My Last Innocent Year(72)
After I marked up the story, I threw it away and wrote him a letter instead. I told him how good it was to hear from him and everything I’d been up to since we’d last spoken. I’d intended to keep it short and businesslike but found myself telling him everything, about Bo and Alice, my work and my writing. I didn’t ask many questions about him. Then I sent the letter to Wilder College, hoping someone there might forward it to him, and for a good year after that, I thought he might try to contact me again. I’d open the mailbox expecting to find another story or a package or one of the love letters he’d once promised me. I’d come home and expect to find him waiting on my doorstep. But he never wrote back.
A few weeks after I got his story, I booted up my old computer, the one with “This Youthful Heart” saved on it, and started working. I worked for three years and at the end of the fourth, found someone who wanted to publish it, now a book. Bo was proud of me; Abe was thrilled. The book came out to a couple of nice reviews but mostly silence, which was okay because I was already on to the next one. The book had done what it was supposed to do, sparked something, opened the portal. I sent Connelly a copy of This Youthful Heart when it came out, along with an essay I wrote for the New York Times about my father and The Assistant and the parallels between Abe’s story and Malamud’s fictional shopkeeper, which brought even more business to the store. I never heard back. I wrote another novel, and then another, each time sending Connelly a copy along with reviews and articles about me and my life, my husband and daughter, my skin-care regimen. It was what he’d always told me I could do, and now I had done it.
It was around that time that my marriage to Bo started feeling small, like a pair of shoes you buy because they’re on sale; they don’t really fit, but you can’t pass up the deal. Bo wanted another baby, but I didn’t, so I started taking the pill without telling him. I could feel myself falling back into old habits. Unraveling. Throughout this period, I thought about Connelly’s wildfire story more and more. I hadn’t kept it, so what I remembered was a sort of Frankenstein version, what he had written mixed up with what I had read into it. I know you, I imagined him saying. You might have fooled everyone with your classic 6 and Vuitton purse and KitchenAid mixer, but you haven’t fooled me. Was his the house on fire, or was it mine? Either way, I was about to burn it down.
When Alice was nine, I had an affair with one of the fathers at her school, a sexy erstwhile sculptor who stayed home with his daughter while his wife stormed the barricades at J.P. Morgan. I fucked him every morning for a year, while our girls played foursquare at recess. I’d forgotten how good it felt, not just the sex but the secrets, and through it all I wondered how Connelly had been able to manage it. Because once I started, I couldn’t stop. By the end of the year, my marriage was over. I wrote to Connelly again and told him. He had both made me and ruined me.
Jason and Bo were still friends, so while Kelsey stuck by me, would never abandon me, she needed to make sure her own house didn’t burn. And so I leaned on Debra, who was back in New York with Luis and Anka. We took long walks pushing Anka in the stroller, talking while she nursed. Why had Connelly done this? I asked her. Placed a bomb in my life and then retreated? I wondered if he was watching me, if he knew that what he had predicted for me had, in some ways, come true. By then, I’d written to him a dozen times or more, and he’d never answered. I’d had a dream that he was dead, I told Debra. He could be, for all I knew.
“Set a Google alert on your phone,” she said, moving Anka from one breast to the other.
“A what?”
She reached for my phone. “Here. Type in ‘R. H. Connelly’ and ‘obituary,’ and it’ll alert you as soon as he dies.” Anka gurgled. Debra stroked her cheek. “I’ve done it for all my old boyfriends.”
Times were changing, or maybe it was just me. We were reimagining things we’d taken as givens, scrutinizing the wreckage of our collective past, and I thought a lot about what Tom Fisher used to say about us being products of our time. Young women took “slut walks” and talked about rape culture, and when I considered what had happened with Zev through their eyes, I felt an outsize rage that made it hard for me to function. Even Monica Lewinsky had emerged from exile. I watched her TED Talk one night while Alice did her homework, and I could see how luminous and intelligent she was, understood implicitly why powerful men would have been drawn to her. I could also see now how young and fragile she had been and how badly we had treated her. She was lucky to have survived. I suppose we all were.
I wrote Crushgirls during those years, in a kind of fever dream after my divorce was final. Bo had Alice for half the week so I had more time to myself, time I filled with this strange, angry story about Eliza Cherry and her posse of girl vigilantes who systematically torture and kill the men who have oppressed and demeaned them. I remembered what Connelly told me about those long days and nights in his cabin, how he started talking to himself, drank too much, punched a window until his hand exploded. Alone in my apartment, I could feel myself beginning to succumb to my own dark thoughts, but instead I poured them onto the page. I wrote to Connelly only once during that time, a long, meandering letter about art and solitude and madness. He never wrote back.
I’d written Crushgirls partly as a joke and partly as an homage to Debra and the girls we had been, so I was shocked when someone wanted to publish it. “No, dear,” my agent, Matilda, said after reading it. “This is the kind of book publishers want to publish.” She pitched it as Heathers meets Death Wish, and it sold at auction for more money than I thought it deserved. Matilda got annoyed whenever I talked this way. “I don’t know a man alive who would say that. He’d say he earned every damn penny, and so should you.”