Shit Slope
I am sort of dragging my feet through the end-of-relationship material in order to get to the fun stuff.
Hi from Berlin, where I’ve been writing whole sections of this post in the middle of the night, jet-lagged, and wired, with one eye open. Too awake to sleep and too tired to make sense. Mostly, I feel delighted to be here. The automated announcements on the train platform prompt nostalgia for past trips when I was so drunk and happy and excited for the future. I fantasized about living here. I should’ve run away to Berlin years ago. Once, I kind of tried to.
Nearly two years ago, I half-ass ran away to Berlin. I impulsively booked a ticket on an Icelandic airline that has since gone bankrupt. Like the airline, I had no money so I used a payment plan. I stayed with my brother for a week, and while I was here, I had coffee with an ex who I have long mythologized as the ideal prototype for all other men. I suppose I was trying to shake things up. I needed to get out of the the rut I was in but I couldn’t — I had a lease and several (shitty) jobs and a boyfriend who loved me.
The day I booked the ticket, I got up at 7 am to go to my babysitting gig around the corner in Park Slope. On my walk, I passed countless moms with their dogs and their toddlers bundled up in the gray winter. I saw plastic bags hanging from the bear, brittle trees. I remember thinking Brooklyn was ugly and expensive and Manhattan was corporate and soulless, and the subway was an orgy of delays and strangers’ misery.
But I’ll write more about that trip to Berlin later. At the moment, I feel the need to get through the end of the story about X and L and our lives in Park Slope.
I am sort of dragging my feet through the end-of-relationship material in order to get to the fun stuff, like sex—but it feels essential to construct a narrative of what happened in order to understand themes or threads or whatever you want to call them.
The last piece I wrote was about L, how I met her, and what it was like to exist in her insular, elitist Ivy League world. I tried to describe how uncomfortable it felt to try to conform to the expectations she both enforced and felt constrained by. In this next part, I’ll tell the story of how her affair with X began and how money and class continued to play a central role. Feels weird to make my intentions so transparent and unsexy but…whatever? It’s also felt strange (but exhilarating) to make so much raw, unedited material so publicly available. Thank you to all of my volunteer copyeditors for catching typos.
Fall 2019
X and I lived in Park Slope for about three years. Our apartment was a (relative) steal: a one bedroom with two small office/baby rooms and a kitchen big enough to fit extra counter space and a breakfast table. The kitchen window looked out onto the neighbor’s garden. We decorated slowly and intentionally with hanging plants and bar cart stocked with foreign-labeled digestifs. I wanted to love that apartment. But sometimes, when I peed, I noticed that the coat of cream-colored paint in the bathroom had failed to sufficiently cover up the word “wife,” etched in pen on the wall across from the toilet. I wondered who the former tenants were and what had ailed them.
That same year, Gia Tolentino wrote a thought piece about the ridiculousness of the word “wife.” I didn’t read it. The prospect of becoming an actual wife was too real for me to bear it.
When X and I first moved to Park Slope, I loved the treelined streets and the brownstones and the farmers market. I would kill time browsing shops that sold nothing but fancy coasters and soy candles and $5 birthday cards. It took me some time to come to the conclusion that I didn’t like these stores, I just needed to spend money to fill one of those existential holes. None of the bars were that fun and all the restaurants were indistinguishable and mediocre.
I soured on the neighborhood completely after babysitting for local families who consistently forgot to pay me. These families preferred sitters who lived close-by but refused to acknowledge rent would be prohibitively expensive for anyone who needed to babysit in the first place. I was never sure if I was a quintessential Park Slope resident—one half of a nice young couple planning a future— or a broke interloper desperate to flee.
*
Exactly a year ago, L and her husband moved from their lavish town house in Lower Manhattan, to another lavish townhouse a few blocks away from us in Park Slope. They came with their dog and their baby. They were no different from many of the neighborhood couples that I worked for. They had a full time nanny and Nest Cams all over the house.
Shortly after the move, L’s father crashed his private plane and died. When L got the news of the plane crash, we were at a party. The party was for my birthday and X’s birthday, which are three weeks apart. It was also a housewarming party for L and her husband. I only just deleted the email invite to that deranged event.
