In Spite of Everything (11 page)

But now, as I reflect on my behavior, I wonder:
Was
I, on some subterranean level, trying to string guys along? Maybe I did unconsciously intend to cultivate an air of mystery, knowing that only the most determined—and therefore potentially the most worthy—would answer the call. If so, it certainly wouldn’t make me unique. It’s a typical female sexual strategy across species. The female displays herself at the appropriate time, lets the guys show off and duke it out, and then chooses the mate who has demonstrated the most impressive quotient of power and success. But measures of power and success are, obviously, subjective, and to me, the qualifiers were not how good-looking you were, how rich you were, if you were the quarterback on the football team, if you were funnier and smarter than everyone else—or even if you had
all
these things going for you. For me, and for girls like me, you did not have to be perfect in and of yourself. You had to be perfect for
me
.

The order was this: Be my father, best friend, and love machine all in one person. Make me the absolute center of the universe, the most adored, the most desired, the most fascinating creature ever to have inhaled a single breath on earth. Annul the past; you have no past. Your life began when you first glimpsed me. In return, you are Everything.

This is self-centered, unfair, implausible, unhealthy. Indeed, such consuming needs are the ugly psychic offspring of the narcissistically wounded, so the psychiatric literature tells us. Denied attention early in life, we inhale it as adults. Indeed, we see the objects of our affection as very young children see their parents and want their parents to see them:
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end
.

That’s how we feel, even if we’re loath to admit it or even countenance the thought of it. Even as a teenager, I hated that in myself. But forcing all my eggs into one hapless little basket seemed like the only option, or at least
my
only option. To suggest to me that I
should just go out with people “for fun” would have been like telling an alcoholic to have just “a drink.” The alcoholic does not want
a
drink. The alcoholic wants thirty drinks, and because of this, she knows it is better to have no drinks at all rather than to attempt, and fail at, one or two (or three or six). So it was with me and guys. Better to be completely abstinent than to date casually.

So, as eager as I was to be assigned a walk-on part in it, the whole Brat Pack ethos remained utterly foreign to me. The adolescent romance was not, for me, about secretly making out behind the gym with the misunderstood, angry punk-rocker guy and hiding it from your cheerleader friends. Neither was it about being the school slut going to the homecoming dance with the sweet nebbish from AP chemistry. There was only one thing, in capital letters: LOVE. Love was
everything
. It wasn’t just a Springsteen-born yearning to know love is wild and real (though that isn’t bad). Love had to be more than that. Love had to make a permanent dent in that wireframe grid of the universe. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
Exactly
.

Thus courtship became highly distorted. I felt too internally wounded to risk playing the field to find the right person. I had to develop wolflike attention and the discipline of a sniper. It would be easy to be distracted. Certain people I liked a lot; they were funny, smart, cute, interested in the things I was. But if I could not smell on them that particular pheromone that signaled to me that they had similar genes, then considering anything even resembling an intimate connection with them was a nonchoice. Suffice it to say, there were few choices.

For a period of time in high school, I attempted to anesthetize myself under the numbing mask of cocaine and sundry other drugs. It more or less did the trick in that regard. It did not, unsurprisingly, in others. When I found myself, at nineteen, living on a crack corner in North Philadelphia with a boyfriend (the first post-Jai) who had
honestly tried to do his best by me but with whom I was nonetheless headed down a terrible path, I left and hurled myself at work. I got a job as a reporter at a construction newspaper in Philadelphia. I was very aware of how alone I was. At this point, my mother and I were estranged; my rebellious behavior with that boyfriend had compelled her, probably prudently, to let me go. I’m not sure that my father knew or thought about where I was. I remember walking alone across an empty lot in North Philadelphia that winter, wondering: Who will identify my body if I die?

I got an apartment share, had a smattering of brief and sordid dalliances (which couldn’t count as dates but rather hair-tearingly shameful drunken hookups), but mainly I worked and worked and worked. I enrolled at Temple University, for which I paid myself; although it had been specified in my parents’ divorce agreement that my father would pay college tuition, he had reneged on the contract. I saved up enough money to sue him, but we were able to settle out of court. I had had no contact with him for more than a year, but I called to tell him that I had applied and gotten in to Columbia. He was silent on the other end of the line. “Good going, Suze,” he finally said, quietly. “You haven’t done it with any help from me, that’s for damn sure.” I asked him if he would like to help now. He told me to tell his secretary where to send the check; then he hung up.

I worked hard. I transferred to Columbia and was on the dean’s list every semester, and I was proud. I did not hang out with any particular group. All the psychic horsepower I had expended in my teens into thrusting myself into someone’s orbit found a new course in grinding intellectual toil and massive output. I was a machine. I felt durable, self-sufficient. I took nine classes in my final semester of college; all A’s. My mother and I began talking on the phone, and by and by we came to enjoy each other. After a period of stealth dating, she got engaged to Joseph, whom I liked on the spot and trusted shortly thereafter—unprecedented for me. It was almost surreal how
good he was: brilliant, prudent, ethical, kind. I was so happy for my mother; I was overjoyed for Ian and me. (I still am, twenty years later.) But my father continued to rip me up.

