In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  This meant, for me and people like me, that the mate selection process was, depending on how you looked at it, either so complicated as to be statistically impossible or really quite simple: Get sucked into someone’s orbit.

  The first love of my life was a guy I’ll call Jai—the yoga name that his parents cursed him with, and they couldn’t have chosen a worse guy for it. Jai looked like a lusty cross between David Bowie and Jack Nicholson, and he could not have been less calm and centered. In fact, when I saw my first Eminem “Slim Shady” video years later, I was full of delighted recognition: Jai! Jai was gorgeous and feral and funny and smart and angry. He raced bikes with sustained, intense fury and had the most Adonis-like body of any guy I have ever known before or since. Everyone wanted Jai: teachers, girls, guys, little brothers, mothers. But the best part about Jai was that he was devoted to one thing: me!

  We met at boarding school, one of those third-tier sorts for kids who had been kicked out of someplace better. Students were housed in the upper floors of the school’s main building, divided into “Girls’ End” and “Boys’ End.” Jai and I didn’t so much know each other as eye each other, and since Jai was eyed by everyone, that didn’t mean much to me. I was known primarily as the punky girl whose off-campus boyfriend (Pete) was always sneaking her off to the city. Then, one early winter morning, on the students’ return from breakfast, each of the girls of Girls’ End discovered a note in her mailbox. Each communiqué was profoundly and explicitly insulting, a brutal inventory of that young woman’s flaws in the estimation of the authors. My note, however, was not. It was rapturous, worshipful, panting. And it was, as one shrill know-it-all pointed out loudly, written in Jai’s handwriting.

  I don’t have to tell you that this was—and depending on the day, just about remains—the best fucking moment of my life. To be sure, it was great that he was hot and kooky and the main event. But that wasn’t what made this event so exquisitely transcendent to me. For a fifteen-year-old girl with an acute case of unrequited Elektra complex, it was that I was The One. He saw me, chose me, conspired with his fellows, bankrupted his reputation—risked school ousting—for me. For me. Reader, he could have had teeth growing out of his ears. I was his.

  In the end, we got kicked out of that boarding school. Jai had to move back to D.C. with his dad; I returned to my mother’s place outside Philadelphia. Still, we stayed together for nearly three years, and we saw each other every weekend. Every weekend. By that time I was sixteen years old; Jai was eighteen. He dropped out of high school, took the GED, and became a TV producer; I went to a local public high school, where I was an exotic boarding school expellee and angry writer-in-residence (a status that, to my ambivalence, isolated me from the main population). But though we lived hundreds of miles apart, there was never any question in our minds that we would stay together. Jai either rode his motorcycle up I-95 to me, or I dashed out of Friday’s last class and ran directly to Amtrak, where I would plunk down in the smoking car and produce essays, short stories, songs, poems, and sketches of Jai in various guises. My mother wouldn’t let us sleep in the same bed, but Jai’s father was deeply moved by our guileless devotion to each other (probably because he was Russian) and gave us our own room in his apartment.

  It never fails to elicit jaw-dropping responses when I tell people that our parents did not quibble with this arrangement. I suppose it’s partially that, first of all, the divorced parents were just too taxed by this time to stand firm on anything. But they must also have had the sense that Jai and I did actually love and buoy each other in ways that they couldn’t or didn’t. Easier to countenance a radically unorthodox relationship between a pair of delinquent teenagers than to undertake the alternative: Deal with us.

  But our epic teenage love story finally ended when the long-distance commute began to get to me. I promised Jai that we’d get back together once I graduated from high school. He snapped and launched an array of distressing tactics: phone calls from window ledges; middle-of-the-night high-speed trips from D.C. to my mom’s apartment, culminating in Jai’s bellowing beneath my window like Stanley Kowalski; anguished, angry letters. Ian was heartbroken; he adored Jai. What was I doing? I was wretched and torn. On the one hand, Jai was my psychic twin, My Guy. On the other hand, I was seventeen. I was going to a sis-boom-bah public high school, complete with freaks, geeks, jocks—the whole Pretty in Pink ecology. Everyone was dating, going to parties, being kids. I observed the scene as if it were unfolding in a different dimension. I inhabited Unknown Regions. Still, maybe I could try to be normal. Was I such a ruined mutant that I couldn’t fit into a traditionally functioning solar system, too?

