Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss Page A

students every semester.
    “How can you even go on living?” said the date.
    Whoa. I buckled a little and went: “Um.”
    And like that, Celine was here too, right with me the way her mother had wanted. She was saying: Yeah, I want to hear the answer to this .
    Anyway, pretty quick, in my mind, I got really sharp: unruffled in James Bond tux, letting drop an epic retort while laying down beaucoup eight balls at the baccarat table on some island somewhere. I put up my mental dukes; I was all ready to give the date my best.
    “I don’t know. I just, well.” And then I coughed up: “Uh”—a kind of vocal grimace.
    “Yeah,” she said in her wronged voice, “that’s what I thought.” Who was this person with her Kleenex skin and her internship and that smile and did she kick puppies for fun?
    “You have no idea how much I have thought about it,” I said, prim and soggy.
    “And so you think, what, Oh, why did this happen to poor me? Why can’t I go to a movie all these years later? Hark unto this sad story about me .”
    Her crossed arms told me that the conversation was over. But there was a cold playfulness to her face, the kind you’d see in a kid who has just gulped down, in front of a hungry sibling, the last cupcake at the party. I stood underthe theater’s electric red tickertape, movies going around over my head like a thought bubble: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID … THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE … MOST WANTED … EVENT HORIZON … A LIFE LESS ORDINARY … THE ICE STORM … I KNOW WHAT YOU DID …
    I probably looked tearfree and sturdy, and I finally left for the subway without walking her home. “Okay, then,” is all I said to her, more preset civility than real goodbye. And the question I’d asked myself right after the accident had yet to be answered, after eight years: Would I ever get over this? (I know how this must read—my being focused on my own emotions right as she accused me of being self-absorbed—and I don’t defend it.)
    A little later on, the date phoned me. She’d often thought of committing suicide in high school by swerving into oncoming cars, she said. This call was meant to be her apology.
    “I came close a few times, usually when it was late,” she told me. “You know, headlights coming my way and I’m really depressed, nights like that.”
    Martin Amis has written that we all hope, modestly enough, to get through life without being murdered. A lot more confidently, we hope to get through life without murdering anybody ourselves.
    “All right,” I said to my date, just as I was hanging up the phone, because what else was there? I pictured a bicyclist on the edge of vision: the dark speck of Celine. “All right, then,” I said. “All right.”

4
“My ideas, my language, support me in the face of disastrous horror over and over.”
—Harold Brodkey

“I see here you went to Tufts,” a prospective employer would say.
    “English major,” I’d tell the guy. “Concentration on creative writing.” (But would I get fired if this person finds out what I’ve done?)
    “We cover the financial-technology beat,” the guy would say—turning over my scant resume, his face dimmed by boredom. “Nothing creative about the writing here , young man, I can tell you that.” He’d lean forward. “Can you go really, really non-creative?”
    “I’ll ignore my finer instincts.” (But so, am I being ambitious enough for two lives? Is this a good enough job?)
    As I moved into my late twenties, as I got to the bridge that would carry me to the thirties and beyond, I realized I’d absorbed Celine’s mother’s request. When I thought about her now, it was about trying to live well enough for two, successfully enough—with enough diversions, enough achievements—for us both. And Celine herself started coming with me, on job interviews, dates, everywhere. I thought of her each time I drove by a bicyclist. (Which happens a lot more often than you think. I’m guessing that’s