by Laura Zigman
“I had just learned to drive a standard, and after I’d fuck up my two-hour shift, Michael would take the wheel and make me get the Hewlett-Packard calculator out of the glove compartment and turn around in my seat and get the bags of maps out of the back to figure out the average number of rest stops that had bathrooms and gas stations. Then I’d get carsick from turning around, and then I’d divide wrong, and then we’d fight all the way to the next Rock Formation National Park and he’d lock me out of the car. He locked me out at Yosemite, at Yellowstone, and somewhere in the Badlands. Then we lived together for three more years. And somewhere in between all that I stopped sleeping with him too.”
Ray shook his head empathetically as we reached the car. “God. I wonder what that would feel like,” he said wistfully, looking up at the sky. “To really get along with the person you’re with. I wonder if that’s actually possible.”
I looked up at the sky too. It was clear and black and full of stars. “Probably,” I said, but the word came out sounding fake and halfhearted, like an unconvincing white lie. And as I looked at him, then at the little lines etched in the skin on either side of his mouth, I wondered, for the first time in a long time, when it was that I had stopped believing in the possibilities of things.
It hadn’t happened overnight.
Those things never do.
Hope erodes slowly, over time, until you wake up one night at three o’clock in the morning and realize: I am not meant for that kind of thing.
That kind of thing:
Romance.
Passion.
Being the object of someone’s desire.
Showing up in someone else’s dreams.
There had, of course, been men who had liked me, who had even loved me—men I’d been friends with and never slept with had told me so, months or even years later; men I’d slept with and never been friends with had told me too, sometimes, afterward. And obviously Michael had been in love with me once, at the beginning—before he knew that I’d never fully grasp the basic principles of particle physics—but never like that. Never enough.
Which, I suppose, made Michael and me equal in at least that one regard, since I had never been in love with him like that either.
But sometime after they had all left me to go back to their lives, their wives, to new women in whom they presumably saw what they hadn’t seen in me—some spark of promise, some reflection of themselves they had never seen before but had always imagined seeing, some vision of their future—I would ride out the varying waves of crushing disappointment or secret relief until I came to assume that I was missing some element, some particular, elusive, intangible, crucial quality that made other women keepers. I didn’t know exactly what that quality was, but I suspected it had something to do with clarity, with a lack of ambivalence, with the certainty of knowing what kind of relationship you wanted enough to be willing to try to get it. But after Michael and after a long string of short-term attachments—some intense, some not so intense; some bad, some not so bad—I was less sure about what I wanted than what I didn’t want:
I didn’t want to spend the rest of my thirties imprisoned in my office.
I didn’t want to have to accept the idea that I might never have children.
And I didn’t want to think about the fact that I might never find a soul mate.
Like Ray. Maybe.
Not that I thought that yet.
And not that he was such a prize either.
He was engaged, after all, and therefore, technically, unavailable.
And although he was smart and funny and tall and not Jewish, and even though I liked his mouth and his teeth and especially his hands—even the left one, the one with the imitation wedding band firmly embedded on the ring finger—he wasn’t really my type.
Not really.
Not the type I’d always been attracted to and that had always been attracted to me.
Perpetually depressed.
Emotionally damaged.
Slightly secretive.
Desperate to be loved.
Desperate to be saved.
No, Ray was none of those things, and he displayed none of the usual neurotic psychopathic behaviors that initially ignited my imagination, my curiosity, my rescuer fantasies; that made me want to rip off the veil of his psyche and find out what lonely monster lurked underneath.
Ray, it seemed to me at the time, had no veil; he was just some above-normal average guy, a little obsessed with and unsure of himself, who seemed slightly, vaguely, improbably interested in me.
PRECOPULATORY PHASE: STAGE III
THE METAMORPHOSIS OF COW TO NEW COW AND THE ROLE OF THE CURRENT-COW SOB STORY
A prerequisite of love is that a man’s face, at first sight, should reveal something to be respected, and something to be pitied.
—Stendhal, Love
In the metamorphosis from Cow to New Cow, the Current-Cow sob story is an important phase.
This, of course, is when a man “accidentally” lets it slip out how unhappy he is with his Current Cow while he is ostensibly telling you some innocent and charmingly revealing story about himself and his past.
Sometimes confused with the almost identical Poor-Guy sob story, the Current-Cow sob story is so full of intimate Good-Bull-Bad-Cow details that it will seem completely believable—and even romantic—so much so that you will immediately find yourself in the throes of a full-blown crush and forget about one very important detail:
The Current Cow.
Allow me to deconstruct the essential elements:
1. I know we just met, but did I happen to mention how sad, miserable, misunderstood, and lonely I’ve been my whole life?
This is crucial to introducing the myth of male shyness and the Poor-Guy persona—common disguises for a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
2. You’re so easy to talk to—not like my Current Cow.
While you will think he is flattering you by trusting you with his life story, he is actually busy flattering himself by showing off how open, honest, and sensitive he is.
