To the Man I Made into a Stranger
If you’ve just lost your cute, bearded, Jewish boyfriend, there is no worse place to live than the Upper West Side. I learned this, over and over, during my first year in New York. Because you were everywhere. You were on the train and on the street and in Trader Joe’s and in Zabar’s. You were at the bar and at the museum. You were in my building and in the hallways between classes. You wore a yarmulke, or you didn’t, or you’d gone Orthodox, sweating in a black wool suit. You were a hipster, finally, or you were still in the flannels of your 1990’s California adolescence. You were a little shorter, a little taller, a little fatter, a little thinner. Always with the same dark, thick, wavy hair, same pale skin. I’d see you in a flash but then the eyes were never right. Never as pretty. Never as kind.
Each night, I thought of you sleeping alone back in our old bed, in Baton Rouge, as I slept alone in my new one. There was a cool emptiness around me where you should have been. Where our little cat, Smudge, should have been. I’d stare up into the dark and listen to the ambulances speeding toward St. Luke’s, right on my block, and tell myself I was warm and safe.
But then I'd remember you, just months before, fleeing our bedroom that night I told you I’d cheated, running out into the living room, dropping to your knees, and banging your head on our wooden floor. The sound that came out of your throat was like a low, droning siren, swelling and fading and swelling again. I could only stand over you, sweating and shaking, lightly rubbing your back, murmuring, “Ari, stop, Ari, stop, it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, stop.” Trying to comfort you, I was also begging. You stood up, dried your tears, and said, wearily, “You make me crazy.”
You took my hand and led me back to bed. There, we spooned as we did every night, quietly wrapped around each other, you curled behind me, Smudge nestled in front of me, a family.
There was much about our relationship that left me restless. Short version: you wanted partnership, I wanted passion. You wanted to build a stable future, brick by slow brick. I wanted to burn in the present. You took me back but I did not want to be taken back. The cheating hadn’t been about the other man; it had been a way to spring free, right before I left Baton Rouge for graduate school. I didn’t want to spend a year or two long-distance, pining for something that seemed to stall in a state of potential.
The last time we spoke was on the phone. I called you from New York with another tearful confession: I’d just lost Smudge. She had escaped during the move, disappearing in the night from the house of a friend. Despite weeks of putting up flyers and paying pet-finding services and fielding creepy responses to my Craigslist post, I would never see her again.
“That’s so sad,” you said. I thanked you—it was a kind thing to say, considering what I’d put you through. “No,” you said. “Sad for Smudge.” I took this silently. I hope so, anyway. I deserved punishment, I thought then, and sometimes still think. I should have left her with you. You would have been safer together.
You’re married now, with a child; it’s all part of a kind of life that always felt too big for me to take on. I could barely take care of myself back then, should not have tried to take care of anyone else.
Seven years after that call, I was still in New York, and finally ready to adopt another living thing. There was a rescue group in Union Square, and I picked out a tiny, striped kitty, bundled him into a hot-pink carrier. This was meant to be a celebration of my having come far enough to let another vulnerable creature rely on me, however young and silly that may sound. I made my way down into the subway, elated, weaving carefully through the rushing bodies with my silent companion.
“There was much about our relationship that left me restless. Short version: you wanted partnership, I wanted passion. You wanted to build a stable future, brick by slow brick. I wanted to burn in the present.”
When I reached the 4 train platform, I saw you. A dark-haired, pale guy. And for once even his eyes seemed right, seemed like yours. I stared and glanced and stared and glanced and then his train was pulling in, going the other way. I panicked and stepped over to him, carrier in hand.
“Excuse me? Ari?”
He shook his head kindly. “Sorry, no.” He seemed to sense my vulnerability, my fear and longing. He reacted so much like you would have—no judgment, not looking at me like I was crazy, or like I was bothering him—that for a moment I persisted, thinking, It is him, he knows it’s me, he just doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to open it back up.
But I wanted to open it back up. I wanted to show you that this time I could be counted on. That I had learned, finally, how to give and accept love without destroying it. I wanted to show you my new cat and say, Look. I am going to be so good now. But the man on the platform was someone else. As decisively as a cat slipping out into the night, he stepped into the train just before the doors slid shut.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Perry is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She can be found here, here, and in Brooklyn, NY, where she lives with her tiny, wobbly cat, Ziggy.
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Header photo by Joseph Ngabo