Unwifeable

by Mandy Stadtmiller

  Four or five women sitting at different tables yell out in near unison, “What did you do?”

  “ ‘What did I do?’ you want to know,” he repeats to the audience. “First of all, thanks for blaming the victim. But if you must know what I did, I fell in love, that’s what I did. I was thinking with my dick.”

  Appreciative laughter, especially from the men. Some women titter, uncertain as to what’s to come next.

  The story of the attempted murder he’s telling is a matter of public record, no matter how unbelievable I found it at first. My mistrusting nature led me to do a search for the 2004 police report, and there I saw it, the woman who had greeted him with a murder-suicide note in her pocket and police-issue Glock 9mm before he wrestled it out of her hands. At that point, she unleashed her fury on him, jumping onto his back, scratching his face, and trying to force her fingertips into his eye sockets.

  The woman, who was convicted of second-degree attempted murder, had been his mistress in his failing second marriage. When he cut the relationship off and put all her duffel bags in a hotel room to avoid a face-to-face showdown, she grew obsessive and increasingly unglued. She called his family members, whom she’d never met. She incessantly called his parents, threatening his mother.

  Having cheated death that time, Pat resolved to never cheat again.

  “Would you like to know why men think with their dicks?” Pat asks the women who shouted out the question to him earlier, asking what he’d done. “Because I’ll tell you.”

  A pause.

  “Yes!” one woman cries out.

  “It’s because,” he says, “our dicks have pretty good ideas.”

  He’s killing, and he’s won the women over, too—the same way he’s winning me over as his girlfriend.

  After the show, I see him mingling at the bar with the other comics, drinking a Coke and speaking out of the side of his mouth. He’s perpetually unperturbed, his military-close haircut alienating and cold, giving him a look akin to Travis Bickle-cum-Peaky Blinders, which works, since he has the swagger of a maniac, the guy who could either save the day or light the whole place up, unredeemable.

  “Good set,” I say, sounding almost hesitant, which I never am anymore.

  “Come downstairs with me,” Pat says, and he leads me through a narrow stairwell and into a hidden greenroom with a picture of Rodney Dangerfield hanging above us where he closes the door. Rodney has a look that says, I get no respect, and I giggle looking at it. Pat has taken me to a secret place. He swings one arm over my black lambskin jacket and black disco pants and pulls me close.

  “You know who you remind me of? Blondie. Not Deborah Harry, the comic strip,” he tells me, running his hands up and down my body, which is boosted up and cinched into the tightest outfit I own. “When I was little, I thought Blondie was the sexiest woman in the world, with her figure and the tight dress, the hair. And now here you are with me. Big tits. Perfect face. Blond hair. Long legs . . .”

  “Fuck,” I say, breathing into his ear. “You don’t seem scared of anything.”

  “What’s there to be afraid of?”

  I think for a minute.

  “I don’t know. My past, maybe.”

  “Your past is what makes you you, Mandy. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  When he comes back to my place in Chelsea, I go into autopilot, switching into a character I can do on cue: The Slut. I try not to do it anymore, but sometimes old habits kick in without my even realizing my defense mechanisms are at play.

  “Do you want me to touch myself?” I ask Pat, in a caricature of seduction.

  “I want you to cut it out,” he says, looking me right in my eyes. “What’s this thing you do, where it’s like you’re doing a show?”

  “It’s just easier,” I say hesitantly. “Sometimes just pretending to be someone else feels safer.”

  “The only thing that turns me on is seeing who you actually are,” Pat says, moving his hand up my body. “Tell me, do you need me?”

  “Yes,” I say, answering what I know to be true. “I do.”

  “Why, baby?”

  “Because I love you,” I say without thinking.

  Good God in heaven above.

  Did I just say that aloud?

  So much for my “Mandy’s Relationship Expectations” where the guy must say “I love you” first. Besides, it’s only been about six weeks. I try to reel it back in. “I didn’t mean it, like, you know . . . it was just . . .”

