I came back to myself as orange light flooded into the car. The train finally pulled aboveground and rolled out across the marshy waters that surrounded JFK. We were deep in Queens now. In the distance, I could make out the city skyline glowing gold against a red sky. Deep down in my bag I could feel my phone vibrating through the leather of my backpack.
3. Messages from Invisible Sources
I waited until I got off the train at Broad Channel before I retrieved my phone from the depths of my bag. It was cooler out here, away from the city and closer to the ocean. The breeze was stronger and had a hint of fall to it. Unlike on the weekends, when the platform was packed with beachgoers and surfers, there was only a handful of people now waiting for the S shuttle to bring us the rest of the way out. My phone vibrated again, but still I refused to look at it.
If there had been a soundtrack to my life in recent years it was the buzz of my phone. If there was one thing I wanted to leave behind in my thirties, it was my phone. It felt like a narcotic. I’d lived with enough smokers, and seen the wrong end of the sunrise after nights fueled by lines of white powder, to recognize my own twitchy symptoms. The device itself was not entirely the problem, so much as the fact that it held incontrovertible evidence of the series of bad relationship decisions I’d made over the past few years. It was like carrying around a court transcript of my personal crimes and misdemeanors, proof of a person I didn’t want to be but had been . . . repeatedly.
She was always waiting for me. If I scrolled up (and up and up) I’d eventually reach that first innocuous hey that had unleashed her. Men and their heys. I’d come to see them as a “dead end” road sign: nowhere to go past this point. This particular hey was from a married man, and it had been sent a year and a half ago at 1:48 a.m. and received the following morning when I woke in the hotel room where I was staying at the conference I was attending. I was, at that point, twelve months out from my career-halting burnout and still in the early stages of putting my life back together. This married man had laid eyes on me the evening before, across a large, packed hotel lobby that was doubling as an event space. I could feel the gaze; it was as if we were in one of those comics where lasers shoot out of an alien’s eyes. Out of the corner of my eye I’d watched as he raced around the perimeter of the room to put himself directly in my path. It worked. We spent the next two hours on a couch talking. We’d parted at midnight. He’d hey’d me not long after.
It’s not as if I didn’t know not to get involved with a married man. I, like nearly every woman I knew who worked in New York media, had been dodging the advances of married men for so long it sometimes felt similar to walking down a crowded New York City sidewalk, one more annoying thing to maneuver around as I went through life. Not this time. This time, it was a direct collision, and I was laid flat. A weekend at a convention away from home turned into a series of clandestine rendezvous back in New York. In the aftermath, I’d often asked myself why. Why this time? When I mentioned to friends that I was involved with a married man, trying to figure out how to extricate myself, nobody seemed terribly shocked. But I knew it was a bad decision nonetheless. Not that it stopped me. He was successful and determined and sure of himself: three things I definitely was not in that moment. All the usual clichés had been uttered: he was unhappy, his marriage was basically over, it was just a matter of him figuring out how to leave and when. I’d heard it all before to varying degrees from men I’d walked away from, or at least kept at arm’s length while they cried on my shoulder over drinks. But I hadn’t kept this person at arm’s length; I wanted him as close as possible, and so I accepted these assertions as truths. I believed him. Instead of turning my back I responded with patience and understanding. Later it occurred to me that, more than anything else, these were the two things he likely wanted most. Even afterward, when it all spectacularly imploded and I could only shake my head at my own stupidity, I still remembered how alive it had made me feel. How exciting it had been to be excited about someone, to have him excited about me. In the numb aftermath of quitting my job, that excitement felt like a lifeline. Proof I wasn’t wasting the time I had left. Proof there was still hope for me, age thirty-seven, to get together all the things I needed to get together. If I wasn’t quite in love with him, I was falling that way. It was the oldest justification in the book.
The affair did not last long, though it might have if we hadn’t been discovered. It’s hard to give up feeling alive, even when the source of the feeling is a cheat.
I’d been walking across the Brooklyn Bridge the last time he’d called, three months after we’d met. It was May, and the fresh spring wind was whipping against my phone so that I had to stand in a sheltered corner under the soaring arch of one of the towers to hear him. “My wife knows,” he said. An electric surge of relief came over me. He’d spent two months going back and forth, back and forth: “It’s over, I just don’t know how to get out of it.” Or, “I can’t stop thinking about you, but I also have this life that I am just not ready to blow up.” It would end and start. I would cut things off, saying, “Go figure it out.” And then a few weeks later it would start again. This, now, finally seemed definitive.
My relief was short-lived. He, it immediately became clear, was not relieved she’d found out. “I may not even have a home to go back to tonight,” he said in the panicked voice of a child who’d only just realized there were consequences to actions. I looked out across the East River toward the Statue of Liberty, listening to him grasp reality, apparently for the first time, and was struck by the realization that this would make a terrific opening scene in a romantic comedy. As he went on about the need to go home, I became furious at myself for managing to be such a cliché in every way. I held the phone out for a moment and looked at it as though it were a person that I could glare into his senses. I wanted to say to him, No fucking kidding you might not have a place to go home to. Had this never crossed his mind? I wanted to say, You are gross. And You are an idiot. And then, I am gross. And I am an idiot. But I didn’t. It didn’t matter at that point. A few days later I received an email that read as though it had been written by a crisis management firm: he needed to return to his life “without confusion”; he hoped I could “understand and respect what he was saying,” (translation: keep my mouth shut), and that was the end of it.
