Time Line
February 2009
Met at the party of a friend of a friend, began e-flirtation.
March 2009
Ceased for murky reasons.1
May 2009
Resumed, presumably after period of mourning ex had ended.
June 2009
Had first date. Discovered mutual love of dirty martinis; lap swimming; little precious objects known as clutter to most, but not us; making lists of fun things to do.
July 2009–April 2010
Enlarged carbon footprint; earned free tickets; gained intimate knowledge of tarmac.
October 17, 2009
“Will …?” “Yes!” “How much money …?” “What!”
October 17, 2009 onward
Engaged? Yes! Happy? Questionable.2
December 2009
“… open marriage?” “Shouldn’t you have …?”
April 2010
Mingled pots and pans, sheets and towels, my debt and your assets; changed voice mail message, living room furniture but agreed to leave last names untouched.3
June 14, 2010
Bid adieu to catering deposit, said awkward hellos to dozens of friends over forty-eight hours: “Just postponing …” “Working out …” “Some issues …”
July 10, 2010
Didn’t say, “I don’t,” but didn’t say, “I do” either. You entertained overseas friends who couldn’t change tickets without massive penalties while I weekended in the Hamptons with college roommate who didn’t mention “postponed” wedding.
June 2010–December 2010
Scuffled on. Spent large percentage of disposable income sitting at an uncomfortable distance from each other on tan leather sofa. Learned to say, “I hear you saying …”
Discussion/Background
August 2009
We were in New York, and you wanted to see a show of male nudes at the kind of midtown gallery where no one speaks above a whisper. This seemed like a strange choice—we’d only been dating for two months, were still working out the kinks of our own erotic life—and there we were, our shoulders brushing as we looked at naked men lying like logs stretched across roaring streams and naked men making coffee (the ruffled apron a nice touch) and naked men against black backgrounds staring defiantly at the camera, naked men whose nakedness was not the point, and naked men who were decidedly supposed to be naked.
I did know at this point that you were sort of fascinated with nudity, because on our second or third date you’d sat me down at your computer and showed me a video of a shadowy figure dancing and singing haunting songs—sometimes more of the body was visible, sometimes less, but it was still clearly naked.
“Is that you?” I blushed as more of you came into sight. Your hands hovered above my shoulders like moths.
“Yes,” you answered in your very serious way.
I stayed over for the first time that night but slept in the living room. You said you weren’t ready for sex, but we could share a bed, and I said, “Let’s wait. Waiting is more exciting.” Lying on the couch, I imagined you tossing and turning two floors above me, a prince driven senseless by a pea buried under his tower of mattresses.
At the gallery your gaze lingered on a young man who’d just tumbled out of bed, who looked like he was ready for a stack of pancakes. “How does this make you feel?” you asked.
“Weird.” There it is—that terribly vague word that, nevertheless, seems to describe so much of our relationship.
“Does it turn you on?”
“Not really,” I answered.
We walked on to Saks, where you began taking pictures of mannequins. This was another one of your projects when we first met—out-of-focus photographs that made the human form disappear into an abstract arrangement of colors. Though you made your living as a lawyer, you were an exceptionally talented photographer. That’s when I asked you: “Is this what you and your last girlfriend did?” The whole morning had been so odd, I felt like an understudy who’d stepped into another woman’s lead. You closed your eyes. This was your tendency when you were thinking. By the end, this habit could whirl me into a tornado of irritation and even shouting. You hated this—you called me violent—but we weren’t there yet. I still had the patience of an average person. Standing on the busy sidewalk, your camera cradled in your hands, your eyes closed. Your pauses—God, I’d always be imagining the worst—they could go on and on. I’d meant my question to be playful—playful in a way that was also seeking reassurance, wondering, trying to establish a boundary, etc. I realize now this wasn’t the most direct way to ask for what I needed. As you continued standing, I felt the flood of a caffeinated buzz, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just jittery and sharp, and I started to imagine the worst.4
When your eyes finally opened, you spoke with great deliberation. “I don’t know why you’re asking me this question. I don’t know what you want me to say. Does the fact that I’ve done these things with other women take away from doing them with you? Perhaps you’re setting the bar too high?” I shrank back because what you said was both logical and far worse than I had anticipated. You added: “You’re very special to me.” Do you remember? This was the weekend you told me you loved me. And I said I loved you too.
Halloween 2009
Your friend, his name was Jawara, was having a costume party. It was his forty-fifth birthday, and though he was now a hotshot lawyer whipping around the partner track, you told me in confidence that he had once led a different life as a dancer in the Senegalese Ballet. It was amusing to see pinstripe-suited Jawara baring his beautiful chest, his costume a red grass skirt and matching cap crisscrossed with conch shells. He was usually so grave—and frankly boring when he rattled on about mergers—that it was difficult to imagine him doing anything as light as leaping. It was hard to remember that, yes, of course, he had a life in his body. Everyone does. Jawara was a good man when all was said and done, despite the fact that his Halloween party was probably the beginning of the end.
