Half a Life: A Memoir (11 page)

And nodding went around the circle again.

Part of reunions is reenacting the whirl of departure over and over. Every few minutes at the bar somebody
would make a sloshy toast and then a dramatic exit: hugs, complicated handshakes, punching email addresses into cell phones. We’d become used to one another again and were saying goodbye again.

I don’t even know how I’d gotten Kim and her friends discussing the accident. Ten years on, talking about it remained a crackling horror. Probably, just by acting weird, I’d shown myself stained by the blemish of it. Whatever private anxieties we endure are, of course, never really private. Our own dissembling behavior guarantees their eternal, public return.

“Thanks,” I said. “But it’s just—” And why couldn’t I let it drop? All they’d done was agree to try to buck me up. I wanted to shout:
Come on, someone died!

“Okay!” one of Kim’s friends said, clapping once to ring in a change of subject.

The nodding petered out. I was aware of people’s hair no longer being near my eyes. And it felt as if the music suddenly got louder again. The moment had lifted its gates from around us.

“Thank you,” I said, “all of you.”

“Don’t sweat it.” Kim tilted her thin, savvy face. I never want to talk about this again, her expression said.

The social-approval me—like the smoke that Kim had earlier waved from my face—seemed to just go
poof!

And now I was the one gushing my way down the bar, handshaking, hugging, giving out my business card, getting it confused with other people’s, so that a few times
the card I gave out was someone else’s and we had to reexchange. Maybe some friendships had been relit here, but I doubted it. What was said between this group who had been the stars of each other’s lives had been said already, or wouldn’t ever be said.

The bald dude I’d stood next to in the reunion hall was moping in a corner: hand around a plastic cup, beer slobbering down his knuckles. This guy looked handsome in a diminishing way. Ignore all the scalp and some excess under the chin and he could still have been eighteen. He kept staring at the mirror behind the taps, and that’s where our eyes caught.

He raised his nose, a quick and wordless
What’s up
. He was one of the people who’d been remembered by no one, and I thought to give him a backslap, learn his name, but that felt false to me, too. We face-gestured at each other a second time. And next (because life isn’t any more afraid of cliché than we are) I jostled out the door and saw a good friend of Celine’s. This guy had maybe even been her boyfriend: part of Melanie Urquhart’s clique.

He was talking close with arrogant lips to some people I had barely known even back when. His hair was neat as a haiku. And everything seemed just as it had with Melanie ten years before. The guy showed me a rigid, squint-eyed nod. I paused, my cheeks went warm; I scuttled off to my car. I hated that moment: I was angry at the pause, angry at my legs. I had neither sauntered right over to say hi (
This is behind me
) nor kept moving with my head up (
You think the wrong thing about me, and it doesn’t matter
). Maybe this is as near to time travel as we can know. Not the sort that undoes events, but the situations (the same faces, words, and gestures; the same internal responses) that bring back former selves. Everything between past and present hadn’t disappeared but grown incredibly slim, a wall between now and before that seemed to occupy no space at all. I was the person I had been. This guy was who he had been. Someone all of us used to know was long dead. And the person who’d killed her was making his way home, after pointedly not ordering a single alcoholic drink because he didn’t want anyone to see him and have DUI thoughts.

Four years later. It was after 1 a.m., the window cracked open. Breeze and quiet. The empty platform of a night, waiting for the next day to roll in.

“What’s on your mind?” Susannah was asking.

We’d just moved in together. I’d climbed out of bed, walked to the kitchen.

Susannah said, “How often do you think about it?” She was rubbing her cheeks awake. “So I’m right, aren’t I? The car crash.”

“Probably less than once a day,” I said. “I don’t know.”

The accident still turned me shy. She came up to face me. I said, “I guess once a week, maybe.”

We’d been together a pretty long while, and by now could decipher the intonation of the glance. “I’m just asking,” she said.

“That’s a lot less than I used to think about it,” I said. It was shyness not unlike the feeling you get in classroom dreams about being unprepared for the surprise oral exam. I said, “Why ‘just asking’? Do I sound touchy?”

