The Atomic Weight of Love (31 page)

“What?”

“Leave him.”

There it was.

“Please sit back down,” I said. “I want to talk to you about this. To be as articulate, as honest as I can be.”

“You’re saying no.”

“Not in the way you envision.”

“How many ways are there to say
no
?”

“Oh, Clay.” He hadn’t lived long enough yet to know the infinite ways in which
no
becomes manifest in the world. “You have to finish school.”

“So? What’s to stop you from coming to Berkeley with me?”

“You need to do this part of your life alone, without the weight of me.”

“Fuck that, Meridian. Alden may consider you a weight, but I do not.”

“Focus on your studies. Don’t throw your life away on me.”

“So someone who loves you is throwing their life away?”

This time I raised my voice: “I’m telling you
exactly
what someone should have told me. To set my career, not to give it up for some man, for anyone. Don’t you see that? I only wish someone had loved me that much.”

“I think you’ve forgotten what real love looks like.”

“Real love looks like this.”

He was quiet for a beat or two, formulating his argument, and then he said: “I’m offering you a new start. You could finish your graduate studies.”

I laughed, picturing myself on the Berkeley campus I’d seen on the news, the student protests, yet again ensconcing myself where I would never fit in.

“This is bullshit,” he said.

I took his hand, and we sat for several minutes beneath the breeze that rifled the tops of the pines, listening to the occasional watery murmurings of White Wing and Beacon.

“You’re not saying never?” he said, finally calmer.

“I’m saying not yet.”

I rested my head against his shoulder and was glad he couldn’t see the fortitude it took for me to say “no” and to maintain the hope that he would keep loving me.

A FEW DAYS LATER,
Alden announced over dinner that beginning in the fall he would be teaching Physics 101 at the University of New Mexico’s burgeoning Los Alamos branch. He was more animated than he had been in years.

“You’re retiring?”

“No, no. This is in the evenings—Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

The following morning, I drove to the library and picked up UNM’s course catalog. I read the listing with Alden’s name and then left the catalog on the passenger seat of my car when I went to Clay’s.

We made love with unprecedented ferocity, like two animals who had not copulated in decades. We sweated and grunted and cried out. Clay authoritatively moved my legs into various positions, some of them extreme; he pushed me up against walls, pinned my arms above my head. I bit him, sucked and bit at the tender flesh of his inner thighs until he gasped and I left bruises. “I’m marking you,” I said. “Branding you as mine. I’m feeling just a tad possessive.”

He seemed to like that.

CLAY WAS RIGHT,
I
could go back to school. I decided take one of the courses I’d seen in the UNM catalog, and I went to the bank to withdraw cash to pay my tuition.

I drummed my fingertips on the countertop while the teller counted out the bills. I was pulling out more than I needed, taking some of
our
money for
my
needs.

“There’s one more thing you can do for me,” I said. “I’d like to know the entirety of our holdings, current balances.”

“Certainly. If you’ll wait just a bit longer, I’ll retrieve that information for you.”

She returned with a Photostatted ledger and identified various items.

I was stunned. We had a checking and savings account—fine, that made sense to me. But there were also five certificates of deposit.

“You’re earning good interest on these,” she said, pointing at the eight percent interest rate figure.

“I see,” I said, trying to hide my surprise.

Over the course of twenty-six years, Alden had squirreled away over $1.5 million.

In the bank parking lot, I sat in the Morris and rolled down the window. I had done without so many things, scrimped, saved, endured the infantilizing humiliation of a minimal household allowance. A few months ago, I’d moved furniture and painted the house myself, not hired anyone. I’d stripped the teacup wallpaper in the kitchen, painted the walls a bright, cheery yellow. And then I’d asked Alden for a refrigerator—one of the new avocado green ones. I wanted a color television, a dishwasher—just a few things to make my life easier, to bring us into the current era. I had secreted cash around the house just to have a few dollars of my own to play with—“play” being something so wild and crazy as a new crow journal or a pair of Dearfoams slippers. I touched Belle’s pearl studs. I didn’t buy jewelry or expensive clothing; I didn’t have June Jacobsen’s wardrobe, her shoes. I bought meat on sale, never paid top dollar.

