When Jean was nearly seventeen years old, she instigated an affair with a house painter in his early forties who played drums in a Beatles cover band. Her boyfriend had asked her to go with him to the all-ages early show at a bar that was usually only for people who were over twenty-one. They quickly saw that even at the early show the crowd was still mostly people their parents’ age, though neither set of parents would come to a place like this. Jean could think of a few of their teachers who might, but none of them were there either. Maybe they were waiting for the late show? Jean had driven so that her boyfriend could eat some psychedelic mushroom caps he’d foraged a few days earlier and dried at home with a lamp whose intended function was to regulate his little brother’s iguana’s body heat.
‘You’ll be okay?’ she asked as he unbuckled his seat belt with a demeanor indicating that whatever had happened to him was still happening to him. They were parked in his driveway and she could see the play of TV light on the drawn curtains in the living room.
‘The world is just the truth,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anything extra.’ Jean did not agree, but he hadn’t phrased it as a question. He leaned in to kiss her and she turned her face slightly to the side. If she allowed him a full kiss he might say something else ridiculous, perhaps about the fundamental strangeness of a ritual that involved touching tongues.
Instead of going home she drove back to the bar. In the parking lot, under the glow of the dome light with her face framed in the mirror of the flipped-down sunshade, she applied a layer of makeup that made her look like someone older who was trying to look younger. Her boyfriend kept a spare pack of cigarettes in her glove box and she took one, though she did not smoke. She walked up to the bar holding it and said hello to the bouncer, who gave a nod and waved her in.
The late show drink special was two-for-one daiquiris because it was Wednesday. This was Florida, in the late 1990s, in a strip mall on Griffin Road, thirty or forty minutes to the north and west of what you’d probably think of if someone said ‘Miami’. Until relatively recently, this had been part of the Everglades, the famous River of Grass, a unique, irreplaceable wonder of the Earth that was being methodically drained for developments such as the one where Jean lived, the one where her boyfriend lived, the high school they attended, and this strip mall.
Jean had not planned further than achieving re-entry to the bar. She probably would have turned around and left but just then the performance began. It felt natural to drift toward the front of the room, to a cocktail table shared by a couple, where there was an empty third chair. She asked if they minded if she sat. They said no, not at all, please join them. The man introduced himself as Grayson and the woman as Cori, short for Corinth, not Corinne like most people would assume. They explained this in husky whispers while the band warmed up the crowd with ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’. Grayson wore a green Lacoste shirt tucked into his jeans; Cori wore white stretch pants and a floral peasant top that was as long as a short dress. They both wore Birkenstocks and expensive rings and it was clear they were reliving their own youth or some version of it that they’d seen on television and over the years had come to believe had been their own. They hadn’t quite dressed the part for whatever they thought they were doing, but they were having a good time and Jean recognized that she herself was playing dress-up, so what was it to her. Grayson got up to get a drink and Cori told Jean she had a good aura. The band played ‘Ticket to Ride’, then ‘Nowhere Man’, both of which Jean had heard at the early show. Next they played ‘Taxman’ and everyone started cheering because it was April. The drummer sang lead and he had an excited sneer in his voice when he sang lines like ‘Be thankful I don’t take it all.’ This was Leon. The audience whooped and booed, thinking of cruel and beloved Uncle Sam, who gave them their freedoms but also said pay up or else.
Grayson returned to the table with a pint of beer in one hand and two strawberry daiquiris teetering in the other. ‘They were two for one,’ he said. ‘So I figured.’ Jean thanked Grayson and accepted the drink. It was sickly sweet but also tart, like a Pixy Stick. She liked that the crushed ice chilled her while the cheap rum warmed her. She liked that she already felt like a regular at this bar though she didn’t particularly like this bar. She had a good view of the drummer from where she was sitting and she liked his voice and the fact that he was a singing drummer. She decided to introduce herself to him after the show.
When the show ended, she thanked Grayson again for the drink and said goodnight to him and to Cori, who leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. The couple left and Jean walked toward the stage, where the band was packing up their equipment, unplugging various cords and wrapping them tightly, using their forearms or fists as spools.
