Daniel and Julieta

From 'New Yorkers'

It wasn’t entirely clear how they’d met. He claimed – this was the canonical version – that he’d followed her across a party to where she was smoking on a fire escape. He’d pretended to be a smoker, which made them even – she was trying to quit drinking and sensitive about it, she sipped at her seltzer-and-juice concoction, he was in the full throes of his mid-twenties mini-alcoholism, kept slipping back into the party to refill, she had to come up with ever-more elaborate explanations for why he shouldn’t get anything for her. Her version, though, was that they’d actually been at several parties together before that – this was the summer her sorority sister friend Caitlin was experimenting with being a New York City hostess – and she’d noticed him, thought he was cute, thought, in that telescopic way she had, that he was exactly the kind of person she should be with, light and fun and optimistic, a bit Laboradorish, but coachable, and had waited for him to make a move, had even crossed paths with him once at the snacks table, but he’d looked right through her. He’d disputed that – at first, he’d argued dates and places, cooked up alibis, said he couldn’t have been where she said he was. When she’d cracked those stories, remembered, for instance, the shirt he was wearing, he shrugged, said, “Maybe I was blackout.”

It wasn’t completely clear either when the dynamic between them shifted. He tended to be unwashed, unlaundered, still in a kind of post-college delirium. She was like a wary mother condoning his drinking, his forgetfulness, his chronic lateness. She was more established than he was, had her own apartment, in a better neighborhood than his, had a real job with a real salary. She talked about things like tax deductions and credit scores. He was big and shaggy, chased her dog around the bed as the first thing he did whenever he came to her apartment, was effusive in his praise of the simple stews she made for him, very shy always about asking for seconds. There was something juvenile, too, about the way he had sex, very affectionate and persistent, how he pursued her around the bed, how he wanted to try all different positions. “Who would have thought it, when I looked at you at Caitlin’s party and wondered why you didn’t pay attention to me,” she said during a lull in the action, “and now here we are doggie-style on the floor.” And there was something about that, a finality, that bothered him, like everything that was happening was something she’d planned.

If it’s possible to pinpoint the shift between them, it would have been in the down times, when he was lying in bed with her head tucked in his shoulder, thinking about whether, for the sake of a change of clothes, he should take the long subway ride uptown or when they were together in the apartment for a full Saturday and chatted as she flicked restlessly between shows, and the roles that they’d been playacting, he the incorrigible young man in need of taming, she the wise woman two steps ahead of him, seemed to relax, and she talked in a very different way, with no particular connection between her thoughts, sometimes she was in her childhood, sometimes she was complaining in incredible detail about somebody at work. At these times her voice was very flat and slow, and reminded him of someone scratching at an itch that they could never get rid of. In these stories nothing was good. Her father had been verbally abusive, lazy, a tyrant, and then he’d dropped dead. She’d wished for him to disappear, and had felt incredibly guilty when it actually happened, and punished herself by restricting food and when that proved insufficiently masochistic by cutting her legs. And work was just a treadmill, just a constant headache from new bosses – all of whom seemed to be promoted with no qualifications whatsoever – and exerted their authority by completely changing her assignments, by making her life as miserable as they could.

This was the point where Daniel would have been likely to leave. He had declared himself incapable of commitment, was in a stage of his life when he was trying, with real discipline, to be as promiscuous as possible. But he was also warm, affectionate, that had been the base of his personality going back to childhood, before the exigencies of libido made him callous, and he wasn’t going to abandon someone in distress, especially if she were a pretty woman with whom he had good sexual chemistry. He had the uncomfortable feeling that Julieta had calculated everything up to this point, that this was exactly the web she had woven, if not all the way back at Caitlin’s parties which he hadn’t remembered then at those low-key moments, on the pillow, in front of the TV, when she had suddenly, without real warning, decided to be herself, but if everything had been calculated she had also done it with her usual shrewdness, and he was intrigued, it wouldn’t really have occurred to him to leave at this precise moment, it was the part of the relationship that for him was the best part, that unspooled like a detective novel, the new characters, the various hardships, the background information letting you know who this person was who up to now had really just been a pretty face, a drinks’ table frisson, the phase that he privately thought of as the honey trap, leading you into the next phase, which was domesticity. It felt that every time he was at her place there was some new revelation, for instance the fact of her anorexia, then the news that it hadn’t stopped in adolescence as he’d naively thought, that she was on a very complicated schedule of bingeing and restricting that she executed with great cunning, never meeting him for dinner on her restrict days, or just pretending to eat if she were feeling particularly weight-conscious, and every time she told him something he just took it in, nodded sagely, thanked her for sharing with him, asked a few gentle follow-up questions, asked if he could help her in any way.

