Divas: Courtney Love, Britney Spears, Sarah Palin—all perfect 10s
Initially, I exposed Jeff to some garden-variety actress crazy. I read for a TV pilot he wrote and was producing. When I didn’t get the part, I spent two days in bed weeping nonstop, and then cut out of town for a weekend Zen retreat, even though we had made elaborate and expensive plans together. Perhaps Jeff’s checkered dating history came into play here. He seemed inured to female flakiness, and was just happy I hadn’t stolen his credit card to pay for my trip.
Jeff’s next glimpse was brought about by my scheduling the visit to meet my very stable older sister and her very wholesome and respectable family in Northern California. I feel I should try to explain the story that Jeff so enjoyed on the drive. It involves all of the things I would learn that Jeff loves: silliness, humiliating job stories, chance meetings, vegetables, and sex. I was a bottomless dancer who lived in a pumpkin patch, while he was a waiter at a greasy spoon along the highway. We met unexpectedly in the patch. Sex ensued. In the patch, so to speak. (I had no idea I would be expected to keep up this kind of thing for the rest of our lives.)
In defense of my “pathetic” sense of direction, let me just say that finding the entry to the Golden Gate Bridge is much like getting rich in America today: you might see it looming in the distance, but it’s a lot harder to get there than you think. Upon arriving at Lisa’s house, I instantly surmised that I had made a serious error in judgment. My sister’s family practices Judaism as though they’re training for a competition in extreme Judaica, and here I was inviting someone who abhors organized religions to a veritable Jewapalooza. But our mutual disdain was the first time we realized how much we enjoy disparaging things, which quickly turned into one of our favorite activities and the closest thing either of us has to a hobby. Our shared suffering brought us even closer, although, ironically, bonding over suffering is even more Jewish than celebrating the Sabbath.
That occasion predated my biggest crazy of all: I announced that not only should we move in together, but I’d move in only if we got engaged. Jeff mistakenly remembers this as two separate discussions in the Saab, but he’s wrong. I am certain that both of these issues were brought up in one fell swoop in the Saab, where so many important events in our life occurred, which, to be honest, makes me seem even kookier than Jeff’s recollection.
I think I produced some pretty cogent arguments recommending this course of action. There was the financial incentive and the added bonus that moving in would increase Jeff’s chances of scoring more morning sex and accruing a never-ending reserve of cuddle time.*
The thing was, I was positively freaked out at the prospect of combining households without some assurance that this wasn’t a temporary arrangement. I had begun to worry that my unavailability was central to Jeff’s attraction to me, and that he might dump me once we moved in. I’d not only be heartbroken, but also homeless, which is my worst nightmare.
I grew up in a home where it was not uncommon to wake up and discover that overnight our circumstances had significantly changed. This resulted in several moves across the country. When I was five, my father’s Rolls-Royce with the luxurious mahogany pull-down dinner trays was suddenly replaced by a Ford station wagon into which everything we owned had been crammed, and we found ourselves moving across the country to stay with relatives until we got on our feet again. Since that time I have stubbornly clung to locations as magical talismans.
After being evicted from my NYU dorm room for a series of infractions that included not being enrolled in the school anymore, I moved exactly one block over and lived in three different buildings within a two-block radius over the next six years.
Once in Los Angeles, I settled into a studio apartment and I subsequently resided in four other units all in that same actors’ shtetl building. Each move was precipitated by a different event in my life. First: divorced, needed new starting-over space. Second: acquisition of more money, moved into two-bedroom unit. Third: downsizing to save cash, moved back into one bedroom. Fourth: started therapy, determined to change entire life, but had courage only to move across the hall. Fifth: OK, no big reason, except for the desire to climb fewer stairs. After seven years in that building, I finally worked up the courage to relocate to another part of town and start anew, but when the deal for a cute guesthouse I had procured fell through the week before I was to move in, I ended up placing all of my belongings in storage and checking into a residential hotel in the heart of Hollywood. The deep shag carpeting was always suspiciously damp and flea infested, and my neighbors were junkies, hookers, and would-be screenwriters.* I couldn’t stand being in there for more than an hour at a time. I was so distraught that I began dating a man whose apartment was the mirror image of the place I had just left. Those were the circumstances that predated my inadvertently moving into the apartment next door to Jeff’s old place. After that debacle, I vowed that if I ever moved again, it was going to be permanent or at least based on a relationship that offered a blueprint of permanence in the way that marriage offers that illusion.
