“Okay. This is the truth, so help me God. Lis and I had . . . become friendly before I was able to have the conversation with your mother—”
“Conversation? Dad, you just informed her that you were filing for divorce!”
She had cried so hard over the next ten days that she lost ten pounds. I told her she should market the Surprise Divorce Diet Plan—lose ten pounds in ten days! All it’ll cost you is three easy payments of $19.95, your marriage of nineteen years, your house, and your happiness.
“Are you going to let me finish? Okay. My therapist told me that my marriage to your mother was over. I fought her on it. I almost walked out, quit therapy then and there. But once I realized she was right, I knew I couldn’t go back. Once I’d seen it, I couldn’t unsee it. As soon as I could, I booked a trip back to New Hampshire to tell your mother. I had dinner with Lis several times. She stayed over once before you kids were told. I regretted it then. And I regret it now.”
He let out a deep breath.
“You had better not tell her that. Your mom or your sisters. I am trusting you here.”
He was. It wasn’t the gutting confession I had hoped for, but it was something.
“I won’t tell anybody.”
We sat there in silence for a moment. The sun was nearly gone. It had roiled through its beautiful end while we hadn’t been paying attention.
“What else?” he said, frowning like he had just been told he needed a root canal and was bracing for more bad news.
“I mean . . . there’s more. There’s a lot more. I didn’t prepare a list. Honestly, I didn’t think we’d get past that first one.”
“That’s good. I mean . . . that’s good?”
He looked at me.
“It’s a start.”
I stood up. He stood up. We shook hands. Then we went inside.
What the fuck happens now?
My father asked Theresa to marry him, and she said yes. I wanted to be a prick about it, but Theresa was too kind. Besides, we were trying to play nice now. Before they could marry in a Catholic church, Dad had to have his marriage to my mom annulled.
It wasn’t bad enough that he had divorced my mom and tried to divorce us kids. Now he was trying to rewrite history, to purge us from the official record, to deny that any of us had ever existed. It infuriated us all. But the most infuriating thing was that my mother was going along with it. She knew it was an insult. She knew it was bullshit. She knew it was incredibly painful for all us kids. But she refused to stand in his way.
“Fuck it, Mishka,” she said. “I’m out of tears. I am bone dry. If he wants it gone, fuck it, good riddance.”
In order to get the annulment, my dad had to sit for interviews with a priest, then write something up establishing that the marriage had been flawed in its inception. Like a fucking essay on “What I Did over My Summer Vacation.” They’d been married nineteen years, bought three houses together, and raised a family—how could he argue it wasn’t a legitimate marriage?
I pestered him to read what he’d written. He sent me a couple of paragraphs. They were more tantalizing than satisfying. There was nothing about me or Tatyana or Tashina. I could almost see where he had nipped out the juicy bits, the parts that might explain why he had shut us out, how he had been able to shut us out. I knew he’d written about us, about me, and it burned me to know I would never read it.
When the heat went off in my Bushwick apartment that winter, the landlord declined to turn it back on. Tired of seeing her own breath each morning, my roommate, a girl I’d worked with in Colorado, found a new space, an open loft in a warehouse. Reluctantly, I agreed to move in with her and her friend, my fifth move in as many years in New York.
My dad was between jobs, so my roommates and I chipped in on a plane ticket, and he came east to help me build out the loft. I took some time off from Luxx, and for four days we worked every waking hour. I wasn’t a total failure at carpentry, but my dad, man, he’d line a nail up and drive it flush with the stud with one strike of the hammer.
Allison brought us takeout food and leftovers from her job at the soul food restaurant. Each evening, she marveled at the progress we’d made. Each night, I slept like the dead. Each morning, it took me several minutes to get out of bed because my bones hurt, my teeth hurt, my fingernails hurt. It was the happiest I’d been since I was a kid.
After framing, sheetrocking, taping, and spackling four separate rooms, the last thing left to do was to hang my door. My dad set the frame in place, then looked at me.
