The days in this new year are passing too quickly, filled up by all of the very last tasks required to pack up our lives in Berkeley and transplant ourselves to the sunny kingdom by the sea — truly by the sea this time, as our new apartment is a scant five blocks from the beach. On a slightly dismal Friday morning — my second-to-last in the once-tidy A-frame studio — I ticked off my duties, one by one.
☒ Clean bathtub
☒ Beat rag rug
☒ Countertops cleaned with vinegar and lemon spray
☒ Sweep deck
☒ Books back to library (check in loft to make sure Alex not hiding any)
By lunchtime the day’s list of chores had shrunk to the one that made my head hurt even more than the fumes from the Ka-Boom bathroom cleaner.
☐ Call Julian
We’d spoken with each other only a few weeks before, as we always do on December 18th, our anniversary. It would have been our ninth, had we made it that far. Even that very first year we were apart, Julian sent me flowers and a beautiful cashmere sweater. “Woollens, for our seventh anniversary,” he’d remarked dully when I called to thank him. I’d gotten him nothing, not least because I hadn’t expected he’d be minded to mark the day at all. Last year, like this one, I had only a call, which was more than enough for me.
What a shame, Mel, what a shame. We might have made it, if you’d only let me.
When we spoke the other week on the 18th, it felt less of a punishment for what I’d supposedly done to him and more of a chance to think on who we were when we’d thought we could just push past all the red flags flying, warning us not to marry. We’ll hope for the best, I’d said at my bridal shower to Jen, who by then was only a week away from dropping out of my wedding party. I’m putting it in God’s hands, Jules had said to Will at the strip club stag do in London. (How sanctimonious — he only remembers he supposedly ascribes to a religion when it suits him to look pious or particularly martyred.)
“I know I say it every year, Mel, but what a shame. I suppose you’re happier now, and whatever Alex may think, that does mean something to me. You know how it is. I suspect like me, there will always be a small chamber in your heart that you keep the best parts of us in.”
He wasn’t wrong, though I’d be lying if I said it was only one small chamber. Nestled in my nightmare house with all the rooms of terror, Julian and I played out so many little scenes of good cheer and solace behind the keyholes. The suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, where I stood on a balcony overlooking the buzzing Place de la Concorde at midnight, dressed in only the lightest wisp of a silk slip, thinking he loves to make this happen for me as Julian called me back to bed for another, ached-for round. On the gold chaise longue in Julian’s study, drenched in the sweat of the flu, where he slipped into my parched mouth spoon after spoon of chicken soup he’d made himself. Two bodies in a hot spring pool in the middle of the desert under the dark purple and russet and gold of a California sunset, limbs curled and unfurled around and across the other’s, so young and so graceful and so very, very in love. I don’t forget we were once in love. No matter how many lies I tell myself, that’s one I don’t indulge in.
This early January call wouldn’t be one where I thrust my hand into the memory box for a sepia-tinged and polished up recollection. The past holds demons other than Julian, and some of them need more help than Alex can lend me (I think). A day after our anniversary call, I’d had from Julian Josh’s yearly reminder that success and notoriety and fawning blurbs in Publisher’s Weekly would never be enough for him. No, Josh wants something of me still. Me leaving him was not how our little romance was supposed to end. Even worse, I left with something of ours, of his and mine.
Alex may call Julian a monster, and I tend to agree with him, most days. “Now, he’s not my patient, but everything you’ve told me says Julian has narcissistic personality disorder,” my therapist back in Burbank told me. “Entitled, power-hungry, fixated on everyone seeing him as successful. Glib and infatuated with status. His constant bullying of you and others, and his obsession with control.” I’d tried more than once during our marriage to drag him to couples therapy, but Jules told me, “Shrinks are a waste of time unless you’re very unwell, and I’m not. That’s why it’s good that you’re seeing one, darling. I want you to be better.”