  It would become clear that the answer was a resounding yes. For years, I regretted letting go of Jai. I would never understand someone else as well, or be as well understood, again—without risking more than I was willing to risk via any audition process. In other words, I could not date.

  I do not understand dating at all, and for that reason, I have never done it. Yet were you and I to meet, this would probably not be your impression. It’s not that I don’t like hanging out with guys. I have always loved hanging out with guys; I love the whole guy talk shtick. It’s not that I don’t think sex is good; I think it is quite good. Moreover, although I don’t really see it this way because it sounds bad and inappropriate to me, I am told that I am a catholic flirt: I flirt with young and old men and women, babies, dogs, birds, everybody (except cats). My point is that, to the world, I apparently present as someone who would date, and maybe date a lot. No. No freaking way. The mere idea that I would agree to go to dinner or drinks with someone, with the naked subtext of “Does either of us want to sleep with the other?” running like a prurient news crawl underneath the veneer of conversation, is so fantastically upsetting and alien to me that it actually makes me sick to my stomach. I know that this makes me nuts. Yet there it is. My feeling is: Why are we even watching this movie if we’re not getting married? (I would do very well in the Orthodox community, my Orthodox friends tell me. Then I show them my tattoos. Okay, maybe not so much, Susie.)

  My version of dating was: Watch, sniff, wait, and then signal. There was nothing civilized about it. Indeed, my process unconsciously mimicked animal mating strategies because I was, after all, a wounded animal looking for protection. It wasn’t until after I had already been with my husband for well over a decade that I began to understand the ways in which my incipient sexual identity had been hobbled by the circumstances of my father’s leaving and my conjoining with Pete—which had, unconsciously, compelled me to set up job candidates for the position of safeguarding my gnarled-up little psyche. And let me tell you, that position was a serious business. I now see that there was a pattern to the way my courtship strategy worked. I was never a note passer or a rank-and-file coquette, though I have always, as mentioned, been at ease with, and taken genuine pleasure in, guyish company. Again, I also seemed a lot older than I was, not surprising since I had been doing older things for a few years already. I had advanced tastes. I seemed, in short, like someone who knew a lot about a lot. But of course I didn’t. Just because you’ve had a lot of experiences doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wise. It makes me think of the fallacy of that hackneyed Nietzsche saw: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” This is something that people seem to say when they either have not yet been through an experience that actually did come close to killing them, or they can’t make sense of life’s horrors. I can definitely understand the impulse, but still, it has always struck me as utter horseshit.*

  At any rate, my experiences hadn’t killed me, but from Jai on, whenever the vibe smacked of dating—in any given school, college, workplace, or regular social situation—I would hang back and disappear out the back door. To me, this was basic self-protection: entering into anything resembling an emotionally intimate scenario would render me utterly defenseless, vulnerable, childlike. I couldn’t do this with anyone casually, so I’d chat, joke caustically, have
a giggle, and exit. But to others, I was later told, such behavior bespoke an attractive unavailability. Who knew? It never fails to amaze me that one’s deep and abiding neuroses can, when masked, seem like something marvelous to the outside world.

  But now, as I reflect on my behavior, I wonder: Was I, on some subterranean level, trying to string guys along? Maybe I did unconsciously intend to cultivate an air of mystery, knowing that only the most determined—and therefore potentially the most worthy—would answer the call. If so, it certainly wouldn’t make me unique. It’s a typical female sexual strategy across species. The female displays herself at the appropriate time, lets the guys show off and duke it out, and then chooses the mate who has demonstrated the most impressive quotient of power and success. But measures of power and success are, obviously, subjective, and to me, the qualifiers were not how good-looking you were, how rich you were, if you were the quarterback on the football team, if you were funnier and smarter than everyone else—or even if you had all these things going for you. For me, and for girls like me, you did not have to be perfect in and of yourself. You had to be perfect for me.

