18
Hot Dog
We talk about love like it’s an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love, we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice. Your heart thumps because there’s danger and adrenaline in love. You lose yourself in love because you’ve displaced yourself. But dating sites and yentas, arranged marriages and speed dating, advice columns and blind dates, all argue that love is something we can manage, a losing that we can find. I suppose that if you walk into a minefield, you’re more likely to explode; if you walk a country lane in the dark, you’re more likely to trip; and if you put yourself in the path of dating, you’re more likely to fall in love. I maintain that love can’t simultaneously be an accident and a premeditated act, yet we treat it as if it is. It’s a necessary fiction, love’s oxymoronic nature. Love’s a contranym as sharp as “cleave” and twice as dangerous.
I loved a man, once. I didn’t merely feel passionately for the man; I loved him. By this I mean that when love is real it’s not a noun; it’s an action. To love was not something I wanted. My thinking has always been that if love, marriage, and family were intrinsically so meaningful, so exceptional, and so necessary, then we wouldn’t need millennia of propaganda selling them to us. As I grew up, I looked at my mother and my father and their plastic fantastic Connecticut world, and I knew my bones were telling me that this— this familiarity, this life, this sham—was not for me. Still, I must admit it: once I loved.
I fell face-first in love. As if I were the kicky, peach-faced lead in a romantic comedy, my love began with a literal tumble. It was a jaunty spring day in 2004. The sun was shining, the squirrels were chattering, the whole of Manhattan seemed to be stretching in a wholesome Disney way. Everyone was summoning excuses to be everywhere but the office. I left mine at Eat & Drink to get a cup of espresso, but really, I wanted to be outside, in the winsome air, feeling the leaves unfurl, and smelling the peculiarly fresh, waking city air.
I was stopped by a tourist, map in hands and a confused expression on her broad Teutonic face. “Do you know where is the library?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said and walked away, turning the corner onto Madison from 44th Street. I saw a FedEx carrier loaded with a dolly of boxes, and I swerved. Unbalanced and inattentive, I rammed into a man buying a hot dog. What happened next was almost slow motion; it was nearly a ballet. The hot dog flew upward, and as the man reached to get it, my momentum took me forward, spinning me over his leg and toward the hot dog cart. An arm caught me just as my right hand grazed the cart. Hot, slick steel burned my palm. I felt a firm arm around my chest, a firm hand on my shoulder.
I felt myself guided upright, and I felt strong hands steadying me.
I looked up and saw blue eyes, thick eyebrows, honey-blond hair. A positively Brobdingnagian head. There was something familiar about these eyes, something reminiscent about his hair. Somewhere, somehow, I remembered those eyebrows, that massive head.
“Dorothy…Daniels?” He asked.
“Hi, yes.” I felt oddly flustered. It’s rare for me to look up into a man’s eyes. These were at least three inches above my own. “I’m Dorothy Daniels.” I brushed chunks of green relish off my coat.
Napkins were pressed into my hand. I used them to dab at the mustard that was Jackson Pollacked across my bodice.
“Yeah, I know! Dorothy, it’s Alex Konings. Remember me?” I looked up from my coat. “From Pennistone?”
I stared blankly.
“I was editor of the paper when you started as an arts writer.”
“Alex!” I said. I had no idea who he was. None. I hadn’t slept with him, I was certain. Looking at this Alex in his nicely fitting, subtly striped suit, all long legs and slightly receding hairline, I felt I might want to. “Alex, of course! How terribly silly of me.”
He laughed. I laughed. We laughed, you know, as people do when confronted by the absurdities of life. Mouths open, sound escaping, we laughed like a man and a woman in a film, the sunshine a warm benediction on our shoulders. What are the chances that you’ll turn a corner and run smack into a man you’ve not seen in twenty years. What are the chances that he’ll still be attractive, at least as attractive as you. What are the chances of the kind of cliché whimsy that passes for romance on an aggressively spring-like day in the city of New York.
“What are you doing? Holy cats!” he said and smiled a big, middle-aged grin. He had damn fine teeth, white and hard, glittering like marble. I groped to recall this man, this Alex, this once-editor from many decades ago. I remembered shades of an oddly sincere, quiet fellow. I remembered him hunkering in his editor’s lair behind the pane of glass, poring over proofs in the small hours of the morning on Wednesday nights, when we students worked all night to put the Pennistone paper to bed. I remembered being at his apartment for a party once, briefly, and I remembered boxes of macaroni and cheese lined up like squat blue-and-yellow soldiers. I remember riding in his car, squashed into the back seat, some last- minute ride from campus to a show, and I remembered ignoring him as soon as the band started to play. I remember him being remarkably quiet, solicitous, polite.
