by Stephanie King

On discovering a man I was secretly in love with wrote a poem portraying me in an unflattering light

2013 Fiction Prize Winner

 

 

At least poetry is nearly dead in the United States, thus limiting the number of people who have access to my humiliation. It appeared on page 17 of the Fall issue of Ploughshares, a triumph for him, to have cracked into the literary elite. It would have been bearable for me alone to know that he didn’t love me back, if only beneath the title of his poem, in neat italics, he had not written, for Kimiko.

“I didn’t think I was so harsh on you,” he said.

“Well, I did,” I said, and hung up on him.

Thankfully, they have only 3,600 paid subscribers, the rest being newsstand copies that may or may not be sold. And it’s not as if he wrote, for Kimiko Savitsky, who is obsessed with me and thinks I don’t know.

My best friend Kit said I should look at it this way: at least I was mentioned in the pages of a national literary magazine. If Andrew ever becomes truly successful, I could be considered a muse. If I ever publish anything, people might feel like they’ve seen my name before. There is an upside. It’s unbearable sometimes, being the friend of an optimist. Kit sent me a haiku to cheer me up:

Lovely Kimiko,
the stuff my dreams are made of.
Or else I’m just drunk.

“There’s nothing from nature,” I told him. “You’ve got to have an element from nature.”

“But there’s the turn,” he argued. “I thought I needed to have juxtaposition or nature in a haiku. I didn’t think I needed both.”

There was always the turn. I kept waiting in my life for the turn to stop turning.

“Miss Savitsky, what rhymes with depth?”

My students were always asking me to help them rhyme words; it was inconceivable to them that a poem not rhyme, and who was I to tell them otherwise when it was on every standardized test they’d ever encountered? I taught them about meter and allusion and watched their brows furrow in frustration as they counted 5-7-5 on their fingers.

I taught English to ninth and twelfth graders; Kit taught tenth and eleventh. I told him they were ruined by the time they got back to me and he would always say, “ruined for what?” The ninth graders were doing their poetry unit and for the fifth year in a row I had to admonish some pencil-necked geek who said poetry was “gay.”

“I didn’t mean anything against homosexuals,” he said in detention, as I made him copy The Complete Poems of Wilfred Owen.

“I’m sure you didn’t,” I said, “but you disrupted class. I’m sure next time you will be more respectful.”

“At least Wilfred Owen died young,” he said. “Fewer poems to copy.”

I sat at my desk and corrected my seniors’ essays as I watched the student, Josh, busy with his copying. Somewhere in this Jewish day school where I taught there was maybe a little Lauren or Allie (or maybe Ben) who watched this Josh’s every move, seeking the glimmer of hope that he liked her (or him) and reading nuance into everything he said, every glance. On my desk, the magazine with its cursed “What You Thought” on page 17 mocked me. I wrote snatches of lines in my notebook, all of which were wholly unacceptable. Finally, I wrote:

On Reading the Poem You Wrote About Me
You’ve broken my heart;
I wish you would fucking die
I’ll kill you myself.

Which was the worst haiku ever, but pretty much evoked how I was feeling.

“No nature,” Kit said, reading it over my shoulder when he came to pick me up for the ride home. Unfortunately, he was right as usual, something else I hated about him.

My father nearly killed his parents with shock when he returned from a year studying in Japan and brought home my mother, Makiko. His parents were both Brooklyn born-and-bred, the children of Holocaust survivors, and they knew with the unshakeable certainty of the truly mistaken that their sons would only bring home nice Jewish girls. My mother placated them, and kept my father from being disowned, by converting prior to their wedding. Her Hebrew was always terrible and singsong, and she couldn’t pronounce its guttural <ch> or <r>. My brother Taro and I had the same almond eyes and black hair, although ours had a surprising amount of waviness to it, and we had confused synagogues in six different states. Approximately ten percent of my students asked, Miss Savitsky, why do you teach in a Jewish school?

Andrew was perfect for me, but he couldn’t see it. He was the nice Jewish boy my grandmother kept wishing someone in the family would bring home. We met in the poetry section of Politics & Prose and started meeting for coffee in Dupont Circle about once a week. We exchanged poems and his were better than mine; I accepted this with the grace my mother always told me I should have in deference to my future husband. He had a girlfriend, some of the time, but they were in an “open relationship” that got progressively more open the more time I spent with him. After three months we started meeting for coffee in his apartment, and he would read me Whitman while we were lying in bed, me grading essays on “The Iliad” while he smoked fervently. I had always sworn that I would never date a man who smoked, but of course I never stuck to my guns about my own resolutions.

“Do you ever think about getting married?” I asked, after things had been like this for around seven months.

“Actually, Lisa and I are getting married,” he said. “In December.”

I started picking up my clothes and putting them on even as I was asking him to explain. I left, crying, and he didn’t know what I was so upset about. At the time, he said that nothing would change; things would be as open as they had ever been.

