And yet it goes on. I grab his shoulders back and speak slowly, gently. You are lying. I’m taking her to the doctor now.
My mother and I are silent on the drive. I’m texting my sister, not just at stoplights, but texting constantly, needing her with me: Emergency, emergency, this is bad. My mother plays brain-dead, looking out the car window, not a tear left on her face.
When we arrive, she won’t get out of the car. She holds on to her seat belt. When I try to unbuckle her, she hits me, then gasps like I might hit her back. I leave her and go into the office to check in. There’s Dr. Chan. I saw him quite often when I was the nurse ten years ago. The relief I feel at seeing him, the adult reality of him, makes me feel temporarily safe. This might be okay.
Where’s your mom?
She won’t get out of the car. My voice cracks a little. I want him to hug me. I want to abdicate all responsibility and lie down on the floor. I swallow it. It’s a bad scene. Do you have a wheelchair?
I sit in the wheelchair across from the open passenger seat in a mostly empty parking lot. A gray coastal day, fog that would burn off by noon. We are—as I should have expected—an hour late to an appointment that is a ten-minute drive from her house. I told her that we will not be leaving until she sees Dr. Chan. We’re sitting in a sort of stalemate. I’m really just catching my breath.
She picks at her cuticles and I stare at the mute, office-park architecture, wondering if there are normal people inside doing their jobs. What do those jobs look like? Email marked urgent, new boxes of pens and paper clips. All of that life unrecognizable to me in the one I’m living.
I’m not going in there, she says eventually.
I know, because you’re drunk, and you don’t want him to know, I say.
What I want to say is, How could you do this to me? The answer is, she can’t help it. Not because of her brain, I’m realizing today, but because this is who she always was. This is who she was when she was too drunk to pick up my sister and me from friends’ houses in the evenings, or when my sister came home and found her unconscious in a puddle of blood from falling, and who she was when I was thirteen and we fought and I screamed at her to stop, to please stop the car, I couldn’t breathe, if she didn’t stop the car I would throw myself out of it. She yanked a fistful of my hair and said, stone cold, You think you’re special? You think you’re the only one who wants to die?
Additionally, this shell of a woman in a Long Beach parking lot is still the little girl I saw in the coma. When she doesn’t respond about her state of insobriety, which is an affirmative answer, I find I’m crying. Not enthusiastically, like she was, snotting and yelping while we got her out of the house, and not like Larry’s histrionic weeping. It’s the resigned, accidental crying of a child who knows no one is coming. I don’t look at my mother. I try, I really do, to keep myself tiny, silent, and numb. But I feel it coming and then it has arrived, my hurt: it is massive, I can’t see beyond it.
Here are your options, Nancy. You go in to see your old friend Dr. Chan. Or I drive you to detox at the county hospital, not the fancy fucking place in Newport Beach you usually go. As you know, detox sucks, and I won’t let them give you Valium. While you’re in detox, I’m going to get a lawyer. I have lots of money now, I’ll get a fancy lawyer. When you get out of detox, I’m going to put you in a nursing home, where you’re the only person not in a fucking diaper, and they won’t let you drink, and you won’t be able to hurt yourself. I look at her. And you will never see me again. I swear to God, Nancy, I will not think twice about it.
She mumbles.
What’s that? I ask sharply. I heard her. Go ahead, say it again.
I hate you.
I nod. There is no place for my rage to land, so it dies in me, temporarily causing a roar in my ears, then nothing. I feel nothing again. She’s as blameless as a child. None of this will stick. We are actors, playing preposterous parts, which if I tried to write, the editor would cut, scribbling too much, and yes, it is, in fact, TOO MUCH. I also know that we aren’t going to see Dr. Chan today, or any day in the future. I can’t get her out of the car against her will, and I already know it’s not possible to check her into detox without her consent. I can’t really afford a lawyer. I want to beat traffic back up the 5 freeway and get in the bath and eat Xanax until it’s dark. This is a scene that I have played before and will play again as long as I continue to want anything from her. The players’ motives are clear enough: I want her to live, and she just wants to die.
