“Now?” I asked. It was already after midnight, and it was a work night.
“Now,” he said . . . and I was enchanted, impressed by his impulsivity, the strength of his desire. I was also terrified. On the phone, I could play the seductress, could murmur promises about which body part I’d put where, but in person, it was different. What if he didn’t think I was attractive? What if I opened the door and he gave me a sheepish smile or a shrug, and turned around and went back to New Jersey?
I got so busy worrying about whether he’d like me that it never occurred to me to wonder whether I’d like him. When he arrived, it was a shock. There were things that I liked right away—his height, his sweet smile, his inquisitive gaze—but there was also something distressingly simian about him. He had long hair and long arms and a round, hard lump of a belly, hunched shoulders, and bad posture. It all added up to a first impression of chimpanzee. Also, there was his smell. It wasn’t that he smelled bad, exactly—his scent combined a little bit of old library book, a little Head & Shoulders, a little marijuana—it was that he didn’t smell good to me. I am a great believer in the importance of scent, and in the notion that a couple can get through a lot together if they enjoy each other’s conversation and appreciate each other’s smell.
But there he was, brown eyes crinkling in the corners, looking at me in a way that let me know he liked what he was seeing, or, at least, that he wasn’t appalled. I opened the door, smiling back, ready to make good on my promises. Inside, however, things did not start well. His hands were cold and clammy, and he was a terrible kisser, whose perfectly normal-looking lips seemed to instantly flatten on contact, leaving me with the sense that I was kissing teeth. He did not, it emerged, believe in putting chemicals on his body, which, alas, included factory-made deodorant, and it turned out that he hadn’t had a lot of experience with women. He was raw material, happy to let me mold him, at least hygiene and kiss-wise. And, if I hadn’t fallen instantly in love with him, I was immediately besotted with his family. His long-married parents, who were very much in love, lived in a beautiful house in the Jersey suburbs, its sides and trim unpeeling, and a swimming pool in the back—a house that reminded me of my own house before everything went south. His folks invited me to celebrate Passover and break the Yom Kippur fast and go on vacations with them. His mom clipped my stories out of the paper and took me shopping for a new comforter after I bought my first actual bed. At meals, his father sat at the head of the table, asking his children thoughtful questions about their jobs and their friends, listening to their answers. I wanted them to adopt me . . . but, barring that, I wanted their son to marry me so that I’d keep them in my life forever.
At some point, after a few years together, between perusing friends’ wedding registries and baby-name books and idly wondering what wedding-dress silhouette was the most slimming, I realized I should ask Mr. Right whether I should go ahead and book the hall. We had a long, tortured conversation full of twenty-eight-year-old angst—Who are we? Where are we going? What do we want out of life?
Our answers to the last question should have alerted me that all was not well. I wanted fame and fortune . . . or, at least, I wanted to publish a book and earn enough money that my kids would never be pulled out of a college class-registration line. He wanted to enjoy life, to have as many good times as he could, an endeavor that was possibly going to include following the band Phish for a year. I hated Phish. I disliked all jam bands, with their endless, noodling guitar solos, their twelve-minute drum breaks, the wordless interludes where the male fans would time their head-bobs to their knee-bobs and the girls would twirl in endless, dizzying circles. Where are the lyrics? (Not that the lyrics ever improved things much.) What’s the point?
By the end of our talk, we’d agreed to split. In my mind, this was a “let’s take some time apart and talk about things” break, because I couldn’t imagine us not being together.
He must have thought it meant something different, more permanent. Which I learned, a few weeks later, when I called him on a Friday night and heard a reluctant “Hang on,” followed by a long, muffled pause and the sound of faint conversation and giggling. Female giggling. He lived, as I well knew, in a studio apartment, with only one telephone, which he kept on the windowsill, right next to the king-size bed that his parents had bought him (along with the sheets, and the comforter, and the pillows, and the apartment).
