“Yes, Ellen. Nothing,” he’d say as I frantically took note that he wasn’t calling me by his usual pet form, Ellie. “Sometimes I’m just thinking nothing.”
“Okay,” I’d say, determined to give him space or play it cool, all the while relentlessly, doggedly analyzing his every move, speculating about what was wrong. Did I get on his nerves? Was I too far from his ideal? Did he still have feelings for his ex-girlfriend, an Israeli artist six years his senior (which made her a dozen years more experienced than I)? Was I as good as she in bed? Did he love me as much as he once loved her—and more important, did he love me as much as he once loved me?
At first, these questions were all internal musings, but slowly they surfaced, sometimes in the middle of a heated argument, other times as I broke down in frustrated tears. I demanded assurances, fired off questions, painted him into corners, started arguments about everything and nothing. One night, when I was alone in his apartment, I even snooped through his drawers and read a few pages of his journal—the sacred book stuffed with cards and clippings, photos and musings. A book that he carried everywhere and made me feel a rush of love for him every time he cracked it open. It was a huge mistake—not because of what I found or didn’t find, but because I was left with an awful, hollow ache afterward, an almost unwashed feeling. I was that kind of girl now; we were that kind of couple. I tried to put it out of my mind and move on, but just couldn’t get past what I had done—what he had made me do. So, a few days later, I broke down and confessed, leading to an explosive fight in which I got him to admit that he didn’t believe he could ever make a permanent commitment. To me. To anyone.
“Why not?” I said, filled with devastation and frustration.
“Marriage just isn’t for me,” he said, shrugging nonchalantly.
“Why not?” I said, pressing him for more. Always for more.
He sighed and said marriage was essentially a contract between two people—and contracts are signed when people don’t fully trust one another. “Which clearly you don’t,” he said, throwing all the blame my way.
I apologized and cried and told him that of course I trusted him and that I had no idea what had come over me and that I didn’t care about marrying him, I just wanted to be with him, forever.
His expression became steely as he said, “I’m twenty-nine. I don’t want to talk about forever.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling the onset of groveling. “I’m sorry.”
He nodded and said, “Okay. Let’s just drop it, all right?”
I nodded, pretending to be placated, and a few minutes later we made love and I convinced myself that everything would be fine. We were just going through a rough patch, a few growing pains, and I needed to be patient, ride the wave, take the bad with the good. I told myself that love is sometimes a war of attrition, and that through sheer force of will, I could fix our problems, love him enough for both of us.
But days later, we got into our final fight, which was dramatic only as far as the calendar; it was the New Year’s Eve of the new millennium.
“New Year’s is amateur night,” Leo had been insisting for weeks, every time I begged him to come to the party I had promised Margot I’d attend. “You know I hate those scenes. And this Y2K hype is unbearable. It’s just another year.”
“Please come,” I said. “It’s important to Margot.”
“Then let Margot party it up.”
“It’s important to me.”
“Well, it’s important to me to stay home,” he said.
I negotiated, pleaded. “Just come for a little while. An hour or two. Then we’ll go home.”
“We’ll see,” he finally conceded—an answer that almost always means no.
But that night, I clung to the faith that he’d surprise me and show up. I imagined the gauzy, backlit scene. Our eyes locking and the crowd parting as he found my lips, right at midnight. Just like in When Harry Met Sally. I spent the whole night watching the clock and the door, and feeling generally heartsick, but ever hopeful. Until eleven fifty-nine came, and I stood in a corner alone, listening to Prince’s pulsing remix of “1999” and then the final, stomach-turning, ten-second countdown. A drunk, giddy Margot found me minutes later, hugging me hard, gushing about how much she loved me and how much we had to look forward to. But then she returned to her own date, and I went home alone, sleeping with the phone next to my pillow, waiting, even praying.
But Leo never called that night. Nor did he call the next morning. Around noon, when I couldn’t stand it another second, I took the subway to his apartment. He was home, reading the paper and watching MTV.
“You never came,” I said, pathetically stating the obvious.
“Sorry,” he said, sounding not at all sorry. “I meant to. I fell asleep around ten-thirty.”
“I was all alone at midnight,” I said, pitifully, self-righteously.
“So was I,” he laughed.
“It’s not funny,” I said, now more angry than hurt.
“Look. I never promised you I’d come,” he said, agitated.
I quickly backed down, resting my head on his shoulder as we watched a bowl game on television, then made Greek omelets—Leo’s specialty—followed by sex on the couch. But some time afterward, when he stood abruptly and told me he had to go work on a story, I got upset all over again.
“It’s New Year’s Day,” I whined, detesting the sound of my own voice.
“I still have deadlines,” he said flatly.
I looked at him, my head spinning with bitter resentment and desperate grief, and then opened my mouth and uttered those infamous words.
“This isn’t working,” I said, believing in my heart that I was only testing the waters, pushing the limits, trying another tactic to reel him back in. “I think we should break up.”
I expected resistance, a fight, at least a robust discussion. But instead, Leo quickly agreed that I was right. He said so tenderly, almost lovingly, which made me feel worse than an angry response would have. He put his arms around me, his relief almost palpable.
