Land of Enchantment

by Leigh Stein

  I had forgotten the movie was so dark, so sad. I hadn’t watched it since I was much younger, but now I saw the swamp of sadness with its quicksand as a perfect metaphor for depression. I was dreading the future conversation with Brian, if this relationship progressed—and I was hoping it would—about my depression, and the medication I was taking. Some boyfriends got it, some didn’t (one had burst out laughing when I’d used the phrase mental illness). I’d just started seeing a new psychiatrist, who called me Lay-uh and spoke to me in Hebrew until he realized I had no idea what he was saying. At my second appointment, after skimming my file, he said, “Ah, you’re my depressed young woman,” as if that made me singular. He gave me trazodone to help me sleep through the night.

  When I eventually told Brian, in bed, in the dark, he said it was no big deal. He was on antidepressants, too. Relief was my blanket. I felt so comfortable being with him, it seemed almost too good to be true. We were seeing each other every couple of days when, after a few weeks, Brian got a strange pain in his leg.

  “Maybe you slept on it funny,” I said, but the feeling didn’t go away. He started limping. If he couldn’t get a seat on the subway, he stood and suffered in a way that made me wince in sympathy. Aside from going to work, he couldn’t leave his apartment. No more dates or outings. I’d go over there, bring food or make it, do his dishes, sleep next to him, sexless. Doctors thought he had sciatica, then told him it was a herniated disc. He was supposed to do physical therapy, but felt too depressed to call and schedule the appointment. He took Percocet. We watched TV.

  February passed in this way. And then March. I liked Brian, but I resented playing the role of caretaker for someone I’d only just met. I wanted him to get better, but I couldn’t do it all on my own.

  In addition to working for Françoise and teaching theater to children again, I was also going to school full-time, finally finishing my bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College. In April, I would get a week off from teaching and classes for spring break, and I needed a vacation. The siren song of New Mexico was always there in the back of my mind, selling itself as the antidote to my overscheduled life in New York.

  On a Sunday morning, we had brunch at a diner a couple of blocks from his apartment. “I’ve been thinking of going on vacation,” I said. “My spring break is coming up. Would you want to come with me?”

  “A vacation where?”

  “New Mexico.”

  Brian looked skeptical. “What’s in New Mexico?” he asked.

  “Sunshine?” I hadn’t prepared a convincing speech. I couldn’t explain my intense feelings for the place over eggs and home fries, and his reaction to the idea made me reluctant to even try.

  “I’ll just go by myself, then,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  After that, he stopped calling. When I finally texted, he responded to let me know he thought I wanted more of a relationship than he did. Insulted, I insisted we meet in person to talk about it. I didn’t think it was fair that I was taking care of his needs the way a girlfriend would, and he was scared that this was turning into a “relationship.”

  He agreed to meet me at a Mexican restaurant. It was April first. I was sick with a cold, and so I skipped my usual margarita. I tried to explain why I liked him so much: “You never yell at me or call me names; you’ve never hit me; you wouldn’t cheat on me.”

  “All that’s happened to you before?”

  “I’ve told you—”

  “Don’t cry,” Brian said, less as a comfort and more of a warning, so people wouldn’t look at us. It occurred to me that the qualities I’d just listed were maybe not the best reasons for being in a relationship with someone. The only box Brian was ticking at that point was “not a horrible person.”

  “Do you want to come over?” he asked.

  “No. I’m sick. I just want to go home.”

  “You’re still the funniest girl I’ve ever met,” Brian said, offering his idea of a consolation prize.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not a comedian. Or a nurse.”

  We broke up.

  I booked my trip. And like I’d said the magic words or cast the perfect spell, Jason started texting me again, out of the blue. Our lives seemed destined to collide, like outer space debris in a Hollywood movie. It was destabilizing and thrilling both: every time I thought Jason was finally out of the picture, he popped back up.

  Right before spring break, the New York DMV screwed up my driver’s license renewal and gave me a state ID instead of a license, so I had to cancel the car rental I had booked for my trip. I was literally back where I’d started: in New Mexico without wheels, in need of a ride everywhere.

  From the airport in Albuquerque, I caught a shuttle bus to Santa Fe, where I’d rented a little vacation condo with one bedroom and a kiva fireplace. When I opened the front door, I saw a staircase. There were two bedrooms upstairs. Three bathrooms.

  I called the front desk.

  “I think you made a mistake,” I said. “There’s only one of me.”

  The woman laughed at me. “We upgraded you, that’s all.”

  Being alone just reminded me of how alone I was. I heard things at night, but only because the rest of the world was so silent, and left the light on in the hallway, something I hadn’t done since I was a child. In the morning, out my west-facing window, I counted sandy peach-colored hills, dotted with green brush, and the indigo mountains beyond. The more images I memorized by Georgia O’Keeffe, the more the landscape looked as if it copied its brushstrokes from her, instead of vice versa.

  On my second night, I went on a ghost tour of downtown Santa Fe. At the river, the guide told us the story of La Llorona, said she drowned herself there. At La Posada Hotel, we heard the story of the Staab family, who’d originally lived there in the nineteenth century. When Julia Staab lost her youngest baby, her hair went white and she lost her mind, never leaving her bedroom again. The guide claimed that she still haunted the halls, spooking guests and making glasses fly in the hotel bar. Jason was alive, but still I thought I knew what it felt like to be haunted. That’s what our love was: a haunting.

