by Joan Connor
DO NOT talk about yourself, your former lovers, husbands, dilly-dalliances, or your offspring. DO NOT complain when you spend your birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Valentine’s Day alone. (They hate that.) DO NOT analyze your relationship with him. They really hate that. Compliment him sincerely on his intelligence, hair cut, car and clothes, especially his socks (they give great thought to their socks) even if you don’t mean it.
Go to his condo. Memorize his wardrobe, the tweeds, the double-breasted, gold-buttoned blazers that only he can wear without being flip or camp. Memorize the contents of his medicine cabinet. Run water while you click through his bottles of sinus spray, his prescriptions, the Valium, the Xanax. Rifle through his magazines, his CDs, his books. Always remember this: they secretly long to be rock stars. Or cowboys. They are desperate men. They play air guitar or air harmonica before the steamy bathroom mirror. They dream of room keys wrapped in red string bikinis tossed past the footlights. They dream of being lone little dogies eating maverick beans and fire-sizzled bacon. Their dreams are not their own. They secretly long to be rebels without a dependent clause, but only if, an essential if, they already have a girlfriend or a wife. They need their security systems.
Study the sock drawer. They take pride in the insignias. Other pod-women have gotten to them about the socks. No crews, only J. Crews, a discreet alligator, perhaps, or decorous tony Ralph Lauren argyles. Cull all the details. Become his expert. Memorize the photos of his mother, deceased father, his sister, his son, his girlfriend. Speak well of them all, especially the girlfriend. Compliment his taste in women. Never mind that she sells insurance, pays one hundred dollars a week for her hair and nails, drives a red car with a cellular phone. Study your rival. Cut your hair like hers. Forget the nails; you’ve most likely already bitten them to the quick.You will require a few nervous habits, however bad. Falling out of love is rigorous work. But that comes later.
Fourth, in bed strike a balance between demure and sluttish. Moan; they like that. Never, ever say, “Take me, take me, make me yours.” They hate that. Tell him the truth, that he is beautiful, that his skin is soft and dark until the white band below his navel where you imagine enwrapping him like his swimsuit, that you almost cannot bear the auburn down on his abdomen, soft as it is, that his come tastes like strawberries, not the hothouse grocery store variety, the sun-warmed mid-July tiny ones which hide under parasol leaves of green. Put your index finger into his mouth like a key into a lock. It opens the door to that forbidden room where everything is tentative, where everything, perhaps joy, trembles and waits. His mouth is the threshold of possibility which demands great courage to cross. Cross. Cross over. Kiss him. Exchange body fluids until you feel consumed, transubstantiated. Adore his bristly tree trunk of a leg between your thighs. Let your fingertips memorize the shape, the contour, the beautiful hardness of every muscle because you cannot help yourself, because you truly love this man, because you would sleep anywhere even on a bed of broken glass to hear this man’s fitful snoring deprive you of sleep, because you cannot bear your own tenderness when you touch his sweet face, because you want to forgive him all his flaws, ease his past, take his pain into yourself and make it your own. Imprint his skin into your fingerprints until, defying nature, you are two snowflakes crystallized alike. And when he startles awake from his midnight ride on the white mare, console him, touch him until the white horse gallops off, touch him until, cocksure and cock hard, he rides you, saddles you with his pain although even he will not know that that is what he is doing.
When he calls you by his girlfriend’s name, overlook it, overhear it. When he says your name, feel blessed by his voice. Let it haunt your dreams until you wake up in the morning and feel his fingernail, the crescent fingernail of his index finger, trace your backbone. Delude yourself that he loves you. Hook your pinky in the bliss between his lips, the bliss that is his mouth, the unuttered prayer that is always and only hope. Love him wholly, holy, sacramentally. Confess the sin of truth, that you have never known intimacy like this, so bottomless, so vast, as infinite as the chalice of your heart which you bear to him, offer to him. When he, in an anxiety of stage butterflies, drops papery like a Monarch’s winter wings, lie. Tell him that it doesn’t matter. Tell him that you are happy, satiated, full to the brim with him. Tell him until it becomes truth. It will be truth. It is truth. But learn how to lie. You will need to lie to protect him from himself, from his troubled past and inky dreams. Soothe him. Stroke his brow. Kiss his fingertips and say, “It’s all right. Everything is going to be all right.” Be his understudy. Become the biographer of his body. Always play Boswell to his Johnson.
