Sarah Haufrect
Creative Non-Fiction
I started checking Leona’s posts about ten years after I’d slept with her husband. She didn’t post very often, maybe once or twice every few months. But with a decade’s worth of accrual before I finally looked, it felt like discovering a pile of shiny rounded pebbles I could skip across the murky waters of my mind, each one a cause for wondering.
Leona’s photos and videos perpetuate the mystery she has always been to me. An Instagram post from a spin studio suggested she might be a fitness instructor, or merely a workout enthusiast. A Facebook video of a blender pulverizing fruit and greens and branded vitamin supplements with a coupon code in the caption implied she might be an independent business owner of a nutrition-focused coaching company, or maybe the victim of a multi-level marketing scheme parading around like a good job. She has long brown hair that never alters in color or length and her head tilts casually and always to the left when the camera captures her. Sometimes she references being a mother, but I knew she was a mother when I slept with her husband.
No, I honestly did not think Leona and her husband were together when I slept with him, but I’ll admit there were plenty of signs that they might not yet be unentwined. I could have said it more simply (they were still together), but I’m using that awkward phrase intentionally here because it’s accurate, and because unentwined was the kind of word Leona’s husband would have used.
He was a man of thoughtful word choice. I can only assume he remains so to this day.
I remember he used the word separated, so being who I was at the time—young, stupid, sheltered, lovesick, and unconcerned with everything a word like separated might or might not mean—I believed him. I defined it to match the reality I wanted to see. They were separated, as in, not together. The thread connecting them had been snipped, which turned out, at the time, to be true. It turned out, at the same time, to be not so true.
For every truth, there seems to exist an equal and opposite untruth. The trouble being that these unalienable counterparts don’t like to show up to the same party, or if they do, one has already left by the time the other shows up.
I moved to Sacramento in 2005 to live with my boyfriend. He was born and raised there, was a state champion wrestler and valedictorian of his high school before we met at UC Berkeley. He was my first love, my first long-term relationship. We’d been dating since we were 19 and now we were 22. Three months after moving into his parents’ house in the suburbs, the future I had envisioned, or, at the very least, some progress toward it, had been replaced by a life reminiscent of a waiting room with only a sad stack of crumby magazines to pass the time.
I had no friends and no routine outside of work. The activities I loved in college were hard to find. No museums, no art house movie theaters, no speaker series. My boyfriend had decided to postpone his dream of becoming a doctor to take a gap year for work and travel before applying to medical school. This sounded good to his parents and to me, but over the ensuing months, it had become abundantly clear that he was covering up an intense fear of performing poorly on the MCAT he was working to dispel by traveling to his bedroom to play first-person shooter games or World of Warcraft for six-to-eight hours per day. And when I returned home from my job, I was greeted by variations of the same scene: My boyfriend with his dad or his high school buddies, a few beers in and deeply involved in some heated and completely insignificant debate about, say, who was the better arm wrestler, or who could do more pushups when they were 18, until his mom rounded them up for dinner. They’d all keep on drinking and I’d do my best to make pleasant conversation. Sometimes, a fight broke out between my boyfriend and his dad, who was increasingly frustrated about his son’s professional future and why he was putting it on hold. Eventually, one would leave the house in a fury to cool down and the following day we’d all pretend it never happened. Night after night, his mother and I would wash the dishes and huddle away from the men and chat about safe topics, like her WeightWatchers membership or the newest home-renovation show on HGTV (her favorite) until I could no longer feign interest. Then, I’d excuse myself to the guest bedroom to take solace in a book and distract myself from the rapidly crystallizing realization that my boyfriend and I were poorly suited for one another.
This is precisely when Leona’s husband and I met.
We worked together at a fledgling e-commerce company that sold skincare and makeup when the internet was less clever about its dishonesty. Leona’s husband managed a handful of online copywriters, of which I was its newest member. Using Microsoft FrontPage, widely considered the most pathetic of web design software, we developed hideous landing pages, complete with blinking, fluorescent CLICK NOW buttons encased in thick cell padding. These pages linked to the company’s assortment of creams, cleansers, and serums. Then, we created fake user accounts on various beauty and style forums and wrote comments with links to these pages. That was the entire job. We were all miserable.
