Ignoring passive-aggressive notes like this was a specialty of mine, so I welcomed my neighbor’s “thoughts.” Even though I was rarely at the house, it made me feel secure to own it. I just never expected that I would one day need to expose a boyfriend to it.
When Dennis first saw the place, his distaste revealed itself on his face in the form of furrows and frown lines, even though his mouth evicted the words, “It’s cute.” Which was exactly what he said the first time he saw my flat butt and tried to mask his disappointment.
“It does have a luxurious number of outlets in the kitchen.” I smiled expansively, just like the Realtor had done with me. I even made the same sweeping hand gesture.
“I guess that’s a good thing,” he said, frowning.
But as much as he loathed my little house, he did like being in rural Massachusetts. And because my career hadn’t failed as I’d expected and because I was now part of a couple instead of part of a suicide pact with other survivalists, we decided to sell my little house and build our own new, vastly superior house in the next town.
Construction took almost two years. The doors were solid. The trim was wood, not Sheetrock. The shingles were cedar instead of aluminum. From nature’s point of view, our new house was entirely edible.
* * *
One unexpected benefit of suddenly owning a new house that required as much attention as a newborn was that we now traveled between the apartment in New York and the house every weekend. It wasn’t that I enjoyed the three-hour drive, but now we just didn’t have as much time to spend with Dennis’s soul-numbing friends, and this secretly delighted me. For the most part, I saw them as place-holder friends, waxworks from a cobwebbed museum of people he’d accumulated over the years without much thought given to their actual personalities. If there was a trait they all shared, it was a peculiar emotional remove that made interactions with them puzzlingly impersonal. I felt certain that chinless Brenda, whom he’d known for over a decade, couldn’t even spell Dennis’s last name. And on the rare occasions when one of his friends called him, it was usually because they were dutifully returning his call to them.
“It’s not that I hate your friends,” I lied. “It’s that none of them seem to have any real affection for you. It’s almost like they’re generic.”
Dennis felt I was making him choose between me and his friends; I felt I was making him choose between actual friends and a bunch of names in an address book.
There were exceptions. His South American friend, Marta, was smart and filled with life; she adored Dennis. And his former business partner, Alice, was fun. But for every Marta or Alice, there were four or five Gray Garys. Gary’s skin was actually the color of a fly’s wings. I once had to sit across from him at dinner while he described the difficulty he’d experienced opening a jar.
His wife had joined the discussion. “I told him he should try running the lid under the hot-water faucet,” she’d said in a voice just barely above a mumble. I could never remember her name, so I dubbed her Tedia.
Gray Gary said, “So I did like she said and ran the lid under the hot water. I had to dry it off because the water made it slippery, you know?”
Dennis nodded enthusiastically, like this was the most scandalous story he’d ever heard, positively dripping with suspense and intrigue.
“And then once it was dry, I was finally able to twist it off. Seemed like a lot of trouble to go through for some pickles,” he said in thrilling conclusion.
Tedia added, “They were those pickles sliced lengthwise, for sandwiches.”
Because I am a horrible person, my eyes bored through her skull as I sat there smiling and thinking, Oh my fucking God, please stop talking about pickles. Please stop breathing. Nobody in the world cares about a single mushy word falling out of your face, so at least shut up so I don’t have to look at your tan teeth.
It was sometime after this endless dinner when I realized that almost all of Dennis’s friends seemed clinically depressed. Lumpy Tina, whom I’d only met once and had forgotten by the time I turned away from her; Pat, who lived in suburban Pennsylvania and collected plastic food storage containers; Roxy and Chaz, whom I at first presumed to be a lesbian couple on the verge of breaking up were in fact man and wife, newly married.
The exception turned out to be Sam and Paula, whose low-level bickering at Thanksgiving barely hinted at the real fireworks. They had recycled their depression into a glorious and spewing volcano of unbridled rage. A salty cracker could provoke an explosion of “I need a fucking knife to scrape off all this goddamned salt. You could melt the snow on every road in Connecticut with these bastards. Christ.”
Sam and Paula fascinated me, because all they did when we visited them at their eighties time capsule of an apartment was complain about the unfair downsizing they experienced and scream at each other over the tiniest and most insignificant things (cheese and dust were favorite topics) while their nine-year-old son lay on the carpet in front of their chipped glass coffee table and drew unicorns with his crayons.
I didn’t want Dennis to get rid of all his friends. What I wanted was for him to have friends who were more emotionally engaged with him, called him for a change, asked him how his life was going, showed some actual friendship. If that meant all new friends, I couldn’t help it.
“Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?” I asked Dennis once after we left Sam and Paula’s apartment.
“I didn’t think they looked that unhappy,” he said unhappily.
I turned to him. “Didn’t you ever see All About Eve? That’s Marilyn Monroe’s line; she says it at the party. Are you sure you’re even gay?” I added with a smirk.
There was a muscle twitching in his tightly clenched jaw and a slight narrowing of his eyes that let me know he did not find this funny. He coughed.