Neither L nor I were particularly happy at the time of this party. L was recovering from postpartum depression. Her husband was frequently away on work trips or at the office late. Even with the nanny, she expressed frustration with the responsibility of caring for the baby without her husband’s help. Meanwhile, X and I were in the early stages of planning a wedding I wasn’t sure I wanted to have. I didn’t want to end our relationship but it was becoming increasingly clear that I was too restless to stay in it. I hated teaching at Hunter, where I always felt unsupported and like an imposter. But I couldn’t leave because I relied on the income and I was reluctant to give up the prestige of teaching at a university. Even when it made me feel like shit.
Basically, what I’m trying to convey is that long before the news of this fucking plane crash, we were a a bunch of broken, grasping people ripe for self-destruction. The party invite now reads to me like a desperate attempt at normalcy: “Come celebrate our life changes!”
*
This is what about I remember about the night of the party:
L wore ripped jeans, a leather jacket, heeled-booties and a Baby Bjorn. I wore a cropped T-shirt and hoop earrings. Both of us were visibly stressed. I was stoned on THC chocolate-covered coffee beans and she was vaping furiously.
L’s dog was having emotional issues too. He had recently started anti-anxiety meds to help him with his new aggressive behavior toward men (I feel that…) and L kept him crated in the bedroom behind a locked door. The party was crowded, so you couldn’t hear the dog wining and growling unless you listened close. Get it?
Around midnight, we transitioned from L’s home to a bar nearby. My friends and I stood outside the bar with paper plates of birthday cake. I spooned pink strawberry frosting into my mouth.
“Whose home were we just in?” one of my friends asked.
“That was L’s place.”
“Which one is she? The mom with the vape?”
“And the leather jacket.”
“That place is huge.”
I was about to tell them what had happened on July 4th just as X tapped my shoulder and pulled me aside and told me about the plane crash.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said. I spit out my last mouthful of cake.
“Fuck. This is going to be really bad,” I said.
X said that L was still at the house and would not be coming to the bar. He told me not to tell anyone at the party what had happened. I went inside the bar, sat down next to my friends and the birthday cake. I told everyone everything.
*
That night, I couldn’t sleep. X and I lay side by side in the dark. He stroked my back. I felt numb and weird.
“I feel so weird,” I said.
X said that he had texted L on behalf of both of us: “I said, ‘I love you. Shayna loves you too.’”
The next morning, L asked us to come over to her place with vodka and tomato juice. She specifically wanted Campbells tomato juice. I was anxious not to disappoint her. I went into several different grocery stores in search of the right juice. I felt unsettled, far away from X, who already seemed preoccupied with tending to L via text. I wanted to earn their favor by finding the right brand of tomato juice but ended up buying V8, which we hid carefully from her in the kitchen.
L was in the garden looking pale and shaken. She didn’t want to be touched or hugged. She was very close with her dad and called him several times a day. I don’t want to make light of her pain; it was evidently immense.
We sat around the fire pit eating bagels and lox and drinking whatever we could find. We drank wine, sambuca, jars of moonshine with smooth slices of 100 proof peaches. We drank all day while friends and family came by with more bagels and cakes and cookies and pizzas. I fished the peaches out of the mason jar with my fingers.
L was too miserable to eat anything but she drank. We all drank too much. The sun went down and L’s husband fell asleep on the living room couch. At 2 AM we let the fire die and went back inside. After everyone had gone home, X and I cleaned up the garden and the living room while L sat on the kitchen floor. She hadn’t cried all day but alone with us, she began to unravel. I told her she needed to eat something. “How about a bagel?” I asked her.
“If you let me dip it in wine,” she said.
X hand-fed her wine-dipped bagel. Months later, when I was sleepless and weeping on my kitchen floor with the CSA kale, I thought back to the parallel image of L in the same position, eating morsels of bagel.
X helped her upstairs to bed. I remember thinking that he was a good friend. I loved him a lot that night—my caring, sensitive man. I was comforted thinking he would care for me in the same way, as he always cared for me when I was struggling. He was good and I was good. I was a good friend. I was a good girlfriend too. I was a good person. As someone with codependency issues, I enjoyed the intimacy of being in L’s home while she grieved. I was glad to feel included and helpful.
Back at home, I texted L: “please let me know if you need anything. If you have trouble sleeping and are up late at night, you can always text me.”
But she did not text me, she texted X. And over the next few weeks, I noticed that X was constantly texting with her, or going to run errands for her like feeding her cats or walking her dog. I was on continuous group threads with X and L. We exchanged pictures of rescue dogs and made plans for dinner.
Each night I took the train home from Hunter to Park Slope, I headed straight to L’s apartment to watch TV with her and X. She was now essentially a part of our relationship.