It was bad timing for A Public Affair, an album I genuinely loved, so I relied on my girlfriends. At the end of September, my new assistant Adrienne and I planned a girls’ trip to London to see my sister Ashlee in her West End debut in Chicago. Adrienne is good company, direct and funny, and basically took the job as a lark. She grew up with family money, so she wasn’t impressed by any of the trappings of my life. We’d go shopping and she’d leave with more bags than me. Which takes doing, I’ll tell you.
We had a few days to hang out in London before seeing Ashlee’s debut, and we had the best time. When I was in L.A., even when I wasn’t photographed, I was watched. There were still lots of paparazzi in London, but less people cared about taking note of what I was eating in a restaurant. The British public just let me be. Ashlee had only been in town about two weeks, but she already had this cute apartment and whole new life in London. She seemed so grown up, and I was again struck by how she always had the life that she wanted, and on her terms.
I know I irritated Adrienne because I kept finding ways to bring the conversation back to John. I kept seeing signs and spooky-spiritual things that would make me think of him. I would see a white feather and ask Adrienne what it meant. Oh, Lord.
We were at our hotel one day and I went out on the balcony to look down at the London streets. I saw someone staring up at me, but I was too high up to make out his face. His hair was wild and curly, like I pictured Romeo.
“Adrienne,” I yelled. “Is John in London?”
“What?” she said. I didn’t have to say Mayer. He was always John.
I turned inside to get her to look. “I swear I just saw him,” I said.
“No way. You are crazy. Bonkers.”
I looked down again and he was gone. I did feel crazy. I still hear myself now, too, and wonder if I imagined it. But John had a gift for showing up out of nowhere.
Sure enough, the next night we went to a small party with Ashlee, and John was there. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him if he was outside my hotel, because I knew how it would sound. He came over and started riffing with me, and that’s all it took. I was hooked again. That he even talked to me was a relief, and that he wanted to be with me that night felt like I was released from solitary.
It was on that trip that I felt the full intensity of his obsession with me. And it was a drug to me. He studied every inch of my body, every detail of my face. He photographed me constantly, to the point that I worried he was keeping souvenirs before dumping me again. He was only in London briefly, and when he flew out we stayed in touch. Our secret was safe again.
I was on a high from being with him when I went to see Ashlee onstage, and she was amazing. As soon as she made her entrance, I started crying with pride. Ashlee had become a pop star, but this felt like it was in her heart. I loved that little girl who sang her heart out to Phantom of the Opera and Les Miz, but now she was a woman playing London’s West End. Someone I didn’t know but wanted to get to know. I thought about all the times she had been my backup dancer, when I was too busy performing to look back and admire what a star she already was.
“You were shining even brighter than the lights on the stage,” I told her backstage. She smiled and started to look away, but I wouldn’t let her. “I always knew you were so talented, but to own that stage is such a gift. It was your stage tonight, Ash.”
We looked at each other for a long beat, and so much that was unspoken was released. She started to tear up, this girl who was always so tough. Who’d protected me all those years even though she didn’t realize she needed to. I started crying again, and then laughed at myself for being so sentimental. There’s something wonderful about rediscovering each other as sisters, when you’re in your twenties. You have more perspective. That night, I was able to let go of a lot of the guilt I had about her missing high school to join me on the road. She was living the artistic life she was destined to have.
Ashlee had to leave to do an on-camera interview with a U.K. show backstage, and they wanted me to join in. I looked at her, not wanting to steal her spotlight, but she nodded. My face was swollen from crying so much, but I didn’t care. I wanted to make sure people knew how proud I was of her.
We started waving our fingers at our faces to dry the tears. We Simpson girls, always ready to be on.
IT WAS TWO MONTHS LATER, LATE NOVEMBER, AND JOHN HAD ALREADY broken up with me again at least once. Honestly, he did it so many times I lost track. Always in an email.
Sometimes it was out of the blue, other times I knew it was coming, because my light would start to go dim. John loved me when I was shining, and he drew strength and inspiration to write from that light. He would grill me about my life, asking me questions about the men I had been with and the choices I had made. When he tapped me dry, he looked at me like I was withholding something from him. He would tell me that my true self was so much greater than the person I was settling on being. Like there was some great woman inside of me waiting to come out, and I had to hurry up and find her because he wanted to love that woman, not me.
He’d dump me, then come back saying he had discovered he loved me after all. I always saw it as him mercifully taking me in from the cold. Every time John returned, I thought it was a continuation of a love story, while my friends saw a guy coming back for sex with some foolish girl.
One of those times, I wrote him a gushing letter thanking him for realizing I was worthy of love, and it breaks my heart to see how I practiced the wording in my journal: “I promise to be myself as I search to become the woman you already see.”
I can’t even believe the acrobatics of promising to remain true to your own self while becoming the person someone wants you to be. I had gone from trying to find that woman for me, and now I had to be that woman for John. Only he could deem when I had made it. He had that kind of hold on me.
He said a lot of our breakups were about me drinking and not being present for him, which was not, I would only find out much later, the full truth. But I took him at his word about his motivations, and that’s why I always went back. It was my fault, and if he forgave me, that was all that mattered. Or at least he made me feel like everything was my fault. He has since admitted that he has abused the ability to express himself. I had always prided myself on being smarter than everyone thought I was. For a long time, he took that from me. He made me feel dumb. I stopped understanding what was real and what was in my head.
I was so afraid of disappointing him that I couldn’t even text him without having someone check my grammar and spelling. This drove my mother nuts. “That is a terrible relationship,” she said, “if you have to be scared you misspelled something.”
Because we were so often long-distance, our relationship was often over text. I treated even the most basic texts from John as make-or-break riddles to solve. If he was annoyed with me, I would invest hours decoding a basic fact, trying to find the poetry so I could respond accordingly. Did it mean we were over? Was I supposed to stand up for myself? My anxiety would spike, and I would pour another drink. It was the start of me relying on alcohol to mask my nerves. After overanalyzing his text, I would write back paragraphs of tortured words, and hand it to Adrienne to proofread.
“Jess, you don’t need to send all this,” she said to me once when we were in a car heading to an appearance. “Don’t.”