Lucky Us (13 page)

Not that he had been mean or unkind to me at any time during the night. (By this time it was almost dawn.) He had been a little rough—I had bruises on my wrists, where he had held me down, and I was sore inside, sorer than I'd realized—but I had urged on most of this myself. No, it was the way he had been so mirthless and intent
and also the way he had issued commands: turn over, come here, don't move.

For the first few months we were together, Jason was nicer than I expected him to be. We did not exactly go on dates, but we ate meals together and watched TV and spent as much time in bed as possible. Drugs were involved, sometimes in intimate and imaginative ways—coke, when Jason had money; Ecstasy or Special K, when we were hitting the clubs; and plain old marijuana, for those slow nights at home. I was not always comfortable with Jason, but I had the style not to show this, and I was zonked enough of the time not to have to worry about making conversation. We did talk—about people we knew and painters we envied—in a loose and rambling way, without paying much attention to each other.

Our first fight was after we went to a movie together. It was an underground film about a hitchhiker who murders people, and I came out of it saying, “I hate that kind of picture. Violent and boring at the same time.” Jason, it turned out, had been very into it and felt that I was shallow and philistine and in denial about the truths in this epic. “I didn't like it,” I said.

“You did like it,” he said. “You screamed when the woman's ear was shot off.”

“Screaming is not liking,” I said.

“You are so full of shit,” Jason said.

“I am not,” I said. We were getting to that level fast. I said the movie was all about high emotion without content.

Jason said I was obviously scared out of my wits by any intensity at all. “No guts,” he said.

We had to stop in the middle of the street to make our points with the right emphasis; we couldn't argue this hard and walk at the same time. “Fake blood, fake thrills,” I said. “You're a sucker for that, aren't you?”

In the end, Jason shook his head at me in disgust and started to walk away. “Go home,” he said. “To your roommates. That's what you want. If you hang out tonight, I might not let everything be so sweet and safe.”

Oh, please, I thought, who needs that kind of sinister bragging? I wasn't an idiot. I went home and complained to my roommates. Dawn said, “It was about the right time for a fight. Three weeks, right?” Bruce, my other roommate, said, “He was cute, but cute is not everything.”

When Jason called me again, he didn't mention the fight and I didn't either, and we were fine for a while. But if I happened to suggest that Clinton was not
that
bad or if I was negative about the design for the Bilbao Guggenheim
or if I didn't think we should wait till nine-thirty to eat, he would rear up and tell me I had no idea what I was talking about. In public he was sometimes testy and dictatorial (make up your mind, will you please hurry up, any asshole could do that by now.) And I never just stood there and took it, I flared up (when I'm good and ready, I beg your pardon, you're such a fucking expert.) He always said I gave him a hard time and I always said,
me?
Dawn said the two of us on the street were like an entire flock of squawking birds. I got used to ourselves that way.

I was in my third year of art school then, and I was very caught up in the advances I was sure I was making weekly. It was a nice time for me, in that way. I painted in the studios at the school, and I was there so much, I didn't notice right away that at home Dawn and Bruce were having a romance. Bruce had been dating men—a sweet boy with angelic looks and then a plump guy with a shaved head—and so I completely missed all the signs about him and Dawn. When Dawn told me, I said, “I can't believe I was so naive.” I was glad for them, but the apartment was not the same. Having dinner in the kitchen was like being their daughter.

It made me want my own couplehood. I began staying at Jason's more nights and bringing over more items. Jason seemed to regard this progression as unsurprising;
he had lived with women before, maybe he thought they all edged in this way. Sometimes he mocked my big plastic shopping bags of clothing (“love your luggage”) but mostly he just kind of waved me in.

I don't know what I thought. I was smitten and besotted with Jason, in one sense, and in another I saw him pretty clearly. He was vain and full of himself and always amazed at being crossed in anything. But why did he pick me then? I was never especially adoring or agreeable, not in the beginning, not ever.