We brainstormed, trying to come up with birthday-worthy costumes, but it was actually fun. This was one of the things we did well together: projects. Our projects, as you affectionately called them. When we were apart, I read (and you reread) The Works of John Locke, and we had long, very important conversations over the phone about the state and the extent to which the state actually protects us. When we traveled around eastern Europe shortly after our engagement, we produced a travel journal (though in the sections you wrote, you never mentioned my name, which seemed strange—which was strange—it was always “we” or “I,” but never “A” or “Anna”5). You taught me how to take photographs, and you lent me one of your cameras, a camera that was worth more than my pitiful stock portfolio. I still remember the day we wandered around your neighborhood, looking for the sun falling against a brick wall just so, or an interesting crack in the sidewalk, or a basement window framing a beautiful spider. Then we returned home, and we exchanged our best pictures and wrote poems about them. I loved our projects—your curiosity and also seriousness.
But anyway, back to Halloween: You suggested costumes that involved various states of undress, which I still found charming, given how buttoned-up you usually were, but I came up with the winning idea. We’d each go as our unconscious.6
Do you remember? The spandex bodysuits, our attempts to find the best way to transfer the text to fabric? I wound up using fabric paints and made a glorious, unintelligible mess of curves and flourishes—letters that looked more like dying trails of fireworks or hieroglyphics than the alphabet. You used a black Sharpie marker, and instead of transcribing your automatic writing, which you judged uninteresting, you mostly used poetry you’d written years ago.7 The joke was your unconscious was “stark and uncompromising.” One thought began and another ended, each block of legible writing framed by plenty of white space. Across your groin (the bulge held snug by a dance belt), I dared you to write, “Your unconscious here,” and you did.
I knew almost no one at the party, except for Jawara and his partner. There’s nothing liberating about a costume party. Nada. If anything, it was harder to figure who I could talk to. The man dressed up like a box of cereal? Stale. The tennis pro? Stoned out of her mind. I stood near the samosas and deliberated over the different chutneys. Occasionally a person would drift over, ask me what I was, take a step back appraisingly, and then pronounce the bodysuit a work of art.
“It’s impossible to read,” a Pippi Longstocking remarked.
“Of course it is,” I snapped. “It’s the unconscious.”
I was so anxious right after we got engaged. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, worrying about the possibility of letting you down in one nebulous way or another. I’d snap on the light, open my computer, and begin working through columns of numbers that represented my debt without understanding what I was trying to figure out. I’d worry I’d fucked too many people, that I’d used myself up.8 When I tried to go back to sleep, the conversation I had with your mother would pop into my head: Why don’t you give this ring a test drive?
We got engaged too soon. We’d only been dating four and a half months, and we didn’t even live in the same city. My parents: “How exciting. You’re starting a new phase of your life.” Courtship in the age of cheap tickets and cell phones can be terribly old-fashioned, an arranged marriage you arrange yourself. We didn’t know each other, not really. Take the ring. It hadn’t occurred to you to propose with one, and it hadn’t dawned on me that this would be important.9 Your mother came to the rescue and magnanimously offered hers; that was the first time I met her—the weekend of the engagement ring ceremony. You recited a poem (Keats? Wordsworth?). Your mother cried. Your brother, whom I was also meeting for the first time, threw his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into an armpit hug. Your father said, “It’s taken you a long time, Philip, but we’re so pleased for you.” I was as small and dumb as a stuffed bear.
Does the Halloween story have a dramatic ending? Something I saw you do that I have hoarded until this very moment?
Is there something you’ve been meaning to tell me? I doubt it. Nothing happened, except I felt abandoned. I’m a baby, I know. Petty. It didn’t help when I found you among the boxers and pirates, call girls and heads of state (your friend Lydie made a pretty great Hillary Clinton) with Aranka, her hennaed hands and her loud, grating laugh, prostrating herself in front of you.
Does Aranka matter? I don’t know. Everything matters, and nothing matters. That’s the great truth of failed relationships, the narrative and the absence of narrative. Each time you tell the story, it makes less sense, the smooth arc disintegrating into a series of jagged peaks. As you stand on one of its precipices, you can no longer see the way forward. How did you traverse from one point to another? How did you make the journey safely?
Conclusion
This is where I’m supposed to synthesize the information I’ve presented and chart a course forward.
In conclusion, we didn’t get married because I was afraid I didn’t really know you.
But of course, it’s not as easy as that. I’m sitting in a house overlooking the ocean, and I’ve just drunk several glasses of Chablis and read through what I’ve written. It has been six months since we separated, and a little over a year since we called off our wedding, and a year and a half since you broached the subject of an open marriage (not that you really wanted one, you just wanted to discuss the idea of it) and told me about your relationship with your best friend (a woman), and twenty months since you asked me to marry you. Time heals wounds. This is true, though something like Time wears people out seems more accurate. You can only step on the same nail so many times before you have to choose between mortally wounding yourself and walking away. It would be easy to say that we didn’t get married because you cheated on me, but what’s easy is not necessarily true. Besides which, you didn’t cheat on me—since we’d only been dating a week or two when you flew to Texas to see your best friend.