I could watch old movies all day every day for the remainder of my life. What was wrong with a black-and-white world? Dennis preferred decorating shows on home improvement channels, which hurt my eyes and my sensitive, broken brain.
* * *
Once we started living together at “our” apartment uptown on Seventy-Second Street, Dennis’s 1950s-white-person-movie behavior became terribly apparent—his defining trait, even. He began leaving notes on my laptop keyboard on his way out to work or for a run, notes that said things like “Pick up some butter today!” or “Vacuum a little if you have time after you finish writing?” Sometimes he even drew a smiley face on the note. Other than a question mark at the end of a declarative statement, a smiley face is the most passive-aggressive form of punctuation known to man, and Dennis knew how to combine the two.
I was painfully aware that it was still entirely his apartment even though I now lived there, too. None of me had permeated the space. His tacky African baskets hung on the walls, his wobbly bookcase threatened to fall over onto the floor like a drunk. I just hadn’t felt like I could pee on his hydrant, so I still felt like a visitor. It was different when we went to the house in Massachusetts. Because we’d created it together, it felt a little more mine.
The first week I moved into the apartment, I stood to answer the phone, but he intercepted. “I should probably get that,” he said.
“Oh,” I said and stepped out of the way. He wants to be the one who answers the phone. Okay. He also wanted to be the one who controlled the music: smooth jazz, twenty-four hours a day. I looked at it like, That’s okay. I can give up music. I have to write, anyway.
When the phone rang one night just before midnight, I thought it was probably him since he’d been out at a friend’s birthday dinner, but I wasn’t sure it was him, because sometimes his father or his sister called. So I just stood there in frozen stupidity, looking at the damn phone as it trilled atop his Ikea buffet.
Finally, I picked up, and the first thing he said was, “What took you so long to answer the phone?”
I couldn’t just blurt out, “I was worried it might be one of your tedious friends, and I’d get stuck
talking to them for even thirty seconds,” so I said, “I was cleaning the toilet.” Which wasn’t a lie, only a time shift, because I’d scrubbed it earlier. On my actual knees.
“Well, I wanted to let you know I’ll be home soon,” he said.
There was something odd in his voice that I couldn’t positively decipher. Something that reminded me of our early dating days when he was worried about slipping out of love with me, as though love was a pair of jeans and he’d been on a juice fast for a year.
He told me he was getting ready to leave the party, but he was helping them clean up; all the other guests had already left.
I wanted to tell him, “The hosts never want help cleaning up; they just want all the guests to go the fuck home so they can polish off the wine and talk about everybody,” but I didn’t say this.
He told me, “I’m really tired.” But it didn’t sound like tired. Was he drunk and trying to hide it?
I said, “Okay, so you can go to sleep when you get home.”
Why was he calling me to tell me he was tired? It made no sense.
And then, why my paranoia?
For the past couple of years, I had fallen into a permanent bad mood. An endless male PMS. Suspicious, anxious, second-guessing myself. It seemed I was so constantly wrong about him that I could no longer trust my own instincts.
When Dennis had looked angry several days before and I had asked him, “Are you angry?” he replied, “No, not at all.”
Score: Dennis 1, My Instincts 0.
I pressed the issue, which was seemingly of my own creation. “Are you sure you’re not angry?”
He chuckled. “Of course I’m sure. But I might get angry if you keep asking me.”
So he definitely hadn’t been angry, and I definitely had believed he was. This meant something inside of me—something I had relied on my entire life—was essentially faulty. My compass, my inner homing pigeon, my deepest instincts.
Since mine could clearly not be trusted, I would have to rely on his.
* * *
My third book had just been released, a memoir about drinking, called Dry. I’d actually written it before Running with Scissors or Sellevision. It began years earlier as a journal when I got out of rehab and didn’t know what to do with my hands or my brain. If I went downstairs for five minutes to buy cigarettes at the Korean market and the guy handing me back my change accidentally touched my hand, that’s what I wrote about for the next two hours. I lived a small, desperately sober life where I did pretty much everything wrong and microexamined every petty detail until I could at least understand myself better. It didn’t become a book until I’d given it to Christopher and asked him, “Is this style of writing anything I could ever use somewhere?” I wanted to know because my journal writing was so different from my Sellevision novel writing.
His reply had been, “Why didn’t you show me this first? It’s amazing.”
I said, “That’s not even possible. It’s just my own mess.”
“Well, yeah,” he agreed. “You need to cut about seven hundred of these thousand pages. But it’s a memoir. I think Jen will buy it.”
I was astonished, because it seemed like he was going to ask my publisher to buy my used tissues, and that could ruin everything. Of course, once they found out that my childhood was even more fucked up than my adult drunkhood, it was decided that Running with Scissors should be my next book. It was after that that I released Dry, the first book I ever wrote, published as my third.
The alcoholics and drug addicts had come out in force to meet me and share their own sordid stories of debauchery. It was surreal and amazing and also totally draining and exhausting. After more than a month on the road, I was completely spent and just wanted to be hospitalized in traction because my back was killing me. I was also willing to accept being placed in a mental institution for several years, where I could learn to knit. But I’d promised Dennis that we’d take a vacation. “Just as soon as my tour is over,” I’d told him.