Annabelle let slip to me once in a particularly unguarded moment that Julian had been made to see a counsellor at school after he’d been disciplined several times for his haughty and domineering behavior towards his fellow students. “I saw the letter the school sent to Dad. Apparently, he was too young to be properly diagnosed, but the head of school recommended Jules get therapy for ‘nascent narcissistic tendencies.’ My father funded the fencing team for the next three years in exchange for that never going further.”
But all — I say “all” like it’s no big thing, how ridiculous — Julian wanted was control: over how classmates and teachers, and later colleagues and business partners, saw him; over his home life, so that it was a place of calm retreat; over me, that he might have the perfect shiny ornament to reflect his power. Look at what I have, world, am I not worthy of your respect? I cannot deny the wounds Julian caused me, the gouges at my sense of self-worth and identity, but he did (and probably still does) love me. He never wanted to destroy me, even if sometimes I felt close to crushed. Destruction would have made me disappear, and he needed a compliant, devoted wife to crown the image of a powerful man’s perfect life.
Josh? Josh never loved me, though he claimed to, especially when things were at their darkest. Josh wanted to possess me completely, obliterate Melissa. I doubt the man who has written so prettily of complex human emotions has ever had a proper one himself besides lust. (I lied when I said I never could read his books. Of course I’ve read them all.) He wanted to replace me with the facsimile of his ideal girl — docile and literate and gentle and in complete control of her every passion. She would not beg her boyfriend to touch her like that. She never disobeyed his greater wisdom, never let the Lilith-beast he knew raged within her to whisper too loudly. She would understand why she needed to let him guide her through every decision she might wish to make, from what to eat to what to wear and what to read and how to stoke his desires just enough not to make him lose his own control. Oh, because he could never lose control, she would never want to see him lose control. (If Josh was right about one thing, it may have been that.)
I am not quite ready to talk about what happened my junior year of high school, the year I joined the Lit Lads as “Josh’s girl.” I’ve only recently spoken of it in any depth to my therapist, whose first reaction was simply, “Wow. What a lot for a young girl to handle on her own.” And boy, was I on my own, having allowed my entire reality to be placed in the frame Josh felt suited me (him) best.
As a clever little girl, I was adept at hiding my pain, or the questions I had about whether what I was feeling was pain, from everyone around me. To my friends, I was Mel, still sensitive and compassionate, just a little distracted, more devoted to writing than before, but in pursuit of getting into college as we all were back then. To my parents, I was still the dependable Melissa, never a missed class or a call home from school. To my teachers, I was the dedicated pupil, churning out near-perfect essays on Molière en français, drafting piquant character studies in Creative Writing, striving and striving for more than an A- in Calculus AB and lauded for my efforts in a tough STEM subject. And to my classmates I was “a sweetheart,” “generous,” “a superstar.” “A goddess,” Brad Whitaker, my biology lab partner called me back then. I reported the last of these epithets back to Josh, who was pleased but directed me to request a new lab partner who was a girl. (“You never know, Melissa. He might expect more from you one day when he asks to study for a test. Better to be safe than sorry. You know what boys are like now, don’t you?”)
But behind all of it, I was in pain. I know that now, though at the time it seemed ordinary to contort myself into the positions Josh ordered me into. A feminine, passive, submissive girl child after he tamed me. Before our nightly phone call, I would brush my hair with 101 strokes as directed. To make its strawberry blondeness shine like Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn, he told me, though I suspect the number itself had more to do with Orwell’s Room 101, a nasty little dig he would have enjoyed. And every night I would obey his standing request — “be my little Scheherazade” — and tell him a story of what I would let him do to me if only we weren’t so worried about him losing control.
The tales were as short or as baroque as he needed them to be for him to come as hard as he wished. From the cloister of my sliding-mirrored closet, I’d talk him through permutations of his favorite fantasies, tarted up with half-recollections from the Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller stories he’d passed to me between classes with the instruction to read them in the bathroom and touch myself as he’d shown me. When he was done, he’d tell me with a breathless ache, “Very good, Melissa, my little Scheherazade. Now go think on how filthy your mind must be for dreaming up those stories.” It didn’t surprise me to find versions of my 1001 Nights threaded through the Brookes canon in the years that followed — I always suspected he’d wrote them down after I’d told them, to savor again and again on demand.
