But recently BadNews Boy started temping at Empire again and I asked him to lunch. After all, six years was a long time ago. I was over it. All I wanted was some cute male companionship as my relationship exploded in a burst of slow-motion fireworks.
Soon the lunches became more frequent and soon BadNews Boy was hinting around at more dangerous activities. “Doing anything fun this weekend?” he’d say in that languorous, blasé tone of his, with just a hint of eagerness beneath the smoke-tinged surface.
“Resist,” said Sensible Girl one Friday afternoon, startling me. I had no idea she was still around. It had been two years since her voice had popped into my head. Two years since I’d wanted to do anything not sensible, at least in the realm of men—so I figured she’d gone off to torture someone else. I hadn’t presented her with much of a challenge lately. “Resist,” she said, pushing her big, unfashionable glasses up on her nose. “He’s no good.”
And so I did. For about three weeks.
And then one sultry Friday, as BadNews Boy and I sprawled on the grass in front of one of Empire’s many cafeterias, I invited him out to a party with me and GalPal #2 that weekend. Sensible Girl piped up immediately.
“Why are you doing this to yourself? You’re going to get hurt!”
Then came another voice I never even knew existed. It was high-pitched and excitable. “Leave her alone!” said Needy Girl. “They’re just friends! Besides, doesn’t she deserve a little fun?”
Wearing a hot pink minidress with thigh-high white go-go boots that must have been murder in the heat, Needy Girl put her hands on her hips and glared at Sensible Girl. Sensible Girl, who had on a baggy T-shirt and unflattering khaki shorts, must have been intimidated by the newcomer’s outfit, because she glared back but didn’t say another thing.
Oblivious to the battle of wills occurring right before him, BadNews Boy accepted my invitation. His long, lean body snaked along the ground, dangerously close to mine. I’d forgotten how sexy his smile was. “Sounds like fun.”
I reread what I’d written, wondering where in the world Sensible Girl and Needy Girl had come from. The unexpected depths of my imagination, apparently! It had been so long since I’d let my imagination just go to town.
A year ago, when I’d begun to realize that even stability with Loser didn’t seem to be helping my book-writing skills, I decided to take a new tack. I put Temporary Insanity on hiatus. I would try to hit it big in the travel writing world. After all, I was already a “travel writer.” I’d published numerous travel articles for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I’d been the editor for a once-glamorous, now-defunct travel webzine called The Outpost. I’d written cover stories for Horizon Air Magazine!
So, six months before my trip to Thailand with Loser, I’d cranked out query letter after formulaic query letter. “Spa vacations in Phuket!” “Stay Alive Eating Street Food in Bangkok!” To Outside magazine. National Geographic Adventure. Travel and Leisure. I didn’t get anywhere, of course, except to a place of complete creative bankruptcy. I devolved into a writer who could write only unsuccessful query letters.
So as I sat there in Victrola, with characters popping unbidden out of my head, I felt as if I’d gotten something back again. My creativity.
Suddenly I remembered the whale dream. A week before Loser and I broke up, I dreamt that we were having one of our tortured pre-breakup discussions in a dinghy in the middle of the ocean. He was telling me yet again—in that new, cold tone of his—that he wanted to break up with me. That he didn’t “see how it could work” anymore. Just as I was about to accept that Loser was dumping me for good, a whale surfaced near us, about ten times bigger than life-size. I was so thrilled and terrified at the same time, I practically fell into the water. I woke up balancing on the boat, watching the whale slide beneath the waves.
And after a profound $90 discussion with my therapist, Jade, I determined it meant this: Something creative was going to come out of this breakup. It had to. Otherwise, this pain was going to sit on my chest and crush me.
I hadn’t thought about that dream in a while. In all the ensuing turmoil, I’d forgotten it. Now that I remembered it, a flicker of excitement stirred in my stomach. A shadow of the same thrill I’d felt in the dream. It felt—just a little—like this blog could be the start of that “something.” I sipped my coffee and got back to it.
