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

by Ben Karlin

  A couple of days later, Helen Goldfarb called. She wanted to apologize. She’d gone back to her books and couldn’t figure out why I’d been invited.

  “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” she insisted.

  I told her not to worry about it.

  “Well,” she said, “let me know if you ever want to come to one of my parties in the future.”

  She had to be kidding.

  “Your friends aren’t looking for a guy like me,” I said, trying to be polite.

  “Who knows? Maybe some of them have a Mrs. Robinson fantasy.”

  That cracked me up.

  “I really don’t think your friends go to your parties with a Mrs. Robinson fantasy in mind,” I laughed.

  “Don’t be so sure,” she said slyly.

  “I’m pretty sure,” I insisted.

  “Well don’t be!” she practically purred.

  Was this possible? Was Mrs. Goldfarb trying to seduce me?

  “Are, uh, you saying that you . . . have a Mrs. Robinson fantasy?” I stammered.

  “Maybe I am.”

  So there it was. I had no secret admirer, but I did have my very own Mrs. Robinson.

  I was shocked. Like any healthy twenty-eight-year-old, I had a couple of Mrs. Robinson fantasies stored in the old fantasy Rolodex. I was very open to the idea of afternoon trysts at a discreet hotel with a grown-up woman with grown-up needs. But, again, something just wasn’t right. I mean, a Mrs. Robinson fantasy is one thing, but Mrs. Goldfarb was something else entirely. Why couldn’t my Mrs. Robinson look a little more like Anne Bancroft and a little less like Mel Brooks?

  I let the silence linger for a few moments longer, and then I very politely declined the invitation.

  Lesson#11

  A Grudge Can Be Art

  by Andy Selsberg

  Our second or third time in bed together she bit her lip and said she had a confession to make. I tensed up and cupped my nuts protectively to prepare for possible bombshells: crabs, herpes, warts, a psychotic boyfriend, a Nazi grandparent, a nameless rash. But it was none of that. Instead she said, “I’m not really twenty-two. I’m nineteen.”

  Nineteen! Was I angry? Hell no. I felt like I’d won the Barely Legal sweepstakes. I pinched myself, then her, and wondered what I’d done to deserve such good fortune.

  This put our span at eleven years—scintillating, but hardly a scandal. It was nothing compared to those chasms bridged regularly in Hollywood, where an actor can be in his forties, dropping the kids off at college, and his dream girl is taking nursery school entrance exams. None of that for me—what this girl and I had was positively wholesome.

  Ours wasn’t just a novelty act—we got along, bantered well. One waitress even thought we were a stage duo, our jibes were so in sync. There was a picnic in the park, the Guggenheim, a Mets game. She had big red hair and a Birth of Venus beauty that was all invitation and tease. She liked to say it was a good thing she wasn’t more attractive, because then she’d really be able to wreak sexual havoc.

  That should have been a warning. Also, she was an aspiring actress. Also, she said she wasn’t looking for anything serious. Also, she drank a lot. Also, I had to buy her beer—suddenly I was the skeevy older guy who gets booze for the high school crowd. Also, she was into diet pills. Also, she fantasized about plastic surgery. Also, she said she had a problem with dating guys and then banging their best friends. And this is just the evidence that to me speaks well of her.

  Did all these pieces add up to a red flag? Try a massive, rippling banner of war. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see it—too big. Maybe I thought I could beat the system. Maybe I just really liked her. Either way—I was all-in, gung ho.

  One night, after a play, she called me from a bar and said she wanted to come over. I met her at the subway, and before we’d walked a block she told me she didn’t want any romance. She just wanted me to be a friend. I wish I wish I wish I explained to her that she was just with her friends, at that bar, and that I was something different—a friend with a hard-on. I should’ve said I’m sorry and good-bye and been done with it. Instead, I tried to be that friend. We sat on the swings across from my apartment and discussed her confusion. It got late, and I convinced her to sleep over as a friend. She worried it would be awkward. I wish. Watching the person you want to touch, who doesn’t want to touch you, sleep in your bed, in your boxer shorts, is searing. “Awkward” would’ve been a vacation.