Leon had curly hair that was not yet entirely gray. He had worn it in a stumpy ponytail while he played but now it hung freely about his ears. Jean had straight black hair that spilled nearly to her waist. She was tall and sturdy in bootcut jeans and a loose white shirt of her father’s, untucked, with the sleeves rolled up and the top buttons undone so you could see the gray ribbed tank top underneath. People often took her for Native American, which she half was – her mother was a registered member of the Cowlitz nation – but she always denied this when asked. She had no shame about her heritage. She only hid it because of how weird people could get about it. This was a few years after Disney’s Pocahantas and she had been asked more times than she cared to remember whether she could paint with all the colors of the wind. In the seventh grade her math teacher had told the whole class that the land on which the school sat was rightfully Jean’s. She’d raised her hand and explained that the Cowlitz were Native to the opposite side of the country and that this was, if anything, Tequesta and Seminole land, though the history of the Seminole tribe as a tribe was complicated, being largely an epiphenomenon (she didn’t use this word) of resistance to colonization and chattel slavery, and anyway the land wasn’t really anyone’s, it was the Everglades. Or it had used to be. Her parents had met at Stanford and were no more native to South Florida than whites, Cubans, or anyone else. The teacher had been afraid to interrupt her while she spoke, but when the bell rang he held her back and handed her a detention slip for being disruptive. After that, she answered all queries about her heritage by saying that her father was an emotionally abusive Jewish real estate lawyer. Nobody had any more questions after that, and the statement had the further virtue of being true.
Decades later, a therapist in Chicago would ask her whether she thought there was a causal link between her complicated feelings about her father, who had recently died after a long battle with stomach cancer, and her affair with the middle-aged drummer when she was sixteen. ‘Nearly seventeen,’ Jean would correct him, and she would say she did not see any link and would mean it, but she would not be believed. She’d only mentioned Leon at all because it had occurred to her while talking about her father that the two men were roughly the same age, and she wondered whether Leon was still alive. Also, that the period of the affair had tracked closely with the period of her father’s worst emotional abuse, the dark time which had preceded and ultimately resulted in his entering therapy, though by that point the affair with Leon had ended. Jean’s therapist would assure her that he understood correlation was not necessarily causation but that in this case, well – come on! He would say this to her: ‘Come on!’ She would end the therapeutic relationship on the spot. He would object in strenuous terms, and then fall to pleading, which would strike Jean not only as inappropriate but pathetic. She found displays of male weakness repulsive; they hardened her heart against whoever was blubbering in front of her. The therapist told her that the affair with Leon had left her emotionally arrested and that this was not only the reason she was still single – being incapable, as a perpetual adolescent, of adult relationships – but was also the reason why she had chosen a high school teaching career and now spent her days around teenagers. He told her she was living in a self-made cage that only he could free her from and if she did not continue her treatment, she was likely to fall into a situation with one of her own charges that would reproduce what had happened to her, but she would be the perpetrator this time. She laughed aloud when he said that, a vital disbelieving laugh that captured the absolute contempt in which she now held him. She had never once considered a sexual relationship with one of her students, not even the most attractive or emotionally mature of them, any more than she had considered a sexual relationship with one of her teachers when she was a student. She was a good and committed educator and had always believed, rightly or wrongly, that her experience with Leon had been unique, self-contained, and without lasting consequence: entirely her own. That had been the point of it from the start. And it was for that reason that she had never told the story to anyone before.
She’d liked his ropy forearms and his chinos with frayed cuffs, the fact that he wore flip-flop sandals like life was a beach, and that the sandals never caught on a drum pedal or amp cord when he played. He always wore band T-shirts, onstage as well as off, but never for the band that his band pretended to be. It was all groups he’d seen, mostly in the 80s, such as Aerosmith and the Allman Brothers. But the first night she’d seen him play – and then again three weeks later when she returned to the bar to reintroduce herself and make her interest unmistakable – Leon wore a T-shirt commemorating the Steely Dan 1993 World Tour. The shirt featured the band’s name in hideous blue below a tableau of national flags arranged vortically around an electric guitar the same hideous color as the band name. The graphics were printed on white cotton that reminded her of the phys ed uniform she’d had to wear in middle school, which was where she had been the year of this tour.
She sat again with Cori and Grayson, who said they’d missed her. It dawned on Jean with muted horror that these people came to this place to see this band every Wednesday of their lives. Leon was singing the lead on ‘Carry That Weight’. She told the couple that she was twenty-three years old and working as an in-home caregiver for the elderly and disabled. It was contract work and the hours were unpredictable; she hoped to save up and go back to school to finish a teaching certificate. They accepted all of this without question, which gave Jean confidence that Leon would as well. Grayson treated her to another BOGO daiquiri and she drank it as fast as she could.
