One's Company

by Ashley Hutson

Back then I never shared my plans or preferences, my ambitions or desires. I never gave away the things I loved. I knew better. Other people can ruin a dream just by knowing it.

Death and the wisdom of Bret “the Hitman” Hart were the extent of my lived experience.

My own identity had always seemed suspect to me. Though I believed a shadowy, hidden kernel of personal essence lay within the heart of every individual—a certain absolute truth that determines one’s identity—I had never found mine. I felt I could change in an instant depending on the situation or the people around me. It all seemed so real in the moment, and so completely fake upon reflection. Recalling my own memories felt like remembering a stranger’s dreams. I had no true idea of myself.

People who research anything, who deep-dive anything, understand that solitude is never loneliness when you have your subject. The subject looms before you like a bright city on the horizon, beckoning you forward. And you’re forever living in it, or going toward it.

Her pratfall felt like good luck.

Then, suddenly, a glow emanated from the screen. It was golden, like God. The warm air of the 1970s wafted over me, and I fell into a paralytic hypnosis. A show played on the screen but another thing was happening on a separate level, inside a secret flap of consciousness, and there was something autumnal about the feeling it generated, deep and nostalgic, regressing my heart to a past date that might have been real and might have been a mishmash of fiction or advertisements or childhood happiness, or a collection of weather: the pleasure of a rosy-lit room in a cold season, the dream of a warm ocean, the late afternoon sun. My reality cracked open, and the television spooned another one on top.

I refused to play a game they had never felt free enough to refuse, and women generally don’t like being reminded that if one is willing to be unattractive, you can get away with anything.

Some men don’t trust a woman who doesn’t play their game, and then, if that women wins at a bigger game—one that has nothing to do with them—their hatred is complete.

Love was a sickness. It had poisoned me. People lie when they say misery or loneliness kills; it’s love. Love is the lethal agent. The more you have to live for, the more can be taken away.

And now, with Three’s Company, I had a secret inside me, a romantic, fantastical vision that kept me afloat, and I cherished it so much that my spiritual survival seemed at stake. If other people came to know it, the depth of it, my end was assured. I could be killed by a skeptical eyebrow. Murdered with one look. Then I’d have to kill my body. But if I kept it to myself, I could inoculate myself against the death-urge forever. Only my own private obsession would save me. That is why I needed to resist love’s hostile invasion at every turn. With love comes attention, then judgment, then annihilation.

So, for a whole week, I camped out in the woods and pretended I was an intruder. What a thrill it was to look at the house from the tree line, an outsider once again! It’s delicious to spy on one’s self. During that week I watched the house from afar and imagined walking around in the rooms, what meals a person might cook in the giant kitchen. I fabricated an entire routine for the person who inhabited it—their fondness for certain spaces, their shitting and eating schedules, their mundane, bizarre habits done every day at the same time, thinking themselves invisible. I took notes. In this way, I taught myself how to live there.

Grief was ugly and embarrassing. The word itself, grief, embarrassed me, something that dated back to childhood.

Adults, I wanted to believe, went largely unaffected, and the prospect that one day I, too, could reach a point of dignified apathy reassured me.

Grief was worse than death or crime. It was humiliation.

one of the fancier places, where multiple dentists glued veneers on rich people. They also offered spa treatments to patients. For a regular dentist appointment. You could go in, get a hot rag on your forehead and a hand massage while Dr. So-and-so drilled

Anyone who seemed particularly empathetic toward Mr. Roper being a harangued man beset by an increasingly progressive world was dismissed immediately. I didn’t have time for stupidity. My judgment had no root in political correctness, though I was accused of this by one man who was angry I was running “a liberal shitshow” when he was shown the door. No, it was a matter of love. I needed people who could keep an open mind. I took in only those who appreciated the spirit of the show in the context of the era in which it was created, minus the sandbag of political beliefs. I turned away people who only liked the show because they thought it was on their side. Three’s Company was a farce, after all. Farce punishes everyone eventually.