  The order was this: Be my father, best friend, and love machine all in one person. Make me the absolute center of the universe, the most adored, the most desired, the most fascinating creature ever to have inhaled a single breath on earth. Annul the past; you have no past. Your life began when you first glimpsed me. In return, you are Everything.

  This is self-centered, unfair, implausible, unhealthy. Indeed, such consuming needs are the ugly psychic offspring of the narcissistically wounded, so the psychiatric literature tells us. Denied attention early in life, we inhale it as adults. Indeed, we see the objects of our affection as very young children see their parents and want their parents to see them: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

  That’s how we feel, even if we’re loath to admit it or even countenance the thought of it. Even as a teenager, I hated that in myself. But forcing all my eggs into one hapless little basket seemed like the only option, or at least my only option. To suggest to me that I should just go out with people “for fun” would have been like telling an alcoholic to have just “a drink.” The alcoholic does not want a drink. The alcoholic wants thirty drinks, and because of this, she knows it is better to have no drinks at all rather than to attempt, and fail at, one or two (or three or six). So it was with me and guys. Better to be completely abstinent than to date casually.

  So, as eager as I was to be assigned a walk-on part in it, the whole Brat Pack ethos remained utterly foreign to me. The adolescent romance was not, for me, about secretly making out behind the gym with the misunderstood, angry punk-rocker guy and hiding it from your cheerleader friends. Neither was it about being the school slut going to the homecoming dance with the sweet nebbish from AP chemistry. There was only one thing, in capital letters: LOVE. Love was everything. It wasn’t just a Springsteen-born yearning to know love is wild and real (though that isn’t bad). Love had to be more than that. Love had to make a permanent dent in that wireframe grid of the universe. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” Exactly.

  Thus courtship became highly distorted. I felt too internally wounded to risk playing the field to find the right person. I had to develop wolflike attention and the discipline of a sniper. It would be easy to be distracted. Certain people I liked a lot; they were funny, smart, cute, interested in the things I was. But if I could not smell on them that particular pheromone that signaled to me that they had similar genes, then considering anything even resembling an intimate connection with them was a nonchoice. Suffice it to say, there were few choices.

  For a period of time in high school, I attempted to anesthetize myself under the numbing mask of cocaine and sundry other drugs. It more or less did the trick in that regard. It did not, unsurprisingly, in others. When I found myself, at nineteen, living on a crack corner in North Philadelphia with a boyfriend (the first post-Jai) who had honestly tried to do his best by me but with whom I was nonetheless headed down a terrible path, I left and hurled myself at work. I got a job as a reporter at a construction newspaper in Philadelphia. I was very aware of how alone I was. At this point, my mother and I were estranged; my rebellious behavior with that boyfriend had compelled her, probably prudently, to let me go. I’m not sure that my father knew or thought about where I was. I remember walking alone across an empty lot in North Philadelphia that winter, wondering: Who will identify my body if I die?

  I got an apartment share, had a smattering of brief and sordid dalliances (which couldn’t count as dates but rather hair-tearingly shameful drunken hookups), but mainly I worked and worked and worked. I enrolled at Temple University, for which I paid myself; although it had been specified in my parents’ divorce agreement that my father would pay college tuition, he had reneged on the contract. I saved up enough money to sue him, but we were able to settle out of court. I had had no contact with him for more than a year, but I called to tell him that I had applied and gotten in to Columbia. He was silent on the other end of the line. “Good going, Suze,” he finally said, quietly. “You haven’t done it with any help from me, that’s for damn sure.” I asked him if he would like to help now. He told me to tell his secretary where to send the check; then he hung up.

