by Julie Barton
I couldn’t get enough of Brian’s bad-love adrenaline, and at the time I didn’t question why. Not only did I not question unhealthy love, I sought it out. I wasn’t about to turn around and start dating Will, the sensitive, guitar-playing ponytail guy.
I still have a picture of Will and me that night at Philander’s Phling. There was a photographer walking around the dance taking pictures of each couple. In ours, Will is standing behind me, his arms around my waist. We look as if we’re mid-step, leaning into the camera. My first thought when I saw the picture was that my face looked fat. But my second reaction was that I looked happy—genuinely, no fuss, happy.
After the dance we went back to my dorm room. I turned on my Tori Amos CD and on came that song that goes, “God, sometimes you just don’t come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?” He held my waist firmly, pressing his hips into mine, then he slowly leaned into me. Something happened when our lips touched. It was like white light. A thunderclap. I remember thinking that this must be what they mean when they say a first kiss can be like fireworks. That was it. I was a goner.
We started spending every spare moment together. We’d make out and talk, and do everything but have sex. I told myself that I would not embark upon another dysfunctional sex-driven relationship. As if I were protecting something sacred, and finally trying to treat myself well, I decided to send him home just about every night at 2 or 3 a.m. I liked having him in my room, but I also liked when he was gone. This kind of romance felt healthy.
He played guitar and would come over to my dorm room plucking melodies while we talked about our families and childhoods. He told me he’d never met anyone like me. He said he felt safe around me. It had never occurred to me that men could feel unsafe. The men in my life never seemed to be in need of protection. His vulnerability struck me as enlightened and beautiful and rare.
Will was also the first man to make an effort to understand me sexually. He identified the massive mental hurdles between me and orgasm. He worked and worked until he could satisfy me. I told my girlfriends about him, said that I’d never had more orgasms with a man. They listened, mouths agape as I told them that he whispered crazy things to me in my dorm room late at night. “You are beautiful. I love you. I want you to come for me. Now I want you to come again.” It was an epic, best-sex-ever love affair that I wanted to continue in Manhattan. We were two wounded birds who would take flight together. Our romance quickly became us against the world. We decided that just about everyone else was stupid and mean and unenlightened. The only way for us to survive would be to stick together.
When he graduated one year before me, I bought a special dress for his graduation and posed in all the pictures with him in his cap and gown. We stayed up half the night before he left for Manhattan and talked about how, while I completed my senior year, he would spend the time preparing the city for us, getting ready for our lives together there. I imagined us going to concerts: Wilco and Paul Weller and all the unsigned singer-songwriters down at the Ludlow Street Bar & Grill. I wanted to help his band book gigs, move equipment, gather fans. I would be the one in front starting the mosh pit and then stepping aside as the crowd got wild. I imagined going out drinking with our friends and sneaking away to make out with Will in dark corners before racing home to one of our apartments for loud, urgent, wildly satisfying sex. I imagined us meandering tree-lined streets in the morning, lounging on a blanket in Central Park, eating hot bagels, rehydrating with enormous bottles of water, our limbs intertwined, getting each other off under makeshift picnic blankets because the worst fate ever would be for us to be forced to keep our hands off of each other.
But within mere hours of my arrival in New York, I sensed a distance. I planned to stay with Will and his roommate in their tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment for a few weeks while Leah and I looked for our own place. I envisioned Will, me, and his roommate, Jeff, having pizza on the floor of their barely furnished apartment, Jeff thankful for a female touch. Instead Jeff asked me, “You’re going to be here how long?” before ignoring me in protest, sighing heavily when he was forced to maneuver through the narrow hallway past my stuff. Will apologized to him, said, “Wasn’t my idea. Fucking sucks.” I felt a betrayal that was softened by my general understanding of men—that men don’t like women unless women do things for them.