One of the main things about the show that had so completely hooked my interest was that it was rooted in the decade(s) that produced it: the late 1970s and early eighties. The seventies were a bleak time, I had no illusions about that. Bombings, terrorism, pointless war, the rise of cults, environmental alarmism, and at the end of it, Reagan. Nobody who actually lived through that decade enjoyed it. But it was gone, it was done, and it now sat safely in its little historical drawer.

That’s the beauty of anything set firmly in the past, especially a past time that was never one’s present—you know how it ends.

I had been watching good people my whole life from a distance, and though I had tried—over and over I’d tried—I had never been able to excoriate the deep, deep wrongness of being that I felt ever since I was a little kid. I was always choosing the wrong thing, always making the wrong moves. Always outside. The goodness, the rightness, of others fascinated me, the way that things one is not born into usually do. In a way, my project was an opportunity to study it close-up. I wanted to know what it was like, even if it was only for one minute in a decade, to feel good because I was good, because I was born the right way.

All in all I wanted to touch the fabrics, to eat the ice cream, to feel the same afternoon sunlight a model kicking up her heels in a seventies-era Sears autumn catalog was selling. The humming safety of a packaged life. I wanted to experience a whole other timeline.

I became drowsy and my brain started crawling the way it always did at the edge of sleep, loosely holding wonder, idly thinking about the past, or the day, or my life, or how luck unfolds. How time folds in on itself, and how so many versions of a person live and die and resurrect over the course of one life.

The entire scene was muted, like a painting composed of feathery brushstrokes and a palette of grays and greens and browns, with the occasional dull orange speckles of hard hats, and I observed it as I would an ocean or a baby, the possibilities of all things past and future rolling and multiplying within it.

Some plants were seen in Apartment 201 throughout the series, such as a schefflera next to the telephone in the living room, and others rotated or appeared and disappeared and reappeared, such as Boston ferns, a corn plant, and several varieties of ivy and philodendron,

Sometimes, when studying a piece of art from the apartment—say, F. X. Leyendecker’s The Flapper print that appeared in nearly every single episode in the series—I gazed at its image for long minutes, trying to figure out what, exactly, appealed to the roommate who might have chosen it, in this case probably serious Janet Wood. Was it the contrast between the joyful, brightly colored image and the sad story of the artist—a gay man in the early 1900s who, overshadowed by his brother, a much more famous and accomplished artist at the time, committed suicide by morphine at age forty-eight? Was it the composition? Was it the general theme? Did she love butterflies, or the metaphor of a butterfly? Did she have a random experience as a child watching an exotic swallowtail flit across her path one summer day, and did the ghost of its beauty subconsciously guide her down the aisle of the secondhand store and toward The Flapper? The artwork itself was a pun. A 1920s flapper dressed in a gauzy costume floated in front of an anise swallowtail butterfly that was huge, almost looming, and her outstretched arms mimicked the widespread wings of the butterfly. And “Life” was merely a coincidence—the illustration was used as the cover of a Life magazine in February 1922. But the word LIFE emblazoned above the image had a suggestive effect. Was this life? A bright explosion of youth and beauty? A pun? A joke? I decided that Janet, sensible but unsentimental character that she was, probably j...

sometimes we stood together in silence and watched the activity around us, observing the task that was unfolding, or the next task revealing itself. When I was around him there was no inkling of a past or future, only the present. I was grateful.

Inside every person’s head is a set of films, each a spool of memories, and one of these reels features the most trivial things a person does over the course of a lifetime, including ordering a ham sandwich from the local market’s deli counter years ago and the girl who handed it to you, and I hated that the films in these other people’s brains were still running, and that I was in them. The humiliation of being alive, and being seen! Oh, it wrangled me. I wanted to kill the very fact. I had known these strangers only briefly, and only by which brand of chaw they preferred, or what cut of meat to set aside, but they threatened to fan the dying ember of the past into a full, hemorrhoidal flame again, just when I was about to leave it behind forever.

