Reckless Years Read online

Sunday, April 9, 2006

  I had a little birthday party today. Tomorrow I will be thirty-five. I’ve been gone so long it was the first time I’ve seen my friends in months. Josh said he’d take care of getting the brunch stuff, but then, when the minutes kept clicking by and still he was mining ore in Star Wars Galaxies, I leashed up Sakura, who was sitting by the front door giving us the evil eye, and went myself. The plastic bag handles of everything I hauled back sunk into the flesh of my hands, leaving angry red indents.

  I’ve told you what Josh was like when I first met him. Should I tell you what he’s like now? Let’s just say that the brilliant fire, which raged so brightly in him at twenty-five, has burned itself down to a fine, chalky dust. His very presence, as far as I’m concerned, is an affront to how much I used to love him. The man who couldn’t sit still now can’t move. The man whose intelligence kept me mesmerized now spends his days playing Star Wars Galaxies and watching third-rate movies on pay-per-view. When I look at him I see a corpse pulled from a river. I see deathly white skin and pot-glazed eyes. I see passion that has turned into uncontrolled rage and grief into depression so deep it’s like watching someone drown.

  (I warned you I felt no generosity toward the man.)

  Josh says something happened to me when I started taking antidepressants; he said I lost the ability to empathize. I remember watching him when he said this, or screamed this, because he was screaming at the time, his finger an inch from my nose, and I didn’t say anything out loud, but in my head, I was saying, no, I haven’t lost the ability to empathize; I just no longer want to be in a codependent death race with you to the bottom of the ocean.

  I never know what’s going to be the flip that sends Josh spewing insults and shouting at me. When he gets like that, though, my heart pounds so heavily I always dimly wonder if I’m about to have a heart attack.Was there a middle? I loved him at our wedding. I think I did. That was in the middle. The man could be incredibly charismatic. Funny. Insightful. Josh at his best was the best. I remember thinking at our wedding, please let this be the version of Josh I get to spend the rest of my life with.

  Anyway, I was so sad at my birthday party I could barely hold my head up. I felt I wasn’t even there; I was just drifting through. Josh was telling people he was going to LA to make a movie based on “our” book. I doubt anyone in that room believed him any more than I did. After everyone left, I went and sat out on the back steps that lead down to our garden—or rather, the plot of land that belongs to Josh and me that could one day be a garden but today, on this day, is just a plot of land with weeds growing up higher than the fence that surrounds it and covered in dog shit, because, although he says he does, Josh obviously doesn’t walk Sakura while I’m gone.

  The first summer after we moved into this place, I went into the “garden” and discovered the construction people had buried all their leftover materials back there. Every day I dug up bricks, bags of cement, old Coke cans, cinder blocks, you name it; it was there and I dug it out. It took me two summers to dig everything up. Eventually I had a pile that stretched from one end to the other and came up to my waist. We had to threaten to sue the developer to come haul it away. Then I finally got it smooth. I brought in new soil and laid down a thin sprinkling of grass seeds. Soon, tiny little heads of grass began poking their way through the dirt. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything so lovely. I was already picturing foxgloves and lilies, hydrangeas and lavender, sweet-smelling thyme. When I had to leave on my first trip to Dallas, I gave Josh simple instructions. Water it every morning and don’t let Sakura back there. When I returned, all the grass was dead, the soil was dry as sand, and the ground was littered with dog shit. This happened three more times before I gave up.

  I think our “garden” may be the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Later

  Josh comes into the back of the house.

  He sits down next to me and puts an arm around my shoulders. I try to pretend my shoulders aren’t my shoulders so I won’t have to feel his body touching mine.

  “Did you have a good time today?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “It’s nice to have you back.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re not really that glad to be back, are you?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Well, it’s hard to compete with the St. Regis.” And then to Sakura, sitting beside us, “But we’ll try, won’t we?”

  Sakura just sits there looking regal and ignoring us. Sakura is a white Shiba Inu with triangular ears, a curled tail, and coal-black eyes with white eyelashes. I’m pretty sure he was a pharaoh in his last life. He doesn’t have much time for Josh or me.

