Michael

When I was fifteen, I found the man my mother was having an affair with. He was a Radio broadcaster named Michael. Each night, I'd listen to their hushed conversations on the telephone line like a bedtime story. I had never heard my mother sound so stricken, so full of life. She doted on him, loved him deeply, all in secret. I had never thought of my mother as particularly passionate about anything, but she was passionate about Michael. It was some education, I guessed. Even as I watched her do mundane things, like lay around the house, or polish our glassware, or mend my father’s pants, she displayed all the signs of rapture and sadness: Slightly slumped shoulders, loose hands, downcast gaze. All movements I would try on alone in my room, only to find they were useless on me, who had nobody to tie them to.

The first time I saw Michael was at this hotel bar, the spot he’d go after work each day. I had taken two busses just to see what he looked like. He was sitting in a blocky grey suit and sad satin tie. His head was almost completely bald, still holding on to the last strands of youth. It was also perpetually bobbed forward, like a pelican catching dinner. I would later discover that he had to go to a chiropractor twice a month because of his poor posture. He had remarkably feminine lips, detached earlobes, a moon-shaped birthmark on his temple. I could see why my mother loved him so much, there was a pitiful feebleness about him that made my heart cringe, a feeling I supposed was close to love.

She hadn’t always been this way. In childhood, I remember her as an inconsolably anxious woman, totally taken over by the idea that I’d get into a freak accident. Choke on my green beans and pass out on the kitchen floor, blue-faced and bug-eyed. Or faint from the steam of my bath, slipping under the water to drown. My presence frightened her beyond forgiveness. Her paranoia had been so intense that I’d mistaken it to be a part of her personality. But by the time I turned fourteen she stopped worrying so much about me and started loving Michael.

I first came to know about him the morning of my first day of high school, when I picked up the phone to call in sick. His voice was unromantic and unsophisticated, as were his words. She didn’t seem to care though. In fact, there was a tiny tremor in her response that suggested prolific admiration. I was immediately fascinated. I thought about Michael probably as much as my mother did. There was something so incredible about him that I couldn’t put my finger on. I knew my mother knew it too, she had to. Why else would she be so in love with such an unremarkable man? He wasn’t particularly wealthy, neither generational nor self-made. Not graceful or charming by any means. He didn’t have a kernel of poetry about him. But in the mere presence of his voice, which was deliberate and monotone, there was a kind of beauty that made me inexplicably, physically emotional. Like the pressure you feel in your chest when you want to cry but can’t.

I spent my last summer before college with my back pressed into the diamonds of our wire fence, listening to Michael talk about the news and weather. He would say: It’s 68 degrees right now, and sunny. And I’d look up at the sky and it’d be true. It became a special time for me, a kernel of happiness in the blurry, uninteresting day.

Once the air had settled into the heavy heat of August, I found myself less and less occupied with Michael. It happened slowly and without warning. The last night I listened to them on the telephone line was different than all the rest. Michael was saying: I love you, but we’ve got to let each other go. I don’t want to hurt my wife, just like I know you don’t want to hurt your family. It was a dramatic scene, but Michael had a way of making everything sound absolute and acceptable. My mother sobbed and murmured indistinguishably in response, which I imagined was her own way of agreeing. He did not call after that.

I got into a school far away, where it hardly went above 60 degrees, where there were tulips but no palm trees. Michael had become distant in my mind. I thought myself to be incredibly mature and totally unaffected by any force that wasn’t my own will. It was a narcissistic, pretentious kind of thinking but well suited to that stage in my life when I was preparing to go study the lives of people who had been dead for a long time at a red brick university.

The day I’d leave came just after Michael and my mother had called it off. There was no more loving flush on her face. An absence in her gaze that was Michael-shaped. When I was waving goodbye to her at the terminal, I was saying goodbye to him too, I suppose. I would not come back for eight months.

When those months had passed, I found myself back in town with no intention of completing my classes or returning in the fall. I didn’t really know what had changed. I could have gone on with it, studying and memorizing and acting smarter than I was. But there had been moments where I felt so pointless that I would have laughed at myself if I weren’t so prideful. It first happened when my father sent a picture of my mother he had taken of her in the kitchen. Her hands folded and a jug of marigolds next to her. Then there was the time I was flipping through radio stations and heard a broadcaster say: Ten inches of snow are expected tonight. Better break out the defrosters! His voice was more jovial than Michaels, slightly pitchier too. Still, I burst into tears at the sound, and within the next week had notified the dean that I no longer had any interest in being a scholar.

When I had come back from school humiliated, with my tail between my legs, my mother had patted me on the shoulder and smiled without her teeth. She had taken to gardening. Things like fennel and raspberries. Summer fruit and some flowers too. The sun made the marigolds glow. I had forgotten how different the light was in town, soft and shockingly uplifting. My mother seemed perfectly happy. More than that. She had the kind of sweet look on her face, a color in her cheeks that she had had when she was with Michael. I felt almost hurt; I couldn't tear my eyes away from it.

That summer, I spoke to Michael for the first time. It would have been my break if I were still in school. I was working at the diner across from the railroad. It happened so serendipitously, so randomly, so perfectly. He was sitting alone in my section, there in his un-ironed dress shirt. It was like seeing someone who you thought had been long dead. Immediately, he was special to me again, the time I had spent apart from him melting away. I was once again enraptured by his movements, his presence. I walked over, at once nervous and excited. What can I get for you? I asked. Just a coffee. He said. His voice was as it always had been, perfect. When he looked up, his perfect eyebrows scrunched together: Hey, you look familiar.

Michael would come in the next day and the day after that. He would fall in love with me after our first kiss in the front seat of his silver Toyota but before the first time we had sex, in a demurely dressed hotel room. I found his propensity to love and affection bizarre but sweet. It was this that I liked most, the wonder and awe that he was in love with me back, the man I had studied since high school. It made my features soft and my eyes gentler and full of sweet things like desire and shyness, joy and lust and sadness too. Those days, I stopped feeling so shameful about dropping out of college. It became far away in my past, an unimportant phase, though ultimately necessary in bringing me back to my golden little hometown, with Michael. I only cared about him, his plain, lovely face and organized way of explaining the radio broadcasting industry, or all his college friends who had died or gotten divorced, which he would do in great detail while I murmured in agreement or emphasis.

Michael didn’t call when he said he would. He had never done this before, but I withheld my concern as much as I could bear to. By the next day, when the phone still lay silent, I began to worry. I was at work when I set down my tray and picked up the daily paper. There, I saw his picture, tiny and grey, next to a story about a freak accident on the 280. Most unlikely, the paper read. A driver had collided with a merging car and died on impact. Not Michael, never him, I thought. But he was the guy behind the wheel. Silver Toyota smashed in with a shattered windshield, it was true. I rushed home, burst through the fence of the garden. My mother was harvesting sweet potatoes. What was wrong, she asked me. I couldn’t speak, my face was hot and my hands were cold. I shook my head and scanned her expression carefully, looking for any special signs of grief. But her face was still stuck in joy because she had uprooted a particularly fat sweet potato. I ran to my room in confusion at the whole thing.

I hardly mourned Michael, which scared me. I hadn’t made up the intensity of our affair. Nor had I faked my feelings for him. But I didn’t weep over his belongings, wasn’t haunted by his memory. It was my mother I was sorry for, most afraid for. Each day I wondered if she had caught wind of the accident. How strange for him to go this way, so suddenly, so violently. It was such cruel news. All I could do was watch her tend to her garden. I wished that she would give me a sign. I wanted to shout, it’s Michael, you must have heard about Michael! But there was no sign, no hint of the ridiculous truth I was desperately looking for.