Words

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

Six years ago last week, Dave posted that quote on my Facebook wall. Privately, so that only the two of us could see it.

The quote is by Joan Didion and I had told Dave that she is my favorite author. One night, looking for something romantic to say, he probably Googled Joan Didion quotes and found that one.  

We had just started dating and we went out a lot, to dinner, for drinks. I took the post to mean it the way Dave meant it, which is that the two of us had gone out together and that our lives had forever changed. For the better, he meant.

If Dave had read A Year of Magical Thinking, where the quote is from, he would have known that it is used by Didion to describe her husband's death. In painful detail, she writes about how the two sat down for dinner, what they were eating and drinking, what they were talking about. At one point, her husband stops speaking. She sees him, slumped over, silent, and, believing that he is choking, tries to move him so that she can do the Heimlich. He falls from his chair, hits his head on the table and lies motionless on the floor, blood pooling on the carpet. He is dead.

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

Still, I was flattered and moved. I thought that Dave seemed deep because he was quoting literature to me. And caring because he remembered the name of my favorite author. And romantic. I didn't think much about context or meaning. I didn't wonder about a person who mistakenly uses a quote about death to describe the beginning of a relationship. It strikes me now, as I read the quote again, that it does not seem positive, even without context. It is about something sudden and abrupt that wipes out all of that which came before. If you are looking for that in a new relationship, you aren't looking for love. Love isn't something that you can use to erase your past. It's not an excuse or an explanation for the bad things you've done or will do. And it can't help you outrun yourself.

I remember the night that Dave broke up with me, five and a half years later. The details used to pain me but they don't anymore. I remember sitting down for dinner, which is when I realized what he was about to do. I remember what we were eating and drinking. He had steak and beer and I had nothing. We weren't talking about anything because we weren't speaking. Dave was concentrating on his meal, cutting his steak into pieces, and I was wondering how he could eat at a time like this.

The end was like the death scene Joan Didion describes, Dave slumped over on the couch, crying as he spoke his parting words. Me, motionless, next to him.

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

And, sometimes, it's better that way.

Light

After Dave left me, my friend Chris invited me to come stay with him in Charleston, S.C. It would be good for me to get away, he said. And I agreed. I decided to go at the end of October, around Halloween, because that's my favorite holiday.

I met Chris years before at a party on the Lower East Side. He was still living in New York then. Dave introduced us and we bonded immediately because we both worked for the same chef but in different restaurants. After that, we often ran into each other because he and Dave knew a lot of the same people, DJs, party promoters, musicians. I worked part-time then and it gave me a lot of freedom to go out so I spent an inordinate amount of time at concerts, in bars and going to parties, surrounded by people who, it seemed, never had to wake up early for work. It's a lifestyle that, from time to time, I still miss. But seeing the same people at the same parties, drinking shitty gin mixed with soda night after night and waking up, vaguely hungover, at noon every day, becomes tiresome. And when the lights come on at the bar at 4 a.m. and you see your friends - maybe acquaintances is a better word - eyes wide, looking sweaty, worn and messy, you begin to long for the daytime.

I never quite fit into that world and so I sought out people I could relate to. There weren't many but Chris was one of them. We would find each other in the crowd and, sitting alone on a couch or perched on barstools, we would talk. When he became the chef at a wine bar in the East Village, he got me a job at the restaurant next door. Many nights, after I got off work, I would go to that wine bar and he would feed me bitter chocolate and sweet wine. I would watch him in the tiny open kitchen, always impressed by how quickly and deftly he cooked.

Once, Chris says, he came up to me at a party and told me that he thought I was the most beautiful girl in the room. I became awkward and, in his words, "ran away." I don't remember it. On another night, at yet another party, I propositioned his girlfriend. Thankfully, I don't remember that either.

I do remember the last time I saw Chris in New York before he left for his hometown, Charleston. We met downtown. He had his dog with him. We went to a bar where Chris knew the bartender and we drank together as his dog sat at our feet. Later, we walked slowly around the neighborhood and he told me about his breakup as he tried to keep his dog from lunging at passersby. We hugged goodbye in the middle of a sidewalk and I felt something more than sadness over the fact that Chris was leaving.

We stayed in touch, texting, talking on the phone. Chris got his life together, stopped partying, simplified his existence and got a good job. And I fell apart as my relationship slowly failed. When Dave finally left me, Chris knew, intuitively, that I needed to leave New York for a time, that getting fucked up and acting out was not the answer. After some animated discussions about all of the things we would do together in Charleston - in the sun, during the day - I excitedly booked a plane ticket. Then, I immediately became nervous and self-conscious. I called Chris, frazzled, and he reassured me that he wanted me to come.

In the weeks leading up to the trip, I allowed myself, sometimes, to think, cautiously, that, maybe, just maybe, something might happen. When my friends asked about my expectations, I would often say coyly, "Maybe," before saying more seriously, "No, I don't think he's interested." Still, I agonized over what I would wear, the things I would say, how I should act. I bought a half-assed, overly sexy Halloween costume that I never actually wore.

When my plane landed in Charleston, I beelined for an airport bathroom to redo my makeup, applying red lipstick and dark eyeliner. I wore a tight, lacy, black outfit. My hair was dyed turquoise. I put on oversized sunglasses to cover the dark circles under my eyes, which were more pronounced than usual because I hadn't slept the night before. I left the bathroom and saw Southern women in pastel dresses all around. Next to them, I looked like I was doing a walk of shame through an airport. I felt awkward, uncomfortable and conspicuous. I chalked it up to the fact that I was a New Yorker in a Southern city. My emotions were real but my reasoning was flawed.

I walked outside into the mid-morning sun. I looked across the airport parking lot at the palmetto trees and, beyond them, at the blue Southern sky. I stood on the sidewalk, waiting for Chris.

And I realized that I was tired of living in the dark.