  Some nights later she told me she loved me “as a person.” Unless you want someone to hate you forever, don’t ever tell him you love him “as a person.” It’s like a consolation prize you don’t want that leaves you with an unwieldy tax burden. If you absolutely have to love me as something, love me as a walking dildo.

  And I didn’t even get breakup sex. Isn’t breakup sex Article One in the relationship Bill of Rights?

  A couple months after she broke up with me—while we were still having fraught, sexless rendezvous—she screwed one of my close friends. She screwed him not once, but on three separate occasions. Then she had a threesome with my roommates. My roommates! A threesome! With! From a distance, I have a sort of reverence for this blitz—it took some set of labia to pull it off. But really, I felt like I’d been smashed in the back with a folding chair, then elbowed in the gut. I worry the nausea will never go away completely. And these are just the things I heard about.

  And I didn’t hear about it for over a year—one of those years where everybody knew I was a patsy but me. I’d known the friend since college, and once, when we were taking a long walk and having an old-friend talk, he asked if the girl at the center of this gave good blow jobs—when he knew the answer from direct experience! I didn’t know it at the time, but here was the humiliating vaporization of our friendship. And I’m flexible—if he’d only gone to first base with her, I would’ve let it ride. A lot of gay couples don’t even think of making out as cheating. But anything in scoring position and beyond is a problem. I miss the guy on occasion, but the image of those two repeatedly fucking each other, while I still wanted her more than anything, blots out all the good memories.

  Right after I found out, I ran into her at a bar. She was with her new guy, a pip-squeak. If she’d been toting around a movie star, or some Wall Street stud, I would’ve at least had the grim solace of being soundly beaten. But this dude was her age. And in acting school. She was slumming it with a peer. And . . . they made out in front of me. A fail-safe display, in case I didn’t get it. This was a rout. I got it, I got it.

  What was I supposed to do with all this? People rarely say, “You know what you need to do? Carry a grudge. An old-fashioned, dense and righteous grudge.” Forgiveness and forgetfulness are prescribed so often that we’re likely to forget the grudge is even an option. But I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. The grudge picked me.

  It’s not easy. I didn’t have any experience with grudges, had no good models to follow, so I had to wing it. A year or so after she broke up with me, the actress crocheted me a scarf. Most likely, she really did love me as a person, or at least felt some vague guilt she wanted to ease. I could’ve just accepted the scarf, held it to my face while imagining her having sex with my former best friend, and left it in a garbage can—maybe on one of those dark, lonely alleys near Wall Street. That would’ve been a dignified move, with a nice quiet drama. Then maybe we follow the scarf’s adventures after it gets picked up by a lovable hobo. But that wouldn’t be true to my grudge. Instead, I took the scarf back to the girl at work. I said it was the only scarf that made me feel colder when I put it on. Zing! I was hoping she would cry and be mad at me. She did! She was! I swear I had a grudgegasm.

  The grudge is a way to show you care, a way to stay connected. It would have been an insult to let what we had be downgraded to a mere polite acquaintanceship or even worse, nothing. The grudge required embarrassing, accusatory letters. It required sending blank e-mails. It required every meeting we had to be ambiguous and tense. I
t meant feeling sick when I saw girls who just looked like her.

  I started doing some stand-up comedy, and she said she really wanted to see me get up and tell jokes. I forbade her from watching, as my main reason for doing stand-up was to spite her.

  She said she wanted to be able to ring me up and have long, late-night chats about her dating life. I blocked her number.

  Who knew a grudge could be so sweet? I would love it if a girl I dumped cared enough to stage a performance based partly on my idiotic moves, and then prohibited me from attending. I even started feeling disheartened by exes who didn’t hold grudges against me but should. It’s like, don’t you care?

  The good moments of our relationship—when we were both just aggressively happy to be in each other’s company—would add up to fewer than forty-eight hours, and that includes being asleep together. It has what people in the relationship business call a long, spiky tail. Now, I’m the only one lumbering around with this bitch of a tail—I’m sure the other principals have long since sloughed it. This freakish thing is all mine by now. A grudge distorts—it wears a brain-path that you keep going down.

