MONSTERS...Notes from 2006.
Sarita: plus, that kind of shit gives me stuff to write about. lol.
leighd: exacltly, you can always get back at them by bringing them to life as a weak and pitiful character in one of your stories...
Sarita: could happen. that's the danger of befriending a writer
leighd: and the greater danger of offending that friend :>
Back in August 2003, he had no idea. Then again, neither did I. We had scratched each other’s surface and liked the scent we exuded, liked the way we fit together, in a metaphoric sort of way. But we were clueless. Him more than me, me more than him, what difference could that possibly make? But when he was joking about the danger of offending me, his writer friend, he didn’t know that at that very moment, I was printing out multiple copies of a poem I’d written about him and was sending out to the greater void known the World of Literary Magazines and he, years later, has no clue that very poem has been published more than once.
You don’t have to “offend the writer” to become a weak, gutless construction in her work. He should know that. But he doesn’t.
Actually, moments before he made his joke, a joke that makes me laugh on a daily basis, we’d been talking about the pros and cons about finding out what people say behind your back. He’d just told me about how his roommate, a classmate of mine, had so enjoyed a sneak-peak down my shirt, god bless the v-neck, I always say, while he gave me some free Starbucks coffee, the greatest perk a barrista can offer to his friends and neighbors. “You know we’re speaking in confidence here, right?” he’d asked, as if I was going to march to Central Square and demand his roommate explain his gross maleness, thus exposing the fact that his friend revealed their man-to-man confidence and embarrassing the hell out of a sullen poet. Confidence, yes, that I understood. I knew how to keep a secret. Not that one, mind you: I told everyone I could about my free coffee, wink wink, but other secrets... Well, there were things on the horizon. Things that would rise and fall like unforgiving, pleasure cruise waves, things that would eventually strand me here, alone and forced to admit that we are both monsters.
I met Leigh in an unlikely place: his home. It was a Thursday in March 2003 and we were doing what we’d come to do: read poetry and get sloshed. His roommate Max had been hosting our group of writers, mainly Emerson College MFA candidates, for about a month and every week was like this. Six, eight, twelve, fourteen writers lounging in the Walden Compound, as Leigh addressed their Porter Square home, listening to each other read our own work and the work of others. I was invited as a “friend of a friend” for the initial gathering and had enjoyed the atmosphere, the comraderie of poets and writers, the flowing conversation, the bottomless glasses of wine. Max, our host, I knew remotely; we’d shared one class together and had vaguely gotten along. Melissa was our tangent point, his friend and mine, and she had asked me to check the scene out with her. Tonight was maybe our fifth consecutive gathering, and the group was good-sized. Six fellow Emersonians plus two quasi-outsiders, Leigh and my own roommate Kelly. Leigh worked at MIT, while Kelly spent her days at Boston’s Children’s Museum. It was the first night that either of them had joined us, Kelly out of sheer curiosity and Leigh because the hockey season was over, thus he was home. They had picked a good night to start. There was something in the air, a vibe of mischief and revelry that would propell us late into the night.
When I was about a quarter drunk as I would get that night, one of the women in the group pulled out thick edition of collected Borges and began thumbing through it to find a particular story. I was getting antsy, wanted to move on to someone else while she looked, wanted to pull out my collected Garbiel Garcia Marquez short stories and read my favorite one, when I heard Leigh, sitting in a chair to my right, say, “Read the story about that drowned man who lands on the beach and the people bring him to their city and claim him as their own... What’s that story? Isn’t that Borges?”
Holy shit. He had my attention.
Because, no, it was not Borges. It was Garcia Marquez. It was the story I had been planning on reading. As I whipped my book out, I corrected him on the author, and produced the story: “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: A Tale for Children.” Read it and weep, kids. So, drunk as I was, I made it my turn and bumbled my way through one of the funniest short stories ever written.
That night, Kelly and I stayed at the Walden Compound until well after two in the morning. Everyone else had to catch the T and had bolted by a little after midnight. But Kelly and I lived a mile or so down the road in Union Square and had to walk, regardless, so when Leigh said we couldn’t leave until the wine was gone, we shrugged and went along with it. There we were: an odd foursome -- Max and me, two classmates who barely knew each other, Kelly and Leigh, our roommates -- all of us drunk, Max now getting stoned, talking about god-knows-what while we slosh through bottles of wine and second-hand bong hits. Something seemed so right about the whole scenario, even though nothing should have seemed right. There was an odd chemistry that night that could only partially be blamed on the mixology happening in our bloodstreams. Max and me on the couch, Leigh and Kelly in chairs, a semi-circle of girl-boy-girl-boy roommate happiness. I remember looking at Max and thinking what the hell am I still doing here?
Then Leigh would fill up my glass and, even though I didn’t have an answer, I didn’t need one anymore.
Somewhere in our transient conversation, Leigh started smoking cigars and so Max put down his bong and joined him. Right in the middle of someone talking, Max stared right at me and said, “Sarah, you’d look damn sexy smoking a cigar. Do you want one? It could be your thang.” Yeah, right. The next Gertrude Stein. Fits of giggles for the house, put it on my tab, thanks. We were all just intoxicated and happy, but when the wine was gone, we had to leave. Not that they didn’t try and stop us, no. While all 6’5” of Max slouched against the doorframe in their outer hallway, all 5’6” of Leigh crouched down to try on my shoes. We probably wore the same size. “These are so cool!” he said as he waved one of the black leather Josef Seibel’s in the air. “Dude, I need to put that on,” I said and he said, “Oh. Oh, yeah.” They offered us their couch. They offered to call a cab. They were perfect gentlemen. It was a perfect night, and Kelly and I walked home drunk and happy.
