ran off with an architect who’d come to lecture at my prep school. I was a senior, had just turned nineteen. David was thirty-one. At the end of his week at Tellman Rose, I slept with him. One of us was going to sleep with him, and as the reigning alpha female I had first dibs. I had dated older guys — high school guys when I was in junior high, college guys when I was at Tellman Rose, a few starving-artist types on trips to Boston or New York — but David was something new to my experience. A man, full stop.
A bit of a weenie, perhaps — petulant, conniving, prim. But that’s a retrospective analysis. At the time I just saw the charm and cultivation, the dark twinkling eyes above the brown beard, the immense learning. And more than those things, I saw the virtue. He was a man who lived by a code. He thought classical learning was important, and so he’d become an excellent classical scholar, though it was only indirectly useful to his practice. Which was itself a model of virtue: an attempt to create classically beautiful buildings that were, you know, green. This wasn’t a man who watched TV, went to the gym, wasted time. He didn’t eat meat and he drank only to show off his knowledge of wine.
I was attuned to his every move as he delivered his afternoon lectures, as he held forth at various luncheons and dinners, to which I always managed to be invited. Clearly I had a daddy thing going on, even more than usual. He possessed the three qualities I associated most closely with my father — learned, virtuous, flummoxed by me — and he displayed them all much more conspicuously, not to say pretentiously, than my dad ever had. My dad was cool. David was like my dad but not cool at all. One of the TR girls, not my main rival but the one I feared most, because she was as smart as I was, referred to me as Pellektra. I couldn’t complain; it was too spot-on, her tone too light. You’re only Jung once, I replied. Enjoy it.
Because of David’s virtue, his virtuous self-image, I had to present myself as the seducer. Which I did, a project that culminated the night before his departure. I felt as if I’d deflowered him, not because he was inept compared to other guys — again, he was thirty-one — but because he maintained that facade of virtue until the last. You’re awfully stiff, I said right before we kissed — my last best double entendre of the night.
A week later was spring break. I’d just gotten into Yale. My friends and I were going to Jamaica to drink. We were at the Burlington airport, already drinking. David walked in. He had a bag over his shoulder, two tickets to Rome in his hand. Shall we? he said. He was sweating, plotting, a turtleneck under his jacket, anxious about my answer — not cool.
My break was a week long, but we stayed in Rome for three. Afterward we flew to San Francisco, where David’s latest project was located; I felt elated, like I’d bypassed Yale and young adulthood and graduated straight into the world. When I recall those first weeks with David among the crumbling buildings of Rome, weeks of feeling deliciously older than old, giddy with my own seriousness, it’s probably no accident that I can’t think of my life without using the word ruined.
Pella, per instructions, finished her whiskey and returned her seat back to the upright position. Okay, you could tell that part like a story, a creative-writing assignment, could even toss in a florid last line to keep people on their toes, but that was because it wasn’t the real story. By which she meant it wasn’t an answer to the questions she feared most: Who are you? What do you do? Well, what do you want to do?
No, the past four years — and especially the last two — had passed in something like a dream, and nobody wanted to hear about your dreams. She’d done nothing. At some point she’d realized that the marriage was a mistake, but she’d been unable to admit it to herself. She’d cut herself off from the source of her distress, which happened to be her entire life. Consequently she became helplessly depressed, and David hadn’t minded, because when she was helplessly depressed she depended on him and was therefore unlikely to leave him for someone her own age, which was always his greatest fear.
And so the months had mounted, Pella lying in bed in their sun-struck loft, dragging herself to the Rite Aid and the psychiatrist and back again, David alternately peeved and given purpose by her somnolence. There were events, fights, excursions, but none of it mattered, none of it penetrated the thick fog under which she lived. I ruined my life in Rome and lived in a fog in San Francisco. Their sex life dwindled, and neither of them mentioned it. “They” were fine. She had to get better. Why was one in quotes and not the other? David prescribed regimens to help her sleep at night: no caffeine, no TV, no electric lights. Each night she would go to bed beside him and then, the instant his breathing changed, get up and go to the kitchen to begin her nightly vigil of slowly drinking whiskey and chewing sunflower seeds while enduring the sheer excruciating boredom of being alive.
Eventually, inevitably, she’d landed in the hospital, with heart palpitations from the mix of drugs she was taking—over-the-counter sleep aids, antianxietals, prescription painkillers, in almost random configurations, in addition to the whiskey and her antidepressants. In the hospital they put her on suicide watch. She hadn’t been trying to kill herself, though that was easy to say in retrospect, now that she felt a tiny bit better. Her thinking about death had always been inextricable from her thinking about her mom; there was pain and pleasure, fear and comfort there, mixed in roughly equal parts. “It’s the Affenlight men who die young,” her dad had said long ago, in a weird attempt to reassure the nine- or ten-year-old daughter he’d never quite known what to do with. “The women live forever.” Though this had been borne out in particular historical cases, she couldn’t believe it applied to her or, God forbid, to him. It was hard to imagine her father as anything but immortal, her own purchase on the world as anything but tenuous.
Not long after the hospital incident she’d been given a new, experimental SSRI — a tiny sky-blue pill called Alumina, presumably to connote the light it would bring into your life, though Pella couldn’t help seeing the word Alumna and interpreting it as a snide remark on her failure to finish high school. She Sharpied out the label and called it her sky-blue pill. But it worked, it worked, better than anything ever had. She started to read again. She felt a little better; she was able to think about her life. It was confusing to have leaped precociously ahead of her high-achieving, economically privileged peers by doing precisely what her low-achieving, economically unprivileged peers tended to do: getting married, staying home, keeping house. She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind.
In recent months, her panic attacks came less often and lasted less long. After David fell asleep she bundled up and went out on their plant-filled terrace with a flashlight and sat in a lawn chair and read through the chilly San Francisco night, downtown and the bridges twinkling in the distance. She could feel her strength slowly returning, being marshaled for some maneuver or another; she didn’t know what it was. Then at five o’clock Tuesday morning, David in Seattle on business, she found herself dialing her dad’s number. She hadn’t seen him since she met David, hadn’t spoken to him since Christmas.
Pella chomped her gum as the plane descended. Then she headed for the baggage claim, not because she had any baggage — except for that failed marriage, kaching! — but because that was where she and her dad used to meet, when she made trips from Tellman Rose. She stretched out across three plastic chairs and watched the carousel mouth disgorge a series of compact black bags with wheels. Her dad had said he’d be late — how dully typical of him — but he hadn’t said how late. The black bags all disappeared, were replaced by a new set from a new flight, and then another. Was there an airport bar nearby? Probably, but she was too tired to look. It saddened her that her dad was willing to start on this note. The carousel bags blurred together, and she closed her eyes.
“Excuse me,” said somebody, somebody male. The guy smiled suavely. “You probably shouldn’t fall asleep here,” he said. “Somebody might steal your bag.”
“I wasn’t asleep,” Pella said, though clearly she had been.
The guy smiled some more. Everyone’s teeth