I remembered a party at a country club, a spring night in Vermont, a night not unlike the one coming to Manhattan in five or six hours. There was a hot tub. I wore a shiny purple Danskin one- piece bathing suit that zipped up the front, and Alex told me I looked like a Bond girl. I let him take my toes in his mouth, the steam rising around us like the small talk, my feet cold in the air, my toes warm in his hot mouth. We talked, or I talked, mildly distracted by the frisson of public toe sucking. It didn’t occur to me that Alex was hitting on me. He seemed too innocent, too cherubic, too earnest for carefree fucking. His authenticity didn’t match with my gut feeling that all men
merely wanted to enjoy me and move on. So I let him suck my toes, and it was splendid, and then I stepped out of the tub and stalked off into that glorious damp night.
“Please, Alex, let me take you to lunch. I made you drop your hot dog. I know a fantastic place around the corner that does amazing Turkish tapas. You’ll love it.”
If I’d known then what I know now, would I have taken Alex to lunch? Probably. But that day I was suffused with the vivid grass green of possibility, the lush rush of long-gone youth, and the flood of blood to the heart that signaled carnal desire. Here was a man taller than I, big and strong enough to keep me from falling, a man of appetite and well-cut garments and limbs. That day, what I saw was opportunity, and I’d have felt like a fool not to seize it. One thing I’ve learned since college is that few men will suck your toes. Those who will are men of uncommon bravery, vision, and appetite. You don’t let them just wander off to eat street meat.
And that was how it started, innocent as milk. Alex and I shared a long, delicious Turkish lunch. There was smoky eggplant salad, lush and bitter, oily and fresh with lemon juice. There were little bowls of sapid hummus, thick and savory yogurt, chilled spinach sautéed with garlic and lemon. There was a variation of halloumi, a baked cheese made of sheep’s and goat’s milk, salty and briny and seductively burned. There were thick slices of sausage, burned and crispy on the outside, juicy and feral on the inside. There were mounds of salty, fluffy, oily bread. It was a meal you ate with your fingers, of course. It set the tone for generous reminiscing.
Alex, unlike me, had left the world of writing almost as soon as he had entered it. He’d gotten a job as a stringer at the Times after graduation—he had family connections—but he hated it. Hated the hours, hated being called “Tiger,” “Sparky,” and “Junior” by his chain- smoking editor. Hated not having a byline. Hated cold-calling survivors of minor tragedies for a quotable reaction to something horrific. He hated it all, so he packed it in, took a year at Columbia to fill in the science and math courses he’d missed as an English major at Pennistone, and went to graduate school for engineering. He designed foundations for skyscrapers, he said. He put big holes in the ground, where they lived on in obscurity, quietly supporting the
massive structures above them, gathering no glory, garnering no fans. There are few foundation aficionados, but without foundations, those great mounds of glass and steel would tumble like Jenga. He’d married, Alex said, and he divorced. He didn’t have children, he said.
I was charmed. I didn’t want to be, but I was.
And that was the first date. He held one of my hands in both of his as he said goodbye, and he massaged it slowly, casually. He looked me in the eyes as he told me how happy he was to have run into me. And then he kissed me on the cheek, and asked me for my phone number. I gave him the real one, almost without realizing that honesty was the choice I was making.
This first date led to a second date, and a second date brought on a third. We didn’t have sex until the fourth or fifth date, Alex and I, and as uncanny as it was to wait, the sex was spectacular. For all his earnestness, Alex was a deep-down dirty pervert, a man who liked to let fucking linger; he spent hours in flamboyant constructions of pleasure. I can’t say enough good things about sex with engineers.
Sensuality hides in the dark, dim recesses of the mathematical mind.
Before I knew it, I had a boyfriend. I was forty-two, and I had a boyfriend, the first who wasn’t merely a convenient cover for federal holidays and family and gatherings, the first about whom I truly cared. Sure, I loved other men, or thought I did—who can say. How do I know if I really loved them, I fucked many—sex is fleeting. I felt certain that at times I loved Marco, and I felt very warmly about Gil.
