She found the ripped up journal entry in the trash can while looking for traces of a cigarette package. For years he swore he wasn’t smoking, despite the lengthy list of evidence she had compiled: unflushed butts in the toilet, receipts for $4.49 from the Chevron station for the item “Marl,” and the most compelling--the overwhelming taste of cigarettes on his breath when he’d kiss her hello. She didn’t yet understand the nature of pathological liars and their propensity to deny, deny, deny. Should she have caught him inhaling the smoke from one of his femme little mentholated Marlboros, he would have sworn she hadn’t seen a thing.
This did two things: drove her crazy and turned her into a grade A detective.
Perhaps the most unnerving thing to find while searching through your boyfriend’s trash is little bits of paper with his handwriting on it. Something so dreadful for anyone to find that merely throwing it away isn’t enough. She pulled out the smelly bits of paper, one by one, and put them together, like a puzzle. She had always been good at puzzles.
It was a journal entry from a year ago--halfway into their relationship. She would have never read his journal. She never wanted to know what was actually happening in that twisted head of his. It was about another girl. Chelsea. That girl he was “friends with” the first few months of their relationship, the summer before she had moved to be with him and go to college in the city. The months she was just a teenage virgin living 400 miles away, eating up his claims of love and affection and commitment.
Why did it have to be Chelsea? That red-headed beauty who was one of the big girl crushes she had ten years before during Christian drama summer camp. Her pretty voice. Her big, red-haired family. Her domestic goddessness. Her love of Jesus. Her perpetual sweetness.
She was the opposite of Chelsea. Dark-haired, opinionated, independent, and a budding intellectual. She thought that was what he wanted, but the journal entry, as well as many discovered clues following the ripped up paper incident, told her otherwise. She thought of the awkward comment his mother made while they made Thanksgiving pies together (she kept fucking up the crust). “Kevin just needs a cheerleader.” Don’t we all? she thought. It had always been about Kevin. Kevin’s addictions, Kevin’s screenplays, Kevin’s first novel (it was good, but it wasn’t that good). Kevin’s feelings, Kevin’s diarrhea (and constipation, interchangeably), Kevin’s Catholic guilt. Kevin’s anxiety attacks. And she cheered him on the entire time. She was eight years younger and eager to please. She was no little girl.
She quickly give him the virginity she had been saving all her life for her husband. She wasn’t 18 yet, and he was 26. She drank a bottle of wine first and said, “let’s get this over with.” She curled into the fetal position and cried afterward.
But while she was becoming a woman too fast, he was pining over Chelsea, 23 year old divorceé who had married her Christian private school sweetheart who turned out to be a wifebeater.
She found an email he wrote to a friend when he was pining for Chelsea. “She’s so cool! She even likes Jonathan Safran-Foer.”
Who doesn’t!?, she raged. His books are shit. His books are movies. I read Capote and Morrison and Kafka and Tolstoy!
The rants of the pretentious twenty year old he had helped to build.
The betrayal and pain of the first lost love wore off, but the thing that will always bother her the most? The way that journal entry was written. Flowery, affected, and full of the hyperbolic angst and pain that peppered his dull life. Not genuine. Who writes for an audience in their 99 cent spiral bound notebook of a journal? She did not know. But that fruity little entry was enough to make her leave before he could come home from his bullshit movie business lunch at some place with a one-word name and a terrace, where he would order the burgeriest, baconiest thing to add to his 28 year old pot belly. Its melodramatic words were enough to hang up on the “baby no no no listen please please listen just wait” and drive all the way to her sister’s house in San Francisco from their too expensive Downtown LA loft. She didn’t bring the dog. She’d pick her up later (sole custody was the consolation prize she demanded).
As she drove away, she felt a rush of freedom to have friends and date boys and fuck and drink and not have to tend to her old, jealous, lying, sad boyfriend. She felt the unbearable lightness of being. Yes, Milan Kundera. Bite me, Safran-Foer.
