Wreck and Order Read online

  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.

  CARPINTERIA

  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 cr
ied 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.

  BROOKLYN

  The night I got home from California, Brian and I went to a German café near our apartment. We dipped hunks of rye bread into creamy tomato soup and sipped strong Manhattans. We didn’t know it was movie night until fifteen minutes into our meal, when The Princess Bride began, projected onto the wall in front of us. I tried to continue answering Brian’s questions about how my father was handling the loss of his brother, but the movie was loud. The boy asked his grandpa, who was reading him a fairy tale, “Wait, is this a kissing book? What about sports and stuff?” Brian chortled. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t concentrate with this movie on.”

  I didn’t mind. It was nice to sip my strong cocktail and watch Wesley and Buttercup brave the Fire Swamp for the sake of true love.

  There was fresh snow on the sidewalk when we left the bar. I didn’t notice the white branches gleaming overhead until we were at the door of our apartment, and then I did not want to go in. I wanted to stay outside, a creature walking through the world, not of it. Fortunately, Brian started kissing me as soon as we shut the door behind us. He pulled my chin down with his index finger and ogled the O my lips formed before falling on my open mouth. He led me into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed in front of me. In one motion, he pulled off my T-shirt, sweater, and bra. He cupped my breasts in his hands and bounced them. “I missed your boobs.” He grinned. I kissed his forehead, relaxing into his delight in something that just happened to belong to me.

  He yanked off his boxers and rolled my underwear down my hips. What I had done with Jared was a mistake with a clear name and a clear implication. I hadn’t let myself name it while I was making the mistake; it just felt like something that was happening to me, the way Brian had happened to me. Only away from Jared could I recall what I’d done in terms of my own agency. So I listened to my boyfriend’s pleasure without striving for any of my own. All I deserved was his satisfaction. When it was over, I kept my face burrowed in the pillow next to his head for as long as I could. “You’re so still,” he said finally.

  “I’m not crying for a bad reason.”

  He patted my hair until I quieted.

  Although Jared and I had barely slept during the two days we spent together, I was restless that first night back and lay awake for hours, telling myself I should get my book out of my suitcase. “Your breathing is too shallow,” Brian whispered to me once. “Take deeper breaths.” The S came out in a harsh lisp, and I rolled away from him, folding my hands across my pounding chest. I awoke in the morning as he shut the door to the bedroom, having quietly dressed for work. I shot upright.

  “Brian!” I wondered for one second if I could bear it if he were already gone. I ran out to the hallway, where he was zipping up his coat. “You didn’t say goodbye.” His leather jacket was cold against my breasts.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “You seem worn out.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, one hand on the doorknob. So he had sensed my distance. Which meant he would be cold to me for a few days and then fuck me roughly, his eyes clenched, jaw set, nostrils flared. How he would have hated that image of himself. I knew that we should not use sex to release unspoken anger, like one of those stereotypical couples that terrified me so much, who would never know true closeness but would just seesaw between neediness and resentment until they died. But how could I stop him when he was bearing down on me hatefully, all muscle, no confusion? That kind of sex left me uncomfortably horny for days afterward—awful word, horny, with its harsh, adolescent hurriedness, but the misplaced need that arose from makeup sex (another juvenilely crass phrase) was awful indeed. I always wanted just one more orgasm, the one that would make all these unspoken negotiations worthwhile.

  Brian wished me a good day, staring at the floor.

  I called Jared a few minutes after Brian left. He yawned loudly. “I miss you, beautiful girl,” he said. Just like that, this became an acceptable pattern of feelings.

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nbsp; —

  Brian often had several big projects due around the same time, and in the week or two before the concurrence of deadlines he was empty of himself. He would hug and kiss me, tell me he loved me, bring me flowers. But his affection was a performance he enacted while his mind was elsewhere, so industrious that he forgot to eat or shower or have sex. I took NyQuil before bed during these periods, so as not to be kept awake by desire for a body that stress had traumatized into an unfeeling mass of blood and water and flesh, dumb as a fetus. Sometimes in the early mornings, his cock would remember to need me, and Brian attacked me with a sudden, brief passion that enflamed and then abandoned me like the boys I used to meet at bars. I knew that Brian and I would have close, long-lasting, satisfying sex again as soon as he completed this latest round of websites and that I must therefore remain calm the few times he fucked me hard and fast with no thought to my own enjoyment. But precisely because I found this to be the most erotic of all sex acts—in concept—and because I could never, not once, experience this fast, violent release that I imagined to be the most perfect pleasure, I was never calm. A miniature girl in combat boots and fishnet tights stomped on my chest and shouted to me about the selfishness of all male bodies and the treachery of all female bodies, which give themselves wrongly again and again.

  At breakfast—Brian both stiff and jumpy, wide-eyed with anticipation of the workday; me glaring and tense, my chest hardened against the quaking of tiny, helpless feet—I would mutter that I could pour my own cereal when he asked if I wanted Raisin Bran or Puffins, would chew with my mouth open, refuse to wipe the milk out of the corners of my mouth, turn my face away when he tried to kiss me goodbye, tell him that he was not meeting my needs and I was so unhappy and felt abandoned and was going to have a terrible day. I could behave as horribly as I wanted; it would not be long before he would want to take me again and I would want to submit. Brian would say the word “sorry” several times, pat my shoulder, back out the door, pause in the doorway to stare fearfully at my hard jaw and small eyes, tell me he would see me tonight and it would be okay. He was a good animal, plodding along the path in front of him with heavy steps, thoughtlessly following every rule of every preexisting game. And I was a ghost with an enormous belly and a tiny speck of a mouth, unable to consume enough food at one time to fill me up. The more the ghost eats, the more it is reminded of its hunger.