The revelations culminated when he came to her place and found the bed littered with dresses still with the tags on. He tried to move them and she said that she should do it, they needed to be touched carefully since she would have to return them all, she couldn’t afford them, it was just a painful and embarrassing thing to do because they really all looked so good on her. “That hasn’t happened to me in a long time,” she said, “I thought I was past that.” At which point she explained to Daniel that she was bipolar, that she’d been diagnosed with depression just after her father died, that that had been upgraded to bipolar after a bad manic episode when she was in college, that she was going through a heavy battery of therapy appointments, that there was some reason actually to think that a more appropriate diagnosis might be borderline. “Did you know that?” she asked Daniel. He had to shake his head and admit that he didn’t. “You got close to it at one point,” she said, “I thought maybe you’d guessed.” And he had to shake his head again; if he had nearly guessed, it had probably been some polite follow-up question, it was all a different world, the terms meant almost nothing to him. All he knew was that they were red flags, he’d heard different phrases about it, that there was ‘no cure,’ that these things were a ‘life sentence,’ that, really, there was ‘a sick world,’ and if you were unlucky enough to be on the far side of it you had to forget about normal relationships, with partnership-building and commitment issues and jealousy and all the things that were so aggravating to most couples, you just became a ‘caretaker,’ a live-in nurse. But he really was warm and affectionate, didn’t intimidate easily, didn’t follow the herd. He nodded, thanked her for sharing that with him, asked if there was anything he could do to help.

Once those restraints were gone – the initial flirtation, the slow leaking of information in the getting-to-know-you phase – the relationship started to look very different. He came to her place and found her couched – staring up at the ceiling, illuminated by the light from the TV – or else just a crying mass in the bed surrounded by a stack of blankets. The dog had been given away – barking too much, too much of a hassle. The stews had been replaced by takeout. He did the dishes, wiped out her takeout containers, separated her trash and brought the bags downstairs. He folded up the clothes she’d left strewn on the floor and guessed which closet drawer they belonged in. He curled up in bed next to her, didn’t say much of anything, definitely didn’t push for sex, just lay in bed with a glass of beer on the nightstand, sometimes fooling around with a composition in his notebook, and felt a purr of satisfaction whenever she rested her head on his shoulder or placed a hand on his chest, exactly the way he might have if a cat crawled out of its hiding spot and settled on his lap.  

Nobody else understood the relationship, and he didn’t bother explaining it to anyone. The few friends who’d met Julieta – and found her unhinged, constantly wandering off to smoke, even just Irish Exiting from parties – assumed that she was using him, that he was the crying shoulder, the comfort blanket, and he didn’t disagree with that assessment; the missing piece of it, what his friends couldn’t see, was that he enjoyed it. During one of her crying jags she got self-deprecating, mad at herself for not having hobbies, not having any interests outside work, not giving to anyone. “And you, you’re perfect,” she said, very angrily, and he felt actually that it was true, he was employed, he’d been promoted, he had friends, interests, he’d become better-dressed, better-groomed in the time since he’d known Julieta – she was very good about that, would meet him right after work when she was unrecognizably bright and extroverted, take him clothes-shopping, and, with humiliating invasiveness, force him to buy better deodorants, soaps, moisturizers – and he was capable of suspending himself, pausing his ambition and his social life, pouring himself into looking after Julieta, who so badly needed a friend.

***

He was introduced to Lauren as a half-setup. Arianne, who was his most interesting and flakiest friend, his sometime librettist, kept mentioning her fun new friend, who was exactly like Daniel – the ‘female version’ of him – was conservatory-trained, had great taste, etc, but was also, ‘you know, grounded, together,’ would be a good influence on him, kept telling Daniel to remind her to introduce the two of them. Of Daniel’s friends, Arianne was the most mystified by Julieta, accused him of ‘taking advantage of that poor sick girl.’

She dangled Lauren in front of him for some time, told him she’d arrange the meeting once he was single again, and when Daniel insisted that he was – which was technically true, he and Julieta had never had the talk, for that matter almost never saw each other outside her apartment, were, in a sense, more companions than anything else, like some inscrutable old couple taking care of one another – she made her famous fish eyes at him, nodded along, ‘Yeah sure,’ like some kind of sitcom smart aleck, for all of his explanations of why he wasn’t really attached.

She finally delivered, texted them all to get together for brunch, and after she’d finished her mimosa strode off. “And now,” she said to Lauren, who looked very surprised, “having done my part, I leave him in your capable hands.” Daniel actually was a bit mystified at why Arianne thought they were similar – he tried to ask her about this later on, but she’d evidently decided she no longer wanted to be friends with him and stopped returning his text messages – Lauren was quiet, serious, with a habit of petting her hair as she talked to him, she had been conservatory-trained but that was apparently parental influence, music was long behind her, she worked a corporate job now. On the other hand, she was exquisitely pretty, which Arianne had somehow neglected to mention, her button-nose, proud chin, the shoulder-length hair as carefully groomed as a show poodle’s, the summer dress that she bravely wore out-of-season, pretending all through their long, momentous outdoor brunch that the cold wasn’t bothering her. And she let Daniel walk her to her apartment, didn’t let him kiss her, but said “Maybe next time” in such a dreamy, thoughtful way that it was very hard not to be hooked. He felt himself trembling as he composed his text messages to her asking her for a date, just staring shamelessly at his phone, like a sentry on patrol, while he waited for the reply.

