by Laura Zigman
“Listen, obviously they liked you. I like you. You’re immensely likable.”
“But why?”
“You mean, besides the apron?”
He nodded.
I turned and stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“Kind of.”
“Why is it so important whether they liked you or not? Or whether you liked them or not?”
“I liked them.”
“But why do you care so much?”
He picked at a piece of the leftover apple tart but quickly grew bored with it. “Because I hate it when people don’t like me. Mia’s friends never liked me. I never knew what to say, and then when I’d think of something, it was never the right thing. Dinners were always like an E. F. Hutton commercial: Whenever I opened my mouth, they’d all stop talking and listen, as if they were sure I was going to say something politically offensive. Which I guess I did after a while. On purpose.”
“But tonight wasn’t like that. Joan loved you. I could tell. She would never have talked so much if she didn’t like you.” Which was true. Joan would have just sat there looking either extremely bored or extremely annoyed.
“And what about David?”
“What about David?”
“I don’t know. I felt like he was watching me the whole time. As if he knew something I didn’t.”
“That’s just the way he is. He’s very protective of me. Like a brother would be if I had one. We’ve known each other a long time—he was there when I was with Michael, and I was there when he still slept with girls. We know a lot about each other that no one else knows, and we understand each other in ways other people don’t. If he was watching you, he was doing it for me. To make sure I’m not going to get screwed.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“I’m always afraid of that.”
Ray looked at me. “I’ll never screw you,” he said, pulling me out of the kitchen and over toward the bed. “At least not like that.”
[SCREWING SCENE DELETED.]
“Funny,” Joan declared first thing the next morning when she called me at the office. “Definitely funny.”
“You think?”
“Hilarious.”
“Really?” I tried to remember Ray being hilarious the night before, but nothing came immediately to mind, so I thought I’d just take the compliment and run.
“Also, very, very cute.”
“I know.”
“I’m sure you do. Great hands too.”
“I know.”
“Very important.”
“The most important.”
“Can’t get very far without great hands.”
“I know.”
“And very attentive. You should see the way he looks at you. Turning his chair to stare at you while you’re talking. Ben never does that. Look rapt.”
“Wrapped?”
“Rapt. As in fascinated. Mesmerized. Enchanted. All of which Ray looked the entire evening.”
“So …?”
“So I approve. As soon as he ditches the phantom vegan …”
One down.
One to go.
I waited all morning to hear from David, but by noon he hadn’t called, so I called him.
“So what’d you think?” I asked when I reached him at his studio.
“Great dinner,” he said.
“And?” I said expectantly. “What did you think about Ray?”
“You mean, besides the fact that he has a great ass?”
I stopped short. “How could you tell he has great abs?”
“Ass,” David enunciated. “I said he has a great ass. Obviously your second choice.”
I laughed quietly. “Third, actually.”
“I see.”
“But what did you think think?”
There was silence on the phone as he considered the question.
“David?”
“Yes, Jane?”
“What?”
David exhaled loudly, and I could tell he was fidgeting. “Look, he seemed nice. He seemed very nice.”
“But?”
“But I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Tell me what you aren’t telling me.”
He exhaled again. “I just got this feeling. This feeling like he was a little too good to be true. Perfect cook. Perfect looking. Perfect boyfriend. It’s like there’s something going on underneath all that perfectness, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Well, what do you think it is?”
“There’s just something lost about him.” He paused for a minute, thinking. “It’s as if he’s never really belonged anywhere. As if he’s never quite figured out how not to feel lonely.”
I nodded, as if I understood, but I didn’t really. Not yet. I just waited expectantly on the other end of the phone for him to say something else.
“What?” he said. “You want me to tell you that you’re going to live happily ever after? That your kids—all two point five of them—are going to be brown-eyed child-pornography underwear models?”
I didn’t answer.
“What do you think I am?” he said. “An ass reader?”
I thought all day about what David had said, but by the afternoon I had decided to put it aside, to chalk it up to the over-protectiveness I’d described to Ray the night before. In the past I’d always seen what David had seen, what he’d try to explain to me. But this time I didn’t. When I looked at Ray, I believed what I saw:
Bull’s bullshit factor: zero.
POST-COPULATORY PHASE: STAGE IV
THE VOCALIZATION OF EMOTIONS
With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves: it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them.… Self-deception has to exist if a grand effect is to be produced.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human (1878)
You’ll never forget where you were when someone tells you they love you.
Where you were.
What you were doing.
What exactly they said when they said it.
Ray and I were putting fresh sheets on my bed. It was sometime after eleven o’clock on a Friday night, only two weeks after our relationship had begun, and we had just come upstairs from doing my laundry. The windows were open and it was raining outside, and I remember the smooth hissing sound the cars made as they drove by on the wet pavement.
