“You’re right. I’ll stay for my presentation. I should really get to work. Is there anything else you need?” I reply coldly.
“No,” Susan says with a puzzled look. “Are you sure you’re ok?”
“Yes, I really need to get this finished.”
“Okay, we’ll talk later,” Susan says, doing her best to comfort me.
I can’t say how much longer Susan stood beside me, and I didn’t notice when she finally left. I only have one thing on my mind at this moment, and that is to blow the marketing managers out of the water with my presentation. Everything else can wait.
22
Things Fall Apart
After the presentation, I decide to take the rest of the day off. The marketing managers raved over my work. I would normally relish in such an ebullient outpour of praise; but I barely had time to relish in anything. Almost as soon as I was out of the meeting, I was hitting the down button in the elevator. And despite sunshine and blue skies, my commute home was nowhere near as enjoyable as my commute to work. How could it be, when a dark cloud is casting such a colossal shadow over my day?
I have so many questions I want to ask Jason. I don’t know where to start. Did he know he was getting fired? Why didn’t he tell me? Why did he miss a meeting with the client? Is that the reason he didn’t come home the night before?
Jason is the ultimate perfectionist and overachiever. I can’t imagine he’d take any level of failure lightly. He’s probably embarrassed. My poor Jason, he’ll need all of my love and support.
As I’m about to enter the apartment, my phone buzzes. My heart leaps as I grab my phone, hoping it’s Jason. My moment of elation is swiftly dampened as I see it’s just a text from Susan.
Call me if you need to talk.
I’m sure I’ll appreciate her concern later. For now, it’s another irritating distraction from Jason. I carelessly drop the phone back into my purse and exchange it for keys. In my haste to get into the apartment, I jiggle the door knob before I have a chance to turn my key in the lock. To my surprise, the door opens easily. That’s strange. I always lock my door.
When I walk inside, I see Jason sitting on the couch with his head bowed into his hands. My heart sinks to my stomach. As the door swings shut behind me, I drop my purse to the floor and run to him. I take his head in my hands and kiss him on the forehead, then on the lips. His head falls to my chest, and I hold him there. Time seems to stop as neither of us say a word. I barely recognize this melancholy man that sits before me. I’ve never seen Jason so vulnerable. All I want is to protect him; to help him cast away the malevolent thoughts that leave him unable to look at me. I know a thing or two about thoughts like those. I learned, long ago, to keep them far from my conscience so that they never catch hold. I will help him escape the sorrow they bring, and he will once again be my strong, confident, Jason. The man that I love.
“I know what happened. It’s okay. Please look at me,” I say, soothingly.
Jason lifts his head, so he’s facing me. His countenance is unlike anything I’ve ever seen from him — he looks so … drained.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Jason says, his tone ominously gruff.
“Okay, tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll understand,” I say with cautious optimism. Jason needs me right now, and I’m happy to be his rock, the same way he’s been mine since the moment we met. I’m certain there’s nothing he can tell me that will change my mind on that point.
Jason anxiously wrings his hands together. Could it be that he’s nervous? Jason. Nervous? Silence fills the room as I watch him expectantly.
“I have to move to New York, and I want you to come with me,” he blurts out.
“You what?” I ask, wondering if I’d heard him right.
Jason stands and starts pacing the room. “I know it seems sudden. And I understand that this is a shock to you. I have everything planned to make this a smooth transition. I’ll foot the bill to get you out of your lease, and you can put your furniture in storage. We can be on a plane to New York next week.”
“Next week? Jason, you’ve lost me. You’re talking to me like you’ve solved a problem, and I’m not certain what that problem is. I need you to start at the beginning. Why do you have to move to New York? What’s going on?”
Jason sits down in a chair across from me, resuming his curious new habit of wringing his hands together.
“My family’s in New York.”
“Okay,” I say trying to read between the lines of his terse non-explanation. “Is someone in your family ill?”
Jason shakes his head, his face transforming into a rebuking frown. I almost feel like I asked a stupid question.
“There are things about my past that you need to know. Things that you might not like.”
“We all have skeletons in our past. Whatever it is, you can tell me. I’ll understand, I promise.”
Jason gives me a pained look, as though my attempt to mollify him is a brutal attack on his character. He’s once again silent for what seems like ages, wringing his hands, swallowing — all the while I stare at him expectantly. Then, after what seems like minutes, but was likely only seconds, he finally speaks.
“For you to understand why I have to move to New York, you need to know who I was back then, long before you knew me. When I was a freshman at Princeton, I was the poster guy for an entitled, spoiled rich playboy — the kind of person that you would have despised.”
I shake my head to disagree with him, but realize that if his description of himself is at all accurate, he’s probably right. I’m already dumbfounded that I didn’t know Jason went to an Ivy League school, or that his parents are apparently wealthy. These are things we’ve never discussed. They never seemed important.