The next day, I got an email from Melissa saying, “So, what about Leigh? You two seemed to hit it off...” And I guess that we had, although, to this day, I couldn’t say if that first night was a result of Leigh’s attraction to me or Kelly or both. It doesn’t really matter. All I know is that I walked around with a big smile on my face all day, happy to have been in the company of some cool guys who treated us like people. I was as attracted as hell to Leigh, but I couldn’t for the life of me conjure his face in my mind. Blame it on the alcohol, blame it on their dim house lighting, blame it on a stubborn consciousness, but I couldn’t have told a sketch artist what he looked like. I promised myself that the next time I saw him, I’d remember.
And saw him again I did. Off and on for the next few weeks, we combated as the flirter and the flirtee, drinking together, reading together, playing the role of the babe and the asshole boyfriend in our friend’s screenplay, emailing, planning, being coy as hell. It was all fun and ridiculous until he turned serious on me, pouring his heart out to me about struggles with his ex-girlfriend.
His ex live in girlfriend. Of six years. Martha.
I’d never heard a word about her and then, like discovering which socket that light switch corresponds to, there was a new hue in the room. A new brightness, but this one was harsh, flourescent, showed off every clogged pore. The ex. What a drag.
There’s a lot of history between Leigh and me in the year we were involved, but the moment where things went wrong came a short month after we started dating and Martha became part of the undercurrent. I never met her or any of the other women Leigh involved himself with while he was in my life, but I know for a fact that Martha continued to plagued every romantic relationship Leigh pursued in that time.
That woman has power.
My romantic interest in him tapered the more I heard about Martha’s daily woes and annoying habits, but I remained friends with him, even though he was less than straightforward with me about the other women in his life -- women besides Martha, that is.
This story really only becomes interesting when Lindsay stumbles into the picture. I don’t know where Leigh met her or how long he’d been seeing her before I found out about her existence. All I know is it happened during a particular month where he and I simply failed to find time to spend together. We hadn’t exactly stopped seeing each other, and we certainly weren’t particularly involved, but I felt like we were trying to have a go at some sort of real relationship. Well, that’s how I felt, but Leigh felt like fucking around with a school teacher and he also felt like not telling me about it. I found out during a Red Sox playoff game versus the Yankees, a Game 7 situation, no less, and my source was a mutual friend who was backed up by Max. Here we all are. Drunk in a bar, making small talk about Leigh and some girl. I didn’t say anything then. I actually didn’t say anything until two weeks later when Leigh finally told me himself about what had apparently been going on for some time. He’d met Lindsay. How nice.
I should have packed it in right then. This guy clearly had baggage of all kinds and was not worth my time, but here’s the thing about Leigh... He’s charismatic. He’s addictive. He remained in my life.
What our relationship became, I’m not really sure. We more or less talked all the time and saw each other every so often. I continued to hear about Martha at every turn, but Lindsay? She might as well have been a figment of our collective imagination.
So imagine my surprise when the spring finally errupted on Boston and I got a message from Leigh’s wack-o girlfriend. I had sent him a text message -- him and four other people, I might add -- about a homeless man dressed as the Cat in the Hat on the Common who told me that the Bruins were going to win their playoff game 2-1. I thought it was funny -- I wanted to tell some people. Less than a minute later, I got a text response from Leigh’s phone -- but it wasn’t from Leigh. It said:
Please stop texting my boyfriend. He is busy going down on me.
Lindsay apparently didn’t see the humor in the Cat in the Hat.
I waited until the next day and called Leigh at the office to find out what the hell his girlfriend was talking about -- how she could send me such a territorial, lewd message -- and Leigh laughed in an unnatural way and said, “I think she was kidding.”
Men can be cute sometimes, can’t they?
I should probably also mention that I never -- to this day -- met Lindsay, but I do know she had great insecurities about Leigh’s relationship with Martha (he told me so), and she apparently had some sort of insecurity about me. I don’t know what Leigh told her about me -- lord knows he never said much to me about her. Whatever it was, she felt strongly enough to spit right in my face, unprovoked.
Though, that’s not how Leigh saw it.
We got into a pretty intense screaming argument -- well, really, it was me screaming -- wherein I dropped enough F-bombs to destroy one of those small European countries and he told me I was out of line. Not for saying fuck, no, Leigh didn’t care about that. He cared that I was trash-talking his sweetie.
Was he kidding? He had to be kidding. Where’s the hidden camera?
I was stunned by the entire ordeal. I mean, what had I done to Lindsey to justify such an attack? And what would ever make Leigh say that I was the one who was causing trouble?
I won’t pretend that I didn’t want Leigh back then. I did. I wanted him back and I wanted him bad. I flirted with him, I made suggestive comments, I put myself out there. But only with words. I hardly ever saw the guy.
Shit. I told you. He’s a little Napoleon, no kidding.
Well after that screaming match and a few bumpy conversations about me wanting to talk to him face to face and him ducking for cover, capped by a scathing email where he essentially equated me with the keeper of hellfire, I didn’t see him or talk to him for almost a year. And when we did find ourselves on the same guest list, he tried to nonchalantly say hello, but all I wanted to do was sit in a corner with as many people as possible who weren’t Leigh and get rip roaring drunk. Which is what happened.
“Look, there’s your ex. He’s like a dwarf or a troll.” From the lips of one of my drinking buddies. “Let me tell you a story,” I said. Let me tell you a story.
It doesn’t have a happy ending. It doesn’t have an ending at all. It hangs in the air like an unfinished sentence, bold in its belief that, underneath it all, we are not good people. We are just people alive with passionate friction. We’re both cruel and manufactured.
We are monsters.
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