Wreck and Order (9 page)

“I'm not—I just wanted to tell you one thing.”

“I can't take it anymore.” His hands flopped around on the mattress, desperate to be calm. So these nighttime conversations, which I believed were carrying us toward a new intimacy, were a burden to him, one of the unpleasant compromises of a relationship. I never told him the one thing. I stopped crying in his bed. I asked him to make me come if he came first.

I met Brian's family for the first time over Labor Day Weekend. On the drive to their home in rural Connecticut, Brian gently coached me in what not to say to his parents—swear words, jokes about suicide or depression, anything in any way, however remotely, connected to sex. I mocked the last directive—just how sex crazed did he think I was?—until I remembered our recent weekend at my father's house. It was pouring and we'd been stuck in the house, drinking too much coffee and wine. My father told us about my mother's abortion over dinner, a story I was sick of hearing: She'd gotten pregnant again when I was only three months old. “I wanted to keep it, of course,” my father said for the hundredth time. “I said we could use formula. I would do all the late-night feedings. But Elsie's mother always made her own decisions—absolutely nothing I could ever say to sway her. Hey, what kind of birth control are you guys using? The fastest way to kill a relationship is to have a baby before you're both ready, trust me.” I'd tried to laugh at my father's inappropriate divulgences, teasing him for successfully scaring away my boyfriend within a matter of hours. But Brian blanched and stammered out a question about the Manny trade, hoping my father would be a Red Sox fan because he happened to live in Massachusetts.

As we pulled down a dirt driveway lined by careful stone fences, Brian said, “Oh, and don't mention you didn't go to college. I mean, just until they know you and realize how smart you are. I kind of implied you went to school in Paris, which is sort of true, right?”

“If you count drinking a bottle of wine by yourself and crying in public parks as going to school in Paris, then yes, I definitely went to school in Paris.” Brian chuckled and told me not to worry, just be myself. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and bit the insides of his cheeks as he pulled into the driveway.

I felt his parents straining to like me as we stepped out of Brian's car in front of their pastel three-story home, Brian looking at the ground and me squeezing out a smile in my hopeful sundress and sandals. His dad shook my hand with vigor and sized up my face as he called out, “Here's the brave girl at last! Come meet Elsie.” Handshakes, names, more jokes about my courage. And then I felt his family—parents, sister, brother-in-law—turn away from me as we ate dinner at the picnic table outside, and I kept oohing and aahing over the pink smeared across the sky instead of entering their conversation about an eminent-domain lawsuit over one of his father's rental properties and the feasibility of adding commuter facilities to the parking garage in the Boston suburb where Brian's sister lived with her husband. I did not know how to talk about the things one must talk about; this never stopped being a painful surprise.

Brian shoveled food into his mouth like a teenager after basketball practice and refilled my wineglass with waiterly attentiveness. While the adults ate tomato pie, grilled lamb, and buttermilk rolls, Brian's nieces played in the overgrown field in front of the house, throwing crab apples and running around with a garden hose, pretending to put out fires.

“It's amazing how parents do it with the little ones,” Brian's dad said.

“We did it twice. Or don't you remember?” Marianne flicked her husband's wrist with her cloth napkin. Brian's father had cheated on Marianne soon after they were married and in addition to raising two children only eleven months apart she'd had three miscarriages and one stillbirth. Brian told me that his mother “practically lived” in the clapboard shack behind the main house, where she kept the canvases and watercolors that she referred to as a hobby. Watching her slice pie and dart in and out of the kitchen for missing utensils, my breath got short and shallow the same way it did when Brian spoke confidently of our future—asking me where I'd most like to honeymoon, fantasizing about settling down in a farmhouse near his parents. When this anxiety seized me, I wanted Brian to hold me and tell me it was all right, but it seemed he might take offense if I asked him to comfort me for my fear of being bound to him.

After his family went to sleep, Brian and I stayed up late at the picnic table. He poured us generous helpings of the fancy whiskey he'd brought for his father. I was surprised and excited by Brian's carelessness. He tended to be a measured drinker, corking the bottle and clapping his hand on my knee around midnight, saying, “Bed?” I always wanted to drink more. I always told myself to be grateful for Brian's reasonableness. But tonight he kept refilling our glasses until the smoky liquor was almost gone and I was flushed and bouncy. He took my hand and led me along a creek in the backyard until we came to a tree house.

“I built this place in high school,” he said. “Came out here to play guitar.”

“You never told me you played guitar.”

“No?” He climbed the wooden planks nailed into the tree trunk. I followed. “Thought I was going to be a musician. I designed CD covers and everything. There should be one here.” He groped the planks of the tree-house floor and handed me a slip of paper. I held it outside the door to see the cover image in the moonlight: a photo of a white spiral staircase against a black background, the top step jutting into darkness, leading nowhere. A poignantly explicit image for a teenage boy. “Oh,” I said, resting my fingertips on Brian's wrist.

