"Our Room Is the World."
Web Exclusive
[WEB EXCLUSIVE: THE BACKSTORY]
Another Look at “A Second Look at Providence”
by Caitlin Leffel
I started this essay intending to write about frustration, not deception. The experience my husband Alex and I had on Amtrak on the way to Providence was both epic and tragic; absurd but also illustrative of a 21st-century reality; a David-and-corporate-Goliath narrative ripe with suspense and human drama. The piece I intended to write about our trip was a retelling of the seven-and-a-half hour journey from New York to Rhode Island that I hoped would cast me as a Michael Moore of interstate transportation.
But truth is a wily bastard, isn’t it?
The essay became a story about a lie because of something I read the morning I started to write. It was from the etiquette column in the Style section of the New York Times. The question was about whether it was ethical to tell a lie to spare someone’s feeling. I don’t remember exactly what the columnist answered, but this part stayed in my head: “Mark my words,” he wrote. “The truth will come out.”
At that point, I realized my story wasn’t about Amtrak.
The truth is—here it comes!—I don’t know why Alex thought I’d never been to Providence. I guess I gave him that impression at some point when he told me about his college days as a painting student at the Rhode Island School of Design. I might have even used the words “I have never been to Providence,” and when I said them—if I said them—I’m sure I meant “I’ve never been in the city or experienced any of the things you are telling me about when I went on a tour of the Brown campus many years ago.” Perhaps the distinction didn’t seem important. Providence isn’t Paris. My memory was of a college tour with my father, not of sites, history, restaurants—all the things that typically make up a remembered place. So when, years later, Alex and I headed off to Providence together and I realized that he thought I’d never been there before, it seemed too minor a distinction to go to the trouble of correcting.
Part of the reason I continued writing the piece was because I wanted to explore a second realization I had about the trip. Even though I consciously allowed my husband to continue believing something I knew wasn’t true, I still didn’t think I’d lied. Before that weekend, I really hadn’t been to Providence—in relation to him. Providence is a leading character in so many of Alex’s stories about how he came to be the man I know. The place he described to me—his first home on the East Coast—wasn’t recognizable as the place I’d spent maybe two hours in a dozen years earlier. It’s possible, of course, to feel that you’ve experienced a place where you’ve never lived. But it’s also possible to not have experienced a place where you have been, and vice versa. The distinction between “being in” and “experiencing” is crucial. In 2003, during the blackout on the East Coast, my mother and I were in San Francisco, trying to get back to New York. We returned several days after our scheduled flight via a series of connections, one of which left us in the airport in St. Louis for several hours. I don’t feel, as many people say, that I “missed” the blackout. But have I been to St. Louis? I don’t know. Depends on who’s asking.
Like all stories told from life, this one has an epilogue. Once I wrote the piece, I realized I had to come clean with Alex. Though I believed myself innocent of fault for what I’d let him to believe about Providence, writing the piece gave this minor point a place of importance and created a new deception that compounded each time someone else read it.
Still, it wasn’t easy. It took me months—and many hours working on the essay—before I told him what I had done. Not surprisingly, he was less bothered by the lie than he was by the fact that for months I’d been thinking and writing about it without telling him. He told me that from now on, he’d keep a closer eye on my writing.
–Caitlin Leffel, July 15, 2010
CAITLIN LEFFEL
Caitlin Leffel is a writer, editor, and co-author of The Best Things to Do in New York: 1001 Ideas (2006), NYC: An Owner’s Manual (2008), and Flair (2010). She is a runner-up in the Southeast Review’s 2010 Nonfiction Contest and will be published in the next issue of Drunken Boat. Her writing has also appeared in publications such as Blackbook, Daily Candy, and Mademoiselle. She’s a graduate of Amherst College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.
