by Ben Karlin
I blame all the women who never dumped me.
Lesson#45
It Wasn’t Me, It Was Her
by Rick Marin
I got in touch with my college girlfriend recently when her husband left her for the daughter of a famous TV mogul. We exchanged e-pleasantries. Then she asked how come in my memoir, Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, I didn’t mention that she dumped me. Okay, Julia (as I called her in the book), I’ll bite. I e-mailed back, “I thought I dumped you.” Her response came fast and furious:
“Say you’re joking or I’ll lose what little faith in men I have left.”
My fingers froze on the keys. I thought we were engaging in a few gentle jabs to the ribs, but she was serious. The woman was clearly in a vulnerable place, man-wise. A TV star in her own right in Canada, where we both grew up, she had now been reduced to tabloid fodder. I needed to be giving, sensitive, understanding . . . Unfortunately, I possess none of these qualities. But I can be quite condescending.
“Well, if it was important for you to think that,” I wrote, and changed the subject. Still, she’d planted the seed of doubt. Could my first love possibly have dumped me? For two decades, I’d firmly believed otherwise. You might even say I cherished the belief. Now I needed proof—a forensic analysis of the death of the relationship. Fingerprints, DNA, sunglasses like David Caruso’s on CSI: Miami. So I snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and went out to the garage to dig out a musty shoe box of Canadian-stamped letters with 1980s postmarks. Then I went into the musty shoe box of my mind (isn’t that a Barbra Streisand song?) and dug out some memories of those years when I met the girl who almost became the first ex-Mrs. Marin.
It was my second year, Julia’s first, at McGill University in Montreal. She had a wild mane of hair that a pretentious Art History 101 student (like me, then) might call “pre-Raphaelite.” Her angular jaw-line was on a perfect parallel with her cheekbones. She had quick, appraising eyes and a slightly gummy smile with tiny perfect teeth. Big-boned, but toned, she was still coming into her looks and by no means thought of herself as the mediagenic beauty she would later become.
We met at a meet-and-greet in the quad of our dorm, Douglas Hall. I wasted no time in chatting up both her and her roommate. Julia would later profess amazement that this “short guy”—five feet nine, for the record—could be so cocky. Like most men, I went for the easier mark—the roommate. She was a blond innocent hot enough to have been wooed by Pierre Trudeau and chaste enough to have rebuffed his advances. I didn’t get much further than Canada’s playboy prime minister, but while I was trying, Julia and I became friends.
I was on the cocky side then, and she was the first woman I liked because she made fun of me. Her sense of humor was goofy and sophomoric, like a guy’s. She impersonated minor Canadian celebrities. (Her Brian Linehan rivaled Martin Short’s on SCTV.) She told Newfie jokes—our equivalent of Polish humor, directed at the good people of Newfoundland. (“How do you kill a Newfie while he’s drinking? Slam the toilet seat on his head.”) She called people “dinks” and “faggots”—both as insults and terms of endearment. Her idea of an F-word was “Fuzz!” Out of context, none of this sounds sidesplittingly hilarious, but she was very good company.
“You’re good for me because I waste all my time entertaining you (something I enjoy very much),” she wrote in one of the letters I dug out of the garage.
At the Douglas Hall Christmas party, we both got very drunk. “Julia’s blotto!” the resident Newfie announced. Blotto enough to convert our friendship into the official beginning of a three-year relationship. I lost a friend doing it—she was seeing a Tennessee preppy at the time. But he had to go. This was my first true love.
Dating during our second semester was single-bedded bliss, though I could have done without staring at her Police poster every night. She had a thing for Sting, who according to imdb.com is a full six feet tall.
That summer, she went back to Toronto—our hometown. I went to Oxford, the one in England, to immerse myself in pints of liquid Eng. lit. We wrote impassioned letters. Well, hers were impassioned. Mine were filled with disquisitions on the difference between an “Oxonian” and an “Oxonion.” Or so she complains in her letters. I’m sure she was right. I never gave her the mushy romantic stuff she asked for. In letters or in person.
