I groan the way any guy does when a girl wants to hear about his past and you plead. You endured three hours with a bunch of women you’ve known since high school, most of whom are married to men or women you’ve known for aeons.
“Come on,” you say. “Tell me why you really bit the bullet. Who are you running from?”
It’s the dream—you want to know everything about me—and it’s the nightmare—I can’t tell you everything about me. I learned the hard way, with Love, but there is no way for us to move on unless you learn why I am the way I am, handsome, available, good.
I start at the beginning, my first love in New York. I tell you that I fell hard for Heather (RIP Candace). It was lust at first sight. I saw her in a play—pretty as Linda Ronstadt—and I tracked her down at the playhouse.
You wipe your glass with a napkin. “Wow. You went all out for this girl.”
“I was young. It’s different when you’re young. You get obsessed.”
You give me a yeah and you are jealous, the idea of me obsessed with another woman. I sip my drink while you picture Linda Ronstadt on top of me and I tell you what you need to hear, that Heather broke my heart. You perk up. You want to know more and I tell you about the day she dumped me. “I’m checking out this apartment in Brighton Beach because I think we’re gonna move in together,” I begin, remembering that day on the beach, Candace. “It was a hot summer night. I’ll never forget the smell, the gnats…”
You’re happy because this girl made me unhappy and you pout. “Please don’t ruin New York for me, Joe.”
I laugh and I tell you that Heather dumped me over voicemail while I was in that apartment and you gasp—no—and I laugh defensively, lovingly, the way you do when enough time has passed and you’re ready to love again, in a way you never have before. “Yep.”
My chicken sandwich arrives and you pick up one of my French fries and you chew. “Wow. You lost the girl and the apartment.”
I take a bite of my chicken and you reach for another fry. We are clicking. You want the bacon, I can tell, and I pull it out of my sandwich like it’s a block of wood in Jenga and you pick it up. Crunch.
“If you think Heather’s bad, oh God, let me tell you about Melissa.”
You rub your hands together and this is fun. It’s cathartic for me to tell you about Melissa (RIP Beck). In this version, I was a waiter at a diner on the Upper West Side and Melissa came into the restaurant, sat in my section, and wrote her number on the bill. You take a big sip—Well, that’s aggressive—and I say that Melissa was too young for me. Your cheeks turn as red as the Red Bed. You like that I’m the anti-Seamus, that I want a woman, not what our youth-obsessed society would call a trophy.
“Yeah,” I say. “Way too young, but I thought she had an old soul. Her favorite book was Desperate Characters.”
You wipe your hands, feeling threatened again. I tell you what I learned from Melissa, that reading doesn’t always promote empathy. She was a competitive fencer and she was in a love-hate codependent relationship with her best friend Apple (RIP Peach Salinger). “But that wasn’t the problem,” I say. “In the end, Melissa was in a relationship with one person and one person only.”
We say it at the same time: “Melissa.”
You feel for me. I endured Melissa’s numerous microbetrayals. I tried to love her, help her focus on her fencing (writing). And then she cheated on me. She slept with her coach (psychologist). You bury your head in your hands. “No,” you say. “Oh God, that’s horrible on so many levels.”
“I know.”
“A coach.”
“I know.”
I’m eating my sandwich and you’re looking at me like I should be crying. “It’s really not so bad,” I say, realizing that it isn’t, because look where it got me, to you. “You’re lucky to get your heart broken. That just means you have a heart.” I’m not ready to talk about Amy, about Love, so I move us past anecdotes into theory. “Everyone is the wrong person until you meet the right person…” You rub your empty ring finger. “I’m not bitter, Mary Kay. If anything, I hope they’re doing great…” Up in heaven, or dust in the wind. “I hope they found the right person.” I pray for a remorseful almighty lord—Hare Forty—and I take a big bite of my sandwich.
You let the waitress know that we would like another round—fuck yes—and you admire my healthy outlook on life. I tell you it’s no big deal. “So,” I say, because the door to your heart is cracked now, the tequila, the details about my life, and you’re finally ready for me to enter. “You and Nomi… real-life Gilmore Girls. What’s the story there?”
