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: : : FLETCHER AND FREYA ARE EATING at one of the Vietnamese restaurants up on Argyle. Fletcher's in poet mode: he's looking around with one eye out for images that he can take home and put into his long poem, Everything.
Everything needs some work. Last spring he thought he was almost done, and then things took off with Cassandra and he got caught up in the whole wanting-to-be-available-when-she's-available thing, plus teaching, plus whatever—various causes corroborated to drain the urgency out of the book. Now it's just a pile of papers with text on them. But things are settling. The early heady phase of his relationship with Cassandra has opened up into a kind of stability. A complex stability, dynamic (no doubt), disturbed occasionally by turbulences, but—subtle ones. (The grain of other adults—he never realized the full extent of its intricacy. He still doesn't.) But in any case—one year in with C. and he feels grounded enough to realize that something's missing, and it's the work. So he's taken to going through the pages, trying to work through the occlusion and remember what system of development he'd intended. He's covered one wall in his bedroom with tacked-up pages so that he can see the book in what he calls exploded view. And he's begun to feel ready again, finally, to begin seeking out new things to add to the mix of the book. There's a picture of a rooster on the wall calendar.
Freya tells him that she and Jakob have been talking about having a kid. Noodles freeze in the air halfway to his mouth. He feels the old pang. Thinks about New Year's Eve, not last year but the year before, and thinks that's all you're ever going to get.
—He was kind of surprised, Freya says, —to hear that I'd been thinking about it.
—I'm kind of surprised, Fletcher says. —I didn't really know that you even wanted kids.
—For a long time I didn't. I mean, for a long time there didn't even really seem to be a point in thinking about it, because I was, you know, having kind of a fucked-up youth. I wasn't sure I was even going to be around to see thirty.
—But now— Fletcher says.
—Now—Freya says. She turns her palms up. —Now, you know, I'm thirty, I'm managing the store, I'm in a relationship that's actually lasted three years—I'm starting to realize that, yeah—I'm not going to die.
—You hope.
—Well, I mean, we're all going to die, but—you know what I mean.
—I do.
—So, Freya says, and she takes a mouthful of noodles, and nods her head while she's chewing, and then swallows and speaks again: —I mean when I did think about it, when I was younger I had this whole set of reasons not to have kids—like, I don't know, angsty stuff: the world is all shit, why would I want to bring a kid into it? But at some point I heard myself saying that kind of stuff and I just suddenly realized that somewhere along the way it had begun to seem—
—Juvenile?
—Yeah, juvenile, exactly. And so I just—let it go. And just kind of cleared my mind about it and just started over from nothing. And I just thought: well, how do I see myself as an adult? What kind of adult do I want to be? It was something I'd never really thought about before.
—And when you came up with this vision—thinking about kids—you decided this is the thing for me.
—I guess. I mean I'm still not sure: everybody's freaking like I'm saying Must Have Kids Now or something. And I'm not saying that. I haven't even made up my mind. I just want it to be a topic for discussion. I'm just—puttin it out there.
She takes another mouthful of her soup, adds more hot sauce to the bowl.
—I mean what's the alternative? she says. —I keep working at the store, Jakob and I keep doing our thing, and then—? I mean, I like records but I have to wonder how long into life I can go getting most of my satisfaction from getting new records.
—I feel totally the opposite, Fletcher says. —I did visualize myself as an adult—
—You were an adult at like age sixteen, Freya says.
—and in my vision I was like no kids. Because there's poetry. And I feel like I could spend my whole life reading, like, just Shakespeare—nothing else but Shakespeare —and I could still not have absorbed everything that Shakespeare has to say. Multiply that by thousands of poets and you've got a life.
—But, of course, you write, too.
—I write, too, Fletcher admits.
—There's the work, Freya says.
—There's the work.
—I don't have that. I haven't played the drums in—it's been ten years.
—It doesn't really matter, anyway, Fletcher says, —because I ended up with Cassandra, and Cassandra has a kid, and so here I am suddenly as like a stepdad.
—But you love her, Freya says.
—I do, Fletcher says. —I do love her.
He looks down at the scallions in his bowl, thinking. When he finally emerges to speak, what he says is:—That's so fucked up.
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