by Leigh Stein
Death always seems so faraway, something that only happens to other people, until it comes so near to us it obliterates our sky.
And violence, too, seemed so faraway to me that I never recognized it in the foreground of my life with Jason.
It was warm enough for short sleeves the day we loaded the truck. We drove through Amarillo again, this time without stopping, and through the long, lackluster length of Oklahoma and into Missouri. It got colder and colder and colder. In my overnight bag, I had packed white pillowcases we could substitute for the scratchy ones at a Microtel outside Joplin. Our last night together fell on Valentine’s Day. We did not have sex, and I cried myself to sleep on the familiar pillowcase, waiting in vain for him to figure out that was what I wanted.
The next morning, we stopped at an enormous roadside souvenir depot with a glittering marquee called Ozark Village, and Jason bought me the ninety-nine-cent fake turquoise ring that I would one day wear to his funeral. The only finger it fits is my ring finger.
The previous August, our drive to Albuquerque had been so colored by hope and ambition and audaciousness. The return trip was just the opposite, darkened by trepidation and hopelessness.
When we got back to the western suburbs of Chicago, we parked the truck overnight on a side street around the corner from my parents’ house, and I remember sitting in the cab, not wanting to get out, not wanting to go inside, not wanting to go backward or forward, not wanting to get on with anything.
Around midnight, I finally climbed down from the truck, and my leg went through a foot of dirty snow piled at the curb. The night sky was steel gray with light pollution and there were no stars to see. Jason and I hadn’t officially broken up, but we weren’t officially together either. As much as he’d hurt me, I could still point to the kind, softer parts of Jason—the sweet way he was around children or the elderly, or funny love notes he’d written me addressed to “Kit,” short for kitten—as evidence that it was only a matter of time before he grew up and became a kind, responsible, hardworking person.
My mom could see no future. “Let him find his next victim,” she said, and that was the first time I understood that that was how she saw me.
This was the fourth time I’d returned home to live with my parents since I’d originally left for New York City in 2003. In rational moments, I agreed with my mom; I knew I had to move on from Jason if I wanted any kind of future, but life felt devastatingly boring without him, and I was always only a phone call away, available for smoking pot or having sex or picking him up in the middle of the night when he was wandering snowy suburbia without socks on. Every few days, I saw him, then quit him. Then saw him again. It was a dark and dull winter.
February 29, 2008—It felt so good to see Jason again, to touch him, and have him kiss my hair. But now here I am, twenty-four hours later, desperate to hang out with him and keeping the phone nearby. Callista doesn’t have to worry about being replaced. I do. I will be. Yesterday I asked him where those lips had been and he said, “Nowhere.” He said, “Do you know how many opportunities I’ve had to have sex with girls this week and I haven’t?” I said, “Wrong thing to say.” He said, “No, no, no, forget it,” and undid my jeans.
March 2, 2008—We’ll count today as my first day of sobriety. Drug/alcohol sobriety at least. I’m also addicted to Jason and my cell phone, which I keep turned on at all times, even during the night, anxiously awaiting some desperate phone call from him that’s an apology or a plea or a confession.
I cringe now when I read my diary entries from that time: how badly I wanted to find the perfect combination of responsibility and recklessness that would make a relationship with Jason tenable, and at the same time how badly I wanted to cut him out of my life completely, be strong enough to avoid texting or calling him, how much I hated myself for still wanting him. Without him, I had nothing. No money, no job, no college degree, no apartment, no car. I had my family, but we were tied together in a three-legged race; now I couldn’t get anywhere without them, and at the same time I resented being hobbled by the tie.
I could borrow my parents’ Saturn for the day if I drove my mom to the train station in the morning, and as soon as I could, I went to a temp agency. They gave me a proficiency exam, which required me to find misspelled words on a worksheet and take a typing speed test. When my scores came out of the printer, the manager told me I had scored higher than anyone they’d ever tested and that he had the “perfect” opportunity for me. This was the best news I’d gotten in a while.
