I text him all the things I would do to his cock that I would never do to his cock. Or I might during his lunch break, or during a layover in the next synthetic place we met, the next carpeted hotel room, somewhere between the first drink when we were hopeful and the last drink when I was yelling at him. The truth is, we mostly fucked facelessly via the Internet.
I’ve been game to pause my entire life to text with him. I traveled all over the world and was paralyzed in one conversation with one man. When I was in Egypt, on a Nile cruise for a writing assignment, I sat huddled on the floor in pajamas outside the closed captain’s office. It was the only place with solid Wi-Fi. I stayed there until two a.m., ignoring other guests walking past me back to their rooms, though I saw them whisper or share a look. At a residency in the Catskills I stood outside a closed office in a snowstorm because it was the only place with service. I’ve walked into people, trash cans, walls, while texting. I’ve been almost hit by cars more times than I can count. Twice, I’ve pulled over onto the shoulder of the freeway. My days are made up of intervals of activity between the deluge of texting that starts when I wake and ends when his wife comes home. But today I am bothered. I need to get in the shower.
He writes that he wants to fuck me from behind with my face shoved into the pillows but that he will pull me back by my hair when I need to breathe. Maybe, he writes. Jesus, I write back.
I can’t shower, return emails, drive, leave my seat, until he finishes jerking off in the bathroom stall at his work.
I’m going to explode, he writes.
Jesus, I write again.
He thinks Jesus means, Fuck I’m so turned on, I’m coming so hard, but it means, Jesus, you fucking moron, you think this is romantic?
I am talking to both of us.
At the same time, my agent, my editor, and I are on a group text.
#selfrealizationinwomen
Lots of champagne-glasses-clinking, heart-eyed emojis. I smack myself in the face as hard as I can and text back: Yay!
* * *
Once in graduate school I was workshopping pages of a novel in progress and a man—whose prose I very much admired—had his turn to weigh in.
It’s good, he said. It’s really good.
I waited patiently for the “but.”
But I hope this isn’t going to be just a love story. It’s better than that.
I ran up to him after class. Of course it’s not just a love story, I assured him. Novels are about big ideas: class, gender, race, religion, politics. It definitely had a theme like The American Identity, The Human Condition, The Failure of Language. I thanked him for his appraisal in class, which seemed to imply that if I applied myself, really focused, I might be a serious writer.
It wasn’t until days later, as I sat at the table to write, that I thought, Wait. What is just a love story?
Los Angeles, California
Up at the top of a hill in the Pacific Palisades is a house with the most jaw-dropping views I’ve seen in Los Angeles. The Charmel house was built on a northwest-facing cliff overlooking a ravine and Topanga State Park, the mountains of Malibu, and the Pacific Ocean. You can’t see another house, or even a road, when you look out. There is nothing ahead of you but green and blue, nothing beneath you but air. When the sun sets, you could easily be in another, less developed country. I like to imagine that this is what California looked like before we got here.
This is Alex’s house, or, to be more precise, Alex’s parents’ house. During breaks from college, if I came back to California, I would bounce between Carly’s house in Santa Monica and Alex’s house in the Palisades, avoiding Seal Beach, Naples, and my family. Kenyon College was teeming with unmodified wealth, the kind that felt liquid and made the ski homes in Colorado look basic. I was used to visiting my friends’ ostentatious homes, also their second and third homes. Used to being taken out on boats, then to a clambake, or noting a Matisse, a row of Rauschenbergs, or a Lucian Freud. And while I never stopped noticing, I did learn to swallow the guttural surprise of seeing art in a private residence and temper my recognition of a house that had been featured in Architectural Digest. I grew accustomed to the staff, ever-present. Within that jaded bubble, Charmel was still something spectacular. The house seemed built out of glass, so it decanted light, the swimming pool chopped into the hillside, the air always fragrant with thyme. The closets in this house were bigger than any bedroom I’d had in my life.