They were together four years. Everything about the relationship followed a perfectly normal, predictable arc – as Arianne told him when she could finally be reached for comment. “You’ll be blissfully happy for like six months, six months to a year,” she said, “that depends on how long it takes for you to get it together to move in with her, then once you do she’ll start to get glimpses of how selfish and inconsiderate you are, you’ll start to forget all kinds of things, which with her – especially with her – will drive her completely crazy, and after about a year of that she’ll be ready to end it, a nice, simple break, but you’ll turn on your sweet side and your charm or whatever it is that you get to work for you and you’ll probably run the clock out to five years when she’ll realize that you’re going nowhere in a hurry and what she really wants is a nice husband in the suburbs who can make her feel like she’s Katherine Hepburn and she doesn’t have to worry her head about a thing.”

Everything happened exactly as Arianne said it would, although her math was off by about a year. At the very start of year four, just as their cute little apartment in the West Village suddenly seemed too small for her, and she began complaining about closet space and the five-floor walk-up, which had never bothered her before, Daniel was going through his own crisis. He had somewhat belatedly let go of his planned career composing operas, he had been in and out of work in tech services and around the time that he and Lauren got serious he committed to a job there that he himself found very difficult to describe – it had to do with facilitating communication between engineers and project managers. It was the sort of job that seemed tailored for him, he was personable and articulate, he was able to effectively communicate with anyone he was told to communicate with, and, unlike just about anybody else, he could, thanks to his music training, somewhat comprehend the computer engineers with their beautiful, impenetrable minds. It was a good job – Lauren, in particular, agreed that it was a good job – and he suddenly found himself completely incapable of doing it. He spent his days in the office imagining how to make it to the next coffee break, and then towards the end of the day how to last until happy hour. He became noticeably less detail-oriented, more willing to let various tasks slide. He attributed this to being more experienced – “work smarter not harder” became a private mantra of his – but it was hard not to notice a certain condescension creeping in towards him, he was referred to once as possessing ‘a lot of institutional knowledge,’ which really made him feel like office furniture. He was still very well-liked, a lumbering, reassuring presence at lunchtime or company happy hour, and he was at no real risk of being fired, but when the industry had a downturn and the company was seized by layoffs, no one fought for him, it was very difficult to make a case for why he would be essential.

The thing to do in that situation was to get on your feet as fast as possible – to start firing off cover letters to every rival company you could possibly think of, and to do it before your former co-workers got their e-mails in first, but Daniel found there to be something very reassuring about having the days wide open, to be at home, to lie on the couch and type his e-mails from there if that’s what he wanted to do and he found himself, contrary to all reason and common sense, to be in no particular hurry. Lauren was working, they had some savings, but not nearly enough to withstand even a few of weeks of unemployment. He found it beyond his nervous system to check in on his bank account and to see how rapidly it was diminishing – just as he found it somehow out of his reach even to apply for unemployment benefits or write to old friends asking if they knew of anything. “I’m depressed,” he said to himself late one Wednesday afternoon as he watched the sky slowly darkening outside his apartment. “This is what it’s like to be depressed.” Although he found it not unpleasant, this feeling of being so quiet and cozy at the same moment that he was apparently in freefall, this feeling of having a series of childish games he would play with himself throughout the day: could he send off one e-mail; could he both change out of pyjamas and shave – and if he managed to do both could that be enough and he wouldn’t have to worry about the e-mail; could he make it to 5pm without a drink, and if he made it that far he might muscle all the way to 6 or even 7, which he felt might be a world record for an unemployed tech consultant and then would celebrate by making it all the way to the wine store and having a fresh bottle ready to share with Lauren when she got home from work.

She broke up with him over coffee – he knew in advance what the conversation would be and she told him that she didn’t want to ‘contaminate the apartment’ with it. It felt exactly like getting laid off. She told him that he was a wonderful person, that she would always love him – he was getting a flashback of the HR person going down a checklist itemizing all the ways he’d been an asset to the company – but that he had work to do, and it was best for him to do the work on his own, and if he managed to do it, as she was sure he would, they could always try again. She started crying as she said that – a discreet cry in their tucked-away corner of Stumptown Coffee – and he had no sympathy, didn’t take her hand or try to dab her eyes, just watched her beauty, thought about how he’d had that for so long, such a companion to him, and now it would be taken from him, and he’d probably never be so close to anybody as beautiful as that again.

