Tension flickered between us.
“Nothing,” I said, leaning in and kissing him harder because I was afraid to speak my true reaction, because I didn’t want to embarrass him, because I didn’t want to make a big deal out of what was probably nothing. So I’d stayed home and been a nerd while he’d been out in the world having a good time, so what? He offered me a glass of wine, and even though I’d enjoyed how clear I’d felt all week, I agreed, hoping everything would just relax and ease up between us. And it did.
In the morning, while we were still in bed, Robert sat up against the pillows.
“I need to talk to you about last night,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound mature and adult, even though I felt like running from the bed.
“It’s really important for me to feel wanted by you,” he said. “And when you act like that, it’s really hard for me to want to be close to you.”
I felt awful. I loved him. I didn’t want to hurt him and make him feel bad.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know, it’s not easy for me to trust, and being close is hard for me sometimes.”
I felt shaky throughout the conversation, but by the end I was glad he’d said something. And I was excited to be with someone who was so capable of identifying a problematic moment in the relationship and bringing it up in a neutral conversation. It felt like we were building something with real potential.
We spent Thanksgiving alone together, even as his family, who he was close with, celebrated together up in Santa Barbara. He brought over a bottle of bourbon with the remaining ingredients for dinner, and he poured us drinks and kept me company while I cooked. Tipsy, working through the multitude of steps in Marilyn Monroe’s elaborate stuffing recipe, I chopped my finger badly. Queasy at the sight of blood and unable to look at the carnage full-on, I let Robert doctor and soothe me while I cried from the shock of the cut and the pain, comforted by his steadiness in a crisis.
The following weekend, he took me up the coast to meet his family, who were the kind of lovely, real people it’s so easy to forget live in California alongside the stars and aspirants. They made me feel very welcome, and I was flush with good feelings as Robert took me out to an upscale bar afterward to celebrate what was also our one-month anniversary. I was still on my superstrict diet, but I hadn’t wanted to put his sister-in-law out, so I hadn’t eaten much at dinner, and I was starving now. When the food came, Robert picked up the knife and fork and cut the food into tiny pieces, and then he handed me the fork. I felt cared for, and I leaned in closer to him and took a bite.
“I want to talk to you about what our future might be like,” he said. “Now that you’ve met my family, I want you to be close to me.”
I swooned at his assuredness and his openness to discussion. Here, finally, was a secure future with a man I loved deeply. We spoke about places we might want to live, and about our thoughts on marriage. He promised me a forty-five-year honeymoon. I felt as if we were already building a shared life, even though we’d only dated for a month.
Robert was clearly besotted, and I was deeply in love, but the night before I left to go home for Christmas, my old daddy issues reared their grizzled heads. After years of toil and aborted hope, I’d had my first feature script go out to producers, and I had a meeting in the morning with a hotshot producer who’d scored a big hit in the indie world and had told my agents she’d loved the writing enough to want to meet me. Given the pressure I was feeling to make a good impression, and the fact that I had to then get on a plane to fly home for two weeks, I’d suggested that Robert stay at his house that night so I could wake up rested and have plenty of time to get ready in the morning. He’d taken me to dinner and then come over, and we’d had a nice night in which I’d felt well taken care of and close to him.
When it was time for him to leave, I was already in bed. He got dressed and leaned down to kiss me good night. I was consumed by a wrenching sense of loss. He was going to walk out that door, and although he was driving me to the airport, I wasn’t going to sleep next to him again for two long weeks. I felt as if I would never see him again. I squeezed my eyes shut and buried my head in his neck, soaking up his familiar scent of rose and musk. Hot tears punched their way out of my lids, and my body jackhammered with sobs. He squeezed me tighter, but I just cried harder.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he said. “You have a big meeting tomorrow. And then you’ll be at home. And the time will go by before you know it.”
“I know,” I choked out. “But I’m going to miss you so much.”
“I’m going to miss you, too. But it’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
He climbed into bed with me and held me close. But no matter what he said or how long he lay next to me, I couldn’t stop crying. I could tell he felt awful, even though he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, and that he was confused and a little scared. I was, too. Intellectually I knew that this was fucked up. But emotionally I was hemorrhaging grief and loss, and I couldn’t stop. It was almost midnight, and it became clear I wasn’t going to stop crying. Robert unclenched my arms from around his neck. I curled up in a fetal position.
“I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Try to get some sleep.”
“I love you, too,” I choked out.
Through tear-clogged eyes I watched him put on his coat and step out the door. I heard him turn the lock behind him. I heard his car start up and drive away. My tears kept up for another thirty minutes after he was gone. Clearly having a loving boyfriend wasn’t going to heal my issues any more than reconciling with my dad had.
When I flew back into Los Angeles a few days after Christmas, Robert was at work, but he stopped at the grocery store to buy essentials and then came over. This was not just a thoughtful gesture on his part. One of my clients hadn’t paid me thousands of dollars the previous year, and the contract for the book I was about to hand in had been delayed. My credit cards were literally charged to the max. Robert was barely keeping up with his expenses, but he told me that he had some credit available that was all mine if I needed it. I couldn’t take his money, but I appreciated his keeping me in food and drink and, even more important, books. I had missed him just as much as I expected to and was ferociously glad to see him. We instantly stitched our schedules back together, but the seams were visible.