There was always a demand.
***
With Josh at Yale, I steered clear of New Haven after I made it to Brown. None of my close friends had ended up there, so I had no reason to visit another rainy, chilly, occasionally ravishing, tiny New England city possessed of an Ivy. Occasionally I had reason to cross into Connecticut — my mother’s family remains based in and around North Stonington — but I stayed safe in the far east of the state, in the jade and brown seclusion of its forest paths, on its tidy town greens and upon the creaking floorboards of the early 19th century houses of aunts and uncles and grandparents. I’d thought for a hot minute about joining the Brown cheerleading squad (my freshman roommate Sally Givens said all the team expected was a good attitude and an ability to show up on time, no athletic talent required), but when I found out I’d have to go to the Yale Bowl to cheer on the football team in November, I declined. Last thing I needed was Joshua K. Brookes watching me in a short skirt jumping up and down in front of a crowd.
Once I saw him in Providence, just once my sophomore year. I was trudging down Wickenden Street, kicking at leaves blown down the night before in a terrible, keening windstorm. In my left hand, I clutched a large coffee in my red woollen mitten. I remember wearing the mittens only because I couldn’t get a good grip on the coffee, and the cup almost slipped from my hand again and again as I walked down the wooden stairs of the coffeeshop. When I stopped to peel them off, perching my coffee on the domed top of a litter bin, there was my old demon lover striding towards me, arm in arm with a woman who couldn’t have looked more like Rachel if my sister had spit in a cup and asked for the Clone Special.
It had to have been Josh — the same plush lips that had covered me and uncovered me and lapped at me and scorned me, the same long limbs I’d stroked and petted and let hold me down and resisted and resisted, the same violet eyes behind his dark-rimmed specs that saw me and through me and yet never did know who I was. Those eyes found mine and I felt trapped like a doe in a tangle of brambles, my heart thhrumping so hard I thought it might burst out from my pale fawn cardigan to spill onto the pavement with a hard thwack, pumping its hot blood for Josh. (Look, I still bleed for you, do you know I still bleed for you?) I left the cup and one discarded mitten where I’d placed them and ran and ran until I reached the playground on Arnold Street.
I collapsed on a green park bench, clutching at the stitch in my side. The maple tree above me dropped a single broad yellow leaf on top of my beret. I let it rest, and touched at its slightly damp weight on my head with an unmittened hand. I am safe, I reminded myself. He won’t abandon that woman to march over here and tell me how wrongwrongwrong I am. At 10am, young mothers and nannies sat with babies in prams, pushed older children in swings, minded their charges as they sped and spun and chased around the field and mounted the climbing bars. Shrieks of laughter and managed peril shot through the air. A young man on his own would not be welcome here, I comforted myself.
It was the very last time I saw Joshua K. Brookes in person. Though we both returned to Burbank for summer and winter breaks, he mostly kept his distance, only once calling my house (I’d long since changed my cell phone number) from Yale after I ended it with him. After several unannounced, in-person visits to my home to check up on me (I never came downstairs to greet him) over that first Thanksgiving break, my father took him out to lunch at Bob’s Big Boy. Over omelettes and black coffee, Dad explained to Josh that he had to respect whatever reason I had for ending it — and I certainly never told my parents why — and let me be.
“I told him you might always be the one that got away, Melissa, but part of growing up is accepting you can’t always get the girl and keep her,” my dad told me over dinner that night. “I always liked Josh and the respect he showed you and our family. I’m sure you have your reasons, but we’ll miss him.” (Rachel snorted so lightly only I could hear, I presume, since neither of my parents reacted.)
