Reckless Years

by Heather Chaplin

  Tuesday, April 11, 2006

  Rain is hitting the windows at the back of the apartment as if someone were throwing bucketfuls of water against them. It gives my sitting room a ghostly, beneath-the-sea kind of light. Who cares, I think. I’m sitting in the dark at 3 p.m., smoking pot and doing nothing. So sue me. Josh is in the front of the house doing whatever it is he does all day. I wonder what he thinks I’m doing. I never do nothing, but I’ve barely moved from this spot since I got home. All I do is sit here, writing this story for God knows who, Sakura watching me from his position on the window ledge with his imperious black eyes. I would call him over to come sit next to me, but I don’t know that he’d come. Sakura has never fully accepted the dog-master paradigm.

  How do I articulate the feeling I have that my heart is dead? That there is no life in the cavern of my chest?

  The ivy that covers the windows is shaking in the wind; the trees in the yards that surround our yard wave their branches wildly. One day, I think, my yard too will have something in it to blow about when it storms. I went out there this morning to clean it up, but I got so angry and demoralized I just turned around and walked back in.

  When I was a little kid our next-door neighbor gave me a pansy from her garden. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I was sure a fairy lived inside it. My mother helped me plant it in the backyard, and every day I would go outside and watch for the fairy to come out. None ever did, but every day I would kiss the pansy on its purple-and-yellow face anyway. I wish I had some pansies to kiss now.

  Later

  Finally get off the couch and go over to Mac and Katy’s, who live a neighborhood over in Windsor Terrace. I’ve known Mac my whole life. Our mothers were pregnant with us at the same time, and our older brothers were in a toddler group together. Mac’s older brother was Gabriel. Who got murdered. Are you keeping up? I remember when Mac and Gabriel’s mother ran off to an ashram, abandoning them to their father, who they barely knew. When I was having “problems” in college, Mac came. He lay beside me while I was having nightmares that made me too scared to close my eyes. When his brother was murdered I moved in with him. And so it goes.

  When I walk in Katy says, “You looked so sad at your birthday party.” And I feel sadness like a living thing pulling me down. He doesn’t even see I’m dying here. That’s the refrain running through my mind, and it’s hard not to drop my forehead onto the Formica kitchen table. Josh loves me—I have no doubt he would die for me if given the choice. But if no one warned him, I could die slowly before his eyes and he wouldn’t even notice. Who knew love could be so useless?

  Mac is out, and I find myself grabbing Katy by the arm. I’ve never really talked to her about the disaster of my marriage but I find myself suddenly unable to stop. “I know how much he’s suffered,” I say. “I told him, just be the best version of yourself you can be. When he said not being able to surf had wrecked his life, I told him I’d make the money and he could travel to every surf spot in the world. When he said he wanted to be a musician, I said great! He bought himself a professional-quality recording studio, but he never made music anywhere except our living room.”

  There’s a pause and Katy says, “You want a whiskey?”

  No doubt because of that enormous Irish-Catholic family of hers, Katy has great respect for whiskey as part of the healing process.

  We sip.

  “When the publishers asked me to do radio publicity for the book and not him, he said I was a fucking cunt for doing it.”

  “He called you a cunt?”

  “He insisted on doing all the readings when we were on the book tour even though he’d barely done any of the writing. In our hotel rooms at night he threw furniture because not enough people had come. Katy . . .” My heart is pounding. It comes out as barely a whisper. “What if I leave him and he doesn’t make it?”

  Since Dallas, I’ve been practicing in my mind what to do if I leave and Josh kills himself. That was part of our story, how I had saved Josh from suicide back after Gabriel got shot and then his mother got diagnosed with terminal cancer. I imagine the phone call. “Hello, Ms. Chaplin . . .” I imagine how I would be tormented for the rest of my life with questions of culpability. How he would haunt me in my dreams the way Gabriel haunts him.