And he did like me. He was charmed by things I said and remembered them weeks later. He'd stand around happy just to watch me get dressed. I wasn't wrong about that. In the summer, we went for a week to a house in Nantucket that a friend of Jason's lent to us, and we were so publicly fond that some old people in a restaurant asked us if we were honeymooners. (“I'm her dad,” Jason said, patting my knee.)

He did like me. But one night, after we'd been together eight or nine months, we were having a big argument about who spent the most time on the phone, and when I walked away, he blocked my path, which made me furious. I could not get around him, and as I was trying, he pushed me, hard enough to make me stumble. He shoved me again, with a kind of muscled contempt.

“That's it,” I said. “We're through. I don't put up with that.”

“Oh, go,” he said. He stepped away from the door. “Go out if you want to. Who's stopping you?”

I stormed out—that is the right phrase—and walked around in our neighborhood. I went into a video store that was still open and I thought about going into a bar, but I didn't. When I came back Jason gave me a long kiss—he said I had made a big fuss about nothing. He was not contrite but he was affectionate, and we sort of made up. I was sullen for a while, but I hadn't really wanted to be wandering the world without him.

But I had no intention of letting him be a bullying asshole. Not to me, buster. I was on my guard after that. When he told me I was a cunt for taking the last slice of bread, I said, “Wait just a fucking minute here.”

“Wait for what?” he said.

“Watch your mouth,” I said.

And he backhanded me on my own mouth.

I put my hand to my lip in shock and self-pity, and then I smacked him back. I was very scared as soon as I did it.

“Go ahead,” he said, “hit me again.” He came after me and pinned me to the wall. “What's stopping you? Hit me harder. Let me see it.”

I sputtered and wailed and tried to get free, and he said, “Big shot,” and smiled meanly. By this time I was crying, and when he saw that, to my surprise, he let me go. I started to run out of the apartment, as I had before, and he mocked me for being so chickenshit.

“Don't
talk
to me,” I said, from the hall, and got myself down to the street.

I was walking around with a fat lip that anyone could see, and I was shaken but not as shaken as I might have been. I knew we had crossed some line, and I was
interested
in that line. Here I was, imagine that.

If my face was swollen and lopsided, no one on the street gave me much of a glance. And I didn't want to run to go tell Dawn or Bruce or Fiona. I was ashamed before them. But I felt superior too—look what I knew about and they didn't.

I believed that I would leave Jason when it got too bad (as I more or less did), and I wanted to see this through a little further. I was rampantly curious and I was used to daring myself to do things, traits that had served me well before. Also I did not think I had been cowed by Jason, and I was proud of that. I could deal with this. Of my own free will, I believed that. I was as vain as Jason.

A
LOT OF
other things happened that year as well. I won a school competition, my mother had a breast cancer scare and I went home for a month to be with her for the biopsy, the oven in our apartment blew up, Dawn and Bruce broke up, and I started working at the camera store. In the middle of all this Jason and I fought. We knocked over the sugar containers at the diner where we had breakfast, we shouted at each other at my school's exhibition, we were the noisy couple in the audience at a concert. Many of the fights we had in public were started by me. I seemed to want other people to see that I was right, to marshal them to my cause. Mostly, of course, they didn't take sides. They looked on in horror or they pretended to find us funny. There they go again, that battling boy and girl.

What was I thinking? I would hear my own voice, getting shriekier, and I would only want to keep going. I couldn't stand his getting away with anything, and I certainly was not going to be talked down. I didn't enjoy any of this—it exhausted me and ruined some good times—but I was implacable. It was clear to me that otherwise I might go under altogether.

Our most bruising fights were at home, out of anyone's earshot. I was lucky (I do call this luck) in one thing: Jason always let me go when I ran outside. Seeing me
scared made him feel unfairly maligned and hysterically accused. He would stand in the doorway with his arms folded, shaking his head and telling me what a drama queen I was. He seemed to really think he meant me no harm.

My friends, who didn't know the half of it, were full of advice. I kept saying I had to see this through. “Through to what?” Fiona said. I must have had something in mind that would be a victory for me. I wasn't leaving, not me, until I won.