This house is full of warm memories for me. The generosity of Alex’s mother and father combined with the extravagance of their dinner parties. Alex and I playing dress-up in her mother’s vintage Valentinos and Halstons. We were served wine from their favorite vineyards in Napa, where they also had a house, and we were expected to converse. The day after I got engaged to Brad, it was Alex’s mother, Linda, who threw us an engagement party. She gave me a lace handkerchief with a card that said, Something old. My family wasn’t there, but Carly and Alex were. Brad was so blown away; he couldn’t stop talking about the house when we got back to New York.
But now Linda is sick. Really sick. Alex has been flying back and forth from her place on Devoe, but she’s officially moving back to Los Angeles. Back into Charmel. It was almost impossible for Alex to get information from New York, as Linda has been evasive, proud, and deeply in denial about her cancer. Things are devolving quicker than expected. When I first moved back, Linda was still upstairs in the master suite. Now she’s been moved to a hospital bed in the downstairs bedroom with a full-time nurse. I’ve come over tonight because Alex and I are going to cook all of Linda’s favorite foods and have dinner together.
When I get out of the car, I steel myself for the experience ahead. I have some intimacy with sick people, that’s not what disturbs me. It’s that Alex just lost her father three years ago, in this same house. It’s that Carly lost her mom when she was twenty-five. The sigh I heave is for my best friends who are losing their parents: parents whom they missed when they were away, parents who were conspirators in their lives. And my parents—twin vacancies—just keep living. I want to apologize for how senseless it is.
Linda didn’t lose her hair. She’s the type who wouldn’t allow such a thing. While Alex preps ingredients, I sit next to Linda’s bed with a laptop and we click through photos of Alex’s wedding venue in Napa. Linda nods to photos, indicating she wants me to continue, but doesn’t speak. Her breathing is labored, throaty, wet. There are oxygen tanks next to the bed. Her coughing is unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. Each time I clench my teeth because it sounds so violent shaking her tiny frame. I’ve mentioned casually—to both Linda and Alex—that we could postpone the wedding that’s scheduled to happen in six months. From what I can gather, which is what Alex gathers from doctors who won’t make absolute statements, Linda won’t make it. Or perhaps, I say carefully, we could do it next week in the backyard? Linda ignores me. The commotion of planning, the efflux of money, the illusion of control, it all feels like a circus of denial. Busyness that takes away from the gravity of these—almost certainly—being some of the last months (weeks? days?) Alex and Linda have together. Alex sometimes tries to talk to her about it. Mama, she asks, maybe you can give me a sign. Maybe you can tell me what you’d like to come back as, so I can look for you. She forbids all talk of death. Instead we talk of weddings. Maybe it’s better this way. Some minutes later, Linda turns to us and says clearly, I think I’ll wear orange to the wedding. The Carolina Herrera.
We cook a feast. Steak and chicken. Five different vegetable sides. We have peaches to grill for dessert. We use all the dishes, every cooking surface. There is enough food for twenty. Linda isn’t able to make it out. We take little plates into her room and turn on some reality television. Alex tries to feed her mom, but Linda isn’t interested. Each breath gurgles in her throat.
Later Alex and I take bottles of wine outside. I eat some of Linda’s mushroom chocol
ates, a gift from some well-meaning visitor early on, and Alex and I accidentally get really drunk. We have a way of drinking with each other, impassioned and innocent, and then whoops, we’re wasted. We strip down and sit in the hot tub and stare out into the night. It’s moonless and pitch-dark, a void just beyond the edge of the pool. We talk about Devoe Street and New York and all the crazy shit we used to get into, how the hangovers would last days, but they were our favorite days.
I can’t do this again, Alex says at one point. Her face contorts, then she blinks it away. She dislikes crying. She’s rational, well-mannered, able to forbid her own feelings the way her mother forbids certain kinds of flowers in the weekly arrangements. I think Alex means she can’t watch her mom die, like she did with her father. I don’t know what to say. I think back to all the times Alex has picked me up off the floor. When I would tell her I didn’t want to continue living, she would say, You don’t have to. You just have to make it until morning.
