My Unsentimental Education

but you fight back by surrounding your flowers with mothballs, or human hair from a barber shop, or bars of soap.
Or you sprinkle your flowers with synthetic wolf urine from the hardware store. Or mist them with a spray called Not Tonight Deer. But Sim, an asset whether I hunted or ran cattle, patrolled my flowerbeds. So I kept planting, having discovered this urge to dig, sow, water, fertilize, wait for bloom. Nightfall, I’d walk to the river and swim by moonlight, my arms and legs pale in dark water. Sim stood guard on the bank, protecting me, I felt, but the book said no, claiming me. He nipped my heels, rushing me home.
In August, I had to go to a two-week conference. I boarded Sim with a man who used to raise minks in huge pens. “Honey, a dog like this is happier outside,” the man said. “Might even calm him down,” he added, because Sim, at the end of his leash, had lunged.
I drove to the university town to spend the night with Felix—his apartment was closer to the airport. Felix was teaching summer school, and he complained that Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” didn’t depict the underclass. But Chekhov was the underclass, I said. Once he’d made money, he spent it on people who didn’t have any. I loved the story, its ending, its last word, beginning, demonstrating that endings-as-resolutions are artificial, unlike life with its culminations that undo again, new problems arising.
Conversation with Felix was like sex with Felix, combative. But, having been Chet’s wife, I hadn’t had sex in years. I didn’t see sex as a means to an end. I saw it as an end. I should have been forthcoming about that. Or I shouldn’t have slept with someone from work. But there are lots of people most of us should never have slept with. After sex that night, I lay in Felix’s bed, nervous about the trip, the important conference. Go and be your best self, my mother had whispered the night before I started kindergarten, I recalled. Felix felt restless, or neglected. He pushed me out of bed and onto the floor with his feet. I stood up and turned on the light. “What?” Hangdog, he smiled.
After the conference, Sim was happier outside. But my flowerbeds had been ravaged. It was late to reseed. I’d fallen in love fast. This is like taking drugs—short-term pleasure, long-term ruin. My usual way is to meet a man, pledge myself to him while feeling suspicious yet hopeful he might be The One with whom I’d belong in the paired-off world; or I’d feel pressure to take myself off the market, to ward off scary or implausible suitors. I’d been in love with James Stillman those fleet weeks when the wanting was mutual, neither of us weighing the other down, and during wee hours with Max, who, as a favor to me, gave monogamy a whirl. I hadn’t wanted someone badly since.
Now this time the longing and remembering—he said, and I said back, and he touched me like that, and our eyes met but no one saw—went undeterred too long, due to the vacationlike setting of clapboard cottages, Adirondack chairs, the vernal wood we wandered while pointing at writers one or both of us had read but never hoped to meet, and our most serious decision of the day the restaurant at which we’d dine that night. The conference was renowned for its aphrodisiac mood. A classmate from Utah had seen my name on a poster and called to warn me. “The careerist and sexual currents run deep there.”
Did he know this firsthand? No. He’d heard. Correctly, maybe. Cardboard bins in the laundry rooms held free condoms, the conference director announced during his first-night keynote address. This was when heterosexual people first started using condoms again. Promoting safe sex was the right thing to do, the conference director said. As was protesting apartheid. He mentioned this too. But I’d be laundering a pair of jeans or a summer dress because the weather was hot, cold, hot again, and someone would wander in, grab fistfuls of condoms, and I’d see him two hours later on a panel discussion.
Landon and I located each other early in the same way that, on my first day of school, a boy in a knitted red sweater and I located each other and walked hand in hand through manic recess. One night I drank too many of the complimentary cocktails, and Landon and I woke together in the morning. The sex was incredible, he said. Fully alert, I gave it another try. It was. The conversation was too, like a good class discussion, but not dog-eat-dog, as school so often seems, because this was talking, not debating, not one-upmanship, and it was mixed, too, with Landon’s asides about how he liked what I said about John Berryman, or that I lived in the hills with snakes and deer, or the way my hair tangled in the humid summer air, or the dress I’d sewn, or how I kissed. Had one person ever liked all these different qualities of mine at the same time before? No. Just my homework. Just my housework. Or just how I was in bed, flesh-and-blood and wanton.
But all things must end. Autumn leaves must fall. That’s what I thought, flying home, deplaning, driving from the airport, surveying my pillaged flowerbeds. What happens in Yalta stays in Yalta. In “The Lady with the Dog,” Gurov went home to Moscow and should have forgotten Anna and resumed his life. But if he had, we wouldn’t have a story.
All I hoped as I unlocked my door, thinking it would take me time to forget Landon, was that he’d need time to forget me too. Landon was tenured in another state, living with a woman in a refurbished Victorian with a fountain that babbled as he sat alone on the porch, contemplating Lucretius or James Agee, while she watched TV