Leona’s husband had been working there for several years, but it was my first office job after college. Initially, I found him to be strange looking, irreverent, with an obnoxious surfer vibe I found off-putting. That is, until he started chatting with me about non-work subjects on AOL Instant Messenger throughout the day and we happened to share similar tastes in books. He had a degree in English literature, and had wanted to be a writer, but became a husband and a father and now managed online copywriters. And one day, while chatting with him at our terrible job, I came to learn that Leona and her husband were separated because Leona was in jail.
In little floating bubbles of text on the right edge of the hunkering IBM desktop in my cubicle, Leona’s husband told me about her hard childhood, one that had toughened her like leather. Normal Lifetime movie/network TV show montages of gangs, drugs, and not a lot of help. In my own life, I’d had quite a bit of help, and no experience with gangs or drugs; they had only been the stuff of Lifetime movies/network TV shows. I took in her life as if she were a character in a story filled with drama and intrigue. I was desperate for a story more interesting than my own.
When I lay awake at night in the guestroom of my boyfriend’s parents’ home, unable to drown out the sounds coming from the TV in the living room, instead of counting sheep or meditating, or doing any number of positive coping strategies to combat insomnia, I would pass the time by recounting all the conversations I was having during the day with a man nine years older than me, whose face, when he saw me broke into a smile so all encompassing, I couldn’t look at him for very long without losing the ability to speak. This man, whose once strange face now struck me as complex and whose clever armor of casual aloofness made sense to me now, and who used words like unentwined and aberrant and catastrophic, and who happened to be separated from his wife because she was in jail.
Not prison, but jail. I remember this because, after using the two words interchangeably and being gently corrected, I had to look up the difference between the two.
One night when my boyfriend would be distracted by alcohol and playing cards with a group of friends while his mother refilled the Chip n’ Dip before logging her WeightWatchers points and cozying up to the latest issue of RealSimple, scenes which had become a stifling possibility of what my future might hold, I lied to my boyfriend about meeting some coworkers for happy hour, when I was meeting one coworker, Leona’s husband.
I’m certain whatever we talked about and drank on our date was equally intoxicating, but I don’t remember any of it. Instead, I remember how it started to rain when the check arrived and after we’d paid the bill, emerged from the restaurant into the stuff of romantic comedies, hopscotching around newly formed puddles, laughing, and running towards my car. Amid this moment, Leona’s husband paused next to a covered doorway, reached over, and pulled me toward him. We huddled close to one another in silent delight until Leona’s husband took both of his hands and delicately cradled my face in their warmth and kissed me.
That weekend, I broke up with my boyfriend.
I told him I had feelings for someone at work. I told him I wasn’t ready to commit to our relationship while I felt this way, which was, both then and now, a spineless, piece-of-shit lie that also happened to be true. I moved out the weekend before my 23rd birthday. I had only moved to Sacramento to live with my boyfriend four months earlier. It was not the year for a party. The truth and its equal and opposite untruth would not have been able to avoid each other.
When I broke up with my boyfriend, I told him I needed time to reevaluate everything (him) and figure out what I wanted (to sleep with Leona’s husband). I rented an apartment less than a block away from where Leona’s husband lived, far enough so that I could not see his front door, but close enough that today I cannot fathom the level of stupidity that informed my decision. I had seen the for-lease sign after I’d dropped him off the night we made out in the abandoned doorway in the rain and thought it was a sign. It was a sign, a for-lease sign, and a sign that I was 22 and an idiot.
I bought a cheap mattress and metal bed frame, a desk for my computer that went in the bedroom and found a free table and chair on a nearby street corner to put next to the window in the kitchen. I unpacked my books, three cardboard boxes, which I had never unpacked at my boyfriend’s parents’ house in the first place. I stacked the books in tall rows against one wall of the living room. I decided no other decor or furniture were needed. The emptiness would not be a flaw, but a feature. Sparsity would symbolize freedom from my former life and former self. I convinced myself that this poetic asceticism would offset my otherwise questionable choices.
In a brief four-week burst, I slept with Leona’s husband three times, only at his place in his bed. I never spent the night. Each time was worse than the last, but he told me it was great, and I wanted to believe him. I learned that Leona’s husband drank a six-pack of Bud Light after work, which I didn’t know since I’d only spent time with him at the office. On the second night when I slept with him, finishing the last of the six-pack, Leona’s husband told me that Leona could beat people up with her bare hands because she was tough as mother-fucking leather, and sometimes the people she was capable of beating up included him. When he said this, I became very still. I had no words. He told me he was trying to start an organization locally for others like him, who were male victims of domestic violence by a spouse. He still loved her. He said, she will always be the mother of my child. I can hear him say the words even now. He sounded almost proud, that he respected this about himself. That he was a special person to be able to withstand this. His trim muscularity, the barbed wire tattoo encircling his left bicep, the shaved head, the raspy surfer voice made him seem hard. Not the kind of man who would be beaten up by anyone, let alone the mother of his child.