Dennis didn’t truly grasp the magnitude of my double life. On the one hand, there was the me that he knew: motionless on the bed with my laptop, my entire circle of friends seemingly existing only within the computer itself. To him, I seemed perfectly content to live as a shut-in.
Then there was the other me, the writer who met thousands of new people every year, who signed voluptuous breasts with black markers (by request—I wasn’t just running around with a Sharpie looking for boobs), attended cocktail parties with booksellers, exchanged brief though intense moments of brutal intimacy with stranger after stranger for weeks at a time.
I tried to explain it to him. “You think I’m antisocial, but I’m incredibly social; it’s just that it all happens in a very compressed period of time.”
All he saw was the former alcoholic, spending yet another day in his gym shorts, tapping away on his keyboard, for all he knew looking up recipes for mixed drinks like the Harvey Wallbanger, the Singapore sling. That’s how he looked at me, with a side eye that said, “You’re up to something over there. I don’t know what it is, but I’m watching you.”
We’d added two smash-faced dogs to our little family, and the hardest part about being away from home was being away from them. But a few days after finally returning home and curling up into a slumbering pack, we handed them over to Christopher, who had plenty of dogsitting space in his rambling apartment, and flew to Amsterdam.
People were surprised we chose Amsterdam of all places. “But you’re sober now. Why go there?”
Because I’d thought exactly the same thing myself, I could only reply, “That’s where Dennis wants to go.” The fact that he wanted so much to see Amsterdam made me want to go there, too.
He was looking forward to the museums. Which to me translated to: standing in line for hours only to then spend more hours standing around in front of walls. Museums were not my thing because it hurt my screwed-up back to stand. If I could rent a stretcher and view museums from a horizontal position, they would totally be my thing.
Though I was half-excited to visit the Anne Frank house. In third grade, only the girls got to read The Diary of Anne Frank. All I knew was that there was some lesbian material in the book and that the house had a hiding space behind a false door. I am all about false doors.
Arriving in Amsterdam was disorienting. Everybody rides bikes everywhere, which I supposed was admirable and inspiring, but it felt like stepping into a buzzing haze of flying monkeys. I was almost hit by some asshole healthy person every two and a half seconds.
Then there were the tangled, guttural vocalizations the Dutch people made to form their own private little language. Dutch isn’t easy for the outsider to learn, because it’s spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex. In order to make the correct sounds, you have to have quite a bit of phlegm at the ready, which is probably why everybody smokes. Nonsmokers can’t even understand Dutch, let alone speak a single word of it. The word for “hello!” is actually the noise you make when you clear your throat really hard before hurling out a loogie onto the ground. “Have a nice day” sounds exactly like someone choking on his or her own tongue.
The smug Dutch learn three languages in school, because they know that nobody else in the world is going to speak their strangled and gasping mother tongue. They learn the extra two languages, I figured, to show off. I was onto them: in my experience, startlingly modest, peaceful people would do anything to get you to notice how startlingly modest and peaceful they were. The Dutch did not fool me any more than the Buddhists I’d known growing up in western Massachusetts. Give a Buddhist a vacuum cleaner and the very first thing he or she will do is run through the house with it, sucking up all the spiders. Zen, my ass.
According to the itinerary Dennis had devised and then printed into an actual stapled handout, we would trudge from one continent-sized museum to another before embarking on a lengthy barge tour (with an onboard wine tasting for him) of the meandering canals and then fin
ally to the Anne Frank house and its concealed hiding place. The itinerary was two single-spaced pages and resembled a publicity tour. Seeing it, I thought, If I made it through thirty days of rehab, I can make it through two weeks of Amsterdam. I was counting days again, just like in the early part of my recovery.
On our first night, we went to dinner at a sleek and modern restaurant housed on the ground floor of one of the narrow, stepped-roof houses that line the canals. The juxtaposition of the several-hundred-year-old canal house and its contemporary, glassy interior was almost pleasing enough to make up for the fact that the room was filled not with air but faintly blue cigarette smoke.
Dennis had something misleadingly called steak. When the plate with the scrawny piece of meat landed on the table, I said, “Looks more like pounded canal rat.”
He ate it dutifully, insisting, “It’s not that bad. It’s actual steak; it just probably comes from geriatric cow.”
Because the Netherlands is a coastal land, I ordered fish. This turned out to resemble a small, Chinese hand fan on the plate, just a splay of slender bones stretched with thin, translucent fish meat.
Dennis washed his blackened strip of deadness down with wine. I made a meal from the ice of my Diet Coke and ate all the bread from the basket in the center of the slightly wobbly table. As I watched him drink, his face visibly relaxed, which made me think, Well, of course. I hadn’t expected to want so desperately to drink in Amsterdam, but this was precisely what I wanted to do. I even said to Dennis, “The really fucked-up thing about being an alcoholic who doesn’t drink anymore is that on days when you really, really need a drink to take off the edge, all you get to do is wait for the edge to pass on its own.”