Memory and Desire

The steady roar of the whitewater track brings me back to the present. I zoned out while Lila was asking me. . . something. Until very recently, I would have tried to wing it, pretend I heard every word she said, then make an ass out of myself when she sets one of her traps. Always proving to everyone how smart she is. Some people say she has a chip on her shoulder. It’s more like a cinder block.

Dear God, don’t let her narrow her eyes at me or say, “Let me tell you something.” It’s never just one thing. If she’s decided to list grievances, it’s all over. Grand juries have nothing on her when it comes to indictments. Don’t bother trying to defend yourself; I can assure you that it will backfire like that Volkswagen her dad got her when she was fifteen. He had to know she took it out before she was sixteen, but she never got caught.

So I fess up, ready to take a dose of her mercurial anger. But it doesn’t come. She’s keeping her word, not getting mad if I’m just honest with her. She’s not exactly easy to be honest with; you never know if she’s telling the truth or just spinning you out in one of her stories. She says she’s emotionally honest, that it’s her right as a writer to do what she will with the facts to make the truth of the story resonate.Yep, sounds to me like she’s giving herself carte blanche while demanding an impossible level of honesty from the rest of us. Then she dips out of the real world and makes one up, almost a replica, but in the worlds she creates, she’s God, weaving this thread of that person into that thread of this person until she’s made up a brand new person. It’s crazy when you think you see yourself in one of her stories, then you find out it’s not you at all; it’s some stranger you thought was you. Or maybe it is you, just a collage of different pieces of you from different years, put together so you don’t quite recognize yourself. She’s the undisputed queen of the mind fuck.

Lila’s biggest lie? She tricked everyone into thinking she’s easy. I have no idea how many she’s been with, will gladly go to my grave without even knowing how many digits, but there are some I know about, and I’m sure she didn’t spend time in a convent during the years we were out of touch, so there’s that. And then there are all the guys who wished they had, even said they had, whom I know for a fact she would never have. One guy even threw a party to get her over to his house. She hooked up with someone else, then left.

So you see how people got the idea that she’s easy. Yeah, I know, she and Matthew have been in love and married almost twenty years, but we’re talking about Garden City, the hardest place in the world to not have your reputation permanently set during your adolescence. Most of us had to leave if role casting didn’t fit who we were inside. Thank God Lila finally got out of Garden City; people here just don’t get her. I don’t think she’ll come back this time. It was her fifth attempt to get out, this time to Charlotte, where she’s wanted to live since she was nineteen. Maybe it matters that she was running to something instead of away from everything this time. I doubt I’ll leave again. Garden City is a good place for me now.

Anyway, she’s not easy. In fact, love makes her uneasy, scares her to death (like the night I declared mine and she ran away in the middle of the night, while I was out cold). Case in point: when we finally made a real effort at getting it right, I asked her to just let it be easy. She broke down and told me she didn’t know how. Yeah, it broke my heart, too. That’s the thing, she keeps more secrets than anyone I know, and if one of her walls comes down, she’s scared everything will collapse. She can make things unbearably hard, but she’s not hard; there’s a softness in her that she won’t let anyone see. Anyone except me. Because of that, she’s always been the opposite of easy. I don’t know how it’s been for the other men she’s loved—not dated, slept with, whatevered with, but loved. I know I’m not the only one. Obviously, there’s Matthew. She told me about Gabe, but beyond that, I don’t know. She says that most guys she found an emotional connection to left her cold, and most that got her hot were so stupid that she didn’t even tell them her real name and wouldn’t let them find out where she lived. However, I get the feeling that there’s someone I don’t know about, from Honey Creek. She went there for Jesus like I went to Kanuga for him. When I asked her not to go, to stay in town to be with me, she said no. And when she got back, we were both sick. I just found out that she got sick while she was there, that she was miserable with a fever and sore throat and missing me. She said she kept going in the bathroom, just to be alone and close her eyes, reliving our afternoon in her bed.

If she hadn’t gone, everything would have been different. So first she stands me up on that hike at Windy Gap (in front of everybody), and then when we make love for the first time (I don’t give a fuck how cheesy it sounds. That’s what it was. I’ve never felt anything like it), I ask her to stay, she says no.

She’s got me so upside down and inside out I can’t stand it. On the one hand, she’s always begging me to come see her, always giving me a green light, and gives me these soft looks that make me want to give her everything and protect her from the whole world. And then she’s saying no, running away when I need her the most, acting like she doesn’t need me. I don’t care if it’s just an act. It’s an act that fucks me over and breaks my heart so bad that I have to break hers back.

So here’s what I never knew about why she had to go down to South Georgia: she had a fall from grace in 8th grade. Went from being the most popular girl in school to the most humiliated girl in school in one weekend, and she never really got over it. But no one at camp had seen any of that. When she was with those friends, she felt safe, loved, and accepted. The rest of the time, except when she was at church or with me, she felt out of place. I had no idea, about any of it. All I ever saw was this beautiful, intelligent girl with a wicked sense of humor whose writing hypnotized me, and she could talk about anything. I mean she was everything. I thought she saw herself the same way I did, but now I get the feeling that she’s never seen herself clearly. Turns out that she isn’t fragile like a flower; she’s fragile like glass—if you break her, you’ll lose some blood and take some shrapnel in the process.

So I asked too much. I asked for the one thing she wasn’t ready to give up. How was I supposed to know that?

After she got her driver’s license, she was at every party except a Westside party. She had friends from all over, public schools, private schools, not to mention her camp friends all over the state. When she wasn’t grounded, she was always out, but where or with whom was anyone’s guess, if she was even in town. There was only one predictable thing: if Westside people were there, she wasn’t. She avoided the people from her school; I didn’t know it at the time, so I went to her school’s hangout looking for her and ended up making an ass of myself without even getting to see her. I would occasionally hear her name at my school, and it would make me crazy to hear her name in those assholes’ mouths. There’s so much we never told each other, all because we couldn’t ever trust each other.

I can’t think of two people who have broken each other’s hearts more than Lila and I. I lost count a long time ago, and, as she says, she’s not a bean counter. If she were to take a quantitative analysis of our relationship, she would count moments, not heartbreaks. And that’s the thing about her that I can’t let go of: no one can create a moment like she can.