Sidney used to say that life sped through three acts toward the grave.
In the first act, things happen to you. In the second, you think about those things that happened to you. In the third, things happen to you that you’d rather not think about.
I think Sidney is somewhere between acts two and three, but she might be trapped in an encore of the first. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been able to see the stage for quite a while.
I met Sidney through Veronica, who edited my first short story collection. They worked in the same office, and were eating lunch together in a parkette overrun with skateboarders one afternoon when I picked up Veronica’s latest round of edits, which she insisted on giving to me on paper.
I had a small crush on Veronica, but it vanished the instant I saw Sidney struggling with an overstuffed tuna sandwich, her enormous lips caked in mayonnaise, crumbs on her blouse.
‘This is Sidney, she’s a translator,’ Veronica began. Sidney, uninterested in decorum, cut her off,
‘Veronica was telling me about your book. I’ve got a note for you too. If you want a character in a short story to sound important, make them a translator.’
With one comment Sidney told me she was smart, that she didn’t take herself seriously, and that she didn’t give a fuck that she had food on her face.
I’d say that I fell in love with her right then.
When Sidney was twenty-nine she moved to Paris with her then-boyfriend, Yuri. I told her I would’ve advised against that, because your thirties are about comparing your current partner to the one from your twenties, the one you’re destined to break up with.
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but who knows that at twenty-nine?’
They’d been together for four years. Sidney was in love with Yuri, so much so that she had agreed to relocate to Paris for him, despite disliking Paris.
During the third week of her new life on Rue des Batignolles, Sidney had a thought: Paris was full of men, each of them potentially better for her than Yuri.
‘I realized,’ she told me, as we folded laundry in our building’s basement, just days after moving in together, ‘that people move to Paris hoping to find their true love. The move to any new city is always the hope of a new life. Renewal. Not that that’s something I believed in, and I’m not sure I do now either.’
Yuri sometimes skipped bathing for a day, occasionally two. It hadn’t ever bothered Sidney before, not really, but in Paris she saw men on the street who were just as handsome as Yuri, possibly more ambitious, not as attached to their mothers. Maybe these men showered daily, never took a day off the way Yuri did. What had she done? Who moves, she’d realized that morning – in the apartment they were still furnishing – to one of the world’s most notoriously romantic cities with someone they’ve grown, as she put it, accustomed to? She was ‘selling herself short’ she told me. Yuri had done nothing wrong. She assured him of that when she broke up with him, a few weeks later.
I plucked Sidney’s favourite T-shirt from the pile of laundry and began folding it. I’d never met Yuri, but my heart broke for him: young and in love in Paris, building a new life, looking forward to folding laundry with his girlfriend, unaware she was about to become a memory.
I told Sidney that as her current boyfriend, this was a terrifying story to hear. She laughed and called me silly, maybe gave me a kiss, and all I could think was,
‘But, she would’ve acted just this way with Yuri.’
Before Sidney, most of my time in the shower was spent adjusting the knobs like a safecracker, rarely able to find the perfect temperature. During the first week in our apartment on Jackson Street, Sidney witnessed this while she sat on the toilet brushing her hair.
‘The water’s fine,’ she laughed, ‘get the fuck in and get wet.’
Sidney, Sidney Sidney.
Eventually Sidney and I got married. We moved into a building with in-unit laundry, but we no longer shared stories while folding clothes. Nothing was wrong, we’d just developed our own routines, and were occasionally out of sync.
It’s only with hindsight that I remember Yuri, and Sidney saying she’d grown ‘accustomed’ to him.
Sidney and I rarely fought and could tell each other anything, or so I thought. People say it’s healthy for couples to fight, it means there’s still passion. I’ve always assumed that was bullshit, but now I’m not sure.
Our new dynamic involved us only having sex once a month, sometimes less. I brought it up one night when I was tired and frustrated by my inability to finish writing a story.
‘Obviously, I think you’re beautiful, and fatally sexy,’ I’d told her, truthfully. ‘I just wonder what other women might be like.’
