Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  I’ve cultivated quite a lot of shame over this, because I didn’t stick up for myself. I knew that the anguish in me was growing with each story I heard about some other girl and, to his credit, he was always very frank with me. I think he reasoned that if he remained direct and honest, the ball was always in my court. I had all the data I needed to make decisions for myself. The problem was I didn’t have the spine.

  This is a kind of classic bullshit move people play with one another. It takes a certain amount of adulthood to realize that being honest doesn’t make you good, it just makes you honest. You can be completely open and direct about your flaws but it doesn’t absolve you of them. Hopefully we can all agree that lying is awful, but it’s important to add that being frank about your own awfulness doesn’t make you less awful. It makes you easier to identify.

  I’m not histrionic or vain enough to use words like “abuse” with respect to this situation; not only was I an effectively willing participant, I was also inoculated by his directness. Yet things began to accumulate that chipped away at my self-worth. Eventually, it felt like I would endure anything to remain unhappy. I was paralyzed: fearful of being away from him, vigilant with him near.

  Maybe it was the bottle of lubricant he kept on the nightstand beside his bed, something never required for our purposes but an ever-present reminder of his activities with others. Maybe it was inviting me to a screening of a tape he made of two drunk girls fooling around in his bed. Maybe it was finding out that his roommates casually referred to me as Wednesday, owing to the day of the week that I was the girl in his room. Maybe it was when he admitted to me that he jerked off to the nightmarish anal rape scene in the movie Irreversible. A couple of times. Maybe it was when he told me that I was very innocent, which he “liked too,” but part of the reason he wanted to be with other girls was my innocence made me unsuitable for the kind of violent sex he liked. This was fair enough as, having only been with him, sex was a mostly undiscovered frontier and doing anything that wasn’t regular old missionary was practically a space mission. Still, it’s never nice to hear that the reason for your bottomless torment is your own sexual inadequacy. By the time I came across a numbered list he kept of every girl he’d slept with in chronological order, I was so hollowed out that I scanned the list and saw my name—at thirteen, at seventeen, at nineteen and twenty-two with strangers names’ in between and so on—and I felt nothing.

  —

  Part of my reason for telling this story, despite that it’s still a dull pain in me, is to prove to myself that I don’t have to feel shame over how someone else treated me and not to judge myself by coping with the heartache in a way I now recognize as weak. Part of it is to say that no one should feel ashamed of who they were at seventeen, unless they are the same. No one springs fully formed from their parents, able to identify goodness and decency and what we’re willing to put up with in a partner; we have to learn. Part of it is to affirm that I don’t mean to demonize him, because I don’t think he was actually terrible to me so much as he was terribly suited to me; as far as sex-crazed teenage boys go, he wasn’t remarkable in his appetite, but he was distinguished by his unwillingness to lie. Part of it is to record that honesty is not necessarily a virtue, let alone one meaningful enough to offset a corresponding set of vices.

  I must also admit this period of my life instilled in me an unfair albeit permanent distrust of promiscuity. This time so soured me on the concept of casual sex that I sometimes still suppress a pang of judgment when I hear about messy hookups and one-night stands. It is a little Pavlovian negative association burnt into my heart and nothing more. In my right mind, I understand this is bigotry.

  In a very important way, he didn’t go about his promiscuity badly: he was frank, made no effort to conceal his activities, used protection meticulously and, as far as he was concerned, I was fully aware and fine with it. Because I said I was. I thought I could handle it, I tried, it hurt more and more and I became so sick with it all that it hardly stung any. I just took it.

  But the most powerful lesson I learned in all of this? Don’t date people you don’t really like. They may pull off long hair and be charming and have lots of friends, but if you don’t have anything to talk about and you don’t respect each other, there’s no point. There comes a time in many bad relationships when you realize that the other person is hilariously incongruous with you and your tastes and your values and, when you become an adult, the adult thing to do is listen to that realization because it will save you a lot of time.