We left my friends’ New Year’s Eve party early and went home, where I was abuzz with bliss. As we sat together at my table, Robert’s mood didn’t match mine.
“That’s the first time I haven’t had anything to say to your friends,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy yourself more. They’re all really nice. They’ve known each other forever. I’m sure next time will be more fun for you.”
I moved on to what I really wanted to discuss.
“I think we should talk about next year.”
“What, like New Year’s resolutions?” he asked.
“Sort of, more like what we want to do together, like it would mean a lot to me if you could come home with me.”
“Um, maybe in the fall,” he said, sounding less excited than I’d hoped.
“It’s so beautiful in New England in the fall,” I said, fighting to stay perky. “I’ll ask my mom and Craig when would be best for foliage.”
But what I really wanted was a little bigger than a vacation.
“And I really want to buy a house next year,” I said.
I prattled away happily about neighborhoods and fixer-uppers and how Craig could come out and help us do work on the place. Robert didn’t exactly run away with the conversation, but he didn’t shut me down either.
The next day, Robert started to feel weird, queasy and tense, and that deflated further into him being distant and a little cross. I was already restless, and the more he pulled away from me, the more anxious I got, and the more I wanted to be closer to him. I put on my sneakers to go for a quick run. I returned feeling energized and ins
pired, but Robert was feeling worse than before. Later that night, he confessed he was having a hard time; feeling anxious lately. By this point, I was feeling so far away from him, it was as if I were staring at him across a vast silent library, instead of sitting next to him on my tiny love seat.
Our conversation became a subtle sortie of defensive moves. I tried to feel out how bad it might get and how much help he was willing to enlist. He tried to manage his anxiety, which wasn’t being helped at all by my probing.
“You make it sound like this is a deal breaker, or something,” he said.
“Of course it’s not,” I said, shocked he’d made such a vast leap. “I’m just trying to figure out what I can do to help you.”
By the time we went to bed that night, I was crying. I felt so very alone, and I felt guilty for demanding anything from him during his time of need. Instead of being better in the morning, things flatlined as they were, and even got a little worse. Robert faced off against his anxiety attacks and waged a steady war against increasingly severe neck and back pain. Socializing was out, but I didn’t care. I was happy to drive up to his apartment.
Feeling helpless in the face of his unhappiness, I wanted to be near him, to try to lighten his mood. I slid into a sheer pink nightgown and twined flowers in my hair, and then pulled on my black trench coat against the January chill. I put lamby, my stuffed animal from childhood, in my bag, and when he opened the door, I held lamby aloft, an amulet against bad feelings. Once inside, I slid off my coat and showed him his other present. He laughed.
I stretched across his bed and talked him through his anxiety as he packed to go to a conference for work. But after he left for his business trip, the tempo of our lives suddenly changed. I was just finishing the book I’d started the previous fall. And I was hired to ghostwrite two other books and edit a third, starting immediately. I left for Las Vegas with a new client on the day I was supposed to pick Robert up from the airport. Her book was due in six weeks, and I had promised I could meet the deadline. The day I flew back from Las Vegas, I didn’t have enough cash to take a cab from the airport, and only one of my credit cards had enough credit left to cover the fare. But I had a big check in my bag. I went immediately to the bank, feeling everything lighten. It was the first time I hadn’t been worried about money in nearly two years. I drove back to the airport to pick up my friend Cathy, who’d flown in to celebrate my birthday, but really, she’d come to meet Robert.
“I’ve never heard you talk about a guy like this before,” she said.
The only problem was Robert was now sick with a bad cold and bowed out of all of my invitations to meet us for dinner or sightseeing. One night, on the verge of a meltdown, I dropped Cathy off at my house and drove up to see Robert, desperate just to be near him. It had been nearly two weeks since we’d seen each other. I climbed into bed with him and took off all of my clothes. Afterward, we lay together talking quietly, and it was if a great weight had been lifted from me, just like at the bank.
It seemed that Cathy might not meet Robert at all, until the last night she stayed with me, on the eve of my birthday, he joined us for dinner and a show at the Magic Castle. The next morning when Robert and I woke up alone in my house, he immediately began secret birthday maneuverings. He’d snuck stuff into my refrigerator the night before, and he now got up and cooked me eggs with special steak he’d tracked down for me. At my place setting was an antique souvenir book from Niagara Falls inscribed with a beautiful, romantic letter, and a birthday card that echoed a vow he’d been making to me since we confessed our love, the promise of a forty-five-year honeymoon. Nothing scared me when I knew we were both in it for the long haul. This was how relationships got broken in, this was how people got to know each other, this was how families worked, right?
