by Leigh Stein
We were sitting outside on the restaurant’s back patio, eating french fries. The evening was unusually cool, and Brian snuggled in closer toward me for warmth, an absurd gesture from someone a foot taller than I am. “Get out of here,” I said. “I’m the lady; you’re supposed to put your arm around me and ask if I’m cold.”
He put his arm around me and pulled me closer. “What are you doing next week?”
I froze in his embrace. Did he somehow already know what I was doing? “Why do you ask?”
“I’m going to the Provincetown Film Festival for work and wanted to see if you’d like to come with me. On a road trip.”
“Oh, I would love to, but . . .” I tried to think of how I wanted to put this. Part of me felt duplicitous that I was going from seeing one guy to seeing another, but another part of me felt defensive. What, I was just supposed to wait for Brian for months, assuming he would want to get back together with me? I wasn’t supposed to make any plans? It was none of his business that Jason was coming to visit.
“I have a friend in town next week,” I said.
“Who?”
“Just an old friend.”
“You mean a guy friend.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s staying with you?”
“Yes.”
I waited for some kind of reaction, but Brian didn’t say anything else. I had never told him enough about Jason for him to put the pieces together, for him to worry.
On the second day of Jason’s visit, we went to this same restaurant. He was drunk and high. I was high and tired. I could not keep up with one-tenth of the amount of drugs and alcohol Jason was consuming that week, and no matter how much I drank or smoked, I still wasn’t having fun. He ordered a steak and two glasses of scotch, and I had a cheeseburger. We had nothing to talk about. Unless I was willing to participate in his fantasy of us moving back to the desert together, there was nothing to say.
After dinner, he wanted to go out and keep drinking, and I wanted to crash. I gave him my house keys and offered to tell him where the bars were.
“I’ll find them,” he said, and left.
By four thirty in the morning he still wasn’t back. Between night and dawn, the sky poured rain. I tried texting and calling, but there was no answer. I felt more pissed off than worried, and lay in bed, unable to fall back asleep, listening to the rain and the occasional whoosh of a car on the street. When he finally burst through my bedroom door, Jason was dripping wet.
He peeled off his clothes and dropped them; his belt buckle made a thud against the hardwood floor. “I went to this bar on Coney Island Avenue and there was this group of gay guys all talking to me and buying me drinks and the bartender was giving me all my drinks for free.”
“Why?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer to my own question: he’d found a rapt audience.
“Because they liked me! Then the bartender had to close, and it was raining, so I went home with her.”
“You went home with the bartender,” I repeated.
“It was raining!”
I didn’t even want to know what he did after he went home with the bartender. I didn’t ask. I went back to sleep. By eight in the morning, he was wide-awake, jumping on the bed, trying to wake me up, too, so we could start the day. “You’re being boring,” he told me, as I tried to bury my face deeper into my pillow. When I told the story of the bartender to Callista at the funeral, she said, “I can’t believe he did that to you, Leigh,” and I saw that she felt more pity for me than I’d felt for myself. I was so braced to be hurt by him by that point that nothing he did was beyond the realm of possibility.
The next four days in Brooklyn passed in a blur. I stayed as drunk or high as I possibly could, so I would be numb to what was happening. We got in a fight at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade because he was tired of walking and I was tired of him complaining. We got in a fight in Central Park in the rain over something that I’ve now totally forgotten. We had dinner with my friend Sarah and her boyfriend, and Jason avoided eye contact with both of them and blatantly ate a sandwich he’d pulled out of his backpack, before our entrées arrived. I canceled all the plans I’d made for him to meet my other friends. I gave him my house keys so he could go out at night while I slept alone. We did not have sex again.
Jason’s visit was a trap I’d built myself and then walked right into. I couldn’t wait for him to leave so I could go back to work, so I could see Brian again. The trap I’d built was also my own liberation: his visit had finally made me see that I no longer wanted this person to be a part of my life. The morning he left for the airport, I kissed him good-bye. Then I went to work and after work I went over to Brian’s and I made a promise to myself that I would never answer Jason’s phone calls or texts again.
For the first time, it felt like I had a choice. I didn’t have to be the tragic heroine of my own life anymore. I didn’t have to play Medea or Alcestis or a rusalka or La Llorona or Sylvia Plath, women spurned and vengeful and suicidal and martyred for love. Seeing Jason in the context of the life I’d rebuilt in New York gave me the clarity to cut his character from the script, and the power to put the ending on our story.
Within a month, he had stabbed a man in Little Rock. Eleven days after that, he was dead.
For so many years, I never felt like I could tell the truth about my relationship with Jason, because then there would be no sympathy for me. He hit you? Then why didn’t you leave him? And then I couldn’t reveal everything that happened the summer of his death, because then there would be no sympathy for him. He died young, so what? He stabbed someone!
I wanted sympathy for both of us. I thought maybe it was a matter of getting the facts straight. Maybe I was having trouble telling a sympathetic story because I didn’t have all the information.
So I decided that if I could just get a copy of the police report, I would be able to put that summer back together. I thought I’d be able to draw a clear straight line between our visit, his crime, and the accident, and then the story of our lives together would finally make sense.