I reached across my side of the bed to pull up the corner of the sheet and waited for Ray to pull up the other side. But he just looked at me and didn’t move.
And that’s when he said it.
He must have said something else just before it—something like I’ve never felt this way with anyone or How did I ever live without you? or some other combination of words that he had often strung together and that had always made him seem like such an emotion-filled person—but I don’t remember exactly what he said. What I do remember is that he said it, and that he used my name when he said it.
I love you, Jane is what he said. And then, without really thinking, without really knowing if it was true, even though in retrospect, of course, it was, I said, I love you too, Ray. Just like he’d said it, just so he’d know how it felt to hear his name used in a sentence like that.
Ray came around to my side of the bed and said something about fate, or about destiny, and I remember saying that I felt a very strong sense of some force too, of an invisible hand having led us both down separate paths to this point. And as we leaned against each other, waiting for the meaning of our words to sink in and settle, we both exhaled a long, slow, heavy breath, a breath that seemed to come not from our lungs but from a place much deeper and more unknown—the same place where relief comes from when finally it comes.
[MATING SCENE DELETED.]
In high school, when you start reading real books, about the suspension of disbelie
f—about how you will either be able to momentarily overlook a story’s contrived details and petty inconsistences and fall headfirst into the hole of the narrative, or you won’t.
Staring into a man’s eyes, at some critical juncture of a relationship, trying to decide whether or not you will close your own and fall farther into the deep, dark abyss of love is much the same thing, I think. Though the latter requires more than just a leap of the imagination. It requires a leap of faith as well.
I used to think about that Friday night a lot, when I was still trying to fit the pieces of Ray’s personality back together again. I used to think of him standing across the bed from me, telling me he was in love after only two weeks. Telling me he wanted us to move in together—without ever explaining what he planned on doing about Mia. And I often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t been sucked in by him that night, what would have happened if I had heeded the old proverb, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” Or if I had, say, thrown the sheet over his head and tried to suffocate him, knowing that he would break my heart ten weeks later.
Would he have retracted it then and there?
Would I have been spared two and a half more months of bliss, and thus, given the calculations of the layaway payment plan for passion, two and a half years of pain?
Or would he simply have mistaken my horseplay for foreplay and thrown me down on the bed and covered me with the sheet too?
“He just came out and said it. Just like that. After only two weeks.”
Joan and I had met the next day, on Saturday afternoon, at Aphrodite, a diner on Sixteenth Street which was halfway between her apartment in Chelsea and mine in the Village. She was staring at me while her hand went back and forth from the plate of french fries we were sharing to her mouth, and her eyes looked like they were open about a quarter of an inch too wide. Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed the split second or two between french fries, between sentences, when the expression in Joan’s eyes changed from shock and amazement to sadness and probably jealousy—that thin curtain that comes down occasionally between two friends when one is happy about the other having something but wishes she herself had it too.
But I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy not eating, since “love” had made me lose my appetite. I fondled both newly protruding hipbones and sucked down another glass of water.
Joan finger-combed her hair behind her ears and stared expectantly at me again. “And then what did he say?”
I picked up one of her Marlboros and took my time lighting it, for effect. “He said he wanted to live together.”
“Live together? Oh, my God. What did you say?”
What did I say? What did I say? “I don’t really remember. I must have said yes, or something to that effect, because he left with the Times’ real estate section.”
She stared at me. “It took Ben almost a year to say the L. word, and when he finally did, we were, you know, doing it, so it didn’t even really count.” Her hand pawed blindly at the plate in vain, since she had devoured the last french fry minutes ago. “I can’t believe this.”
I looked at the plate. “We can order more.”
She stared at it and then at me, and in seconds her eyes narrowed into slits. “Oh, I see. You’re trying to fatten me up while you get down to your cohabitating weight.” She grabbed a passing waiter by his Naugahyde menus and ordered a piece of Boston cream pie.
“Eat,” she said, handing me a fork. “Or I’ll tell Ray what a pig you are in real life.”
[DESSERT-SPLITTING SCENE DELETED.]
POST-COPULATORY PHASE: STAGE V
PREPARING FOR COHABITATION
A female, playing the domestic-bliss strategy, who simply looks the males over and tries to recognize qualities of fidelity in advance, lays herself open to deception. Any male who can pass himself off as a good loyal domestic type, but who in reality is concealing a strong tendency towards desertion and unfaithfulness, could have a great advantage.… [N]atural selection will tend to favour females who become good at seeing through such deception.
—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Fast forward:
Two months, ten days.
There was still this one little problem.
“So what should we do?” I asked one morning before work while we were still in bed in my apartment. What should we do about the ball and chain?
“We start seriously looking for an apartment is what we do.”
