by Leigh Stein
“YOU HAVE TO STOP,” Jason said.
Or else what?
I became irritable from not eating enough, and soon I could no longer concentrate at work. My job was to give singing lessons to children, which meant sitting all afternoon in a small windowless studio, teaching breath control to the tune of “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” There was no way to check Facebook in the olden days before smartphones; the most I could do was stare at my flip phone and wait for it to buzz with a text from dat man who was no longer mine. I could feel myself molting like an animal—shedding my childish skin, my kindness, my passivity, and in its place growing the scales of a woman who would do anything to get what she wanted.
In a last-ditch effort to get over Jason, I posted a Craigslist personals ad, and went on a single date with a nice twentysomething who took me to the fanciest vegan restaurant in the hippest neighborhood in Chicago. Over five courses, he eagerly explained everything I never cared to know about DVD rental kiosks at grocery stores, and I failed to impress him with my accomplishments as a poet. Maybe I felt guilty that he had spent so much on dinner, knowing that I would never see him again, but I took the date’s failure as a sign: I was meant to be with someone else.
After dinner I took 290 West back to the burbs, and showed up at Jason’s apartment, still in my date outfit—a size-two houndstooth skirt, a royal blue blouse with a bow, and vintage kitten heels. When I’d first bought the skirt, it was too small, but thanks to him it now fit. I’d rehearsed so many dramatic love scenes in acting school that I had a script in my head for how this would go: I’d call out Jason on what he’d done, we’d argue, he’d raise his voice, I’d eventually cry, and then he’d realize what a dick he’d been and ask me back.
First I demanded to know why we weren’t together.
“The sooner we start dating,” he said, “the sooner we’ll break up.”
“But you’re dating Veronika now. Does that mean you’re going to break up with her soon?”
“You don’t know anything about her,” he said. “She was molested.”
“She was molested?” This wasn’t part of the script. “That’s why you want to be with her instead of me?”
“That’s not what I said.”
In my mind, I inventoried what I had on Veronika: I was definitely thinner than her, I was probably smarter, and I was old enough to legally buy alcohol—she wasn’t. Jason seemed to be enjoying the scene I was making; he was trying not to smile. I followed him around his apartment until I finally had him cornered against his kitchen counter. I leaned in to kiss him and he pulled away, laughing. I had never felt so grimly determined in my life—I was not leaving until I got back what this girl had stolen from me. I put my hand on the zipper of his jeans. He was hard.
“What are you doing?” he said.
I unzipped his pants. I went totally off script. “Cheat on Veronika,” I said, “and then you’ll have to be with me.”
It worked. I got him back.
Shortly thereafter, Jason decided to delete his Facebook profile. He said it turned girls crazy.
For Jason’s nineteenth birthday, I brought stacks of quarters and did his laundry for hours. He got approved for a loan to buy a motorcycle, and took me for my first ride.
“You’re going to have to hold on harder than that,” he said. We rode to the gas station to get sodas.
In the parking lot he said, “I think I might be falling in love with you.”
I wanted to know when he would know for certain, but decided not to push it.
Jason said I was his favorite person and called me darling without the g. We made plans to go to a water park in Wisconsin where we could hold real baby tigers. The school in Canada never even called me for an interview; I took this as another sign that we were supposed to be together, and moved into his apartment. On cold nights under the bedcovers, whenever Jason casually asked me to marry him I would say, Sure. When the weather got warmer, I’d sit on the grassy lip of the parking lot outside his apartment and read a book while he took his motorcycle apart and put it back together again, to see how it worked. I realized I was doing the same thing with the books I read, and told him that if I wasn’t going to directing school then I wanted to write a book—a real book, a novel.
“What if we moved to New Mexico,” he said, “and I could work while you wrote your novel?”
“Why New Mexico?”
“It’s supposed to be a very creative place.” The Land of Enchantment. Neither of us had ever been.
“Are you being serious?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Jason,” I said, “that’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”
We struck a deal: six months in Albuquerque while he worked and I wrote, and then we’d move to Los Angeles and I’d work while he pursued his dream of becoming an actor.
Now we just had to tell our parents we were moving. I was excited to move but dreading the conversation with Jason and my parents. My mom had tried to help me through his betrayal and now here I was, living with him. And Jason hated to perform on command; any time he knew he was expected to make a good impression, he rebelled, grew sullen, even rude. You could never tell which Jason you were going to get. Over the course of weeks, my parents got to know the charming, hardworking Jason (they hired him to do landscaping in our backyard and he brought down most of a dead tree by swinging from it with his bare hands; he also fixed my mom’s accordion with a screwdriver and she was so grateful she played “Oh! Susanna” while we danced) as well as the rude Jason, who could be surprisingly, memorably cruel.
One Saturday afternoon, Jason came with me to a state music competition, where my young students were singing and playing piano, and unsnapped my bra through my silk dress every time I turned my back on him. Humiliated in front of my students and their parents, I had to keep going in the bathroom to fix the clasp. He thought it was funny. And then he did it again at dinner, at a restaurant, in front of my own parents, and my eyes filled with tears.
“What’s going on?” my mom asked.
