by Adam Haslett
Because I never told the station manager that I’d dropped out, I was able to keep my radio show, and that January I noticed a schedule change announcing the slot after mine would now feature ska and early dub. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued. What DJ had come forward to fill the only spot deader than my own with grooves that demonstrated such an advanced sense of where dance music on both sides of the Atlantic was headed?
I first saw Caleigh through the glass of the booth. She was hefting a crate of twelve-inches across the lounge dressed in an oversize black turtleneck, baggy purple cords, and black boots, a getup which, properly fitted, wouldn’t have been out of place in London, 1965, or Oakland a decade later, but which on her looked like a thrift-shop effort to obscure how slender she was. She was tall too, nearly six feet, but seemed keen to hide the fact, walking with her shoulders hunched and her head dipped, as though trying to move as invisibly as possible through the room. She wore no makeup or jewelry and had her hair pulled back flat off her high forehead. None of it was enough to disguise her beauty. That she would try apologizing for it only lifted it out of the realm of mere physical chance into a kind of moral grace.
I put on an extra-long final track and came out of the booth to ask if she needed help carrying her records in. She made no response, as if she weren’t the person to ask. I gestured toward one of the crates at her feet; she didn’t protest. The plastic grips were still warm from the touch of her fingers. “I love early dub,” I said. “You can get lost in it.” She nodded, looking straight at me for the first time, for only a split second, her enormous catlike eyes driving stakes through my feet into the carpet like a Roman soldier nailing a thief to a cross. When a half smile lit her face, and she said, “Yeah, I guess you can,” there seemed nothing left but the question of where we would spend the rest of our lives together.
I stayed and listened to every record she played. As I did the following week. She barely spoke between sets, practically whispering her playlist into the mic, using only the recorded PSAs, her demeanor strictly divorced from the frenzied energy of the tracks she spun. Obviously, I had to know more. After that second show I hazarded an invitation for her to join me for an early breakfast. By some miracle she agreed. We ate at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Cleveland Circle. She ordered tea and a plain, and offered the briefest of responses to my questions. Though I did manage to get out of her that she’d gone to high school in Houston, that her father was Nigerian and her mother Sri Lankan, and that (like me) she had no friends at BC. She was, moreover, studying black Anglophone poetry. Maybe when she told me this last fact I shouldn’t have reached quite so quickly into my messenger bag to read her the Audre Lorde quote I’d highlighted the day before—“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment”—but then I couldn’t help myself. We were meant for each other even more deeply than I had first understood. When I put the book down, she looked at me skeptically, as if I were a cad feigning interest for seduction’s sake. “Why do you read Audre Lorde?” she asked, unconvinced. But when I replied, “Who doesn’t read Audre Lorde?” she laughed for the first time, and I was able to breathe again, knowing this wouldn’t be our last meal.
Should the fact that we bonded that first morning at Dunkin’ Donuts over the work of a radical lesbian feminist have tipped me off that Caleigh would one day date women? You could argue that. But even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I needed her too fiercely.
One of the troubles with reading Proust while living at home with your mother because you’re too depressed to be in college is that the experience simultaneously aggrandizes and hollows out your fondest hopes for love, leaving you both more expectant and already defeated than most people are into. “One can feel an attraction towards a particular person,” MP allows, which I sure in heaven did for Caleigh, “but to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be—and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace—the risk of an impossibility.” A sweet impossibility to goad the heart higher. Albertine’s lesbianism may be a filigree of Marcel’s imagination, trumped up to fend off boredom and the suspicion he doesn’t actually care for her, but Caleigh’s turned out to be the real, impossible thing.
But all that wasn’t until later. In the beginning, I just organized my life around her as I had organized my life around Angie, though we had so much more to talk about that there wasn’t any question of not seeing each other every day. I arrived at her dorm room midafternoons, after I’d finished my bakery shift and made the trip into Chestnut Hill. If she wasn’t there, I’d write a note on her door and wait for her outside. She’d lead me upstairs without saying much, and we’d start playing records, and I’d read aloud from Gide or Baldwin or Angela Davis as she lay on her bed with a hoodie pulled over her head, rolling her eyes at my oracular tone, chiding me more gently for what I cared about than anyone ever had. Her base state was one of melancholy. She read poetry but ignored her other assignments, sleeping ten to twelve hours a day. I pressed her again and again to reveal every detail of her past to me, but she divulged very little on that score. I had to piece together the internal exile of her high school years, when she was nearly as alienated from the black kids, who saw her as an immigrant freak, as she was from the white kids, who saw her as just black. About her vexed parental relations, she offered little more. All I could make out from stray comments and the occasional overheard phone call was a serious-minded Nigerian businessman who wanted his daughter to study a subject more practical than literature, and a somewhat morose Sri Lankan woman who hadn’t bargained on Texas. The only two subjects she was the least bit voluble on were music and her sense of being inadequate. Whatever portion of our afternoons and evenings that I didn’t monopolize describing how beautiful she was or reading aloud to her, she filled telling me I was just infatuated and that she was clumsy.
