Samsun Knight
University of Iowa Press (July 29, 2025)
128 pp. $18 (paperback)
On a summer evening in the 1990s, Anne learns that one of her husband’s lovers is expecting his child, only a few weeks after learning that she too is pregnant. He tells her casually, as if it’s just another colorful story about his day. And the tenuous understanding between them—the careful balance of privacy and flexibility that has sustained their open marriage to date—is shattered.
Meanwhile, Sandy, the lover, works to find her own path forward through her surprise pregnancy and all the million tiny miracles and catastrophes that she must now navigate, often entirely on her own. Searching through diaries and grocery lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to remember just enough of her original sense of direction to make her own way home.
TO BE LOVED.
She’d just said something about not being attracted to him anymore
and now she was looking someplace faraway that also happened to be
in the direction of the window, in the direction of their neighbor’s,
staring right into the light, and he asked her if she’d been sleeping with
their neighbor and she admitted that she had. He nodded for a long
time, his mouth small. Just nodding. He stood up and then sat down
again and then stood again and put his hand to his mouth and then
let it fall. Then he stopped nodding. He asked her How long and she
didn’t answer and he asked her again, How long, and she stood and
left the room. She was wearing a shawl, a light red shawl, and she threw
it around herself as she left. Sebastian followed her and she saw him
following her and she led him outside to the front step, where she asked
him for a cigarette. She was squinting at the sunlight, whole for now
but dying. It was almost the end of the day. She asked him for a cigarette
again. He went inside and got his pack and lit two and handed her one.
I originally imagined all this on the bus home, staring out the window
on my way to sleep, just after he’d explained the broad contours
of his past to me for the first time. We’d been dating for two months.
When he’d finished speaking I had told him that I loved him, and he
had said, Oh, Anne.
The countryside faded from green to gray.
He took a drag of his cigarette and turned to his wife and he asked
her How long and she took a drag of her cigarette and said Three
years. His daughter, at that time, she was eighteen months. She’d
been calling Sebastian “Da” for about seven months. People tended
to remark on her light hair and her light eyes. He sat down on the
edge of the porch and put his head in his hands. His wife finished her
cigarette and went indoors.
He had liked Eisenhower enormously, was part of it. He’d even
bought a retro bumper sticker, two years into their residence, an old
1950s I Like Ike. It was a joke, a friendly joke that nobody seemed to
enjoy as much as him. It made his wife uncomfortable. Too reverent,
she’d called it. Weird. Even Eisenhower, though he didn’t exactly
seem to mind, didn’t fall over himself about it, either. But Sebastian
liked it, and it stayed. Sebastian’s father had separated from his mom
when he was in his early teens, he explained when he first told me this
story, and he had this thing, especially in his teens and twenties, of sort of glomming on to older male friends and authority figures. Too
reverent, he explained, was actually exactly right.
But, so. Sebastian didn’t really look for work in another city for
five weeks, once he found out. For obvious reasons, maybe. But he
also did this thing of being altogether too solicitous toward Eisenhower
at first. The day after his wife revealed the affair, he went over
to Eisenhower’s house and told him that he knew about it, and that at
least it wasn’t some random schmuck screwing his wife. And he sort of
laughed, this little breathy sort of chuckle, as if he was trying to make
it seem like it was almost okay between them. As if he was trying to
say, it wasn’t like they were obligated to kill each other now. There
was this bizarre moment, he explained, the morning after he learned
about it, before he talked to Eisenhower, where he only seemed able
to think about how horribly guilty they must both feel. How badly
Eisenhower and Marge must want him to forgive them. Not that he
articulated this to himself at the time, or even very clearly to me later
on, but that’s how I made sense of it from the pieces he told me. What
he said was: I thought there might be a way to make it okay. He said
that he went over to Eisenhower’s nervous but also sort of weirdly
purposeful. In control.
But then he got to Eisenhower’s house and Eisenhower actually
opened the front door and Sebastian actually said what he came there
to say—about the random schmuck—and Eisenhower just stood
there and looked at him. Looking at his uncomfortable smile with this
blank face, like Sebastian wasn’t really there at all. And it’s only then
that Sebastian finally got it: they didn’t need this to be okay. They just
needed him gone. It was only an inflated sense of self- importance, a
kind of arrogance, that had led him to believe that he had any semblance
of control. And he stepped back from Eisenhower’s front door
and made one of those automatic apologies, his habitual response to
awkward situations, not really thinking about what he was saying—this is the part he’s always been clearest on, that he’s always remembered
best—and he said “I’m sorry” to Eisenhower. And Eisenhower
nodded, sort of, also automatically, and then stepped back inside and
let the door swing shut.
It’s worth noting that his daughter is never singled out here, when
he talks about his kids; it’s like it never occurs to him that she could
be implicated by the fact of her patrilineage in all the bad feelings
coming at him out of this. He never once distinguishes his daughter
from her four-year-old brother in his telling, from the son who is most
definitely his—they’re always just “his kids.”
