I didn’t stop dating all those years. There were a few minor obsessions but no one truly serious. I told Vic about some of them. I said they were friends and I let him balance the suspicions in his head. But mostly I lied. I would say I was going out with girlfriends and then sneak from the office and run toward a subway, looking back the whole time, terrified he’d followed me. Then I would meet some unkind boy and Vic would go home and patrol the Internet looking for signs of me on social media. He would write me around eleven, Watcha up to kid. He didn’t use a question mark so it would look less inquisitive. You begin to understand human nature at a cellular level when an older man is obsessed with you.
The status quo was manageable. We were both getting what we needed, though I could have done without him. It turned out he could not do without me. He likened his relationship with me to Icarus. He was Icarus and I was the sun. Lines like these, which I wholly believed and still do, made me sick to my stomach. What kind of a girl wants to be a sun over a country she doesn’t even want to visit.
Everything was fine for a number of years, until the man from Montana. I called him Big Sky and, in the beginning, so did Vic. I sent Vic to the depths of what a man can stand. I don’t recommend you do it, and you should know what it does to a human being.
I think Vic came to shoot me that night, is what I think.
2
IF SOMEONE ASKED ME TO describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use. The depravation has been useful to me. Useful to what end, I couldn’t say. But I have survived the worst. Survivor is the second word I’d use. A dark death thing happened to me when I was a child. I will tell you all about it, but first I want to tell what followed the evening that changed the course of my life. I’ll do it this way so that you may withhold your sympathy. Or maybe you won’t have any sympathy at all. That’s fine with me. What’s more important is dispelling several misconceptions—about women, mostly. I don’t want you to continue the cycle of hate.
I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I’ve done unto others but, cruelly, by the things that have happened to me.
I envied the people who judged me. Those who lived their lives in a neat, predictable manner. The right college, the right house, the right time to move to a bigger one. The prescribed number of children, which sometimes is two and other times is three. I would bet that most of those people had not been through one percent of what I had.
But what made me lose my mind was when those people called me a sociopath. Some even said it like it was a positive. I am someone who believes she knows which people should be dead and which should be alive. I am a lot of things. But I am not a sociopath.
When Vic shot a hole in himself, the blood leaked out like liquor. I hadn’t seen blood like that since I was ten years old. It opened a portal. I saw the reflection of my past in that blood. I saw the past clearly, for the first time. The cops came to the restaurant looking horny. Everyone had been cleared out of the place. The man I’d been eating with asked me if I would be okay. He was putting his jacket on. He meant would I be okay alone tonight and for the rest of my life because I would never see him again. Once he’d asked me who my group was and I didn’t know what he meant and now I did. The dead man on the floor was my group. I was part of a group that Dartmouth didn’t recognize. After the cops left I walked home to my apartment. I thought I had no carbohydrates in the house, but I found a taco kit. The worst thing about eating too much is that you need more Klonopin than usual. I got just high enough to be decisive. I decided I was going to find her.
Vic was probably cold by then. I pictured his cold tentacles. When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced. When Vic died, I was completely alone. I didn’t have the energy to make someone else love me. I was inert. Vuota. A word my mother would have used. She always had the best words.
There was one person left. A woman I’d never met. This was terrifying because women had never loved me. I was not a woman whom other women love. She lived in Los Angeles, a city I didn’t understand. Mauve stucco, criminals, and glitter.
I didn’t think Alice—that was her name—would love me, but I hoped she would at least want to see me. I’d known her name for years. I was almost positive that she didn’t know mine. For the first time in a long time I was going somewhere for a reason. I had no idea how it would go in California. I didn’t know if I would fuck or love or hurt someone. I knew I’d wait for a call. I knew I would be rabid. I had zero dollars but didn’t rule out the prospect of a swimming pool. There were many paths my journey could take. I didn’t think any of them would lead me to murder.
* * *
SHE’D BEEN UNTRACEABLE FOR YEARS, no social media, no real estate transactions. Once in a while I would look for her. But I had too little information, on top of which I was scared to death.
Then one afternoon I went to a dentist because two of my teeth had been knocked out. A man had done it but not technically with violence. It was an expensive dentist but the man responsible for the loss of the teeth was paying for it.
I waited in reception for over an hour, flipping through one of those aspirational magazines for people who make over five million dollars a year. There she was, on the cover, with four other pretty women who were the best of fitness, Ashtanga, aikido, and so on, in Los Angeles.
I was so drawn to her looks that I read the article and saw her name, which I’d kept on a slip of paper for over a decade. I gasped, and air whistled through the hole between my teeth.
She was prettier than I ever could have imagined. Her breasts were absolutely perfect. An old boyfriend—not a boyfriend but one of those purveyors of multiple and uncertain mornings—once said that of an actress who’d bared her breasts for a scene. Her breasts, he said to me while eating cheap vanilla ice cream, are absolutely perfect. I am still impressed that I didn’t kill him.
* * *
FOR YEARS I’D DREAMED OF her. Oftentimes I dreamed of hurting her. The rest of the time it was something else, equally worrisome.
Within days of Vic’s death, my apartment was cleaned out. I was an expert at leaving. I didn’t know where I would live. I called about a few rentals near her place of work. But I was low on money and there weren’t too many options in my budget. It got so bad that I called a place off of a rental site whose main photo was a bathroom with mold in the grout, a bottle of Selsun Blue in the stall shower, and nothing else.
I mapped out a quixotic, impractical route and drove my Dodge Stratus to California. It was a very ugly car but large, and I was able to fit many things inside. My mother’s jewelry in a taupe tin. My best dresses, each sheathed in plastic and folded over the passenger seat. There were my Derrida and photographs and menus from restaurants where I’d spent memorable evenings. Essential oils from a holy place in Florence. A shallot of marijuana, a pipe, ninety-six pills of varying shapes and shades of cream and blue. Very expensive copper yoga pants and mustard bralettes. Boxes of smoked Maldon and twenty squat cartons of pastina, which I’d heard they did not carry at the Ralphs or the Vons. I took the things that could come with only me, that could not be trusted to travel under anyone else’s care. My favorite scarf, my panama hat. My Diane Arbus. My mother and my father.