In Spite of Everything (14 page)

T
here were fissures from the start. But they were the kind that might have mended themselves had the pieces been broken in the right places to begin with. If you buy Plato’s take on soulmates—that they are two halves of a whole, split before birth and searching for their mate to fit back together—then you might reason that, perhaps in our case, the severing of our particular pieces was never in our own control. The Greeks, it seems, get you coming or going.

At the end of our first year together, I had moved away from him, from New York to Washington, D.C. It was 1992, and I said that I
wanted to see if I couldn’t capitalize on some of that Clintonian “youthquake” energy and muscle my way into writing for
The Washington Post
. I honestly hated my job at
PC Magazine
, and though I tried to piggyback on Cal’s workplace detachment—as well as his (correct) long view that by working at the magazine of record for the industry that was going to dominate for the next decade, we would cement our stature in it—I could not drum up an enthusiastic rhythm in my everyday process. This wasn’t a problem for Cal: He was okay with going to work, doing the work, then either going out with friends or going home, kicking back, and watching TV. I envied him this. I wanted to be able to kick back,
needed
to kick back, and Cal’s congenital ability to do it was one of the reasons that I was drawn to him.

But I couldn’t do it. For one thing, I hated how much TV he watched. I hated that it was virtually impossible to get away from it in that small apartment. It’s not that I’m one of those people who think that television is the devil. Actually, that’s a lie: I do think it is the devil. With a few programming exceptions, I have always been deeply unsettled by this eerie sensation I have in front of the TV—that my life force is being siphoned off and replaced with a pornified marinade of human drama, history, current events, the natural world. Furthermore, I’m a spaz. While I am a standard-issue Generation X person in many ways (and like all Generation X people, I am ashamed of that), I have never been big on inertia. While we all know by now that, yes, X was never
actually
apathetic but just inconsolably disappointed, most of us at least had the appearance, the gestalt, of slackerishness. I’m way too antsy for that. If I don’t like something, it’s very hard for me to sit still and be quiet. I have to do something about it. Right now. So, one weekday evening as we lay on his couch watching something on TV, I had the premonition that I would lie on this couch, night after night, looking away every so often and becoming instantly dreadstruck by the void of my life, and then being pulled back into that numbing, low-level seizure induced by whatever happened to be blipping on the screen, and the exact
words flashed into my mind:
When I am dead, I won’t have to make decisions
. That was it. I bolted to D.C. within the month.

But I did not see this as a breakup. Cal, though hurt by my rash decision, did not, either. We would simply stay together at a distance. At the time, I didn’t know what it was that kept a couple together, but it is fair to say that some degree of thermodynamics is necessary to inspire, and certainly to sustain, mutual pull. Cal and I didn’t have it. In hindsight, I might have been instinctively trying to generate some by putting space between us. Certainly, our physical separation did nothing to unravel our attachment. During the two years that I lived in Washington, we talked on the phone at least three times a day and spent at least two weekends each month together. I never even considered cheating. Neither did he. But the absence of heat persisted.

It’s not as though it never came up. On the rare occasions that we discussed it, we did so gingerly. I would not push, because I could not lose him. He was afraid to push because he did not want to rip apart any delicate stitching that our relationship had lent to my open, raw psyche. He had not known that it was possible to come from the kind of world from which I came; learning of it made him protective, but it also scared him. On my twenty-second birthday, Cal had gifted me with
Laughable Loves
by Milan Kundera. He told me that I reminded him of the main female character in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. “Who?” I wanted to know, already knowing that it would be Sabina, Tomas’s mistress, the boho artist, the one with the hat. Actually, no, he said. I reminded him of Tereza. Oh. The heavy-hearted innocent, the “child put in a basket and sent downstream” for Tomas to find—the one who hated anything to do with bodies, who cleaved to absolutism, who was crushed by the demolition of her values. The only one Tomas truly loved in spite of her asexuality, the one who ballasted his lightness with her heaviness. I nodded. He wasn’t far off. But he was also miles away.

