To Paul, Who Sometimes Wore Red Cashmere Socks
I met you once, in the fall of 2001. To be honest, had you not died, I wouldn’t have retained you so vividly—your round, plump face, a pile of thick wavy brown hair on your head, glasses with 1950s black frames, and a mischievous smile as you went to the kitchen to fetch a plate of couscous salad or chicken satay or some other dish that you had whipped up for the occasion. It was a meet and greet for MFA students at your house, an LA-English Tudor style gem with lead windows and dark wood, stone paths and a curated garden, a kitchen painted robin’s-egg blue. Your wife, Michelle, was my professor. She introduced us by saying that you looked so eternally youthful that despite the both of you being in your 40s, not infrequently, strangers assumed you were her son.
At the time, I was more concerned with her face and presence than yours. She was a dichotomy in many ways, with a regal profile and an intensity with which she paid attention to seemingly every sentence of student writing, yet her green eyes were soft, warm, young. When her girlish laugh bubbled up, it always surprised me.
I struggled from the start of the MFA program, drowning in myriad insecurities and jealousies, failing again and again to catch the elusive validation doled out by male professors and visiting writers. As a result, I often blurted out the truth of the workshops’ unfairness and enigmatic rules of praise. In the room, my peers said nothing; in private, we commiserated. I considered quitting often, but kept returning week after week, to prove what, I no longer know. When Michelle headed up the workshop at the end of my first year, things shifted. She brought with her a level of objectiveness and equilibrium which enabled me to survive. While I couldn’t tell her exactly the depths of my anxiety and depression—that was for my mother to bear—she sensed it.
Once, during her office hours when I was trying to process feedback on a story, she said, “The truth is, workshops can have a certain level of emotional violence to them.” She paused. “You have such a beautiful ferocity.” There was no more perfect compliment she could have given me.
It was three years later that you killed yourself, the news coming to me from my closest friend in the program. I said, “Paul? No, that can’t be right. It just can’t.”
I didn’t know you, but I knew this—it was impossible for a person like you, who loved a person like Michelle, to be dead in this specific way. In the weeks that followed, the details slowly leaked out. Those I retained most vividly: your blood on a Dylan record that had been put back on the shelf, your body found by the dog walker in the backyard, a last call to Michelle while she was on jury duty, gone unanswered because she didn’t want to break the courthouse rules.
This was a time before I knew death, long before my body had experienced loss that rearranges you on a cellular level. What I knew then was bad break-ups and longing for a life that I hadn’t yet built. It was that terrifyingly untethered period of my late 20s, where I had no idea who I was or who I might become. A writer. Maybe. A wife? Who knew. A mother? Unfathomable. When I couldn’t shake you, a dead stranger, my mother pointed out that your and Michelle’s lives were the kind I aspired to and admired; to her, it made perfect sense that your death had rattled my core. Together for 20 years, you met in adjacent programs at the same university where I was a student. She was brilliant enough to get two masters simultaneously, one in poetry and one in fiction, and you were getting a PhD in philosophy or English, I can’t remember which. She was the type of woman I could only imagine becoming: a writer, a fierce intellectual who was quirky, kind, and complicated, co-running a top writing program, while you were a lawyer focused on keeping the separation of church and state intact. It was the era of George W. and John Ashcroft as attorney general, the latter of whom was doing his best to create a national database of women who’d had abortions, to do what with, well, Paul, you already knew.
One afternoon before you died, Michelle invited me and two other female students over to your house. All three of us were struggling to find footing in our writing, ourselves. She understood this without saying it; and I believe she entertained us with wine and fabulous cheeses and olive tapenade as a way of soothing our confusions, signaling that we had enough inner strength to be writers, enough talent and wherewithal to hold our own with a professor.
“Paul and his colleagues fear that Roe will soon be lost,” Michelle said. I didn’t fully believe her, given that the previous summer, I’d gotten an abortion of my own. I was wholly ignorant as to the machinations of the right wing, secure in what women before me had succeeded in legalizing.