Some weekends Brian spent two straight days on the couch. He always went through the motions of being a good boyfriend—asking what I wanted for dinner, ordering and paying for takeout, telling me he loved me and I looked so pretty in that top—but every word and gesture seemed to be a sacrifice. “I can't hear you,” I'd say. “Why are you talking so quietly?” “I'm sorry,” he'd say, quietly.

When I got low in the way shrinks call depressed, my lowness was aggressive, evident; Brian's was unknown to himself and therefore enraging to me because it could not be acknowledged. I wondered sometimes which was worse: to be with someone who dealt with discontent by drinking too much or by lying around. Since I was sure I knew the answer—Brian was a Web designer, not a drug dealer; a homebody, not a womanizer—I had not spoken to Jared since Brian and I started dating.

The next morning at his parents', Brian slept much later than usual. I'd been awake for hours, but didn't want to wake him and be forced to join the paternal pronouncements and clanking dishes coming from the kitchen adjacent to our guest room.

Around noon, Brian rubbed his eyes and reached for me under the covers. We lay on our sides, my back to his chest. I was too preoccupied by his sister's voice to feel his small, fast movements. It was nice to be needed without needing anything myself.

Preparing to join his family in the kitchen afterward, I wanted this feeling to continue. So I decided to play the role of a sweet girl who speaks only about topics that have no relevance to anyone's personal life. I put on a blouse that brought out my eyes and generalized my figure, and walked into the kitchen wearing the kind of half smile I often saw on the faces of young women speaking to their husbands in public. Brian's father had just finished reading a newspaper article aloud. He turned the paper out to Brian and me. “Just look at that bastard.”

“And which bastard is this exactly?” I asked, thrilled by my boldness, my coy phrasing, my blousy blouse and self-contained smile.

Brian's father smarted as if he'd been pinched. Then he started laughing. “You know who that is,” Brian said. “Honey?” He blushed and stared, willing me to retrieve the name. “Honey, you know that's John McCain.” His dad was still laughing in grand, jolly gusts. “Hear that, you bastard? The youth of America don't even know who you are!”

“I know who he is,” I said. I just didn't watch TV and I only read the paper online, paying no attention to pictures. I could have saved face by showing off my knowledge of McCain's hypocritical torture policy, but I was afraid I'd start crying if I tried to talk about it casually.

Brian's mother became very busy in the kitchen, humming, discomfited by empathy, knowing my faux pas (how delighted I was, during French class in middle school, to uncover the meaning of the phrase) would guarantee her husband would never again take me seriously.

Accepting defeat, I spent most of the day reading
House of Mirth
on the couch. “Must be a real page-turner,” Brian's father said, and joked that he had gotten his fill of novels after being forced to read
Ulysses
in college. The culture demands the faces of presidential candidates become second nature to us but forgives people who never listen to music or read books, who have no idea what they're feeling most of the time and no language to describe the feelings in any case.

Before we left Brian's parents', his father gave us some meat from their neighbors' farm. Brian stammered thank you several times and offered to pay his dad.

“No, no,” his father said toothily. “This one's a gift.”

In the car, I poked fun at the excessive formality of the exchange. Brian was not amused. “That is seriously good meat,” he said. “It was really nice of my dad to just give it to us.”

Brian believed that life consisted of hard work interrupted by a smattering of fun moments. He told me this later that night, lying in bed beneath his open window, shirtless and relaxed now that he was back in his grown-up home. His long lashes blinked deliberately as he spoke about the rightness of dull suffering, his face backlit by the artificial brightness of summer nights in the city. He placed his hand on top of my thigh. “Your skin is so soft it startles me every time I touch it,” he said. My body responded to his words, pressing its hot skin against his, kissing his smooth cheek and prickly chin. But I felt heavy with the logic in which Brian's will was imprisoned. My hands moved over his body throughout the night, clinging to his bicep, his shoulder, his fingers, trying to feel their way out of the inertia gathering around us in the almost dark. But the morning was sunny and dry, and as Brian biked off to work, I heard him singing for the first time.
I just kept lookin' at the sight of her face in the spotlight so clear…

A few nights later, he took me out for a fancy dinner, offered a short speech about how well things were going between us, asked me to move in with him, ordered a bottle of champagne when I said yes. The careful way he courted me felt like grace, like something mysterious was finally pushing my life in the right direction. I clinked glasses with his, thinking how handsome he was, marveling at his certainty that we should be together. I watched myself dipping bread in olive oil and cutting handmade pasta as if I were standing behind a plate-glass window, feeling something I couldn't quite describe while I watched people on the other side of the glass act out emotions with clear causes and correct names.

