in, dude? What did you think, I want to be your housewife back in North Carolina? I’m not ashamed that I fuck who I want when I want. If you can’t handle that, it’s your problem, not mine.”
“I never wanted to make you a housewife—I just…” She left me stuttering. Embarrassed that this was more or less exactly the fantasy I’d harbored. She could be so raw, so unapologetic. “What do you think I was feeling for you this whole time?”
“What were you feeling?” she asked. Humoring me.
“Oh fuck you, come on.” I felt the burn in the back of my throat that comes with the push of first tears. “That I was falling in love with you, that…” I’d felt like I had a speech, but as soon as the word was out there it only sounded stupid. “So.”
She was quiet for a while.
“Maybe I was clumsy in what I just said,” she decided. “I don’t mean that I haven’t developed many strong—very strong feelings for you. But I’m not yours to get jealous of. And I never will be. I’ve noticed most men absolutely cannot handle that. I thought I was sparing you by keeping it all from you.”
And of course, she was right about that.
I texted to ask if we could get together before she left, but she never replied, and I expected she never would. I began to feel what it would be like to never see her again, what kind of void she would leave. Yet, she’d shown me I was a person who could stitch up his wounds before he could even feel them. I read what I’d written that summer, and I could hear her voice in my head pointing out the inanity. Suddenly, my whole life looked silly to me, a spoiled rich kid phony who’s read too much Kerouac playing at profundity. On the docks, I mostly shut down. While I was gassing up one of the private boats, Captain Ray called me from the marina. He sat on the truck tailgate smoking.
“I asked the guys, ‘What’s going on with Tar Heel?’ Damien tells me you got your heart shit on.”
“Something like that.” I didn’t want to have this conversation with Ray. What I wanted to do was quit my job early. Get the hell out of Wyoming. I wanted to go back to Raleigh, start applying to law schools, and forget I’d ever come out here. “Is this where you give me the ‘plenty of fish in the sea’ talk?”
“Sure,” he said. “Pussy comes and pussy goes. Everyone knows that.” He took a drag of the cigarette. “Doesn’t mean it can’t be goddamn awful when it goes.”
We sat looking out over the mountains, granite-colored, pocked with white snow and dark green forest. Mountains are chaos disguised as stillness, Kate had explained once. “We carve out these places in the world, spare them from our cruelties, but only because it’s one of the last ways we can still feel mystery. And then even our sense of mystery becomes another consumer edifice.”