Casting the Lead in a Play Called Desire

On love and self-deception

I owe the women’s movement of the 1970s a great deal—contraception, safe abortions, and the right to wear pants to work, chief among them. But in the mid-1980s—more than a decade after the Equal Rights Amendment had passed—my central ambition was still a man, a ring, and a future with children.

If pressed, I’d have struggled to name a single desire of my own—apart from the desire to be desired. To be chosen. The designated amour of some handsome young man. Desirability, as I understood it, was a tactic—a tool for snagging a good catch. I know, very Jane Austen. Except in 1985, Like a Virgin meant lace gloves and a hair bow, not a corset and chastity.

In the lace-curtain Catholic community where I grew up outside of Boston, pleasure wasn’t part of our vocabulary. Navigating the murky middle between prude and slut required careful choreography. But even within the sanctioned zone of coupledom, pleasure was hardly the point. The social contract allowed for sex before marriage—but not before prom, of course. Sex was a rite of passage, a gateway to adulthood, one step closer to the man, the ring, and the future with children.

And the spiritual side of sex? Please. As a Catholic, I’d have told you sex and spirit didn’t even belong in the same room—let alone the same bed.

* * *

I was still, for the most part, clutching these antiquated sexual mores when I met my husband. I was twenty-two, attending graduate school in New York City. On the first day of class, he slid into the seat beside me and introduced himself with an easy confidence and a crooked smile. His teeth—untamed and unapologetic—caught my attention. He wasn’t a pretty boy, but boy, was he beautiful.

We struck up a friendship, platonic at first, and spent long evenings walking the streets of the Lower East Side. Our favorite meeting spot was a basement-level restaurant on the crowded row of Indian food spots on East 6th Street. The low ceiling hung as heavy with colored lights as did the air with spice. It was there, as I watched him sweat over a dish of vindaloo with a side of hot chillies, that I first learned about his life on the road after leaving home at fifteen.

He’d been a Dead Head, part of the makeshift family that floated in the Grateful Dead’s free-love slipstream—the band's flower children followers long since replaced by yuppies. He told me outlandish stories starring eccentric characters, many of whom had died young—of AIDS, overdoses, and tragic accidents.

“Yet here I am.” He smiled that crooked-tooth smile at me. I pressed for more, which he readily offered. When the kool-aid had finally soured, and a drug-fueled life on the road lost its allure, he found a new home in the straight-edge hardcore punk scene of New York—a transition I imagined was like moving from a tie-dye hammock in the back of a van to a mattress on the floor of an empty warehouse in Brooklyn. Hardcore music is as aggressive and strident as the Dead’s music is breezy and whimsical. But the straight-edge ethos of sobriety, veganism, and authenticity was what it took to get him sober. Straight edge gave him not just a reason but a regimen to get off drugs and alcohol. He shaved his long, wavy locks down to a crew cut and marked the back of his hands with big, black Xs: the straight-edge symbol of discipline and integrity. In lieu of AA meetings, he took to the mosh pits on Saint Mark’s Place.

What do you say to a man who is four years and nine lives your elder? I wanted to impress him, but my upbringing in seaside Massachusetts would surely seem a conventional bore to him. I rarely chimed in about my own past life, always steering the conversation back to him.

“Incredible,” I’d say. Each new tale was more fascinating than the last. He was a climber of iconic bridges, a collector of vintage ephemera, and a stray cat whisperer. He could make a killer puttanesca and parallel park within a sixteenth of an inch. I didn’t just want this man, I wanted to be this man. I felt as if I’d been sitting on a park bench trying to brush the dust of my hometown off my shoes, and suddenly he’d appeared with a new pair of shoes in my size.

He was so adoring of my physical form that whatever bodily insecurities I had melted away. I swelled with seductive force. We spent a scorching summer lounging around an unfurnished Upper West Side apartment naked and sweaty. The heat and scent of our sex on my skin lent gravitas to a life that had, until then, felt inconsequential. Through him, with him, in him, I expanded beyond the edges of my old self. I was becoming someone other than that provincial girl.

We moved to Brooklyn and adopted a stray pitbull who we brought to run at a spit of green earth under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, referred to locally as Rat Park. We lived in a railroad-style tenement above a bodega near the abandoned waterfront. It was a vinyl-sided row house with crumbling plaster walls and a clawfoot bathtub not quite in the kitchen, but just about. Around us, the neighborhood was anchored by Polish, Italian, and Hasidic enclaves. We ran with a small crew of creative twenty-somethings whose cultural backgrounds were a patchwork of everything and nothing in particular. But our taste in work boots and Carhartt coats was uniformly grungy.

By day, we were teachers who taught great works of literature, graded papers, and planned curricula together. By night, we hopped from gallery openings to poetry readings to live music shows and plays. Brooklyn’s creative pulse beat strong. But the world was bigger than Brooklyn, and we wanted to know it. So every summer we caught a flight to any country where we could live on $15 a day. The summer I was twenty-eight, after an adventure through Southeast Asia, we came home and got married in a machine shop under the Williamsburg Bridge.

At last, I was the chosen one. Chosen by this brilliant, wild, exceptional man. All the striving and maneuvering had worked. I’d played the part, followed the script, and secured the role. But no one tells you what to do when the play is over and you’re left wondering who you are without the performance.

If I could bend time, I’d find my younger self on her wedding day, tap her on the shoulder, and offer this:

Dear One,

Know this: you are the casting director of your own life.

Every role is chosen, consciously or not, by you. The man you’ve crowned as hero in Act One? He will become the villain in Act Two. That, too, will be your casting.

Here’s the truth that will sting: his fall won’t just be a tragedy—it will serve you, though not in ways you’ll admit aloud. Righteousness comes easy when you’ve been wronged. Strength slips on like a costume when he’s cast as the weak one.

You won’t just watch the story unfold. You will shape the script. And somewhere deep inside, you will know you are doing this. Using his defeat to justify your own armor and avoid being seen. You will continue to conceal your deeper longings until you’re ready to own them.

Because we don’t choose our foils by accident. We cast them to act out a conversation we’re not ready to have with ourselves, one we may not yet have the language for.

At the end of Act Two, you will receive an invitation. It will go something like this:

If you’re willing, Dear One, to pause the performance and face the parts of yourself you’ve cast onto others, Act Three is waiting. And it won’t be a repetition. It will be a reckoning. A return. The beginning of everything.

With love,
Me

I love you.

Juliette