Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  51

  In the 1944 film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman, a husband convinces his wife she is mad by manipulating minor elements in their home and projecting qualities onto her that she does not exhibit. He gifts her an heirloom brooch and then hides it from her. “You are inclined to lose things, my dear,” he tells her. When she questions his suspect behavior, he asks her, “Are you becoming suspicious as well as absentminded?” As he searches for hidden jewels in their attic, the gas lights of their home dim and when his wife inquires, the husband convinces her that she imagined it. The film was advertised as “the strange drama of a captive sweetheart,” and earned Bergman that year’s Academy Award for Best Actress.

  At a conference in Boston, I waited for Amaia in the hotel room. I opened her computer. I typed the word Cristina into the search window and found the e-mails in her trash folder.

  Amaia had written: I am thinking of that poem. About “the face that launch’d a thousand ships” and “burnt the topless towers of Ilium.” Like the kiss in that poem, your mouth took something from me, or gave me something. I’ll keep it always.

  The girl’s mouth had given her something. I read all the e-mails. I watched her build a story for the girl out of the same phrases she’d used on me. The same tricks, I thought. And they were tricks. But that didn’t make it hurt less.

  I took a picture of the words she had written to both of us. I sent her the picture.

  FUCK YOU, I wrote.

  I packed my suitcase. My heart muscle contracted. Maybe, it stopped. A chamber closed. I had a heart left, but not my right heart.

  I called Amit. I’m leaving, I said.

  Are you sure? she asked.

  But I didn’t leave.

  Amaia returned, breathless and pale. I love you, she said.

  Fuck you, I said.

  I love you, she said.

  You can fuck yourself, I said. You can fuck that girl, too. And then you can fuck her over like you did me and like you did your wife.

  She blocked the hotel room door with her body.

  I love you, she said, backing me into the room. It was so stupid. I was just scared.

  I slapped her face. She didn’t even flinch.

  Stay, she said.

  To face your Imago and walk through it is to re-enact the most painful parts of your beginning. The point is to find or create a new ending. Most of the time we don’t. But we try again.

  It’s an addiction, Amit told me. I typed “love addiction” into my browser window. Even the misspelled descriptions and lists of warning signs in purple font described us. How do we know when to stop trying? And what if, when that time comes, we cannot? Lessons often arrive in the form of lovers, and lessons keep us captive until we learn them. My lessons keep calling until I answer. They wait in a parked car outside the house. They are infinitely patient. In this way, every lesson is “a strange drama of a captive sweetheart.” Sometimes, we need a glue so strong it is part poison.

  “I am mad,” Bergman laments in Gaslight. “I’m always losing things and hiding things and I can never find them, I don’t know where I’ve put them.” She is wrong and she is right. She has lost things and hid things, but not the ones she thinks. Not the ones her husband tells her she has lost. Not the brooch, but herself.

  52

  Soon after the conference in Boston, Amaia was scheduled to give a lecture. I knew Cristina would be in the audience. Before the lecture, Amaia sent me her draft for notes. The paper was excellent. In it, she wrote about Marlowe’s Helen, about “the face that launch’d a thousand ships.”

  Please don’t include that, I asked her.

  It has nothing to do with her, she said. Who cares if she thinks it does?

  Please take it out, I said.

  She did not. She delivered the lecture. Cristina sat in the front row. I stood in the back. When she finished, I went to the restroom and screamed into my hands.

  I need some space, I told her. I just needed a couple of weeks to gather my thoughts.

  That doesn’t make any sense, she said. You’re coming here in a few days.

  I canceled my ticket, I said.

  She called me weeping, then accusing, then begging. She could not let me be.

  I need to talk to you, she said.

  I need you to give me some space, I said.

  She sent me a long letter. For the first time, I did not answer.

  I opened my world to you, she wrote. I tore it apart. To you, I suppose my world is not so special. I am not so special.

  Of course, I wanted to argue with her. But I did not.

  A few days before Easter, at the end of the first week, I sat at my desk. If I couldn’t yet make sense of things, I could at least record them. At dinner that night, over cayenne-dusted tortilla chips and guacamole, I had told Amit that something felt different. I hurt, still, but the squall in me had begun to settle, lights to flicker. The strange sensation of seeping back into myself. My friend had looked so relieved.

  That night, I was writing about my trip with Jon when I heard a soft knock at my apartment door. I pushed back my chair and walked the few steps to open it.

  Amaia. A familiar sweatshirt hung on her broad shoulders, a suitcase in her hand, and her face so soft with hope that it broke me open like a street melon—the sun-soaked ones they sell on Nostrand Avenue in summer. Once, I watched one roll off the pile and hit the pavement, hot rind cracked open to the sugared center. She could have sunk a spoon into me.

  I let her in. I took her suitcase and pulled her into my arms, and she folded over me, hair cold against my cheek, breath hot on my shoulder. Her neck was so sweet. It was a place I had thought of so many times. I tasted it and saw stars—Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, and my lost Merope.

