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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is based on notebooks I kept between April 2006 and July 2008. At the time, my writing was copious, covering not only my emotions but also conversations, descriptions of places, what was happening in the lives of those around me, and bits of random observation. For periods when my notes were thinner, I pieced together hundreds of email exchanges—I recall chasing down the date of an event to a time stamp on a photo someone had posted on flickr. I also consulted the memories, diaries, and datebooks of friends not only to confirm facts but also to try and get a sense of other people’s perspectives.

  When I first started writing, my only rule was I had to be completely honest. I meant this in two ways. I had to be honest in the sense that I was going to put it all out there—I wasn’t going to make myself or anyone else look better than their actual behavior indicated. I also meant honest in the journalistic sense of sticking to the facts. My rule was that if something I thought I remembered wasn’t in my notes, and I couldn’t confirm it elsewhere, I didn’t get to use it.

  Yet as time went on—it took me about six years working in the summers and Januarys to finish this book—I began to conceive of truth in a different way. I started the project convinced that I alone knew the reality of those years, but as I got farther away from the events, I began to see just what a slippery business truth is, how totally unavoidable the subjective is. I began to see that there is truth beyond mere accuracy.

  Everything in this book is true, in the sense that it is an honest account of my experiences. But I did not in the end stick to the second part of my initial rule. In the interest of publishing this, I cut back on the number of characters and gave their lines to those who remained (not the main figures, but some of the friends). Also, I moved dates around to serve the narrative and to protect people who wanted to remain anonymous. A few conversations actually took place after the time period of the story. And, toward the end of the book in particular when my notes were thinner, I relied on memory to reconstruct conversations and events—as long as I felt I could justify my choices by what I found in emails and talks with those involved. Last, as I faced the book’s publication, I changed almost everyone’s name and altered many identifying details.

  PROLOGUE

  Wednesday, July 27, 2016

  On April 3, 2006, at 1:33 p.m., I started taking notes. I don’t know what to tell you except it was my attempt to stave off going mad. Although I didn’t fully know it yet, I was recording an extraordinary period in my life—a time of freedom and exaltation such as I’d never known, as well as darkness that threatened to bury me.

  It’s been ten years since I started writing in those Moleskines, and now I’m scared. Sometimes I lie in bed, sick with anxiety at what I’m revealing, sick that I’m causing pain to real people in my life. I say to myself, you have no right to do this. But in the morning, the need to proceed is stronger.

  I don’t know why I wrote everything down. You could say it was a compulsion, although I’m not crazy about that word. It seems to imply something unhealthy, while I would say keeping those notebooks and then turning them into this book saved me.

  BOOK ONE

  LEAVING

  Monday, April 3, 2006

  1:33 p.m.

  What to do now, I don’t know. You see, I no longer love my husband.

  It’s one of those New York spring afternoons when, as if overnight, the slush is gone and the blustery wind has ceased. Hyacinths, daffodils, and crocuses splash the ground with color, and the magnolia trees are just beginning to unfurl their fleshy blossoms. It’s one of those days when you simply have to be outside. But I’m not outside. I’m inside, my dog, Sakura, sitting like a sphinx on the floor at my feet. I’m on my couch in the back of our apartment, watching the spring day through my windows, smoking a spliff, listening to Coldplay (don’t even start with me about the Coldplay), and trying to figure out how I’m going to get out of this situation.

  I had that dream again last night—the one where my father and Josh are chasing me. I can feel their breath on my neck, and I’m trying to scream, but no sound comes out. Bluegrass music plays. Then we’re all in the air, flying, cruising over an enormous crater in the earth, and I realize something terrible is happening beneath me. And then I’m falling, plummeting downward 100 miles an hour toward the terror, and trying, desperately, to cry out, please, someone, save me—but no one does.

  I used to have this exact dream except instead of trying to get me, Josh was trying to help me. Sometimes when we fight, Josh still shouts at me about this dream.

  How did this happen? How can it be that one day you’re so in love with a person that just being near him is like bathing in golden light, and then the next thing you know, you’re fantasizing he gets in a car accident or contracts a disease that doesn’t require any nursing and kills him quickly?

  I’ve always believed that the really great writers are generous to their characters. But I warn you: I don’t feel generous toward Josh. I’ll have to throw myself on your mercy and say, forgive me, I’ve lived with the man for thirteen years. I have no generosity left.

  At this moment, as I write this, my husband is sitting on the couch at the other end of our apartment watching the Golf Channel and sucking on a can of Coke. Sometimes I think Josh tries to stay as still as possible, hoping against hope that one day life will, at last, just leave him the fuck alone. What he doesn’t know is that I too may leave him alone.

  Or maybe he does. He’s a crafty bastard beneath that gentle stoner demeanor.

  I don’t know why I’m putting all this down on paper. I’m writing God knows what for God knows whom. I feel somehow that if I don’t write everything down, I will simply come flying apart. The center cannot hold! But maybe, just maybe, if I document every single thing I see, hear, and feel, I can keep it together, spinning a web of words around myself that will keep me from breaking apart from the inside out.

