by Alana Massey
He was a native New Yorker and I had been an enthusiastic import when I was eighteen, so we recounted the many merits of the city while deriding Los Angeles, where his job in the entertainment industry often sent him. He spoke of the terrible artifice of Los Angeles and I echoed the sentiments with a litany of San Diego’s moral and urban-planning failures. It was a perfect set of circumstances in which to start an affair and a lousy one in which to fall in love.
“You can be my girlfriend that knows about my girlfriend,” James suggested on the ride home on Monday. He smiled with his whole face from the driver’s seat, grasping at my left hand with his right. He demanded that Tommy, our affair’s new coconspirator, plug his ears while he began negotiations for how we might continue our illicit behavior upon our return to the city. I felt like I was ten years old again, when my first boyfriend, Scott, made his friend Kurt go into the closet so that my dignity would remain intact for our first kiss. James sulked convincingly at my refusal of the offer. “It just sounds very French to me,” I replied coyly, a line that made him laugh. To this day, I am still not sure if I stole that line from a book.
Like Maria Wyeth, I was in a habit of sleeping with attached men. But this was the first time I had done so knowingly on the first try and the first time that I had wanted to continue despite the fact. But when we arrived at my apartment and unloaded my bags from the truck bed where we had been fucking just a few hours before, I averted eye contact and slowly said my phone number so he could enter it into his phone without Tommy being able to tell from the passenger seat. “I’m going to see you,” he said, staring directly at my eyes though I kept them averted. “You have my number,” I replied, in the hopes that a value-neutral response would drive him crazy about me.
His barrage of attention and affection began two days later. He said that he missed me and wanted to see me at the end of the week. He had a way with words and a swagger I had seen only in movies. I remained careful not to let delight come across my face when I was so convincingly feeling so very little. At one point, Joan describes a masseur and Maria’s dear friend BZ as “gleaming, unlined, as if they had an arrangement with mortality.” It is a physical description but one apt for how I saw James: a spot of eternity in an otherwise rotting world.
James often remarked on the oddness of how even military personnel and law enforcement were drawn to him. “I don’t get it; they just like me for some reason,” he would say, especially during the conversations we’d have when he asked to meet my career Navy veteran father. In a mix of envy and awe I would reply, “That’s because everybody likes you.” He would shrug off such claims, unaware of his charisma’s attendant privileges and I unwilling to expand on their power.
We began to meet often at his parents’ Battery Park City apartment overlooking the Hudson River. It was infrequently occupied since his parents had retired to what he referred to as “Long Island” but I would later learn was East Hampton. It was one of many attempts to obscure the extent of the wealth in which he was raised, but the address and even the sheets on the bed that always smelled fresh in their immaculate whiteness betrayed a story of money. The apartment was not characterized by its value so much as its seeming ability to stop time. In one fantasy in the novel, Maria injects sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” into her arm. When it fails she imagines driving into the “hard white empty core of the world.” Being with James felt like some euphoric combination of both; only the white empty core was not so desolate and desperate when our modern prescription variations of sodium pentothal were able to populate it with what I believed to be some sad but true thing at the center of us.
At a birthday party toward the end of the summer I told a friend about his more worrying habits. In an attempt to disguise my growing affection, I said, “Don’t worry, he’s just a rich kid posturing as a graduate of the School of the Hard Knocks.” Without missing a beat, she replied, “That’s always the one that dies first in the movies.” There were warning signs all over, first in their eyes and then in the few brave enough to summon the word “unhealthy” to their lips.
We returned to the Hudson Valley near the end of the summer for an informal folk music gathering that Tommy’s family throws every year. James had broken up with his girlfriend by then, but another ex of his, Virginia, would be making an appearance with two friends he was not aware of until a few hours before her arrival. He berated Tommy for allowing Virginia to come, venomous and snide in a way I had not yet witnessed in him. I sat silently in the front of the truck as he banged on the steering wheel and rattled off irrelevant but embarrassing personal details about the trio of young women and the traitorous friends who had granted them passage. I had heard of Virginia before only in passing, a “crazy ex” with whom things had not ended well. I was accustomed to this lazy shorthand for men who dislike the emotions of women, but his outrage signified that she still meant something to him. Men do not indulge in such outbursts over women about whom they are ambivalent.
I soothed myself with literary snapshots of men’s violent outbursts representing some internal passion, disfigured care but care nonetheless. Carter and Maria might fight this way, I thought. “After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave,” Joan writes of the fights between Maria and her husband. We were in the open woods and sharing the back of a truck, so I had the refuge of rigidity but not of another room, which felt like enough to last a weekend.
