“Are you okay?” he said.
“Sorry, baby,” I said. “I’m good. That all sounds really good. I can’t wait.”
He smiled. The smile of a boy with feet itching to take him on the adventures waiting for him. If I’d proposed we throw bags in his car and leave in that moment he would have been thrilled.
He went on with ideas for the road trip.
The dog stopped and crouched. I looked off. My sense of shame was so profound it even extended to feeling discomfort on behalf of animals. I had come from squalor and refused to allow it to reclaim me. I caught my own reflection in the window of a parked car. She was recrimination incarnate. Is that what you think? her eyes said. I put on my sunglasses and pulled a ziplock bag over my hand. In my distraction it occurred to me something was different. Jason wasn’t talking anymore. I looked at him and saw that he was in a condition I had literally never seen him in before. He was speechless. I smiled the way we do at things that are new and fearful.
He did not smile back. His features were ossifying in that familiar way.
“What is that?” he said, from somewhere inside Fort Jason.
I followed his pointed finger to the sidewalk. It is tempting in scenes like this to anthropomorphize the reactions of animals, but it is an even more obtuse exercise than attempting to understand each other, if that’s even possible. The dog was as indifferent to us as it was to the human inheritance of shame, much less the pale, vermicular, indigestible passenger in its stool, an abhorrently ribald pig in a blanket.
The dog turd contained a used condom. One which hadn’t been used by Jason.
By the time we reached the apartment the barometric pressure had dropped and the pink clouds had black wisps like cotton candy that had been held to a flame. As the saying goes: if you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait five minutes. I poured each of us a whisky. He took it without saying anything.
“I want you to promise me something,” I said. “Promise me that no matter what happens from now on you’ll never let anyone make you smaller than you are.”
I held my glass out to toast. He didn’t meet it.
“Now your life starts,” I said.
I moved my glass to meet his in a clink but he pulled it away, downed it in one swallow, and placed the glass on the counter with a sharp clack. Not anger, some form of punctuation.
“It was a nice idea,” I said. “We were a nice idea, and it would be nice to pretend that there are not certain realities, but there are.”
“Can you define ‘certain realities’?”
“Do I really have to? How many autopsies have we had while we were still alive?”
We were both quiet.
“When I think of the places you’ll go I get this crushing feeling like there’s a thousand pounds on my chest,” I said. “But I’ve gone as far as I’m going with you.”
Zion was lying on the floor with passive anxiety over the turning weather. Jason sat on the couch and ran his hands up and down the fur of the dog’s chest with quiet focus. I was aware that the absence of emotion on his face was a quirk of his brain and not an earnest attempt to spite me, that rather than evading this conflict he simply wanted one moment of shared mammalian warmth before whatever was going to follow, but as though on a television game show buying spree at this point my vengeance was pulling items from the shelf with abandon. I had never felt a closer bond with Diane: the annihilation of all sensible reasoning in submission to this cleansing wave of shadow.
“Tell me why,” he said.
He did not know how unready he was for what he was saying, and I found his ignorance tiresome.
“Baby, read between the fucking lines.”
“What lines? Can we establish a personal first and talk about what we’re actually talking about?”
There was a raucous noise outside and something out the window caught my eye, two massive black wheels in the sky, one on top of the other, and parallel to the ground, turning in opposite directions. It was grackles flocking in discrete gyres.
Yes. I was ready to establish this personal first.