Leon did believe her story – why wouldn’t he? – and she stuck to it for three months. After school let out for the summer she had fewer hours of unavailability to account for and that made things easier. Her boyfriend was away being a camp counselor in Maine. She told Leon that the reason they could never go to her apartment was because she had an agoraphobic roommate who would listen to them through the wall with a cup to her ear. Leon suggested she move. He didn’t like to think of her living with someone who was both mentally ill and a pervert. Jean said this was a good idea, but you know how these things take time. Leon did know. He’d been there. And as far as the two of them were concerned, it was fine to always go to his apartment. He didn’t care.
Leon was generous in all ways: as a listener, as a lover. If they split an entrée, he was careful not to eat more than his share. Boys her own age (and, later, men her own age) were always saying they were cool with splitting an entrée, especially if they were treating, but they counted on you not eating more than three bites of the steak or whatever it was. Jean liked to eat her share of food and she liked that Leon liked for her to do this. He would have showered her with gifts all the time if he’d had any money. Her birthday was approaching and she had mentioned it in the hope that he would do something special for her. Nothing expensive, just special. She reminded herself that, as far as Leon knew, she was turning twenty-four.
He lived in a humid ground floor apartment in a building on a canal near a massive outlet mall that when viewed from above was revealed to have the shape of an alligator. Alligators had been common here before the Everglades was drained to build the alligator-shaped mall. When the mall had opened in 1990, Jean vaguely remembered, the local news had sent up a helicopter so everyone could see what it looked like from above. When you were inside the mall it did not feel like being inside of an alligator. There was no sense that this particular store or corridor was in the snout or tail or claw. Mostly you knew which food court you were closest to, the one with the fresh-baked pretzel kiosk or the one with the teriyaki chicken place that gave out free samples. Toothpicks in rows straight as veterans’ gravestones sticking out of chunks of glistening meat each the size of a throat lozenge. The platter was held by an employee in a red apron and matching hairnet who would not look you in the eye but wouldn’t scold you if you came back for a second sample.
Jean’s family lived in a monied suburb south and slightly to the west of this mall. They lived at what was now the frontier of the Everglades, though it wouldn’t always be. Jean’s father, who’d had a hand in making their subdivision possible, sometimes stood in their back yard and looked out toward the flat horizon and told Jean or her mother or the maid, whoever was around, that someday soon there’d be a Starbucks and a Shell station out there. He was right.
In the fifth and sixth grades, Jean would go to the outlet mall with her girlfriends to cruise the long body of the alligator. They’d dip fingers into fountains and flick the water. They’d laugh at lingerie in display windows and take second samples of chicken. One time Jean went back for thirds. She’d met no resistance from the employee and returned to the girls in triumph, with the morsel in her mouth and the toothpick poking from between her grinning lips, but something had shifted in the mere moments that she’d been away. She’d looked at her girlfriends uncomprehendingly, searching each stony face for a clue. The sweet gooey chicken, still unswallowed, was cooling on her tongue.
‘You can be such a piggy sometimes,’ Charlene Stevens said, and then all five girls turned on their heels like it was something they’d practiced, which for all Jean knew, they had.
Now she went to the outlet mall with Leon. Not only was it cheap but she was sure she’d never see anyone she knew there. All the kids from her school went to the fancy mall on the other side of town. Nobody wanted anything from an outlet store. Leon and Jean were free to hold hands while they strolled. She tried on some of the lingerie that she and her friends used to gawk and howl about. She thought lingerie was silly but it wasn’t as though she didn’t understand the principles involved. She’d taken AP Psych! Her parents paid for HBO! She was coming to understand that sex was a secret you shared with another person, but sexiness was sort of a joke that you were in on with yourself. She stood in the changing room before the full-length mirror, admiring herself in a matching bra and panty set the color of fresh blood, as bright as if it were oozing from a newly scraped knee. She closed her eyes to make sure she really liked the fit, and not merely the look, of the garments. Leon stood on the other side of the curtain, being chivalrous and very excited because, this being the outlet mall, and the garments in question on clearance besides, he would be able to afford the set and so insisted on purchasing it for her as a gift for what he believed was her twenty-fourth birthday. She handed the garments to him around the side of the curtain and he went to pay and have them wrapped while she put her regular clothes back on.
