R—
Second thoughts about the relationship? Frankly, with my work schedule and the custody stuff, I haven’t had time to have any thoughts, much less second thoughts.
As for the blog, well, you wrote about the situation as you saw it. How can I have any complaints with that?
How was the HR meeting?
I’ll call you soon.
My God! I felt like I should be wearing a T-shirt that said “I practically got fired and all I got from my boyfriend was a stupid e-mail.” This e-mail was even colder than his last one. When I read it, something twisted inside me, and I knew. Jane had been right about him. Whatever was going on with Jake—whether it really was this custody battle, lingering feelings for his ex-wife, or he was pissed off about what I’d written—it was not the warm, friendly Jake I knew. And it was not the Jake I wanted to be with.
If he lived in Seattle and we could see each other on a regular basis, we might be able to work through this, whatever “this” was. I just did not have the time or energy to deal with a difficult, baggage-ridden guy who lived in Portland. Besides, as GalPal #1 had put it on the phone last night (loudly, as usual), if our relationship was this difficult in the early “honeymoon” stage, how likely was it that it would get better?
Not very damn likely.
When I called him, I jumped in immediately so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. “I think,” I told him, “that we need to cut this off now. It’s just not working. I think you’re too busy for me. It makes me sad when I don’t hear from you, so instead of being one of those nagging girlfriends, I’m just going to say, Okay, that’s it. We have different needs. And let you go. Even though I really don’t want to.”
I had rehearsed that speech many times in my head. I was hoping, of course, that he would leap in and say, “I’m sorry. This is just temporary!” But I knew he wouldn’t.
Silence on the other end.
“Jake?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Oh.” The English accent still made me melt. Suddenly I wanted to take everything back.
Finally he spoke. “What would you like me to say? Sounds like I don’t have much of a choice in the matter. Not that I ever did.”
“What do you mean?” The cold tone in his voice broke my heart.
“Well, your whole blog is an ode to commitmentphobia, isn’t it?”
“What?” This comment shocked me so much, I almost laughed. I imagined, for a second, making it the subtitle of my blog: “Breakup Babe: An Ode to Commitmentphobia.”
“Haven’t you noticed? You just use guys up and throw them out so you have something to write about.”
“Oh my God.” How had this suddenly turned into a conversation about what was wrong with me? I was the one who had complaints here!
“That’s what you did with me, too.”
I felt like I should argue. Protest. Slam down the phone. It seemed so unfair that he was using my blog against me. But I was too curious about my intriguing new status as a literary man-eater.
“I did?”
“Yes! You told me one of the reasons you agreed to meet me was that if we got together, it would be a ‘great ending’ for your book.”
I was about to say something, but he kept going. “Moreover, you made me look like a fool, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“But you certainly got a lot of laughs out of your readers, which is all you were looking for, I’m sure. They all think I’m a raging idiot. Well, I tell you what. I feel like one right now, for ever agreeing to be one of your subjects.”
I didn’t know whether to feel guilty or outraged. He’d given me permission to write about that trip! He’d said, specifically, that he deserved “a little ribbing” for what happened! So I’d given him a little gentle ribbing. I hadn’t been that bad, had I?
“If you can, during an argument, try to step outside the situation and put yourself in the other person’s head. What are they feeling right now? If they are upset, in their own head, they have a valid reason for it. But often, if a person is angry, they will not be directly addressing this reason. Instead, they’ll be casting blame” (Amos White, Relationships for Dummies).
He was hurt. I had to understand that. I had hurt his feelings.
“I’m sorry, Jake,” I said, “I’m really sorry if I made you feel bad. That was not my intention.”
“And now that you’ve already featured me as the Clown of the Week on your blog, you’re ready to back out of the whole thing just because I’m not e-mailing you ten times a day. Because I’m not ‘supporting’ you, or whatever. As if my own troubles don’t count for a damn. No. I’m only about to lose my daughter, that’s all! Did it occur to you that maybe I need support too, and the best way you could be supportive is by being patient?” His voice cracked here.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. This time it came out as a whisper. There was no point arguing now. I wished we could turn the clock back to that moment when he told me, over e-mail, the whole sordid story of his ex-wife, People magazine, the rich new boyfriend, the moment when I could have said “too much baggage,” and steered the tone of our e-mail away from the flirtatious and back to the friendly. When I could have heeded my own New Year’s resolution not to “grasp at pointless relationships with hot but inappropriate men.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he said. “Save it for the next guy. That’s who I feel sorry for.”
Then he hung up the phone.
I’d cried for half an hour afterward. For hurting him. For being hurt by him. For the potential that had shimmered so brightly for such a short time. Then I picked myself up and, miraculously, got a solid hour of work done on the latest assignment for my writing class. I noticed, yet again, how the act of writing smoothed the jagged edges of my life.
Now, as I wondered how to blog about it the next day, I felt a sort of admiration for him. The way he’d extricated himself so quickly from the conversation. What if I’d done that when Loser had first wanted to break up with me? It would have saved me a full month of excruciating heartbreak.
It’s true. The daydream that is Long-Distance Boy is over. I’m not going to give the hows and the whys here. Last night it all ended in a brief burst of explosives that hopefully left no permanent damage.
