Timeline

The first June I thought I would die of heartbreak

for a boy who didn't sufficiently appreciate a girl

who spent spare hours studying the section titled

"Stranger in Town" in Spanish in a Nutshell (}Socorro!

iMe han robado!) and Practical Chinese Conversation

(Hsia-yu pu ch'ing-t'ien, "It's not a fine day

when it rains") you nearly died of spinal meningitis

in Paris. And when my car spun out of control

on the way back to college after seven months in Boston

as a dropout manqué, you were packing to move to Boston

where your life would become so rich with friends

and compatible intellects that you suspected marriage

was the logical next step in this ladder of happiness.

At the moment I decided to teach myself shorthand,

having dropped out for good for the second time,

you were working in the back of a bookstore

dreaming up a woman who could understand Nietsche

in German, not once forgetting the z in his name,

and who could write you celebratory poems

that wouldn't sound tinny. And when I threw

my spiral dictation notebook at the fast-talking

TV anchorman, you were forgetting to remove

your red spiral notebook from a phone booth-

a loss you would mourn all your life. And it's true

that the week I entered law school you'd begun to look

at your wife's male friend with slightly altered eyes.

But is it possible that the very afternoon

I decided to quit law school for romantic reasons,

you discovered you were drinking a beer you didn't want,

and feeling bored with marriage, or merely numb?

While I helped, more or less, to push my sister's car

up the blizzarded mountain in my wedding dress,

you were upstairs in your father's house in Vermont

reading Kafka while everyone else was out skiing

in perfect conditions.

Wen shih ch'u tsai na-erh? Where is the information desk?

Of course, when I moved out that first summer,

under a shower of words hissed sharply enough

to be heard over all the neighbors' sprinklers, you

were still either bored or merely numb. And later

that same summer when I moved back in, carrying

grounds for divorce in the deepest pocket of my heart-

that's right, moved back in, an emotional gesture I still

can't swallow in retrospect, but have proof of-

you were writing about a mistress you didn't have.

And wasn't it ta-hou-nien, or "year after year after

the next," that I picked up the note left on my car seat

about the woman my husband had been lying about-

or so the note said-

just as you were thinking about not having children

for a while? Then the argument about his children

being his children, and the subsequent silent meal

I don't remember cooking or eating, at which moment

you were just carrying the window fan we still have

into your new apartment in the strange city

to which I would move the next time I left him.