***
2010 was a singular year for both Josh and me, as it turned out. In January, I spurned Alex (again) and took a penitent Julian back as my fiance; by December he had his visa and we were husband and wife. I won’t retread those boards again here — we all know the little puppets get tugged and dangled and prodded into the same sad scenes. The Princess Melissa never let the brave Duke Alexander save her from a terrible fate, and when she crossed the drawbridge into the castle the evil Lord Julian had bought just for her, she was trapped for years and years. A cautionary tale for American girls in love with charming, nasty English princes.
In New York, however, Josh wasn’t living in a castle. A year and a half before, he’d rented a fifth floor walk up in Williamsburg, slung a mattress in the middle of the studio room and set up his life in New York, ready to write the Great American Novel after months drifting through good old, bad old Europe, where he’d “found his voice again,” and two years at UVA, where he’d been the best (reportedly) in his MFA cohort. I’ve read so many interviews with him about this time, I sometimes feel like he’d told me the stories himself. You might have heard them yourself by now, but if you haven’t, it goes a little like this:
After graduating from Yale (magna cum laude, rumored to have been in a secret society), he’d spent the summer in the UK, looking for “The Girl, the one who got away.” He’d heard she’d fallen in love and he wanted a chance — one last chance — to win her back, though he never did truly deserve her. Finding this girl consumed him that hot, hot summer, a summer so hot the roads melted and rail lines buckled. Leads that she was in Bristol came to nothing — upon reaching what a student directory (“obtained in a probably inappropriate manner, involving chatting up several lovely young women… and men”) assured him was The Girl’s flat, he found only her former flatmate. As he told Esquire last year, “Her flatmate was possibly the poshest person I’d ever spoken with, and I was quite well-acquainted with privilege after four years at Yale. ‘Cut glass’? No, her accent was the pure crystal blown only at pony clubs and dinners in draughty country houses.”
However, The Girl was long gone, relocated after she was caught in bed with her boyfriend’s best friend. After composing himself from the shock of hearing his girl had been unfaithful (“I thought we both condemned infidelity — had I ever really known who she was?”), Josh’s attempts to pry The Girl’s current location were rebuffed by the “rather pudgy” flatmate — to a point. “She propositioned me in exchange for the new address, but I would never do that to my girl. There had been subterfuge enough. But before I left, she told me to look in the City of Westminster, in London. I’d find her there.” Strictly correct, of course — well done, Min, for taking advantage of an American’s ignorance of English borough councils. I’ve always thought she was brighter than anyone gave her credit for.
“I was on the next train to Paddington — the rail station, not the bear.” (I imagine he must have chuckled at this as he said it, though any laughter went unreported.) “If The Girl was in London, I knew I could find her. Blame my American bravado, but I thought if anyone could find a singular needle in a teeming haystack of seven and a half million souls, it would be me. I never did — the second time I’d ever failed at anything I’d really tried for. Losing The Girl, of course, was the first.”
Josh took a holiday flat in Wimpole Street for the rest of the summer. Rachel sent me an article she’d found online this September, from when he was starting a promotional junket for his new podcast, the one starting at the very end of this month. (“Found this in my Google Alert on Josh today. What a pretentious asshole. xxR”) “It made sense to me that she might land there, with all the literary connotations. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, of course, and did you know Shaw placed Henry Higgins there in Pygmalion? And Maria Bertram moves there upon marrying Mr. Rushworth in Mansfield Park, before she begins her affair with Henry Crawford. From what I hear of The Girl’s life after she married the man she fell in love with, she seems to have followed Maria’s dark path more than a trifle closely.” (Yes, Rachel, quite the asshole.)
Josh quickly determined that with no further leads — Julian’s name had never reached his ears, no matter what surface he put them to — I was, as he told Vogue a couple of years ago, “lost to the Big Smoke, perhaps a plume of fantasy best left unfollowed. I thought to keep what I had of her pristine, shut away in my memories, the purest love I have ever known.” (Gross.) “She broke my heart for the second time, and I wept for hours in that Wimpole Street flat, mourning what we might have been, growing into lovers and mutual muses.” (Further gross.)