That fall, we shacked up off campus. Oh, the anxiety of those first parental visits when they’d find out we had only—gasp!—one bedroom. We played house in an apartment on Summerhill Avenue, dress-rehearsing for marriage. The cutesy nicknames: “Munchkin,” “Rice,” and, inexplicably, “Tapir.” The scavenger hunt of love notes left around the apartment: “Happy October the 2nd!”—signed with her last name crossed out and mine written in. And, “I love you very much even though you’re a faggot sometimes (and I mean a big one).” Another nickname she had for me was “The Minuteman.” Hey, I was nineteen! There was chemistry. Sometimes too much.
Our test tube of premature domestication had a tendency to explode. Not just yelling or throwing capons at each other. Actual physical tussles. We were pretty evenly matched, but I could usually take her. Sucking wind, I’d just manage to pin her to the futon like a wrestler, demanding she “give.” If we were lucky, the deathmatch would take a sexy turn. This was, after all, the decade of Fatal Attraction. Julia wasn’t a bunny-boiler, but she could be a ball-buster. Which was how she was typecast during her college acting career. First, as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, then Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
She got deeper into acting. I got deeper into gunning for a 4.0. The only note I have in my shoe box that’s from me to her says, “I’ve gone to the library, but I’ll be back around 11 p.m.” What does the “but” mean? Like eleven o’clock was knocking off early? In the space of two semesters, I’d gone from a DJ/alcohol-poisoning guy to—as she put it—“developing quite a reputation as a poindexter.”
Things started to turn dark. Her notes to me degenerated from “I gotta admit I like living with ya, so always love me, eh?” to “I don’t know what’s happening to us.”
This was after a month.
Another sign of her mounting dissatisfaction was the affair she started having with the gay guy upstairs. Not in the Biblical sense, I’m fairly certain. But I’d come home and find the two of them watching The Wizard of Oz, with him prancing around in a pair of her red pumps. This turned out to be another dress rehearsal. Years later, Julia got famous in Canada as host of a cooking show built around her making fun of a short (nowhere near five feet nine) gay sidekick.
I remember how mad she was that I only went one night of the twelve-night run of Virginia Woolf. “Term papers” was my excuse. The real reason, I suspect, was I didn’t need to sit in the audience when we were living our own George-and-Martha drama every night at home. She was asking more than I could deliver, so I retreated into my books like Albee’s toxic marrieds into their booze and bitterness. And, like them, we stayed together anyway.
I graduated. She had a year to go. Five hours I’d drive to visit her from Toronto to Montreal through blinding snow in an ailing Chevette. We’d fight all weekend. It ended, symbolically at least, when I threw up in her best friend’s hat. I should mention that I was wasted. And it wasn’t a very nice hat. There was no definitive breakup, but the visits stopped. And we were suddenly affectionate in a way unique to that relationship limbo between dating and hating.
“Rickles, I have no one to hug and talk to,” she wrote me. “Plus I can’t have tantrums because no one notices.”
A year after it was over, I tried to get back in there. She rebuffed me. My inability to “open up” was cited. I cursed myself for not being more giving, sensitive, understanding during all those years with her. I consoled myself by hugging tight the belief that I had dumped her.
When I heard her marriage had broken up, I told myself the reason I wanted to reconnect was to offer support. The truth of what I wanted to offer was more like gloating. I
never met the now ex-husband but I’d always felt a vague antipathy. When they first started dating, she asked if they could stay at my apartment in New York while I was out of town. I said no. I didn’t want my first love and some bouncer-actor-hyphenate soiling my sheets. I might have cast some aspersions on the guy, perhaps invoked the word “freeloader.”
Years later, I saw her again and asked if she was “still married.” An obnoxious question, even if it proved prescient. Cut to five years ago. She and her husband were renting a house a few doors down from my mother in Toronto. I was home from New York for a visit and Julia drove by. We chatted. She was all smug about being married, having kids, living in Rosedale—it’s a fancy neighborhood—while I was still futzing around with a live-in girlfriend (albeit one on the verge of becoming my wife and, later, mother of my children).