On Finding Out the Man I Have Been Sleeping with 
Is Marrying Someone Else
biting words, you sting
sweetly and deep, like an asp
clutched by a lover

That was six months ago. I had done an admirable job of pretending that I was over it, even when winter came and I knew the wedding must be coming up. Kit carried me home drunk and cursing on the day I saw the wedding announcement in the newspaper, but he never said I told you so even though he had, in fact, told me so. I considered the whole thing just about forgotten when the poem was published, like an injury where the doctor has to re-break the bone for it to heal properly.

Christopher Maldonado, called “Kit” after watching too much Knight Rider as a child, six-foot-six and Northern Italian and thus as blond-haired and blue-eyed as they come, an eternal disappointment to his old-world Catholic parents for being flamboyantly gay as well as teaching in a Jewish day school: this was my best friend. We met in Teach for America in Southern Missouri, where we taught children who lived in houses that actually had dirt floors. This astonished both of us, who had been raised in northeastern cities, Kit in Boston and I in New York. We earned our MA degrees at Southwest Missouri State University and tried to make sure our pupils had socks or underwear and didn’t have head lice. Lice eggs showed up a lot better against my black hair than they did in Kit’s blond strands. We shampooed each other with Rid and picked at each other’s scalps with the special little combs while drinking red wine and watching Godzilla movies. Kit loved Godzilla movies, or any creature feature that was badly dubbed or starred a fake-as-hell monster. We kept the tradition alive after I got him to move to D.C. by recommending him for the open position at my school.

Friday night I had him over for stir-fry and a newly restored edition of “Tarantula.” We drank Italian table wine with our chicken and snow peas and got maudlin. Kit’s impossibly young boyfriend had just broken up with him, for someone closer to his own age. I was six months shy of my thirty-third birthday and had recently become filled with the fear that I would never get married and have children. Some of which was prompted by my mother asking, Aren’t you afraid you will never have children? In this sense, her conversion to Judaism had been successful.

“I feel like I’d be missing something,” I told Kit.

“I feel the same way,” he said. “I always wanted kids.”

“You hate kids,” I said.

“I hate married people,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

Kit never campaigned for gay marriage but I could see him with an equally handsome, immaculately dressed man raising good-looking, impossibly well-mannered children. I wondered whose genes these children would have.

“Kimiko, if you can’t find anyone else,” Kit said, but he didn’t say anything more or indicate what I was supposed to be finding them for.

“I know,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

I did think about it: would our children be tall? Who would they live with? Would we raise them to be Jewish? Would they call us “Mom” and “Dad,” or would we think of something better? I would have dismissed it as a frivolous fantasy, brought on by too much Chianti. Instead, two weeks later, Kit’s mother died.

When we were teaching in Missouri, I went to Boston over one of our winter breaks and stayed with Kit’s family. It was clear to me that they thought I might be a girlfriend, even though he had told them I was just a friend, and they obviously should have suspected what he would eventually tell them. His mother was very uneasy around me, and Kit and I would make fun of her in whispers after everyone else had gone to bed. I was sleeping on the guest sofa in the basement; for Kit to have a woman he was not married to in his bedroom would have been scandalous.

“You have to tell them,” I told Kit.

“I can’t,” he said. “They still send me money once in a while. I’m not ready for them to never speak to me again.”

“They love you,” I said.

I could see that this was true. His mother sometimes ruffled his hair when she walked by him. He was an only child and had apparently been a difficult birth.

“When has love ever meant that you can’t hurt someone until they want to die?” he asked.

I hated it when he was right. He didn’t tell them that trip, or the next, or the one after that. To this day I don’t think he has ever had “the conversation” with his father. He told his mother and it went as well as could be expected: she cried a lot and bemoaned the loss of her theoretical grandchildren.

“What about your friend?” she asked. “The exotic one, what’s her name?”

“No, Mom,” he told her.

“You could marry her,” she said. “You could marry anyone. I don’t care what you do in your spare time.”

His entire life was her spare time. I don’t know what his response had been. Now she was gone, and he would never be able to make her understand.

 We planned to take the train together back to Boston for the funeral, so neither of us would have to sit next to a stranger. The train was early the next morning and Kit came to stay over. I left a note that afternoon on his desk,

On Using Sushi to Solve Your Emotional Problems
happiness bundles
little fish wrapped up in rice
when can I eat you?

“You’re racist,” Kit said. “You’re always making some kind of Asian food. Can’t you ever make a pizza?”

“Shut up or I’ll make you eat gefilte fish,” I said, neatly rolling spicy tuna rolls.

We ate sushi and drank sake, and when the
sake was gone we moved on to pouring rum into cans of Coke. Eventually, we were quite drunk.

“Read me the poem,” Kit said.

I refused. I didn’t even want to look at it again, much less read it out loud. Even though I had been reading it approximately once an hour, and sadly, the text of it never changed. It was exactly parallel to the way I used to check my voicemail every hour to see if Andrew had called.

“I can buy a fucking Ploughshares at any Barnes & Noble,” Kit said. “You’re not fooling anyone in your misery.”