It was a job working in a windowless call center, answering phone calls from people whose basements had flooded, and dispatching crews to install sump pumps. Not only was this winter dark and dull, but it was rainy. The phones rang off the hook. There was no lunch break. When it was busy, I had to try to flag down the woman in charge of booking the crews. Usually she ignored me because I was a temp, and so the customers on my line grew increasingly frustrated with me. This was my perfect opportunity? When the phones stopped ringing, at least I could read a book. That winter, I only wanted to read true stories about terrible lives. I read about the trials of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, and about a girl tortured at a religious reform school in the Dominican Republic. I read about fundamentalist Mormons, child brides, and murder. At my mom’s suggestion, I started reading Eat, Pray, Love, and literally threw it on the floor during the first chapter because although I could relate to the suffering of many, I could not sympathize with someone who found herself unhappy in spite of having the house, the career, and the husband of other people’s dreams.
One day, a coworker saw me reading and looked over her shoulder nervously. “I don’t think you’re allowed to do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Right, Cheryl?” She brought in reinforcements.
“But no calls are coming in,” I said.
“If you really need to read something, I think you could read the product manual.”
The other woman agreed. “Yeah, she could read the product manual.”
I ignored them. When my boss came over and asked if I could help with some filing, I said sure. I wasn’t being deliberately disobedient by reading a book. I just didn’t have anything to do. When I was finished filing, I went back to my cubicle and picked up my paperback. From across the room my manager caught my eye, pantomimed holding a book, and then shut it, shaking his head.
I quit.
I was expecting a few hundred dollars from our security deposit on our Albuquerque apartment, so I thought I’d be okay for another couple of weeks, until I found a new job. Then I learned that our landlord not only charged us for replacing the bathroom door but also took excessive cleaning and repair fees from our security deposit, leaving hardly anything to return. On the Internet, I found out this was illegal and spent days making phone calls, writing what I thought were strongly worded e-mails, and talking to people on the Duke City Fix message boards, trying to get more of my money back. The apartment complex’s “independent” legal team reviewed my claims and found that I was due nothing more. The next time I saw Jason, he told me he was proud of me for fighting my case, but for the first time, I wasn’t doing this to impress him—I was fighting for money that belonged to me because, in a bigger sense, I wanted my life to belong to me again.
Then my parents announced that we would be taking a family vacation to Albuquerque.
“Is this a joke?” I said.
It was not a joke.
“I just lived there for six months and you never came to visit me,” I reminded them.
“It would have been too hard to come when you were living with Jason,” my mom said.
If I felt a pinch of self-pity that she and my dad hadn’t done more to save me from Jason, this vacation made the pinch a punch. They’d waited for my relationship to end so that we could all have a “nice time.” The plan was to fly into Albuquerque, visit Santa Fe and
my aunt in northern New Mexico, and then drive on to Colorado, to see my dad’s college buddies. I could show them around Albuquerque, but show them what? On your left is Old Town, where Jason and I fought about who screwed up the directions on how to get to Old Town and he threatened to leave me in the supermarket parking lot. To your right, the hot air balloon fiesta field, where he promised he’d marry me someday.
In the middle of all of this—quitting my stupid temp job, losing my battle with the apartment complex, preparing to play tour guide for my parents to a sad and strange chapter of my life—my friend Julia, to whom I’d sent all those sad dispatches from the Southwest, e-mailed me. Her boss, the cover editor of the New Yorker, was looking for a new assistant and asking Julia if she knew anybody. She wrote, I kept saying no because I don’t know anyone around here but LEIGH MOVE TO NEW YORK AND WORK THAT JOB. The e-mail ended with, Do it.
But I did not see this as an exciting opportunity; I saw it as a prospect too terrifying to even seriously consider. I replied to Julia with a list of all the reasons why I could not do it: there were some days where I literally could not leave my bed, I didn’t know Photoshop, I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, and anyway I was planning to go back to school, so this was a bad time.