“I’m not proud of who I was, and I can’t justify my behavior,” he continues. “I can only attempt to explain how I came to be that way. You see, until college, I was a studious kid with little exposure to the corrupting influences of the world. I attended an all boys private school, and my primary focus was to get into Princeton. That’s where both of my parents attended college. I spent most of my spare time studying or participating in after school activities. Both of my parents were involved in my life, and they had high expectations of me. I never wanted to disappoint them. Don’t get me wrong; I had a childhood that was, for all intents and purposes, happy. They aren’t to blame for the mistakes I made. For those, I take full responsibility.”
I narrow my eyes at Jason as I watch him pace back and forth. It’s very unlike him to take the scenic route when a straight path from point A to B can reach the same destination, but faster. His lack of efficiency in explaining his New York declaration is far more telling than anything he’s said so far. I’m beginning to suspect that his news isn’t merely inconvenient.
“In my first year of college, I realized that I was finally free of my parent’s scrutiny. With them all the way in Scarsdale, I didn’t require their approval to do things they would find questionable. I also didn’t understand the concept of consequences — that they could be outside of my control. I never knew a problem I couldn’t solve or an outcome I couldn’t manipulate. All of my worldly experience, up to that point, lead me to believe that everything I did must be right because I’m successful. So long as I’m successful, I can’t be wrong. I thought I was logically infallible and, in a way, invincible.
“It didn’t help that I surrounded myself with people who thought along similar lines. From the day I stepped foot on Princeton soil, I was on a path of destruction, but my real problems started after I joined a fraternity. That was when my focus shifted from academia to parties, drugs, and women.”
I can barely contain a grimace as Jason alludes to other women whom he’s had intimate relations. The thought of him with another woman, even in past tense, makes me sick to my stomach. I never asked him about his previous girlfriends because I didn’t want to know. The only way I’ve ever wanted to view Jason is as mine and mine al
one.
“I indulged in these things frequently and in excess. In my first two years at Princeton, I was able to remain in good academic standing and sober up enough so, when I visited home, my parents wouldn’t suspect what I’d been doing. It was my third year when my grades began to slip that they took notice. My mom found drugs in my bedroom, and my dad threatened to pull financial support if I didn’t get my act together. So I convinced them I would. I became better at hiding my drug use. I made them think I was getting clean, when in reality, I was getting worse.
“At that time, cocaine was my drug of choice. It seemed like the perfect solution to all of my problems. I was able to stay up all night and still manage to ace a test on two or three hours of sleep. I don’t recall much about that period in my life other than my desire to maintain a feeling of invincibility, at all costs.”
As Jason lays before me the sordid details of his past, as horrible they are, I can’t shake the single most disturbing connection that I’ve made with his drug use, which he doesn’t explicitly say — but I have to know. If I don’t ask, I’m certain the question will gnaw at me until I give into the anxiety that such a question will produce.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I interrupt. “Help me understand something. So you were a cocaine addict who liked to indulge in women. So these other women…” I can’t finish saying it, but I’m certain Jason knows what I’m getting at. Jason is a gorgeous man. It wouldn’t take much more than him acknowledging a woman’s existence to get her into bed. I always thought that he was above that sort of behavior, but maybe I was wrong.
“Yes?” Jason asks.
“Were there a lot of them?” I finally manage to say, knowing with certitude that I will abhor his response.
“Yes,” Jason answers tersely, without any further explanation.
Then I ask the question that I never thought I'd need to ask: “How many”?
“I honestly couldn’t say. Dozens. Maybe.”
I feel the air around me thinning, and I struggle to breathe. Dozens? How could he never have told me?
“I was careful, I mean with you. I would never put you in danger. I was tested over the years. I don’t have anything.”
I take a deep breath in and out. “I wasn’t even thinking of that,” I reply, acknowledging to myself that I should have.
“I can’t say anything to excuse my actions. I was young and stupid. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”
I stay silent as I slump back into the couch, my arms folded across my chest, I’m sure Jason can sense my antipathy for this entire conversation. Rampant drug use and sex with random women are enough of a shock. What could be worse?
Standing, Jason begins to pace the room once again. “The summer before my senior year at Princeton, I met a woman. She was the older sister of one of my fraternity brothers, Brent.”
Brent? Why does that name sound familiar? In a less troublesome conversation, I might ask Jason. Somehow this doesn’t feel like the right time. And it just doesn’t seem important.
“Her name was Amber. She was a mess. But I guess that’s what I liked about her. She was wild, carefree and into things that, before meeting her, I had never in my wildest dreams considered. Even as a cocaine user I had my standards. She managed to challenge my most basic ideas of what was decent or even moral. When I was with her, it was as though I existed outside a reality where those concepts seemed relevant. There was no end to where she could take me; and each day I spent with her that summer felt like a new high.”
I wince as Jason seems to describe this woman from his past with such fondness. “I don’t know if I want to hear this,” I cut in.
“Please Bridget, I have to tell you. So you can understand why I did what I did.”
“What did you do?” I demand.
“I’ll get to that. But you need to know what lead up to it.”
I nod, signaling for Jason to continue. All the while realizing that this story just keeps getting worse and worse. I’m not sure I want to know what Jason did. I’m already starting to see him differently than I did only minutes ago. Once he tells me, I might never look at him the same again.