It was fun, all right. At 3 A.M., we spilled out of the party into the August night with a crowd of laughing, drunken people. My ears were ringing with DJ Krush. My head was spinning with the electric blue punch I’d been drinking for three hours straight, and I felt like I’d rejoined the human race.
But when BadNews Boy—who’d been touching and flirting with me all night long—draped his arm around me, put his stubbly cheek against mine, and said, in my by now half-deaf ear, “Can I walk you home?” my whole body tensed like that of a dog that’s just heard a set of unfamiliar footsteps approaching the door.
Sensible Girl appeared immediately, her hair flying this way and that. She was wearing an ankle-length cotton nightgown covered with pink flowers. “Watch it,” she barked at me.
“Jesus Christ, give the girl a break, would you?” Needy Girl tottered up to us in spike-heeled sandals, her little gold cocktail number swishing midthigh. From the looks of her, she’d been drinking too. “He’s just putting his arm around her. What’s the harm in that?”
I melted instinctively into BadNews Boy’s embrace. So what if the feeling of “love” and “protection” it offered was a sham? I was like a scarlet tulip bursting into bloom after months of subterranean dwelling and saying, “Let’s partay!” I wanted nothing more than to stay glued to BadNews Boy’s body for the rest of the night. The rest of my life.
“Damn it!” Sensible Girl was furious now. She’d stalked up to Needy Girl and yelled in her face. “You know he wants to sleep with her! And that if she lets him walk her home, she’s going to invite him in!” Needy Girl looked startled but held her ground. “And, yeah, it might feel good tonight, but how’s she going to feel tomorrow if she sleeps with him? Any little crumbs of self-esteem she’s managed to gather together in the last month will get instantly blown away!”
As I paused in my typing and let my eyes wander over Victrola’s other patrons—the woman with a hot pink shawl and a fluffy white dog, the gorgeous olive-skinned dad with his angelic daughter—I felt a tinge of apprehension about what I’d just written. Should I really cross this line—I took a quick, embarrassed gulp of my coffee, as if Hottie Dad could read my thoughts—into sex?
I’d never written about my sex life for public consumption before! Hell, Temporary Insanity didn’t even have a make-out scene in it!
Heartbreak was a safer topic. No one could judge me for getting my heart broken.
Then again, I thought, downing the last of my coffee, which was sugary and cold by now—who was going to judge me? It was mainly my best girlfriends reading this and they knew all about what had happened anyway. Why not write it up for their entertainment? In all likelihood, no one else would ever read it. Plus, you couldn’t exactly call what happened last night “sex.”
“Hey, we’re going to IHOP, wanna come?” said GalPal #2, holding the hand of her husband, B., who towered over her five-foot two-inch pixielike frame. Her short blond hair was tousled, her voice animated from a rare night of drinking. GalPal #2 wore a maroon tube top that we’d shopped for together the other day at Banana Republic. Despite her hemp-clothed girlhood on an organic farm in Eugene, Oregon—or maybe because of it—GalPal #2 tolerated the occasional indulgence in corporate consumerism, though not without beating herself up afterward. (“I’m going to make all my own clothes after this!” she’d say. And she would. For about a month.)
BadNews Boy paused and looked unsure. Sensible Girl and Needy Girl glared at each other. For a moment, the night was still, with only the sounds of distant I-5 in the background. Then a burst of drunken female laughter pierced the air. It must have startled Need
y Girl, because one of her stilettos buckled and she nearly fell to the ground.
“Yeah!” I said to GalPal #2, almost hugging her in gratitude. I was half hoping BadNews Boy would come along, half hoping he would decline and leave before I lost any shred of willpower I might possess.
Needy Girl scrambled back up, her face red, watching BadNews Boy intently. Sensible Girl closed her eyes and grimaced.
“I think I’ll pass on that,” said BadNews Boy, though the cloud that passed over his face indicated that he was going through his own tug-of-war. His arm was still around me. He smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, a delicious and dangerous nighttime smell. I breathed it in deeply, and then breathed it out, trying to expel it from my body.
