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Getting to That Safe Place

Brian Rea

By ELISABETH FAIRFIELD STOKES

Published: March 29, 2012

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I MET him at the coffee place where I was working after I’d dropped out of graduate school out West, many states and several states of mind away from the New England college town to which I’d returned. I was floating between Gen X jobs, living in the aftermath of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship that had left me dazed and shaky, still absently rubbing my arms where bruises had marbled them, unable to look much in mirrors because I felt exposed, vulnerable.

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I dated here and there because it seemed like something people did. I would follow along like an observer of my own life, watching myself at the movies, ordering a Scotch at a bar afterward, being dropped off at my car, giving a long look and a quick kiss.

He was a regular, lingering at the counter after I gave him his coffee, smiling and trying to hold my gaze. He bought board games and left them at the bar along the window, an excuse, he said later, to hang around and watch me. One Tuesday I hurried past his table on my way outside, not breaking stride, answering him with a "Hey, how are you?" And pretty soon he was blocking the early spring sun I had lifted my closed eyes to.

I don’t remember much between opening them resentfully, sighing, and sleeping with him a few days later. I had no money, no place to be, and he took my weariness, my lack of interest, as a challenge. We were almost instantly inseparable, delighting in how much we had in common, as all new lovers do until they don’t. A stranger paid for our meal in a pizza joint because we looked, according to the waitress, "so happy and in love."

He had a trust fund and spent it heedlessly on toys and clothes and eating out. I accepted his gifts and ate the meals and stayed constantly at his side, even quitting the coffee job so we could be together.

He was affectionate, tender; told me I was beautiful, that he loved me. I was broken, exhausted, lost, and I let him take care of me, but the long goodbye began when the tough-girl facade he found so irresistible inevitably slipped. The fragility it had masked was more than he was interested in dealing with, after the rush of rescuing me from the rage of something he didn’t understand.

Dinners at his favorite restaurant became opportunities for him to explain how "it" was, how I was wrong about feminism and affirmative action, how men, especially white men, are discriminated against, how he thought he got bad service in restaurants because people assumed he wouldn’t tip well because he was young. He especially seemed to hate this Catch-22 he imagined for himself: Should he tip well for bad service to prove that he knew how to tip well?

I picked at my food, nodding that, yes, I liked the wine, and, yes, I understood it was hard to select a wine that would complement our different meals and I’m sorry I wouldn’t order the veal but I just couldn’t and I thought the wine was fine with my pasta and vegetables and julienne of hot peppers, and, yes, it did seem possible that we might be the most attractive couple there.

Finally, over yet another nice dinner at which he mocked my food choices again, apparently feeling he could do so because he was paying for them, I said I thought we shouldn’t sleep together anymore, seeing as there was a "visible terminus" (the kind of phrasing he was partial to) to our relationship. He was leaving for New York at the end of the summer, dropping out of his own graduate program and heading to Wall Street. He was furious, angrier than I’d seen him, and I realized that control was not something he liked losing. That was our last meal together.

It didn’t quite end there, however. I slowly extracted myself; it was hard for me to accept that it had mostly been about sex for him, that and some damsel-in-distress fantasy I seemed to have dispelled, because I think it’s possible that he did care for me at some point. I didn’t understand then that I had used him, too, to learn how to get from Point A to Point B again, and, let’s be honest, to simply eat at times.

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Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes works and writes in Maine.

Theo www.nytimes.com