Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  I hadn’t been looking to make any friends whose bones I constantly wanted to jump but wasn’t allowed to, so this wasn’t great news.

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  I could’ve argued with him, I suppose, told him I was worth his getting past the pain-in-the-ass-ness of the situation, but I wasn’t sure I was. I understood his fear because I had it myself. By the time most people are thirty-four, they’ve had multiple relationships and they’ve learned all the important lessons about how to fight without throwing things, what their deal breakers are, and what fetishes they can tolerate/might actually enjoy.

  I was already so behind.

  I sat staring at his blank bedroom wall, knowing this conversation was probably going to keep happening with every man I met.

  He brought me tea and toast with jam in bed and we talked for a while before going up to the attic to hang out. As “friends.”

  I felt sad and more than a little rejected, but it didn’t take long for me to get sucked into my surroundings. The attic was surprisingly warm and cozy, with crisscross-paned windows and old filing cabinets topped with vintage wire in-boxes that held stacks of paper I wanted to snoop through.

  We talked and he showed me some of the black-and-white portraits he’d taken of his friends (none of them were naked, which made me relieved that he wasn’t “that guy”). Then he put on a Tom Waits CD and read and napped on an old couch next to the desk while I typed on his Underwood (note: not a euphemism).

  It felt like a perfect afternoon.

  And then, because it was so perfect, it couldn’t have been more imperfect.

  This was what I would be missing because I had this fucking vaginal albatross.

  “I’m gonna go, I think,” I said, waking him up.

  “Oh. Okay,” he said, looking at his watch. It was about four in the afternoon. “You sure you don’t want to stay for supper?”

  Yes. It’s everything I want, actually. Everything.

  “No. I’m good. I just need to go.”

  We went downstairs and I put on my tights and shoes in his bedroom, the same spot where I’d had so much hope just a few hours prior.

  Stupid bedroom.

  He walked me to his entryway and opened the front door.

  “Well, I had a great time,” he said.

  “Yeah, it was really nice. Thanks so much for breakfast and for the drinks.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay? I could cook some pork chops.”

  “No, but thank you.” I just wanted out of there. I thought I might cry and I didn’t want him to see that. (Hey, remember when you thought you shouldn’t date me because what kind of freak is a virgin at thirty-four? How ’bout the kind of freak who cries after a first date?)

  “Can I at least hug you good-bye?” he asked.

  “Of course you can,” I said.

  He went in for a hug but kissed me instead.

  He kissed me so hard, it threw both of our bodies up against the wall in his entryway, his chest pressing into mine and every limb I could spare pulling him in with equal force. My hands were immediately in his hair and tugging at his shirt. I finally understood what people meant when they said they wanted to devour someone. I’d never been hungrier.

  After about five minutes of this, he finally came up for air and stepped back. He looked like a feral animal. In a good way.

  I attempted to recombobulate myself.

  “Well. All right,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he replied. “So, yeah. So you should stay for dinner. We can make out more.”

  I wanted so much to stay. But the problem was that it wasn’t all I wanted. I didn’t want to just make out with this person, I wanted to stay with him and then wake up with him. Multiple times, ideally. Maybe all the times.

  “I think I’m gonna go,” I heard myself say.

  “Really?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re ambivalent about me, I think. So I’m gonna go, and you can think about all this and figure out where you stand.”

  He seemed genuinely shocked.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll do that.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I smiled as I walked out.

  It was by far the coolest thing I’d ever done.

  And even before I got off the porch, I regretted it. All I could think in my car on the way home was What did I just do?

  I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. Until he called three days later. He wanted to cook me dinner, and I accepted. Which also had the potential to be the biggest mistake of my life.

  A week later, he made me pork chops and we fell in love.

  It took him three months to finally take my albatross, and because he’d spent that time figuring out what I liked, and I’d spent even longer reading a great book called The Guide to Getting It On, a huge eight-hundred-page tome with chapters like “The Glands Down Under” and “Fun with Your Foreskin,” it was actually quite lovely.

  I felt very lucky about that. After waiting as long as I had, it would’ve been horrible if it had been horrible. Which is probably why he didn’t want the pressure in the first place.

  Once I’d had sex, I wanted to have it all the time. And we did. In fact, if you lived in the greater Portland area between August of 2002 and April of 2004 and you noticed a slight downturn in the sexual activity in your relationship…we were probably having your sex too. Which I’d like to apologize for. But I won’t take it back. Believe me, the world owed me that sex.

  And I guess with all that doin’ it, I was distracted from the fact that I was making the classic rookie mistake: As I fell into him, I fell away from myself, almost completely. I was so grateful to him for loving me that I was perfectly happy to step into his life and leave mine behind. I hosted his cocktail parties, hung out with his friends…I even took on his temperament. I thought my goofiness wasn’t very sexy, so, for the most part, I ditched it.

  I loved to chat, but he was careful with his words. I would hunt for topics that he’d think were interesting. At the end of the day, I mostly wanted to talk about my job and my friends, but I could tell he didn’t find those subjects compelling, so I’d try to work those stories into a larger context.