A few blocks later we went our separate ways. “Okay,” I said as I turned to hug him, “I’ll see you later.” I felt the hardness of his chest against mine. The way his six-foot frame felt so strong as he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek. I hadn’t felt a male body against mine in two months. Needy Girl let out a little moan.
“Bye, R.,” he said. And he turned left to go up Madison, while I turned right. GalPal #2 and B. were walking ahead, still holding hands. I breathed in the warm night air, and Sensible Girl sighed in relief.
“Good job,” she whispered in a ragged voice that wasn’t quite relaxed. As if she knew this was only the beginning of a stint of hard labor, perhaps the hardest she’d ever faced.
As we walked toward IHOP, I was breathing fast and hard. Just three years ago, I would have let BadNews Boy—or someone like him—walk me home. I would have invited him in. Slept with him and then regretted it, because, of course, I would have ended up getting hurt.
As I gazed off into the distance, trying to decide how to end the entry, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I was so startled, I nearly jumped out of my seat. My first thought was “It’s BadNews Boy!” who lived, inconveniently, in the neighborhood. “What if he sees this?!” In the world’s most unsubtle move, I lowered the screen of my laptop so that Breakup Babe was not so glaringly visible, and looked up.
But in fact, it was only Victrola’s cutest barista, the black-haired one with the orange-framed glasses. Had he just come in? I hadn’t noticed him earlier. He was smiling at me and pointing to my plate, which had sandwich crumbs on it.
“Are you done with this?”
“Oh—yeah,” I said, my heart pounding so hard from my initial fright that I could hardly hear myself speak. “Great,” he said, taking my plate away, then smiling at me again before he walked to the next table.
Jesus, what was I so damn jumpy about? It wasn’t even like I’d said anything that bad about BadNews Boy, or anything that embarrassing about my feelings for him.
Heart still pounding in my ears, I scanned the café for him. Loser. Anyone. But all I saw was the regular yet ever-changing crowd of hipsters, couples, and intellectuals. When I finally returned to my computer, my fingers were trembling slightly as I typed.
I watched GalPal #2 and B. ahead of me and thought about what I had just done. Maybe, just maybe, I was stronger than I had been before. At least on this one particular affection-starved Saturday night. But if BadNews Boy had come along to IHOP? And then walked me home?
The door to the restaurant swung open, and I was engulfed in the aroma of maple syrup. I took a deep breath. I didn’t need to worry about that. Who knew what might happen with BadNews Boy in the future? All that mattered was that I was safe for the moment.
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Who is this BadNews Boy? Have we met him? I knew we should never have let you move out.
Worried About You | 8/25/02—2:17 P.M.
Chapter Three
I’d been at work for a full thirty seconds on Monday before I knew it was going to be one of those days. For the most part, life at work had gotten better thanks to the holy pink pill. Fewer crying fits. Fewer urges to run to Loser’s office and beg him to take me back, tearing my clothes off for extra added encouragement. But there were always the days that grief blindsided me, and this, apparently, was one of them.
No sooner had I turned on my computer than I felt the slimy tentacles of despair reaching up my back. Going for my neck, where they would paralyze me. Making me unable to work, yet unable to go home and face my utter aloneness. I knew that within an hour, when my morning caffeine high had worn off, I’d be on the phone with GalPal #1 or #2, blubbering “I c-c-can’t work down the hall from h-h-him anymore!” Sob, gulp, cough.
As if that weren’t enough, I was now in the disagreeable position of waiting to hear from BadNews Boy. Ye Olde Unreliable. Who, in the old days, had ignored my calls and e-mails until he was good and ready to answer them (i.e., when he was horny). Not that I wanted to have lunch with him. Or sleep with him! No! I would not get myself into a “situation” with him again! It’s just, I wanted…oh God. I just wanted him to want me. To keep making me feel good the way he had on Saturday night, without any ramifications. Ha.
