When I’m playing a character, I am never allowed to explicitly state the takeaway message of the scenes I’m performing—after all, part of the dramatic conflict is that the person I’m portraying doesn’t really know it yet. So let me do it here: I thought that I was smart enough, practical enough, to separate what Joaquin said I was from what I knew I was. The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that knew I deserved more. Different. Better.
But that isn’t how it works. When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.
I told myself I’d asked for it. After all, Joaquin never said he’d break up with his girlfriend. He let me know from the start that he was a rebel and a tell-it-like-it-is-onator. He never even told me he’d call. But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other. As a friend recently complained to me of the lawyer she was dating: “How could someone who cares so much about social justice care so little about my feelings?” I told her about my belief in this promise. That it is right, and it is real. Joaquin didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. And I didn’t learn anything about life that I hadn’t learned in Soho.
* * *
1 I think Joan and I are talking about slightly different sorts of self-respect. She’s referring to a general sense of accountability for one’s actions and a feeling that you’re being truthful with yourself when you lay your head down at night. I’m more talking about sex. But also what she said.
2? The time we took ecstasy and, right before it hit, he asked me what my thoughts on open relationships were. Cut to twelve hours of sobbing, not the eight-hour orgasm my friend Sophie had described.
? The time he made me drive three hours to his friend’s birthday party, then was too socially anxious to enter it.
? The time he invented a purple cat that lived in his cupboard and made general mischief. Or was this a high point?
I’M AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR.
Because I add an invented detail to almost every story I tell about my mother. Because my sister claims every memory we “share” has been fabricated by me to impress a crowd. Because I get “sick” a lot. Because I use the same low “duhhh” voice for every guy I’ve ever known, except for the put-off adult voice I use to imitate my dad. But mostly because in another essay in this book I describe a sexual encounter with a mustachioed campus Republican as the upsetting but educational choice of a girl who was new to sex when, in fact, it didn’t feel like a choice at all.
I’ve told the story to myself in different variations—there are a few versions of it rattling around in my memory, even though the nature of events is that they only happen once and in one way. The day after, every detail was crisp (or as crisp as anything can be when the act was committed in a haze of warm beer, Xanax bits, and poorly administered cocaine). Within weeks, it was a memory I turned away from, like the time I came around the corner of the funeral home and saw my grandpa laid out in an open coffin in his navy uniform.
The latest version is that I remember the parts I can remember. I wake up into it. I don’t remember it starting, and then we are all over the carpet, Barry and I, no clear geography to the act. In the dusty half-light of a college-owned apartment I see a pale, flaccid penis coming toward my face and the feeling of air and lips in places I didn’t know were exposed. The refrain I hear again and again in my head, a self-soothing mechanism of sorts, is: This is what grown-ups do.