After we moved in together and Brian no longer had to ask me on dates in order to see me, I started to fear his solidity. I'd ask him to waste time with me at various bars and restaurants and concerts and he'd pull me against him and nuzzle my neck, saying he was exhausted. Weekends were documentaries from Netflix, Indian takeout, cuddling on the couch, chatting idly, sort of watching TV, Brian dozing off, me sneaking sips of the vodka we kept in the freezer, my internal organs jumping up and down on a little raft adrift within me, making me seasick. This will be my life, this will be my life, this will be…

But when I thought of my future without Brian, it was a dark room filled with a chemical meant to smell like rotting wood. I don't know where the image came from, but it was specific and terrible. So after Brian left for work some Monday mornings, I found myself kneeling on the floor, begging: “Do not let me be bad. Do not let me want to leave. Do not let us become a nightmare of entangled needs unmet. Do not let me kill this.” The prayers came unbidden, always in the negative.

They didn't work, of course.

I had to go back to California for my uncle's funeral. Thomas died in a one-car crash. My father was convinced it was a suicide and equally convinced he could have prevented it, had he only forgiven Thomas's boyhood meanness—smashing my father's favorite toy to bits while my father cried and pleaded; locking my father in the basement for hours; giving my father charley horses and dead legs and worse. Dad called me several times a day after Thomas died, repeating these awful stories, illogically ending each with the regret that he had not reached out to Thomas more as an adult, he could have helped him, it wasn't Thomas's fault that their parents had no idea how to take care of kids. I tried to tell my father that he was expecting too much from himself, but he spoke over me in a loud, shaky voice, telling me, not for the first time, about the one good conversation he and Thomas had had as adults, when Thomas revealed that the sound of my father's baby cries still haunted him, a small, hopeful wail escalating into a shriek of desperation that eventually exhausted my father's breath. I pictured, not for the first time, a wreckage of baby babble crashing in the air above my father's neglected crib and raining down on him, smothering him into silence. I was nauseated by love for my father, imagining him alone in the too-big house my mother had insisted on buying and then abandoning. Is there any emotion more uncomfortable than pity for one's parents? I told my father that I would borrow Brian's car and drive out to his house so we could fly to the funeral together, already dreading being a captive audience for my father's pain on the five-hour flight.

Thomas was buried on the Fourth of July in L.A., where he had spent his adult life. The funeral was my uncle's immediate family standing around the coffin, surrounded by tombstones so new they looked metallic, speaking incidental memories of Thomas as they came. The far-off cackle of store-bought firecrackers was the only music at the service. The sun was brilliant and cloying. I'd barely known my uncle. I had no memories to share with his widow or children. But being admitted to this scene of reasonably excessive suffering unhinged some badness in me. Life was too hard, it was not my fault, everyone suffered, may as well take the drug. Brian had offered to take time off work to come to the funeral with me but effused relief when I told him not to bother, to save the time off for something fun instead. I had recently resumed talking to Jared on the phone while Brian was at work; he knew I was living with somebody; I thought we could be friends. So after the funeral and the family sitting around in my uncle's house with nothing to say, I called Jared and told him I was in his neighborhood, sort of. He was at a party, but he'd leave right away. He gave me the address of his new digs and promised to be waiting outside when I got there. There is a Zen parable about a teacher who tells his student to stop obsessing over the bad things he's done, to treat his past badness as a collection to be mined for knowledge. The student takes this to mean that he can do whatever he feels like doing, and goes on adding to his collection of mistakes until it is too huge and putrid to sort through for any glint of wisdom. I told my father I was going to visit friends in my old town and drove north to Carpinteria just as the real fireworks started, littering the skies over Camarillo and Oxnard. Stupid towns—outlet malls, the smell of sulfur from factories, blimps floating in the smog. Jared was waiting outside his apartment when I got there, wearing pants that I hated. Too short, flamboyantly checkered. He hated them, too, but not enough to spend money on new clothes. And now they looked perfect to me, even manly in their disregard for appearances.

“No sex,” I said as he unlocked the door to his apartment.

“Right. We're just friends.”

As soon as he shut the door to his bedroom, he gathered my hair into his fist and ran his tongue from the nape of my neck to the base of my skull. I noticed the unforgiving hardness of the tips of my shiny black shoes, the overripe banana musk in his room, the crumpled newspaper by his bed. Or whatever the particular external details happened to be. What I remember clearly is that the quality of my awareness changed—Jared pushed me onto the mattress, held my arms over my head, lifted up my dress—the way water changes according to one's thirst. This could be the last time we would ever be together. The more external details I could notice, the more okay I would be. “Yes,” I said again and again, until sensation wore away the meaning of the word.