“How do you want it hung?” he said.
He was covered in drywall dust—not just his hair and his face; there was also a light dusting on the lenses of his glasses, though he’d been cleaning them all day. Dust in his eyelashes, even.
“Well hung?” I said.
He grinned and rolled his eyes.
“Hoo boy. Gets it from his old man, I guess. I’m doing it so it will certainly be hung well. But do you want the door to swing open when you twist the knob, or do you want it to swing shut when it’s open?”
It would be most convenient for the door to swing shut. But what would be the most difficult for him to do?
“Can you make it so the door just stays however I leave it?”
Three minutes later, he called me over. I wobbled when I got off the ladder. I was so fucking tired. We were so fucking tired.
Dad gently pushed the door. It swung shut and clicked quietly into place. He opened it three inches and took his hand away. The door didn’t move. He pulled the door five inches open and took his hand away. The door didn’t move.
I started laughing. He started laughing. You had to give it to the old man sometimes.
The anniversary of my year off drinking came and went. I kept going: working long hours at Luxx, boxing at Gleason’s gym, tinkering with guitars, practicing guitar and squeezing out a few songs about my old life, reading but carefully not writing. My dad and I talked, not a lot, but a little. Tatyana was doing okay; she had her nest and her baby and her husband. My mom was doing okay without any help from me, still down in the Virgin Islands with Paul, selling advertising for the local newspaper. She didn’t make much money, but they didn’t pay rent or car insurance, and she had lots of practice living close to the bone. Even Tashina seemed to have found her happiness, going to college in Toronto for radio production. What made me happy? I mean, besides alcohol.
I loved Allison. She loved me. We never fought. She was never mean to me. She was patient when I got squirrelly, which was often since I’d quit drinking. Allison was beautiful, and I loved every Allison she was: I loved her at my side while I worked the door at Luxx; I loved her singing my songs with me, on stage or at home; I loved her in Rochester, opening her Christmas presents like a little girl while her parents looked on. I loved her sober (to support me in my year off), as I loved her after one drink, the taste of wine or vodka-cranberry in her open mouth, as I had loved her wasted—Alcoholison. When I woke her in the middle of the night to show her how the plastic wrapper on the Tylenol PM made blue sparks in the dark, she didn’t get angry. I loved her in public, and I loved her in private, gasping underneath me. I loved her asleep, her eyelids fluttering in a dream, loved her so much that I missed her even while I was beside her, while I was inside her. But . . . was this it? Were we just to go on loving each other forever?
I got an email from Riley. I had kept my name off the utility bills in every apartment I’d lived in and paid to keep my number unlisted. But finally she had found me.
I read her email. Then I read it again. Then I deleted it. Then I rescued it out of the trash can, created a folder called “Work,” secreted it there, and turned my laptop off. I closed the lid, zipped it into its carrying case, and stuck it under my bed. As if that would keep me safe.
I was finishing a guitar I had been working on for months, an old Hagstrom neck and body I’d found in a pawn shop, which I’d wired with Jazzmaster pickups—The Hagmaster. I had finally gotten all
the electronics up and running, and I was ready to take it for a test drive. Before I strung it up, I opened a can of lighter fluid to clean the fretboard. I put some on a paper towel and rubbed all the old gunk off the fingerboard. The lighter fluid smelt oddly comforting, familiar. I sniffed the paper towel, greasy from the lighter fluid, gray from the dirt. Then I took a deeper breath. Then I opened the container, emptied my lungs of air, put my nose right over the opening, and drew its scent as far inside me as I could. God, it smelled so fucking good. I started shaking.
I knew it would be a mistake to write back to Riley, but I couldn’t help myself. I let fly, all bile, just raging at her. She wrote back. I wrote back. Then we were writing to each other.
