Land of Enchantment

by Leigh Stein

  At the dinner table, the first night Jason met my parents, he told my dad, “I love sleeping with your daughter.” I almost stabbed myself with my fork. He’d blushed and tried again: “I mean . . . sleeping . . . next to your . . .” Luckily, my dad laughed and he relaxed.

  Another one of his wonderful traits was impersonating various television personalities. My daughters were locked into some of the reality shows and I always had many laughs when Jason was able to pull off a perfect impersonation of Tim Gunn or Johnny Cash. I also remember when he and Leigh moved to New Mexico and the wonderful, silly artifacts he brought back from Albuquerque, including a toy alligator and straw cowboy hats. That was true Jason. He had a very keen sense of humor and after a long day his humor and energy was a tonic for the soul.

  The toy alligator lives on a bookshelf in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. I don’t know where he got it, or how it came to be mine, or why it’s still there.

  I saw a young man filled with many great traits, intelligence, wit, a great sense of humor, very adept at working with his hands, and with a love of animals. He had so much promise with so many great skills and intelligence. He is survived by friends and family who will continue to believe in him and carry his zestful spirit every day. I know I will.

  Thank you, Jason, for helping me laugh and look at the World in a little different way. Godspeed, my Friend.

  I made it to the end of the letter mostly without crying, then lost it at World. I still find the way my dad capitalizes common nouns—Cats, World, Friend—to be almost unbearably poignant. I’m the writer in the family, but he’s the sentimentalist. “Your dad’s just a simple guy,” Jason used to say, in admiration. He used to call him B-Rad for Brad. Be rad.

  Outside, after the funeral service, I saw Jason’s grandfather. He was now a widower. His wife, the woman who’d hugged me in the parking garage, had died of cancer a couple of years after I’d met her. His body was shrunken, but his face looked enormous. His nose looked like a caricatured replica of Jason’s. I noticed that his hands were shaking on top of his cane. I thought either he was in shock, or that he didn’t quite know what was going on.

  “Hi,” I said gently, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met in Las Vegas at Victor’s wedding. You and your wife took us out to lunch. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  I don’t know why I kept talking. He just stared at me, trembling, until I walked away. There was that vertigo again—the feeling that I might be the only one alive who remembered that afternoon in Las Vegas at all.

  Callista and I piled into Lisa’s car, and she drove us to the cemetery. The Hell’s Angels led the cavalcade through North Little Rock, and as we followed I noticed that Lisa was blowing through one red light after another. I knew she was upset, so I didn’t say anything. Eventually it dawned on me that we were part of a funeral procession; we were supposed to go through the red lights. I’d forgotten what we were doing, where we were going.

  At the cemetery, Victor’s girlfriend told me and Lisa that she felt Jason was with them the previous evening at dinner: across the street from the restaurant she’d seen a parked motorcycle with a white helmet on the seat, “like an angel.” Then she began to cry. I could tell she was trying to connect with us and share our grief, but I didn’t want to share with her. I didn’t think she deserved a piece of what Lisa and Callista and I felt. For the past year, she and Victor were out of his life. Completely. Jason would have wanted me to hate her, so I did him a favor.

  Toward Victor, my feelings were more complicated. I felt empathy—we both had finally reached our limits with Jason before he died—but also tremendous pain on Jason’s behalf, to have had the person in his life he admired most of all cut him off. I asked Victor if he was going to be at the luncheon at Jason’s grandmother’s house, so we could talk more.

  “No,” he said, “I can’t be around those people,” referring to his ex-wife of almost twenty years and her family.

  Like son, like father: everything had to be on their own terms. Before we left for the luncheon, I told Victor that the novel I wrote in Albuquerque would be published in a few months, and I was going to dedicate it to Jason.

  He stared at me and blinked a few times. I don’t think he even remembered.