Laurel Canyon, California
One time he broke into the house on Devoe Street in Brooklyn, removing the screen, scraping himself shimmying through the window. I was in the shower and screamed when he pulled back the curtain. He was ecstatic, overly proud of himself, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down. We didn’t talk about us. I stayed in the shower and he watched. Didn’t touch me. By dinnertime he was back in San Francisco.
In New York we met in the mornings to ride the train into the city together. He was on an extended work project and I had no fixed schedule, an interloper on the L train. I picked him up from his office at six and we’d discuss options like the train, or a ferry, or a drink. We commuted together for an entire month so we could sit side by side, hidden in plain sight. That was the month where I saw him every single day except two Sundays.
One time a plane ticket showed up in my in-box. We hadn’t spoken in six weeks, not since he blocked my phone because he and his wife were on vacation. The plane ticket was audacious, a dare. He can’t be serious, I told my friends. His smile when I arrived in Toronto with a backpack, a smile not of surprise but of confirmation: this story was about us, it would always be us.
When I was in Rome, six months into this affair, he told me he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t leaving her. I wept via Skype. Why do you keep coming for me? I asked. Because I love you, he said. He asked me to keep the computer on until I fell asleep and I did. He watched me, confused, and said, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as much as you do.
Forty-eight hours later he was in Rome and I asked no questions. We kissed on a park bench in front of the Fontana Paola for over an hour, as savage as teenagers. He carried me piggyback through the streets, the gardens on top of the Gianicolo hill filling with mosquitos around us. He emptied his pockets into the Trevi Fountain and swore I would be the mother of his children.
I spent a lot of money buying us time. Whenever he failed to leave her, I booked a new ticket. I was making things easier for him, giving him space, not knowing that he’s a hunter who lives for a chase.
Even now I have no doubt that everything I’ve suffered, every accident and pivot, from my girlhood until now, has been leading me to him.
It has crossed my mind more than once that I should not let him find me here in Laurel Canyon. And yet I’m cutting lemons on a stingingly blue morning, arranging them in a bowl, ordering singular sandwiches with extra avocado. I’m applying invisible makeup, laying out a patterned sundress because I know it will drive him insane.
We’re so close to our real life. He’s asked for a divorce. He’s here for a job interview. He’s here to see my new home, except he texts, Our new home, and I’m so scared that it was a typo I write, Ha. I tell myself that I won’t remember any of the pain. That we are going through a transformation of which amnesia is a blessed side effect.
I make the man behind the counter re-wrap the sandwiches because the first job was messy. It’s something the Monster’s wife would know, how to order his sandwich. I had to order better than her. That’s easy enough because I am uniquely adept at loving him. I am uniquely adept at dividing him into things his wife knows, and things I know. Don’t lie to me, I told him at the beginning. I can stomach anything but lies.
And when he tells me that he never lies to me, though I see him lie to everyone else, I believe him.
The Monster enjoys his sandwich. He doesn
’t give a shit what’s on it. He takes a work call and I thoughtlessly undo his pants while he talks. Thoughtlessly. No, I can’t get away with that. I am full of thoughts. Thoughts of us referring to this blow job that he got while he was taking a meeting, when we’re growing old together and the patina of this affair’s misery has shifted to something bronze and noble.
When I come, I cry. When he comes, I cry again. When he tells me, with his pants still off, that he has to go pick up his wife at the airport because they’re going to Palm Springs with a group of friends, it was planned a while ago, I don’t cry.
Sooner is better, I say. No one can live like this.
I know, he says, looking at his hands, his ring. I can’t do this anymore.
When? I ask.
Soon. Really soon.
Soon, someday, maybe, our refrain. Probably this weekend, I think. Probably when they get home from this weekend. He’ll start a fight, he’ll be distant. Then he’ll say that he needs space. Or maybe he’ll just dive in: There’s something I need to tell you.
