Stray

by Stephanie Danler

  I want to go out, she says. She almost yells it. I want to meet people.

  I cringe. I don’t know where to go, I say.

  Can’t you do this one thing for me?

  She wants me to call around, find something for us to do.

  I can’t do that. I only hang out with Luca right now. She tells me to call the Love Interest, maybe he has some friends.

  I can’t, I say. I’m trying to take it really slowly.

  You’re saving yourself for the Monster? she asks.

  It’s over. I told you—

  Yeah right.

  Come on, Christina. Not even my sister, who would follow me into fire, believes me. I can see that she’s tired of me.

  No, I say, trying to reset. It’s not him.

  Great. Let’s go out.

  Christina washes her face, first with an oil cleanser, then a foaming one. She tones it, applies an essence, then a sheet mask. She stretches while the mask sits, and I bite at my cuticles, refusing to move from the couch to shower. After the mask she moisturizes, a cream, then an oil. Her skin looks like glass. She sits in front of the mirror and brings out her curling iron, an item I have never owned. She separates her hair into sections and twists them around the iron, her mouth rigid, and lets the curls bounce out. I put on music, then turn it off. My stomach is clenched.

  Why can’t I do what she asks, when it seems so small? Why does her way of coping threaten me? Why am I so angry that someone hurt her, but I’m blaming her? Why do I want to insist that we cope in my way, which involves building an impenetrable structure around myself that won’t allow anyone close enough to hurt me, and does not involve meeting people?

  My stomach hurts, I say finally. I’m sick. You can call your friends, but I’m not going. Her hair is in the kind of loose waves I have to pay someone to perform on me. Her face is impeccable. Then it’s a cracking mask.

  It’s always about you, she says. Then she starts crying. Really crying. It’s about you, and your big feelings, and there’s no space for me.

  My sister is the only person I bargain with God for (You can do anything to me, but please spare my sister) but when she starts to cry, I do not feel sympathy. I feel rage.

  Stop crying, I say.

  I don’t want to. She cries harder.

  Stop it, I hiss.

  You abandoned me, she says through her makeup. You rejected me.

  She sits on the floor as if she’s about to have a temper tantrum and sobs. I have no idea how we’ve arrived here.

  Are you fucking kidding me?

  You abandoned me when you went to Colorado, and you abandoned me with Nancy, and you abandoned me in New York. You left me alone.

  Somewhere in my body there is a puncture, but shock keeps me from feeling the damage. I observe it, but adrenaline has taken over. It’s impossible that I made her feel the way my mother made me feel, that I raised her only to hurt her in the ways I was hurt. This can’t be the legacy of my love, can it? I don’t say any of that.

  Get. Up. I say. And get out of this house if you really feel that way.

  It’s what my mother said to me when I was sixteen, right before she changed the locks. Christina cries harder and begs me not to say that to her. I say it again, louder, and pick up my phone to call an Uber. I hold the phone in front of her to show that a car is coming, and she puts her hands over her face, Please don’t do that.

  Why can’t I stop? Why is this the part of my inheritance I’ve absorbed? I look at her and a memory comes back to me, a vision of her at fourteen, in Old Pukey, the Volvo, driving in Colorado. I was talking fast in the front seat, directing her, while she drove. She didn’t even have a learner’s permit yet. I was forcing her to learn to drive. I wanted her to be designated driver for me that weekend. At the on-ramp to the freeway, she started crying. She told me she was scared. Don’t be a fucking baby, I yelled at her. You have to get stronger.

  All my life, I believed I was protecting her by training her. When we were little, I told her we had to be soldiers in addition to princesses. I told her not to let anyone see her cry. Now she is an adult and curled in a ball on the floor because she thinks I’m her parent. She thinks my approval will stabilize the shitty terrain we always seem to be walking. I should say that to her. I should start it with, I’m sorry. It’s the first time I can feel the magnitude of the disservice I’ve done her, making her believe that feelings were weaknesses, or that people like us couldn’t afford to have them.

