TEN POUNDS heavier from sadness scones than I was when I was wasting my time talking to Alex, I was only being productive in the moping department of my life, and the only writing I did took the form of boring journal entries about what a terrible person I was for not eating more salads. The days were getting shorter and colder, and the writer’s assistant job I’d been working on for the past eight months had ended, and I suddenly found myself fat and alone and not over Alex one bit. But I decided I would try to quit being so narrow minded, and try to be “open” to men in my life I already knew but had never previously considered as potential romantic partners. That’s right! I would do that! It would be a method known more commonly as “rooting through the garbage,” but at the time I was certain it would solve my problems.
I’d known Ben in passing for years and never regarded him in any way beyond thinking he was friendly. He was a little heavy, but kind of cute. He was someone I’d say hello to in passing—a friend of friends. That’s it. I saw him one night after a party I forced myself to go to, and when I went outside the bar to hail a cab, he talked to me while he smoked a cigarette. We talked about Nashville, and Karen Black, because Karen Black should always be talked about, and then Ben told me that he remembered meeting me six years earlier, and recounted all the details of our first encounter. He knew where we were, who we were with, how I made a joke about the Holocaust being fake. It jolted me; I didn’t remember any of that, but his story seemed to check out, especially because the Holocaust is totally fake, and most of the time people think I’m joking about it. I was really flattered Ben remembered all those details about meeting me, and that he was, I gleaned, “open” enough to tell me about how he did. I thought he was really sensitive.
A week later, I wrote Ben and asked him if he wanted to watch a Robert Altman movie that we discussed when we were outside.
HERE’S THE thing about Robert Altman. His name is a cultural talisman; it’s a topical buzzword for attracting the attention of a male adult of a certain age and cultural disposition. Some women learn about sports so they can seem interested in the Giants at a dive bar in Midtown, and others take the cultural approach. Altman is like Stanley Kubrick or Tom Waits or other men who make art that men like. I like Robert Altman fine. Nashville and Short Cuts are great movies, if a little long, and nobody is going to argue with Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye. But I didn’t really care about the movie Ben was telling me about that night. I was open to watching it, but my e-mail to him was more about me saying I was open to getting to know him.
I know. If you hear the word “open” again, you’re going to open your mouth so vomit can spill out of it into the terlet. Well, ditto, dollface. I’ll hold your hair if you’ll hold mine.
Ben replied to my e-mail, saying he was happy to hear from me, and invited me over to his apartment in Astoria, Queens. And then, I decided to like him. He was funny over e-mail, and he mentioned details that “cool people” usually skip over, like how he didn’t really have any food in his house except for wasabi peas and Beaujolais Nouveau, which he knew was sort of gay, and then he gave me really extensive directions to his neighborhood and told me to call when I was downstairs. And I was really charmed by how he typed out his train of thought: It was an affectless way of flirting. Again, I thought, he seemed really sensitive.
I SHOWED up to Ben’s place wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie, which, for me, is an unheard- of outfit to wear unless I am taking a trip to the county dump or giving a cat a bath. But I didn’t want to break out a dress and tights because I didn’t want him to think I’d made up my mind that I was attracted to him, even though I already sort of had, and I also didn’t want to look like I thought we were on a date. Because we weren’t on a date. We were just hanging out.
When I came into Ben’s apartment, I took in all the books on his shelves and the movies in his collection, scoping out the semiotics of the place, and decided it was all very acceptable and impressive. Again, it was the cultural-literacy thing. I didn’t care about college degrees and good breeding in terms of parents and towns. I was looking for the pedigree of taste, and with Ben, I thought I’d found a quality contender.
Ben was loquacious and polite. He spoke constantly and enthusiastically about the movies he showed me and the art he’d hung on his walls, and we got to know what we each thought was cool over what soon became hours.
