Me: “Well, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black.”
Hanna: “P, this isn’t about me. And you know that.”
I decided to sleep on it, which was hopeless. I tossed and turned all night and the next morning, at about seven, I put my bruised ego and my sorry ass back into a taxi and went back to Guy’s apartment and sniveled an apology to him. Guy, as was the norm for him, was fairly stoic about the whole thing. A few days later, he said he wanted to meet for dinner so we could “discuss” our relationship.
Anytime you have to discuss your relationship, you know you’re in trouble. No one ever gets together to discuss a relationship if everything is going well. No one’s ever like, “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about our relationship because I think it’s going really well.” If you get together with someone to discuss your relationship, it’s most likely because your relationship is fucked.
Over dinner, Guy told me that he really liked me but that he just wasn’t “sure” about us. He also said that he really didn’t think I was putting one hundred percent into our relationship. When I didn’t respond, he asked me, “Are you putting one hundred percent into this relationship?”
The truth, of course, was that I wasn’t putting one hundred percent into this relationship at all. The truth, of course, was that I was so preoccupied with making sure I didn’t get hurt that I was fucking the whole thing up. But it was too late to do anything about that. The only thing I could do, it seemed, was at least get out of this with my dignity intact. So instead of blowing myself up like a suicide bomber, which was what I wanted to do, I told him the truth. He was right, I said. I hadn’t been putting one hundred percent into our relationship. I told him that I, too, wasn’t sure if this was a one-night stand that we had mistaken for something else, but that I definitely felt something for him that I couldn’t explain away. He seemed really conflicted and we decided it was probably best to take some time apart.
Or, rather, he decided it would be good to take some time apart and I agreed. But I agreed mostly because I knew I had no choice. If I had learned anything at all, it was that if someone wasn’t sure if they wanted to be with you the worst thing you can do is to try to convince them otherwise. They’ll just retreat further. It’s human nature. You can’t force things and if Guy was ambivalent, then so be it. I told him I hoped he would come around, and more than that, I hoped that if he did come around that I would still feel the same way.
I was proud of myself. It takes strength to be vulnerable. We had a sweet and very sad parting that night. We hugged for a while and I went back to Maya Silver’s apartment knowing that at the very least I had been honest, and that was really all I could do.
The next day I had resigned myself to the fact that things very likely were just not going to work out between us and I was going to have to live with that.
And then I got a text message from him as though nothing had happened. He had the gall—the audacity really—to invite me to go to his parents’ house with him for lunch. Like we hadn’t pretty much just broken up the night before.
Now I was really confused. And pissed. What the fuck?
I wrote back saying that given our conversation the night before, I really didn’t think it was a good idea, at all, and that perhaps it would be best to see each other when he was more clear on how he felt and what he wanted.
The whole thing was beginning to seem very insane to me.
I called Roy and told him what was going on. I was like, “I don’t know what his deal is, but I am not in the mood for mind games.”
Roy was like, “I don’t know what’s going on with the two of you, but I can tell you for sure that Guy is not the type of person to fuck around and if he’s asking you to go to his parents’ house with him, you should just go.”
Meanwhile, Guy would not stop texting me.
So I caved.
From the moment he picked me up, everything was different. He was different. I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone. I don’t know if he had been testing me the night before or if the fact that I had been so honest had lessened his fear or if my willingness to be vulnerable made him feel less vulnerable or if it was a combination of all of the above. Or maybe it was that he had told his parents I was coming for lunch and he didn’t want to show up without me. I knew his parents adored me but that seemed like kind of a stretch.
Whatever it was, it seemed insane.
When I called him out on his erratic Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde behavior, he got all verklempt. I got a sense that I had really done his head in. I was in Israel but I wasn’t staying with him. My friend came and I went away with her. I didn’t answer the phone. Was I coming or going or staying? When I pressed him on this, he said, “Your lease is up in two weeks and I think you should move in with me.”
I remained silent.
For the next two weeks, from morning until night, I sat outside at the coffee shop across the street from my apartment and wrote. Guy came by to say hi almost every day. He left work and drove the fifteen minutes across town just to give me a kiss or bring me flowers. The first time he brought flowers to the coffee shop, he texted me and told me he was parked up the block and to just leave my stuff and come meet him. When I got to the car, he handed me a bouquet of flowers and said, “I couldn’t bear to be one of those pathetic guys who gives you flowers in public, but I hope your writing is going well and I can’t stay but I just wanted to tell you that I love you.”
As the summer and my lease drew to an end, it became increasingly clear that I was going to have to make some sort of very serious decision.
The way I saw it, I had three options:
1. Renew my lease at Maya Silver’s.
2. Go back to New York.
3. Move in with Guy.
After living with Noam for ten years, the last thing I wanted to do was play house. Moving in with someone was serious business and moving out was even more serious business. I asked myself if I was really ready to get that serious.
