CHAPTER 45
Set It Alight
I walk into my October 29, 1992, session with a haircut (it was just a solid trim!) and he accuses me of self-destructing. I’m supposed to discuss these things before doing them. I justify.
“I guess I wanted immediate gratification. I wanted to change my hair—like for a date.” The date gets lost in the fury over my defiance and his desire to hold me accountable. Testing him, annoying him, pushing his limits—I never tire of it.
“Are you not here today?” he asks at our next session. I’m distracted and evasive during that early 11/02/1992 appointment, unexpectedly pondering the man who’s about to take my solitary mind and celibate body for an airing. “The date.”
“I don’t really know why I’ve agreed to go,” I tell Dr. Kohl. I’m nervous. “Obligation. I’m a loner. I will live by myself as soon as I get out of therapy. I envision living alone for the rest of my life.” I say this half to piss him off, half in truth.
So why am I going on a date? Is it possible for me to entwine my existence with someone else’s, trading out the solitude that’s the essence of who I am? What if I mix myself up and lose the pieces? I’m just learning to live and now I’m distracted by the possibility of pulling apart that hard-earned safety. Why would I choose to give that up when I’m just becoming familiar with myself in a form I can (almost) recognize as me?
The date—Dwight—and I first met at Middlebury College. We were there at the same time, but it’s chance, proximity, the happenstance of friends in common that transform a brief encounter nearly five years after graduation into a life I never believed in.
By the time he appears I’m still busy stashing piles of tainted cash for delivering myself up, along with hash and eggs Benedict, to the hungover morning crowd. House-sitting nearby, he comes in to do what defines him—read, write, eat, and drink. I pour his coffee; give him a menu; take his order; deliver eggs, breakfast meat, and toast. We exchange awkward small talk meant to make our lives look better than they are—thoughts of grad school, GREs, leaving Vermont. Of course I’m a waitress and he’s already a writer, a journalist for the Vermont Times, the local alternative weekly. I’ve applied to grad school. Anyone can do that. It means nothing unless you get accepted. He has a career; I have sore feet.
We fill the silence with questions about our college friends RWR and Karen. I never entertain the possibility that this guy might be gauging me in any other way than the way you might gauge any waitress you’re barely acquainted with—wishing your table wasn’t in her section so you can proceed to do what you came to do in peaceful anonymity.
I never give him another thought until the next day when my coworker Rachael calls me from the restaurant to gush, “A boy who sounded cute called and left his number. Dwight, I think …” I’m surprised.
After three days of uncomfortable anticipation—the phone and I have a patchy history—I call. He’d left his work number so it’s not he but a receptionist who picks up on the third ring. Biting a stray nail until the salty iron taste answers my tongue, I say his name. “He’s on vacation for the next ten days,” she says. “Can I take a message?”
A message? No. Definitely not a message. I’ll be scattering no evidence of being played. No wait, do leave him a message, can you just write, “You’re an asshole.” Who but the most mean-spirited person leaves a number and a name for a girl to call and then goes off on vacation, knowing he won’t be there for ten days? Maybe I’m just another figure to him, one of many he’s fished for—I’m nothing.
Face burning, I replace the receiver, cursing the gullible part of me for falling for an obvious ploy. Fuck him and fuck you, too, phone. I fall for the thing every time. Days and days gone. More than a week passes before I lay out my humiliation, explaining to Dr. Kohl how he called and set me up.
A tad less paranoid than I am, Dr. Kohl practically demands I call again. It was, Dr. Kohl convinces me, likely a mistake. No malicious intent. An oversight. Why would I not call when he returned from vacation? I must call one more time. I suppose, given my success in remaining mostly solitary despite roommates, he’s eager for me to venture into any new relationship. Maybe he thinks I’m ready. Maybe he thinks I deserve to have a boyfriend who offers more than Matt, more than fantasies of him. It’s been almost a year since I walked back into his office after my months in exile at Sheppard Pratt. I wonder how different I am now and what, if anything, has really changed.
