Secrets and Lies

If love doesn’t exist, why are we here?

James and I went to the pub, had a few drinks, and he made it very clear any mention of his dead fiancée was off limits. My jet lag resulted in a stagger to my room, but a few days later we slept together. I was immediately drawn to this man, his broken heart, his anger, his humor, and his connection to my childhood. Of course it ended badly, with his shooting out the mansions’ windows with a pellet gun and fucking another woman, an old girlfriend, in the room next to me.

I left for Ireland the day after James slept with his old girlfriend.

Emily Murphy had invited me to stay with her in Cleggan in a cottage she used, belonging to a friend of her father’s, the poet Richard Murphy. Richard had been a visiting professor at Princeton when I was in tenth grade, and, because the school failed to pay his rent, he lived in his office. When his daughter Emily came to visit him, she stayed at our house and we became friends after meeting several times when we were younger. Emily’s mother, Patricia Murphy. was a doctor, writer, and an alcoholic whose drinking binges were legendary. Emily grew up in boarding schools, but she also lived with her mother, loving her despite the chaos that surrounded her.

My knowledge of Patricia was that she had been with my parents in a pub on the west coast of Ireland when President Kennedy was assassinated, and she applauded and was nearly attacked by the other drinkers who, like most of the Irish, worshipped Kennedy. She was also the lover of the poet Philip Larkin, a doctor, and a very talented writer herself. This was typical of the circles my parents had been part of all my life: famous people, mainly writers, who had affairs and drank too much and raised their families haphazardly. There were stories about my talking Kingsley Amis silent when I was three, impressing Edmund Wilson with my erudition when I was eleven, but I never understood the importance of these people.

It was only later that I recognized most people didn’t use the Norton Anthology edited by their father in freshman English or; while reading a poem by John Nims in a college poetry class I remembered the summer we lived at Bread Loaf and I had spent the night at the Nims’ cottage with his two daughters who were very mean to their mother. At Bread Loaf, Nims had a beautiful girlfriend with whom he spent all his time, leaving his wife alone. Yet he wrote in the final stanza in a poem dedicated to his wife:

“Be with me, darling, early, and late. Smash glasses
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.”

When I read those words, I thought about the kindness of his plain but incredibly sweet wife, Bonnie, and how the girlfriend was so blonde, tan, and wore bright red lipstick even though most women at Bread Loaf didn’t dress up. It struck me how sad a writer’s life and family could be. I had been writing stories and poems and keeping journals practically since kindergarten, but the idea of claiming such an existence was not attractive.

I hitchhiked from Dublin Airport to Cleggan on the west coast, having dumped the bicycle at the Gales. The first night I spent at the cottage with Emily, we decided to attend a local dance. Emily had purchased a cold medicine from the local druggist that contained morphine, cocaine, alcohol, and god knows what else. You put several drops in hot water, and its effects were strong. I went into a near-blackout. We started walking to the dance, but somehow decided to go swimming instead. We took off our clothes and swam, and then wandered off after putting some of our clothes back on, falling over many stone walls. Waking up in the cottage the following morning to the sound of what turned out to be Richard Murphy coming to greet me, I had two black eyes, any number of bruises and no memory of the previous night. Richard was kind enough to pretend he didn’t notice my injuries.

I started Rutgers by driving away from my parents’ house, my VW Beetle loaded down with stuff, stalling all the way since I still didn’t know how to use a clutch. By late November, I had a boyfriend I met at a poetry reading when I told him I liked his poetry, which I didn’t, but he was tall and handsome. Mark Dolce spoke very little, made love like a robot, and never said he loved me. After he fell asleep, I would drink tea with his handsome, kind graduate student roommate until he said that seeing me after sex, hair tousled, big t-shirt, and underwear was doing in his head.

One night, I dreamed I was in a beautiful garden, surrounded by flowers and trees covered with fruit. Suddenly, someone approached me, and I stood up to leave. It was a man with huge blue eyes and the kindest face I had ever seen. “Stay,” he said, softly touching my hair.
I woke up and told Mark my dream.
“That’s a dream about God.” Mark seemed angry.
“It can’t be. I don’t believe in God.”
“Well, it’s a garden and a man telling you to stay.” Mark looked pissed.
“I’ve never dreamed about God.”
He looked at me as if I had done something to make him feel bad.

I was incredibly lonely. I didn’t talk to my parents. I lived off-campus in an apartment in a singles complex my father had chosen. The apartment had large, empty rooms since I had little furniture, a dishwasher which was rarely used since I had few dishes, a balcony where I would sit and smoke, and try to understand why I was so unhappy. My roommate was a self-identified “Jewish American Princess” who wanted to marry a dentist. We ended up getting along, but we were exact opposites. Lisa woke up hours before her first class to shower, wash and style her hair, apply makeup, and choose her outfit, whereas I rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and clogs, and drove over to campus. The only time I asked Lisa to start dinner, she dumped an entire box of pasta into cold water, bringing it to a boil, resulting in a gigantic ball of starch. After she ran out of frozen dinners, I cooked all our meals. I was an excellent albeit inconsistent cook from years spent helping my mother in the kitchen.

