The old chair was cornflower blue, with little pastel squares dotting its fabric. It was close enough to the bedroom window to where you could slide it over and lean out and smoke, which happened often. The blue chair was comfy but kind of gross, like your dorm room might have been, and one of us was always sitting in it. Someone had to be sitting in it in order to be in compliance with the rules for a game of ball.

Ball was played with a ninety-nine cent beach ball and $9.99 eighteen pack of Bud Light from the Key Food across the street from our apartment building on Bronx River Road. The lights were out on the dingy store’s sign, so we actually purchased from the “K y Foo”. I once got stopped in the parking lot of the Key Food by two neighbors from up the hill, Jim and Diane, who worked with the consumer movement in the social work field. I had the aforementioned beer.

“I won’t tell anyone I saw you with that,” Diane winked, motioning at the beer. 

Was I holding a sheet of acid? Really? “Okay,” I said. 

They proceeded to talk about my future mother-in-law (Jim hated her) for the next twenty minutes. I was ready to get home, and they couldn’t wait to get into their groceries. In the twenty minutes, during which I could practically feel myself losing brain cells, they proceeded to eat an entire bag of double-stuffed Oreos. In the parking lot. No shame. 

Back on the fifth floor in our apartment, I’m sure I spirited the beer into the fridge, grabbed two, and headed back to the bedroom. We were fairly poor, you see. When I first moved to New York we were making nothing – I mean, I was on a grant position that paid five thousand over three months. When we finally got jobs, I think we pulled in $40k between us for the first year. We had about two pieces of furniture in the living room, and we didn’t have cable so we didn’t hang out in there. We sat in the bedroom and watched a tiny television from Brendan’s parents, if we watched at all. 

One of the channels we got was whatever the Mets played on, and it came in as long as we angled the antenna out the window and wrapped aluminum foil from the antenna to the bars of the fire escape. We watched the Mets while we played Ball.

In order to play, one person sat in the chair, and the other person stood a respectable distance away, and you batted the ball back and forth. You could hit the ball in any manner that was legal in volleyball. We tried to see how many hits we could get in a row. 

I generally sat, Brendan generally stood. He was extremely dramatic in the lengths he’d go to in order to save a volley. There were a lot of falls, extensions, collisions with furniture, and spilt Bud Lights. We only really cared about the Bud Lights. 

You would have thought we invented Sim City with the pleasure we got from this game. We played constantly. I don’t remember ever getting tired of it. Maybe it was the simplicity of no other distractions, everything stripped down to the bare essentials of pleasure, the very smallness and easiness and absence of pressure. 

Maybe Brendan and I would have had a better outcome if we’d been able to stay in that one room, with that one focus. But life grows and your attention is pulled in different directions and your pain and your pleasure is divided. We got a couch. We got cable. We got out of the room, and we got on with our lives, and he began to step on me. And I began to do a sidestep of him, which infuriated him. And it led us where we are. But at some point, at some points, I loved him. And I liked him.

Brendan came into my life whip smart and funny and cute. He had amazing stories from New York and Los Angeles, and he was different from everyone I’d known. He took me to the catwalk over the basketball stadium at the University of South Carolina, looking down at the court where the Gamecocks were actually playing well for once in my college life. He took me into the cavernous areas below where his office was, where the industrial team washers were and where he did his laundry. He played me music I’d never heard and he talked about places I hadn’t been. He wrote me poetry. 

We used to go out and then come home to our duplex, and we’d both wait for who would go upstairs first. The stairs were up against the same wall in each side of the house, you see. It would be weird to go up and listen to him going up at the exact same time. We did a lot of crossword puzzles on the porch. We were both huge lovers of words. We were also both competitive at that point. 

We’d go to this restaurant, Sushi Yoshi, and get big bottles of Newcastle and massive quantities of sushi. As we got to know the waitress, the sushi started to disappear from the bill. Soon we were only paying for Newcastle’s and appetizers.

Brendan had this friend Craig, who we were with a lot. He ended up living with him for a period during his last semester. We did a lot of hanging out and a lot of bullshitting and a lot, I mean a lot, of drinking. 

I sat down to write about the good things I remember about Brendan, but what just came to mind is the first specifically controlling thing that I remember his doing in our relationship. We’d been seeing each other for a little over a year, and we were sitting at the table in Craig’s dining room playing cards with him and his girlfriend, Susanna. For some reason that night Brendan had begun to get bothered by how far I was smoking my cigarettes down – he insisted I was smoking the filters. And I wasn’t, because I think that’s disgusting. In all my time smoking, I have always been completely disgusted at the whole thing. I hate smoke, I hate ashes, I hate the smell. I hate it when people let the ash dangle on their cigarettes and I hate it when people tear the filter off their cigarettes and I hate it when people smoke to the filter. Basically, I hate smoking but it’s fucking addictive and I don’t want to talk about it anymore except to finish this story. I am so glad I am done with it.

Anyway, I was talking, and Brendan reached over, took my cigarette away from me, and crushed it out. 

“You were burning the filter,” he said. 

I had a good half-inch before I reached the filter. “No, I wasn’t,” I said. I reached for my pack and he put his hand on it. 

“Why don’t you slow down a little?” he asked. 

I met his eyes and I felt like a disgusting animal, with these base needs that I wasn’t strong enough to overcome. I knew I would listen to him, and also that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else until I was able to smoke. 

And I just realized that I can’t do this. I can’t write this chapter. Everything that I can think of that I enjoyed doing with Brendan can stand alone as something I simply enjoyed doing. I thought of these late nights we used to listen to music and hang out, but it was always him telling stories about himself and I don’t feel like he knows a damn thing about me. I drank for the first 10 years of our relationship, and pretty much everything we did involved drinking. Sure I looked forward to hanging out at night – I remember looking forward to when it was okay to start drinking.

I know, I know, that there were times of love and laughter and friendship. But I can’t access them right now. Maybe that’s what trauma has done to me, or maybe that’s what divorce has done to me, but whatever the case may be that’s where I am now. I hope I can come to a place where I can access good memories to share with my children. What a horrible waste of life if there aren’t any there.

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