The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [81]
Michael. My father’s name.
Is that what my father looked like, I thought, as a man in his early twenties? Tall, thin, beautiful, his hands making a dance against canvas?
I didn’t learn to love men from anything I knew. I learned to love men from loving Michael.
There is so much I didn’t glean from being a daughter in a family full of women.
I didn’t learn to love holidays from my family. I learned it from entering Mike and Dean’s house, beautifully decorated - as beautiful as you imagine fantasy worlds as a child - warm amber rooms and candle lights and ribbons and the smell of baked things and spice - with no father to smash it apart.
I didn’t learn how to cook from any mother. I learned to cook from watching Michael - his hands, the patience, the artistry, the care, the joy of putting something into your mouth so filled with love it made me weep to chew.
I didn’t learn how to be feminine from any women. I learned to take off my combat boots and comb my crooked hair from looking at pictures Dean took of me over the years, pictures where he showed me that someone like me could be … pretty.
Michael was at my first wedding on the beach in Corpus Christi when I said I do to Phillip on the white sand. Michael and Dean were with me at my second wedding with Devin on the top of Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, where a strange casino minister with hair black as a record album recited a Hopi prayer while my mother waited to drink and gamble. Michael was not with me when I married Andy in front of a justice of the peace in San Diego, but my big belly was, and it carried something of him, too.
Once Michael came to visit when Philip and I still lived in Eugene. After the baby died. Philip and I were nothing about each other. I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town. Philip worked at Smith Family Bookstore by day, and by night he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else. The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me. But on the second day Michael showed up on my doorstep at three in the morning. I opened the door. He looked like ass. He had his suitcase with him. He said, “I can’t stay in that fucking efficiency. It reeks. There’s cat piss and shit and oil paint everywhere. The guy doesn’t live like a human.” And I let him in.
It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip. Together. Deeply. And that both of us left Phillip. Divorced him. Forever. Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, passive hands. It was a sacred truth between us.
After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends. I hated knowing he was there. My Michael and Dean. Goddamn you, Devin. But then Mike called and told me, “All he wants to talk about is how many times a day he fucks the womanchild. I don’t give a shit how many times he screws the infant. GAWD. It’s so juvenile.” The next day he called again and said, “Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while we were at work. I think he stole one of our pans. And some of Dean’s CDs. He’s never staying here again.”
I know it’s petty. Idiotic. But I loved him so much for telling me that.
When Andy and I were first getting together, it was hard. Andy was still married. So we had a couple of rendezvous out side of San Diego. One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived. They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died. They moved there for work, I’m sure - both of them are astonishingly talented graphic designers. But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me. I mean I wished it was true. I wished the moment when he said one afternoon “We should live closer together,” the afternoon we downed 12 beers in a row in my house in Eugene, was somehow why he was near. It’s the wish