You let out a deep sigh. You look around the restaurant, but no one is listening to us. No one is close. I know it’s not easy for you, being on a date, but you are. You know it. You begin. “I was young but I wasn’t that young, and my life… well, I told you about my parents.”
“Mary Kay mom and dear old dad.”
You smile. “Yeah.”
“Did your dad put up a fight when you moved up here?”
I smell onions, layers peeling away, revealing the truth under the truth. You tell me you didn’t understand the divorce. There was no scandal, no cheating. “It was like one day, my mom woke up and she didn’t want her pink Cadillac anymore. She didn’t want him either.”
“Were there signs?”
“I missed them,” you say. “Are you good about signs? Reading people…”
Yes. “Well, who can say?”
“I think we all see what we want to see.” You look around again, so nervous, as if one of these people is going to text Nomi and tell her that her mother is on a date. And then you relax again. “Well, my mom sort of just announced that she was done with Mary Kay, that we were moving to Bainbridge Island, that she was craving nature.”
“And you don’t know why she left him?”
“No clue,” you say. “It was amiable. There was no custody battle, no fight. He was so calm that he drove us to the airport! He’s my dad and he’s kissing us goodbye like we were going away for the weekend. We left him all alone. My mother made me complicit. But then, that’s not fair to say because it’s like I said. It was all so damn amiable.”
I feel for you, I really do. “Jesus.”
“One day my mom’s harping on me to use more eyeliner and the next thing you know… we live here and she’s telling me that I don’t need lipstick. I didn’t ask her why we left, but then… what’s scarier than your mom becoming a total stranger?”
I think of where I stand with Love, powerless against a woman’s blind determination to make our child her own. “I get it.”
“And then, after all that, my mom spent every night on the phone with my dad, egging him on to eat better.”
“Strange.”
“Right? And this was before cell phones. I couldn’t call my friends back home. I didn’t have any friends here yet. I felt so alone. She was always in her room, taking care of my dad, letting him tell her how beautiful she is as if they were still married. I remember thinking, Wow. You leave him… You move to another state. But you never leave a man, even when you do.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ.”
You air-toast me with your empty glass. “And that, my friend, is too much information.” We’ve come full circle, inverted the joke, and you signal for another drink and you’re in flow, the levee broke. “It’s like… we all know about sham marriages. But what about a sham divorce?”
“That’s a good way to describe it.”
You stare at the table and the waitress plunks our drinks down and you thank her and sip. “I just wish I knew why she left him at all if she was only going to spend the rest of her life on the phone with him, you know? Because why not just stay together if that’s what it is? Why uproot my entire life?”
I don’t answer your question. It was rhetorical. All you need is for me to listen.
“I look back and I don’t know how I survived.” You breathe. You are activating the most important empathy, the em
pathy we have for ourselves. “My mother and I were bickering nonstop. One night I lost my temper and threw my landline at her and she had this huge welt on her forehead, so bad she had to get bangs to cover it up.” I smile but you furrow your brow and oh that’s right: violence against women is always bad, even when it’s you. “It was like Grey Gardens minus the fun…” I love you. “I guess your Cedar Cove fantasy got under my skin because no one welcomed us with open arms.” You sip your drink. “Then, one day, Melanda asked me to eat lunch together. She told me all about her fucked-up family…” Foregone conclusion. They named their child Melanda. “I told her all about mine. She said I’d fit in really well because everyone on this island is fucked up, they just like to pretend they’re not and… I dunno. Life just went on from there. Melanda was my buffer. She showed me all that graffiti at Fort Ward. And that graffiti… well, it helped. It still helps.”
“How so?”
“It’s like a conversation that’s still alive. My mom and I, we never got around to hashing it out. But I go to Fort Ward and I feel like I can still talk to her even though she’s gone. Like maybe one day she’ll appear in the sky and tell me that I’m not doomed to mess up my daughter the way she messed me up…” That is why you stay away from love and you shrug. “I dunno. I’m probably just drunk.”