We climb upstairs to the master bedroom at two a.m., trailing wet footprints, leaving the kitchen a mess. God, Linda used to scream at us if we left so much as a water glass out. If there was one streak of grease near the stove. I guess it doesn’t matter now. An hour after we go to bed, I wake up to Alex moaning that she’s sick. I follow her into the bathroom and rub her back while she pukes. I ask if she took any pills and she swears she didn’t. I don’t know if I believe her. I’m spinning, she says. Linda’s cough flares up and echoes through the glass house. Alex winces.
I have her lie against me. I sit against the wall with a pillow on my lap and Alex in front so she can be reclined. This is a trick from college. It helps with the spins, as does keeping one foot on the ground, as does not drinking so much. I tell her the story of Dante’s Inferno, from a class we took together, but I remember very little of it, so it’s radically condensed. The thing between Dante and Beatrice is more sexual and less divine. Alex’s eyes are closed, and she gives me a few smiles. Her breathing slows and I wonder if I can wedge a pillow next to my neck so I can sleep. She opens her eyes and looks at me.
Where is he? she asks. She means the Monster. He was supposed to be in Los Angeles by now. Alex has enough grace not to ask directly.
Stockholm, I whisper. A new project. I give a shallow cry and swallow it, apologetic for the pettiness of my pain, and also relieved to show it.
I’m sorry. I’m sure he’s coming.
Linda’s coughs are like gunfire. I hear movement in the nurse’s room downstairs, a door creaking open, and I’m sure the nurse is giving her a sip of water. But the coughing goes on for long enough that Alex startles when it goes quiet. I try to take deep breaths so she’ll mimic me and fall asleep. I think, in that moment, that Alex is the least judgmental person I know. So much kinder than me. She tells me all the time, We do the best we can with what we’re given.
Long Beach, California
Men are cowards, my aunt says to me. He’s not going to leave his wife. Their essence is just scared little boys. He’s afraid you’ll leave him someday. You think because you had the courage to leave your marriage, this guy does as well. He doesn’t and it’s not his fault. He’s not built for it.
He’s going to leave, I say quietly. He said before the holidays.
Are you really this stupid?
Countless times I’ve washed up on the shore of my aunt’s home in Naples and taken refuge. I even lived with her earlier this year, for a month, while finishing one of the drafts of my novel. She deposits me in a massive bed with Porthault sheets and brings me a massive glass of the cheap Chardonnay my uncle favors at 5:30 p.m. on the dot.
I sit with her and my uncle in the evenings and they tell me stories about California. Corrupt politicians, money-laundering schemes on Catalina Island, gossip about Gil Garcetti, famous cases they were briefly custodians of, all the ways the cops fucked up the O.J. trial. We sometimes argue about politics, then pull back before anything becomes hurtful. My aunt does my laundry, chides me for dressing like a kid and for wearing the same four outfits for the past year. Don’t you just want to burn these clothes?
This must be what people feel when they go home to their parents. I can’t talk to my friends about this affair anymore. I’m defensive, self-righteous, a tone I know from when I’ve been part of interventions. I speak hotly with denial and I don’t care. It’s a state of mind that is strikingly similar to faith.
My aunt, for whatever reason, from whatever bank of life experience, is kinder about this than about most of my alternative listeners. She actually remembers the Monster. I have no idea why or how, but when I told her I was seeing him, she wasn’t surprised. Oh, he was always in love with you. I could tell by the way he looked at you.
He was fourteen, I replied. She shrugged. It was plain as day.
I’ve never been able to see anything so clearly, I say. My life with him.
You see it clearly because you’re making it up.
I’m not stupid. Do you think I would be in this if I wasn’t sure?
She considers this. I see her imagining whether she’s going to have to have dinners like this with the Monster, see him on the occasional holiday. Or if this is going to be another painful story in my database. The odds, I’m aware, are not with me.
You’re going to be broken before you begin. It will all be uphill.