His hands went still in the dog’s fur like he was pressing them into his star on Hollywood Boulevard. In the cacophony of the grackles Jason did not fully process my answer. Nor did he days later on the 10 driving alone and stopping only for rest station naps under the desert sky’s overturned black colander, or when he reached the ocean and stood with pant cuffs rolled up and waves lapping his bare feet, or a long time after that. Not that all the signs hadn’t been in front of him. Every time. Every time Harry put me down in public led to this. Every time he made me feel small. Every time the voice inside my head that believed I wasn’t talented enough, or smart enough, or pretty enough, spoke to me in Harry’s voice. Every time Jason failed to make me feel loved enough. Every time he succeeded. Every time he told me not to call myself ugly. Every time he believed in himself, and made me believe in him, shining too brightly, like someone who would never need me, like someone who would leave me. Harry had said at the gun range that we were alike in ways that Jason was not like us. Mainly, we knew that this was a world where the people who love you the most can do this to you. The heart’s inconstancy, its plasticity, above all its capacity for treason to itself. That day the previous year driving back from the range I curled up in the passenger side and the top of my head touched Harry’s leg and if he had touched me back then I can’t say how history would have gone. He was tattooed and heavily muscled and smelled rank and dangerous and knew how to fix things and kill things and I had already protested far too much. But he didn’t, then. He waited. He was a satellite male always around to tell me I wasn’t good enough, until he was on the way up and Jason was already out the door. I think in Harry’s imagination he was doing Jason a favor, setting his world on fire, giving him nothing to come back to. It had happened several days ago. I told Harry I needed him to look at a leaking faucet that obviously Jason would be useless for, and while I’m not sure either of us exactly planned it, it felt like if I’d passed my hand over my head I could have felt the strings. Squalor reclaimed its own. Perhaps it should be noted that Harry requested that nothing be said until after Jason’s departure, that there was no point in shoving the knife in beforehand. But saying this was only words: he knew who was wielding the knife.
It would be a long time before Jason understood what a mistake he’d made trusting short people.
The object of this exercise is honesty. This was never my strong suit. And I don’t know if I can ever send this to you, baby, because I’m still so mad at you.
Jason looked at me for a long time, those great black wheels turning in an ominous and inscrutable mechanism in the sky behind him; his eyes had already begun the search that was to define the next chapter of his life, the search to understand how he possibly hadn’t seen this coming. I shrugged with polite helplessness and attempted to keep the giddiness from my voice. The process was simple. Everyone had to hurt more than they needed to.
“I’m not in love with you anymore,” I said.
funny you should ask that, Terry
Funny you should ask that, Terry. Three weeks. Harry and I lasted three weeks. His parting words to me were: “And that’s my limit for being criticized by a woman.” I didn’t see him after that. He went to New York to meet an interested agent and wound up getting an apartment with his prize money. Not long after that there was a bidding war for his book, which he sold for an amount of money we will not discuss, as to this day the specific figure has the power to induce hives. He bought a house in the Adirondacks to kill beautiful things and tell himself stories around the campfire of his own greatness.
After he left, I walked to the lunatics’ cemetery to have a cry. There was a strange hissing sound in the grass and I looked down and saw a tiny creature, a mammal of some kind no bigger than a mouse. I couldn’t tell you what it wa
s, really; it looked like the magical friend in a fantasy novel. If I’d taken another step I would have squashed it flat, but there it stayed, raising up on its hind legs and bristling and baring its teeth, hissing at me. I suppose I must have been approaching its burrow or whatever, but it gave no quarter! I crouched down and now this Lilliputian warrior was spitting mad, hopping and spreading its paws. I was so infatuated I forgot my heartbreak for a moment—my first instinct was to clutch Jason and show him. But Jason was gone forever. That was the first moment the reality of what I had done really caught up with me. I sat back on the ground, all the air left my body. I had lost the right to share the smallest wonders.
A vole, maybe? I don’t know.
I finished my last years in Texas in a state of near neutrality to what my future held except the time and location of my first drink. The immolation of the body a consecration, every hangover a benediction. Or whatever crap writers use to turn cowardice into valor. I didn’t actually write a word I wasn’t repelled by. For every action there is a reaction, and it stood to reason I had been a party to destruction and thus had lost the gift of creation. But this was not the case. The news came to me that Jason had sold a movie pitch, and my imagination was never more fertile than it was conjuring scenarios for the glamorous new life he had left me for. (In these scenarios there was no ambiguity that HE had left ME.) Sometimes I would see a couple in public, the man resting his hand on the back of the woman’s neck in a gesture I have always found so brutally tender it makes my heart fall into my stomach, or find myself running a finger along my own scarred thumbnail the way Jason used to, or some other small provocation I would use to listlessly sleep my way through a ring of some of his other friends who had stuck around. It was both over- and under-kill. Diane Galvan’s daughter, the prophecy fulfilled, had been left behind.
