by Leigh Stein
And then after Jason and I broke up, I added the story of our relationship to my inventory of wounds. I still wanted someone to fall in love with me not in spite of my depression and past relationship drama, but because of these things. I would spend years wandering the streets of New York, drinking too much and turning first dates into confessionals, the jukebox in my head playing the same song on repeat: Are you my boyfriend? Are you? like the tragic heroine of a children’s board book. I can see now why I rarely got asked for a second date.
A few months before my trip to Santa Fe, I’d had a procedure done to remove precancerous cells from my cervix after some bad biopsy results. Jason was to blame for this—he’d given me the virus that had caused the abnormal cells. The gynecologist explained that there was a low risk I’d be rendered infertile by the procedure, that I would miscarry indefinitely, that my cervix would become “incompetent.” An incompetent cervix—I found this phrase darkly hilarious, since after putting my life back together in New York I prided myself on my competence, and here was something totally out of my control.
My mom flew in from Chicago to be with me when I had the procedure done at Beth Israel. They gave me local anesthesia, so there wasn’t any pain beyond the initial shot, but I could smell myself burning as they used an electric wire that looked like an Easter egg dipper to scrape tissue from my cervix. For a week after, I bled. I waited for the lab results that would tell me whether it was a success, or if there were still more abnormal, potentially cancerous cells.
At the time I had just started dating this nice, tall guy named William. We met at a mutual friend’s reading in Chinatown. The theme of the reading was “heartbreak.” In between sets, they had a contest for the audience to come up and tell stories of heartbreak, for a chance to win a free drink ticket. My name was written all over this.
I went up to the mic and told the story of a boy named Taylor in my third-grade class. Taylor had a mushroom haircut and also a long, skinny tail of hair that went all the way down his back. He showed up at my house on his bike one afternoon to deliver a note that read DO YOU LIKE ME CIRCLE ONE YES OR NO. My mom accepted the note, while I hid upstairs in my bedroom, begging her to tell him I wasn’t home. I didn’t like any boys, but I would have felt too sorry for Taylor if I had to circle no, so I planned to just pretend like I’d never received the message.
The next day at school, I found out on the playground that this same note had been delivered to every girl in our class. I went from feeling special yet embarrassed, to allowing myself to be swept up in the mob of meanness and ridicule. We all laughed at Taylor, then went back to ignoring him. That day in class, he took his pair of kids’ scissors and cut the web of skin between his forefinger and thumb, spilling blood over his desk. Our teacher, horrified, sent him to the nurse, and told the class he must not have taken his ADHD medication, but of course I knew the real reason he had cut himself, and felt the heat of my own culpability in his humiliation.
I won the drink. William asked for my number. If that sad story was what made him interested in me, I thought, then we were starting off on the right foot. On our first date, we got coffee at a pastry shop near the Columbia campus and watched the peacocks in the yard of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He told me stories about going to South Africa with his high school choir, and about driving his mom’s Toyota Echo to Castle Valley, Utah, on a self-made vision quest.
“You’re a liar,” I said every time he said anything interesting, and this delighted him, made him laugh.
After a few rounds of this, he said, “Why do you keep saying that?”
I wasn’t sure. I replayed the three words in my head, like running my tongue over the familiar point of a canine tooth. Then I realized that this was something I used to say to Jason, to provoke him into telling me which part of what he was saying was actually the truth.
“Oh, I used to date a liar,” I finally said, and then forced myself not to say anything more, lest I fuck up this perfect afternoon.
We went out again, to an improv show in the village, and to the tiny food co-op where William used to work, so he could introduce me to the delicacy of the dehydrated banana (I thought they were disgusting). Then, on a Saturday afternoon that was also the first day of spring to feel like summer, he came over to my apartment in Brooklyn and I cooked dinner while he played Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” on the Rhodes keyboard in my bedroom that I kept for a musician friend whose apartment was too small. I was wearing a sleeveless dress that buttoned up the front. Jason had undone those buttons. William undid those buttons. We fooled around in my bed until we reached the point where I was down to my underwear, and I had to stop him.
“We can’t have sex. I’ll explain later.”
“Why can’t you explain now?”
“Because then you’ll stop calling me,” I said.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I just had surgery and I might have cervical cancer?”
“Holy shit,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me, and we slept like that all night, nesting spoons.
The perfect ending to a story that began with heartbreak is that of course he did stop calling me after that. Over a week later, he sent me an e-mail to say he decided there was a “fundamental difference” between us that he couldn’t name or define, but he hoped I was enjoying the beautiful weather.
As wrong for me as Jason was, I seemed incapable of finding—not finding, but holding on to—anyone who was better. Like an alcoholic who secretly wishes she’ll become pregnant and that will force her to get sober for nine months, I wished for a boyfriend who would occupy so much of my headspace that Jason would be crowded out, exiled to a memory.