I don’t know which was more ridiculous, my demand or that Jeff went out and bought me a ring. Jeff’s retelling of our engagement story is exactly as it happened except that I’ll never fathom why he thought his plan was a good idea. No woman likes to be told that she has a pimple on her chin. No man does either. There’s a billion-dollar skin care and cosmetic industry entirely devoted to selling products to ensure that no one on a date ever has to be told that he or she has a pimple. You know perfectly well when you have a blemish, and you carefully conceal it before you go out. That’s one of the unspoken rules of the early stages of dating: the obligation—no, requirement—to cover up one’s imperfections. That’s why I was mortified to think that I had missed a zit. Jeff may not have farted in front of me, but I was still going to bed with my makeup on. Plus, this was an important night. Jeff neglects to mention that we were headed to visit friends whose number included an ex-boyfriend of mine. As everyone knows, one of the most pressurized of all social occasions is the encounter with your ex.* You need to look great, but not just great, so great that even though you no longer covet his attention, and he no longer carries a torch for you, your mere presence reminds him that he missed out on something great, and by the way, you’re doing just great now too, thank you, better than you ever were with him. That message is communicated without even speaking, just by seeing you, the version of you that doesn’t have a gigantic green pimple on your face! That’s why I was so freaked out.
At this juncture, all prescriptions recommended by dating and relationship books disintegrated into dust: wait two days until you call him back, don’t ask him to move in, let him think he’s making all the important moves. These guides don’t always take into account the particular mental and emotional quirks of your beloved, because at the time we got engaged and decided to move in together, I think I was scoring a textbook 10 on the Derang-O-Meter.
Our engagement also proves the old adage that there’s someone for everyone. The caveat is that the “someone” isn’t necessarily someone who is perfect. It’s someone whose eccentricities complement your eccentricities and then, fingers crossed, over the years you don’t outcrazy each other, because as nutty as I was, Jeff still wanted to be with me. So who’s really the crazy one? Him or me? I think we all know who that is: Jeff.
And for the record, Jeff’s close friend Rick is married and has three beautiful children with that same girlfriend he moved in with, got engaged to, and broke up with. They have been married for twelve years, only one year less than we have.
I really do love the ring he picked out for me.
If I knew then what I know now, I never would have given that couch away. I would have had it incinerated.
“Forty percent of women say they have hurled footwear at a man.”
—Y. Kaufman, How to Survive Your Marriage
don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t want to know
CNN reports that
although personal boundaries and privacy expectations differ from couple to couple, most people seem to agree that being exposed to the following behaviors stretches acceptable norms: farting, burping, plucking eyebrows, using the toilet, weighing oneself, clipping toenails, shaving, popping pimples, and blowing “snot rockets.”
too old to care?
A 2009 study from the University of Chicago tells us that marrying at an older age makes marriage last longer, but why? “Marriages that take place at a very late age may actually be more unstable than those contracted in the early or mid-twenties but individuals, having become more cynical or just practical, settle for poorer matches that are far from optimal.”
worried about long-term commitment? marry like the stars!
Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock lasted only three months in marriage, but that union beats her hookup with Rick Salomon, to whom she was married for only two months. Robin Givens was married to Mike Tyson for eight months, which was a long run compared with her betrothal to her tennis pro, which lasted all of eight hours. Married at ten a.m., they had irreconcilable differences by four p.m. That knot stayed tied longer than screen legend Valentino’s liaison with Jean Acker: they were shacked up for only six hours.
you’re not gaining a spouse, you’re adding to your girth
University of North Carolina researchers have shown that young marrieds experience a six-to-nine-pound weight gain over their single and even co-habitating peers.
looking for love in all the right places
With more than 20 million people looking for love online once a month, 120,000 marriages a year are now attributed to Internet dating hookups. One of the most successful, at least by their own reports, J-Date claims to have helped 21,000 couples find love in 2008 alone.
* I happen to have an abnormally low body temperature, so cuddling is fine but mainly I want the warmth. I’m not picky; mammal or electric blanket, it’s all the same to me.
* The Highland Gardens Hotel famously boasts that Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane once lived there, meaning that you could probably get a contact high from inhaling old carpet threads. If it sounds a lot like the Oakwood Apartments, where Jeff worked on Cooties, it’s because these joints all look the same!
* Once, wrestling with a terrible flu, I was on the subway home from a doctor’s appointment, stuffing a Snickers bar into my mouth and reading the National Enquirer, when I ran into a high school boyfriend. I immediately switched to a doctor closer to my apartment. Lesson learned!
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• • • •
A Tale of Two Kitties
“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
—PHYLLIS DILLER
Dating is one thing, and seeing your beloved trim his or her nasal hair for the first time is quite the other. Cohabitating couples see up close and personal for the first time what the next few decades of communal living might have in store for them. Living together before getting married is like a fight between two heavyweights in the opening rounds. You’re trying to read each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and strategies before you’re comfortable enough to really start pummeling each other. It could also be likened to the musical trajectory of The Beatles. Just when you think you have a handle on what they’re doing with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” they hit you with “Let It Be.” Moving in together is in many ways a Magical Mystery Tour.
He Says
Long before Annabelle was packing her bags to move into my hip little house in the Hollywood Hills, I was known by my friends as the unofficial president of “Roommates Without Borders.” All were welcome at Chez Jeff. There was always someone—friends, friends of friends, and sometimes even a celebrity or two—sharing a home with me. Joan Cusack was my college roommate, and years later her brother John crashed at my apartment between girlfriends, houses, and movie roles. He had let me crash at his house back in 1988, so it seemed only fair. When I first moved to New York, I slept on Ben Stiller’s foldout couch. After that I shared a cozy one-bedroom with my oldest friend, Peter, whom I met in summer camp in 1972. When Peter’s girlfriend moved in, the three of us slept in the same teeny-tiny bedroom. When people ask if that was ever uncomfortable for me, I tell them the God’s honest truth, that if I wanted to masturbate, I’d just get up and do it in the bathroom. Perhaps the revolving-door roommate situation was a residual effect of going to summer camp for eight years and how much I enjoyed sharing a cabin with ten other boys: all that camaraderie, the late-night dirty jokes, panty raids, and circle jerks. Another reason for communal living was necessity, namely splitting the rent. But even after I had more money, I still insisted on having roommates. In short order, in Los Angeles, the residents at the Pension de Kahn were my friends: Rick; Diana; Victoria; Rick’s friend Larry Brandenburg; an actress named Kimmie, who dreamed of becoming an extra in the movies until her first day as an extra sent her packing back to Indiana; a cute German girl I met at a café—she never paid me a dime in rent but cooked dinner every night; and last, my first college roommate, Evan, who moved in from Chicago following his divorce.