I was devastated. This was heartache like a physical illness, an incurable case of the flu. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t exist in my own skin. I couldn’t eat and, for the first time in my adult life, briefly approached something resembling thinness. I didn’t even care, which was a sign of just how badly I was doing. The truth was that I’d had doubts of my own about the relationship and whether he was The One. Where I was driven, he had a more laissez-faire view of life. Where I’d been not exactly neglected but certainly not spoiled, and was accustomed to taking care of myself, he’d been cosseted by those loving parents, who gave him everything—a car, spending money, and vacations. He didn’t like my dog. I didn’t like his friends, a motley collection of good-natured stoners. I loved great food and dreamed of the restaurants I hoped to someday be able to visit; he was a vegetarian whose favorite meal was cheese pizza. In retrospect, we were obviously ill suited for each other, and we probably would have made each other spectacularly unhappy . . . but I couldn’t see it then. Once we’d parted, and he’d found someone else—a giggler! If he’d wanted a giggler, why had he been with me at all?—the situation instantly clarified itself in my mind. This man, whom I had callously discarded, was the only one who would ever love me or understand me or want to see me naked. If I didn’t get him back I’d die alone . . . and it would be one of those horrible, single-girl-in-the-city deaths where nobody even knows you’re gone until the neighbors notice the horrible smell seeping into the hallway, and when the cops break down the door, you’re nothing but a decomposing corpse, and the dog has eaten your face (I found this possibility especially terrifying because my rat terrier, Wendell, was a very small guy, and the face-eating would have taken him a very long time).
I called my ex. I went to see him. I wrote. I tried to make a case for getting back together. He wasn’t having it. “Goodbye,” he told me, kindly but firmly, over and over. I should have salvaged the shreds of my dignity and let him go . . . but I couldn’t. I hung on, calling and writing, trying to explain myself, to say the magic words that would convince him to take me back, until there were no longer dignity-shreds to save. I was, you’ll remember, twenty-eight. This was the third serious relationship of my life. I hadn’t been single since I was sixteen. I didn’t know how to be alone, and I didn’t want to learn. I wanted to be married. To him. I wanted to buy the dress that would magically make me look like Stephanie Seymour in the “November Rain” video. I wanted to choose the invitations, register for china, get an announcement in the Times, to live out the Disney-princess-for-a-day fantasy. I wanted my relatives to make the trip east, where they’d be forced to admit, I guess we were wrong. Turns out, someone does love her.
If you’ve ever been twenty-eight and heartbroken, you might know the steps to this dance. I would begin each day by reading his horoscope in the morning and getting depressed if it said he’d be having a good day for love. At work, I’d scour the nascent Internet for his stories, trying to divine his mood and romantic status by reading between the lines of newspaper pieces he’d written about insurance fraud and freeholder elections. I mooned over pictures and old letters. I did drive-bys, which would have been pathetic under any circumstances, but were especially sad, given that he lived two hours away. I signed up for a clinical trial of a new weight-loss drug, convinced that if I was thin he’d want me back (even though my weight, unlike friends and taste in music and general attitude toward life, had never been a point of contention). Nights, when I’d lie awake, or early mornings, when I couldn’t sleep, I would drive around aimlessly in my little Honda Ci
vic, and I’d listen to the radio. This was 1998, the Year of Titanic, and I would cruise the streets of Philadelphia with Wendell on my lap and tears streaming down my face, singing “My Heart Will Go On.” I wasn’t sure it was true. I couldn’t see my way out of the sadness, couldn’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t be dragging myself through my days, weighed down with thoughts of what he was doing and thinking and fantasies about what might have been, and what his new girlfriend looked like, and what she was, or had, that I wasn’t, or didn’t. Every house I drove past was a place we’d never live; every weekend that went by was another forty-eight hours that we’d missed out on spending together.