My favorite word in all of the English language is the word still. It means itself and also its equal and opposite self. Still meaning cessation. I became very still. Still meaning continuance. Leona was still in jail. He still loves her. I still recall this after so many years.
I don’t remember if I told Leona’s husband that I didn’t want to keep sleeping with him or if this is when his mother died suddenly, and we stopped sleeping together because his mom watched his daughter on the nights I came over. He was at work when he got the call about his mother’s death. I saw him pacing back and forth in the office parking lot like a lost creature. My mom was alive this morning and now she’s gone, he said when I rolled down my window leaving work for the day. I didn’t even have time to respond before he walked back to his car and got back on his phone and drove off. I attended the funeral along with several of our coworkers. It was the first time I saw his and Leona’s daughter, an angelic looking toddler.
I continued to go to work. I slowly made other friends with the next round of chumps making ugly landing pages about skin creams. I took long morning runs around the state capital building holding imaginary conversations with my ex, who seemed much less boring now that he wasn’t mine, and had found a job as a lab technician, and was studying again for the MCAT, and was sleeping with a married researcher at his lab to make me jealous.
Around this juncture, I told my ex that I’d slept with Leona’s husband and that it was terrible, and I regretted it. My ex curled up on the floor of his bedroom in his parent’s house and he wailed like a dying animal. Later I learned he’d been stashing cash in the bottom drawer of his desk to buy me a ring.
For a while, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake breaking his heart because he was a good person who loved me, who wanted to marry me. I had not yet learned that there can be good people who can love you, whom you might love in return, and even then, the life you create with that good, worthy person might not make for a life that you could manage to live. Regardless, I wish I hadn’t been such a stupid, selfish, lying fool.
Leona’s husband and I saw far less of each other after all this. He took time off from work and shortly thereafter Leona returned, and they were no longer separated. I’d spot his car from the kitchen window from my apartment where I would sit and drink coffee. Then, I’d watch the other neighbors, who would congregate in the street, and then I’d worry about my life. I worried that I’d squandered the only comfortable, stable relationship I would ever have. I worried about Leona and her husband and whether I did or did not want to run into them. I worried because I thought that meant I was a better person.
When I sat drinking coffee hoping or dreading I would spot Leona and her husband, one of the people I saw often was a downstairs neighbor. She was always sitting on her front stoop when I left for work and when I returned home and all weekend long. I would pass by her and say hello or goodbye or wish her a nice day, and she seemed to always have sun in her eyes even on cloudy days. One morning when I passed by her, she asked if I wanted to take in a pregnant stray cat hanging around the building. This girl needs a home, she said.
I was living alone in a half-empty apartment a block from the man I was no longer sleeping with whose mother had just died unexpectedly, and who was no longer separated from his wife, and I was still talking to my ex, who was embroiled in his own sordid love affair, still in love with me, and also furious with me for very justifiable reasons.
I definitely wanted to take in the pregnant stray cat.
She was tortoise-shelled and lithe, apart from her drooping belly. I adored having a creature to care for. My days became fulfilling and purposeful. She would jump up on the kitchen table and watch the street with me. Her purring was like music.
The other thing I did during this time to fill my days was write a lot of angsty poetry, as one does with my disposition. And once my ex recovered from the shock of my transgressions, and his affair with the married researcher at his lab fizzled out, and we had screamed and cried and grieved the death of our future enough, we somehow managed to be friends. We sent emails with funny videos in them and met for dinner occasionally and helped with errands that were easier to do with an extra set of hands. The friendship we had built over three years won out against all odds. And within this new dynamic of ours, and as if further proof was needed of my immaturity and stupidity, I decided to share one of my poems with him.
He hated it. He more than hated it. He raged against its very existence. Stop trying to make ugly things into something beautiful, he shouted. Some things are just ugly. They’re not art.
What he said has always haunted me. Regardless of whether his words were true or not, I think they came from a place of truth. He was such a good and worthy person. I assume he remains so to this day. I never could have married him.
