He would break things off with me two weeks later to attempt to repair the relationship that we had poisoned with our basement antics and the events that followed. He even asked for advice on getting her back a day after professing once again how much he missed me. I treated the pain of being unchosen with Klonopin and a solo viewing of a One Direction documentary at the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue. It was my budget version of driving off into the great white nothing of the desert; and in lieu of a handsome actor to fuck some of the pain away, I settled for the on-screen company of cheerful, rambunctious boys.
When James reemerged in November, it was with appeals to the woods. He texted that he missed “getting high and wilding.” He communicated the way a teenager might, tearing at the fabric of the very adult tragedy I felt I was living. I said that if he was serious about seeing me, he would have to come over that very night to prove it. It was the resolute ultimatum of a grown woman masking a childish enthusiasm at the potential reunion. He arrived within the hour. Two weeks later, he claimed to have ended things completely with his girlfriend. We picked up right where we left off.
I made him promise that if he ever chose someone over me again, he would not tell me. He should just break things off and go away, make another excuse if necessary. I told him that girlfriends don’t just sprout from the ground and that the devastation of being left for someone else would be more to bear than the knowledge that he’d continue to sleep with other people. I also asked to never be complicit in his infidelity again. I felt that I had outgrown other-womanhood and did not want to play the role. Frankly, I felt too much and let it show.
I hesitated to share my writing with James, considering it an earnest collection that was at odds with my nonchalant self-presentation and intentional air of mystery. But in the early morning of the Fourth of July, I laid my head in his lap and pulled up a segment that I had written and read for a CBC radio show. The story was about my struggle with suicidal ideation and a saccharine reflection on our belovedness by strangers. I was quick to share the story with the whole of Canada, but my fingers trembled as I pressed Play for the man I loved despite myself. It was after an all-night run through several bags of cocaine and the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now. The all-nighter was full of our typical laughter and near-perfect sex, but our serotonin-starved brains after so much cocaine and so little sleep left us vulnerable as the segment played.
“That was really beautiful,” he said after seven excruciating minutes spent listening to my own voice. He kissed my forehead and said he was glad I was alive. “Why don’t you ever write about me? About us?” he asked. I said that I wrote about people only with their permission and asked why he wanted me to anyway. “I don’t know. To prove that we mattered. To prove that we existed,” James replied. I recalled a moment of frustration between Maria and her friend BZ over her seeming ambivalence. “Tell me what matters,” BZ had demanded of her. “Nothing.” Maria’s reply was decidedly sharper than mine, but I said, “James, we don’t exist.” In my perfect version of women having their emotions entirely obscured under bored gazes, neither of us would have bothered to respond at all.
That evening, we went to a barbecue on his sister’s roof in Crown Heights. Having primarily witnessed his charm in groups of strangers, I was startled by the blinding love between James and his family and friends. It was his typical charm on steroids, amplified by the familiarity of the crowd and by the celebratory nature of the holiday. Through nervous laughter and averted eye contact, I fumbled through introductions and withheld tears as he held me close during the fireworks. I thought briefly about how there were worse ways to spend the Fourth of July. At the bottom of the Long Island Sound between the beach at Silver Sands and Charles Island, for example. The next morning, I broke things off and gave him my e-mail address, “in case you need to let me know about any STIs,” I said, in yet another attempt to appear as empty as I longed to be.
My no-contact resolution did not last long. I sent him photos of myself in a sequined bikini, purple on top and green on the bottom to resemble a mermaid. There was a failed attempt to coordinate schedules so that we’d be in New Orleans at the same time. I refused to meet him and held on to hope that some new man who was also charm incarnate would appear so that I might never see James again. “I want to see you,” he would whine convincingly, appealing to a certain fondness I had for occasional turns of boyishness. He requested more photos, and I refused as a sort of pregaming for disciplinary role-play. One night would have been a typical exchange of plans to get together littered with explicit photos, but then James told me that he’d be moving to Los Angeles to be with someone else. “There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant,” Joan writes.
I put up a worthy fight against his insistence on seeing me one last time before he left. He tried to coax me into forgiveness for what I knew would be his final abandonment. He said, “I love you,” for the first time and refused my request that he take it back. We exchanged the kind of cruelty reserved for those we know how to cut the deepest. He walked out the door and bid me farewell in a text message rather than with the smoke in his voice.
“Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life,” Maria declares at one point. “Radical surgeon of my own life” was a line I had remembered and conjured often, long before retrofitting this story about the desert to a city affair. But what happened next was not so much a delicate surgery on myself but rather a crude execution of any lingering love left between us. I found his new girlfriend online and told her everything. He retaliated with a swift and relentless viciousness that would be more an exercise in trauma pornography than in prose to deliver here. His desire to hear my bones crushed under a moving train and a gentle declaration that I’d be pretty with a bullet in my head made appearances alongside actual threats. He asked over and over why I did it.