  “It’s okay,” he stops me. “I love you, too.”

  Panic creeps in goose-bump inches up my body. This guy is different.

  “I know you, Mandy,” he says. “You were bad, weren’t you?”

  I nod, eyes squeezed shut tight.

  “Nothing is wrong,” Pat says, “unless it’s untrue.

  “Did you fuck a lot of guys?” Pat asks. “You love sex, don’t you?”

  “I have,” I say. “I do,” I say.

  “Tell me everything,” Pat whispers to me.

  My eyes flutter open.

  “Okay.”

  With every story I tell Pat, he relays to me one of his own.

  “Mandy,” he says. “I have a feeling about you and me. That we are worthy of each other.”

  On his way out the door, he hesitates. I’m smiling at him, drunk on closeness. He looks at me, eyes shining, taking me in.

  “Will you marry me someday?” he asks.

  My heart is pounding. I wonder if I am dreaming right now.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Good,” he says with a nonchalant smile, and walks out the door.

  * * *

  THE HARDEST PART about sobriety is realizing that when you open that black box inside of you, the secrets and addictions don’t stop their revelations after the first one.

  I am a drug and alcohol addict. I am a sex addict. I am a food addict. And the most difficult one: I am a rage addict, too.

  “Do you really not care if you lose me?” I scream at Pat one day. This is based on, honestly, no reason at all besides a small disagreement that has now spiraled ridiculously out of control. “You disgust me! You’re disgusting!”

  “Why are you saying all of this, Mandy?” he asks. “Because I’m not getting upset? I figure you’re just saying all of this to get a reaction.”

  “Well . . . I am,” I say, surprised at him calling bullshit on my bullshit.

  “Well, okay then,” he says.

  I sit there, stunned. I’ve never met someone who knows how to deal with me like Pat does and cut through my defenses. And then he surprises me again, as he always does. Instead of wanting to continue to fight, he has just one request.

  “When was the last time you saw your therapist?” he asks.

  “I don’t have time,” I say, looking away. “I saw her after we fought that one time. I did, I swear.”

  “If you don’t have time for that, then we likely won’t have a relationship either,” he says. “This is that important.”

  Therapy is, as anyone who takes it seriously knows, not like, say, getting your high school diploma. It’s not a “Congratulations, you’ve graduated” kind of situation. You have to keep going. A lifetime of conditioning doesn’t just magically disappear.

  When I see my therapist again and tell her some of the cruel things I’ve been hurtling at Pat, she suggests it’s time for me to consider group therapy.

  “Will that make me less defensive?” I ask.

  “That’s the idea,” she says.

  After a few group sessions, we are asked to do psychodrama and role-playing just like when I went to the Caron Institute in Pennsylvania. In one of the most intense sessions, I am told to role-play my ex-husband while I speak to a chair who is “me.” I really get into it. I am cruel. I am scathing. I am relentless. I summon up the worst things my ex ever said to me, and I scream at the chair.

  “You’re pathetic,” I say, pretending to be my ex-husband and spitting the words at “myself” l
ike venom. “You’re pathetic!”

  I am crying near the end. Because I can hear myself . . . in the way I talk to Pat.

  “You disgust me! You’re disgusting!”

  How many times have I said cruel things—including to my ex-husband—that I may not even remember because I was in a rage blackout? I need to turn everything around. I cannot continue this cycle of victimization.

  “I owe you an apology,” I tell Pat afterward. “I can see now that a lot of the things I said to you were hurtful and cruel. I don’t want to do that. I want to support you.”

  “Thank you for really trying with me,” Pat says. “It means a lot to me.”

  This, apparently, is how people have a conversation. One person says one thing that isn’t a platitude; the other person engages.

  “Have I ever told you about my whole black-box theory of relationships?” I ask him.

