Half a Life

by Darin Strauss

  Mostly, I was trying to move on. Even though my thoughts did tend, still, to slip inward, to the incident that was the reference point for every sorrow that came my way. (“Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair,” Kierkegaard once whimpered.) And I was very mindful that Celine didn’t have a fun or normal middle-twenties, or any middle-twenties at all.

  When I was twenty-six, I somehow ended up on a first date at the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer. Which has at its crux a moment in which a teenager hits someone with his car. My breath went pinched.

  I thought I was no longer the terrified kid who couldn’t think without visualizing Celine, who couldn’t visualize Celine without shaking. I thought the past could no longer vaporize my day-to-day life. But now I was having an animal response: I couldn’t watch.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said. “Please.” This was about thirty minutes into the movie.

  My date didn’t want to leave at first. I’d only just met her. But she’d seemed witty and spirited (if very pale), having crossed the lobby with her Christmas-ribbon smile and her good job in publishing. Now we slunk out of the theater.

  Or, we were trying to: we had to stand up, block the screen for people who’d merely wanted a good scare. I was obstructing the fantasy with the real thing, though only I could understand that.

  Once we got clear of the cineplex, I told her everything. The response was a stunner, out there on the sidewalk—a gruff note of grievance. Maybe I was mishearing; maybe this was her way of warming up toward being sweet and caressive.

  “Christ, Darin, don’t you think of her sometimes?”

  She shook her head, even though she was still smiling a bit. She whistled through her teeth. “Fuck.”

  I turned out to be perfectly, officially wrong. This wasn’t caressive. This was pissed.

  “It’s so goddamned selfish for you to feel bad for yourself,” she said, a hand at her pale forehead. “I’m not being rude.”

  Wait a second, here. Of course I think of Celine sometimes.

  “Yeah well, fine. But do you think about her enough?”

  Celine’s eyes getting teary after she tripped stealing third base in little league; Celine crackling over pebbles on roller-skates. Celine not being able to stay awake to the end of The Wizard of Oz as a kid. Her father (as Celine got dressed for her first date) singing a goofy, made-up song from her infancy. Sixth-grade Celine getting sick to her stomach on doctor’s-office candy after a flu shot. These brain montages were how I saw her—and often still see her. Aches and TV shows, family memories. Other times I construct the life she would’ve gone on to have: Celine wearing a long good coat, in her kitchen, flipping through envelopes to find a med-school acceptance letter. (This is a patently middle-class swirl of images, but I can’t deny who I am; I can’t unsee what I see. My pictures of a happy life are, intractably, those of ambition cultivated and rewarded.) Sometimes this story line includes rash, dangerous romances, nice solid domestic contentment, shattering health problems: everything, anything but nonexistence.

  Or actually, everything and anything but the real Celine. My date, in her way, had been right. My mind was unrelentingly narrative: I imagined the loss of possibility, of chapters, scenes, minutes, of events and kisses and steam escaping the radiator behind Celine and her husband’s bed, with their kids in another room. I could feel what I felt about the loss of that. I even allowed myself to imagine her father. Alone at the kitchen table, lights off, not a voice in the house, passing a bottle of something square, bracing, and amber from hand to hand: a movie cliché flickering within the perimeters of recognizable devastation. But I was never brave enough to picture the one thing I knew to be true—Celine lying in the grass on the median strip, her eyes staring only a couple inches above her face, the last bit of time she ever saw.

  “It’s okay that you called Mr. Zilke a prince, Dad,” I had ended up telling my father that morning of my first hearing.

  “I just didn’t know how to react,” Dad had said. “Because even with the lawsuit and the suing for millions and, let’s be frank, a broken promise, I still empathize a lot with their family.”

  “How much thinking about it would be enough?” I was saying to the date now, in front of the cineplex. “What’s the amount you’re looking for?”

  “Okay,” the date said, and laughed.

