Early on in our relationship, Anna had said that her attraction to me made her so nervous that all her spit dried up. It was a mistake to let me know how much she liked me. I couldn’t handle the responsibility—Anna’s feelings for me were things I would always hold against her. Every gesture of love I found fault with. When she tended to me when I was sick, I berated her for buying generic medicine instead of name brand. I constantly accused her of being sheltered. In truth, she was; she’d been raised in an upper-class family, her father an intellectual property lawyer, her mother an art history professor at Brown with inherited wealth. But her privilege ended there. She’d suffered abuse herself, which I only knew about because she’d once broken down and told the group during treatment. She never discussed it with me, and I never asked.

The day she called to tell me she’d gotten into law school at Columbia, I panicked. The Upper West Side was where the professor and I would meet for our coffee dates and lunches—activities that I thought might lead to her Riverside Drive apartment. The right response to Anna’s news was to jump up and down and squeal, take her out to a celebratory dinner, offer congratulations, at the very least. Instead, I breathed audibly into the phone and asked, “Does this mean you’re going to start hanging out at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, too?”

Anna hung up and avoided me for a week. I went crazy, calling dozens of times, leaving desperate, incomprehensible messages that I wept my way through. I was terrified at the thought of not having her, and I mistook the pain of losing control for love and compassion. I finally rode the ferry across the harbor to Staten Island, where I had never once visited. At her doorstep I held her for as long as I could. I invited her to live with me in Brooklyn, knowing it was a bad idea. What we needed was to break up. But I just couldn’t stand to be without her, entirely alone without the possibility of anyone else.

On her doorstep, Anna nodded through tears. “I’ll move in,” she said, then smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Someone needs to tame you.” I felt my heart sink at the fatalism of her reasoning. Yet we laughed and kept holding on to each other. Besides, we both knew it was too late: we had already started to shatter.

•

Maybe I didn’t want the professor to end up like the real people in my life. The people I kept things from because I couldn’t face them myself. Maybe she offered the possibility of escape.

Chapter 11

11