Land of Enchantment

by Leigh Stein

  “Do you have a Facebook?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do you?”

  “Friend me.”

  By the time I got home that night, he had removed his date of birth from his profile, so I wouldn’t know he was only eighteen years old. I turned off my phone and went to sleep. When I woke up the next day, there was a voice mail from him, left in the early hours of the morning.

  “Leigh,” the message said. “I don’t actually hate spending time with you. We should go out sometime. Okay, ’bye.”

  When I called back he said he’d stayed up late Googling me and reading my poems. “They’re very . . . Jewish.”

  “‘Jewish’?”

  “Jewish,” he repeated.

  “Oh, I know which one you read. . . .” The poem that begins, Miriam danced in Exodus while the Red Sea drowned the horses. . . .

  “Can you look at my English paper that’s due in an hour and twelve minutes?”

  Was he serious? “I have to go to work,” I said.

  “I’ll e-mail you the outline now and you can look at the real paper later. What are you doing this weekend? Want to go out?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I just asked you out,” he said.

  “And I said, ‘Sure.’”

  After we hung up, I wrote in my diary, There must be something horribly wrong with him I haven’t discovered yet.

  Torch Song

  (2007)

  I grew up in the dark—in basements, in bedrooms, backstage in the wings behind the velvet. I grew up at sleepovers where the girls with the power were the ones who came up with the most humiliating dares for the others. We didn’t realize the name for what we all wanted so badly was power; the closest we could get was attention, standing outside in the middle of the night unsupervised, lifting our shirts to flash our small breasts to streetlights, screaming the words we weren’t allowed to say in daylight. When were our real lives finally going to start? When and how would we learn all we could do with our new bodies, and what could be done to them?

  In sixth grade, a boy asked over Instant Messenger if I would be his girlfriend, and four hours later I called him to break it off, too nervous about what it would mean to be someone’s girlfriend in person. Somewhere between fear and desire, I figured out how to take pleasure all by myself, rubbing my pelvis against the carpeted floor of my bedroom while wearing a particular pair of denim overalls. In seventh grade, my teeth chattering from Paxil, my friend Erin and I acted out the entire cast recording of Rent, borrowed from the library, with Barbies we both knew we were too old to play with. A couple of years later, my first kiss was in the back of a car with the best dancer at the performing arts school I attended on the weekends. He had already kissed every girl I knew, so to stand apart as someone special, I let him wrap his hands around my throat at rehearsal whenever no one was looking and squeeze. I was fascinated by the dancers because they knew already what their bodies were capable of. I was still afraid of mine. Instead of dancing, I learned to sing.

  I won competitions for my performances of Mendelssohn, Bizet, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Delibes, collecting trophies for the power of my lungs. “Your voice is very . . . loud,” the father of another competitor told me, inside a nave. I liked being loud. I liked hitting the sweet spot of high C, the way the note blew off the top of my head.

  In public, I was a soprano, a prizewinning coquette, but home alone, I was obsessed with memorizing torch songs, laments for the unrequited love of a brute, which I downloaded off Napster. Popular in the 1920s, the torch singer was the opposite of a flapper girl. She didn’t want to burn her candle at both ends; she carried only a single flame, a torch, for dat man she can’t help lovin’. The “can’t help” part is crucial. The singer is a slave to her bad romance. My favorite remains the original torch song, “My Man,” sung by funny girl Fanny Brice about her shithead second husband: What’s the difference if I say I’ll go away, / When I know I’ll come back on my knees someday?

  On our second date after the Medea callbacks, Jason forgot the keys to his apartment, and picked the lock with his library card. I had never dated anyone who knew how to pick a lock before. I had never dated anyone who kept a copy of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists in clear display on his bookshelf either, though to be fair, there was a copy of The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr next to it.

  “You’ve read this?” I asked, holding up the memoir.

  “Of course I have,” he said, which surprised me because even though he said he’d read my poems, I still had him pegged for a semiliterate jock.

  I gave myself a tour of his apartment, which I hadn’t paid much attention to the first time I visited. It was a one-bedroom, for which his dad paid the rent as long as Jason went to community college. It sounded like a pretty sweet deal to me, but Jason said it was only so that his dad could get him out of the four-bedroom house he shared with his new fiancée, a ten-minute drive away.

  The living room carpet was riddled with neon BB pellets. In the bedroom, he had a comforter tacked over the windows on top of the blinds to block out all light. After lots of Q&A, I’d finally figured out that Jason was only eighteen years old—but he would be turning nineteen in April, and then we’d be only three years apart, which seemed okay. My mom is three years older than my dad, a coincidence that I mentally registered as a sign.

  There were no pictures of his friends or family anywhere in the apartment, only a poster of James Dean on the wall of the hallway between the living room and bedroom. Jason stood beneath it, flipped his collar, and scowled. A dead ringer.

  “Have you seen Rebel Without a Cause?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  He promised we would watch it together.

