But it’s important because I responded, at the time, by sending the first naked picture of myself I’d ever taken. I know. I get it. Spare me your judgments. It just seemed right at the time. I let my dress fall to the floor along with my tights, bra, and underwear, and I snapped the picture by holding a phone to the mirror on my closet door.
I made no attempt to hide the stuff about my body I hate. My outie belly button. The constellation of moles on my right thigh. A half-moon scar over my hip from a bicycle accident. My noticeably uneven breasts. I wrote back:
This is what my body looks like when you think about it.
I knew I shouldn’t be sending it even as I did it. I’d heard all the warnings. But what no one ever tells you is that the risk itself is the point; it’s the thrill of making a mistake on purpose. The only problem is that I thought I was making that mistake for someone in particular. Someone I knew.
Honestly, though, the sex stuff didn’t bother me as much as I thought. Worse were the things I told him. Stuff I hadn’t told anyone else. The way I used to shoot baskets in my parents’ driveway in junior high, telling myself that ifI could just hit ten free throws in a row, I would no longer be ugly. My fear of the dark, all the way into high school, and the way I used to leave my blinds open so I could see the light from the neighbors’ TV.
The time I got my first period at a pool party and had to call my mom to bring me home. The time I watched all my friends make fun of an overweight girl in gym class until they brought her to tears, and I did nothing to stop them. And the admission, absolutely true, that I’d never had a boyfriend until him.
Some of these things made it to Jonah, I know. We spoke on the phone occasionally at first, and I remember his low voice saying “it’s okay,” and “but you were just a kid.” He hardly ever returned the favor, though. He wasn’t good at revealing. The only time I can remember clearly was when he told me about being hospitalized for a weekend when he was sixteen.
“All I can tell you, Tess, is that I felt worse than I ever had in my life. And I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if I was left alone. My mom found me staring into the knife drawer in the kitchen, and when she asked me why, I couldn’t answer. She called my doctor and he helped make the arrangements at a place nearby.”
I asked him if he’d ever felt that way again.
“No,” he said. “But I have to take a pill every day. Probably for the rest of my life.”
It might have been the last real thing I found out about him. Soon after that, he wasn’t interested in the phone as much. He wanted to text and chat, claiming he felt “more like himself” that way. And who was I to deny him? I liked the way he sounded in writing. I imagined us as a famous intellectual couple from history, exchanging “correspondence.” I had still never read anything as sexy and strange as Flaubert’s letter to Louise Colet in 1846.
Mr. Barthold had mentioned something about these letters when we were readingMadame Bovaryfor A.P. Lit, and I had quickly looked them up. What I found was better than I could have imagined.
“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die... when you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”
Damn, Gustave!
I wanted to be written to in that way, and Jonah came close.
Daniel, I suppose, came close, too.
I stayed away from Facebook for a week after that firstexchange with Daniel. When I finally logged back on, I found a single message sitting in my in-box. It was not from Jonah’s account this time. It was from someone that I wasn’t friends with. The profile picture was not a face. It was a white silhouette with a light blue background, a template for a future image.
The message read:
Hello, Tess.
First of all, I don’t expect you to get in touch with me again.
This isn’t a plea for that to happen. I just wanted to explain some things to you in case you are curious about them in the future. Then, I promise I won’t contact you again.
Here goes.
First: I believe Jonah stopped communicating with you because he didn’t want you to know what was going wrong with him, psychologically. He didn’t want anyone to know much about that. I didn’t fully understand this at the time, but now I’m sure about it.
Second: I started using his account because I wanted himto break up with you the right way instead of just shutting down. That was my plan. To break up with you as him in a gentle way. I know this doesn’t really make sense, but at the time I thought it did.
Third: Once we started writing to each other, I was not able to break up with you. Either as him or as me.
That’s all.
I’m not sure what I expect you to do with this information. I just wanted you to have it. You have plenty of reasons to distrust me, but I still feel the need to tell you that I have never done anything like this before. And I’m not quite sure how it all happened. I do know that I have made a terrible situation much worse and I hope you can forgive me someday.
Okay,
Daniel.
P.S. I think Jonah would have been in love with you if he was capable of being in love with anyone. But I’m not sure he was when you met him.