  “I wasn’t at the St. Regis,” I say.

  Josh sighs.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll be in the front if you need me.”

  I don’t say anything as he gets up to leave, but my heart hurts. Josh’s rage I’ve learned to handle. The doing nothing, I’m used to. But Josh trying, now, when it’s too late, this feels like it could kill me. But I must not pity him. If I pity him, I won’t be able to leave. And if I don’t leave, I won’t survive.

  Later

  I was at the St. Regis, but that was last summer when I was in Aspen. Now I’m just back from Dallas, where I stay at the Hotel Crescent Court, which has an enormous marble lobby with enormous, ever-changing orchid arrangements and a rectangular swimming pool on the roof. I’ve been ghostwriting a book for a billionaire. Did I want to ghostwrite a book for a billionaire? No. But we were desperate for money. The advance for the book had seemed so big at the time—but it was only supposed to take one year, and instead it had taken three. The line of credit on our mortgage was maxed out (eighty-five thousand dollars), as were our credit cards (forty-two thousand dollars). We owed my mother seventy thousand dollars from one of her credit cards. It never even came up that Josh should get a job—because that would have been to admit that he hadn’t actually worked on the book and wasn’t actually a house husband, which would have been to invite a rage so great and bitter that the last time I’d done it, he’d spit on me and told me to go fuck myself. His spit had landed right in the middle of my chest.

  Much to my surprise, the billionaire and I hit it off right away. He flew me out to Dallas to talk, and when I got stranded because of a snowstorm in New York, he put me up at the Four Seasons and told me to do a little shopping and get a massage. At Christmastime he sent me a thank-you card and a check for ten thousand dollars. I thought, ok, now this is someone I can do business with.

  I finished our book and then I went straight to work on his. That’s why I’ve been living in hotels for so much of the last year. I’ve just gone wherever my billionaire went. “We’re a two-Learjet family,” he’d say with a chuckle as we walked across the tarmac to his private plane. Inside it was all creamy-white leather and gold fixtures. The seat-belt buckles were gold. The cup holders were gold. The toilet fixtures were gold. He even had his own stewardess, who prepared his favorite meals and served them to him on fine china with gold silverware. A private stewardess, I thought. Now that’s wealth.

  I lived in Aspen most of last summer and I was strangely happy there. I realized that when Josh wasn’t there, I could breathe. I was working superhard, and I’d sprint out of my hotel room when I needed a break and ride my bike as fast as I could along the roaring Fork River with the biggest, most intensely bright blue sky I’d ever seen above my head. I started hiking in the mornings, charging up rocky paths, across alpine meadows filled with wildflowers, to the top of mountains where the air was so thin it hardly seemed like air at all.

  I also had a butler who brought me coffee in the morning. But now I’m digressing.

  Josh came to visit me out there. I didn’t want him to, but he’d say, “Do you miss me?” and I’d say, “Of course I do,” even though I didn’t at all. I could tell my billionaire pegged him for a loser the minute I introduced them. No, I wanted to say,
this isn’t the man I married. The man I married could have taken you on. This stammering geek shifting nervously from foot to foot is some imposter who showed up at the airport with Josh Reed’s driver’s license. I don’t like him any more than you do.

  I told my billionaire, in the strictest of confidence, that Josh had Asperger’s. I don’t know why I said this. I just couldn’t bear the shame of the association without an excuse.

