I used to have an old red suitcase where I kept my journals, about fifty or so notebooks, each filled with stories and poems, travel notes, bits of this and that I’d glued onto the pages: A note from my first boyfriend, failed short stories, a rejection letter from the New Yorker, a receipt from the coffee shop where I’d written my first poem. The pages were filled with disfigured self-portraits, twisted and half-real reflections of me at sixteen, at twenty, at twenty-three. Much of what was inside these notebooks was badly written, and some of it was even abysmally written, but I felt too attached to the efforts—the deformed beauty of my ungainly sixteen-year-old handwriting—to throw them out. As a result, I’d lugged these notebooks with me from apartment to apartment for years. I never opened the red suitcase, but slipped it under the bed or into a closet of whatever apartment I was renting.
One day, not long after we moved in together, The Magician saw the suitcase and asked what was inside. I opened the brass clasps and showed him the rows of neatly arrayed notebooks. He picked one up and turned over the cover. I eased it from his fingers and replaced it in the suitcase, Image may be NSFW.
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snapping the clasps closed.
“They’re private,” I said, and although nothing in the notebooks was secret, the collection of them together created my own bible of sacred texts.
“I can’t read them?” he asked, hurt.
“Nobody has ever read them but me,” I said. “And I want to keep it that way.”
A week or so later, I came home from class to find him sitting cross-legged in the middle of the living room, stacks of my notebooks spread around him. There was a cup of tea steaming on the floor next to him and, as he looked up, he gave me a big goofy smile, an awkward I didn’t expect you back so soon grin. The suitcase was open at his side. I was so surprised I could hardly speak. “What are you doing?”
“Reading,” he replied, as if he had been glancing through the New York Times Style Section.
“But I asked you not to read these,” I said, taking the notebook from his fingers and replacing it in the suitcase.
“Did you say that?” he said, a look of consternation crossing his features.
“You know I said that,” I responded, my frustration growing.
“Maybe you did,” he admitted. “But you didn’t actually mean it, did you? I love you. You would want me to know everything, right?”
He took a long sip of his tea, still smiling, and it was then when the thought first crossed my mind: He doesn’t understand that he’d done something wrong. He doesn’t understand why I am upset.
“Yes, I really meant it,” I said. “They’re private. They’re mine.” I picked up the suitcase and carried it to the bedroom where I shoved it under the bed.
When I came back to the living room, he was exactly where he had been, sipping his tea, beatific. He smiled a vacant, evasive smile. “Yours?” he said, as if the concept struck him as odd, as if delineating between what was his and what was mind had become difficult, Image may be NSFW.
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as if boundaries had bled and he didn’t know where they were any longer. “I was sitting here earlier and I wondered: Why doesn’t she want me to read what she wrote? Maybe she wants to hide something? Maybe there are things I should know about her? The guy in the elevator, for example. Who was he?”
I knew the passage he was talking about. I’d written a vivid description of giving a guy a blowjob in an rickety old-fashioned elevator, a gilded and velvet car with mirrors on every side. In the description, I’d backed the guy against the stamped brass wall of the carriage, slid to my knees, and opened his zipper with my teeth. As the elevator lurched up, and began its slow ascension, I brought my mouth over him and then drew away, teasing him, making him want more and more. It was total fiction, the beginning of short story I wanted to write, the throwaway exercise of a young writer learning to create tension in a scene, but it had clearly upset him. He thought it had been real.
“It is none of your business,” I said, looking at him with suspicion. I felt betrayed that he’d ransacked my suitcase, and I felt betrayed that he acted as if doing so was no big deal. And worse: I had the eerie feeling that he had been reading my notebooks for weeks, perhaps every time I left the house. I felt as though he’d been collecting information about me, that he was pillaging my treasures, taking them for his own. Why he was doing this, and what he might use the information for, were questions I couldn’t begin to answer.
I only knew that, now, something was off balance. It was like looking at a painting and noticing that the shadows fell the wrong way, with no correspondence to the angle of the sun.
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To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original art by Claire Stringer.
Rumpus original logo art by Max Winter.