Julia called and tried to persuade me to try. “I found out the salary and it isn’t a lot, but there’s tuition reimbursement! You could still go back to school!”
I burst into tears. “But I’m too depressed to move to New York right now.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, backing off. “You don’t have to move to New York, but can you at least send her your résumé?”
“And anyway, even if I did get the job, where would I live?”
“You’d live on my futon.”
I said I would think about it. Then I called Jason.
“Are you crazy? This is your dream. You have to do it,” he said. I told him I would think about it, hung up, and watched myself cry in the bathroom mirror. No one else was going to feel sorry for me, just because I was scared of this, so I had to feel sorry for myself. How could I reconcile Jason’s support for this leap with the fact that taking the leap would mean moving farther away from him?
Over dinner, my parents expressed skepticism over the whole thing, as if this—like the savings I’d spent moving to the desert to write the novel I hadn’t even finished—were another one of my far-fetched schemes that would end in disaster. “The New Yorker? The magazine?” My dad had gotten me a subscription for Christmas, and getting my new issue each week from the mailbox was one of the things I’d looked forward to in Albuquerque.
What was I so afraid of? I was afraid it was too good to be true. I was afraid that it was true, my dream, and that I would fail at it, spectacularly. I was afraid of leaving Jason, even as I wrote diary entry after diary entry about how I had to quit him. I was afraid that I didn’t deserve to be saved like this.
In her essay on O’Keeffe, Joan Didion tells an anecdote about taking her seven-year-old daughter to the Art Institute. When the girl sees the cloud painting, she wants to know who created it. “I need to talk to her,” she says.
So did I. What would Georgia do?
My parents’ skepticism, combined with my own self-doubts and fear, had helped me to set my expectations so exceedingly low that it was almost like playing dress-up in someone else’s clothes, dashing off my résumé and cover letter to Françoise Mouly about what a great opportunity it would be to work for her. I wrote that I wanted to relocate to New York, and by writing it down I almost believed it myself.
As soon as she read my e-mail, she called me and asked if I’d fly out to meet her. I said sure because I was still playing make-believe. My parents bought me a plane ticket and a new pair of shoes. Julia was out of town, but I crashed with an old friend who lived in the West Village. On the morning of my interview, I tried to put together a costume for an art editor’s assistant, and dressed in hot pink tights, high-waisted striped shorts, and a periwinkle trench coat with cropped sleeves. Then I walked to Françoise’s SoHo apartment building, where she ran an independent comic book publisher on the first floor. When she greeted me by kissing my cheeks, I fumbled the order (right first, then left) and she said, “I’m French. You’ll get used to it.” She was Parisian thin, with curly dark hair and thick kohl liner on her bottom lids only. Her long fingers were covered in rings, and she wore a watch that her husband, Art Spiegelman, had made, with an image from MAUS on the face.
I’d brought a three-ring binder with my “portfolio,” which consisted of poetry chapbooks and photos of plays I’d directed, but Françoise didn’t look at any of it. She just talked to me for two hours, asked if I could start by stuffing envelopes and, when I said yes, put me to work. My new shoes were too tight and my feet bled through my pink tights, but I didn’t care; the bloody feet were part of the fairy tale. I was in a SoHo loft, surrounded by artwork and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, mailing comic books to librarians. Françoise paid me for my time, and then we made a deal that I would go on vacation with my parents and then fly back to New York and start working for her full-time.
And that’s what I did. I flew from New York back to Chicago, saw Jason, and, like the addict that I was, swore to myself that this would be the last time. We smoked pot outside on his dad’s patio and had sex upstairs. I had glimpsed a vision of what my future in New York could look like—the cobblestone street setting of SoHo, the sweet smell from the honey-roasted nut pushcarts along Broadway, the customary cadence of stand clear of the closing doors, please—but more important, Françoise saw me in that future.
