The Myth of You and Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

an article once about how there was no essential difference between the mind’s experience of waking life and the mind’s experience of dreams, and he’d talked about it for weeks. Sometimes he had memories, he told me, that were as vivid as his life in the here and now. This, he said, was time travel—exactly what I had no wish to do. I wanted to stay in the here and now, in this house where I’d been happy, where Oliver said I belonged.
    When I didn’t answer, he sighed. “All right,” he said. “I won’t talk about her anymore.” He squeezed my hand. “I love you very much,” he said. “I can’t possibly be the only one.”
    “You’re enough,” I said. I put my other hand on his. He leaned over to brush his lips against my cheek. Then he rested his head on my arm. We sat like that a long, long time.
    Two months later, Oliver was dead.
     
     
    The whole time I lived in that house I wanted to take a particular kind of photo of Oliver in front of it. In the photograph I envisioned, he was dressed in one of his southern-gentleman suits—not unlike the ones Faulkner wore in the postcards for sale at Square Books—with both of his hands resting on his cane. But the one time I tried to pose him, he looked so unsteady that I couldn’t bear to leave him standing there unsupported. I settled for a picture of him sitting at an open window. In it you can just make out the shock of his white hair, a glint of light off his glasses, his lifted hand, blurry with waving.

 
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    O liver used to tell people that he had found me wandering in the woods, taken me home, and adopted me, and though this couldn’t have been further from the truth it was certainly how I felt. I didn’t see my parents very often—my mother, remarried, lived in California; my father, retired, lived in Montana and volunteered at Yellowstone. Between dropping out of graduate school and going to work for Oliver, I had a series of unsatisfying jobs—cataloger in a used-book store in Austin, waitress in a vegetarian restaurant in Asheville, copy editor for a university press in Chapel Hill. I had even gone back to Nashville, where Sonia and I went to college, for a summer, and had a brief tenure as a secretary in the Vanderbilt English department. When I left Austin, the man I dated there said that I thought that because my father was military, I was, too. He said I’d treated my life there, and my time with him, like a tour of duty, and that the only reason I was leaving was that my year was up. I said, “You’re probably right,” and then he was quiet. I accepted this view of myself as restless, and thought I would probably move around forever, and most of the time that was fine with me. There were times, though, usually late at night, in a new apartment, when I was lonely, and sorry that I’d never found a place where I wanted to stay.
    Oliver’s daughter, Ruth, was the one who hired me. She’d been trying for years to get her father to accept a live-in aide. He was almost ninety and, while mentally acute, he was frail. He had refused her offer to hire help until she began to call this hypothetical employee his “research assistant.” That was me. Ruth heard about me from my undergraduate advisor, who had never given up hope that I would do something with my education, maybe even go back and finish the doctoral program I’d abandoned after less than two years. Every few months, he wrote me an impassioned letter about his latest scholarly interests, meant to convey to me the pleasures of the life of the mind. I appreciated his efforts, but I hadn’t found graduate school to have any pleasure in it at all. Ruth’s husband knew this professor, and through him she tracked me down in Chapel Hill. I’d already begun to have the feeling that signaled an upcoming move—that my life was a piece of paper I wanted to ball up and throw away—so Ruth had no trouble convincing me to relocate to Oxford. She wanted me to encourage Oliver to