In between these travels, I lived with my other best friend, Alex (Carly, Alex, and I went to Kenyon College in Ohio together and have been bonded to each other since), at the house on Devoe Street in Brooklyn. Alex kept the third bedroom for a closet. We costumed ourselves and ate rare steak every night. We knew people who could get us in places. Or I was with Eli at a basement dance party enmeshed in dazzling boys who shoved poppers under my nose (Are you being safe? Carly used to text me while I was in Cairo, in Mykonos, in Palermo. LOL, I texted back). But the majority of nights, I ate dinner alone. I read constantly (I don’t understand having that kind of time, she said) and I booked plane tickets in my sleep (When are you coming home? she wrote me. Tell me where that is and I’ll come tomorrow, I said).
Carly and I know we are lucky to connect, despite envy, confusion, and sometimes a lack of common language. There is a respect that isn’t a given after fifteen years of friendship but is earned.
Maybe that’s why I avoided telling her about the Monster as long as possible. Alex, my sister, Eli, they all knew. They had met him when it started. But still I didn’t tell Carly. I avoided telling her until I was so fucked up with hurt and anxiety that I needed her.
I’ve told her it was over more times than it’s actually been over. The last time I told her, I could see that her patience was thinning: You’re in a relationship with a married man. He’s going to go on vacation with his wife. That’s what married people do.
The time before that I called her, enraged, after Eli ran into the Monster and his wife on the street in the Mission. (Yes, said Carly, that’s what married people do, they walk on the street together.) More time has passed and now I have to tell her, Surprise! It’s not over. I have to listen to myself say, This time it’s different, because I do in fact believe it’s different, while in the foreground her son builds fortresses out of Magna-Tiles and her daughter has learned to pull up on the coffee table. Her husband, Alejandro, used to make pozole when I crashed on their couch, or would take us all down to the beach at sunset. He usually leaves the room when I bring the affair up. I see him just barely shaking his head when he thinks he’s out of view. I’ve become their wayward teenage daughter. I can’t remember when I was an adult like them.
Today I brought a lawn sprinkler with me, so their son, Luca, and I can run through it in the overbaked autumnal heat. Being in Carly’s home is like being held: things are white and made out of linen or alpaca wool or marble. They burn the expensive incense. I barely clear my throat before she says, Please don’t say what I think you’re about to say.
* * *
My great-grandmother’s ring, the snake ring, is passed down to the eldest daughter in each generation, which it is my fate, my great privilege, to be. My family talks a lot about inheritance. That means money, jewelry, real estate. Sometimes we mean recipes, silver, linens. The inheritance of the snake ring is something else entirely.
My great-grandmother Adelaide was married and divorced three times. She made fortunes and lost them, abandoned her children, and was “married” a fourth time in a ceremony at her nursing home to one of the few men left alive. It was so they could sleep in the same bed. Somewhere along the line, Adelaide took all of the diamonds from her wedding and engagement rings and turned them into a new ring. A snake.
It’s a phallic symbol, my aunt said to me. The ring had been hers, the eldest girl of her generation.
It sounds cursed, I said. I was eighteen years old.
She dropped it into my hand. The curse isn’t the marriages. It’s Adelaide’s sex drive.
San Francisco, California
Of course, it’s not true that I’ve never been to San Francisco. Even that basement rave when I was seventeen is not the whole truth. San Francisco is the Monster’s home. I was visiting Eli in that city when he invited me on a walk. He had seen my photo in the paper. I had sold my novel. I always knew I’d see you on the other side, he wrote me. He means that we grew up together in Seal Beach. He then wrote, Congrats, and with a pleasant condescension, I’m not impressed you wrote a book. I’m impressed you started a business with no capital. I doubt you know anyone who’s done that.
It’s hard to remember the innocence we possessed, so hard that I begin to doubt if we had any at all.
What is true is that I’ve never been to San Francisco on a gray day. It’s always brilliantly blue, hills suspended in water, so that the hills seem to be drifting. I’m constantly disoriented. I asked no questions about where we would be walking. When I arrived, he said, You’re going to walk in those shoes?
I was wearing sandals. I looked at the Golden Gate Bridge ahead of us. Wait, where are we going?
We were never friends. Later we would say that even when we were kids, we must have known that there was the hum of a third rail between us. A quickening when we saw each other. He dated girls I knew, and I would confide that they weren’t good enough for him. I lost track of him when I moved to Colorado. Then came a fortuitous meeting when he walked into the restaurant where I worked in New York City. That became the occasional Facebook message or email—we were still protected by geography. This kind of crush is built on ideas of someone, their perfection enhanced by ignorance so that we could point to the other and say to ourselves from a safe distance, that’s the kind of person I could be with.
I hadn’t seen him since he completed his PhD in engineering. He was recruited to be the senior vice president of a music streaming company—a vague position that allowed him to travel constantly (sounds like a bullshit job, I said sweetly).
I’m addicted, he admitted. The weird in-between places, the arrivals, the departures, the lounges. The strangers.