I whispered across the table. He became instantly furious that I had “told” on him, and walked out of the restaurant. My dad, a nice guy who’d been a cool dude at CU Boulder in the early seventies, took the side of Jason, the son he never had: boys will be boys. Maybe he was right, maybe we were all overreacting to a silly prank, but my mom called out the “game” as manipulative and controlling, a way to put me in my place. She and Jason got into an argument; he accused her of raising her “feminist hackles” but promised he wouldn’t do it again.
That night, after dinner, at Blockbuster, in front of one of my childhood friends working the cashier, he unsnapped my bra one last time, to see if I would say something.
I did not.
There was a part of me that didn’t care what Jason did to me—hit me, bite me, hold me down, humiliate me—as long as he didn’t do it in front of my parents. I didn’t care if I got ruined. But I didn’t think they should have to watch. I wanted to protect them more than I wanted to protect myself. Ultimately, being their daughter and being Jason’s girlfriend became mutually exclusive roles, and I had to choose.
It was as if all my years of training in the performing arts had prepared me for this—not for a career onstage, but for starring in the Tennessee Williams version of my own life. At conservatory in New York, I’d played a woman cheating on her heroin-addict husband with his brother, and another woman trying to break up with her married boyfriend without letting him know she was dangerously hemorrhaging. I’d memorized that monologue from Alcestis, a Greek tragedy about a woman so loyal she’ll sacrifice her life so her husband can keep his. I knew how to play a woman in crisis. We were both actors—Jason, too. I still have a paper he wrote on Respect for Acting by Uta Hagen. The section on obstacles says, “There is always an obstacle. Create one if it’s not obvious.”
“You don’t think this is a good idea, do you?” I finally asked her.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
That was the end of it. She didn’t want me to go, but I was going. My dad didn’t want me to go either, but he didn’t want me to go anywhere. He would have been happiest if I lived at home forever. I had dropped out of high school at seventeen and moved to New York City with the help of my singing teacher on the eve of my nineteenth birthday. (I eventually got my GED in New York.) My parents knew that when I seriously committed to something, I saw it through. But what I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t just another one of my bold moves for independence. Moving to New Mexico was a decision I had made under the serious influence of another. Somebody has me, Alcestis says. Somebody takes me away, do you see, / don’t you see, to the courts / of dead men. . . . Let me go.
After dinner, I followed Jason from my parents’ house back to his apartment. He was on his motorcycle; I was driving their sedan. He sped ahead, as he always did, and I lost sight of him, until I turned down the winding tree-lined road that lead to his apartment complex, where I saw his bike stopped on the shoulder. He was talking to a police officer. I tried to catch his eyes as I drove past, to see if everything was okay, but he didn’t see me.
It seemed like I waited a long time in the parking lot, but it could have been ten minutes. Finally, I saw him in my rearview mirror.
“What happened?”
“I got pulled over.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Did you get a ticket?”
He was grinning. “I was speeding, but the cop had a bike, too. He wanted to know where I got mine, what year it was.”
“So you did get a ticket, or you didn’t?”
“You need to learn how to relax,” he told me.
Niagara Falls
(2011)
I decided to go to Jason’s funeral. My mom offered to drive down from Illinois and meet me in Little Rock, but I worried that if she came I’d be recast in the role of her daughter, rather than his ex-girlfriend. I already had so many conflicting feelings about meeting his mom and stepdad under these circumstances and seeing his dad again for the first time in years—the sole thing we had in common was our love of Jason, in spite of all he’d said and done to us. At the time, it didn’t register that my mom was offering to come not because of her unconditional love for Jason, but because of her love for me.
The morning after I spoke to Jason’s brother, I used Brian’s laptop to go online and book a flight. Then I logged into Facebook, thinking I might post something about Jason’s death so I wouldn’t have to tell my friends one by one, but as soon as I signed in, I lost my train of thought. There was his face. By the time he died, Jason had deleted his Facebook profile (again) because it kept too public a record of who he was dating (made girls crazy), but nevertheless, there was his face in my feed. His best friend, Callista, had changed her profile picture to a photo of herself and Jason at prom, and when I clicked through to her friends, I entered a hall of mirrors. Jason’s mom, his grandmother, his half brother—everyone had changed their profile pictures to photos of themselves with him. There he was with his family on the front porch, squinting in the sun. There he was with an ex-girlfriend, the Chicago skyline sparkling behind them. Should I do this, too? I wondered. I started flipping through all my Facebook albums: “Balloon Fiesta,” “Leigh and Jason Go to Las Vegas,” “Santa Fe,” “Final Field Trip.” Jason and I had lived together for a year, and known each other for another four, but in that moment I discovered there were no photos of us together.
I had twenty-six pictures I’d taken of him: in his Ray-Bans, in a fringed leather jacket, in his cowboy hat, posed beside national monuments and roadside attractions. I had a fourteen-second video of him rolling down a dune at White Sands National Monument. I had exactly two pictures of me, taken by him. But none of us together.