Ray rolled over on top of me and kissed me with his eyes open. “Just think,” he whispered, opening his eyes even wider with obvious delight, “we’ll be able to do this all the time.”
“You mean, not just when Mia’s sleeping over at the shelter? Or away at some conference?” The latter of which was why we were together that morning. “Or when you tell her that you worked so late at the studio, you fell asleep on the couch in your office?” Despite his lies I couldn’t help feeling flattered that he’d lied for me.
“No. We’ll be together all the time. Every morning. Every night. Weekdays. Week nights. Weekends. The thought of it is almost too wonderful to imagine.” He sighed heavily and paused for maximum effect. “My joy knows no bounds.”
His joy knew no bounds?
How pretentious he sounded.
How affected.
But New Cows can’t be bothered with the details of foppish language—they are far too busy enjoying their esteemed status and waving good-bye to their Bull’s soon-to-be-ex Current Cow.
It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it, though—Ray’s occasional lapses into pretentiousness. One night, shortly after we’d first met, when we were leaving the office together at the same time, we walked out onto the street and found that it was raining. I flipped open my umbrella and turned to look at him. Already drenched, he shrugged and rummaged through his bag.
“No umbrella,” he had said, as he removed a thin-spined paperback book and put it over his head. Then he said a most revolting thing: “But e. e. cummings.”
“I was thinking we should live downtown. Soho maybe. Or Little Italy,” Ray continued, a beatific expression spreading across his face. “I’ve always wanted to live in Little Italy since I like to pretend I’m Italian. Except for the fact that there’s no real supermarket below Houston, there’s great shopping.”
He rolled onto his back and ran his hands up and down his own abs, presumably checking to make sure they had not disappeared overnight. Reassured, he turned to me again and took both of my hands in his and kissed them. “I make a great sauce, cara mia. We’ll find the perfect apartment with a great kitchen, and I’ll cook spaghetti for you every night.”
Despite myself and his annoying use of the Italian possessive I couldn’t help being momentarily distracted by his pitch—even if one wasn’t necessary at that point.
After all, I had been starring in the movie of my perfect New-Cow fantasy life for a while now, ever since he had said, practically in the same breath, that he loved me and wanted to move in with me. The only thing I couldn’t quite manage to splice out of the endless reels of fantasy footage was the persistent plaintive mooing of that fucking …
“But what about …?”
“What? Apartment hunting? We’ll find one. A great one. I have a good feeling about this. And once we do, we’ll each give one month’s notice on our leases and be able to move in on September first.”
The footage continued.
The bedroom.
The bed.
The sheets and pillowcases.
The kitchen.
The Calphalon.
The vats of marinara sauce boiling over on the …
“Actually, I was talking about … you know.” I still couldn’t say Mia without feeling a wave of nausea at the “uniqueness” of it. I would have been so much less jealous if she were just Susan or Donna or some other fat-girl name.
Ray released my hands and went back to fondling his abs, albeit more distractedly than he h
ad before. He sighed heavily and shook his head against the pillow. “I guess I have to tell her, don’t I?”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, I would think so. Unless, of course, you want us all to move in together.”
The extra pillow.
The extra place setting.
The extra toothbrush.
The extra name on the mailbox.
All those macrobiotic cookbooks and packages of miso and fluffy clouds of tofu floating in watery …
“I know, I know,” he said. “I know I have to do it. I just haven’t known how. Somehow I feel like it’s the ultimate act of betrayal, of desertion.”
“That’s because it is.” I could hear myself saying the words slowly, too slowly, as if I were talking to a moron. “Look, I don’t want to feel like I’m forcing you to do something you don’t want to do. I mean, maybe it’s too soon to do this. Maybe you need some time between Mia and me to process everything. And maybe we shouldn’t rush into living together just because in New York it’s too expensive not to.”
“I don’t want to live with you because it’s cheaper,” Ray said.
“I know.” I paused. “It’s just that if you really want us to move in together—to be together—then I think you better tell her before someone throws her a surprise bridal shower.”
Ray stopped fondling mid-ab and looked stricken. “God. You’re right.”
“Not to mention,” I added, since I had his attention, “the fact that it’s wrong to continue deceiving her like this. I mean, if my fiancé wasn’t in love with me anymore and was in love with someone else,” I began, not knowing where I was going with that sentence but suspecting I was headed for a big fat fucking lie, “I’d … well, I’d want to know.”
“You would?”
“Of course I would.” I clicked my tongue and hissed like a pissed-off twelve-year-old. “Wouldn’t you?”
Ray looked pale. “I guess.” He lay on the bed not moving, barely breathing. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him.
Maybe a triple bed wouldn’t be so bad.
I put his hands on his stomach and moved them around slowly, hoping he’d catch on. But he didn’t.