Anyway, five weeks out, his wife finally dropped some hint about
him looking for a new job, the first real thing she’s said to him in over a
month, and without even a nod of acknowledgment he went out right then and drove to some city an hour east or west or north or south
and went around picking up newspapers for their local classifieds.
And then he was sitting at a diner, going through the first paper over
a cup of coffee, looking for any sort of job that wouldn’t remind him
of working in a health food store, when he suddenly got this feeling
in his gut like he knew that Marge and Eisenhower were fucking.
This feeling like he himself was getting fucked, he explained to me.
Which I’ve always thought was a little much. But regardless, he got
this feeling, however it felt, and he was just lost. Lost in the sense of
losing the game of his life and lost as in he didn’t know where to go
anymore, because he understood, finally, that he couldn’t go back. He
wasn’t wanted there, and also, he just couldn’t.
It was winter at this time, I should have mentioned. Deep winter,
northern and hard. The kind that grows at once out of and into the
landscape; the kind that wants to eat you alive and sometimes does.
It had just started snowing outside, building into a blizzard. The TV
in the diner said it was building into a blizzard and the spitting wind
outside said it was building into a blizzard and after a minute of staring
out the front window, feeling all sorts of desperate, Sebastian
left his coat and walked outside knowing that he was walking into a
blizzard. In just jeans and a white tee. He meant to die. Although it’s
unclear to me if he really felt that way at the time, but that’s what he
told me later on.
But so he walked for a long time in the cold, a long time in this
weather meaning five, ten, fifteen minutes—and he reached the highway,
the small local highway. One of those “Route 1” or “Route 2”
two-lane state roads. He didn’t stop walking; didn’t exactly give up
the ghost of the idea that he was going someplace. Because he could’ve
just stopped, right? Could’ve just lain down and waited. But he didn’t
stop, and after five or ten or fifteen minutes a trucker driving down
Route 1 or Route 2 saw him shuffling by the side of the road and
pulled over and shouted at him and got him into the shotgun seat and under a blanket and saved him. And that was it. Years later a doctor
would remark that this might have been his first episode, looking
back in retrospect, but at the time it was just his origin story, like a
superhero at the beginning of the comic book. He got in the eighteen-wheeler and rode with this trucker all the way from northern
Montana to Somerville, Massachusetts, and he started a new life.
Two months after he got there, he saw me in a coffee shop, and he
made eye contact and smiled, and I smiled back, and he walked up
and introduced himself.
And I suppose, sometime around that same time, he met Sandy, too.
It wasn’t until a couple of months in, after we’d been sleeping
together for a while and I was starting to act the girlfriend, that it
first occurred to me that this might be something after all. It was a
morning-after, I remember, and we were in a coffee shop, drinking
Americanos. I liked to take him to coffee shops whenever I could, so
we’d have the chance to banter about our first meeting, to remember
it together. To turn it from a standalone story into the first chapter
of our book.
This particular coffee shop was one of those places that was accidentally
ahead of its time in terms of its business model, but so weird
in its execution that no one could’ve possibly guessed that it would
be part of a trend. It was a big open space with lots of little tables and
little chairs and dozens of hunting trophies on the walls, all swaddled
in winter hats and scarves, with bronze plaques underneath each one
that said that no animals had been harmed in the making of these
trophies, that no one could really tell if they were ironic or not. I was
working in the bookstore then—this was before I got caught too many
times for my habit of borrowing hardcovers from the shelves—and
as we waited for our drinks to cool, I was showing Sebastian my latest
find. The woman one table over from us, it turned out, had just
bought the same book, and was reading it, and when she heard me
mention the name she conspicuously checked the title of the text in
her hand, like a member of a secret society too-casually checking the
time and flashing a secret membership ring. I smiled and kept talking
but Sebastian recognized her, and said her name, and then she walked
over and he introduced us. Her name was Sandy, she said. It took both
of us a second to register. For a long moment, our smiles stayed lodged
against our skins. There was this deer’s head on the wall just over her shoulder, a big buck with an argyle bandana and massive branching
horns, staring straight ahead and looking at once deeply angry and
deeply lost. I stood and walked to the bathroom and cut the line and
locked the door. When we left I put the book in the trash. A couple
of weeks later, the bookstore told me I no longer had a job.
I called him an asshole. I wasn’t very creative about it. We both
knew that I didn’t have a right to be this angry about meeting one of
his other lovers, that this was just fine print on a contract I’d already
signed. I put him on ice for a couple of months but he stuck around,
until I managed to fold the feeling into a persistent discomfort just
small enough to bite back with the tiniest possible grin. When we
got back into the swing of things, we drafted some rules about Other
Lovers, and I decided that that was enough. I understood that there
existed plenty of other happy, healthy open relationships in the world,
between people who could push past their jealousy and genuinely
share their love, and at that time in my life, I was still more interested
in being the person I wanted to be than in being the person I was.
