Reckless Years Read online

  What an idiot I am.

  All we had was an enormous television that Josh had insisted on buying. There’d been nothing in the place except that TV surrounded by video game consoles and a folding camp chair set up in front of it. I remember coming home one evening with a couple of friends. And there was Josh, his mouth hanging slightly open, alone in the darkness, not a single light on, tethered like some enormous, obscene baby to the TV by the cord of a video game controller. Yes, hello, friends, this is my life—a huge loft we can’t afford, no furniture, and a husband who just wants to sit in the dark playing video games.

  Josh had wanted this loft so badly it had been like a fever. He’d told the real estate agent that we could easily afford it, even though we couldn’t, and when I brought this up to him, he’d shouted, “Don’t you trust me? Why don’t you ever listen to what I have to say? Does it ever occur to you that maybe I know something?”

  No, I’d thought, no I don’t trust you. I just watched you puff yourself up in your own eyes as you inflated by one hundred thousand dollars what we’d agreed to spend. Is the kind of person who needs to impress a real estate agent trustworthy?

  But that was inside. On the outside, I cried. I hate being berated. I always want to be forgiven, allowed back inside the fold.

  “Of course I trust you. Of course.” Weeping, copiously.

  We were supposed to move in on September 12, but then September 11 happened, and we were stuck down in Baltimore at my mother’s house, where we’d been spending a few days. September 11 is Josh’s birthday. Maybe that was part of it. Maybe he was retraumatized the way people with posttraumatic stress disorder can be. I don’t know. But he flipped that day. I remember standing on a street corner in Baltimore while he screamed at me so loudly that people in their cars turned to look at us. I’d bought a frozen Pepperidge Farm cake for his birthday because we were all so disoriented and horrified by what had happened in the morning that we’d canceled our plans to go out to dinner. Josh had agreed to this. But then there we were on that street corner—and I’d ruined his birthday. And this would never have happened if his mother were still alive. And I was a terrible wife and a terrible friend. “A fucking frozen Pepperidge Farm cake!” he kept shouting. I just remember looking at him and thinking, are you crazy? Terrorists just blew up the World Trade Center.

  You could say that was the end of the middle.

  By the time we moved into our new place, Josh was already furious with me about our book. Every time I showed him something I had written, his face would get tight with anger and he’d say, “What is this? This isn’t what we talked about.” He said, “If I were writing this with Gabriel, we’d be done already.” He said, “I dropped out of graduate school to write this book with you and now it’s a disaster. We’re never going to finish. We’re totally fucked.”

  It’s true I’d asked Josh to work on the book with me. I’d been growing increasingly anxious that he was no longer going to class, even though he’d spent two years working to get into that fancy philosophy-of-mind graduate program. I thought asking him to cowrite the book was like throwing him a life preserver. But I didn’t say that to Josh. Instead I said, “I need you to help me with this. I can’t do it by myself.”

  Christ on a crutch, what bad decisions we make.

  Anyway, we sent out that invite for Thanksgiving. We were going to show everyone what big shots we were. After I bought the dining room and living room furniture, Josh decided we needed bookshelves before the guests arrived. And he was going to build them himself. But he didn’t start until the day before—and mind you, the wall on which he was building them is about ten feet high and ten feet across. At first he was meticulous, finding every stud, putting brackets in, checking the level as each new piece of wood went up. But as day turned into night, he grew increasingly sloppy, not putting brackets at the ends of the shelves and eyeballing levels. I begged him to just leave them unfinished. But Josh had been telling stories all day of what a lousy builder his father was and how these shelves were going to put him in his place. Josh said he’d put in those last brackets after Thanksgiving but that he had to finish the whole wall in time for his father to see. He wanted to dazzle his father with his success—a book deal! (no matter he wasn’t actually writing it), perfect furniture! (no matter that his wife had picked it out and paid for it on credit), a beautiful loft! (no matter that we couldn’t afford it), and a beautifully conceived set of book shelves that didn’t actually have the support they needed to hold up our books.