But while she insisted on disagreeing with my estimation of her, she wasn’t at all scared of my feelings the way Angie had been. She seemed, instead, to accept them as you might a physical disability. I was allowed to say constantly how much I loved her, and to complain about any delay or skipping of visits. She listened patiently to my descriptions of all that mesmerized me about her, and after protesting that she possessed none of the qualities I ascribed to her, she would reason out with me how I might cope with such a powerful need, as though counseling a friend with romantic troubles. If I had been a testosterone case, I suppose I might have found this condescending, but it struck me instead as deeply kind—for her to bear the debilitation of my love, and even to care for me in the throes of it. I could have talked about nothing else, but occasionally she would put a stop to it by changing the record, and we would both lie back and travel together over the peaks and valleys of those endless dub tracks carved into vinyl by King Tubby and his descendants, the occasional lyric echoing down the trenches of bass so deeply you couldn’t make out the words, only the longing behind them.
As time went on, her generosity toward me extended to hugging. I would sit next to her on her bed and she would put an arm around me and let me rest my cheek on her shoulder. I don’t need reminding how pathetic this seems, to be pitied in this way for what you want and can’t have by the very person you want it from. If I’d managed the tidy, maturational career of a bildungsroman protagonist, I might have suffered all this for a while, and then chucked passion aside for functional reciprocity. But Angie and my early days with Caleigh were no obligatory errors of youth; they were the blueprint. You can diagnose me all you like, and no doubt you will, as Celia and Alec never cease to, pointing out the doomed aspect of obsession, the anxiety it feeds, the s
upposedly genuine intimacy it precludes. And given my many years of experience in this field I can throw in for free whatever pathology you choose to make of a romantic and sexual attraction to black women by a white man who studies slavery and its legacy in the U.S. But you will come up with nothing that I haven’t thought or worried to death already. Which is one of the reasons I fill these forms out in such detail. The only relief comes in describing it.
That first physical contact with Caleigh, that first hug, wiped out whatever vestigial dignity or restraint I had managed to maintain. I wept. And not a few smiling tears of relief, but open sobbing. And still she held on to me. She said later that she kissed me then not out of pity but because my weeping made her want to kiss me. If she hadn’t already been my best and perhaps only friend, I wouldn’t have believed her, but she’s never dissembled. She doesn’t have the energy for it, and she isn’t trying to get anywhere, so she has no reason to lie or manipulate people. It’s one of the upsides of avoiding ambition.
Thus the answer to the question of a “real date” that had tortured me with Angie came in the vanishing of the question. With Caleigh’s first kiss, that full fount of sorrow opened up: my wretchedness had never been so entirely relieved, even if it returned with a vengeance as soon as our kissing ended. She forgave even my shuddering awkwardness in bed. Being naked with her was terrifying. I couldn’t see how everything I did wasn’t a prelude to rape. My thoughts were unacceptable; my body jerked like a spastic dog; I did everything I could to make sure I wasn’t hurting her and was still certain I was hurting her. It was best when she closed her eyes and I sensed there might be pleasure for her I couldn’t touch or see, some thing or place hidden back inside her where she could go in my presence, if only alone. Then, at least, I didn’t feel purely selfish. It’s so easy to mock the earnestness of men who actually believe in feminism rather than simply pretend to for advantage, as if trying to step beyond a history of violence is a dweeb’s sickly riposte to not getting enough. I wanted to love her, and to be as kind to her as she already was to me. She says she’s never regretted that we had this period together, and I believe her.
There was nothing luxurious about those first months, no panning shots across a clothes-strewn floor leading to the couple naked atop the sheets. Even with as abject a lover as I was, she shied from displaying herself, hurrying instead into the shower when we were done, staying there for long stretches and emerging fully clothed. Her most comforting intimacy was ceasing to use my name and calling me Flipper instead. I had never earned an endearment before, and though its etymology was a mystery to me, I felt chosen each time she used it.
