Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me

by Ben Karlin

  “She died loving you,” said the man.

  “No doubt,” I said, not wanting to say, “Yeah, and one time I came all over her!”

  The next hour is a bit of a muddle in my memory. Our neighbors behind us provided me with a shovel and a large shoebox. I put Gabby in the box and went into our backyard, where I started digging a hole under the big banana tree. My movements were laconic at best. I was thinking about how Gabby would always drape herself over my shoulders while I was typing, and about how she wasn’t going to do that anymore. I also remembered how she shredded my roommate’s favorite plant the day I adopted her, setting the stage for many years of naughty behavior. For a while, I had a black plastic stick with a feather on the end. I’d wriggle it in front of Gabby’s face, and she’d lunge for it. Then I’d whirl it around in a circle, and she’d lay chase. Then, I’d wriggle it again, just below her chin, and then suddenly whip it up several feet in the air. Gabby would leap high in the air, providing amusement for many years’ worth of stoned partygoers. She hadn’t done that for years, but she still had a pretty good vertical leap.

  From behind me I heard, “Let me help you.”

  It was the hippie.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “I’m a professional,” he said.

  I wanted to say, “What? You’re a professional grave digger?” But, again, he was very helpful, so I didn’t.

  He took the shovel from me and began attacking the ground with a jackhammer motion. His body type (lanky), level of tattooedness (high), and general speed of motion (spastic) called to mind Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He attacked my cat’s grave as though he were performing a lunatic encore at the Wiltern.

  He handed me the shovel silently. I tried to place Gabby’s box into the hole. It didn’t quite fit. So I poked the shovel around the edges to create a few extra inches of room. From behind me, I heard, “Hey, Neal, you need a drink?”

  “I’m cool,” I said.

  “You need some bud?”

  “Hell, yeah!” I said, and I started to dig faster. Gabby would have wanted me to get stoned at her funeral.

  A few minutes later, I scooped the last shovelful of dirt onto my cat’s grave, and patted it down. Less than one hour before, she’d been alive. Now she was in a box in my backyard. Life went away that quickly. Man.

  The smoke could wait. My family needed me now. Or I needed them. I went into the house where Elijah was watching an episode of Curious George on TiVo, sat down beside him on the couch, and immediately broke down sobbing.

  Regina rushed me out of the room.

  “Get a grip on yourself,” she said.

  “How can I?” I said. “My kitty is dead!”

  “You need to be strong for your son.”

  “You fucking Protestants and your repressed emotion!”

  “This has nothing to do with me being a Protestant. I just don’t want you upsetting Elijah.”

  “Fair enough.”

  A few minutes on the bed calmed me. Then we switched our focus. We were concerned, at first, that it would be tough to get Elijah through Gabby’s death. But he moved quickly through several odd stages of four-year-old grief.

  1. Lying in bed at night, listing all the family members who are still alive.

  2. Asking what Gabby is doing in heaven. Asking what a soul is when we tell him that only Gabby’s soul is in heaven.

  3. Asking how Gabby can eat underground.

  4. Pronouncing “We have a dead cat!” upon entering the schoolyard the day after Gabby’s death.

  5. Less than a week later, asking if we can eat “Gabby stew” for dinner.

  I think the kid will be fine.

  As for me, I miss my little Gabby. She was a good companion in the days when I didn’t have permanent female company. She saw me through the writing of four books, the editing of another, and the composition of countless newspaper and magazine articles. She moved with me from Chicago to Philadelphia to Austin to Los Angeles. She also left little pools of barf everywhere and consistently tore holes in my clothing with her claws. Basically, she was a cat. But she was a sweet cat, and she was mine, and there’s a hole in my life without her, even though I now have to do a little less cleaning.

