Land of Enchantment Page 9

  “Isn’t there a shelter she can go to?” Jason asked.

  Vicky glared at him.

  “I can give you a list of shelters,” the female cop said.

  “I’m not going to a shelter.”

  Her partner chimed in. “You are not allowed to sleep at home tonight, ma’am. Do you understand that?”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “She can stay on our couch,” I said, trying to appease everyone. This was the second time in my life I’d interacted with the police; the first had been the night of the proposal.

  Finally the police left, after Vicky signed a report and accepted a photocopied list of battered women shelters, and then she asked us what we’d do if she went home anyway.

  Jason said he’d call the police again.

  “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

  While Jason was in the bathroom, she asked me if I thought he meant what he said. I nodded, scared for both of us. There was no one, nothing, that would keep Jason from doing what he wanted to do. I could only try and think of things to say while she smoked the time away, waiting for Jason to change his mind and let her go.

  “In a couple of days we’re going to Las Vegas,” I told her, “for his dad’s wedding. I’ve never been there before.”

  Vicky looked me in the eye. She was sober now. “When you go to Vegas,” she said, “don’t get married.”

  “Don’t worry, we won’t,” I said.

  “I mean it,” she said. “That’s what Rick and I did. We thought it would be funny.”

  That night, she slept on the couch. I wanted to go back to bed, but Jason made me sleep with him on the floor near the front door to guard the exit. At five thirty the next morning, I loaned her a sports bra and a pair of shoes that she could wear to work. When I offered to let her use our shower, she said she always showered at work anyway, before dressing in the special chemical suit she wore while infecting monkeys with disease.

  We drove to Las Vegas. By November, I knew how to drive stick, but Jason wanted to be behind the wheel for all 575 miles. Along I-40 W, I cranked the window down so I could stick out my arm and photograph the brambles and the life-sized dinosaur statues and teepee souvenir shops. We watched the landscape change from dusty flats to rusty mesas and back to dusty flats, beneath a sky colored like Renaissance paintings of heaven. In Nevada, we paused at the Hoover Dam and I made Jason pose with the river behind him.

  Then, just outside Vegas, our tire blew. We made it to the parking garage at our hotel, and Jason’s dad, Victor, met us in his shiny rental car and took us to the rehearsal dinner. He had just bought a Garmin GPS, which he showed off to us; I’d never seen one before.

  “Look, I can make her speak French,” Victor said, changing a setting. “This would have been good to have when we were actually in France, huh?” he asked his fiancée, Maria. She was a pianist, twenty years his junior, and they traveled the world together so she could perform in competitions for emerging musicians. Maria was also the heiress to a small fortune from a chain of Midwestern fast-food restaurants, the number one reason (according to Jason) that Victor was marrying her. “He’ll cheat on her, just watch,” Jason had warned me. “He cheats on all of them.”

  At dinner, no one drank. Tucked away in an ornate private dining room at an Italian restaurant, the atmosphere felt more awkward than celebratory. It was a small wedding party—Victor’s parents lived in Vegas and were too old to travel very often, which was why he had chosen this place for the ceremony. In addition to his mom and dad, his adopted sister came, plus two friends of his fiancée’s and her parents. None of Victor’s friends were there. No one tried to engage me or Jason in conversation. It seemed like they all saw us as children, and expected us to be quiet and well behaved in exchange for unlimited soft drinks.

  “Leigh is writing a book,” Jason, hyped up on Sprite, announced to the table.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Maria said. “How’s that going?”

  “I’ve written almost ninety pages.”

  “And how long is a book supposed to be?” Victor asked.

  “Two hundred and something.”

