Her first name is Annabelle, the perfect name! Her last name is Gurwitch, the worst name. But the Annabelle part is so amazing it obliterates the Gurwitch part. Even better, Annabelle is enchanting, with porcelain skin and hair the colors of autumn in Vermont. She loves Bob Dylan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the Tao Te Ching—the holy Trinity of things I also love. We banter, we joke, we laugh, and we sit next to each other during dinner. I’m so enraptured by her I sneak off to call my best friend in New York and tell him I’ve just met “the one.” At the end of the party she writes her name, number, and street address on a napkin for me. This is it, I thought, I’m in! From this point forth, it’s Annabelle and Jeff forever. As I walk her to her car she tells me that she has some free time to hang out because her husband is away at art school in Chicago; then she hops into her Honda and drives away. I stand there staggered, all the air in my body sucked out as if Mike Tyson had punched me in the stomach. I need some air, need air! “I’m sorry, her what? Her who?” The woman of my dreams married to some art school student? Was this some kind of High Holiday joke to amuse God on Rosh Hashanah? I hope I made his High Holy Days, because I’m miserable.
Back in New York, I can’t stop thinking and talking about Annabelle. My friends literally beg me to shut up. As my career fate would have it, for the next year and a half I shuttle between New York and Los Angeles for work, and I time my red-eye flights so I can be at Farmers Market at the precise moment Annabelle has her morning cappuccino at her favorite café. (I ran into her there once by chance and over the booming noise of my heart pounding in my chest, I was able to make out her saying that she has coffee there almost every day at that time.) While I’m working in LA, I try to see her every chance I get and even dare to write her love letters. Some see this full-throttle approach to win Annabelle’s heart as romantic; others call it stalking and urge me to get professional help. One windy afternoon Annabelle and I find ourselves on Venice Beach and I kiss her. It’s the single most romantic moment of my entire life. We end up spending the night together in her apartment because art school husband didn’t seem to get home much. I believe we would have had sex that night, but unfortunately, we had eaten pizza for dinner. These were the days before Lactaid tablets, and later the cheese tore at my stomach like thousands of tiny razor-sharp daggers from Wisconsin. It took all my concentration not to fart or pass out from the pain.
The next day we wake up in each other’s arms and Annabelle looks me in the eyes and tells me she’s very happily married, and we can never do this ever, ever again, ever. I tell her she’s just fooling herself. How is she going to stay married when we belong together? Annabelle gets very indignant. She wants us to be friends. Suddenly she’s very committed to her marriage. I can’t believe that after coming so close, I have to spend the rest of my life being friends with the woman of my dreams. Damn cheese!
It’s not long before I move permanently to the West Coast and hear that happily married Annabelle is now happily divorced and seeing RJ, a friend of a friend. He’s heard all about my obsession with his girlfriend, but isn’t concerned, according to my friend, because he’s a hot, young Hollywood director with bigger fish to fry. Hearing this has the effect of reducing my ego to the size of a spawning anchovy.
My friend invites me to tag along with him to Annabelle’s birthday party. I think that if I go and flirt with other girls at her party, it’ll make her so jealous she’ll realize she’s in love with me, not RJ. My ingenious plan never quite gets off the ground because her party is, by design, wall-to-wall men. Annabelle ignores me and buzzes from guy to guy like a bumblebee in a never-ending garden of man flowers. Fish-frying RJ sits on the sofa like a petulant teenager who’s had too much to drink and is looking for a face to punch. Not wanting to be that face, and pissed off at being wholly disregarded by the birthday girl, I leave the party, figuring I’ll never see Annabelle again. So I’m shocked when she calls out of the blue a half year later. She and RJ have broken up and she’s practically begging me to attend a preview performance of her one-woman show. Yes! Annabelle wants me again. I’m back, baby! During her show I discreetly jot down a few funny lines. This way I’ll be able to quote them afterward when I praise her for her fine, fine work. Instead, she’s livid with me, accuses me of working on my own scripts during her show, and hangs up on me when I call to defend myself.