Of course, I see my obvious attempts at wit, which are, I suppose, annoying in light of the subject matter. Laughing until you cry is surely quite different from crying until you laugh. You are probably doing neither. I don’t blame you.
(All these paragraph breaks, all these crevasses.)
In conclusion, we didn’t get married.
That I can say for sure.
Was it because I didn’t know myself as well as I should have? Or perhaps it’s that old cliché: I saw the person I’d become, or the person I’d stop being, if I stayed with you, and it frightened me.
The weekend of the art walk? Remember it. Red and white helium balloons rose from our front stoop, and friends and strangers wandered into our house and studied the self-portraits you’d spent the last six months obsessively taking, the last six months we were together. Everywhere I looked, I saw you: kneeling on the ground, with your ear cupped close to a yellow flower, staring thoughtfully into a cracked mirror, lying on a teeter-totter in nothing but your birthday suit, wearing a plastic shroud in an attempt to re-create another famous photo. There you were and there you were and there you were: a flesh-colored boulder in a field of rocks, a brown trunk in a grove of pale aspens, hairy legs beneath a table, a face half fractured in a puddle, a man against a red backdrop dancing to some music that I couldn’t hear. You left to run an errand.10 I was supposed to hold down the fort.
When you returned, everything appeared to be the same. You are everywhere, and everyone is looking at you, and I will never be anywhere or anything, except as a spectator or a spectacle, angry woman, or violent bitch.11
This is why I left. Why I disappeared for good.
1I said, “Let’s meet in the real world.” You said, “I’m unfit for female companionship.”
2You’re the one who read me the opening of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Our first line: “Every anxious couple is anxious in their own way.”
3I know we’re too old and established to hyphenate.
4I’ve had enough therapy to see how fucked up I am. (I’m not sure therapy helps you as much as it highlights your flaws.) Why would I go out with people who screamed, “Stay away!”? Built-in emotional distance?
5“Shall we get you some dinner?” you used to say, not exactly the same thing, but evidence of some kind of self/other dilemma that I still don’t understand and probably never will.
6A confession here: this was my crazy friend Sylvia’s idea. She explained automatic writing, a practice developed by the surrealists, to spill thoughts across the page. “Whenever you get stuck,” Sylvia told me, and I, in turn, told you, “just write, ‘I am hot, I am hot,’ until something else comes to mind.” “Do you still think I’m hot?” I asked her. Her cheeks colored painfully. Sylvie and I once kissed, which I suppose I should also confess. She likes to pretend it didn’t happen.
7The superego instead of the unconscious?
8“Get over it,” Sylvia said repeatedly. “This isn’t the eighteenth century. You’re experienced but hardly tarnished.” Once she even took me by my shoulders and shook me.
9I’m sorry this got dragged into so many of our subsequent skirmishes. I know you’ve said your failure to think of a ring is evidence only of your nerdiness, but it was hard to keep this in mind as we hunted for a starter ring for you as carefully as a beachcomber pursues an agate. A starter ring. You’d never worn one before, and this would help you get used to it. We looked until you found the perfect one: silver and braided. I bought it for you.
10While you were gone, I slipped into my Halloween costume, and I put techno on the stereo, mainly because you hate it, but also because it has a good fast beat, and I leapt down the stairs, surprising the quiet art appreciators who were studying the arch of your foot here and the curve of your lower back there, all the fine variations of gray, and I began dancing, shaking my arms and ass, spinning and dipping, strutting and folding, repeating motion and gest
ure until they took on their own grammar, until the subtext became text, until lowercase letters all turned to CAPS, AND THE CAPS THICKENED INTO BOLD, AND EVERYTHING WAS FINALLY CLEAR, AND WHEN I FINALLY STOPPED, EVERYONE WHO’D BEEN BRAVE ENOUGH TO STAY, ALONG WITH THOSE DRAwn by loud music and a glimpse through the open door of a woman dancing, said “yeah” and “cool” or nothing at all, just shook their heads in dismay or shock before wandering out.
I did this, Philip; I did this and other things that you have characterized as violent, and that I would characterize as hurtful and also disruptive, rebellious, immature, and selfish. I said I didn’t want to get married months before we postponed the wedding, and I called your best friend and told her I knew about your trysts, and I walked out of your house when you disappointed me in one way or another. I picked fights, and when you closed your eyes or wandered silently through the rooms we were supposed to share and I felt myself growing smaller, I didn’t know what more I could do.
That day, I danced until just before it was time for you to return home.
11My word, not yours.
The first time the Porn Star showed up at Maureen’s house, he walked around, inspecting everything. He flipped through the books piled on her coffee table and randomly read aloud things she’d underlined. “From The White Album by Joan Didion,” he said, clearing his throat as if he were about to deliver a monologue. “I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge.” He walked into her bedroom and opened the things on the dresser—a cedar jewelry box, a playing card holder from Russia where she kept copper and brass bracelets from Nepal, a cloisonné ring box that held a small carved ivory elephant from Tanzania. Maureen was thirty, never married, well traveled. She had climbed Kilimanjaro, tracked silverback gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, scuba dived in Thailand, dined on rats in Beijing.
The Kissing List Page 10