I missed sex with my wife, that was the crucial bit, but after that, I just missed sex. Despite my awareness of Sidney’s beauty and my own glaring sexual and physical mediocrity, I felt restless. I presented the classic pitch of all men selling non-monogamy: I claimed to be helpless, just like an infant, a ten-month-old focused on a purple block who quickly becomes attracted to an orange sphere. I loved the purple block that was Sidney – with her blond hair, long legs and enormous, perfectly symmetrical breasts – but if she wasn’t available, I still needed a shape to play with.
The day of my comment about other women, I’d seen one: a brunette shifting her weight from foot to foot in line at the grocery store. She was wearing tight leather pants. Sidney only wore dresses. She had big dumb curly hair. Sidney’s hair was straight. She could’ve been anything really, so long as she was different from Sidney. At that point we’d been married for eight years, one more than the famed itch, although I’d been itchy for a while. The woman ahead of me in line might employ a sexual technique I’d never experienced, might say or do something so unexpected that it would blow my mind. I put down my basket, ran to the bathroom and masturbated furiously.
I wasn’t being entirely selfish. I was, I told Sidney, also interested in her pleasure. Maybe she’d like to experience something different? I trusted her, I loved her; I wasn’t scared she’d leave.
‘You hurt my feelings,’ she said. ‘I honestly am happy with you. You make me feel great. I don’t notice anyone else.’
I wanted to take it all back. Her lips had kissed mine thousands of times. She never made me feel fat, or bald, and I was both. I didn’t bring it up again.
Two years passed.
Sidney and I managed to get back in sync, and I accepted that I couldn’t have everything I wanted. The novelty of unknown naked women never became more important to me than our marriage. Surrendering to that fact may have made me a better husband, although I never thought to confirm this by asking Sidney. We went back to folding laundry together, and it was while I watched Sidney rolling up my socks that she told me the story.
Translation work had dried up, so Sidney was bartending at an art house theater here in Los Angeles. She’d been setting up for a screening slash reception when a woman she described as looking ‘dusty’ walked in.
‘She was in her early thirties,’ Sidney said, ‘and I swear just covered in a thin film of dust, head to toe. She was beautiful in this 1970s way, with blue eyes, sandy blond hair in a ponytail, and freckles on her nose, the kinda freckles you see on cartoons and Playboy bunnies. Hollywood pretty, unreal, like an average dad’s dream centerfold.’
I told her she was also an average dad’s dream centerfold, seeing as I was an average dad. She laughed and we both looked at Penny, our nine-month-old who the day before had been eight months and thirty days.
The dusty woman seemed dazed, stunned. Sidney always tried to help strangers, especially women who seemed vulnerable. She continued.
‘I thought maybe she was a camper who got lost. I asked if she was okay. That seemed to wake her up. She said she came to the theater because that was the last place she was “before.” That was confusing. I asked her before what?’
‘Well,’ the woman told Sidney, ‘I’d just seen a movie, and I wanted a date shake, so I drove to the Date Shack in Westmoreland, near the Algodones dunes.’
Sidney was born here. I’m from Michigan. The date thing runs deep for locals. She explained.
‘I understood her. Date shakes don’t taste the same anywhere else. If you get them from Date Shack or a stand in the valley, the fruit is still warm from the sun, and the vanilla ice cream is really cold. They melt into each other in this amazing way. You can replicate it by leaving dates on your dashboard, but if you want the real thing you have to go to the valley, where the medjool dates grow.’
There’s a particular type of California girl who prioritizes medjool dates and getting to the beach to watch the sunset. They say you walk too fast and they never know what time it is. They love Joni Mitchell but especially Hejira, apparently her most personal album, which some critics were unkind to. They believe that dreamcatchers work, that magic is real, and they’re experts at being in love. Sidney was that type. She tried to hide it the way certain girls from Boston try hiding their accents. She mostly failed, and I loved that she did.
The woman explained that after she got her shake, she saw ‘an unusually handsome man’. He struck up a conversation with her, and she found herself transfixed by his looks, and his charm. He said he had a farm nearby where he grew dates, and invited her to go back with him. Despite how objectively sketchy it all was, she was interested, and found herself walking toward her car with him. That was when the handsome man told her that he had ‘multiple wives’ and suggested that she might want to join his household; a red flag the dusty lady claimed to have purposefully ignored. Once she got to the man’s farm, ‘it was paradise.’ She liked the other wives and decided, basically immediately, to become wife number four. They all wore beautiful handmade clothes and picked fruit together. She didn’t mention her relationship with the man, instead she focused on how much she enjoyed the company of the other wives. Sidney made a point of telling me that the dusty woman ‘didn’t use any special jargon’.