My discomfort at the speed and force of his unexpected wrath prompted me to drink for the first time in three years. I became drunk quickly, from both lack of practice and from the anxieties that had prompted me to imbibe in the first place. Virginia and her friends introduced themselves to me kindly, while James avoided the section of the woods where they had set up camp. In the absence of my typical inhibitions, I enthusiastically befriended them and found them warmer. Their designer clothing and casual talk of international travel suggested wealth similar to James’s, but they did not posture against it as he did.
The only photograph of James and me together would be taken during that hazy episode. In the photo, I am staring into the camera, desperately drunk, with my mouth half open and a come-hither stare. James’s back is turned to the camera behind me, adding wood to a massive bonfire. I have attempted to project meaning into this scene, something about my negligence that he was building an attractive and dangerous fire within my sights. It never quite sticks as well as the simple fact that I wanted to stand by the fire and he wanted to build it.
The two of us drove home together at the end of the weekend and stopped for dinner around dusk. After a long silence, he took my hand in his and said, “I want us to go to Cozumel. I want to take you to Cozumel.” It was a place I knew well from photos taken by my friends who remained in San Diego into adulthood, but I had never been myself. I also knew it to be a desirable destination because BZ’s mother in the story hates it, and what glimpses of her the reader gets are terrifically unflattering. I replied, “So let’s go,” but knew very well that James would never take me to Cozumel.
He would break things off with me two weeks later to attempt to repair the relationship that we had poisoned with our basement antics and the events that followed. He even asked for advice on getting her back a day after professing once again how much he missed me. I treated the pain of being unchosen with Klonopin and a solo viewing of a One Direction documentary at the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue. It was my budget version of driving off into the great white nothing of the desert; and in lieu of a handsome actor to fuck some of the pain away, I settled for the on-screen company of cheerful, rambunctious boys.
When James reemerged in November, it was with appeals to the woods. He texted that he missed
“getting high and wilding.” He communicated the way a teenager might, tearing at the fabric of the very adult tragedy I felt I was living. I said that if he was serious about seeing me, he would have to come over that very night to prove it. It was the resolute ultimatum of a grown woman masking a childish enthusiasm at the potential reunion. He arrived within the hour. Two weeks later, he claimed to have ended things completely with his girlfriend. We picked up right where we left off.
I made him promise that if he ever chose someone over me again, he would not tell me. He should just break things off and go away, make another excuse if necessary. I told him that girlfriends don’t just sprout from the ground and that the devastation of being left for someone else would be more to bear than the knowledge that he’d continue to sleep with other people. I also asked to never be complicit in his infidelity again. I felt that I had outgrown other-womanhood and did not want to play the role. Frankly, I felt too much and let it show.
I hesitated to share my writing with James, considering it an earnest collection that was at odds with my nonchalant self-presentation and intentional air of mystery. But in the early morning of the Fourth of July, I laid my head in his lap and pulled up a segment that I had written and read for a CBC radio show. The story was about my struggle with suicidal ideation and a saccharine reflection on our belovedness by strangers. I was quick to share the story with the whole of Canada, but my fingers trembled as I pressed Play for the man I loved despite myself. It was after an all-night run through several bags of cocaine and the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now. The all-nighter was full of our typical laughter and near-perfect sex, but our serotonin-starved brains after so much cocaine and so little sleep left us vulnerable as the segment played.
“That was really beautiful,” he said after seven excruciating minutes spent listening to my own voice. He kissed my forehead and said he was glad I was alive. “Why don’t you ever write about me? About us?” he asked. I said that I wrote about people only with their permission and asked why he wanted me to anyway. “I don’t know. To prove that we mattered. To prove that we existed,” James replied. I recalled a moment of frustration between Maria and her friend BZ over her seeming ambivalence. “Tell me what matters,” BZ had demanded of her. “Nothing.” Maria’s reply was decidedly sharper than mine, but I said, “James, we don’t exist.” In my perfect version of women having their emotions entirely obscured under bored gazes, neither of us would have bothered to respond at all.
That evening, we went to a barbecue on his sister’s roof in Crown Heights. Having primarily witnessed his charm in groups of strangers, I was startled by the blinding love between James and his family and friends. It was his typical charm on steroids, amplified by the familiarity of the crowd and by the celebratory nature of the holiday. Through nervous laughter and averted eye contact, I fumbled through introductions and withheld tears as he held me close during the fireworks. I thought briefly about how there were worse ways to spend the Fourth of July. At the bottom of the Long Island Sound between the beach at Silver Sands and Charles Island, for example. The next morning, I broke things off and gave him my e-mail address, “in case you need to let me know about any STIs,” I said, in yet another attempt to appear as empty as I longed to be.
