thing, and from out of the black marshes and muddy bottoms of small-town experience, I was determined to wrest a book, an enigmatic, ruthlessly apocalyptic, elegantly filthy dirigible of a novel that, in order to make its points all the more salient and startling, was unafraid to suffer under the weight of its own showiness and pretense, and for a little while I believed I might actually succeed.
After earning our undergraduate degrees from Normandy College, Morgan and I rented an apartment in a row house of soot-covered brick and calcified limestone that teetered at the river’s edge. A single bay window offered an unobstructed view of the flotsam that accumulated and swirled in the powerful eddies—plastic bags, cardboard boxes, wooden crates—before it continued downstream and plummeted over the falls into the valley. In front of our building, atop a muddy knoll, there was a sandlot where serious children played their serious games. Every night someone draped a flannel shirt on the rusty bars of the jungle gym, and as it flapped in the wind, the shirt looked like the cruciform figure of a headless man, arms reaching out in a lunatic embrace, another body ripe for the river, unloved and casually discarded.
With its beige carpets and dirty plaster walls covered in a machine-gun fire of nail holes, the one-bedroom apartment was a dun-colored shell that seemed intentionally designed to expunge from the minds of its broke and directionless tenants any traces of hope or dreams for the future, but Morgan worked diligently at transforming the place into a personal refuge, a sanctuary for the quiet contemplation of complex ideas. She spent nights and weekends patching and painting the cracked walls, choosing the best spots to display her small “art collection,” framed reprints of masterpieces by Cézanne, Pissarro, Rousseau, Gauguin, Degas, Cassatt, Doré. Though she endeavored to turn the place into a cozy gallery, she succeeded only in making it look like a consignment shop or the waiting room of a dentist’s office, minus the algae-filled aquarium.
For the most part the other tenants—overworked and sleep-deprived machinists, gas station attendants, fast-food workers—seemed friendly enough, and whenever they passed us on the street with their brood of wailing toddlers strapped into unwieldy, puke-splattered, secondhand strollers, they stopped to ask, “So when are you two lovebirds gonna bite the bullet, tie the knot, have a couple of kids?” They smiled, but I never failed to notice how they looked imploringly at me as if begging for rescue from some forced-labor camp and warning me away from the nascent hell of domesticity.
In Normandy Falls people too often resigned themselves to a predictable pattern of unintended pregnancy, reluctant cohabitation, long stretches of unemployment, substance abuse, battery, incarceration. Some days parents sent their children to school, other days they did not. Men and women partied all night and slept all day. It made little difference to them financially and professionally, and it certainly cost them nothing socially because in Normandy Falls there were no routines, and the only real constant was the mayhem that lurked at the periphery of this forlorn place.
Morgan and I had no immediate plans for marriage, and we agreed not to have kids for a long,
long
time. Things continued just as before until one day, after sitting through a three-hour graduate seminar, I returned to the apartment to discover—whether by accident or design, I was never entirely sure—that she had stopped taking the pill. At the bottom of the bathroom trash can, clumsily concealed under a sheet of tissue paper, I found her unopened prescription. More mystified than alarmed, I fished the container out of the trash and confronted her.
She had just finished her afternoon shift at the bistro, and as always the work had taken its terrible toll. By then I worried that my notion of Morgan as the unrefined
After earning our undergraduate degrees from Normandy College, Morgan and I rented an apartment in a row house of soot-covered brick and calcified limestone that teetered at the river’s edge. A single bay window offered an unobstructed view of the flotsam that accumulated and swirled in the powerful eddies—plastic bags, cardboard boxes, wooden crates—before it continued downstream and plummeted over the falls into the valley. In front of our building, atop a muddy knoll, there was a sandlot where serious children played their serious games. Every night someone draped a flannel shirt on the rusty bars of the jungle gym, and as it flapped in the wind, the shirt looked like the cruciform figure of a headless man, arms reaching out in a lunatic embrace, another body ripe for the river, unloved and casually discarded.
With its beige carpets and dirty plaster walls covered in a machine-gun fire of nail holes, the one-bedroom apartment was a dun-colored shell that seemed intentionally designed to expunge from the minds of its broke and directionless tenants any traces of hope or dreams for the future, but Morgan worked diligently at transforming the place into a personal refuge, a sanctuary for the quiet contemplation of complex ideas. She spent nights and weekends patching and painting the cracked walls, choosing the best spots to display her small “art collection,” framed reprints of masterpieces by Cézanne, Pissarro, Rousseau, Gauguin, Degas, Cassatt, Doré. Though she endeavored to turn the place into a cozy gallery, she succeeded only in making it look like a consignment shop or the waiting room of a dentist’s office, minus the algae-filled aquarium.
For the most part the other tenants—overworked and sleep-deprived machinists, gas station attendants, fast-food workers—seemed friendly enough, and whenever they passed us on the street with their brood of wailing toddlers strapped into unwieldy, puke-splattered, secondhand strollers, they stopped to ask, “So when are you two lovebirds gonna bite the bullet, tie the knot, have a couple of kids?” They smiled, but I never failed to notice how they looked imploringly at me as if begging for rescue from some forced-labor camp and warning me away from the nascent hell of domesticity.
In Normandy Falls people too often resigned themselves to a predictable pattern of unintended pregnancy, reluctant cohabitation, long stretches of unemployment, substance abuse, battery, incarceration. Some days parents sent their children to school, other days they did not. Men and women partied all night and slept all day. It made little difference to them financially and professionally, and it certainly cost them nothing socially because in Normandy Falls there were no routines, and the only real constant was the mayhem that lurked at the periphery of this forlorn place.
Morgan and I had no immediate plans for marriage, and we agreed not to have kids for a long,
long
time. Things continued just as before until one day, after sitting through a three-hour graduate seminar, I returned to the apartment to discover—whether by accident or design, I was never entirely sure—that she had stopped taking the pill. At the bottom of the bathroom trash can, clumsily concealed under a sheet of tissue paper, I found her unopened prescription. More mystified than alarmed, I fished the container out of the trash and confronted her.
She had just finished her afternoon shift at the bistro, and as always the work had taken its terrible toll. By then I worried that my notion of Morgan as the unrefined
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