AT OUR FIRST session, The Newest Therapist asks me to write two lists: one that describes every terrible thing The Man I Used to Live With ever did, another that describes each thing he ever did that made me feel special and loved. I start to panic. I make excuses. I say, I have a lot on my plate right now. She doesn’t fall for it. She points to the door, says only, Write.
Somehow, the terrible list is easier to start: how he kidnapped and raped me, how he murdered my cat in our kitchen, how he threatened to abandon me in foreign countries. It’s harder to write about how he saved me from getting crushed by a surge of people rushing the stage at a concert. How he dragged me to the outer edge of the crowd, his arm around my chest. We watched the rest of the show at the crowd’s perimeter, his arm around my shoulder.
It’s easy to write about the argument we had while traveling in Spain, how he shook and shook me by my shoulders until I wound myself into a tight ball. He left and didn’t come back until I was asleep. He lifted me from the bed so gently, so lovingly, it seemed. I thought he was going to apologize. Instead, he put me on the floor. I remember it so clearly: the fluff of hair under the bed, the cold seams of the parquet.
It’s easy to write that I’m afraid of him.
It’s harder to write that he taught me about film, and cooking, and to admit that I’m probably a writer because of him, because of all that happened.
It’s hard to admit that I loved him.
When I give The Newest Therapist the list—not two lists but one—she does not put it in my folder like I expect. She puts on her glasses and reads. Occasionally she sighs, or shakes her head. I have nothing to do with my hands, or my face, or my feet. Panic washes over me. Eventually she looks up, her eyebrows slightly raised, as if expectant. She says nothing. She waits and waits for me to speak.
It’s possible I’m not remembering right, I finally mutter, my hands in my lap, my head pointed in the general direction of the floor.
She laughs out loud, puts down the list. She asks, Is there any other way of remembering?
I remember how a late spring rain darkens the tarmac as we board the plane for Europe: a smell like dirt, like exhaust, like grass and engine fumes. I hold his hand and lean into his shoulder as the plane accelerates down the runway, tires spinning across the level earth, lurching into that curved space between longitudes, where at first we do not sleep but turn and rock and slouch across the aisle, our heads bent together or apart; and of all the voices droning on across the ocean his grows the most tender and cruel. I remember a blanket, a swirling indigo scarf, news of a typhoon. When someone leans over the seatback and whispers a question, like an aunt in my ear, I remember admitting to nothing but being an odd pair.
Odd, too, how cool the hour we shuffle from the plane into the fog-filled Belgian city, too early for the black knot of streetcars and taxicabs, no one in their native streets at all except four women in hairnets outside the boulangerie, cigarettes leaning out the windows of their open mouths, curtained by the sweet bread-tobacco scent, gossip in an unwelcoming tongue. And odd how our pair weaves and unweaves itself through the stone-gray monuments toward separate beds in a rented room: Too tired, I tell him over my shoulder, for that now. It doesn’t matter. My eyes don’t close for hours that night—a surprise concert of fireworks washing the Grote Markt walls in audible light: too loud, too bright for sleeping. The shadows of anonymous bodies dance across our wall like marionettes, each one dangles over the great crack that branches from the floor to the ceiling of our room in the hostel, and surely beyond: the bond between earth and edifice, brick and mortar, history and memory loosening, sliding, suddenly giving way. And like that: anything can be broken.
I remember how a scrubbed-clean body can rise like new in the morning. I remember how to pack and repack a bag. I remember how to blame myself for almost anything at all as I watch cities pass, stations pass, rail-side tenements pass: brown, rust-brown, gray-brown; blue unshining windows shuttered against the mist-gray sky. I remember how to share a seat on a train with a man whose touch might make me shudder or wince, who often dozes with his head against the window or takes my photograph while I read a book. I remember how we sit behind a commuter in a wool-blend suit, across from two students playing cards. At the front of the car, there’s a young mother tucking a curl into her infant’s navy-striped cap. Her husband, I imagine, is young and smiling and kind. From my place in the train car I can see how, even on a morning like this, clean sheets hang to dry between the buildings on clotheslines: the white squares bleached bright as beacons.
We ride the train to Amsterdam, where we pitch our tent at a campground on an island in the IJmeer. At the campground bar, I let a Scottish day laborer buy me a beer. He’s as old as my father, at least, and I’m trying hard to understand what he is saying, the music playing loudly, when I look up and see The Man I Live With crossing the bar, returning from the bathroom outside. He places my beer on the bar and leads me by my arm back to the tent, pushing me through the door, face first into the ground, my cheek hitting a rock under the tent floor, his hands inside me, his whole body inside me.