“Brookes’ smile fades at the edges; he fidgets with his phone. I ask him why he chose to stay in London after realizing he’d probably never find The Girl before her wedding.” (That was from a 2012 interview in Elle.) “‘Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it?’ Brookes confides. ‘I’d watched The Graduate before I flew over, and I could see myself as a more-successful Benjamin Braddock, stopping the wedding before she married her Carl.’ Brookes snorts lightly in self-deprecation; he removes his dark-rimmed glasses to rub his brow briefly and I catch sight of those famously violet eyes before he dons them once more. ‘I wasn’t to know she wouldn’t marry him for another four years. Big ceremony in Beverly Hills. The irony is, First Flush hit the bookstores one day before her wedding. How’s that for timing?’ Brookes is smiling again, but it looks like regret.” (It wasn’t.)
Shortly after he’d abandoned the stalking portion of his UK excursion, Josh found himself stuck in a prepaid flat for which no refund was forthcoming “unless I agreed to sleep with my very proper English landlady. It was not a trade I sought to make.” He made the best of it, finagling through an ex-girlfriend’s connections a diary column in an online publication that shall remain nameless (you can find it if you look, I’m sure) detailing the wry observations of a young and privileged man abroad for the first time.
“I grabbed the offer before the editor thought better of it,” he told GQ, “even though I wasn’t paid a dime. Three 500-word dispatches a week, with the only direction: Dry humor, on the rocks.” Josh pounded out odes to the calm of Cavendish Square Gardens, tucked behind the madness of Oxford Street; to the ache of falling in love with dogs he could not bring back from the Battersea Dogs’ Home; to feeling slightly out of time in so many corners of the city, not least the chill he’d felt when he thought he saw “not a ghost, perhaps only a disquieting shadow” of a woman at the Queen’s House in Greenwich. I’ve read them all now, though I wasn’t aware of them for many years. Each is a delicate curio, his obvious brilliance so lightly worn and so careless that for a moment the reader can’t help but be intimate with Josh, to feel the embrace of his youthful wonder at the greatness of the world. If I didn’t know who he was, I might have fallen in love with him as legions of Brookes Babes (yes, that what they call themselves) have done in the nearly 10 years since First Flush broke Josh into the big time.
He stuck around London until October, long enough to send his final dispatch about the opening of the new Arsenal stadium, an opportunity to wax a little poetic and pathetic about how he’d come to London to find The Girl and ended up finding his voice instead. By then, the publication he’d been writing for had started paying him a weekly stipend — Joshua K. Brookes was becoming a minor draw for younger readers (“younger” meaning under the age of 45) and the famously tight-fisted site editor stretched the budget enough to send Josh to Paris, Amsterdam, Budapest, Florence, Madrid and Lisbon over the next six months with the same instruction: dry humor, on the rocks.
“Each month, a new city, long enough to rock me into the rhythms of the locals, short enough to keep me edgier, bristlier than in London.” (This was in The Atlantic, I think.) “And the language barriers in Budapest and Lisbon kept me at a greater remove than in the others, where I either knew the language sufficiently to open the cities’ pleasures and dangers to me, or where I could muddle through to achieve some greater insight than a tourist on a whirlwind European jaunt.”
It wasn’t exactly Brookes-mania when Josh arrived in Charlottesville in 2007, but there was sufficient buzz around his tri-weekly internet gems that he was treated as a minor celebrity on campus. He’d had to quit his paid writing gig for his MFA, but his works in progress continued to find a home online on his blog (and if you think I haven’t read every page, every entry, you’d be wrong — it was there that I found the earliest iterations of my own teenage erotica repackaged as his own). His thesis advisor, a well-known but not terribly successful author of literary fiction, a man lauded for his own deftness in capturing the authentic voices of women and girls, guided Josh closely — in drafting his thesis, in navigating early fame, in wrangling the hot blue flame of desire that had always vexed Josh into cooler prose.
