Your Life for Another

Italicized lines are from James Joyce’s Ulysses (Random House, 1986 reissue).

ms cuello cause she never give up on me even though theres no hope

I liked the way I was portrayed in the note. I saved it in an overflowing binder filled with thank-you notes from students. I had no idea who wrote it.

In my classroom I did not give up on people. But teaching is lopsided in its power. The balance in friendship is more unclear: What are we allowed to need from each other?

In 1993 I enrolled in a seminar on James Joyce’s Ulysses with my friend Natalie. In order to graduate, we had to write a senior thesis. I did it easily. She never did. Her voices began that semester, and she dropped out before May. Not long after, I abandoned her.

James Joyce describes Stephen’s dead mother as folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.

I met Natalie my second day of college. She called me Jessie (few people do) and immediately made me laugh with a parody of the dean’s speech on being a Barnard woman. We went to a filthy diner with bent silver ashtrays, smoked a whole pack of cigarettes (hers), ate eggs over easy, and talked about everyone we had met. We felt an electricity from being in New York City, waiting for classes to begin. I felt exhilarated to be smoking freely, out in the open, buying food in a restaurant, free from my home.

The diner closed because of health violations before the year was over, but we remained friends throughout college, despite moving in different crowds. Freshman year, she was famous for sleeping in the lounge so she could smoke all night while she studied. One morning, late to a final, she emerged cloaked in her blanket, glasses askew, red hair wild, and ran off in her smoke-smelling pajamas. There was a trail of books left in the hall. Kant. Hobbes. Locke. Saint Augustine.

I cannot find my thesis on Ulysses. But my penciled notes are still in the margin of my book. I vaguely remember what I wrote. Something about the decay of the body, something about loss.

In the original Odyssey there is only one hero, and he ends up alone, losing his companions one by one, but in Joyce’s Ulysses there are two protagonists. One hero returns to his love and affirms life with a resounding Yes. The other remains isolated and alienated.

I don’t remember the subject of Natalie’s thesis. I only remember that finishing it was the biggest barrier to her graduation. She confided in me that James Joyce came to her as an auditory hallucination and berated her while she tried to write. “You don’t understand my book,” he’d say, “Your idea is all wrong.” Once, when Natalie’s despair was unbearable, Virginia Woolf showed up and defended her against Joyce. Later, Natalie imitated Woolf ’s hallucinated voice for me in an English accent, “You leave that poor girl alone.” Woolf came to her as a rescuer and put Joyce in his place.

Senior year, Natalie took Ancient Greek as an elective, a graduate class that was too hard for her. Hard classes were part of her destruction. Like cigarettes, they also kept her alive. As a kind of talisman, a kind of childlike protection from the shame of failure, she kept a stuffed bear named Homer Bear. When she studied, she held Homer Bear up like a puppet, and he’d recite The Odyssey in Greek. He leaped wildly and gesticulated; he whirled his head around and flopped over in death.

One day as Natalie and I sat in a diner on Broadway, we spied our Joyce professor buying the New York Post from the corner kiosk. “New York Post,” said Natalie. “I can’t believe she reads the trashy New York Post.” Our professor smoked as she walked, and we loved this. We loved finding these human elements in our ideal. Natalie and I were idealists, and the object of our idealism was our professors. We so badly wanted to belong, to feel smart. We thought the life of the mind could save us. Natalie piled on courses that were too much for her, as if each course were an antidote to her suffering. She believed she could think herself into a good life. For a long time I believed this too.

Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness.

I went to Barnard, but I was never a part of it. No administrative speech spoke to me. No building made me feel at home. I did all the reading, but sometimes I spaced out in class, unable to follow. Sometimes I simply didn’t care. I lied about this to myself for years, for decades: I pretended that school defined me. I did not admit to myself that I wanted to be seen, to be taken under a teacher’s wing, but the desire was so buried that I graduated unknown and invisible like I had been in my family. In the end, Barnard was simply something to finish so I could get closer to other things.

do they see anything that we cant staring like that when she sits at the top of the stairs so long and listening

When Natalie dropped out of college and lost her dorm room, she lived for a little while in different apartments adjacent to campus. Eventually she was unable to hang on to those rooms, and a year later I let her stay with me in my tiny studio apartment on West 106th Street. I was student-teaching during the day, working in the late afternoon, and attending graduate classes in education at night. I didn’t get home until after 9 p.m. I came home one evening and the door was wide open. All the burners on the gas stove were lit, with the flames on high. Natalie was not there.

I told her she couldn’t stay with me anymore.

We stopped talking. Though she tried. She left numerous messages. Messages that begged. “Jess, Jess,” she began on the answering machine, “I know we had a rough patch. I know. I know. But we’ve been through too much of a friendship for you to throw in the towel. You can’t just end the whole friendship like this.” But I did.

For a very short time she lived above Cannon’s, a bar with few tables and few lights, meant for fraternity boys to lurch across the beer-splattered floor while singing “Brown Eyed Girl.” Once, as freshmen, we’d wandered in there at midday and shared a pitcher of beer with three young Latino cops, who confided in us that they were hated. We talked to them like they were our kids; it was strange—we were younger, but they wanted advice. We had none. We had only been waitresses or babysitters. We had no wisdom for Latino cops, for men, for people who didn’t go to college. We were a break for them from something heavy in their choices and we paid for the beer because they seemed gentle and lost.