  Channel Georgia

  (2008)

  Our six-month lease in Albuquerque would be up in the middle of February, and we had no plans to renew it. Although neither of us would have ever flat-out said this didn’t work, Jason and I each surrendered to the struggles that had sprung from our adventure. I no longer had anything in the bank, and I was spending each of my days in a heavily medicated fog; he was homesick for Chicago and Callista. We fell into the same trap that had gotten us here: Wouldn’t everything be better if we lived somewhere else? With my savings gone, I would have to move in with my parents yet again. Jason would move in with his dad, who had agreed to pay our moving expenses. I hated accepting his money, but at the same time I reassured myself it was only fair, as I’d been supporting his son for six months.

  I made all the to-do lists: rent the truck, clean the bathtub, get the hole in the bathroom door shaped like Jason’s fist fixed. I was too depressed to write, but I was thinking of going back to school and finishing my bachelor’s degree. Instead of spending my days making things up, I read admissions information, marked deadlines in my calendar, researched CLEP exams. I told myself that this time I would follow the rules. I would make all the right choices. I e-mailed someone in the admissions department at Northwestern’s night school program for working adults, forgetting that this was where my mom finished her own bachelor’s degree in the late seventies, while working full-time as a secretary at Sears. Maybe subconsciously I thought that I could be forgiven for leaving, for letting someone hurt me, for failing to prove this love was worth the pain, if I stopped trying so hard to be myself, and tried to become a little more like the woman who’d raised me.

  Clearly I was a flop in the role of the carefree rebel, so I could try playing the good, obedient daughter instead: live at home, go back to school, get a job, hang out at the mall, be normal. If there was a character in between “good girl” and “bad,” I didn’t know who she was. I worried I would have to always vacillate between the two extremes. I was too ambitious to allow my life to become a total disaster, yet still too hungry for experience to commit to settling down in suburbia. I was also twenty-three years old. I’m sure a lot of young women feel, or have felt, as I did, but I didn’t know any of them, except in books.

  When she was twenty, Sylvia Plath spent a summer working at Mademoiselle in New York City, the setting for her future novel The Bell Jar. On her last night at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, Sylvia got drunk and threw all her slips and sheaths and stockings off the roof. She had to borrow a peasant skirt and blouse from a friend to wear home the next day. For the rest of the summer, her plan was to sunbathe and study Joyce for her senior thesis at Smith. From a hotel roof to reading Ulysses in Wellesley, from your buzzed brain saying fuck it to your morning brain telling you to buckle down—these extremes I knew very well.

  With the deadline of our move on the horizon, Jason and I spent our January days making up for lost time, trying to fit as much of the scenery in our mental suitcases as we could, before we had to say good-bye to the Land of Enchantment. Like a child of divorce, the state itself became symbolic of our past affection and devotion to each other.

  On a day trip, we drove south to Alamogordo, along what was often a two-lane highway with no other cars in sight, no cell phone reception for miles, just the occasional pay phone booth or picnic bench with a view of roadside creosote and faraway mountains. We passed Trinity Site, where the first nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945, and I took a picture of the sign that marked the spot of “the beginning of the nuclear age.” We pulled over at a petrified lava plain called the Valley of Fires, and I took photos from the road of Jason standing below
, his arms outstretched like wings against the black trenches, the sun casting a shadow like a scarecrow behind him. The recreation area where we’d stopped was on the east side of the Carrizozo Malpais, which translates in Spanish to “badland.” In the tiny town of Carrizozo we stopped at a restaurant called Restaurant, which had green chile cheeseburgers, and bought big plastic bottles of cherry cider to take home with us. Lava fields and cherry cider: enough to make a dot on a map a destination.