I asked about his wife, whom I didn’t know. They married right out of college. He told me that marrying her was the smartest thing he ever did, and I believed him. I felt that way about my ex-husband. People like us fasten ourselves onto those we think are safe. I told him how I was haunted by my divorce. By how big my promises were, and how few I was able to keep. How being a young wife made me feel unfit and destructive, and that a lasting marriage really comes down to how you both behave in a crisis. My ex-husband and I behaved badly. I told the Monster that I was still—three years later—recovering.
I have so much more respect for it now, I said. It’s really sacred. I meant marriage.
He considered that.
The vibrating tenor of this conversation is as old as adultery itself. The high of prohibition, the stepping in and out of ambiguous, flirtatious conversation. Is it revolutionary that we both loved to read? That when we argued it felt like foreplay? That our minds felt faster and sharper in the spark of the other’s? That we were physical immediately, pinching, slapping, bumping into each other?
It wasn’t his intelligence or stories: the one about losing his virginity to his mother’s friend—on a family vacation, no less—or how he was kidnapped during a surf trip near Tijuana and his friends pitched in two hundred dollars and a Nokia cell phone to get him released, or how he was on a tiny plane that ran off the runway in Japan. I did love his perversity and how global he’d made himself. But that’s enough for dinner, not enough to risk my life over.
It was when he told me how embarrassed he’d been by his father’s clothes when he was a teenager. I remembered his father riding a bike through Seal Beach and giving money to the homeless crew near the pier. When the Monster talked about times he had almost died. Talked about getting his heart broken in college. Talked about quitting drugs when his best friend overdosed on heroin.
In middle school I’d watched him bodysurf from the pier, but he was just another lost boy in the water, tips of his hair blond from the sun. Now he listed the bridge’s suicides as we walked. He had shed all his boyishness. When he said he was sometimes unsure about his marriage, I understood. I get it, was all I said.
After talking about himself for some time, he suddenly as
ked if I remembered seeing him during the summer of 2005 when I was in Seal Beach, nursing my mom.
You used to walk your mom on the block. On a leash. I would see you from my bike. I waved one time, but I didn’t know if you saw me.
I stopped walking.
When I was teaching Nancy how to walk again, she had a big Velcro harness and a leash. Sometimes she would cry at the door because she was embarrassed. I’d put a baseball cap over her head where the hair was growing back and help her get sunglasses on. I said, We’ll hide from the paparazzi. I would take her out of our house and tell her we were going to make it to the ocean, three blocks away. We only ever got to the end of our block.
How could he have seen that vulnerable moment? Caught me in that state of care that I never let myself think about, let alone talk about? There was suddenly something bigger between us—history. When he said that, he entered me directly, bypassed every brick wall I’ve put up to other men.
Because I’d stopped walking, he stopped, and was turned toward me. We were still on the ascent on the bridge, I could smell my own sweat, my sunglasses slipping down my face. My sandals by the end of the day would give me bloody blisters. When we were still, there was wind I hadn’t noticed, and that feeling of drift came to me, as if we were moving away from the known world. We had been hiding, side by side, so we didn’t have to look each other in the eye. We stood about six inches apart and I thought, We are fucked.
I did walk her, I told him. I didn’t see you.
Do you also remember, he asked—and I had this feeling that he was just warming up, that he had something in store for me that wasn’t this walk, or the picnic he’d packed, or this city on the sea, but something ambitious that would unfold over the rest of our years—when you ate the pizza off the ground?
I laughed. I did remember it. I must have been fourteen. A group of teenagers on Main Street, terrible pizza by the slice. But you weren’t there, were you?
I was there, don’t be rude. You were wearing a yellow sundress and riding that pathetic longboard you used to skate. You had no shoes. Your feet were black on the bottom, it was fucking disgusting.
He continued: You dropped your pizza and it fell cheese-side-down onto the sidewalk. You looked so sad and I said, You can still eat it. And what did you do?
I thought, I can trust him, he’s smarter than me. He won’t get us into trouble.
I picked up the pizza and I ate it, I said, trying to control my smile.
He nodded. You picked up that filthy piece of pizza and you ate it. You were a monster. And that’s when I knew.
Knew what, I should have asked, but didn’t have to. We walked until the sun set, while sailboats toggled beneath us like toys in a bathtub. I knew too.
Long Beach, California
Imagine an inner tube, my mother’s surgeon said. Imagine a bulge appears, where the rubber is weak. Imagine putting pressure on that inner tube, the bulge growing. Can you imagine what I’m saying?
It was March of 2005 and we were in Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. I had flown in from Europe, where I had been studying abroad in Rome.
Your mother won’t live, my aunt said when I got ahold of her. I didn’t have a cell phone, so she didn’t know how to find me. She called my school in Rome but I was visiting Max, my first love, in Madrid. It’s evidence of how distant I was from my family that when my aunt finally called Max’s mother, she was able to get in touch with me immediately.
I called my aunt back from a phone booth. It was Good Friday in Spain. Every shop was closed, row after row of steel grates over storefronts, and all I could think was, It’s finally happening. The specter of tragedy stalking my family had arrived.
An aneurysm is a bulge in an artery in the brain. A bulge can appear and go unnoticed because it has no symptoms. What happened here is a rupture.