  She had a cheerful, almost childish voice—a voice I’d come to hear often in publishing meetings, a first-day-of-schoolish excitement and forthrightness. New subjects, new students every semester.

  “How can you even go on living?” said the date.

  Whoa. I buckled a little and went: “Um.”

  And like that, Celine was here too, right with me the way her mother had wanted. She was saying: Yeah, I want to hear the answer to this.

  Anyway, pretty quick, in my mind, I got really sharp: unruffled in James Bond tux, letting drop an epic retort while laying down beaucoup eight balls at the baccarat table on some island somewhere. I put up my mental dukes; I was all ready to give the date my best.

  “I don’t know. I just, well.” And then I coughed up: “Uh”—a kind of vocal grimace.

  “Yeah,” she said in her wronged voice, “that’s what I thought.” Who was this person with her Kleenex skin and her internship and that smile and did she kick puppies for fun?

  “You have no idea how much I have thought about it,” I said, prim and soggy.

  “And so you think, what, Oh, why did this happen to poor me? Why can’t I go to a movie all these years later? Hark unto this sad story about me.”

  Her crossed arms told me that the conversation was over. But there was a cold playfulness to her face, the kind you’d see in a kid who has just gulped down, in front of a hungry sibling, the last cupcake at the party. I stood under the theater’s electric red tickertape, movies going around over my head like a thought bubble: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID … THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE … MOST WANTED … EVENT HORIZON … A LIFE LESS ORDINARY … THE ICE STORM … I KNOW WHAT YOU DID …

  I probably looked tearfree and sturdy, and I finally left for the subway without walking her home. “Okay, then,” is all I said to her, more preset civility than real goodbye. And the question I’d asked myself right after the accident had yet to be answered, after eight years: Would I ever get over this? (I know how this must read—my being focused on my own emotions right as she accused me of being self-absorbed—and I don’t defend it.)

  A little later on, the date phoned me. She’d often thought of committing suicide in high school by swerving into oncoming cars, she said. This call was meant to be her apology.

  “I came close a few times, usually when it was late,” she told me. “You know, headlights coming my way and I’m really depressed, nights like that.”

  Martin Amis has written that we all hope, modestly enough, to get through life without being murdered. A lot more confidently, we hope to get through life without murdering anybody ourselves.

  “All right,” I said to my date, just as I was hanging up the phone, because what else was there? I pictured a bicyclist on the edge of vision: the dark speck of Celine. “All right, then,” I said. “All right.”

  4

  “My ideas, my language, support me in the face of disastrous horror over and over.”

  —Harold Brodkey

  “I see here you went to Tufts,” a prospective employer would say.

  “English major,” I’d tell the guy. “Concentration on creative writing.” (But would I get fired if this person finds out what I’ve done?)

  “We cover the financial-technology beat,” the guy would say—turning over my scant resume, his face dimmed by boredom. “Nothing creative about the writing here, young man, I can tell you that.” He’d lean forward. “Can you go really, really non-creative?”

  “I’ll ignore my finer instincts.” (But so, am I being ambitious enough for two lives? Is this a good enough job?)

  As I moved into my late twenties, as I got to
the bridge that would carry me to the thirties and beyond, I realized I’d absorbed Celine’s mother’s request. When I thought about her now, it was about trying to live well enough for two, successfully enough—with enough diversions, enough achievements—for us both. And Celine herself started coming with me, on job interviews, dates, everywhere. I thought of her each time I drove by a bicyclist. (Which happens a lot more often than you think. I’m guessing that’s not something most drivers register.)

  Mrs. Zilke’s extracted promise felt immutable. Each equivocation and hedge, every dawdle, each dereliction and misdemeanor—all the human stuff of growing up—seemed to count against me on some celestial checklist. I’d later think of Celine at my wedding and when my wife told me that she was pregnant. Name an experience: it’s a good bet I’ve thought of Celine while experiencing it.