  He and I were texting and e-mailing during my New Mexico trip. I bought a bright green vintage feathered hat and sent him a picture of myself wearing it. On Easter, we spoke on the phone for seven hours. He was living with his grandmother in Little Rock, and I could hear her birds screaming in the background. “She wants to know who I’m talking to, since I never talk on the phone this long, and I told her you,” he said. “Come visit.”

  “I’m not going to come to Little Rock.”

  “We’ll go camping in the Ozarks.”

  “I’m not going camping.”

  We negotiated, until I persuaded him to visit me in Brooklyn in June. We agreed to split the airfare, and I considered this progress, proof of his evolution. I felt like I’d tried my best with Brian, to have a healthy, stable relationship, and in light of its failure I fell back on old standbys—our shared nostalgia, the promise of good sex, the allure of Jason’s unpredictability.

  Seven hours. I wish I could remember more of what we talked about, but I only remember the time passing, the effervescent pleasure I felt when I made him laugh, the way he pronounced pin for pen and bin for been and did for dead.

  Two weeks before Jason was due to arrive in Brooklyn, Brian e-mailed and asked me to dinner. He apologized for how things had ended, told me his back was healed and he’d just started a new job. While he was on vacation in Italy, I had visited him in his dreams.

  Last Days

  (2011)

  Jason arrived in New York on a Tuesday. I was at my office in SoHo, and he called me when he was nearby, in TriBeCa, where Manhattan falls off the grid and becomes a tangle of diagonal cross streets and dead ends.

  “Tell me what corner you’re at,” I said, looking at a map online, “and I’ll tell you how to ge
t here.”

  “I don’t know where I am!”

  “Don’t you see any street signs? Look up.”

  “Leigh. Just come and get me,” he said.

  I told my coworkers I’d be back in a few minutes, and went to go claim him, like a child who’d gotten lost at a theme park. We reunited beneath the marquee for the Tribeca Film Festival. Jason was wearing a large camping backpack over a tight gray shirt made out of some space-age sweat-proof fabric. He was sweating a lot. His hair was buzzed, and it made his face look big, mean.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Oh, hey.” Neither of us touched. We’d talked on the phone for hours, anticipating this moment, but nothing could have prepared us for what it was actually like to stand face-to-face again for the first time in two years. My point of view had completely changed. I’d wanted him to come visit so I could see him, but I no longer had any desperate hopes for our future. I just wanted to have a good time. If that sounds naïve, it’s because it was—I thought I was tough enough to spend a week with Jason and have nothing but “good times.” I thought he wouldn’t be able to hurt me anymore because now I was strong enough to stop him.

  We walked back to my office so I could finish my workday. “This is my friend Jason,” I announced to my coworkers, which seemed like the simplest way to describe him, even though it wasn’t true. We’d never been friends. In the back of the office, under a skylight, there was a wicker couch with pastel floral upholstery, and that’s where he sat quietly, the rest of the afternoon, reading the news off his laptop. So far so good, I thought. He hadn’t said or done anything rude or strange that I would later have to apologize for, in his absence.

  At six o’clock, we took the subway to my place. After swearing as a teenager that I would leave the suburbs as soon as I could, I had settled down in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was practically pastoral. The streets, lined with old sycamores, were safe enough for kids to bike alone, and on Saturdays I could smell freshly mowed grass. Every morning I woke to birdsong. I shared an apartment on the second floor of a Victorian house with three other women. Our apartment was quirky and charming: we had a terrace covered in AstroTurf, a bathroom door we could never close completely because it was swollen in its frame in all weather, and a trapezoidal living room with built-in shelving.

  In my cozy room, my bed, desk, bookshelves, and keyboard took up almost all the square footage. When we got there, Jason sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor, unzipped his backpack, and removed a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with pills.

  “What is all that?”

  “Vitamins. Antioxidants. Fish oil, zinc, Adderall, Klonopin.” By color, shape, and size, he could distinguish between the pills, and he swallowed them in strategic handfuls. “I’m doing an experiment on longevity.”

  “I know,” I said. “You told me.” I remembered his most recent e-mail: Immortality ahoy?

  I couldn’t tell if he looked healthy or not. He was built-up, huge, from working out; his triceps looked like wings trying to push through the skin of his arms. Watching him sort through the stuff he’d packed for his stay, I remembered how much I’d once loved being his audience. But this time, I was slightly on edge. Jason was twitchy. He could focus intently for a few minutes, and then his mind would be racing elsewhere. ADD, I thought to myself. So ADD! But according to the e-mail he’d sent me, his experiments made him feel more focused and “smarter.”

  “I got a bottle of wine and thought we could make pesto for dinner. Okay with you?”

  He was staring at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re so confident now. It makes you sexy.”

