Three years later, a piece of paper dropped out of one of my books while Mark and I were purging our shelves. Our landlord had suddenly and apologetically raised the rent to an amount we did not think it wise to pay, and we were moving from Park Slope to Kensington.
Mark picked up the paper and examined it.
Who’s Jimmy? he said. Our backs to each other, each facing a bookcase.
No one, I said. I kept pulling down books, trying to decide if it was dread or arousal flushing my face, my arms, my legs.
Did he know that?
It was a very long time ago, I said, and turned around. Please give me whatever you found. As if he were a student who had not heard me the first time.
He walked out of the living room and left the apartment with a slam of the door that seemed to echo long after it shut. The note lay on the hardwood floor.
On the back of an envelope that had contained a bill from ConEd, Jimmy had written, with one of the black rollerballs I always had lying around:
To: Charlotte
From: Jimmy
Re: A FORMAL REQUEST
I had never seen his handwriting. It looked, somewhat predictably, like the handwriting of a man not educated past high school, and I felt terrible, a little, for thinking it—boxy, blocklike capital letters that tilted a little toward the right, letters sprinkled with the occasional lowercased i.
He’d written a list of things he wanted to do to me. All the usual words, but because Mark and I would never dream of speaking in that way to each other, and because Mark and I never exchanged anything more than sweet and pleasant release with each other, and because I had been too scared to let myself truly love Jimmy, all the usual words undid me.
I burned the envelope over the sink, to prove to myself that I could live without it, and then walked to Prospect Park, where I was fairly sure Mark must have gone. I knew the route he liked to walk inside the park and thought I might have a chance of meeting up with him. I walked those paths and when I emerged from the woods I thought I saw him sitting in our usual spot. As I walked up the slope, careful to look everywhere but at him, I realized that I was glad to be leaving this neighborhood and its insistence on family as the only kind of heaven.
I sat down beside him. He did not look at me.
Why don’t you give me what you gave him? he said.
I didn’t know you wanted it, I said.
You don’t think I have it in me to give you what he gave you.
That’s not what I said.
Why did you marry me?
I love you.
Right, he said.
The person who wrote all that is dead.
He thought for a while.
I don’t think the person he wrote it to is.
I laid my cheek on his shoulder. He stiffened.
Mark had seen that maybe I didn’t fully belong to him, and he didn’t know what to do about this wound other than to become jealous of a dead man. Soon he started saying things like Do you really need another glass of wine? at home, or if we were out with friends, and that always produced a few moments of awkward silence at whatever table we were sitting at. If he saw me opening a package of something I’d ordered off the Internet: You already have enough clothes. My appetite, in any form, was a threat. If he was trying to shame me out of the third glass or the unnecessary dress or the unnecessarily long happy hour with friends who were not his, it worked. For a little while, and then I stopped caring. We fought over how much I drank, how much I spent, what dresses I wore, and where I wore them, and how late I stayed out. Fought over what I wrote, because he said the books I’d written were nothing more than conversations with a bunch of dead women about how to escape monogamy.
He wasn’t wrong.
We made the move to Kensington, and shortly after we moved, I was two weeks late for my period when I usually bled like clockwork. I did not believe the pregnancy tests and was too afraid to go to the doctor to get my blood drawn. I was convinced I was pregnant and did not want to know the truth. Why was I sure I was pregnant? Something needed to punish me for marrying someone I shouldn’t have married, and for not telling Jimmy I loved him.
