Looking back, I can see how Jason liked to manipulate me. He relied on being a Southern boy when he wanted something. He talked about the house he wanted to buy as our opportunity to “live life on the plantation.” Even before we went to look at the property in Garrison, he was planning the afternoon croquet games we were going to play there; we’d play croquet and drink mint juleps, he announced. When Jason really wanted something, he began by making it into some kind of fantasy—the more exaggerated and ridiculous the better. He said that made it easier to cope with whatever problems came up later. We had lived together in the city for more than a year, and he was restless and wanted a place in the country. So he bought the big yellow house up the Hudson in Garrison and he took a leave of absence from his job and spent a month that autumn painting it white. I glazed windows and helped him sand the floors, and by the time the house started to shape up I loved it more than Jason did. In the mornings, I had coffee and watched the sparrows and the squirrel fighting over the birdseed in the hanging feeder outside the kitchen. I began to wait, in the late afternoon, for the sky to get pale and the sun to set. Jason took to sleeping late and reading magazines and watching the evening news. When he went back to the law firm where he worked in New York, I stayed on. Wyatt visited. Jason called and said that he couldn’t come up for a couple of weekends because he had so much paperwork. The next weekend, Corky and my brother drove up, and just before they left she took me by the arm in the driveway and walked me around to the back of their car. “I’d say that if you want to keep Jason you ought to get back to the city,” she said. But by then I wanted to believe what Jason said he believed when he bought the house: that New York City was a battle, that it was important to escape to a place where you didn’t always have to be on guard, that it was important to remember that it was a green world. Late in November, when I did leave the house at last and took the train back to New York, I walked into our apartment and felt like a stranger. He was still at the office. I wandered around, a little surprised that my things were still there—a pair of my sandals under the chair in the bedroom where I always kicked them. Walking around the bedroom verified what I hadn’t been able to admit in Garrison: that it really was over between us. Seeing my things there didn’t make me feel at home; it made me realize that it had always been Jason’s apartment. He had hung up the Audubon prints his parents had given us for Christmas; I’d never liked them—they were like prints on the walls of some country inn—and here they were, out in plain view. They were on the north wall, which he had always insisted be left empty because pictures would spoil the beauty of the bricks. When Jason came home from work, we made drinks and went up to the roof and talked. It was clear that we wouldn’t stay together, but he seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion. When I walked over to where he stood by the railing, it surprised me to see that he had tears in his eyes.
“Why be upset?” I said. “It’s not your fault. We both feel the same way.”
“When are you going to stop taking everything so casually?” he said. “As if you didn’t matter. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, and you made a really bad choice about me, way back. I feel guilty that I lived with you and let you assume that I loved you.”
“You did love me,” I said.
“Honey, I’m telling you the truth,” he said sadly. “Don’t forget what good Southern manners I have. You used to make fun of that. I
When I left, I walked to the restaurant and sat at the bar, waiting for Wyatt to get off work. Jason didn’t love me the time he said that on Saturday nights he never wanted to go out but only wanted to listen to Keith Jarrett’s “The Mourning of a Star” and make love? Not when I read him Firbank’s