Some reports described me as “a survivor,” a term that was so ludicrous I snorted the first time I heard it, its suggestion of heroism. As if there is heroism in keeping one’s body alive. If only they knew how I wanted to shuck it off, this shell. This bag. This thing that carried me around from place to place. When I looked in a mirror, I never knew what I saw. It wasn’t me.

The world felt large and doomed, yet everyone seemed destined to carry on normally. Commercials blasted in between national news reports, as did the latest music about love, love lost, love never had. Global ruin was discussed constantly but no one could imagine it. It was like any other year.

The glut of information, the hubbub of people who worked in the buildings around my property, all of it was a sickness. I could even feel it physically, like an exotic pneumonia, a pulling-down at the stomach, the chest area, a ragged feeling of need. I was determined to cure it. However, it’s one thing to wish for solitude, and another thing to embrace it. I understood that for all of my misanthropy, if that’s what it was, part of me still longed for the most basic connection—saying hello, or hearing someone work in another room. These thoughts disturbed me. They didn’t fit with the other feeling I had in most waking hours, the one that had boiled down to a low-level resentment within me, the grating torture of knowing others and being known.

I tried not to think about it. Money was like drugs or a favorite food—as soon as I had it, all I could think about was losing it, for its purpose was to be used, so the having was never permanent. And I was convinced I would lose it, that nothing literally gold could stay. The best antidote to this worry was practiced indifference.

Two Robert Furber prints, one for each of their birth months, flanked the bed,

when I turned to him after the demonstration, I saw the pride on his face. And something else, too, maybe a smile, one of those rare, pure expressions of joy that people witness only so many times in a life, the joy of making something and giving it away.

occasionally finding myself drifting into full-blown paranoia, but mostly I indulged in generic hatred and shame. I was ashamed not of myself but of myself as seen by others, which I sensed was happening even more than I suspected.

I suddenly felt large and fanciful, full of gregarious jollity, the kind of feeling a host gets at the end of a long, complicated party when the last guest is leaving and seems, in that moment, like the dearest, most wonderful friend in the world, and whose soon-to-be-gone presence reminds the host that they’re all human, and in this soup together, battling this fleeting timeline as one, and the thanks and smiles and sentimental goodbyes are laid on extra thick, all because freedom is in sight.

There was no point to anything. And that supreme desolation—that realization that I had been abandoned by my own certainty of how the world worked—gave me the reckless freedom to do something truly wild. I started believing in myself. I believed everything I thought. I couldn’t fail. My newfound narcissism felt like revenge. I figured that if the world was going to wreak its random cruelty on me, I might as well aspire to greatness in the meantime.

pareidolia.

People who declare things impossible lack a ruthless imagination.

I was unafraid. The days were round and full and sweet. It was an era of golden light and gentle breezes, of falling asleep holding hands. No dread and no fear entered in. We did not have to practice our parts. For once I lived effortlessly, my mind as clean as a toothpick pulled from a fully baked cake, and there was no record, no history, no memory, no larger world to which I had to answer. I was free.

How could we ever know another person’s life? All the tiny details that are never relayed to us, that are kept hidden. Sloppy guesswork is as close as one can come to the truth.

She’s different somehow, stronger. Something about her newfound strength chips away at the ground of my being, hinting at something that lies underneath everything here, an unpleasant and volcanic underworld I can feel at all hours threatening to overpower the medications, the bland white halls, my pureed smoothie of a life.

I’ve been writing my own history, my weak attempt not to forget, to try to form a wormhole to the past, to get back to all that I’ve lost, but I fear the more I write about it the more I destroy it, the essence of it. I find my descriptions have not served my memory at all. If anything, my inadequacies as a storyteller are hastening the end, proving how far out of my hands my life has fallen. Writing it down has been like trying to capture the colors and flavors of a dream upon waking. The meaning and the body of it fade away.

up, I noticed he was wearing one of the same flannel shirts he’d worn years ago. Under it he wore a faded T-shirt that said The Outer Banks. Below the words was a man walking along a beach near a lighthouse, and behind him trailed a white dog.