Reckless Years Read online

We stand by the car, holding each other for a long time. I can’t let go of him. What am I doing? I think. It’s Josh who pulls away.

  “Okay!” He claps his hands together and climbs into the front seat.

  In another instant, he’s gone. Just like that. After thirteen years. After the last three months. Just a key in the ignition and Josh is gone.

  Later

  The cleaning lady comes at one.

  She packs up Josh’s Pez collection, his Japanese toys, the stacks of philosophy books bought in moments of self-improvement and then left to gather dust and dog hair.

  Sakura sits bolt upright in the hallway, triangular ears erect, watching. I go to the back of the house.

  And when I come back to the front, I shudder, because Josh’s office is empty. It’s as if he’d never been there.

  Sunday, September 10, 2006

  Cleaning.

  I have four full-sized garbage bags of computer cords. Random press materials dating back to 2002. Motherboards, flash drives, wireless mouses. I dump everything into bags with no attempt at organization. I fill up an entire bag with game controllers, thick with dust. There are keys that belong to no locks, stacks of disks for programs I’ve never heard of. All over the house, these little piles of crap—manuals, receipts, empty boxes. I go around with a trash bag, dumping everything in it. I stick a piece of masking tape on the bag and write “Stuff.”

  Tuesday, September 12, 2006

  I pick up all the books all over the whole apartment and rearrange our enormous, and dangerously sloping, bookshelves so they all fit in. I’m crossing my fingers the additional books won’t cause the whole thing to come crashing down.

  Wednesday, September, 13, 2006

  I go grocery shopping and almost become hysterical in aisle three when I realize I don’t have to buy all the stupid stuff I usually buy for Josh. Like Gatorade. It’s in front of the Gatorade that I almost lose it. Yeah, you sure need some electrolytes with all that remote control action, I used to think. But now my pile of cottage cheese, yogurt, almonds, and carrots looks so small and pitiful on the conveyer belt. These aha moments really aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.

  Thursday, September 14, 2006

  Email from Mike: “What the fuck happened to you? Where are you? Are you okay? Is there a reason you didn’t call me?”

  So much for the cave theory.

  Friday, September 15, 2006

  Tonight when I was coming home from yoga in my Uggs and sweatpants, I passed a group of people about my age, all dressed up for a night out. I used to pass these people and think, ha, fools, walking around in uncomfortable shoes, desperate to meet someone. And I’d feel smug that I was married and thus had the privilege of schlepping around in Uggs and sweatpants, going home to watch TV and eat tofu pups on a Friday night, secure in the knowledge that I was loved. Suddenly I felt humiliated by my Uggs and the fact that I was going home early on a Friday night to eat cold tofu pups and watch TV. But I like tofu pups, I thought. And then, what if being alone really is as bad as everyone says? What if everything you’ve convinced yourself of isn’t true? What if an awful husband is better than no husband?

  Saturday, September 16, 2006

  The silence in the house is like nothing I’ve ever heard. There was a moment today when I was sitting at my desk just going through some papers, and it crept up on me like a living thing. I have this ceramic bunny that sits on my desk—I looked at it and it seemed more still than it had before. I looked at the books on my bookshelves. They seemed stiller. Don’t get me wrong, I know these are inanimate objects we’re talking about, but I could have sworn that just the moment before I looked, they’d been vibrating. I sat there for like an hour, with my eyes closed, listening to the silence. I had the mad thought that I would never again let anyone into my house to break that silence. It’s all-encompassing—gorgeous and dreadful at the same time.

  Wednesday, September 20, 2006

  Mike was supposed to have arrived in New York the day before yesterday. He’d told me the morning I left LA that we’d see each other that night. Even after the whole cave fiasco, he said he’d see me in New York. He promised me.

  I waited for his call all day—and all night.

  Finally, at 11 p.m., I left him the most pathetic message in the history of pathetic messages. “Um, hi, it’s me. Are you here? Okay, good-bye.”

