The Dictionary of Failed Relationships

by Meredith Broussard

  I shrugged, as if I didn’t care one way. In truth, I didn’t know how I felt anymore. Rob was a good guy. A compassionate guy. I saw that now. It was the fact that he wanted to be taken seriously as a thinking, breathing, feeling man—I realized that now, too— that presented the greatest obstacle for me. In my mind, he had always been the rock to my paper and scissors, desirable by virtue of his density; the soundproof wall that muffled the voices in my head, voices that had haunted me since childhood with their tireless directives to keep up, because I would never keep up, because time was running out, because it was already too late, because there was no escaping history, it was only ever a second ago. Such was the mantra, and the curse, of families like mine, families who could never just live, never just be, but who were forever looking over their shoulders, measuring their own lots against the travesties and triumphs that had come before. In that sense, I didn’t know whose legacy had proven more pernicious: the Nazis’, or Marx’s, Freud’s, and Einstein’s.

  But how could I begin to explain that to Rob? How could I begin to admit that I had picked him among all men for his dead weight when he crushed me? “I don’t know,” I finally answered, purposefully avoiding the point. “You almost suffocated me to death last night.”

  “Gimme a break!” he protested. “I didn’t almost suffocate you.”

  “Then what do you call cutting off someone’s oxygen supply?”

  He shifted his gaze away from me, into the parking lot, looking wistful. “Look, I’m sorry I gagged you. I was just pissed because you kept calling me a street vendor.”

  “Only after you said ‘fuck you’ to me.”

  He turned back to me with a heavy sigh. “Look, Rachel. I’m sorry I said that. I shouldn’t have said it. And I didn’t mean it. But none of what happened matters. I just want to make up with you. I love you.” His eyes honed in on mine. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t think under pressure. We sat in silence for a few minutes—him waiting, hopeful, me looking anywhere but at Rob. Finally, our lunch arrived. That bought me a few minutes. But Rob started up again halfway through his sandwich. “Rachel—do you love me?” he wanted to know.

  A feeling of weightiness suffused my chest and my lungs. I felt like sliding under the table. At some point it occurred to me that I ought to get it over with right then and there—admit that I didn’t love or respect him; that I would never value his M.B.A. half as much as I did my father’s Ph.D. That was just how I’d been raised.

  But I couldn’t convince myself that I wanted to lose him, either. Staring into my half-eaten lunch plate, I pictured myself drifting away from him, coming home to a dark apartment, a cold bed. It had only been nine months. In the larger scope of things, that wasn’t so much time. I was still young. Barely thirty. I had another ten years to meet someone, to find a sperm donor for my strollers through the mall. I was outgoing. Other than a few lines in my forehead, I still had my looks, my figure. Some people would say I had a glamorous job. At the very least, I was self-supporting. I would probably meet someone new within the year. Someone more intellectual, more Jewish, more like an Epstein. But would he treat dead cats half as nicely as Rob did?

  I glanced up at my boyfriend, at his vibrant yet indistinct face, which sported a quarter-shaped protuberance. That’s when I noticed the ketchup on his stubble. It drove me crazy the way he always got food on his face when he ate! But there was also something endearing about it. He was like an overgrown baby. My overgrown baby.

  “Look, I love you. Okay?!” I lit into him suddenly, furiously, as if I were the victim. In a way, maybe I was—the victim of my own skittishness. Maybe I couldn’t even accept the fact that Rob Muhlenberg made me happy.

  Just then, a tickling sensation seized my thigh. I went to scratch it. Then I realized it was my boyfriend—dragging his unused fork against the inside of my thigh. His drooping mouth had firmed up into a goofy grin. “What are you doing?” I whined.

  But he didn’t answer, just kept smiling—and dragging.

  “Stop that,” I said, but just phlegmatically enough to imply that I didn’t actually mean it. I felt suddenly powerless. I was just an animal looking for a set of warm limbs to wrap around. I figured I could always run away later, if I had to. In the meantime, I closed my eyes and allowed myself the pleasures that kitchen utensils occasionally afford the lower regions of the body.

