Shutever

When I left New York this spring, one of my best friends threw a surprise going-away party for me. Nobody came. Well, not nobody, exactly, but only three or four people; it was last-minute, and not even in my borough (I whispered to myself on the cab ride home, trying to justify it) but even so, it was exactly the kind of proof that I needed that it was time for me to leave New York. I didn’t want leave New York in a smug, Didion-esque kind of way—it wasn’t about the luster of the city fading, the insistent pull of possibilities out west—it was just about the fact that my life had gotten so small in New York, my home for so many years, that I didn’t even really have anyone left to wish me farewell. It felt fitting, somehow. 

But the next day, I flew to Los Angeles and invited a few friends to meet me on the roof of my favorite hotel, where I was staying while I looked for an apartment, and they came—all of them, most of them late, shuffling in looking a little abashed, but they came, and suddenly there were ten of us laughing beneath a trellis on a West Hollywood rooftop, all the lights twinkling in the hills to the north and strung above us on wires. One friend of mine with a certain fondness for metaphor talked about how, after being in the darkness for so long, she wanted to be more like a sunflower—turning her face toward the sun as she grew. After being so broken, she said, she had to learn how to be a mosaic, to pick up the splintered pieces of herself and create something beautiful from it. And when I went downstairs to walk them out, hugging goodbye, my heart so full, there was a mosaic of a sunflower in the lobby of the hotel. Did you know that was there? I asked her, and she shook her head no. I didn’t even notice, she said. As we all turned to gaze at it, slack-jawed in astonishment, suddenly, everything made perfect sense.

It’s funny—in the months after you get your heart broken, everything feels a little bit different. You feel nothing, and then you feel everything. All the colors get duller for awhile, and then suddenly they resharpen, snapping into focus with laser-like brightness; and things stick out to you that you might not have noticed before. Text on a billboard cuts with an unexpected profundity. Tears sting in your eyes over the silliest things. You laugh harder and louder than you really need to, just to remind yourself what it sounds like, and that you’re capable of it. But it’s the details that feel so surprising and so poignant, the details that hint at some greater design just beyond what’s immediately visible. Or maybe it’s all just senseless coincidence, the ways in which experience makes you notice things that have always been there.  

I went back to New York this week and spent a few days out in the Hamptons, where the salt air makes the green of the trees so impossibly vivid, where the slapping of the water against the rocks in the harbor sounds rhythmic as a metronome. On a winding country road I’d driven down a dozen times, I passed a street sign that read Bittersweet Lane, and I pointed at it and said the name out loud. Bittersweet Lane. How odd that I’d never noticed it before. And then, just as quickly, I was looking at it in my rear-view mirror. 

Dear Courtney:

It feels funny now that the apartment where my boyfriend and I built a home is emptied of furniture, holes in the walls from where a handyman helped us hang beautiful things we scooped at discount stores upstate, driving through tree-lined country roads on our way to bucolic towns in the springtime. Pretty soon they’ll slap a fresh coat of paint on the walls, shut off the cable, sand the dark hardwood floors, and it’ll just be another transient space that we passed through on our way to somewhere else. I wonder if you think about this place, or wish things had been different.

It was spring two years ago that my boyfriend and I were falling in love, all those thrilling gusts of breathless sentiment and promises—the end of loneliness, the end of first dates—and spring again last year that we moved into this apartment. This spring, he left and I knew he wasn’t coming back.

Before us, it was you and Brian. The realtor who showed us this apartment mentioned you, though she didn’t use your names. The rent was subsidized, she said, because the people who lived here were breaking their lease and paying part of it to rent it quickly. They were paying the broker’s fee, too. It would save us thousands. “Why are they breaking their lease?” I asked. “They broke up?” The realtor demurred. “They broke up,” I said.

My boyfriend loved it—the kitchen that gleamed; the dimensions of the living room, capacious by Manhattan standards; the convenient location; the price that was reasonable, again by Manhattan standards, for a one-bedroom in a doorman building on the Upper East Side. It was so fancy—the fanciest place I had ever lived in New York City by a mile. 