I had no choice but to play along. After all, it had been my suggestion in the first place.
“’Bye, Leo,” I said, sounding way braver than I felt.
“Good-bye, Ellen,” he said, at least feigning sadness.
I hesitated, but knew there was no turning back. So I left his place, in shock and denial, springing for a cab home instead of taking the subway.
When I got back to my apartment, Margot was in the family room, reading a magazine. “Are you okay?” she said.
I told her I didn’t know.
“What happened?”
“We broke up.”
I considered saying more, confiding all the gory details, but could feel myself shutting down, becoming defensive and closed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I shook my head and said, “I don’t know…It’s really…complicated.”
And it felt complicated in the way that all breakups feel complicated when you’re embroiled in them. While in cruel actuality, most are really quite simple. And it goes something like this: one person falls out of love—or simply realizes that he was never really in love in the first place, wishing he could take back those words, that promise from the heart. Looking back, I can see that that was likely the case with Leo and me—the simplest explanation is often the right one, my mother used to tell me. But at the time, I didn’t believe that could be the case.
Instead, I hoped for what all girls hope for in my situation: that he’d change his mind, come to his senses, realize what he had in me, discover that I couldn’t be replaced. I kept thinking, even saying aloud to Margot and my sister, “Nobody will love him like I love him,” which I now realize is far from a selling point to a man. To anyone.
Even worse, I kept replaying in my head that dreadful saying that starts, “If you love something, set it free.” I pictured the laminated poster-size version of it that my siste
r hung in her bedroom after a particularly scarring high school breakup. The words were written in purple, sympathy card-style script, complete with a soaring eagle and mountaintop view. I remember thinking that no eagle in the world is going to willingly fly back to captivity.
“Damn straight, he was never yours,” I always wanted to tell Suzanne.
But now. Now Leo was that eagle. And I was certain that he would be the one exception to the rule. The one bird who would return.
So I stoically waited, desperately clinging to the notion that ours was only a trial separation. And, incredibly enough, my feelings became even more intense post-breakup. If I was obsessed with Leo when I was with him, I was drowning in him afterward. He occupied every minute of my day as I became a cliché of the broken-hearted woman. I tortured myself with his old answering machine messages and sad, bitter songs like Sinead O’Connor’s “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance.” I wallowed in bed and burst into tears at the most random, inopportune moments. I wrote and revised long letters to him that I knew I would never send. I completely neglected my personal appearance (unless you count candlelit pity parties in the bathtub) and vacillated between eating nothing and gorging on ice cream, Doritos, and the ultimate cliché, Twinkies.
I couldn’t even escape Leo during sleep. For the first time in my life, I remembered vivid details of my dreams, dreams that were always about him, us. Sometimes they were bad dreams of near-misses and poor communication and his cold, slow withdrawal. But sometimes they were amazing dreams—Leo and I wiling away the hours in smoky cafés or making hard, sweaty love in his bed—and in some ways, those happy dreams were more agonizing than the bad. I’d awaken, and for a few, fleeting seconds, I’d actually believe that we were back together again. That the breakup was the dream and that I had only to open my eyes and find him right there beside me. Instead, grim reality would set in again. Leo was moving on to a new life without me, and I was alone.
After weeks, nearly months of this sort of melodrama, Margot intervened. It was a Saturday, early evening, and she had just failed in about her sixth straight weekend attempt to get me to go out with her. She emerged from her bedroom, looking radiant in a funky, indigo sweater, hip-hugging jeans, and pointy-toed, black boots. She had curled her usually stick-straight hair and applied a shimmering, perfumed powder along her collarbone.
“You look awesome,” I told her. “Where are you going?”
“Out with the girls,” she said. “Sure you don’t want to come?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Pretty in Pink is on tonight.”
She crossed her arms and pursed her lips. “I don’t know what you’re so mopey about. You were never really in love with him,” she finally said, as matter-of-factly as if she were stating that the capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg.
I gave her a look like she was crazy. Of course I was in love with Leo. Wasn’t my profound grief proof of a grand love?
She continued, “You were only in lust. The two are often confused.”
“It was love,” I said, thinking that the lust was only one component of our love. “I still love him. I will always love him.”
“No,” she said. “You were only in love with the idea of love. And now you are in love with the idea of a broken heart…You’re acting like an angst-ridden adolescent.”
It was the ultimate slam to a woman in her twenties.
“You’re wrong,” I said, gripping my icy tub of pralines ’n’ cream.
She sighed and gave me a maternal stare. “Haven’t you ever heard that true love is supposed to make you a better person? Uplift you?”
“I was a better person with Leo,” I said, excavating a praline. “He did uplift me.”
She shook her head and started to preach, her Southern accent kicking in more, the way it always does when she’s adamant about something. “Actually you sucked when you were with Leo…He made you needy, spineless, insecure, and one-dimensional. It was like I didn’t even know you anymore. You weren’t the same person with him. I think the whole relationship was…unhealthy.”
“You were just jealous,” I said softly, thinking that I wasn’t sure if I meant she was jealous she didn’t have a Leo—or was jealous that he had replaced her as the most important person in my life. Both theories seemed plausible despite the fact that she, as always, had a boyfriend of her own.
