Jennifer Steil

The Truths You Can’t Tell

You can’t tell the truth about the Hostage. He has a mother and cousins and a sister and they all suffered when he was held captive in Syria for more than two years. You bite your lips while credulous reporters who believe him when he says he was a journalist call him “wise” and “whole” in your favorite magazines. Reporters who never verify his stories. You do not offer the corrections.

Torture, unsurprisingly, did not improve him. It did not make him kind or generous or less patronizing. It did, it does, safeguard him from criticism, and from you, though you have never posed a threat, never given him anything he didn’t want, except too much of yourself, too young.

You don’t say that after you broke up at the end of high school, he still showed up every few years to make sure you hadn’t moved on, or at least not too much. He talked you into introducing him to people you were dating, and then needled and ridiculed them until they went home in a rage. You stopped introducing him to anyone, but he showed up uninvited, came to drinks and told your friends, people he did not know, that they had made stupid choices with their lives.

You can’t say that after you spent two years trying to help his family find him—because while he had done nothing to earn your help, his mother deserved it, his cousins did—he sent you a friend request, only to later post an unhinged rant against you and your work on your high school page. A rant even Facebook found abusive and removed.

Two years of torture and he still has the energy to want you to fail. That desire still holds him.

But you can’t call a survivor an asshole.

You can’t mention you keep his emails in the folder labeled Hate Mail, alongside notes from the people who wrote you that Al Qaeda should have killed you when they had the chance. Emails you keep in case you ever need to prove anything.

He was charming when he wanted you and thought he had a chance. But as he told you himself the evening you decided to reveal your greatest flaws to each other over black market gin in his Yemeni kitchen, he was prone to self-sabotage. He sulked when you told him you were on deadline and wanted to work instead of entertaining him. Was incandescent with rage when you landed the book deal, found your husband. Whenever you found happiness elsewhere. A rage that leaked through snide, gaslighting emails. Just before you gave up for good on friendship—you wanted to keep everyone, never wanted to risk enemies—he wrote: “look: maybe you are going to like despise me in a few months. You shouldn’t be friendly with me. You should be saying, That T—! That asshole! I hate him!”

That was him all over, the vague, incomprehensible threats of harm to come, all wrapped up in a faux-casual tone dripping with condescension.

He was never violent, but he did like to remind you that he was not on your side. He did like to lie about you to the people you loved. He did enjoy calling you, who taught him anything he knows about journalism, a “bimbo,” just to see if you would take the bait. 

Perhaps more than this, what you can’t forgive him is his absence from his dormitory room when you showed up the night before your high school graduation. He was not there because he had sneaked out to have sex with someone else. Someone no longer a student, but it doesn’t matter who it was. That wasn’t what upset you. That you could forgive. You were sad, but after all, you were heading different places for college and what difference could one more night make?

What upsets you is:

because he was not there to celebrate your final night together, you went back to your dorm room, alone.

because you went back to your dorm room alone, you were there when his friend, the captain of the soccer team, a charismatic boy who sewed his own colorful skirts, crawled in your window.

You have never told anyone that this boy did things to your 17-year-old body that you explicitly told him not to, but which you eventually stopped fighting so as not to hurt his feelings. You wanted to be a good sport. You thought it was just one more thing about being a girl.

You never forgot. You just didn’t want to give what happened weight. For decades, you swept this memory aside as insignificant. You did not want it to matter.

You have made it not matter.

You thought you had made it not matter, until you started writing a list of things you have never told the truth about and this was on it, and hot tears choked you.

He does charity work in D— now, though you heard he worked as a pimp elsewhere in Europe before that, and you still don’t want to make a scene because all those refugee kids look up to him. When he asked you to talk with them last year, to tell them about your work, let them interview you, you did it. For the kids. And because you didn’t want to seem hung up on the past.

You don’t want to have to think of high school as traumatic. You loved school.

You had always loved school.

You can’t tell the truth about the college boyfriend, now a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, who during your sophomore year and his junior year of college in Ohio, after a year of fucking and fighting, of him explaining to you every way he could how little you mattered, when words were no longer enough to make you feel your insignificance, he threw you into a plate glass window and captured your neck between his hands, squeezing until a passing stranger pulled him off of you, because now he has a wife who is probably nice and kids who probably love their dad. Besides, maybe he doesn’t throw women into windows anymore. The website of his practice says he teaches nonviolent communication, does yoga, and gardens.

Men get to forget.

For far too long after that, him, you chose lovers you knew could not hurt you, people you could love, but not too much.

Because you could not love them the way they wanted to be loved they sometimes left, or you did. For example, you left Brian (whom you can name because he was nice) in Seattle and then he left you in New York, standing in your bedroom in his flannel shirt while he said, “but you don’t want anyone to need you.”

When you at last dropped the reins, your free-range heart sped giddy and heedless to those who drew no borders around it. Who would not drag you into commitment and obligation.

You trespassed because you could not risk being trapped.

You don’t tell the truth about the Irish Novelist, one among many of his type, because he has a nice wife with tiny delicate ears that make you think maybe you should have picked her, and because he has won all the book awards and it will look like you are seeking a way to fly to fame on his contrails. If you ever get to fame, it will be on your own. His three children do not deserve to be disillusioned about their father. Or maybe they do. But you can’t make decisions for someone else’s children. That was his call, one made long ago.

You are not proud of all the ways you knew him, even less proud of allowing him all the orgasms. He shared an email address with his wife, so you were not allowed to write. He had no cellphone, so he could not be found. You respected the rules, accepted the parameters. Settled for impromptu taxi rides at midnight from the pub to your apartment, for spreading yourself on the grass of Central Park at 2 am, for fucking under the piano of the American Irish Historical Society with an audience of ghosts. Male journalists for papers of record write stories about things that have happened in this building but they never mention you. Your history is subterranean, invisible, despite the floorboards still marinating in your DNA.

“Please don’t tell my wife and kids,” he said. “You could kill them.”

No, you wanted to say, “You could.”

You don’t tell the truth about this for all the obvious reasons, but you made no promises, nor did you break any. Your heart was never very good with borders. You see his shame—or is it fear?—in the way he pretends not to know you when he sees you across the VIP room of a literary conference, in the way he swallows his drink fast and leaves. As if you are an unexploded landmine.

Maybe you are.

But the famous ones are protected by your refusal to become famous through them.

You can’t tell the truth because you know where judgment would fall. You don’t tell the truth because you have better stories to tell, stories you choose.

You once tried to tell the truth, or at least part of it. You wrote a chapter of truth, but your editor said that readers would dislike you for how and whom you loved, and it was important to be liked. There is a limit to how many people, what kind of people, you can love or fuck and still be “relatable.”

You are too profligate with your heart and other organs. That book was published without chapter nine.

A friend tells you to take the high road, to rise above. She’s right, of course she is. And you have. You do.

But the high road is a toll road, and you are the only one who pays.

The untold truths become the sediment out of which life grows. The compost, the fertilizer, the dark director sending you places you don’t think you chose.

Layers upon layers upon layers. You don’t know how deep you want to go. Maybe this is where you can stop.

Is there anything to be mined from these dark places? Does anything glitter at all?

Maybe not all of these secrets are yours.

Maybe you can let some go,

Give them back to the people to whom they belong.

Let them figure out what to do with them.

They are too heavy to keep carrying.

You have no reason to protect those

who never worried about protecting you.

You’re 54 and still trying to collect all the pieces

of yourself that you shouldn’t have given away,

the diaspora of you.

You can’t even write the truth in anything

but second person,

Holding it away from you,

keeping its blade from your throat.