  I rolled my eyes, secretly flattered on behalf of the insecure twenty-two-year-old inside me. He put the pills away, and we sat beside each other on my bed, on top of the same hot pink satin quilt that had covered our bed in Albuquerque. I had the standing fan in the corner by the window turned up to high. Jason seemed nervous, so I kissed him first. He kissed back, and pulled down the straps of my dress. “Your boobs have gotten bigger.”

  “Maybe.”

  We lay down. More clothes came off. Jason paused the kissing and held my face. “Leigh,” he said. “I’ve thought a lot about how I treated you when we lived together, and I want to be so good to you now that it makes up for every horrible thing I did.” I didn’t know what to say. It sounded like a cliché line a bad boyfriend would give his woman to get her to forgive him, but it wasn’t a cliché for Jason because he never said anything like it. The closest thing it reminded me of was a time in Albuquerque when he’d gotten into bed with me and cried, “I don’t know what I’d do if something bad happened to you. I don’t know what I’d do.” Back then, I’d thought that true love meant making yourself sick imagining something horrible happening to your beloved, and predicting how you yourself would be destroyed without them.

  “That’s nice,” I said, and unbuckled his belt.

  “Wait,” he said, stopping my hands. “We need a condom.”

  “I have condoms,” I said.

  “What kind? I only use female condoms now.”

  “What?”

  “They’re so much better. I met this woman in Little Rock who—”

  “I don’t want to hear about the woman in Little Rock. Can’t you just use what I have?”

  But no. He refused to use the condoms I had and I gave up on arguing, got dressed, and agreed to walk to the drugstore with him. Darnell, the cute checkout guy, was working. I avoided eye contact and took a circuitous route to the “family planning” section, skulking like a teenager. The drugstore didn’t have any female condoms. I walked outside and waited for Jason, who finally came out, wearing a grin. “Darnell is gonna hook us up with some weed.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been in New York for like four hours and you’re already trying to score weed?”

  “Hey,” Jason said, “I’m on vacation.”

  Back at my apartment, we started fooling around again. He didn’t want to use the condoms I had and I said to just forget the condoms, I was on the pill. What could go wrong? He’d already given me HPV. But what if he gave me HIV? I’m sure the number of women he’d slept with was in the triple digits. I was being stupid; I knew I was being stupid, and yet I didn’t care. We were repeating our entire relationship at hyperspeed: I was tired of being in my head. I wanted to be in my body; I wanted to take what I wanted from him. The golden light of early summer evening shot through the windows and I was naked and unselfconscious. We fucked for a long time. He remembered every way I liked to be touched, as if he’d written the book on my body. There was just no comparing the way Jason touched me to the way I’d been touched by anyone else.

  In my memory, it’s the best sex we ever had, but that’s what memory does: lets you shape a raw experience into a story you can tell yourself later.

  The next day, I worked from home. I told Jason he could go out and explore without me, but he said, “I just want to be with you, okay? I just want to do everything with you.” He went to the liquor store when it opened and bought a jumbo bottle of white wine, which he began drinking around noon. While I was on the phone with my boss, he wrote me a note: May I have an Ativan? I looked away while he crushed the pills on my desk and snorted them up his nose.

  In the afternoon I got high with him because I thought then this would all seem more fun. We stood by my open bedroom window, which overlooked a playhouse in the driveway for the toddler who lived upstairs. I was scared that my landlord (a mother of two) would smell the smoke and say something, but part of Jason’s black magic was that he made me, a usually responsible adult, become completely irresponsible. He gave me permission to be a fuckup.

  “Next time, you’ll come visit me, and we’ll go camping in the Ozarks,” he said, sucking on the joint.

  “No, I won’t,” I sai
d. “I hate camping.”

  “You don’t know how beautiful it is.”

  “You’re right, I don’t know how beautiful it is, but I still don’t like camping.” I was coughing too much to fully inhale, so I closed my eyes and Jason blew the smoke right into my mouth.

  “I think about moving back all the time,” he said.

  “To New Mexico?”

  “Leigh, let’s go back. And just live off the land.”

  All our old dreams now sounded like nightmares. Jason was living with his grandmother in Little Rock, working odd jobs, trying to go back to school. From the time I’d met him, when he was about to turn nineteen, until now, at the age twenty-three, Jason had always seemed on the verge of success, but never once actually successful. That verge used to unify us, when it was us against the world who didn’t believe in our dreams, but now it just showed how different our lives were. I was happy in Brooklyn. I had a good job and good friends and the novel I’d written in Albuquerque had been picked up by a publisher. My life was no longer about planning my next escape.

  The week before Jason came, Brian and I had our second first date, after we’d broken up and he’d dreamed of me in Italy. We met for a walk in Prospect Park, and stood still on a small bridge overlooking a beautiful wedding on the lake. Brian kissed the back of my neck and whispered that he was sorry for everything that had happened between us. We walked from one end of the park to the other, until we were closer to my neighborhood than his, and went to dinner at my favorite restaurant.

  “So your back is better?”

  “So much better. I could even dance if I wanted to. Not just slow-dance, but like Irish line dancing.”

  I had almost forgotten how funny Brian was. When I told him I was geeking out because I had my own ISBN now for my novel, he said, “Usually Jews don’t like getting assigned a number, but in your case, that’s awesome.”