Stray

by Stephanie Danler

  I’ve decided not to tell Carly that I saw the Monster last night, or that he’s currently at the airport—maybe by now in midair—watching me. His gaze hovers over me, even when he’s gone, keeping me inattentive to my real life. I can smell his fear sometimes, that I’ll become someone who can live without him. But Carly knows.

  Why don’t you just stop?

  You don’t think I’ve tried? I keep waiting to know that it’s the end. For some sign that I’m supposed to give up.

  The sign is that you’re suffering. There it is.

  I know. I can feel myself falling away. I’m scared.

  But you’re choosing it. You know that, right? That you’re making this choice, every day.

  I feel choiceless.

  Do you know what makes me mad? She turns to me. That you did it. You fought so hard for this life and now you won’t let yourself have it.

  We spend the afternoon with the kids. I take Luca to Rite Aid in his wagon for an ice cream cone. We stand in the toy aisle and I pretend to make a list for Santa Claus of all the plastic crap he thinks he wants. Luca tells me I should marry George and I, having no idea who that is, say sure, he sounds nice enough. We walk back, and the air is damp, spiked with salt. It smells like my childhood.

  Epiphanies aren’t lightning bolts. They are a hummed note, a prayer mumbled constantly, brought to the surface given the right conditions. It’s as if I am always hearing three ways, first shallowly, collecting, then one level deeper as I’m processing, and finally, I am hearing with my body, which is when I’m hearing myself. That’s one way, for me, information combines with experience and becomes knowledge. I wish there were a shortcut.

  I did do it, didn’t I? It’s not just a loop of my failures, there is something else too, some remote euphoria that I am a writer. I’ve forgotten I can choose something else. Forgotten that choice has always been the antidote to fate.

  When we get home, Carly and Al are cooking dinner for me. Cacio e pepe, my request, and a salad with blood oranges and cara caras and chicories. There’s a bottle of Nebbiolo, but neither of them will think to open it unless I ask them. I will ask them to. I’ll only have one glass, maybe a second, but small pours. When I leave, I’m going to drive Sunset Boulevard all the way home. There’s a cake tucked into the back of the fridge. I ask them who George is, because Luca wants me to marry him. Curious George, Carly says. The cartoon monkey. It is my thirty-second birthday.

  * * *

  Since I’ve started writing about my father and visiting my mother, I notice Luca is the exact age I was when my father left us. That was also the age, three years old, when I had my first panic attack. When I stopped being able to sleep alone in my bed. I watch Luca play and imagine if one of his parents wasn’t home anymore. Not living down the street, split custody, alternating weekends, joint holidays, but gone. As in not knowing where he lived, what he did with his days, when or if he was coming back. What confusion, terror, grief Luca would feel. I think it might create permanent feelings of unworthiness in him, believing that he didn’t deserve to be loved the way other children were loved. It causes me to cry as I’m pulling away from Carly’s house, imagining Luca experiencing that. It’s so much easier to have compassion for others than ourselves.

  Luca asked earlier if I knew where their cat, Bucky, has gone. I hedged. Bucky is one hundred percent dead. I said I didn’t know where he was, but he should ask his mom. Luca pulled my ear to his mouth and whispered loudly:

  He’s in heaven. But you can still talk to him. You can talk to anyone in heaven.

  Wow, I said. I didn’t know that.

  He nodded at me. The most patient teacher in the world.

  Los Angeles, California

  I remember saying to the Monster when I found the cottage: We can walk to the Chateau.

  A few weeks before my birthday we walk to the Chateau Marmont. He notes the lack of sidewalks, the suicidal traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I don’t know how to be myself anymore: whether to enjoy him while I have him, to meet his frenzy for me with nonchalance, or to scream at him to respect me, a respect I’m afraid I can only earn by never seeing him again.