That afternoon in the bar seemed far away by the time that Natalie lived in the upstairs apartment. I don’t know what possessed me to knock on her door one day. We’d hardly seen each other since I graduated. The buzzer had a mournful howl as she let me in. The two-room apartment was dark; cigarettes, books, papers, and food were strewn about. She stared at me listlessly. We both knew the act that hung in the room: She was thinking about suicide. Later she stared at me in a blank way, her eyes going elsewhere, and she said, “I knew you were psychic, Jessie. You saved me that day. You filled the whole place with love.” I said nothing. I had only been trying, with a desperation I hadn’t shown, to keep the darkness at bay and then get out of her apartment. The air had been thick with despair. I could not breathe, but I could not leave her inside that fog. Not until I knew she was okay. Later I could.

I do not like that other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet.

In 2005, Texas schools began an initiative to teach young people how to have good character. There were six pillars: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. It was like a Catholic virtue list rewritten for public schools. Our students had to choose people in their lives who embodied the pillars and explain why. Afterward, if their English teacher saw words about you, they’d stick it in your box.

ms cuello cause she never give up on me even though theres no hope

We all had scorn for the character initiative. The lie of it, the disconnect from students and who they were. Nevertheless, I saved this little paper.

When I was a girl, I never understood the essence of the Easter story. How does dying save another? But its idea of sacrifice was threaded through narratives I devoured, especially the fairy tales I read and reread.

Once, a friend said, “My problem with Christ is he gave his life for another.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“It wasn’t his life to give. Your life is not yours to give away.”

Whenever my daughter and I become obsessed with a book together, my husband wants in, to join the conversation. We drilled him as he read Little Women.

“Don’t you love Jo best?” we asked. “You must love Jo best if you belong to this family.”

“I like Jo, but I don’t like when she almost lets Amy die on the ice.”

“Sacrilege,” said my daughter.

“Misreading,” I added.

“No,” my husband insisted, “she skates on ahead with Laurie. She leaves Amy behind, knowing the ice is too thin.”

“But, but,” my daughter and I cried out in unison. “Amy tore up Jo’s book. She shouldn’t have followed. Amy is less than Jo.” We defended Jo’s actions aggressively. We wanted to rip the book from his hands. He was not ready for it. Maybe he could not understand what it means to be Jo. To have created something. To have been betrayed. The enormous pressure to comply. The bitterness on the ice. Always as a child, I was cheering Jo on. Amy deserved to be in danger. She had made her own danger by following Jo.

Jo violates the rules for being a girl. She is vengeful, neglectful. And we root for her—at a limbic level. She throws away her value as a girl by refusing to care about Amy’s life, by giving in to anger. She cares about her own creation more.

The Joyce seminar was the last class Natalie took.

She could not finish the thesis, and I felt compelled to help her.

“Can’t you just write it?” I asked her. “Can’t you just write it badly?” I had none of Woolf ’s gentleness.

Everything speaks in its own way.

Woolf, who hated Joyce, was tormented by voices and freed herself by drowning.

Before the voices came, Natalie was in love with our eighteenth-century literature professor. He was from the Midwest, brilliant, down-to-earth, and handsome because of his vitality. He had thick brown hair and liked country music. She stalked him a bit and discovered a book he had written on Tobias Smollett. We thought this was hilarious for some reason, maybe because we had never heard of Tobias Smollett and his name was so uncanny that it felt incongruous with her crush. Because of the professor’s lectures, we fell in love with Samuel Johnson. I prank-called him and said, I am the ghost of Samuel Johnson in a spooky voice; we hung up before I could finish because we were laughing too hard.

High falutin stuff.

At my birthday party right before the friendship ended, we were at a favorite Greek restaurant on 113th Street. It had a lovely black cat and a tree growing out of the ceiling in the back room. A group of us were seated around a long table. Natalie had lost the apartment over the bar and was now living in Spanish Harlem, a few blocks from campus but on the other side of the park. Her hallucinations had become more intense and pervasive. During dinner she twitched her head to respond to someone who was not there. None of my guests wanted to sit near her. They were afraid. After dinner we walked down Broadway.

“Jessie,” she said, “there is a boy in communication with me. He lives in Harlem. He’s alone and is misunderstood. He has been in pain. I am trying to comfort him with my words.” He was real to her. His mind had found her mind.

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly.

Not long after, she called me wanting help. The voices were tormenting her. She had tactile hallucinations, strokes on her arms in addition to the voices. She talked clearly about her suffering and described it with desperation. I asked if I could take her to the hospital. To my surprise, she said yes. As we got on the subway she began to get very angry with me, agitated.

“Where are we going?”

“I told you, the hospital.”

“But which hospital?”

“Columbia Presbyterian, I was told you would get better care there than Saint Luke’s.”