I knew that there were, of course, no guarantees with anything in life, but the thought of going through yet another breakup made me want to toss myself into oncoming traffic. On the other hand, I felt like I had been standing at the edge of the diving board for quite some time and it was time to jump or go home.
I jumped.
13
The One I’ve Been Waiting For
On August 1, 2009, I moved into Guy’s apartment. It had been nearly a year to the day we met. The first thing I did was throw away every single trinket in it. The second thing I did was throw away the god-awful painting he had hanging over the couch. Then I reorganized the entire apartment. Guy was a clean freak but his organizational skills were for the birds and his “taste” in design was haphazard at best. I don’t do floors or windows or really anything of that ilk but I am totally OCD and will organize the shit out of any closet, cabinet, or drawer. I also threw out all his sheets and towels and bought new ones. Things were coming together. At least in the apartment they were.
The adjustment of living in Israel was another story. I adored Guy and while Tel Aviv was a great city to visit, I found that it was not nearly as dynamic as New York when it came to actually living there. Moving someplace new was always exciting until you got used to the place and then it wasn’t new anymore. And after the newness of Tel Aviv wore off, I started to get really claustrophobic.
Guy was really cute and he tried really hard to make me feel at home; he left me little notes telling me how much he loved me and he took me to the beach at night and he was very romantic—all the time. He was always hugging me and kissing me and he was obsessed with music, so he was constantly dedicating songs to me.
We could be in the middle of anything and he would suddenly stop everything and say, “This song is dedicated to you . . .” He liked dark, brooding stuff like Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen and he was obsessed—obsessed—wit
h Neil Young. I mean he was crazy, too, don’t get me wrong. He took like five showers a day and was constantly cleaning shit but other than that and his occasional big mouth—which made me want to murder him—he was pretty much an angel. I mean, listen, no one’s perfect.
I was writing all day but I was restless. I decided I needed to get a job. So I found a bartending gig. I had bartended on and off for years in New York but I quickly learned that bartending in Tel Aviv was very different from bartending in New York. Bartending in New York is awesome. Bartending in Tel Aviv, not so much. For starters, in New York there is something called tips. This was a concept that had apparently not yet been integrated into Israeli society. Because I didn’t drive, I was taking taxis to and from work and it was costing me as much in travel as I was making in a night. Moreover, because we were in Israel, everything was in Hebrew—from the cash registers to the menus to everything in between. I spoke Hebrew, but I didn’t read Hebrew, so this was a nightmare as well.
Beyond that, I was like an indentured servant, scrubbing glasses and mopping floors until four in the morning. In addition to tips, restaurants and bars in New York have something called dishwashers. They were invented during the Industrial Revolution but apparently restaurants in Israel had not yet received this memo either. The glasses would be washed in the back and then they would be stacked in front of us and we had to dry them by hand. And then the manager, Shira, would come over and hold each one under the light as though she were appraising a rare gem. No matter how clean I would get the glasses, Shira would be like, “Are you sure you dried this glass? There are still some water spots on it.”
And then, she would actually rinse a glass off and dry it in front of me and say, “This is what the glasses are supposed to look like when they are dry.”
It wasn’t long before I wanted to bash her face in. It was painfully obvious to me that Shira was overcompensating for the fact that she would be running that restaurant for the rest of her life. One day after I had been working there for a couple of months Shira came up to me and said, “I just want you to know that I really like you. I admire the fact that you came to a foreign country and I think you’re really brave but I don’t think this is really working out. What do you think?”
I said, “You really want to know what I think? I think you’re a liar. You haven’t liked me from the moment you met me and that’s fine because I don’t really like you either. Second of all, I think you’re envious of the fact that for me this is a job and not a career. And third of all, when you grow up a little bit and get the owner’s dick out of your ass, I think you will realize that your snotty attitude is a thinly veiled attempt to overcompensate for the fact that you are deeply insecure. That is what I think.”
And with that, I collected the rest of my paltry salary and left.
After a few more months in Israel, I was really starting to get antsy. In Israel, I felt like I was a fish in a pond. And I didn’t want to be a fish in a pond. I wanted to be a shark in the ocean. I was having delusions of grandeur and thinking of sharks when my phone rang and a number showed up I hadn’t seen in months.
I said, “Your ears must have been ringing.”
Nico said, “P?”
I said, “So funny you called. I was just thinking about sharks.”
Nico said, “I’m doing well, thank you. How are you?”
I was like, “I’m good, but let’s skip the formalities. What’s going on?”
Nico said, “Well, actually, we just signed a new client and it’s very up your alley and I thought maybe you’d want to be head creative on it.”
In other words, he needed help. Given how we’d left things, it was shocking that he had the balls to call me out of the blue and ask me for help. I was about to articulate this when he said, “Given how we left things, I know it’s really ballsy for me to call you out of the blue and ask you for help. And I would completely understand if you told me to go fuck myself and hung up . . . But it’s a really big job.”