But these were shadow loves, the ambient feelings without the palpating passions. I never lost myself with any man before Alex, and I’ve never lost myself after. I had never breathed with anticipation like a pet, counting minutes until I’d see him. I had never lain in bed next to a man and wanted to feel absorbed into his body, like a kit into the uterine wall of a rabbit—a gross metaphor, but love is rife with body parts, with wet hearts and thudding rib cages and heaving bosoms and salty loins and velvety genitals. You can’t have erotic love without the rank grittiness of dirty bodies, and bodies, like desires, are disgusting. Such was my love for Alex that I liked his morning breath.
Alex thrummed in my bones; he resonated like a sounding charge. He split my heart and made it grow. It was painful. With Alex,
I thought I might have a soul; he made be believe that I was a better person than I knew myself to be. And here I must pause—my story is inextricably bound with Alex, yet I want to protect him. My victims rise, herky-jerky, like zombies from the dust as people listen to this, and I don’t care; their flesh-and-blood realities are immaterial as shades. I hesitate to admit this, but I don’t want Alex to be touched.
It’s strange to be caught between my will to spill and my desire to protect this man, but here we are, rubbed raw with ambivalence.
The naked, aching truth is that, here in prison’s concrete walls, I hold the vestiges of my love for Alex close for comfort. I pull them out like a velvet rabbit and wrap my arms around them. I stroke these remains of love, and I rub their threadbare silkiness between my thumb and my forefinger. I can’t tell this story without talking about Alex, yet I don’t want to share him. With every iteration of him, he grows thinner, his memory more frayed; his flocking wears down, his form becomes more undefined. Writing about Alex is the opposite of the old wives’ tale about mother bears and their babies: my tongue licks him not into shape but out of it. Holding Alex beyond words keeps him safe.
I don’t have much in prison, just a very few possessions, and those are always under threat of confiscation or theft. Let me keep Alex. He is mine, even now, even still, even with him gone—alive, as far as I know, but deader to me than those I killed.
Months passed before I realized I was in love, an awareness that required Alex’s absence, as so often happens in literature. Alex was out of town, working on a foundation site for a skyscraper in Cincinnati or Cleveland—I always get them confused. I was in New York, living my ordinary life and doing my ordinary things, yet extraordinarily counting days until Alex’s return. I remember I was in the Broadway Panhandler shopping for a new mandoline—mine had broken, and I wanted to buy another for shaving fennel; there is no vegetable as flexible, as unsung, and as enlivening as fennel. If a dish is a disco, fennel is the song that a DJ relies upon to make the crowd dance. If you learn nothing else from me, learn to add fennel to legumes when you cook them; it makes lentils sing.
Walking through the store, I saw a pair of egg coddlers, and I thought to myself, Alex loves coddled eggs. I plopped the coddlers into my basket. It was a nothing gesture—the pair of coddlers cost no more than $10—but the moment was an epiphany. In that gesture, I realized that I loved Alex, because in buying those egg coddlers, I was purchasing a bit of domestic intimacy. Of course, I’d purchased gifts for other men before, but I’d always purposefully shopped for them; never before had I spontaneously indulged in the generosity of menial, quotidian pleasure. The gifts I’d bought previously were always for a reason, a part of a larger narrative, and usually something I gave in order to get something back. These gifts were investments at best and emotional blackmail at worst. Alex’s pair of egg coddlers—nothing special, just little ceramic cups painted with playful flowers with shiny lids that screwed on—was the first thing I’d ever bought a man for the simple reason that it might make him happy.
With that, I realized I’d fallen in love. Because of egg coddlers.
With a man I knew from college and had forgotten. It was wild, and I felt exhilarated. I sensed a stirring in the void where my soul should have been—no great hatching of conscience but a flutter, a breath, a quickening.
Our relationship progressed, a supposedly natural occurrence that I’d read about but never before experienced. Alex and I spent time with each other, and then we saw each other more. We shared weekends, and then we shared holidays. Together, we went on vacation—I brought Alex to Italy, and I spoke Italian for him and we drove the Autostrade. I taught him how to ride the vaporetto in Venice, hail taxis in Rome, order raw shellfish in the Maremma, spit wine in Barolo, and buy pizza by the width of your fingers more or less everywhere. His life became my life, and we slept in each other’s beds as often as we finished each other’s sentences.