  If I could erase the whole thing from my memory, go Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I would. She even looked like Kate Winslet’s character in that movie. My facility with grudgecraft is something about myself I’d rather not know. So I’ll allow myself this one grudge, and maybe if I don’t work on it it’ll just get worn down into something faint and powerless, like graffiti on a park bench.

  I do know where I’ll see her eventually: on a reality show. She is genetically and socially engineered to tear through one of those setups like an erotic tornado. She’ll wire the group together, then detonate every basic interaction. The cameras will find her. She’ll make for fantastic television. America will love to hate her, hate to love her. I can see the teasers: on next week’s episode, Eternal Sunshine makes a shocking confession. It will be disgusting. It will be spectacular. And I’ll be retching and cheering louder than anyone.

  Lesson#12

  I Still Like Jessica

  by Rodney Rothman

  In 1987, when I was thirteen years old, I dated Jessica. She was the first girl I ever dated. It lasted two weeks. Then she became the first girl to ever dump me. For years afterward I was secretly in love with her. In fact, it never really went away, even during the occasional times I saw her as an adult. In March 2007, using this book as an excuse, I called Jessica up in San Francisco to talk about it. With her permission, I taped the conversation.

  JESSICA: Hello?

  RODNEY: Jessica . . .

  JESSICA: Hey . . .

  RODNEY: Okay, cool. Sooooooooo . . . let me start with a basic question. Do you remember going out with me at all?

  JESSICA: Uhhh okay, okay . . . [nervous giggles].

  RODNEY: [nervous giggles]

  JESSICA: Um . . . like, I am having a vague recollection. . . .

  RODNEY: [giggles]

  JESSICA: But I am not sure . . . if it’s . . . I would think we may have gone out . . . before I went . . . before I went out with Jon Nelson.

  RODNEY: Come on.

  JESSICA: He was your best friend, right?

  RODNEY: Yeah. Yes.

  JESSICA: I think that might be . . . that’s what I am remembering.

  RODNEY: So you are remembering that you definitely went out with us.

  JESSICA: That’s possible.

  RODNEY: Me.

  JESSICA: Definitely.

  RODNEY: Definitely.

  JESSICA: I definitely went out with Jon Nelson.

  RODNEY: You remember that.

  JESSICA: Clearly.

  RODNEY: Okay. I guess just tell me what you remember [about us going out]. Do you remember how it started?

  JESSICA: All right. Okay . . . Okay, now thinking back . . . the last thing I remember is sleeping over at your house when Samantha and I used to hang out and make cookies and all that.

  RODNEY: My twin sister.

  JESSICA: And you and Jon were hanging out having a sleepover that same night also, so . . . I remember not being crushed out on either of you guys.

  RODNEY: Uh-huh.

  JESSICA: I remember that you guys were lurking. [That’s] too harsh a word, but . . . [giggles] . . . you were around.

  RODNEY: Right.

  JESSICA: And you know, I think . . . we started talking and maybe I agreed to go out with you . . . and maybe—this is like I am reaching back—that you may have asked me to go out and I said yes but I don’t know if we did or not. But I think that was how it was. But I am not sure if I agreed to go out or not. Um, I think I recall like it being like it was for two hours or three hours or one of those things like its going out but it only lasted a couple hours.

  RODNEY: I remember [it] being like a couple of weeks.

  JESSICA: Oh my God.

  RODNEY: Yeah, I remember that I was told I should ask you out and it was around the time of my bar mitzvah. So that would like be December of probably eighth grade, and . . . so okay . . . so it’s [stammers] . . . so did you have a crush on me? It doesn’t sound like you did at all.

  JESSICA: No.

  RODNEY: So you don’t even . . .

  JESSICA: No crush.

  RODNEY: So . . . so this may be hard if you don’t remember us dating for more than a few hours.

  JESSICA: Right.

  RODNEY: But why . . . but why if I asked you out, why would you have said yes?

  JESSICA: I think . . . because I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. And I would just feel bad to say no. Maybe it was the first time being asked, or having a romantic relationship. And not knowing what to do.