I’m completely crushed, which is why I’m astounded when several months after that Annabelle shows up at my door, unannounced, with her incredibly cute new kitten. Annabelle is heading off to New York to act in a play and she desperately needs someone to take care of Stinky. How can she have the nerve to ask me to take care of her kitten after telling me off on the phone and hanging up on me? I look straight at Annabelle and tell her, “Of course Stinky can stay. I’d be happy to have her.” Maybe now she will finally see what a great guy I am and give herself to me, body and soul. As it turns out, Stinky is an incredibly loving cat. She follows me everywhere, wants to be petted all the time, desires my undivided attention, and sleeps cuddled next to me every night. Stinky is everything I want from Annabelle, but furrier and happens to poop in a litter box. When Annabelle returns, she doesn’t give me her body or her soul, but instead hands me a copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith. Does this book mean I should keep leaping in faith for her? I’ll never know. It’s so tedious to read existential Christian Scandinavian philosophy; I never made it past the inscription “Thanks for taking care of us, Annabelle and Stinky.”
I try to accept the fact that Annabelle and I are just not meant to be. Life moves on, my career starts picking up steam, I have lots of friends, I date occasionally, and I see a really good shrink. I am actually fairly content with my life on the day I look out my apartment window and see Annabelle standing by a moving van. She is, I kid you not, moving right next door to me. I’m staggered, thrilled, itchy. This must be fate, a sign from above. I go over to welcome her with a bottle of wine. Later I call to ask her out, but call waiting clicks in before she can answer me. She tells me she’ll be right back. Two minutes later she clicks back and says she’s almost done with the other call and then she puts me on hold again. I fiddle with a Seinfeld script. Floss my teeth. Maybe five minutes later Annabelle’s back, saying it’s taking longer than she thought, but she’ll be right with me. Click. She puts me back on hold. I take a piss and pay my phone, gas, and electric bills. Ten minutes later she’s back to say she’s in the middle of a major dramathon with her latest ex-boyfriend and asks if I don’t mind waiting just a little longer. I start a load of laundry, cook a soy cheese omelet, eat it, rinse off the dishes and dry them. Twenty, maybe thirty minutes later she’s still hasn’t returned. I hang up and officially abandon any hope for Annabelle. I get rid of my apartment and move as far up into the Hollywood Hills as I can go without actually hitting the HOLLYWOOD sign and hope she’ll never find me.
More than a year later I walk into a restaurant and there she is. For some reason, Annabelle seems genuinely, perhaps even too happy to see me. “Where did you go?” she asks. “Why did you move? Why didn’t you call me?” She gives me her new cell number and wants me to call her so we can catch up. My writing partner at the time informs me that if I call Annabelle after all she’s put me through for the last five years, she’ll personally kick my ass. Of course I won’t call her, I assure my partner. I am fully over Annabelle and whatever strange fried-potato High Holiday Cooties spell she cast over me, I will not call her. I mean, come on, I’m not a complete idiot!
On the way home from the restaurant, I call Annabelle and we make a plan to go out, confirming once more that when it comes to very attractive, nutty young women who have conflicted feelings for me, I am a complete and utter idiot. Thank God.
She Says
In my early twenties, my entire ambition in life was to appear in avant-garde adaptations of German expressionistic dramas in un-heated basements in off-off, nowhere-near-Broadway theaters. As it turned out, this goal was not that hard to achie
ve, particularly if you’re not interested in purchasing luxuries like food or furniture. But after ten years of eking out an income in New York City and living in a studio apartment where you could literally be in bed, open the door, and fry an egg at the same time, it was time to conquer new worlds. The year was 1989 and I moved to a middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles teeming with aspiring actors, group homes for the mentally disabled, halfway houses, and religious Jews. It’s known to locals as the actors’ shtetl. It was so filled with members of the Screen Actors Guild that on any given day you could sit on your stoop going over your lines for an audition, look across the way and see other people sitting on their stoops talking to themselves, and know that either they were crazy or they were just actors working on their lines, or maybe they were crazy but they were also actors who were working on their lines. My neighbor on one side was George Clooney; and a future porn star lived across the hall. Up-and-coming actors Sandra Bullock and Tate Donovan were shacked up across the street, while the rest of our block was populated by Orthodox Jewish couples whose duplexes were exploding with children. After six months of auditions and working a part-time gig hostessing at an after-hours Euro-trash coke den, I had landed a lucrative gig on TV, so professionally things were on an upswing. But I didn’t have many friends in the city yet so when I was invited to a Rosh Hashanah party, I happily agreed.