  With this first “serious” relationship, that moment came after months of enduring so much sadness. It was not the bottle of lubricant or the list of conquests with my name appearing again and again alongside the names of girls less virtuous on account of their anonymity. It was not his unapologetic want to fuck other girls with whom he could do things deemed too advanced or illicit for me. It was this: one day, I found a brand-new copy of the Tao Te Ching on his desk.

  —

  Thanks to my upbringing, I have an aggressive dislike of Westerners purporting to practice Eastern religion. I grew up beside many selfish, nasty, sanctimonious kids who came from money hailing themselves as Shintoists, for example, because they wanted to rebel against “the establishment” and they liked anime. Once I saw a woman at a Whole Foods sushi counter harangue a soft-spoken sushi chef for daring to use the same knife on separate (but both vegetarian) sushi rolls. He apologized profusely, but she insisted he make new rolls all over again and chastised him the entire time he did so, accusing him of thoughtlessness and not taking pride in his work. When he finished, having discarded the first rolls, she accepted the new batch, put them in her cart, prayered her hands at her chest and said curtly, “Namaste,” before stomping off. This is, of course, no fault of the East’s but it is exquisitely embarrassing for us in the West, having birthed and nurtured that rare beast, the “asshole Buddhist.”

  There I was in his room, under his towering stacks of action movie DVDs and beside his brand-new computer already made sluggish by an astonishing quantity of pornography. I picked up the book and saw its unbent spine and its pristine cover and said, “What’s this?”—knowing full well what it was but smugly suspicious he didn’t.

  “Oh,” he said, immediately trying to play it cool, “it’s this really cool book that’s, like, poetry but about how you should live your life.” He paused and seemed to decide that he could do it more justice, then added, “It’s about simpleness and it’s just really cool. I’m really into it.”

  “Huh.”

  I drove home the next morning and he no doubt spent the following night fucking some girl I didn’t know. Yet it was our exchange that plagued me and, for once, not the knowledge that I’d be sleeping alone while he was sleeping with someone else. I sat in bed that night thinking to myself that something about this smacked of behavior I actually couldn’t abide.

  Within a week or two, he had changed his profile across various social networks. Under religious views—which, if filled in, is never a good sign—went the curious phrase “Philosophical Taoism.” My first thought was everything I knew to be true about this guy was diametrically opposed to what rudimentary knowledge I had of Taoism. It seemed, if nothing else, disingenuous to go waltzing into hundreds of years of nuanced reasoning and say, “This flatters my idea of myself. Now I shall gild my social media presence.”

  I knew in this exact moment that a vain, sex-crazed teenager whose only want was to play beer pong until he passed out inside of a stranger probably neither grasped nor sincerely cared for any text concerned with applying thoughtfulness to living. I probably didn’t need to confirm with Laozi that this boy was unable to attune himself to the ineffable while having sex competitively. Or that it seemed impossible for him to revere the “mysterious female” while choking her with his cock.

  My second thought was, If I start using “philosophical” as an adjective, will it make
everything I do sound more important?

  It was right then I got over it. I was so repulsed by this affront to critical thought that I managed to tear myself out. It wasn’t all the humiliation and suffering that severed my deep, urgent emotional attachment. It was him becoming a Taoist on the Internet.

  This cultural dilettantism was actually quite a beautiful expression of a fundamental difference of ours: I think that philosophy comes from introspection and consideration and discipline (which is why I have little will for it); he thought it came from spending six dollars at a mall bookstore, deciding it flattered him and then trotting off to the Internet to make sure changes in his relationship with the infinite were reflected online. Which is to say, I think philosophy is the activity of critical thought, he apparently thought philosophy was the absence of it. It was not everything else he did to me; it was old-fashioned, oblivious, self-serving hubris.

  It’s unfortunate I internalized his behavior and found it so objectionable that it formed my own bias. However, I can appreciate how he required of me an introspection and self-knowledge to eventually grow from that. He was the architect of a “Choose Your Own Sexual Hang-Up Adventure,” in my heart. Although it took me eight years (or so) to get out of that midnight in an abandoned amusement park of my psyche, it was a valuable journey out and I won’t begrudge him. Though I do hope, someday, he has a girl.

