You remember they were building a wall by his house. You were always speeding, almost missing the turn, when you’d spot the men with their stones, and back up, and take the right. It seemed like the two of you had always been in love, but the whole time you were together they were building that wall, so how long could it have been, really?
The boy wore Hawaiian shirts in winter. He had a mouth that never stopped moving. He had a dumb dog with short legs who was always getting lost, and one time, before you’d met, your parents found her by the side of the road, and drove her back to him. He could sing like Freddie Mercury. He could sing like Paul McCartney. He could sing like Tom Waits. You were seventeen and you didn’t stand a chance.
He had boy habits like collecting Star Wars figurines and farting under blankets and speaking in silly voices when he needed to say serious things. He had grown-up habits like a bad back that required orthopedic sneakers and a painkiller addiction. Like listening to Wagner while slowly driving his mother’s sedan down the back roads when he had insomnia.
He took you to the lake. You sat in a lifeguard chair together and he told you he loved you and it was all very romantic until you realized there was another couple ten yards off, fucking in the sand. Honestly, it was still pretty romantic. Honestly, you still think lifeguard chairs are some kind of sacred.
You had an agreement to pull over any time you saw a toy store. You threw dodgeballs at each other and adopted stuffed-animal children and tried to fit your lanky teen bodies into the plastic race-car beds until someone yelled at you to leave. That was the deal. You never left without first getting at least one person to yell at you.
He got you into bad situations. Forgetting about you at his friends’ parties so you had to find your own ride home. Getting you into fights with your parents. Always, always telling the waiter it was your birthday when it wasn’t, just for the piece of free cake, even though he sometimes left without paying anyway. When you cried he’d ask if some ice cream wouldn’t make everything better. Like girls’ problems were that easy to fix. You’d hit him and curse but then he’d drive you to the twenty-four-hour Carvel on the side of the highway, and once he had you sitting on a picnic bench, watching the cars do eighty, eating vanilla soft-serve with rainbow sprinkles, smelling the exhaust, he would say, “Admit it, you feel better, don’t you?” You’d hit him again.
His mother taught Shakespearean acting to middle-schoolers. Her troupe rehearsed at the local farm, which had too few cows to be a good dairy but enough acres of garden that when she put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream it looked just like it was supposed to. You liked the parts where the young lovers got confused in the woods and fought and kissed but you didn’t understand the other half of the play where the builders and tinkers, the mechanicals, tried to stage their own show within the show. The mechanicals were neither young nor beautiful and the show they tried to make was very bad. It was called Pyramus and Thisbe. In it, a man played a woman and a woman played a wall and they kept on talking about a lion’s terrible roar. You found the whole thing extraneous. He thought it was the best part, and you wondered what you were missing.
You cracked up your car and had to go to the hospital. He came to see you even though your parents didn’t like him. He brought you a dirty traffic cone stolen off the road with wildflowers stuck in the top. This meant, I love you. This meant, Be careful.
His house had a sauna and a pool and a collection of African masks. The two of you sat in the sauna, then ran outside across the grass, to jump in the water naked. You paddled around, him chasing you under the Tibetan prayer flags that flew from the tree line, and when he caught you, he pressed himself against you until you couldn’t stand it anymore and then he took you inside and laid you on the floor and fucked you while you stared up into the carved-wooden faces of those masks. He was your first, and the sex always felt safe and it always felt good, and the fact of this, the safety and goodness of it, has proved lethal down the line.
And yet, if you had to compare your dynamic to something, you think he probably thought of himself as Jean Reno in Luc Besson’s The Professional and you as his Mathilda, his sad baby Natalie Portman. Except you were actually fucking. Except you were only a year apart in age. You know you’re not supposed to like that movie anymore now that you’re old and overeducated but you still love looking at her—love looking at him looking at her—in all the problematic ways you’re not supposed to look at a bruised peach and find it beautiful. Not supposed to want to eat or be that peach. This particular ouroboros of saving and being saved has also proved lethal down the line.
You could make it to his house inside of ten minutes if you blew through one stop sign. If you didn’t miss the turn. If you didn’t have to wait for all the men building the wall to clear their tools and their stones from the street.
When the boy went away to college he told you he was scared, but you were the one left behind with your parents, who were so mad you’d had sex. Left behind with all the fights defending this relationship you didn’t even have anymore because he was gone. You were so angry and you didn’t have anyone who understood and so you made him into everything. Your defining story. It had to be a story that mattered, otherwise what was it all for?
