W
e were lying around his apartment, him wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, me in only one of his T-shirts, the first time I saw the photograph. We’d just had our initial foray into actual sex. Three previous dates ended in some fumbling and dry humping, but this night I’d had quite a lot of wine, and holding back any longer seemed plain unfair to both of us. It was awkward, as such initial contacts usually are; both of us stayed neck to shoulder during the whole thing, facing past each other but close, really close, and it felt fine. He promised it would be better next
time and I told him he didn’t have a thing to worry about. The reassurances on both sides were nearly rote, but with the codicil that I actually liked this guy quite a bit, and it was the first time in a while that that had happened and he seemed to like me as well. We both recognized that tonight might not be the only night, but the first in a long string of nights. It was immediately comfortable on some fundamental level, and even the awkwardness of the intimacy quickly fell away into an easy, innocuous kind of conversation, good rhythms, neither of us forcing it, both of us secretly happy that it hadn’t been any more disappointing than expected.
He lived alone, which was unusual for a twenty-three-year-old in our snug little college town. Most guys his age had roommates, out of preference if not necessity. My friends and I judged that most men didn’t have the mental capacity for living alone; they needed to spout off to someone about stupid shit or else they got backed up, and turned weird. Randy seemed capable not only of handling solitude, but also of using the time alone to develop himself to an impressive degree. He was what HR types call a “self-starter.” His apartment was tidy and fashionable without coming across as effete; a gas fireplace and a couple of nice reproductions on the walls, Impressionist ocean scenes and rustic landscapes. He’d dropped out of school his junior year, not from burnout but because he’d interned with Jackson-Lilliard, an international chemical company that had a regional office headquartered in Albany, an hour’s commute north from our campus town of Corvallis, and they’d offered him a full-time position at a salary no sane man his age
would’ve refused. That’s a damned rare outcome for what had begun as an unpaid internship; his mentor had been extremely impressed with the way he’d carried himself and the amount of time and energy he devoted to his work.
He was an extremely impressive sort of guy.
When Dana had pointed him out to me two weeks earlier, a face across the bar at Happy Sam’s, I knew right away that he was distinct from the frat boys and the indie rockers and the other types of posers who filled the classrooms and quads at school. It was there in his carriage, his mannerisms of restraint, the way he spoke quietly when Dana introduced us. He made himself clearly heard without raising his voice, even in the boisterous din of the bar. A sharp dresser, not conventionally hot but put together just fine, ripped biceps and a thick chest under a tasteful Ralph Lauren shirt. Confident enough that he didn’t have to take extra measures to impress anyone, he didn’t sport any jewelry aside from what appeared to be a real Rolex. When Dana invited him to our table, he didn’t offer to buy everyone’s drinks; he just bought mine.
Now he returned from the kitchen to refill my wineglass. I was holding the framed photo I’d found on one of his end tables. “Is this you?”
He traded me a replenished glass for the picture, and a nostalgic, smoky sort of smile crossed his face. “That was in Alaska,” he said, settling down beside me on the couch. “I went up there for Christmas break my sophomore year. Some guys from the dorm were going and I couldn’t really afford it but in the end I decided, fuck it. I mean, when was I going to get the chance again?”
The shot was taken from a low angle, about waist high, and portrayed a silhouetted, featureless figure facing away from the photographer and gazing off into the horizon. The horizon was the most striking facet of the scene: a forested slope at dusk, dropping away beneath the first evening stars and a hint of rippling aurora at the very top of the frame, an orange hem of sprinkled light.
“It’s quite majestic,” I said, gently teasing. “But you should’ve turned around and smiled or something. It’s a little too dour.”
“It’s dramatic effect,” he chided me. “The lone figure against the coming night. When the sun starts going down, which is like at noon that time of the year, you really only have a short window between the daylight and when it gets totally dark. And it does, darker than you’ve ever seen.” He sounded wistful, pensive; dramatic effect, I supposed. “Really dark, up there at the top of the world.”
If that was not the exact moment I fell in love with him, still there was a palpable sensation in my chest as he said it. The moment could almost have been posed, just like the photo itself, but I didn’t
feel
manipulated. It sounded like something he’d thought of before, pondered upon, and I felt awfully damned privileged, at that postcoital moment, that he would share it with me. I snuggled in close and he smelled good. I started kissing his neck, tasting salt and soap, and then we were going at it again. And it was better this time. It got better each time for a long while, right up until we got married.