  Sitting there paying the bills, I was thinking about that Thanksgiving and looking at our still unfinished bookshelves, sloping down perilously on the ends, and wondering, as I always do when I’m paying our bills, what exactly happens to all the money I’m earning. This was the first time I’d been home and paying the bills in months and months, so I’d decided to actually go through the charges instead of just writing a check for the total amount as I usually did. I found more than two thousand dollars’ worth of electronic deductions from our credit cards—for online services, music equipment, computer parts. We were still paying monthly fees to a hosting company for the website Josh had built for the book and then abandoned a month later.

  I felt it all rise into my throat, a rage that all my hours of work, of zigzagging around the country to earn all that money and bring in speaking fees, was being thrown down the toilet by an imbecile who couldn’t even be nice to me while he did it.

  Josh did not get mad when I asked him about the charges, as I was expecting. Instead he got kind of nervous and hangdog. I could tell he was trying to be “different” as he’d promised after getting back from LA. He apologized and said he hadn’t realized he’d spent so much.

  I got up from the dining room table and found that I was laughing. Josh stood where he was, over in the kitchen, watching me. His brows were knitted together. I turned to the windows that face out over Eleventh Street, put my hand on the glass, and just kept laughing.

  “What?” Josh said.

  All I could do was shake my head. It was so clear, so obvious—so ridiculously, absurdly obvious. For a moment I really thought Josh would just say, “You know what. Why don’t I just pack my stuff and go.” But when I looked over at him, he looked irritated. And he said, “What? Why are you laughing?”

  “Josh . . .” I said. Could he really not know?

  He intensified his gaze on me, shrugged his shoulders as if in bewilderment.

  “Stop saying my name. What? What is it? Speak.”

  I think his ability to be simultaneously aggressive and oblivious kept me to my purpose.

  I sat down on one of the bamboo chairs that line the front wall. My heart had begun thumping. I could feel it in all my muscles. I am not good at confrontations. I never have been. It’s like my brain, which works just fine in other stressful situations, shuts down.

  I said it quickly, before I could have time to think and get too scared.

  “I want a separation.”

  I could barely hear my own words because of the pounding of my heart. I thought for a second I might pass out. I wished for a second I could take it back, shove the words right down my own throat in some desperate attempt to avoid whatever was going to happen next. Which was—what? I didn’t know, but I knew it was going to be terrible.

  “What?” Josh said.

  Keep breathing. Keep breathing. It’s going to be okay.

  “Did you just say what I think you just said?”

  There’s nothing he can do or say that can hurt you. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  Suddenly he was right above me, his face contorted with fury.

  “You couldn’t wait, could you?” he shouted. “Just when everything was about to change for me. Just when I was getting it together. But no, you couldn’t wait. You couldn’t wait for just a few months until I made it.”

  You are delusional, I thought. But I said nothing. I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to see his face. I didn’t want to go away to tha
t place where all I want is forgiveness, where I find myself groveling.

  “Look at me! Look at me!” he shouted. “Open your eyes!”

  I looked at him, right in the eye. I tried to will him to understand what I seemed unable to communicate verbally. Don’t you see I’m dying here? But I was afraid to open my mouth, because if I opened my mouth I would start apologizing. It took all the will I had not to do this—I didn’t have anything left over to speak.

  “Oh, that’s right. Do the victim thing,” he shouted. “Poor overwrought Heather. I know this one. It’s a good one. Really. But actually, no, save it. Actually, go fuck yourself.”

  That was my cue to get up and leave the room. I’d told myself that the minute he started insulting me, I would leave. But Josh didn’t want to let me leave. He blocked me at the mouth of the hallway, all 230 pounds of him, moving from side to side so I couldn’t pass. And then the cursing started.

  “You fucking bitch. You’re a fucking bitch, you know that? You’re a cunt. You’re a dirty sniveling cunt. I fucking hate you, you fucking cunt.”