Jean asked if he’d like to split a plate of teriyaki chicken over rice. He said he would be happy to share with her. They walked to the food court and over to the restaurant stall and stopped at the free sample station as though considering their options, though the decision had already been made. The employee holding the platter today was a short plump woman with gold clasps high on her earlobe cartilage. She was wearing latex gloves that were translucent enough to reveal a dreamcatcher tattoo down the side of the index finger of the hand with which she proffered napkins in case anyone wanted to wipe their mouths. The dreamcatcher design included an eagle feather that dangled down to her fingertip.
‘Norma!’ Leon said when he saw the tattoo. He’d not yet looked at the woman’s face nor she at his, but he’d have known that tattoo anywhere. He’d been there when she’d gotten it, had in fact supplied the Vicodin that had made the procedure bearable. Some people found transcendent calm or even ecstasy in submitting to the tattooist’s needle, but not Norma. She and Leon had been living together at the time. Norma looked from Leon’s face to Jean’s face and then to the paper bag Jean held, the name of the store emblazoned on its wide side.
‘Oh boy,’ Norma said. ‘Don’t look now.’ But she already had.
Leon and Norma caught up for a couple of minutes, not getting overly sentimental or specific in their reminiscences, except about a mutual friend named Arnold Anderson who had died a few years earlier. They both knew he’d overdosed but avoided saying so. They only said what a shame it was. Jean was not jealous. It made sense to her that people would have histories. When she had a history of her own, this would be part of it. She was over by the counter waiting for the food, which she’d already ordered and paid for. ‘It looks like you’ve got your life all figured out,’ she heard Leon say to Norma.
Norma replied, ‘Well, I’m hanging in there.’
‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Leon said, with a forced cheer intended to direct the conversation to its end. ‘Hanging in and not hanging out.’
They took their food to a table far from the chicken stall. With their sporks they scooped and poked into the hot wet heap of meat and rice.
‘Sorry about that,’ Leon said. ‘I hope it didn’t put a dampener on this wonderful day we were having.’ Jean assured him that it did not. To prove it, she asked a few questions about Norma and those bygone times. Leon answered dutifully, even when the answers cast him in a less than flattering light, as far as the overall way he’d been living back then and what had led to the break up. But all that was a long time ago, even before the 1993 Steely Dan world tour, the commemorative shirt from which Leon happened to be wearing yet again.
Jean appreciated that Leon was so emphatic in his performance of candor, on top of the fact that he actually seemed to be being candid. Beneath his honesty about the squalid chaos of the Norma days, Jean sensed, there was genuine affection for Norma herself that wasn’t yet abated and that he hoped not to trouble her with. She thought this a sign of sophistication and respect and wanted to demonstrate a maturity commensurate with his own. So after they’d returned to his apartment, and she’d duly donned, modeled, and been relieved of the birthday lingerie, and they were lying sweaty flank to flank in the narrow bed the apartment had come furnished with, she told him that there was something about her upcoming birthday that she needed him to know. He laughed and turned her face toward his by touching his pointer finger to her chin and gently pushing her head. He said women always lied about their ages. He had figured this was coming and it was okay if she was really twenty-eight or even thirty. Women thought thirty was a big deal, Leon said, when really it was nothing. You could easily view it as still being the start of your life.
‘Oh boy,’ Jean said, quoting Norma from earlier without realizing it. She no longer wanted to tell him the truth but there was no obvious way out of the conversation and she was too proud or honest to take the lifeline he did not know he had thrown her.
All the color drained from Leon’s face. He jumped out of the narrow bed, accidentally pulling the top sheet with him so Jean was fully revealed. She sat up. A scream stalled in Leon’s throat as he threw the sheet over her. She looked like a child pretending to be a ghost. He grabbed his pants from where they lay on the scratchy brown carpet that always felt a little damp even when it definitely wasn’t. He ran with pants in-hand to the bathroom and locked the door. She could hear him crying on the far side of it while she dressed.
‘I could be in prison!’ he yelled. ‘I might never see my kids!’