  When I was a kid, I lived in terror that my father was going to commit suicide. I used to have nightmares about it. I once mentioned this to a shrink and was surprised that she seemed surprised. “Why did you think that?” the shrink asked. “Does he threaten it?” No, I’d said. I hadn’t known how to explain. Did other girls not think the same thing about their fathers?

  When Katy asks me what I mean, I don’t say any of this. I say, “Josh hasn’t had a job in eight years. What will he do?”

  Katy says what feels like maybe the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.

  “Everything is not about Josh,” she says. “You have a right to live too.”

  I think, I do?

  Right when I’m leaving, Katy slips a pair of keys into my hand.

  “You know, for while we’re in California,” she says. “Just in case you need a break.”

  I drop the keys into my purse.

  Later

  It’s still raining. I wish it were time to go to sleep. Mike, I say in my imagination, what are you doing here? We’re on a beach in Mexico. Neither of us knew the other would be there. I’m wearing a bikini and my legs look long and lean from all that biking in Dallas. (Otherwise, I would never put myself in a bikini in this recurring fantasy.) I see fear on your face, Mike. It hits us: we’re alone in a foreign country, unchaperoned. In my imagination I cut to twilight. We’re on the beach, coconut cups in hand. We’re staring at each other. The sun goes down in a glory of pastels and bright fuchsias. You take my hand.

  Despite the intensities of my longings for Mike Talese, I don’t think I actually want to have sex with him. I just want to kiss him and have him hold me. Christ, what am I, twelve? Do other people remain entirely clothed in their sexual fantasies? My friend Summer says you can do whatever you want in your fantasy life as long as you keep it clean in real life. So why even in my imagination do I remain chaste? Sometimes I think something is really wrong with me, that I’m not like other women.

  Here’s a memory that haunts me.

  It’s San Francisco, 1995.

  The setting is a Mission-neighborhood coffee shop—all used couches with sagging cushions and threadbare coverings; a mural on the wall of Che Guevara; another of round, Diego Rivera–style peasants picking coffee beans. Bleach is playing over the speakers, and Josh is pleading with me.

  “Please,” he says. “If I don’t do this now, I never will. I’ll never learn to stand on my own.”

  He’s wearing a dark green V-neck sweater. A piece of his black hair falls over his eyes. I think, he is the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. I think, how did it happen that he became mine?

  I’m trying to convince him that we ought to move in together. I’m twenty-four. He’s twenty-seven.

  “Why do men always think they can’t simultaneously be in a relationship and grow?” I say. “I don’t see why it’s mutually exclusive. I don’t see why you assume that living with me will somehow rob you of your independence.”

  “Heath, this is my last chance,” Josh says. There is pleading in his eyes. But I am merciless. I don’t say, forgive me, I’m so in love with you I’ll die if you don’t want to live with me. Instead, I say: “I don’t buy it. Two people together make each person stronger.”

  Oh God, I didn’t know I was manipulating him. I didn’t know back then what I know now, which is that I can be brutal in the pursuit of what I want, or what I think I want.

  A month and a half later and we’re moving into a little place on Divisadero at California Street. With the U-Haul double-parked outside and a carful of friends on their way to help us unpack, Josh pulls me toward him in the corner of the empty living room. He hoists me up against the
wall like I weigh nothing at all. He pulls my skirt off, puts his hand inside my underwear and a finger right inside me. The first time Josh ever kissed me, he’d done that—and for months afterward the thought of that moment, of his finger inside me, had left me panting with desire. But now, in our new apartment, I’m dry. His finger might as well be sheathed in a plastic glove like the gynecologist’s. Ouch, I think, I hate you. This has been happening to me lately, these involuntary flashes of hatred at the very moment we should be most loving.

  “I love you so much, Heather,” Josh whispers in my ear. He’s pushing against me, beginning to undo his belt. I think of a rutting dog. My head bangs against the wall behind me.

  Sometimes in these moments I think about Josh’s old girlfriend as my private aphrodisiac—well, not her exactly, but how I stole him away from her, how I was victorious. This makes me feel passionate.