She practically spit in anger, “I don’t want to go to Columbia. They don’t let you smoke there.” She was so angry she wouldn’t look at me as I checked her in. I took her cigarettes before I left her and smoked them one by one on the windowsill, legs on the fire escape, telling myself I had done the right thing.

Tell him if he smokes he won’t grow. O let him! His life isn’t such a bed of roses.

It occurred to me that the night when she left the burners on, she had lit them for a cigarette. That she had left to run to the store, maybe for cigarettes. The door was open because in her mind she was just running out for a minute, to the corner. At the time I was vulnerable. I had to wrench back control of my space, the only space I had. The space that connected me to security, to my teaching degree, that would connect me, in three short months, to a full-time job with salary and health care. The middle class was waiting for me, and I suddenly felt like Natalie was a risk. I didn’t even call her to say she could not stay there anymore. I shut the door and didn’t answer my phone. It was the days of answering machines. You could listen to people talking without picking up. You could replay the message over and over.

We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light.

Her messages were plaintive, moving. I recognized something hard in my heart. Or the heart of those who had raised me. I had had to turn my heart off daily during childhood so I would not feel hurt, rejected, unseen. I did not notice Natalie’s absence. Absence was normal. Early on, I learned to turn away from anyone who had hurt me or anyone who left abruptly just as the other members of my family turned away. When my father left for the last time, no one mentioned him again. I put loss in its little drawer and rearranged the family members. I am this, I am that. Each to his ability. Each to his acts.

When I was five, the man in an apartment below us fell asleep with a lit cigarette. The house caught fire, and our mother carried us down three flights of stairs. Outside the man wandered about on the front lawn holding up his burned arm. That night, my brother and I were taken to the home of a babysitter who used to abuse us. We slept on the hard floor of his bedroom and I recall that the flames from the fire glowed on the wood-paneled walls. But of course that memory is impossible, the house was around the corner on the other side of the block, too far from the fire.

Now I realize that the scary babysitter was also a child. There had been toys in his room.

I have a single memory of calling my mother a liar when I was five or six. I never did it again. I swallowed the thought, and mercy was swallowed with it. My mother had no space for mistakes. I could not risk the relationship. I did not allow for mistakes in myself.

As I listened to Natalie’s messages, I felt a band that lifted my jaw, lifted with a kind of arrogance. Often, in a picture someone took, I’d see that my head was lifted slightly. Lifting slightly is survival. False survival. If you see someone lifting their jaw, they need your love, but they will probably reject it. Every year when we take the staff photo for work, the photographer says, “Lower your chin.”

Does he ever think of the hole waiting for himself? They say you do when you shiver in the sun.

I had never before turned away from her, never not shown compassion. A perverse survival instinct had kicked in. Her voice played repeatedly in my little studio. Each time I deleted the message robotically.

Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur.

Natalie’s tuition was paid by a Russian grandmother who had raised her. Mine was paid through financial aid. The two of us used to count pennies to pay for a pack of cigarettes, and the man at the store would shake his head, putting up his hand to say no.

“No,” he’d say every time, “no more pennies.”

“It’s legal tender. Issued from the government,” Natalie said, and laughed as she stacked the pennies into piles on the counter.

The only real family she had was a distant brother. Once, her father had shown up on campus trying to find her. He wandered around on a freezing winter day in underwear and bare legs, asking everyone if they knew her. He questioned kids on campus, homeless men on Broadway, bike messengers delivering food. Had they seen his daughter?

As she and I walked out of a diner the next morning, she went to hand a dollar to the homeless man who stood outside the door. She always gave him a dollar.

“Keep it,” he said. “Keep it and buy your father some pants.” He’d seen them together the day before.

We laughed at this for months: Buy your father some pants.

I used to save every note or letter a student had written me. There were hundreds in a giant box. They were strange proof of value, of redemption.

In Little Women Jo turns her back on Amy, but then skates back. She hurries to save her. We don’t love Jo because she is good, we love her because she’s true to herself. But no, we also love her because she turns back on the ice for her sister, loves her sisters. The two impulses are intertwined, at odds, and cannot be separated.

Natalie left New York and moved in with the older brother she had rarely talked about. I found out through a mutual friend. “Do you know how Natalie is?” I asked, not mentioning our falling-out.

“Yeah,” he said, “She pulled a midnight move-out and broke her lease. She left in the middle of the night, leaving most of her stuff behind.”

A mighthavebeen. Losing heart.

Freshman year, she used to take me out for dinner and insist on paying. I never had enough money. “Let me pay!” she’d exclaim. “What’s wrong with you? Were you tied up as a child? Don’t you know how to let people do things for you?” She knew all the waiters by name. “Yanni, Yanni,” she’d croon to an elderly waiter at Tom’s Diner.

“My baby,” he’d say back. “My baby,” he’d say, putting extra fries on the table.

Love that is singing: love’s old sweet song.

I viewed redemption as an exchange, a way to stay in goodness. But I never understood it. The word grace used to make me bristle. If I heard it, I’d glaze over, waiting for the person who said it to stop talking. Grace had no meaning for me. I wanted loyalty in pure form.

I did not know I could fail over and over and remain loved. I did not know that we were given endless chances.

Read more from Issue 23.1.