Most people thought of what you had as teenage infatuation, but it wasn’t. Even now you sometimes think of the high-octane intimacy that passed between you and wonder if someone older could have survived it. You’re not saying that this was unique, just that it was real.
The boy sounded far away on the phone when he called you from college, even though he was only in California. Sometimes he was weird and would apologize and say it was just the pills the pills the pills. He’d say he was going to quit them, and you’d help him talk himself into doing it, and he would. He’d flush them down the toilet and you would hear him dropping them in, plink, and flush. You’d wonder whether he’d really done it because he was at acting school after all. A few days later, though, you would know it was for real, that he’d gone cold turkey again, because he would say flippant, cruel things and be listening to Frank Zappa.
You broke up with him the summer before you went to college because you were tired of trying not to reciprocate the advances of the boys back home, who just wanted to sit with you on a rock with a bottle of bourbon and make up names for the stars while they tried to cop a feel. Later, at college, the boys had all gone to Catholic preparatory schools and they did things like ask permission to touch you. You weren’t able to appreciate that at the time. They planned dates they called dates and bought you flowers in cellophane and you couldn’t appreciate this, either, so you lied and said you were a virgin waiting for marriage.
The boy wrote you letters. You wrote him back.
You almost got together again after college, when he came to visit you in Brooklyn and you spent a week together, cutting up like old times. Sprinting through the Arms and Armor section at the Met and getting yelled at by security. Dancing in your bedroom at night because you’d both had sugary cocktails and you could hear the guy upstairs practicing his bass.
You were in your twenties now, so grown, and there was no one to stop you from being together. This was it, you were sure. But then he broke it off. You were wearing a blue neckerchief that must have seemed like a very cool thing to be wearing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2006 but when he told you he’d slept with a yoga instructor he’d met while visiting a friend two nights before, the neckerchief compounded how stupid and lacking in dignity you felt and you vowed to never again wear any article of clothing that you could not survive the mortification of being dumped in. This has proved to be a good rule.
After he returned home, he posted long Facebook meditations about the Brooklyn morning light coming through your windows, how it illuminated your beta fish, who lived on the mantel, all this to describe the melancholy of having fucked you and left you naked in bed for what would be the last time. Later, he began posting photos of the yoga instructor.
The shame of having been wrong about him, doubled down on being wrong, on and off, for six years, was almost worse than the heartbreak. Almost.
You didn’t return his letters. You cut things off and didn’t cave until he became a twelve-stepper, another five years later, writing you one of those long apology notes that are part of the making-amends step. You have received, in this human life, too many of these letters. The letter enumerated a million things he’d done that you hadn’t even remembered. There was no mention at all of how callous he’d been after you chose him over your friends and parents when he went away to college, or the phone calls after the pills, or the yoga instructor after that.
A year later you were both invited to the same wedding in a vineyard. You were smoking cigarettes and drinking bourbon and he had quit everything, which, no matter what had passed between you, you acknowledged as a very good and impressive thing. The two of you walked down rows of grapevines and he asked you to let him make amends. You said amends were made. Check it off the list. Consider it done. You crushed a cigarette under your boot and ground it into the soil. You kissed the boy on the cheek when he drove you back to your shitty motel and you thought that was a pretty good way to say goodbye to someone forever.
The next morning the woman at the front desk said a man had come looking for you in the middle of the night, around four a.m., and she’d told him there was no one by your name staying there. You gave her back your key on its plastic ring and thanked her. You realized that this generous woman working the night shift at the goddamn Sea Breeze motel had more sense than you, and she’d met him for only two minutes.
You visit your hometown. You are driving aimlessly when you see the wall. You stop and slowly back up to the right-hand turn. It is built. There it is, all real and caked together with stones, and you feel a pang. You can get rid of everything else, the phone numbers and the photos, and still you will have these stories banging around inside you.
This is the first time you understand that, when people talk about moving on, they don’t mean that you won’t remember or bleed anymore. Just that you’ll go on to do other things. Meet other people. And yet, in the middle of a normal day, something as simple as a stone wall can still suddenly and invisibly destroy you. And because it’s too much to explain, most days, when this happens, you’ll just keep driving along. You won’t mention the wall or what it summons to anyone. And it’s this silence, more than anything else, that defines moving on.
The wall they’ve built is highly mediocre.
You think of the one funny part in the mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus has killed himself, and Thisbe has killed herself, and still the play does not end there. Not only because it is insufferable but also because, next, the person playing the wall falls down as if dead. A dead wall and even now the play is not over. Because still left is the moonshine, represented by a paper disc, and the lion with a mop for his mane. The play is over. For years and years, it has been over. And still, here you are, stuck with these sad props.