Bear Country

The problem was you were always jumpy and I was always silent. You’d be in the bedroom, matching socks and folding towels the correct way, when I’d appear in the doorway and you’d start like one of those women who is about to be murdered in the first five minutes of those Scandinavian dramas you always watched without me. Or you’d be in the kitchen, draping scraps of uncooked bacon over uncooked breasts of chicken, when I’d pad over the tiles in wool socks, and you’d spring like I’d tripped a wire, your hands up and glistening with meat slime, eyes baby-big and blue, defenseless as they always are in your selfies.

Or the positions reversed, but the results still the same: me sprawled on the couch after one of my walks or trips to the café, cheeks pulsing with cold, clothes doused in coffee, picking my toenails or staring at the trowel work in our ceiling or skimming a book I never seemed to have time to read, and you coming out of the shower in nothing but two towels to find a stranger where you expected no one.

You scared me​, you’d accuse, clutching after your heart, as if I’d hurt you on purpose. And sometimes then you’d nestle into my shoulder, skin still steaming and bird body quivering, affectionate after fear.

*

I used to scorn you for this, like a boy who mocks girls for shrieking at spiders and mice or sticks dead fish down their bathing suits to hear them yell. I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t be calmer. I couldn’t understand how your mind could transform my body into a being you were scared of, or turn a face you said you loved into a facelessness you feared. It seemed like a flaw to me, an intemperance, like your drinking and credit card debt, that ought to be disciplined. So I confess that sometimes, caught between perplexity and shame, I’d laugh.

*

I knew even then about the basement in the town you asked me not to bury you in, the father your sister never let meet his grandson, who you never called and who never called you, except on mornings he was already drunk–the dark corners of your poems where men did unspeakable things to innocent girls, the place where you learned to fear the snapping of belts.

But I didn’t connect cause and effect until later, by accident. I was in grad school at the time, more concerned about impressing a professor of British Modernism than I was about figuring you out; so I’d been researching what I believed to be the most difficult poem we had read in a semester of difficult texts, trying to make sense of the kind of a nonsense a cartoonist might have put in the mouth of a mad caricature:

I want a holophrase.
NORD SUD
ZIG-ZAG
LION NOIR
CACAO BLOOKER
Black-figured vases in Etruscan tombs.

I stuffed an attic of miscellanea on my hard drive trying to understand those fragmentary lines, scans of cigarette ads from the 1920s, and photographs of demolished monuments I applied like ciphers. But no thesis was forthcoming, the fragments stayed fragmented, and finally, in desperation and shame, disappointed in myself and feeling like I’d disappointed my professor, I forced myself to write about something easier so I’d at least have something written. And that’s how I found you: a bibliography in a novella about a shell-shocked soldier leading to a footnote in an article about neurasthenia leading to a paragraph in a ​For Dummies​ book about trauma that went from describing the symptoms of soldiers to declaring they were indistinguishable from those seen in ​survivors of rape and incest​: ​reacting irritably, sleeping poorly, ​startling easily.

There was a time in my life when I feared red moons, when every morning I opened my Bible to learn what part of my body I should cut off: if your right eye causes you to sin, whoever looks at a woman with lust​, etc.

I read these words like I used to read those: with guilt in my throat.*

*

I never apologized for laughing at you, and I never overcame my tendency to silence, which must have been just as irritating to you as your tendency to babble was to me. You were always asking what I was thinking, and I could never tell you because the answer was ​leaving you​. So in what was left of our marriage you never tell me what you’re thinking became an accusation I often denied but never refuted. And although I’m skeptical of self-congratulation, being raised to believe that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, I do know that if I startled you thereafter, any scorn was checked by the memory of what I’d read, that I made a habit of rattling door handles and jangling keys when I returned to the apartment, of whistling themes from symphonies and knocking into things before entering a room where you were occupied, as deliberate and loud as when I beat the ground with a snake-stick while hiking through the Badlands, as artificial and brash as conversations I have carried on in bear country.

*How often I wanted to scribble your names in the margins of books: still, sometimes I’ll turn a page and find you—surprise! You were harder to decipher than any modernist poem.