That afternoon I obediently pick up the receiver to punch in the numbers I’ve scrawled on the back of a notebook. The familiar sickening trepidation makes itself at home in my gut. I prepare for the assault. The humiliation of rejection will be on me again. I’m asking for it.
Once past reception with “Just a moment, I’ll connect you,” I soon have a kind, easy voice in my ear, nervous but warm enough to erase the dread. He needs to be brave. He has to ask. For a date? We set a time to meet at the bar where everyone goes to withstand this sort of thing: the Daily Planet, a hardworking room hot with people, noise, and friendly waitresses.
What to wear? I’m past thinking I’m the kind of girl who meets the right guy. This date is part of my training—living with roommates, trying to make friends, saying yes to padding out my minuscule social club—to be less alone. But it always matters what I wear. Not for him but to get me through. There are the shoes. The sweater. The pants. Each one is essential for the company it brings me, the way it will hold me up amid strangers because I know it’s there with me. On my side.
My trusty pink Converse high-tops protected me from Sheppard Pratt’s corridors, bathrooms, and cafeteria. The rubber, the canvas, and I bonded against them. The pink wool KIKIT cardigan sweater twins the shoes. It does more than match. The risky, unusual fringe of pom-poms on the sweater’s hem cancels any remaining masculinity the boyish shoes might claim, transforming the outfit into what I’d like to think is a mix of girlish, sophisticated, funky, and posh. The set goes on, slim white cotton tank top beneath the sweater, sockless feet, familiar, comforting jeans—jeans that don’t betray me by not fitting or by making me feel more cowish than I already feel. Even if I am on the much thinner side of “I can’t live with myself,” not too fat relative to fat, no matter how much I weigh I’m always FAT. The word has a presence that skips alongside my body, waiting for the right angle or the right thought to pop out and show itself.
Right now, I’m not letting it. I feel okay. Ready. I leave my room on the second floor, closing it tight, thinking how soon I can come back to lie on the bed in soft pajamas and finish Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It won’t be long. Dates don’t last. Duty. Obligation. I can’t hide from this one now. It’s done.
There, by the window, he sits at a table for two. He looks as kind and harmless as I wish I felt at my best. Nervous, I take the empty chair and order a beer. I ask if he minds if I smoke, thinking surely that will be the end of it—he’ll be repulsed by the disgusting habit, ask me if I mind not smoking, ask me why I smoke. Rather than all that, his face opens as if he sees Lauren Bacall with a Gauloise, those eyes of hers waiting for Bogey to set it alight. This he does not do. Not being a smoker, he keeps talking as I huddle and light it myself. Burying my relief in the nicotine, I find my pace as I hold the burning object with one hand, my pint with the other. It’s going to be all right. I can do this. I’m not looking for the way out. Not yet.
CHAPTER 46
Ugly but Interesting
We talk and listen without trying, not noticing the hour, TAG Heuer silent and well behaved. The deflective maneuver of asking too many questions comes to a draw—he’s a pro at that game, a match for me. We tell and ask—neither of us doing all of one and none of the other. Outlasting the polite brevity allotted for “a drink” in date parlance, we order pints until late. He walks me the short distance to the door of my loathsome shared house, where I pull the covers up with a giddy glee, astonished at remaining so long aloft on Dr. Kohl–free warmth and pleasure. This one’s mine.
For once my book, abetted by the pleasant whirr of alcohol, won’t have me. It doesn’t really matter; not even Hardy can better the pleasure of replaying the memory of him.
Not many second dates involve a two-hour drive in a nine-year-old Volvo station wagon to a used bookstore but that’s what we do. “Wanna go to Rutland?” is a roommate’s transcription of a message Dwight leaves that morning. The note waits on the kitchen counter when I come down that morning looking for coffee. A piece of paper understated as a grocery list.