  When I told Amit that she had shown up, Amit looked so tired. She said, I’m sorry. I can’t do this with you anymore. She said, I love you. Call me when it’s over.

  53

  The next time I arrived in Torrington, Jon and Pat greeted me in the kitchen, freshly dressed and smelling of soap. They were ready to go. Joan sat at the table, elbow propped on her Bible, a cigarette between her fingers dribbling smoke toward the cracked window.

  Aren’t you coming? I asked. Oh, no, I’m tired and you know, my breathing is bad today, she said, though I could tell she wanted to join us. It’ll be time for you to spend alone with Jon, she added. I understood that he had asked her to stay behind.

  I led Pat to the passenger-side door and Jon stopped me. Oh, no, she can sit in the back, he said. He wanted to sit in the front with me. I had always craved being wanted, but there is a principle difference between wanting someone and wanting someone to give you something. I had wished to be possessed, but not excavated. I knew the addict’s heat vision—how it turns people into blurs of body warmth, the red glow of what you want from them the only vivid thing.

  An early drug experience: my first girlfriend and I decided to try magic mushrooms. Something flipped in me. When we encountered hiccups in our quest to find them, she didn’t care much. She was distracted, ready to return to our usual pastimes of kissing and crying. In the months I had known her, I had thought of nothing but her. Until that day. Suddenly, I wanted her to shut up. I wanted her to stop touching me and help me find those drugs. Who cares? she said. We’ll do it another time. You’re scaring me, she said. My heat vision had turned from her and she felt the sudden cool of it. I was gone. She hadn’t known I could disappear like that.

  We like to call it Oz, Jon said of the casino. He wanted something from me, and he wanted me to drive him to that Emerald City. Maybe that was all he wanted on that sunny afternoon. It took two hours to drive there. Jon reached his hand into the back and tugged on Pat’s cane. She cackled with delight at what was clearly a favorite game.

  Did you see my new scooter? Jon asked me. I had, in the driveway of Joan’s house. Spiffy, I said. How’d you score that?

  With Pat’s money, he said, hackles risen.r />
  I said nothing.

  I take care of her, he said. People get paid a lot to do what I do for her.

  54

  Amaia and I drove to the Cape. We drove in the dark and laughed all the way. She was doing everything right and still it didn’t calm the nervous churn in me, the voice that said your true love should not be anathema to everything else good in your life, should not turn you into a desperate stranger, a person unable to say no. But still, I wanted her.

  As we crossed the Massachusetts state line, I spotted a hair salon—Hairy Situations. Reminds me of a place upstate, I said. Hair’s the Deal! We were glad to laugh, mouths salty from truck stop snacks.

  Vanity Hair, she said.

  Fresh Hair with Terry Gross, I countered.

  The Canterbury Hairs.

  Hair ships of purple gently toss.

  But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

  Nor lose possession of that hair thou ow’st;

  Hairy Tales to Tell in the Dark.

  Hair Supply.

  I laughed so hard that I begged her to stop. I was going to piss my pants and we were on a long wooded stretch of highway with no exit in sight.

  Goldilocks and the Three Hairs.

  Grimm’s Hairy Tales.

  The Hair Up There.

  Hair! The Herald Angels Sing.

  The Hair in the Moon.

  In one version, “The Hare in the Moon” is a story of a selfless rabbit who offers his own flesh to feed his hungry companion. As a reward, he is placed in the moon as an example to all of true selflessness. The entry of Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings dedicated to “The Hare in the Moon,” however, recalls the last lines of Canto XX in Dante’s Inferno: “Cain with his thorn-bush [striding] the sill / Of the two hemispheres.” After he murders Abel, Cain is imprisoned in the moon by the Lord. There, he carries a bundle of thorns for eternity. Our stories tell us that some passions are rewarded and others punished. But passion always feels justified. Everyone is a Hare in their own mind, even Cain. In our passion, we rarely know if it will lead to salvation or damnation. And sometimes, it is both.

  In Canto XX, Dante finds a procession of sinners with their heads turned backward. Horrified at these head-spun wretches, he weeps and is chastised by Virgil. The final reference to Cain with his thorns means only that the moon is low and the aggrieved hero is ready to move on.

  A few weeks before our vacation, I drove to visit my brother in his communal household in Northhampton, Massachusetts. I spent the drive chewing on my own mind, and most of the day telling him about my own troubles: my ambivalence about our love, the way we couldn’t stop hurting one another. He offered little advice, but listened well, and by the time we started dinner, I felt easier, less bound by my own obsession.

  On the wall of my brother’s bedroom was a printed quote from the German psychotherapist and Zen master, Karlfried Graf Dürckheim: “The man who falls upon hard times … will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a ‘raft that leads to the far shore.’” I tossed alone in his creaky loft bed that night, wondering how you knew when you reached the far shore. And what you did when you got there.