3. I am not the asshole. She is, poor thing.
Just in case you’re starting to think he is a coldhearted, home-wrecking womanizer, don’t be so quick to judge, because his description of her wounding inattention and indifference will prove that he is putting the Current Cow out to pasture for good reason and that he is tormented by guilt at the thought of abandoning her.
4. What’s that thing they always say about the love of a good woman (hint, hint)?
That it can save a man from drowning. This is your cue to put the little white cap on and get the life preserver out of storage. You’re going on another rescue mission, Florence Nightingale.
5. Do I hear bells ringing?
Yes, he does. And so should you. New-Cow bells. The empty barn beckons, the Bull awaits, so don’t bother with the Old-Cow hat and red-lace Merry Widow. You won’t need them—yet.
It was three weeks after Washington that Ray called me from the East Village. That night, after the hair, after the nightcap, after we got to Charles Street and climbed the four flights of stairs to my apartment and made coffee, we climbed two more flights to drink it on the roof and watch the sun come up.
“I can’t remember the last time I did this,” I said, “staying up all night talking with a virtual stranger.” I looked down onto Bleecker Street and beyond to the Hudson River, feeling completely awake even though I’d barely touched my coffee. Whenever the last time was, it had been a long time—a very long time—since I’d felt that … happy.
Ray sat on the ledge of the roof with his back to the skyline and stretched his legs out. “I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.”
“Oh, come on. You probably do it all the time. Lure an unsuspecting woman out of her apartment at midnight to see some hair. Hint around after all the bars and diners within walking distance have closed until she invites you over for coffee.”
“Then bore her with my entire life story until the su
n rises and there’s nothing left to do but watch cartoons.”
“Cartoons?” I said.
“It’s Saturday morning.”
It was after seven when we went downstairs and sat on the bed, in the blue light, with the television on. Twice Ray got up to adjust the color/tint setting and each time he came back, it seemed he sat just an inch or two closer. But a little while later, at the end of Bugs Bunny, he turned to me and said: “You must be tired. Maybe I should go home and let you get some sleep.”
And before I could turn to him and tell him that I wasn’t tired, and that I didn’t want him to go home, he took my hand. He didn’t let go, and I didn’t let go, and later, after he kissed me and told me that he’d wanted to do that from the first moment we’d met, I remembered what a small miracle it was to like someone and have them like you back.
[MATING SCENE DELETED.]
POST-COPULATORY PHASE: STAGE I
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF INTIMACY
What are the clinical characteristics of erotic desire as they become manifest in the course of psychoanalytic exploration? [One] is a search for pleasure, always oriented to another person, an object to be penetrated or invaded or to be penetrated or invaded by. It is a longing for closeness, fusion, and intermingling that implies both forcefully crossing a barrier and becoming one with the chosen object.
—Otto Kernberg
Love Relations: Normality and Pathology
I thought we would leave it at that.
At a “small miracle.”
At “like.”
After he left that morning—after I’d replayed and analyzed everything that had just happened, I spent half the day dementedly imagining what it would be like if Ray and I got married. Then, when I couldn’t get Joan on the phone, I called David, and spent the rest of the day at his apartment preparing what I would say when Ray came into my office on Monday morning for the Talk—the awkward, meandering, polite retraction of a “confused” man trying to get himself out of something he’d “accidentally” gotten himself into.
“Okay,” I said, sitting down on David’s couch. “So, like, I go to the office. And then I see him.”
“Right,” David said. He’d made coffee and poured us each a cup, then sat down in the armchair next to me. David had been in therapy for almost as long as I’d known him—long enough to treat me.
“Right.” I nodded my head.
David nodded too. “In essence, then, you see each other.”
“Right.” We’d see each other.
He brought his cup up to his mouth with both hands and blew at the steam. “It might help if you imagine exactly where this would happen. Like, at the reception desk.”
“Yes. Good,” I said. Then I said nothing. I could feel the autism setting in again, and so could David. I put my head down on the pillow and stared at his foot.
“Jane?”
I craned my head so I could see him.
“This really isn’t that hard.” But obviously, from my lack of response, it was. “So he’s there, and you’re there, and then Ray says something like—and I’m going out on a limb here—‘Hello.’ And you say?”
I took hold of his shoelace and pulled. “Hello?” I sat up on the couch and reached for my coffee. “But how do I say it? I mean, am I friendly? Aloof? Embarrassed? Unfazed? What’s my motivation?”
“What’s your motivation?” He ran his hand over the short, short hair on the back of his head and sighed loudly. “Jane, Jane, Jane-Jane-Jane. Why are you being so retarded?”
He waited, and when I said nothing, he came over and put his hands on my shoulders and bent his head to mine.
“Oh, I forgot,” he said softly. “You always act this retarded when you really like someone.”
But Ray did not leave it at that. And I was grateful not to have to wait until Monday to try out my big hello line.