With Alex, I shifted to first-person plural pronouns. I became we, and Alex grew closer. He wore me like a second skin, and I was fine with it. I was fine and I was fine and it was beautiful and life was good. For the first and only time in my life, I felt a there, there, in my chest, buried beneath my solar plexus. I felt an uncomfortable prickling when I acted in ways that were displeasing to him; a second
sense guided my choices, and for the first time ever, I thought about whether what I was doing would make another person happy. I was monogamous. When has that ever happened. Exactly never. Even Emma liked him. She smiled big loopy smiles up at his big Brobdingnagian head because Alex was a smart open book, and even if his big, broad words came easy, they didn’t bore you. I read him with my fingers; I read him with my mouth moving in slow, rolling vowels. I read him with delight, and he read me, too.
With Alex, my fortress of solitude grew a Juliet balcony. The balcony became a balustrade, the balustrade a veranda. Before I knew it, the fortress was open, and soft winds blew past gossamer curtains. My heart had become a home, and I did not live there alone.
Have you stayed with me throughout this tale of murder, betrayal, carnage, and meat only to become disillusioned as I tell you of love?
I fell in love. I loved. I did not want to. I had not put myself in the path of love; I did not seek gravity. Love found me; gravity took me. Alex was a man so good he was good enough for us both, and I don’t like good people. Good is round as a spoon. There’s no edge in good.
Somehow, though, Alex was interesting. There wasn’t a shred of sanctimony in Alex. He was funny, even sarcastic. He could be dark and angry. He was no right little ray of sunshine. His excrement had odor, and I was frequently in a position to smell it. I found I rarely minded. Most of all, Alex was a singular human in his shocking ability to love me without reservation, condition, or mendacity—and not be irksome about it.
Aileen Wournos’s last meal prior to execution was a cup of coffee.
Before her lethal injection, Karla Faye Tucker ate a peach, a banana, and a small garden salad with ranch dressing—it’s almost Spartan.
So, too, was Judy Buenoano’s final meal: steamed broccoli, asparagus, tomato wedges with lemon, berries, and hot tea. Ruth Snyder, killed in an electric chair in Sing Sing, consumed a meal that is the essence of American Gothic—chicken parmesan with pasta Alfredo, ice cream, two milkshakes, and two six-packs of grape soda. See also: Velma Barfield; her last meal was a Coca-Cola and a bag of Cheez Doodles. It’s odd to choose a final meal that you
could pick up at a truck stop, but de gustibus non est disputandum and all that jazz. Perhaps the most poetic last meal was that of Victor Feguer, a man made interesting only by what he ate. His choice was a single whole olive, and before he was hanged, he placed the olive pit in his suit pocket, wanting to seed the olive, a symbol of peace.
Feguer was buried in the suit, pit in pocket, in an unmarked grave.
Too bad it was in Iowa, a place inhospitable to olives, a Mediterranean fruit, and too sad that Feguer didn’t know that olives must be cured to be edible, rendering their pits infertile.
Divided by what they chose to eat, these people are united by the fact that they committed crimes that caused the State to kill them.
What drives killers to kill is a very personal question. We like to think that men kill because they’re men—it’s as indiscriminate as their wont to procreate. The quarterbacks in the high school of life, men are given a wide berth for murder, as they are for most things.
Women, on the other hand, kill for only two reasons, or so the people who study women killers say. We women kill for personal financial gain or to escape an abusive relationship. Of course, this binary stereotype is insulting and inaccurate.
The truth, whether we want to see it or not, is that women will kill for almost any reason. Aileen Wuornos claimed that she killed only men who had raped her; it’s more likely that she was a psychotic, angry, and violent human who expressed these qualities through killing. An opportunistic murderer, Karla Faye Tucker killed when a robbery went grisly; her victim, Jerry Dean, was nearly decapitated from the vicious assault by Karla Faye’s boyfriend. When Karla took a pickaxe to Dean as he gurgled, drowning in his own blood, it was nearly a mercy—though one woman’s mercy is another man’s murder. In the nineteenth century, Jane Toppan killed scores of patients while working as a nurse in a Boston hospital; she’s not alone: British hospitals have a long, florid history of angels of death.
Ditto American nursing homes. Mercy is a wriggling thing. I rarely trust it.
Mothers who kill their children fascinate us—Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and Diane Downs, child killers all. Fascinating, too, are those women who kill with the men they love, women like Karla Homolka, Rosemary West, Charlene Gallego, and Martha Beck,
women whose sadism matched or even exceeded that of their husbands and boyfriends, their partners in crime. The couple that preys together stays together, at least until Johnny Law comes knocking and, to save his or her golden hide, one of the previously inseparable two inevitably makes a plea deal and turns State’s witness against the other.