So one day while Will was at work, I trudged a few blocks carrying two enormous bags of his dirty laundry and, like a new and dutiful wife, laundered all of his clothes. It wasn’t until I hauled the bags back to his apartment that I realized some of the clothes were still mildly damp. I folded them anyway, and when he came home from work to several neat piles of clean clothes on his bed, he didn’t smile. He asked me why I’d done it. And he flatly told me that he didn’t think of me as the kind of woman who would do chores for her man. I wasn’t, of course, that kind of woman. I was worse: weak and terrified, a suburban girl dropped in the big city, not an ounce of self-confidence to her name. I apologized, saying something like, “Sorry. Just trying to help. Make up for crashing at your guys’ place.”
“Whatever,” he replied, kissing the top of my head. “No big deal.” When he went to his bed, he touched one of the piles and looked at me, eyes tight. “You know these are still kind of wet, right?”
“Shit,” I said. I did know. I just didn’t want him to notice. I don’t know what I wanted. I wanted him to be gentle with me, the way he was in Ohio. New York seemed to have hardened him and weakened me. I wanted to cry and apologize and ask for his forgiveness, even though I had no idea what I needed forgiveness for. I felt adrift without his approval, his love.
A few weeks and many arguments later, I found out through a woman named Jane that Will had been cheating on me. Jane worked as the receptionist for my roommate Leah’s publishing house. She was a pretty, perky brunette who always wore bright-red lipstick. We started chatting one afternoon before she knew I was Will’s girlfriend. Turns out she was dating the lead singer in Will’s band. Will had excluded me from all band activities, so we hadn’t met yet. Jane was laughing about how all the guys in her boyfriend’s band were sluts.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “Those guys mess around a lot?”
“Oh, my gawd,” she said, her Staten Island accent curling the end of every word. “You have no idea.”
“Really?”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “The guitar player? Will? Won’t leave me and my friends alone. He asks me all the time, ‘Hook me up with a hot blonde.’ Once,” she paused and put her hand up in a way that suggested I needed to prepare myself, “I walked into Jon’s apartment and saw Will naked, running back into Jon’s bedroom where some skank was laughing and waiting for him. By the way, he apparently has a girlfriend who lives in like Idaho or something. And he has a nonexistent flat ass.”
She was right. He had no ass.
I wandered away mid-conversation. I only remember my stomach doing that awful acidic drop. I took the elevator down and walked out into the street, headed up to Tower Records and it was there that I began to cry. I leaned on the window, my clammy forehead resting on a ten-foot-tall poster of Tupac. How could I be such a fool? How could Will do this? It was supposed to be us against the world.
I confronted Will. Initially, he weakly denied any infidelity. Then he defended himself fiercely, calling me crazy and overly sensitive, calling Jane a liar. Soon, we were fighting terribly about the truth of these rumors, about the truth of everything that had ever gone on between us. We would break up, then reunite, and break up again. Sometimes when I was with him, I found myself clearly thinking, “I don’t want to be with this man.” This should’ve meant that I could walk away. But nothing surpassed my need for Will’s approval. Nothing. It was a desperate grab, something I did not know how to control.
I remember several dramatic, sob-strewn scenes in restaurants, on sidewalks, and in our respective apartments. Once, a bartender asked us to go outsid
e because we were fighting so loudly that we were disturbing other patrons. I pined for months, unable to think of much else. I looked for him everywhere, and the fact that I pretty much never had a chance of accidentally running into him in Manhattan left me feeling stranded, alone on an island of millions.
Then he would show up at my doorstep at 3 a.m., like a miracle, several beers in, and we’d fall into each other’s arms. We’d have sex, wonder aloud why we were not together, and pledge our undying love. Then in the morning the flaws would re-emerge, the hurts resurface, the arguments rewind, and we’d call it all off again. I’d be crushed. Devastated. Imagining suicide off the roof of my building. Too torn apart, I knew, for my sorrow to be just about the demise of our romance.