  He doesn’t call me back. Not that day. Not the next one, or the one after that. The disappointment is crushing. I sit in stone-cold shock for two days. I don’t leave the house. I don’t really move. Sakura is beside me, but I don’t even try to pet him. Like Josh used to, I let him out in the backyard rather than walk him. The silence is impenetrable.

  What have I done? What have I done?

  Finally I get up because I’m freezing cold. I go into the bathroom and run a tub of hot water. I get in and the strangest feeling overcomes me. Remember my policy of nonviolent resistance, how I used that to get through telling Josh I wanted a separation? That my material body sort of ceased to matter? Well, this feeling comes back to me while I’m in the bath, only more so. I feel myself separating from my self. My body, the bathtub, the water—the boundaries between us seem to blur. I feel like my self goes floating up out of my body into the larger atmosphere.

  It stays with me as I get out of the bath. I don’t feel earthbound. I feel as if someone has come along and untethered me and now I’m just floating in space. Except it doesn’t feel scary or lonely. It feels fantastically peaceful.

  Monday, September 25, 2006

  “It’s like I’ve ceased to exist,” I say to Eleanor on the phone.

  I can’t even explain how strangely relaxed I feel.

  “That doesn’t actually sound good to me,” Eleanor says. “It actually sounds kind of like a psychotic break.”

  We laugh. And then I try to explain again. “You don’t understand,” I say. “It’s great. I feel totally diffuse. You know how drunk people don’t get hurt in car accidents because they’re so loose? I feel like that. Like I could just walk through things.”

  “Let’s make a deal,” Eleanor says. “If it doesn’t go away, you’ll tell me. And if it really doesn’t go away, you’ll call a doctor. You have to take care of yourself, Heather.”

  I agree to this.

  The next day, I’m talking to Summer while I walk Sakura in Prospect Park and I’m telling her about the feeling.

  “I think it sounds like enlightenment,” she says. “I mean, isn’t that what they’re always talking about in yoga—letting go of the ego?”

  I like the sound of this much better.

  “Exactly,” I say. “I always had this notion of Heather as this solid thing. As something I could describe or show you. Something you could hold on to. And now it’s just gone. There is no Heather. And since there’s no Heather, I don’t have to do anything to be like her. I can just be.”

  Lately I’ve been having conversations with people on the street and finding myself thinking that I love them, passionately. I feel so much warmth for everyone. Amazement at their existence—at their brilliant, flawed humanness. I hope I’m not losing my mind.

  Sunday, October 8, 2006

  The contractors came today. I’m using the last of my money from the billionaire to have flagstone put down in the backyard and flower beds built. One day, I will have a garden.

  Friday, November 10, 2006

  So much time has passed and I haven’t been keeping up-to-date. September became October, and then October, November. It gets darker earlier. I don’t like that.

  Talese finally called me. In October, from LAX on his way to Tokyo. He’s sooo sorry he missed me in New York. Noooo, it wasn’t anything weird at all. He just got busy.

  Fucking pussy.

  “Mike,” I say. “My girlfriends tell me that when a man doesn’t call, it’s because he doesn’t want to talk to you. Why didn’t you want to talk to me?”

  This seems like a good question to my mind. St
raightforward, to the point.

  But suddenly Mike needs to go because his flight is leaving right now, right this very minute, got to go, have to rush, so sorry, bye, bye.

  “Why did you ask him that?” Summer says. “I told you to keep it light!”

  “But why would he have just disappeared?” I say. “I don’t understand.”

  I can hear Summer holding up her hand across the country. “Do not even go there,” she says. “Expect nothing and take nothing personally.”

  I start hanging out with a game designer I know. A little guy, with a puffed-up chest and a strut like a peacock’s. He’s supersmart and really fun to hang out with. One night we go dancing and end up making out like crazy on the dance floor. I haven’t kissed someone my own size since high school. I spend the night at his house and we stay up all night, not taking off any of our clothes, but kissing until the light breaks. I had to cancel another date I had the next afternoon, because I was so pooped. And that very night, he sends me an email telling me what a great time he had and how awesome I am, and that kissing me was “heavenly.”

