Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

My breathing slowed, my tears stopped. Here was the hidden part of Brian that I needed — some urgency, some insecurity, some sense that he did not know how everything would turn out. I let my lips fall on his cheeks, his forehead, the sharp V between his eyes. I told him I was scared. We talked about our parents’ failed marriages — just because his parents were still together didn’t mean they had succeeded, he said. We promised each other we would not end up like that, two people unknown to each other, forced to share a house, a blanket, a toilet. When our bodies came together after these talks, my thoughts about my life unraveled inside me like a trapeze artist’s rope after the tent has folded, hanging from the sky unobserved, pulsing with the breeze.

But one night, I started to say something after Brian turned out the light and he snapped, “No talking.”

“I’m not — I just wanted to tell you one thing.”

“I can’t take it anymore.” His hands flopped around on the mattress, desperate to be calm. So these nighttime conversations, which I believed were carrying us toward a new intimacy, were a burden to him, one of the unpleasant compromises of a relationship. I never told him the one thing. I stopped crying in his bed. I asked him to make me come if he came first.

—

I met Brian’s family for the first time over Labor Day Weekend. On the drive to their home in rural Connecticut, Brian gently coached me in what not to say to his parents — swear words, jokes about suicide or depression, anything in any way, however remotely, connected to sex. I mocked the last directive — just how sex crazed did he think I was? — until I remembered our recent weekend at my father’s house. It was pouring and we’d been stuck in the house, drinking too much coffee and wine. My father told us about my mother’s abortion over dinner, a story I was sick of hearing: She’d gotten pregnant again when I was only three months old. “I wanted to keep it, of course,” my father said for the hundredth time. “I said we could use formula. I would do all the late-night feedings. But Elsie’s mother always made her own decisions — absolutely nothing I could ever say to sway her. Hey, what kind of birth control are you guys using? The fastest way to kill a relationship is to have a baby before you’re both ready, trust me.” I’d tried to laugh at my father’s inappropriate divulgences, teasing him for successfully scaring away my boyfriend within a matter of hours. But Brian blanched and stammered out a question about the Manny trade, hoping my father would be a Red Sox fan because he happened to live in Massachusetts.

As we pulled down a dirt driveway lined by careful stone fences, Brian said, “Oh, and don’t mention you didn’t go to college. I mean, just until they know you and realize how smart you are. I kind of implied you went to school in Paris, which is sort of true, right?”

“If you count drinking a bottle of wine by yourself and crying in public parks as going to school in Paris, then yes, I definitely went to school in Paris.” Brian chuckled and told me not to worry, just be myself. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and bit the insides of his cheeks as he pulled into the driveway.

I felt his parents straining to like me as we stepped out of Brian’s car in front of their pastel three-story home, Brian looking at the ground and me squeezing out a smile in my hopeful sundress and sandals. His dad shook my hand with vigor and sized up my face as he called out, “Here’s the brave girl at last! Come meet Elsie.” Handshakes, names, more jokes about my courage. And then I felt his family — parents, sister, brother-in-law — turn away from me as we ate dinner at the picnic table outside, and I kept oohing and aahing over the pink smeared across the sky instead of entering their conversation about an eminent-domain lawsuit over one of his father’s rental properties and the feasibility of adding commuter facilities to the parking garage in the Boston suburb where Brian’s sister lived with her husband. I did not know how to talk about the things one must talk about; this never stopped being a painful surprise.

Brian shoveled food into his mouth like a teenager after basketball practice and refilled my wineglass with waiterly attentiveness. While the adults ate tomato pie, grilled lamb, and buttermilk rolls, Brian’s nieces played in the overgrown field in front of the house, throwing crab apples and running around with a garden hose, pretending to put out fires.

“It’s amazing how parents do it with the little ones,” Brian’s dad said.

“We did it twice. Or don’t you remember?” Marianne flicked her husband’s wrist with her cloth napkin. Brian’s father had cheated on Marianne soon after they were married and in addition to raising two children only eleven months apart she’d had three miscarriages and one stillbirth. Brian told me that his mother “practically lived” in the clapboard shack behind the main house, where she kept the canvases and watercolors that she referred to as a hobby. Watching her slice pie and dart in and out of the kitchen for missing utensils, my breath got short and shallow the same way it did when Brian spoke confidently of our future — asking me where I’d most like to honeymoon, fantasizing about settling down in a farmhouse near his parents. When this anxiety seized me, I wanted Brian to hold me and tell me it was all right, but it seemed he might take offense if I asked him to comfort me for my fear of being bound to him.

After his family went to sleep, Brian and I stayed up late at the picnic table. He poured us generous helpings of the fancy whiskey he’d brought for his father. I was surprised and excited by Brian’s carelessness. He tended to be a measured drinker, corking the bottle and clapping his hand on my knee around midnight, saying, “Bed?” I always wanted to drink more. I always told myself to be grateful for Brian’s reasonableness. But tonight he kept refilling our glasses until the smoky liquor was almost gone and I was flushed and bouncy. He took my hand and led me along a creek in the backyard until we came to a tree house.

“I built this place in high school,” he said. “Came out here to play guitar.”

“You never told me you played guitar.”

“No?” He climbed the wooden planks nailed into the tree trunk. I followed. “Thought I was going to be a musician. I designed CD covers and everything. There should be one here.” He groped the planks of the tree-house floor and handed me a slip of paper. I held it outside the door to see the cover image in the moonlight: a photo of a white spiral staircase against a black background, the top step jutting into darkness, leading nowhere. A poignantly explicit image for a teenage boy. “Oh,” I said, resting my fingertips on Brian’s wrist.

Some weekends Brian spent two straight days on the couch. He always went through the motions of being a good boyfriend — asking what I wanted for dinner, ordering and paying for takeout, telling me he loved me and I looked so pretty in that top — but every word and gesture seemed to be a sacrifice. “I can’t hear you,” I’d say. “Why are you talking so quietly?” “I’m sorry,” he’d say, quietly.

When I got low in the way shrinks call depressed, my lowness was aggressive, evident; Brian’s was unknown to himself and therefore enraging to me because it could not be acknowledged. I wondered sometimes which was worse: to be with someone who dealt with discontent by drinking too much or by lying around. Since I was sure I knew the answer — Brian was a Web designer, not a drug dealer; a homebody, not a womanizer — I had not spoken to Jared since Brian and I started dating.

—

The next morning at his parents’, Brian slept much later than usual. I’d been awake for hours, but didn’t want to wake him and be forced to join the paternal pronouncements and clanking dishes coming from the kitchen adjacent to our guest room.