In the morning, chickens peck at grass blades, pause to rearrange their feathers. Goats take turns bleating in their pens. Cool lake water laps at the campground shore. The thin metal tab of a zipper, pinched and led in silence along its tracks, bobs in the wake of a head emerging from the tent before dawn. Wrapping itself tight in an unraveling sweater, the heavy skirt shuffles along the gravel pathway, through the fog and early light of morning—campers in their sleeping bags still snoring—toward the shower house, like every other shower house, where steam rises thickly out of faucets, the concrete floor darkened by decades of all that disappears down a drain; this naked body like every other naked body: dark or pale, bruised or ruddy, wet and slouching toward oblivion.
We ride the train to Paris. We ride the train to Spain. We swim in the ocean and listen to music over glasses of wine. We ride the train to Austria, where the blue bruise of a boat ferries us across a mountain lake. We eat lunch on a balcony, and he takes a photograph of the snow on the mountaintops. I wear a scarf. I lose the scarf.
We ride the train to Budapest, where we share a room at the hostel with three Australian rugby players who take turns touching my breasts. I can’t remember their names. Does one have a mole on his cheek? The Man I Live With holds up my shirt for them, pinning back my arms. He laughs without smiling, his mouth wide open.
Or maybe he is waiting in the hall for the bathroom. Maybe he is drawing me a bath. I want to remember being drunk. I want to be standing on the bed, holding my own shirt up, my own arms back. I want to remember that I begged them to touch me. Not how they finally turned away.
We ride the train toward Slovakia. But the engine stops at the border, stops moving for hours, while uniformed guards move up and down the train cars making everyone stand. Two guards carrying machine guns question a young family: a young mother, a young father, a daughter who whimpers, an infant who wails. No one understands. Other passengers close their eyes, one empties his pockets: passports, tickets.
This is my documentation, Herr Schaffner. Do not refute who I am! Coins clatter to the floor and roll under the seats. All the exits are blocked. We remain sitting and do not whisper. I try to look like I belong with him. Like we belong here, together.
Earlier in the day I wander into a musty bookstore near the station. It’s one of those shops a person can get lost in forever: a leather armchair in the corner and coffee rings on the ancient library table near the register. I find a copy of Leaves of Grass, and feel elated to see English in print. Whitman writes:
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)
I realize, as I’m squatting in the musty bookstore, my back to The Man I Live With, that even if I stand and walk out the door, even if I leave right now and never see him again, unless I come down with amnesia, which happens only on daytime television, I’ll always carry him with me. I can’t will myself to forget his voice, his face, the rough impression of his palm on my hip’s still-forming curve.
The fact is, The Man I Live With will remember the hostel in Budapest. And the train. And the bruise-blue boat. He will remember the campground in Amsterdam.
And he will remember them differently.
I close the book and place it on the shelf, trying not to think about that fact, because thinking about it would mean acknowledging that my story is not the only story. And there is no story in which this, or our life together, makes sense.
And yet it’s the only thing I will always carry with me.
We ride the train to Denmark, where he will stay for a month after I return to the States. While I begin summer classes, he’ll stay with one of his ex-wives—not the mother of his children, but the one he married only for the visa—while he tries to arrange visits with his daughters and sons. Before I catch the train for the airport we all have lunch together. They talk to one another in Danish. She glares at me over her plate while she eats her sandwich with a knife and fork, though her mouth smiles and says It’s very nice to meet you. It’s nice to finally meet you. I pick up my sandwich and eat it with both hands, setting it down again to take a long, slow swig from my beer. I say shit and fuck and wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans. He puts his hand over hers when she looks far down the street.
Rain falls in sheets between the train and the platform. He pulls me close, roughly—the last time, I tell myself—and puts his mouth over mine, then places several crumpled bills in my shivering hand. I stuff them in my pocket and bolt down the stairs and across the platform, shouldering my way past faceless passengers, into the train cars about to pull away on the tracks. I can’t remember the city: the buildings, the streets, all stamped out by darkness. But I remember the way back to the room with the cracked wall near the Grote Markt, the single bed, how I can’t sleep with the sound of a guitar played badly in the courtyard, with all the tuneless but joyful singing. I dress and descend the stairs, find a group of backpackers my own age. They introduce themselves and I immediately forget their names. They hand me a cold beer, a lit cigarette. Their open faces also lit. I remember it is morning as the plane lifts from the continent. Somehow still morning when it lands.
Alone in our apartment, I open all the windows and realize only as the sunshine comes pouring in just how dark our rooms have always been. I ride my bike to class each morning, and to the coffee shop each afternoon, where I recognize a student from one of my classes. We sit together every day, both of us writing. He is my age, and handsome, I think, and he never touches me, not once, though he sits right next to me for hours every day. In the evenings I go back to the apartment and keep writing, writing. I write papers about folklore in reggae and the Jamaican struggle for independence, and about heteronormativity in contemporary fiction, and poems about the rain-pocked creek bed on my grandmother’s farm and e-mails to graduate programs in creative writing to request application materials. I call My Handsome Friend and we plan to go see a movie together, just as friends. And My Handsome Friend invites his friends, a couple, and we all sneak into the theater where he works and stay out so late, and instead of crushing my face into the ground or pushing me to the floor, they laugh at my jokes and say, Let’s do this again.