  When I was twenty-eight, my hair went gray and I had stomach surgery. I’d been grinding out my insides. The squinch, the clench, had followed me from freshman year of college on. I was almost six-two and weighed a hundred and fifty-eight pounds. There’s only a certain amount of acid you can create before it starts consuming everything. I was eating myself from the inside.

  New York’s best stomach surgeons—the surgeons you would want to cut you open, if such a cutting were called for—didn’t take insurance. So I had to settle. I needed a procedure called a Nissen fundoplication. This marries a fairly caveman straightforwardness to NASA-grade sophistication: a doctor manipulates two laparoscopic robot hands to tie your stomach around your gullet and stick it there. (When the tummy is pinned in the shape of a folded-up change purse, acid can’t spew back up the esophagus.) I had the surgery in 1998 at the one shitty local hospital that would take my shitty insurance, the Cabrini Medical Center.

  Heading to one of Cabrini’s surgery theaters, I’d gotten stuck in a bizarre traffic jam; different hospital people wheeled me and two patients I’d never seen before to a bottleneck point (stretchered, gowned, at one of the obvious precipices of a life), and they simply left us there. Our gurneys lined up side-by-side, in a kind of vestibule. The scene felt ghostly and almost comic, a small-scale First Circle. I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours and, in my condition, every swallow came like an act of courage. We patients all raised our heads to look at one another—three men made of bedside promises, of cold feet, of life lurch. I was the youngest by fifty years. We each kept totally quiet, very somber. I remember the room as eye-stingingly bright. The other patients showed the frog spots and lack of vehemence that men often have in the last panels of their lives. The hospital went bankrupt pretty soon after this.

  I don’t want to valorize anything. I don’t want to make this more than it was. No false drama: my stomach hurt, and then it didn’t. The Nissen fundoplication worked. I thought I’d been fixed for good, but this turned out to be not so. A few years later, I’d lost weight again. I found myself under that haze of mystery discomforts called IBS. It was pretty rough. And as soon as I had handled that, I suffered another murky ailment called CPPS (chronic pelvic pain syndrome). My internal climate was a hurricane alley. Emotions blew through, downing power lines, hefting cars onto roofs, destroying the finish. Low trees, dead wood thrown across traffic. That’s the force of guilt for you.

  During the worst of this I was essentially alone. Then I met my wife.

  “I want to tell you something,” I said to her, to the woman I’d ultimately marry.

  “Tell me what?” Susannah said. This was several weeks into our romance. It must have been about a year after my stomach operation. I was standing at the farthest edge of the twenties, and the sad, steel-gray bridge I mentioned—the thirties and beyond—it wasn’t so bad once you looked at it. I was getting to know that most things, as you approached them, were like that. The scary thing about drawing near milestones was merely that you weren’t there yet. Once you arrived, they turned familiar—you were in the landscape. They could be dealt with.

  Susannah said: “Something bad?” and I scooched around to find the carefree side of my chair.

  I tried not to feel the two poles: the excitement of saying something that was sure to be a gongish way to get her attention, and the desire for it to be a less-than-cataclysmic admission. Every time it became social, it felt like a lie. So I tried to say it without having any emotions at all. Any emotion amounted to my playing a part, instead of simply being the part.

  “Yeah,” I told Susannah. “It is a pretty bad thing I have to tell you.”

  In some ways I remained like the guest arriving at a dinner party with an expensive wine bottle whose price tag has been left conspicuously unremoved. The me who still wanted the world to notice how upsetting this whole thing was, this core thing, pushed to the front of the line.3 “It is pretty bad,” I said.

  It’s probably a testament to how Susannah took the news that I can’t actually remember what she said. It’s nice to think your spouse is better at emotions than you are: it’s a reminder of why you made the marriage. She probably didn’t say anything. She probably just nodded and let me talk. What I can picture is her look. The rational eyes, the quiet crimp to the brow, the sympathy flaming her cheek. It was this that decided me, that had me feeling normal and in love. I remember that her face just opened. I don’t know how else to describe it.