What happened here is a rupture.
When an aneurysm ruptures, it floods the brain with blood, an event technically called a subarachnoid hemorrhage, commonly called a bleeding stroke. They are most often fatal. Sixty percent of the people who suffer them and survive live on with brain damage.
My aunt over the phone: You better hurry up.
When my sister and I arrived in Long Beach, we were told our mother would never come out of the coma she was in.
The surgeon: It can be random. It can be caused by high blood pressure. Sometimes smoking increases the chances that it ruptures.
She smoked, I said. A lot. And drank. Like an alcoholic drinks.
He already knew. Like an alcoholic? The doctor’s folded hands. Where were the adults? Was I really alone, at twenty years old, in his office as I remember it? Did I invent him to console myself?
There’s no time of day in the ICU. I was hollowed out and sedate from the Klonopins I bought from a classmate back in Rome. I bought them for fun, not necessity. Max flew with me, breaking up pills and ordering Heinekens, feeding me pretzels when I woke up from sleep gasping It’s not real, in the business-class seats his parents upgraded us to. Max must have been in the waiting room while I talked to the doctor. Christina must have been somewhere—was she sleeping? Or was she making conversation over tepid coffee and vending-machine Cheetos with all my mother’s ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends? Even my father flew in.
It can also be hereditary, the surgeon said.
The drinking or the aneurysm? I asked. Genuinely.
* * *
I watched men walk all over her. When we were little, Christina and I were expected to entertain her boyfriends, to convince them to stay with her and by extension, us. We put on concerts, choreographed dances. Spent extra time choosing our outfits, fixing our hair before they came over. In a few instances we asked them to be our new father. There were more men than was prudent. Some of them treated her appallingly. One night I heard her and a boyfriend in the backyard, outside my bedroom window, fighting. He was calling her a stupid bitch in a soft, terrifying voice. I went outside in my pajamas. Get out of our house, I said to him. I wasn’t ten yet. We don’t need you. My mother was so drunk she could barely talk. She sent me back to my room. I was wrong. She did need him. They continued dating.
By the time I was in high school I was used to watching my mother drink herself into semi-consciousness at the kitchen barstools of our house in Seal Beach, then try to master the staircase. She would paw at the wall instead of using the banister. This was our big house, not the shitty, trashed rental we had to move into whenever she and her current boyfriend broke up. Richard was a charming but shallow lawyer who kept a safe in the garage filled with cash and guns. He didn’t believe in banks. He was always kind to Christina and me. He bought us the big house when he and my mother got back together. After many years of fighting, he finally married her.
We were lucky to live there, and we all knew it. The time at the rental had been tense, eight hundred square feet filled with outbursts, my sister holding pillows over her ears while my mother and I screamed. We blamed the confines of the apartment, but even in the bigger house, not three blocks from the ocean, there wasn’t enough air for my mother and me.
At that point, it had been years since she asked the barest questions about my life: who my friends were, what I cared about, who I wanted to be. I was failing classes, constantly in detention, and when the report cards came home, she only raised her eyebrows at them, proof she was right about me. I would come home stoned and instead of running up to my room, I would stalk her in the kitchen, begging for confrontation. I would stand at the fridge eating chicken salad with my hands, opening bags of tortilla chips, microwaving Hot Pockets I bought myself at the 7-Eleven. I was either hiding from her rage or trying to get her attention—there was no safe middle ground while she was drinking. I stared at her while she looked, fixedly, at the small television.
Leave me alone, she slurred.
Why can’t you be happy?
I asked.
Leave me alone, she said again. She pretended to file her nails. Go to your room.
I sat on the countertop and ate with a stoner’s abandon, totally invisible to her. When she saw me again, she was startled. She said, point-blank, Some people aren’t meant to be happy.
What people, I wondered but didn’t ask. Me?
That’s bullshit, I said. You’re just lazy.
You’re lazy. She said this half-heartedly. This happened, that she got too drunk to hold on to an argument. And you’re selfish. Just like—
—My father. I know.
I continued eating, my hunger bottomless. I opened cupboards, ransacked bags of chips. She continued to watch TV.
Some evenings she would sketch while she was drinking. When I was a child, in a fit of optimism she had taken interior design classes at a night school. Another such mood had her looking at real estate in Santa Fe (I can actually breathe there, she confided to me, turning pages of a Sunset magazine). A door would open up in her and through it I could see our escape. But her enthusiasm over projects, trips, and potential lives was terribly short-lived. If I tried to bring it up again, she silenced me quickly. It came down to money. The muddy secret of our life was that we never had any money. As a court clerk, my mother didn’t make much of her own. My father’s child support was inconsistent at best. My grandparents bought her first house. They gave us an allowance, paid for private school, bought our clothes, took us on vacation. My mother’s second husband bought her the next house. They control me, she would whisper, her teeth purpled from wine. They use the money to control me. Every dream died on her and left a bitter stain.
Still, she would occasionally take out some graph paper and start sketching a new house for us. Maybe she would leave him, she would say, sell the house. Move to Hawaii. Yes, I would say when I was little. Let’s go together. Why not?
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