A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  “I know that, but you didn’t tell me why. Why couldn’t you give me what I wanted? Why didn’t you want to marry me?” I fought back a few tears that seemed to pop into the corners of my eyes. Okay, maybe I wasn’t totally over him.

  Ben’s own eyes looked so sad. “Here’s the thing, Kell. I’m not so sure about that anymore.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I think I made a mistake.”

  I walked Ben around the corner to a little Italian restaurant called Angelina’s that I’d spotted recently. I still wouldn’t invite him into my new apartment, but we couldn’t have this talk in the driveway, either. The dinner rush wasn’t on yet and so we were soon seated in a front table by the window with two glasses of Chianti in front of us. To someone on the street who happened to glance inside, we probably looked incredibly romantic, a couple who’d clearly known each other for a long time, tucked into a cozy table, our heads pushed close together as we talked.

  In reality, I was feeling about every emotion imaginable except cozy and romantic—love, hate, anguish, regret, anger, confusion, you name it.

  “Let me start over,” Ben was saying. He put his hands flat on the table for emphasis. I’d seen him do that a million times at Bartley Brothers when he was trying to make a point. “You know I don’t like being told what to do.”

  I huffed but didn’t say anything. It was one of my pet peeves about Ben. If he thought you were ordering him to wash up the kitchen or pick up the dry cleaning, then he would act out like a kid—delaying, pouting, stomping around.

  “Look, I know it’s not a good trait, but I can’t help it sometimes,” he continued. “And when you said that you had to be engaged by your birthday, I felt like you were telling me what to do instead of us making a joint decision.”

  “So why didn’t you make it into a joint decision? Why didn’t you talk to me about it?”

  “Kell, you know how you are when you want something, and you made it perfectly clear you wanted a ring or we were done.”

  “Fine,” I said, practically spitting the word, because he was right. “What I’ve been asking you, though, is why you didn’t want to marry me. Even if you did feel like I was telling you what to do, why couldn’t you do it eventually?”

  “That’s the thing. I felt I did want to marry you. Eventually. But I didn’t like that ultimatum you were giving me. I didn’t want to be pushed into it, so I finally decided that if I couldn’t do it in your time frame, maybe I shouldn’t do it at all.”

  Was he actually telling me anything new? It didn’t feel like it.

  “That night of your birthday was one of the worst days of my life,” Ben continued.

  “Join the club.” I said it sarcastically before I realized that I couldn’t technically remember that night. It angered me all of a sudden, this memory thing, because although it had delivered me from depression and given me a shot at a new life, it had also stolen from me the right to remember, to revive how fucking pissed off I was at Ben that night.

  “I know it wasn’t a good day for you, either, and I’m sorry about that, about breaking up with you on that day.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I was a mess after we broke up. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and what an ass I’d been, because by breaking up with you, I was actually coming to terms with the fact that I did want to marry you someday, and then all of a sudden, I didn’t have you at all. It was killing me. But right when I was about to come talk to you about all this, to tell you that I’d made a huge mistake, you started calling me at all hours and stopping by work or my apartment. You didn’t seem like yourself anymore.”

  “Why? What did I seem like?” Half of me didn’t want to know, but I was too curious. I needed to hear Ben’s take on what I’d been like during that time.

  “You were down. Very down. It was almost spooky the way you acted. Kind of like you were on the edge, and if we didn’t get back together you were going to lose it. It got pretty creepy for a while, and I called Laney to ask her what in the hell was going on, but she didn’t know, either.” He shook his head. “The thing was, once you started acting so strange, I started feeling better. I know that sounds shitty, but it was like you were reinforcing my decision. Every time I found you sitting on my doorstep or waiting for me by the El after work, it was like a confirmation that we weren’t supposed to be together.”

  He paused and looked at me for a response. I wanted to scream at him, to call him selfish and shallow and reactionary and shortsighted, but the thing was that I might have acted the same, felt the same, if the person I thought I loved had forced me into a corner. “What did you mean tonight when you said you thought you’d made a mistake?”

