An Obituary

I discovered recently that my first serious boyfriend, a man 13 years my senior, died in 2002. He met me when I was 21 and he was my age now. He died ten years later, married and, I hope, a changed man. He was not the changing kind.

He had the whiff of death about him, from his smooth, hairless, tan, runner’s skin to his unnaturally pressed, faded cargo pants. He had worn himself out with trying and bitterness and hiding it behind a too-hearty laugh and too-carefully folded laundry. He was not a handsome man, per se. He had long, deep lines running down his face, cut there by rivers of dry tears never wept for his childhood of being beaten with a belt and a free adulthood never seized. His smile broke across these lines, forcing them crooked. It was painful and unnatural to observe, the attempted derailment of determined grief. His smile revealed his gums, too much so. His brother and sister had the same unfortunate trait, inherited from their alcoholic father, as if years of baring their teeth had left its mark.

I thought, one Christmas away from him, that perhaps he would commit suicide. I berated myself brutally, as he would have done had he known. The silent suggestion of his death, the natural conclusion of all his implications, of his steady self-abuses, his denials of the flesh, his final sinking under the unbearable weight, terrified my younger self with its probability. I believed that, as my infidelity had proven to be the agonizing long and artificial end of our unsafe world, my unspoken thoughts damned us both, him to actual death, myself to premonition and therefore guilt in the act.

He hit me once, a retaliatory slap. I did not know if I should take it as abuse. He was determined in his belief that I had given him AIDS through an unconsummated one-night stand and another, less organized infidelity. Or so he called it: we were separated at the time, at his relentless insistence. (It would have been Ross and Rachel and their break if he had had a sense of humor.) In his world, everything was dim and out of focus, unlit by possibility. I could not focus there, could not tell his extremity from the dark that surrounded it. His judgment, like a kidnapper’s to its victim, was all that mattered. His reactions were without reason, seeping from some polluted spring whose source I would never locate and staunch. I tracked it, for lack of anything better to do in the gloom, to add purpose to our wandering, to deceive myself that there was anything but more night ahead, that the shroud might tear with enough sly light and the right weight.

He believed that the suffering of the church, mortification of the flesh, might save him from the demands of his own mind and the intrusion of the sun and the days ahead. He gave up sex for Lent one year, yelled at me for my temptations. I did lure him. It was my retaliation. He was my childhood nightmare made real, the duplicitous woodsman, the dancing stepmother, the dark woods, the sneaky wolf. His world demanded immersion, isolation, a sinking in his pages, few and ill-written though they were. My worst fears were realized: the world of men, of others, was indeed dark, sadistic, hopeless. The suspected innards of another were, after all, poisoned, rotting, stinking labyrinth of collapse and demise. I was absorbed whole into another unwelcome self, assumed it was my fate. He was my punishment and mission, smothering but energizing. As it turned out, thank God, my will to thrive was stronger than his rag of chloroform.

I played chess with him in the back of a U-Haul in the rain on the afternoon of one of his frequent moves. I won. He gave me gifts I could not afford to reciprocate. He left me notes folded into my clothes, written in his thin, all-capitals handwriting. He forced me to skate up endless hills when we went Rollerblading: to him, nothing was worth anything without adversity. I abandoned friends he disapproved of; I rested my head on the wall of my first apartment and wept from exhaustion. I pretended to write and strode away, breathing, to the only things that mattered to me more than him: a lucky job on a film, a class filled with broad thoughts. He despised me for my advantages while he railed against his own misfortunes. He was the first of the men who would hate me for the same fruits he had pursued. There was no wrong that was not someone else’s fault, that did not lead him to justified paralysis: he had been forced to wear shoes that were too small for him and there was no comfortable road.

I swore at him finally, in the parking lot of a storage area on the dismal outskirts of Philadelphia, the end point of yet another move. I yelled at the top of my voice, just for the exercise of it. He was not in the end scary, is not now. I believed for a time that the river of his misery ran deep, concealed depths unrevealed by the smooth surface. As I bathed and dove there, I stumbled in unrepentant shallows and cut my feet bloody. He was petty, jealous, spitting, childish. His stones overturned, his slopes climbed and conquered, he raged and furiously scribbled new outlines for our world. His monuments to the wrongs done him, constructed painfully over years, had to stand. He obsessively sharpened their edges, caretaker of his own misery.

The miracle is that we get better. The tragedy is that not all of us are saved. We are complicit in both our resurrection and our demise: created perfect yet free to fall. Hail, one of the fallen. No great mind o’erthrown, but I hope he rests in peace just the same.