And, yes, I’m sad. But I’ll survive. It was short, after all. Short, then sweet, then very bitter. I’ve learned from it, though, and the most important thing I’ve learned is this:
Don’t date a guy who reads my blog!
So if I’m ever tempted to do that again, please stop me, okay?
Meanwhile, my book marches forward at a snail’s pace! There are now three full scenes written with plans for a fourth. At this rate, I will be done in forty years, and you will all have to come to the nursing home to get your autographed copy!
Just imagine, though, the merchandising potential. Action figures, for example! “Nursing Home B.B.” with portable oxygen tanks and little pink vial for her meds!
So there you have it. That’s what I have to look forward to right now: a book that will be published in forty years and, until then, a life bereft of s*x and companionship, because—you know what?—boys are just a distraction and I don’t need them, do you hear me? I DON’T NEED THEM!
I felt a little better after writing my blog. Especially, because, just as I finished, I looked up to see the cute barista gazing at me with what could only be described as a longing look. Where had he come from?
I smiled at him and he smiled back, then quickly looked away, as if he hadn’t expected to get caught. My insides fluttered. Maybe today was the day to go strike up a conversation with him. Then I caught myself.
JESUS! Would I never stop?
I snapped my computer shut, trying to put a businesslike expression on my face. I’d been sarcastic, of course, when I said I didn’t need boys, but I knew without a doubt by now that the steamroller approach I’d been using post-Loser just wasn’t working.
; I need to chill out. Cool off. Mellow out. Stop the insanity. Take some me-time.
For at least a day.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I managed to take some me-time for a full two weeks. Instead of moping around about boys, I focused like a laser beam on the things that had to be done.
One, I had to improve my work performance so that I could get back in Empire’s good graces.
Two, I had to work on the first chapter of my book, which was due at the end of the class in March.
Three, I had to start training for Mount Rainier. I’d decided, in a wave of momentum after breaking up with Jake, that I would climb it without him. Who needed a guy to do such things? Certainly not moi! The day after we broke up, I signed up on the American Lung Association website before I could lose my nerve.
Merely putting my name down, however, didn’t fully commit me. In May, I would have to make a deposit of $200 if I wanted to climb. That gave me two months to decide if I really wanted to do it. By signing up on the site, I could reserve myself a spot and get in touch with other potential climbers so we could train together.
I got into a solid routine. Up at 7:30 A.M., write, and get to work at the very Empire-acceptable time of 10 A.M. When I wrote every day, even just for an hour, I made a lot of progress. The story line of my memoir (girl gets heart broken, girl starts blog, blog helps girl get over broken heart) started to become more than just an outline. It was a living, breathing thing. I realized, as I combed through my blog, that I had tons of material.
While some other blogs were short and pithy, giving only a bird’s-eye view of people’s lives, mine really delved into the details. I’d worried about it on a number of occasions. Was I going on too much? Did people reading about my life on the Internet want something quicker, snappier? Whether or not they did, at least I now had the details that made for a good book: smells, sounds, feelings, settings.
When I’d written my proposal back in December, I didn’t have a good idea about how I’d tie all my blog entries together. Now, as I learned more about structure, I realized that to turn them into a cohesive story would require connective narrative and a good, dramatic shape. The beauty of a blog was partly its randomness, the way it reflected what was going in a person’s everyday life. A book couldn’t have that arbitrariness. There had to be a sense that everything was leading somewhere.
Which meant, of course, that I had some thinking to do about my life. Where was all this dating leading? All this blogging? To true love and a multimillion-dollar book deal, I hoped! A life of endless glamour! Breakup Babe quits her boring job to become a jet-setting travel journalist and scores an assignment to travel the globe with the Italian men’s soccer team, where she must fend off marriage proposals left and right! But who knew what the real ending would be? I’d have to figure it out when I got there. Meanwhile, I knew now that if I had a good outline in place, a compelling story would emerge. I saw it happening already.
After my daily writing session, I’d head to work. In the past, I’d arrive at the office and wallow in boredom and misery for several hours before doing any actual work. Now I fought these feelings with a variety of successful tactics. Previously, I’d started the day by checking my e-mail, arranging and rearranging my task list, and IMing the GalPals. Now, when I arrived, I would immediately dive into my editing without checking my e-mail. I turned IM on only for brief periods of time (much to GalPal #3’s dismay), and made reading my e-mail a “reward” for doing actual work.
Not that there was ever anything scintillating in my in-box. It was the same old work-related technical gobbledygook as always. Messages with subject lines such as: Missing Parameter in the CreateNullVoid method—can you fix? But I always looked forward to reading it just in case I got that e-mail that changed my life forever. An old flame could miraculously e-mail me and beg me to come back! Some other random, cute boy could have miraculously gotten my e-mail address and decided to contact me! Johnny Depp could have miraculously stumbled upon Breakup Babe and begged for the rights to the movie!