  I wanted Rob again. I wanted him on top of me and inside me, sucking the wind from my tunnels and the thoughts from my head. Until I was just gray matter. A woman with no plan—just a canal. To be living in the present!

  And to be freed from the past—the future, too. (Maybe that was enough.) We paid the check and went back to the car.

  A half-mile up the road, behind a hubcap store closed for the holiday weekend, we found an empty parking lot and climbed into the backseat.

  ZERO

  By Erika Krouse

  ze·ro ’z-(’)r, ’zir-(’) noun [French or Italian; French zéro, from Italian zero, from Medieval Latin zephirum, from Arabic sifr] (1604) 1: the arithmetical symbol 0 or Ø denoting the absence of all magnitude or quantity. 2: the point of departure in reckoning; specifically: the point from which the graduation of a scale (as of a thermometer) begins. 3: an insignificant person or thing: NONENTITY. 4a: a state of total absence or neutrality. b: the lowest point: NADIR. 5: something arbitrarily or conveniently designated zero.

  It’s hard to stop looking for something without simultaneously giving up hope. I don’t know how. Buddhists learn the art of non-attachment, or they say they do. But have you ever seen a Buddhist lose his car keys? I have, and they’re just like the rest of us.

  Now that I reached my thirties, being single was entirely different. It meant candid discussions with a date, both of us saying, “Naaaaah . . .” but friendlylike. It meant peeling singles out of my wallet, splitting the tab exactly down the middle. I was starting from zero. I’d forgotten all my exit lines. I’d lost that “Good morning, Vietnam” feeling. I just wanted a little peace.

  Two things told me I was getting older: Last Christmas, three people gave me tree ornaments. And second, when my friends described the men they wanted me to meet, they listed their qualities. “He’s an individualist, losing his hair but in a good way, Harvard grad school, wants children . . .” It felt like shopping— shopping blind. It used to be that we all went out, drank a jug of wine, and woke up the next morning to see what had happened during the night. These days, you go on a date with a pen and notepad. They’re more like job interviews.

  “That’s why I believe dates should be conducted in a formal office setting,” said my friend Jack.

  Shouldn’t it feel natural, spontaneous, like falling out of a tree?

  Other people think I’ve made a mess out of my life, but I disagree. I think that I’ve just been efficient. I’ve managed to cram a lifetime of mistakes into a span of ten years. I’m still young, thirty-two, and I’m watching other people take their time with it, sticking with husbands or wives who won’t have sex with them, who won’t clean up after themselves, whatever. I’ve done all that. Somewhere along the way, I’d gotten selective. My condoms had dust on them. I wanted a mail-order prince. Either that, or nothing.

  “Here I am, baby,” Jack said, thumping himself on the chest. “Prince Charming.”

  “Prince Alarming,” I said.

  I took a test out of a magazine. “What Kind of Girlfriend Are You?” There were questions that went like this: “He wants to eat burgers. You want Chinese. What do you do?” I scored a zero. I made Jack take the same test. He scored a one. He was delighted.

  “Together, we’re a ten!” he said.

  The morning after every first date I went on, I would buy a fifteen-cent feeder goldfish from the pet store and put it in a giant jar that used to hold pickles. I would name the fish after my date. And I wouldn’t give him any advantages. Instead of distilled water, I would use tap water—overchlorinated, radioactive. I would not change this water. I wou
ld not feed the fish. If my date called and the goldfish was still alive, I would go out with him again. If the goldfish had died before he called, I would give up on him.

  “It’s Darwinian,” I explained to Jack.

  Jack said, “That’s totally crazy.”

  I said, “When it comes to dating, you have to be a little crazy to be sane, because a sane person would go crazy.”

  “Jesus. Feed it, at least.”

  My instincts are always wrong, but I follow them anyway. I read somewhere that you can find your way out of any maze by touching the wall with your right hand and following that hand wherever it leads. Eventually it will lead out into the open air, even if it takes a million billion years.