  I worked hard. I transferred to Columbia and was on the dean’s list every semester, and I was proud. I did not hang out with any particular group. All the psychic horsepower I had expended in my teens into thrusting myself into someone’s orbit found a new course in grinding intellectual toil and massive output. I was a machine. I felt durable, self-sufficient. I took nine classes in my final semester of college; all A’s. My mother and I began talking on the phone, and by and by we came to enjoy each other. After a period of stealth dating, she got engaged to Joseph, whom I liked on the spot and trusted shortly thereafter—unprecedented for me. It was almost surreal how good he was: brilliant, prudent, ethical, kind. I was so happy for my mother; I was overjoyed for Ian and me. (I still am, twenty years later.) But my father continued to rip me up.

  My father came to visit me once while I was at Columbia, during one of his stints of trying to get sober. He came uptown to my dorm, having made a presentation on Wall Street. When the elevator doors opened, he was unimpeachably dressed, as usual. He stepped out with his briefcase in one hand, cradling on his shoulder with the other a giant cardboard box of O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beer. “Howdy, there, Suze,” he puffed, and blew past me into the hallway. He kicked open the door to my room, plunked the box down, sat on the end of my bed, wrenched open the cardboard flap in one ear-splitting rip, grabbed a bottle, twisted off the hissing top, and chugged the whole thing down in two seconds flat. He placed the bottle politely back in the box, pulled out another one, and chugged it, too. He nabbed a third and sat there gazing at the empty bottle for a moment. Then looked up at me, still standing in the doorway to my room, and grinned. “Well, old pal,” he said, “the word is you’ve gotta drink about a case of this stuff to get anywhere.” I laughed until my stomach hurt. Then I excused myself to the bathroom and vomited. I knew he would end up drinking again. He did, landing in his first rehab right before Ian’s boarding school graduation, though he did manage to show up, looking wan and haunted, saying little.

  Just after I graduated from college, Dad took me by surprise by asking me to visit him in New Mexico, where he’d bought a piece of property in Arroyo Seco, near Taos, with two casitas on it. He was still married to his second wife (the former secretary), but their union had been all but disemboweled: booze, brutality, bone-cracking hatred. This place was his refuge, where he could go to paint, to look at the mountains. Dad was in a great mood when I got there. To pay the mortgage, he said, he had rented out the lesser of the casitas to a “pack of do-gooders” hailing from Vermont. But there was a caveat: “I made it abundantl
y clear that if I sniff out any illicit drugs, I’m calling the cops and donating a grand to the Widows and Orphans Fund to make sure that they take these little pricks on a one-way trip to the bottom of the Rio Grande.” One day, however, he’d noticed that the license plate on the doomed renters’ VW bus read biko, as in Stephen Biko, the slain South African civil rights activist. Not reading it correctly, he had perked up right away, and he strode over to the Vermonters, who were harvesting chili peppers in the front yard. My dad smiled widely, thumbing at the license plate. “Well, what do you know?” he chortled. “Booster Engine Cut Off!” I don’t know if I have laughed so hard since. (After my dad died, the Peter Gabriel song “Biko,” spookily, seemed to be playing everywhere. Or maybe I just heard it that way. “The outside world is black and white / with only one color: dead.”)

  After I had been at the casita for a few days, Dad paid me to go into town to eat by myself. He floated this gesture as a treat. It was an empty bluff. He wanted to drink the way he wanted to drink: alone. When I came back, he was passed out in a deck chair sitting behind an enormous telescope.

  When I started my first job, in May 1991, I issued strict marching orders to myself: Work, work, work. Don’t look up.

  * Interestingly, it turns out that it is utter horseshit. In a 2009 report published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers at McGill University found that child abuse can so traumatize developing brains that it actually mutates DNA by modifying the gene NR3C1, which is responsible for modulating stress response. These genetic changes suggest that abuse survivors may have neurological trouble turning off the stress response, resulting in a constant stressful state, leading to future problems with depression, anxiety, and possibly even suicide. So, that which doesn’t kill us does not make us stronger. It just doesn’t kill us. (Plus, seriously, Nietzsche himself knew better: He had a series of nervous breakdowns and had to move in with his sister.)