  He gave a short, embarrassed laugh. “Well, it’s all different now, isn’t it?”

  “What’s different?”

  “You, for one thing. You’re totally different now than you were this summer.”

  “How?” I thought I knew what he meant, but some needy part of myself wanted to hear it.

  “You’re like you used to be before we got so caught up at Bartley and before all this marriage talk. You’re confident again and funny and laid-back—and let’s face it, you look gorgeous. Every time I see you like this, I realize that I might have made a really, really grave mistake. I miss you, Kell.”

  I pulled my glass of Chianti toward me and took a glug of it, my head swirling. On one hand, I hated him for deciding this now, for being such an asshole that he couldn’t have realized before how awesome I was. On the other hand, I felt fluffed up and proud at his praise, his second thoughts.

  “I don’t know what to say, Ben. I mean, what do you want from me?”

  “Didn’t get that far.” He laughed. His nervous laugh. “I guess I just want us to be able to keep talking about this.”

  “What about Therese?”

  He looked at the table, then back up at me. “I just want to talk to you, Kell, that’s all. Maybe in a few days, maybe on the phone, whatever you want. Can we do that?”

  I wanted to tell him to fuck off, that he’d already made his one mistake. But I’d made mistakes, too, mistakes that might have been even bigger than his, and sitting across from him like this, our hands almost touching on the table, I missed what we used to have.

  “Yeah,” I said, “we can do that.”

  16

  Ben called the next morning before I left for Cole’s. “Hey, I forgot to tell you something last night,” he said, as if we talked on the phone all the time. “Tony Poppin came out of the closet.”

  “No!” I yelped, so surprised that I couldn’t even be annoyed at Ben’s casual tone.

  Tony Poppin was another analyst at Bartley Brothers who had long been suspected of being gay. Not that anyone would have been upset or particularly put out by this, but because he rarely dated, was always dressed impeccably and had season’s tickets to the opera, he was forever a source of office speculation. Was he or wasn’t he? I’d never chimed in on this topic, of course, given my gaydar history, but everyone else liked to give their best guess. He did talk on the phone all the time, some people said, and he was forever taking classes on cooking with truffles and flower arranging. But others pointed out that he always showed up at the Christmas party with a gorgeous female date, and so the questions would start again. It’s sad, really, that this was such a topic of conversation at Bartley, but let’s face it, most corporations are simply big high schools.

  After that conversation about Tony, Ben started calling nearly every day, sometimes a few times a day, and our chats were always just that—chats. We gossiped about people at Bartley, told stupid little stories from our day (Ben being mistaken for the Bears quarterback while on the El; me getting a heel stuck in a street grate outside Cole’s building) and reminisced about some of the great times we’d had together (the Halloween party we had two years ago; the time we got upgraded to first class flying home from Paris).

  I didn’t tell Laney how often Ben and I were talking. I’d
told her about that night at Angelina’s, of course. I’d called her as soon as I walked in the door, and we analyzed that encounter for a solid two hours. But I was embarrassed about how easily I’d let Ben slip back into my life after he’d dumped me on my birthday and helped to send me into a depression. Actually, I now considered it a bit of a bonus that I couldn’t remember the breakup or the depression, because how upset about something can you be when you have absolutely no memory of it? But I knew Laney remembered for me, and although I loved her for it, I couldn’t betray her by telling her that I was talking to the enemy all the time now. And enjoying it.

  And so it became weirder and weirder. A few weeks went by during which I told Laney very little about my days or how I was filling them. Since we’d met, I’d rarely kept anything from her, and although I didn’t think she suspected anything now, our time together became strained. I felt awkward for hiding something from her, and over and over, maybe in response to my holding back, she insisted that this memory gap had gone on long enough and I needed to do something about it.

  “I’m serious, Kell,” she said on the phone one day, “you’ve got to see a doctor.”

  She’d called me at Cole’s. I had a booker on hold on the other line, and Cole gesturing to me to help him with something.

