Researching Jenna, Discovering Myself

"Why do you think Jenna left me?" I asked friends and family, pen and paper in hand. I admit it looked silly, and it felt silly, too. But my psychotherapist had urged me to start writing down my conversations with people about what had happened with Jenna (instead of, as she put it, "just letting the wheels spin"), and I had decided to follow her advice. Enough with the endless whimpering. Time for some hard-nosed research.

Of course I also hoped I might find an answer. I certainly wasn't having much luck staring at my ceiling night after night, sleepless and distraught. And Jenna had proved to be a poor source of information since she'd stopped returning my calls.

I didn't think any of my interviewees knew Jenna better than I did; she and I had been together almost 10 years. But still there was a Jenna I didn't know: namely the Jenna who left me so suddenly over the phone that warm afternoon in March. This Jenna, I hypothesized, must be the composite of the imaginings of all these other people.

Flipping open my steno pad, I first posed my question to a friend of mine with whom I'd quickly started an affair after Jenna left. She was in her kitchen, perched on a stool, smoking a Marlboro in her green bathrobe.

"Oh, Brian," she said. "Why do you want to torture yourself?"

"It's not torture," I said. "It'll be good for me."

"Is it something about beating a dead horse?"

I urged her to say something. She and Jenna didn't like each other too much, but I'd always felt they were a lot alike.

My rebound lover took a drag on her cigarette and said: "I think it has to do with the age difference between when you started out and now. You were 19 when you got together. Over time she developed needs and desires, needs that maybe she didn't even know she was having. And whether or not she told you about these needs, you weren't fulfilling them."

Scribbling down her thoughts, I tried to think of a good follow-up question, as a good researcher would do, but I realized I'd been hoping she'd say something more like "I don't know, I don't care, let's mess around." Instead she had concluded that Jenna left because of my inadequacy. And did this mean she, too, was anticipating my inadequacy? Suddenly hurt, I ended the interview.

Next I asked Cynthea, Jenna's favorite professor in college, who'd become a good friend of us both. It was at a party; she wore a colorful blouse that looked like it had been shredded and sewn back together. I pulled her onto the front porch so we could be alone for my interview.

"She left you for her own reasons," Cynthea said. "I think she had a lot of small unhappinesses, the most recent being that she felt unsupported when her dad died. She felt he abandoned her, and she decided that you abandoned her, too. She had a big catharsis, and you were a part of that."

She looked away from me. "I also think she wanted someone to stand up to her and fight her more. But that's probably projection. That's why I leave men; they don't stand up to me."

I winced at the thought that in Cynthea's mind I was no better than her two ex-husbands, but she was right, I think, about Jenna's dad, who died, suddenly, four months earlier. This wasn't the father who raised her but the estranged, alcoholic, misanthropic father whom her mother had left when Jenna was 2, taking Jenna with her. When he died, Jenna was visibly upset but soon stopped talking about it. They weren't close, Jenna would say, adding that it was more of a relief to her that he was in "a better place."

The subject of his death didn't come up again until she called me to say that losing her father had turned her whole world upside down, and that I was no longer in it. I figured I needed to take my research deeper, closer to her family, so my next interview was with Jenna's stepfather, Tom.

When I asked him why he thought Jenna had left me, he said simply, "I don't know."

We were standing on the sidewalk in front of my house. He'd stopped by after work to pick up some things Jenna had left behind and didn't want to retrieve herself: artwork, books, printmaking supplies.

I stood there waiting, pen to paper, until he said again, "I don't know."

"I don't know. I don't know," I repeated, writing it down. I shouldn't have mocked him -- Tom had been consoling to me in the past -- but today his rushed and dismissive response irked me. I looked up from my notepad and said, "That's it?"

"I'm probably going to answer every question like that," he replied.

I started to write that down, too: "Probablyanswerevery---- "

"We've all been in relationships," he finally interrupted. "And we all know that no one around you knows the answer." He paused as I wrote silently. "And the corollary is, no two people in any relationship know what's going on in that relationship."

This seemed very wise to me, and I told him so. I had always liked Tom. But as we put Jenna's stuff in his car, his statement lingered between us and became extremely troubling to me. In rapid succession I wondered about my relationship with Jenna, about his relationship with Jenna, and about my relationship with him.

Before Tom drove off, we shook hands and wished each other well. The way things had been going with Jenna before she left me, I'd thought he and I were on the path to becoming in-laws. Now we were nothing. This much we could know for sure.

My mother was the last person I needed to speak with for my research project. That requires some background information.

When I was 8 years old my mother divorced my father and left us in Seattle, moving across the country to start a new life. For two years I was an emotional wreck, but finally I got on with the business of growing up. I saw her for Christmases and summers, got along great with her new family in Virginia, and fit in perfectly with my new stepfamily in Seattle. I never resolved my feelings about my mother leaving, but I decided they would be unresolvable. Everyone's got issues with parents, I decided. Life isn't fair. Deal with it.

In my first visit to a psychotherapist after Jenna left, while I was in my spinning-out-of-control phase, my deft counselor identified this trauma deep in my emotional life, and I erupted, first with tears, and then with an overwhelming clarity. I was having, I realized, the same reactions I'd had as an 8-year-old: grief-stricken, lying awake at night wondering why she'd left, wanting to do anything to get her back.

I wrote my mother, telling her of my realizations, and she told me it was high time to pay me a visit "to work some things out."

Weeks later, over our steak-and-salad dinners in the restaurant next to her hotel, my mother told me what it was like for her to leave me, my sister and my father. She talked about how necessary it was for her to "rebuild" herself, how it was a decision she hated having made, but the life she was living was something she had hated more.

I was surprised to feel uninterested in these monologues. For so many years I had wondered why she left, but now I realized I didn't so much care. The point, for me, was that she had. All I actually needed was to tell her that her leaving had "really screwed me up for a really long time."

She looked up from her plate and nodded.

I didn't get to ask my mother why she thought Jenna left me until I was driving her back to the airport two days later. I handed her my notepad and pen and told her about my research.

"You want me to write down what I think?" she said, incredulously.

Yes, I told her; it was part of my psychotherapy.

She was quiet for a moment, then she wrote: "She had too much pressure. (Master's Degree and family of origin problems.) Communication broke down because of pressure."

She stopped writing and spoke out loud about how you can't have too much pressure from family issues if you're going to have a successful relationship. You have to "really sweep the floor," she said; it was all a part of being "on the ball" not only in your relationship but in your life.

"But you'll see," she said. "In your next relationship, you'll have learned." I glanced at my dashboard. The "low gas" light was on. Damn. I tried to remember how many miles I had before it would run out. I tried to remember how many miles it was to the airport. I pictured trying to flag down a cab on the highway as my mother missed her plane. Damn, damn!

AT the next exit I apologized and pulled off the highway.

"That's fine," my mother said, waving off my apology.

But when I got back in the car after pumping gas, the first thing she said was, "Never let it get below a quarter-tank."

"O.K., Mom."

"Maybe you're not quite ready for that next relationship," she said, laughing.

I laughed too, but it stung. "O.K., Mom," I said.

And she was right about me, of course, but not because I'd failed to maintain at least a quarter-tank of gas in the car. It wasn't about that, just as her talk about sweeping the floor wasn't about Jenna and her father but about me and her, just as the friends I'd interviewed had been talking less about us than about themselves, and just as my research hadn't led to the discovery of a Jenna I didn't know but of a me I didn't know how to approach.

When we arrived at the airport, I walked my mother into the terminal and hugged her goodbye. Then I returned to my car and my life, content, this time, to be left behind.