  A few days before our vacation, I had lunch with a former teacher of mine—now mentor and friend. I told him our story. I wanted him to tell me what to do. Or that I had done the right thing by staying.

  Marriage, he said, is a list of grievances. Among other things. I had my thorn bush, he meant. As she did. As we all do, if we stay long enough.

  I wanted to ask him if my head was on backward. There were the grievances, yes. I could forgive her, or I could leave. But what of the constant itch in me? What about the part of me that felt, without any drama or fanfare, that the choice was not to stay or to go. The choice was her or me.

  55

  The Mashantucket Pequot are part of the diaspora of Algonquin-speaking indigenous people that include the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Delaware. The Pequot reservation was created by the Connecticut Colony in 1666, after the tribe had been nearly annihilated.

  In 1677, the Puritan colonist William Hubbard postulated that predating the pilgrim’s landing, the Pequot had moved coastward from points in the Hudson Valley. He depicted them as invaders from “the interior of the continent” who “by force seized upon one of the places near the sea, and became a Terror to all their Neighbors.” The irony of this perception, like so many in the history of colonization, cannot be overstated.

  When the last tribal member living on the Pequot reservation, Elizabeth George, died in 1973, the federal government initiated the process of reclaiming the tribal land. In 1983, after a ten-year fight for federal recognition, Ronald Reagan signed the Connecticut Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, which included recognition of the Mashantucket Pequot.

  Now, the Pequot reservation land is home to Foxwood’s—the largest casino in the United States and Jon’s favorite place to gamble.

  Frank L. Baum built the Emerald City out of his own nightmares. As a boy, he suffered recurrent dreams of a scarecrow whose “ragged hay fingers” grasped for his neck. His fear of struck matches came after a theater burned during a production of his play, Matches. Baum’s mother-in-law had conducted research on witch-hunting whose horrors engraved his imagination. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whose film adaptation my abuela often played for my brother and me, Baum wanted the magic of Grimm’s fairy tales without their horror. In his book’s introduction, he states that “it aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.” And likewise, he reversed the power of his own fears. His scarecrow becomes a jester. His witch deserves her morbid fate.

  Years before he penned The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum wrote an editorial for a newspaper in South Dakota in response to the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee. In it he called for the killing of all remaining Indians. “Why not annihilation?” he asked. “Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.” Even when the “heart-aches and nightmares” that troubled him were living people, he wanted them eradicated. Self-protection can be that merciless.

  The people of the Emerald City wear green goggles to believe that their city is made of emeralds. Ten years before the book’s release, Baum published a story about a farmer in a drought who dresses his horse in green goggles to trick the horse into believing that the wood chips he feeds on are grass.

  Green goggles, heat vision, cathected attachment—we all build our Emerald City. Out of people, slot machines, sparkling powders, and smoke. I saw Jon’s eyes shine as we drove into the casino parking lot. You’ll never win, I wanted to tell him. But who was I to call his salvation a damnation? It was both, of course.

  56

  Amaia and I wandered the narrow sidewalks of Provincetown, happily invisible amidst the stream of gay men and tourists. We bathed nude on the sundeck of our hotel and ate the same mediocre, overpriced meal at every restaurant in town. And my phone didn’t ring. No one but my mother even knew we were on vacation.

  We made love—my bite less ravenous than it had ever been. And we did not fight. We climbed to the top of Pilgrim Monument and looked out over the bay as the wind lifted my skirt. The water and the sky folded us in its envelope of cool color, damp with salted mist.

  By the time the Mayflower landed in Provincetown in 1620, five weeks before Plymouth Rock, two thirds of the Wampanoag Nation had already been killed by disease. French explorer Samuel de Champlain led a mapping expedition in 1605, landing precisely where the Plymouth Colony would later settle. For nearly one hundred years prior, European fur traders had made excursions on the coast between Maine and Massachusetts, delivering yellow fever, smallpox, spotted fever, and typhoid.

  When I stood on the shore of Plymouth Beach as a child and imagi
ned the sight of that ship, I had imagined it a wonder. Maybe the Wampanoag did wonder, but they also probably recognized their ruin. Of the 45,000 already dead, the largest numbers were of Elders and children—the surest way to lose a language. They didn’t know what to call the white devils, but they knew their words were in danger.

  The 252-foot monument commemorates the Pilgrims’ first landing and the signing of the Mayflower Compact, which states: “Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together … to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”

  As we climbed those 116 winding steps and sixty ramps, we passed plaques that honored the Mayflower descendants and founders of familiar towns. It chilled me to think of those earnest people. They believed in their god, and their good. They believed in their right to extract submission and obedience not only from themselves but from the people whose land they’d claimed. They believed in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination—that God doled salvation to some and eternal damnation to others. They believed in the genocide of these people, in their enslavement, in the trade of native men and boys—deemed too dangerous to keep in the colony—for African slaves. The first African slaveholders in this country were the Massachusetts colonists.