by Tim Kreider
Maybe it was a kind of Stockholm syndrome, this perverse identification with the man who held us all hostage to his churlish whim. I would’ve quashed it if I could, but Lauren said it was this weird empathy that kept my cartoons from being agitprop, that gave them a depth and humanity that the more one-sided polemicists of the Left lacked. She’d always shared my terrible pity for Richard Nixon, who’d resigned when we were little kids; after I drew a cartoon called “Li’l Nixon,” about the ex-President’s early years—lying about eating a Fudgsicle, listening at a wall with a drinking glass, in seclusion in his tree house—she wrote me rhapsodically: “I don’t want any cartoons but Li’l Nixon.”
I saw her as someone very much like myself, but just a little saner, kinder, wiser. Our minds were the same size, with roughly the same ratios of ambivalence to conviction, cynicism to sentiment. But Lauren seemed capable of moral outrage without rancor, a disappointment in her fellow Americans that didn’t descend to contempt. She was as angry as I was, but for better reasons: when the first ugly photos came out of Abu Ghraib prison—U.S. soldiers grinning and giving the thumbs-ups over piles of naked prisoners on leashes—Lauren wept at the thought of all the men and women in uniform who’d ever tried to behave honorably and were now disgraced by association. “We don’t get to be the good guys anymore,” she said, with irony, rue, and sadness. When the war turned into the quagmire the Bush administration had assured us it wouldn’t, Lauren simply mourned the pointless loss of life, while I was secretly relieved that they hadn’t been able to repeal the law of cause and effect as easily as the Bill of Rights. It always made me feel better to be around her—better in the sense of calmer and more clearheaded, but also like a more decent human being.
There was a thing she would do on our long walks on the sidewalks of Brooklyn or the beach at my cabin: she’d be trying to articulate some complex or knotty thought and suddenly stop, refusing to take another step until she’d worked it out into words. Sometimes I’d casually try to resume our forward progress, but she wouldn’t budge until she’d finished what she had to say. I never knew whether she was thinking so hard that her brain could no longer run both operations at once, or if she was doing it for rhetorical emphasis, the perambulatory equivalent of smacking the podium. It reminded me of the way she had in conversation of fixing me with a fishy look to call me on some glib bullshit. She told me once that she worried that my caricatures of our fellow Americans in the red states—what I called “the Shithead Vote,” those fat-assed, mustachioed suburban dads with wraparound shades and NASCAR caps, dingbats in belted pantsuits and lacquered bouffants—were too broad and cruel, that I just wasn’t being fair. She objected to my cartoon contrasting “the Ladies of the Left” (modeled on the lissome agents of the Axis of Eve) with “the Ladies of the Right” (haggish pro-lifers with dismembered-fetus photos), arguing that I was equating virtue with beauty.
The first time I ever drew Lauren in a cartoon, we had to sit down over beers and have a little talk. Lauren admitted that she had not been initially thrilled to see herself looking, in my depiction, “like a batty old lady.” But, she admitted, there was a certain batty-old-ladyish side to her personality, and, as a cartoonist herself, she could understand that I must have observed her carefully, and with great affection, to have captured that aspect of her. She’d often teased me for having such an obvious “type,” to which, she had noted, she did not conform. “You like them wil-lowy,” she’d croon, “with looonnng tresses.” Lauren herself had chin-length brown hair, and had once told me she’d always thought of herself as “short and stumpy” compared to her pretty, popular older sister.
I did not even make eye contact during this talk, and I’m sure she took my silence as acquiescence. The only thing I could think of to say in response was something I could not say: that her face was my favorite sight on earth. That my heart lit up like the tree at Rockefeller Center every time she walked into a diner or bar to meet me, every time I heard her answer the phone “Tiiim!” with such audible pleasure. That I adored the broad curve of her lip, her pigtails, her knit cap, her leopard coat, the pale blue of her eyes. That I cherished the sly sidewise look she’d give me to let me know when I was full of shit; the way her lower lip pulled to the left when she felt conflicted or guilty; the glances she’d give me across the room at parties, both of us complicit in the knowledge that we’d rather be talking to each other. That sometimes I’d close my eyes and breathe in the air she’d walked through. One rainy afternoon, when I was helping her with some scanning and Photoshop during a deadline crunch, she got up to fetch us some lunch and paused behind me for a moment to rub my left shoulder blade. I felt her handprint there for years.