  At the beginning with Josh, when we first got together, it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I was like, oh, this is what everyone has been going on about all these years. Once, when Josh went back to his old girlfriend, I actually thought that not being able to have sex with him again would drive me mad. In fact, it did drive me a little mad. I remember I had the sense that my body was made of doors. My desire for Josh had caused one door to pop open and then they were just flying open willy-nilly until the air of the outside world was breezing right through me. I had the sense that there were no boundaries, that I was just open space that anything or anyone could have access to. That’s when I first had the dream, my father chasing me, bluegrass music playing.

  Josh is moaning as he thrusts himself inside me. He whispers: “I want to anoint this place with how much I love you.” I’m just thinking, ouch, ouch, ouch. Fucking ouch. But I don’t say anything.

  When he finishes, we sink to the floor. His body is covered in that thin sheet of passion sweat. I’m as cool and dry as if I’d been having a glass of iced tea. He kisses me on my neck and on my face and then lays his head against my chest. I’m curled up on his lap. I always love him again after he comes. It’s only while we’re having sex that I feel overtly hostile.

  “This is our place,” I whisper. “This is where we’re going to live.”

  I listen to his breathing and think that I love him so much I want to weep.

  “You’re my whole life, Heather,” he says, “my whole world. You’re everything to me.”

  At the time, my heart soared. Now of course I know how utterly, ruinously claustrophobic it is to be someone’s whole world.

  I stopped having sex with Josh not long after we moved into that apartment. He’d reach over to touch me and I’d start crying. And when he complained about it, I was outraged. I pulled the old college feminism bullshit about it all being up to the woman and threw it in his face as though he were a dirty old man trying to cop a feel. But the thing is, once he’d admitted that he loved me, once we were a couple, his touch felt like a betrayal, and my passion for him disappeared as if it had never been.

  Oh God, I wish I’d been nicer about it. I wish I’d had the nerve to discuss it instead of just pretending it wasn’t happening. When we first went into couples therapy, this business about sex was the first thing Josh brought up, and I was shocked. I hadn’t even known he was angry about it. How could I not have known?

  It was in that apartment on Divisadero that the dream changed, that Josh became my antagonist instead of my protector. When I told him, he shouted, “You refuse to deal with your issues! You’ve destroyed this relationship! You’ve destroyed me!” And I wept.

  Thursday, April 13, 2006

  I can hear Summer’s food processor whirring over the phone.

  “What are you making?” I say.

  “Mashed potatoes but without the potatoes,” she says. I think, uh-oh. Summer is another childhood friend. She used to live in Williamsburg, but then one day she came home and Ricky Martin was filming a music video in her hallway, and she said, okay, time to go. She moved to Los Angeles last year and has since become a raw foodist. This worries me because Summer has a way of doing things that seem completely crazy and then a few years later all the rest of us are doing what she’s doing as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  I’m thinking, God, I hope I don’t become a raw foodist, while Summer is saying, “Honestly, Heath, it breaks my heart for both of you.”

  Summer insists on being frustratingly compassionate toward Josh. Don’t get me wrong, I know all about compassion. I go to yoga every day and it’s the only good thing in my life right now. (And yes, it was Summer who made me try it after much sniggering and eye rolling on my part.) But at this moment, I don’t want to hear it. Eleanor, on the other hand, hates Josh. She doesn’t say so explicitly, but she does, deep down in her bones. I can tell, and it thrills me.

  I change the subject. “Did you get the scarf I sent you?”

  “I did,” Summer says. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Lavender to go with your blond hair,” I say.

  Sakura comes trotting up. Glares at me, like, who are you to make all this noise and why aren’t you serving me steak on a golden plate?

  Since I’ve been making all this money with the billionaire, I buy a little something for Summer whenever I get something for myself. See, these are my people here—Summer, Eleanor, Mac, and Katy. I have another Level 1 friend too. Faith—we were the kids in the after-school program who’d still be there at five, hoping our parents remembered to pick us up. But I never hear from her since she moved back to Baltimore to have kids. I have lots of Level 2 friends also, but I’m not going to throw them all at you, or we’ll find ourselves in a Dickens novel here. Eleanor says I have a gift for relationships. That it’s what I do best. Although apparently, this gift does not apply to romantic relationships.