Whatever else you do, do not cry. Do not cry even when you realize that anyone won’t do. That only he will do, this one, him, him, himself, the one with the uptown argyles, the one with the ultraviolet ravaged face. Do not cry even when them redacts to him. Do not generalize, and never deign to become specific yourself. They hate that, and they really, really, really hate it when you cry. It makes them feel responsible.
Recall the mission of your education thus far. You have schooled yourself in him, tutored yourself in his dental floss, his scrapbook, his socks so that eventually you can stop loving him. Memorize his scent because you have no other choice; you will never be able to forget that he smells like anise and carnations, a day beyond their cut stem perfection. Gillyflowers. A scourge on memory. On love, on loving, a curse. But that comes later.
Fifth, ask nothing of him. You will get it anyway. Elate with an edgy joy when you spot a stranger who resembles him even in the most oblique way. Enroll in a dysfunctional relationship course, cram for the exam on Denial, carry crib notes about co-dependency, watch talk shows until your brain atrophies, gripe futilely to your therapist about men who fear intimacy. Read only Chick LIT.. Glory in your victimization, but never ever allude to it. They really, really hate that. Remember: they are not accountable. They are not responsible for their actions. Sartre be damned, they know no bad faith. They lack free will; it is never their problem. Ever. Never. Not ever.
They blunder around among the heifers, stomping shards of Wedgewood into a pale blue dust beneath their hooves. It isn’t their fault. It’s how they’re bred. Graze, stare dumbly, moo, make milk, nurse. If you still retain the capacity to frame even a fleeting thought, pray with all your cowness for artificial insemination to occur to your farmer. The herd goes on. Love falls by the byway. It’s all for the best. You have several stomachs for grass, but you have no stomach for love. Don’t worry. The diet will alter soon enough.
Sixth, ignore all of the above. Drink too much smoky Chardonnay. Call him after five when you know that his girlfriend is home. Recriminate him. Unleash the harpies who have become more crowded than the angels on a pin’s head in the Pandora’s box of your wounded loving. Mix your metaphors, mix it up.You are crazy with love, dizzy with longing, coiled with misplaced moonstruck lunatic unmet unmatched desire. It is not your fault; it is the nature of the beast. Moo, low. The blues are always down and dirty. Discover the gift that is your tongue. It terrifies him; it has known his teeth, his moistness, his fruited come. Say FUCK a lot. Talk like a truck driver, a stevedore, a Stella-deprived depraved man. They hate that; it isn’t ladylike. Refer to yourself in the third person. Refer to yourself with self-hatred. Employ the venomous reductive C-word, the part that will not speak its name. Check a Georgia O’Keeffe coffee table book out of the library and feast your aggressive eyes on the female metaphors. When is an orchid not an orchid? When it’s in a jar. Press against the glass bell jar that barely contains you. Kick in all the doors and roar like a whore, says Barnacle Bill the sailor. Avoid the temptation to sing Helen Reddy anthems, but do read Adrienne Rich. Dive into the wreck, ah, there’s the ticket.
Feel sorry for yourself. Let him say, “Self-pity does not become you.” You become it anyway. Suicide will slip its possibility like a blackmail letter into the envelope drop of your dark hour and dark heart. Go ah
ead, read it. It’s only an aimless threat.
Accuse. Ecce homo. Unstring the pearls. Let toads and snakes and wet slimy primitives slither from your lips. Take Occam’s razor to Bluebeard’s twelve o’clock shadow. Let a frown be your penumbra. Scream, “I am not a convenience store. I am a woman.” Let the ten pounds creep from the Pound and spring lapdog back into your lap. Weep. Rant. Gouge out your eyeliner. Slash your merry widows. Use your garter belts for sling shots and slay him with the arrows of outrageous misfortune. Disease your vocabulary. Call each other (here, he must participate) egregious names until the words coagulate, combine, amass weight, slide, slither, slink up the biological tree, develop legs, discover land, croak, tumesce into thunder lizards who will trample through the peat swamps of your tenderness, die violent, vicious deaths, sediment into the sheaved shale of hatred and provide you with fuel, more fuel, endless reserves of fuel to fire your madness which is the moon at which you will hopelessly howl.