  At the same time I see that if she doesn’t pick herself up from this—if she can’t get on the freeway—then she will be a victim. She will be the parts of our parents that didn’t survive. But I can’t say any of that. It’s only clear I care more about her survival than her heart when I say to her: Grow up. We’re all in this alone.

  Then, I think we should go to bed.

  My sister and I can’t help holding each other in our sleep. First our toes touching, then one stomach curving to one back. The next day we go to yoga. Her hair is still curled. Then we go back to the Korean spa and keep trying to be all of each other’s family.

  Los Angeles, California

  I wake up and his lips are on my forehead. I draw back, confused. Where am I?

  I was checking your temperature, he says. I notice I’m covered in sweat, the pillow under my head is soaked. You were yelling, No, in your sleep.

  I sit up, irritated. The Love Interest doesn’t know how hard it is for me to sleep at his house. After he passes out, I sneak to the bathroom to do my idiotically complicated skin-care routine and then take Xanax or melatonin. He lives near downtown LA, in an area that I accidentally called “scary” the first time I went over, and I haven’t heard the end of it since. It’s MacArthur Park adjacent, once the crown jewel of Los Angeles in the 1920s, complete with rowboats and a bandstand, and surrounded by mansions. Now I can’t walk from my parking spot to the Love Interest’s house without being harassed. The front yards are full of garbage, a few tents lining sidewalks, tarps strung together to create shaded passages. But the Love Interest knows all his neighbors and walks his dog without commentary from the entire street, so it seems to be my problem. A car alarm goes off—every morning—at six a.m., directly under his window.

  I look around his room. A lumpy mattress with what was once beige bedding that now just looks brown, and a spectacular lack of objects. A defunct filing cabinet, a few books from grad school, a photograph of his mother. This is the room of a sixteen-year-old boy, I say. He opens the window, where more street noise rushes in, the car still alarming, but I begin to cool down. Where did you get this mattress?

  He sits back down. This? Why?

  I don’t know, I say, is it made out of straw? Or cement? Or lumps?

  Is my mattress made out of lumps?

  Well I know it’s made out of lumps, but where did it come from?

  He leans back in his bed and pulls my damp body onto him. He whispers that this is his park mattress. After he finished working in Alaska as a kayaking guide in Denali State Park, he decided to hitch rides down to San Francisco. He crashed with friends when he got back into town, then found a room in an old Victorian with five other people, a gorgeously crafted house above the Matching Half Café. He found that after living in a cabin in the woods—sans plumbing, showering at the Roadhouse, shitting in an outhouse, hauling water from town on a mile-long bear trail, looking over his shoulder constantly for grizzlies, and hitching all summer—he had no things. And he liked not having things. In a fit of asceticism, he decided to forgo a bed. He slept in his sleeping bag on a yoga mat, with a blanket folded up under his hip. They were nice floors, he says, like that matters. He slept like this for months.

  You’re joking.

  Do you want to hear it or not?

  He realized he needed a bed when he brought a girl home and she was not into his sleep
ing situation. Still he wasn’t in a hurry. On New Year’s Day he woke early, hungover from a warehouse party, and headed out into a sleeping San Francisco for a walk. No one else was out. As he came up to Alamo Square, there it was: park mattress. In great condition, he says. It was a sign. He ran back home to get his car, tied it onto the roof, and his roommate helped him carry it up the stairs. It has been his bed ever since.

  The sun is coming up outside his window and I can see the top of City Hall. The more time I spend with him, the more my skepticism is interrupted by spontaneous bursts of affection. I’m having one now. It comes out like laughter. I can’t be close enough to him.

  I really like you, I say.

  He slaps his hand on his awful mattress and says, I guess you must.

  * * *

  A nightcap? I ask Eli.