  Besides, teenage heartbreak is devastating regardless of context. All feelings are at once more lucid and baroque when we’re seventeen. If he didn’t break my heart, someone else would have.

  To those of you who think it’s a bit hypocritical for me to praise my own coming to terms with an unfair bias while at the same time admitting I left a man out of what was ultimately an act of religious intolerance, I say, “Excellent work.”

  PARENTS

  I think one of the greatest challenges to dating—at all ages—is parents. Not your own, obviously, there’s nothing you can do about your own parents so they’re not really a “challenge” so much as a nuisance. I mean your significant other’s parents. Most of those I’ve encountered have just despised me. Strangely, the ones who didn’t despise me were the ones that despised their sons, so there was probably a connection there.

  I had a brief two-month faux relationship right around age fifteen that didn’t go far past the hand-holding stage. He was crazy. He was clinically crazy. Once, his mother took my hands and looked me really deep in the eyes and said, “Ashley, you’re just too good for him. Someday you’ll realize that.” That was intense. It kind of made me wince at the time. Still, I’m touched she brought it to my attention.

  I had another boyfriend with a mother who openly loathed me. She had a blunt, abrasive character in social situations and was extremely childlike in her affect: denim smock dresses, braided pigtails affixed to her graying head with little plastic barrettes and giant Coke-bottle glasses, behind which she’d blink with animal bewilderment. Despite this—and her habit of clapping when the family dogs entered the room—she was exceptionally cruel and prone to hysterical fits of screaming rage when she disliked something. Basically, she was the quirky, adorable child from every juice commercial you’ve ever seen, only add forty years and ill will.

  The moment I really understood this collision of simpleness and nastiness was right when I decided what college I wanted to attend, a college I happened to be very excited about. I ended up getting, for the sake of brevity, something like but not quite the equivalent of a classics degree. Which is funny, in this economy, because I really could have just taken $160,000 out of the bank—someone else’s bank account, mind you, because I don’t have that money—spent it all on acid and gotten to the bottom of things myself. At least I would have talked to some cool trees or something. But no, I graduated college in an abysmal recession with a degree in Reading Aristotle Good. And not even that good. Reading Aristotle Serviceably, that was my major.

  The point is this is something I really wanted to do and I was so proud when I got in. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been because it wasn’t remotely hard. It’s not like they’re turning kids away from the Reading Aristotle Serviceably program at the school no one’s heard of in the middle of the New Mexican desert.

  Regardless, I was over at this early boyfriend’s house for dinner the day I decided I wanted to attend this college. His parents were visibly relieved to learn there was an end to our relationship in sight. They asked me what I was going to study there and I said, “Classics.”

  My then-boyfriend’s mother looked up from her kids’ menu food—because the rest of the family ate like adults but she ate butter noodles and chicken fingers for dinner every night—and she just said, “What . . . a waste . . . of time.”

  I was so startled by the sheer force of her judgment that I had no idea what to say.

  She continued: “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Uh. I just think that . . . well, it’d be great to read books, I think that would make me a better writer. And I’d like to read classics so I can learn about the history of the Western world,” and I stuttered something about seeing its “progression of thought.” Which isn’t terrible, really, because it’s not like one day some politician or television producer or ad man decided that man has a soul or that a system of morality should exist or that the planets move in a certain way or that parallel lines don’t intersect (or, eventually, that they do). Those things had to come from some place and no one’s a monster for being curious about where. It is monstrous, though, to ridicule teenagers who care about their education, while the absolute most monstrous thing is to lack the courage to speak up for oneself in moments of minor conflict and then, having stewed for years, write a vicious takedown of everyone who ever wronged you, especially that woman who wore rainbow striped socks with the toes in them. Well, fuck her.

  After I’d given my little apology for studying classics, she replied in the same tone of barely bridled disgust, “I don’t think any of that stuff matters.”

