Free Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss Page B

drops—kept on. “That’s got to be one of the saddest things I personally have ever heard,” Felicia said. “But you have me now.” She often listened to The Cure and was in thwarted, tragic love all the time. And here’s Stacey, who was acting like Juliette Binoche in The English Patient (the movie we’d just seen): “I’ll take care of you.”
    “Um, I don’t know,” I said—and said. I kept waiting to become more who I thought I should be. Sometimes I would think, appallingly: “Good.” Or, if I was in an optimistic mood, I hoped the woman might actually tell me something that perched in the soul and sang the tune.
    Instead, Stacey’s eyes got big and wifey. Felicia just scooted closer.
    “It’s been easier than I thought,” I’d say drably, if I wanted to look brave. “I don’t know.”
    “I’m sure it can seem easier, might be the way you feel sometimes,” Felicia said. “But.”
    “Thank you, though,” I’d hear someone with my voice say. “You’re very kind.”
    (It was like this with everyone but the newly healthy girl at that gloomy bistro—Jacqueline. When I told Jacqueline, she slitted her eyes. She was making wind-resistance and weather calculations, anyone could see it. She already had the elsewhere stare of a break-up. I dropped a clumsy hand to the table and splashed my salad. Then, months later, I ran into Jacqueline again. I was now taking classes in an MFA program. At a party thrown by a student I knew, there was her trademark glossy dark hair and the flash of her teeth. Jacqueline really stood out amid the frayed ends and premature grays of grad school. I asked if she’d ended things because of what I’d told her. And she said—this was so diplomatic, it became one of those details I made a point of remembering, in case I’d ever need to reproduce it—“You just seemed like you had a lot to work out, Darin. And I thought maybe you could work it out easier without having to worry about how you sound to someone else.”
    “I don’t,” I told her, “blame you”—and realized I was quoting the Zilkes. I wondered if that was why I’d asked her: to have their words in my own mouth. The words, however, were untrue. I identified with Jacqueline—I wanted an easy life, as well—and stood watching her sullenly with clipped, cloudy wings. But I did blame her. And the words tasted unclean in my mouth.)
    It’s as if there’s some pheromone of tact and sanctity given off by people whose suffering embarrasses others. Most of these women understood how and why I was behavingthe way I did, before I had even behaved. And their sense of me, I realized, was dull and limited, but essentially accurate. (I’m not proud to admit that I found a way to shed the chafing habit of unwarranted sainthood: I broke up with these women.) Anyway, you see why I told so few people, and so rarely. It always ran conversation into the sand.
    But I did have a somewhat normal and fun middle-twenties, or at least a multifaceted middle-twenties. And things had been happening in the world that anyone my age had to be at least faintly aware of: the United States had asked Iraq to step outside, then a Democrat came to occupy the White House for the first time since I was nine.
    Mostly, I was trying to move on. Even though my thoughts did tend, still, to slip inward, to the incident that was the reference point for every sorrow that came my way. (“Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair,” Kierkegaard once whimpered.) And I was very mindful that Celine didn’t have a fun or normal middle-twenties, or any middle-twenties at all.

When I was twenty-six, I somehow ended up on a first date at the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer . Which has at its crux a moment in which a teenager hits someone with his car. My breath went pinched.
    I thought I was no longer the terrified kid who couldn’t think without visualizing Celine, who couldn’t visualize Celine without shaking. I thought the