  “I can’t talk about this right now,” I said, glad I hadn’t told her much about my pesky headaches. In fact, I had another one right then, and I didn’t relish a lecture from Laney.

  “You’re going to have to face this.”

  “Yes, I know. You’ve told me.”

  “At least go see Ellen Geiger again.”

  “Why? So I can pay her over a hundred dollars to tell me nothing?”

  “You haven’t given her a chance.”

  “I gave her a chance all summer, and I’m doing better now without her. I’m fine!” I looked over to see Cole making a face at me.

  “I’ve got to go, Lane.” I clicked over to the booker before she could say anything else.

  Meanwhile, it was so much more enjoyable to talk to Ben or meet him for coffee (that’s all we’d done; no physical contact), and I actually began feeling closer to him than Laney.

  My life began to take on a surreal slant. Here I was living in my new apartment, as I still called it in my head, having coffee and marathon phone calls with my ex-boyfriend, and, at the same time, avoiding contact with my best friend who’d just nursed me out of a five-month downward spiral. I felt guilty. So guilty. But I just wanted to have a good time. I didn’t want to worry about those five months or why I couldn’t remember them, or anything else, for that matter. The fact was, Ben was simply more fun to be with.

  Strangely, even Cole had become more fun than Laney. During the lingerie shoot, he let me take the test shots and then a few frames every hour or so. He hovered behind me, offering encouragement and whispering instructions about what I should be seeing, how the photo should look. I brought coffee in the mornings from Katie’s, and we talked about what we would be working on that day.

  I knew that I was really hitting some kind of stride in my life during the two days when the studio was filled with lingerie models dressed in a few strips of lace. You’d think I would have been insecure, maybe going to the bathroom to check the size of my gut and comparing it to the concave abdomens of the models, but I didn’t. I ate fat-ridden muffins while watching them lie in sexy poses over a black-velvet-covered box. I chatted with them while they were naked in the dressing room. Not once did I consider myself deficient compared to them. That’s the whole point, I guess—I didn’t compare myself to them at all.

  It probably had something to do with the fact that I’d lost weight, but it was more than that, more than just body image. There was some sense of contentedness about the way my life was going. For the first time in a long time I was excited to go to work in the morning. I could hardly wait. It seemed that so many parts of my new life were falling into place, a good place.

  Except for the Laney part.

  Well, to be honest, there was one other piece of my life that wasn’t so spectacular, either—my evenings. My nights were a little lonely. It wasn’t as if I had no options. Laney called every day, and almost every time, she offered to “take” me to a movie that night or to come over with some Chinese food. The strange thing was that the more she offered, the more I backed away. I had to work late, I told her. Cole was such a slave driver, he was keeping me overtime. But the truth was that things had grown so awkward between Laney and me that I actually preferred my lonely apartment.

  I had the occasional cup of coffee with Ben after work, but I was always sure to end it after an hour or so, no matter how hard we were laughing, no matter how many times he flashed his bedroom eyes. As much as I wanted to have sex with him (and I really, really wanted to), I didn’t want it to progress to the point where I had to make a decision about our relationship. Also, I found myself overly conflicted about the subject of Therese. On one hand, I felt strangely ashamed. What was she doing while we had coffee and yammered on the phone? Did she even know? It was technically Ben’s problem, not mine, but I couldn’t help but have a little sympathy for the girl. And yet on the other hand, if he really had made a mistake by breaking up with me, shouldn’t he break up with her now? I didn’t ask Ben these questions, because I guess I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to be culpable for keeping him away or breaking them up when I wasn’t sure if I was ready to recommit to him. I didn’t want to think about what a shit he was for seeing someone other than his current girlfriend. I just wanted to keep laughing, to keep having fun with him for an hour or so at Katie’s Coffee. So I kept it short and was always back at my apartment by seven or eight o’clock, the rest of the evening stretching out ahead of me.

