The Mare

Ginger

I met her when I was forty-seven, but I felt still young. I looked young too. This is probably because I had not done many of the things most people that age have done; I'd had no children and no successful career. I married late after stumbling through a series of crappy relationships and an intense half-life as an artist visible only in Lower Manhattan, the other half of my life being sloppily given over to alcohol and drugs.

I met my husband, Paul, in AA. I only went for about a year because I couldn't stand the meetings, couldn't stand the language, the dogma. They tried to make it sound like something else, but that's finally what it was. Still, it helped me quit, no question. And I met Paul. It was six months before we even had coffee, but I immediately noticed his deep eyes, the animal eloquence of his hairy hands. He was fifty then, nearly ten years older than me, and still married, but living in the city separately from his wife. It made him nervous that I stopped coming to meetings, and though he'd never admit it, I think that tension gave our slow courtship a stronger charge. We eventually moved to a small town upstate, the same town he'd moved from, where he made a good living as a tenured professor at a small collage. A lot of his income went to support his wife and daughter, and we lived in an old faculty housing unit long on charm and short on function. Not owning didn't bother us though. We were comfortable, and for a long time we were happy with each other; we went out to eat a lot, and travelled in the summer.

When people asked me what I did I sometimes said, "I'm transitioning," and very occasionally, "I'm a painter." I was embarrassed to say the second thing even though it was true: I still painted, and it seemed like I was better than I was when I showed at a downtown gallery twenty years before. But I was embarrassed anyway because I knew I sounded foolish to people who had kids and jobs too, and who wouldn't understand my life before I came here. There was a few - women who also painted at home - whom I was able to talk about it with, describe what art used to be to me, and what I wanted to make it be again: a place more real than anything in "real" life. A place I remember now just dimly, a place of deep joy where, when I could get to it, it was like tunning in to a radio frequency that was sacred to me. Regardless of anything else, nothing was more important than carrying that frequency on the dial of myself.

The problem was, other people created interference. It was hard for me to be close with them and to hear the signal at the same time. I realise that makes me sound strange. I am strange, more than the bare facts of my life would suggest. But I have slowly come to realise that so many people are strange, maybe the word is nearly meaningless when applied to human beings. Still, people interfered. And so I created ways to keep them at a distance, including my increasingly expensive habit. What I didn't see, or allow myself to see, was that drugs created even more interference than people; they were a sinister signal all their own, one that enhanced and blended with, then finally blotted out, the original one. When that happened I got completely lost, and for many years I didn't even know it.

By the time I got into AA, art had all but gone dead for me, and I credit my time in those stunned, bright-lit rooms for waking it up again.

When we finally moved out of the city, I began to feel the signal again, but differently. I felt it even when I was with Paul, which did not surprise me-he was not "other people." But I began to feel it with other people too, or rather through them, in the density of families living in homes, going back for generations in this town. I would see women with babies in strollers or with their little children in the grocery store, and I would feel their rootedness in the place around us and beyond-in the grass and earth, trees and sky.

To feel so much through something I was not part of course lonely. I began to wonder if it had been a mistake not to have children, to wonder what would've happened if I'd met Paul when I was younger. The third time we had sex, he said, "I want to make you pregnant." I must've had sex hundreds of times before, and men had said all kinds of things to me-but no one had ever said that. I never wanted anyone to say it; girlfriends would tell me a guy had said that and I would think, How obnoxious! But when Paul said it, I heard I love you. I felt the same; we made love and I pictured my belly swelling.