by Love Rehab
“It’s two a.m. You could have come in the morning.”
“It’s New Jersey. I got bloody lost. How anyone gets anywhere in this damn state with all your roundabouts and whatnot I don’t know, and I was starving by the time I finally got to where I thought I should be going, but thankfully there was this delicious little boutique pastry shop open twenty-four hours.”
Of course she had never stumbled across a Dunkin’ Donuts chain store before. I ushered her in and realized everyone else had been awakened by the door and was gathered Brady Bunch–style lining the stairs.
There was no point in beating around the bush, even though I couldn’t imagine anyone breaking up with that butt.
“Did you … get dumped?”
This prompted a torrent of tears, obviously not for the first time this evening.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
A nod sent snot running down her face, which prompted Stella to silently run for a tissue.
“Hey, Prithi, do you have any more of those cookies you baked?” I yelled over my shoulder as I guided Jordana to the couch. In a lower voice I explained, “Cooking is her therapy.”
“That’s so smart,” Jordana said, obviously uplifted by the thought of having cookies. I was worried her yoga instructor’s body was going to go into sugar shock after years of healthful eating and it would be all my fault when that perfect butt ballooned up to the size of a very normal butt. As all us ladies with normal butts know, once you cross that threshold there really is no going back.
Cookies on the table and everyone seated Indian style in a circle as if we were preparing for a campfire, Jordana let loose her story.
“Well, I have been dating Paul for three years. We were living together in the West Village. We had a dog together, a rescued English bulldog named Elvis.” At this point it was hard to feel sorry for Jordana since she did indeed seem to have the very perfect life I had always imagined as I glimpsed her through my downward dogs.
“He is a rolfer.” Maybe not so perfect.
“Oh, honey,” Prithi said. “They have over-the-counter drugs for that.”
Annie nodded. “My pledge name in college was Ipecac since I used to ralph so much.” She got a room full of blank stares. “You know, ipecac. It makes you throw up.”
Jordana now looked horrified. “No, he practices rolfing. It’s a form of bodywork and massage. It gets deep into your tissues. It is like a deep tissue massage on steroids. He rolfs.”
The explanation didn’t make the word any less funny, and titters continued around the circle until Jordana continued.
“One day I checked his e-mail.”
A collective groan through the room.
“Snooping is public enemy number one for anyone in a relationship,” I said from experience.
“As well it should be. Anyway, so I checked his e-mail and there were notifications from Nerve.com … so I tried to log into his Nerve.com account. And, well, it wasn’t terribly hard since Elvis was his bloody password. Anyway he had been searching Nerve for dates.”
“Nooooooo.”
“But that’s not the worst part. He was searching Nerve specifically for women who were into threesomes … something I told him I just wasn’t into. You know, there are enough limbs flailing about in the bedroom as is; why do you need to add four more?”
I agreed with her. I had always found the intrigue over the threesome completely confounding.
“So you confronted him?”
“No, not then. I was about to when he decided to break the news to me.”
“He admitted he was a dirty, lying cyber cheater?”
“No, he told me he was a dirty, lying, actual, in-real-life cheater. With a Pilates instructor, no less.” Jordana said Pilates the same way most refined English ladies would say poop.
“Is that a little like defecting to the dark side?” Prithi asked.
“Yes!” Jordana practically screamed, so happy that someone understood just how big an offense her boyfriend’s indiscretion with an alternative fitness instructor had been. I realized that it probably wasn’t the three-way cyber peeping that had my yoga teacher in a donut-eating rage, but rather the fact that he would abandon her for what she considered a less evolved form of bodywork.
She looked sheepish for a moment.
“But now I am obsessed. I can’t meditate for even thirty seconds. He is all I think about. My brain is on some kind of hamster wheel. When I walk on the street, I think every man might be Paul. Every woman looks like that Pilates-peddling bitch. When I see a fat woman who very obviously couldn’t be her, I start to think about whether Paul would find this woman attractive, whether he would have a threesome with her. Every woman is my enemy, and every man has become the love of my life. I can’t BLOODY turn it off.”