Let’s walk, I say.
We walk up Runyon Canyon and the night cools. I think he must notice that my legs are brown. I’ve been running obsessively. I look around at people hiking, sweating, talking into Bluetooth headsets, tethered to their animals, and I think about their small, weak lives, and I think, He picked me because I’m strong.
He picked me. No, I can’t get away with that either. I picked him too.
I’m late, he says.
You’re having an affair, you’re always late. I stall. You don’t want to come back and shower?
No, I really have to go, he says, and checks his phone. His background photo is of her at a concert and I still don’t cry. Numb, numb, numb, a breeze passes and my skirt flies up, and I will myself to be light. I’m not.
You’re going to go meet your wife with my pussy all over your face?
He looks at me seriously, like I’m trespassing, but doesn’t respond.
That’s who you are now? I say, with more force. You don’t care enough about either of us to clean up?
He doesn’t respond, and I hear, faintly from myself, That’s who he always was. He kisses me and I smell our sex on his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, his earlobes.
He says something unnecessarily cruel, cruel to me, cruel to her, so shocking it’s funny, and gets into his car.
I laugh. I’m charmed by how he seems unafraid of being ugly. Charmed by how messy our sex is, like we’re drawing outside the lines, and all the degrading things we say and do seem to be closer to the truth of human nature. Charmed, perhaps by our superiority, though it feels to me as the months go on that I’ve made a terrible mistake. I can’t dwell on it, only continue soldiering on. I let him go and I drive up to Mulholland. I continue dividing my life into Times I Cried, Times I Didn’t Cry. I drive with the heater on and the windows down until the San Fernando Valley turns blue, then black, and the lights come on.
Death Valley, California
It’s us and about one million other tourists descending on Death Valley for the rare burst of fertility and color called a “superbloom.” I’ve never had the desire to go to Death Valley (Something about the name, I tell the Love Interest on the drive), and, to be honest, I don’t have the desire to go camping (I have my period, I tell him. You can’t camp when you have your period? he asks. Not really?). The Love Interest is a passionate outdoorsman, and I have purported to be one as well. I’m fucked.
The entire park is full (Even the hotels? I ask musically, and he thinks I’m joking), so we head out to BLM land outside the park bounds. This place is not Joshua Tree. It’s blanched, as if ill, and featureless. As soon as we find a spot—the spot is not exactly beautiful but is technically outdoors, so it’s still part of “the experience”—it starts to rain. The temperature drops and the rain turns to needles.
Is this snow? I ask. I’m shivering. I had to borrow his socks, I’m so unprepared.
The Love Interest shrugs, Maybe hail? And keeps setting up our tent.
I’m wondering how embarrassed I’ll be when I ask to sleep in the car. His girlfriend—or whatever she is—definitely loves to camp. She loves to rock climb and probably howls at the moon with abandon, has passages of Women Who Run with the Wolves memorized.
I have a hard time explaining to the Love Interest how tired I get. He says, From what? As if exhaustion has an addressable root cause or could be remedied by sleep. Depression, I told him, just one time, to see how it landed. He kind of laughed. I watch him bring firewood out of the trunk into the rain.
You can’t build a fire in this, I say, waving my hand to the weather. I notice a sour taste in my mouth that means I’m very, very close to ruining this “experience.”
I can, he says. For the next fifteen minutes I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds, sitting silently, waiting for him to give up as the rain extinguishes every effort. Then there is a roaring, orange-tongued fire.
I’m impressed.