When the tabloid news broke that a Canadian B-actor had left his wife for the TV mogul’s daughter after a torrid on-set affair, I felt sympathy for Julia—they’d just adopted a second child. And yet some part of me felt vindicated. A little petty rejected voice wanted to say, “You dumped the wrong guy.” Which meant deep down I knew all along she’d done it to me. Because if she hadn’t, why would I have cared?
When she sent that e-mail, I was certain she was the one rewriting history. Then I delved into those musty shoe boxes and found her side of the story. If she has a corresponding archive of my letters, I don’t think it would help my cause.
I’ve always had so much invested in being a dumper, never a dumpee. The motto on the crest of my dating life was, “It’s not me, it’s you.” And usually it was. But there was something liberating about the idea that Julia had dumped me. I lost the urge to gloat. I felt her pain, not the one I’d swept under the rug so many years ago.
“You can be very cruel, like ice, but please not to me, over something so small,” said one of those love notes from when we were living together. My friends used to pull her aside to tell her how “good” she was for me, like I was some kind of superdink until she came along. I would normally discount this as a wildly unfair assessment of my personality except my wife says they’ve told her the same thing.
I hope she doesn’t dump me, too.
Lesson #46
She Wasn’t the One
by Bruce Jay Friedman
Dear Harry [the letter began] “You probably won’t remember me, but I thought I’d take a chance and write—in the hope that you would. We knew each other in the Long Ago and dated for several months. (My name was Sybil Barnard at the time.) Then we drifted apart. Since that time, I’ve been married, had two sets of twins, and have recently gotten divorced. :(
I have followed your career with a great deal of interest—and I thought it might be fun to get together and catch up on old times. I’ll be at the Plaza Hotel Nov. 7, 8, visiting my sister, and wonder if you would consider meeting me for a drink. I certainly hope so. If not—I wish you continued good luck—and just write this off as the idle fantasy of an (ex) suburban housewife.
Fondly,
Sybil Barnard Micheals
Harry remembered her, of course. How could he not remember her? He had thought of her for the last twenty-five years, if not every day, then at least once a week for sure. She was The One Who Got Away, or, more correctly, The One Who Broke His Heart and Got Away. She had been a drama student at the University of Colorado. Harry reviewed the plays she was in for the local newspaper. He had dated her during his senior year. She was tall and blonde and beautiful in a quiet regal way, and though Harry was in love with her they had never slept together, which may have been why she broke off their romance so suddenly, and in Harry’s view, with such brutality.
Their dates consisted for the most part of the two of them dancing together, along with other couples, in the parlor room of Harry’s boardinghouse. At some point in the evening, her skin would become damp and she would start to quiver and say, “Take me home when I feel like this, Harry.” And Harry would dutifully and gallantly whip her right back to her sorority house. Whenever they passed the wooded area, where couples slipped off to be together in total privacy, she would say, “Whatever you do, Harry, don’t take me in there.” And Harry would assure her he had no intention of doing so. They continued along this way, taking walks, seeing an occasional movie together and dancing—less and less dreamily as time went by—in the parlor of Harry’s boardinghouse. One night her hand brushed against his erection. She jumped and Harry apologized and told her not to worry, it would never happen again.
In some section of himself, Harry had the sense that all they were doing was treading water. He liked being with Sybil, liked the idea of her, but he didn’t really know what he was supposed to do next. One night, she asked: “You wouldn’t ever consider meeting me in Denver and taking a hotel room, would you?” Harry said of course he wouldn’t. This time even Harry knew what she was driving at—but he was twenty years old and had never rented a hotel room before. The thought of walking through the lobby with Sybil and dealing with the desk clerk was more than he could handle. Maybe if she had phrased it differently—or if she had arranged for the room.
One night, Harry returned to the boardinghouse after a film course in which the class had dissected The Loves of Gosta Berling. Waiting for him at the top of the stairs was his roommate Travis, who was smiling broadly.
“You have a call,” said Travis, who must have known what was in store for Harry and was enjoying the moment immensely. He accompanied Harry to the wall booth, as if he were a maitre d’, and stood by smartly as Harry picked up the receiver. Sybil was at the other end and wasted no time in telling him that she didn’t want to see him anymore.