But I didn’t want to live there. It was stupid and superstitious, I knew, but I was skittish about building a home amidst the dissolution of someone else’s relationship—all those cinders. I didn’t want to get burned. When I looked up the building online, there were complaints about the street noise, the mismanagement, the endless parade of temporary doormen. Rich people, I thought, and their petty complaints. Still, if it was going to be our home, I felt like I should do my due diligence and find out for sure.

I called the broker. “The internet does not like this building,” I said. She laughed. “The girl whose lease you’re taking over—she never would have rented anywhere that wasn’t top-notch.” Her voice dropped an octave. “Between you and me, her parents wouldn’t have let her.” It allayed my anxiety. The problem wasn’t the building—the problem was that you were so high-maintenance. Still, it rattled me to think about the energy that you and Brian had left behind. I almost backed out the day before we signed the lease. But I didn’t.

You were there to sign the documents to turn the lease over to us, in a cramped conference room in a nondescript midtown office building. You were wearing a trendy fur vest and designer heels, cheekbones so sharp they could slice your hand open, unsmiling, prune-faced, stinking of perfume. I said it was nice to meet you, and you didn’t say anything back.  

A week later, I took a cab down to a funky little hole-in-the-wall storefront in the East Village that sells witchy knickknacks and bought a smudge stick, then carried it through the apartment as ash sprinkled down onto a white porcelain plate, letting plumes of fragrant white smoke snake through the living room. I didn’t really believe it would work, nor did I really believe that it wouldn’t. Still, I said a little prayer, asking that whatever darkness you had left here would evaporate.

It didn’t. The first thing I noticed was the chip in the granite on the sink. I made up stories about it. I imagined Brian cracking a beer open there, too drunk to find the bottle opener—did you hate his drinking?—you sniping at him, resenting him a little bit more every time you washed a dish and saw that aberration in the smooth line of the granite. There was no storage in the too-small bathroom, so we installed a vanity and put in shelves, and then it was too claustrophobic to ever feel comfortable.

The street noise was relentless. Honking so loud it sounded like you were standing outside. Endless drilling from construction projects. Jackhammering on the weekends. It was always too hot or too cold. We bought four lamps and yet the living room always felt unlit. Even on the eighth floor, there was never a moment where direct sunlight actually filled the room. We bought beautiful furniture that looked cold and sad and dark in our beautiful apartment, where the noise was always too loud to be at peace. I looked up studies about noise pollution. Rats exposed to it over time go insane, and we were rats, trapped in our expensive sterile box in the sky, growing more and more agitated until we turned on each other. Until we turned on each other for the last time. 

We got your mail. We should have forwarded it to you, but we didn’t. I’m sorry about that.

In three days, I never have to come back to this apartment, and I’ve been thinking about you a lot. The way you looked that day, signing those papers. How cold and unkind you were. I thought you were truly awful, but I wonder if I was wrong to judge you so harshly. All year, I just assumed that you drove Brian away. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did.

The possibility never occurred to me that maybe you had done your best. That you had tried a million different ways, and couldn’t make it work, no matter how fiercely you loved him. That your desperation to get out of the apartment—a need so urgent you would spend thousands to rent it out quickly—wasn’t because you were so privileged, but because the pain of staying in the home you built with a man you loved after he was gone was so enormous that you just had to go. It must have been so sad for you, remembering how you had laughed and wept and made love in this place, only to have it all come to a premature end.

Or maybe it wasn’t premature after all. Maybe relationships, like leases, just come to an end sometimes. And when that happens, you pack up your things. You say goodbye. And you find a new home.

Oh, Courtney—I hope you’re happy in yours.

“Is there a prince in this fable for a small town girl like me? / The good ones are gone or not able, and Matt Damon’s not meant for me.” (“Men In This Town,” 2009)

“I’d rather eat my soup with a fork / Or drive a cab in New York / Cause to talk to you is harder work.” (“Poem To A Horse,” 2002)

“For you, I’d give up all I own and move to a communist country / If you came with me, of course.” (“Don’t Bother,” 2005)

“As every voice is hanging from the silence, lamps are hanging from the ceiling / Like a lady tied to her manners, I’m tied up to this feeling” (“Underneath Your Clothes,” 2002)

“Cause I’m a gypsy, are you coming with me? / I might steal your clothes and wear them if they fit me” (“Gypsy,” 2010)

I was looking through some old files this weekend, reading the poetry I wrote when I was in high school; most of it, mercifully, is embarrassing and not very good (I am always terrified, reading old work, that I will discover that I’ve gotten worse with age), but there was a passage in a poem I wrote when I was 16 called “Espérer,” which is French for “to hope,” that I quite liked. 