It was true that I’d at first assumed I was safe from the usual disastrous romantic complications with Lauren, not only because she was married but because she wasn’t my type. But those very limits were what allowed love to sneak up on me incognito until it was too late. My useless love for her persisted throughout flings and affairs with other women, some of them deliriously distracting. At times, between my secret love for Lauren and my sex life with someone else, I had what amounted to one whole relationship. The night Lauren and I laughed so hard painting protest signs on my floor was only a week or two after I’d consummated my decades-long crush on the willowy, long-tressed Kati Jo. Even as I walked around New York in a state of ecstatic stupefaction over Kati with Ella Fitzgerald on repeat in my heart, some small, obdurate part of me knew that I would still rather talk with Lauren. What Lauren had to say about my romance with Kati Jo was: “I’m not seeing a lot of winning for you here.” In her last letter to me, Kati told me that she couldn’t be with me because she knew she’d never be the woman I loved most.
I should make clear that this love affair was confined entirely to my own head. How Lauren may have felt about me is not for me to say; it really isn’t even any of my business. I was, of course, wild to know. I scrutinized her for clues, parsed our conversations for subtext. We once had a very delicate conversation about what she thought was the fact that I just wasn’t attracted to her. She acted matter-of-fact about it: she knew she wasn’t my type, and it wasn’t an issue anyway, since she was married. She told me that she loved me as a friend and that she was attracted to me, “so you can imagine how I would feel about you if I weren’t married.” One morning, when we’d slept in the same room before some march on Washington—her in the bed and me on the floor—I woke up early and thought I’d caught her watching me. But she closed her eyes so quickly I could never be quite sure I’d really seen it.
At the time, falling in love with Lauren seemed unrelated to the protests and the war, but in memory they are inextricable. Veterans and journalists have written about the illicit joys of war: its addictive intensity, its exhilaration and beauty, how it calls up what’s finest in people as well as what’s base, bonding comrades as unbreakably as family. It has some of the same effect, more faintly and distantly, on civilians—and not just on those flabby Rambo fanboys who wear camo pants to infiltrate the aisles of Target or drive Tonka-yellow Humvees on the deadly road to Muvico. Those of us protesting the war were infected with some of that dreadful excitement, too—a sense of urgency and portent, that our actions mattered as if on some moral battlefield. We got to feel like a brave, embattled band taking a stand for what was right, racing against Armageddon. It’s exciting to imagine that you’re living at some crucial historic turning point instead of just another unexceptional year in the annals of brutality. It was, in a way, fun, just as it must’ve been for the planners of the war, a bunch of aging draft dodgers playing Napoleon. Lauren and I got to act out our banal domestic drama against the colossal operatic backdrop of the capital of a collapsing empire. It was an antiwartime romance.
I waited for years for my infatuation to blow over, managing it like a chronic illness. But suppression only sustains and intensifies passion instead of letting it peter out into domesticity, the way the narrow glass canyons of Manhattan V
enturi the winds to a pitch that rips umbrellas inside out. Kati Jo used to say she wished Lauren and I could just fuck so I’d get it out of my system, but I never wanted anything as feasible as an affair. I never imagined that Lauren might leave her husband, or entertained shameful little daydreams about his death. The only scenario I could plausibly picture that would bring us together was not Lars’s death but my own: I would contract some painless terminal illness that would entitle me to ask Lauren to sit at my bedside in my last months and read to me or bring me little sandwiches. I couldn’t envision any realistic way of changing this world; what I wanted was to live in a different one. I was never really a reformer, but a utopian.