The shock and dismay I felt over the suddenness of this ending was almost immediately dulled by the presence of the actor. I now thought of him as 646, the area code of his phone number. On paper (or rather in our text message exchanges, which numbered somewhere in the thousands), it was by far the more appropriate of the two relationships. In reality it had been far the worse, and I’d come to think of it as the more shameful decision of the two.
I first met 646 while covering the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. He’d been there to perform, I think. Those four days, which culminated in Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, had felt like one long jubilant circus, and meeting 646 was par for the course in a week in which every day had been filled with exciting encounters. We’d exchanged emails and then promptly lost touch. Four and a half years later, a few months after I’d collided with the married man, I’d bumped into him at a springtime event in Washington, D.C. He remembered me immediately. I’d rounded a corner to the bar, he’d spotted me, exclaimed “Glynnis!” and crossed the floor to say hello. (There is perhaps nothing more seductive to a person unsure of her place in the world than someone crossing a floor to pursue her with determination.) Telephone numbers were exchanged. Another post-midnight text, this time starting with Hi! which felt charming and direct. Over the following weeks messages were received and responded to, and then more, and then more.
In the beginning, I didn’t take it seriously. He lived in New York, but I didn’t see him and didn’t think much of our correspondence. The affair with the married man had not yet ended and was still consuming most of my attention. Plus my time in New York media had placed me adjacent to enough celebrities that
I knew better than to put too much faith in their behavior. In the aftermath of the affair, however, 646’s texts became a nice, gentle distraction. The slowness and distance of our correspondence felt safe and responsible compared to the whirlwind and drama and pain of the married man. At the end of that June, 646 moved to the other side of the country for work, but still the messages continued. Sometimes in addition to the texts I’d get little videos of him walking and making jokes for me; I began to think of them as sweet. “It’s old-fashioned. Like how the Victorians exchanged love letters,” a friend remarked to me once, when I told her I was beginning to wonder what this all meant. Another friend took one look at them and told me to get on a plane immediately. “He’s crazy about you,” she proclaimed.
It was easy to think so. I heard from him morning to night, a constant stream of bubbles on my phone. The messages were tame and funny and caring: pictures of what he was doing, the little videos, never anything risqué. There was nothing edgy or dirty here. If there had been, I’d have shut it down immediately; I’d had my fill of risqué behavior. Slowly our correspondence became part of my regular diet, as necessary and stimulating as morning coffee. Goodnight, XO he’d write. Or Good morning! XO or just XOXOXO. Once again, here was an accomplished, busy person taking time out of his day, multiple times a day, to check in with me, a person who at that moment was not entirely convinced she would be hard at work or accomplished ever again. I was intoxicated. My heart beat faster every time my phone vibrated. I began to imagine I could hear it vibrating when it wasn’t. All the mental energy I’d been missing in my life was reawakened and channeled into waiting for the dots on my phone that let me know he was typing a message, and composing responses in anticipation of them. As that summer drew to a close, it was nearly impossible to think of our correspondence as anything but the beginnings of a long-distance romance. How else could I think of it? What other explanation was there? Why else would a person, always so hard at work, devote this much energy into keeping a connection alive? When doubts crept in I simply looked at my phone, and there it was. I had it all in writing.
But the doubts still crept in. Invites to come and visit were frequent, but no plane ticket ever materialized. Rachel and I were still in the early stages of starting our business, and I was far too broke to buy my own ticket and far too proud to admit it. I’d get weird messages that had no context and seemed to belong to another conversation. Once he texted to warn me about an incoming storm. I was walking to work over the bridge at the time and looked up at the clear bright sky overhead, puzzled. Oops, wrong map! he wrote a minute later. Once I mailed him a small book of pictures I’d thought he’d like. I waited for a response and eventually asked him if he’d received my package. I need to check my mail! And also your face, I love it!! Later that day he thanked me for the place settings. I didn’t correct him, but I didn’t text him back either. A few days later, as I was coming up from the train, my phone vibrated as I always hoped it would (I’d started to anticipate the buzz of my phone each time I returned aboveground from a subway ride). I looked down. Reminder: I like you a lot, said the bubble.
Exactly a year ago, on my thirty-ninth birthday he showed up in person. Glynnis! I’m in NY for a day, he wrote that morning. Is this my surprise birthday present? I wrote back. I hadn’t mentioned to him that my birthday was coming up and figured this was the easiest way to do it. Ha! Yes! he replied. I met him at a restaurant in the city later that afternoon, wearing jeans and a silk pajama top. “You’re not going to dress up even a bit?” asked Rachel with a sigh, as I left the office. 646 arrived with flowers and a box of chocolates and kissed me on the cheek. As we ate, the waitresses hovered around our table at a safe distance, whispering to one another and stealing glances in our direction. Afterward he walked me to the subway. “When are you coming to visit me?” he asked. I floated through the rest of my day.
