Flagstaff

A proposition.

In Arizona, in the days before I bought a car, I used to ride the Greyhound bus from Phoenix to Flagstaff. I stayed in the house of a woman I’d met at a party. She didn’t go there much and liked people to use it. The temperature of Flagstaff was cooler, and your emotions flowed back. The bus terminal was in a part of Phoenix where poor people gathered. Almost everyone else had cars. The riders were careworn, missing teeth and missing days. Maybe they’d rolled here by accident, crossing the continent from left to right or top to bottom, carrying pillows they rested against the windows. They drank beer from paper bags and ate hot dogs that were pink as the inside of a lip. They were friendly, filling me in on the customs of the bus and things we would see as we climbed higher and higher to reach the 6.000-foot elevation of Flagstaff. Heat had sucked out everything but kindness.

It’s easy to be right about me. Shrinks can size me up before I’ve opened my mouth. They have a special sense inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors. It’s well known shrinks have more Neanderthal DNA than any other professional group. In case you don’t know, Neanderthals, who used to have a bad rap as thugs among early homo primates, have been revised up the food chain and are now the peaceful, hippy homo primates. It’s easy to be right about me because I have no secrets. Or I appear to have no secrets. According to the DNA findings of my ancestry search, I am five percent wolf. That’s not on me. All DNA is a birthday cake we arrive with.

For years on and off, I knew the poet and teacher Richard Howard. He had been the lover of a close friend of mine, and he was friends with other people I knew. Sometimes, he was warm and kind to me. One time, he was angrily dismissive, and I didn’t know why until many years later a friend told me he thought I’d blown him off at a party. I could barely remember any of it, and I was shocked and sad to have unintentionally caused him to feel some prick of whatever. I lived in a world of crazy small gestures I made much of, and I suppose other people lived in this place, too. This has changed a bit for me. I can’t be sure. Maybe this is an example.

The other day, I said to Richard, “I think we should get married.” He was in his studio, reading on his not-real but pretty-nice Eames chair. He looked up. I have never wanted to marry anyone. The one time I was married, I knew it was a bad idea and I did it anyway, the way we do things all the time that are bad ideas. You can feel the ground beneath you slipping, and you just go along with it until you’re under a car or in a muddy road, where it makes that suction sound when you try to walk.

Not that I didn’t love the man I married. I didn’t connect marriage and love. I don’t like the words: husband, wife, married, single, divorced, Miss, or Mrs. I have never wanted to be understood as a married woman. It’s not a good look for me. It’s not an institution whose history I want attached to me. Read Engels. Just read him.

I said to Richard, “I was thinking about the money I could get, and I didn’t like the idea I wouldn’t get it because of this sexist governmental regulation I would have to comply with, and then I thought, but that’s a lot of money.” I’m talking about taxes and the fact that Richard’s social security payment is a lot more than mine. Also, we’re old, and stuff is probably going to happen involving hospitals. I could lie as I have in the past and say we are married, but saying we are married isn’t much better from my point of view than being married, so if I am going to put a toe in this thing, maybe I could slide all the way in?

I feel a bit like a whore. I will abandon my values and seemingly conform to yours if you pay me. Indeed, that’s true. But here’s the thing I can feel has changed in me. I find I don’t care that much about how I’m seen socially. I don’t give a shit anymore about what anyone thinks of me.

Today I searched for my birth certificate, in order to get the marriage license, and I couldn’t find it. It’s somewhere in the house, but it’s hiding. In Flagstaff, the bus station was several miles from the house where I was staying. I could have taken cabs, but I always walked, and it reminded me of other times in my life I’d been happily alone on strange roads, walking along with a backpack. Who did I think I was? A woman on a road alone, who didn’t need to explain herself to anyone. It was never lost on me, in so many parts of the world a woman without protection offends the foundations of power. I wanted to defy this. I wanted to make a show of this as often as I could. I still will.

Sometimes, people would ask if I wanted a ride, and I would take it. Flagstaff is a crunchy granola kind of place with a vibe of hiker camaraderie. Along the way, I’d pass a house surrounded by towers of balanced rocks. Balancing rocks was a thing there. When I proposed the marriage idea to Richard, he said, “Okay. The only problem is I will be a person who has been married four times. I’m turning into Zsa-Zsa Gabor.”

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