Arriving at the house, I settled into the kitchen and began cooking. I don’t remember every detail of that particular evening, but I do remember this: Jeff Kahn—funny, sweet—paid a lot of attention to me. We shared the same taste in melancholy music and literature, and were both vaguely and pretentiously interested in Eastern philosophy. Did I mention I was married? That’s right—I don’t think I mentioned this small detail, but why would I? I wasn’t on the market.
My then husband was a Church of England, anarchist artist. You know the type: incredibly sweet but exceedingly eccentric. Tall, lanky, blond, choirboyish. Straight, but looked smashing in a dress. Good-natured but given to outbursts of Tourette’s-like rants against the evils of “fucking wanker TV idiots” at dinners with the heads of the network I was employed by at the time. Only his posh British accent and dashing good looks kept me from getting fired. We had impulsively decided to get married the night we met, and we actually married within a year from that date so we didn’t know each other all that well. Early on, the ex had casually mentioned that his goal in life was to bankrupt himself in pursuit of his art. I assumed this was hyperbole, but only a few months into our marriage, I learned that he meant it literally. By the time I met Jeff, he had moved to Chicago to attend graduate school at the Art Institute and he was well on his way to achieving his stated dream.
I should mention here that due to the aforementioned shambles of a marriage, I was already having an affair with someone and the last thing I was looking for was another complication. That guy was another tortured soul, also married, a Buddhist who was bipolar and addicted to a number of drugs of various varieties. This was ill advised but also highly entertaining. I’d get calls to watch him withdraw from some drug or another, read from an anglicized pocket version of the Tao, and listen to equally spiritually ambiguous music like Sinéad O’Connor and Dead Can Dance. My life was a train wreck when I met Jeff Kahn.
On top of that, Jeff seemed like just the kind of guy I had avoided my whole dating life: nice, totally into me. Turnoff. And he was Jewish. Since high school I had stuck to my rule: one Jew per bed is enough!
My family moved to Miami Beach when I was twelve. Not the current hipster South Beach, no, this was strictly the Miami Beach of the past where your alter caca aunt spent her winters at a kosher hotel and my teenage years were spent getting felt up by members of BESHTY, the Temple Beth Shalom youth group. After leaving Miami, I was anxious to expand my horizons: I only dated men of varying religious and cultural backgrounds. I hadn’t even seen a circumcised penis in years.
Clearly, Jeff Kahn was “friend” material and possibly only interested in me because I was unavailable. How much more unavailable could I be? I wrote my number down on a napkin. I told him to call and we’d hang out. Between the absent anarchist and the married manic-depressive, I had a little extra friend time.
Not only did Jeff start calling me at odd hours, he would drop by my house unexpectedly. Sometimes I would get a call and he would be circling the house. At eleven-thirty at night. Then he began sending obsessive missives.
I quote: “I came to you a knight in shining armor and offered you my heart and in return you gave me a stick of gum!” He even wrote: “Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger. You may see a stranger cooking latkes across a crowded room.” He was gripped by what I deemed a delusionary fantasy that we belonged together. It was a cross between a Philip Roth novel and a John Hinckley fixation. I had already married one guy who proposed on the night we met; why had I attracted another man who was seized by the same impulse? I wasn’t sure whether Jeff was an incurable romantic or whether I should take out restraining orders.