At least Austin was a good city for that; a high degree of intelligence and planlessness were virtually prerequisites for residence. Musicians referred to it as “the Velvet Coffin”—you can live such a comfortable life there you will never be compelled to leave to start your real one. I got a job with an organic cleaning service—well, yes, that is another word for it: an eco-friendly maid. Terry, if you gave me a rag and some white vinegar you would not recognize this studio afterward! I didn’t mind it. I’d spent so much of the previous years with status-obsessed males that I saw honor in servitude. Cleaning someone else’s house is one of the great anonymous acts of love. Our customers were mainly in west Austin, all the tech industry nouveau riche. The things that people who can afford organic maids buy! Lawn gnomes in ten-gallon hats around koi ponds made of plastic rocks, all-white shag carpeting, chandeliers in the bedroom. But this was where the universe had directed my anonymous acts of love and it was not my place to question it. Freedom is the enemy of happiness.
In one of these houses there was a kid home from college: a skinny, entitled, resentful child passing through life with a perpetual sneer. He was always around when I was working and would make an exaggerated display of annoyance at my presence while managing to place himself directly in my path as much as he could: wanting to watch the particular television in the room I was cleaning or waiting until I was in the kitchen to become imperatively hungry. His eyes were small and he was acne-prone, yet the majority of available wall space was devoted to photos of him throughout his undistinguished academic and athletic career. Some empathy was required for an unphotogenic credit to no one entombed by the brittle fantasy of his mother. One day I was cleaning his bathroom and there was a quite unmistakable stain on the shower door at waist level. In deference to the more delicate listener, he had committed the sin of Onan and left it for me to find. I would like to say this was my “come to Jesus moment,” as it were. But actually it was a few weeks afterward, when a client mentioned casually to my boss that she preferred an organic service to the more traditional because it was a relief to her to be dealing with members of her socioeconomic class. At home I reevaluated my position. I did not love these assholes, and did not want to clean their stupid tacky houses. I couldn’t continue being a spectator of the pity parade of my life, I had a destiny, and it was time to get serious about it; I would not be defined by the dramatic departure of all the men in my life. I was inseminated with purpose! As it were.
Then I got a call from New York.
It was a woman I’d worked for prior to Hogwarts. She had just taken a position as culture editor of an “aspirational” Condé Nast fashion and lifestyle magazine whose key demographic was single urban women with a median annual income of $103,000. Within a year I was a contributing editor. The last thing I’ll claim is that the experience did have its charms. I’m still a girl. The effervescent closing minutes of a gala in a dress you could never afford when the ties and morals become looser, models in the background smiling with too much gum like the children they are, or being the girl reporter sent to disarm famous men, the way their brains short-circuit when you turn them down. Not that I mean to exaggerate how frequently I turned them down. I took secret pleasure in passing through the housing projects on my way to the East River promenade to run; the men in athletic jerseys two sizes too large and women in painted-on jeans with behinds so protuberant it seemed like they had to be inflated a reminder of the street my mother lived on, the unrecognition in all of their faces that we had anything in common. I attempted to justify this life by remembering that Joan Didion had worked for Vogue and gone on to great success and great love. Of course, Sylvia Plath had also worked for Mademoiselle…
Had there ever been such an ingrate? Yes, I was aware that any job in the existing journalistic climate was like a fairy tale, let alone at a print monthly. No, it did not escape me that this was the archetypal dream job of a romantic comedy protagonist. But history was repeating, Terry. The city was a perpetually self-altering maze of DISTRACTION: who can get in where and where happens to be worth getting into at the moment and who hates who—which is easy enough to keep track of because everyone hates everyone, though for reasons mysterious. (The reason is always jealousy.) But you persist through this byzantine web of snubbing and status anxiety based on nothing but ephemeral patterns of condensation and the reason is the party, not even the party itself, the line to the party and the promise it implies of better fashion, better people, better intoxicants (please). The fact that it will simply be populated by the same people making the same migration is missing the point. And, of course, the line is only an advertisement because it’s not like you’ll be standing in it like some loser.