Though I initially called bullshit on his open relationships, it’s true. His girlfriend, or his primary, knows that he’s seeing me. She knows who I am, that he and I have friends in common. Knows that he’s camping with me right now. He’s not sure exactly how polyamory works, very much a work in progress, but believes in the honesty and communication it requires. He believes in questioning all his assumptions. Up until now, I’ve either not cared or pretended not to care. I have told him that I’m in something also, but I don’t talk about it. Now I’m here with him, outside my comfort zone, and it strikes me that this is how you build things. After this weekend, the Love Interest and I will have stories, tellable stories, ones not about hotel rooms and how one sneaks in and out of crowded places. The night sky crackles as the clouds recede, my hands burn from the fire. I drink red wine, he drinks mescal and I am so fucking relieved to be out of the city.
I don’t like open things, I say, suddenly.
What?
Open relationships. They’re dumb. Don’t work. Sometimes when I talk about my feelings out loud, my vocabulary regresses to that of a seven-year-old.
You’ve had experience with them?
I’ve had experience cheating.
So you already know that monogamy is flawed.
Ha. I take another drink. Yes, it’s flawed.
And you think those two things, open relationships and cheating, are the same thing?
I know this debate inside and out, and I’m usually partial to late-night philosophical chats about monogamy. I’ve studied infidelity, polyamory, and I did try an open relationship in college after I read too much Sartre (it didn’t end well). I’ve questioned heteronormative assumptions and forced myself into threesomes, foursomes. Part of me wants to unleash a deluge of cynicism on him, make him feel embarrassed by whatever he’s trying with his girlfriend. But the truth is, I don’t know what I want. I’m still waiting for the Monster.
It just doesn’t feel good. Knowing you’re with someone else.
Why?
Because I don’t like it.
What don’t you like about it?
It’s not fucking cute, I say. I’m mad, grossly mad, indicating a well of feeling. I’m not one of those flexible girls, open to whatever-the-fuck experience. I’m a fucking adult. You can’t commit to this girl—what is she, twenty-two? So open-minded?—so you’re keeping your options open under the guise of enlightenment, but as soon as either one of you falls in love, the entire enterprise falls apart.
He exhales. Maybe. What are you saying?
I don’t know.
It’s been dark almost the entire time we’ve been here. I haven’t seen any flowers. There was a poster when we were denied entrance to the park, drawn in a 1950s tourism style that said, Death Valley: Remember, at the lowest point in North America, the sky begins at your feet! It depicts two people standing a
t the valley floor and the stars rippling up from the ground. It’s like that now, stars all the way to my frozen toes.
Have you ever been in love? I ask him.
I think so.
Then you haven’t. It’s hard enough with just two people.
Are you asking me to stop seeing her?
That would be crazy. I can’t promise this man anything. I’m not even sure how I feel about him. And the hideous thought comes to me that perhaps I don’t like this arrangement because it’s too…honest. This rage coming off me is so mis-projected, so directly related to this affair I’m trapped in, that I can hear the Monster laughing at me. And yet, I feel a surety I’m not used to, which is, I’m not doing this again. Nothing murky or illegible. Nothing where we parcel out our hearts and give only to withdraw. I won’t.
What are you saying? he asks again because I’ve gone quiet.
I don’t like it. That’s all. I think in order for things to have a shot, you have to take risks. Monogamy is a great big risk.
His face has grown serious in the firelight. This is it, the night he figures out that I’m not worth the effort. Fuck. He has no idea what to say.
Anaheim, California
The Love Interest doesn’t scare easily. Weeks later, walking his dog at a park near his house, he asks me, Was it always bad with your mom?
He knows that I’ve been parentless for a long time, that my stories have calcified. He knows I’m writing a piece about my father and the writing causes me a lot of pain. I’m surprised by his question, by his relentless pursuit of some positive. At that moment, I can’t remember her, really remember her as a mother. Her disabilities color every memory.
Not always bad, but always hard, I say.
His question causes me to recall suddenly and perfectly a day she picked us up from day care late. We were the last kids. My sullenness on the car ride home. I know it was winter because it felt like it had been dark for hours, adding insult to injury. I didn’t look up for a long time. When I did, I noticed we were not heading toward home. In the front seat my mother drove silently, chauffeuring us as she did every day of her life.
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