AS I mentioned before, I don’t usually spiral into extended periods of delusional quasi-stalkery. So in an effort to map my madness, I should mention another variable, besides Patrick’s moving out, that, at the time, didn’t seem to have any connection to the blossoming romance in my mind.
The day after I saw Sweeney Todd, and a week after Patrick moved out, my father’s mother, Adele, to whom I genetically credit my inability to reasonably function anywhere besides New York City, my exaggerated sense of stubborn self-sufficiency, and my love of ’70s clothing—particularly the cowl neck-medallion pairing—passed away, at home, after suffering from a long illness.
The week after my grandmother’s death, Patrick didn’t call me, visit my home, or write me to express his condolences, because, as he would later explain, he knew my family was sitting shiva, and didn’t know whether reaching out was in line with the Jewish rite of mourning. (It is, in fact, sort of the point.) Another culture gap was accumulated between me and ol’ Patrick, and this time, it was a bigger deal than ham on a paper plate in a basement.
Eventually, I forgave him for sending a card to my parents after the fruit baskets had rotted and the veils on the mirrors were lifted. He would tell me later that he was sorry that he didn’t know what to do and that he didn’t err on the side of kindness and generosity. I acknowledged that the timing of our discovery that “moving out but staying together” was a veritable Fudgie the Whale of a lie that we pretended was a real possibility at the time of our transition-easing. But our rift stung as it revealed itself in the face of a loss of a family member I’d looked up to for as long as I was alive. And I don’t look up to people just because I share a last name with them: Adele Klausner was the kind of person you identify with so totally that you see what you like about yourself in them, and it makes you think you’re all right by association.
Adele was the one who would take me to the New York Public Library and make me walk five blocks to Ray Bari pizza afterward, which felt like the Trail of Tears to a suburban creampuff used to riding five minutes to get to Italian Village. She survived breast cancer before it was a cause you wore a ribbon for, worked for the Nurses’ Labor Union until retirement demoted her to commie volunteer, and taught the aerobics class she took at the 92nd Street Y when the teacher was sick. She’d bake her own pies from scratch and wouldn’t let me win at cards. She lived alone in a high-rise apartment building and walked three miles every day, even if it was shitting sleet. And when she said she loved me, she smiled with all her big teeth.
Then, one day, she was gone. And so was Patrick. I lived alone, and I was trying to get used to it. As I moved furniture around and threw things away, I thought about the advice my grandmother had given me a year earlier, when I told her I was moving in with my then-boyfriend. Patrick and I had been looking at apartments in the East Village together, and considered pooling our rents for a bigger place instead of making room in my one-bedroom for his stuff. And Adele said to me, with the authority of a woman who had lived alone in Manhattan since her husband left her a widow at forty-two, “Don’t give up your apartment.” It was the best kind of advice—prescient and blunt.
I missed her and Patrick like crazy, but I didn’t like thinking about it. My mind was far more content to spin sultry yarns about an actor I hoped would ravish me with the same conviction he funneled into his bloody stage performances. It’s unwise to underestimate the macabre fascinations of a grieving mind or the sexual fantasies of the recently heartbroken.
SINCE OUR one-way obsession-fueled exchange, I’ve met Sweeney a couple of times. He’s always been extremely kind to me and has never mentioned the e-mails, which I appreciate. Read from top to bottom, I’m sure they make a clumsy bit of fan fiction, collaboratively penned by two people well-versed in theatrics. But at the time, they kept me, if not sane, at least more human. And I see Patrick all the time, since he quit that job he hated to do more of what he loves. We’re not friends, but I still like him.