So how hard could it be to live with me in a terrific three-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills? I wasn’t the type of single guy who watched football games sitting on a blow-up plastic chair with a can of Coors, fisting a bag of pretzels. No, I was the type of single guy who watched football games on a vintage Stickley chair with a glass of French rosé, chopsticking Thai noodles and tofu. I was renting a very sleek midcentury home, which I had furnished with several pieces of arts and crafts furniture, and a trendy-at-that-time Indonesian teakwood dining room table set. I even owned an upscale espresso machine. However, Annabelle still insisted that I reupholster my Ethan Allen sofa so it wouldn’t look so “Ethan Allen-y,” and that I take down my beloved framed Elvis Costello Trust album poster and in its place put up a jumbo-sized painting of a female’s backside standing in front of a bathtub, the work of her ex-husband. I happily acquiesced, believing that by letting her redo and redistribute the decor, I was genuinely making room to share the house with her. As further reassurance that mi casa was her casa, I agreed to the purchase of an immense, cavernous armoire that swallowed all the electronic devices to placate Annabelle’s desire that “watching TV wouldn’t be the dominant activity of our lives,” overlooking the inconvenient truth that making TV was the dominant activity of both our lives.
Annabelle’s other precohabitating concern was that although she was moving in, I wasn’t asking Evan to move out. Besides being one of my best friends, he is good-natured, hilarious, and perhaps the only person I know who farts more than I do. I thought it only fitting that he was my first and now would be my last roommate; consequently, I didn’t want to kick him out without giving him time to find a suitable place for himself. I thought it only fair to do so.
Within days of Annabelle’s arrival, I became very much aware that she demanded solitude and had the housekeeping habits of a feral animal. In addition to those observations, I noticed that she could be impatient, quick-tempered, slightly belligerent—even bellicose—and wouldn’t hesitate to mix it up whenever she didn’t get her way. This behavior concerned me slightly, but I chalked it up to post-moving stress disorder and believed that once Annabelle had acclimated herself to new digs, she’d mellow out. (This was the last time I ever entertained that notion; Annabelle does not do mellow.)
One morning I saw her making mincemeat of my beloved espresso machine while trying to concoct cappuccino, and when I offered her some friendly advice on how to properly use it, she promptly tore my head clean off. She was an “adult” who knew very well how to make coffee and I didn’t have to “micromanage” every little thing she did. It was the first time I had heard that word and I hated it just as much then as I do now.
I was familiar with the side of Annabelle that could knock the world on its ass—she could captivate, charm, and wow everyone she met—but now I saw her come home and completely crumble after a bad audition. It would take a ton of her energy and
mine as well to get her back on her feet. And Annabelle had this thing about “boundaries.” She went on and on about the importance of “establishing clear and defined boundaries.” She fumed if a friend of mine called after eleven at night. If I had the audacity to try to get into her pants during what she deemed the “no-sex times” of the day or night, or the “no-sex zones” of the house, Annabelle would read me the riot act. If I wanted to talk to her in the morning before I went to work, I had to wait until she had her third cup of coffee before she would be civil. If I needed to tell her something when she was in her office, I had to knock, and then when she decided that knocking was too disturbing to her sense of boundaries, I was told to slip a note under the door and wait for her to respond. My once sweet fiancée had transformed into Rulella, the Queen of Rules.
Not only were there all these rules to deal with, there was also a variety of other issues concerning Annabelle and our newly shared space. To me, Harvey, the guy who managed the house I was renting, was my own little fix-it guy trying to keep things in order and see to it that everything in the house ran smoothly. To her, he was always around and in her way. Then there was the matter of my next-door neighbor Rudmila. I hardly ever even spoke to her. All I could pick out from her absurdly thick accent was that she was of Serbian origin. However, in very little time, Rudmila and Annabelle were embroiled in some kind of turf war over the ring volume of Annabelle’s telephone. The house didn’t have air-conditioning, so we kept the windows open for the hillside breeze. Yes, the phone occasionally rang during the day, no louder than any other phone in the world, but according to Rudmila, it sounded as if we were blasting dynamite, mixing concrete, and building a tower to the moon. I was usually off working at my office in Beverly Hills and unfortunately missed Rudmila’s bloodcurdling shrieks of “Turn your phone down!” coming from inside her house.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 4