“You still use ‘once a day’ as a point of reference? How often did you used to think about it?” She moved to the kitchen table. “Not touchy, Darin—it’s just, you never bring it up.”

Susannah’s mix is innocent and hardheaded; she settles on a position without worry, and stays put.

I squinted and grimaced my authentic surprise. “I can’t
believe
it’s down to once a week now.”

A garbage truck blustered past: clang and rattle across a sleeping street.

Relationships are physics. Time transforms things—it has to, because the change from
me
to
we
means clearing away the fortifications you’ve put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I had started riding Einstein’s famous theoretical bus. Here’s my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you’re riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you’ll actually live through less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But when you’re
on
that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of world out those rhomboidal coach-windows, the same trip will take just twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It’s hard to fathom. But I think it’s exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it’s just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems no time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship—when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes—do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics. It had been four years since my
ten-year reunion. I did math in my head about Celine all the time. I’d struck her bicycle when I was eighteen. I was now thirty-two: closing in on a decade and a half since the accident. I’d entered adulthood sensing Celine with me. I’d entered romantic life sensing Celine with me. The person inside the bus, ignoring the stopwatch that measured years, had my teenage face.

Discussing the accident with Susannah now, I felt the brain-hesitation, the sudden focus you get before a life shifts.

“I think,” she said, dropping into a seat at the table, “we need to discuss it.”

I sat, too.

Susannah kept talking. Asking did I think of going to a therapist ever—is there something you need that
I
can do? We’d recently ratcheted up our commitment, and this was night-speak, pledged allegiance; it hardly mattered what she said, more that she was taking the time to say it. Really, honey, have you considered therapy, which is something I can help you with.

“Hard to believe that it’s down to just once a week now,” I repeated. Was the decreased frequency of my thinking about Celine a good thing or a bad thing? “It sounds shitty out of my mouth,” I said.

“Not at all,” she said, lowering eyelids, talking fast, crumbs of reticence.

Whenever I got tired of—not tired of; self-conscious and immature about—examining my own motivations, an
untrusting part of me examined
her
motivations. I could see calculation in Susannah that she was unaware of. (Or could I?) It was in her interest, as well, not to linger at a moment when I questioned my goodness. Maybe it would start up her doubts about me. And nobody wants to go through that.

“Well,” she was saying, “it’s like what’s the name of that term? No, it seems strange you’d want to deal with this by yourself.” Her forehead made its crinkles; she crunched her eyebrows together. There was something both fussy and loving in this. “Survivor’s guilt.
That’s
the term,” Susannah said.

She got up and went to the fridge.

“Really, Darin, what about just talking to somebody?” she said. “I mean a new … someone.”

I waved her off with a gesture that meant
phooey
. She’d heard about my day with the Shrink, that rough, wet afternoon.

“I really question your decision not to try,” she said, in a darker voice.

Whoa. I couldn’t believe it. Was she going to let me down? Was I going to tell myself she’d let me down, just so I could avoid talking about it?

She lifted her eyebrows, to say that she was looking for some response. My brows frowned out an answer: I have no response, because your idea’s unwelcome. It’s a totally unwelcome idea. All the New York street noise was getting blown right back in the window.

Susannah turned, and was now reaching and digging something out of the refrigerator.

I crumpled back in my chair distractedly, rudely. “I don’t know,” I said in a mock-tired voice. “Why would you push this?”

Susannah pretended she hadn’t caught my tone. Outside, there was wide 9th Street, the livid brick of Methodist Hospital, then Prospect Park’s great isolating meadow. My cheeks started guiltily to burn. Was it really down to just once a week now?

Susannah came away from the fridge holding a pitcher of water. She walked to the counter, poured out two glasses, then handed me one. “Well,” she said.

I had waited a long time, knowingly or not, for this moment. Things seemed to be falling away between Susannah and me.

“Well,” I said.