S
o let’s suppose you’re the young Nina Leigh Sarbaines, right out of Tapersville, Oregon, a logging town in the eastern half of the state, growing up among the big trucks thundering down the narrow two-lanes, the constant fog in the air like an unqualified gloom. The landscape all bright mossy greens and slate gray, that paper-mill smell that lingers over the town and that natives only notice after we’ve been away for a while. I wore flannel and triplepierced my ears; I got a butterfly tattoo on my ankle. Certified full-time smoker by age fifteen, sexually active by sixteen, celebrity-obsessed and spending the money from my part-time job at the drugstore on gossip magazines and jeans jackets and accessories, but I managed to avoid the meth and the harder trouble that came with it, at least for the most part. Some of my friends succumbed, but I had starry eyes early on and didn’t want to jeopardize my chances of getting out any more than was necessary just to get by socially.
Dad was the regional manager for one of the trucking outfits, so we weren’t as poor as some of my friends whose parents worked the mills or logged out in the expanses of seemingly boundless woodlands (although the interloping environmentalists from Seattle and California were constantly reminding us that they were diminishing by the hour). Our house, though, was too small by half, especially when Mom would catch Dad cheating on her and the halls would practically scream with silence for weeks at a time.
I’d lock the door to my bedroom and stay on the phone with my friends for hours, or stare at my little TV, or listen to headphones, all those overwrought grunge CDs that spun through my Discman. Mom never did leave him; my father died of liver failure my senior year of high school. He was never a violent drunk, or particularly neglectful; my memories of him are actually quite fond, for the most part, and he treated me like gold, spoiling me as much as he could afford to. He bought me earrings and CDs and my first car, an old Volkswagen Bug. I imagine this was part of what made him attractive to other women; when he was with you, you were the total focus of his attention.
I blamed Mom for the cheating; she could’ve left him at any time. The way I saw it, she brought most of her misery on herself.
My acceptance letter from Oregon State looked like a Golden Fucking Ticket.
By the time I met Randy, I was six months on the other side of my first “adult” relationship, which had turned out not to be so grown-up after all. Brad was a grad student in English Lit, one of those stereotypically gaunt and bookish guys, tall and thin with wire-rimmed glasses, shy around groups of people but garrulous when we were alone. Later I would think that one of the reasons I was instantly attracted to Randy was that he was damn near to being Brad’s physical opposite. At the time I met Brad, though, I was still treading water in the backwash of the lingering grunge-rock romanticism that had defined my teens, and his pale intensity sent shivers right down to my core. We got to know each other
through mutual friends when I was only a sophomore. It was a tempestuous nine months, high romance carried to an unhealthy degree: the early days sequestered in Brad’s loft bedroom while his roommate practiced guitar downstairs. We didn’t go out much, lost touch with friends and didn’t care; we wanted it that way, immersed in our dyad. The feelings were so strong and, for me, so new. I’d had a few overtly delirious relationships in high school, but they’d always been tempered by the constraints of home and community and the knowledge, which I kept largely to myself, that I would be fleeing the scene as soon as it was economically feasible. With Brad, it was the great Meant to Be, the intimacy completely unforced, the sex so terrifyingly good that it left me in a sated daze for hours afterward.
Then came the nitpicking and jealousy and the vague, nebulous dissatisfactions, followed in short order by concrete manifestations: screaming fights, cheap, reflexive verbal barbs, and then drunken, maudlin reconciliations. Late night phone calls and weepy confessions. The two girls who shared my apartment advised me in no uncertain terms to drop-kick the fucker. Eventually came the strenuously resisted realization (on my part, at least) that it was never going to be good again, that those first heady four or five months were long gone, and what was left was only cinders turning to ash. Brad was obviously an adolescent at heart, a romantic who would likely zero in on a romantic’s dissolution. The probability was that sooner or later we’d do something severe, and perhaps even permanent, to one another.