Will we hide our prescriptions
and our wrapped next-birthday presents
under the patio; will you
extinguish my bad habits, or will you
be the spark to my cigarette?

And will I know it, then,
the skipped-heartbeat ignited breath
will I be able to distill you
or melt you down;

Will we plan bank robberies
and heinous crimes

[all film-noir sexiness
wearing leather under the hot
desert sun as we speed away
leaving a trail of burned rubber]

while we read the Sunday Times?

And in love, I believe,
there is no remission.

It’s funny, thinking about what I thought love would be like then — the love that comes when you find the person you want to be with forever — as opposed to the practical execution of it. After being hurt so many times by people with whom I thought I could have that kind of cinematic, sweeping, wild, reckless love, I think I stopped believing in it. It became safer to compartmentalize the idea of a partner outside the feelings that would accompany him. I wanted someone to listen to me complain about my problems, someone to bring to parties, someone to wake up beside, an abatement of loneliness. A reprieve that I could control, so I could say when I needed it and when I didn’t. 

And then I fell in actual love, and it was what I’d imagined, only better, and also harder. Real love doesn’t work like that, with all that agency and control. It’s too intense, like a drug you take anticipating effects that are potentiated beyond your control. It is dramatic and reckless, emotionally, and then on a tangible level, there are compromises and sacrifices, and things are smaller and narrower than all of that big, bold sentiment. It is adult, in difficult and often infuriating ways. 

And in love, I believe, / there is no remission. I’ve been turning those words over and over again in my head, the same way I idly jingle change in my pocket, trying to find some solace or safety in their rhythm, trying to understand what I believed as a teenager and what I believe now. You put your faith in people, you take it away, and then you put it back again. The sickness of love, the tenuous light, a flame that keeps flickering and won’t go out. 

I have a piece of memoir coming out in a national magazine this month where I write about being raped as a teenager. It wasn’t something that I particularly wanted to write, and it’s not something I feel comfortable publishing, and if I was pressed, I doubt I’d be able to give a reason good enough for having done it to justify the potential damage it will cause. That’s not to say that I fear repercussions in any tangible way — it’s something subtler than that. Something in the way people treat you when they know the truth about who you are and where you’ve been; something that you give up when you are bracingly honest that you can’t ever get back, no matter how hard you try.

Last week, reading the final mockup of the piece, I was paralyzed by anxiety considering how the man who raped me would react if he were to read it. Would he think that it was fair? Would he feel like I did him justice? Would he feel like I misrepresented the facts? Then I wondered — why would I voluntarily subject myself to the ordeal of thinking about all of that? Anyone who would do such a thing is insane, surely, lacking tact and discretion and good sense. To go down the rabbit hole of a dark and painful series of memories, drudge it up to shine a spotlight onto it and inspect it closely, and then expose it to the world — it feels irrational and self-lacerating, even to me. 

As I have gotten older, I have become a terrible liar (and I was a good one as a teenager); I have no poker face when I am upset or not at ease. I wish I were steelier, but it also feels like an odd blessing that my ability, if not my desire, to be dishonest has dwindled to almost nothing. The truth is a fire that I circle endlessly, trying to get closer to its white-hot core even as I’m totally sure that it’s going to burn me, and it will hurt. And I write to try to tell the truth better than the last time, better than it’s been told before, for no other reason than because the truth feels desperately, urgently important, no matter how ugly it might be. Because the writers and people I admire most aren’t the ones who are the smartest, or the funniest, or the most successful. They’re the ones who are willing to step out from behind the curtain of irony, and self-conscious self-satisfaction, to say something that is real and true. 

Writing about real people is dangerous; so is telling the truth. People won’t like it. People will leave. People will call you crazy behind your back, or to your face. And sometimes people are right to do so.

That doesn’t make it any less worth doing.