She was in Washington, DC, as she had been for all six years since she’d broken off contact. She had been trying to track me down. She knew I had gone to Columbia and had even screwed up the courage to call my old apartment less than a month after I left there. I had slipped up and put my name on the Con Ed bill, I recalled. Riley had never stopped missing me. Riley wanted me back.
Tatyana and Bill were down in Virginia for some military training. They had invited me down to see Mika. I booked a hotel room outside DC and caught a bus down a day before I was to meet Tatyana. I would not sleep with Riley. I could not sleep with Riley. But I had to see her. I had to know.
When I got off the bus, she was nowhere to be found. I sat down in the bus station to wait. Ten years now with Riley, ten years with her absence, ten years of a rusty fishhook in my heart for her to twist whenever she got bored.
I waited for more than an hour. Of course she wasn’t going to show. To lure me down here and then not show up, well, that would be the perfect punch line to this long, humiliating shitshow. The explanation I’d come so far for? The explanation was that life did not owe you an explanation for your suffering and that you were an idiot to expect it. It was what I deserved. Then there she was: a woman in her mid-twenties, reddish-brown hair or maybe now brownish-red. Heavier not just in the hips but everywhere, especially her face. She looked worried and anxious, late and stressed, more fearful than excited.
I had been remembering Riley as I’d first seen her at Simon’s Rock in the fall of 1993. But had I even been remembering the actual experience of her on the lawn like a delicate rainforest sugar glider, fearful of being trampled? Or was I remembering the memory of that experience from being heartbroken over her for the first time, when I was seventeen? If you taped a song off a CD, and then taped that tape, and then taped that tape, well, with each new copy, the song got duller, weaker, diminished, until the music was finally swallowed by noise. Remembering Riley—compulsively, desperately, insanely—hadn’t diminished her. It had perfected her. Memory hadn’t preserved her but transformed her. The Riley in my head had become better, brighter, more alluring as the years had passed. For the real Riley, time had had the opposite effect.
Go, I thought to myself. It was stupid and crazy to come here. You have your answer. Stand quietly and slip discreetly out before she sees you. Then run. And don’t look back.
She saw me. We both froze. Then she walked directly toward me.
We didn’t hug or even shake hands.
“Hi,” she said, breathlessly.
For years and years I had been imagining this moment, encountering her again, and all the brilliant, cutting things I would say.
“Hi,” I said.
She drove me to my hotel. I made her wait in the car while I checked in and ran my bag upstairs to my room. This would unfold exclusively in public places.
We got a table at a fake Mexican chain restaurant across the street. We ordered, and a mute food runner put two limp, greasy Southwest Caesar salads before us. We discussed the banalities of our lives. She was finishing her master’s. It was okay. She was excited about having been accepted to a PhD program in Montana. I passed her the two CDs of songs I had written about her. And then we both went silent. I looked down at my salad, as appetizing as a dissected, formaldehyde-soaked frog.
“Why, Riley? Why did you just disappear on me?”
I looked at her. She looked down.
“You were cheating on me,” I said.
“You’ve cheated on me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she said. “A boy at the dance program in Maryland. It’s terrible, and I’m sorry.”
“I . . . I don’t even care about that. It’s actually a relief to get confirmation. I knew something was going on.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Where did you go at the end of the summer? I mean, I know you went to DC to dance. I called your house one night when I was shitfaced, and I talked to your mom.”
“She told me.”
“I guess the question is why. Why did you go? How could you? You didn’t just get accepted to that program randomly one day and leave the next morning. You knew you weren’t coming to Denver; you knew you were going to DC. You knew that for a long time. And you pretended everything was okay.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? You just disappeared. It was like you died.”
“I was afraid you’d react badly. You were just . . . you were kind of unstable then.”
I laughed.
“If you thought I was unstable before you disappeared, you should have seen me after. I went insane.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m not insane anymore.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Why didn’t you want to be with me? I loved you. You loved me. Or you said you did.”