You’re not drunk. You just haven’t found anyone to talk to. You look at me—you can’t believe I’m finally here—then you smirk. You can’t believe I’m still here. “Pretty bad, huh?”
“No,” I say. “Pretty human.”
I said the right thing and you laugh. “Well, I swore I’d never confuse Nomi like that. Ever.”
You’re self-conscious. You felt so safe with me that you forgot about where we are and you glance around the pub, nervous. You wipe away a half-tear and you snort. “Sometimes I think I got pregnant just to piss her off, to remind her that if you really love someone, you know, you fuck them instead of just talking on the phone…” You are a little drunk now. “And once in a while when you’re actually having sex, the condom breaks. C’est la vie.”
“I get it,” I say.
Another anxious look around the bar. “Well, the timing was tough… but yeah, I did have this hunger to make my own little family, to kind of show her up.”
“And you did.”
“Have you met my kid?”
“Oh come on,” I say. “Your kid is fucking great. You know it.”
You do know it and it’s important for you to realize that you are a good mother because once you see that, you can let me in all the way. We are still treading water, even after all you said. You’re holding back as you open up about your father and explain that he calls you a lot. “I don’t always pick up, I mean I have Nomi, I have a job, and every call ends in frustration. I’m not my mother, you know?”
“It’s fundamentally different.”
“I can’t stay on the phone with him all night. I will not do that to Nomi.”
You think all men are a threat to your relationship with your daughter and I am here to help you change. “I’m sure he understands that.”
“I just… I will not do that to my daughter. I won’t let my life ruin her life.”
You think it’s your fault that your dad is sad and I know how that feels. I push my plate to the edge of the table. You look at me. You need me. “Look,” I begin. “You can’t fix someone who doesn’t want to be happy.” Hi, Candace. “You can’t make anyone see the light if they prefer the dark.” Hi, Beck. “You try to do that, you end up on a dark road. You make bad decisions.” I really did move to Los Angeles for Amy, the stupidity. “And then you get stuck.” I have a permanent bond with Love Quinn, a son. “It’s not easy, but you have to accept that there’s no right move with your dad. You can’t save him from himself.”
The pub is clearing out and you’re rubbing your neck. “Wow,” you say. “And here I thought we’d just be gossiping about the Mothballs.”
You’re officially drunk. Floppy hands and loose lips and still I want you. You tell a long-winded go-nowhere story about an old friend in Arizona and you can’t remember her name and you say you feel like a traitor sometimes. You don’t keep in touch with anyone from your past in the desert and you came here like a phoenix from Phoenix.
“I’m the same way, Mary Kay. The ability to move on doesn’t make you a sociopath.”
You raise your glass and wink. “Let’s hope so.”
We’re closer than Closer. You tuck your chin into your hand. “Joe,” you say, pulling me in, making me think of your Murakami, all but sucked inside. “Tell me… Do you like it in our library?”
What I say right now matters and I take my time. “I like it in your library.”
You felt my your. Your foxy lips are wet. “Do you feel good in the library?”
I felt your good. “Yes, I feel good in your library.”
“And you’re pleased with your boss?”
Oh this is fun and I stir the ice in my cocktail. “Mostly.”
“Oh,” you say, and I am the human and you are my resource. “Mr. Goldberg, do you have a complaint about your supervisor?”
“That’s a harsh word, Ms. DiMarco.”
You lick your lips. “Tell me about your complaint.”
“Like I said, it’s not a complaint. I just want more, Mary Kay.”
“More what, Mr. Goldberg?”
Your bare foot finds my leg under the table and I pay the bill. Fast. Cash. I am up. You are up. You say you need to stop in the bathroom and the bathrooms are off to the left and you go in and close the door and then you open the door.