Three years after his death, I obtained the incident report from the night of the stabbing.
Suspect is light complexioned, with medium, straight, brown hair. The color of the suspect’s eyes is unknown. The suspect is clean shaven. Exact Age: 23. Weight: 190. Is the suspect MENTALLY AFFLICTED? Unknown.
At 5:40 a.m. on July 10, 2011, a convenience store clerk called the police after a girl (a “female juvenile”) entered the store and told him that her father had been stabbed. When the police officer arrived at the scene, Jason was sitting on the curb and told the officer, “I was getting on my motorcycle when a white male approached me and asked me for money. I told him I did not have any and he walked toward his car. I went to a nearby vehicle to bum a cigarette. The white male said, ‘What did you say about me?’ and came at me. We fought and I pulled my knife to defend myself. He went back to his vehicle and ran over me and my motorcycle and left the area.”
There was a large amount of blood on the concrete, but Jason wasn’t injured. The officer asked Jason who got cut. Jason said he didn’t know. The officer repeated his question multiple times. Finally Jason said, “Someone might have gotten cut,” and pulled the knife from his pocket. It was covered in blood.
The first few times I read this, I thought Jason sounded like he was out of his mind. And if he sounded out of his mind, it meant either the report was badly written and I could criticize and dismiss it, or it meant that he was actually having some kind of psychotic break and I could forgive him because he didn’t know what he was saying or doing. Either way I was on his side. Then again, under the category of “demeanor,” there’s a check mark next to “calm.” Jason knew how to talk to police, so maybe he wasn’t out of his mind; maybe this was just sophisticated manipulation and I was falling for it yet again.
It finally dawned on me that Jason must have been manic that summer—from his Brooklyn visit to the stabbing to the deadly accident. I flashed back to the bipolar disorder medication I’d found in his bathroom when we first started dating. I replayed a mental montage of his visit: bag of pills, bottle of wine, jumping on the bed after three hours of sleep. I thought about his final e-mail, about his self-designed experiment on longevity, and his theory on using Adderall and bupropion cyclically, to treat depression:
When ceasing bupropion you have to gradually decrease the dosage due to the possibility of SNRI withdrawal symptoms- this is very common when dealing with ss and SNRIs. However, due to the mood-elevating properties strongly associated with amphetamine salts, you could most likely avoid the side effects that frequently include irritability, and recurrence of depressive symptoms. This could likely hold true for the opposite, decreasing Adderall and increasing bupropion, due to their similar effects regarding noradrenergic and dopaminergic activity.
His e-mail didn’t make sense to me when I read it the first, second, or third time. I thought I was just too ignorant to understand the science behind the drugs, but over time it became evidence of the flights of his manic mind.
Poor Jason, I thought. A victim of mental illness. No matter what he did to me during the four and half years we knew each other, I’d always found it much easier to award the role of victim to Jason than to consider that the role might be mine. Maybe that’s because when he was alive, he’d accused me of always casting myself as the victim in my stories, and the only way to prove him wrong was to stop admitting that he was hurting me. I so rarely described Jason to anyone as “abusive,” because I thought then I would be in the position of explaining why I didn’t cut him out of my life—why, instead, I always yearned for him to stay in it.
But this was a report of a crime, and it scared me to think my brain was still calibrated to his specifications, that I could read a narrative of what he’d done and still frame him in my mind as the victim.
For so long, I struggled to come up with an explanation for why our lives seemed so inseparably intertwined, for why I went back to him so many times when his behavior should have kept me away. Was it his charisma? My insecurity, naïveté? Our youth? Was I seduced by the idea that there was this one person for me who, for better or worse, I would never escape?
I never found the answers, but now I don’t think I need them.
I can reread the police report, all my diary entries, our e-mails, the poems I wrote him, every document I have of our lives together, but the stories I find there will always conflict, like dissonant piano chords. I can’t bring them to resolve, no matter how many times I keep banging them out. I know that I love Jason, and I miss him—present tense. I also know that when I first heard about the stabbing, the thought flashed across my mind that I could have been the victim. Do I contradict myself? Now that Jason’s gone, I finally have control of our story, and I’m leaving in the contradictions. Our story would be incomplete without them.
After his death, my mom planted a rosebush in Jason’s honor, in the backyard garden that he helped to till for my parents when we first started dating.
“I wanted to choose one that made sense for Jason,” she told me.
The rose she chose is called Knock Out.
How to Get Over It
(2011–14)
The young widow should wear deep crepe for a year and then lighter mourning for six months and second mourning for six months longer. There is nothing more utterly captivating than a sweet young face under a widow’s veil, and it is not to be wondered at that her own loneliness and need of sympathy, combined with all that is appealing to sympathy in a man, results in the healing of her heart. She should, however, never remain in mourning for her first husband after she has decided she can be consoled by a second.
EMILY POST
Decide to get a tattoo.