“I know. I don’t know. I just . . . I couldn’t go to Denver. I didn’t know why, but I knew I couldn’t go. Something bad was going to happen.”
“Something bad did happen to me.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Fuck it, whatever, I’m not going to be a crybaby. You made the right decision. You should have told me, but you’re right. It would have been a mistake for you to come to Denver. I was out of control. It would have ended badly.”
“I should have given it a chance. Maybe it would have worked out.”
“No. No, you did the right thing. It was crazy. I was crazy.”
“Maybe it was crazy. You were certainly crazy, but I was crazy too. We were so young. But we’re not crazy anymore . . .”
“Riley. Are you kidding me?”
“Mishka, I . . . I’ve never stopped loving you. The whole time, you were the one. I knew it, but was I was too afraid to see it through. I’m not afraid anymore.”
This whole thing, coming down here to meet her, had been a rotten idea. What was I going to do, pull out a yellow legal pad, give her the specific dates and times I’d cried on the bar or wept myself to sleep, and punish her for each one?
Riley was damaged. A loaded, unkind word, but there was no other. Not just her brain or her mind but the very core of who she was. She had been damaged by the men who had raped and abused her, as a child and as a teenager. Then she had damaged herself more, out of rage at them and out of rage at herself for being powerless to stop them. Then she had damaged me, out of pain and out of malice. And then I had damaged her, and myself in her name.
Inflicting more pain on her wasn’t going to undo any of that. It wasn’t going to make me feel better about the hell she’d put me through. It had been torture, absolute torture. And it was nothing compared to what she’d endured.
“Riley.”
She looked up at me, miserable. She was still so beautiful.
“It’s okay. I forgive you.”
Her face opened up.
“I forgive you. And I wish you every happiness. I hope you have a great life. But I won’t be in it in any way. I will never trust you again.”
I insisted on paying for the salads we didn’t eat, a petty revenge I allowed myself. We said good-bye in the hotel parking lot outside her car. She stepped close for a hug. I shook her hand, then turned to head inside.
Light was fl
owing through me. It was over. It was done. Riley had been leaving me for nearly ten years. Now she was finally gone. For the first time in my life of weakness and idiocy, I had done the right thing. I was free.
“Mishka.”
I looked back.
“Can I use your bathroom? I’m sorry, I should have peed at the restaurant.”
I hesitated.
She rolled her eyes.
“Come on. I have a long drive home ahead of me.”
“Ah . . . yeah, that’s fine. Sure.”
She followed me into the hotel. We walked up to the second floor in silence. I opened the door with my key card, walked in, and turned on the light in the bathroom. Riley pushed the door to the hotel room closed and, without a word, knelt at my feet and pulled my belt open.
Riley dropped me off the next morning at a little country store at the entrance to some military base where Tatyana was going to come pick me up. I felt completely out of my mind.
We had slept a couple of hours at most. My will had folded instantly with her on her knees in front of me, staring deep into my eyes, my cock in her mouth. Riley wanted to do everything, everything we had ever done, everything she had never let me do, everything either one of us had ever thought of. She had brought a Polaroid and wanted me to document every depravity.
And I wanted it all. I wanted to roughly fuck her mouth till her eyes watered and she gagged; I wanted to come in her mouth, come on her face. It sickened me, and it made me hate myself, but I goaded myself on: here is what you wanted; take it now, take all of it, all you can stomach.
I professed to love my mother above all others and to hate my father for the ill he’d done to her. I’d aced my women’s studies course; I loved my Bikini Kill and Liz Phair records; I read women authors and went out of my way to support female musicians at the club. But in my personal life, all that shit went out the window. I’d taken Riley for granted when we’d been together and cheated on her repeatedly. When I’d finally driven her away, that’s when I decided I couldn’t live without her and dove headlong into hateful obsession. I professed to hate the men who’d abused her, who’d dehumanized her, who’d treated her as a sexual possession . . . and then, in my mind, I’d done the same thing.
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