Quitter

by Erica C. Barnett

  As if that’s ever where it ends. Within months, we were texting each other from across the room at Tiffany’s house—what if we left together, right now?—and then one night he was standing at my door, acting nervous, bottle of red wine in hand.

  I had always assumed infidelity would involve more pretense—a tortured conversation, maybe, some self-justifying explanation about how his marriage was a sham—but there was nothing to it. We sat, we drank, and he opened his arms. And then, after a while, I took his hand and led him into my bedroom.

  Sneaking around had always come naturally to me, and I slipped into the role of secret girlfriend like it was the part I had been born to play. It was thrilling, like a shot of tequila—a little hit of dopamine every time my phone buzzed and the little pixilated envelope indicating a new message flashed on my screen. If I had qualms, I just reminded myself that I wasn’t the one who was cheating—and what business did I have worrying about the state of his marriage? Before long, John and I were stealing away for midday “lunches” at my apartment, and I was sitting up waiting for him to come over after band practice, which often lasted until eleven or twelve. Occasionally, he would spring for a hotel room—once out by the airport, when he was flying somewhere for work, and once on a whim, when I was out drinking with Lisa at a bar downtown. “I’m at the Ace downtown,” he texted. “Can you get here?” I told Lisa I had to take an emergency phone call and ran down the street, leaving her alone at the bar.

  It was all worth it, though, when he played me a new song that he said was about me, and when he finally told me that he loved me. Well, not exactly. What he actually said was, “I can’t say it, but you know I do.” Close enough. A comment like that was like a drink of water at the end of a long, grueling hike: It replenished me in a way that the predictable generosity of a regular relationship just couldn’t. I could live for a week on “I’m so happy I got to see you tonight,” or a T-shirt he thought to buy me at the airport on a trip to see his family back East. “Somebody in Nashville loves you.” Hey, he’s talking about me!

  Eventually, when gifts and late-night texts were no longer enough to assuage me, “I love you” became an all-purpose balm. It smoothed over all the times he disappeared for days without texting, or the times when my phone buzzed with some vague excuse—“I’ve been held up by circumstances, but I’ll be there as soon as I can,” meaning one in the morning, or never. “I love you,” he would tell me when we finally saw each other. “I need you.” And all the despair and anguish I’d been feeling would disappear, the way a hangover vanishes when the first drink kicks in.

  Everybody knows that cheating men don’t leave their wives. And everybody who gets “chosen” by a cheating man thinks they’re the exception, even if they tell themselves they know better, as I did. Eventually, though, I did start to wonder: Was I just like all the rest of them? Because, as I quickly discovered, I wasn’t the first—or the fourth, or the tenth. I started to resent his wife, and, increasingly, him. I did little things, then bigger ones, to make him jealous, thinking maybe if he knew how easily he could lose me, he would try a little harder to keep me around. Meeting guys at bars, it turned out, was the easiest thing in the world—if someone had told me all it took to start a conversation was a few drinks for bravery and an ability to act interested in a guy’s screenplay or band or alma mater, I would have started doing it a whole lot earlier. I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who had one-night stands, but now, weeklong or monthlong flings became a point of pride—proof that I didn’t give a fuck, a way to avoid giving someone time to disappoint me.

  Not that every guy I met was a dud—I liked some of them quite a bit, but, you know, I was taken. So I always came up with some excuse to dump them or drive them away. One guy wanted me to throw a football with him in the park like I was his kid or something. Another couldn’t name the mayor. Still another once referred to my breasts as “titties.” Gone, gone, gone. Eventually, an act of rebellion—going home from a bar with one of John’s old friends—led to something that could have turned into a real relationship, but it came with a built-in kill switch. What was I going to do—dump the guy who said he loved me, or come up with some excuse to end a relationship that John said was “killing” him?

  Still, I told myself that I was under no illusions—John would stay with his wife, and I would move on. Just not yet. It wasn’t even like John was the kind of guy I’d want as a partner (he was a cheater and a musician). What drew me to him was the feeling of being chosen, as if no married man would cheat on his wife unless he felt compelled by an attraction too strong to resist. If John, whose stories about one-night stands and backstage hookups had me convinced he could have anyone he wanted, would risk everything to see me, then I must be something really special.