  I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, really, writing everything down, even tracing words on my forefinger with my thumb like a tic—trying to make sense, I suppose, through the calming logic of language, of a world that is simply too chaotic and too mad to make sense of.

  For the record, I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in Sinai Hospital, not one mile from the Preakness racetrack. My mother was a German-Jewish immigrant from South Africa. She grew up in a prefabricated house in New Haven, Connecticut, with her mother, sister, and grandparents. She never knew why the older generation spoke German—Holocaust, what Holocaust?—and she never knew why they left South Africa for America without her father. (He had a child with another woman.) She knew she never saw her father again and that she couldn’t move the left side of her body very well because of a childhood bout with encephalitis. From pictures, I know that my mother was slim and lovely with violet eyes, black eyelashes, and an impossibly small waist, like a young Elizabeth Taylor.

  Anyway, the reason she ended up in the postindustrial, recession-ridden nightmare that was Baltimore in the 1970s with two small children and a quite possibly psychotic anarchist of a husband had something to do with bluegrass music and a strong desire at nineteen to escape that house in New Haven. Still, marrying my father was not her best move. Neither was having children, reall
y. Can you imagine? It’s 1965, you marry some asshole you meet at a Country Gentlemen concert, you move to Baltimore, of all places, you have two kids, and then—bam! The sexual revolution hits. The women’s movement! Oh wait, I didn’t have to get married? I didn’t have to procreate?

  My father was gone before I was one, and she hit the Baltimore nightlife with a vengeance. Baltimore was still a thriving seaport in those days, and she seemed far more interested in Greek sailors and disco dancing than keeping house and raising children. In the afternoons, my brother, Seth, and I used to play we were in Vietnam as we fought our way through the fruit flies that infested our kitchen. At night we heard laughter and stumbling on the stairs and ran into men who didn’t speak English in the bathroom. What can I say? It was the seventies. My mother had a life she wanted to live. And who can blame her, really? Well, me for many years, until I got older and fucked up my own life.

  My father, I’ll give you the basics. He grew up in a tiny apartment in the Bronx, his father a Russian-Jewish immigrant. My grandfather—Zaidie, we called him—was the kind of guy who when you telephoned said, “Oh, it’s you, how come you never call?” And when you asked him what he was doing, said, “Oh, just sitting here in the dark.” Photographs of that side of my family show people with faces so dark and stormy it’s as if they’re perpetually standing in shadows.

  My dad hit Bronx Science at ten and Johns Hopkins at fifteen. Graduated: never. He was a first-generation computer programmer who didn’t believe in the twenty-four-hour day, a smuggler for the Sandinistas, and a professional mandolin player. He thought 1968 was the high-water mark of human civilization, and he was waiting for the day when humans shared a single consciousness and boundaries of all kinds disappeared. When I was a kid, I said that sounded terrifying, but he said that was just because I had petty bourgeois values. He took my brother and me to New York with him and left us under blankets in the back of his van in the middle of the night while he dropped off computers for the Nicaraguans. He took us to Florida for vacation and drove 100 miles an hour the whole way because we were running late—me sitting in the passenger seat, afraid to close my eyes, sure that if I did, even for a minute, I would be killed.

  I officially cut off contact with my father fifteen years ago. I’ve seen him once since. I was arrested covering an International Monetary Fund protest in DC, and, while hog-tied in a police gymnasium, I heard my name called out and found that someone—someone with the exact name of my father—had bailed me out. Who knew, but he’d been in DC protesting the International Monetary Fund. I hadn’t seen him in all those years, and there he was waiting for me outside the jail, proud as if I’d provided him with a grandchild. No words of reproach for the years of silence. No apologies. No requests for apologies. It was like he didn’t remember that I’d cut off contact. Or why. Just, “In times like these, Heather, getting arrested is a badge of honor.” I was so stunned by his physical presence, I forgot that I’d sworn never to let him near me again. I actually got in his van with him. And then he nearly killed me by falling asleep while driving us back to the Washington Monument.

  Why am I telling you all this? I don’t even know who you are. You’re the person I’ve been writing to all my life, I suppose—you’re someone who cares about me, whose attention I have a right to claim. In other words, you’re nobody at all. And perhaps that’s what feels so good about this. I can write anything here, because it isn’t for anyone. I can say whatever I want and suffer no consequences.

  Yes, this is my life right now—a lovely day of streaming spring light and blossoming spring flowers. And me sitting here on my little couch, mouthing the words I’ve tried so long to avoid. I no longer love my husband. I don’t want to be his wife.

  Wednesday, April 5, 2006

  Me and Josh, just now, in the kitchen:

  “I talked to Abe this morning,” Josh says, beating a rhythm on the countertop with his hands. “He’s pumped about the movie.” And he moves as if to give me a high five.

  Abe is a director friend of ours in LA.

  “We’re going to be riiiiich!” Josh says.