  I don’t remember what we talked about, or how I felt on this trip. The day plays behind my eyes like someone else’s silent movie: a guy in the driver’s seat blowing cigarette smoke and shifting gears, a girl in the passenger seat watching out the window as the scenery goes by. If I had to guess, we probably had the same conversation we’d been having for weeks, trying to solve for the variable that made our life together unsustainable. Was it money? We never had enough, but it was hard to say where it all went. Was it the distance from our friends and family? I thought that was part of moving all the way out here, to prove we could do this without them. Was it me? Was I crazy? Impossible to live with? I stopped smoking pot, and then I tried to cut back on my alcohol consumption, too. “I remember the fun Leigh, who used to drink half a bottle of wine a night,” Jason teased. The antidepressants, the sobriety—nothing I tried to heal myself with made a difference because, according to Jason, I had bipolar disorder and just wouldn’t admit it. “Good luck to whoever dates you next,” he told me. The variable we never found, the possibility we never debated, was that it was Jason who made our life together unsustainable.

  At White Sands National Monument in Alamogordo, I took a video of him rolling down a white sand dune, the blue horizon the constant behind the velocity of his body. The largest gypsum dune field in the world, White Sands sits in a basin in the middle of the desert. After it rains, the wet gypsum crystallizes on the surface as it dries, and then erosion breaks the crystals into sand, which the wind blows into towering, shape-shifting dunes that look like they’re from another planet. Spiky yucca plants grow from the sand, their long thin necks angling for more sun.

  At the crest of another dune, we met a family of three in the midst of traveling around the Southwest, living out of their cargo van and homeschooling their little boy, who was sliding down the dune on a round snow sled. Will their son someday remember this? I wondered, watching him play with Jason and their little dog in the sand. I never forgot that day. Why do I have so many clear, detailed memories of days spent with Jason, when other memorable days of my life are so fuzzy? Maybe I never took enough care to memorize those other days. I have gone back and relived my life with Jason so many times that, in spite of all the dark and painful parts, some moments will always bloom like flowers in the fastidiously tended garden of my memory.

  On another day trip, we went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. I didn’t know much about Georgia or her work. Even though I’d seen “Sky Above Clouds” at the Art Institute of Chicago many times, I always paid more attention to the Impressionists. I hadn’t yet become a lover of the sky.

  At the little museum in Santa Fe, we watched a short documentary on Georgia that told me everything I needed to know to become her devotee: Midwestern-born, lover of the Southwest, part-time New Yorker, Georgia was ferociously independent, even when sharing a life with the powerful man who helped to launch her career. As hyperbolic as it sounds, I thought of Jason as my Stieglitz, because he was one of the first people to believe me when I said I was a writer, and of course I projected myself on screen as Georgia. It seemed we had so much in common, and yet she was so tough, so true to herself, that the more I learned about her, the more I wanted to resurrect her from the dead so she could teach me how to live.

  In the gift shop, I bought Roxana Robinson’s 656-page biography of O’Keeffe, which immediately became my combination of a devotional and a self-help book. The first hundred pages I hesitantly marked with only small translucent sticky arrows, but after that I was underlining full paragraphs in black ink. Today, when I look back at what I underlined, I can see I was trying to collect all the things I had in common with the artist, while at the same time I was searching for advice, trying to teach myself a lesson: more of this, less of that; above all, channel Georgia.

  Page twenty-nine: “Privacy and solitude would continue to be of immense importance to Georgia throughout her life. ‘I don’t take easily to being with people,’ she said.”

  Page thirty-one: “Georgia was not by nature a rebel; she did not define herself through opposition.”

  Page forty-six: “‘I am going to live a different life from the rest of you girls,’ Georgia told her high school classmates at graduation. ‘I am going to give up everything for my art.’”

  In an essay that celebrates the artist for her hardness, Joan Didion writes, “Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it.” I felt like I had a tiny spark of this inside me, the notion that I would put my art first and that made me who I was—after all, we’d moved to New Mexico so I could write a novel—but I relied too much on Jason for the oxygen that would make that spark a flame; if he doubted my work, or said negative things about my lack of productivity, the spark cooled and died.