That last step, step six, is absolutely, unqualifiedly essential. Without it, you cannot stumble. Without it, you cannot trip. Without it, you cannot bump down the stairs, acquire the bruises necessary to prove that you have loved and lost and can therefore attest that it is better to never love at all. Bruises fade. Can memory fade? Can memory fade enough that you can raise a parasol, shade yourself from pain? Maybe. Yes. Eventually. But that comes later.
Hang up on him, then call him back because you cannot help yourself, because you want his approval that your action, your tears, your bitter calls, your hurt letters preclude. Threaten him; you have no clout. Issue ultimata which will result in his dismissal of you. Let him complain, “You are forcing my decision.” Let him gloat, “You will miss me.” Tell him you already do, then hang up on him again. Brood for ten minutes, pace while you wait for him to call. When he doesn’t, call him back. Many are called, but few are chosen.You will be one of the few. When he says that he hates to be pressed, when he says “I think of you as a sister,” when he says “What happened to our friendship?” hang up again. Then hang up his picture in your bedroom. Keep another on your nightstand to punish yourself with longing, to prolong your self-torment. Repeat after yourself, “I don’t have what I can’t want.” Fantasize only about him. Only he will suffice. In the wide desert of your white-sheeted bed, thirst until you hallucinate, see his figure wavering in the heat, a quaver, a quivering cipher. Oasis.
Check the mailbox for the letter which won’t arrive. Then check it again and again until it becomes a nervous tic. Open and close the refrigerator. Stare at the unflashing Cyclopean eye of your answering machine. When your phone rings, bruise your shins in your scramble to answer it. When Joe the automated telemarketer pitches five-year light bulbs, spiral downward in a maelstrom of loathing at your expectancy, at your weakness. Check the mirror several times a day to be sure that you still exist. Rearrange your hair. You are never pretty enough. Eat the Havarti which you bought for him. The sound of your phone not ringing hums in your apartment, the silence so complete, so nearly complete that you startle when your neighbor’s phone rings in the parallel universe beyond your white apartment walls. She gets calls. She gets so many calls that she isn’t even home to answer them. You hear the dim formal electronic rhythms of her prerecorded message. You stare at the white wall as if it were an empty mirror, as if your loneliness were palindromic. If you could only ghost-walk through the wall, there, there on the other side, fortune would rise to meet you, come with both hands full.
Here is the still center. Here is the point to review, here before the long downward slide to the last step. The last one is a doozy.
“Say, where’d you meet him?”
“I met him at the convenience store. He turned around. He smiled at me. You get the picture?”
“Yes, we see.”
Then what happened?
“That’s when I fell for the litre of the pack.”
So I called him. So he called me.
So then I go, “Let’s get together?”
And he goes, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We could have a swingin’ time.”
So I go and he goes, and it’s love à go go. And he goes on and on, telling me about his tour of duty in Viet Nam, his failed marriage, his son who writes poetry and plays Kamikaze soccer.
He told me about the novel he was writing. He told me he loved Havarti. He told me about his socks. He did not tell me about the girlfriend. That came later.
How much later?
After I stopped resisting him, after we went out to dinner and sat outdoors holding hands at an Italian restaurant on a mountaintop, after we went swimming at midnight with fireflies, after I started loving him, after that.
And then? And then?
When he danced, he held me tight, and when he walked me home at night, all the stars were shining bright.
And then? And then?
And then he kissed me.
Did you love him right away?
No, I was afraid. Again? I thought, Love again? It is too painful. I can’t, I can’t free fall into love again,
But then? Then?
Yes. Then. I did.
And then and then?