  “Looks like Karen’s getting divorced,” I’d say. “People keep saying that divorce rates are skyrocketing, but in fact, they’ve been steadily declining for the past decade. Isn’t that weird?”

  It was fucking exhausting.

  I envy the reticent. They hold so much power.

  I would ramble on and on while he sat and listened and judged.

  Or at least it felt like judgment.

  It was probably just boredom.

  That’s just as bad. Maybe worse? Hard to decide.

  I used to think that in order to seem smart and interesting, I needed to reveal all the things about me that were smart and interesting in conversation. But I learned the hard way that the more I revealed about myself, the less interesting I became. At least to him.

  He was a goddamn sphinx, so of course I still found him fascinating.

  And even though the conversation didn’t always flow, I still thought I was happy.

  I was loved. Right?

  Lots of things suggested we weren’t right for each other, but other things suggested we should hunker down and work it out.

  He could be incredibly sweet.

  One night we were on the couch in front of a raging fire. He was reading a Michael Chabon novel and I was working on a sketch for the show. He was sitting sideways with his feet toward me, sometimes rubbing my leg to get my attention, like a Labrador. I would rub his foot for a minute and we’d lock eyes and smile and then go back to our respective book and laptop.

  The next morning as we were waking up, he said, “Last night? Sitting on the couch reading while you wrote? That was perfect. Thank you for making my life into exactly what I want it to be.”

  But over time, he became increasingly frustrated with my
neuroses, as did I. Neither of us knew that I had generalized anxiety disorder.

  One night as I was lying in his bed reading, he walked in and told me that he had noticed a small growth on my back.

  “Really?” I said, immediately reaching over to feel it.

  “Calm down,” he said. “I’m not gonna break up with you because you have a fucking mole.”

  I was always nervous about our relationship, so he wasn’t totally off base, but in that case I wasn’t worried he would break up with me, I was immediately sure I had skin cancer and would die within a year, so I was thinking about what countries I should travel to.

  So we were already on shaky ground when it finally cracked beneath us.

  Our friend Josey died in May of 2004. She was just a few days shy of her thirtieth birthday.

  Really, she was Jake’s friend. He’d brought her to Portland to work with him in his camera store. Josey was one of an army of fiercely loyal minions he had. They were people who believed in the power of old machines and the permanence of photo paper. They were anti-digital, anti–planned obsolescence, and pro–art that is very, very labor-intensive to create.

  I’d been dating Jake for two years and had grown to love Josey. She was impossible not to love and as different from Jake as she could be. He would walk to the store from his home close by, dressed in khakis, a sweater vest, and a tie. Josey rode a Razor Scooter with a monkey head on the handlebars, and she’d once paired a set of human-size butterfly wings with purple Doc Martens for a store party. When customers walked into the store, Jake would look up from his work and give them the Nod. Josey would run around the counter to give them rib-cracking bear hugs. She was the heart of that place, and in some ways I imagined she was his heart. Jake cared strongly about his customers and friends but his introversion didn’t allow him to run around the counter to hug them. Josey was his hugger-by-proxy.

  Their relationship was both professional and personal—Josey was a badass, do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-the-job-done employee and also the little sister that he (an only child) had never had.

  On May 8, 2004, Josey left Portland to drive to her parents’ house in Port Orchard, Washington, to celebrate Mother’s Day and her birthday.

  Jake’s phone rang at three a.m.

  She was only about forty miles outside of Portland on I-5 North when she hydroplaned and her car spun around and landed next to the median, backward. She got out of the car, perhaps to open up the hood to indicate she needed help, and another car hydroplaned in the exact same spot, spun, and hit her, throwing her about twenty feet onto the pavement.

  We wouldn’t know it for about three weeks, but for all intents and purposes, Josey died that night.

  Her parents, Randy and Marion, drove down from Port Orchard as soon as they got the call.

  I drove Jake to the hospital at three a.m. I spent about four hours in the waiting room while it started to get light outside. Jake emerged at about seven thirty a.m., and we walked out into the cool May air, the grass on the front lawn still dewy with mist from the night before. His face looked drained and blank as he matter-of-factly told me what had happened to her.

  It was bad. She’d lost her legs, aspirated fluid into her lungs, and been put into a medically induced coma.

  He broke down, and I let him fall into me, sobbing.

  It was Mother’s Day.

  I took Randy and Marion back to Jake’s house to get them settled in. Jake wouldn’t leave the hospital. He slept in the fetal position on a tiny couch outside the ICU that night, with one of those scratchy, too-small blankets that make everyone look like a child. He didn’t leave that couch for three weeks.

  As Josey’s body fought to survive, her friends and family filed into the hospital, one by one and in groups, reading three-year-old magazines over and over again and talking about mundane things to avoid talking about devastating, life-altering, heartbreaking things.

  Jake’s mother flew in that first week to help but only after he very pointedly told her, “If you come, you can’t be my mother. I need a driver, a shopper, a bed-maker, and a phone-call-maker. That’s the kind of help I need.”

