The Skin Horse Part One

Balthazar is his own person and he deserves his own book, a book I am in the process of writing on this blog. But he is also part of my life, which was well underway when he was born. It seems diminishing to say that his death is one of several pivot points in my life. I want to say that it is the pivot point: Before and After. But there are many ways to divide an orange.

I was writing another, different memoir before Balthazar was born. It was tentatively titled The Skin Horse, and it was about my childhood and about motherhood and my long slow crawl toward a real and authentic self. My agent told me it didn't have an ending. I'm posting some of it now, because it's what I've been working on and thinking about lately, trying to understand where Balthazar fits.

*

A year after I graduated from college, I got a job at an independent bookstore I'd venerated as a holy shrine since I was a little kid. While I worked there I became involved, predictably, in a brief, tortured relationship with a coworker.

We met in front of the self-help section. The manager was introducing me to all of my new colleagues, and the man was shelving books in what I learned were his assigned sections: self-help, sexuality and religion. How absurdly spot-on is that? What a Holy Trinity, those sections. What a perfect shamrock of all that I had yet to grapple with. And standing right in front of me, blond and beautiful, was the curator of that arcane knowledge.

There was something defiantly 1970's about the man, though maybe that was just the beard, which was an unusual feature in the mid-90's. He was wearing green jeans and running shoes, but he might as well have been wearing a deerskin vest with no shirt underneath, and maybe some kind of amulet on a leather strap. He might as well have been strumming "Dance With Me" on an acoustic guitar. And I was a goner, because I was a girl trapped in amber, a girl with a heart schooled by 70's soft rock, a heart that was lonely and sad and vulnerable to synthesizers.

When we were introduced, he briefly lifted his bright blue eyes from his cart of books, and I was shocked stupid by them. Apparently my rostromedial prefrontal cortex recognized him in an instant.

Some higher, wiser part of my brain recognized him, too. This will not end well, it informed me.

*

Five months later I was at the bookstore's service desk with Daria, who was eighteen years old and a recent Russian émigré. We were talking about a chick who worked in the café, who had gotten married over the weekend to someone she'd met the week before.

"Why would she do that?" Marriage: I couldn't imagine it. Couldn't you just hole up in your apartment and have sex constantly? Of course I had a boyfriend and I wasn't having sex with him at all, much less constantly, but that was because I was secretly in love with someone else.

"Maybe he's a millionaire," Daria said.

"Maybe he's a millionaire," I spat. "Only you would say that."

I was always annoyed with her. She was brilliant and socially awkward and so nakedly, transparently in love with the man that I was also (secretly) in love with.  She was what I feared I was, and was therefore to be despised in the same measure as I despised myself.

He approached the service desk and caught the tail end of the conversation. It took him a minute to figure out who had said what.

"Thank god," he said to me. "I thought you said you wanted to marry a millionaire and that would be terrible."

"Your image of me would be shattered?" I teased. For many weeks I had been too terrified to speak to him. Every day I had left the store determined not to be such a pathetic loser and every morning I had been again unable to act like a normal person. Eventually I had committed myself to a slow process of desensitization, as if I had a peanut allergy. Even now, though, I had trouble looking at him directly.

"Why would you care if she said that?" asked Daria suspiciously.

"She's the only woman I respect," he said.

"Me?" said Daria, confused at first. "I'm the only woman you respect?"

He caught my eye over her head and gave me a conspiratorial smile. Eventually Daria understood.

"But what about me?"

"You're kind of a counterpoint."

As soon as I was able I fled to the warehouse. I offered to wrap things for people and hid at the wrapping station, where my goofy joyful smile wouldn't cause anyone to ask me any questions. That was where he eventually found me, some time later.

"Here you are, hiding and wrapping," he said, correctly assessing my motivations.

"That was really nice what you said," I said, not looking up from the roll of hunter green paper and the spool of gold stickers. "You embarrassed me."

"I embarrassed you?" He seemed stumped by the admission. He hung around awhile longer, put some of the books in his bin onto a cart and checked whatever lists managers checked, but then he left me alone.

What he said was not nice. It was cruel to Daria, who was just a teenager, after all. He was thirty-one. And what was wrong with a man if a co-worker he hardly knew was the only woman he respected? Did he not respect his mother? His sister? His boss or his college professor or Hillary Clinton or Ruth Bader Ginsberg or An Sung Suu Kyi?  The other possibility was that it was a lie, an obvious attempt to flatter me. But I didn't see that, because I had fallen for it.

*

My mother's family thought of itself as a Family. As in, the Family has endowed this church pew. The Family always sits at this table at the country club for Sunday brunch. This farm has been in the Family for a hundred and fifty years.

Being born into this Family, I learned early on, meant certain things. In a place like Louisville, in which the degree to which you belong is measured in generations, I was given to understand that I could hold my head up against anyone. With the possible exception of the kids whose great great great grandmother had been scalped by Indians on the way from Shelbyville to Louisville and had survived to found a dynasty. Fortunately there were only three of them.

Being part of the Family meant that I was not allowed to get a bad grade, or use the incorrect object pronoun. I was not allowed to be rude, or loud, or neglect my grooming. I attended church every Sunday, not the megachurch in the South end with the video screens and electric guitars, but the Presbyterian one in Crescent Hill with my parents or the Episcopal one in the Highlands with my grandparents.

Everyone in the Family gave money and time to the Red Cross and the Democratic Party. In return for their noblesse oblige, they could expect a certain amount of deference wherever they went, a deference I could only assume would be mine as well, when I grew up and took my rightful place.

It hardly mattered for the purposes of this narrative I was bequeathed that we actually lived in an ugly suburban ranch house where the kitchen had a plaid carpet, that I wore pale blue Levi's corduroys and matching acrylic sweaters, that I went to public school and had giant, ugly, crooked teeth. All of that was incidental. My mother also made it clear that my father was, genealogically speaking, beside the point.  He had come to Louisville from Tennessee and would therefore always be an outsider. I, on the other hand, was a princess of the blood.

To be continued...