I met him on the Internet, or maybe I didn’t; it’s all the same now, anyway. I was seventeen and he was a well-known film producer. He seemed well-known, at least, after I looked him up and realized who he was. He had a townhouse in the West Village and I had nothing but time. We spent a weekend there, tripping on Ambien in the middle of the day, smoking cigarettes on his terrace. He ordered breakfast for dinner. Time went backwards.

On his mantel, he was in pictures with celebrities. They were his friends. He was the best man at the wedding of two famous actors. I wanted his life, his graying temples, his small hands, his owlish spectacles, the way sunlight shot through his bedroom in the morning. I wanted it all. 

He was kind. He was my father’s age. He seemed sincerely interested in my hopes and dreams and aspirations. He gave me $100 for a cab when I left on Sunday. I declined it until I took it. I went to Bloomingdales instead, then rode the subway home. 

The next morning, when I got to school, I wanted to tell my friends about the guy with whom I’d spent the weekend shacked up, but they already thought my proclivities were weird enough. They went to nightclubs on the weekend, like normal kids in New York City; I was always having odd, short-lived affairs with older men. So I didn’t tell anyone about it. I kept him like a warm secret humming in my chest, turning the memory over like a lucky rabbit’s foot in my pocket.

Tonight I read his emails. I had given him a fake name and lied about my age, as I so often did. I wonder if he ever gets curious about what became of me, after I drifted into and out of his life like a ghost. I wonder if he thinks of me at all.

So I keep going back to the conversation we had last weekend — when you said those things about the house upstate and the fantasy of waking up to find me in the kitchen talking with your mom and wanting to stop being so lonely all the time and the darkness that’s within you (you’re probably regretting mentioning that at all right now) — and I really don’t want that darkness to win! And when I didn’t hear from you, really, and then last night when you told me you were too busy, I felt like that was happening, that maybe that darkness was edging ahead, and it made me nervous. Terribly nervous.

And maybe it’s not! I’m hypersensitive and overly analytical. I might have this all wrong, and maybe now that you’ve gotten to know me better you don’t like me as much as you thought you did, in which case — ha! Sorry for all this. But I still want you to come over and watch The Client List and discuss how Jennifer Love Hewitt is the greatest actress of her generation, or just go to bed and not talk and not have sex and just be close to someone. We can do those things, if you want. I’ll even watch The Newsroom with you. Really! I’m not just saying that.

But I’m afraid of the pulling away and the curt responses, not only because I’m a caricature of emotional sensitivity but because you told me what it’s been like for you, and I don’t want you to feel that way anymore. Maybe I’m not the right person to change it; maybe this email, in its woeful sentimentality, proves so, and that’s it! Nail in the coffin of this dumb thing, whatever it was. (Although I don’t think that’s the case because I like you and you like me and I’m cute and you’re cute and our bodies fit together like puzzle pieces when we’re spooning, so I don’t know how much more written in the stars this could be.)

And so I think about the things that we talked about when it was all just a fantasy, the double dates and paper lanterns and a wedding on the beach, and all of that, of course, were a very far-removed-from-reality goofy game that was self-conscious and not serious in the first place, but that doesn’t change the fact that those are still things that I want with someone, and how will I know if you’re a contender if it ends before it’s even really started?

So I had to say something, because at the end of the day this is who I am (hilariously neurotic) and this is how my head works (it’s just awful up here!), and if you want to hang out again and all this doesn’t frighten you, just write back and say, “Okay.” And if you don’t, you don’t, and that’s okay, and we’ll both be fine, of course.

But I sort of hope that I’m right and that darkness was winning and I can shake hands with that darkness and dismiss it gently, because I have that darkness, too, that still haunts me sometimes, like when I’m unexpectedly intimate and vulnerable with a man I think I might be beginning to care about and then he’s closed-off and distant and I make up that it’s my own fear of terminal unlovability coming back to rear its ugly head and keep me alone forever. I hope that I’m right and we can both banish those old friends with kindness.

So say “Okay,” maybe, and we can see each other again. (That doesn’t have to be tonight, or anytime soon, but, you know, sometime.)

And best of all, if you do say “Okay,” maybe we can never, ever talk about how embarrassing this letter was, because I think this letter is a little bit like sending a bed to Matt Damon’s house, but maybe you’re like me and you really don’t mind that sort of thing.