  But I also feel like, in some ways, her death was my fault. They say you cut several years off a cat’s life when you let them go outside. So why did I let her, in a congested urban neighborhood? In some ways, I was still trying to make up for how I treated her after the “incident,” and to show that I still loved her in the pre-incident way. I now realize, and for some reason didn’t realize it then, that pets don’t really have memories. They respond to how they’re being treated at the moment, and that years of kindness and loyalty can erase a couple of nasty afternoons or weird, semiperverted nights. Yes, you should live every moment like it’s your last, and all that, but pets are around for even less time, and we should appreciate them fully before they’re gone.

  Gabby used to sit on my laptop. Sometimes, I’d leave it open, and she’d sit on the keyboard and really screw things up for me. For eleven years, I made it a habit of running into my office and making sure my laptop was okay. It still occasionally occurs to me that I should check.

  But she isn’t there.

  Lesson#7

  Technology Can Be Friend and Foe

  “The Internet may not be he best way to meet guys, but it sure is a fantastic way to break up with them.”

  Lesson#8

  Eggs Must Be Broken . . .

  by Tom Shillue

  On Sundays I take the baby out to the park. It is all daddies on cell phones pushing strollers. We look at each other and smile—gosh darn it if we aren’t the coolest guys in New York City—in our baseball caps, with a Starbucks in the cup holder. Most of the dads look like Moby. A few look like Wayne Gretzky. But we’re all equal in the park.

  “Give your wife the morning off?”

  “Yep, sure did. Told her to relax, get a pedicure.”

  “Nice.”

  I always like to help out with the baby. A car seat has to be adjusted or a whole new larger car seat has to be installed or perhaps the same one has to be turned to face the opposite direction. So I do that.

  I help with bath time. Not in a useful sense, but I am there for support, and if my wife has to go get a washcloth, I make sure the baby doesn’t drown. I also lean over and make faces so the baby looks straight up while she gets her hair rinsed. That is a big help.

  But more importantly I make sure I am always available for date night with my wife. We get a sitter and go out to dinner, just the two of us at a nice restaurant. I’m sure my wife appreciates this—and it’s not just because several Web sites have confirmed this is something that should be done—I like doing it, too.

  So I’m the perfect husband. And everything is as it should be. But it wasn’t always this way. If one pulls back the blinds and peers out into the yard of my past, you’ll find the rusting carcasses of many failed relationships, right there, up on blocks. I’m not hiding them—they are out there for everyone to see. But were they really failures? Or did they all have meaning? Serve a higher purpose? Did they all briefly run, and then die, so my current, blissful family life could purr like a . . . I don’t know . . . is GTO a car? Whatever car runs really well. That.

  To put it in more academic terms, those carcasses/girlfriends couldn’t have known it then, but they were a prestigious prep school for Happy Marriage University, where I am currently enrolled. Or rather, each was a prep school that I got kicked out of, before finally being accepted at HMU, which, I’ll have you know, was in no way a safety school.

  Without a doubt, the two-year relationship, or “fake marriage,” is the perfect place to prepare for real marriage. It provides a man all the trappings and pleasures of marriage, but requires no more commitment than that of a softball league or car lease.

  Here’s how it works: Somewhere early in the two-year relationship, the guy will do something bad. Not
bad enough to get dumped, but just bad enough to breach confidence. He will offer an apology of sorts—something along the lines of “Sorry, but that’s just the way I am”—which will leave the relationship in a state of limbo. This is the “commitment sweet spot” for a guy. Trust is shattered, but sex continues and the bathroom still smells good.

  For those wondering how that breaks down into a formula, it is this:

  Happy Fake Marriage→Callous Behavior→Half Apology→Détente

  The relationship will slowly play itself out, and eventually end, unremarkably. But don’t be fooled—these relationships are far from meaningless. (I had nine of them!) They prepare a man for a successful long-term relationship by providing a “what not to do” template he will be able to follow in the future.

  In a fake marriage, you will get away with things a wife would simply not allow. For example—men don’t like to plan ahead. Women do. In one of my fake marriages, with Alison, I insisted no plans be made more than forty-eight hours out. I would say, “Honey, where I am in my life right now, I need flexible scheduling.”