“Jealous. I don’t think so, Ellen.” She sounded so convincing, so borderline amused with the mere thought of envying what I had with Leo, that I felt my face growing hot as I retreated on this point and just said again, “He did too make me better.”
It was the closest we had ever come to anything resembling a fight, and despite my rising fury, I was also nervous, unable to look her in the eye.
“Oh yeah?” she said. “Well, if that’s true, Ellen, then show me one good photo you took when you were with him. Show me how he inspired you. Prove me wrong.”
I put down my ice cream, right onto her April issue of Town & Country, and marched over to my roll-top desk in the corner of our living room. I pulled open a drawer, grabbed a manila envelope filled with photographs, and dramatically fanned them onto our coffee table.
She picked them up, flipping through them with the same detached expression with which one shuffles a deck of cards during rounds of mindless solitaire.
“Ellen,” she finally said. “These pictures…They just aren’t…that good.”
“What do you mean they aren’t that good?” I said, looking over her shoulder as she examined the photos of Leo. Leo laughing. Leo looking contemplative. Leo asleep on a Sunday morning, curled up next to his dog, Jasper. I felt a pang of longing for the surly boxer I never liked much to begin with.
“Okay,” she finally said, stopping at one of Leo that I took the summer before. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that says “Atari” and is reclined on a bench in Central Park, staring directly into the camera, directly at me. Only his eyes are smiling.
“Take this one, for example,” she said. “The lighting is good. Nice composition, I guess, but it’s…just sort of boring. He’s good-looking and all, but so what? There’s nothing else going on here but a reasonably cute guy on a bench…It’s…he’s trying way too hard.”
I gasped, at least on the inside. This insult was, perhaps, even worse than likening me to a lovesick teenager. “Trying too hard?” I said, now full-fledged pissed.
“I’m not saying you’re trying too hard,” she said. “But he definitely is. Just look at his expression…He’s affected, smug, self-aware. He knows he’s being photographed. He knows he’s being worshipped. He’s all, ‘Look at my sultry stare.’ Seriously, Ellen. I hate this photo. Every single shot you took in the year before Leo is more interesting than this one.”
She tossed the photograph back onto the coffee table, and it landed face up. I looked at it, and could almost, almost see what she was saying. I felt a stab of something close to shame, similar to the way I felt when I went back and read my cringe-worthy junior-high haikus about the summer surf at the Jersey Shore. Haikus I once proudly submitted to a literary magazine, feeling genuinely stunned when the rejections came in the mail.
Margot and I stared at each other for what felt like a long time. It was probably the most powerful, honest moment of our friendship, and in that moment, I both loved and despised her. She finally broke our silence.
“I know it hurts, Ellen…But it’s time to move on,” she said, briskly straightening the pile of photographs and returning them to the envelope. Apparently Leo was no longer worth the energy it took for her to rip his face in two.
“How am I supposed to do that?” I said softly back. It wasn’t a rhetorical question—I really wanted to know the mechanics of exactly what I was to do next.
She thought for a second and then gave me instructions. “Go ahead and sit around in your sweats with Molly Ringwald tonight. Then tomorrow, get up and take a long shower. Blow out your hair, put on some makeup. Then get your camera out and get back to
it…He’s not coming back. So do your thing…It’s time.”
I looked at her, knowing she was right. Knowing that once again, I was at a crossroads in my life, and once again, I needed to take Margot’s advice and turn to photography.
So the very next day I bought a new camera—the best one I could afford on my meager credit—and enrolled in a comprehensive course at the New York Institute of Photography. Over the next year, I learned the ins and outs of the equipment, everything from lenses and filters to flash, tungsten, and strobe lights. I studied in exhaustive detail aperture, shutter speed, and exposure as well as film and ISO parameters, white balance and histograms. I learned theories of composition, color, patterns, and framing, as well as “the rule of thirds” (something I think I knew instinctively) and how to use lines for more powerful images. I had already learned a ton about printing, but I was able to practice my technique on much more sophisticated machines. I took a course in portraiture, studying lighting and positioning. I studied product photography, food photography, architectural photography, landscape photography, even sports photography. I delved into digital photography, mastering Adobe Photoshop and the language of megapixels and chip size (which was cutting edge stuff at the time). I even took a class in the business and marketing side of photography.
With every fresh week, every new technique I learned, every photo I snapped, I felt a little more healed. Part of it was just the passage of time, an essential ingredient of any emotional recovery. Part of it, though, was that one passion was slowly replacing another. And although one broken heart doesn’t make me an expert in the subject, I believe you need both things—time and an emotional replacement—to fully mend one.
Then, about nine months post-Leo, I finally felt ready—technically and emotionally—to show my portfolio and apply for a real assistant’s job. Through a friend of a friend, I heard that a commercial photographer named Frank Brightman was looking for a second assistant. Frank did mostly fashion photography and advertising, but also some occasional editorial work. He had a distinct cinematic style that evoked realism—a look that I both admired and could imagine someday emulating, with my own twist, of course.