And upon graduation, Josh pulled that mattress up to that fifth floor apartment, unpacked his toothbrush and opened his brand new MacBook Air, ready to work those first 100 pages of what would become First Flush into The Great American Novel he’d promised me he’d write on our very first date.
“Brookes is coy about those nine months between UVA and the bidding war,” the March 2011 Vanity Fair piece goes, “but most of us know the drill by now: Like other privileged millennials, Brookes’ parents pay the rent on his Williamsburg home while he toils away at his novel in coffeeshops and dive bars, generally unpaid but for the occasional bone of work thrown his way by his former editor. But unlike other privileged millennials living on Daddy’s dollars in Brooklyn, two things set Brookes apart. First, he’d never be caught in a pair of skinny jeans — ‘Always been a strictly cords and chinos man, even when I was a boy,’ he tells me over a cocktail called a Brawny Man at Amor y Amargo in the East Village. Second, Brookes is good at writing. The breadth of his allusions — literary, scientific, historical, philosophical — in our two hours at the bar makes me forget the man in front of me is just about to turn 27. He’s erudite without being showy, funny without artifice. He’s precise and ordered, but never fussy. A man in control of his passions so that he might display them properly for our enjoyment.
“By March 2010, Brookes has a mostly finished manuscript, an agent, and the attention of every major publishing house. He’s paid an unreasonably large sum for such a young man; he’s shy about numbers, but rumor puts his advance in six figures. He teases portions on his personal blog, where he answers reader questions thoughtfully and with a certain gracious humility. The week before Christmas, what’s being called the first audaciously brilliant bildungsroman of his generation rolls out, to near-uniform acclaim and a number two spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Not bad for 26. And if the Brookes Babes — his army of devoted, mostly female fans — have their way, First Flush will be no flash in the pan.”
I’d been so circumspect with even my best friends about my relationship with Josh that nearly every one of them — the Jen(n)s, Caitlin and Mack — bought me a copy of First Flush for Christmas that year. Julian thought it was hysterical that everyone thought I needed the book in my library — one of the few things he saw eye-to-eye on with either Jen or Jenn.
“Come on, Liss,” he chided. “Aren’t you at the very least curious to see if you’re in there? I know I am. Now, we’ve enough copies to go around so let’s read it together and you can point out where you are.” I gave it a pass, fobbing him off with some line about feeling uncomfortable about the possibility of finding passages about our “hormonal gropings” (the phrase I used) and discussing them with my brand new husband at bedtime on Christmas Day. We’d just climbed into the bed we’d barely had the chance to break in as husband and wife — after the wedding ceremony, we’d lingered five days in Beverly Hills so Julian could spend time with his parents before they left for Christmas in St. Lucia.
“Sounds sexy to me, darling,” he countered with a wink. “I do like a nice grope of you. We could… recreate some of the saucier parts. You know, naughty schoolgirl needs a spanking, that sort of thing.” He chucked me under the chin and I turned away sharply.
“No. I’m not interested in reading it, Jules. Not with anyone, not ever.” I turned out the bedside light and pulled my silk eyeshade down — my regular signal to Julian that sex would not be an option that evening, no matter how many pretty words he used, no matter how he touched me. I tried to use it only when I meant it, as I wanted to keep the message clear.
Despite the eyeshade, I could still tell that he’d switched off his own light. Julian’s hand found my own under the duvet. “I’ve said something wrong but I don’t know what. There’s something you’re holding back, Liss. I’m not blind.” He pulled up my eyeshade and pressed a kiss on my cheek. “I don’t want to push you. But if there is something I should know, I’ll listen. As much or as little as you want to tell me.”
I didn’t reply, not at first. There were times like these, especially in the beginning of our marriage, when Julian was so attuned to the slightest shifts in my emotions that I felt my sense of a separate self bleeding into his. And when that emotion was fear or sadness or anger, Jules would assess the damage, formulate a plan and fix or mend or fight for me. The tender boy in him still lived to be useful to those whom he loved, and especially to protect me, his tender-hearted, too-sentimental sweetheart. His wife.