I watched other Los Alamos wives enter and leave the bank, their children’s hands held tightly, protectively. We had no children’s college funds to build. We’d never gone anywhere. We rarely ate out anymore.

I had nothing. Nothing. And yet I was a millionaire. A millioinairess.

I hit my fist against the steering wheel, on my way to a full-blown explosion, and then I stopped myself. It was my own damned fault. I’d allowed Alden to do this. A child says
Screw you!
and throws a fit or holds her breath until she passes out. An adult does something about it.

I drove to the UNM administrative offices and plopped down my tuition payment. I would take expository writing, sharpen my skills in preparation for writing my thesis one day.

“GOD
DAMN
, MERIDIAN! I
am so proud of you!” Clay waltzed me around his living room. Jasper nipped at our flying heels.

My hair came loose from the clip, flew in the air as he twirled me.

“Wait a minute,” he said and stopped. He pulled the rubber band from his hair, loosened his braid until his hair hung free, longer than mine. “Whirling dervish!” He began spinning, his hair flying.

We spun until we were dizzy, out of breath. I dropped into the cushion pile. Every cell of my being effervesced.

He stood there staring at me so intently that I grew uncomfortable.

“What?”

“I’m memorizing you. I love seeing you like this.”

“Thank you.”

“Not my doing, baby. You did this. Take credit.”

“IT’S A GREAT IDEA,
Meri.” Alden was loading his pipe for an after-dinner smoke. “I applaud your decision.”

“I’ll go Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights,” I said. “We won’t see each other much during the week.”

“Worth the sacrifice,” he said, his cheeks working like a bellows to get the tobacco to ignite. “Kudos, wife of mine.”

I chose not to tell him about my trip to the bank. I was armed with the knowledge, and that’s what mattered. I’d also long ago observed that if a smaller, weaker bird is challenging a predator bird—a raptor, a crow—then it is best to fly above the predator. If I flew just over Alden’s back, he wouldn’t know I was there unless and until I cried out. For now, I intended to hold my silence.

DURING WHAT REMAINED OF
the summer of 1970 and into the fall, I saw Clay at our crow spot and in the evenings when I told Alden I was swimming.

I tried to enjoy each moment, not to project myself into the future, but every time Clay and I made love I felt I’d eaten another chocolate in a box of candy—that soon enough, all I’d have was paper wrappers and the ephemeral memory of sweetness.

“HIROSHIMA AND MY LAI,”
I said, handing my first expository writing assignment to Emma. “We were supposed to use the technique of comparison/contrast.”

“Aren’t you brave,” Emma said, beginning to scan the first page of my essay. I looked out her kitchen window as she read, and I sipped coffee from a mug that read
CAPE CANAVERAL—
something Vince must have picked up while working on some space project. I could hear her dryer tumbling clothes, and I smelled fabric softener and furniture polish.

She finished reading and looked up at me.

“Your honest opinion,” I said. “Show no mercy—you’re the expert, and I want to learn.”

“The putative permission to kill granted to those in Vietnam by what took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the comparative ‘guilt,’ the way American society has reacted to the two events . . .”

Oh dear.
I knew I’d chosen a topic that might offend; now I realized I’d done exactly that.

“I know it was—” I began.

“It’s well done,” she said, her eyes swimming behind the bulbous lenses of her eyeglasses.

“I was afraid I’d offended.”

“You didn’t offend me, although you may offend your professor. But, Meridian, if you really want to write, if you really want to speak through your writing, to communicate anything of value, anything worth saying—well, you have to be fearless. Sometimes, to get people to think, you have to offend, get them riled up. My advice is don’t anticipate what people will or will not think about what you’ve said, how it might alter their perspective of you.” She reached behind her back to adjust the elastic of her belt. “Define yourself—don’t let your imagined reader define you. Say what you have to say. Or,” she paused, “you are wasting your gift.”