“Before I returned to Princeton that Fall, I learned she was one month pregnant with our child. Once it hit me that we were going to be parents, I decided to make an effort to clean up my act. I started seeing someone, a psychiatrist. It helped for a little while. But no matter how I tried to stay away from that life, Amber did everything in her power to rein me back in. In time, I grew to resent her. With graduation less than a year away, I was moving forward with my life. I was changing, and she wasn’t.
“Her efforts to lure me into relapse were mostly futile. That is until one night: we were arguing — I found out she was sleeping with another man. I remember I was angry, having to envision the woman carrying my child doing that … I was disgusted. I called her names, accused her of being a slut, and I questioned whether the child was even mine. That’s when she told me that she made sure it was — she got pregnant on purpose.
“From that moment, it started to sink in that this child would link me to Amber for the rest of my life. I didn’t understand why she chose to get pregnant. We weren’t in love, and she lived on her parent’s allowance — it’s not as though she needed the money. What other reason could she have for tying me to her, other than finding some sick pleasure in making my life hell? Whether I was right or wrong, that’s the situation as I saw it.
“I was tempted to start using cocaine again, but I knew that I didn’t want to go back to that life. I wasn’t that person anymore. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to stop. The temptation was, at times, overwhelming. I’d gone three years of my life evading consequences for my actions. And I’d finally reached the point where I couldn’t bridge the gap between the heaviness of everyday life and the feeling of ecstasy I got with cocaine. I didn’t know how to fill that void, how to exist anywhere in between those two realities.
“Eventually, I found a way to fill the void, although I didn’t see it that way at the time. I started drinking. I thought I could control it; alcohol had never been my poison of choice. It seemed like child’s play compared to what I’d done. My mistake was underestimating how much it could effect me. The more I drank, the more hostile I became towards her. I hated her. I thought she was holding me back. I even wished that she would have a miscarriage and lose the child. I know that’s a horrible thing to say. To this day I hate myself for ever thinking something so monstrous. But I only ever thought about myself; and as the months progressed, she increasingly became an obstacle in my way.”
Jason suddenly stops pacing and looks directly at me, his eyes filled with sorrow and regret. That look, like a wounded puppy, it tugs at me. It’s as though he’s trying to discern if I’m going love or punish him. To see him so undone is truly pitiful. I’m almost tempted to forget all the horrible things he’s told me so far … almost. He seats himself on the chair across from me and resumes his nervous habit of wringing his hands.
“One night, when Amber was eight months pregnant, her brother called me. He was worried about her. He thought she’d somehow gotten her hands on cocaine. She was living with her parents, and they cut her off financially. I could only imagine her lowlife boyfriend got it for her. I was furious. I thought she would know better. Perhaps I was naive. I knew how hard it was to quit. I took for granted that when Amber got pregnant, she had. The truth is, I didn’t want to know what she was doing. I didn’t want to care. I wanted her and all the problems that came along with her to disappear.
“When Brent called me and told me the news, my foremost concern was not the safety our child. It was my burgeoning hate for her. How she kept dragging me back into all of her bullshit; and how she was ruining my life. I looked at Amber as a weight, and with her holding me down, I felt ... average. Life seemed darker and less exciting with the limitations she imposed. I wanted to break free of her. But I didn’t see a way to do that. So I dealt with my discontent the only way I
knew how — I went to the bar and I drank. I don’t know how long I stayed there, maybe hours, maybe minutes. However long, it was enough time for all of my animosity for her to surface. When I finally I left the bar, my mind was deranged, and the most pressing thought was to let Amber know how much I despised her.
“Once I reached her parent’s house, I found Amber in her upstairs bedroom. She sat at a vanity, and in front of her were several lines of cocaine. She looked at me with a happy smile, as though she were doing the most natural thing in the world. Then she asked if I wanted to join her. That’s when I lost it. All of the anger I felt towards her amplified. I wanted to yell every kind of obscenity at her. But first, I wanted to wipe that sickening grin off her face. I knocked over her vanity, and all of her precious cocaine went toppling to the floor, disappearing into the fibers of her carpet.
“She was furious. She started screaming and calling me every derogatory insult she could. I didn’t care. I took pleasure in her anger. With all of the misery she brought into my life, being able to hurt her, even a little, was an accomplishment. Then … I made the biggest mistake of my life. Everything happened so quickly. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Even to this day what I did is a blur.
“She tried to slap me, and I grabbed her wrist to stop her. Then she bit my hand. I pushed her. It must have been hard because she ended up on the ground. She grabbed my leg when I was turning to leave and bit into it. I fell to the floor next to her. And then I no longer cared to restrain myself. I started yelling, far worse things than she said to me. Then … I hit her. No, that’s not accurate. I didn’t just hit her. I beat her, viciously and brutally. I beat her until her face was bloody and her body was bruised. I beat her until she no longer tried to fight back.”
Jason: The Philistine Heart (Book 1) Page 16