Jean apologized a few times but she was getting impatient. She was annoyed by his refusal to come out of the bathroom. She had not meant to precipitate a breakup but since it was happening she felt that they ought to do it face to face. This in the name of that same maturity that had provoked the honesty that had ruined everything. But that didn’t matter anymore, and neither did mutual respect, apparently. Leon would not see her. He would not discuss things. He had stopped responding to her entirely. She was already in the rearview mirror of his life, one more thing that had seemed so promising as he’d approached it, but was now bitterly relieved to see receding behind him to a speck and then to nothing at all. If she hadn’t still been able to hear his hitched breath and quiet crying she might have guessed he’d climbed out the bathroom window, like in that one Beatles song he sang, but in reverse. She was one more thing he would count himself lucky to have survived.
Jean didn’t see Leon again for nearly a year. Then she happened to see him twice in the same week. On a Sunday she had gone with her age-appropriate boyfriend (a different one) to a free all-day local music festival in a city park. She had noticed that Leon’s band was on the bill and so had known that they might run into each other because it wasn’t like the musicians were tucked away in some fancy backstage area. It was the kind of scene where everyone mingled and hung around. A sign said that the purpose of the festival was to raise money to save the Everglades. The music was free and the idea was that the money you would have spent on a ticket to the concert would be given as a donation to the organization that had sponsored the festival. The organization’s goal was to raise awareness. Their private expectation was to recoup in donations slightly less than half of what it had cost to stage the festival.
Jean’s current boyfriend was unlike the last one in almost every way, but the boyfriends did have one thing in common, which was a desire to take drugs to establish a deeper relationship with music they already knew. Jean had driven to the festival so that her boyfriend was free to get as high as he wanted to get. He’d figured he’d be able to find some psychedelics once they got there, but he failed. He went back to the parking lot. In the car he had stashed three Xanax that he had taken from a bottle his mother had been prescribed after a minor car accident. He chased these with glugs from a plastic water bottle that he’d filled with vodka that morning. It had sat in the hot car for hours and he felt proud at being able to keep it down.
Jean had expected this to be a long day and her expectation was being met. She had agreed to come in part because the prospect of running into Leon excited her. Not that she was hoping to run into him, just that it was exciting to know that she might. Maybe he’d apologize for his behavior, the crying and locking himself away. She felt she was owed this. She also felt she owed him an apology about creating a situation that could have possibly affected his visitation with his children. She hadn’t known about that at the time. Maybe Norma would be with him and there would be a dramatic scene.
None of that happened. Her boyfriend overheated in the midday sun. She took him to the medical tent and left him there. She stood at the back of the crowd during Leon’s band’s set. She wasn’t hiding, she was simply more comfortable out of the crush by the stage. The band wasn’t doing Beatles covers that day. They played a few originals, songs Jean remembered Leon playing for her in private – demos the guys had recorded, or sometimes he’d pluck one out on his acoustic guitar and sing it for her – then they did the Allman Brothers instrumental ‘Melissa’, from which they attempted an improvised segue into ‘Blue Sky’, also an Allmans tune. The lead guitar player’s work during the segue was labored and Jean could see the frustration on Leon’s face as he drummed. Or maybe she was imagining that, because she was still at the back of the crowd, but she did remember what his face looked like when he was frustrated. Leon had complained to Jean about the lead guitar player many times. She had once suggested firing him from the band but Leon said they had grown up here together and he would never betray a friend even if the friend was a middling talent and sometimes a pain in the ass. Besides, the lead guitar player owned the band’s van.
Now the lead guitar player said into the mic, ‘We’re gonna bring it down for a minute, folks,’ and then turned to Leon, who hit the kick drum and the snare at once, inaugurating the new song, on which he would sing the lead. The song began, ‘By and by, girl, we’ll get over things we’ve done and the things we’ve said.’ Jean did not recognize this song, which was from Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker’s solo record 11 Tracks of Whack, which had come out in 1994, the year after Leon had seen the Steely Dan world tour. Jean thought that this was another original song and that Leon had written it, since he was singing it. She began to fantasize that he had written it for, or rather about, her. When he sang the chorus, in which the line ‘There’s a star in the book of liars by your name’ is repeated twice, she felt gooseflesh ripple down her bare arms despite the heat of the afternoon. She was absolutely certain that this was her song.
The set ended and the band was still packing up but Leon seemed to have left by the time Jean got to the stage area. Someone else was packing up his drum kit. She wanted to ask about him but didn’t want to talk to any of the bandmates. She didn’t know what Leon might have said about her – not the truth, surely – to have explained her abrupt expulsion from his life. She picked up her boyfriend from the medical tent and they left the park.