Despite their numbers, brutal women catch us by surprise. We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and football. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women’s essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we act as starry-eyed as Margaret Keane paintings about the eternal sunshine of the spotless female mind. It’s as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly, and we all did. Some more than others.
It’s not difficult to understand why abusive women kill their husbands or boyfriends (or wives or girlfriends). It’s equally easy to understand women who kill for financial gain; money is such a louche, if effective, motivator. The torqued logic behind angels of mercy likewise reads legibly; everyone knows someone with an unhealthy commitment to their work. These are murders that we can imagine with some degree of empathy, if not comfort. The emotional resonance breaks, however, with women who kill their own children or those who kill in tandem with their husbands. We don’t get these women, but we are drawn to them. These murderesses fascinate us most because they take the essential romanticized blocks of human society—family and love—and turn them deadly. You have to respect an ironic twist on an old favorite. Love makes us do the wacky; it also can make us do the whacking.
Love, as much as any other human passion, made me kill. Love, anger, fear, hunger—take a flashlight to your soul and tell me that these emotions don’t burble and stew as one.
Without Alex, I would not be here, neither on the page nor in prison. Without him, I’d not have picked up in 2008 with Andrew where I’d left off in 2000, Giovanni impaled and bleeding like a martyr, the patron saint of vehicular hit-and-runs. Without Alex, I
would not have enjoyed Gil’s tongue or Marco’s brisket. Without Alex and my love for him, this story would not be. It would have ended with the abiding memory of Giovanni’s liver, luscious and grainy, salty and fatty, slathered on a piece of garlic-rubbed toast. But Alex came into my life, and he changed everything.
Almost three years passed between Alex losing his hot dog to momentum and gravity, and I losing my heart to Alex. My life was breath-takingly stable in February of 2007. I was writing and reviewing for Eat & Drink, where I’d been happily on staff for a decade. I was preparing to write Voracious. I was in my mid-forties, child-free by choice, financially independent, creatively fulfilled, in a loving relationship with a man who seemed to accept me entirely as I was. Everything could not have been more perfect—I looked like the late-blooming model of American womanhood. I was living the have- it-all dream I never wanted, and for a while, it wasn’t bad. For a while, it was quite pleasant, in fact.
On Sunday, February 18, 2007, Alex asked me to meet him at the corner of Fifth and 33rd at five P.M. A large snowstorm had blown through days before, and Manhattan streets were still piled high with big, dirty mounds of marshmallow snow. I try to avoid Midtown at all costs, unless I have work or an assignation, so this address felt odd.
There’s nothing there at Fifth and 33rd, nothing but the Empire State Building.
“Dolls!” Alex said as he saw me approach. He had picked up Emma’s nickname. “How about this snow?” He laughed. “Come. I want to show you something.”
“You want to show me something? Please tell me you’re not taking me to the Ripley’s museum. I do not need to see a two- headed cow.”
“Oh, you are a piece of work. That’s closed. It’s moving to Times Square. I want to show you something truly spectacular. I want to show you the Empire State Building,” Alex said and raised his hand dramatically, like a conductor eliciting a crescendo from an orchestra, or a Price Is Right model showing you the splendors of Showcase #1.
“General Motors’s John Jakob Raskob wanted a building better than the Chrysler, so he bought the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which stood on this spot, and razed it.” Alex led me inside the big brass doors into the gilt, marble, and tile interior. “The excavation for the foundation began on the Empire State Building in January 1930.
More than three hundred men worked night and day to simultaneously tear down the existing hotel while removing the dirt needed to build the foundation for the Empire State Building.”
“Is that so?”
“It is so. The concrete foundation stretches fifty-five feet below street level, the depth needed to hit bedrock solid enough to support the weight of the 365,000 tons of steel, marble, bricks, plaster, and limestone used to make this building. It took two months to finish the foundation, and construction began on April 7, 1930.” Alex edged me forward to the kiosk to buy tickets for the observation floor. “Two,
please.”
“We’re going to the top?”
“We are. What else would we do?”
“Good point.”
“Although the construction company promised to finish within fourteen months, the teams of 3,000 builders worked around the clock to complete the 102-floor Empire State Building, using state-of- the-art pre-cut girders and steel framework, a mini-train-track system to get building materials to the site, and even individual concessions and restaurants on the various floors so that workers didn’t have to
descend to get food.”