It cannot be harder than what we’re doing now. There will be peace. Peace is coming.
I’m staring into my Chardonnay glass. I haven’t spoken to the Monster in two weeks, allowing him one last time in therapy with his wife. But I feel him out there, circling me. We often said that we would have found each other earlier if I hadn’t been sent to Colorado. We often wonder why he walked into Union Square Cafe in New York City, just three weeks after I had gotten the job, with no idea I even lived in New York. These kinds of stories protected me from believing I degraded myself over absolutely nothing.
Do you ever wish you had stayed married? my aunt asks suddenly.
I guess it’s strange I never think about that. I wish I was the kind of person who could have stayed married.
I flash the snake ring at her. She smiles. There’s a fire in the outdoor fireplace. I can smell the sea. I recalled suddenly my first winter in New York City. I couldn’t afford to buy myself a dresser so I lived in a room surrounded by suitcases. She flew out and bought me a winter coat from H&M. She often appeared in moments of believing I had no one. And now…she’s pleased…She’s pleased I’m with her, I can tell.
You know, I never thought you’d move back here. Never thought you should go to graduate school for that gratuitous degree. I did not think you should leave your marriage. I don’t say this often, but I was really wrong about that whole thing.
What whole thing?
You.
Colorado
Every addict’s journey follows the same trajectory. It’s an Icarus story: a high that’s unsustainable and then down, down, down. Still, I’m not entirely sure what happened next. I was at Kenyon and the news and updates came to me in fragments. I had trouble getting people on the phone. Each time I checked in, the stories of who found out what, what exactly happened, lost the chime of truth when they were repeated.
To the best of my knowledge, he had been behaving erratically with family members and friends for anywhere from six months to a year, depending on whom you ask. This included my drive from Colorado to Ohio in 2005, and could include his disappearance in Rome earlier in the year. It was chalked up to his unemployment.
One of my cousins found my father walking through his house early in the morning, going through the cupboards. He had been talking to himself.
Acting against advice, he sold the Hygiene house for half its value because he needed cash.
He was found in a parked car on my cousin’s street, foaming at the mouth, an empty bottle of OxyContin in the center console.
&
nbsp; He was in a detox center when the house needed to be vacated. My cousins moved his furniture out into a storage unit. They lifted up the mattress and found dozens of used syringes. That was how we found it wasn’t just the pills. He had been injecting crystal meth between his toes.
When this news hit me, the meth, the context of our drive two months earlier finally made sense. It made a nightmarish, incredible kind of sense. The fact that he was carrying on a double life the entire time I was in his care also was—in retrospect—obvious.
What came back to me was a day in high school when I was having lunch with a friend, an insomniac musician who lived down the street in Hygiene. He said, Your dad was walking again last night. I asked him what he was talking about. Your dad walks and smokes at like three in the morning. I see him all the time, even in winter.
It’s only in writing this that I’m disturbed by my ability to deny the truth. Most of the time I wear that ability like a survivor’s badge. But I must have known, somewhere, and then decided, a thousand times, to un-know it.
* * *
There are boxes piled in the garage at Laurel Canyon. In those boxes are broken mason jars, niche cooking equipment like a pickling kit and a pasta maker, notebooks, my wedding dress, and half a dozen impact letters, written at the request of various rehab centers. My mother went twice before the aneurysm. My father, after 2005, would relapse at least once a year for the next decade. The letters have a formula. I have copied and pasted from one to the other, depending on which parent I’m addressing. The times they scared me. How much it hurt to watch them hurt themselves. How alone I’ve felt, how I’ve struggled to fill the void they left. How I wanted to believe they could get better (the preferred phrasing is, I know you’re going to get better).
In these letters, there is a girl displaying how tough she is. She says she expects little, but I know she foolishly hopes for so much. The hope should be honorable. But as I get older, the more it seems like detrimental magical thinking. Every time they did it to me, again, I was sliced open, idiotic with surprise: How did I become so fucking pathetic? How do they still hurt me?
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