  I’m still baffled that an adult would say this to a teenager. I don’t think you should disparage the dreams of terminally insecure, ultimately well-meaning teenagers who always offer to be the designated driver. Unless, obviously, their dreams are stupid. Like wanting to break the world record for having the most billiard balls in your mouth or major in communications.

  I kind of nodded, as if to say, “I totally get that,” because I was a coward who thought placating people and being blindly respectful was going to get me somewhere in life. “Yeah, I mean, it’s not like becoming a lawyer or something.” Which, by the way, my mother still wants, though the only reasoning she’s ever put forth is I’ll acquire lots and lots of skirt suits. Something opaque about skirt suits.

  My then-boyfriend’s mother frowned deeply and looked up, above me, now appearing to think aloud more than challenge me directly. “I just don’t understand why anyone would want to read a bunch of books by dead white men.”

  I looked at her and her long, messy, grade-school braided pigtails and I regarded the funny cat-shaped brooch she always wore on her breast like a billboard of suspended adolescence and all I could think was, Funny, I don’t know why anyone would want to sit around in this darkened house all day crafting with macaroni noodles in between shitting out unremarkable children. But I’ll tell you what I do understand: why your son fucking hates women. But you can’t say that to someone with a plateful of chicken fingers and butter noodles. It’s selfish to ruin things like that.

  —

  Miraculously, this mother was not the greatest source of grief from a significant other’s parent I’ve encountered. Not even close. Next in line was the mother of a guy I dated when I was a few years older. This guy was also a bit of a woman-hating prick, but his parents were much more erudite. His mother was outwardly a very nice person but also passive-aggressive and undermining. Her favorite game—if I were to give it a name—was Telling Stories About All
the Girls My Son Has Known Who Are Better Than You. Although I didn’t take her seriously enough to be hurt by this, it was still exhausting to live on the receiving end of her thick-headed affectation of urbanity and withering disdain.

  For example, I’d be siting in this woman’s living room. I’d like to tell you I was reading Plato or Chaucer or Shakespeare or something that reflects well on me but I was almost certainly doing a puzzle intended for small children, wearing a jean jacket, and watching Animal Planet. So whatever infantile thing I was doing in the living room was unimportant, but she would come walking through with a basket of laundry and she would see me sitting there with the puzzle and then she’d stop and look off with a far-and-away expression, misty almost, and say, “Oh, that’s so strange.”

  I’d look up.

  “I just got déjà vu. You reminded me of someone.”

  “Oh? Who?” And I walked into the trap with huge, innocent eyes because she was instigating conversation. Maybe she liked me!

  “I was just thinking of his first girlfriend, Colleen.”

  “Oh.” And I looked down because that’s a bizarre thing to say.

  Of course she elaborated. “She really broke his heart. He was so cut up over that, he just stayed in his room for weeks. He was devastated, I didn’t think he would ever recover. I mean,” and here she would pause thoughtfully and tilt her head to one side as if to give her statement heft through more adroit consideration, “she had to go to Yale and do what was best for her. I think that’s why he took it so hard, because they didn’t break up over something bad happening or their feelings for each other going away. They broke up only because she had to pursue her dreams of studying architecture in the Ivy League.”

  Side note: the college I attended—where I met her son, incidentally—accepts approximately everyone who applies, though it is renowned for its astonishing rate of attrition (about half of the freshmen class makes it to graduation, a statistic that would horrify more arid institutions). I’ve never been one to be impressed by the name of a college, and I think higher education is what you make of it, and you get out what you put in, and also, the undergraduate experience of the Ivy League in particular holds little glamour as far as I’m concerned thanks to its legacy of grade inflation and dynastic admissions policies. I also recognize that these thoughts are extremely convenient for someone who attended a college roughly all people can get into. The brochures explain it away by suggesting most students self-select (and there is truth to that), but that is a kind of honey-laced wormwood we drink while discussing Lucretius with other eighteen-year-old assholes who smoked too much weed to get into Brown.