  In the spring of 1917, when Georgia was twenty-nine, she fell for the handsome, younger photographer Paul Strand (Stieglitz was his mentor). At the time, Paul was merely one of a few men taken by Georgia’s charms, and she unapologetically avoided committing to any of them. In a letter to Paul, she wrote:

  I some way seem to feel what [men] feel—never wanting to give it all. . . . As I see it—to a woman [commitment] means willingness to give life—not only her life but other life—to give up life—or give other life—Nobody I know means that to me—for more than a moment at a time. . . .

  It’s always aloneness—

  I wonder if I mind.

  I minded. And I hated that I did. I was scared of living without Jason, but I was also scared of sacrificing my whole self to our doomed endeavor. I felt submerged in our relationship, like I was underwater and unable to delineate the outlines of my limbs. It was all blurry, without boundaries. The story I told myself of our adventure in the Land of Enchantment—that it was the result of my independent spirit, my own choices—seemed delusional when I honestly examined how controlled I was by Jason, how I’d made my life dependent on his conditional love. And yet, as much as I looked to Georgia’s letters to teach me how to be independent, I was also comforted by glimpses of her vulnerability. In the summer of 1917, she wrote to Paul from Colorado, describing Stapps Lake:

  One lake . . . surrounded by bare mountains—bare banks—rocks—a cold bare lake sparkling in the moonlight—

  Gosh it was bare—

  And I wanted to like some one tremendously—some one that liked what I saw—like I liked it.

  I wanted a witness, too. Maybe I was scared that it wouldn’t matter what I did with my life if I had no one at my side to watch me do it.

  A night or two before we moved back to Illinois, our neighbor Diane, who had taught me to drive, and her husband, Ted, came over. Diane helped me clean the apartment until it looked like we had never lived there at all (aside from the bathroom door, which had to be replaced). Then we all went to Del Taco. Diane had good news to share: she was pregnant and had just come from the doctor, who gave her a tiny plastic replica of a fetus, to show what she was carrying inside her. It was the size of the tip of Diane’s thumb. She kept taking the tiny fetus out of the pocket of her jeans to hold in her palm and marvel at it.

  As we said our good-byes, I wished I had something to give these nice people, to thank them for their help and friendship, but truthfully I hadn’t anticipated feeling so close to them as I did that last night. Maybe because he’d grown up bouncing fro
m one city—one set of parents—to another, Jason quickly made friends (or enemies) and could drop them just as easily. In Albuquerque I followed his lead. We met so many people, but Rick and Vicky were the closest thing we had to friends, and they hadn’t spoken to us in months. In hindsight, I recognize how isolated I was.

  Diane, now a mother of three, is one of the few people I’ve kept in touch with from that time. Years after I left Albuquerque, she sent me a message on Facebook that revealed her one regret: “I just wish that I had been able to give you better advice/talk to you more about the abuse.” The abuse. I didn’t know that was what it was. Or maybe I did know, some of the time, but it was knowledge that was easy to cast doubt upon and discredit. After all, I wasn’t coming into work covered in bruises like Stephanie. The cops weren’t showing up at our door. I didn’t think the domestic violence posters at the medical clinic applied to me. I never would have called a hotline. The closest I came to identifying what was happening was in the e-mail I sent Julia from Albuquerque: Sometimes I feel like we are in a romantic relationship, but it is a bad, abusive kind that I should get out of. That sometimes flickered on and off like electricity in a storm.

  My favorite Georgia O’Keeffe painting is From the Faraway, Nearby. I can never decide what I love more: the image itself, or the poetry in the title. It’s an oil painting of an animal skull, framed by pearly gray antlers that reach like live tendrils toward the blue southwestern sky. Below, the sherbet-colored mountain ridges are diminutive in comparison to this surreal animal that seems at once dead and alive. The title plays with this distortion of perspective, setting the skull dramatically in the foreground, afloat like a spectre that demands our gaze.