***

He and Julieta had been in touch throughout his relationship. He didn’t hide their friendship from Lauren, but he was discreet about it – Lauren didn’t at all like the sound of his undefined thing with Julieta, thought it was ‘squishy’ – made sure he was out of the apartment whenever he called Julieta for a catch-up, incorporated it into some other errands when, on a self-help kick he had early during the Lauren relationship, he stopped by her place to drop off The Power of Now or The Japanese Art of Tidying. Now that he was single, he got back in touch with Julieta, found her pretty much just as he’d left her. He came to her place looking for someone to commiserate with him about Lauren – all of his other friends, Arianne, Caitlin, this whole pack he’d been so close with, had drifted away over the course of relationship – and she was clearly the wrong person for it, was in one of her bad funks, lay in bed, frowned at the ceiling fan, the takeout containers in a ring around her. She’d hated Lauren, had no idea why he hadn’t left her sooner. He was thrown by that, didn’t have it in him to argue the opposing side, explain why he’d stayed. He lay next to her, the fan rotated around them, eventually he put out his hand, grazing the backs of her fingers, so lightly that he wasn’t sure she noticed, and then she slid her hand into his, her small birdlike hand, his clammy, clumsy hand, and it felt completely natural, like it had always been there.

She had had boyfriends since they had last been together and he had kept up with most of the relationships. They texted during the long lazy afternoons at work, it was always her doing the talking, they could have an entire text conversation in which she didn’t ask him a single question about himself, just provided the updates on the incredibly predictable, entropic process by which the latest boyfriend discovered the extent of her depression, promised to be there for her, said that none of what she was telling him discouraged him, then through a series of face-saving gestures artfully distanced himself, explaining that he just wasn’t equipped to deal with what she had, that as much as he wanted to help her, he just didn’t get it, she needed to be with someone who was either a clinician or depressed, someone who knew what she was going through. The most difficult of these abortive relationships had been with Jeremy, whose trauma – ‘trauma with a lower-case t,’ Julieta had emphasized – was that he was a lawyer who wanted to be a writer, who just couldn’t seem to make up his mind to quit his firm just as he couldn’t make up his mind about her, until, finally, inevitably, he had suggested that she be with someone ‘more like herself.’ “And the thing is,” Julieta had written, livid, “is that I could have helped him, I really could have, if he had quit and he needed support, I would have done that for him, I would have worked extra, done what I had to, I would have taken care of him.”

At the time Daniel had had even less patience than Julieta for Jeremy’s trauma with a lower case t – there really was nothing that sickened him more than hearing lawyers complain about how they didn’t actually want to be lawyers – but now, lying together one weekend afternoon in bed, he turned to her and said, as nonchalantly as he could, “Do you remember what you said to Jeremy once about supporting him? I think I’d like to take you up on that.” And she kind of fluttered in bed, pleased that he’d remembered a conversation they’d had so long ago. She was really doing very well at work – he had no idea how she’d managed it, how inexorably she’d been climbing the ladder, given the way she collapsed in the evenings and on weekends – and they both knew she could manage it, she was nothing if not resourceful. She kissed him on the forehead. “If that’s what you want,” she said.

Over the next few days, they set a few ground rules. No drinking while she was gone, that was the major one, no drinking at all if he could help it, but the main thing was that she keep an eye on him, that he not keep secrets from her, that he not quietly go into his own spiral. “I have enough I’m dealing with,” she said, in this saucy aunt-like voice she sometimes put on, “I can’t have you dragging me into some fresh vortex with you.” And he had to do something with himself, he couldn’t just vegetate in the apartment while she was gone – he didn’t have to work, but he did have to spend his time doing something other than lying on the bed and couch. “You have things you care about,” Julieta said in that strange aunt-like voice of her. “At least one of us should spend their time doing something.”

And he tried. He pulled himself out of bed towards mid-morning, long after she’d dressed and kissed him goodbye for the day. He worked his way to the couch, the TV was almost always on, the History Channel and HGTV, the companions that she kept with her through all her time alone, he put them on mute, he found he liked having them there, the faces lighting up when they advanced to the next round of a contest or saw their dream house, and he wrote in his notebook or played around on GarageBand. He’d given up on music for all the usual reasons – no money, no time, but also no talent, he knew that about himself, he was under no illusions now, but the ground rules were clear to him and, besides drinking and couching, nothing else occurred to him as a way to spend the day. He white-knuckled it, he composed, and she texted him whenever she was at a break in her work and she was as pleased as a mother when he reported back his progress, the number of lines written, the number of hours clocked sober. He felt underwater, completely underwater, that was the phrase that always came into his head, but it was very different from the freefall he’d been in at the end of the relationship with Lauren, and if it wasn’t exactly pleasant with Julieta, let alone happy, it was manageable. He could, he felt, stay in this for a long time.