  I stood still, waiting for him to let me pass. This is what I’d been practicing for. I’d told Eleanor I was developing a policy of nonviolent resistance—beat me, curse me, do what you will. I won’t fight back but neither will I back down. I’d seen Gandhi on TV while in Dallas and been struck by the scene of all the Indians lining up to get beaten by English soldiers. I’d wondered what they did with their selves during that moment—not with their bodies, which they were willingly handing over to be violated, but with their selves. I thought, they must have taken themselves somewhere far away from the situation, to a different place entirely. And this is what I tried to do. I could hear, but I stopped listening. I could watch his face contort, but if I believed enough that I was doing the right thing, I didn’t have to let the sight penetrate beyond the outermost senses. It was just what he was doing. It had nothing to do with me. I kept taking long, even breaths, listening to the sound of the air coming in and out. I was in the room, but I was nowhere near it.

  Finally Josh stepped to the side with a snort and a big show of letting me pass. Then he followed me down the long hallway, whispering in my ear and pounding on the wall with his fist. “Fucking bitch. Fucking cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt.”

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  I went to my closet in the back of the house and pulled out my biggest bag. I tossed in underpants, socks, yoga clothes, and a book. I had a toiletry bag with supplies to last several days, which I’d already taken to carrying with me. I dropped that in.

  “Oh, you’re leaving,” Josh hissed. “Perfect. That’s right. Run off. You fucking bitch.”

  I made it to the front door and got it open before Josh slammed it shut again with the palm of his hand. Now he was really hulking over me. He was all I could see or smell. I was afraid, except I wasn’t afraid because I thought, even if he breaks all my bones and I end up in the hospital, I will have done the right thing. They say the primary tool dictators have over their people is fear. If Josh was my oppressor, I was going to deny him his most powerful weapon. Nonviolent resistance. No fear. Just keep breathing.

  He took hold of my bag and tried to pull it from me. I yanked it back from him. I don’t know what he was saying but he was screaming and spit was flying in my face. He had nearly pulled the bag away from me when suddenly I dropped back into the situation. I was in the middle of it. This was happening. I was leaving my husband. Suddenly we were both screaming, and wrestling too. I was yelling at him right back in his face. Shouting at him to go fuck himself right back. I was twisting and turning, trying to get away from him. He slacked for a second, startled, I think, by my sudden turning on him, and I pushed him in the chest with all my might. I threw the door open and ran out and down the stairs. There were so many voices in my head. My brain was shouting, no, no, no, go back! My heart felt like it was splitting in two. Some part of me was praying, oh please, dear God, take me out of this, please, please. But that other part, the new part, was hovering above it all, just watching, waiting, saying, okay, open the door. That’s right. You got it. Left foot. Right foot. Keep walking. Good job. Anything you do, don’t look back. Just keep moving. There you go. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

  I went straight to Mac and Katy’s apartment. Let myself in with the keys Katy had given me. I don’t remember anything at all from the walk. When I got to the apartment, I lay down on the rug in the living room and hung on to its edges. I wailed. I’ve never heard myself make such noises. I thought, I sound like someone at a funeral. I thought of the sounds Gabriel’s grandmother had made at his funeral. I cried for who the man I married had become. I cried at my own weakness in staying so long. And I cried for the will it took not to run back. The sheer act of not letting anything he’d said penetrate left me prostrate. In my mind I erected a wall between him and me and I refused to let him in. I held on to the edges of that rug as if for dear life.

  Friday, May 19, 2006

  Scene: our bedroom. Josh is lying down on the bed. I am sitting on the edge. It’s the first time I’ve been home since leaving.