That was Sunday. The following Thursday, her no longer very emotionally abusive father asked her to go to the hardware store to pick up an orbital sander so he could refinish their back deck. Normally he would have hired someone to do this for him but he was currently in a form of therapy that encouraged physical activity and home improvement projects as means of developing self-control, learning to find satisfaction in small things, and channeling one’s energies into healthy interests rather than getting trapped in the cycle of repression, explosion, and remorse. Jean’s father said he was going to leave work promptly at five. If she could pick up the orbital sander on her way home from school, which got out at three, he would have a few good hours of daylight left to put into the deck. Jean, who wanted to encourage these healthy interests and development of self-control, agreed to run the errand. At the hardware store, she saw Leon. He was wearing an orange uniform smock and working in the paint section, running the machine that mixed the custom colors.
She stuck the bright green box containing the orbital sander under her arm. She waited until he was without customers and then strode boldly up to him. ‘I heard your song,’ she said, trying to sound brazen, perhaps affronted, though she wasn’t.
‘What?’ he said. And then, ‘Not here.’
He said he was about to go on break. She went to the front of the store and purchased the orbital sander while he clocked out. They reconvened a few minutes later in her parked car. He insisted that he had not written a song about her. She sang the chorus for him and he laughed like he had during their last happy moment together, when he had thought she was about to tell him that she was secretly thirty years old.
‘Okay,’ he said, still laughing. ‘You caught me.’
‘I guess it was pretty messed up, what I did,’ she said. He patted her thigh reassuringly. The reflexive intimacy of the gesture was a shock to both of them. He quickly withdrew his hand.
‘If anyone should be apologizing,’ he said, and took a deep breath as though preparing to make a statement rehearsed in private countless times.
‘Oh no,’ she said, cutting him off. ‘I take it as a gesture of respect.’ She meant the negative portrayal of her in the song she thought that he had written.
Leon had no idea what to say to that. His break was almost over. He was back with Norma now. They were doing the one day at a time thing – hanging in, not hanging out – and even his kids’ mother said that the situation was better than in who knew how long. She was sometimes allowing sleepovers on nights that were technically hers.
Leon telling Jean that he was back with Norma seemed to foreclose whatever line of conversation she’d been about to open. She herself could not have said for certain what line it would have been. Unlike Leon, she had rehearsed nothing, had not imagined a single thing about this moment beyond the fact that it might, at some point, occur. She was enamored of the mystery of her own heart, the inherent outlawry of desire itself, which she and Leon had translated into an actual if inadvertent crime, a crime with which they’d gotten away. Jean was looking forward to breaking up with her boyfriend, who had been cheating on her with Charlene Stevens, who would, in the weeks following 9/11, abruptly become an evangelical Christian and call Jean, who was away at college at Reed because she’d been offered a scholarship there and liked being close to the Cowlitz Nation, and Charlene would confess her high school sins to Jean and Jean would tell her that she’d known about it at the time and it didn’t matter, not then except as a pretext for a breakup and not now in any way, shape, or form. If Charlene were really looking for something to apologize for, Jean would say, why not that time at the alligator mall when she turned all the other girls against her over chicken on a toothpick? That moment, Jean would say, was the loneliest she had ever felt, or expected to feel, in her entire life. It had changed a lot of things for her in ways that were difficult to explain. There would be a long silence on the phone and then Charlene would say, ‘My word, Jean, grow up, there’s a war on,’ and hang up without saying God bless you or goodbye.
In this moment, all that was still to come. So much was to come! Jean was looking forward to all of it. She would go home and hand the orbital sander to her father, and hear the whir and whup of it from her bedroom window, which she would have already opened to receive the cool evening air. Then there was the whole rest of life to look forward to, all that future history. Her heart was full of love for the life she would live, and when she was the age that Leon was now, and firing her therapist, she would think back to this long-ago time and recognize that she had been right. She would say to the therapist, ‘All anyone wants is to love their life and I have loved mine.’ After saying this she would slam his office door behind her, rattling the frame of an expressionist female nude whose presence in the waiting room had always irked her.
In the meantime, Jean gave Leon a chaste kiss on the cheek and released him back into his workday. She pulled out of the hardware store parking lot, still humming to herself the brutal and beautiful song she still believed and would always believe that he had written. It was the most generous thing anyone had ever done for her – borne witness to her full true self – and she did not mind that there wasn’t another living soul who she could tell.
Image © Meriç Dağlı
