View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
JE: I’ve had similar major shifts in my worldview, which I attribute to multiple causes, but mostly to sobriety and doing the things that it takes to be sober (“outside my comfort zone” things). I’m grateful for that. While I still slip into negative thinking, mostly I am able to find joy and wonder in small things, like a positive interaction with one of my students or even the seasons changing. Sometimes I think how funny it is that my life is so wholesome now, and how much better it is to seek a wholesome life, rather than the life of chaos that I avoided personal responsibility for because I thought of myself as having an “artistic temperament” or whatever. (Which I guess is still true, given my emotional volatility, but at least now I attempt to regulate it.) Sometimes I think I’m ridiculous because I’ve gotten into sober clichés like meditation and exercise. I think it’s cute/funny that you’ve turned to weightlifting and Jesus for similar reasons. How do you feel about being a sober cliché?
He pulls a piece of paper from his jacket. It’s folded down the middle with crisp exactness; Mitch has always been an attentive person. He begins to read in a low whisper, his voice shaky but rehearsed. His letter includes words like unhappiness and change and finding our true selves. It does not include words like abortion. When he starts talking about the past, and the importance of old friendships, I tune out and study his face. Its worn, pallid, large, raccoon eyes may not signify sleeplessness but sure as hell suggest it. There’s gray in his stubble, too, and not just here or there. He’s miserable. Of course he is.
My eyes slide over to the game on the television, and not only because Mitch’s kicker is lining up for a field goal. When I look back, he’s stopped reading from his letter.
“You ever cheat?” he asks.
It’s a sudden question. It’s also one he possesses the answer to.
“Julie,” I say. “You remember all that.” I pause and narrow my eyes to shards. “We were 17.”
I hate Mitch, I know now that I always will. But deep down? Deep down, I understand him. That hurts more than turning against a friend from the past ever could.
“Just her?” he asks. “That’s it?”
“Yes,” I lie.
Once. A couple times. On girlfriends, sure, but that doesn’t change the hurt, only its scale. I have to forgive myself, I think, watching Mitch fold up his paper speech and ask for another round. But I don’t have to forgive you.
oooooo
My mind returns to Mitch and my sister. He and Ashley got together so long ago I don’t remember introducing them but they both swear I did. I gave a sloppy, immemorable speech at the wedding that referenced their shared passion for itineraries. Now they’re getting divorced. Ignoring it until you can’t is the only reasonable human response. The clichést of clichés: Mitch got caught banging his paralegal. He swore he’d ended it, then got caught again. Ashley kicked him out of their Capitol Hill apartment and served him with papers. It splattered public two weeks into the season. Another group chat was formed, sans Mitch. Unfair to boot him for his personal life, went one argument. More unfair to Thrope to not boot him, went the counter. The latter won out because Ali argued it, and she’s both our alpha and our lawyer. So we’d play out the rest of the year, and find a replacement in the offseason. Could I have quit the league? Made a quiet act of loud solidarity with my sister? Yes. But I didn’t. Mitch put us in this position. Not me.
JOEY FELT THAT his romance with Daisy might ruin his life, but that didn’t stop him. He liked the idea in fact. It had been a long time since he’d felt his life was in danger of further ruin, and it was fun to think it was still possible.
Daisy had never been to an opera. “Will there be people in breastplates and headdresses with horns?” she asked. “Will there be a papier-mâché dragon and things flying through the air?” She looked hard at the curtained stage.
“Probably not,” he said. “I think this production is coming from a German Impressionist influence, which means they’ll eschew costumes and scenery as much as possible. They’re coming from an emphasis on symbolism and minimal design. It was a reaction against the earlier period when—”
“I want to see a dragon flying through the air.” She took a pink mint from the box of opera mints he’d bought, popped it into her mouth and audibly sucked it. She shifted it to her cheek and asked, “Why do you like the opera?”
oof this hurts
SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. Perhaps her body tilted too far forward as she walked, perhaps her jacket made her torso look bulky in contrast to her calves and ankles, which were probably skinny. She felt like an object unraveling in every direction. In anticipation of their meeting, she had not been able to sleep the night before; she had therefore eaten some amphetamines and these had heightened her feeling of disintegration.
He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.”
He thought: There is something wrong. Her passivity was pleasing, as was her silence and her willingness to place herself in his hands. But he sensed another element present in her that he could not define and did not like. Her tightly folded hands were nervous and repulsive. Her public posture was brittle, not pliant. There was a rigidity that if cracked would yield nothing. He was disconcerted to realize that he didn’t know if he could crack it anyway. He began to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps the weekend would be a disaster.
They spent some moments regarding the people around them. They were short on material. There were only a few customers in the bar; most of them were men in suits who sat there seemingly enmeshed in a web of habit and accumulated rancor that they called their personalities, so utterly unaware of their entanglement that they clearly considered themselves men of the world, even though they had long ago stopped noticing it. Then a couple walked through the door, carrying luggage. The woman’s bright skirt flashed with each step. The man walked ahead of her. He walked too fast for her to keep up. She looked harried. Her eyes were wide and dark and clotted with makeup; there was a mole on her chin. He paused, as though considering whether he would stop for a drink. He decided not to and strode again. Her earrings jiggled as she followed. They left a faint trail of sex and disappointment behind them.
She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. The blue puffball thing unfurled itself before her with sickening power. It was the same image of him holding her and gazing into her eyes with bone-dislodging intent, thinly veiling the many shattering events that she anticipated between them. The prospect made her disoriented with pleasure. The only problem was, this image seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. She tried to think back to the time they had spent in her apartment, when he had held her and said, “You’re cute.” What had happened between then and now to so disappoint him?
She hadn’t yet noticed how much he had disappointed her.