In the summer of 2013, Michael asked if he could send me a birthday present. It was six months since we had broken up, and he’d asked as a gesture of his respect for my boundaries as we considered giving it another shot. I arrived home from my twenty-eighth birthday party to find a mailbox full of package notices for gifts from my family that I would have to go to the post office to fetch the following day and one small package from Michael. I was tired from a three-mile walk home following dinner with a small group of friends from whom I’d grown apart while I was away at Yale and never fully reconnected with upon my return to Brooklyn. The group grew noticeably smaller each year, as birthday parties become the private stuff one mourns with their inner circle rather than the public celebrations of our very existence they are in younger years.
I was happy to have at least Michael’s gift to open on my birthday and so I tore into the manila envelope with the shameless urgency of a child. It was a paperback copy of Play It as It Lays and a note recalling my fondness for Joan Didion and his near certainty that I hadn’t read this one, but that it sounded like something I might like. The cover featured a photograph of a thin woman sprawled out in a sleeveless white dress. The top half of her face is out of the frame, and her body is loose in a way that indicates the kind of lethargy induced by hard drugs rather than the rest of sleep. The gift was a sweet but unknowingly cruel gesture, a postcard from the isolated hell of that sticky and stinking summer cohabitating with a ghost I could not rouse back to life by pitifully reading book passages aloud. The realization that my vivid memories of reading this very book to him were not shared by him made me resolute in the decision not to rekindle the relationship. Anger that had mostly subsided reignited in the knowledge that even on those rare occasions that he would lie down by my side that summer, I had still actually been alone. It was too eerie a coincidence that the book title was a gambling reference while considering giving a chance to a man whose track record inspired so little confidence.
The next day I put the book on the top shelf of my bookcase, too high to see the title when I passed the shelf and remember all over again. Then I went to pick up the packages my family sent. Among them was a white tulle party dress from my sister. I did not realize it at the time, but it bore a remarkable similarity to the dress on the cover of Play It as It Lays. I was not yet looking for omens. Though I knew before I left that I would be overdressed, I wore it to a barbecue that my friend Tommy was having for his twenty-ninth birthday at his family home in Brooklyn. Had I noted the similarity earlier, I might have noticed more coincidences in the events and catastrophes to come.
At the party I sat stiffly on a patio chair and listened quietly while the men present spoke about the state of their industries and cooked with fire. I spoke when spoken to, except when I was politely offering to carry food items between the kitchen and the backyard, then back again as needed. My offer was always declined, and so I was subjected to pointed questions by Tommy’s well-meaning but prodding father, whom I knew from church. “Do you miss your family?” he asked when I reported that they were still in San Diego and that I visited rarely. “No,” I told him, failing to give even a moment’s pause to reflect on how heartless this truth would sound.
When the hosts disappeared inside and a silence briefly hovered over the patio, a young man with unkempt blond hair and smoke in his voice said, “What are you doing over there? You’re too pretty to be sitting by yourself like that. Come here.” It was a moment that confirms the worst fears of a certain type of bitter and ordinary male: that their bad pickup lines are usually bad because the man saying them is ordinary. On the lips and in the throats of handsome men, they are a charm attack. I turned my eyes without turning my head and smiled with only half my mouth, a literary move from California in 1970 if one ever existed. The young man’s name was not James, but I will call him that here, just as I call everyone here by a different name. It was the first time of many that I would come to him when he called me.
Within the hour, James and I were snorting crushed Valium and Percocet in the basement of Tommy’s family home. He introduced the existence of his girlfriend by telling me that his instinct as I leaned over to snort lines was to hold back my hair but that his girlfriend wouldn’t like that. I said, “It’s just hair,” feigning the nonchalance I was perfecting more quickly now that I had been single for some time. I didn’t mean a word of the three words. We had unprotected sex pressed up against the bathroom counter as the song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore throbbed on the porch above us.
By nightfall, we were with Tommy and two of their friends on the road to a cabin in the Hudson Valley, where the party would continue through the weekend. It was three days of sex on icy riverbanks, in the back of his truck, and, in an especially poor judgment call, in the parking lot of a gun supply store. The shelter of the deep woods made us candid. And just as Maria’s parents were reduced to a reckless gambling father and a mother crippled by neurosis, we, too, spoke of one-dimensional fathers whom we feared we disappointed and of mothers made almost entirely of love and poorly executed good intentions.
He was a native New Yorker and I had been an enthusiastic import when I was eighteen, so we recounted the many merits of the city while deriding Los Angeles, where his job in the entertainment industry often sent him. He spoke of the terrible artifice of Los Angeles and I echoed the sentiments with a litany of San Diego’s moral and urban-planning failures. It was a perfect set of circumstances in which to start an affair and a lousy one in which to fall in love.
“You can be my girlfriend that knows about my girlfriend,” James suggested on the ride home on Monday. He smiled with his whole face from the driver’s seat, grasping at my left hand with his right. He demanded that Tommy, our affair’s new coconspirator, plug his ears while he began negotiations for how we might continue our illicit behavior upon our return to the city. I felt like I was ten years old again, when my first boyfriend, Scott, made his friend Kurt go into the closet so that my dignity would remain intact for our first kiss. James sulked convincingly at my refusal of the offer. “It just sounds very French to me,” I replied coyly, a line that made him laugh. To this day, I am still not sure if I stole that line from a book.