  By Christmas, it had become harder to maintain the façade. I was drinking almost every night, and every show of affection from John felt like a referendum on my value. When he showed up at my apartment loaded down with a ridiculous number of gifts—an expensive stainless-steel Cuisinart food processor, cookbooks, a red rhinestone brooch—I wasn’t grateful; I knew, from his text telling me he’d be late, that he’d been shopping at Tiffany, and I didn’t see any blue boxes on my floor. When he got us a hotel one evening shortly before he left for the holidays, bolting after just a few hours with a paper-thin excuse about a last-minute band practice, I sulked: I just knew he would never treat her that way, inviting her out for a special occasion and then leaving in the middle. I started getting my revenge wherever I could—making out with a friend of his at a party while he waited for me in his car back at my apartment, or talking about my latest boyfriend while we were all at Tiffany’s, knowing he had to sit there and take it—but I always felt that he had the upper hand. Compared to just . . . being married, dating was so much work, and going out for conveyer-belt sushi with a nice guy you met through a friend of a friend is never going to provide the same thrill as having midday makeup sex in the office bathroom with your married lover.

  Things went on like this for two years. They might have continued for years longer, if we hadn’t decided to take a trip to California—a significant step, I thought, because it meant being out in the real world together, not confined to the 600 square feet of my apartment or some anonymous hotel room. Surely, it meant something. Maybe he was ready to leave his wife and be my boyfriend, but for real.

  In reality, it was a swan song. We landed in San Jose, picked up the red convertible John had reserved at the airport, and drove down to Monterey—an adorably romantic coastal town with a beach called Lovers Point. In theory, we were free. But outside the familiar privacy of my darkened bedroom, John and I were like strangers, people who had never seen each other in daylight and were suddenly getting a look at each other’s flaws. What do you talk about when you suddenly have not a couple of stolen hours, but all the time in the world? I had no idea, and I babbled about anything to fill the silence—the aquarium we’d just visited, books I’d read, the wonderful food at the famous restaurant we went to in Big Sur, and on and on and on and on. I was just so terrified that I would turn out to be a disappointment, and he would stay with his wife after all, and then what in the world would I do?

  Finally, it was the last day of our trip. In an attempt to be close to the airport for our flight in the morning, I had booked us a room in Mountain View—home of Google, LinkedIn, and ten thousand office parks—and the place was a dump: Burger King in the lobby, cracked plastic Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom, and scratchy polyester bedding that looked like it hadn’t been laundered since the nineties. We were sitting in bed, under a pink thermal blanket, when he said it.

  “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “This? You mean—this trip?”

  I knew perfectly well that he wasn’t talking about the trip.

  “No. This. All of this. This trip was a bad idea. But the whole thing has gotten out of control.”

&nb
sp; “No. No, you don’t mean that.” If I could stall him, just for a minute, maybe I could figure out what I’d done wrong. Was he saying this now because I had acted so needy for the last few days? I could be less needy. Was it because I mentioned that it was Valentine’s Day when we were at the restaurant? I didn’t even care about Valentine’s Day—surely he knew that! Did I act like I cared? Did I pry too much into his long disappearances, when he wandered off to call his wife, or—who knows—some other girlfriend? I didn’t mean to be nosy; I could learn to be less insecure.

  When I came out of my reverie, he was still talking. But now he was talking about his wife.

  “When we get back, I’m going to tell her everything. All of it. Fuck it. I’m going to write her a letter and just confess. I can’t do all this lying anymore. It’s killing me. This was a bad idea.” He was spiraling. Crying, like he wanted me to sympathize with him when it was my life he was ruining. “I don’t want to throw away my marriage. I’m just going to tell her everything and let her decide what she wants to do,” he said.