However, for all that amused about this life—and only the worst prig would pretend it’s unamusing—there was one problem: it didn’t belong to me. This person who had just hours ago stumbled home to throw away the ripped stockings and scrub off the smeared mascara of the night before, who was now wearing a Roberto Cavalli skirt of a certain length because she would be appearing in the “leg shot” of a third-tier morning show segment, and riding in the elevator with gazelle-like women smiling their hatred while behind each other’s backs they posted unflattering pictures of each other online—this person was a double, the changeling of Galvan family lore. She was as far from the person I was supposed to be as the maid in Texas cleaning up some kinesiology major’s come stain. I was helpless, the victim of an identity thief I was always chasing, but never fast enough or clever enough or, in my heart, prepared enough, to catch.
One night I was at a book party with the changeling’s friends—young, striving journalism types, most of whom worked for publications devoted to less frivolous fields than her own. But to tell the truth, Terry, I believe that most journalism is fashion journalism. It’s a sea of flume: au courant opinions and half-formed analysis as rigorous as cocktail party chatter, the educated gliding on the winds of their own pontification. I came to call them—and make no mistake I lumped myself in this—“the Bitterati.” Because everyone in the circle was a frustrated something else; their unwritten novels and screenplays kind
ling for their enmity for Malcolm Gladwell or Jonathan Franzen, anyone whose success was more comfortable to malign than attempt to emulate. Sometimes I would end up drunkenly in their beds without letting them touch me to amuse myself. Sad satellite males, not a real man in the bunch.
The party was being held at a certain ostentatious hotel penthouse bar that may or may not have been cool at that point, but it was irrelevant to me because the waitresses were golden sylphs who glissaded across the floor without their feet touching the ground and the bathrooms with black reflective tiling and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water were designed for licentious abuses, and such imperial disdain for taste and restraint was irresistible to the Diane in me. That night a storm was coming. There was a bank of black cloud over Jersey City like a single ominous protozoa. It felt like the wake for a god. At our table after the customary Franzenfreude, the conversation turned to a recent David Brooks article. A frequent contributor to the Times’ Book Review, Brooks adopted a posture of sort of Oscar Wilde superiority and announced that evolutionary biology was the “phrenology of the twenty-first century.” He expounded on his umbrage: the nerve of biologists trying to usurp the province of artists and philosophers. This line of reasoning has a name: Human Exceptionalism. Essentially this is the belief that while there is no God, human beings have preferential status in an otherwise random universe, thus giving the educated permission to worship themselves. I recalled something I had picked up from random reading, that the physical structure of the neuron is no different than lightning or a tree; an ideal form for the flow of energy—something so beautiful it had to be true. I did not contribute this to a conversation taking the absence of God as a given. I was supposed to be an observer, my art concerned what was eternally true, and here I was caught in a maze whose existence was defined by being different than it was the week before, on what was in fashion to hate. Of course I had once argued fiercely with Harry for espousing the scientific school it now depressed me so completely to hear dismissed, but any argument has way more to do with your feelings toward the arguer than whatever is actually coming out of his mouth. And this time I did not argue back, I let a learned fool publically dismiss the mysteries closest to my own heart to not appear frivolous. I wrote about OLFACTORY EMPIRES and THE POWER OF PINK in an office place with a designated “Crying Room”—what could I say without sounding like SUCH A GIRL? I was taken most seriously when listening to men listen to themselves.
The Lights Page 12