My father came to visit me once while I was at Columbia, during one of his stints of trying to get sober. He came uptown to my dorm, having made a presentation on Wall Street. When the elevator doors opened, he was unimpeachably dressed, as usual. He stepped out with his briefcase in one hand, cradling on his shoulder with the other a giant cardboard box of O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beer. “Howdy, there, Suze,” he puffed, and blew past me into the hallway. He kicked open the door to my room, plunked the box down, sat on the end of my bed, wrenched open the cardboard flap in one ear-splitting rip, grabbed a bottle, twisted off the hissing top, and chugged the whole thing down in two seconds flat. He placed the bottle politely back in the box, pulled out another one, and chugged it, too. He nabbed a third and sat there gazing at the empty bottle for a moment. Then looked up at me, still standing in the doorway to my room, and grinned. “Well, old pal,” he said, “the word is you’ve gotta drink about a case of this stuff to get anywhere.” I laughed until my stomach hurt. Then I excused myself to the bathroom and vomited. I knew he would end up drinking again. He did, landing in his first rehab right before Ian’s boarding school graduation, though he did manage to show up, looking wan and haunted, saying little.

Just after I graduated from college, Dad took me by surprise by asking me to visit him in New Mexico, where he’d bought a piece of property in Arroyo Seco, near Taos, with two casitas on it. He was still married to his second wife (the former secretary), but their union had been all but disemboweled: booze, brutality, bone-cracking hatred. This place was his refuge, where he could go to paint, to look at the mountains. Dad was in a great mood when I got there. To pay the mortgage, he said, he had rented out the lesser of the casitas to a “pack of do-gooders” hailing from Vermont. But there was a caveat: “I made it abundantly clear that if I sniff out any illicit drugs, I’m calling the cops and donating a grand to the Widows and Orphans
Fund to make sure that they take these little pricks on a one-way trip to the bottom of the Rio Grande.” One day, however, he’d noticed that the license plate on the doomed renters’ VW bus read biko, as in Stephen Biko, the slain South African civil rights activist. Not reading it correctly, he had perked up right away, and he strode over to the Vermonters, who were harvesting chili peppers in the front yard. My dad smiled widely, thumbing at the license plate. “Well, what do you know?” he chortled. “Booster Engine Cut Off!” I don’t know if I have laughed so hard since. (After my dad died, the Peter Gabriel song “Biko,” spookily, seemed to be playing everywhere. Or maybe I just heard it that way. “The outside world is black and white / with only one color: dead.”)

After I had been at the casita for a few days, Dad paid me to go into town to eat by myself. He floated this gesture as a treat. It was an empty bluff. He wanted to drink the way he wanted to drink: alone. When I came back, he was passed out in a deck chair sitting behind an enormous telescope.

When I started my first job, in May 1991, I issued strict marching orders to myself: Work, work, work. Don’t look up.

I
met Cal in the summer of 1991 at our first job after college, fact checkers for the now defunct
PC Magazine
. How I hated that job! I had a crushing chip on my shoulder: I couldn’t believe that I had worked so hard to end up at a goddamned computer magazine with a bunch of loser computer people. I had done everything right! I had networked with and sent my résumé to editors at the major news, literary, and lifestyle magazines in New York (though with the first Bush recession in full swing, hiring freezes were entrenched). I had nurtured an ongoing correspondence with the then editor of
The New Yorker
, Bob Gottlieb, who showed me inexplicable kindness by responding to my fulsome notes on his manual typewriter and did his best to connect me with an entry-level editorial position, which
was ultimately stymied by his ouster and the subsequent installation of the editorial impresario Tina Brown. In the end, the only job that offered to pay me a living wage, along with health insurance, was
PC Magazine
(the magazines for which I wanted to work—
Harper’s
,
The New York Review of Books
—did not, which made working there a possibility only for smart kids bankrolled by their parents). So there I was, sullen and contemptuous, but also taking my career extremely seriously and studying office politics intently. I was like that self-absorbed, self-loathing, ineffectual, plotting guy in Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from Underground
.

Cal, however, did not give a crap about any of that. He made this plain at our first introduction, in which he leaned back in his cubicle’s office chair, drummed carelessly on his desk with a pencil, and allowed as how he had not only never networked with editors but didn’t even really care, or know that much, about journalism. He had majored in religion and philosophy and was a hard-drinking member of the fraternity Beta Theta Pi. Having no clear idea of what he’d actually like to do for a career, he’d simply stuffed copies of his résumé into a few dozen envelopes addressed to “Human Resources” at various newspapers and magazines, gone on a handful of interviews, and taken the job at
PC Magazine
based on a vague sense that computers were “going to be important.” He’d stay at the job, he said, until he got bored. “I told them that in my interview,” he said. I was first dumbfounded, then seriously irritated.
Arrogant, not funny, not smart, frat guy
, I noted.
He’ll be fired before summer is out
.

But, of course, I was wrong—as I daresay I have been about most important things in my life. In the first week of work, he appeared at the opening to my cubicle, panicked, to ask if I had any Windex. He needed it, he said, to disinfect a floppy disk that he suspected had a virus. I stared at him. I would come to recognize the look he had on his face then as his comic signature: a frozen deer-in-the-headlights expression, with an undercurrent of self-mockery. As I sat chomping on a giant liverwurst sandwich (which, he would later tell me, made
him fall head over heels then and there), I mused: This guy is kinda pretty
funny
.