David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons—when she worked in the development office—I’d go into her room, shut the door, lock it, and sit back in the swivel chair at her desk. She always left a window open. The late fall wind would be blowing the curtains around, and the Jupiter Symphony would always be on the little red record player on the floor. She often left wet shirts hanging all over the room; they’d ripple eerily in the wind. On the wall were a few calligraphic renderings of her own poetry. Her desk was always a mess, but her journal—a thick black book—was never very difficult to find.

I was nineteen years old and a virgin, and at first I read Rebecca’s journal because I needed to know what to do next and what she liked to hear. Every little gesture, every minor movement I made she passionately described and wholeheartedly admired. When we were kissing or swimming or walking down the street, I could hardly wait to rush back to her room to find out what phrase or what twist of my body had been lauded in her journal. I loved her impatient handwriting, her purple ink, the melodrama of the whole thing. It was such a surprising and addictive respite, seeing every aspect of my being celebrated by someone else rather than excoriated by myself. She wrote, “I’ve never truly loved anyone the way I love D. and it’s never been so total and complete, yet so unpossessing and pure, and sometimes I want to drink him in like golden water.” You try to concentrate on your Milton midterm after reading that about yourself.

Sometimes, wearing her bathrobe, she’d knock on my door in order to return a book or get my reaction to a paragraph she’d written or read. She’d wish me good night, turn away, and begin walking back to her room. I’d call to her, and we’d embrace—first in the hallway outside our doors, then soon enough in my room, her room, on our beds. I hadn’t kissed anyone since I was twelve (horrific acne throughout high school), so I tried to make up for lost time by swallowing Rebecca alive: biting her lips until they bled, licking her face, chewing on her ears, holding her up in the air and squeezing her until she screamed.

In her journal, she wrote that she’d never been kissed like this in her life and that she inevitably had trouble going to sleep after seeing me. I’d yank the belt to her bathrobe and urge her under the covers, but she refused. She actually said she was afraid she’d go blind when I entered her. Where did she learn these lines, anyway?

Shortly before the weather turned permanently cold, we went hiking in the mountains. The first night, she put her backpack at the foot of her sleeping bag—we kissed softly for a few minutes, then she fell asleep—but on the second night she put her backpack under her head as a pillow. Staring into the blankly black sky, I dug my fingers into the dirt behind Rebecca’s head and, the first time and the second time and the third time and the fourth time and probably the fourteenth time, came nearly immediately.

From then on, I couldn’t bring myself to read what she’d written. I’d read the results of a survey in which 40 percent of Italian women acknowledged that they usually faked orgasms. Rebecca wasn’t Italian—she was that interesting anomaly, a southern Jew—but she thrashed around a lot and moaned and screamed, and if she was pretending I didn’t want to know about it. She often said it had never been like this before.

Every night she’d wrap her legs around me and scream something that I thought was German until I realized she was saying, “Oh, my son.” My son? She had her own issues, too, I suppose. We turned up the Jupiter Symphony all the way and attempted to pace ourselves so we’d correspond to the crashing crescendo. I was sitting on top of her and in her mouth, staring at her blue wall, and I thought My whole body is turning electric blue . She was on top of me, rotating her hips and crying, and she said, “Stop.” I said, “Stop?” and stopped. She grabbed the back of my hair and said, “Stop? Are you kidding? Don’t stop.”

At the end of the semester, packing to fly home to San Francisco to spend the Christmas vacation with my family, I suddenly started to feel guilty about having read Rebecca’s journal. Every time I kissed her, I closed my eyes and saw myself sitting at her desk, turning pages. I regretted having done it and yet I couldn’t tell her about it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’ll miss you,” I said. “I don’t want to leave.”

On the plane I wrote her a long letter in which I told her everything I couldn’t bring myself to tell her in person: I’d read her journal, I was very sorry, I thought our love was still pure and we could still be together, but I’d understand if she went back to Gordon and never spoke to me again.

She wrote back that I should never have depended on her journal to give me strength, she’d throw it away and never write in it again, and she wanted to absolve me, but she wasn’t God, although she loved me better than God could. Anything I said she would believe because she knew I’d never lie to her again. Our love, in her view, transcended time and place.

Well, sad to say, it didn’t. The night I returned from San Francisco, she left a note on my door that said only “Come to me,” and we tried to imitate the wild abandon of the fall semester, but what a couple of weeks before had been utterly instinctive was now excruciatingly self-conscious, and the relationship quickly cooled. She even went back to Gordon for a while, though that second act didn’t last very long, either.

It was, I see now, exceedingly odd behavior on my part. After ruining things for myself by reading her journal, I made sure I ruined things for both of us by telling her that I had read her journal. Why couldn’t I just live with the knowledge and let the shame dissipate over time? What was—what is—the matter with me? Do I just have a bigger self-destruct button, and like to push it harder and more incessantly, than everyone else? Perhaps, but also the language of the events was at least as erotic to me as the events themselves, and when I was no longer reading her words, I was no longer very adamantly in love with Rebecca. This is what is known as a tragic flaw.

Love is illusion

“IF YOU’RE A NEWCOMER to this show, you’re probably wondering what in the world it’s all about. Well, it’s not about politics. It’s not about wars going on around the world. It’s not about trials and tribulations. It’s about you. It’s about your heart. It’s about what in the world is going on in your world. We are here to take your calls about family, friends, sweethearts, that special someone you met over the internet, falling in love, having your heart broken by love, babies, and graduations. And then we mix those stories together with your favorite love songs. Thank you for finding us. You’re listening to Delilah .”

Delilah (who, as any icon seeking goddess status must, goes by only one name) advises Kathy, who’s shy about approaching the former security guard she’s in love with, “What happens if you don’t follow through with this and he gets away again? Say ‘Thank you for alerting me to the fact that my headlight was broken. I owe you my life. Here’s a plate of cookies and my phone number at home. And my cell phone and my pager number and my fax number and my email address.’ Come on, Kathy—shoulders back. Be bold. Be brave.” Then she plays Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover.”

Delilah , which is recorded live in Delilah’s home studio in the Seattle area and is broadcast six nights a week between seven and midnight in most markets, has 8 million listeners on more than 200 stations in every state except Rhode Island, covering 90 percent of the country, even though the show is in only five of the top ten markets. Delilah’s listeners are overwhelmingly female, modestly educated, and politically center-right. She also says that “it seems as if half my callers are single moms.” Unlike, say, Dr. Phil or Dr. Laura (my wife’s name remains Laurie ), Delilah only occasionally accompanies the sugar pill with harsh-tasting medicine.