  I keep my eyes down as the maître d’ seats us and recall another night, when he and the servers were background extras in the great romance of my life. The Monster shook his hand, introduced us. We invited him into the conversation. That thrilled me, the public proof of us as an us, even if our public was always strangers. That night I had offered the maître d’ a taste from our bottle of wine. Tonight, I realize he doesn’t recognize us, even as I try to order the same bottle. My wine knowledge annoys the Monster. He believes it all tastes the same, sometimes orders Malbec to annoy me. Tonight, I know there is something vulgar about how careless he is with pleasure. So certain that someone else will pay attention for him.

  You’ve gotten skinny, he says to me. Your breasts are disappearing.

  The food isn’t good, besides the French fries. I explain that I’ve stopped being able to eat around him because when he leaves, I feel sick. I’m never hungry anymore, and when I eat, it tastes unsalted and ashy. Even my periods have stopped.

  The food’s never been good, he says.

  I don’t know. I see, in the distance, my heartbreak blinking, promising a prompt arrival. I remember it being good.

  We stayed at the Chateau early in the affair, when I was still living in New York. I flew in. I told none of my West Coast friends, or my aunt, that I was coming. Drifting into the city of my birth anonymously elated me and if I’m honest, that’s when it started, the splinter of a thought: I could live here again.

  That time we didn’t sleep. You’re a miracle, he said when he touched me. We couldn’t breathe calmly. We touched each other and lost hours. Can you believe it? Is this real? Omelets came to the door. He loved to feed me wet foods—eggs, salads, fruit—with his fingers. We laughed at the idea of sitting on opposite ends of the couch from each other, of being able to watch television in each other’s presence. This isn’t real.

  Touching lips, Is this real?

  Hips, Real?

  We said, We’ll take this slowly. I wanted to be careful. I was always urging him to rethink things, trying to protect him. My biggest fear, in those days, was that he would leave his marriage impulsively before we knew if this was solid. Then I’d disappoint him. We would become real: I’d nag him about how he washed dishes, or I’d be too tired for sex, or we’d be buying toilet paper together and I’d look at him to discuss what ply paper to buy and he’d be checked out. Worse, I worried that I’d leave him like I did everyone else. I said, We should wait.

  Tonight, we eat at the discreet tables at the edge of the dining room, invisible. There is a lot of sighing.

  We are still waiting. We are junkies who can’t increase our dose. Every meeting we’re trying to reclaim that brief minute we believed love weighed more than timing, geography, or the limits of each other’s character. The same sharp intervals of time, the same inane text messaging, the same replaying and rewriting what we’ve done, regurgitating excuses for how much pain we’ve caused, then, the same someday, soon maybe. I have never wanted to die more consistently than when I sat through evenings like this, loving him down to his eyelashes and teeth, bludgeoned by that love, while knowing we were rotten.

  It is not our playacting a couple to strangers, but in our silence that we can prove any of this was real. That it wasn’t lust, or boredom, or pure self-destructiveness, but something spiritual that hushed all other noise. For a moment at least. When the other dies—I pray it’s decades from now—will we hold our breath, maybe sigh a remorseful sigh, then rage at someone else who loves us? Will I delete all the unsent letters, accept that I was always talking to no one? Which visit to the Chateau will come back to me?

  Sometimes I think, if I had to do this again, I would go to his house after our walk on the
Golden Gate Bridge and stand in his doorway while he grabbed one change of clothes. I would take his hand and say, We are going. Now.

  Touching the nape of my neck, the ridges of my ears, which he notices have perforated edges, Can you believe it?

  * * *

  Weeks later he comes back. He wanted to be with me at midnight. The first person to wish me a happy birthday. This doesn’t land on me as “loving.” On this night I single-mindedly resent the space the Monster takes up in my life. He’s become a colonizer, someone who declares ownership without concrete investment in the country. He’s defined the language, laws, borders. Those borders make the shape of his absence.

  I know it’s the last time we will ever have sex. He doesn’t believe that, but this is—mercifully—one thing he isn’t in charge of. It’s over.