People forget in the moment that breaking up isn’t an action; it’s a process. Not a deus ex machina, but a whole show, and a big one too—the kind with time elapsed and flash-forwards, and sometimes a stage manager has to put talcum powder on your head to age your wig. It’s not just a click of the mouse to change “In a Relationship” to “Single,” or the command “Send,” when you’re trying to tell Sweeney Todd you think it would be fun to have coffee sometime. It takes a long time for relationships to shift their contents, and then change their very makeup. Before Patrick and I had that conversation on the beach, I’d been quietly packing up the stuff that belonged to him, in my head. And not just his dresser. I was picturing what it would be like to come home to just the cat, cook for myself, date other guys. By the time we talked about him moving out, I had some of my feelings in boxes already. It wasn’t easy, but it got better. Not every breakup is scored by Tina Turner and ends with you wiping your hands, “That’s that.” Adult relationships, even with guys you think are immature, dignify more gradual separations. And mine from Patrick took a long time, even after Sweeney and Adele were gone.
YEARS LATER, Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd came out, starring Johnny Depp. I liked it, though I’ll never understand the goth inclination to erase all humor when adapting to film what is technically a musical comedy—as though jokes and tan skin together are responsible for everything that’s offensive to people who like The Cure. But it was awesome to see that story told on the big screen, and it was a pleasure to hear those soaring, familiar melodies in surround sound while throats spurted and roaches scurried into pies. I also realized, watching Depp do his best “Bowie Todd,” that I was super-attracted to him in a way I’d never been before. I guess I’m one of the rare girls who never had a thing for Johnny Depp—weird, I know: Even lesbians like that guy. But I had a crush on Dana Carvey, remember?
But Depp as Todd did it for me, and when I figured out why, I had the kind of moment that makes you actually surprise yourself with how nerdy you are. I realized when I saw that movie that I, in fact, have a crush on Sweeney Todd. The character. It sort of made that whole mystery of “Why me, why then, why him,” when it came to that actor, a cold case. Because “him” could have been anybody in that role, to some extent. A ton of guys like Catwoman, whether she’s Eartha Kitt or Julie Newmar, right? I guess I just like Sweeney. Is that the worst thing in the world?
As I watched Depp croon to his razors and waltz with his conspirator, I thought of the guy kind enough to e-mail a lonely girl who liked hearing him sing. And then, I thought of Patrick, and remembered, as I do every day, my grandmother—the one who made her own pies from scratch.
the critic
Alex and I met online Christmas Day, because the only thing more festive than rallying around a tree with loved ones is frying your eyes by the glare of a laptop screen alone in a dark room, because all your friends are out of town, and you’re bored to tears in the house you grew up in, and the loneliness of not having somebody to love during the holidays rapes your face every quarter hour, on the hour.
This was my first Christmas alone for a couple of years. The year before I’d gone home with my then-boyfriend to listen to his mother read a “letter from Santa” to her full-grown kids, citing their accomplishments of the past year. She/Santa referenced me to Patrick when it was his turn, adding, “Well, well, well!”—Santa always exclaimed in threes—“It looks like you have a special visitor here today!”
A year later, I was home with my own family and online in my brother’s old bedroom turned mom’s new office, looking for faces on what was at the time a gleaming new social networking site. There’s always a pathetic glint of “Now It’s Different”-based optimism when you get a new toy; as in “Now I’ll be able to find the career I always wanted,” or “Now I’ll be able to lose weight or find a guy to fall in love with” as soon as you get access to a new job counselor, exercise gadget, or website you hope will bring you closer to the dreams you’ve had since you
were old enough to want things. They keep you from thinking you’re the same as you ever were and spare you from the responsibility of being at fault for not seizing the opportunity of your surroundings.
As it turns out, in fact, meeting Alex on MySpace was only one of the electronically conceived disappointments I’ve endured while embarking on the task of finding somebody to love me by typing into a box that plugs into a wall. If I ever meet you, I’ll tell you in person about the time I went on Match .com and met a chess enthusiast whose ability to bore adults to tears just by saying his own name (“Herb”) was eclipsed only by his racism toward Mexican busboys. The two of us will laugh, and then one of us will cry, and then I’ll go home and eat frozen waffles.