On the eve of the 2004 election, Lauren cajoled me into going with her to Pennsylvania to volunteer for the Democratic campaign. The candidate, an august stuffed shirt who was husband to a Mozambican ketchup heiress, inspired a kamikaze fervor among liberals that was 100 percent anti-Bush in origin. On our first day in Philadelphia, Lauren and I were dispatched to carry out the critical mission of standing on a median strip, holding signs and leaping up and down in order to exhort passing drivers to honk. We were a little chagrined about leaping being our contribution to the electoral effort, but also had to admit that leaping was kind of fun. Philadelphia was a Democratic stronghold where we were surrounded by young volunteers, all of us giddy with the feeling that this might really be it, the end of the nightmare Bush years, plus everybody was honking! “Are you kidding?” one guy said to us that night when we were knocking on doors to get out the vote. “I’d vote for Joe Donut over George Bush.” I let down my pessimistic defenses. As the polls closed I dropped Lauren off at 30th Street Station: she’d said she felt she should watch the returns at home, with Lars. I said I understood. We said we’d be thinking of each other.
You already know how this turned out, but bear in mind that we, trapped in the year 2004, did not. That night in Philadelphia a friend of mine and I numbly watched as the networks called state after state for George. When the Democratic candidate conceded, even unflappable ironist Jon StewartIII looked like he might be about to cry. I later heard that the morning after the election some despondent liberal had gone down to Ground Zero and shot himself. (“That was our crazy guy,” one of my friends lamented.) The next morning I woke up alone in a cold guest room in the same shitty world, made even more intolerable by the fact that I’d briefly believed it might not be inescapable.
No one stays secretly in love forever. My febrile infatuation broke, perhaps by no coincidence, a month after George’s reelection. Lauren was in the middle of a humiliatingly public professional failure—“a fiasco,” she kept calling it—while her husband was inconveniently out of the country. She called me at my cabin from New York one afternoon, disconsolate; she used the words nervous breakdown. I asked her: “Do you want me to come up there?” I told myself that I would’ve done the same thing for any good friend. I spent that evening with my arm around her while she sobbed in bars. Our waitress, assuming I was breaking up with her, quickly set our beers down in front of us and did not ask whether everything was all right. As we walked through the snowy streets that night, Lauren took my hand.
“Why do these conversations always have to happen at five a.m. when you’re drunk and sleep-deprived?” I later asked my friend Gabe. He sagely explained: “Because that’s when they happen.”
I had rehearsed the Big Talk with Lauren, the confession of my love, countless times in my mind, recited it out loud like the St. Crispin’s Day speech, but when the moment actually came I forgot all my lines and just sat there, choked and frozen. I’d always imagined it happening in some dream space, out of time, exempt from any consequences—some mountaintop, or the Bardo—but we were in Lauren’s familiar kitchen, the next morning already starting to show in the sky. When she admitted that she might have fallen “a little bit in love” with me, I was unable to get my mouth to move, while inside I was yelling at myself. Once spoken aloud, made real, it might turn out to be a cheap, silly thing, easily busted. After a long, pained silence, I finally admitted that I felt the same way. “Except,” I said, with difficulty, “not a little.”
Readers who have been lured along this far by sexual tension may want their money back; nothing untoward happened between Lauren and me that night, or ever. We stayed up talking until dawn. She was flying across the country to join Lars early that morning, and she asked me if I would go with her to the airport. On the taxi ride she dozed with her head on my shoulder with the unselfconscious presumption of a little kid. The casual physical intimacy of it felt unreal. When I saw her off at the airport, I told her I loved her, and she did something like laugh, except sadly, and hugged me good-bye. Then I was alone, sleep-deprived, heartbroken and hungover, at LaGuardia.
Around seven a.m. I turned up looking haggard indeed on my friend Lucy’s doorstep in Brooklyn, where I was granted asylum and fed blueberry oatmeal alongside her children. Later that morning—I like to imagine at the same moment—Lauren and I both threw up: I, bluely, in Lucy’s bathroom, and Lauren in an airplane lavatory at thirty thousand feet, moving away from me at five hundred miles an hour.