  I don’t care, anymore, about the flight he took. The hints, promise-like, but loose enough to slip out of. The false flags of progress he plants as we loop through Fryman Canyon, saccharine light on cattails, another fucking sunset. We sit for a bit on a rock and he is calm, he has everything under control, while I am far away, voiceless, small, but protected from him. This is it, I keep thinking. He carries me part of the way on his back, sweat slicking the front of me. I lick it off his neck. We sit in my garden. The Love Interest has installed a fountain, but the Monster doesn’t ask where the fountain came from, maybe he doesn’t even notice how it obscures the noise of traffic, and we watch the hummingbirds. He looks around when the hills glow and says that he’s proud of me. For what, exactly? For continuing to live in spite of him?

  Last night the sex was wilder than normal. That was my fault. We’ve turned out to be pitilessly cerebral in bed. Neither of us would call it “fun.” No one laughs, there is no sunshine or indolence. Our bodies ask questions of each other, we tunnel into strange white spaces, time pauses. Once we finish, we’re disappointed that we failed to come up with an answer. That rainy afternoon in Brooklyn, when he hoped he would get snowed in but the rain never solidified, he said, I don’t know what I’m trying to get out of you, but fucking is a poor way to achieve it.

  Will you stay? I ask.

  He is quiet while thinking about it. Nobody would miss him if he slept over, but I know he’s going to say that his coworkers will know if he doesn’t come back to the hotel, they’ll know and mention something to their wives about how he missed breakfast and their wives will say something to his wife at the next holiday party or whatever simulacrum of bonding his people do, and so he has to be careful. In the next second, he says that almost exactly.

  How many times have I told him it was over? A hundred? Told him that I hated him? That he was a coward? A solid handful. Most recently I told him if he contacted me again I would destroy his life. Send the texting transcripts, the hundreds of letters, the pornographic photos, to everyone. The fact that he continued to contact me shows—not that he’s fearless—but how little my words mean to him.

  I have the urge to tell him that it is real this time. That barging into Los Angeles with gifts and flowers to “celebrate” my birthday and then making me sleep alone is—really, honestly, truly—the death blow to us. But I say nothing about that. He wonders at the fact that I have no curtains.

  Aren’t you afraid?

  I turn to him. Please. I am begging you to stay.

  He doesn’t. I sleep like I have a fever, my skin at first itching, then too raw for the sheets. My earlobes are hot and swollen, I can’t bear my head on the pillow. When I scratch my thighs, the hair follicles throb.

  In the morning I wake up and sit in front of the mirror we fucked in front of eight hours earlier. It comes as no surprise that I see the Monster in the reflection. It was always me.

  Long Beach, California

  Another puzzle, another one of Gilda’s turkey sandwiches, it’s a stunning seventy-five degrees on the canal and my grandfather is wearing pants, a belt, a polo, a cardigan, and thick socks under his shoes. I’ve decided to interview him. We bypass the morbidity of such a request, and I explain that I’m writing something, but I don’t know what it is yet. He hands me a report made by naval officers who interviewed him extensively about the USS Albacore, his submarine.

  Anything you want to know is in here, and he taps it. This was a professional interview. The final word on me.

  Right. I take the printed pages that he stapled together. God, I wish I cared about submarines. I guess I’m wondering about other things. Like your feelings.

  He pretends not to hear me and starts fussing over Gilda. He wants her to sit and listen, and then he wants her to go in the other room and watch television. He wants to know if I want any watermelon with my lunch. Stop, Gilda says, you’re always worrying about something.

  Granddaddy, will you just sit down?

  He tells me of being fifteen when they bombed Pearl Harbor and knowing with every fiber in his being that he was supposed to fight for his country. Three years later, he left his home, his violent father (who used a horsewhip on him, also a baseball bat), his band of sisters, and was admitted to the Navy in May 1944, just in time, and by that he means World War II wasn’t over. When he got to Annapolis, he was a just a poor kid from Rock Springs, Wyoming, where only Italian was spoken in the house. He didn’t even know how to swim.

  And they pushed you off the diving board, right?

  They did. And I learned how to swim real quick.

  I know these stories. All the ones captured in that engineering paper.

  Tell me about meeting Grandmamma.