“Welcome to the club,” Prithi said.
Jordana was also homeless, and we bartered that she would stay in exchange for some morning meditation and yoga instruction we all agreed we could use. We were an inpatient and an outpatient rehab.
It was nice having the house full. It reminded me of summers when I was a kid and my grandmother invited all her own kids to come back to New Jersey, from wherever they had scattered around the country, for two weeks with their own children and sometimes the odd friend or two. At nights the adults played cards, drank wine, and stayed up late reminiscing, while all the cousins bunked on cots in the attic and bonded over the forced closeness. In this same way, I came to realize that I liked having roommates as an adult. With them came the kind of forced bonding that only happened in summer camp, where girls you never would have even spoken to at home became your lifelong best friends just because the first letter of your last name got you placed in the same cabin, and then you all got your first periods together.
I ended up sharing the master bedroom with Katrina. She was a woman I never could have imagined making my girlfriend when she arrived with her six pieces of matching Louis Vuitton luggage and a very small terrier named Nahla.
“I’m here for the love retreat,” she announced imperiously when Annie opened the door. Katrina’s chin was cocked just an inch above where most of us let it hang from our heads, her eyes hidden behind giant Marc Jacobs sunglasses.
“Retreat?” Annie asked. “We’re doing something called Love Addicts Anonymous.”
“Don’t be silly. Retreat is such a better marketing buzzword. All the real rehabs are retreats, breaks, just like all overdoses involve being hospitalized for ‘exhaustion.’ Love retreat has a much better ring to it anyway, don’t you think?”
I wasn’t there but I can imagine Annie wanting to slam the door in the face of Katrina (whom she immediately nicknamed Princess Katrina in her head, a moniker that we eventually shortened to Princess). But then Katrina did something only a princess (a true princess like Kate Middleton, not a faux princess like one of those Italian or Danish princesses who wear pantyhose with open-toed sandals and run away with their jockeys) could do—she won Annie over.
“I love your tattoo,” she said, admiring the labyrinth Annie did not remember inking on her upper right arm after a trip to Mexico.
Katrina went on, “I’m very into Mayan culture. Anyway, I walked the labyrinth the entire time I was doing a yoga retreat down in Tulum and it was the best meditation I have ever done. I can’t sit and meditate, so walking and meditating was simply perfect for me. The labyrinth looks like it fits you though. You look like the kind of person who always has to be on the move. Like a strong person who knows exactly what she wants in life.”
At that, Princess reached out and enveloped Annie, who had no idea what the tattoo meant, just that she woke up on spring break in Tijuana with a permanent reminder of a gorgeous Mexican tattoo artist named Maria permanently on her body, in a bear hug.
“Thank you so much for having me,” Katrina declared, walking right past Annie into the living room, up the stairs, and into my room, where she plopped all six of the Louis Vuitton bags on the spare bed we
had just dragged up from the basement and sat Indian style filing her nails, waiting for me to wake up.
Princess was terrifyingly put together on the outside and commanded an air of respect. More than that, she genuinely liked almost everyone she met and wanted to hug them and shower them with compliments and find ways to make their lives better, often through crystals, herbs, or skin care advice.
Her full-time job was a singular quest for self-improvement fueled by a hearty trust fund. She didn’t have to work, since her father was the famed engineer who invented the thing that makes SUVs beep when you’re about to back into something. Princess was therefore free to spend her days seeking various spiritual and physical guidance strategies, which made her a walking self-help encyclopedia. She had instructors for and/or personal certifications in everything from crystal healing, herbology, the Alexander technique, psychic powers, acupuncture, acupressure, Thai massage, Pilates, yoga, rolfing!, macrotherapy, hydrotherapy, psychotherapy, and a little bit of voodoo. She had traveled the globe, hopping from one retreat to the next, looking to find herself.
