Chancers Read online

  By his birthday in March, we were back on the top of a roller coaster I was learning how to ride. The weekend before he turned forty-three, I went up to the Catskills to visit some friends for a couple of days; Graham stayed home so he could hang out with Liam. I was feeling a little guilty about encroaching on their father-son time, so I thought it might be good to spend the weekend apart. But after I got back on Sunday night, I took the train down to Brooklyn so Graham wouldn’t wake up on his birthday alone.

  He preempted my presents by giving me a note he’d written, on the kind of lined ledger paper children use when they’re learning how to write. The way the penciled words spilled across the page, it’s like Graham didn’t even notice the lines. I tried not to notice his spelling mistakes.

  Well it’s my birthday but I want to say that the fact we’ve made it through 2½ months of ups and downs not having known each other apart from a few days at Montauk is really amazing. I’m very proud of you for even considering taking me on—I feel sort of privilaged that you had time for me even if it was a welcome distraction you were looking for + not some guy talking about his sorry old “this is my life so far.” Today I hope is the first of many birthdays—mine and yours—that we will spend together. The best present I could get—for every birthday from now onward—is to be able to look in your eyes and without words know that you love me as much as ever + knowing that I do too. (Love you that is). You’re a surprising but beautiful woman, complex but disernable, committed but wary, loving yet strong, smart but not conceited. Honest + understanding + many more attributes that make you that very special you. Somehow in this visual, emotional, geographical cocophoney of everything we bumped into each other. All I can say is brilliant! I love you. Gx

  The card I gave Graham wasn’t nearly as gushy, but I put a lot of effort into the presents I picked out for him: a vintage shirt I discovered at a thrift store, a photography book he’d mentioned he wanted, and a kitchen stool I found on the street. Graham loved searching for treasures on trash night—I didn’t—but the wobbly stool didn’t quite meet his standards. Since he’d given me a lingerie catalog on my birthday and told me to order whatever I wanted, I figured we both had a learning curve to master.

  I did try to mimic his (usually) romantic gestures by starting a list I planned to add to in the coming months. “Here’s the first entry on my list of Things I Like About Graham,” I wrote in the card I gave him, picturing many birthdays and holidays we’d share.

  #1) That I can’t imagine ever getting bored with you.

  I signed it, “Love, S.”

  —

  FOR A WHILE, things were good between us—the way life feels on the days you later realize you took for granted. We went to galleries and movies, showed each other our favorite places in the city, spent a rainy weekend just lounging in bed. We even talked about our future together, which I was beginning to let myself imagine.

  When the bathtub backed up and I insisted we call a plumber—help Graham resisted, sure he could fix it himself—the plumber commented on all the pictures on the walls and asked if we were both photographers.

  “I’m a writer, he’s a photographer,” I said, suddenly seeing our life from the outside looking in. As the plumber talked about wishing he could’ve been a photographer, I felt like one of those couples other people envy. Free to pursue our creative careers, unburdened by bosses or young kids. Our relationship had its challenges, but I never felt restless or trapped.

  A few days later, Graham asked me to move in with him, offering to take back part of the upstairs apartment he leased to renters. He’d been suggesting that since January—a running joke at first, but this time it was a more formal plan.

  “The front room can be your office,” he said, showing me a drawing he’d sketched on a scrap of paper. “We’ll connect it to the living room with one of those circular stairs.”

  “Too noisy,” I pointed out. “I couldn’t write listening to you banging around down here.”

  “So we’ll put up a wall—with a door.”

  “What about a bathroom?” I asked, half in jest. “I’d have to go down two floors every time I needed to pee.”

  “We could add a bathroom,” Graham said, undeterred by the logistical challenge—or the expense.

  I secretly coveted that room, which overlooked the tree-lined street, with its stoops and wrought-iron fences. All the windows in my apartment faced brick walls, barely letting in any light. Still, I wasn’t ready to take that step.

  “You couldn’t afford all that,” I said, trying to deflect Graham’s proposal with humor. “The renovations I’d demand would be very expensive.”

  The truth was, I could barely pay the mortgage on my apartment, carefully tracking every penny I spent. But we’d been dating for just a few months, and moving in together was a big commitment—one I wasn’t prepared to make.

  “Sometimes I don’t know why you’re with me,” he said, crumpling up his drawing and tossing it across the table.

  I grabbed his arm as he started to walk away. “Please don’t be like that. I can’t just sell my apartment, move in with you, and then be out on the street if we break up.”

  “See, that’s the problem with you—you assume we’re not going to stay together.”

  “Well, you’ve been divorced twice already,” I snapped. “Maybe the problem is you rush into relationships that don’t work out.”

  I knew it was a bitchy thing to say, but I couldn’t help myself. One of my hesitations about Graham was that if we ever got married, I’d be his third wife. That didn’t feel like “third time’s a charm” to me—it felt more like third place.

  “Forget I brought it up,” Graham said, yanking his arm free and stomping downstairs.

  I was happy to do that, but I knew he’d stew about it for days.