To tell him the entire truth in one evening would be impossible, too painful to serve up in one dish, but I wanted to confess the truth — or at least some of it — to someone who was not Rachel. I crooked my back into the curve of his body, the heat of his chest pulsing into my skin. Safe. This beautiful boy would keep me safe.
What Josh and I had wasn’t normal. It was agony, every day. He broke me like a child throws a china plate on the floor — just to see what happens. I was like a insect whose wings were pulled off by a cruel and curious boy. He took me and did whatever he wanted with me because I let him and I didn’t want him to stop because I loved him and I hated him and I feared him and Julian, Julian, I am still so afraid of him.
(I said I wasn’t ready to talk about what happened yet. I’m not.)
He didn’t speak as I sketched the year I’d spent as Josh’s girl but I could feel his body behind me flinch repeatedly, tensing over and over. One of his arms held me close, and his fist clenched and released, clenched and released. I didn’t get into too many specifics, but I explained how it was that I’d ended up unsupervised in Palo Alto on a sunny October Monday afternoon, and how the descent had started there.
“He’s not a good man,” I concluded, somewhat lamely. That was true, but it was a bit of an understatement.
I let Julian rant for a while, watched his shadow as he paced around the room, gritting out threats of retribution. “I’ll destroy him. We’re going to sue. We’re going to get this piece of shit removed from the planet, and his life will be over. In the morning, we’re going to that… who’s that woman lawyer that takes these kind of cases?”
“Gloria Allred? God, no. I’m not suing him. It was over a long time ago, and I just don’t want to think about him. I never want to see him again, Jules. Not in court, not anywhere. Please don’t put me through this.” I turned on my bedside light again — Julian had thrown his new dressing gown on over his nakedness, and was now looking furiously for something under the pile of presents we’d opened earlier that evening.
“Laptop, Liss, where’s my laptop? I need to see what this arsehole looks like so I’ll know whose face to break when I get to New York.” My brand new La Perla teddy sailed over his shoulder in a cascade of chiffon as he continued the hunt, unearthing a copy of the book beneath the pile of Saks Fifth Avenue boxes and Hermes scarves. Julian jabbed a finger at Josh’s author photo on the back flap of the dust jacket and read the author bio to me.
“‘Joshua K. Brookes was born and raised in beautiful downtown Burbank, California, but now makes his home in exotic Brooklyn, like every other striving millennial. A doomed chase after the one that got away brought him to Europe, where he learned to like blood sausage, love Real Madrid, and accept that sometimes even if you get the girl, you might not be able to keep her. Josh is a 2006 graduate of Yale College and received his MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. His favorite song is the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” and yes, his eyes really are that color. First Flush is his first novel.’” Julian spat the last part out before flinging the book at the bedroom door. He missed and managed only to knock a bottle of my hand lotion off the oak bookcase.
I let Jules get his rage out, hurl invective against every wall and surface in that room. As much as I wanted his fury to be about the pain I’d endured without much complaint, I was aware even then that my violation was his violation. It reflected poorly on him if we didn’t pursue some sort of action against Josh, he argued. If we just leave it, how will it look if the truth ever comes out? What kind of a husband would people think Julian was? (It was always about Jules, even when it wasn’t about him at all.)
I didn’t interrupt him as he stalked in and out of our bedroom, listened as he prowled up and down the slightly creaking oak stairs leading to the ground floor, thankful we’d agreed not to have our housekeeper live with us. This was my filthiest of laundry, and given Josh’s growing profile, I couldn’t risk having a stray word reach the ears of a stranger. Given Julian’s reaction, I wasn’t even sure I could trust him not to drag the stains out into the public eye.