The Worst Movie I Ever Saw
(2011)
In late July, Brooklyn reeks of rotten garbage and dog shit. Twilight comes late, smoky blue. No crickets or June bugs, just sirens and the repetitive thunder of the R train below Fourth Avenue. One night, shortly after Jason’s funeral, while waiting for the subway, I watched a woman pull her sweatpants down to urinate onto the tracks, and I saw intense relief on her face before I blocked my ears and forced myself to look the other way. When the train finally came, the air-conditioned car offered a brief reprieve from the smells and the heat of the station.
At Brian’s apartment, I arrived to find him watching COPS on TV. A police officer was chasing a man in a wifebeater over fences, between houses sitting on cracked foundations, and across ugly yards. When he finally tackled the criminal in a driveway, I cringed.
“Can you please turn that off?” I asked him.
“Why?”
“It’s making me upset.”
“Why is it making you upset?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought I would sound too sensitive if I tried to explain that I couldn’t watch desperate people who had run out of options pee in public or run from police.
Instead of changing the channel, Brian suggested I go in the bedroom until the episode was over. So I sat on the bed and fumed. If he sympathized so much with law enforcement, and I sympathized with criminals, we were doomed.
But I also didn’t want to be—couldn’t bear to be—alone. I didn’t want to sleep in my own apartment, in the bed I’d shared with Jason six, seven, eight weeks earlier. I stayed at Brian’s every night. He was a prolific sleeper and I was an insomniac. In the middle of the night or early in the morning, when Brian was asleep and I felt alone, my grief would find me.
It was grief that made me feel covetous enough to ask Lisa if she’d look for a purple throw blanket Jason had taken from me three years before, because I wanted it back. (Or did I just not want her to have it?) Grief that took my hand and led me online to look at pictures and memories of Jason on Facebook, clicking through anonymously, never commenting, always lurking. I was jealous of Callista, who seemed to always be receiving “signs” of Jason at her bartending jo
b—a song played at his funeral on the radio; a dollar for a tip with JASON written on the bill in Sharpie ink.
The only thing I could count as a sign was a dream: I am standing at the bottom of a stairwell in a dark, musty basement. Someone opens the door at the top of the stairs and light pours in. It’s Jason. He’s standing at the top. He’s come here to yell at me for letting them bury him. He was never really dead; it was all a mistake, and I’m to blame. I get the sense that he’s at the top of the stairs and I’m at the bottom because he wants to trade places with me.
I woke up sweating, afraid to move.
Once I had exhausted Facebook, I would browse Craigslist for New Mexico real estate listings. Browsing was already a habit, something I’d done for years to break up the tedious afternoons at office jobs, but now, at night, my searching took on a new desperation.
I found a miner’s cabin for sale on the Turquoise Trail, a 1991 Spirit Mobile Home in Pojoaque, a three-bedroom in Moriarty for less than fifty thousand dollars. I didn’t have any money, but that didn’t stop me from dreaming, with every listing, of abandoning my life in New York and moving back there, by myself. I could get a dog, I thought, before I remembered that I don’t like dogs. I could get a cat. A guard cat. My favorite part of each listing was always the property photos because they showed the sky. When I dreamed of leaving, I never thought of my job or of Brian or what I’d tell my family. I thought of the sky alone and it made me break out in yearning like a rash.
In Albuquerque, I’d been the sleeper. Jason was always the one awake in the middle of the night. Before we’d moved, I’d done what I thought was the “mature” thing to do, and switched from using LiveJournal to Blogspot. From our new apartment in Albuquerque, I’d posted the first entry:
Jason woke me up at four in the morning by jumping on the bed. He was wearing his cowboy hat.
Do we have any tuna left? he said.
No, I said.
If you wake up and I’m not home it’s because I’m out trying to catch a stray cat.
Okay, I said.
He came home empty-handed. He said it was a little white cat, but it kept running away from him and he had to chase it through the tall prickly grass along the road near our apartment. Everyone wants to know why we would want to move to Albuquerque. Last week at a party someone laughed at us and said, “People come here going, ‘Look at the pretty sagebrush,’ but we call it weeds.”
Those sleepless nights at Brian’s were even lonelier knowing Jason wasn’t out there anymore, not anywhere, not even as a friend or an enemy; there was no way to call and ask if he remembered the night he went looking for the little white cat.
I avoided posting anything to Facebook about Jason’s death, but eventually I posted something on my blog, a territory whose borders I felt I could control. Dear Jason, I wrote, The night before your funeral, I told your mom the story of the night you proposed to me. I’m wearing the ring you bought me in the Ozarks. It’s cheap plastic, but it has veins in it like turquoise. I signed it Love.
After the post went up, a few friends e-mailed their condolences. They’d had no idea. They’d had no idea because I was daunted by the task of telling them. They asked if there was anything they could do, and I replied, asking a few girlfriends in New York if they’d go to a yoga class with me. They were all too busy. But it seems like you’re handling everything really well!
I didn’t feel like I was handling anything well.