  “See, that’s what you’re looking for in a man,” Eleanor says.

  At my coffee shop I meet a beautiful dark-skinned Israeli with long dreadlocks, an electronic musician. He’s so lovely in a millennial-generation, Benetton kind of way that I can’t believe when he starts calling me and wants to take me out. We go to a bar in the neighborhood. He tells me how his best friend was killed in a car accident. I think, why me? We make out a bit. The next morning he calls and asks me to come to his house. I live just down the block, so I say, sure, and head over.

  “I just think you should know I live here with my girlfriend,” he says. “Oh God, now you’re going to hate me. You hate me, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to hate you,” I say. And then, as I walk out, “Dude, you are crazy.”

  Eleanor sets me up with a somewhat well-known writer who is in New York to give a talk titled “Depression: Is Suffering Useful?” I say, “I’m kind of done with suffering for a while.” But Eleanor says he’s “one of us,” so I go for it. I meet him at the lecture, and then he takes me to Angel’s Share bar above Ninth Street at Bowery.

  He’s sitting next to me, not looking at me, with the palm of one hand cupped over his left eye, his right eye staring into space in front of him. He confesses that he’s a sex addict.

  “Boy, were you set up with the wrong person,” I say.

  “No one understands,” he complains. “It’s not like we’re running around all the time with our tongues lolling out of our heads. It’s not like that at all. It’s just a need. A need to connect. It makes the pain go away.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I say. “You’re a seducer. Me too. Only I don’t care about the sex part. I just need to get my hooks in a person, then I’m pretty much done.”

  He looks at me for the first time all evening.

  “What?” he says.

  “It’s about getting high, right?” I say. “Me, personally, I get high off seeing someone unable to resist me. Then I go home and I’m depressed.”

  The writer puts his finger on his nose, then points it at me.

  “Now you’re talking,” he says.

  “It’s bottomless,” I say. “There’s no amount of sex you can have that will fill you up. It’s futile. Don’t you know this?”

  Then we go back to the Carlyle, where he’s staying, and fool around on his big hotel bed. I don’t know if it’s all the practice or what, but the sex addict gets me seriously hot. He even got my shirt off, which is more progress than the game designer has made in three weeks.

  “I think all the machinery is working,” I say to Summer the next day on the phone. “I got wet. A little. I’m pretty sure.”

  “That’s great news!” Summer says.

  I’ve been to the gynecologist many times over the last decade to investigate my lack of sexual interest and failure to ever get wet. I thought it was a medical problem. Josh always said it was my “issues.”

  I’ve been making out so much, the skin around my mouth and nose is in tatters. It’s constantly peeling off.

  I FUCKING LOVE BEING SINGLE.

  Finally I decide I ought to have sex. But I don’t know who it should be. The sex addict disappeared back to Virginia or wherever he lives. There’s an AP photographer I’ve been going on walks with. And an amateur boxer I met at the coffee shop. But I think he might be on drugs, or maybe just crazy. Also, he has very long nose hair.

  I decide on the game designer, because he’s such a nice guy. I let him take my clothes off. I let him go down on me. At one point he raises his head and says, “You know, feel free to make noise at any time.”

  Somehow I get through the whole thing without ever touching his penis.

  Josh never even comes into my mind. It’s Mike Talese I feel I’m betraying.

  The next day I am miserable. I feel gross and lonely and violated. I curl up in a little ball on the back of my couch. Sakura is sitting in his sphinx posture on the window ledge.

  “Sakura,” I say. “Do you love me?”

  Sakura blinks his white eyelashes. His eyes are black and mournful in the dim light. I first saw Sakura in a pet shop window in a mall in New Jersey, never having even thought about getting a dog before. He’d been looking at me with his soulful eyes, as if saying, please get me out of here, don’t you see this isn’t where I belong? And I took him home with me that day. I wonder what he did as a pharaoh that has him back on earth as a dog. I imagine he had a favorite mistress in his harem and when he discovered she had a secret lover he had the young man killed—beheaded in a rose-filled courtyard while fountains bubbled, hummingbirds buzzed, and his lovely mistress wept.