Grimly I turned my computer on. One minute of my workday down, 479 to go. Before entering my office, I’d caught a glimpse of my colleague Thomas next door, typing away. He appeared to be working on one of the novel-length e-mails that he was famous for. In each one, he went into dazzling detail about minute stylistic inconsistencies in our documentation and proposed sensible solutions, that were then ignored because no one could ever read that far. I knew, from our brief weeklong stint as officemates, that he arrived every day at precisely 9 A.M. and left at 5:30 P.M. He took a half hour lunch at his desk at 12:30, eating a peanut butter sandwich on oat bran bread, an apple, and a rice cake. His life seemed so predictable. So free of drama. Typing away with that solid gold band on his left hand to anchor him down. Oh, how I wanted that life right now!
When my computer came to life, I clicked over to my blog. It was now the first thing that I did every morning. More than my e-mail, it was likely to yield satisfying personal results. Today, I knew, I would scan my e-mail for a message from BadNews Boy, and there would be none. Instead there would be a backlog of e-mails with subject lines like: Schema Changes: Parameters now render as italics. I could put that inevitable disappointment off for a few minutes. At least on Breakup Babe, Jane could usually be counted on to leave a witty comment.
There, indeed, was a comment from Jane, and:
You need time to recover from the breakup. I recommend taking time just for yourself—to regroup and figure out what you want and need in the future. I sent you an e-mail about this; check your account.
Juliana | Homepage | 8/25/02—5:02 P.M.
Juliana? Who in the world was Juliana? I raised my head, which I’d been resting in my hands, barely able to support the weight of it. A second ago, all I’d wanted to do was lay it down on my desk and close my eyes. But suddenly I was completely alert. As Juliana instructed in her message, I checked my Breakup Babe e-mail account, which so far had received a grand total of three messages—from GalPals #1, #2, and #3—in the month since its inception. I had set up the e-mail account when I started my blog, just because it seemed like the thing to do. All the other bloggers I’d read had e-mail accounts to go with their blogs, so what the hell. I never expected people to actually send mail to it!
From: Juliana Stamford
To: Breakup Babe
Date: August 25, 2002
Subject: You Are Me
Hi, Breakup Babe,
When I was in my twenties, I was just like you.
Though it was fun at times, I would never go back there!
I think you should do what I did. Go ahead and date, but make sure you keep a list. List the red flags you find, and when you get to five, dump him. Because if there are five things that concern you within a short period of time, there’s a lot more where they came from.
Within a year of when I started keeping track this way, I met my husband. Because I stopped depending on the potential of a man and started to look at reality.
I h
ave linked to you from my blog, Big Bad Swede.
Juliana
http://bigbadswede.blogspot.com
“Oh my God!” I mouthed, staring at the screen. “Oh my God!” I had a fan! My mind reeled. How had she found my site? The only possible way was through the front page of Blogger. Every time you updated your blog, the name appeared for about a minute on the front page. She would have had to click on it at exactly the right time.
I got up from my chair and did a little jig around the office. My troubles were, for the moment, completely gone. I had spoken to someone out there in the big, wide world. My writing spoke to someone.
I didn’t think much right then about the advice that Juliana had given me, or about the odd fact that this complete stranger had given me advice at all. All I could think was she liked me! Even if it was just one person, her e-mail made me feel completely justified for baring myself online. Someone enjoyed it! Someone related to it! I was a writer!
Monday, August 26, 2002
3:14 PM Breakup Babe
Today was a big day here in Breakup Babe Land, thanks to Juliana. Her e-mail was the first thing that helped me survive this Monday, which promised to be A Very Bad Day.
I woke up this morning drenched in sadness. Last night I dreamt that Loser was caught in the crossfire of a gunfight downtown. As he lay there bleeding to death on Pike Street, I threw myself over his body (ruining an $80 Anthropologie blouse in the process) and screamed, “No! No!” But of course he died anyway, the bastard, without any parting words for me other than a death rattle.
Plus, any ridiculous illusions I may have had about Saturday night are gone. GONE, do you hear me? Believe me, I’ve fantasized repeatedly about those two shimmering, innocent hours at the party when BadNews Boy made me feel like a human being for the first time in two months. Now if only it could stay like that. If only he and I could go out occasionally and flirt and fondle while the lights flash and the music plays, and I could feel good and warm and forgetful; then we could go our separate ways and the night would just vaporize into pleasant memories.
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