“That’s pretty clever.”
“It really is. Five men died building the Empire State Building.
They fell from girders. When it was structurally completed in April 1931, it stood for forty years as the tallest building in the world.” Alex whispered into my ear, as we crowded into the elevator and started our ascent. “A small military airplane flew into the 79th floor in 1945, killing fourteen people. One of the plane’s engines shot clear through the floor, out the other side, across the street, and landed on a penthouse roof, setting fire to the penthouse. But the Empire State Building wasn’t structurally damaged.” We exited the one car and stood in line for the second elevator.
“They don’t make buildings like this anymore,” I said. I had
learned I could play along.
“No, they sure don’t.” Alex smiled.
“You really love this building.”
“I do.” He cocked his head like a dog. “Why is that so surprising?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really think about buildings. They’re just… there. I rarely think about their personalities or histories.”
“Well, that’s how you’re a dummy.” He gripped my elbow, guiding me out of the elevator and onto the observation deck. The wind cut through my coat and whipped away Alex’s voice. “This deck, you likely don’t know,” he shouted, “was built as a landing place for dirigibles, but the wind is too strong, and then the Hindenburg disaster happened, making a dirigible landing dock beside the point.
Let’s go to the west side.”
A blood-scarlet dot, the sun slunk low on the Jersey horizon.
Thick swaths of silky rivers and many slabs of satin steel ranged below, making giants of Alex and me. We strode as colossi through the frigid air. Wind knifed through my fur coat and across my face, freezing my tears and sucking my breath. Alex stood behind me, wrapping me in his arms, his cheek heavy on my own, his arms tight around mine. The sunset glittered, turning buildings into chromatic staves, the urban angles glowing in a bonfire of light, ready for the ink-black relief of night. I felt Alex take a deep breath, his chest pressing against my back.
Alex turned me toward him. “Dolls. I love you,” he said.
“Yeah, you do.”
“Yes. I do. Marry me.”
I looked at him, at his big newscaster head, his kind indigo eyes, his menacing eyebrows. I looked at him, and I imagined my life with this man, this Alex. I imagined endless days of waking up next to him, of sleeping beside him, of conversations about whether this tie went with that shirt and how ridiculous he’d find that new molecular gastronomy place. I envisaged days together and nights apart, talking on the phone, and sleeping separately only to come back together. I imagined arguments punctuating our time and earnest conversations where each of us took responsibility for whatever it was the other thought we should.
I saw time passing, us growing old together, Alex’s head now more scalp than hair, and my flame mane shot with gray. I saw our hands mottled as corn chips, our skin slack and seamy, Alex’s mostly firm flesh gone soft and faintly breast-like. I fast-forwarded to dotage and old-man khakis and old-lady dressing gowns. I imagined staying with this man until one or the other of us died, those decades of dinner parties and vacations, of planning our days and choosing movies, of making beds and folding sweaters, of all those tiny, daily tasks, decisions, and moments that string together to make a life. I imagined, for a moment, that I would share a life—all these days, all those nights, and the long, stunning dots of time that, viewed from a distance, looked solid, impenetrable—with this man.
I imagined being the me who I became when I was with Alex, this kinder, softer, gentler, thousand glimmering shafts of conscience- ridden self. I imagined a life where I would always, ever, be Alex-me because to be the calculating, howling void I was before I met Alex was not an option. I could not be both alone-me and Alex-me; one had to die so that the other could live. I had to make a choice, there as the sky turned plum dusky, and Manhattan grew black and brittle as old glass.
I looked down into the gold-and-red gilt canyons and felt a swoop of vertigo, a sudden, nauseating drop. I saw my former self, the self I’d lived and loved and tended for decades, fall away. My stomach
lurched.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
And I left Alex there on the wind-whipped observation deck of the building that, once the tallest in the world, killed five men in its creation, a skyscraper that will only ever be a building to me.
I never saw Alex again. I’d made my decision, and I saw no need to pretend that it was anything other than the death of our relationship.
In the end, it came down to this: Alex made me a better person, but I didn’t like her. She bored me. I couldn’t imagine forty more years with her. I saw her in my imagination, and I wanted to stab her through the heart with something thrilling and awful. So I killed the relationship instead.
It took me a little more than a year to realize I’d lost something important when I lost Alex. And that was when I decided to look up Andrew. I like being by myself, you see. I just didn’t want to be alone.
And now I never will be.