When The Man I Live With returns from Denmark we go back to our normal life. I take classes; he teaches. Once a month he plays poker with his former students and comes home with all their money. When he’s gone, I apply to grad schools, the Peace Corps, any excuse to move away. I tell myself I will leave him at the end of the year. I plan exactly what to say. When he’s home, he wants to fuck: in the morning, at lunchtime, after school, before bed. If I say no, or turn away, or if I find some reason to be out of the house all day, we’re up until three in the morning, him screaming at me the whole time, twisting my words until they tell a story I’ve never heard before, until I doubt myself, until I finally give in, and let him fuck me while I sob face-first into my pillow. Our polite Asian neighbors never complain, never look me in the eye.
On my twenty-first birthday, he makes me breakfast in bed and pulls a giant package from the top shelf of the bedroom closet: a down duvet he bought in Denmark; he’s been hiding it all this time. That night, we go out to a comedy club with a group of his former students, and afterward we go out dancing. In the car on the way home, I roll the window down, close my eyes, and let the wind blow my hair into my face. I’m a little drunk and feeling happy and I reach over to rest my hand on his leg. I feel his hand in my hair so softly, his fingers rubbing the back of my head so softly, his hand pulling me toward him, toward his lap, pushing me down, down, down.
On his fortieth birthday, weeks later, I throw him a surprise party and invite everyone from his department, from his poker games, the bartender from our favorite dive downtown, people from my classes, my teachers, the few friends I have made. He is genuinely surprised, I think, and touched. Everyone dances and drinks until it is nearly dawn. One friend says as he is tumbling out the door, You guys are such a great couple. You throw the best parties!
The Man I Live With doesn’t come to my college graduation. He says he is staying home to get ready for the party, but when I get back to the apartment, nothing has been done. He disappears for longer and longer stretches of time, and occasionally messages appear on our voice mail from numbers I don’t recognize. One day I tell him I have been accepted for an internship at a literary magazine in town and the fight we have lasts for days and days. At one point I lock myself in the bathroom and sleep there all night. At another he’s cursing at me in every language he knows. He palms my face and pushes me backward onto the couch. I hit my head on the windowsill and see a flash, then darkness. I try to kick him away and he punches me in the hip. I turn into a puddle, dripping from the couch to the floor.
In the morning, I say I’m going to my parents’ house for a few days, just to visit. I pack a few changes of clothes into a small bag, nothing to raise suspicion. He is playing backgammon on his computer when I kiss him sweetly on the cheek and walk out the door.
He calls, days later, already very angry, though his voice remains calm. At first he tries to bribe me. Come home and we’ll plan a trip to South America. Then he pleads, and I can feel the decision slipping out from under me. He threatens to tell my parents what a slut I am. He offers to come get me. Finally, I hang up the phone.
When he calls back, Mom answers and calls him a sonuva-bitch before slamming down the receiver. He calls back again and Dad tells him that he is bringing me, along with his friend, The State Trooper, to get my things.
He isn’t in the apartment when we arrive—me, Dad, and his friend, The State Trooper—or as we stuff the rest of my clothes and books into big black trash bags and toss them in the back of the car. On the way home, Dad pats my leg and asks how I am feeling. I don’t hesitate to answer.
Free.
I get a haircut. I spend whole days writing in coffee shops with My Handsome Friend. I start an internship at the literary magazine, reading submissions from the slush pile, helping to load content into the website. I get a job processing used books at a warehouse. I shop and walk in the street. I run errands and buy groceries. Occasionally, I look over my shoulder and see him walk into or out of a building a half block away. Sometimes I leave through the back exit to avoid him. Other times, I stay right where I am. He approaches me, or doesn’t, or leaves a note on my car. Please come home. I crumple it up and throw it away. If he follows me, it’s always a few cars behind. I sign a lease on an apartment I’ll share with My Good Friend.
One night, before we’ve moved in, My Good Friend drives me back to her place from a bar downtown, and we see a car, his white sedan, following close behind us as we trace the winding unlit road. She drives fast, turning and turning and turning, trying to lose him. We park on the street and run from the car into the house, where we crouch on the living room floor and peer through the blinds with all the lights out. The day I move in to the new apartment he corners me at the hardware store and says he’s bought two tickets to Venezuela. He would love to take me there, just to talk. Just one more trip. Just one last time. I owe him that much. I want to say, I don’t owe you shit. But I say nothing. I pretend I haven’t heard him. That he’s someone I’ve never met before. I turn my body and go.
Did you ever, My Newest Therapist finally asks, holding the one list—its intersecting paths—in her hands, even once, tell anyone the truth about what was happening to you?
No, not ever, I say. I still don’t understand it myself.