It took another couple of months to break up, including several attempts at rapprochement that grew increasingly halfhearted on my part, increasingly desperate on his. I looked him up on the Internet a few years ago, during one of those early spells right after we’d moved to Cary, when I was still afraid of losing my entire history. (And at some point I did, but by then I’d realized that it isn’t so hard to let go—there are advantages.) Brad has a wife and two children, and he teaches at a community college in Nebraska. I wish him the best; I hope he still thinks of me from time to time, and feels that same twinge I feel. Not exactly nostalgia, but more than fondness. The best kind of hurt, if there is such a thing.
S
o let’s say you’re me, only a year from graduation with a BS in Marketing and no real idea of where to go from there. Given to fits of impulsive behavior, drunken onenighters with jocks or dropouts, I didn’t make much distinction. They always left me feeling worse than before, emptier somehow.
Then, in swept Randy Mosley, at first simply another eye-lock across the bar and some sloppy kissing, an exchange of numbers, but he kept calling and so I went on a couple of dates, and what do you know? Turned out he was resourceful, commanding, self-assured, and seemingly knowledgeable on an array of subjects. On our third date, he brought me a pencil-shaded sketch he’d made of me, just a facial portrait, something in my eyes lacking and somehow unfinished, which I chalked up to his being artistically inept but
touching in the effort he’d spent on it—and an aspect of him I’d have never suspected. Most important, perhaps, was his reaction when I got a little too tipsy and went all confessional on him, a mere two months into the relationship. I’d been acting as though Brad had been more of a fling than an actual love affair, but halfway through the second bottle of wine one night it all came flooding out. Randy didn’t jump ship or quit calling. Instead, he said all the awful things about Brad that I really needed to hear. He never questioned what I’d been doing with such a loser; he simply passed judgment and moved right along. Before I knew it I was sleeping over at his place, borrowing his clothes, letting him pay for just about everything.
Once I’d breached the dam with the Brad saga, I found myself confiding all sorts of shit to him that I’d never shared with anyone else, not even my girlfriends. We went away to a chalet in the mountains one weekend, and, while we lay naked on the overstuffed mattress, I told him about a friend of mine who’d died while we were still in high school. “I remember when my mom told me that Jessica was gone. It was so typical, Mom didn’t even refer to her as Jessica, she called her ‘Kay Flythe’s daughter,’ as in ‘Mrs. Stancil just called and said Kay Flythe’s daughter got killed in a wreck on Old Bridge Road. You knew her pretty well, didn’t you, baby?’ Like she hadn’t met Jessica like ten times already.” I’d actually been sneaking smokes with Jessica and her boyfriend, Greg, out behind the youth center just the day before. Greg lost control of his Jeep and flipped it, and Jessica wasn’t wearing her seat belt. “Mom mentioned that,
too, ‘she wasn’t wearing a seat belt,’ like she had to make sure I got a lesson from it.” Randy stroked my hair and didn’t interrupt until I was done.
He didn’t offer much about his own past, only random anecdotes that could just have easily come from any adolescent history: a best friend who’d betrayed him for a girl; other kids who’d picked on him because he was smarter than most, which drove him more deeply into solitude; the way his favorite dog had disappeared and then turned up dead, the victim of some sadistic neighbor. He mentioned an early abandonment, a series of foster homes, some abusive. And with a detail here and a detail there—Christmases where all his gifts turned out to be secondhand, a story about how he’d had to do a book report in front of his sixth-grade class with his eye still swollen from a smack his foster mother had administered—he intimated enough to let me know that he’d had it harder than most, so I didn’t pry. I was amazed that he’d come out of it all so stable.
Jessica Flythe. That was my first taste, the first time mortality reared up and I understood how fast it can all go away. It was too real at the same time that it wasn’t real at all, like a switch had been thrown and there was this lowfrequency buzz in the back of my head all the time, blocking me from quite accepting that this girl would never again let me bum a smoke or help me adjust my top so that Greg’s friend Zac would be most admiring. She had
ceased
; she was never going anywhere again, never getting any older, never resolving her issues with grades or knowing if she would be accepted into college.
My dad found me crying in our garage the day after Jessica’s funeral. He sat down and patted me awkwardly on the back while I sobbed. He didn’t offer any platitudes. He bummed one of my smokes, and said he wouldn’t tell Mom if I wouldn’t.