My husband is a writer, too. He’s a very different writer than I am, and his process is so convoluted and 
focused he may as will be building a nuclear reactor as writing a story. He’s also* an academic scholar who discovered some important things about the texts of Shakespeare, so his focused and convoluted processes work well, it seems. There was this one time I caught him with a 16th century text, a muffin tin, and a bowl of dried beans. When I walked in, you would have thought I had caught him spanking the maid, or something.**
It seems like a thousand years ago, but it was really 2003/04ish, and I challenged him to write a story based off I prompt I came up with. I feel like we were eating nachos at Mikey’s Gyros in Moscow, Idaho, but that can’t be right, so maybe it was naan at the India Oven in Port Angeles, Washington. He did not want to do this, because a) he knows my prompts can be extremely devious and b) he doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do, ever, least of all me, and finally, c) once someone has told him to do something, he cannot resist doing it. It’s like a curse that a demented fairy placed on him at the occasion of his royal birth*** with a spindle. Following the request with something like “nevermind” doesn’t even work to break the spell. He is in thrall to the reqest/demand even as he grows increasingly disturbed he is doing it. Go on, ask him about the Darby Miller**** years in high school.
So, reluctantly, he said “okay.”
This is how I got him to write a romance.
As I told him that I wanted him to write a happy ending romance where the heroine is one of those people who protest logging by living up in a tree and never comes down, he kept his eyes closed as if he was receiving a round of rabies vaccinations with a dull needle. Then he looked at me and rolled his eyes and started eating his nachos or his naan again and refused to talk to me about it again.
I, of course, was rubbing my hands together in glee.
Now, this isn’t to say that there isn’t romance in his stories. There is. But HEA is not certain, and often, there is death. Like the one set in a submarine where the crew knows they are going to die and so decide to perform Hamlet from memory and the husband/wife characters use the last of their oxygen to bone. It’s romantic, but not romance.
When he gave it to me to read, he had glinty eyes. Which meant, of course, that he had fulfilled my request, but found some little evil twist into it.
Christopher Otto is a successful corporate statistician on his way to paying off his mortgage before he’s forty-five when he suffers an accident that damages the speech areas of his brain. He is aphasic—while his brain tells him that he is saying what he thinks he is saying, his speech is a halting word salad of approximations.
Christopher Otto is the first-person narrator of our story.
This story should be impossible. It should be frustrating to simply read. Instead, it has never failed to make me cry, and laugh, and fall in love with this brain-damaged, determined hero who, having nothing better to do, as he is disabled and unable to work, decides to sit underneath the tree Megan Lock is trying to save and figure out why reading a magazine article about her made him want her.
It begins with our hero in the airplane, winging his way to Megan’s tree:
I am on my way to find Megan Lock, a wisdom I have never met or spoken to. I have decided to fly into Portland mainly because I’m not ready to go all the way to California. The airplane is robust, no room in the luckless stows above our heads. The prison in front of me has fully reclined in her seat. The man to my left has consummated my armrest.
Before the accident, I would been embellished by the lark of space.
As it is now, I am fascinated. In the air, we – people heading home, people running away, people embanked on one quest or another, many of them as oblong as mine – are part of a nice illustration. In this briefest of momentums, we are heading the same direction, suspended over everything we know in a shared, metal paragraph.
For now, we are only about flying.
We try to work out, as the story unfolds, what Christopher means to say, and what his speech betrays, and what is meaningless. We are brought into his emotional space because his words are unreliable, elusive. Once he makes it to Megan’s tree, he learns about her from her comrades camping on the ground below:
Her friends have taken names from the story of Job, to protect themselves against the law, and our story moves into a kind of fable where we are guided by how canonical stories are twisted to our own uses, and how love is a fable of its own. The pot-smoking protestors are the first people who don’t seem to question Christopher and his broken speech – in fact, they take what he says as its first meaning, turning his involuntary words into a philosophy.
The camp sends supplies up to Megan via a pulley on a basket. After time spent in the camp, he has decided he will woo her. He imagines a backstory for her, a life, and he starts sending her gifts in the basket. We have no way of knowing what it is Christopher is sending her, because he can’t report accurately. Just as Christopher as no way of knowing who Megan is, only that she does not refuse the gifts, and this is a way to understand her, to fall in love. We are left guessing at everything, and yet, being certain of the depth of their feelings:
Everyday, I bring something nice for the champ and we sit in the rain. I hemp out around the stove. When I am there I am the only fun to give anything to Megan. I send her carefully estranged plates, clean crowbars, bankers to keep her wan.
Zophar beats us at basketball and Eliphaz deserts him in chess.
I stay longer every time but no one experts that I would stem the night. I exaggerate that I could do their laundry and the three of them let me. Even if no trickname sticks to me and I am never one for them, they are glad to see me in the morning.
At night I search the Book for family and monkeys, faith and epistemology. I use different pens. I weave circles, underlines, wavelengths. I am not an elegant concordance but I leave detailed knots.
And I invest Megan Lock. I conduct a mother and first marriage that didn’t take. I provide a fishing trip and a serious of lost kites. When Eliphaz or one of the others tells me something I was wrong about, that she was really form Utah, I am more than willing to adjust my daguerreotype.
I am not sure love is the right word.
I know. It’s that, it’s that argument, “I am not sure love is the right word,” that makes a story with the most tangled of narrations compulsively re-readable, and romantic, and yes, a romance. Because that just it, isn’t it? We’re never sure, none of us, if love is the right word. Love, the word, stands in for something that we send up into the sky and hope is understood.
This story is available in Matt Vadnais’ 2005 collection of short stories All I Can Truly Deliver: Cover Stories. The submarine story’s in this collection, too. If you can believe it, this was before the age of epublishing, but because this is my blog where I can talk about things like my own husband’s book, I can also give away a print copy of this collection. Comment on this post before 8:00 a.m. EST Monday, April 29th, 2013, and I will choose a winner randomly to receive one copy (void where prohibited).
*He actually holds a professorship in both Shakespeare and Creative Writing, starting this fall. He’s always been good at getting weird gigs. Including his marriage.
**We do not have a maid.
***He is not a royal.
****Darby used Matt’s curse for wrongdoings.
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