  There are some people who seem tickled to take on your sad history as their own. It’s an object to cuddle and sculpt to their floating aspirations. They see a chance, in you, to be their best selves. You can be the prettying gleam they turn their profile toward. Susannah wasn’t like that. She didn’t fall into the easy and false posture: “Because you have brought me this problem, I am the expert, and it’ll be my opinion and solution you shall treasure.”

  Susannah shook her head at moments of the story and at others just chewed the side of her own mouth affirmingly. I looked down a few times, when I came to parts about which I wasn’t sure I was expressing or even feeling honestly. And every time I turned back, her you’re-doing-great eyes were still on me. She may as well have had her hand over mine.

  She said something like, “It must be with you all the time, even now”—you know, something unimprovable. (Susannah is not a woman to drag her feet in platitudes.)

  Because this was stress-free, I could follow my thoughts on their own steady glide, without hope or push.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty terrible.”

  “I’m sure. But you seem okay, too.”

  Almost overwhelmingly decent, levelheaded, very stubborn, Susannah’s a bit unpracticed at hardship. This leads to a defiantly virtuous optimism. It’s tough to be swamped with misery when you’re next to a person like that.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  I’m surprising myself by grinning now, just recalling this. There’s a pleasant, weird vibe you get from remembering a moment of early closeness with someone, in the time before you realized this closeness was going to become your life. And here again is where a split comes. I smile at that thought; I get to learn how that feels. Celine doesn’t. And I remember that she will never get to.

  “I can’t even really imagine,” Susannah was saying. “And it’d probably be distasteful to pretend to try.”

  She’s a tall perfectionist who looks like a soft-boned sister to the Faye Dunaway of Chinatown. The same high, regal forehead; tepid blond hair that wrongly gets called brown. She’s both striking and practical, somehow, like the string of rope lights around the banister that dangles and loops and steers you upstairs to a nighttime party.

  This was probably date number five for us, and already I knew she made sense for me. It’s a question of rhythm: walking rhythm, thinking rhythm. Her mental pace seemed sensibly like my own. I’d look over, and she’d arrive wherever I was in a conversation, right next to me. And so I’d been measuring with dread how close we seemed to be getting, because if she did make sense, then I would have to tell her, and that would maybe end it all.

  “Really,” I said now. “T
hank you.”

  “Of course—of course.”

  Then we just went on with our relationship. Another bridge: going from not telling someone to having told her, to having that moment behind me. Until now, in every relationship, it had always been ahead of me. And then the relationship would vanish. Now was the first time I’d ever seen the other side of the bridge, and there was a person beside me.

  3. To be fair to myself: I didn’t ever tell my story in a wheedling voice. I didn’t pursue sympathy as if I thought it was somehow the right payment for any psychic wounds suffered. I didn’t throw my sadness around. Most of all, I always remained awake to the only certainty there was: I am here and she is not.

  “Hey, Darin,” people said. They slapped me on the back, they shook my hand with both of theirs. “You made it—you came.” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “Yup.” These were people I hadn’t seen since that pre-graduation speech. People who had watched the back of my eighteen-year-old head, watched my lurch for the exit.

  Most everyone standing near me now had been balded by time, or at least a little gunked up in other ways—lumps, chins. But we were all doing a lot of generous ignoring. Here were people we had spent our childhoods with. They could not be replaced. North Shore High School, class of ’88, was sucking in its gut and stepping into a party. This was the denialathon that is a ten-year reunion: the bad luck and scraped knuckles of a decade gone by.

  People who haven’t stood together for a long while greet one another in format, in banality. Everyone at the reunion was going out all at once into torrents of cliché—“I can’t believe it. Ten whole years! Amazing!”—into gusts of the same old stuff. “Look at you—exactly the same. Sophomore year, buddy. A decade! Man, you look … great?”