Finally, around four thirty a.m., he stood behind me as I sat watching a YouTube video on his computer, and put his hand on my shoulder. It was the first time he’d touched me all night—that’s how cautiously he set the stage for maybe later making his move, with permission. I didn’t flinch, so two hours later, he finally lowered his voice and said how he was thinking about wanting to maybe kiss me if that was OK, and I smiled and nodded, like “Fucking finally, jackass,” and the next thing you know, he’d gotten me onto the floor, flipped me over to all fours, pushed my panties to the side, and started aggressively lapping at my ass with his tongue like he’d been thinking about doing it for the last six years.
This was surprising.
At first I was embarrassed, because I hadn’t shaved or showered right before, and didn’t expect to be in the throes of such graphic intimacy when I headed out to his apartment. I was wearing jeans, remember? But when you’re digging into the carpet and somebody’s been eating your ass for ten minutes, your inhibitions and expectations shift considerably. Soon, moving into his bedroom seemed like a reasonable thing to do, especially since it was getting light out already.
I got under a filthy black comforter in his tiny, dark bedroom, the corners of which were graced with stacks of dusty old issues of Penthouse, and told Ben with no uncertainty that I was not going to take off my panties. He said fine, and we made out more, and then he was behind me, feeling my tits under my bra and rubbing his dick against my ass, and then I felt him push my thong panties to the side and slide inside of me. He started fucking me, muttering the whole time.
“It’s OK, Julie. I left your panties on. Your panties are still on. It’s OK.”
I was deliriously turned on. I’d gone from no sex to crazy sex, and it was not healthy. It was setting me up for a crash, like eating a huge pile of candy after fasting for a week.
I WOKE up a few hours later to find Ben on his couch in a flannel bathrobe. I guess I’d banished him there during the night because his snoring set off my sleep-talking tendencies. He was smoking and drinking freshly microwaved tea—there was no food in the apartment, and the idea of him running out to get us some bagels seemed like something I’d be crazy to ask for. He seemed pretty settled in, like he wouldn’t be leaving the house anytime soon. He puttered around, stalled and tethered in his own space, like a dog in its crate. There were no snacks in Ben’s cupboards and the fridge was empty. For a fat guy, it seemed a little weird—I wondered when it was he actually ate food.
There was more sex after no-breakfast, and then I began getting ready to head out in my jeans from the night before. We shared our niceties about how it was a lovely evening, and what a great surprise and all that. He gave me a hug and I combed my hair.
And that’s when he told me he was seeing someone.
“SO,” HE said, like an afterthought, while I was getting my stuff together to leave, “I’ve been dating somebody for a while. But it’s pretty casual. She doesn’t mind if I see other women.”
He cleared his throat and took a sip of tea, then continued, as calm as a pond, like he was about to ask me if I knew the weather. “How about you? Are you seeing anybody?”
My stomach lurched. I needed to go out and get food.
“No,” I said. “No, I’m not seeing anybody.”
And I was shocked. Not because I figured Ben had been waiting around his whole life for me, or at least since we met and I made that (hilarious) Holocaust joke, but that in the wake of what was an oddly direct disclosure that he was dating somebody, more than anything, I just couldn’t believe that this guy wasn’t completely avail
able. As in, totally alone. It was kind of his shtick. When we were hanging out on the couch the night before, his gratitude for my company was almost overbearing. Who’d have gotten any whiff of unavailability from this guy? It was so masked by desperation musk the night before.
“I CAN’T believe you know about this movie!” he’d exclaimed hours earlier, exalting something off the radar in, like, 1991. He’d made me feel so high-status—I was the awesome babysitter with boobs and Van Halen tickets, and he was my adoring charge. And now, after a night of ass-pounding floor sex, he popped a “B.T. Dubbs” and told me, “P.S. I have an open relationship with a person you haven’t heard of until now.”