  It’s Christmas Eve and we are on our way back from Carly’s. I impulsively swing the car left onto North Beverly Drive. Eli, I am surprised to learn, has never been to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  We walk through the heady, night-blooming gardens, the air damp with unsustainable greenery. There are people unmoved by this kind of manufactured beauty, but they don’t end up in Los Angeles.

  The Polo Lounge is strung up with Christmas lights and prostitutes. There are the straggling men who pay for sex on Christmas Eve, and an Australian couple who sing along loudly to the carols the piano man plays. The wife is barefoot, rubbing her feet into the carpet, occasionally trying to get up to dance before falling back into her chair. We order negronis and we’re content. We chat with a man in an all-white suit crowned with a black bolero and he tells us stories about fucking transvestites in San Francisco in the seventies—a hole is a hole, he says, and besides she was beautiful. Eli and I nod, full of understanding. He and Eli get into how degraded the city has become by tech money, the traffic, how you can’t find a tranny bar anywhere. He buys us a round and invites us back to his room to do a shitload of cocaine, which we decline. He moves off the bar, swimming into his endless evening, appearing to be some sort of Messiah, a man totally at peace. As he passes the piano, he turns and waves to us: Merry Christmas, darlings.

  Eventually Santa comes, another wasted character wearing a suit filled with stuffing, and sits on Eli’s lap. They flirt for a bit and I watch the bartenders mix drinks and whisper about the guests without moving their lips.

  Christina has flown back to her beloved New York. I spent the middle of last night looking at plane tickets, wanting to head back to Sicily, where maybe I could spend a month in my editor’s empty cottage in the mountains. I can see it all, the slow-simmered sauces, the paperbacks piling up as I finish them, the wine bottle suddenly empty, whoops, emails unanswered, some glorious unaccountable aloneness. I’ll tell the Love Interest I’ll write, tell the Monster nothing, but he’ll find me, and I’m so weak that I’ll let him. I’ll tell my friends I’ll miss them. I’ll help my landlord find a sublet, pay the new renters to let me store my shit in the garage. My parents will slip from memory, and their tentacles of sadness won’t reach me. This is my instinct, with the sheen of brilliant idea. I’ll burn it down, I thought. It will be like I was never here. Again.

  And then what? I asked myself.

  Santa leaves us, and our tray of corn nuts and pretzels is refilled. I turn to Eli with a completely insane, half-baked idea.

  Hey. You know how you hate San Francisco?

  Yeah. Miserable.

  Do you want to move in with me?

  He doesn’t bat an eye, like he’s been waiting all night for me to ask.

  Meh. Into that disgusting closet?

  It’s technically a bedroom.

  I won’t pay full price.

  Of course not.

  There are spiders everywhere, even in the bed.

  It’s a season here, like a spider season—

  I am covered in bites.

  I’ll call an exterminator.

  Sure.

  Really?

  I mean, we are one hundred percent going to die in that house when the trees fall down on us, but you won’t have to die alone listening to Adele in your bathrobe. So that’s a win.

  Cool, I say, half regretting the offer, half moved and tipsy. Did I fail at living alone? Or am I admitting to Eli that I simply need help? My eyes water. I guess I’ll try staying.

  Los Angeles, California

  In 1963, Ed Ruscha put a motorized camera on the back of a pickup truck and drove the Sunset Strip, photographing the blocks, then turned those photographs into an accordion book. It’s called, appropriately, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The photos are just that: every building on the Sunset Strip, in all their tackiness and vacuity.

  What his project does—slowly—is reveal a kind of purity in these strip malls, fast food drive-throughs, gas stations, abandoned discos, coffee shops, nail salons, music venues, auto shops, strip clubs, bus stops. This landscape does not possess the architectural uniformity that we commonly call beauty. But when I trace the images Ruscha captured, I’m reminded that it’s the way we look, how we organize the world and name it, that creates beauty.

