My Unsentimental Education

one knee to block Sim. I apologized, put Sim on a chain. I said, “He doesn’t get it that he’s a dog and I’m not.”
Jed Pharr drove me to the tops of tall hills, pointing at small towns nestled in distant valleys. An appealing restaurant here, he said. Good music in warm weather in a natural amphitheater over there. Our last stop was an ornate bridge over a creek, leading to nowhere—to a tiny lot with a cliff behind it. Jed owned the lot. One day, tired of his clients, he’d brought his crew here. He opened a thermos and poured us cups of coffee mixed with reposado tequila. “Poetry,” he said, about the bridge. “Form. No practical function.”
That wasn’t his line. The editor of the small-town newspaper had written it.
It was a beautiful bridge.
For Christmas, Jed bought me a poinsettia and a bottle of tequila.
His eyes changed according to light, I realized. He was fifteen years older than me, not old enough to be my father; I was nobody’s midlife crisis. He’d gone to college at the state’s best school, but what he knew didn’t sound familiar. Or all business majors have just a cursory acquaintance with history, philosophy, literature. I meant to date him briefly.
As a young man, he’d run one of the first catfish farms. He showed me a photo of this self—no beard, wearing a double-knit suit and a cowboy hat, on the House floor in Washington D.C., lobbying for catfish. He’d married and raised a child. He’d divorced, not amicably. He’d imported tequila. He owned an antique machine that made adobe bricks from straw and sand, because new adobe (concrete covered with painted stucco) offended him. He built houses for people he liked. He’d just bought property in a far off mercury mining ghost town filled with decamped-from-the-American-Dream former strivers, a wild west where men outnumbered women. On the way to visit this property, we stayed at a restored grand hotel in Marathon, Texas, where we ate roast quail, drank champagne, and slept in a room draped with Victorian fabric, train whistles waking us at night.
Then we went to the mercury mining ghost town to see Jed’s abandoned dance hall made of real adobe. Its roof had blown off seventy years earlier. By day, the former dance hall felt like a container of light, its walls as bright as egg yolks, the turquoise sky, the homemade adobe bar with art deco aspirations, curvaceous, geometric, and then the surrounding cell-like rooms that, we surmised, had once been whores’ bedrooms. Jed and I slept on a pallet on the dance floor, staring at millions of stars, one or two always falling.
When we bought ice at a place people called the Straight Store because it was run by fundamentalist Christians, I stayed close to Jed, and Sim, who tolerated Jed now. Men who lived in cars or rusty trailers crowded too near. I registered a doubt: Jed liked it here.
But Jed’s assorted ventures sounded enterprising on a summer trip he proposed we take to Spooner, Wisconsin, where, flashing a credit card, he paid for every meal and talked to my dad, who owned the auto parts store and, once, a tire shop and little gas station. They talked about business, the suppliers, the employees, the customers, so necessary but annoying. Then they’d cheer each other up, pouring another drink, and quote Dale Carnegie: “Take a chance! Life is chance!” When my dad talked to me, he talked about weather in Texas, weather in Wisconsin. Then we left, Jed waving from his truck, and my father, stepmother, sister, brother, nieces and nephews, said goodbye, a chorus of sighs, murmurs: Jed Pharr was a brick, a saint, a piece that would fit the puzzle, me.
James Stillman weighed in too. In recurring, unsettling dreams, he was dying. No deathbed. No last breath. A pair of low-order angels wearing navy blue uniforms took him away in handcuffs. He’d whisper to act as if I didn’t know him. This was like a plan we’d had when I’d slept at his house: if he got busted, I didn’t know about the drugs. In these dreams, arrested by Death, he told me to stay alive. But in a new dream, he stood at the end of a hall I recognized, a hall with a green phone, and said: “Better.” James, forever young in ragged Levi’s, said: “Man, I’d be watching you with those other guys and think, damn, she could do better. A little better this time.” I woke, annoyed or pleased.
I used to split myself in two. Or I believed I’d split myself in two: a bookish self; a homespun self. A third self had emerged: emergency. I’d been having sex on and off for twenty years, but I’d been so intent on being good in a one-time man’s career, being good in a system of courtship where men pursue and women accept or demur, that I’d curbed the desire for what I’d had for a few hours with just a few lovers and never with a husband.
Or it’s biological, animal fact. I was thirty-five. I didn’t want to hope for sex to get good, better, best. I wanted it best now. It was. So I was three selves now. Jed suited two. My work self had survived alone so far, I thought. But lying in bed with Jed after luxuriant, frantic, slaking sex, during the pillow talk, I’d think how different this talk was from talk I’d had with Landon, though not for long—my conversations with Landon in tangled bedsheets lasting just ten days and ten nights, but countless hours by letter and phone. I’d talk about work at work, I decided, and not with Jed, who looked anxious if I did.
Fragmented thinking, I thought. Old vistas. New frontiers.
My wandering grandmother would run away from home, and people brought her back. Playing separate roles for separate spheres—roles that well-adjusted people keep inside “healthy boundaries,” to use the lingo—isn’t schizophrenia. But schizophrenia is