I wouldn’t have known how to say this at the time, but I now know that it is possible for someone to be damaged without being
breakable. Heat can cauterize: It can keep two people soldered together when forces on all sides are pulling them apart. Sex
is
soul-gluing in a loving relationship, it
is
essential. It is what separates friends from mates. It populates empty planets.

But I didn’t really get that at the time. I just knew something was wrong, and I would flailingly try to fix it every so often during the two years we were living apart. Sometimes during our bimonthly visits I would, in drunken states, hurl myself at him, and while the velocity of it would simulate ardor, it was never long before it was exposed as a simile, leaving both of us sad, confused, and embarrassed. My response was to whip myself up into a state of constant kinetic energy. I wrote for
The Washington Post
, for Time-Life Books, for
Glamour
, for every publication that would have me. I jammed every potentially vacant moment with work or social connection that was related to lining up more work. I made hundreds of genial, interesting acquaintances during that period in D.C. but no durable friendships. I lived in a house with five other people, but I essentially lived by myself. I slept in winks. I might have heaved myself into his outermost orbit by moving to D.C., but Cal was still my center of gravity. I had to move back to New York, I came to realize, or I would be forever lost.

When I returned, we moved in together, but my manic kinesis intensified. Cal’s career, in my view, was stagnating. He was still working at the same place, still vaguely interested in it but admittedly not passionate about it. He still did not seem to care much about his career, and while his relative inertia was alien to me as ever, I had come, in a way, to rely on it because I did care. I cared about work in the way the lone figure adrift on the life raft cares about not being eaten by sharks or dying of dehydration. Throughout my twenties, I lived in a sustained state of panic, some of it ostensibly work-related, all of it insidiously self-absorbed. Like the hapless protagonist in some form of
Sex and the City
–style Greek tragedy, I had left New York because I hated writing about technology only to return to write about it again, but this time for a major newsweekly. So I just went on torture rampages.

Was I going to make my deadline? Had I interviewed everyone I could have interviewed? Did I get that iffy part of the fifth paragraph right? Did I file the right caption with the right picture or the left picture? I hate myself. I hate every little thing: how self-absorbed, how empty and small I am. My mother was right: I’m a “miserable failure,” an “evil child.” Guess what? I was promoted! The youngest senior editor at
U.S. News & World Report
! Check me the fuck out! Now I’m all over TV! Uh-oh, now there’s a new editor boss, and he hates me. Is he out to get me, or just impervious and grumpy? Why does he hate me? Do you think I’ll ever be promoted again? I am an incompetent, a fraud, a pathetic fucking joke. Everyone can see it. The boss can see it. I don’t know why you’re with me; I don’t know why anyone would be with me. My father is gone.
Gone
. But I can be funny! Can’t I be kind of funny? I can be funny, right? Why was I writing about technology? I hated technology! I want to be writing for the theater! Now I’m writing about technology
and
I’m writing a play. My play isn’t finished yet. My play sucks. But now I’ve been offered my own TV show! My editor is mad at me because I’m writing a play and have my own TV show, even though I’m still getting my work done for the magazine. I am terrified because everyone hates me, and you are going to leave me because I’m such a lunatic. Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t anybody? My father left me. Left me. Was my editor going to fire me because, even though he didn’t say it, he obviously felt that there was no way I could write a play, have my own TV show, and get my work done? I can’t believe I just spent three hundred dollars on a pair of shoes. I spend money on clothes because I hate myself. But don’t they look kind of good?

Much of this is the boilerplate raving of any neurotic writer living in New York. It was accompanied by a consuming sense of incompetence, fraudulence, plain badness. I was sure that I wasn’t the person I’d advertised myself to be. Deadliest: I was my father. I panicked, suffered, and often drank late into the night with Cal talking me down. And he did, he always talked me down. Because perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Cal was his ability to step back, out,
above, and zero in on what was extraordinary about virtually anything. He zeroed in on facets of me that I did not perceive, that perhaps were not even there but for his perception of them. I was, he said, the most amazing person he had ever known. I cared, he said, I wanted to do better, and no matter what had happened to me, I never gave up, I kept moving. Look, he said, at what you have made, what you have always made, out of
nothing
. Magic, he told me.
You are magic, Susie
.