‘Then,’ Sidney told me, ‘she said that “years passed”. She’d woken up and realized she missed her mom. Her credit card had expired and her cell phone didn’t work. Her car was parked there at the farm, but looked like it hadn’t been driven in years. She tried the ignition and it started. There was just enough gas for her to drive back to LA, to the theater. It seemed like she didn’t know she was covered in dust, and I didn’t ask about it. She didn’t mention saying goodbye to the wives, or anything about the man. All I could think to do was offer her a drink. I gave her a glass of whiskey and asked if she’d ever go back. She looked at me strangely, took a long time to answer, then said “I guess not.” Then she laughed; she realized she couldn’t pay for the drink. I said it was on the house. I mean I was worried about her. I went to the stockroom to get napkins. When I came back she was gone. Her car was gone. Nobody had seen her leave. I’d only been away for like thirty seconds.’
Sidney couldn’t stop wondering about the dusty woman, and I sympathized. It was mysterious. Where did she go? Where had she been all those years, and who the fuck was this medjool farming Svengali?
‘Why didn’t she ever talk about the man?’ she’d ask me, ‘Why was it only about how nice it was to be with the other wives?’
This came up a lot. I was curious too, just less vocal. Anyone who loves someone with an obsession inevitably becomes exhausted by how they unceasingly belabor some point or another.
‘Fuck, Sidney,’ I said once, on a day where she’d mentioned it repeatedly, ‘maybe the whole story was bullshit. Maybe there was no guy, maybe the guy was just the least interesting part of what happened there. You need to let it go.’
I’ve tried to forgive myself. It was practically every day for over a year, most people would lose patience.
She stopped discussing it with me soon after that, but she didn’t let it go. And why should she? That I got tired of hearing about it didn’t make it any less interesting to her. And she’d actually talked to dusty, spaced-out wife number four. I couldn’t know what that felt like.
For six months, Sidney kept her curiosity to herself, and while I should’ve known it was because she realized it was getting on my nerves, I forgot. She began making the two-hour drive to the Date Shack in Westmoreland every other Sunday, but I wasn’t concerned. She was a California girl who liked the open road and doing what made her happy.
I was a Michigan guy who’d been trying to let his wife have her own private life ever since we began dating. Possessiveness was my default. Suggesting we explore non-monogamy was my most extreme attempt to act against my own nature, and I found it very uncomfortable.
It’s a complicated thing when your less sophisticated character traits are proven to be useful.
Looking back, she must’ve been waiting for him to find her, leaning against her car in the parking lot, sucking the last of a date shake through a plastic straw.
When she didn’t come back that day, as awful it sounds, for a while I hoped she’d crashed the car, far from the road, or that she’d been abducted by aliens.
For the first few months I drove to the valley each Sunday on my own, asking if anyone had seen my wife. Nothing. There was comfort in that, but not much. Later I started to bring Penny with me. Penny, a good luck charm. Penny, with the photograph, asked a trucker with a date shake if he’d ever seen her mama.
He had. I took over the conversation.
‘Brother,’ he said, with more pity than I liked, ‘I saw her, was around eight months ago. She was talking with some man . . . I sure as shit didn’t like him because my girl couldn’t stop saying how handsome he was. Then they both got into a car and headed south toward that mess of medjool farms.’
Penny turns four in three weeks. Sidney’s forty-third birthday was last Wednesday. I pay to keep her cell phone working and renew her credit cards. I tell my friends to keep an eye on their wives. I hope they don’t misunderstand me.
Sidney thought that life sped through three acts toward death. That makes sense to me. But I’ve learned it’s also true that you might be forced to work from an illegible script, that the stage can dissolve. Life is about structure, either one you construct or one that’s forced upon you. Mine has collapsed. All three acts are playing out simultaneously. I wish I could talk to Sidney about it. She understood these things.
Image © m01229
