Rebecca Johnson

Darwin theorized that blushing is our way of telling the world we recognize something is wrong and we’re sorry for it. I have a secret that makes me blush. It happened in college, a million years ago on the Upper West side of Manhattan and it doesn’t amount to anything to anyone but me, but thirty five years on, I can remember the details with a startling clarity. It has to do with a betrayal, naturally, and I suppose it stands out because it was the first time I learned that I was capable of cruelty.

Setting has a lot do with falling in love. You could meet the world’s most boring man in Venice but, still, he would always be infused with bits of that city’s glamor. I met Anton, my first boyfriend, one spring in the impossibly romantic town of San Miguel de Allende, located four hours north of Mexico City. A recent graduate of Columbia University, he was teaching Spanish to gringos at the Instituto, a crumbly mansion in the heart of town owned by his mother’s family, a clan of glowering widows dressed in black. I was a high school senior studying abroad for the semester.

More than one person compared Anton to Humphrey Bogart for more than one reason. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes, always dressed in button-down solid-colored shirts rolled up to his elbows, dark chinos and incongruously old man black shoes. He looked like an insurance agent from the 1950s but what can I say? He pulled it off. His mother was an upper class Mexican; his father was a highly disappointing Minnesotan who had clunked off from alcoholism early in Anton’s life .

The first time we met, he was reading Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night on a terrace café overlooking the main square of town. When he wanted to make a point about the book he would literally tap the pages with his pointer finger, as if to say, see, see here? He was 24; I was 16, though I may not have mentioned my age to him.

A lot of the American girls in that town were after him. One of them, Bridgette, came from Connecticut and wore those long Indian skirts that were popular back then. She was always laughing, which caused her to appear a bit stupid. I could tell he didn’t like her, even though she would literally fling herself on him whenever they met. I think my literary pretensions appealed to him—I had just finished Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano and was working my way through A Hundred Years of Solitude. Plus, I was fucking gorgeous, as sixteen-year-olds are wont to be.

Sex was had. The first ever for me. When my semester ended, I returned to my New England boarding school firmly convinced I was in love. We exchanged a few tortured letters but I remember struggling to find anything worth saying. “Golly, the frogs are really loud this year!” Nevertheless, when it came time to pick a college, the fact that he would be back in New York played no small part in my decision to attend Barnard, the women’s college at Columbia.

Things were different in New York. Very. I was a freshman in college, excited by school and the thrumming possibilities of the big city. He worked at the gift shop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and lived in a depressing railroad apartment with three other guys on Amsterdam Avenue. Their bedrooms had windows on to the street but his, the smallest, looked out on an airshaft. “Why does J.D. get the good bedroom?” I’d ask, pouting, but he’d just shrug, indifferent to bourgeois comforts. This was partly what had attracted me to him in the first place, but at the time he was living in his family’s empty mansion, the gaudy furniture covered in white sheets. A tenement that smelled like roach poison wasn’t nearly so romantic. Plus, he never washed his sheets.

In his free time, he worked on his short stories, minutely observed rehashes of traumatic childhood episodes. His English was perfect, but Spanish was his mother tongue and the stories felt labored. His other friends had begun to hedge their bets by looking for jobs at publishing houses or going to grad school but he was convinced that no one would ever hire him for him that kind of job. He drank to excess. Normally reserved, the drink would unleash spasms of overwrought emotion and he would show up at my door unannounced in the middle of the night. His hangovers were brutal.

I did not want to be his girlfriend anymore. At all. It was clear he was a sinking boat and no matter how hard I bailed, I could not save him. Still, I loved him. He was kind and could be funny. He was a natural athlete, with a talent for soccer and tennis. He may have lacked the temperament to be an artist, but his devotion to literature and its salves matched my own. What’s more, I liked his crowd of friends, young men who carried paperback copies of Beckett in the pockets of overcoats they bought at vintage stores downtown.

I suppose it was natural that I would fall in love with one of his friends, but it would have been better if it weren’t Anton’s best friend. Like him, the friend wasn’t conventionally handsome. He was tall, with a New York pallor and small, intelligent eyes set too closely together, but he had the most marvelous snicker and a knack for making you feel like he was observing you from a great distance. I felt he saw things in me. Which is what we all want, ultimately. To be seen.

The friend was in grad school but worked nights as a bartender at a nearby restaurant. It wasn’t the kind of place where students went. Instead, it seemed to serve couples on the brink of divorce who would huddle at their candle-lit tables and speak in low, muttering tones of discontent. My friend Catherine, who also had the habit of falling in love with inappropriate men, would go with me and sit at the bar while I did my best to flirt. We’d order the terrible house wine and nurse it for an hour. He’d top us up for free, which was all the encouragement I needed.

Eventually, I roped him into bed. I say roped because it was always clear to me that, in this situation, I was Bridgette from Connecticut. And yet, I persisted. The sex was fumbly and awkward. As a child, I’d read an inordinate amount of idiotic romances which had inculcated me with the idea that fucking was the apotheosis of love. (See Bridgerton for this kind of tomfoolery.) Of course it was neither. The next morning, after he left, I noticed a tiny smear of shit on my sky blue sheets. I quickly bundled them up for the laundry. After that, whenever I thought about the friend all I could see was that tiny brown stain he’d left. I wasn’t smart enough then to realize that my disgust had less to do with his fecal smear and more to do with my own dismay at betraying Anton.

Whenever I was around the two of them after that night, I would do everything I could to ignore the friend. Eventually, Anton asked if I’d had some kind of argument with him. “No,” I answered, “he’s just so obnoxious.” The answer delighted him. He loved us both. Had we joined forces, it would have destroyed him. So we kept our secret and our distance.

In the end, none of it mattered and all was forgotten. We stayed in touch intermittently over the years. Sometimes, when I was driving home from Manhattan to Brooklyn after a party, I’d swing by the Mexican restaurant where Anton was bartending, an easy exit off the West Side highway. I’d sit at the bar, nursing a margarita, and we’d chat. He always seemed happy to see me and that made me happy.

One day, I received a call from one of Anton’s other ex-girlfriends. His body had been found in the East River, weighted down by a backpack filled with books. I found myself wondering if Journey to the End of Night was one of the books he had chosen, but of course there was no one to tell me whether this was so.