Agnes & Muriel’s and All the Places I Have Loved You

Berkeley, California, October 2007

About a year ago, in that pretentious philosophy grad lounge at Georgia State, I overheard you across the room, though the existential prattle: “yeah, a 1977 MGB … a week in the shop …  over in Ansley Park…”

Disinterested in relationships in general (cite obsession with freedom), I found myself interested in you just the same, you strange, lanky, long-haired, Italian-label-wearing West Coaster. At age 27, I had confronted a reasonable number of pivotal relationships and had faced each one with reckless immunity, assured of the strength of my narcissism, headed to that mullioned-windowed, ivy-shadowed office — definitively alone. 

Irreconcilably curious, I issued, in an I-don’t-care-one-way-or-the-other drawl, “Care for a ride?”

After we got your car (old, orange, meticulously kept, and oozing personality), I suggested supper at Agnes & Muriel’s, my favorite spot for no-fuss local food in Atlanta. It was a bit of a test to determine which brand of judgmental Californian you were. We ate so-good greens and beans, which you picked at, and talked about the South that I loved but wanted to leave, about the continents you’d seen via ships, what bands we’d seen in common at Smith’s Olde Bar (not many), and my aversion to marriage proposals. 

You interrupted an exam on Religion in America to ask me on a date. We stood facing each other, riding the MARTA train, keeping balance at the stops. We talked about the ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese and if either had a theory of intuition. We walked to our places in Midtown, yours modern and pristine, mine populated by cockroaches and antiques. Talking, walking down Vine Street, that man took his pants off and used them as a lasso over his head, as you compared your time at sea to a 12-string guitar. You got my attention. 

You asked me by the angel statue at King Plow Arts Center on my 28th birthday if I believed in them. I halfway did, because I needed them. I moved from Midtown to Decatur, needing more trees. You wore your black Armani suit and watched me do makeup at my great-great Aunt Maud’s vanity before the ballet. I kissed you in the top floor lobby at the Fox Theater, empty except for us. You drove me home down Dekalb Avenue, October air carrying the delicious and indistinguishable smells of the rot of changing seasons. When we drank tea on the porch of 523 Clairemont Avenue, rocking chairs creaking, I thought that old age with you might be all right. 

You worked with precision and clarity, which were two of your favorite words, I noticed. Your goals were clear; you knew what you wanted from your few human days and your sacred hereafter. 

My priorities — soft, lingering, late-night, cigarette-accompanied literary dribble and an insatiable desire to experience every sensation this world offers — were rather short on attainable goals by comparison. You told me you loved me in Decatur Cemetery on Halloween by the formidable burial plot I’d pass on solitary walks there. I’ve given it wide berth ever since, superstitious about the dead’s envy of the determinedly still-living. 

We argued at Apres Diem, both of us intractable, about writing. You were wrong, I was right. We stumbled onto a 16th century Vatican text in Chattanooga, hiked a bit of the Grand Canyon, made it to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco just as the gates were closing. Over a red-checkered tablecloth, we watched nighttime D.C. go by and planned a future as Professors of Important Topics. We went climbing with friends, had beer and pizza, and dissected the appeal of a woman’s spine. When the sun rose on New Year’s Day (you already up doing yoga) I stretched into the warmth of your space, not particularly used to sharing anything. 

We ate perfect sandwiches at Gardner’s Market in Cleveland, Tennessee, and when we walked by St. Luke’s across the street, we talked ourselves into similar ideas about God. We didn’t bother to guess at our differences. I drove to the Monastery in Conyers and found you and Father Tom having soup, his ancient monk eyes holding mine, and we talked of holy things (poetry mostly) in the semi-dark. In April, you asked me as we were lying on your sofa if I would marry you. You used my middle name. You had bronchitis. 

You hadn’t, before this, asked much of me. Lying in my bed, uncertainty pulsing with the merciful ceiling fan, I estimated what it would take to execute this particular “yes.” The humility required to step away from the calm pool of my own myths — I didn’t particularly care to possess.

We made plans to move to Berkeley, so you could study there, and I could see if, in your stratosphere instead of mine, I could still breathe. We sold what we could, shipped what was left, and had a breakdown — the MGB and the relationship. We went to the Brick Store Pub, split fish and chips and a Corsendonk. You went to the bathroom, and because I was crying, the bearded server asked if I wanted him to kick your ass. I thanked him. We stayed in the Holiday Inn for two days, a block from my old beloved porch, while the car and I recuperated.

You drove us across the country, top down. I checked our blind spots, watched the clouds stretch, checked the fluid levels at pit stops. The wind was too loud to talk, the sights too big to want to. We curled up in a friend’s bed in Denver. You dodged debris in the road and asked, “Water, please?” and got heat exhaustion in Nevada. You said I spilled the water, I said the water spilled. You were demonic on the curves above Lake Tahoe, forgiven as we rolled into California. 

