“I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point,” Maria says, protesting the very idea of pursuing explanations. I admit that I fumbled over and wept into explanations for my reasons when he called to spew venom like the very snakes that litter the story to which I now return so often when I replay this episode. “I had to burn every fiber of every bridge that led to you,” I choked out through tears, proud to have introduced metaphor even in a time of great distress. The truth was more complicated, more hostile. After all, I was like Maria, and “[she] did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.”
When his new girlfriend stood fast in her refusal to speak to him, he claimed he had taken thirty Klonopin and his imminent death would be my fault because I took his love away. When he stopped responding to my texts, I begged her to talk to him again so he’d go to a hospital, which she did. In hindsight, faking an overdose was a brilliant Trojan horse to ride back into her life on. It was then that he was able to rewrite our history as just one of many affairs he regretted with the sad, sundry bulimics of New York. He left for Los Angeles the next day.
There were moments to which I returned repeatedly in the aftermath, trying to match his calculated deceit to prior conversations that he used to gather intel. His professed desire to have only daughters mirrored my own, but I was unsure if it had been gleaned from a direct statement of preference or from my evident distrust of men. He began to tell me, “I just want you to feel safe with me,” several weeks after I revealed past violence experienced at the hands of men. He pulled me into the nook of his arm and whispered, “I want to keep you here forever where it’s safe.” I wondered what it felt like to possess such emotional capital and not use it. I wondered if the burden of latent antipathy felt similar to latent passion.
There are times, too, when I am drawn back into the text of Play It as It Lays and find new ways of having inhabited the story without my own knowledge. “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other,” Joan writes of Maria’s extended trip to Las Vegas, a feeling of disorientation that characterized the weeks that followed. On one of her routine drives into the desert, Joan writes, “As if in a trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.” It was this feeling that I clung to in the aftermath, having felt what I thought was love coursing through the marrow in my bones only to discover poison in the end.
But the artifacts and gestures of our time together were hollow things shaped like love, their true emotional bankruptcy revealed by touch rather than by sight. They were hyperrealistic portraits and bowls of plastic fruit rather than blurry landscapes that appeared whole from afar. Part of the purpose of such objects is illusion itself; they are designed not only to appear beautiful but to appear real.
The archive that remains of me and James is littered with artifacts well suited to melancholy fiction. Condom wrappers behind a heating unit and cocaine residue on a hardcover children’s book. The address in Battery Park City stuck stubbornly in the memory of my takeout delivery account. An armchair that he moved into my apartment for me and then sat in for a lap dance. A matching pink-and-yellow bra and G-string, a sartorial abomination to me, but sex appeal to him. There is a collection of screenshots of text messages in which I halfheartedly sever ties, followed by his uncharacteristically quick replies with empty promises to do better. I am not the first person guilty of saying, “I’m leaving now,” when I really mean, “Don’t you want me to stay?”
I made it all the way to the process of transcribing his threats on an official form for requesting an order of protection at the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn before realizing that because he fled so quickly to Los Angeles, there would be no way of delivering it without his address. I am glad I was spared the bureaucratic nightmare of pursuing it to its end. I am told that is its own kind of trauma. I am happy to have conjured the strength to deny him an opportunity to bear witness to my suffering again. I have no way of knowing if Los Angeles quieted his restless and reckless tendencies. I have no way of knowing if he was lying when we lay in his truck and spoke such ill of the Golden State. I do hope that he is sufficiently distracted by paradise.
I told a friend from Yale Divinity School about the episode early in the winter that followed as we made the case to ourselves that New York was the best city to live in on earth and that Southern California was a destination for moral failures. She recommended a text by Thomas Merton, a mystic I had read on days when no one died on the beach and therefore had allowed to let slip away from my memory more easily. He wrote:
Yet look at the deserts today. What are they? The birthplace of a new and terrible creation, the testing ground of the power by which man seeks to un-create what God has blessed. Today, in the century of man’s greatest technological achievement, the wilderness at last comes into its own… He can build there his fantastic, protected cities of withdrawal and experimentation and vice… They are brilliant and sordid smiles of the devil upon the face of the wilderness, cities of secrecy where each man spies on his brother, cities through whose veins money runs like artificial blood, and from whose womb will come the last and greatest instrument of destruction.
I stop short of agreeing with this account entirely, because to suggest that James is the anti-Christ is to give him too much credit. When I had been afraid in the aftermath of his threats, my friend Phoebe, whose name is the only real one used in this story, told me with remarkable certainty, “That man is a loser who will never accomplish anything, including your murder.” She was right. I am a small person inside and out, and he couldn’t even destroy me, much less civilization. But I can return to that brilliant sordid smile resting on a face that did not betray the wasteland beneath it and still be unnerved by its cruel forgery.