*
I believe that I know what a relationship is. I know that it implies two people with individual wills meeting one another in some kind of mutually-agreed-upon psychic territory, and in the material world, at certain places and times, i.e., “Let’s meet at two o’clock at the Coffee Exchange.” I even understand that a relationship can encompass moments of sacrifice and duty and even unhappiness and still be mutual. But then there are relationships that mimic relationships, and even if you are one of the parties involved, you have no clue that you are not, in fact, in a relationship. You are in a kind of excruciatingly convincing performance.
It was not until my junior year, when, pausing outside a plate-glass window on Thames Street in Newport, I experienced a moment of clarity on this point. I stood in an oversized raincoat, my hair in the kind of childish kinks it develops in humidity, and a man came up behind me and stood there breathing over my shoulder. I thought we were both looking at our reflection, the two of us. A calliope hooted eerily from somewhere in the fog-bound bay. By then, I was skinny and pale and miserable and so self-hating as to be radioactive, and I thought, I am so terribly unhappy. I am going to have to kill myself. I am going to have to kill myself if I don’t get out of this.
Professor K—— put one aged hand on my shoulder. “I will buy it for you,” he said. I blinked. What? He gestured at the charm bracelet that now appeared to me on the other side of my reflection. “I will buy it for you on one condition,” he said. “I will tell you when we get back to the hotel room.” I nodded, though I had not been listening, and he disappeared inside the store.
In the chronology of things, I do not believe that what he did to me in the hotel room in Newport had any sort of bearing on subsequent events. It hurt me, and I bled. But I was from Woonsocket. I’d blinded myself throughout my life there, but suddenly I realized that all the violence was inside me anyway, a branching map of transgressions, crimes, betrayals. The community was full of the passions of any semi-isolated cultural subgroup on the economic downslope. We were full of rage. We were trying to kill one another as a form of relief. I remember what my own father had said of Mémé the morning after we returned from the ballet those years ago. “She got you drunk? She got you drunk?” He ripped open the front curtains, as if she’d still be standing on the porch hours later. “Where is she? I’m going to kill her. I’m going to do to her what she did to Claude. That crazy fucking Nipmuc.”
A shame, really. Uncle Sam was wasting forty-two grand on my senior year. Palid, unwashed, I stalked the edges of that aristocratic campus, moving around largely at night. I was a ghoul. I clung to the low wall that ran along Charlesfield, I watched normal boys hee-hawing through the windows of the social dorms (that’s how you wear a cardigan), I watched attractive semiotics majors smoking Gauloises. And then I just left. Left my things in my room and rented my place on Dexter Street which remained, for years, almost completely unfurnished.
*