One night he unexpectedly dropped by to drop off a bottle of single malt whiskey when he knew my husband would be in town, a pretext for a getting a look at him. “What’s with that guy?” my husband asked in his enticing Cambridge accent. I wasn’t kidding when I said, “I have no idea.”
Jeff correctly predicted that my marriage would end. I had a succession of boyfriends and yet all the while Jeff kept up his pursuit. I would be out having a morning coffee and he would be sitting at a nearby table. Then there was that birthday party he turned up at. I had no idea why Jeff acted weird and left without saying a word. There were a lot of great guys he could have networked with—wasn’t he an aspiring television producer? The play reading I invited him to attend? It was infuriating. Every time I looked up from my pages, I could plainly see that he was writing. Nothing Jeff says will ever convince me that he wasn’t working on a script during the entire length of the show. It was so rude! If he was so interested in me, why did he keep doing things I couldn’t understand?
Jeff also had something of an acting career going at the time and would excitedly call to say, “Hey, I’m appearing as ‘Bell Boy Number Five’ on Blossom this week.” Or, “I’m shooting a movie where I play a character named Nosey. I get to spend three hours a day getting a foot-long nose glued to my forehead; would you like to visit the set?” This, too, was a dating turnoff for me. I really didn’t want to date actors anymore. Sleep with them once in a while, sure, but date? No way. I had had my share of “showmances,” including my soap opera costar, who called me my character’s name while we were having sex, and my classically trained boyfriend, who insisted I should do his laundry because “Hamlet doesn’t do laundry!”* Besides, there’s something that turns me off about dating actors. Maybe it stems from my personal experience of knowing how much time they spend looking at themselves in the mirror, primping. I find this kind of vanity in a woman forgivable and something I am completely guilty of, but in a guy, yuk! Vin Diesel is no doubt sitting in a makeup trailer at this very moment checking out shades of blush, right next to Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, who’s having a little concealer applied. No thanks.
But there was something I liked about Jeff, something that kept drawing me back to him, kind of like the way it’s fun to peel a sunburn or how a song gets stuck in your head and you can’t stop singing, “You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, it’s true,” even when you really, really want to.
Over the next years, I would run into Jeff and we might go on a date during which time I thought it my moral duty to dissuade him from pursuing me, but at the same time I would irresponsibly find myself making out with him too. Now, I don’t pretend this is a respectable way to conduct myself. In fact, it was completely insane. But I was in my twenties, an actress, given to dating men whose most memorable attribute was an interesting accent—the very definition of completely insane.
At a certain point, a truly improbable thing happened. I moved into an apartment
building right next door to Jeff. However, while Jeff sees the fact that he happened to live in a very desirable location where rents were reasonable, as the hand of fate working it’s way to bring us together, I maintain this is just a very good example of how people like to assign meaning in the random universe. After Jeff disappeared from the neighborhood, I didn’t give it another thought.
It was maybe a year later when I ran into him at a café. It was as if a lightbulb went off in my head. Jeff Kahn—what a great guy; didn’t he once take good care of my cat? Perhaps it makes sense to date someone who actually seems to like me, who shares my lactose intolerance and sense of humor, and whose sole interest isn’t to have me witness the disintegration of his personality. It was during our first date that I confessed something extremely shallow: the one time we had come closest to carnal relations, five years prior, I hesitated only because I had seen the top of his undergarments and was convinced he had on tighty whities. Jeff dropped his pants right then and there in the restaurant and showed me that the Calvins he was wearing, like the ones he had donned on that date five years previously, were, in fact, long briefs. We started dating that very night. Jeff still mourns the fact that this mistaken-undergarment moment set us back years of being together, but I’m convinced that this one snafu is the only reason we’re together today. I consider this whole chapter of my life embarrassing and sad, while Jeff refers to those years as our romantic courtship. We’ll never agree, but just to put things in perspective, Jeff loves to tell people that he was so smitten with me that he saved the napkin I gave him on the night we met. For the record, it has another girl’s phone number on the back.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 2