TOTAL ECLIPSE, PENNSYLVANIA AND OHIO
APRIL 17 AND 18, 1996
My mom and I barreled through eastern Pennsylvania. We pulled into a rest stop near Allentown where, as if scripted in a stupid movie, there stood Will. He was on tour with his band, a tour funded by the bass player’s dad.
“Oh, my god,” I whispered to myself when our eyes locked outside the vending machines. He walked over to me and pulled me to him, pressed his whole body into mine. My mom saw us and said nothing, just walked back to the car.
“I left New York,” I said into his collar. He smelled like cigarettes and beer.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Shhh,” he pulled me close again. I still loved him. I loved his body. I loved how slight and strong it was. I had wanted to hold that body every morning and night for the rest of my life. But soon the cigarette smell became unbearable, and my mom was waiting for me. “I love you. I’ll always love you,” he said. I wiped my tears on my sleeve and pushed him away. His bandmates smirked as they ambled past us.
“Me too,” I said. I walked to my mom’s car. She sat clutching the steering wheel with the engine already running. I’d barely closed the door when she floored it and pulled away.
“You okay?” she asked, as she sped back onto the freeway, looking over her shoulder into her blind spot. “Of all the luck. I can’t believe we ran into him here.”
“Yeah,” I said, buckling myself slowly. “Just drive.” I closed my eyes and prepared to return to sleep. I couldn’t look back.
My mom and I didn’t talk for several hundred miles. I slept, then woke and sat with my head turned away from her, my nose an inch from the window until I fell asleep again. We stopped an hour or so later and spent the night in a roadside motel.
I woke in the motel, disoriented after a vivid dream of New York and Will and the life I’d abandoned. My mom tapped my shoulder, saying that it was checkout time, almost noon. “It seemed like you desperately needed some real rest.” I imagined her watching me sleep, monitoring my breathing as if I were a newborn in a crib.
“Okay,” I said. I stumbled to the bathroom, peed with my eyes closed, brushed my teeth, and followed her to the car. I curled up against the car window, my eyes pulling closed again, sleep taking me away.
“Only about an hour left,” I heard my mom say. I opened my eyes to see my mom’s small hands clutching the steering wheel, her rounded nails painted cantaloupe orange. I didn’t respond, hardly awake, noting the descending sun. Leaving Manhattan felt like flipping over a topographical map. On this side, everything lay flat, concave even. After several months of tight spaces, walls, and corners, the openness of eastern Ohio was alarming.
Farmland rushed by: soybean fields, cornfields, enormous old barns. Soon the landmarks became familiar. Outside Pataskala, the tall red barn that leaned one degree short of tumbling over. Roush Hardware at the edge of town, the place Dad always bought us a cellophane-wrapped chocolate coconut haystack as a reward for tolerating his lengthy trips to the garden section. Noah’s Ark Pet Store where I sold my baby hamsters and guinea pigs for twenty-nine cents each. The ice cream shop our family would drive to on a hot Sunday afternoon—rocky road for everyone but Mom, who usually just had water. Then Dublin Middle School, where Mr. Niemie, my sixth-grade English teacher, with auburn curls, John Lennon glasses, and bright eyes, was the first teacher to tell me I should keep writing.
We turned left down Route 745 and there was Oscar’s Deli, the restaurant where I had my first job as a waitress, eating more than I served, trying not to cry when the woman who wanted her eggs poached this way, not that way, sent her unsatisfactory breakfast back to the kitchen six times. Down the long road that hugged the muddy river, past mean Robbie Thompson’s house, who sometimes joined Clay in his attacks, then my childhood playmate Tricia’s place. I imagined that all those kids had left home and not come back. I imagined them off in medical school, law school, landing fantastic jobs, slow-dancing with lovers on sparkling rooftops.
After a few miles, we turned onto Birchwood Road, our road. We pulled up the long, slow hill that I’d jogged countless times, past Mrs. Pethel’s house and Mrs. Jacoby’s place, two elderly women who, on long, lonely summer days, took me in and gave me pie. Past the opening in the yard across the street that led to Lehman’s Pond and the pine grove I spent countless hours wandering.