In college, I had taken an astrophysics class, harboring the small, ultimately fatuous ambition that the night sky might open itself up to me again, and while the results were catastrophic, I did grasp a few things. One of them was that there is a force called inertial force, also known as fictitious force or pseudo force. It appears to be a force, and it can even be treated mathematically like one. But it is not a real force. It is produced by the reaction of a body to an accelerating force, lasting only as long as the accelerating force does.

I kept moving.

F
or the first several years that Cal and I were together, my father was so poisonously alcoholic that he was not really a person. In that period, he went through three harrowing rehabs. I had attended each one, crippled after each of his failures. Cal could not understand why I wanted anything to do with him;
he
certainly didn’t. You sit there freaking out every day, expecting to get a call that he’s either blown his head off or killed someone? When you work up the nerve to call him, the guy can hardly ever be bothered to talk to you—and when he does, you’re crying for a week afterward because he’s pounded you into the pavement?

I had a recurring dream in which my dad had killed The Edge of U2; I had to find Bono and beg his forgiveness. I would tell Cal about these dreams, weeping.
Jesus
, he would say, shaking his head.
But you’d really like him if you met him sober
, I would say;
he really is great
. What can you say? Alcoholism.

There was a period after the third rehab during which my dad did stay sober. I told myself not to hope for too much, but of course I did. It didn’t last. But in that period of about two years when he was in between wives, Dad was back. He had moved into a fishing cottage on the coast of Massachusetts that sat perched atop a cliff abutting the ocean. It was perfect for my dad: all that roil outside, the coziness inside, the solitude. And he
was
great. He was himself: contemplative, sparky, full of ideas, so funny it made you cry. The first time he invited us up to visit him in his cottage, my prediction materialized: Cal and Dad were instant comrades.

They were both into cryptozoology, UFOs, and conspiracy theories, and they stirred each other into a froth, trading reports and specious factoids about all kinds of crackpot bullshit. My job was to appear disdainfully amused, chime in from time to time about how ludicrous such interests were, be swatted down, and ultimately be praised for indulging their foolishness (and pitied for being a nonbeliever). Then the conversation turned to football. It was definitely a classic piece of sexist theater, but I didn’t mind. I was just so happy that Dad was Dad again and that Cal could finally see what I’d been talking about.

But perhaps the most revelatory moment during the visit was Dad’s introducing us to the “Carlin Room.” When we arrived, Dad gave us a tour of his place, which, though small compared to the house we’d lived in outside Philadelphia or the McMansion he and his second wife had remodeled in the Boston suburbs, still could easily have accommodated a family of five. Dad wanted nothing to do with that. The master bedroom was taken, of course; the bedroom with the best light he made his painting studio; the one downstairs was his home office. But the remaining one, the largest one, he called the Carlin Room. The thing was actually padlocked, and, Dad forewarned us—with one raised, bushy red eyebrow—dead-bolted on the inside.

The Carlin Room was so named for an old bit from the young George Carlin in which he proclaimed that the chief function of
one’s room is to protect your “stuff,” that one’s “stuff”—and keeping everyone’s grubby hands off it—ranked chief among the most primal of human needs. Carlin went on further to expound on the paradox of “shit” and “stuff,” explaining (and I paraphrase): “Have you ever noticed that whenever you go to other people’s houses their stuff is shit, and your shit is stuff?” The Carlin Room, my dad explained, was the only room in the entire house that was exclusively his. No one was allowed in it; no one was allowed to
look
into it; no one was even allowed to
think
about looking in it. It was, he grouched, “where I keep my
stuff
, man.”