  Did I take this news graciously, recognizing with equanimity that all affairs must come to an end? Reader, I did not. Instead, I bawled, begged, screamed, accused—“Why the fuck did you bring me all the way to California if your plan all along was to just break up with me?”—until John threatened to leave me alone at the motel and drive back to San Jose by himself. “Oh, so you’re just going to abandon me out here in Mountain View without a car? You fucking asshole!” I screamed.

  Then I begged him not to go.

  We flew back to Seattle the next day in bruised, exhausted silence. I had finally stopped arguing. The following weekend, John kept his word, writing his wife a long letter confessing everything, or at least the part of “everything” that had to do with me. Unmoved by his honesty, she kicked him out, keeping the cat and the apartment and the couch on which I had once sat, scrolling furtively through the images on his phone. I visited John a few times at his new apartment—a tiny studio above a four-lane highway, with a cramped sleeping alcove and a view of nothing—but there was a chill about the place. John had never wanted to date me; he had wanted to feel wanted, the same way I had. Within a few years, he would be married again, and I would still be drinking with the same old crowd or, more and more often, alone.

  Nine

  You’ll Never Guess Who I Went Home with Last Night

  I don’t want to romanticize the relationship between writing and drinking—sober, my mind can follow a thread through to the end in a way that I couldn’t in the days when the longest thing I had to write was a 500-word column about city hall. But there is also this truth: Every writer I know drinks, or did until they couldn’t anymore. Some of the most brilliant writers I have known have been what are euphemistically called “high-functioning” alcoholics—guys who head to the grocery store at noon for a bottle of red wine to tide them over at their desks until they can hit the bar at four, women whose lunchtime martini orders are seen as a sign of joie de vivre, not medicine to forestall the shakes. Alcohol can fuel creativity, and it can shake loose the cobwebs that form when you’re staring down a blank screen and a deadline. But drinking can also make for muddled writing, and mistakes—and as I started to drink more heavily while I wrote, my work got sloppier, and I found myself filling in gaps and fixing errors the morning after. Even worse were the times when I was ready to turn in a column or story I’d thought was full of clever turns and insight, only to read it in the light of day and realize: Fuck. This makes no sense.

  Tiffany and I still spent a lot of time together, but I was starting to wonder just how much she really enjoyed my company. It wasn’t that she said anything explicit, like “You’re lame. Leave me alone.” It was just the way she talked to me, like I was constantly fucking up—buying my own shots at the end of the night instead of waiting expectantly for a guy to pay for them, or borrowing her lipstick without asking. And I had seen how she talked about our friend Sarah, like she couldn’t do anything right. Like one time, Sarah brought a mixed five-pack of beers to Tiffany’s, and as she took them to the kitchen, Tiffany looked at me and mouthed: “Five mixed beers? Why bother?” Sometimes, it even seemed like she was testing me to see how much I’d put up with. For my thirtieth birthday, I cooked a massive southern dinner for twenty friends from both my friend groups in my tiny, no-smoking apartment, and near the end of the meal, Tiffany pulled out a pack of Camels and lit up right at the table. Stephanie still talks about it.

  But I needed someone to hang out with on the weekends, and Tiffany always knew where “everyone” would be. The thought of spending a weekend night alone paralyzed me, and whenever it happened, I just had no idea what to do with myself. Go to a bar and read? Pathetic. Stay home and drink alone? Even worse. Go to the gym? What, like someone with an eating disorder?

  I started to realize that I felt more comfortable around my two best friends when I’d had a little to drink before I went to meet them, and since we might not start drinking right away, it made all the sense in the world to just buy a pint of vodka at the liquor store and keep it in my purse. I even justified it as a money-saving move: If I snuck off to the bathroom occasionally for a few quick swigs, I would only need to buy half as many drinks. It’s funny the things you can talk yourself into. Before long, I was getting drunk more nights than not, and sleeping with guys I had known for a couple of hours, or whom I’d known for years and never thought about that way, until I was six drinks in and not thinking about much of anything. You’ll never guess who I went home with last night. . . .