A few days before Christmas, Mark’s lung collapsed. I called my parents and told them I was staying over Christmas to take care of him. I announced my love for him in the hospital, and he was not happy, suggesting I go home and spend the holiday with my family. He was sleeping with a waitress at the calzone place across the street, which was owned by Mario Batali, who wasn’t famous for anything then but for his superior calzones. Catherine was back from Boston, twenty-four, a bit chubby, which drove my mother crazy, and deeply depressed. But she was, as always, funny, full of amazing stories, and listening to her discuss Emerson with my father was fascinating. Brigid was back from the University of Wisconsin, beautiful, wanting our parents to care about her passion, acting, which they considered a waste of time. I found her hopes for their approval or attention puzzling. Nothing I did was ever of much interest to my parents.

I returned to Rutgers that winter, during my freshman year, determined to avoid men. All men. Permanently. My fall grades were a perfect 4.0. Finally, I was in a situation where my weakness in math didn’t matter, and my professors welcomed the depth and breadth of my knowledge in English and history. Some people knew I was Julian Moynahan’s daughter, a faculty brat, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The first day of class, I had sharpened pencils, new notebooks, the required texts, clean hair, a healthy breakfast, and a determination to succeed beyond anyone’s expectations. And then I would become a nun or a hermit, a lesbian or Virginia Woolf without the men.

“Do you have a pen?”

I didn’t turn around. I simply handed it over. Then it was paper. Ditto. Then a note landed on my desk. I turned around. He was Bob Dylan; thin, long-haired, boy, exactly my type. I glared and returned his note in tiny pieces. The professor, a southerner, not a very nice guy, apparently used us as a case study in the years that followed. The class was called The Immigrant in American History, and here was this Jew from Cedar Grove, New Jersey, hooking up with an Irish girl from Princeton. The earth shifted beneath my feet. My entire existence had seemed like a dream until the moment we met each other. I never thought I would love anyone the way I loved Jeffrey, maybe because I’d been so disappointed in sex and so fraudulent in my behavior as a result. The reality was ignorance, fear, hope, and vulnerability, while I projected experience, indifference, world-weariness, and pessimism.

When I finally agreed to have coffee with him after class we walked down to the bank of the Raritan River, one of the few pretty places on the campus, and sat in silence, shoulder to shoulder. I felt safe yet terrified because I could feel he might storm the barricade I had built around myself. He was gentle but also made it clear that he found me both beautiful and fascinating. Before we slept together, we became friends and then fell in love.

He gave me my first orgasm, made me feel I was beautiful, and read Neruda poetry to me in the bathtub. We lay in bed, twisted together, our bodies without any delineation or barriers. I told him everything, about the rape and my father and he said it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t make that lobster fisherman rape me and I didn’t make my father drink and hurt my mom. Telling him the truth freed me. Fucking him felt like I had been allowed into a paradise hitherto surrounded by thorns. I hadn’t understood that sex could be so much better when it included real love. Jeffrey didn’t shame me for my intelligence, but he also made it clear that my sexuality was a good thing. Of course, he wasn’t perfect.

He asked me after reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead whether I’d be willing to eat his body after he died. He was unsuccessful in school, at work, and with his family. He didn't respect my ambitions in writing. His taste in literature and art was questionable, but he introduced me to new music, new ideas, and he helped me understand that I could love without violence and guilt. His mother hated me for not being Jewish (I brought homemade bread to Passover), my parents considered him a loser, and they were not thrilled with the sexually besotted woman who had replaced their miserable little girl. I drank less; I was happy. We suffered from a lack of money and imagination, but what destroyed everything was his transfer to the University of Wisconsin in Madison that fall. He abandoned me, and I couldn't forgive him or my parents, who responded to my begging to transfer with him to Wisconsin by buying a small house on campus where I could live while I continued to attend Rutgers.

It was not possible to portray my parents as villains, given how generous they were. However, when I told my father how much I loved Jeffrey, he responded, “Love doesn’t exist.”
“You don’t mean that. Don’t you love me?”
“Your idea of love is shit.”
He broke my heart.

Jeffrey wanted me to leave with him. “We can work, and you can go to school there. We can get married.”