  This annoyed Alison, but I held firm. And it worked. I got just what I wanted—no planning ahead. (Alison eventually dumped me with no warning whatsoever. What could I do, besides nod my head and appreciate her lacerating use of irony?)

  Now, with my wife, I know this sort of thing would be unacceptable, so I don’t even try it. I have loosened up my “spontaneous living” demands, and it has worked out just fine. I am willing to pencil in appointments, vacations . . . all sorts of things—weeks, and sometimes months, in advance. I do this for her, but it helps me, too. I actually like knowing we will be renting a house on Cape Cod for the last two weeks of August 2011. In fact, I’m very much looking forward to it!

  Let me use a more vivid example with a different fake wife, Betsy. I did not call Betsy after she went in for surgery.

  Betsy and I were about six months into our two-year relationship when, right on schedule, I firmly committed to the callous behavior as noted in step two of my formula. I was heading to Los Angeles for a while, and after several days I realized I had not yet spoken to my girlfriend. I wonder how she is doing? I thought to myself one day. I’ll have to call her . . .

  This was really not out of the ordinary in the midnineties. Some people forget what long-distance communication was like in the early Clinton years. Not everyone had a cell phone, and making a call required some complicated steps: coins, phone cards, a pay phone not covered in a mucouslike substance. So, we simply hadn’t spoken—for what turned out to be eight days. I would have thought it was a little less than that, but it turns out it was indeed eight.

  I picked up the phone and gave her a ring. What the heck, I thought, I will surprise her with my thoughtfulness.

  “Hi, Bets . . . it’s me. How ya doing!”

  A great deal of silence.

  “Betsy, what have you been up to?”

  A great deal of silence, then an angry voice from the other side.

  “You didn’t call me while I was in the hospital!”

  Oh, yeah. Wow. That’s right. The operation. The eye surgery that Betsy was going in for two days after I arrived in L.A. The eye surgery she had been talking about for months, and that she had asked me to consider canceling my trip over. The eye surgery!

  Instead of becoming immediately apologetic, I decided the best course of action was to pretend that eye surgery was not that big of a deal.

  “Oh . . . wow . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . the surgery. How’d that go?”

  There was a sound of a telephone receiver falling onto a bed, then being dragged slowly across cotton sheets, and then a clumsy knocking on the nightstand, and finally tumbling into place in the hang-up position, and then, more silence. Not quite as dramatic as a good hard click and dial tone, but effective nonetheless.

  The future of the relationship was in danger. What should I do? I consulted my guy friends and associates for help. Most were married or in relationships and reacted similarly: “Oh, man, that’s bad. It’s almost unforgivable.”

  “Start with flowers every day and apologize every chance that you get. It might not work, but it’s worth a try.”

  “Get on a plane right now. Get back there and make it right.”

  And on and on. I decided to consult with my friend Bryce, a gay man.

  “Oh, you poor guy,” he said. “Why is she giving you such a hard time? You forgot!”

  Thank you, gay man. You can call gay men all sorts of names and accuse them of being soft and womanly, but they are blessed with a steely reserve that is 100 percent pure male. They have no fear. Why should they? They have never had their male perspective diluted by a woman. The pussy whip has no power over the gay man. He has never had to face it in battle. He is not intimidated—any more than the family of four is intimidated by the medieval mace riveted to the wall next to their booth at Applebee’s.

  “You forgot!” said Bryce.

  I forgot. You’re damned right I forgot. That would have to do. I would approach my girlfriend with that excuse: I forgot.

  I called Betsy and uttered the phrase. To show good faith, I added a little “I’m sorry . . . but I forgot.” And the whole thing was settled. That is how it works in the two-year relationship! And, of course, we were left in the “commitment sweet spot” for the remainder of the two years.

  Now, I know the Bryce advice would not work for me today. Gay guy counsel can be invaluable to a man in a two-year relationship, but not to a married man.