My friend Sarah took me to dinner, and I described the funeral to her: how they’d buried him in a pink shirt he would have hated, how they played “Pure Imagination” during the service, how hot it was in Little Rock. I tried to summon the details as if from a great distance, as if this was one of those sad stories that would become amusing, or at least interesting, after enough tellings. (A Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to That Fairy Land, and its Sad Results!) Maybe it looked like I was handling everything really well because after unsuccessfully hawking my wounds for so long, I had learned how to protect those around me from my private horror. I could save everyone the trouble of not knowing what to say to me and my grief by never running out of stories to tell.
After dinner, outside the restaurant, Sarah stared at me. I stared back. Finally she asked if it would be okay if she gave me a hug. At first, I thought I was agreeing to it for her sake, to give her something to do, but as she held me I felt overcome by how badly I wanted the embrace to continue. And I wished, impossibly, that her thin arms would be transformed into his. But he’s dead, said a voice in my head. But just last month you had his arms around you and you couldn’t wait for him to leave so you could get back to your life, said the voice’s cruel twin.
A couple of nights later, Brian invited me to go with him to see a movie he had to cover for his job as an online news producer. I didn’t really have the energy, but he convinced me to meet him at an Italian restaurant near the screening room.
“We’ll make a date out of it,” he said, and there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that this date would take my mind off of whatever I was, or wasn’t, handling.
At dinner, I had wine, focaccia dipped in olive oil, an entrée, more wine, dessert. I felt like a slave to my appetite and wished I were wasting away instead. Look at her! She’s wasting away! people said behind my back, in my fantasy life. What people? Friends. Coworkers. Anyone who knew I’d just been to a funeral. I wished my body could telegraph my grief for me, so I wouldn’t have to try and explain what I felt but didn’t yet understand.
Brian drank a Coke, and leaned in to ask if I thought they would charge him if he ordered a refill. I told him to just go for it. Life is short! I could have said but didn’t. One of the weird things about grief is how utterly profound it feels, and yet the only things that come to mind are clichés: he was so young; it’s not fair; life is short! When the bill finally came, Brian was right: they’d charged him for both. He paid the check. He always paid. I didn’t even reach for my purse anymore. We held hands and walked to the movie.
In the screening room, the seats were plush and violet. Buzzed from the wine at dinner, I sank low into my chair, eager to leave my life behind for a couple of hours.
The movie was about two young people in love. One of them is a British citizen, and the other is American. The falling-in-love scenes were all shot through the filtered golden light of an Urban Outfitters catalog. The British citizen is so in love with the American citizen that she overstays her visa, and this causes some problems, so they have to be long-distance for a while. The plot was so banal that I started hoping for a car accident. I wanted one of the lovers to die. Maybe he could go surfing in the Pacific and drown and then she wouldn’t be able to attend the funeral because she’d be far across another ocean and wouldn’t that be so sad? There was no part of me that would relinquish itself to the fantasy of their romance. If the director wanted me to feel for his characters, I needed them to suffer. At the very least I wanted her to have to live in England forever, always wondering what might have been, filled with regret over how young and stupid she’d been.
But the girl’s daddy hires a lawyer to fix the immigration problem so they can be together again, and the most devastating fight in the whole movie happens when one of them discovers a text message not meant for their eyes. At the end, tragedy: though they’re back together, it’s left ambiguous whether they’re going to succeed as a couple.
My eyes sprang with tears of rage during the final credits.
“What’d you think?” Brian asked.
“That was the worst movie I ever saw.”
He laughed. “Come on, no, it wasn’t.”
“YES, IT WAS. IT WAS THE WORST MOVIE I EVER SAW.”
Brian looked around the theater, embarrassed. “Lower your voice,” he whispered.
Brian and I met online in January 2011. His profile made me laugh—there was a picture of him smiling wryl
y next to Vanilla Ice, and another picture of him in fishing waders with a hawk on his arm. I said he’d be able to recognize me at the bar by my Pendleton blanket sweater, and he said he didn’t know what that was, but he’d be wearing a Paddington Bear sweater.
At the end of our first date, he asked if I would spend his thirty-first birthday with him.
“Don’t you have anyone better than me to spend your birthday with?”
“Not really,” he said. “What would you want to do?”
“It’s your birthday—what do you want to do?”
Together we devised a fantasy birthday scenario, in which we would drive to an arcade on Long Island that he hadn’t been to since a Jewish summer day camp trip during his youth. A couple of days later, on his birthday, Brian pulled up in front of my apartment in a rental car. He was late, and I’d become so nervous while waiting for him that I almost canceled the date. But Brian was a good driver, and I relaxed in the passenger seat. Somewhere in the Bronx, we saw a hotel on the second floor of a storage facility, and he asked if we should pull over and start a family.
I laughed and told him that my dad was worried I’d end up in the trunk of the rental car by the end of the date.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Brian said.
In the arcade parking lot, I gave him a gold plastic birthday crown inlaid with plastic jewels and made him wear it. Inside, we played Skee-Ball all afternoon. I beat Brian badly at simulated boxing. We traded in our arcade tickets for Tootsie Rolls and then drove back to Brooklyn, picked up Taco Bell for dinner, and went back to his apartment, where I met his cat Kia, who was born without a tail. Together we watched The NeverEnding Story.
