Like Maria Wyeth, I was in a habit of sleeping with attached men. But this was the first time I had done so knowingly on the first try and the first time that I had wanted to continue despite the fact. But when we arrived at my apartment and unloaded my bags from the truck bed where we had been fucking just a few hours before, I averted eye contact and slowly said my phone number so he could enter it into his phone without Tommy being able to tell from the passenger seat. “I’m going to see you,” he said, staring directly at my eyes though I kept them averted. “You have my number,” I replied, in the hopes that a value-neutral response would drive him crazy about me.
His barrage of attention and affection began two days later. He said that he missed me and wanted to see me at the end of the week. He had a way with words and a swagger I had seen only in movies. I remained careful not to let delight come across my face when I was so convincingly feeling so very little. At one point, Joan describes a masseur and Maria’s dear friend BZ as “gleaming, unlined, as if they had an arrangement with mortality.” It is a physical description but one apt for how I saw James: a spot of eternity in an otherwise rotting world.
James often remarked on the oddness of how even military personnel and law enforcement were drawn to him. “I don’t get it; they just like me for some reason,” he would say, especially during the conversations we’d have when he asked to meet my career Navy veteran father. In a mix of envy and awe I would reply, “That’s because everybody likes you.” He would shrug off such claims, unaware of his charisma’s attendant privileges and I unwilling to expand on their power.
We began to meet often at his parents’ Battery Park City apartment overlooking the Hudson River. It was infrequently occupied since his parents had retired to what he referred to as “Long Island” but I would later learn was East Hampton. It was one of many attempts to obscure the extent of the wealth in which he was raised, but the address and even the sheets on the bed that always smelled fresh in their immaculate whiteness betrayed a story of money. The apartment was not characterized by its value so much as its seeming ability to stop time. In one fantasy in the novel, Maria injects sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” into her arm. When it fails she imagines driving into the “hard white empty core of the world.” Being with James felt like some euphoric combination of both; only the white empty core was not so desolate and desperate when our modern prescription variations of sodium pentothal were able to populate it with what I believed to be some sad but true thing at the center of us.
At a birthday party toward the end of the summer I told a friend about his more worrying habits. In an attempt to disguise my growing affection, I said, “Don’t worry, he’s just a rich kid posturing as a graduate of the School of the Hard Knocks.” Without missing a beat, she replied, “That’s always the one that dies first in the movies.” There were warning signs all over, first in their eyes and then in the few brave enough to summon the word “unhealthy” to their lips.
We returned to the Hudson Valley near the end of the summer for an informal folk music gathering that Tommy’s family throws every year. James had broken up with his girlfriend by then, but another ex of his, Virginia, would be making an appearance with two friends he was not aware of until a few hours before her arrival. He berated Tommy for allowing Virginia to come, venomous and snide in a way I had not yet witnessed in him. I sat silently in the front of the truck as he banged on the steering wheel and rattled off irrelevant but embarrassing personal details about the trio of young women and the traitorous friends who had granted them passage. I had heard of Virginia before only in passing, a “crazy ex” with whom things had not ended well. I was accustomed to this lazy shorthand for men who dislike the emotions of women, but his outrage signified that she still meant something to him. Men do not indulge in such outbursts over women about whom they are ambivalent.
I soothed myself with literary snapshots of men’s violent outbursts representing some internal passion, disfigured care but care nonetheless. Carter and Maria might fight this way, I thought. “After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave,” Joan writes of the fights between Maria and her husband. We were in the open woods and sharing the back of a truck, so I had the refuge of rigidity but not of another room, which felt like enough to last a weekend.
My discomfort at the speed and force of his unexpected wrath prompted me to drink for the first time in three years. I became drunk quickly, from both lack of practice and from the anxieties that had prompted me to imbibe in the first place. Virginia and her friends introduced themselves to me kindly, while James avoided the section of the woods where they had set up camp. In the absence of my typical inhibitions, I enthusiastically befriended them and found them warmer. Their designer clothing and casual talk of international travel suggested wealth similar to James’s, but they did not posture against it as he did.
The only photograph of James and me together would be taken during that hazy episode. In the photo, I am staring into the camera, desperately drunk, with my mouth half open and a come-hither stare. James’s back is turned to the camera behind me, adding wood to a massive bonfire. I have attempted to project meaning into this scene, something about my negligence that he was building an attractive and dangerous fire within my sights. It never quite sticks as well as the simple fact that I wanted to stand by the fire and he wanted to build it.
The two of us drove home together at the end of the weekend and stopped for dinner around dusk. After a long silence, he took my hand in his and said, “I want us to go to Cozumel. I want to take you to Cozumel.” It was a place I knew well from photos taken by my friends who remained in San Diego into adulthood, but I had never been myself. I also knew it to be a desirable destination because BZ’s mother in the story hates it, and what glimpses of her the reader gets are terrifically unflattering. I replied, “So let’s go,” but knew very well that James would never take me to Cozumel.