As Jason fucked me he whispered, God, Leigh, I love you so much, and I dared myself to see what would happen if I said nothing in return. Over the past year he had tried to convince me that I was too depressed, too dependent on my parents to ever do what I wanted to do, but now I had proof that he was wrong. I don’t care that you love me, I thought. I’m getting out of here.
With my family I flew from Chicago to Albuquerque, and hiked up the Petroglyph Monument, covered in symbols I didn’t understand. We drove to my aunt’s double-wide in Questa and listened to the wind howl in the flat land at the base of the Taos Mountains, and then north to Estes Park, Colorado, where I got sick from the altitude. From Denver I flew solo back to New York. The family vacation was like the purgatory I had to pass through, to be forgiven for putting my obsession with Jason ahead of their concern and my own well-being, before I could ascend to the heaven of Manhattan.
For the first month, I slept on Julia’s futon in Harlem and took the A train to Canal Street every morning to work out of Françoise’s loft. When her assistant at the New Yorker moved on that summer, I had an awkward interview with a beautiful woman in a pristine silk blouse in HR at Condé Nast, during which I had to admit I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, and she had to admit that Condé didn’t actually require one.
I would work for Françoise for five years, stuffing envelopes, packing artwork, taking meeting notes, answering phone calls from famous cartoonists, carrying home free books from the piles of review copies the magazine had no use for. Eventually I wrote press releases, handled foreign rights contracts, edited comic books, and pitched them at sales conferences in Boston. I saw the Georgia in Françoise, a woman who put work above all else, and Françoise saw the Georgia in me. I was eager to be helpful, adept at learning whatever skill I lacked, and willing to work harder than anyone else to prove that I deserved to be there. On my own time, I started writing my novel again. When it was published in 2012, Françoise gave me a month off from work to go on tour.
Georgia’s biographer writes, “O’Keeffe believed that work was the antidote for unhappiness, that in fact it was the only way to real happiness and fulfillment.”
When I thanked Julia years later for giving me the opportunity that changed my life, she said that 60 percent of it was because she knew I was the perfect person for the jo
b, and 40 percent of it was to get me away from Jason.
A Cinderella story in reverse: saved from worrying about the prince, the girl gets put to work.
New Territory
(2009)
I was at home in Brooklyn one January night when I heard that my acting conservatory classmate Julian had been killed in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan. He was twenty-five years old, and one of the first combat soldiers to die during the Obama presidency. His death was also the first I learned of from a Facebook wall.
Jan 23, 2009
Julian commented on his own photo. 12:15 p.m.
Miss you too brother. I’ll be home before you know it.
Jan 23, 2009
X wrote at 11:42 p.m.
JB baby any word on your care package?
I’m glad you are safe. Just bought a book about the Tankers in the USMC during WW2. It appears the Japanese feared Marine tanks more than anything else.
Home soon bro. :-)
Jan 24, 2009
Y wrote at 6:36 a.m.
Hello old friend, I miss you buddy and am so glad I stumbled upon your profile and have added you. I hope to catch up and talk soon. I also really hope you are well . . . cheers
January 24, 2009
Z wrote at 8:34 p.m.
It is with great sadness that I share that Julian was killed in Afghanistan yesterday. Our hearts are broken . . . I will post again when we know funeral details. Please contact my husband if needed.
Following that, there were hundreds of comments from friends and family, an outpouring of grief and gratitude. To Julian, many wrote things they’d probably never had the chance to say in person. Thanks for saving my life in middle school, someone wrote. I’ll never forget that dance we choreographed, wrote another. Who were these messages for? Were they really for Julian, or were they the kind of anecdotes told at funerals, to offer brief comfort to the bereaved? I wasn’t sure. I watched new posts flood in with a morbid fascination, but I never posted anything. I had a memory of Julian, too, but if I wrote it down I thought I would have to admit I believed that Julian could still hear us.