  RODNEY: Yeah not knowing what to do. I think that was . . . probably the first time I ever asked anyone out. In fact, I am sure it was. It was through other people. It was like, “You know Jessica? If you ask Jessica out she will say yes.” And I was, “Okay, then tell her that I’ll ask her out.” Then it was like, “Jessica says she will go out with you,” and then I do . . . have a memory . . . of seeing you in the hallway . . . in junior high school after that . . . and really not knowing how . . .

  JESSICA: Uh-huh.

  RODNEY: Like I was talking to someone and you tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around and like I didn’t know how to talk to you because it was like all of a sudden we were going out but we hadn’t actually talked to each other directly about it. I didn’t know how to actually act or behave [with a girlfriend]. I didn’t necessarily know you that well.

  JESSICA: Right.

  RODNEY: Ummmm . . . how do you remember me? How do you remember me from maybe before we dated?

  JESSICA: Ummmm . . . I think, uh, I don’t think there was a Dungeons and Dragons yet, ’cause I think a little of D and D.

  RODNEY: You [think of me] and you remember D and D?

  JESSICA: Okay, yeah, but even like pre–D and D . . . like . . . not playing war games . . . but a lot, like boys scrambling about. And probably [I had a feeling that] Sam’s brother had a little crush on me.

  RODNEY: Oh really.

  JESSICA: Like . . . I guess I thought you had a little crush on me.

  RODNEY: Umm, was that because . . .

  JESSICA: Because you were . . . what’s that word? Furtive. Okay, that sounds weird saying it, but yeah. Kind of like looking over [at me], or sometimes not looking.

  RODNEY: Sounds like you were [very aware of what I was doing]. What was that all about?

  JESSICA: Oooo, ummmmmmmmm . . . well . . .

  RODNEY: I’m just kidding [pauses]. Okay, so, okay, so what do you remember if anything of our actual three-hour relationship? Do you have any memories of that?

  JESSICA: [Pauses] No [laughs].

  RODNEY: [Laughs] No memories. . . . Since this entire interview is based on you being the first person I ever went out with and dumped me . . . is there a possibility that we never went out at all . . . and the entire thing was some kind of twisted delusion on my part?

  JESSICA:
On yours.

  RODNEY: On my part.

  JESSICA: Yeah.

  RODNEY: Uhhh, you’re saying yes.

  JESSICA: Yes. I would say so.

  RODNEY: Oh no.

  JESSICA: You know if you keep hearing something or being told that this may have been possible, you definitely start believing it [laughs]. It’s happened with other guys too.

  RODNEY: Wow, so you also . . .

  JESSICA: [Laughs]

  RODNEY: If there are other guys who imagine that they were going out with you and they weren’t, then I am going to float the possibility that YOU are the deluded one. If that’s happening to you a lot—the guys thinking they are going out with you and you think they’re not.

  JESSICA: Oh, there’s absolutely the chance.

  RODNEY: Yeah, there’s a weird brain situation where you . . . like the part of gray matter that let’s you know when you are going out with someone . . . you don’t have it.

  JESSICA: Well, you know . . . I prefer the case that I’m really narcissistic, but yes, I think this is biological in my brain.

  RODNEY: Well, do you remember . . . do you even remember kissing me?

  JESSICA: [Pauses] Nooooooooo.

  RODNEY: You don’t remember?

  JESSICA: Nope. Did we kiss?

  RODNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

  JESSICA: Stop.

  RODNEY: Yeah.

  JESSICA: Where?

  RODNEY: For real. I will tell you exactly where because I have thought of this probably fifty thousand times. I was going to say fifty times so that I would not seem weird, but in reality probably somewhere between fifty and fifty thousand. No, but I remember this well. It was while we were going out . . . my definition of going out, not yours.

  JESSICA: Yeah . . .

  RODNEY: It was in my house and it was in my closet of my bedroom . . . and I was there, my sister was there, and probably Peter Tompkin was there . . .

  JESSICA: Oh my God.

  RODNEY: And the thing that was weird about it was that Peter was outside, and I had just gotten the Steve Miller Band record and Peter was playing “The Joker” obsessively over and over again the whole time we were in my closet. And whenever I hear that song I . . . that’s all I can think of.