  Jack said I was just looking for someone whose metaphors matched mine. He said I should give up, that I’ll never find that because my metaphors are stupid.

  I suspect that my problem is this: I have never been able to tell the difference between longing and love. This, Jack says, is my dysfunction.

  “There is no difference,” he says.

  Jack and I went to the gym and got on stationary bikes. Jack said, “This is ridiculous. A stationary bike?”

  “It’s cold out, though,” I said, beginning to sweat.

  “I’d rather freeze,” he panted. But he kept pedaling next to me.

  I met Jack five years ago at a party. He got down on one knee and said, “If I don’t take you home tonight, I’ll never recover.” But the way he said it, looking over my shoulder and nodding at someone he knew, told me that he had said this before, maybe as recently as last night, and he had recovered quite well, considering.

  Jack is thirty-five. Jack is attractive. But I say that grudgingly, because with Jack, you do. He has dark brown eyes, and they change expression so rapidly that talking with him is like watching television.

  When he was sixteen, Jack lost his twin sister in a party-related drug incident—he won’t discuss the details. She had an extreme allergic reaction and died. Jack spent the next three years at home in Tucson, comforting his mother and father; then he left and didn’t go back again, not even for Christmas, which he spends with my family each year. My family adores him. They think it’s cute when he says grace at the table, and we all humor him, shouting “Amen!” or “Halleluiah!” afterward.

  Unlike me, Jack had a religious upbringing. He and his twin sister had been forced to take two hours of religion classes every day in school, K through twelve. One day, Jack’s third-grade teacher spotted him daydreaming and asked, “Jack, why do we worship Jesus? Why don’t we worship, say, you?” Startled, Jack said, “Not enough people know me yet.”

  Enough people know him now, but I’m his only follower. Jack and I had settled into a friendship over the past five years that had flowed seamlessly out of his come-ons. Every now and then, he would throw out another one, but I handled them like dents in my windshield, swerving my head for the clearer view. We were each other’s oral historian, always calling to record every little event in our lives: that our ficus plant wasn’t doing well, or that the guy at the gas station had shortchanged us by five dollars. Sometimes I was confused and would forget what I had told Jack versus what I had planned to tell Jack, and it would take us some time to iron out those details.

  At the very least, it was nice to have a compatriot. There at the gym, I slid over a retro seventies postcard I had just bought next door. It vibrated on Jack’s machine. It was a picture of a smiling blond woman curled up on a couch, watching her date croon a love song to her, his open mouth wide. In a cartoon bubble over her head, the woman is thinking: “The good times are killing me.” Jack laughed, pedaling faster.

  I told him about the date that had inspired the purchase. I had gone out the night before with a man who told me, “I’m not religious, but I’m very spiritual.”

  So I said, “I’m not at all spiritual, but I’m deeply religious.”

  He asked, “What religion?”

  “Oh, you know,” I said, waving my hand. “Any of ’em.”

  “I see we have some differences,” he said.

  Jack now explained. “He was just trying too hard, that’s all.”

  “Oh.”

  Jack told me about his last date, a woman who described in tortuous detail every other man she was currently seeing. She knew how much money each man made. She proceeded to ask Jack about his income, and then repeated the number back to him to make sure she had gotten it right.

  Jack had met her at a dance club, where she had written her phone number on his stomach in red lipstick. He sweated too much at the club, and by the time he got home, he was missing a number, so he tried number combinations until he reached her. She didn’t remember who he was, and it took him an hour of all his funniest jokes to convince her to go out with him. He said that the date had gone so poorly because he had used up his best material on the phone.

  My legs hurt. I looked at the exercise machine, unable to decipher it. “Help me with this thing.”

  Jack leaned over and punched some buttons. A drop of sweat fell from his forehead onto the panel. The pedals got looser. I stared at the sweat shimmying on the plastic as I said, “I don’t know why you’re even bothering with her.”

  “Because she doesn’t want me. Once she changes her mind, I can leave her alone.” He wiped his forehead with his arm and glanced at me.