  One night, I decided to go home with an acquaintance of mine, another one-hit wonder musician notorious for trying to sleep with any woman who was conscious, and probably some who weren’t. (Tiffany told me he had once cornered her in a bathtub, where she had gone to escape during a coke-fueled party, and tried to force her to give him a blow job. If that happened, it was the kind of thing we laughed off in those days—just another “can you believe that guy” story to roll our eyes about over Bloody Marys in the morning.) I don’t recall exactly how or where we started talking—drunk memories can be blurry like that—so let’s just say it was after my fifth or seventh or ninth vodka-soda of the night, and he asked if I wanted to come to his apartment, and I shrugged, smiled coyly, and said, “Okay!”

  Here, my memories go black. I don’t remember how we got to his place. I don’t remember where he lived or what we talked about on the way there. When my memory clicks back on, I’m climbing the stairs into an ultramodern townhouse: three stories, one and a half baths, and a kitchen that, while bachelor-small, is stocked with a full bar’s worth of liquor and Le Creuset cookware that had probably never touched a burner. The room is starting to list sideways and I make a hasty detour to the nearest restroom. As I’m kneeling on his bathroom floor, trying to puke as quietly as possible while he rustles around in the kitchen for more champagne, I can’t stop myself from thinking, Damn. Are these heated floors? Even as I’m kneeling there, wanting to go home, I’m also writing tomorrow’s story: You won’t believe who I went home with last night. And—you’re not gonna believe this—his bathroom has heated floors!

  Did I enjoy it? You’d have to ask someone who was there. My brain clocked out again sometime between the first sip of champagne and the bedroom upstairs, and it didn’t click back on until later that night, when I stole back down to the bathroom to hack up whatever was left in my stomach and steal a swig of something from the shelf of liquor to forestall the inevitable reckoning. In the morning, I made a quick inventory, stealing a glance around my side of the bed before he heard me rustling. My clothes were in a tangle on the floor by the bed—taken off, by the looks of it, by someone who couldn’t wait to get out of them. It was late-morning bright outside—maybe eleven. And there was a condom wrapper—several, actually—on the table by the bed. Phew.

  One hour later, licking the salt from the rim of a cold Bloody Mary in the dark cocoon o
f Linda’s Tavern—our favorite bar for picking up guys at closing time and nursing our hangovers the following afternoon—I told Tiffany and Sarah about my adventure. “You’ll never guess what happened last night.” And they couldn’t.

  The problem was, more and more, I couldn’t either.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t think a lot about consent in those days, at least as it applied to myself. I was moonlighting as a writer for a national feminist blog, covering issues like sexual harassment and rape culture, but the idea that I, personally, could ever be too drunk to say yes to sex just never occurred to me. I was in control of my own body, and if I wanted to get shit-faced and have sex I didn’t remember, that was my choice, right? I had chosen to get wasted, right? I liked sex, didn’t I? And besides, wasn’t I usually the instigator, the one who said, “My place is just a couple of blocks away”?

  Even in sobriety, I don’t have easy answers to any of these questions. Yes, there were plenty of nights when I should have said, “This is a bad idea. I’m going home.” Yes, I had sex with guys who would be beneath my standards if I’d been sober, like the one-hit wonder with the fancy bathroom floors. Yes, I took risks that I don’t take now. I know that an impartial observer, watching me from the outside, might conclude that I was a victim of men who took advantage of me when I couldn’t give meaningful consent, or that I should feel bad that I had sex I didn’t fully choose and can’t fully remember.

  I get that—intellectually, I get it. If it wasn’t me we were talking about, I’d probably say all those things, too. But it isn’t how I feel. What I regret now isn’t the sex itself, or the things I don’t remember. It’s the fact that I spent so many years thinking that if I got drunk and had sex with a guy, my own value would increase, just by getting his stamp of approval. I knew better than this—knew, for example, that my true value was my own self-worth and the work and good I could do in the world. But I didn’t really know it, not at the gut, boundary-setting level of self-respect. From the moment I became aware that the two options for women were be desired or be invisible, I wanted to be desired. I wanted it when I was a teenager envying my beautiful best friend, as a young person who felt special for being “chosen” by a married man, and as a woman just entering her thirties, watching the options at the bar dwindle as 2:00 A.M. approached.