Over the Christmas holidays my mother went to Aruba with a friend, and I stayed in New York and went to a lot of parties with Jason. Most drugs did not make us quarrelsome. On the contrary, we were a hazy and inspired twosome, at ease gabbing away and clever on the dance floor. We'd come home, airy and giddy, and collapse on the bed with our clothes on. When Jason fell asleep inside me, I drifted off and slept like a folded insect under him.

On New Year's Eve, Dawn and her new roommates held a party in our old apartment and someone made a bowl of Swedish glogg. The punch was so warm and so delicious, I had one of these moments where you think, this is the best, let me just know this, and in many ways I was right. There were Dawn and Fiona looking beautiful
and wily and smart, there was Bruce wearing a brilliantly funny derby, there was a whole crush of people I liked, crowding into all parts of the room, and there was Jason, my handsome boy.

I leaned against Jason, in my gladness, and I leaned against other people too, most of them men but not all. I think I flirted with Patsy Futterman, in fact. When I got back to Jason, it was almost midnight and he was sitting on the arm of the sofa. “Careful,” I said. “That thing is old, it'll fall apart.”

“It's fine,” Jason said.

“Don't sit there,” I said.

“Can you not nag me for one minute?” Jason said. “Is that too much to ask on a holiday?”

“Dawn really likes that sofa.”

Jason stood up. “It'll be your house again soon,” he said. “When you move back. I don't think you're going to be in my apartment much longer.”

All around us, people were shouting out the last seconds of the old year—thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight. I was surrounded by gleeful revelers right when it was hitting me that Jason had just threatened to throw me out. Probably in earshot of about twenty people. I had never, never thought I wouldn't be the one to end it. It took the wind out of me.

“You fucker,” I said.

“It's your own fault,” he said. Meanwhile, everyone in the room was whooping and clapping and kissing. Bruce ran over to sweep me up in a bear hug, and a minute later I saw Jason in a full-body grip with some blond person.

“Oh, go
ahead,
” I said, but we couldn't hear each other well enough to fight. He shouted, “Don't get so upset,” and I walked away from him.

I went into the kitchen, where people were telling stories about their dysfunctional siblings. By the time I came out into the living room again, I didn't see Jason anywhere. I looked for him discreetly and then not discreetly. “I think he left a while ago,” Patsy Futterman said.

“He's so
touchy,
” I said. “I said one little thing to him.”

“These boys, they shatter so easily,” Dawn said. She stood by me, all slinky in sapphire velvet, and pouted on my behalf. She didn't act worried or try to make me talk until much later, after everyone left. She was a good friend to me, Dawn.

T
HE WHOLE CAB
ride home I was shouting in my head. When I got to our apartment, Jason wasn't in any of the rooms and no one answered when I called his name.

I was weeping, in fury and frustration, and when I
went to the bathroom to wash my face, I heard footsteps on the roof overhead. A wave of fear came over me—I knew burglary was big on holidays—and I made sure the gate was locked on the window by the fire escape. And then I remembered that Jason in summer had once gone up on the roof to see the sun rise. There was a nice view toward the east, over the projects by the river.

I couldn't stand it that Jason might be up there enjoying himself, gazing pensively at the changing sky, while I was sniffling like a jerk below. When I climbed the ladder to the roof, I don't know what I wanted. I couldn't see anyone at first—the light was still dim and purpled—but near the edge, leaning over the metal railing, there was a hulking figure in a leather bomber jacket. “Happy New Year,” he said, without even moving his head.

“Turn around,” I said, which, of course, he didn't—
he
wasn't afraid. He didn't move a goddamn inch. I walked toward him, and when I was maybe a foot away, I knew I could push him off the roof. I could make him hit the ground and break. I wanted him to see, on the way down, what I could do. I felt very clear that I had to do something, and that I had waited too long, which was not like me at all. In that paling violet light, I was out of my fucking mind.