We stopped at the end of the long driveway. Mom jumped out, ran across the road to check for mail, and there was the familiar creak of the mailbox door, the echo of its closing. Then my house at dusk. Its tall central eave and big angular points modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs with loads of blond wood and enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. My parents’ bedroom was in the south wing, my brother’s and mine in the north. In between us soared vaulted ceilings over the kitchen and living and dining rooms.
At the end of the driveway, Mom got back into the car and closed the door hard. “Ahh,” she sighed. “We’re home. Here we go.” She eased up the long driveway. I squinted, one eye closed, blinded a bit by the waning sunlight glaring through the trees. The shafts of light made our house look like a church, a place I could come to rest my battered spirit, or a place I could come to die.
• • •
Many things can go wrong in the first few weeks of a puppy’s life. He could miss out on essential care from his mother and die of malnutrition or hypothermia. His mother could develop mastitis and slowly poison him and all his littermates with the toxins in her milk. He could get crushed under the weight of his exhausted, milk-filled mama. Or there could simply be not enough milk to go around, and he’d die of hunger.
I was as raw as I’d ever been, perfectly willing to become increasingly self-destructive until I finally ended my life. My mind was not well, and I knew it, which was terrifying. Knowing that you are not rational, that your thoughts are out of control, is disorienting. It’s like sitting down on a couch and then watching your body walk away without you. This is the time to ask for help. But I wasn’t aware enough to know that help was what I needed. I was like a newborn too: helpless, blind, weak.
The closer I got to Ohio, the stronger the connection between me and Bunker must have become. I remember pulling into the garage thinking about the dogs of my youth, how they provided me with such solace. It occurred to me then that maybe I could try again and get my own dog. A dog I could protect. A dog that would protect me. It was just a thought.
MIDNIGHT, OHIO
1977 AND 1980
The first dog I remember loving was named Midnight. We found her abandoned in a car wash during a blizzard when I was four and my brother was seven. Family legend has her shivering in the corner with icicles dangling from her matted fur. My mom snatched her up, drove her home, and never posted “dog found” signs, because whoever owned the dog, she reasoned, was irresponsible. And besides, we all fell in love with her. My parents decided she was a cock-a-poo, half cocker spaniel and half poodle. She had soft, tight curled fur and a long, thin tail.
My dad, in particular, adored Midnight. She didn’t soil the house. She didn’t shed. She liked to snuggle and was interminably happy. “Midnigh
t is the best dog we’ve ever had,” he would say. He liked to declare a lot of wonderful things, and I loved this about him. “We are the luckiest people that she came to us. It was meant to be—for us to find her. Amazing dog, that dog.” I would listen, near rapture. I felt the same way, and his similarly deep connection with our dog left me elated. Midnight would twirl adoringly at his feet and he would bend over, all six athletic feet of him, and pick her up, letting her cover his face in kisses. He’d say things like, “Oh, yes, I love you too. I love you too, good girl.”
All little girls love their dogs, but I felt a desperate kind of love for Midnight. I would call her to me, and as if she knew how much I needed her, she came running. When she curled up in my lap, I felt my breathing regulate, my skin relax, my shoulders loosen. I was protective of her because our house felt safe when Midnight was around.
When Clay and I fought, Midnight hid. She would run to my parents’ room, flatten her body, her back legs stretched into a frog-like splay and scoot under their bed. Then she’d army-crawl all the way to the wall, shivering. Sometimes, after the fight, I would try to coax her out, but she would look at me suspiciously from the dark corner, unmoving. Other times when she hid, I would just sit silently next to my parents’ bed, waiting. Usually, she’d come out cowering, her pressed-down tail still wagging at the very tip. She would whimper a little, curl into my lap, and lick me furiously.