Around the time I met Alex, MySpace was exotic and alluring: I spent a lot of time that Christmas weekend arranging my “Top 8” friends for my brand- new Comedy Profile, and I put my friend’s band in the first row, because I thought that showed off how cool I was. But that only took thirty seconds, even with my parents’ crappy internet connection, and in that time, no exciting stranger had found my profile and noticed how cool I was. So, I set out to click around the site’s expanse and soon found myself sifting through the pages of my friend’s band’s “friends.” Maybe there was somebody else who liked this band who would think I was cool. After all, we liked the same band, r ight?
Go ahead and reread that paragraph and hit yourself in your own face with a frying pan every time you read the word “band” or “cool.” That’s an approximation of how embarrassing it is now to look back and see the criteria that fueled my search for a life partner. Because, in truth, I only sort of liked that band. I wanted a new boyfriend, I wanted him in the time it took a page to load on Safari, and I was excited at the possibility of this sparkly new website being the missing link between me and the person I always wanted to find.
Alex was friends with my friend’s band. I found a thumbnail photo of a handsome, sharp-featured guy wearing glasses when I perused that page, and I clicked on him. He was even better-looking when the photo got bigger. I saw more photos of Alex. He kept getting hotter. Everything about his profile looked great, but that’s because I was skimming it for references. He seemed funny. He liked the same TV shows as me. But according to the location underneath his age, it said that he lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What? Why? That was weird. But maybe Tulsa wasn’t that far away.Was it? I had no idea. I’d never been there, or looked for it on a map. I decided not to worry about it, and clicked “Add as Friend” under his handsome face, thinking it was like throwing a seed out the window of a speeding car, with limited investment in the possibility that it sprout into a tree one day. I got a message back from Alex within the day: “Hey, funny girl.”
And then the seed became a tree.
WE E-MAILED back and forth for a while, and that lead to IMs, then texts and calls. He found my website and he liked my work, going as far as to pay me what was the ultimate compliment coming from him: “I keep getting indicators that you might be the female version of me.” And on the surface, we did seem to have a lot in common, but only in the way I scanned his profile for proper nouns, like bands and movies. Alex was a music critic and a pop culture savant, which I loved about him, but I was also at a stage where I didn’t realize the relative importance of things like musical taste and opinions about TV shows in the grand scheme of two-person compatibility.
After our first phone conversation, I wound up at a party at the apartment of one of Alex’s New York friends—another fan of that same band, which seemed to attract a lot of people of a similar ilk. Bands are social; they’re not like comedians. Band members hang out with one another after shows, and there are parties and hookups and fun and other things that make me nervous and sort of jealous of people less neurotic than me. I guess it’s why I glommed on to those guys, groupie-style, after my breakup. It all symbolized some kind of social opportunity. And nobody will go to as many parties or be more open-minded to hanging out with random jerks as the recently single. People who’ve just gotten out of relationships are constantly trying to prove to themselves how much they were missing out on before.
I was psyched to be at that party, even though I was flanked by a bunch of hipsters with whom I’d never be able to sustain a conversation longer than “Cute shorts,” “Thanks.” But at least I wasn’t home alone, online. I called Alex the next day to tell him how funny, what a coincidence, and pretended that I hadn’t gotten a wretched impression of that whole scene. I felt like now I was in, even though those people—his friends, I assumed—were alien and awful.
Soon, Alex and I were talking on the phone every day. I got to know his routine; he would take me with him when he went to buy his menthol cigarettes at the Circle K, and I would talk to him on my walks home from shows.We would text each other constantly while we watched the same thing on TV. We got to know one another, sort of, and I became comfortable chatting on the phone beyond figuring out a time and place to meet up, which is what I usually use the phone for, when I’m not texting. With Alex, I’d created the perfect boyfriend whose only flaw I could think of was that he couldn’t touch me, and I would voraciously debate people who wondered if I chose him because intimacy freaked me out.