Pick out a Georgia O’Keeffe watercolor of the sun burning as it sets because it reminds you of the bold daylight in New Mexico, and the moody blue nights when you could see all the stars. The sun on the horizon makes a red, horizontal J. You’ve never wanted a tattoo before, but you’ve also never had something you wanted your own body to always remind you of. This is it, you think. Loss is the story you want told across your shoulder.
“Don’t get a tattoo right now,” your mother says. “Not when you’re so emotional.” One of her rules to live by is Don’t make any big decisions when you’re in a bad mood. Another is: Don’t cry in front of a mirror; you’ll only cry harder. It’s an empathic reaction. (Which is not to say that you have not occasionally, purposefully, violated these rules.)
“Why don’t you just download the painting and put it as your computer background?” she asks.
Your boyfriend agrees with her, and there go your hopes for an ally in this. He says you should really think about it.
“But I have thought about it!”
“Jews aren’t supposed to get tattoos anyway,” he adds.
You go online and look it up. The Jewish prohibition against tattoos comes from Leviticus 19:28: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.”
No one gets it: you want to gash your flesh for the dead. You want to be marked. And when strangers see what is on your skin, you’ll be able to explain, This is what I lost. This is what I have to live the rest of my life without.
If anyone should understand your motivations, it’s him, this man you’ve just moved in with, in the wake of your loss (see: Don’t make any big decisions when you’re in a bad mood). His grandfather has the indelible mark of a serial number on his arm from Auschwitz. He tells you that in high school he wanted to get the same number tattooed on his own arm—as a reminder of what could happen. What did happen. His mother was horrified. She forbade it.
Seeking a third opinion (seeking permission), over coffee you ask your sophisticated friend Cathrin with the pretty, coppery eyeshadow if she’s ever thought of getting a tattoo, and the answer is yes. She has it all thought out; it will be a German word (her mother tongue) on the inside of her right forearm.
“What word?”
“Longing.”
“What is it in German?”
“Sehnsucht.” She writes it for you on a napkin. “This first part, sehn, is longing. But the second part, sucht, comes from addiction.”
In essence, you both want the same tattoo, but yours is an image, and hers is a word. You could fill a catalog with all you long for—for him to come back, for a do-over, for a different ending in which not only were you strong and said good-bye but he lived and made a success of his life and decades later you could look back together on your twenties and laugh at all your follies, for his voice on the other end of a phone call, for one more of those Albuquerque nights when it was easy to fall asleep knowing he was just in the next room.
After Cathrin gives her blessing for your tattoo, you realize you may have mistaken your own desire. Maybe you didn’t want a tattoo. Maybe you just needed to talk to someone who understands this kind of longing.
Go to therapy.
You were planning to go anyway; you’ve actually been waiting six weeks to be seen at a low-cost clinic in Brooklyn. Your first appointment is a few days after his funeral.
“I’ve just been to a funeral,” you tell the social worker. She is only a few years older than you, with long plain hair and eyes that listen to everything you say. Like yours, her mother is a therapist. Every Thursday night you sit in her small office and cry for forty-five minutes. The tears arrive like a Pavlovian response to her sympathy; you can’t help but cry. On nights when there isn’t much to talk about, you trade book recommendations, talk about feminism.
Your therapist won’t use the word abusive until you do. It will take three years before you are able to say it, seriously, in her office, without using scar
e quotes.
Read all the books.
Read the books by the woman who lost her husband and then her daughter, the book by the man who lost his wife, the book by the woman who lost her mother, the book by the woman whose husband’s helicopter crashed in Iraq. Read the book by the woman who became best friends with a woman on death row in Texas, after her own son died in an accident. Read the book about the sick kids who draw pictures of the afterlife because they know that’s where they’re going. Read the book by the woman who lost her baby. Read the book by the man who accidentally killed a girl when they were both teenagers. Read about the friend lost to suicide (a train), the mother lost to suicide (an overdose), the young wife lost to suicide (an overdose). Read the memoir disguised as a novel about the young wife taken by a wave.
None of these stories are your stories.
And yet all of these stories are your stories, if you extrapolate the data. The beloved husband becomes your boy; the mother lost to cancer becomes your boy; the prisoner whose time has run out becomes him, too.
There is an endless supply of these books. You could never read all of them in your lifetime. The shape and shadow of each loss is unique, but you can always recognize the grieving by their disbelief, their struggle to make sense of tragic senselessness, their desperation for a different ending to a story that has already reached its conclusion.
The cover of one of these books—A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis—proclaims it is “a masterpiece of rediscovered faith which has comforted thousands.” You regret ordering this particular paperback edition (used) off the Internet. You reject the word comfort, the idea that any of these texts could take some of your sorrow away from you. Comfort sounds like a fix, and you don’t want to be fixed. Mostly what you like about all these books is getting to sit with their authors, their confused and angry and unwashed selves, overhearing their ambivalent thoughts. You like it when you get to the end of the book and they still don’t have any good answers to the questions of why and how that haunt them. So often these books end with a beautiful memory, a dream, a good-bye, or a wish. But you want to know what happens to him or her, the narrator, the survivor, who still has to go on living after the last page.