I had to go. Nate was dating this guy in a gay choir (don’t ask), and I had plans to accompany him to Grace Church to watch his guy sing Christmas Carols next to a gaggle of other mustachioed songbirds, because I am the World’s Greatest Hag. But Ben kept telling me more about the girl he was dating as I put my coat on, and that’s when I found out that not only was Ben crazy enough to be telling me all this stuff with no shame at all, but that the girl he’d been seeing was a bisexual vegan who volunteered for PETA, and she’d been dating him for a year. I couldn’t even react anymore at this point. I was just stunned, and didn’t know what I needed most at that moment—an omelet, a nap, or a gun.
But Ben was surprised that I was surprised to learn all of this. He said he thought I knew about her. I asked him how, and he said it was because when I was working at my TV job before, I was in charge of maintaining the guest list for our wrap party. And because he was invited, and he told me at the time he needed a “plus one,” I should’ve known from his RSVP that his “plus one” was his date. Meaning, that he and his “plus one” were dating. He told me that he’d introduced me to her, which I did not remember. That he said, “Julie, this is Leah, Leah this is Julie.” And that I therefore had no reason to feel shocked and upset and hungry and bewildered and oddly betrayed by the events that had transpired over the course of the last twelve hours of my life in an apartment that looked increasingly disgusting in the light of day.
But I tried to ride out my first wave of “should- feel.” You know when you first hear bad news and your first reaction, for some reason is, “OK,” right before you flip your shit? Like you’re told you’re fired, or your parents are dead, or the test results are positive. And you know that in a moment or two, it’s going to be a shit show, because honest reactions come from the gut once the brain has chewed and swallowed. But during the seconds it takes for you to hear the words—you practically see them, like they’re in a cartoon coming out of a silhouette’s mouth and landing in your ear—you think to yourself for a split second: “Maybe I can deal with this.” And “Wow, that’s a surprise, but maybe it will be all right.” And then, finally, the unhealthy one: “Ooh! Drama!”
ONCE I left Ben’s apartment, I tried to digest the news he’d broken while I watched Nate’s Tenor with Benefits warble “come let us adore him.” I tried not to think too fondly on the sexual acrobatics of the night before, as you do when you’re convinced you’re tits-deep with a Trouble Guy and you don’t want to let yourself enjoy liking him so much before it’s too late.
I didn’t hear from him until six days later. While saying I don’t want to be too judgemental at this point in the book is akin to somebody who wrote an auto mechanics manual saying halfway through they don’t want to prattle on too much about cars, I still have to say that it made me feel bad to go almost a week without hearing from Ben. I know I was the one who let him fuck me, panties on or not, on our first “date” after inviting myself over, but I still think that once you sleep with somebody after a night of heavy talking, or pretty much in any scenario where you have a feeling the other person might like you above and beyond what could have just been a blowjob in a bar bathroom after doing lines, you should really be in touch with them the next day, if only to dispel the likely impression that you made on the person you spent the night with. If you don’t get in touch at all, it’s a shitty way of communicating your disinterest in any sort of relationship, by way of not communicating. And if you wait to call six days after the fact to bemoan at length how you should have called sooner, like Ben did, you’re just not being a mensch. By then, I was in the position to decide if I wanted Ben’s mensch-less, non-exclusive company, and its ensuing crazy sex, over no company at all.
And, guess what? It turned out that I did.
BEN SAID he was going away on business that week, but that he’d like to get together that Saturday. And I didn’t hear from him again until Friday, when he called me over and over again from the airport in Dallas, where he was working, desperate to see me that night. I had dinner plans, but he kept saying how badly he wanted to see me, like he wasn’t going to relent. He called again when his flight was delayed. And when it finally arrived at JFK. And then he whined to me about how badly he wanted me to come out to his apartment after my dinner. He would not let go of his argument. I told him no, let’s do it tomorrow when we could have a proper date, like we’d originally planned. And he said no, he had to see me that night. I told him if he wanted to come into Manhattan, he could. And he said no, he was tired from traveling and I had to come to him because it was urgent and he wanted me. And against the advice of a restaurant table full of friends, and how he made me feel the morning after our first night together, and everything I know that makes sense, I went out to Queens to see him again.