  “Sakura, what did you do? Talk to me.”

  But he just sits there looking impossibly elegant. And I think, you and me, dog, dropped into the wrong lives.

  Thursday, November 16, 2006

  Ben Green and I are having sushi, on him, since, technically, he’s my agent. Ben has softly curling red hair, very white skin, and a mouth that always seems to be about to laugh out loud. It’s so good to see him, it’s like a physical rush.

  I don’t say, my husband forbade me to see you. I don’t say, I’m sorry I allowed myself to be forbidden. I don’t say, I not only failed to defend you but also started bad-mouthing you myself so I wouldn’t have to admit how insane my husband was. I just try not to be completely silenced by my own shame.

  All I get out is, “Look. I’m really sorry about all the, ah, weirdness.”

  I’m thinking that Ben and his wife, Marie, have had not one but two children since I took the book deal and that I’ve never been to meet them. I’m thinking that I wouldn’t blame Ben if he never wanted to speak to me again.

  But he says, “Hey, Heath, that’s okay. Books are hard.”

  “I want to meet them,” I say. “Your sons. Eli and Alex. Will you invite me over soon so I can do that?”

  “Definitely, Heath,” he says. “Next week. Or the week after.”

  And I think, okay, the past does not determine the future. I will rebuild my family. There is redemption for me.

  Thursday, November 16, 2006

  Something sort of momentous happened tonight.

  I was out to dinner at this upscale empanada place on Fifth Avenue for a friend’s birthday. I was sitting between her boyfriend and this aspiring novelist with a shaved head and shy eyes, who I was thinking should be my next conquest. I have no real evidence of it, but I’ve decided he has a crush on me and have been considering working my magic on him for a couple of weeks now.

  Somehow the Rock Star my brother is playing with came up.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “My brother is with him now. They’re touring Europe.”

  Suddenly everyone turned to look at me. It was twelve or so faces, just staring in my direction. I always forget how impressed people are by this Rock Star thing.

  “He keeps telling me t
o come meet him somewhere, but the tour is almost over,” I said. And then I kept going, because everyone looked so expectant. “Dublin is their last stop, and then they’re coming back. Should I go? I don’t even have any work right now and I have like five million frequent-flyer miles and a zillion Starwood points. The whole thing would be free.”

  And then I looked over at the aspiring novelist, my future conquest. And he was looking at me with this expression on his face that was not shy. He was looking at me like, what the fuck is the matter with you? And suddenly I thought, what the fuck is the matter with me? Why on earth aren’t I flying to Europe to hang out with my brother, who is on tour with one of the biggest rock-and-roll stars in the world? Why aren’t I doing so right this very minute? If I can reconnect with Ben Green, surely I can reconnect with Seth, my brother. I watched the aspiring novelist watching me, and I thought, I can do anything I want. The world is mine for the taking. I’m going to fucking Dublin.

  BOOK TWO

  DUBLIN

  Sunday, November 19, 2006

  Dublin

  It’s pouring rain out of a flat, white sky. It’s about 7 a.m. and I’m on the bus from the airport into Dublin. I can’t believe it’s only been three days since it even occurred to me to come.

  I got an Americano at the airport. It came out inky black with a delicious-looking film of light brown on top.

  “Do you have cream?” I asked the guy behind the counter, meaning half-and-half. He pulled out a bowl of real cream, freshly whipped.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “See, I knew you were coming,” he said, and winked at me.

  I gave him two euros and thought, I love it here.

  Later

  I thought I was immune to nice hotels, but apparently not. I have French doors opening onto a balcony from which I can see the roofs of the old part of Dublin, and a wrought-iron spiral staircase leading up to a sitting room with book-lined walls and a working fireplace. I have a bed that’s big enough to land a small aircraft on, all in white, with plump white pillows the size of small settees. My bathroom is the size of a tennis court, with a glisteningly white tub like a swimming pool at one end and a separate shower stall big as a studio apartment at the other.