And then he told me about it. It was a big job and it was also a very tempting offer. In many ways, there was nothing to think about. I wanted the job. I just wanted to make sure I’d be taking it for the right reasons. And then, too, it was as good an excuse as any to go back to New York.
Guy and I had been toying with the idea of going to New York for a while and this really did seem like the perfect opportunity. Guy was pretty much over his job anyway. It was a good job, a great job even, and though he never said it, I think meeting me made him realize that the world was full of possibilities he had never considered.
There was one thing I knew I had to do, which was to tell Guy about my history with Nico before we went to New York. Even though it was a moot point, I knew they would meet and I didn’t want him to hear about it from someone else. Plus, I wanted to be completely honest with him. I was like, “Listen, this is totally irrelevant and it all happened a long time ago but I just wanted you to hear it from me. Nico and I used to kind of have a thing.”
“And?” Guy asked.
I said, “And nothing. That’s it.”
To which Guy replied, “Mazel tov.”
And with that, a few weeks later we were on our way back to New York.
One morning, shortly after we had arrived in New York, we were lazing about talking about how we had to move out of the rabbit cage and into a normal-size apartment when Guy said, “Let’s go.”
I was like, “Let’s go where?”
Guy said, “Oy yoy yoy. Where else would we go? Let’s go get a ring.”
I got up and started pacing back and forth. I was like, “Seriously? You’re making me very nervous right now.”
Guy was like, “Well, that’s your problem, not mine.”
I eventually calmed down and we walked over to my favorite antiques shop, where he bought me a beautiful ring with conflict-free diamonds from 1916. Standing outside in the middle of Twenty-Fifth Street, I said, “Well, can I have it?”
And Guy said, “No, you can’t have it. You have to agree to marry me first.”
I was like, “Fine. Now can I have it?”
Guy shook his head. He was like, “There really is something wrong with you. You don’t have a romantic bone in your body.”
He took the ring out of its box and said, “So you’ll marry me?”
I said, “Yes, yes, I’ll marry you.”
Later that night, he took a flower out of the vase on the kitchen table, took the ring off my finger, put on Nick Cave’s “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?” and got down on his knee and again asked me to marry him.
And again, I said yes.
Epilogue
Happy Endings
Noam and I eventually became very good friends again. We reunited when we had to put Eli, the dog we found so many years ago while we were eating Passover dinner, to sleep. It was an emotional reunion and I feel very lucky to still have him in my life. He lives in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, who works in human rights and who is probably far less vapid than I am.
Hanna met someone on her spiritual retreat in India. After a year of dating, she left Manhattan and they got a place together in Montana. He is a social worker and the opposite of every guy she has ever tried to date, i.e., he’s not rich and he’s not an asshole. She recently called me and said, “I got a massage yesterday with Ben and it really made me miss those happy endings. But then I told him all about them and he said he would be cool with it if I wanted to do that again. I think this time I might try it with a girl.”
Nico and I made amends and went back to being best friends. He even helped me plan my wedding.
Guy and I got married in New York City on September 5, 2010. I refused to deal with anyone in the wedding industry, which is, by the way, the most insidious industry in the world. My dress was by Monique Lhuillier and I found it in the Gilda Radner Thrift Store on Sevent
eenth Street. It had been donated by a rich lady from the Upper East Side who bought it for her daughter who then decided she didn’t want it. It was unworn, with the tags still on. The original price was $6,000.00. I paid $350.00. My shoes were by the late great Alexander McQueen. They were bright-red spike heels with a heart-shaped peep toe. The original price was $895.00. I bought them on sale for 75 percent off. Just saying. Hanna, incidentally, was my maid of honor.
Guy and I moved out of the rabbit cage to a loft. I took the couch that accompanied me on the journey described in this book with us until Guy finally convinced me to get rid of it, which I did begrudgingly. Literally one week after I donated it to a thrift store in the East Village, I got a phone call from my editor, Denise, to discuss the cover of my book. She said, “I know we had planned a different direction entirely, but one of my colleagues had an idea that everyone loves and I hope you’ll be open to it because I think it could be really great.”
I was like, “Go on.”
Denise said, “We think you should be photographed on your grandmother’s couch . . . if you still have it.”
I was like, “You have got to be kidding me.”
And then I told her the story.
We actually had to purchase the couch back from the thrift store so that we could use it for the cover shoot and then re-donate it. Since the plastic cover was long gone, I had to make about four thousand phone calls before I found a company in Queens, of all places, that would custom-make one for it.
I never found my hygienist Leslie Myron.
Uncle Bark is as crazy as ever. But he’s one of my favorite people on the planet and I couldn’t live without him.
Roy and his wife still live in Tel Aviv. They just had their second baby. He was the best man at our wedding.
Even though we left Chinatown, Guy and my father meet every single week (usually on Saturday mornings) to have coffee and get a foot massage around the corner from where we used to live.
On My Knees Page 16