We’re off. Talking as if we know each other. I embarrass myself by hiccuping half the way to Rutland. Perhaps he’s bored, thinks I’m a freak, wishes he’d never asked me along. It doesn’t feel that way but then my judgment can’t be relied on. The wreck ahead comes from liking him too much, too soon. If I were capable of reason I’d stop now. Too bad emotional control remains no more than an enviable intellectual construct.
Tuttle Antiquarian Books, 160 years old, forty thousand books. We wander the paper warren, the diversion of the find consuming stray awkward moments. Our eyes on the spines, we pull, flip, and replace books the way people do when they know what they’re after. He buys H. L. Mencken, Lionel Trilling, Paul Fussell, and John Updike; I buy Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and Jim Harrison. We load our booty into the car before buying sandwiches from a deli down the street. We walk past chain-link fences; once charming houses, their front porches piled with boxes and plastic toys; dog shit ground so far into the sidewalk it’s nothing more than an ugly thought even in my mind. The bleak atmosphere of the gray working-class neighborhood grinds against the fragile pleasures of our picnic. We’re new to each other. I’m conscious of my body and words, of the impression I think I’m making.
I say, “Yes” to dinner that night at his apartment. “Yes” to 7 P.M. I bring expensive dried dates and a bottle of half-decent red wine. Because that’s what you do.
Between the soft eyes of his eight-week-old black-and-white Lab mutt Hank and the flawless salmon with asparagus he cooks and plates I don’t stand a chance. As I take my portion I never even entertain the option of telling him I’m a vegetarian. Eat the fish.
We retreat to his room for dinner to avoid his roommate, swallowing forkfuls of rich fish the color of winter cantaloupe. While we are lying sideways facing each other on his big bed, my expectations slip out the back. Astonished by how much I like him, how safe I feel in his unassuming presence, I’m all his by the time he moves the empty plates aside to make room for four elbows and two slim books: Galway Kinnell’s When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone and Sharon Olds’s The Father. If I’d been less astonished at his offer to read me poetry I might have suspected a setup. But I’m not cynical, because he’s anything but. The words unload their simple force on me, covering the accumulated sludge of remorse, regret, longing, self-pity—all of it. Obscured. I’m lighter and calmer; I’m almost here on the bed, dropping down from the ceiling, where I’ve been watching the scene. He gently asks about the scars on my arm. As I tell him, he reaches out to touch them. Nobody has ever done that before.
When he asks if he can kiss me, a question I wouldn’t have believed could be asked earnestly in such circumstances, he says it with a seductive precision tuned to an internal monitor I didn’t know I had. I answer “Yes” even if I’m not sure I say the word out loud. I don’t need to. Leaning in does the work for me.
I guess you could say I fucked the first guy who offered me his coat and I married the first guy who asked if he could kiss me. I’m a sucker for good manners and even for standard boy ploys that probably work every time. The kiss. Eating dinner on the bed. Poetry. A puppy.
I know I want the first kiss and the next and the next even if I lack that enviable, smoldering Lauren Bacall confidence—to steal the first kiss and then reply, when I asked why I’d done it, “To see if I liked it.” He’s the arts editor at the local weekly and a stringer for the Village Voice—generally pretty hip and respectable work as Burlington, Vermont, goes. I’m a waitress at a popular hash joint with an uneven schedule of early mornings and free afternoons. He gives me a key to his apartment so I can hang out or walk the puppy when he’s at work in the afternoon. Unlike me, he’s dated a lot and had plenty of serious girlfriends. But none of them, it seems, were perfect. Perhaps, soon enough, I won’t be perfect either? The puppy stays, I go.
I suspect I’ve found in Dwight what I’ve been looking for. What I look like—good or bad—has always reinforced the break between what I consider “me” and my damnable body. When it comes to men my physical self works as litmus paper to identify the frauds and users shallow enough to care about my appearance. I’d fall in love with someone who thought I was ugly but interesting. At least then I’d know he meant it. Although Dwight has given no indication he thinks I’m ugly, I don’t get the sense that he cares all that much about what I look like. He seems to like me because I’m one of the few people he’s met who has read more books than he has.