  What he was saying to her but never said to me was Don’t love me. Don’t touch me. Don’t comfort me. It will break me.

  He was taking care of everything, dealing with the police and the hospital and insurance companies, and he believed, I think, that if he took any kindness, leaned in to a warm shoulder or returned a sympathetic glance, it would weaken him and he would never recover.

  I spent those weeks helping take care of the out-of-town guests, doing the grocery shopping and cooking meals, making beds and taxiing people between the hospital and Jake’s house. I was shell-shocked and sad, watching this extraordinary couple as their daughter slipped away from the world while at the same time watching Jake slip away from me.

  He would give me my assignments and then offer a perfunctory hug, but other than that, this previously affectionate (to me) person became cold and businesslike. He would sit as far from me as possible in the hospital waiting room. When I touched him, he would cringe and turn away.

  On May 28, 2004, three weeks after the accident, Josey died.

  The funeral was a week later in Port Orchard, Washington, about a three-hour drive from Portland. Jake and I drove up in a rental car along with a couple other friends and stayed in Josey’s old house with her parents. We were given the guest room—a perfect 1970s semifinished basement room with shag carpeting and a yellow floral bedspread.

  Jake was still emotionally distant but was at least holding me as we slept, which was perhaps my favorite part of dating him. Every night we spent together, as we prepared to go to sleep, he would wrap both his arms around me and pull me in as tightly as possible, the way you tie your boots before a long hike. It was as if he didn’t want a millimeter of space between us. It made me feel loved and safe, and most of the time it made me forget whatever perceived crimes of his I’d shoved all the way down into the dark recesses of my subconscious that day.

  After Josey died, Jake had let me know that Kelley, his ex-girlfriend of eleven years, would be attending the funeral. They’d broken up just five months before he and I started dating and he was understandably concerned about my feelings. I appreciated it but told him I was looking forward to meeting her. I wasn’t, but that’s just one of those things you say to not sound nuts.

  The funeral was at Marion and Randy’s Lutheran church, the same church that Josey had attended as a kid. It was beautiful and poignant and filled with hundreds of people trying to make sense of the utterly senseless.

  After the funeral, there was a potluck where we all ate way too many carbs and milled around for about an hour, until it was time to head over to the grave site for the interment. People started getting into their cars. I looked around, but Jake had disappeared. I asked Zeb, who worked in the store with Jake, if he knew where he was, and he told me he thought he’d seen him with Kelley. I looked out the back door of the church and saw the two of them walking away into the woods. There were a few of us going in the same car, so we waited for them.

  We sat in the back hallway of the church making small talk as more time passed. Fifteen minutes. Then twenty-five minutes. Then thirty. We were all fine at the beginning of this waiting period, but after a while, things got uncomfortable. I started having a hard time with the fact that my boyfriend had disappeared with his ex-girlfriend for a half an hour without saying a word to me. Of course I didn’t think anything illicit was happening between them. I wasn’t crazy enough to picture them having postfuneral sex in the woods. I was just feeling like…an asshole. Like the person who, along with a whole passel of other supportive people, had seen this man through a life-shattering experience and was now being treated just a little like shit.

  I knew my feelings were ill timed, but there they were, bubbling up and then bubbling over and slathering every good intention I had in black, tarlike emotional bile. Maybe being angry felt more comfortable
than being sad.

  We finally decided not to wait anymore and walked out to the church parking lot, and that’s when Jake and Kelley showed up. When Jake spoke to me, I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember that I was a bitch. I was short with both him and Kelley and couldn’t look either of them in the eye. We got into the car and drove to the grave site.

  The spot where Josey was interred was beautiful—a perfect, tiny but lush knoll under a big shady tree.

  As Jake and I stood next to the grave, he put his arm around me. I was sobbing quietly and couldn’t bring myself to put my arm around him.

  “Court?” he said imploringly. “Put your arm around me.”

  I just kept crying.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I couldn’t respond.

  He pulled me away from the grave site down a stone path about twenty feet away.

  “What is going on?” he asked.

  The best answer would’ve been Josey died, and I’m sad. That’s the answer a person who hadn’t been shoving down her anger for two years and, more important, the past three weeks would’ve given. That’s the answer that a person who could look past her own pain and exhaustion and whatever perceived slight she might have experienced and could recognize that this day was about Josey would’ve given. I regret to inform you that is not the answer this person gave.

  “You should’ve told me,” I said.

  “Told you what?” he asked.

  “You just should’ve said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go talk to Kelley for a while. Are you okay? I love you.’ You just should’ve said that.”

  I watched as all the color, feeling, and love drained from Jake’s face. With his head cocked, he squinted at me, looked down, and walked away.

  For me, the image of the end of us is simple. It’s Jake in a suit, walking wordlessly past a series of gravestones, and me knowing that he would never come back to me.

  The heaviness in my chest was almost unbearable, and there was nowhere to find comfort. I was three hours from home, surrounded by Jake and Josey’s friends, doing my best to hide my agony. As soon as we got to Josey’s parents’ house, I grabbed the cordless phone from the kitchen and went to the basement to call my friend Marie.