  Jess and Steve were barely back from their honeymoon and busy moving into their new place, so I couldn’t go out with them. I did call a few analysts that I used to work with at Bartley Brothers, but they were all at a conference in Tahoe, one that I would have attended if I still worked there. Not even my two-freckled guy had visited me again.

  On one Thursday night, when I could have been out with Laney at a trendy new wine bar she wanted to try, I decided to take a bath. The tub in my new apartment was rather large, with two armrests cut into it. I started the water and rooted around under my sink until I found some paper packages of aloe vera bath salts. I didn’t remember buying them. Probably a gift from Laney when she’d stopped by over the summer. I poured a whole package into the bath, making it a milky, foaming green. Lighting a few candles, I set them on the countertop. I dragged a boom box out of my bedroom closet and put on an Eric Clapton CD. Then I turned out the lights, stripped and slid into the steaming bath.

  It was perfect and soothing. For about five minutes. But then I started to feel sweaty and red-faced, and Eric’s guitar sounded screechy rather than melodic. I took a sip of the wine I’d brought in with me. I slid deeper into the tub. Deep breaths, I told myself. Just relax. All I could think about, though, was what I would do with the rest of the night. It would be, what, maybe eight-thirty by the time I got out of the tub? There’d be hours and hours with nothing to do, since I rarely went to bed before eleven. Maybe I should call Ben and see what he was doing tonight. But if I did that, wouldn’t I be looking for Ben to save me from myself, the same thing I’d done when I’d ordered him to give me a ring or else?

  I squirmed around in the tub, willing myself to just calm down and enjoy the heat. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I loosen up for two frickin’ seconds?

  Even though it never worked, I tried the meditation breathing again. I hadn’t listened to those tapes in God knows how long, but I could hear the instructor’s voice—Breathe in, breathe out, focus on your breath. I made myself do it. I made myself stay in the bath, in the heat, in the foamy water. And pretty soon, I started to relax. A little. Actually, my body still felt like leaping out of the tub, but my mind was slowing down, and so I made myself stick with it. Breathe in, br
eathe out, focus on your breath. Let all other thoughts slide away. It started to work. The image of Ben faded. The thought of Laney’s overly concerned face took a back seat. I pushed away any inklings about Cole or his many secretive talks on the phone as of late. Dee popped into my head once, but I wouldn’t let myself get hooked in. I let her float away.

  And pretty soon there was just me. Finally. Just me in the tub, surrounded by suds. I could actually see myself, even though I had my eyes closed. This must be good. Possibly I’d tapped into some Zenlike avenue of introspection. I might be the first Westerner to master this technique. I’d probably be invited to give self-help seminars around the world.

  I stayed with it, breathing deeply, seeing myself in the tub. But as I did so, I started to notice something. Something off. It had to do with my hair. I concentrated, and I could see that my hair was not the shiny caramel color with the cute style that Lino had given it, and it was not in a twist on top of my head, the way I’d done it before I’d gotten in the bath. Instead, it was dull and lifeless and long, the ends floating in the green foam. I looked closer and saw that my face looked different, too. Almost gray, my cheekbones too sharp in my face. And my eyes were open. Dull and staring straight ahead, as if there was no thought behind them, no hope or happiness or optimism.

  My face, the one I was seeing now, scared me. I tried to sit up in the tub. I tried to stop my Zenlike breathing. I didn’t need to give self-help seminars, I just needed to get out of this bath. But the image stayed there—strong now—and I couldn’t seem to move. It was as if the bath were a tomb from which I couldn’t escape. The coffee in my stomach made me feel nauseous. I needed to take some Tums, some Advil, something. Strangely, I could feel my legs twitching under the water, but I still couldn’t get them into any kind of concerted motion that would get me out of the tub. I couldn’t stop seeing myself. What was wrong with me? Why was I just staring ahead like that, at nothing? I tried to stay calm and think of something else. Maybe if I could replace the image of myself, I could get out of this state. I tried to instill new topics in my head—my new job, Ben, my mother in L.A.—but my face, that sad, dull face, stayed right there, and something about it was drawing me in.