Every other day at 3 P.M., I went running or to the gym. The Mount Rainier climb was still months away, but I was already getting in shape for it. I’d gotten soft and lazy in the months after The Great Unpleasantness! It was very unlike me. I’d always been disciplined about exercise, ever since I first started running with my dad at age twelve. But it helped to have some sort of goal, a race or an event to motivate me to train. In the past, there had been triathlons. Marathons. Even a relay race at Mount Baker called “Ski to Sea” that I’d been drafted into three years ago despite my protests that I was the slowest cross-country skier on the face of the planet. Well, now I had the biggest, baddest goal of them all, one that on sunny days loomed over all of Puget Sound, looking deceptively beautiful and benign.
I’d get home from work at 8 or 9 P.M. and try to find someone to hang out with who wasn’t a hot but inappropriate male. This wasn’t the easiest thing for me to do, since at that hour, GalPals #2 and #3 were putting their children to bed and GalPal #1 was in bed herself. One night Sexy Boy invited me out for drinks, and I found the New, Improved Rachel™ being put to the test.
“You’re looking awfully well these days, Miss R.,” said Sexy Boy over beers at Paragon, a meat market for well-groomed denizens of yuppie Queen Anne Hill (so different from the jaded grunge holdovers of my own Capitol Hill neighborhood). Since our New Year’s Eve fling, we’d e-mailed and talked on the phone a few times, but had seen each other only once—at a group event right before Jake’s arrival. As befitted a dating confidant, Sexy Boy knew all about the rise and fall of Jake. There had been no further discussion of our own midnight escapades.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve been working out a lot.”
He reached over to squeeze my arm, then let his hand linger. “I can tell!” he said, winking. “Those muscles are feeling very strong.” Sexy Boy’s flirtation was always over the top but in a self-consciously silly way that made it hard not to be charmed. I smiled then looked down. Last time I’d seen him there had been another prospect in the wings, so my usual lust had been dimmed. But tonight, as soon as I’d seen him sitting in the booth at Paragon, looking slightly tousled and überhot in a sky blue American Apparel shirt, my lust made a vigorous comeback.
“How are the friendly skies?” I mumbled, focusing on Sexy Boy’s mouth rather than his eyes. It was his eyes, as usual, that held power over me. If I could avoid looking at them, maybe I could prevent myself from falling back under his spell.
“Oh, they’re not quite as friendly these days, if you know what I mean.” He laughed a little.
“Hm. Too bad.” He must be referring to the demise of his “relationship” with Stacy or Suzie or whatever the name of that flight attendant was. I wanted to ask him about it but took a sip of my beer instead. Let him think I didn’t care. He could play my dating confidant all he wanted, but I didn’t really want to play his.
“How is your work going?” he asked. I’d told Sexy Boy that work had been difficult lately, but not why. Some days I was tempted to tell him about the blog because he was a good friend and I wanted to confide in him. But he was in so many entries! For all I knew, GuyPal #1 had given him the URL already and he was reading it behind my back, enjoying every minute that I talked about his stupid, sexy eyes and soft kisses. I wouldn’t put it past either of them.
“Oh…it’s okay. It’s getting better,” I said. “But things are still a bit…tense.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. Then he looked up from his drink and trained the deadly weapons on me. “I have a few ideas about how to relieve that tension.”
I laughed in surprise.
“Very subtle,” I said, trying, at all costs, to avoid those eyes. I looked instead at his right ear, which bore an old piercing that I’d yet to see an earring in. My heart beat faster. I hadn’t expected a proposition tonight. I really shouldn’t be flattered because what was there to be flattered about in a guy wanting to have no-s
trings sex with me? Yet I was. Ridiculously flattered.
“Yes, I’m known for my subtlety,” he said. He was still looking directly at me, weapons trained on their target. I couldn’t do it, of course. I couldn’t hook up with him again, unless…
I looked in his eyes. Big mistake. I was hoping to see a look that told me maybe this time would be for real, that this time our ongoing attraction could morph into something else. But his eyes didn’t tell me anything. Instead, they worked on me as they always had, making every rational thought in my head disappear. I really wanted someone to be close to. I looked into those big green eyes, the pupils slightly dilated as usual, and was pulled forward into the night. We would have another drink, we would go back to my apartment, we would…
“Can I get you anything else?” The waitress’s tired voice broke the spell.
I looked up at her in a daze. On her left hand a wedding ring glittered. Funny how that was now the first thing I looked for—especially on men, but also on women. How did people ever end up getting married? It seemed like such an impossible state to get to—that level of love and commitment.
But a person had to start somewhere. And meaningless flings were not a good starting point. I glanced back at Sexy Boy. He was looking at me with raised eyebrows. He was clearly up for more drinking if I was. For getting this party started and continuing it long into the night.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Me, neither,” said Sexy Boy, attempting not to react. But a fleeting expression of disappointment passed over his face. Longing flashed in his eyes, which in turn caused my stomach to twist with desire. I looked down at my beer.
“Got an early morning tomorrow?” he asked, after the waitress had walked away. I thought, right then, about putting it all on the table, asking him why we couldn’t just date. For real. But I would only get some slippery answer. We couldn’t date because he was a commitmentphobic pothead, that’s why! Funny and charming and sweet and great as a friend but completely unsuitable as a boyfriend. “Yeah,” I said. “I have to get up early and write.”
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