  What I loved to watch was Jason, the unselfconscious way he did the most ordinary things, like an actor in a one-man show. I studied the lines around his lips when he smoked, the grip of his hand when shifting from third to fourth gear, the square tips of his fingers when he laced his boots. When he cradled my face in his hands or kissed the inside of my elbow, it made everything in my head turn into static, white noise. He made my mind go blank. I’d never felt anything like it. And so I forgot about trying to be smart or funny or impressive—all I wanted was my body laid out like a page of Braille; I wanted Jason to read me that way.

  Neither of us got cast in Medea, but it didn’t matter. We saw each other almost every night. When I mentioned that I’d recently had my wisdom teeth out, Jason asked me to bring over my leftover pain pills and muscle relaxers. He rolled Vicodin cigarettes and we took them to the movies with us. I bought jugs of Carlo Rossi Chianti and we drank them. Matching his level of intoxication felt like part of the audition process, like this was my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try out for the role of the cool girl, after having always been so serious, so ambitious, so square. It was a kind of reverse ambition—what if be whoever you want to be meant forgetting all your dreams and having fun becoming a flop?

  We stayed up so late that the suburbs turned surreal and became ours. If we had not drunk a jug of wine, we drove to the twenty-four-hour diner at two in the morning and sat in the smoking section and ate strawberry pancakes. There, he told me about the treatment facilities he’d been sent to, the detention centers, the wilderness camp in Kentucky where he’d refused to actually go outside and participate, so they’d put him in solitary confinement and he’d played “We Will Rock You” against the wall with his head for fourteen hours.

  To illustrate, he began to sing the chorus while tapping his fingers on the tabletop.

  “But why did you have to go to all these places?” I asked.

  “Because my stepdad hated me.”

  Jason had grown up down south, with his mom, stepdad, and two half siblings. His dad tried to get full custody, but during the court deposition, he ruined his case by admitting that he
allowed adolescent Jason to watch porn on summer visits. Jason told me that once, after his stepdad had finished beating him, Jason wrote I HATE YOU in his own blood on a piece of paper and put on a suit to bring it downstairs to his stepdad on a tray. Did this actually happen? I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I believed him, I always believed him, because of the impressive amount of detail Jason put into each of his stories. He made me feel like he’d been waiting a long time for someone like me, someone to listen to his stories with sympathy, a believer.

  Snooping in Jason’s medicine cabinet, I found Depakote, an antiseizure medication used to treat bipolar disorder, but when I asked about it he said doctors were constantly prescribing him medicine and nothing ever worked. The side effects always outweighed the benefits. I’d been on and off antidepressants for years, so rather than recognize a warning sign, I saw something we had in common. After Jason found my poetry online he started saying that someday he’d tell me all his stories so I could write his memoir, and then we’d both be rich.

  We watched Rebel Without a Cause, and there he was, just as Jason wanted me to see him—in Jim Stark’s blistering rage at his parents, his distant tenderness toward Natalie Wood’s character Judy. From his hairline to his fingertips, Jason was James. It was uncanny. Jason also sang Johnny Cash songs with perfect pitch and slow-danced with me to “Wildwood Flower.” I was falling in love with a young man who had the face of a dead movie star and the voice of a drug-addicted rebel, and so when Jason told me he usually only had sex with virgins, I asked if I could be next.

  “No, then you’re just going to get really attached. Believe me.” The thing I couldn’t believe was that he would turn down what I was asking for.

  “It’s not like I’m saving myself for someone,” I said. “I had this boyfriend in high school for two years and he wouldn’t do it, even though I begged him all the time.”

  “Sounds gay.”

  “Please? You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  He looked irritated and put-upon. “Let me go see if I have any condoms,” he finally said, and disappeared into the bedroom. I followed.

  “Tell me your least favorite part of your body,” he said, “so I’ll know not to mention it.”

  “Do you think I should get surgery so my ears don’t stick out?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then my legs,” I said. “I hate my legs.”

  “Your legs are perfect.”

  He turned on his iPod and we kissed on the bed. The bedroom fan was on because the bedroom fan was always on, providing the white noise he needed in order to sleep. Inside the music and the whir of the blades, he was sweet and gentle until he couldn’t be. With his mouth, he left bruises and crescent moons of teeth on my skin, and I loved being marked by how much he wanted me, so I could forget how much I’d begged for this. At twenty-two, my virginity was the only obstacle I could imagine that was insurmountable without another person and when I lost it I felt relief, followed swiftly by disappointment that after all this anticipation and anxiety, I didn’t feel very different at all. The next morning I went home and wrote in my diary that I had lost my virginity to the song “Heartbreak Hotel.”

  Seven Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life

  (2007)

  One morning a little less than a week later, I said I hadn’t been able to fall asleep the night before and he asked why hadn’t I told him—he would have hit me on the head with something hard. This was the kind of vaguely threatening thing he said to me all the time, but it didn’t frighten me. It made me laugh with surprise, that instead of speaking to me like a baby, someone would address me as a sparring partner. We made plans to see each other later that evening, after he helped a girl he knew, a photography student, with a portrait project.