Why did that seem impossible? I had grown up with my parents’ origin story of how they ran away to New Hampshire to get married without their parents’ permission or blessing. Although I longed to break with my parents, I knew I’d always be looking back, searching for them, for the rest of my life. While I was very angry, I loved them too much to risk a complete break. Jeffrey was convinced we would survive the separation, but I knew we were doomed.

The summer before he left for Wisconsin, I practiced being alone by staying up all night drinking after watching my daily dose of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Our balcony overlooked the complex’s parking lot, and I could see other single people sitting alone, watching Jane Fonda’s Workout, or simply staring into space. In the far distance, smoke poured from the East Brunswick Revlon Cosmetics factory where Jeff was stirring vats of lipstick, working the night shift. He was responsible for earning enough money to pay for his books and board while his parents covered tuition. Just before dawn, I’d stagger off to bed and an hour or so later make love to him, stinking of chemicals. As soon as we were finished, he passed out from exhaustion. Everything was silence.

And then he left. I drank like a fish, slept with his best friend Kenny, slept with an evil professor who harassed me until I gave in, slept with a frat boy who roofied my drink, drank and cried, and had no friends. I went to a local used bookstore run by a talkative young black man who was a friend of ours. After he closed the store, we smoked dope, and I agreed to come over on the promise of a meal. His house was in a very dangerous part of the city. In 1976, New Brunswick, apart from the Rutgers campus, was described as a slum. The city was segregated, and white people were not welcome in his neighborhood. After dinner, when I pulled back from his attempt to kiss me, he threw me out on the street, a street without lights or people. Running home, frightened, and hurt by his calling me a “racist bitch” I wondered whether he was right, that I didn’t want to sleep with him because he was black. 

The assumption that having sex was a default setting for all social interactions was a hangover from the sexual revolution. I was needy and lonely, but it wasn’t about sex. This was my greatest mistake, being in love had absented me from the world of other women. By never living in a dorm, I was isolated and lacked connections with other students. I attended all my classes and received straight As again. I didn’t speak to anyone about the empty, sad life I was living at nineteen. Some part of me knew my choices were ridiculous, that life did not have to be so bleak, but I persisted in welcoming the darkness, unable to tell anyone how much I drank. Academically, school felt like paradise. I was taking advanced history and writing classes, reading great novels, and felt my understanding of the world and human nature deepening with each class.

Thanksgiving, I flew out to Madison and in a sad imitation of my mother made us a dinner complete with Cornish game hens. Still, since Jeffrey wanted me to star in his student film, he encouraged me to smoke pot and drink while we shot the film, and by the time we sat down to eat, I put my head down on that warm plate of meat and passed out. When Jeff returned for Christmas, he told me he couldn’t continue living apart from me. He would return to Rutgers if I didn’t leave. He wanted to get married.

In elementary school, there was a movie we watched called An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge that had a prisoner in it who was being hanged. In the movie, he walks up to the gallows, and a noose is put over his head. The trapdoor opens, the rope breaks, and he escapes. He swims across a stream and runs through fields, and just as he’s about to hug his wife, the rope snaps, and you realize it’s a dream and the guy never escaped and never saw his wife. He’s dead. I hated that movie. I kept thinking of ways he may have survived, but it wasn’t part of the plot. 

This is how I felt about Jeff discovering my situation with Kenny, his childhood best friend. We were together; the cats were purring, I was making coffee, and he was smiling. Suddenly, the rope snapped. 

The night he found out, I decided to bake bread, and there wasn’t enough flour. I realized it was time. I was tired of waiting. “Go to Kenny’s and borrow flour.”
”Make bread tomorrow. It’s snowing,” he said.
“I’ve proofed the yeast. Go. Talk to Kenny. You guys need to catch up.”

He went. I threw the yeast mixture out, picked up my needlepoint, and waited. Kenny had told me he was planning to let Jeffrey know that we were sleeping together. Hours passed. The room grew dark. I waited. Finally, the door opened. He walked into the living room and faced me. “You fucking bitch!” He smelled like alcohol.
“I’m sorry.”
“What kind of person are you?”
“Bad.” I felt very calm.
“You broke my heart.”
”You left me here. There was no one to talk to.”
“So, you fucked my best friend?” He raised his fist and then lowered it. He turned to leave.

If his best friend had been willing to talk to me without wanting sex, I would have welcomed the company. Why was it always my fault? I started sobbing and screaming and begging. I got down on my knees, feeling nothing, watching, and acting. He slammed out of my house and I followed him barefoot, the snow falling, watching myself from above, feeling almost nothing but determined to make him stay until he went back to Wisconsin. He almost escaped but then he faltered, he turned around and looked at me, sobbing, begging, kneeling in the snow.
“I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”
He didn’t forgive me, but he stayed. We spent a week making love, fighting, and crying. There was no more talk about marriage.
I wanted Jeff to hate me. He hated me. He hated me, and now I was free; free to sit on the porch of my house with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes, watching other people live. I never missed a class, read everything assigned, and felt I deserved to be abandoned since I was a horrible human being.

