Couplets by Maggie Millner

Author:Maggie Millner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

3.7

When you lived with him in Monterey, you’d spend every evening on a moldy, high-back couch, watching the light outside go mauve, then die. The neighbor’s house was strung with discs of mirror that turned in wind, blinding you when the sun was right, or throwing phantom orbs the cat would hunt across the wall. Those years were shapeless, unperfumed, a tintering of salt and beaten air. Winter looked identical to summer, which gave the dim impression of a stilled planet, of a planet to which the worst had already happened. It was also a time when stars were back in style—not knowing their names or physics, but using them for augury or just diagnosing personality traits. Many turned to stars because they felt jilted or unpersuaded by Western science, which had by that point made most other knowledge irretrievable, but some just said, It’s fun, it’s only fun. You don’t have to believe in anything. You couldn’t see the fun. Still, you startled when the chart said you were flirty and contrarian, obsessed by hair. Just that week you had received a regrettable haircut, which energized in you a passion for hats. A helmet was a sort of hat, and you wore one every weekend when you bicycled to the abandoned military base, where bits of missile nosed out of the beach and ice plant splashed the dunes with rust and green, the colors of alarm. Ahead of you between the bluffs would tromp the man you loved, a stalk among sargassum, tacking west. Or else behind you if you pedaled fast, or next to you if talk or some dispute were under way. Your fights, you thought, were very rare, though he found them very frequent, it was a question of thresholds. Sometimes you would fight about how much you fought, facing each other in the little apartment you shared by the harbor, frothing up the atmosphere between you with your hands. During PMS, you’d say outlandish things: I feel like a spayed cat, I feel like a woman trapped in a painting that depicts her as a virgin, but she’s not a virgin, she’s not even a woman all the time. The West exhausted you, its lassitude and gorse. It was a soft frontier that fell away as soon as you got used to it, vapid daylight spinning itself always into gold. This was just before the era of overt misinformation, or perhaps that era’s undetected dawn, and for a while you suspected that the world was an invention of your mind—which made it difficult to advance at all across that world, or make the bed, or taste the fragile cod the wharf-men hawked. Looking out over the cliffs, the man would say the names of fish and succulents, the processes by which the beach had cleft itself so steeply from the crag. A tern flew by. The sun moved through a slotted spoon of cloud. You’ve come to think that place was like your interest in your life: hidden, for a time, beneath a sheet of sand and dread.

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