Creek Running North

The other day Becky and I were having one of those idle conversations couples sometimes have. What would our lives be like had we never met? We talked of trivialities, places where we’d both be living and jobs we might still have, and then she looked at me strangely.

“You would have married,” she said, appending a name to the sentence, a person from our past whom I no longer know, on whose rock I nearly foundered my marriage. “And divorced four months later,” I thought to myself. But life does not work that way. I met her at a job Becky had encouraged me to take.

Seventeen years together, and no part of my life entirely distinct from hers. She would be living in an airy single apartment full of light and Scandinavian furniture with no piles of desert books, no random stones from hikes long since forgotten. I would be dead, or in Barstow. She would have no one to challenge her self-abnegation. I would have no one to kick my ass.

Life does not work that way. Ask me what my life would be like without veins, or lungs. She is not part of me, nor I of her. But she has suffused herself into me, my thought, my work. My life.

We knew each other for two years before we were romantically involved. When we met we were romantically involved, I with Elissa, Becky with Elissa’s brother Michael. Becky and Michael lived in San Francisco, and would visit us about once a month, perhaps a little more.

Michael would tell non-stop jokes about old television shows. Becky would roll her eyes. As 1987 turned to 1988, her eyerolling became less patient. Michael was her first love, and so she was growing dissatisfied.

She and I would talk quietly of nothing as Michael and Elissa joked and argued. I tried my best to keep my silly, growing crush on her a secret. Eight years younger than me! I was 27 when we met. The math was irrefutable, my feelings inappropriate and doomed. I worked to transmute secret ardor into simple friendship, familial affection. It worked, for a time. Elissa’s family was large and chaotic, tempestuous, her father famously difficult to bear, though he was always kind to me. Becky and I became allies, confidantes in our struggles with the in-laws. I slowly put my crush aside, concentrated on my failing relationship with Elissa.

Michael and Becky were leaving our house after one weekend of jokes and sniping, talking and eye rolling. We stood in our kitchen. Elissa and Becky exchanged a quick hug, and Michael and I clapped hollow hands on one another’s backs. Michael turned to kiss his sister. Becky moved to me and hugged me. I gave her an affectionate embrace, squeezed just a bit, moved to let go. She didn’t. She clasped herself to me. I melted a little, clasped back again. There passed a very long time. Fifteen seconds? Thirty? Far beyond the bounds of propriety, whatever the duration. And then she turned and walked out without a word, and Michael followed, and when the door closed behind them Elissa masked her rage in mockery.

Neither Becky nor I mentioned that hug for some years after.

The next year Elissa met a man she loved deeply. She dithered. Choose him, or choose me, I said, but choose. Three days later, the kitchen full of boxes, I tapped half the cumin into an empty jar. When I’d bought it, I thought, I hadn’t anticipated dividing it. The phone rang. I smeared tears and cumin on the handset. Becky had heard. Elissa had told her family, and Michael had told Becky. I was fine, I said. Sad, of course. Some friends in Berkeley had invited me to move in with them.

“I don’t want to lose touch with you,” she said. We made plans for coffee.

“I am probably breaking up with Michael,” she said.

Elissa came home, looked at me sorrowfully, told me to take all the cumin if I wanted to. “That,” I said, “is not the point.”

We ate with Allison last week, the night before her plane took her back east. We were talking boys, and it occurred to me she is now as old as Becky was when we started dating. Just don’t fall for a 29-year-old, I said, and Becky agreed. “Don’t make the same mistake I did!” Under the table her hand took mine.

It was a long time ago. I can no longer fully remember the person I was. Nor do I wish to. Twenty-nine from forty-six is a lifetime. How do I disentangle the threads of her from the life I might have had? Sadness, brilliant joy, foundering. Days spent avoiding topics we both dared not bring up. Passion, boredom. Walks back home from Chinatown in Oakland, heavy fresh noodles making the plastic bag handles cut into my fingers. Her voice on the phone from China, from the desert, from across the bay. Waffles and companionable silence. Fierce happiness. Languor. Longing. Laughter.

One day I drove five miles toward the desert, turned and drove back home to kiss her one more time. One day we cast bare hooks into the Trinity’s South Fork, each of us aching as she pulled me back into our marriage, the first day in four years the ravens spoke to me. One day we woke up, our coffee date having run longer than we planned, and looked at each other in wonderment and a little fear. One day I left her forever, washed over with remorse at hurting Michael. One day she handed me a box: food from Chinatown to eat on the plane to Oahu with Elissa. One day I smiled at her through dinner as she picked every last flake of cilantro from her bowl with chopsticks. One day she pulled a love letter from her backpack, handed it to me among the Joshua trees. One day we stood before our friends and slipped rings on one another’s fingers, platinum with some iridium and osmium, Alvarez layers to seal away the monsters of the past.

Seven thousand days and each one changed me whole, but one more than the others. I was in school and she came to me, but I would not know it for some time. I was doing math, or looking out the window. A continent away she drew a breath and screamed. March 29, 1968, and I am the least of those whom she has changed. I may be the most grateful.