A few days later I woke up to this: WHEN are you coming here? I want to see you.
I’ll look at plane tickets, I replied, once again thrilled by the invite. Maybe I could squeeze a ticket onto a credit card if I really did some juggling. While I waited for my coffee to brew I scrolled through Instagram. Without putting much thought into it, I clicked on the button on his profile page that let me see pictures other people had tagged him in. Immediately, I spotted two pictures identical to ones he’d sent me; both were on another woman’s account. I scrolled through her pictures; a few lines down there was a picture of him, apparently wearing a sweater she’d knitted for him. It had been posted on my birthday.
Even then, I didn’t confront him. I wasn’t sure I had the right to. What was this we were doing anyway? It felt real, but what evidence did I have other than all these gray bubbles? Did I have the right to be angry? So many messages exchanged, and now we’re going steady? Reach a certain number of good mornings and good nights, and now we’re exclusive? We hadn’t even slept together yet. One day I went so far as to look up the definition of relationship in the dictionary, unable to trust my own instincts.
I dropped the conversation about visiting him. I tried to step back. Me no likey not hearing from you, he wrote. I didn’t like not hearing from him either. I consoled myself again with the thought that no one who sent me so many messages every day could possibly be doing the same with other women. And why hold on to me? Leaving aside how emotionally deformed a person would have to be to do that, I thought, Who had the time? Was he copying and pasting? Did he have a special app? A text generator for women that spammed numerous numbers with Hi! Just saying hello. Had I fallen for a bot? It was too ridiculous. More than anything it was this that reassured me: the inability to believe someone could put so much energy into something that didn’t matter to him.
By the time he showed back up in the city in November I was excited to see him again. He took me out for dinner. Afterward, we marched back to his apartment, as though on assignment, and I stayed the night despite my growing uneasiness. Or at least half the night. At about 3:00 a.m. he agreed that maybe it would be better if I left. He was weird about his space. He said it in a way that made me think it was something a therapist had told him to say. By that point I just wanted to get away. I could barely connect this man I’d just slept with to the one who had infiltrated nearly every moment of my life for the previous five months. Who was this flesh-and-blood outsider in my midst? It was alarming. It was as if I’d picked up a stranger on the street. And yet on the cold subway ride home I had to resist the urge to text the reliable person who resided there to tell him about this bizarre encounter I’d just had.
It should have unraveled immediately after that, but it didn’t. I stayed overnight with him again at Christmas, and then again in March. Each time I left with the same knot in my stomach—who was this person? And each time, despite my resolve not to, I returned to my phone for comfort. Or the illusion of comfort.
I did try to cut it off once. Over the winter, he moved back to New York, and all the things I had been using his distance to quietly excuse now became impossible to justify. I think maybe we start checking in a little bit less, I wrote him one day. He did not like that. Requesting a cessation of messages, he responded, is cold.
If I’d been slightly less hooked, I would have pointed out that he was describing himself. He never asked about my mother or expressed any curiosity about my well-being, but he also never went away, no matter how many sharply worded texts I sent, or how many times I erased him from my contacts or refused to respond to his messages. Over the following months, as my mother’s health declined, those gray bubbles were a strange means of survival. Something I could reach out for when I was lying in bed with her trying to calm her down or sitting in hospital waiting rooms.
Over the past year, in addition to caring for my mother it had sometimes felt as if I’d been living in a room filled with doors marked BOYFRIENDS, MARRIAGE, BABIES, FAMILY, and everyone but me was exiting through them. I was constantly being left. And here was someone who insisted on walking back in
, whom I literally carried around in my pocket.
Finally, in June, more than a year after we’d crossed paths in D.C., we had a nice spontaneous dinner in New York. I talked a bit about everything that was going on with my family, and he simply listened. Afterward I spent the night at his apartment. I left thinking perhaps there was something there to salvage: I could count the amount of times I’d seen him on one hand, but I needed to buy extra cloud space for my phone to hold all our messages. I was thirty-nine, the age at which women make do with what they have, take the parts and construct them into something usable. Perhaps I could do that with this. But there wasn’t anything. Two days later I clicked his tag on Instagram again and saw a twenty-four-year-old posting photos of the two of them out and about. I resolved to be done with it. It was hard. I tried every trick I could think of. But in the end, the surest way was simply to get rid of my phone. I figured if I could just steer clear of it for long enough, I could kick the habit of him. And so, I slept with it away from me. I deleted the Instagram app. I didn’t text him for over a month. Considering there had been many months when we hadn’t gone more than twelve hours without touching base, this felt like a remarkable feat. The effort not to know was practically herculean.
No One Tells You This Page 4