The worst part was how much I’d wanted to get married—not necessarily because I wanted to spend my life with him, but because I wanted to be done with being single. I was ready for the next part—being a wife instead of a girlfriend; being a mother, and giving my kids all the things I’d never had. Now I was faced with having to go back out into the world of single people, blind dates and first dates and nights at clubs and bars, where I knew that what I had to offer—wit, smarts—didn’t matter as much as being attractive, where inevitably, I’d wind up alone at a table, minding my more attractive friends’ purses. When JDate launched, I put up a profile with an actual picture and an actual description of my actual physique. I met a whopping total of two guys—the only two who’d been interested. (One of them, I later learned, was responding to every single profile posted by any woman between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five.) The first one told me, upon minutes of our meeting, with what was probably meant to be a kind smile, that he “didn’t feel any chemistry.” Fair enough. The second guy was tall and gangly, with thick glasses, so skinny that he looked breakable. He’d come to Center City to meet me at the Pink Rose Pastry Shop, one of my favorite bakeries (I had several). After coffee and pie, I was walking him back to his car, trying to figure out what to say if he asked for my number, when he picked up the pace until he was racewalking . . . then jogging . . . then running. Literally running away from me. Maybe eating the dessert I’d ordered had been a mistake?
I didn’t want a new guy. I wanted my old guy back. I talked about him endlessly, obsessively, for months, until finally my best friend, Susan, sat me down. Susan is tall and striking, a few years older than I am, with dark hair and dark eyes and no shortage of men in her life, and what she said, in her own inimitable, cut-to-the-chase fashion, let me know that there was no future. “Jen,” she said. “None of us liked him that much.”
Once your best friend says that, it’s over. You can’t get back together with the guy your friends don’t like, unless you’re willing to find an entire new group of friends . . . and I wasn’t. I would have to endure single life again, with all of its humiliation and rejection. I’d have to find a way to get along without him.
It wasn’t long afterward when something inside of me rose up, insisting that enough was enough. I remember thinking, What do I know how to do? And the answer came back . . . I know how to tell a story.
I would, I decided, tell myself a story. I would be my own Scheherazade, spinning a tale to keep myself alive, night after night, entertained and away from the dark snares of my imagination, my fantasies about what he was doing with his new girl, and what new humiliations might await me out there in the clubs and bars, a world where smiling guys would approach me, holding business cards emblazoned not with their phone numbers but with information about how to join their pyramid weight-loss schemes, or the Internet, which, thus far, had proved every bit as brutal. I would write my way out of my heartbreak, write my way to a happy ending . . . and, if, by the end of it, I had a story that other people might like, that happy ending might be the publication of an actual book. Not marriage, not a reunion with Mr. Right, not the kids and the house and the white picket fence, but not nothing, either. A happy ending of a different kind.
I took stock of the positives. I loved living in Philadelphia, which seemed to be constructed on a more human scale than either New York or Washington, where I’d spent summers during college. Center City, where I lived, was completely walkable. Everything I needed—the supermarket, the movie theater, my gym, my vet, my dentist, my doctor, the bank and the bookstore and the library, museums and galleries and dozens of great restaurants—were all an easy stroll along tree-lined cobblestone streets, past stately brick row houses with engraved plaques on the front, explaining which historic personage had once lived there. There were all kinds of hidden spots, secret gardens and pocket parks and stamp-size green lawns with fountains and sculptures, if you knew where to look. Every spring, the dogwood and cherry and magnolia trees on my street would blossom, perfuming the air, raining petals down on cars and pedestrians. Every September, the trees’ leaves would change to orange and crimson and gold, turning the city into a watercolor of fall.
The Inquirer’s offices were two and a half miles away from my apartment. Most days I’d walk to work, zigzagging my way northwest, crossing South and Lombard and Pine Streets, then walking up my favorite block of Delancey Street, where all the houses had flags hanging over their front doors. I’d walk past the fountain in Washington Square Park, then up Walnut Street, across Chestnut and Market. Through Chinatown, which smelled like the fish the vendors would display on crushed ice outside of their shops, and through the Reading Terminal, where mornings smelled like the cinnamon buns the Amish bakers were preparing. My office was in a white skyscraper on Broad Street, nicknamed the Ivory Tower of Truth. In the basement locker room, I’d get cleaned up from my walk, put on my working-girl skirts and tops, fill my water bottle, and be at my desk by ten. At night, I’d walk back as far as the Reading Terminal, then take the Phlash, a big purple bus designed to ferry tourists around town. It stopped at Fourth and South Streets, two blocks from my apartment. I’d hit the gym for a step class or a Stairmaster session, walk Wendell, eat dinner, and write.