  This is not a beautiful city. Any beauty found in it is entirely subjective. It requires what the Love Interest once called desert eyes. When people ask me what I love about it, I don’t say the mountains or the beach. It’s the boulevards, like Pico, La Cienega, Lincoln. Streets that are part highway but still saturated with businesses. Streets that crisscross the whole rambling mess, streets you can drive on and watch urban development unfold, settlement upon settlement, until the streets evaporate into the ocean or the airport. Driving what my mom called the surface streets, as in there’s too much traffic, let’s take the surface streets, with the windows down, heater on, makes me think this is the only place for me.

  As I drive back to the canyon from Carly’s on my birthday, the top button of my pants undone, pleasantly satiated, my phone keeps lighting up in the center console. A text from the Monster: Will you come to SF this weekend?

  The Monster: I’m sorry.

  The Monster: Steph.

  Don’t, I say out loud. Do not.

  The Monster: It goes without saying that I love you.

  Does it? I wonder. Go without saying?

  The Monster: Please?

  Yes, I want to text back.

  You make it sound like it’s a game, my therapist said.

  A few months ago, I was recounting to her the ways in which the Monster had hurt me, disappointed me, failed to show up for me, disappeared when I needed him, lied to me over and over. How he maneuvered his way back in, how cheap his promises were, how he surprised me, made me laugh, how I was the only person in the world who understood him and his unique brand of torment…God, I was so much smarter than his wife, who didn’t even see what he was doing…God, how much more stoically I could bear it, look how thin I am, look how I wear it, how could he not be impressed? Things would be different when we were actually together. As I described yet another humiliating abandonment, I started laughing. I couldn’t look at her I was laughing so hard.

  Are you charmed by this? she asked, concerned.

  You don’t get it, I said. I stopped.

  I remembered—brutally—how I would laugh with my friends when telling them about my father’s gout. You don’t get it, I would say. It’s the disease of kings!

  It was a game. One I played well. It rewarded me the less I felt, the quieter I got, the harder I could laugh. If I made the Monster love me, I was lovable. If the Monster could get better, be a good, caring man, couldn’t my father also? I was so desperate to control the story, write the ending I needed. This was why the stakes of this love affair were atrociously high. I want to know what “just” a love story is. It’s in loving that we learn that our blind spots are nearly always our undoing.

  Oh, I said to my the
rapist. You do get it.

  No, I say out loud to the car. I will not. I erase the Monster’s messages, starting the process of leaving him all over again. I don’t know how to keep promises to myself. I don’t know how I’ll heal without him. But I suspect, on this night, for the first time, that I’ll survive it.

  * * *

  Right after my divorce, the summer in between my two years of graduate school, I walked across Spain on the ancient pilgrimage trail. I ended up walking past Santiago de Compostela, the traditional finish. I walked to the Atlantic Ocean, via the Costa da Morte, the coast of death, past Finisterre, mile one, once thought to be the end of the earth. I walked to Muxía, mile zero, to a church on a promontory, a site that’s been mythic since the Celts, and thought it one of the most magnificent places I had ever seen. I could not believe that my feet had taken me there, and was awed by the privilege of walking. My life had become smaller in those forty-six days, my mind more manageable. But I did not feel absolved of my sins. I was not a better person. There is nothing falser to me than a story that ends with catharsis.

  Loving liars, addicts, or people who abuse your love is a common affliction, and we are all mostly the same. We have a gift for suffering silently. No one taught us how to trust the world, or that we could, so we trust no one. We’ve never developed a sense of self.

  There is no cure for the Monster, or the black hole. Not falling in love, or becoming a parent, or making money, or working harder.

  Boundaries help. It’s through boundaries that we construct ourselves, say, Here is where you end and I begin. However, while boundaries are powerful, they’re unfortunately not solid. They are made in the imagination, and there are inherent flaws in arming oneself for battle in our fantasies. What is shocking isn’t that we have lived through the traumas of our lives. The miracle is that we are still remotely permeable.