  “Heather, please, please!” Josh is sobbing, more than I’ve ever seen him. He’s clutching my arm. Everything is foggy. I feel like I can’t see clearly. “Please don’t go, please don’t leave me. I won’t make it if you leave me.” He pulls back. Looks right at me. “Don’t you see—I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I know it’s not your responsibility—but if you go, the jig is up. That’s it for me.” More sobbing. And now I’m sobbing too, and thinking, please don’t kill yourself. Please don’t kill yourself. I say, “Josh, look at me. Look at me. Don’t you know we have to do this? Are you happy? Can you tell me you’re happy?” But of course he can’t, and this makes us cry all the harder. We cling to each other.

  Monday, May 22, 2006

  Josh is leaning not just his head but his entire torso out the front window. I’m walking away, up Eleventh Street, thinking, so much for “talking.”

  “You’re a fucking rat!” he’s shouting. “I knew it! I knew I should never have trusted you!”

  Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Like a chorus following me up the street. I’m thinking, yeah, the rat survives when the ship goes down, motherfucker. And then, is this really happening to me?

  Thursday, June 15, 2006

  It’s been almost a month since I told Josh I want a separation. I’ve been eating a lot of Oreos dipped in vodka. Every day I get stoned and drunk and talk to Eleanor and Summer on my cell phone, and then I trudge back to my house to “talk” with Josh. But Eleanor’s wedding is tomorrow, and before driving up to Martha’s Vineyard, I go to Philadelphia to see my brother, who is on tour with a very famous Rock Star.

  I rarely see Seth, even though he and Cecilia live in Greenpoint. The truth is I feel uncomfortable around him—primarily because the sight of him makes me feel as if there were a swelling in my chest, as if I have so much love for him and so little idea how to express it that it’s actually constricting my breathing. He’s my older brother, and if you have an older brother, maybe you know the feeling that he is more a minor deity than a flesh-and-blood human. I’m always so conscious of how superior he is to me in every way that I can never think of anything cool enough to say, and so walk around uttering the most inane garbage you can imagine and then hating myself.

  Josh decided many years ago that he despised both my brother and Cecilia. He didn’t have the nerve to forbid me to see my brother, but he sure didn’t make it easy. The last time my mother was in town, we all went out to dinner and Josh actually started shouting at Seth, something to do with the Bush administration’s handling of 9/11—right there over ceviche at this Peruvian restaurant on Fifth Avenue. He kept shouting, “You can’t bully me! You can’t bully me!” while Seth just sat there, as if frozen in his seat. And I thought, now it’s out, they know what my life is; they know I live under the thumb of a hideous tyrant. And it was worse than that because I’d also flas
hed to my brother when we were little, approaching my father with something he’d been saving up to tell him, something he thought would win that man’s love, only to find himself snarled at or, worse, ignored. Me thinking, you don’t want his love anyway. Me not knowing how to protect him. When Cecilia started shouting back at Josh to shut up, I remember dimly thinking, oh, you can do that? And then, before drowning again in my own sorrow, thank God for Cecilia, thank God for Cecilia. She will protect my brother.

  Saturday, June 17, 2006

  Eleanor’s wedding.

  “Are you happy now?” Eleanor says. “My parents are spending sixty thousand dollars so you can be a bridesmaid.”

  “Yes,” I say. I’m wearing a gold-colored tissue-papery Miu Miu dress I bought at a Barneys Warehouse sale in another lifetime and pink patent-leather peep-toe pumps. I’m not so sad I can’t appreciate a good outfit.

  “You really wish you’d been born into the French nobility, don’t you,” Eleanor says, in her wedding dress, sneaking a cigarette out the bathroom window. “Living it up at Versailles.”

  “World-famous courtesan,” I say.

  “Right, I forgot,” she says. “So you’re always saying. Control over their own money and whatnot.”

  “Showered with gifts,” I say.

  I help Eleanor put on her grandmother’s jade-and-diamond earrings. Make sure the hydrangeas in her hair are set right. But I cannot make her stop counting the minutes until the whole thing is over. I’m thinking, what part of wearing a beautiful, floor-length satin gown and carrying a bouquet don’t you like? But Eleanor is just not like that. Sigh. If only I’d been born a Stein.