I was also, as it happens, dating a boy I didn’t really want to date,
when I first moved out there. His name was Henry, and he was okay. A
law student. We’d slept together my junior year, when he was a senior,
and we’d kept in fleeting touch throughout my senior year, and once
we were in the same city, carrying out a relationship seemed almost socially required of us, at least for a little bit, if only not to be rude.
And also, my friends and I had moved into an old converted barn
way out in the exurbs, far from everything except a flat expanse of
strip malls and the highway that cut the strip malls in two, so Henry
in those first few months was my ride and by extension my friends’
ride, our only manner of reaching the rest of the world after the buses
finished running for the night. So we used him, for that first little
while, and he seemed to feel all right about being used. I think I
expected him to sense that he wasn’t exactly wanted, and to go away
on his own. Instead he ended up cheating on me with one of my
housemates. Which, granted, might have just been his way of going
away on his own.
It was in our seventh month of dating, after we’d just had a long talk
where he wanted me to tell him that I loved him and I didn’t really
say anything at all. I might have loved him. I certainly wondered for
a long time afterward if I did. We were sitting in his car, in a drive-in
movie theater after the movie was over, sipping on malt liquor and listening
to the sound of other people’s sex, having just finished between
ourselves. Drying out our skins, as Henry put it, which I thought was
gross, and said so. I hated the things he sometimes said, the things
he said simply to shock me, simply to get a response. He pulled me
closer and I pushed him away.
I was astonished to hear that he’d slept with my friend. He said it
fast, like it was slippery and he was losing his grip, and for a little while
afterward we just stared at different places on the ground. Eventually
I told him to take me home. I moved out a couple weeks later into a
place much more downtown, close to Somerville, where I could bike
wherever I needed to go. He started dating the friend he’d slept with,
and after a while I stopped speaking to either of them; and in just that
limp sort of way, I let go of that whole group of friends I’d moved to
the city with. I didn’t replace them with anyone else, either. I just
stopped going out. And I stopped talking to people, really talking to people, for a long time. I had new roommates at my new place, but I
didn’t know them, and never really got to know them, either. It was
quite startling, at first, to find how alone I was.
Not that it’s something I regret. I don’t know that I would have
done anything differently, given the circumstances, even if I had the
chance. But it’s important, I think, to explain where I was at before all
this happened, before I get to the rest. Just so certain things are clear.
I’d grown up in a fairly buttoned-up home environment, was also
part of it. My parents weren’t offensively wealthy but they were well-to-do, especially for Worcester in the sixties and seventies, the type
of WASPs who vacationed at a private cabin in New Hampshire and
played tennis together until the week they divorced. My father was
an architect in a local firm and a brutal human, but in a quiet way
that most people experienced as “seriousness,” while my mother was
a part-time art therapist and sort of trapped-in-glass, saying only most
of what she meant in every sentence and keeping herself so private
from other people that she also kept many things, I eventually realized,
private from herself. She often seemed to believe that she was only
being cruel to herself when she was in fact being especially cruel to
me. But they were always well-dressed and almost always polite, even
when they were being breathtakingly mean, and I spent most of my
teenage years dressing like a sort of half-starved animal in order to
define myself opposite to their noiseless misery, sneaking off to outdoor
rock concerts and sketching gruesome doodles in the margins
of Leonard Cohen and Adrienne Rich. And yet their modes, their
physical styles of moving through a crowded room, were still something
that lived in the posture of my shoulders and the manner of eye
contact that I shared with others, no matter how I dressed—and that
core of aloofness, once I found myself suddenly isolated, kept me at
arm’s length from everyone around me by default.
So instead I started to read, to read poetry and fiction and everything
else that I could find in the quiet part of the store, but out of what felt like real necessity, for the first time in my life. It’s not clear
to me anymore if it actually was necessity, but I don’t know if that
matters, either. In those days it felt like a need. A feeling like wandering
thirsty across some sand dunes and making the conscious choice to
see a mirage, if just to have a direction to go. I know it’s melodramatic
but it was a melodramatic sort of mode that I was in, then. In college
I’d majored in English and in those first few years afterward writing
became, in retrospect, the only path I’d ever intended for myself, the
only feasible answer for the question of who I’d been this whole time.
I got the job in the bookstore and I started reading as many biographies
of famous authors as I could get my hands on and imagined
writing poetry for long stretches of time, my hands on my stomach
and a fluttering, weightless feeling just underneath my rib cage, dirty
clothes strewn across the floor and my door closed and my window
open, hearing the voices of other people talking to each other outside.
From Likeness by Samsun Knight, published by the University of Iowa Press in July 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Samsun Knight.