* * *
The golden age of Athens lasted less than fifty years. America had about the same brief, dizzying time on top before we embarked on our own disastrous foreign expedition. Apparently hawks of the Vietnam era liked to cite Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War as a sort of code to identify themselves as clear-eyed practitioners of realpolitik as opposed to those pie-in-the-sky peaceniks. These people may not have read all the way to the end of the book, to the retreat from Syracuse, in which the invading Athenians are forced to flee on foot while their dying comrades beg them not to desert them, doomed to enslavement and slaughter. If they’d at least skimmed ahead or read the CliffsNotes, they might have been able to envision the unthinkable: ignominious defeat, a fiasco, the last helicopters lifting off the roof of the embassy, our former allies clinging desperately to the skids, dropping off one by one, abandoned.
When I first got involved with Lauren, I did not have an exit strategy. After any breakup, as after military defeats, there are always battling narratives, scuffles for the moral high ground, even if the difference in elevation is measured in inches. Lauren was angry at me for having kept my feelings for her secret for so long. I’d always thought I was being frankly sort of noble by keeping them to myself; all I could see was the damage it would do. I’d always assumed that what she didn’t know couldn’t affect her marriage. When I said this out loud, Lauren was too incredulous to be angry. “How could it not?” she said.
Lars was reportedly unfazed when Lauren confessed she’d gotten maybe a little inappropriately attached to me. “You’re boy-crazy,” he said. When I apologized to him over beers, he said, “I’m just sorry you kept yourself in such an unpleasant situation for so long.” Lars was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism and disinclined to such things as punching. Or maybe he just trusted his wife—a trust that had proven, in the end, well justified.
“Are you mad at her, at all?” Lucy asked me, seeming very much to imply that maybe I should consider it. Lauren had probably been less oblivious to my devotion than she pretended, and doubtless she’d enjoyed being adored from anear. Who wouldn’t? But we’d both known, on some level, what we were doing, and we both must’ve been getting something out of it for it to persist as long as it had. But I did think she was rewriting our history now, airbrushing out her own complicity. She told me over the phone that she couldn’t help but reexamine our whole friendship in light of this revelation; it seemed to cover everything with an unwholesome glaze. I begged her not to say the word glaze. I pictured the gelatinous coating over a ham in a cookbook. She said it again, punitively—“glllaaaaazzzze”—leaning on it, giving the l a lot of thick, mucous palate and cruelly elongating the z.
Lucy’s advice to me was to spend that winter with friends in Seattle instead of New York. I’d agreed this made sense, and yet, riding the tra
in through North Dakota in January, staring out at that Siberian desolation, it was hard not to feel exiled. That was a bleak season; Bush’s election in 2000 had been a coup or a fluke, but his reelection felt like a referendum on the war in Iraq, by then indisputably a disaster, and a majority of our fellow Americans had voted: more of the same. After that, a lot of liberals emotionally seceded, abandoning the nation to the will of the Shitheads. Our new official position on the war was: Good luck with that. Let us know how that works out for you. That winter I drew myself trying to cheer up the exiled Nixon on the beach at San Clemente, and lonely Pluto (also soon to be deposed) in love with the distant sun.
Falling out of love is like letting go of grief: a kind of betrayal. Lucy promised me that Lauren and I would get through this together and that our friendship would ultimately be stronger for it. “Just keep telling yourself, ‘She is like a sister to me,’ ” she advised. I gave her a look like kids do when you tell them that someday they’ll thank you for this. But what made it so painful was also what made it possible at all: it hadn’t been just an infatuation. Lauren and I had begun as friends, not lovers going through the motions as a preliminary, and we were stubbornly determined to salvage that friendship. Over the next months we renegotiated its terms. Lauren imposed some conditions: some personal subjects were off-limits now; no unchaperoned visits, at least for a while; and no more code names. This last proscription hurt more than you might think. One of the things you lose when a relationship ends is the person you got to be in it.