This all must read as communicative impotence. But because of my shared perspective with her, and all the couple-impressions we’d logged—all our new knowing—I’d gained a kind of microtonal purchase on hearing that “well” of Susannah’s, just as I bet she had on mine. Hers carried two meanings, I thought:
If you choose not to try therapy, I’ll still be here for you—but you have to recognize that it isn’t your issue alone anymore
. All this felt approximate and submarine, as if we’d both gone deep into the tide of this moment. It was a larger and more complete moment than simply the words that were like whitecaps on the surface of it. All moments are like that. But the rare thing is to have a clear sense of this depth, and to know another person is sensing it, too. Susannah now gave a resolute, palms-up
hand gesture that meant, I thought, even more supra-lingual stuff—something about her character, about her manners and doggedness. (The message of
my
“well” was simple: Sorry for having been a jerk a minute ago.)

“When I figure out what I think and feel about all this,” I told her, “I’ll talk about it with you.”

She brought that gesturing palm to my cheek.

“Anyway, I think I’m getting there,” I said. Susannah said okay. Her hand slipped from my face. We went back to bed. That was it.

In fiction classes—or in the novelist-as-humble-cobbler image,
writing workshops
—you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence. It’s a story, it’s tidy. At the end, the hero finds himself standing under just the right tree, reaches up without quite meaning to, and plucks down just the right fruit.

But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare: there is no walk, there is no fated grab. You try every fruit, or forget there even are trees, and wander from forest to forest, losing sight of any destination. The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you’re lucky you end up walking again through a life where you’re never called on to do too much noticing.

So there isn’t any single moment I can point to that scored
when I began to feel better
. I think my job here is simply to dredge it all up, to offer a lumpily dutiful telling of my own life. This is what guilt is like, this is what grief is like, this is how a life forms: when you
can’t
ignore, when it wraps itself around one event like a vine clutching a rock. Every direction the vine takes will be determined by that
stone. The growth is what you see. But if you look farther down, what you find is the rock.

There were times, in the middle of the night, when I’d come awake and wonder which of us would die first. Cold air above the humidity of the bed, Susannah’s mouth open and fishily helpless next to mine, and I’d think:
Me
. Maybe this was more than a trick of the mind. Maybe this was Celine. Celine with me, her words hard, posthumous, and clear: You, Darin—
you
are going to die first.

I got through my twenties and early thirties only by relying on one thought as hard as I could: Celine had committed suicide. She’d committed suicide through me. I was no more responsible than is the bullet that comes out of the chamber. Etc.

Without those blinders—and the thought was a blinder; it allowed me to move her parents, her funeral, what I’d been thinking about in the car the second before I encountered her body, out of the frame—without those blinders I wouldn’t have made it.

That certainty got me through the first ten years. I nurtured the idea, watered it, saw it ripen, stared at it. Wherever I was, I could summon it.

There are different brands of ignorance: the static of perplexity, the spun silk of denial. People are too hard on denial. Shrinks have theories to confirm, patients to command into the breach. But a person has only a problem, a souvenir, a life to shoulder through. We need to tell ourselves whatever is necessary. I do think real analysis would have let in unsafe doubts too soon, like unlatching the great wooden horse and then just standing aside as all the sandals and swords ambled past.

My talk with Susannah, with its little aha—
Hey, I’ve started to think about the crash a lot less often than I had been! What does that mean?
—allowed the truth to begin taking on more shape than I could have handled before. Okay, why? It is worth considering why. The accident and its aftermath became not simply mine but part of the relationship. Celine was a way we communicated. What a horrible fate for a ghost. She was absorbed into the thousands of things that were part of us. Once upon a time, this was what I’d wanted to do with those two unfamiliar girls on the median strip, and also in front of my classmates at graduation. I’d gotten Susannah to see the crash as the most dramatic and basic part of me—which it had been, but maybe wasn’t any longer. And, certainly, I had tortured myself for feeling nothing special about it (because the official moments of grief handed me not my own emotions, but something fixed and sanctioned, and what I mainly felt was guilt about that). All the same, this awfulness remained part of who I was. And now who I was had become part of who Susannah was. The crash was no longer something that made me half a person.