Were there no photos because he didn’t think I was pretty? I hated myself for reverting to those familiar insecure thoughts, but my brain was determined to remind me that somewhere out there, in a place I hoped I’d never find, were the pictures of him and Veronika. I also couldn’t help but remember that trip to White Sands, handing him the camera, asking him to take a picture of me near where the tall yucca stalks sprouted from the dunes. I was wearing my leather motorcycle jacket. My hair was soft and windblown. He tried for fifteen or twenty minutes to get a good shot, but in the end deleted all of them. My face just wasn’t very photogenic, we decided.
I didn’t change my profile picture, and I didn’t post anything either. Even as someone who’d been writing online about my life since I was fifteen years old, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted everyone to know—that I was devastated? Grieving? Shocked? That I was on my way to a city I’d never seen, to bury someone I loved but whom few of my friends had ever even met?
I didn’t want to post publicly on Facebook or on his online memorial page, but at the same time I was desperate to be recognized as a mourner. I left Brian’s company for a few hours to go back to my own apartment and pack a carry-on bag with black underwear, black sandals, and a black cotton dress.
“You don’t have to wear all black,” my mom had told me over the phone. “Funerals are more casual now.”
But all black was a rule I could follow, even if it was self-imposed. I needed something traditional to hold on to, since I was having so much trouble navigating the territory of modern mourning: I was invisible on Facebook without a photo to share; I was mute on his memorial page. I grabbed a printed cotton shawl I’d bought in New Mexico, as if by wearing it I could wrap the entire state around me, and found the fake turquoise ring that Jason had bought me in the Ozarks. It was cheap plastic and made my ring finger sweat, but I left it on for the next week, wedding myself to my ambivalence.
Then I looked for my anxiety medication. I wanted that little orange pill bottle in my purse, just in case. Just in case what? I started crying and couldn’t stop? I started to scream in front of people who didn’t know me? It was hard to know what to expect once I got to Little Rock, but at least I could prepare for an excess of feeling. The reason I was first prescribed Ativan at all was because Jason made me see a doctor in New Mexico for acting too emotional, too “crazy.”
I began searching around my desk. Since Jason had visited six weeks earlier, I hadn’t slept in my own apartment once, and everything was still a mess. I’d been spending every night at Brian’s luxuriously air-conditioned apartment, sleeping beside a man who was quiet and predictable and gentle. There. It was in the grooved part of the desk drawer where I kept my pens and pencils.
And it was empty.
Empty? The prescription had been for sixty pills, and I’d only taken a few.
Then I found a little note on my desk, written in Jason’s handwriting. While I was on the phone with my boss, he’d written, May I have an Ativan? I must have nodded because underneath he wrote, Thanks, you look super pretty and sound very important. I could remember him taking a few. I could even remember him taking a few more, crushing them, and snorting them. He’d seemed manic to me that entire week, and it had taken a potent combination of pills and wine and weed to even put him to sleep for a few hours.
I couldn’t fucking believe it. When I wasn’t looking, he’d taken them all. I started to laugh. Goddamnit, Jason, I thought. You couldn’t even leave me anything to take at your funeral?
I looked at the note again. You look super pretty. Maybe my face had changed a little in the years since we met—I finally had cheekbones—but what had really changed was my self-esteem. I wasn’t as insecure and des
perate for his approval as I’d been at twenty-two. I’d stopped trying to be the cool girl, at the expense of everything else that mattered to me.
Still, I saved the note. A keepsake for the girl I used to be.
My bag packed, I grabbed my laptop and took the bus back to Brian’s. I spent the afternoon picking out my favorite pictures of Jason: him holding a horseshoe crab at the New Mexico state fair; him pointing at me with fingers like guns at dawn in front of a sea of hot air balloons; him with his arms outstretched in the middle of a petrified lava field. Late on Sunday night, Brian walked with me to the drugstore so I could have prints made of these photos, to take with me to Little Rock, to give to his family.
“Can I see what he looked like?” Brian asked.
I showed him. When he died, Jason was twenty-three and looked just as young and golden and untouchable as he had when I met him at eighteen. Physically, he was the opposite of Brian, who was tall and lanky, his dark hair already handsomely dappled with gray at thirty-one. Brian was the nice tall Jewish boy my mom had been encouraging me to find for years. He was so tall he had to bend his knees when he kissed me. He was so nice it felt radical, like the time I accidentally broke two of his dinner plates and froze in the kitchen, staring at the shards on the floor, waiting for him to yell at me. Without saying anything, Brian got the dustpan from the closet and started to clean up the mess.
“You aren’t mad at me?” I asked.
“It was just an accident,” he said, and I went in the bedroom, shut the door, and cried along to the little voice in my head that said, Jason would have been mad. Jason would have yelled at you.
In so many ways, Jason and Brian were opposites (Stanley Kowalski versus Mitch Mitchell), which was why, in the immediate aftermath of Jason’s death, I imposed a gag order on myself. I would not speak of Jason with Brian. When I showed him the photos, I did not tell him, for example, that strangers used to stop us in the street, to ask what movie they recognized him from. I did not try to dredge up anecdotes that would make him more sympathetic, like the time Jason called me from Arkansas to tell me he’d rescued a baby squirrel that had fallen from a tree. These were my own private bruises to poke at.