For a week I took to sleeping on the bathroom floor with the lights on, because I’d become convinced that if I closed my eyes in a bedroom with the lights off, the blackness of the room would merge with the blackness behind my eyes to create a total darkness that would blind me, but bright white tiles and bright white walls would let me go on seeing. I didn’t sleep. I’d lay there, curled on my side, mind racing. There were also panic attacks on the subway home from school, and when my mind’s racing reached the pitch of the screeching wheels of the R train, I’d get off at the next possible stop and stand on the platform, my back against the tiles, bludgeoned and blurred into three or five or ten versions of myself, three or five or ten transparencies, none of them interested in cohering, stood there breathing in and out, slowly, and staring at the passing faces, until I felt solid enough to walk home. Walking fast, walking hard to rid myself of the last of the panic, thinking that it was very strange to be sane for most of the day, to do what needed to be done at my job, to laugh when it was required, to give intelligible answers when students asked questions, but then watch my mind unravel as soon as it knew that for the rest of the evening there would be no one but Mark it needed to keep itself together for. It was strange, to lose my mind in bits and pieces, watching clumps of it fall out and into my hand, instead of losing it so completely I’d have to be checked into a hospital. Especially considering that I’d written three papers on “The Yellow Wallpaper” between my junior year of high school and my junior year of college.
Mark begged me to get a prescription for Xanax from my GP. I filled it and we had a long and loud argument because I refused to take it. I was afraid if I took one I’d go ahead and take them all.
Are you sure I shouldn’t go to a hospital? I asked Mark. Four in the morning. Our eyes sore and useless from lack of sleep.
You do not want to go to a hospital, he said. His high school girlfriend, he told me, had spent the last few months of their senior year in an inpatient treatment facility. She had not gotten into any of the schools she’d hoped would get her out of Texas and had tried to kill herself.
Neither of us felt like talking, at that moment, about whether Mark might have a type, and how much his mother had to do with it.
My period arrived the next day. I stopped sleeping with Mark because I did not want to ever be pregnant, and abstinence, I knew, was the only foolproof form of birth control. He held me tightly in the middle of the night, and I dreamed of someone fucking me out of my misery.
Why should I exist if Jimmy no longer did?
That Saturday I showed up at Rose’s door unannounced.
I need to tell you something, I said. I stood on her stoop and told her everything. If I didn’t tell her the truth, I worried that I might really end up in a hospital.
I’m so sorry, I said when I finished. I’m so sorry he’s gone, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.
Rose, standing in her doorway in jeans and bare feet. Arms crossed.
So you read that speech at his funeral for me but never thought to tell me?
I said nothing.
You read that speech at his funeral without breaking down? What the hell kind of fucking ice queen are you that you can sleep like that with somebody and not be undone at their funeral?
I went crazy instead. Shouted it. Or, sorry, almost crazy. Does that count?
That shut her up for a little while. She sat down on the top step of her stoop. I sat down next to her. Rehearsed, again, as I had on the subway ride over, what my life might look like without her.
I’m not mad that you did it, she said. I’m mad that you didn’t tell me.
Would you have told me?
You were the only other person in my life who could have known why it mattered that he was gone.
He was your uncle, I said, and I’d known him for what, five minutes? Anything I might have been feeling didn’t matter compared to what you might be feeling.
You were kind of a coward, not to tell me.
I know.
What was it, between you two?
Take a guess, I said.
She laughed, and I felt slightly less terrified that I would lose her.
Well, right, she said. Other than that. Did you love him?
Yes, I said. I think so.
It never would have worked, she said, once I’d stopped crying. Love isn’t enough.
That’s exactly what I said to him. For a moment I thought I might be saved.
You said that to him? Rose did not sound pleased. Out loud?
Yes. Hesitant.
For Jimmy that’s all there was.
We sat there for a while.
What was his reaction to that? said Rose.
He said I was so smart I was stupid.
Jesus. She laughed and shook her head. My mother used to say that to me all the time.
Mine, too, I said.
We still had not looked at each other. We had spoken all our words into the street.
Okay, you need to get out of here for a while, she said. I need to get out of here for a while. We’re going on a trip. On me. Where should we go?
I thought for a few seconds. Barcelona, I said. Somehow we had never been. July, we decided, once I had finished with school.
As the taxi from the airport sped past farms and Ikeas and auto parts factories, as we got closer and closer to Barcelona, she and I both came to life, like cut flowers given new water. Oh, look, Rose would say, pointing at something outside her passenger window. Oh, look, I would say, pointing at something outside mine.