  Josh thinks he’s writing a movie based on the book he thinks he cowrote with me. Considering that Josh’s contribution to the book was basically to sit around smoking pot and playing video games; considering the fact that Josh seems unable to leave the house except to buy a can of Coke every morning; and considering the fact that he has yet to write a word of said movie, I find the notion that he’s now going to become a Hollywood mogul amusing at best. At worst, I think I’d be justified in stabbing him through the heart with a steak knife.

  “Aha,” I say.

  I roll my eyes—I can’t help it; it’s involuntary when he talks.

  I was looking for something to eat in the fridge, something that was neither rotten nor in need of cooking. I haven’t been home for a month and the fridge is empty except for condiments.

  “What’s the matter?” Josh says. “Aren’t you excited?”

  I have two options here. One, lie—which I have decided to stop doing. Or two, say no, I’m not excited, you’ve hardly done anything you said you were going to do for the last ten years so why would I waste the emotional energy now? I choose a third option: silence.

  This of course makes him ask me again. “Aren’t you excited?” And then the inevitable: “What’s the matter? Are you okay? Are you okay? What’s the matter?”

  Oh dear God, I’m so sick of being asked that. No, I’m not okay, I’m married to you, I think. But I don’t say it. I can’t muster up the energy to be that snotty. He’s looming over me too, which drives me crazy. I’m only five feet—five one on a good day—and when he gets really close like that, all six foot three of him, I feel as if he were blotting out the sun. I can’t stand to look at him. He’s a pasty imitation of the man I married.

  Later

  Josh and I met at a funeral. Good sign, I know. I was twenty years old. I walked into that room full of mourners the night before the service. My friend called out his name. Josh turned toward me as if in slow motion. I remember his height; the black hair brushed back from his face; a cigarette clenched between his teeth; those wild green eyes. He was wearing jeans, a horizontally striped T-shirt, red suede Pumas, and a brown suede jacket. You know how when you think back to the time you first met the people you end up loving, and they somehow seem bigger or brighter or somehow set apart from the scene? Well, that’s how it was with Josh. He turned toward me and the rest of the room faded into a blur.

  The service was for my childhood friend Gabriel, murdered while trying to park his car in Los Angeles. Josh and Gabriel were cousins and best friends. Josh was in the car with Gabriel when he got shot. He tried to stop the bleeding with his hands on the way to the hospital, watched him die before they even arrived.

  I know every detail of what happened that night, because Josh told me, back in our courtship days, when participating in Josh’s pain was like looking up into a starry night. How proud I was to be his confidant. His tragedy set off fireworks in my chest. As Josh used to say, Faulkner had nothing on his family. There was his uncle, Gabriel’s father, killed in a car accident in a town called Truth or Consequences; his mean drunk of a father; and his mother, who got diagnosed with terminal cancer six months after Gabriel got shot. I met Josh and I looked into his eyes and I saw something I’d never seen before. I thought I saw a soul who knew the things I knew. I thought Josh was a Byronic hero, dark and sulky and full of anguish. I took his pain the way some women get their mother-in-law’s jewelry.

  Is it worth mentioning how handsome Josh was at twenty-four? How amazed I was that someone so handsome could want me? Six three. Wide shoulders, long muscled arms, a narrow stomach and waist. His eyes were dark green and such an unusual, long shape that they almost seemed to touch the sides of his face. His eyelashes and hair were black, his lips full and red, and his cheekbones chiseled. He’d grown up a surfer in Huntington Beach—behind the Orange Curtain, he used to say, whe
re neo-Nazis painted swastikas on his parking space in high school and his friends’ moms made cocktails from gallon bottles of vodka in the afternoons.

  A bunch of us refugees from the Gabriel tragedy were all living in the same apartment building in San Francisco. I assumed Josh was an idiot because he was a surfer from Southern California and because everyone else said he was a genius. But then, one day, Josh and I started talking and it was as if my brain were a bottle of champagne that had just been uncorked. Pop. Pop. Pop. I thought, holy shit, he is a genius. The man had a degree in molecular biology, had been writing screenplays with Gabriel before the murder, read philosophy in his spare time, played every instrument imaginable, and wrote poetry that actually wasn’t terrible. Once he and I started talking, we just never stopped. We roamed the streets of San Francisco together late at night when everyone else was asleep. We drank from jugs of Gallo wine on the swing sets at the top of Nob Hill. And when finally he admitted it was me he loved and not his mealymouthed girlfriend left over from college, we kissed on every street corner that city had, under the rain, under the stars, in winds and through sleet.

  Josh couldn’t sit still in those days. He was always yelling at the rest of us to get off our asses and come out and do something. Anything. It was as if there were a fire burning in him that wouldn’t let him rest. You could see it crackling in his green eyes, sense it when he tore at his guitar until the sweat poured down his neck. But I was always watching, so I’d see sometimes when his head fell into his hands, or when he looked up unexpectedly and his face was suddenly ravaged, years older than his twenty-five-year-old self. When he left a room it was like he took all color with him. I thought he was brave and noble. I thought I could save him.