Like the other ladies I had met in LAA, Princess was a great-looking girl. Compact and smaller than her personality made her appear, she had near-black hair long enough for her to sit on and an angular face. She dressed perfectly for her curvy body type, wearing clothes that accentuated exactly what needed accentuating and hid any flaws.
Princess hadn’t recently been dumped. But her crystal healer told her that she needed to break a recurring habit of hers that kept leading to heartbreak and would prevent her from ever finding true love. She kept dating gay men. Most of the time she didn’t know they were gay when she started dating them. She just knew they were incredibly well dressed, neat, and quick to compliment her Jil Sander mules, loved to accompany her to the theater, and showered her with affection.
Always came the day when they sat her down to tell her they loved her, couldn’t get enough of her. They needed to still be with her almost every second of every day, but they wanted to sleep with men. It happened thirteen times. She confided in her crystal healer, whose name is actually Crystal, that the seventh one didn’t quite sit her down to have the talk; instead she came home to find him dressed in full drag in her very best Zac Posen evening gown, all her Fred Leighton jewels, and a long brown wig, wearing a Harry Winston tiara on his head. She thought she was looking into a mirror. He was dressing in drag as her. Of course, being Princess and able to skillfully manage any situation, she told him she was flattered and that she was impressed with his technique of makeup mastery, but he did need to go easier on the blush and a little higher on the cheekbones next time. She broke it to him that they could no longer be together, but she still goes to see his show every Thursday in the West Village. It’s called “Katrina, Katrina.”
Her psychotherapist said all these men had mommy issues and Katrina fulfilled the role of the perfectly appointed and loving mother none of them had ever had. Her acting teacher told her she was their Judy Garland, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me because I remember reading somewhere that Judy Garland wasn’t a very excellent mother. She did create Liza Minnelli after all.
It was Crystal who had heard from her Chinese herb expert that there was a love retreat going on in New Jersey and she thought maybe Katrina could sort her problems outside of the city. So Princess had tracked us down and now she was ready to be rehabbed, or retreated—as the posh would call it.
Princess had an entire suitcase full of the most amazing bath products you’ve ever seen and a second just with vitamins and herbs meant to treat any sort of anxious disorder. She went straight to work creating a mulberry tea to cure my insomnia, which made me sleep like a baby for the first time in months. Like Annie before me I fell in love with Princess before I could think about hating her.
LAA had become a mismatched family, still completed by our “outpatients” who commuted in on Sundays.
What did we all have in common? Sure, we had been mistreated by men, but the big thing was that we had all allowed ourselves to be mistreated by men (big thanks to Joe for that revelation). So the point of our group meetings was to help one another break that cycle. Not only did we need to admit that we had a problem and talk about that problem, but we also had to stop doing the things that contributed to the problems in the first place.
That Sunday we sat in the circle and each woman reviewed her progress.
“My name is Prithi, and I am a love addict,” Prithi started off her monologue, one hand on her lower back and the other gesticulating her words. “I’m feeling better this week. But I slipped. I sent the doctor eleven text messages. He responded to one. It was very short and cold and then I cried for about five hours. I took an Instagram of the flowers that Sophie brought home the other day and I posted them on my Facebook wall with a caption that said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have,’ to try to make him jealous.”
Everyone nodded gravely, not making any judgments.
“I think I will be stronger this week,” Prithi said with conviction.
Applause.
“I’m Cameron, and I’m a love addict. I met a guy this week. I’ve seen him around for a while. I think he lives in my neighborhood because he is always at my Trader Joe’s and this time we happened to be reaching for the same prepackaged Tandoori Butter Chicken. We literally touched it at the same time. We laughed. He asked me if I wanted to get a drink. Then I did what I always do. Every time I meet a man who might be suitable for a long-term relationship I start to play out the whole damn thing in my head. We would always have that tandoori chicken as an inside joke. It would be our code phrase for when we wanted to cut out early from some terrible dinner with my work friends.”