As we talked, the landline rang twice, then stopped. A few minutes later, the same pattern. Michelle excused herself to call you back; the rings were your code, letting her know you were on the other end of the line. She explained that neither of you were fans of the cell phones that were becoming ubiquitous, and in terms of landlines, nothing irked her more than when you put her on speaker phone at the office. She had cured you of that habit by asking you loudly, with coworkers in earshot, if you knew the whereabouts of the Fist-Fucking Manual. You had purchased it, she told us, mainly because the two of you were intensely curious as to how such an act might work. All this to say that your marriage appeared to me as equal parts tender and egalitarian, sexy and fun, fueled by books, writing, and endless conversation.
“This was a time before I knew death, long before my body had experienced loss that rearranges you on a cellular level. ”
I didn’t hear about the red cashmere socks until your funeral. They were a Christmas gift from Michelle, and you apparently wore them as often as possible. Standing in the back annex of a church packed with 600 people, I looked at photos of the two of you over the decades. There was one where you are sitting close, Michelle laughing, you in a motorcycle jacket and bandana, leaning forward, soaking her in. I stared at it while people spoke of your kindness, your elevated sense of humor, your great affection for her, and how proud you were of her as a writer, professor, and champion of students, so many of whom had gone on to great success.
When Michelle stood at the podium, I was surprised by her anger, her defiance. “I do not believe that he has gone to a better place,” she said. “I believe this place should have been enough for him.”
Afterwards, I had no idea what to do. Again, my mother advised me. We were very close, talking a few times a week—more if I was in crisis. During these long phone calls to Oregon, she would listen without judgment and usually offer sage advice. I wish I had taken it more often, but I did when it came to you, Paul.
“Go see her,” she said. “Check in, tell her you are sorry for her loss. So many people say nothing because they don’t know what to say.” Later, my mother would send her a condolence note, acknowledging what she was going through, and thanking her for being a source of support for me. Michelle would mention the letter to me several times, saying how touched she was by the gesture.
A few weeks after your funeral, I knocked on Michelle’s office door. She ushered me in as she would have before, showing me a bag of bougainvillea branches, the hot pink flowers brought in for her undergraduate students. “We were talking about a story that described bougainvillea climbing the walls, and none of them knew what it was! Can you imagine?”
I shook my head. “I’m so sorry about Paul,” I said. “How are you?”
“Oh,” she said. “Well. Now, I have to decide if I’m going to continue on.”
I felt a twist in my chest. “You’re going to continue on.”
“I still have to decide, my dear.” She paused, touched the thick string of pearls around her neck. “You see, I was lonely for 28 years. Then I met Paul.”
She was roughly the same age then as I am now; it wasn’t until I met my husband six years later that I would understand. By some grace of the universe, he appeared just as the love of my life—my mother—was dying.
It was around this same time that I last saw Michelle. She was hosting yet another group of students in your beautiful house. I thought of you as I walked past the robin’s-egg blue kitchen, passed a shelf full of records, glimpsed the backyard.
You’d been gone for seven years by then, but to me it felt immediate, fresh. Again, I asked her, “How are you?” I didn’t say your name, but she knew what I meant.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Good, really. Thank you for asking.” I told her about my mother’s terminal diagnosis, wanting her to see that I understood at least one sharp corner of her pain. Mine was like a room of old, brittle wallpaper. I was peeling back an inch or two at a time, and it was a futile and tedious process, the pieces flaking and gathering at my feet. It felt like my own skin for all my anticipatory grief.
She nodded. “You will survive,” she said. “But I will tell you this: Loss of this magnitude never leaves you. Instead, you learn to walk beside it. Afterwards, life takes on a different shape.”
I think of this still, Paul. I see you in Michelle’s shadow, and my mother in mine. It is a strange comfort.
About the Author
Abby Mims' writing has appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), Creative NonFiction, Longreads, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Lily, The Rumpus, and The Normal School, among other publications. Although she has a longstanding love affair with the essay, she is currently working on a novel. She lives on the central California coast with her family. More of her work can be found at www.abbymims.net.
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Header photo by Kenan Suleymanoglu.