  “You always go after unavailable people.”

  “If the available people were all that great, they’d be unavailable,” Jack said.

  “Not true.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “I refuse to live in your Tom Cruise world,” I said.

  But was he was right? Don’t you live in the world you’re stuck with? I mean, I never wanted to live through two Bush presidencies, but here I am, saying it again: President Bush. And here we were, Jack and I in T-shirts, pushing some pedals around. That night, we’d each go on a different date. We’d call each other the next day and complain about it. He’d tell me something, like how during sex (and there would be sex) his date said, “Hup two-three-four . . .” and I’d tell Jack something, like how my date said he was only interested in women who could ski.

  When do the stories end? Is that why people get married, and why married people are so boring? Because you marry the guy who will give you no stories to tell? Is that what I wanted? No more stories?

  Jack created a “Chicks I’ve Nailed” database. When he disclosed this information over lunch one day, I said, “Never tell this to another woman.”

  He said, “Eleanor, it’s a wonderful introspective tool. For example: Although I say I like hippie chicks, the plurality of girls I’ve slept with have been artsy types.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong. I printed out a pie chart . . .” He started groping in his bag.

  “No. Put it away.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  Jack was working a new job doing sales and marketing in the building next to mine downtown. He said that he had taken a two-thousand-dollar pay cut for the convenience of seeing me. Of course, I didn’t believe this, but we did have lunch almost every day, like now. I picked up my sandwich. Jack did the same, but just held it in front of his mouth while he talked.

  “This is what I’m so sick of hearing: ‘I really like you, Jack. You’re a great guy, Jack, but I just don’t feel that spark with you.’ ”

  “Oh. Nice-guy syndrome.” But he wasn’t a nice guy, so I didn’t get it.

  Jack put down his sandwich without biting into it. “I want to figure out this ‘spark’ thing. And control it.”

  “Don’t you think you’re missing the point?”

  “I want to gently open my hand and see a little flame in the center of my palm, dancing.” He stared at his hand.

  “On the prowl again,” I said.

  “That sounds a little more . . . real than I’d like it to,” Jack said, finally eating, mouth full. “I
’m on a mission. I have a list.” Jack flashed me his list, maybe twelve women long, with phone numbers next to them. Some had question marks instead of last names. One woman he simply called Satellite Girl. He kept the piece of paper on the table while he talked, explaining that he had finally, seriously considered what he wants, and who fits the image. He wants the big, big love, composed out of an aggregate of characteristics. I peeked. Halfway down the list, I saw my own name.

  I had a big love, once—Richard. The way it started was this: I had met Richard at a bar and was instantly smitten, but he didn’t notice me. One day, Richard called for my roommate Pete, who wasn’t home. When I answered the phone, I was lying on my bed, playing with a stone that a geologist friend had given to me. She had explained, “See the shiny parts? See how it’s kind of oily looking, chipped in weird places? Long ago, a dinosaur ate this stone and kept it in its gizzard with other stones to help digest its food.” I sometimes tried to put it in my own mouth, but it was too big.

  When I knew Richard was about to hang up, I said, “You’ll never in a billion years guess what I have in my hand.”

  Richard paused then bit, asking questions. Is it old, new, pretty, ugly, what color, what shape? When I finally told him, he asked me out. We were in love for three years, and then he abruptly fell out of love and left me for a woman who makes bagels.

  Despite all that, maybe that’s what love is, after all—holding out your hand and saying, Here. I’m holding this small, simple thing, as old as time itself. Do you want it? Is this what you want?

  Now, Jack asked me what I wanted, pen poised over an old receipt.

  “It depends,” I stalled.

  “Come on,” he said. “Any nonnegotiable requirements? Any personal habits you can’t stand?”

  All I could think to say was that I didn’t want a man who picked up his plate in restaurants and licked it. Not like last time. Jack wrote, “No plate-lickers.” He stared at the paper for a minute and then said, “Well. I think we can find you something.”