  “Is it anything like the old George Carlin joke?” he asks. “ ‘Why don’t they just make the plane out of the black box?’ ”

  I laugh. I am familiar with it, of course. I explain to him the concept: how we have all these internal recordings and programming from throughout our lives that influence future relationships.

  “It’s so hard to examine all of it,” I tell him. “Did you know that I wrote a letter to my future self back in 2012 when I did that really intensive group therapy thing? I can’t even bring myself to read it, that’s how scared I get about looking at what’s inside of me.”

  I point him to where I keep it hidden away, tucked inside a silver envelope, in a childish blue Frozen treasure box above my bed. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything bad that I could have even written in there—after all, I was sober and approaching some semblance of mental healthiness in 2012. But I still don’t want to disappoint Future Me.

  “You have nothing to be scared of,” Pat says. “Did you know that when I first saw you in New York, you were walking through some comedy club, and I asked someone, ‘Who is that?’ Because I had to know. It was 2007. You were amazing to me even then. You made such an impression on me. You were like this tall beautiful wash of blond hair. I thought you were totally out of my league. You were so striking and confident. At the time, I figured there was no chance.”

  I’m floored in more ways than one.

  “Wow,” I say. “I would have been dating Blaine back then. How funny that I didn’t feel that way about myself at all. I just thought of myself as this unwifeable disaster who couldn’t do anything right.”

  “Wait,” Pat says, looking at me. “Unwifeable? No. That’s not you at all. Unapproachable. That’s what you are.”

  * * *

  PAT IS FROM Tennessee. I am from California. Our backgrounds are as different as can be, but we are both children of dysfunction, which has made us hyper-attuned to everything around us. As we grow closer, Pat reveals to me the pain he feels watching his eighty-five-year-old mother’s deteriorating condition as she lives out her final days in the grips of Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t agree with the decision to send her to a nursing home, but ultimately it is his father’s call, not his own.

  We make the long trip together down South first by plane and then by car. As we walk up to the modest care facility, the two of us are carrying bags filled with some of his mom’s favorites—fried chicken, Pop-Tarts, and corn along with a hanging plant of lavender flowers—but I can see the spreading sadness on his face. His smile has altogether faded. Pat stops and touches my arm.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” he says. “It’s so hard.”

  “I’m here with you,” I say quietly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  As we enter the bright little room, I see his mother, who is frail and delicate, lying like a china doll in her bed. Pat reaches down to hold her in a warm embrace, then sits beside her, stroking her arm. His father is sitting in the corner, updating us on how she’s doing lately. She appears so weak. I speak softly and gently, standing above her as Pat holds her. Trying to think of something she might like, I pull up a bunch of pictures of her son to show her on my phone.

  “Oooh,” she says, touching a picture of Pat holding a mic on TV, smiling broadly. “Will you send me that one?”

  She touches her delicate porcelain finger to the screen.

  “You promise?” she asks.

  “I will,” I say. When I look at Pat and her together, I get an idea. As part of getting sober, I studied Reiki, a form of energy healing that is all about channeling prayer and love to someone through touch and intention. I want more than anything else at that moment to love on Pat’s mom. I’m nervous about looking like a fool, but I go ahead and ask anyway.

  “Hey,” I say quietly to her, “would it be okay if I rub your feet?”

  She looks at me with a fragile smile.

  “Okay,” she says in her sweet Southern voice.

  I move to sit at the edge of her bed, lift the purple wool blanket off her legs, and begin rubbing her feet gently as I listen to Pat and his mom talk.

  Old friends and memories are mentioned, but his mom is confused a lot. People who suffer from Alzheimer’s frequently ask about “going home.” They regress into younger states. They want to see their parents, who are, of course, long dead.

  “Can we see my mother in the other room?” she asks.

  “Let’s do that later,” Pat says. “Why don’t we catch up right now?”

  “When can I leave?” she asks. “I keep trying to figure out how to go home.”

  “I’m here, Mom,” Pat says.