After checking into our hotel, Rose decided to sleep, and I decided to take a walk. The sunshine was prodigious, possibly benevolent. I smelled dog urine, strawberries, newsprint, diesel. I heard mopeds, church bells, barking, Lady Gaga. The longer I walked, the lighter I felt.
Wherever we went in Barcelona that week, the Spanish called us las chicas. Shoe stores, cafés, markets, bars, churches, pharmacies. Whenever it happened Rose would elbow me. Las chicas. That was the band we were in, the band we had always been in: two American girls with boundless delight, curiosity, and respect for your country’s long, long history written all over our faces. Just the sight of us, eyes bright and avid, bellying up to your marble-topped tapas bar would make you pour us extra cava. If we were milling about your market stall staring at the olives, you would spoil us like a granddaughter and hand us delicacy after delicacy over the counter. If we were lying, sunglassed, sunscreened, on the rocks north of the beach, you would offer us free cans of the warm Foster’s you were selling to tourists.
Fuck New York, said Rose, as we lay on those rocks.
It can hear you, you know, I said.
Barcelona. Medieval leavings and a beach. Like Paris but much better than Paris. Just this side of too much. Just real enough, just human and shit-streaked enough, we said as we walked along the sea, to keep people from dissolving into blubbering tears at its beauty. We did not want to leave. Because of the sight and scent of tiny, jewellike strawberries—a sugared musk hanging over several corners of the Boqueria, a scent that could sometimes travel all the way out to the street. Because of tinto de verano and pulpo a la plancha. And the stone face of the church of Sant Felip Neri, pockmarked during the Civil War by dozens or hundreds of bullet holes. You could put your hand on the side of that crucified church and feel its wounds. The thirteen geese drifting about in the courtyard of the cathedral in the Gothic Quarter—thirteen because the city’s patron saint was martyred at that age. Saint Eulalia. Or, said another legend, the white feathers of the geese served as a tribute to the dove that flew out of her heart at her death. The steep decline of the short tunnellike street that the saint was said to have been rolled down in a barrel full of glass and knives—a torture devised by her Roman rulers. We bought thirteen daisies, white, at a flower stall on Las Ramblas, and laid the flowers below an altar that had been installed in an alcove carved in the street’s stone walls. Something we would never do in New York. A señora with her little dog saw us as she made her way slowly down the hill, in her secular habit of square navy skirt and boxy white blouse, and as she passed by she smiled and nodded to us. We smiled and said Hola.
Our third night, neither of us slept in the hotel; we’d found men to take us back to their apartments. The next morning, we arrived back to the hotel entrance at the same time.
You’re a terrible influence, I said.
I know, said Rose. She linked her arm in mine, kissed me on my left temple, and turned us away from the hotel doors and back out into the cobblestoned street. So are you. Let’s go compare notes over coffee.
Don’t ever leave me, I said.
We were thirty-eight. It was the most we ever loved each other.
The bus to the beach that day was full of white-haired señoras wearing their secular habit of white poly-cotton blouses and navy blue polyester skirts. I was glad to sit among them as the bus rolled across town and the ocean winked at us from between streets. At the next to the last stop, the señoras clucked and groaned as the bus halted to let what one of them called a puta cross the road in platform heels and a silver spangled minidress. Their mouths and bodies set in resignation, diffidence, and judgment—closed doors sealed up for the winter.
Why don’t you leave? she said, as the bus drifted on.
Why don’t you leave?
What would my grandmother think?
Rose, I said, your grandmother’s dead.
Come on, she said, in rebuke. She knew that I believed the dead were always present and to suggest otherwise was a form of treason. Why don’t you leave?
I’m afraid.
Me too, she said. I don’t want to sleep alone. I don’t want to eat dinner alone.
I don’t either, I said. And I don’t want to run off and leave someone to sleep alone or eat alone. The thought of it makes me sick.
You’re nicer than I am.
I don’t know about that. It also seems incredibly dumb to leave someone who loves me in order to find a replacement for a dead man.
Does he love you?
He thinks he does.
What if I said this: you’ll finally write what you have in you to write if you leave him.
I’ve thought about that, but—
Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Exactly.
