We Are Unprepared. Meg Little Reilly
Читать онлайн книгу.
didn’t like Pia’s parents, but not for the reasons she provided. They offended a Yankee sensibility in me that valued industriousness and discipline. I couldn’t understand what justified their haughtiness when, as far as I could tell, they hadn’t left much of a mark on the world. It wasn’t that their pretensions were unfamiliar to me—there was no shortage of artsy liberal affect in the corner of New England I grew up in. I just hated playing along with it. Pia’s parents attended the symphony and followed culinary trends and read theater reviews, but they didn’t create anything themselves and this bothered me. They seemed to believe that, by virtue of association with greatness, they, too, were great. They told us stories about so-and-so who just produced a one-act play or wrote a book about his trek across Nepal as we nodded with appropriate awe. Visits with them required pretending that we weren’t having cocktails with appreciators of great art, but with the artists themselves. All of this was made even more maddening by their undiluted disappointment at the lack of formal culture in our lives. That was their term for distinguishing the kind of culture that we enjoyed from the established arts of the aristocracy they believed themselves to be part of.
My family was less complicated in every way, a point that Pia liked to make when she was annoyed with me. My father was a lawyer at a local firm in Rutland, where I grew up with two sisters and a brother. I came second, which secured my rank as neither the most successful nor the most screwed-up of my siblings. My mom stayed at home and I believe Pia disapproved of this, but she never said so aloud. My parents volunteered at our schools and picked up trash on green-up days and supported local theater. Since moving to New York, I hadn’t met anyone who cared about their community in the way my parents cared for their struggling town. I like my parents and, although my younger sister’s kids and my brother’s drug habits had commanded most of their attention in recent years, we were all okay. (My older sister lives in London with her wife. We had always gotten along well, though we’ve fallen out of touch in recent years.) This is what family looks like to me. It’s not always joyful, but it’s big and messy and kind of fun some of the time. I expected to have something similar one day, when I was ready.
“Yeah, we have to stay here no matter what,” I agreed, pulling the collar on my sweater a little higher. It was cool outside now and so dark that I could barely see Pia’s face floating above the candles.
She moved our bare plates aside and took a small notebook with a matching pen from the pocket of her bulky sweater. It was list time. Pia loved the idea of being a writer, someone who writes, so she was forever collecting pretty little notebooks to have on hand in case inspiration struck. But inspiration never stayed with her for more than a few minutes, so her notebooks were mostly used for frantic list making, which struck much more frequently. She listed books she planned to read, organic foods she wanted to grow, yoga postures that would heal whatever was ailing her. Her lists were aspirational instructions for a life she wanted to live. They rarely materialized into much but served a constructive role nonetheless, as if the mere act of putting her plans in writing set her on a path to self-improvement. I didn’t object to the positivity of it all.
Pia had begun a shopping list of home supplies we would need for The Storms. She wrote, “canned goods, multivitamins, water filtration system, solar blankets.” It read more like a survival list for the apocalypse than a storm-preparation plan.
“Babe, I was thinking we would just, like, board up the windows and try to seal up the root cellar a bit,” I said. “Do you really think we need all that?”
“It can’t hurt to be prepared.” Pia shrugged, still writing in the dark. “And if nothing comes of these storm predictions, then we’ll have some extra supplies the next time we need them. No harm done.”
Her reasoning was sound, but there was an edge to her voice that surprised me. The coming storms excited her.
Pia came around to my side of the table and wrapped a wool blanket around both of our shoulders. It smelled like campfire from a previous summer outing. She put her arms around my chest for a quick squeeze and then turned back to her notebook. I listened to the leaves swaying with the wind and the din of summer insects that were somehow still abundant. Her hair fell all around us. I could smell the natural almond shampoo she had started using since adopting a more country approach to hygiene, which made her hair wilder than it used to be. Pia was getting charged with each new idea she recorded. I loved her like that: present and energized. I knew what my role was at those moments. I would be adoring and attentive, which I really was.
Pia pulled a knee up to her chest and I noticed a new drawing in ballpoint pen on her upper thigh. It was a tree with the face of an old man in its trunk. She must have done it that evening, mindlessly doodling in a moment of boredom. Our lives were filled with these small reminders of Pia’s artistic gifts, washable and impermanent, but impressive. She had won awards in college for her oil paintings, and a prominent gallery in Manhattan had offered to show her photography years before. But Pia lacked the discipline to carry out long-term projects and she changed mediums too often to be truly great in any of them. With focus, she could have earned a living doing the kind of art she loved.
“You’re going to be great at this,” Pia said.
“At what?”
“You know, bracing for these big weather events, finding industrious solutions to things, living without some of our old comforts. You like things a little difficult.”
She was complimenting me, but teasing, too. Since we’d started making real money, modern life was feeling a bit squishy for me, all morning espressos and personal trainers. I secretly feared that I was growing too attached to it all. A tiny alarm in the primal recesses of my brain had been going off, warning me to stay sharp and focused in case of future uncertainty. I never told Pia about this growing discomfort, but I should have guessed that she could sense it.
“Fingers crossed for frozen pipes.” I smiled.
We stayed outside until nearly eleven, building our plan for The Storms and laughing—flirting even—as we huddled together in solidarity. When I finally convinced Pia that it was time to go to bed, she took my hand and led me upstairs to our bedroom, where she instructed me to sit in a small antique chair to watch her slowly peel off each layer of her clothing.
It would have been comical on a less beautiful woman as she unbuttoned her oversize flannel shirt and pulled off fading green cotton underwear, but it wasn’t. My physical response to Pia’s naked body hadn’t flagged in the years we’d been together. If anything, it had grown more intense as sex tapered off a little. When she was done undressing, she turned and walked her naked body to the bed to wait for me. Her ears and nose were still cold from the evening chill, but the rest of her body was warm, hot even. I attempted restraint at first, but that didn’t last, and what followed was the wild, forceful passion that we’d founded our relationship on years ago. Better even. We fucked like two people desperate to occupy one another. It was feral, afraid. Pia was alive, the weather was our common enemy and I was relieved.
As she fell asleep beside me, my mind drifted back to our unconceived baby and the news of The Storms. I wasn’t ready for a baby, not then, but I loved Pia’s desire for one because it was the embodiment of my favorite things about her: a hunger for new beginnings, adventure and, above all, optimism. Whether there was a place for optimism in the stormy new world we inhabited, I didn’t know. And I wondered—for the first time in my life—whether this was still a world that babies wanted to be born into. And how could the answer to that question be anything other than an emphatic yes if we are to go on living wholeheartedly? Is there a moment at which the human race should decide not to perpetuate itself, or will we keep going until the universe decides that for us and just wipes us out? The latter seemed more likely. So I wondered how the universe might kill off our species, whether it would be instantaneous and painless or cruelly slow. Perhaps it was already happening at a pace just slow enough to go undetected. Were we at a beginning or an end?
WE WOKE UP early the next morning, a clear Saturday that seemed incongruous with the austere task ahead: storm preparations. Pia walked around the bedroom