It had been several years since Cynthia and I had spoken, although we wrote to one another regularly, and I believed we would be best friends forever. Someday, we would have nice husbands and babies and live near each other in a place that was neither dull nor dangerous. She was a crucial part of my happiest memories, and whenever I doubted the existence of unconditional love, her face would always appear in my mind. When she manifested in my homeroom in seventh grade and asked me to eat lunch with her, spend the night, and choose me as her spelling partner, my isolation disappeared. Cynthia swore that I had changed her life by telling her stories about living in Europe and repeating the inaccurate data I had collected about men from the unsuitable books and movies I had watched. I made her lists of books and movies, and I made her laugh. Most of all, we loved each other without any doubt.

When my sophomore year at Rutgers ended, I went to Madison, Wisconsin, to try and resurrect my ruined relationship with Jeffrey. Arriving without notice, I surprised him in bed with someone else, and after several days of mayhem, we resolved to part.

I’d called Cynthia before leaving New Jersey after two years of silence and said, “I’m in trouble. I drink all the time.”
“Come,” she’d said. “Come and be with me, with us. I’ll take care of you.”

My first reaction to witnessing Jeffrey with his new girlfriend was to walk out on his balcony and start dropping potted plants onto what turned out to be his landlord’s car. There was screaming and yelling, and the girlfriend, a nice Jewish girl his mother would have loved, suggested we sit down together and discuss why I was no longer part of his life.
“I know why!” I screamed. “I fucked his best friend.”

Finally, the girlfriend left, and we agreed to talk. Jeffrey and I went to a local bar, and the music said what we couldn’t, the Righteous Brothers singing You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. At that moment, I felt a sense of peace and calm. I remembered the pure happiness of our early love, how my head had once been cradled perfectly on his chest, how I had trusted him with my body and my heart. I needed help, and I knew visiting Cynthia would start that process, and then I would go home and tell my parents how much trouble I was in.

She was killed at twenty. While I was striving to obliterate myself, she had been awake, in love, and happy. When I stood next to her devastated father, looking down at her coffin, I realized I had been in love with her. She had not wanted to die. She was engaged to be married, full of happiness and plans. Her fiancée had been following her when the speeding car came over the barrier from the other side of the highway. She died in his arms. They had been attending a rock concert in Chicago, and the accident occurred just outside of Elgin, Illinois.

After the funeral, I sat in Cynthia’s room reading all the letters I had written during our years apart. She had kept them in a drawer tied with a ribbon. My cheeks burned because of the lies about boys, parties, my made-up, fake life. I hated that girl, that sad, lost, boastful girl. Shame and despair sent me to the bathroom, where I screamed until I was taken home by her best friend, a boy I saw and eventually slept with on my trips to Ohio, who had once loved me. Whatever I said during that bleak, awful night cured him of his devotion. The morning after, there was nothing but pity and a clear wish to see the back of me.

Returning to Princeton after Cynthia’s funeral, my determination to tell the truth was met with my mother screaming at me that I was “perfect, spoiled, melodramatic, and bad.” I called myself an alcoholic and talked about suicide. Since she was cutting up a rather large side of beef during this conversation, she illustrated each point by waving the knife she held.
“Go to your room, nothing is wrong with you! That stupid boy did this.”

I ran out of the house, crossed the street, and hitchhiked to Princeton, called a family friend from a pay phone, and was offered a place to stay. I went to therapy. I went to therapy and worked at the Princeton Shopping Center, at a store called Bailey’s, which sold ballet supplies and support underwear. The few customers were either anorexic bunheads or fat women. The fat women frequently called me into the dressing room to do up the clasp of their enormous bras. The rest of the time, I pushed clothing back and forth on the racks, staring into a grey-tinted future.

photo by Haley Phelps

Refusing to return home, I found a house sitting gig which had me living in a pool house, feeding a depressed dog, and smoking pot. At the same time, I floated on an air mattress watching the trees spin overhead, feeling like a character in an Updike story, surrounded by greenery and wealth, drunk and depressed. Some nights I passed out on the plastic chaise lounge, others I crawled on hands and knees into the pool house and called Jeff, sobbing that I still loved him, and I was sorry. I didn’t love him, and I wasn’t sorry. I was numb, bored, angry, and sad. 

I told the therapist about my impressive parents and how I sometimes went to school barefoot in winter. I don’t recall any useful advice, and when I finally whispered that I drank too much, the therapist changed the subject. In late August, I left for Dublin with a vague plan to commit suicide. The fall term at Trinity started later than in American schools, so I had time to find a place to live. 

—Molly Moynahan