We passed a marble statue of a winged figure raising a star into the sky and she said: I hate everyone we know.
You’re just tired and hungry, I said, in a tone of ironic concern, patting her knee, and I think what you really need is eight hours of sleep and a handful of almonds.
She snorted. What I really need is to drive something into a plate glass window.
I laughed, too loudly, and one of the señoras turned to level a look in our direction.
So instead we got on a plane. Do you mean that you hate Peter?
Not all the time. No. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I hate him because he’s not me, but I need him because he’s not me.
That’s what it was like, being married. Do you love him?
Yes, she said.
I don’t think you’ve ever said that before.
I haven’t?
No, I said.
I think if I talked about my marriage it would bore you.
Rose! Jesus Christ. You’re out of your mind.
I don’t know! Maybe I’m bored with my own thoughts.
Never once have I been bored by your thoughts. Have I ever seemed bored by your thoughts?
No, she said. No.
I mean, I said, maybe I should be—
But it’s too late now, she said, and we laughed. Maybe even giggled.
The bus sat facing the beach, and the señoras rose from their seats, seemingly all together, seemingly all at once, as if rising to meet the end of a Mass.
Do you ever think that half of our problem is trying to be something original when maybe we’re just not? she said.
All the time, I said. And to your point: I feel like I’ve read that somewhere, what you just said. But to quote you circa the year 1998, we’re not just anybody.
At this point in my life I only know I said that because you keep reminding me. Pause. You know what my grandmother would think? That we should stop sitting around reading Anne Frank for the five thousandth time and go play outside.
We got off the bus and walked to the beach.
Later that day, while Rose met up with the man she’d met the night before, I went for another long walk, and I stopped in a church we’d passed several times whose architecture puzzled me: at the top of the church floated a pediment consisting of stones crumbling as if we were in Rome, but then a smooth marble classical eighteenth-century facade picked up where the ruins let off. You couldn’t tell whether the facade was a postmodern wink or a Civil War casualty. Sant Agustí Nou.
It was a lived-in, cared-for relic. The floors were made of cracked and gritty marble but they were spotless nonetheless. I heard the iron votive stand in the vestibule before I saw it. When I turned to find the source of the noise there stood a chorus of candles, fully aflame, an active volcano of sputtering, popping, hissing, dripping wax, prayers roasting away like a crackling, juicy chicken. I’d never heard lit candles make that ferocious a noise. I stood there for a long time, staring, listening.
A large statue of a female saint hovered up front, ensconced in a gilded alcove: Saint Rita. Saint Rita. What did I know about Saint Rita? Given the sheen of the statue’s plaster, the vibrant red of her cheeks, and the unremitting blackness of her robes and whiteness of her wimple, Rita looked like she’d been fabricated in the early twentieth century. Roses—real, plastic, and silk—bloomed from two brass urns in front of the altar. She rated more roses and candles than Thérèse of Lisieux, my father’s mother’s favorite, who stood directly across from her—Thérèse, deposed in affection but probably counting it all glory. And to the left of the altar sat a Plexiglas box about three feet tall filled with folded scraps of paper.
Prayers for Saint Rita, said a sign in Spanish, Catalan, and English. The patron saint of impossible dreams and the love unrequited.
I looked around the church to see if there was anyone else in the sanctuary. There wasn’t. I sat down in the pew that faced the shrine. I looked up at the inscriptions running along the tops of the walls. Qui petit, acciptit. Qui quaerit, invenit. He who asks, receives. He who seeks, finds.
I pulled a pen and a small notebook from my bag and began to write, a prayer for each page of ruled paper. Prayer after prayer after prayer.
I do not want what I haven’t got.
I do not want what I haven’t got.
I do not want what I haven’t got.
I do not want what I haven’t got.
That one went out to the Rose, and the Charlotte, and the Sinéad O’Connor of 1990.
Then I thought harder.
Make me abject.
Make me jealous.
Make me faithful.
Make me honest.
After folding the pages up tightly and glancing over my shoulder, I fed the plastic box as if it were a paper shredder.