By the time he prowled back in the room, I’d climbed back under the duvet, hoping to lure him out of further discussion. If that meant letting him have sex with me, I was prepared – I knew from our years together that it was an effective way of stemming uncomfortable conversations, at least until after a refractory sleep. He ignored me when I patted his side of the bed and crooked a finger at him, wrinkling his nose with what looked like disgust.
“How can you even think about sex right now, Liss?” Julian stopped at the foot of the bed and stared at me. “Who else knows about what happened?”
“Only Rachel. She figured it out, or at least that something was wrong when nobody else was paying attention.” This was true – Rachel was still living at home with us during her unofficial gap year, though she’d been forced into getting a job at Abercrombie & Fitch after my dad dropped the bombshell that her allowance would dry up if she wasn’t going to college. In my opinion, the tiny shirts she had to wear for her job looked obscene stretched across her chest, but it wasn’t like she wasn’t already wearing their clothes in her off hours. She was just paid now to look slutty, which was fine by her. “It keeps me off the pole,” she joked to my mom, which they laughed about, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t actually a joke.
“What the fuck were all your supposed best friends doing, then? I’d have thought Jenn would have castrated him with her bare hands. And that lunkheaded Sean, he’s always watched you too closely for my liking. Why weren’t they paying attention?”
It truly was an excellent question, with an answer I am learning only now not to be ashamed of. “I am very good at hiding things.”
Hiding things is second nature to me – it’s my way of controlling how others see me. I’d rather be seen as ordered and orderly, bright and optimistic, not cramped and small and fearful. And the other week as I stacked our library books behind the front door to my little studio in Berkeley, before I made that phone call to Julian, I knew that soon there would be more I would have to reveal about what happened with Josh. But this time, I’d be forced to drag the past into the blinding light of the present before Alex. I could trust Julian to keep controlled through money Josh’s insistent pursuit of what I still have of his; I can still trust Jules, I suppose, if only in this one regard.
Alex and Josh and Julian are all men who struggle with control. There, I’ve said it. If I’ve found one thread that passes through all three of these loves, it’s that each totters on a fulcrum, nearly tipping over into losing the reins, sometimes dropping them on purpose, through spite or desire or anger. For Alex, it’s control of his blackest moods, like he doesn’t believe he deserves to be happy. For Julian, it’s control of the world around him, forever seeking to bend the outside world into obeying his command through the liberal application of money. And for Josh, it’s control of his sexual appetites, of his desire to keep women in the place where they belong: beneath him.
When I tell Alex – and I know I must, at last – my own control of my past will be lost. And I can’t trust that he won’t lose control himself, turning that little cloud, his near-constant companion, back from grey to black. While Julian could be trusted to keep this secret, Alex will fling it open to the world to settle the score if he believes he must.
All change now in the new year, in the new city, in the new home. All change.
***
There’s much more to this – when I started to write, it mushroomed, became unfeasibly long, as it seems it always does when I start to write of Josh. Fitting, that speaking of an author would require quite so many words. As I post, Alex and I are one sleep away from our move from Berkeley to Santa Monica. Too soon, too soon. I’ll miss my little studio with the sleeping nook and the too-short Murphy bed and the blonde-wood kitchenette. I’ll miss the quiet mornings with my coffee and my Kindle in the green Adirondack chair, the cool evenings around the fire pit with Al as we dined on roast chicken and green olives and a snappy Alvarinho. I’ll miss the place I loved and let myself be loved, where I staked out the bounds of a life on my own terms, not those of some man.
I’ll pick up with the other half of this from Santa Monica when we’re settled – with as much to do this coming week as I have, there will be some comfort to myself that the very most painful writing I’ve done on this (so far, so much more, so much worse) is consigned to words I’ve already forced myself to scrawl. I must finally write as well of what happened at the wedding itself, and how it was that I came to have Lady Fennella Dysart’s Bracelet of Submission around my wrist.The words will come – I’ve never lacked those in written form, even if I’ve often stopped them passing over my lips. The act of writing is safer – and what I have of Josh’s, what he seeks now, is kept very, very safe.
meandering again 