I had read the Gossip Girl books when my parents divorced and my father took a job in Manhattan, leaving me with the option of staying in my crunchy hometown of Portland, Oregon, or coming with him to New York. There was no decision to make: I moved to the city. He enrolled me at a tony Central Park West prep school (the kind where I belonged, I preened, like the asshole I was) and, quickly, I assumed all the affectations of the blue-blazered bluebloods whose lives I’d once idolized. I had wanted to live on the Upper East Side, which sounded so glitzy and glamorous. (“Why would you want to live on the east side?” my father asked. “It’s so staid.”)

But my school was on the west side, as was my father’s office, and it would have been impractical to have to cross Central Park each morning (as so many of my friends did), so we found a sublet on 88th and West End, in a modern doorman building with a marble lobby and an emerald green awning. It felt like New York.

My father dated a woman who lived on the Upper East Side, on 86th Street — they have since married — and he spent much of his time over there, leaving me alone on the other side of the park. I didn’t mind that at all, since it gave me so much free rein to do what I wanted without supervision. But the summer after my senior year of high school, my father sent me away to rehab, and when I came back to the city in the fall, he had moved us out of the apartment on the west side. My things were in a storage locker in Harlem. I stayed with my father and his girlfriend in that apartment on the east side for a few weeks until I went off to Vassar, and then periodically when I was back in the city while in school. I resented deeply the fact that the last home I’d known had been, I felt, taken away from me before I’d had a chance to say goodbye to it, and — being, as I was, spoiled and petulant — I hated that suddenly the only home I had in New York was in someone else’s space. Eventually, I left Vassar and went out to California, and by the time I came back to New York a few years later, my father had left the city altogether. 

I took for granted the way my family fractured in the wake of my parents’ divorce, all of us — my mother, my father, my older brother and I scattering to various corners of the country. (My mother stayed in Portland; my father eventually moved to San Francisco; my brother went to New York, then back to Oregon, then down to San Francisco; I went to southern California, then Boston, then Portland, then back to New York, then back to Portland again, then to San Francisco, then back to New York again, all in the space of four years.) It felt like a game of musical chairs, endless sublets and storage units and suitcases and boxes, all of us living transiently when we’d once had a home that we shared together, as a family.

It was a relief when I settled back in New York last year and signed a lease on an apartment that was, ironically, on the Upper East Side, three blocks away from where my now-stepmother’s apartment had been, although now, cut off from my father’s largesse, I live in a fifth-floor walk-up on a side street rather than one of those stately doorman buildings that I once called home. But I take deliberate strides to avoid walking past that building, the one where I once stayed with my father and his girlfriend in their home which was not my home.

So I once lived on 86th Street; I now live on 83rd Street; my boyfriend lives six blocks away from me on 89th Street. He grew up in the city, but his family never left. He is anchored here. Walking to or from from his apartment some nights, I look down the block and see the awning of my now-stepmother’s former building, see the doorman whose face I recognize standing beneath it, shadowed by lamplight. I think of how the city had felt when I moved here, all the silly clichés I bought into about rich kids and their trivial problems, how I idolized their indolence and their apathy. How it had felt those first nights after I came here as a teenager, as a starry-eyed young arriviste, going to charity events and smoking joints in the park and hanging out at nightclubs where the only people were private school kids and celebrities, a lot of cocaine and a lot of bright smiles. The lavish apartments of friends, the ease with which they called this city their home. How I fell in love with the city and longed to call it my own. It felt so dazzlingly, dizzyingly big to me, then.

But the other night, staring down the darkened street at a beautiful building to which I once hated returning, exactly — exactly — equidistant between my humble apartment and the capacious, well-appointed home of the man I love, with the place that was the beating heart of my disillusionment with New York at the halfway point between the two, I felt torn between the carefree, overindulged kid I was and the anxious, pragmatic adult I’ve become, and caught between the wide-eyed wonder that I once felt in this city and the quotidian frustrations of how each day life here feels less and less bearable, even as my quality of life continually improves. That’s one of those peculiar things that happens in New York, sometimes. Even when life here gets better, somehow it never seems to get any easier.