“I hope I’m not bothering you,” he said late on Sunday afternoon when he rang my doorbell unexpectedly, “but I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
Bothering me?
I opened the door, and he walked past me down the long, narrow hallway to the living room. He was wearing a baseball cap on frontward, an old gray Champion sweatshirt, basketball sneakers without socks, and a pair of khakis like the ones he’d bought in Washington, and when he leaned up against the wall, it occurred to me how good my apartment suddenly looked with him in it.
“I hope you like donuts,” he said, walking over to me and opening the white paper bag he was holding so I could see inside. But I wasn’t looking at the bag, and neither was he, and before I could think of something clever to say, he moved closer and kissed me twice.
“I can’t stay. I’m house-sitting my friend’s apartment and I forgot to feed the cats today.” He looked at me and then away. “I guess I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
“Me too.”
“So. I was thinking maybe, tonight, if you wanted, you could come see the apartment I’m staying in. It’s a loft on Mercer Street.”
“A loft? In Soho?” I looked down at my black tank top and black jeans. “I don’t think I’m wearing enough black.”
He put his hands in his pockets and pulled up his pants until they came up to his shins. “Me either. But it’s air-conditioned.”
I looked at him standing there, with his sneakers sticking out like clown shoes, and at the expanse of calf revealed. I’d been too busy the other night to notice what nice ankles he had. “Okay,” I said, still ogling at them. “I’ll come.”
“You will?” Ray looked at me as if I’d just agreed to jump off a cliff with him. He wrote the address down on a corner of the paper bag, tore it off, and handed it to me.
“You know,” he said, “the only reason I came down to Washington for the convention was because I knew you were going to be there.”
Then he bent to kiss me, and I kissed him back, on his neck, where his shoulder and his sweatshirt and the nylon strap of his bag all came together.
I could tell you a lot of things about that night.
I could tell you how hot it was out and how I took a taxi to the address he had given me and how, when I got to the building and the elevator door opened on the fourth floor, he was standing there, out in the hallway, waiting for me.
I could tell you what he wore and what I wore and what the apartment looked like, all three thousand square feet of it, with its huge windows and high ceilings and us tiptoeing through it, like trespassers, like two benevolent, misbegotten house thieves, whispering, snooping, looking without touching.
I could tell you how making love in a stranger’s home, in a stranger’s bed, with someone I hardly knew, felt both odd and surprisingly natural at the same time, the way wonderfully unfamiliar things often do, and how afterward, when he got up to put the cat out into the other room, he wrapped a long white towel around his waist even though no one else was there.
I could tell you how, when he returned with a cold bottle of water, he sat down beside me on the bed and we passed it back and forth, taking long, slow sips from the wet sweating bottle, and how good it tasted, and how we sat there for a long time, drinking and talking and listening to the sounds from the street, and how sometime after that, after I had removed the towel and after he had pushed back the sheet, how, a long time after that, when it was almost light, we finally fell asleep.
“So. Let’s go over the facts,” Joan said with intense, almost clinical interest after I told her everything early the next morning. Talking on the phone first thing in the morning from our desks was a kind of unspoken ritual—a way to debrief each other on our short time apart (“Did he call?” “Did you call?”); to restate unanswerable rhetorical questions (“What will become of me?” “What will become of us?”); and to plan the strategy for the day ahead based on what we had to work with from the night before.
“For starters, you work together.”
“Correct,” I said, taking a long suck off my Starbucks sip lid.
�
��And, he’s engaged.”
“Correct.”
“Engaged. To be married,” she repeated, pausing a second or two either for effect or to think. “Who is she?”
“She?”
“The fiancée.”
“Oh. Mia. I don’t know. I’ve never met her.”
“Well, what does she do?”
I told her what Ray had told me.
Joan snorted. “I can just picture her. Walking down the aisle in Birkenstocks and an unbleached hemp smock.”
I snorted. “Oh, and she’s also a vegan.”
“They’ve been together how long?”
“Long. Six years.”
“Six years. And when’s the wedding?”
“They haven’t set a date.”
“They haven’t set a date?”
“Nope.”
She paused again. “Yet.” Her tone was firm. Strategic. She must be good at this stuff, I thought, since she was secretly involved with someone she worked with—and someone who hadn’t specified when—or whether—he and Joan would ever get married.
“That’s good,” she went on. “Very good. Considering.”
“Considering what?”
She exhaled into the phone like I was an idiot. “Considering,” she said as slowly as she could without not speaking at all, “that the man has already picked out his wife.”
“Oh. Right.” What was I thinking?
What was I thinking? Maybe I was thinking that our two nights together were more than just a fluke.
Maybe I was wondering when he would get around to telling me that he was still in love with his fiancée, or that we shouldn’t be doing this because we worked together.
Or maybe I wasn’t thinking at all.
Joan lit a cigarette and blew into the phone. “Albeit that he’s put her on layaway.”