  Someone changed the subject, and Victor paid the check. He also paid for our room, at one of the crappier hotels on the strip, far from the hotel where he, Maria, and her friends were staying. It was too expensive, he said, to put us up there, too. I started to wonder if we should have even come at all—I’d thought Victor would want his only son at his wedding, but he seemed burdened by us. Had our invitation just been a formality? Had he been hoping we wouldn’t be able to attend? I remembered a few months earlier, during the summer before we moved, when Victor and Maria first told us they were engaged. “Am I invited to the wedding?” Jason asked them. I thought he was joking. Jason idolized his dad, and the successful career he’d built as a logistics strategy consultant for multinational corporations, but Victor was always traveling or golfing or otherwise MIA. From Victor, Jason learned the power of keeping those who love you at arm’s length.

  The wedding was held the next day, in a chapel at one of the casinos. There was a small brunch reception after the ceremony in a cavernous ballroom. Jason made Maria’s friends—two gay men—laugh, and they snuck him gin and tonics from the bartender. After the reception, we found a liquor store within walking distance and I got more gin we could drink back in our hotel room. We slept all afternoon and then stayed out all night. Jason convinced me that marijuana was legal in Vegas, so we smoked joints on the strip, collected postcards that advertised escorts, ate deep-fried Twinkies, rode the roller coaster through New York, New York, and got grilled cheese and fries at midnight. I won at blackjack and then lost all my winnings. We did not get married.

  On our last day in Vegas, Victor took us to get our tire replaced. I stood in the sunny parking lot of the mechanic shop and watched them argue over whether Jason was sufficiently grateful for the secondhand car with a flat tire that we’d driven through two states because we couldn’t afford to fly.

  “This car was a gift to you. From Maria,” Victor reminded him.

  “Yeah,” Jason said, “I know. It was her crappy car in college, and now she drives a BMW.”

  Victor pulled him aside so that Maria and I wouldn’t hear what he said next. I stared at the palm trees in the distance. When they were finished talking, I awkwardly hugged Maria and Victor and said good-bye. I thanked him for everything, even though I privately wished we had either paid our share (of the dinner, the hotel, the flat tire) or not come to the wedding at all—I hated the way Victor felt he had to remind us we were in his debt. And Jason hated it even more than I did. Later, Jason would tell me that the reason Victor wanted a private conversation was in order to chastise him for not being nice to Maria, and then to threaten to stop communicating with him completely, if Jason didn’t promise to like her.

  With our new tire, we drove to the outskirts of Vegas to visit his grandparents before we went home. Their ranch house sat in the shade of a willow acacia tree. His grandfather was a locally famous poker player, and when we went to a casino buffet for lunch that day, everyone greeted him by name. Before Vegas, they’d lived in Albuquerque for years, so his grandmother and I talked about the sky and the Sandias. I told her about the balloon fiesta. I realized these were the first people we’d really talked to in days, the first people who wanted to talk about anything other than themselves.

  “You’re both welcome to come visit us anytime,” his grandmother said, hugging me good-bye in the casino parking garage.

  I never got a chance to tell Vicky we’d successfully avoided the wedding chapel. After the night she came over, we never spoke again. She left a plastic grocery bag with the sports bra and sneakers I’d lent her on my doormat. One night, Rick came into the diner for a beer, seemed surprised to see me working there, and told me what an asshole my boyfriend was and how I deserved better. His e
yes were pinkish and out of focus. He hugged me good-bye and kissed my cheek. One of the busboys asked if there was a problem and I said it was okay, that he was my neighbor. Jason and I later found a notice to appear in court taped to their apartment door.

  We were back from Vegas in time for Thanksgiving. I’d never cooked a turkey before, but I had my illustrated Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, and Jason said he knew how to make mashed potatoes. We bought a frozen turkey at Walmart (after I lost the argument that we should just buy turkey breasts), not realizing it needed twenty-four hours to thaw. I spent all day thawing it gradually in a couple of inches of cold water in the sink. When it was soft enough that I could reach inside to remove the neck and giblets, I burst into tears.

  “It feels like a cold dead baby,” I told him.

  “Are you crying for real?”

