Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss

past could no longer vaporize my day-to-day life. But now I was having an animal response: I couldn’t watch.
    “We have to get out of here,” I said. “Please.” This was about thirty minutes into the movie.
    My date didn’t want to leave at first. I’d only just met her. But she’d seemed witty and spirited (if very pale), having crossed the lobby with her Christmas-ribbon smile and her good job in publishing. Now we slunk out of the theater.
    Or, we were trying to: we had to stand up, block the screen for people who’d merely wanted a good scare. I was obstructing the fantasy with the real thing, though only I could understand that.
    Once we got clear of the cineplex, I told her everything. The response was a stunner, out there on the sidewalk—a gruffnote of grievance. Maybe I was mishearing; maybe this was her way of warming up toward being sweet and caressive.
    “Christ, Darin, don’t you think of her sometimes?”
    She shook her head, even though she was still smiling a bit. She whistled through her teeth. “Fuck.”
    I turned out to be perfectly, officially wrong. This wasn’t caressive. This was pissed.
    “It’s so goddamned selfish for you to feel bad for yourself,” she said, a hand at her pale forehead. “I’m not being rude.”
    Wait a second, here. Of course I think of Celine sometimes.
    “Yeah well, fine. But do you think about her enough ?”
    Celine’s eyes getting teary after she tripped stealing third base in little league; Celine crackling over pebbles on roller-skates. Celine not being able to stay awake to the end of The Wizard of Oz as a kid. Her father (as Celine got dressed for her first date) singing a goofy, made-up song from her infancy. Sixth-grade Celine getting sick to her stomach on doctor’s-office candy after a flu shot. These brain montages were how I saw her—and often still see her. Aches and TV shows, family memories. Other times I construct the life she would’ve gone on to have: Celine wearing a long good coat, in her kitchen, flipping through envelopes to find a med-school acceptance letter. (This is a patently middle-class swirl of images, but I can’t deny who I am; I can’t unsee what I see. My pictures of a happy life are, intractably, those of ambition cultivated and rewarded.) Sometimes this story line includes rash, dangerousromances, nice solid domestic contentment, shattering health problems: everything, anything but nonexistence.
    Or actually, everything and anything but the real Celine. My date, in her way, had been right. My mind was unrelentingly narrative: I imagined the loss of possibility, of chapters, scenes, minutes, of events and kisses and steam escaping the radiator behind Celine and her husband’s bed, with their kids in another room. I could feel what I felt about the loss of that. I even allowed myself to imagine her father. Alone at the kitchen table, lights off, not a voice in the house, passing a bottle of something square, bracing, and amber from hand to hand: a movie cliché flickering within the perimeters of recognizable devastation. But I was never brave enough to picture the one thing I knew to be true—Celine lying in the grass on the median strip, her eyes staring only a couple inches above her face, the last bit of time she ever saw.
    “It’s okay that you called Mr. Zilke a prince, Dad,” I had ended up telling my father that morning of my first hearing.
    “I just didn’t know how to react,” Dad had said. “Because even with the lawsuit and the suing for millions and, let’s be frank, a broken promise, I still empathize a lot with their family.”
    “How much thinking about it would be enough?” I was saying to the date now, in front of the cineplex. “What’s the amount you’re looking for?”
    “Okay,” the date said, and laughed.
    She had a cheerful, almost childish voice—a voice I’d come to hear often in publishing meetings, a first-day-of-schoolish excitement and forthrightness. New subjects, new