I am not defending my decision. I look back and am floored by the stupidity of it all, and the only way I can explain it is this: Think of crazy sex as some kind of bug that somebody plants in your brain. The bug then eats you from the inside out until you’re stupid and making the decisions of a raving lunatic made almost entirely out of genitalia.
I TOOK a cab out to Astoria, where Ben attacked me in his stairwell. We had sex again, and it was so great that I remember thinking it was probably a dream that he told me he was seeing somebody else when we got together two weeks earlier. Another woman didn’t seem possible in the wake of all that simpatico intensity.
I teased him the next morning, asking him when he was going to take me on a proper date. He said he would come into Manhattan later that night to take me out, and I think that made it easier for me to leave. That, and I was starving and there was still no food in his apartment, and seeing Ben in his flannel bathrobe was giving me an unsavory bit of déjà vu. Was this how he functioned all the time? How did he manage to get himself to the airport and catch a flight to Dallas? And he seemed to adore me, at least from his phone call from before, with all its heaving desperation. Why didn’t he call me the day after we slept together? What the hell else was he doing at the time? The only good thing about dating a self-declared loser is that you figure the guy at least isn’t too busy for you.
Later that evening, it wasn’t until I was dressed and ready to head out when Ben called to cancel what would have technically been our first date. He said he underestimated the amount of work he had to do, and that he couldn’t come out to Manhattan. And now I was pissed, because I went out of my way to cab over to his place for sex the night before, and he couldn’t even come out to Manhattan and eat a burger with me in public? I spoke to my shrink about it, and she told me, based on knowing me for the cartoonishly extensive, Alvy Singer-like duration of our therapy, that I should cut Ben loose. That she knew me too well to advise me in good faith to date a guy who was already seeing somebody else.
I happen to be a very jealous person, and I am not interested in learning to chill out in any way about that particular part of my personality. It bothers me so much when I hear about a man cheating on his wife, or stories about girls who give guys they’re dating his super-unique fantasy of having sex with two women at once, or when girls fight over or compete for one guy, that I am actually getting angry just typing this right now. This might be sci-fi of my own design, but I think men should compete for the attentions of women, and that’s sort of that. I may speak from a pla
ce of curmudgeonliness, but the opposite feels unnatural and gross to me, like the mint gum they make that also tastes like fruit. The idea that Ben had me and this other girl on his social burners at the same time drove me insane. It was a deal-breaker, ladies! I couldn’t casually start dating him knowing that, and what we were in the thick of already was no longer casual. Hot sex is not casual. It begets legitimate feelings of warmth and attachment, even when the person giving you the sex can’t give you anything else.
So I planned to stop seeing Ben. But before I did, I told him to come over to my apartment that Sunday night. Do you know why? Because my vagina is an idiot. But in addition to that, here is what, instead of logic, was running through my brain.
1. I wanted to break up with him to his face.
2. I wanted to make him get off his ass and travel into Manhattan, just like I cabbed into Queens a couple of nights earlier, like a hooker, against the advice of my friends.
And this is the most embarrassing reason.
3. I wanted him to come into my apartment and decide he liked me—the way I decided I liked him when I walked into his.
It was the cultural talisman thing again. Part of me thought he would fall for me as soon as he saw my books and my DVDs and all the cool shit on my walls, and how neat and clean everything was and how good it all smelled and how comfortable my bed looked and how awesome the music I picked out was. And I guess I hoped that he would see all that and decide to not be a huge mess of a man.
So, I was not thinking clearly. I wasn’t able to see that the crazy Ben made me wasn’t even close to the kind of crazy he had in him. And it was around this time when I realized that “crazy,” in Ben’s case, was not the thing Patsy Cline sings about, or an adjective that describes the hotness of chili. But Ben was a sick guy so devoid of empathy that he was unable to understand why telling me about a girl he was dating after sleeping with me would hurt my feelings. All of the clues were there. Colombo—the yogurt—would be able to solve the riddle. It would have just been sad if he wasn’t so talented at making me so angry.
Julie Klausner Page 13