  At midnight, dinner was finally ready. Jason sawed at the turkey with a steak knife and we ate in silence in front of the TV. Though my parents had called earlier to wish me a happy Thanksgiving, I realized that neither of Jason’s parents had called him. Jason asked how I was going to be somebody’s wife someday, if I didn’t know how to cook a turkey.

  For a long time I saw only two possible endings to our story: either Jason had to die or we had to get married. In my imagination, both endings seemed equally as likely, equally as horrifying. If we got married, I would lose my family’s love and support and all my dreams for myself that didn’t include him. If he died, I was sure I would lose the most exciting part of my life. Holding death and marriage in my hands like a scale of justice, I could never decide which would be better and which would be worse.

  Pure Imagination

  (2011)

  The night before the funeral, after dinner at Jason’s grandmother’s house, his half brother T drove us to a bar in North Little Rock. We ordered round after round of whiskey shots. “To Jason!” we said each time, laughing, temporarily forgetting what we were toasting with such joie de vivre. A metal band was playing, and we all had to yell to be heard. I got drunk enough to ask Lisa if Jason ever hit her. “Oh yeah,” she said, “but I hit him back. I scratched his eyes. I kicked him in the balls.”

  I had never thought of hitting him back.

  “We threatened to call the cops on each other,” she added.

  I had never thought to do that either.

  Over the music, Lisa yelled that sometimes, during their fights, she would beg him for his cell phone so that she could call me, because she knew who I was from his stories of New Mexico and imagined that I was someone who’d understand what was going on. His brother T joked that during these fights, Jason must have started to make the sound “Lee” and then followed it with a “Suh,” once he remembered which girlfriend he was fighting with.

  I stumbled out into the street to call Brian, back in New York. “I met Jason’s ex-girlfriend Lisa, and she’s just like me,” I said, “but Korean! I wish we could be best friends!”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I just wish I could, like, tell him that we met and how much I like her, you know?” I started to tear up, and said I’d have to call him back later.

  For my twenty-third birthday, in Albuquerque, Jason used the candles to spell my name phonetically in the cake. Like the time he told me I didn’t need surgery for ears that stick out too far, the candles said he loved me for who I was, but I didn’t want to be who I was if there was always this risk of losing him to someone who was what I was not. Maybe that was why I felt so close to Lisa. She wasn’t a dancer or a model. She was a PhD student in clinical psychology. She had big cheeks like mine, and a too-loud laugh.

  Back inside the bar, I kept tucking the same piece of hair behind one ear, where it wouldn’t stay. It wouldn’t stay because it was too short. It was too short because when Jason visited me in Brooklyn, he fell asleep with gum in his mouth that got caught in my hair in the night. In the morning, he had asked me where my scissors were, and snipped off a four-inch chunk of my hair, before I could think of another solution. And then he was getting ready to leave for the airport. He was standing in my bedroom. I smoothed his blue T-shirt across his shoulders and kissed him on the mouth and said good-bye. I couldn’t wait for him to go, to give me back my life in Brooklyn. I already knew I would not answer the phone the next time he called. It was the last time I ever spoke to him or saw him alive.

  Lisa told me that the same thing happened to her. Before she even realized what he was doing, he’d gotten scissors and cut not only the strands stuck with gum, but almost all her dark hair.

  His funeral would be the first she’d ever been to. She didn’t know anyone else who had died.

  The next morning at the funeral parlor, Victor fell on my shoulder, crying, when he saw me. He had his new girlfriend with him, the woman he’d cheated on his third wife, Maria, with. The new girlfriend had met Jason once. When Jason died, Victor hadn’t spoken to his son in a year.

  A TV mounted to the wall played a slideshow of photos, including the one I took of Jason at the balloon fiesta. Every time it appeared in the rotation, I remembered sitting in the damp grass, talking about marriage, about someday. I preferred watching the slideshow to looking at his body, laid out in the coffin. Someone had dressed him in a crisp pink button-up I knew he would have hated, and I could see how much makeup he was wearing, and the stitches holding his lips shut.