  A yellow star hangs above her bed. I glance at a nurse’s chart and see that it stands for “falling star,” a sign to the nurse on staff that she might not be able to walk on her own.

  “I love you, Mom,” Pat says. “I miss you.”

  When we leave at the end of the night, Pat and I are quiet for a while before we reach the rental car. He turns to me, and his face shows a kind of love deeper than any I’ve seen before.

  “You rubbed my mom’s feet,” he says. “That’s, like, some biblical shit, Mandy. What made you into that kind of person?”

  “Childhood stuff,” I say quietly. “I think my primary love language is touch.”

  Pat pulls me into his arms and squeezes me tight.

  “I would never put you in a home,” he says quietly.

  Only a few months later, Pat flies down to be with his mom in her final days. He brings her that photograph she asked for in a small silver frame and places it next to her.

  Surrounded by family, Pat sits next to his mom, holding her hand one last time. His father and his brothers and sister and a roomful of relatives are there with him, too. He calls me after she passes, his voice breathless.

  “She’s gone,” he says. “It was peaceful. I love you.”

  His mom’s passing makes me want to introduce him to my family all the more.

  “I’m honestly looking forward to it,” Pat says. “And I hate meeting parents.”

  We plan a trip to San Diego a few months away, and in the meantime, I give Pat my dad’s phone number so the two of them can talk. But I don’t know that I expect him to actually call. I don’t want to be disappointed, so I kind of forget that I even gave it to him.

  Before they do connect, my dad and I have a conversation on the phone one day where I am gushing all about my relationship—but before too long it ends in screaming and tears.

  “I really love Pat,” I tell my father at first. “I’m so excited for you to meet him.”

  My dad is silent.

  “Dad?” I ask. “Aren’t you excited for me? At all?”

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” he says.

  “Dad, don’t you see that if that’s your only reaction . . . just . . . can’t you see how hurtful that is to me? How negative it is?”

  “Okay, well, I tell you what, Mandy,” he says, his voice rising in anger, “you tell me what to say and when to say it and how to say it and I’ll forget being honest and spontaneous.”


  I am shaking. I am so far regressed back to my childhood place of fear and anger and sadness I can’t see straight.

  “It seems like, you know,” I begin, my voice shaking, “I’m trying to tell you about something I’m really proud of, and your reaction is, ‘I’m just afraid that it’s going to go away.’ Do you see how that’s immediately just like a lump of coal in my stocking?”

  “I’m sick of being the family asshole!” my dad yells. “Fuck it!”

  He hangs up the phone, and I throw my iPhone across the room. I didn’t detach with love. I engaged with a whole lot of expectations. Honestly, my father’s negativity addiction is so all-consuming sometimes I don’t think he sees how it affects others. But I just know that if I weren’t dating Pat, my dad would be asking me if I was dating anyone—and now, when I do find someone, it feels like he won’t give me the approval, celebration, and support I so deeply crave.

  Later that night, Pat walks into my apartment using the key he now has, but I can tell he’s in the middle of a phone call. He is laughing and smiling, but I am not in the mood. I just sit on my bed, flicking TV channels, my face in a deep scowl—when Pat hands me the phone.

  It is my father.

  “I just had the best conversation with Pat,” my dad gushes. “He’s hilarious. He’s kind. He’s great. I can see why you guys love each other so much.”

  I burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry for before,” I tell my dad.

  “So am I.”

  When we finally travel to San Diego to meet my family, Pat charms them all—and is charmed by them in kind. It is the complete opposite of Blaine’s standoffishness and frequent looking away from my parents when we visited. It is so clear how much Pat respects them. He notices the sly hilarity of my mom, which no man has ever fully appreciated before, and he says of her bouncy walk, “She’s the most youthful woman in her seventies I’ve ever seen.”

  All of the strangeness I long sought to hide from others, he just completely gets it. They are hilarious, weird, brilliant, deranged—and where I come from, always.