Pictures of Atlantis
This is a record of young love and wobbly
stability. There's Mr. X in male cheesecake
pose, lying in front of the newly-planted
impatiens in the backyard of our first
Columbus apartment. Here's Loudon the
sheltie-dog, a ball of fluff, on his first
day home. Sidney
and Zoe
appear as young kittens, playful,
flexible, and sleek. In one set of
pictures, Mr. X and I pose separately,
each of us holding a champagne glass and
wearing the dark-lensed glasses that came
with my grandmother's 50s-era sunlamp. We
look like goons, but that was the point.
And then there are the shots of our
wedding, that great party we gave, where
his relatives filled the space and made it
joyous while mine were reserved and
inward, quiet in their happiness. These
photos are relics of another time, part of
my life but outside of it, too.
As time went on, Mr. X and I took fewer
pictures. Fifteen months after we were
married, we both got jobs in Washington, DC
and life got much more stressful. Mr. X
clashed terribly with his incompetent boss.
Our living situation wasn't comfortable. The
basement tenant in the house we rented, a man
named Dewey Wayne (I've since forgotten his
last name), had an intense personality. Dewey
Wayne had sold his house in Raleigh and put
all his money into a move to DC, which
included paying a year's rent in advance. He
had a habit of leaving his front door open
while he took his dog on walks, which was his
business, except that his place was connected
to ours by a door that we couldn't lock and
our neighborhood wasn't a good place to leave
doors open. The washer and dryer for the
building were in his apartment and he freaked
out (rightfully) once or twice when we walked
in on him, unannounced, to do our laundry.
Then there were the rats. The backyard, a
rectangle of bare dirt dotted with ratholes,
held a thriving rodent commune. We had a
parking space out by the trash cans and the
rats began to use our car as storage space,
something we discovered on our way to the
grocery store one weekend. As Mr. X pulled
out onto 15th Street, the engine began to
smoke. Over the course of our ten-minute
ride, the car slowly filled with the odor of
roasted, rotten meat. We rolled all the
windows down and covered our noses with
tissues to filter out the smell. When we
pulled into the parking lot, Mr. X popped
open the hood: two smoldering pork rib bones
had adhered to the carburetor. The car stank
for weeks. Later a rat actually chewed its
way into Dewey Wayne's apartment ("I came in
and there he was on top of the refrigerator,
munching on a bagel. Like Mighty Mouse," he
told us).
Mr. X and I finally fled the rental after
five months and bought a house in Takoma
Park, Maryland. The night before the house
inspection, our car was stolen from our
street, though it was recovered somewhat
unscathed a week later. In the meantime, Mr.
X's job had gone from horrible to
intolerable. His old position in Columbus was
still open and they were happy to take him
back. On the weekend of our second
anniversary, only eight months after we had
arrived in DC, he returned to Ohio. There
were solid reasons for him to leave that had
nothing to do with our marriage, but it was
the beginning of the end, or at least I can
mark the final slide with this event. We were
doomed from the beginning.
Mr. X is remarried now. He and his wife have
a child on the way. We haven't spoken in a
couple of years, though we are Facebook
friends. And while the past is always present
for me in some way, I don't think much about
that time when I was young and in love and it
was all fresh and new, when I was with
someone who was my loyal protector, when I
was learning to be an adult without drama. I
wasn't good at living without drama and still
courted it with alcohol and arguments, with
cruel remarks and coldness, but there was an
underlying sweetness to the relationship. Mr.
X helped pull me out of my childhood, was the
first person to hold out his hand.
The only evidence I have of that time is some
paperwork and photographs. We had no children
and the last living pet we shared is fading
fast. There are no friends in common with
which to reminisce, to verify that it all
happened. But I'm still not sure what to do
with the artifacts, the pictures that show
the world that we created for a brief moment,
now submerged in memory.
Image: Champagne on our
first anniversary, Columbus, November 1996. I
still have the glasses and -- strangely, but
coincidentally -- my son just fished them out
of a toy box this morning and put them on,
even though he hadn't worn them for months.