You grab me by the collar of my black sweater and pull me into the bathroom and press your body into my body, my body against the wall. The art in here is full of passion. Nudity and salt water. A naked woman in the sea on her back. Her hands grasp the shoulders of a frightened sailor, still clothed. It’s a shipwreck. It’s us. Wrecked. Groping. You kiss me and I kiss you and your tongue is at home in my mouth—land ho!—and the waves wash over your shouldprobablies. My hands slide under your tights—no panties, cotton crotch—and my thumb finds your Lemonhead—and you cling to me. You say it all. You wanted me on the Red Bed and you bite my sweater—this sweater makes you crazy—and there are sparks in the water—we are on fire—and you are the last page of Ulysses. You grab me. Oh God, Joe. Oh God.
But then you break away. Cinderella when the clock strikes twelve.
You remember what you are. A mom. My boss.
And you are gone.
5
I know, I know. It was just a kiss. I barely felt your Murakami and I didn’t lick your Lemonhead but then again. Oh God, Joe. Oh God. What a fucking kiss.
When you’re with the right person you do the right thing and I was smart to let you go home. I went to my Whisper Room and counted my blessings for all the bad women who came before you. I get it now. Of course you ran. Real love is a lot, especially at our age.
I don’t go to Pegasus on the way to work—your kiss is my caffeine—and you pushed me away, but this is the nature of grown-up love, especially when kids are involved: push, pull, push, pull. I open the door to the library—pull—and you aren’t at the front desk and the Mothball on duty doesn’t like me. The day we met she asked if I’m a Bellevue Goldberg and when I said no she turned her nose up at me. She points at Nomi’s chair.
“You mind moving that? It’s too cold by that window.”
I move the fucking chair into the fucking stacks and I grab my lunch—WE eat the beef and WE eat the broccoli—and I tell the Mothsnob that I’ll be right back and she rolls her eyes. Rude. “I hate to break it to you, but your little friend called in sick today.”
No. No.
The Mothsnob just chuckles.
You’re not sick and I go into the break room and where are you? Were you really that drunk? Was our kiss made of tequila? I storm away from Silverstein’s Whatifs and I pass your office and your door is closed. There is no light in the attic
and you’re not sick. You’re scared.
I take my post in Fiction and the day drags. I sell a recently widowed accountant on some Stewart O’Nan and I get a day-tripping lesbian to read the first chapter of Fashion Victim and I am good at my job but I am better when you’re here to chime in. All day I check my phone and you don’t text and I don’t text and you kissed me so maybe I should be the one to text you and I try to find the words.
Hi.
But that’s too fucking wimpy.
Hey.
But that’s too fucking cocky.
Are you there?
But that’s too fucking pushy.
I’m here.
But that’s too fucking needy.
I hate cell phones because if it was 1993 I wouldn’t have a fucking phone and did you tell Melanda about our kiss? Did she get into your head? I walk out to the Japanese garden. I could bail on my shift—I’m just a volunteer—and I could pop by your house and be the Cusack to your valedictorian but I can’t do that because Nomi’s the one who’s graduating this year, not you. And I don’t do that. I don’t “pop by” and I don’t steal phones, not anymore. I check your Instagram—nothing—and I check the Meerkat’s Instagram but there’s nothing about you, nothing but Klebold. I want to share a picture of Love Story but I would never be that lame with you. That blunt. That clingy.
I need to talk to you now because the longer we’re apart, the more the kiss seems like a scratch in the windshield that’s easily sealed and I want to know why you’re hiding.
At the end of my never-ending shift I skulk back to the break room, wondering if I used too much tongue and then the door opens. It’s you. Your eyes are puffy and you fake a smile. “Hi.”
“Hey,” I say. “You’re here.”
Do we hug? We don’t hug. You’re wearing a faded green sweater and you don’t smile. You gnaw on your lip—you didn’t get enough sleep—and you say you just stopped by to pick up a few things. You sit across from me like we’re a couple of Mothballs comparing our MRI results, like you weren’t sucking on my tongue a few hours ago. I lean over the table to get Closer and you arch your back. Cold. Farther.
You Love Me Page 5