When at the end of the school year she needed a place to stay for the summer, naturally she moved in with me and my mother. She’d absconded with one of the college’s vacuum cleaners and derived some odd comfort from vacuuming our living room rug several times a week. My mother was attracted to the vacuum (unlike ours, it worked), but also wary after Alec, already a college freshman living with Aunt Penny in New York for the summer, characterized it as stolen during a rare home visit. It was the first new appliance to reach the household in years; its shiny yellow casing gave it the appearance of a probe sent from an advanced society to gather data on primitives. Caleigh wanted us to present ourselves to my mother as friends, which should likely have been another tip-off, but it defused awkwardness, so I was all for it. “Your friend likes vacuuming,” my mother would say to me when she got home from work. “She’s been at it again.” Having a guest clean the house might once have offended her sense of propriety, but she didn’t have it in her to make more than a token protest.
Once Caleigh had moved in and I no longer had to worry if I would see her every day, it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t just melancholy, she was about as depressed as I was, if not more so. But again, she didn’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter, she kept saying, which was a decent stand-in for her general approach to the world: all obligation was a chore, romance was a fraud, most days hurt, and the only real relief was music. We did read critical race theory articles together, and bemoaned the racial amnesia that hid the decline of black life-worlds behind endless civil rights hagiographies. So that was something. Truth be told, her depression was a comfort, giving me hope we might stay together awhile because there was so much it turned out that I needed to comfort her about.
In August, my mother went away to visit friends and Caleigh and I had that cursed house to ourselves. The month was one long heat wave. My mother didn’t believe in air-conditioning for herself or others, so in my bedroom at night, we’d place a fan a few inches from the mattress and leave it on high. At the bakery, several employees fainted quietly by the ovens. When I got home from work Caleigh and I would sprawl out in the living room, sweating like catfish, distracted even from our own misery, listening to nothing more taxing than ambient house. Celia or Alec would call now and then to check in, and I’d hear about her summer living in Berkeley, or his friends in New York. They’d gotten into colleges with better financial aid, where people drank less Michelob and listened to less Led Zeppelin, and where professors had seminars in their living rooms. I wouldn’t say that I resented them yet because I mostly just worried about how much pain they were in without knowing how to help them. But when they called, it did remind me, as if I needed reminding, that I was living in the house where I had once left them, my younger siblings, to fend for themselves, while they had somehow contrived more permanent escapes.
It would have been appropriate, even natural, I guess, if while I was there I’d dwelt on my father, but I had very few recollections of him and didn’t think about him much at all. This despite the fact that I had been seeing his old psychiatrist, Dr. Gregory, for some time already. I obviously couldn’t afford to pay him, but he’d never lost a patient to suicide before and was apparently guilty enough about it to ignore my nonpayment of his bills. He sent them, I threw them out, and on we went. Celia, asserting her newfound wisdom as a psychology major, said this was clinically unsound, but then she had more resources than I did, and tended toward self-confidence. His office was on the second floor of a small mansion on Marlborough Street in Back Bay. I sat in an upholstered leather chair in the middle of what must once have been a living room, Dr. Gregory’s cherrywood desk placed between two floor-to-ceiling windows with their long sashes and miniature balconies straight out of Edith Wharton, though he didn’t dress half as well as, say, Lawrence Selden in House of Mirth. No suits cut on the bias. No unstructured linen. It’s strange what people do and don’t do with their money. I would never have known he was a Midwesterner or a Methodist, but my mother used to accompany my father to his appointments and she’d gathered this intelligence early on (for her, a visit to a medical professional is first and foremost a social call). I talked to him mostly about psychoanalytic cultural criticism, theories of mass trauma, and occasionally my vicious bouts of panic that Caleigh would leave me imminently for a woman. He was a good listener, Dr. Gregory, and rarely interrupted me.
Perhaps also because of his guilt about my father, he had a quick draw with the prescription pad. This has proved fateful. At some point he introduced the term anxiety disorder into our discussion, and suggested a small dose of Librium, prn. When I told him it didn’t do much more for me than a Benadryl, he wrote me a script for something he described as “slightly more potent.”
I remember my first dose of Klonopin the way I imagine the elect recall their high school summer romances, bathed in the golden light of a perfect carelessness, untouched and untouchable by time’s predations or the foulness of any present pain. As Cat Stevens wrote, The first cut is the deepest, though I’ve always preferred Norma Fraser’s cover to the original (the legendary Studio One, Kingston, Jamaica, 1967). Stevens sings it like a pop song, but Fraser knows the line is true, that she’ll never love like that again. Her voice soars over the reverb like a bird in final flight. The first cut is the deepest. I’ve since learned all about GABA receptors an
d molecular binding, benzos and the dangers of tolerance, but back then I knew only that I had received an invisible and highly effective surgery to the mind, administered by a pale yellow tablet scored down the middle and no larger than an aspirin. There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it’s easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time. This was such a time.
