What Now?

So what now?

This is as far as I got. I was going to get through Balthazar's birthday and then...I don't have a plan, for my grief or for the rest of my life.

Every now and then I read an interview with an actor who says something like, “I never had a plan. I fell into acting and just went with it and here I am.” A modeling agent approached them at a mall. They were waiting tables at a restaurant in Malibu and one of the regulars was Harvey Weinstein. I suspect most of them are being disingenuous. Anyone who makes it in Hollywood has got to be ambitious to the point of rapacity. But I know that such a personality type exists, that there are people who are comfortable just floating along, content to see where the current takes them. I've never had much faith that it would take me anywhere worth going without excruciating effort on my part.

I don't trust the Universe. Is there any reason why I should?

In January, Jonathan and I started looking for work, and now, four months later, I have a short-term, temporary job proofreading a preschool curriculum. I managed to secure the gig despite being self-employed as a writer for ten years, with no recent track record of showing up anywhere or working well with anyone. I was hired despite the economy and despite my own grave doubts about my employability. The staffing agency hired me without even meeting me. I think it came down to the fact that a friend had vouched for Jonathan, who in his interview vouched for me, but it felt like a total fluke.

Unfortunately, the file delivery schedule threw a wrench into my plans of focused and deliberate grieving: I had to work on Balthazar's birthday.

Jonathan went on our planned hike in the Gorge on his own. In the afternoon we went to Portland Nursery with Jasper and bought catnip, lemon thyme and two strawberry plants. I told Jasper that we were getting the strawberry plants to remember Balthazar, and that they represented new life.

“Well, he died, so that doesn't really make sense,” he said. The kid's got a point. Plants say, life goes on, but it's true that they mean life in general, not this one life in particular. And that's supposed to make you feel better why?

Stop all the fucking clocks.

Then Jasper went to a friend's house and Jonathan sat outside Cooper's with me while I ate a chicken pot pie. Without Balthazar in there demanding it, it tasted like chemicals, even though it was supposed to be homemade. Then we went on a walk around the reservoir. It was a really ordinary day. Except that flowers were delivered in the morning and a tree in the afternoon.

I got a lot of support, but none of it helped. Well, that's not true. I can't imagine how much worse it could have been without all of the messages. It just doesn't change anything.

Jonathan says I'm doing well, with my new proofreading job and my Crossfit and my memoir. It's true that I can squat 150 pounds and do ten military push-ups and hang from a bar and bring my toes up to reach my hands. I'm in the processing of mastering a complicated Google docs file management system. I'm learning how to handle passive-aggressive emails from twenty-four year-old designers that come in at ten o'clock at night.

If Balthazar were alive I wouldn't be doing any of it, and that would have been better than fine.

When I lived in New York I worked as a legal proofreader at corporate law firms. I had a beeper, like a drug dealer. I was also using a friend's studio apartment as a place to write. He was a medical resident and there so seldom that once I accidentally left a carton of OJ in his fridge and it went bad before he returned and noticed it was there. I sat at his desk and stared at the index cards I'd covered with facts about Gustav Klimt and Vienna, distracted by anxiety. I lived in fear that the beeper would go off and I'd have to stop what I was doing and head to Midtown. Would it be Paul, Weiss, or Fried, Frank? Would I have time to eat lunch?

Then I got a steady gig on the graveyard shift at a firm on Wall Street. It was proofreading in sweatshop form: 24 hour coverage, five or six of us working side by side through the night with one legally-mandated half hour break. Our eyes never left the documents. The pile at the front desk never got any smaller. The opera singer working beside me winced every time I coughed.

The Jamaican women who managed the proofreaders were always trying to get me to stay late. They meant pull a double shift. I sometimes offered to stay an extra twenty minutes. I started taking ephedrine to stay awake, and my heart sometimes raced abnormally. During the day I was a zombie. The night we got engaged, Jonathan and I went to dinner at Florent before I went to work. It felt glamorous to be eating potatoes in blue cheese sauce at 11pm, but I was too exhausted to enjoy it. If I had been proofreading from 8 to 5, or even 3 to 11, I might not have ever left New York. But then my two novels would probably not have been written.

Proofreading satisfies my tendency to OCD; it's like a puzzle. I get pleasure from finding the mistakes; I feel the joy of the red pen. The gratification is immediate, unlike writing. Also unlike writing, there is no meaning in it. It's like being the person who installs the cup holder, and only the cup holder, into the Subaru Outback.

So what, then? Some things I want to do:

Sell Balthazar's memoir.

Live in Spain for a year.

Run an obstacle course race.

Research Fra Filippo Lippi.

Volunteer at new avenues for youth.

Drive from Portland through Idaho and Montana up to Jasper, Alberta, and back down through British Columbia and Washington.

Take Jasper to England.

Get a German short-haired pointer.

Teach ESL in Peru.

Lose the last goddamn ten pounds.

Hike the Way of St. James.

Learn enough Spanish to get by.

Sing more.

Make our backyard a nice place to hang out.

Get a better job that supports our family.

Write a novel about parenthood that is set entirely at children's birthday parties.

Resurrect the Jackson Pollock novel, perhaps in a completely different form.

Maybe somewhere on this list is the thing that will bring meaning back to life. But I don't know if I can plan for it. It may have to creep in on its own.