Maybe that’s a consequence of a universe where, for the last decade, the most significant things that have happened — falling apart, finding my identity, becoming independent, giving myself over to love — have all taken place in the space of only six blocks of the Upper East Side, in a string of transient places, both other people’s apartments and my own, where I have made homes for myself out of necessity. There’s a lyricism to the geography that feels nearly implausible: I live in a present of my own choosing; three blocks away is a past I’ve fought to overcome; three blocks further is what I think could be my future. I thought of this the other night as I stared down at that old building.

For the first time, the city felt terribly small. 

It occurred to me last night that all I ever wanted was a boyfriend who would sing along to Taylor Swift with me, and now that I have one, I can’t stop turning our relationship into Taylor Swift songs. I worry that I have digested too fully that rhetoric of disillusionment and mistrust, of heartache and doubt. That it is hard for me to love freely, too familiar with the wounds that have come before and the wounds that will ensue.

I am afraid that he will leave me; I think about it a hundred times a day or more. You spend a lifetime getting used up and discarded by men who grow tired of you and it is easy to expect that is all that will be, even though he has given me no reason to believe that will happen again this time, but I know history has a way of repeating itself. That insecurity is corrosive, so I try to quell it, to drown out the choirs of self-loathing and doubt. I repeat affirmations in my head. I look at my face in the mirror and tell myself that I am okay — I say it out loud to make it more real. I try to turn off the noise. I tell myself that just because I’m the broken one doesn’t mean that I can’t be fixed.

I’ve been housesitting for a friend at her country home an hour north of the city in Pound Ridge, where it is so quiet at night all you can hear are the crickets and the squalling of ducks in a pond somewhere too far away to see. The deck looks out onto the woods, clotted with old-growth trees. A swimming pool, shot through with electric blue, is cold in the mornings. It’s a beautiful space, but a transient one, and there is this nagging feeling in the back of my head that reminds me I don’t live here — it’s a space I can inhabit for a little while, but I don’t get to stay.

I’d been out here alone for two nights, having driven out of the city in the middle of the night on Wednesday to escape the insufferable heat; he was to meet me here on Friday night after he left work. I had gone into town to pick up dinner, set the long marble table in the dining room with cloth napkins, put out a bottle of wine for him. Two glasses, even though I wouldn’t be drinking, but just because it looked nice. I waited for him to arrive, and when I heard his car pull into the driveway, I felt a bubble of anticipation rise in my chest, and he walked through the door with his bags all packed and he was handsome and kind and he loved me and it went down so smooth, my performance of domesticity, and everything was exactly in place.

And he taught me how to drive his Mercedes, and I lurched and swerved through the winding country roads until I got the hang of it, and we sang out loud to my favorite Taylor Swift songs on the stereo — he’s learned all the words, initially just to indulge me, but now I think he loves her, too. And we ate dinner at a farmhouse in Bedford where the lights twinkled, roast chicken and flourless chocolate ganache. And we sat outside in the still night talking about our fathers until the bugs got the best of us. I was happy. I was in love.

But this morning, I woke up cold, the muggy summer evening having yielded to a chilly, hazy dawn. He was dressing for work, his cologne lingering in the air, putting on a white dress shirt and dark suit, his car keys jingling in his pocket. I made him coffee. I told him not to drive too fast. I said, “I love you.“ And then he left.

All of a sudden I was alone again, in this beautiful empty house, his coffee half-drunk on the white porcelain ledge of the bathroom sink, a wet towel hanging limply from a hook. The floor all cream marble, the bedsheets bright white, and me with my checkered past and fucked-up pathology and beaten heart. I had work I should have done over the weekend. I was afraid to check my bank account; I’d overspent. In a few hours I would have to drive back to the city. A profound emptiness filled me. That familiar anxiety crept back in. What if that’s the last time I ever see him? I wondered. What if he’s gone forever?

Then I flashed back to last night, when he cupped my face in his hands and looked in my eyes and said, “You are the love of my life. You are the one.” And I felt so foolish that not even that was enough to stay my frayed nerves.

It cut through me then, this notion — that while you don’t choose who you love, the act of love itself is a choice. You choose to trust. You choose to say it back. You choose to believe in the good in people. That they won’t hurt you.

And so, for a minute or two, I let that be enough.