Never outside Dr. Kohl’s office have I felt as safe, real, and adored. Never, even in the presence of Dr. Kohl, have I been this greedy for someone who seems to want just as much from me as I want from him. The fear in my gut eases.
I want to be with someone if this is how it feels and maybe, just maybe, the evidence of what I’ve come to think of myself over the past two years snores softly right there next to me in bed. Allowing myself this, choosing and being chosen, collides violently with my savage interior. It’s hard to believe I’m touching such grace.
I don’t really understand it thoroughly but I’m vulnerable to internalizing Dwight—in danger of becoming him by gobbling up an idealized version of the potent figure I’ve fallen for. As Dr. Kohl notes, in my world love is finite and if I’m going to have enough for Dwight I need to take it away from him. I’m using Dwight to supplant Dr. Kohl. I use both to erase my worthlessness.
“Is it him you like? Or the idea he likes you?” Dr. Kohl asks, very gently.
I’m certain it’s both but I’m also not sure it’s possible for me to separate the two entirely. The linear fixation on Dr. Kohl has wavered, leaving me foolish but not entirely sated. When I’m not there I scoot away from him hoping to leave my shame behind, nestling closer to Dwight, where I know I’m wanted. I’ve swapped one obsession for another.
We spend Thanksgiving together at a big farm east of Burlington with a group of his close friends. It’s a classic Vermont farmhouse surrounded by muddy pastures still green as wet moss. Organic everything crowds together in clunky pottery dishes on the long barn wood buffet table. Apple pie makes our offering, overshadowed by praline pumpkin tart I can’t forget.
Before Dwight my days were ever emptying out, demanding more and more of me—reading, writing, walking, waiting, working, thinking. Now the days take care of themselves.
“I don’t go somewhere else in my head when I’m with him,” I tell Dr. Kohl. Flushed, I can’t taste my own mouth anymore. Lips raw from kissing stubble, I’m uncertain of wanting so much, but there’s no angle out. It’s strange. I can’t find the bottom of him.
Even my massive insecurity, my fathomless doubts, can’t get in the way of a thing so sure of itself. Why keep to our own beds when all that matters is contained by our mixed presence? We’re a couple. We have sex and then watch a show on the tiny black-and-white TV by his bed. I locate my coffee mug, a glossy masculine mahogany, like nothing I would ever buy. It’s all mine every morning while I sit watching him sleep. He lingers long, pulling the last warmth from the night before coming to.
Pruning our lives to suit the conditions of coupling, we begin by not spending another night apart until three weeks later, when he leaves for his sister’s wedding in Naples, Florida. He wants me to come along but we both know it’s too soon—even by our sloppy standards. I miss him the way I miss Dr. Kohl between sessions, as though I can’t breathe until he’s back with me.
I tell Dr. Kohl we spent an hour just kissing.
“I’ve never done that before.”
It’s “Great. Strange. Scary. Wonderful,” I say. I’m unfamiliar with Dwight’s spirited, sensual lust for food, drink, books, music, movies—and even for me.
“All the demons have disappeared. Eating preoccupation is gone. Burning makes absolutely no sense right now.” I’m not giving the Zoloft any credit. I can be around myself when I’m with him without a constant fight between sides.
I think back to the hospital, now a strange memory I keep tucked away, muffled and well hidden. It hides in my mind like an exotic vacation that’s so different, so transformative, it can’t find a place to fit in the ordinary memories that make up the past. Instead, it stays to the side, its own enclosed arctic zone, hard to get to, a little dangerous, best left alone. I shove it away—or try to. Is there a tinge of shame? Maybe. Being there was the ultimate proof of a dark history I’m not sure I want to carry around anymore. Self-destruction of such an explicit kind with permanent results falls into a disturbing category. It doesn’t matter exactly what I was, am now, or will be in the future. At some point I was crazy enough to do what I’ve done to myself.
Lights On, Rats Out Page 24