In every place I’d lived, from my first apartment in Bellefonte to the shared carriage house to my garden apartment in Lexington to, now, my first apartment in Philadelphia, I’d made a place for writing. From Pennsylvania to Kentucky and back again, I’d set up my folding bridge table—under the eaves, in spare corners and second bedrooms—and put a corkboard above it, filled with inspiration (a thumbtacked copy of a story about surviving rejection, with tales of woe from Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike), and, eventually, rejection letters from literary quarterlies and big-deal magazines (“Dear Writer, Thank you for your contribution. Unfortunately, we find it does not meet our current needs. Best of luck in placing it elsewhere”).
My apartment on Monroe Street was the nicest place I’d lived since Campbell Hall at Princeton. It had hardwood floors and a galley kitchen with a dishwasher and a garbage disposal. There were closets in all of the bedrooms, plus a coat closet and a pantry, and big windows that looked down at the row houses across the street and the cars parked along the curb. There was central air and a washer and dryer in the basement, where I had a storage cubby for my college papers and my bike. All of this cost six hundred dollars a month, and the landlord was deeply apologetic when she had to raise my rent to six hundred and fifty.
The apartment had two bedrooms. The smaller bedroom, all the way at the back, looked out over a shared yard. That was where I slept. I painted the walls pink, installed my new queen-size bed, and hung my framed Humane Society poster, a simple line drawing of a woman embracing a puppy, on the wall. The second bedroom was my office. On the far wall was the folding bridge table, draped in a blue-and-white Indian-print cloth I’d found back in State College. There was a foldout pink-and-green jungle-print love seat from Pier 1, and a dresser that I’d trash-picked and stripped and repainted in shades of cream and brown. I put a printer on top, and my nine-by-twelve envelopes and reams of blank paper inside. On the other side of the desk was a flip-out wooden bookcase from Target that I’d filled with my favorite books: Erica Jong and Adrienne Rich, Rubyfruit Jungle and Almost Paradise, Disappearing Acts and
Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney, and, eventually, all the first-person-Sex-and-the-City-single-girl books that would be classified as “chick lit,” along with A Writer’s Guide to Literary Agents. I hung a poster of a sleeping child against a midnight-blue background with the alphabet over my desk—A is for Apple, B is for Ball. I’d bought it at an art fair, when I was twenty-two and couldn’t afford much art, because I’d loved it so much, and I’d dreamed of hanging it in a baby’s bedroom someday.
I wrote on the Mac Classic that my father had bought me the summer before my senior year, one of the handful of times he saw me during college, after I’d told him that I’d do better on my senior thesis—and on graduate-school and job applications—if I didn’t have to fight my classmates for time in the computer lab. My father must have been flush if he’d spent almost a thousand dollars on me. I remember feeling guilty, wondering which of my siblings he’d be stiffing as a result.
So I began. On nights, after work; on the weekends, between brunches and bike rides; and, most of all, on my walks, with Wendell and to the office, I imagined a girl who was a lot like me and a guy who was a lot like my ex. I gave the girl a version of my family (absent dad, funny/bleak siblings, mom who’d come out of the closet in her fifties and hooked up with a much younger woman). I gave her my problematic body and a variation on my job, and I gave her my dog, only in the book his name was Nifkin. (Years earlier, I’d overheard my brother Jake, who’d been in a fraternity, use the word in a sentence that I’m pretty sure was “I’m going to powder my nifkin.” I badgered him until he told me that “nifkin” was the same as “taint,” the space between a guy’s balls and his asshole.)
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