The day after my birthday, I went back to work, and I only saw Robert for a few hours here and there after that. When we were together, I was still fielding e-mails from my clients, whether it was two in the morning on a Wednesday or two in the afternoon on a Sunday. I could feel the chill emanate from him every time I picked up my BlackBerry. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Is it bothering you that I’m working so much?”
“No, no, it’s your work, I get it.”
But his posture told a different story. By Valentine’s Day, I was convinced we were going to break up, and was floored when I arrived that evening to find he’d lit candles throughout his apartment and yard and put on a suit jacket and greeted me with as much romance as ever. I was temporarily reassured and too busy and tapped out to really investigate beyond the surface. And when we did get to spend time together, it was still so easy for us to connect.
During a conversation with Robert about my dad’s gambling and the books I’d bought him to help him master the racetrack, Robert paused and looked at me.
“Well, you know your dad is mentally ill, right?”
I was shocked. My dad wasn’t mentally ill. He was cool, bohemian—eccentric, yes, but in a good way.
The possible truth of Robert’s words bloomed in my mind: the untreated gambling addiction, the depression, the narcissism that my new therapist had basically diagnosed when she’d recommended all of those books on narcissism to me. It wasn’t that I cared, really, about any of this. I certainly had plenty of my own issues. What unsettled me was the possibility that my father had raised me in a complex fantasy where he was the infallible king, and I his most loyal subject. If I woke up from the enchantment, what would happen? Who would I be and in what world would I live?
I didn’t ever make a conscious decision to change my behavior, but after that moment, I started to pull back from my dad. I didn’t talk with him about Robert the way I had about previous relationships. Even though Robert and I were both having a difficult winter, as far as I was concerned, we were still moving toward getting married and starting a family, so maybe it was right for me to push my father off his pedestal and become an adult. My dad even seemed to agree. One day when we were discussing my life—Robert, my ghostwriting, my script—he paused.
“You’re almost done,” my dad said, sounding a little sad that I might not need his support as I had during the early years of our reunion.
Even as blissed-out as I was in my surety that I’d finally found the one, work deadlines consumed me. I was distracted and exhausted. Robert protested up and down that everything was fine, but that did not stop him from growing more distant as the winter progressed, which only made me cling harder. When we did see each other, with booze in our bloodstream, we had sex like we had in the beginning. In the morning, I woke feeling bleary and bruised and went back to my computer, where I stayed for days at a time.
When I opened the file for the book I’d been hired to write, I lost myself in the story I’d been told by my client, whom I genuinely liked, and the sheer joy I felt when I got caught up in the puzzle of moving prose around on the page. It was a welcome respite from the seemingly bottomless longing I felt, which never seemed to alter in any measurable way, even if the men I was longing for changed.
In the first few months of our relationship, Robert had sent me his schedule every week, so I could go to events with him, and we could plan to hang out on his days off. Now, when I asked him about the week ahead, he ran through the plans he had already made for his free time. I sat, staring at him, frozen with fear and dread.
“So you’re not going to see me at all next week,” I said.
“Well, you’ve been so busy,” he said.
At the end of one such exchange, he was sitting in a wingback chair at his house, impassive and closed off. I ended up kneeling by his chair, my arms around his waist. I knew I was clinging, literally, but if I didn’t move toward him, there would be nothing left of our relationship for me to reconnect with after my deadline.
“We’ll talk about it after your book is done,” he said.
“Talk about what?” I asked. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Everything is fine,” he
said. “Just get your book done.”
For the last week of my deadline, I slept six hours a night and spent literally every other waking moment working on the manuscript. When I handed it in, a week late because of the client’s last-minute changes, Robert and I went to Malibu for a night away, which I’d planned carefully and then postponed. I wanted to have sex. He wanted to have adventures. When he reached for a napkin in my glove box, he found there were none.
“How do you expect to be a mom if you don’t have paper towels in your glove box?” he asked.
Instead of defending myself, I made a mental note to get some napkins.
I’d bought a Frisbee and a kite for our weekend away, and as he tossed the white disc to me on the beach, he laughed.
“Maybe you’ll be a good mom after all,” he said.
I stared at him in disbelief but held my tongue.
When we got back to his house, I was supposed to go to a friend’s birthday party, and he wanted to bow out and spend the night at home. Even though we’d just spent twenty-four hours together on a supposedly romantic getaway, I felt farther away from him than ever. I melted down, sobbing and shuddering on his bed.
He drove me to the party and remained cheerful throughout, but I didn’t feel victorious. It hadn’t been a battle or a point I’d been trying to prove. I regularly drove to Texas and Tennessee by myself and had no problem going to a party alone. What I was fighting for, clumsily, was something much deeper and harder to get at than that. I wanted closeness from him, and I did not feel it simply because he was standing in the same room with me, or sleeping in the same bed. Every good moment we spent together was evidence I stored up to ward off this feeling of lurking trouble, but the shadows persisted.
In mid-April, Robert came over on a Friday night. This was usually our date night. But he didn’t ask me where I wanted to eat or grab his keys to head out the door. Instead, he sat heavily on my love seat, and he didn’t move at all.
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