And then lace fluttered in spring windows. Pansies sprang up in the windowboxes. I rose to him like a heliotrope to sun. I wove him viney into my hair. I kissed his eyelids. I kissed his perfect curled toes, every one. I loved him with every cell, with every pore, with every atom spiraling up the Diotima’s ladder of my genetic material.
And then? And then?
Reader, he dumped me.
Seventh. Seven is a magic number. But if you have a tendency to bet on dark horses, it is not lucky. As you slip down the glass mountain, the three golden apples still intact and gleaming on its summit, you will notice that the downward slope is steeper, faster than the incline which was leisurely, which paused every so often to admire the widening view, the purling rivers, the skirling clouds, the tender pink light. The drop is sudden. The plummet quick. All love has a denouement, a declining sun; all stories resolve with a decrescendo, a diminuendo to silence. The downward slope. The spilled pail. And Jill came tumbling after.
Advice for the seventh stage: play only songs which remind you of him. Fall into a coma of disappointed love. Treasure your misery. Miss him at every turn. Grieve for him. Read Simone Weil’s essay on love and underline key phrases in black ink like “Love is a sign of our wretchedness.” or “Love tends to go further and further, but there is a limit. When the limit is passed love turns to hate.” Pass the limit. Pass the time. Grieve for yourself. Forgive him, forgive everything except this: never forgive him for not loving you.
At this stage, you will call him again because you are in the habit of handing your life over to him. But you will do so less and less frequently. Sometimes you will hang up before you say hello. Sometimes you will listen to the electronic buzz of the phone after he hangs up. You will become a nuisance caller but only for a while. You will write him angry letters which you won’t mail. You may drink too much Chardonnay for a while simply to make the days blur, pass with seeming speed, to drop a curtain between you and loss, between you and time.
At this point your heart will feel like a sparrow’s terror beating its blind wings against the chimney flue. This is the time to observe the ritual of unloving someone. Remove his pictures from your wall and nightstand. Return his books, but don’t enclose a note. Throw out his letters. Crate the few impersonal gifts he has given you: the used books, the secondhand CD’s, the flying monkey, the watercolor of a birch tree, the pen and pencil set, the hand mirror. Remove the ring which is the only personal gift. Black onyx on a sterling band. Tuck it deep under the snarls of ironic pearls in your jewelry box. Take antacids. Ignore the physical symptom of thwarted longing, that ache, that hollow in your chest where your heart used to beat. Forget him even though you can’t. Because you must. Because you are here, alone in this room, your head slightly tilted, gazing perhaps unseeingly out of a window at a sudden snowstorm as you remove an
onyx ring from your finger. Because. Because. Because love always presumes an audience. Unfinished clause.You have only because. There is no other choice.
Eighth: erase his name in your address book. Stage revenge cycles in your daydreams: sending his love letters to his girlfriend, showing up at his tennis club with some handsome dope on your arm, adding his name to a computerized mailing list for neo-Nazis or the ever-emerging Christian right. (Surely by now they are emerged.) Hate him for denying you. Call him an asshole a hundred times a day. Be smug; he will never again be loved as much by anyone. Hope that he dies alone with pee stains on his designer pajamas.
If you must, break something, a tea cup, a glass, preferably break one which you never much cared for, maybe that one with Fred Flintstone’s imbecilic grin on it. The glass makes a satisfying sound as it smacks on the kitchen floor and shivers around your bare feet. Tell yourself that you are better off without him. Tell yourself you don’t need him. Tell yourself he’s history, except . . . except.... Some days are darker than others.
Ninth, same as above only a milder attack, and the Havarti’s all gone.
Tenth. Sometimes at odd moments he flashes, flickers like a goldfish through the glass bowl that contains your consciousness. A fragile moment. Think of him wryly. Think of him wistfully. Think, but just for the duration of the briefest kiss, how it might have been other, that alternate life, that life which you might have led together. Pies in the oven, dimity curtains in the window, him there in that navy blue wingchair reading one of his silly Techno-thrillers while you watch him with wifely fondness and your Golden Retriever lopes dopily across the yard and the blue flag Irises, the color of his eyes, spike up in the flower beds.