It’s trite to say you broke my heart, so instead I’ll say you broke my brain.
Because the thing of it was, if I did know you better than anyone, how could I have missed two such glaring omissions from your biography? My love wasn’t of the oblivious greeting card variety that everyone else seemed so blindly happy to practice; I’d always thought I saw you for exactly who you were—smart and funny and gorgeous, sure, but also manipulative, self-interested, insecure, and a little devious, which frankly made you all the more glorious in my eyes.
I walked back down Charles Street toward the subway station in total shock, not so much at the evening’s revelations as at what they seemed to imply.
Either I’d never really known you or I’d never really loved you.
I didn’t know which was worse.
Chapter Twenty-Four
First week of May
12 days left
JEALOUSY WAS A MISERABLE SICKNESS, but I’d lived with it for so long I barely noticed its symptoms anymore. There was no way for me to soothe the painful cognitive dissonance that came from the realization that I didn’t know you as well as I thought, or from loving you desperately despite having been so betrayed, so instead I spent all my free time the first week after spring break trying to find a better target for my hatred: him.
I scoured the Internet for clues, but you were one of those people who mostly ghosted on social media, not posting for weeks at a time. The same could not be said, sadly, for your hipster douchebag of an ex-boyfriend, Jasper Davenport, who seemed to think the world needed to see every kindergarten-level collage he made with “found” pieces of trash (the skateboard he’d recently découpaged with stale Twinkies and empty condom wrappers was especially poignant). But based on his artful, shadow-drenched selfies, Jasper looked to be shacked up with a dark-eyed sophomore vocal major, so that was a dead end. None of your exes’ feeds made any mention of you. I even tried to find Diego’s cousin, but I couldn’t remember his name, and besides, I figured, drug dealers probably didn’t have Tumblr accounts.
I knew Joy would tell on me if I pumped her for information, and that Diego was just Joy once removed, but in a moment of panic I did text Roth after a few beers in my basement late one night to find out if he knew what you’d been up to over break. I didn’t relish giving him another glimpse inside my ever-increasing emasculation (Would you ask her what she wants with me? Jesus, that was sad, no wonder no one ever came to my house), but I also didn’t have much of a choice. It was either trust him, or fly blind.
Sorry man, just saw her at rehearsals, he wrote back, so I got drunk and worked some more on my new play, a monologue about a World War II soldier cuckolded by his wife back home.
At school it was hard to keep a straight face. The anger and mortification just kept growing. I blamed myself, obviously, and your doorman and the lucky, probably brain-dead male model idiot you’d been taking upstairs and every single person I ran into, especially the couples, rubbing their happiness in everyone’s faces, the Diegos and Joys of the world getting exactly what they wanted. And then, of course, there was you.
Being high didn’t excuse what you’d done to me. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure about that, at least.
? ? ?
The saving grace of tech week was that it consumed me by necessity even more than you consumed me by choice. I spent most of my time in the darkened theater with our technical director, Chris, a recent college grad whose sole role on the faculty was to do the technical jobs all of the actors felt were beneath them. Over the next few days I also started a little experiment in which I stopped talking to you unless you directly asked me a question. We could do a whole run-through and I might say nothing. It was fun to watch the insecurity take hold as I gave Roth notes and completely ignored you. I wanted to make you crave my attention, and the only way I could force you to realize you needed it was to take it away.
I was relieved at first that whatever you two had done over break, however infrequently, seemed to have worked. The energy was back, the dialogue wasn’t as rushed, and your chemistry was believable again—onstage, at least. The weird thing was that when you weren’t saying lines, you still seemed to be avoiding each other. At the end of rehearsal, you’d leave not only at separate times, but through separate exits. Without the hostility that had plagued the weeks before break, the disconnect seemed out of place, like overacting for an audience of one. In retrospect, that was my first real clue.
My second came courtesy of Diego, who I ran into in the costume shop, getting fitted for a bolero.
“Looking fancy, dude,” I said, scanning the racks for the post-Victorian work clothes the costumer, Ms. Gaspard, had been tailoring for our dress rehearsal.
“Feeling pretty fancy,” he grinned.