My no-contact resolution did not last long. I sent him photos of myself in a sequined bikini, purple on top and green on the bottom to resemble a mermaid. There was a failed attempt to coordinate schedules so that we’d be in New Orleans at the same time. I refused to meet him and held on to hope that some new man who was also charm incarnate would appear so that I might never see James again. “I want to see you,” he would whine convincingly, appealing to a certain fondness I had for occasional turns of boyishness. He requested more photos, and I refused as a sort of pregaming for disciplinary role-play. One night would have been a typical exchange of plans to get together littered with explicit photos, but then James told me that he’d be moving to Los Angeles to be with someone else. “There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant,” Joan writes.
I put up a worthy fight against his insistence on seeing me one last time before he left. He tried to coax me into forgiveness for what I knew would be his final abandonment. He said, “I love you,” for the first time and refused my request that he take it back. We exchanged the kind of cruelty reserved for those we know how to cut the deepest. He walked out the door and bid me farewell in a text message rather than with the smoke in his voice.
“Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life,” Maria declares at one point. “Radical surgeon of my own life” was a line I had remembered and conjured often, long before retrofitting this story about the desert to a city affair. But what happened next was not so much a delicate surgery on myself but rather a crude execution of any lingering love left between us. I found his new girlfriend online and told her everything. He retaliated with a swift and relentless viciousness that would be more an exercise in trauma pornography than in prose to deliver here. His desire to hear my bones crushed under a moving train and a gentle declaration that I’d be pretty with a bullet in my head made appearances alongside actual threats. He asked over and over why I did it.
“I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point,” Maria says, protesting the very idea of pursuing explanations. I admit that I fumbled over and wept into explanations for my reasons when he called to spew venom like the very snakes that litter the story to which I now return so often when I replay this episode. “I had to burn every fiber of every bridge that led to you,” I choked out through tears, proud to have introduced metaphor even in a time of great distress. The truth was more complicated, more hostile. After all, I was like Maria, and “[she] did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.”
When his new girlfriend stood fast in her refusal to speak to him, he claimed he had taken thirty Klonopin and his imminent death would be my fault because I took his love away. When he stopped responding to my texts, I begged her to talk to him again so he’d go to a hospital, which she did. In hindsight, faking an overdose was a brilliant Trojan horse to ride back into her life on. It was then that he was able to rewrite our history as just one of many affairs he regretted with the sad, sundry bulimics of New York. He left for Los Angeles the next day.
There were moments to which I returned repeatedly in the aftermath, trying to match his calculated deceit to prior conversations that he used to gather intel. His professed desire to have only daughters mirrored my own, but I was unsure if it had been gleaned from a direct statement of preference or from my evident distrust of men. He began to tell me, “I just want you to feel safe with me,” several weeks after I revealed past violence experienced at the hands of men. He pulled me into the nook of his arm and whispered, “I want to keep you here forever where it’s safe.” I wondered what it felt like to possess such emotional capital and not use it. I wondered if the burden of latent antipathy felt similar to latent passion.
There are times, too, when I am drawn back into the text of Play It as It Lays and find new ways of having inhabited the story without my own knowledge. “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other,” Joan writes of Maria’s extended trip to Las Vegas, a feeling of disorientation that characterized the weeks that followed. On one of her routine drives into the desert, Joan writes, “As if in a trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.” It was this feeling that I clung to in the aftermath, having felt what I thought was love coursing through the marrow in my bones only to discover poison in the end.
But the artifacts and gestures of our time together were hollow things shaped
like love, their true emotional bankruptcy revealed by touch rather than by sight. They were hyperrealistic portraits and bowls of plastic fruit rather than blurry landscapes that appeared whole from afar. Part of the purpose of such objects is illusion itself; they are designed not only to appear beautiful but to appear real.
The archive that remains of me and James is littered with artifacts well suited to melancholy fiction. Condom wrappers behind a heating unit and cocaine residue on a hardcover children’s book. The address in Battery Park City stuck stubbornly in the memory of my takeout delivery account. An armchair that he moved into my apartment for me and then sat in for a lap dance. A matching pink-and-yellow bra and G-string, a sartorial abomination to me, but sex appeal to him. There is a collection of screenshots of text messages in which I halfheartedly sever ties, followed by his uncharacteristically quick replies with empty promises to do better. I am not the first person guilty of saying, “I’m leaving now,” when I really mean, “Don’t you want me to stay?”
I made it all the way to the process of transcribing his threats on an official form for requesting an order of protection at the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn before realizing that because he fled so quickly to Los Angeles, there would be no way of delivering it without his address. I am glad I was spared the bureaucratic nightmare of pursuing it to its end. I am told that is its own kind of trauma. I am happy to have conjured the strength to deny him an opportunity to bear witness to my suffering again. I have no way of knowing if Los Angeles quieted his restless and reckless tendencies. I have no way of knowing if he was lying when we lay in his truck and spoke such ill of the Golden State. I do hope that he is sufficiently distracted by paradise.