You can’t say something that direct and honest and totally true to people in a long-distance situation. They will get defensive, and tell you all they want is intimacy, only they’ve been painted into a corner of having to cope with the God-given circumstances of not being physically near the person they want more than anything. But those people are full of beans, and so was I. Distance was what I wanted and needed at the time: the perfect conversation was the perfect boyfriend, and that’s what Alex gave me, often.
I loved talking to him. I snapped to attention when I saw his name lighting up my phone screen, and we spoke every day, and before we went to bed—sometimes until my phone got hot against my cheek.
Alex had an amazing speaking voice, and he’d call me “babe,” in this flippant way that was so sexy I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t have experience taking to guys who didn’t hem or whine. Maybe it was the Southerner thing. Alex was irresistibly gruff and deliberate, and even when he made jokes you could hear in his tone the makings of that wrinkle he had in all his photos: the little vertical line in between his eyebrows, a result of knitting them in terse thought.
I spent my days in reverie, thinking about how one day, Alex would be in New York, and how we’d fall in love, and we’d be able to call it that, because we’d be off the phone and in person, like real couples who live in the same town and know what it’s like to look at each other’s actual faces, and not at their photos, when they’re talking. Oh, and there would be bonkers sex. Because this guy was—by far—the best-looking guy I’d ever had any kind of interaction with in my life. At least that’s what it seemed like from his photos.
Obviously, there were huge gulfs of difference between us that extended beyond physical distance. But unlike Patrick, whose Santa-channeling mom gave me the “I Don’t Belong Here!” jitters, Alex’s Southernerness drove me bats in my pants. He told me that he was a bad kid in high school who got into trouble a lot, hoping that it wouldn’t “freak me out,” which it didn’t, unless “freak me out” was slang for “ruin my panties” in his part of the country. He talked about himself—his goings-on, his worldview, his opinions—and I took it all in the way geeky kids read comic books. He had stories about going to this party, or seeing this band, or bartending this wedding for his catering job, and even the mundane stuff about his life seemed like field reporting from Where the Cool Kids Are.
For everything he had to say, I was at attention; rapt and flattered that somebody as hot as Alex was paying attention to me. I mean, he was just so fucking hot. I was used to “quirkylooking,” or “funny, so it makes him cute to me.” This guy was just out of my league.
I tried so hard to show Alex that I knew about stuff too—I could reference old movies and albums he thought were hilarious. I ma
de jokes and laughed at his, even though they were more referencey than funny, as in, “Look at how I remember this terrible band from 1978!” or, “Check it out! I’ve seen Cannonball Run!” He wasn’t funny the way people who can really make me laugh are funny—people with a surprising insight, a unique point of view, or access to footage of a cat falling into a toilet. I knew I was funnier and smarter than Alex, but he was cooler and way better-looking, so I tried as hard as I could to use the resources I had to make him like me.
After three months of whatever long-distance intimacy we’d established, I gently initiated more provocative conversation. I didn’t start a phone-sex session or nothin’, but I made sure he knew, in my inimitable way, that I was growing impatient for him to fuck my mouth before it got warm outside. I told him before going to bed one night that I had a doubleD-cup bra, and I remember hearing his voice waver, and then get quiet in a way I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t want to keep pressuring him about when he was going to come and visit me, because he dropped the subject whenever I did, until I finally said that if it was about money, I could pay for his flight. I don’t know why I said that, because I couldn’t. I was in grad school for illustration (which is a genius idea if you want to make money and also it is Opposite Day) and juggling two part-time jobs. But I had some savings, and I was dying to meet him. I was also eager to classify his reluctance to set a date and time as something that had nothing to do with his being too nervous to go through with meeting me in real life. It was more attractive to me that he was broke than scared, though it turns out he was both.
Alex called me back the morning after I described my breasts and asked if I was serious about buying him a ticket, and that’s when I realized he was shit-poor. But that revelation receded into the background so “The hot guy is coming to New York!” could take center stage. I went ahead and bought him a plane ticket.
Julie Klausner Page 11