I did the same thing when I illustrated a meet-cute from the beginning of a relationship.
“He was a little tan, which I took to mean he liked the beach. We could spend summer weekends at my parents’ place in Avalon. This all happened in the space of thirty seconds. We had the drink. That drink turned into another drink. We went back to my place and fooled around a little before I told him I had an early meeting. He texted me two days later to say he had a good time. Then I texted him to see if he wanted to come to my cousin’s wedding on Friday.”
The only sound was the soft click of jaws dropping.
“Since I had imagined our entire damn relationship in my head, it seemed like the right thing to do.”
“And?” I asked.
“I haven’t heard anything from him.”
Erin was seventeen going on thirty, just like most high school girls I know. An adolescence spent with Sex and the City re-runs, along with the latest episodes of Teen Mom and Jersey Shore, made the pretty young blonde wise beyond her years. I nervously wondered whether we needed parental permission to have someone under eighteen come to the meetings, but her stories were so juicy that I didn’t have it in me to ask. I used to babysit her, so that would have to do.
A senior in high school, Erin was an über-overachiever. She played on three varsity sports teams, was student council president, and proudly joined the yearbook staff. She was also a less-than-proud recent dumpee.
“Last week they let me start writing the captions for yearbook photos,” Erin said, after telling us all about how her boyfriend of three years unceremoniously gave her the boot. “I found a picture of him getting his blood drawn at the school blood drive. I added the caption, ‘Just a little prick.’ ”
The room roared with laughter, tinged with just a hint of jealousy, at how clever Erin was for someone who was still too young to vote or drink vodka.
Kirsten, a forty-two-year-old, very Caucasian, chain-smoking florist who insisted on gesticulating with an electronic cigarette, made me nervous for entirely different reasons. I was a little concerned she might be arrested.
“I called up the mom of this twenty-two-year-old gangsta wannabe whom I caught back with his baby mama last week,” she said, making what may have been a gang symbol out of her index and mi
ddle fingers and the plastic cigarette. “So I called up his mama and told her that he had given me AIDS.”
Princess gasped. “You have AIDS? Like Magic Johnson?”
Kirsten just laughed. “No, bitch. I just told his mom that.”
“That might be worse,” I heard Annie mutter under her breath.
Liz was a friend of my grandmother’s from her bridge club. She had fiery red hair, and even though it was clearly created by Clairol and not the good Lord, that didn’t stop her from once telling me that the carpet did indeed match the drapes. I was seven years old at the time.
“I am Liz, and I am a love addict!” she announced with a flourish. Like Eleanor, Liz seemed to have a new gentleman caller every week. This week, she had found out that Adam, who was a hot commodity on the senior market because he still had his own teeth, was trying to hook up with other women online.
“I made a fake Facebook profile and friended him. He immediately sent me a private message asking to meet me. What a slimeball!”
The room nodded in agreement.
“When I was the one who showed up at the restaurant, the look on his face was priceless. At first he didn’t realize he had been busted. He asked if I was there with someone. He had the nerve to think that I was cheating on him! A minute later, he figured it out. I tossed my Skinnygirl margarita in his face and I got outta there.”
Liz finished with three snaps.
Lila had brought along a printout of an e-mail she received from the guy she was seeing. They had gone home together for the first time and he hadn’t been able to perform. It was a secret relief because Lila really wasn’t that into him to begin with and she thought that gave her a good opportunity to call it quits.
Hey Lila,
I lied to you. On Saturday you asked me if you were the first person I’d been with since my breakup, and I said yes. Actually, I’d had an unexpected one-night stand just the night before with a friend of a friend who was passing through NYC. I don’t feel I owed you any fidelity. But I felt weird telling you about it right then and I’m rusty with the complexities of casual dating, so I panicked and fibbed. (Also, I think I was seizing on the “first time” thing as an excuse for my failure to launch. The actual excuse is that I’d been up the whole night before having sex. Plus the drinking.)