  During the service, his mom invited me and Lisa to sit coffin-side with the family, like two widows. His best friend, Callista, was also with us, and she passed me Kleenex from her purse every time I needed more. She and Jason had met in a chat room when they were young teenagers, and they’d hung out when Jason visited his dad in Illinois every summer. I met Callista at the movie theater where she was a manager, before we moved to Albuquerque. She and Jason had a very close, loving friendship, like siblings. She was his sidekick, his confidante, someone who always bailed him out of trouble. I used to wonder if she dreamed of someday being with Jason romantically, but my jealousy of his relationships with other women held me back from ever asking.

  The pastor spoke about how sad it is to lose a child. I don’t remember her exact words, because although she seemed like an incredibly kind person, I found it hard to concentrate on anything she was saying. He wasn’t my child, I thought. He was somebody’s child, but he wasn’t mine. He was a man that I loved.

  “Jason would have hated how much money everyone spent on these flowers,” Lisa whispered. We agreed he would rather they’d have spent that money on him when he was alive. He had always been broke, constantly losing this job or that one, asking his family for money if they were speaking to him, and if they weren’t, asking us, the girlfriends.

  “And now a song,” the pastor said, and I heard the first dreamlike notes of “Pure Imagination.” While Gene Wilder sang, I sat in disbelief. This is the song they chose to play at his funeral? Who chose this? I felt like the entire funeral program was planned by someone who’d never met Jason. I wanted to hijack the stereo and play “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash.

  During the song, Callista leaned over. “Jason would only listen to this song if he was high,” she said, and I giggled into my Kleenex, relieved that I wasn’t the only one who thought this was completely inappropriate.

  I was dreading the moment when the pastor would conclude her speech and turn the podium over to us, the ones who had actually lost him, because I had not yet thought of anything I wanted to say. I needed more time to conjure a thoughtful sentiment, something that would do honor to his memory and still satisfy the part of me that raged at him for dying, for doing yet another horrible thing to me.

  You always play the victim in your stories, I could hear him saying. All you do is tell everyone the bad things about me.

  That’s not true.

  Name one thing. Name one good thing.

  I decided to let the others speak first, while I waited for inspira
tion to strike, for a beautiful memory to plant itself in my brain and shoot its tendrils out my mouth. After his half brother said a few words without crying, I felt deeply impressed. The lap of my dress was a basket of crumpled tissues. Then Callista approached the podium and said something honest and funny and kind. I waited for a third speaker, but no one stood.

  I scanned the room in a panic. His dad wasn’t going to say anything? Neither was his mom? That was it? Jason was going to be buried with only two memories to take with him?

  I felt my heart lodge in my throat like a plum. I stood up. I still hadn’t thought of anything to say, but I had a backup plan.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m one of Jason’s ex-girlfriends.”

  At this everyone laughed, including a row of Hell’s Angels up front, there to mourn the death of a rider. Their laughter made my hands shake, and it would be months before I realized that everyone was laughing at the words one of.

  “I want to read this letter from my dad, who couldn’t be here today. . . . He and Jason got along really well.” I didn’t know where Victor was sitting, and I didn’t look for him in the crowd. I read the e-mail off the screen of my BlackBerry in an unwavering stage voice, comfortable delivering lines that I didn’t write.

  I became acquainted with Jason through Leigh, when they were living in Chicago. She always spoke of this young man who was very intelligent and witty and who could make her laugh. I was rather curious about “this Jason” and had the opportunity to meet him about five years ago. She was absolutely right. When he walked (bounded) into a room, the room filled with electricity. He was very animated, energetic, and had a keen sense and love for animals. If he saw one of our Cats he would speak affectionately and make up silly names for this animal. He would also cradle them in his arms. He certainly loved animals, and they loved him. He was also a very good conversationalist at the dinner table.