“I just loved you,” he’d say. “I just wanted to be around you. I told you I couldn’t do it. Why didn’t you believe me?”
I rented the three of us a little yellow house in Eagle Rock with a big eucalyptus tree in the backyard. The house was owned by a church, which was two doors down, and every so often some church people would come by and try to guilt trip us into coming to one of their “activities.” The church owned another, identical house next door to ours, where a middle-aged couple lived with their teenage son. The wife, Kathy, had severe early-onset Alzheimer’s—she couldn’t have been over fifty—and every couple of days she’d wander through our front door, lost and crying. “Where am I? Where’s Jeff? I can’t find Jeff!” We’d try to soothe her, walk her home, back into the house that was a dim, dirty funhouse mirror of ours—towels tacked up over the windows, counters piled with fast-food takeout containers, empty of furniture except for a few mattresses on the floor. One particularly sweltering afternoon, trying to get her settled in the back bedroom to wait until her husband got home from work, I realized with a start that he was there, passed out drunk under a pile of blankets. “Jeff,” I said, shaking him. “JEFF. JEFF.” He just kept sleeping.
Jeff was a really nice guy. Once, when he came rushing over to collect Kathy from our house, his perpetual cheer slipped for a second and he said, so quietly, “She used to take care of everything.”
A week before my life broke, I met my sister for coffee and told her that Aham never laughed at my jokes anymore.
“Dude,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, “don’t you know you have to love with an open hand?”
“What?”
Her eyes rolled.
“If you have a bird that you love, and you want the bird to stay and hang out with you and sing for you, you don’t clutch it in your fist so it can’t get away. You hold your hand out, open, and wait for it to perch there. If you’re holding it there, it’s not your friend—it’s your prisoner. Love with an open hand. DUH.”
“Oh,” I said, stuffing the thought far away.
I didn’t see it coming, because I was a child. I didn’t understand what a relationship was—that the whole beauty of the thing is two people choosing, every day, to be together; not one person, drunk on love stories, strangling them both into a grotesquerie of what she thinks she wants. It didn’t help that the little yellow house next door to Jeff and his there-but-not-there Kathy was just a few blocks from Occidental, the college campus where, a decade earlier, the certainty that I was worthless and unlovable had calcified into a heavy, dragging, extra limb. That was the limb I draped eagerly around Aham’s shoulders, without asking—the weight that broke his back and pulled us under. It had never occurred to me that what I needed wasn’t to find someone to help me carry it; what I needed was to amputate.
The descent was swift and boring: I was too much and too little. He was depressed, distant, and mean. I pressed myself against him harder, more frantic. His eyes lost focus; he was always somewhere else. I pressed. He pulled. I cried every day. He was eliminated from the comedy competition. He was angry. On Halloween, he went to a party. I couldn’t come, he said. Sorry. No plus-ones. He came back at five a.m. We had sex, and then I cried.
“We’re going to be okay, right?”
His back was turned.
“No,” he said, and everything changed. “I don’t think we’re going to be okay.”
I had been sad before. I had been very sad. This was something new. I felt liquefied. Even writing this, years later, I’m sobbing like he’s dead.
I had waited so long for someone to pick me. And then he changed his mind.
I went across town to my friends Ella and Owen’s house for a few weeks, and they let me sit on their couch all day and stare and cry; Ella made me a therapy appointment and tried to get me to eat; Owen made me laugh by narrating elaborate parlor dramas between their three enormous, idiot dogs; at night, the dogs would forget who I was and trap me in the bathroom, barking wildly, until someone got up and rescued me.
I wrote Aham a long, impassioned e-mail, like a teenager—the gist of which was, “I don’t understand. We love each other. It’s enough.”
He wrote back, in short, “You’re right. You don’t understand. It’s not.”
I drove him to the airport and he chattered the whole way about a radio show that was going to produce one of his stories; he thought we were just going to be friends now. He thought I knew how to compartmentalize, like he did. “I’ve missed talking to you so much,” he said, beaming. I watched him blankly. He was going back to Seattle for Thanksgiving; I was going too, the next day.
That afternoon, I noticed a weird charge on my bank statement. Someone had stolen one of my checkbooks—I must have dropped it—and written a $750 check to herself. I called the bank’s fraud department; they said they would take care of it. I woke up the next morning with a balance of negative $900,000. Apparently, that’s the policy when someone reports check fraud to Bank of America; the bank subtracts $900,000 from their balance to preclude any further fraudulent withdrawals.*
I was a negative-millionaire. I shrugged and flew home to Seattle.?
At Thanksgiving dinner, we ate mashed potatoes and bad stuffing from the grocery store deli counter down the street. My dad threw up at the table and then started to cry. Aham called me to tell me about something goofy his mom had done to the turkey. I approximated a laugh. Downstairs, I took off my clothes and shambled toward bed. A massive period clot fell, right out of me, like a crimson water balloon, onto my mom’s white carpet. I looked at it and got in bed.
The plane shook and lurched in the Santa Ana winds, but we returned to Burbank without particular trouble. I took a cab home. Solomon was out of town. Aham was still in Seattle. The wind picked up. The power went out. The windows rattled. I took an Ambien and curled into a ball and tried to hide from the dark and the wind in the bed that had been ours, the first bed I’d ever shared with someone who loved me and picked me and then changed his mind. At a certain point, a groaning started, then a cracking, then a pounding. It sounded like enormous beasts were hurling themselves against the house. Nothing had ever been louder. Growing up, I’d had a recurring nightmare about a flood, where the water rose right up to the level of my bedroom window, and animals—monstrous hippos, rampaging elephants—would lunge out of the storm, smashing their bulk against the glass. It must be the Ambien, I thought. A nightmare bleeding into real life. It sounded like the walls were coming down around me, like something was prying away the roof. I took another Ambien and shook.
I woke up in the morning embarrassed at my hallucination. It was just a storm. Was I really so pathetic? I walked into the kitchen.
The world was gone. Everything was leaves. Leaves pressed up against every window, through the screens, over the sills. The glass back door was a wall of leaves, Solomon’s room was leaves, leaves, leaves. Someone banged on the door. I jumped.
The Santa Anas had been too much for the old eucalyptus tree; it had keened and struggled as I half slept, eventually cracking right in half and crushing our little yellow house. The little house that was supposed to be our love story. It’s a metaphor you couldn’t use in fiction. Too on the nose. Any good editor would kill it, and probably fire you.
My mom called. She was crying. It was time. I went back to the airport.
The End