  —

  I CAN’T PINPOINT exactly when things began to unravel, but obviously the loose threads were there all along. I just didn’t tug at them hard enough—or maybe I tugged at the wrong ones.

  There were always sources of friction between us: Graham was disorganized, emotional, and quick-tempered. I was uptight, reserved, and withdrew from conflict. But our differences also complemented each other in positive ways. His optimism lifted my darker moods; my encouragement tempered his bouts of insecurity. I sometimes had trouble picturing us staying together over the long haul, but I couldn’t imagine leaving him. Still, it became harder to ignore the signs that something else was creating tension between us.

  When I wasn’t around, Graham hung out with friends from the housing projects around the corner—people he had photographed and wanted to help out if they needed a favor, he told me. The doorbell would sometimes ring late at night and he’d send whoever it was away, complaining about pals with erratic schedules. He talked about other friends—designers, photographers, musicians—but I never met them.

  I worried that the company he was keeping was holding him back, one foot stuck in his former dysfunctional life. But I didn’t want to seem judgmental or controlling, so I didn’t suggest he cut those ties. Graham never hid the fact that some of his friends were addicts, or that he’d used drugs during the years when he was drinking. He said he didn’t want to turn his back on anyone still struggling to get sober or clean.

  “I don’t believe in that tough love bullshit,” he told me. “That’s how people end up dead.”

  Loyalty was a characteristic we shared, so I accepted that, reluctantly—until fragments of that other life burst into mine.

  One Sunday afternoon in late March, I found a syringe in an eyeglass case in Graham’s bathroom, just another object I absentmindedly picked up, expecting to find a pair of vintage frames. But this time, what I discovered drained all the feeling from my limbs. I was numb as I walked up the stairs.

  “It’s not mine,” Graham kept saying, collapsing into heaving sobs when I confronted him. “I don’t know where that came from—it could’ve been anybody who’s been over. I don�
�t monitor what people do when they go to the bathroom.”

  It was the first time I’d seen him cry like that, and as I stood there with the eyeglass case splayed open in my hand, I wavered between instincts I didn’t trust in myself. Graham didn’t fit the image of a junkie—there were no track marks on the arms I’d kissed. When I sent my mom some of our Hawaii pictures, she wrote back saying he looked “wholesome.” Yet there I was holding a needle pointing toward my heart.

  “Why should I believe you?” I said, my mouth so dry my tongue kept sticking.

  Graham pulled up the left sleeve of his shirt, showed me the inside of his arm. “Because I’m not using!” he insisted, practically shouting the last two words.

  I was standing as he lay crumpled on the floor, his shoulders shaking as I weighed my decision. This is what I’d worried about all along.

  But Graham was so adamant—“I need you to believe me, I’m not a junkie,” he kept repeating, as I ran through various scenarios in my mind. I’d met some of his friends from the projects—they didn’t exactly hide their habits. One of them could’ve shot up in the bathroom, then left the needle behind. Besides, if Graham were using heroin, wouldn’t I have seen the signs?

  He was slim, but he wasn’t gaunt. He was a bit scatterbrained, but his life wasn’t unmanageable. We were hardly ever apart for ten days in Hawaii so he couldn’t possibly have been getting high. What if I accused him of lying and I was wrong?

  “You can’t let this stuff happen here,” I finally said. “You can’t put me in this position. And what about Liam—what if he had found it?”

  “I know,” Graham said, his whole body sagging with relief. “I’m really, really sorry. It won’t happen again. I’ll tell my pals they can’t be bringing that shit into my house.”

  Then I curled up next to him as he apologized and made promises, the two of us facing each other the way we sometimes slept. Whenever we woke up that way, I thought of lost hikers discovered after a freak snowstorm, their bodies entwined in an embrace of survival as much as passion.

  —

  EVEN AS I accepted Graham’s explanation for the needle, went to bed with him, and spent the night in his arms, I didn’t totally believe that he wasn’t hiding something. I just didn’t have enough evidence to be sure. It was like that legal standard: I felt like I needed to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and his story seemed plausible to me. Or at least plausible enough to make me doubt whether my suspicions were right.

  That made me reluctant to tell anyone else about what I’d found—especially since I’d kept our relationship pretty separate from the rest of my life. At first, I wanted to make up my own mind about Graham before my family or friends weighed in, thinking some people wouldn’t approve of my choice.

  So I put off telling my parents I was seeing someone until we booked the trip to Hawaii, figuring I should let them know I was going to be gone. My mom was upset that I hadn’t filled her in sooner, sending me an email after we talked: “Couldn’t you have just dropped a hint somewhere along the way? Like, I went out with a photographer last night! It just threw me. But I am very happy for you….Remember, all I want is for you to be happy.”

  My dad was more blunt about his concerns. “I am a little stressed about the two marriages,” he admitted. My parents are Catholic—they go to church every week—so I figured those broken vows might raise a red flag. But I left out the details about Graham’s drinking and drug use, emphasizing his savvy purchase of a Brooklyn brownstone instead. Since my mom and dad were both real estate agents, I was hoping Graham’s impressive home equity might outweigh his double divorce.