  Wednesday, May 10, 2006

  Josh is in LA. He went to discuss his movie with our director friend. I think this is the first time I have ever had the house to myself. It’s heavenly.

  Friday, May 12, 2006

  Eleanor is not as happy at Vera Wang’s as I am. It’s all white latticework, white satin couches, and thick white carpeting, more like fur than carpeting. We’re surrounded by satin, lace, tulle, taffeta, embroidery, and little bits of this and that sparkling everywhere. I’m so excited I’m nearly hyperventilating, but Eleanor is staring at the floor, thinking (I believe) how suicide would be preferable to this. But she is a Stein and Steins have big weddings. I’ve known this family since I was five, and I know Eleanor really had no say in the matter.

  “Come on,” I say. “Try on some duchess satin for your old friend Heather.”

  In the dressing room, which is quite a bit larger than my apartment, even though my apartment is pretty big, we’re nearly buried in crystal beads and seed pearls and yards of ruffled taffeta petticoats. I am trying not to die of jealousy thinking how her folks’ place on Martha’s Vineyard has been spruced up for the big day with extra plantings and new gravel on the driveway, of the carts of champagne and lobsters ordered. I’m thinking, as I have since I was five, why wasn’t I born a Stein? I would have been such a good Stein. Why does Eleanor get to be a Stein and not me?

  Then, before I even have time to ponder, Eleanor has dropped to the floor, all the silk and tulle of her gown billowing up around her. She busts into tears. Eleanor is two months pregnant. Besides her fiancé and her mother, I’m the only one who knows.

  “It’s the hormones crying,” I say.

  And then, when she doesn’t respond, “The walk down the aisle is one minute. The ceremony, twenty. Then you’re at the party. Then, bam, three hours later, the whole thing is a distant memory.”

  “I want to be married. I don’t want to get married,” Eleanor cries.

  “You’ve got it backward,” I say. “Getting married is awesome. It’s the being married that sucks.”

  Eleanor looks up. She scooches over in all her silk and tulle. Puts an arm around me.

  “Hey, who would I l
east like to meet at the end of a dark alley?”

  “Me,” I sigh.

  “That’s right,” she says. And then, “At least we have each other.”

  “At least we have each other,” I say.

  Saturday, May 13, 2006

  Josh came back today, and something seemed different. He looked kind of handsome. Less puffy. And his eyes actually seemed to have some life in them. God, it’s worse when I look at him and he’s actually there.

  “Everything is going to change for me, babe,” he said. “Something’s clicked. I feel completely different. Better than I have in a long time. This movie is going to happen. Just watch. I’m going to take care of everything.”

  I don’t think I even bothered to answer. I’ve heard it so many times, the only satisfying response I can imagine would involve shattering his face with my fist.

  Monday, May 15, 2006

  Scene: our living room, around 3 p.m., yesterday.

  I’m paying our bills at the dining room table. It’s an eighteenth-century Quebecois worktable, picked up at an antiques shop while we were in the Berkshires at a friend’s wedding and still thought it was appropriate to buy expensive antique furniture on a whim. The chairs I bought in a fit of trying to make the whole place perfect all at once, back when we first got here in November 2001. They’re from ABC. They have wide woven seats and painted green backs with chips and nicks in them to make them seem old.

  I’m hating these pretentious chairs (which I picked out) as I’m paying the bills and remembering the invitation we sent out to both our families for Thanksgiving that first year—even though we’d just moved in and didn’t have any furniture. We’d thrown away our old furniture because Josh didn’t think any of it was good enough for our new digs, although I suspected he also didn’t want to be bothered moving it. I was trying to show off to everybody by saying, look at me, I can get a six-figure book deal, buy a loft, and host a fabulous Thanksgiving two weeks after moving in.