Maybe, if his mother had not just died, if his blue eyes weren’t as bloodshot as someone with chronic allergies or alcoholism, I wouldn’t have shown him. As it were, I felt guilty for making a big deal of my tiny suffering. Being jilted by some moderately successful poet was nothing compared to losing a parent. If I were my mother, I would have told me to be ashamed of myself. Of course, my mother was not aware that until recently I had been sleeping with an engaged man.

He read it, his smile getting bigger as his eyes scanned each line. It was two pages long. When he was finished, he laughed.

“He sucks,” Kit said.

I agreed, but I still thought it was a good poem. Better to be immortalized in a good poem than a bad one.

“Let’s have a baby,” I said, changing the subject.

“Okay,” Kit said.

In retrospect, it was probably not the best idea to get drunk and sleep with anyone who would say “okay” upon having a baby proposed to them. But like so many other things, it seemed a good idea at the time.

I had tried on clothes in front of him, we had been skinny dipping, but nothing was as embarrassing as getting undressed that night. We both hurried and slithered under my cool cotton sheets with only swiftly sneaked peeks at one another. He still seemed to think it was a good idea, right up until the point where he first touched me, his hand clammy and pale as milk on my shoulder.

“I need to be drunker for this,” Kit said.

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“Shut up,” he shot back. “Have you ever slept with a woman?”

He had a point. We lay there for a while next to each other, lightly.

“Go to sleep,” I said, curling up against him like a shrimp. “Next month we can try the turkey baster.”

“That’s disgusting,” he said. “You’re an attractive woman. That would be an insult to you.”

I made him go to sleep anyway, and I thought I would lie awake a long time, thinking, but I fell into sleep easily and dreamed that I was gently rocking on an ocean, although it may have just been the room spinning from all the sake.

When my dad’s father died, we sat shiva and ate egg-salad sandwiches and looked miserably at one another. Kit’s family was drunk from the day before his mother’s funeral and stayed that way through the interment. I had met several of his copious cousins before, on their various visits to D.C., and they all greeted me warmly, lots of huge hugs followed by wet kisses on the cheek. I normally shrank from such open affection but tried to handle it gracefully.

I was staying in Kit’s room, sleeping on the floor. Strange that even after he came out I still had to sleep downstairs, but with his mother gone that was the first place they put me. She had a heart attack at the surprising age of 54, and I was grateful that it was not from the shock of anything Kit might have told her.

The night they put Mrs. Maldonado in her final resting place, after everyone had passed out drunk, I was awake in my sleeping bag on the floor next to Kit’s bed. His breathing was sharp and irregular and I thought he might be crying, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. Instead, I stared up at the ceiling, noticing that at some distant point in the past he had mapped out the northern sky in glow-in-the-dark stars, which had lost most but not their entire glow. A hand reaching down startled me; Kit asked if I was awake and I told him I was now.

“When I was little, my mom used to come in and read me stories when I got scared,” he told me. “She used to say that was why I became an English tea-
cher, because I liked to read stories to kids.”

I told him I was sorry, but those words felt so inadequate slipping from my tongue that I didn’t say anything more. There was more of the ragged breathing that might have been crying, which gradually subsided to the kind of long, even breaths that indicated deep thinking or the onset of sleep.

“I’m ready,” he said. “Are we going to do this?”

“Okay,” I said, slipping out of the sleeping bag and up into the bed.

Six months later, my first published poem appeared in Modern Haiku.

On Hearing of Your Mother’s Death
petals unfurling
also inside, unnoticed
grief makes us careless

“See,” Kit said. “Nature and the turn—you paid attention during your own haiku lesson.”

“You’re insufferable,” I said. He rubbed my feet while I read the rest of the magazine.

I considered clipping it and sending it to Andrew, but decided I was better than that. I had heard from mutual friends that his new on-the-side girlfriend was a twenty-one-year-old bank teller with red hair and freckles, and she apparently thought Andrew was quite the intellectual. There was no word on whether Andrew and Lisa had decided to start their open family, or if the nanny would be off-limits.

My mother was very proud for me to have been published, although she would be much prouder to find out that she was finally going to be a grandmother. I was two months along and hadn’t told her yet; my defense was going to be that I wanted to be “sure.” She was suspicious when Kit and I rented a three-bedroom house in a gardeny little subdivision in Silver Spring. With Kit’s mother gone, there was no one to comment on the scandal of our living in sin, in spite of our neatly arranged separate bedrooms.

“Why so many rooms, for just you two?” my mother asked, before Kit offered to show her our great kitchen, all blond wood and airy windows. He had bought matching kitchen towels in his excitement.

It had taken five increasingly embarrassing incidents to produce our future offspring. Kit’s response when the second pregnancy test showed the desired plus sign: Thank God, I never have to do that again. I guess I should have been offended.

I didn’t forward any of my magazines to my new address. I would just rather not know.

 

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Stephanie King received her MFA from Bennington College and won the 2006 Quarterly West Novella Prize. She lives in Philadelphia.