  I was mostly worried about my sister’s reaction, since she’d met Graham in Montauk and I wasn’t sure what kind of impression he’d made. She had moved to Los Angeles before Graham and I started dating, but when she came back to New York for a visit the three of us went out for dinner on the Upper West Side. She thought Graham seemed totally different than he’d been at the beach house—charming and funny, now that he was sober. I remember the two of them bonding over my idiosyncrasies, the way people do when they’re trying to find common ground about someone they both know well. Mostly, I was just glad that everyone got along.

  I wasn’t going to jeopardize that tenuous connection by calling my sister a few weeks later and saying, “Guess what? I found a syringe in Graham’s bathroom. He said it’s not his but I’m not one hundred percent sure.”

  Still, I couldn’t keep that discovery entirely a secret. It was like a bad dream I had to share with someone, just to get it out of my head.

  I ended up confiding in my friend Sara, who had encouraged me to take a chance on Graham right from the start. “I think you really like this guy,” she had said, a few weeks after Graham took my picture, when we were out at a bar gossiping over glasses of wine.

  The one time she’d met Graham, she didn’t notice anything odd about his behavior. “He’s cute, smart, and most of all totally ga ga over you!” she’d emailed me the next day. So when I told her about finding the needle, I was relieved that she didn’t jump to conclusions or pick a side. After we talked, she emailed me links to a few Web pages describing signs of drug use, which was what I needed at that point: a friend who looked out for me, but could still keep an open mind.

  I’d already done my own googling—which was only more confusing—so I also called Ethan, thinking he was more informed about drugs. We had broken up and were living on separate coasts by the time he developed a habit, so I didn’t know he was using until he told me he’d quit, mostly by embracing AA.

  Ethan was not one of those people in recovery who assume they have all the answers about someone else’s situation, but he did caution me not to be too gullible or naïve about Graham.

  “You can’t be guilted into feeling bad about being suspicious,” he said, after I described finding the needle. “These are all very reasonable questions.”

  When I asked if he’d noticed anything unusual about Graham in Hawaii, Ethan didn’t take the bait, pointing out that they’d barely spoken. The closest he came to expressing an opinion about what I should do was telling me, “Trust your instincts.”

  The problem was, my instincts were conflicted—I didn’t know what to believe. And Graham kept trying to persuade me to believe him. Since he was always sensitive to even the tiniest shift in my mood, he knew I hadn’t put my doubts to rest. So a few days after I found the needle, he sent me a long email, ending with words he hoped would do just that.

  I’ve been way too cavalier about who I’ve had around and what’s been in my house…but I’m not a liar.

  If I were using

  I wouldn’t give you my keys

  I wouldn’t ask you to move in

  I wouldn’t tell you all I did

  If I was…

  But I wasn’t.

  I love you,

  Graham

  That was the most definitive denial I’d gotten; it was almost like a poem the way he’d broken up the lines.

  The thing is, I wanted to believe him. I wanted all the things he said to be true. Because if Graham was lying to me about using, that meant he was capable of lying about everything—like telling me I was the “love of his life.” In my mind, you couldn’t love someone that much and lie about something so big.

  Graham’s email arrived just as I was getting ready to go meet him in Brooklyn, so I called him to let him know I was walking to the train.

  “Do you want anything from Manhattan?” I asked.

  “Just you,” he said.

  A warm, tingly feeling seeped through me, like a puff of air turning the embers of a fire from gray to red. I didn’t want to give that up—the way Graham lit up my senses. Not if I didn’t have to yet.

  —

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks, I registered certain things I didn’t quite put together—like a child recognizing the letters of a word without knowing what it means.

  Graham started sleeping erratically, staying u
p half the night one night, then nodding off after dinner the next. He disappeared into the basement for long periods of time; woke up early and went on mysterious errands. His healthy glow from Hawaii gave way to pasty skin and pelvic bones I could feel when we had sex. He was increasingly moody and on edge.

  As this other personality emerged, I never knew which side of him to expect, and that made me even more tense.

  My book was about to be published and I was planning a party at Graham’s house to celebrate, on a Friday night in early April. It was the first time he was meeting my parents, and many of my friends, so I wanted him to make a good impression. That didn’t happen.

  When I arrived at his house a few hours before the party, hoping to find the floors swept, the bathroom clean, and Graham showered and sharply dressed, everything was a mess. He looked like he’d just woken up, foggy and disheveled, and he couldn’t look me in the eye—a guilty reflex that was becoming a habit.

  I blew up at him, throwing an empty jar across the room—a rare outburst fueled by disappointment and pent-up anger. He cowered like I was a parent about to hit him, but he didn’t say anything in his defense. In some sense, it didn’t matter. I knew the answers to all the questions I hadn’t been asking.

  We worked in a parallel frenzy to clean the house and get everything ready, barely speaking, then spent the evening in a stony standoff, not even bothering to pretend things were okay in front of our guests. After everyone left, I took a half-empty bottle of wine out to the backyard and finished it by myself, sitting in the dark on a broken chair. When I came inside, I found him asleep on the couch with a crack pipe in his fist.