Leona’s husband messaged me out of the blue one morning and asked if I could watch his daughter for a while. He knocked before I could even respond. I opened the door, and he was holding her in his arms and his face was beaten to a pulp. Can you watch her? Just for an hour, he said from beneath his wounds, which seemed brand new, like fresh paint on a drying canvas.
She was light enough to hold out across the doorway to me like an offering, for me to reach out, grasp, and hold her against me. Maybe 30 pounds. No other words passed through the door with her. Leona’s husband turned and walked down the stairs.
I set her down and we sat on the floor of my empty living room and looked at my books. Eventually, my pregnant, formerly stray cat emerged from the bedroom, crossed the floor, and flopped down, purring and preening. The little girl smiled and gently pet her. The cat’s tail tickled her at one point and made her laugh and I thought how impossible it seemed that two people could create this child and one of those people could beat the other up with her bare hands. I don’t know how Leona’s husband spent that long hour away. He looked the same when he picked her up.
Now that I think about it, that little girl I watched for the briefest hour must be nearing 22 herself. At 22, I was still such a child.
One night, I was roused from sleep by small noises coming from under my bed, a helium-laced keening. I slid my torso down to peer under the bed. My cat had crawled into the back corner and given birth to a litter of seven kittens. I sent a message to Leona’s husband asking if he wanted to bring his daughter by to see the kittens. He didn’t respond.
When my six-month lease was up, I left Sacramento. I found takers for the kittens. They were adopted in groups, and one included my formerly pregnant, formerly stray cat. I wonder if any of the kittens ultimately stayed with their mother, and it pains me now. That she would be separated from her babies, even though these things happen every day.
Two facts I have discovered about Leona off the internet create more questions than they answer. Fact one: There were two criminal cases brought against her in 2001 and 2004 for battery against a spouse or cohabitator, but the cases were dismissed. Fact two: In 2023, she and her husband are still married.
Her posts online show they have lived in many places where surfing is available, coastal California, Puerto Rico, Hawaii. In many of them, the faces looking out at me from my phone are her children. Leona’s husband is tagged in many of her videos and photos. There is a particular photo of Leona with the daughter I watched for a single hour and her three younger siblings. They are all together. They are still a family. They continued.
Here’s the thing: I started checking Leona’s posts on August 15th, 2015. I know this because it was the day after I got a phone call at work telling me that my own mother died unexpectedly.
As if it were the most logical thing to do, after ten years had passed, I sent an email to Leona’s husband.
Here’s what I wrote: I was at work today and got a phone call that my mother died unexpectedly. I remember the day this happened to you very vividly. I have a strong support system fortunately, but even so, I just wanted to reach out to you and say that I hope you are doing well and are happy and I feel like as weird as receiving this email will be from someone who has become a relative stranger, that across the years and distance somehow you will probably understand.
Here’s what he wrote me back: Sarah, What a shock. Getting the call like that at work seems like someone is trying to prank you. The strength of my denial at that moment was catastrophic. It was a reality I was not prepared for. I am very sorry you have to go through this. It’s not strange receiving this email at all. I definitely know what you are going through. I am happy to hear you have a strong support system. If there is any way I can be of assistance please let me know.
Here’s what I wrote him back: Thank you so much for your email. Grief seems like such a small word for all this. Your kind words are comfort in and of themselves.
This email exchange was the last time we corresponded in any form, and I expect it will stay that way. His note was what I needed to hear. Like he said, there are some realities we are not prepared for.
I never met Leona. I never even saw her in real life. In this way, she is a story I have heard, and now she is a story I have told. I’ll never be sure if the story of Leona is the truth, its equal, its opposite, or some approximation of all three.
I used to check more often for her updates, thinking I might better understand myself if I better understood Leona, but I gave up on that. Nowadays, looking her up is more like an annual pilgrimage, or holiday, to acknowledge the simple fact that I still think about her, that I can know so little but feel so much, even now, even still.
Sarah Haufrect lives in Los Angeles where she directs programs and executive communications for a family foundation. Her writing has been published by Salon, Psychology Today, Pigeon Pages, Berkeley Poetry Review and others. She earned her undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and her graduate degree at Otis College of Art and Design. In 2021-22, Sarah was a BookEnds Fellow at Stony Brook University. More at SarahHaufrect.com.
Photo Credit: Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash
L'Esprit Literary Review 