“Gift?”

“Gift. You’re good.” She smiled. “The person who wrote this essay interests me. Has interested me since the day I met her.” She tapped an index finger on my paper. “And you know I do not flatter needlessly or engage in puffery.”

“Emma?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“I’m proud of you.” She reached across the table, patted my hand. “I think you are, at last, donning your seven league boots.”

“I may need them.”

“I suspect you will.”

ALDEN FINISHED READING
MY
essay and flipped it face down on the dining room table. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Well, I don’t know what you expect from me in terms of a reaction, but it’s not a good one—just know that,” he said, using a napkin to clean the lenses of his glasses.

“You don’t think my points are valid, the questions I pose are appropriate?”

“The entire exercise is
in
appropriate.” He put his glasses back on.

“That we impose rules on war is absurd,” I said. “Isn’t the point of war to win? And if it is, then why not win at all costs? Why do some wars have certain rules, other wars have different ones? Isn’t war like evolution, the goal being survival? Those are all valid questions. They’re
ideas
, Alden—and you of all people should not be threatened by ideas.” I paused, but just for a moment—I was driven, and I didn’t want to let his reaction stymie me. “Just think of the British in their red coats, their inability to adjust to circumstances, what great targets they made marching in line across open fields—it was behavior wholly inapposite to survival, to evolutionary success. Was it a war crime to take advantage of their ineptitude?”

“But you didn’t write about the British, Meri. You wrote about
me
, about the men in this town. You compared us to teenage boys in Vietnam who failed to exercise any moral restraint, who stood face to face with women and children and killed them for the sport of it.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.”

“What
you
did is unfair. You cannot compare the unenviable, necessary use of scientific theory, scientific advances of a monumental scale, to the kind of wanton slaughter that took place at My Lai.”

“I
can
compare them. I can compare and contrast, which was the purpose of the writing exercise.”

“Well, it’s offensive. It’s insulting. I am not a war criminal.”

“No, never! I am not saying that at all! I’m saying
none
of the people are criminals—not you, not Bohr, not the boys in Vietnam!”

He looked peeved, exasperated, but he lacked the characteristic Alden fire I’d known for so many years. I felt sorry for the fading, flat man who sat before me, and pity deflated my anger.

“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. That was not my intention.”

He stood up from the table. “Do me a favor. Don’t show that to anyone else,” he pointed an accusatory finger at my essay.

I’d planned to present the paper to my women’s discussion group after I turned it in to my professor, but I realized that Clay was the only other person I really needed to read it.

“All right,” I agreed.

What I wanted to say was that it sickened me that my country was asking boys to make split-second decisions in a hellish landscape—decisions that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, if they were lucky enough to have lives that lasted more than a few more humid, insect-infested months. I wanted to know what Alden felt, now decades distant from his work on the bomb, but I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a substantive conversation, the kind that had fueled our early love, those long-ago expansive talks that had kept me awake at night, abuzz with ideas, with the perspectives he offered. I missed the respect he’d once shown me as an intellectual sparring partner.

Now—now that I was rediscovering the person I’d once been, he no longer wanted to know that person. He did not have the energy for that person. Just as I was reemerging, Alden was disappearing.

CLAY LEFT A NOTE
with his reactions to my essay on my crow boulder.

Baby,

No matter what I say, what anyone says, especially including that asshole sometimes known as Alden, you keep saying whatever it is you have to say. I don’t agree with everything you wrote, but I don’t have to.
No one does
.

The thing for me in Nam was that there was no PURPOSE. Nada. Your war had a reason, and it still does, even in hindsight. Nam has no purpose other than political football bullshit. There is no valid reason for this country to ask us to do what we did, for killing us, maiming us,
fucking us up
. I bought a line of shit, but I was young, dumb and full of cum.