We splurged on fat peaches from the Shattuck Avenue Market — juicer than any I’d had in the Peach State. You brought me flowers, an extravagance I did not appreciate when I couldn’t afford a raincoat. We stood in the long line at the Cheeseboard, stomachs growling, always ordering too little. Autumn was a blip, a slight cooling, and when I searched for the smell of decay in the air, its absence left me desolate. The locals were as foreign as anyone I’d met, oblivious beyond their liberal bubble. You started to make sense, though, you completely content with our cloistered life. You encouraged me to go to museums and find some music. After rent, I didn’t have any money to. 

Before the sun was up at the Oakland Hilton, while I was training for the soul-sucking-est job I’ve ever had, I opened a note from you. You wrote a lament, rather beautiful, missing the ocean, and missing me. I knew what you meant. You missed me, who had been in the room as you wrote, a faintly animated statue, a little breath behind a mask.

One time, I was described by a man I loved, who didn’t love me, as “oceanic.” As in, “a little too much.” I hung onto you, hoping we were just “a little too much” enough for each other.

Roswell, Georgia, November 2019

I left you there, on Berkeley’s Holy Hill, as satisfied as you’ve ever been, in your highly educated, never-quite-summer town, consumed by writing, study, prayer — while my discontent was killing me. I said goodbye for good on Palm Sunday, and flew back South, to a hum in my ears that I could make out as “go, go, go, go,” fear mistaken for freedom. 

To Georgia, in hopes that the drama of distinct seasons might give me rhythms of my own again. I went to the Monastery first. When I remembered that Flannery O’Connor used to go there, too, I suddenly felt her calm crazy hand on my shoulder. I don’t know what I needed her to be saying by the gesture, but it helped, just the same.

You were making a decision in Berkeley I didn’t know you were making, as I thought you were pointed toward your preferred life. You decided instead to return, to Georgia, to me, to propose a life here. The implications of your decision: “I choose you over my otherwise preferred future,” we could not have understood. They would break us, we would patch, and the cracks would become canyons when we weren’t looking.

We had a tiny house, full of character, in Cumming when it was still country, on a road named after the 1840s Methodist camp meetings. We had a garden I overwatered and killed. Our kind neighbor Betty Sue walked down a coffee cake and asked if we wanted to canvas for the Tea Party Patriots. We got vegetables and flowers from the farm up the street, where that hippie dog bit our toddler. Bud rode his John Deere over his acres next door, his cigar smoke traveling to me as I watched my face age in the mirror over dead Aunt Maud’s vanity. 

When the Jehovah’s Witness ladies knocked, I greeted their pious eyes with a baby on my hip, and they sensed I was starving. It was for friendship, not religion, but they eagerly misread it, as I willingly misread them. I made coffee. They came back again and again, me drinking it up until they brought the white-shirt, black-tie man to seal the conversion and, of course, that was the end of it. I joined Facebook instead.  

You, so recently a scholar, didn’t get to read, or write. Up with baby, then babies, through the nights, the house had no quiet corners, just years of screaming night. Repeatedly, our demons burst through any fragile beauty, we furious at our lives limited by the life of the other and by the children we had conjured, only occasionally shocked at the extent of our mutual self-absorption. 

I picked blackberries and made bittersweet cobbler when old friends came up. I let my hair grow long. When babies’ cries became children’s voices, the air softened a bit. One day, for no clear reason, there was more daylight than night and we thought we might be strong enough. 

We sold the house by the campground to a dignified, retired Grand Ole Opry musician, and we moved to Roswell, to compromise, in a reach for each other.

We bought a townhouse — you wanted the city — with a screen porch view of the thick trees — I depend on the trees.  Sometimes I found myself content in the simplicity of our days, you walking in after work, tired, and rising to the roar of the welcome. I watch French films while you read Gregory of Nyssa, sharing a sofa and tea. We’re as content as two restless people can be, our bookshelves bowing, and tonight, home smells like Vidalia and the pine floors are marked from where I let the kids ride the scooter in the house.

Because thick disappointments haunt thickly, some days I don’t lift my head until night, when the mythical creatures we tuck into bed snuggle close with their sweet soap skin, children whose growing is almost audible. And when they belly-laugh at my Beatrix Potter character voices, I do believe that this is better than any otherwise preferred future. 

After dinner tonight, our son wouldn’t quit trying to learn to ride his bike, so determined he couldn’t see through his tears. “How is it so easy for her?” was all he could get out through the choking, head jerking toward his big sister. I looked up and asked her how many times she fell while she was learning. “A billion at least,” she sing-songed as she zoomed by, oversized glasses flashing. 

Agnes & Muriel’s has closed and the years are bittersweet, our differences oceanic. I’ve accepted, for now, our evolutions in body, in mind, in circumstance, in soul, all intuition pulsing rhythmically now: “stay … ” with us, in the fragile peace of a life we’ve built.

Twelve years ago, you asked me to write our story. So we would remember? So we could make sense of it? I started, and then stopped, thinking the story had. But here we are, Love, we among the determinedly still-living.

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