  Josh’s visit was a nightmare. He’d promised he’d leave me alone in my room to work, but then when he asked if he could stay with me, I didn’t have the nerve to say no. He was making a website for “our” book and I was trying to be encouraging that at least he was doing something. But then he started crying and making little choking sounds of rage in his throat because the background color wasn’t coming out right. I said, “Please, Josh, I have to do this work.” And the next thing I know he was yelling at me for being unsupportive. “You fucking cunt . . .” His finger an inch from my nose.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever spent a lot of time in hotels, but after a while you start to feel discombobulated, as if maybe you aren’t really who you thought you were. Your identity becomes thin and wavery, easily swayed by people you meet in the lobby, by the values of people you wouldn’t normally associate with, by ideas you would never entertain anywhere else. In a good hotel, on an expense account, real life never intrudes. Everything is magically taken care of as if the thing to be taken care of—the unmade bed, the dirty dishes—had never been there in the first place. It’s weird and isolating. You do the thing you’re there to do and otherwise it’s just swimming in space, watching your identity flare up and flicker out. It was like being on another planet—and since I was on another planet, I could think things I wasn’t usually allowed to think. I said things in the quiet of that room that I’d never have been able to say in any facet of my regular life. I imagined what life would be like without Josh—coming home to an empty apartment, grocery shopping only for me, watching TV alone, going through life without a wedding ring to tell the world that I was loved.

  I remember when Josh and I first went to couples therapy. On day one, I said to the therapist, “Josh and I are an organism that has gotten sick.” And the therapist looked at me and said, “No two people are a single organism. You are two individuals.” I thought, what?? If we were two individuals, then one individual could leave the other individual. This had never occurred to me.

  All through writing the book my friend Eleanor had said, “Don’t engage the question. Finish the book, then figure out the relationship.” Eleanor and I have been friends since we were five, when our school principal told our parents to introduce us. I don’t think either of us had any friends; I certainly didn’t. Until about a year ago, Eleanor lived around the corner from me in Park Slope and those were the salad days. But Eleanor hated New York, and now she lives in Washington, DC, where she’s a reporter for NPR. (Eleanor is a Stein. Becoming successful was not an option but an obligation. Am I jealous? Let’s just say it’s complicated.) She says the thing about living in DC is that every day she gets to feel thin and well dressed, to which I say, yeah, but you have to live in DC, to which she says, yeah, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s marrying someone she met at the Environmental Defense Fund in two months. Anyway, Eleanor is very sensible and I always take her advice, so I listened when she said the thing about the book. But once I got to Dallas the book was finished.

  “What if I had an affair?” I said to her one day from my hotel room.

  “Don’t you think it would be better to tell Josh how you’re feeling?” she said.

  No, I thought. Instead, I fantasized constantly that he would get killed. Quickly. No nursing.

  It all sounds very calm and cool when I write it out now. Maybe you even think it’s funny. But trust me, it wasn’t. I spent a lot of time in the fetal position, bawling my head off, alternately cold and hot with fear. You have to understand, I used to put my hand over Josh’s heart at night while he was sleeping to make sure it didn’t stop beating. Even as I’ve grown to despise my husband, I still curl up behind him in bed and press my face against his back and pray he won’t abandon me.

  Monday, April 10, 2006

  Mike calls from Los Angeles. I don’t think he even knows it’s my birthday.

  “Mike, what do we do?”

  “We go cold turkey,” he says.

  Oh, Mike, I say your name over and over in my mind!!

  “I don’t know how to do that,” I whimper.

  “Well, we don’t live in the same city, so, you know, it’ll kind of naturally pass.”

  Oh, Mike, how can you???

  He gets off the phone so fast, I don’t have time to say a single thing I’d imagined saying.

  The story of Mike Talese really starts with Benjamin Green or, rather, Cecilia Green—it’s funny isn’t it, when you try to untangle what led you to the people you know? Cecilia is married to my brother—they’ve been together since their days in a Cajun band at Columbia so I’ve known the Greens since I was a teenager. Cecilia’s brother Ben and me, we got to be pretty tight. Although that was before Josh forbade me to see him, and yes, to my shame, I let myself be forbidden.

  Ben is a literary agent, and one day he called and said he knew an editor who wanted a book about digital culture—something about the Internet and virtual worlds and what people were going to be like in the future. Now, if you knew me, you’d know this was not exactly up my alley. I once bought a new VCR because I thought the old VCR was broken when really it was just unplugged. But I’d thought about the way Josh, the most brilliant man I knew, had recently started locking himself in his room to play video games. And I’d thought about my brother and me as kids, when our father didn’t have a house but just lived at his work—how we’d sleep on blankets under his desk and play Zork all day while mainframes whirred around us. (This was back before I was old enough to refuse to see my father.) Ben’s book idea had filled me with a kind of queasy longing to understand something I couldn’t even name and I’d said yes.