  Looking back with Betsy, could I have handled things differently? Certainly. But the important thing is that I didn’t, so the experience was filed away. I learned it is rarely acceptable to forget about a woman’s surgery (even if it is what I would consider, by most reasonable standards, minor surgery). I would not do that again. Now, if I am away, and my wife has to have an operation, I call her before and after. I visit. There are cards and flowers. And my marriage is the better for it.

  This is what I am thinking as I watch my adorable daughter, adorably eating Cheerios one by one off the table as we sit down to dinner. I open a bottle of Côtes du Rhône for my wife and myself. The scene is ideal. And it’s real. I pour, we clink glasses, and silently, I toast. To Betsy. To Alison. To all my fake wives. To all my failed marriages. For they have made me the perfect non-ex-husband I am today.

  Lesson#9

  Women Are Never Too Young to Mess with Your Head

  by Larry Wilmore

  From the moment you know you’re having a girl, you’re in love. The months leading up to the birth of a daughter are filled with romantic notions of father-daughter bonding. These were the things I was promised. When I fell in love with my future female offspring, the femme fruit of my loins, I was counting on this relationship. The first sure thing with a woman since breastfeeding I’ve ever had in my life. Well, things didn’t quite work out that way. It’s taken nine full years to recover and I’m only now able (through the blessings of counseling and psychotropic drugs) to tell the story. This is my journal of those dark days. The days between the precious little love of my life and me.

  July 13, 1998

  11:18 p.m.

  Eight hours and forty-two minutes. It’s so weird knowing the actual date and time your child is going to be born. Angie’s doing pretty good [Larry’s wife] but my lower back is still killing me. The doctor said there’s nothing wrong and even suggested I could be having “sympathetic” pains. Great. (I meant that sarcastically.) I paid him six hundred dollars for him to tell me he doesn’t know why the fuck my back hurts. Anyhow, I’m excited about tomorrow. I’ve always wanted a little girl and she’s almost here. Wow, I’m starting to get emotional. Just the thought of seeing her makes me feel . . . God, I can’t really put it into words. Somebody told me you fall in love with your kids the second they’re born. I think I’m already there. Shit, my back hurts. I hope that’s not an omen. What if there’s a problem with the delivery or if she comes out with something wr
ong with her? I can’t think like that. Everything’s cool. She’s going to be healthy, beautiful and healthy. Shit, I wrote healthy twice. I’m going to bed. See you in the morning, Lauren [Larry’s daughter’s name].

  July 14, 1998

  9:51 p.m.

  Wow! What a day! So emotional! Angie’s spending the night at the hospital. She’ll be home tomorrow. She did great. I was really proud of her. And Lauren. Oh my God, what a beautiful little girl. We are so blessed. It was a little scary at first. They took her out and she had this bizarre frozen expression on her face as if she wasn’t quite ready. The doctor spanked her and she didn’t do anything. My heart was in my throat. Seriously, my mind went to all the worst possible outcomes imaginable. I thought, fuck, what if thinking about bad shit happening last night led to some bad shit happening? I don’t even think I was breathing. She spanked her again and again nothing. Her face had no color and I felt all the blood drain out of mine. I looked at her, my eyes welled up, I can’t even explain how far down I felt like I was starting to go; and then she just looked at me and let out the biggest scream you could ever imagine. Wow! Tears all around. I cried like a beotch. I mean, it was almost as if she saw me and just couldn’t hold it in. The doctor said she had never seen a baby with that kind of lung power. That’s my little girl! And every time I held her today, she cried. Whew, I am drained. Hitting the sack. Hey, my back doesn’t hurt.

  July 18, 1998

  1:05 p.m.

  Thought I’d sneak an entry during the day, it’s so hard to do anything at night. Everybody’s exhausted. This is going to sound weird but I actually got my feelings hurt this morning. It seems like Lauren cries whenever I hold her. Angie thinks I’m crazy, but it’s true. Every time I pick her up, she screams. What the fuck? I don’t want to sound paranoid or overreact but what the fuck? That’s all. You know what, I’m overreacting.