  You look like her. And a little like me. You get the bags under your eyes from me, like a real Italian.

  Thank you.

  He can’t talk about Grandmamma without tears. That’s better, I think, then feel cruel. I don’t want him to cry, but I don’t want his boilerplate either. I’m not deluding myself that we can have some cathartic experience, or that he’ll release trauma, or that he holds an answer about these mercurial, self-destructive women who haunt our family. But I am looking for clues.

  My grandmother was eighteen years old, trying to be an actress, living with her friend Doreen in North Hollywood. My grandfather and his friend Howard had flown a plane out from D.C., a B-52, and Howard had a date with this gal, Doreen. When they went to pick up Doreen, my grandmother came down to open the door. She had just washed her hair. It was down. She opened the door and I thought, I’m going to marry her. I know this story too.

  The interview rambles: it goes toward Italy, our motherland, toward his beloved sister, Rose, who married into the Mafia, and the Sunday dinners of his childhood, filled with deer, elk, moose, trout, whatever they hunted. I’m frustrated by his lack of introspection. He’s not answering the way I want him to; I want answers that reflect myself.

  When I ask him if he was ever haunted by the violence of his upbringing, he says, Of course not. Learning how to take a whipping gave him his integrity. It’s an equation I can’t get him to explain: How exactly does taking abuse equal integrity? He shrugs and says, It’s real life, honey.

  Toward the end of our lunch, I ask him when he was happiest. He avoids the question by telling me how proud he is to have been in the Navy.

  No, I say, what about your daughters? Your marriage? Your travels? Your grandchildren? He shakes his head. His daughters didn’t impact him much, he explains, it was a different time. I eat my turkey sandwich and turn off the recording, thinking that would probably be hurtful if my aunt or mother ever heard it.

  He drums his hands on the table, restless again. Then he says: I think I was happiest when your grandmother threw parties. When I had leave and got off the boat, your mother—your grandmother—threw us these real big parties. All our friends were there, lots of booze. Your grandmother and I used to dance. Those were really good days.

  I write it down quickly, He says the parties were the happiest, and in the moment, I think
the answer is hopelessly shallow. The afternoon passes with more disconnected remembrances, descriptions of fighter planes and aircraft carriers and I nod, and nod, and kiss him goodbye and get in his car that I’m still borrowing with its military license plates and then sit in an hour and a half of traffic.

  I have no idea what memories will last into my nineties because I have never imagined I would make it there. But on the off chance I do, I’ll remember certain meals, perhaps. The din of restaurants. I also enjoy parties. Afternoons of reading, writing, staring out windows as snow falls, melts, picking at my cuticles, lost in thought, then not thinking at all. Strange beds, hard chairs, makeshift desks. Hours on the phone to Christina, Alex, Carly, Eli, all of our absurd gossiping and therapizing each other so meticulously you would think it was a science. It wasn’t. It was just nice to be close. Maybe that’s what my grandfather meant. I keep turning over his answer about the parties in my head. It was the only sincere, unrehearsed thing he said during the two-hour interview.

  California

  The Love Interest, during that winter, wasn’t much more than California to me: temperate, open space to discover and marvel at, a place I wondered if I could stay. He would see me withdraw and ask where I went.

  Have you ever been so scared of some seemingly simple task that you feel paralyzed? Like you’re walking from the house to the car, and you can’t take another step? I asked him once.

  Nope, he said, simply. Have you?

  Or when you’re happy, do you ever feel like it’s inseparable from pain?

  No. He held my face. I could tell he meant it and he didn’t know how to relate to me, or how to respond, so he just touched me. I grew embarrassed.

  I let the Love Interest drive, which I don’t usually do with men. Today he is driving me to another campsite, Montaña de Oro, which also happens to be five minutes from where his parents live. We are all to have dinner together. I watch the sun-colored black mustard pop off the hills as we pass out of Malibu and into Oxnard, and he tells me how invasive the plant is, how it thrives on newly burned hillsides, how it crowds out native plants and wildflowers.