  Which brings us back to Mike. Mike is the editor of a tech magazine, so he knew lots of people I was trying to meet for my book. Perhaps I should mention that he’s also extremely cute, with black hair and hazel eyes. With all the conferences I’ve gone to while writing this book, I’ve seen Mike more in the last few years than most of my closest friends.

  Now, don’t get the wrong idea about me. I haven’t touched Mike Talese more than a hand on the shoulder. If you knew me, you’d know I’m hardly the type to sleep around. But, oh God, he’s all I think about. I feel like he’s the only pleasure I’ve had in my life for as long as I can remember.

  This is Mike explaining how we met: “So there’s Heather,” he’ll say, in his thick Boston accent. “And she’s grilling Rich Vogel. I mean grilling.” Here he always pauses, looks at me, and then tries to imitate me, which means he pulls himself up tall and puts on an air of taking himself very seriously. “So you’re saying it took four hundred people to build this virtual world? But what does it say about our world that people will pay to live in yours? And I don’t understand, how many servers do you have?”

  At this point, he’s usually gotten a laugh and looks at me, which is my cue to shake my head as if I disapprove of his mimicking me. As if.

  It’s funny, I can’t tell you anything specific I like about Mike. All I know is how electrified I feel when he’s near me. Sitting side by side in all those press rooms over the years, feeling his thigh against mine. Whispering in corners. Swatting at each other. Oh lord, when did we start swatting?

  About three weeks ago, I saw Mike at a conference in San Jose. And something changed. We were coming back from a party together late one night and ran into this twenty-three-year-old writer from Austin in the lobby. It took us ten minutes to ditch him, and when we got into the elevator, just the two of us, I said, giggling inanely, as if I were uttering some witticism, “Oh great, now everyone will think
we’re having an affair.”

  Mike was in the front corner by the elevator buttons. He answered without turning around to look at me, cool as a cucumber. “We are having an affair,” he said. Time slowed down around me and I sputtered something high-pitched and stupid like, “Oh my God! No we’re not!” And Mike said, “It’s a platonic affair. Like Lost in Translation.” And I thought, he’s not so stupid after all.

  I barely slept that night. All I could think about was kissing him. How his lips would feel on mine, what his breath would taste like. I kept imagining him putting his arm around me and saying, “I’m crazy about you, Heather. Everything is going to be okay.”

  And then the next day, I’d been around the corner from the San Jose conference center at a crappy little Indian place having lunch with a dreadlocked futurist and a blogger who used to travel around the country in hot pants as the official PlayStation girl when my phone rang. It was Mike, calling because he was abandoning the conference to go back to LA.

  I said, “What, you’re leaving without saying good-bye to me?” My heart sinking and pounding at the same time.

  And he said, “I’m calling you now, aren’t I?” Sounding gruff. Unlike himself. And then, “You know, I don’t really like this.”

  I barely dared breathe.

  “What do you mean?” I whispered.

  “When you act the way you’ve been acting, all flirty, all in my space.”

  “But, Mike . . .”

  “And you know what, I know what’s going on. If I were younger, I would totally do it. It would be easy in a way.”

  “Mike . . .”

  “And you know what else?” Sounding heated now. Angry at me. “Something is really wrong with your marriage. I don’t care what you say. Your heart is just sitting out there waiting for someone to take it. And you know what, I’m not going to do it. It’s not going to be me.”

  And then, I don’t know if it was the reception, or he hung up on me, or what, but he was gone. And it didn’t matter, because I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. And for some reason, standing on that street in San Jose, outside that crappy Indian restaurant, it had just felt like the end. My heart just finally collapsed. All the hairline fractures from my marriage gave, and the whole thing shattered. Just like that. Not because of anything particular my husband did but because of being told off by a man I don’t even really know.