  But I never got to see him. When I tried calling, it went straight to voice mail. My texts went unanswered. I had too much wine at dinner with my parents and went to bed with my phone, hoping a light or a vibration would wake me. Nothing. The next morning, I found the photos on Facebook of him and a Lithuanian model named Veronika—him kissing her neck, him holding her face in his hands—beside a status update to say they were “married,” and then downgraded to “in a relationship.”

  He had mentioned that there would be a girl in the portraits with him, but I hadn’t even thought through the implications of this thoroughly enough to be jealous. It was exactly fifteen days after the night I had met him. What did I expect? That I was his girlfriend? Actually, yes. Or at least that I would be soon. Seeing Veronika’s face, I felt like an idiot. Of course he would choose her cheekbones, her elegant neck, her flawless skin, over mine. Clicking through the photos online again and again like a kind of self-injury, I replayed the evidence of his betrayal.

  I had finally gotten my chance to play Medea: O God, you have given to mortals a sure method / Of telling the gold that is pure from the counterfeit; / Why is there no mark engraved upon men’s bodies, / By which we could know the true ones from the false ones?

  The last time I’d seen Jason, he’d held me down on the carpet and given me the worst hickey of my life, while I kicked and screamed beneath him. Now I got to wear a scarf around my neck every day, while he and Veronika did whatever it was they were doing, and wait for the bruise to fade away. I lost my appetite, and six pounds in ten days. I ran for miles along the sidewalks of my childhood, trapped in a place where everyone strived to conform and I’d spent my whole life trying to be defined by my difference. One way or another, I was going to get out of there. Good-bye, minivans. Good-bye, lawn mowers. I drove my parents’ car with the moonroof up, listening to the new Arcade Fire album on repeat until I knew all the words. I cut off my hair and changed my profile picture to show off my newly prominent clavicle. I left sexual innuendos all over his Facebook wall so Veronika would see them.

  If it sounds like I was often alone, that’s because I was. My closest friend from childhood lived thirty minutes away with her parents, but between our work schedules, our free time rarely coincided. My other closest friends were young women I knew mostly by their usernames and avatars. In my online diary on LiveJournal, I posted about Jason, hoping for sympathy and answers: “Why did he call last night at 1:30 in the morning and not leave a message? Why do people have to die? Who the hell knows the answer to these things? I weigh less now than what I said I weighed when I lied on my driver’s license.”

  My mom had not met Jason, but she saw the Facebook photos with Veronika and tried to convince me to move on and focus on getting into school, where I could meet my future husband. After all, that’s where she met her first husband, a young Greek guy: in the multicultural club at the southern Illinois college she attended on academic scholarship in the late sixties. They moved to Chicago, and she worked full-time as a secretary while going to night school at Northwestern, eventually earning a PhD in clinical psychology. The two divorced because he wanted a wife who would run his restaurant for him, and then my mom met my dad in Evanston, where he was temporarily living at home with his parents after a breakup.

  My mother is brilliant, tirelessly self-sacrificing, and determinedly optimistic. She does not complain. If you bring her a problem, she’ll give you advice. After I cried to her about Jason and Veronika, she ordered a workbook off the Internet for me titled Calling in “The One”: 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life. And then she went back to the rest of her life, which was devoted to helping people with problems worse than mine: seeing her patients, bringing groceries to the African refugee family she had adopted, tutoring children of recent immigrants in an after-school program on her day off, and visiting my disabled and mentally ill grandparents at the nursing home.

  In hindsight I wonder why she couldn’t just tell me it was okay to be twenty-two and single. Was it because she herself had such a hard time being alone?

  I spent most of March in the grips of an obsession there seemed to be no remedy for, fueled
by this idea that I was nobody if no one was in love with me. I gave up on the workbook as soon as the author said to let go of past wounds. I didn’t want to; the wound was what I was most interested in. “It no longer matters why she loved her mediocre man while he was there,” John Moore writes, on torch songs, “all that matters is that she loves him now he has gone.”

  If anything, I craved vengeance, not healing, and I wrote a poem a day on that theme. One was a poem mocking Calling in “The One.” There was another based on a Russian folk tale about a rusalka, a mermaid, who loses her beloved to a foreign princess and goes to a witch for advice. The witch tells her to stab her love with a dagger—made perfect sense to me.

  I sent these poems to Jason. I knew he read them late at night because I got a text at 2:40 a.m. that read, Why do you always allude to my death in your poetry?

  When I finally got him on the phone, he explained that soon after the photography session he’d made a list of pros and cons for both me and Veronika and she was ahead by one point only because I was moving to Canada, but he still wasn’t satisfied, so he flipped a coin four times and that’s how he’d decided who to date.

  “But I haven’t even been invited for an interview yet,” I said. I didn’t say, to Jason or to anyone else, that if I had to choose between Canada and being his girlfriend, I would choose being his girlfriend.

  “If you buy me a motorcycle, I’ll dump Veronika and we can run away to Arkansas,” he offered.

  “I’m not buying you a motorcycle,” I said, but that didn’t stop me from repeating his offer—including the dump Veronika part—in the “favorite quotes” section of my Facebook profile and feeling triumphant when she saw it and freaked out.