“I didn’t come all the way out here to date just one person, Harry.”
He pleaded with her to give him another chance, but she wouldn’t budge.
“Maybe after we graduate . . . if you’re ever in Charlotte,” she said. “But not now.”
Harry was sick to his stomach when he hung up, which did not deter Travis from telling him—with enormous pleasure—that Sybil had been dating an agriculture major on the nights she wasn’t seeing Harry. Oddly enough, Harry did not hold any of this against Travis. His friend, who was the school’s only male cheerleader, had suffered a series of romantic setbacks of his own, all with girls named Mary, and obviously took comfort in having some company.
Harry didn’t give up. The next night, he caught up with Sybil, who was on her way to rehearsals for The Seagull, and begged her to go out with him one more time.
“I have something to show you,” he said suggestively, “that I’ve never shown you before.”
She reacted to this with a little smile, indicating to Harry that the agriculture major had shown her all she needed to see. He trailed her across the campus, asking her if he could at least have a picture of her for his wallet, but she said she didn’t think it would be a good idea.
“Not even a picture?” he said, as she disappeared into the rehearsal hall. That seemed awfully cruel to him; spitefully, he made no mention of her in his favorable review of The Seagull.
He didn’t eat or sleep much in the weeks that followed. To Travis’s great delight, he could not even get fried chicken past his throat—the ultimate test of romantic misery. The other fellows in the rooming house gave him lots of room and lowered their voices sympathetically whenever he walked by. One night Harry ran into Sybil’s roommate, who looked him over quizzically and said, “You’re such a nice man,” which really pissed him off.
Soon afterward, Harry recovered slightly and took up with another drama student—from Wisconsin—who slapped her hips against his on their first date and led him into the woods. They made love virtually around the clock, in deserted classrooms, in the library, in the open fields. One result was that Harry came up with the worst case of poison ivy in the history of the school. He had to just lie there in the hospital under a sheet for days at a time. But none of this erased the memory of Sybil.
He saw her onl
y one more time, dancing with the agriculture major at the senior prom, her face close to his, and her fingers on his neck. He was with the Wisconsin drama student, who looked great and was extremely jolly—but it didn’t help and he spent the evening with his heart in his shoes.
After he graduated, and in the years that followed, Harry continued to nurse the memory of his loss, like an old football injury. It’s entirely possible he got married because of Sally’s fairly close resemblance to his first love. Maybe there was more to it, but Harry didn’t think so. Thus, you could argue that Harry had had to endure an entire unnecessary marriage and have a child and then get a divorce—all because of Sybil. And she wanted to know if he remembered her.
Strangely enough—and call it ego if you will—Harry had always known that he would hear from Sybil. And maybe even get a letter from her, similar to the one he held in his hand. Each time Harry received a credit on a movie, or even a partial, he wondered if she had noticed his name on the screen. She was out there somewhere; surely she went to the movies. He didn’t see how she could possibly have missed his name entirely, particularly in the case of his two big pictures. The letter proved that she hadn’t. When she saw his name up there, Harry wondered if she had ever regretted her decision to dump him unceremoniously without so much as a farewell photograph.
Now that he had the letter, he could hardly wait for Julie to get back from the construction site so he could tell her about it. The great thing about Julie is that he could fill her in on an episode like this with no fear of criticism. And he could count on her to enjoy it along with him. They had been living together at the beach for two years now, a couple of hours’ drive from the city. Julie was working for the post office when they met and had made a recent switch over to carpentry, which she enjoyed more than delivering mail. Each morning she went off to join her construction crew—a great bunch of guys from Greenport—while Harry stayed behind and worked on the screenplay he was doing for a little Czech company that paid him in cash. He was enormously proud of Julie for going into carpentry. And the look of her in work clothes was a tremendous turn-on. One day he ran into her accidentally at the deli, reading off a sandwich order for the crew from a two-by-four. He had wanted to pull off her bluejeans right on the spot.