by Jill Kargman
“Don’t be so conceited. I know you’re fabulous, but he is, too, and he’d be fine.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, knowing my boyfriend was such a catch he’d be gobbled up by the single-girl piranhas that swarmed New York.
“What the fuck is wrong with me?” I asked her. “He’s so smart, so gorgeous, he’s an incredible and probably soon-to-be illustrious chef. He’s got it all!”
“So why are you worried?” she asked, eyebrow raised. She knew me so well and read my indecision.
“Because I can’t stop thinking about Finn.”
“You just met him.”
“I know! I’m being ridiculous. Maybe this is all in my head, who knows.”
“I know it’s not,” Kira said. “You’re always the girl who says the guy doesn’t like you, doesn’t notice you, even when they do. You must be on to something.”
“Kira,” I started slowly. “I know this is going to sound so cocky and so absurd but . . . there’s this . . . crazy weird tension with Finn. It’s fun and there’s chemistry and it’s real. I feel like . . . we have this thing. This instant, deep connection. My stomach is filled with butterflies, and they are going shithouse in there.”
“I can tell,” Kira replied.
“You know his song ‘Beautiful Mess’?” I asked Kira.
“Of course. We played it on a loop that summer on the Vineyard scooping ice cream. When I had one huge arm and one skinny one.”
“Okay, well, that’s him. He’s gorgeous and fierce and strong but also deeply anguished and broken. And I want to glue him back together.”
“Oh nonononono,” she said, shaking her head like the mommy she was. “Nooooo.”
“Why? What?”
“Hell to the hell to the HELL to the no. GLUE? That is a very dangerous word.”
“Why?”
“What is glue used for, Elmer?”
“Making things.”
“Or fixing things. Broken things. The worst thing a woman can ever think is that she can heal a man. He is not Humpty Dumpty. You are not going to ‘fill him’ or complete him like the deaf people in Jerry Maguire.”
“I disagree. It’s like The Missing Piece,” I said, reminding her of our absolute favorite childhood book. “The Pac-Man–shaped thing is literally able to roll when he gets his pie-shaped missing piece. It makes him whole, makes him speed up, see the world from a whole new perspective.”
“Hazel. Have you read it recently? Because I just read it to Celeste. You obviously don’t remember the ending.”
“Whatever. This is stupid. The point is Shel Silverstein was a fucking genius and I learned more from his books than I did from that mountain of crap in college,” I blazed. “I can’t believe you’re not happy for me. I’m having dinner with our IDOL!”
“I am happy, Haze. I just love you. To pieces. No pun.”
“I know.”
“I want to protect you, and I know I can’t. No one can impart wisdom to the lovesick. No one. Not sisters, not Shel Silverstein, not the fascist religious regime that dictates moral propriety. You have to make your own mistakes, and pay for them, or not.”
“What’s your point?” I asked her, confused.
“My point is that no one can guide you here. It’s the hardest thing, that draw. That pull . . .”
“How do you know?”
I heard Kira exhale.
“Because . . . I know what it feels like. A few years back. I fell, for about a month, madly in love with this guy.”
I was stunned. “WHAT? You cheated on Drew?”
“No, no. I didn’t. Nothing happened. Chaste all the way. But we became fast friends—totally randomly, I wandered into a little shop in the East Village and bought a woodcut in a vintage frame, and he took my e-mail for when new ones came in from Dublin. We started e-mailing and it got more and more intense and I realized I started having these crazy fantasies about him.”
“Ki, are you serious? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because. It was wrong. Normal, natural even, maybe, but wrong. I adore my husband. He gave me my daughters, my family, but this man tripped a wire inside me and absolutely set my chest cavity on fire.”
“So what did you do?”
“I decided I could either have an affair with him, which would probably peter out and have me suffocate on guilt for betraying my adorable teddy bear of a husband, or I could do what people do: put all those emotions in a box, reach up high on my mental stepladder, and put it up on the top shelf on my brain’s Manhattan Mini Storage.”
“So that’s it? You just broke off communication?”
“Mm-hmm. I mean, I told him I needed to, and he understood. And you know what? I felt a sad tug on my aorta for a little while, but soon enough it was like being on a sailboat and slowly drifting away from land, leaving the sand behind you. It became farther and farther away, and in the end, that lust, that longing, was replaced by relief. Absolute relief that I was grown-up enough not to jeopardize the thing that means the most to me in the world: my family.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. It was intense.”
“So . . . do you think if I hook up with Finn I will always regret it with Wylie?”
“Only you can figure that out.”
“If I sail away from Finn, I just know I’d dive overboard and swim back. I have to kiss him. I have to.”
“Then go for it. And don’t beat yourself up.”
“First I need to press the pause button with Wylie.”
“Just be really really careful,” she advised. “I don’t want you to do anything you’d regret.”
“That’s my worry,” I confessed. “But I’ll talk to him. I just need to stave off an engagement while I work out what I really want. I just don’t know if I can be . . . Velcro’d forever. That feels like such a long time. I don’t think I’m ready.“
“I just hope he’s willing to wait,” said Kira. “He’s been wanting to get married for a while.”
“I know. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Chapter 19
All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
—Walt Disney
Most women arrive home to find their guy’s on the pot or an armchair but mine was inevitably in the kitchen. From the attosecond I inserted my key into our lock, I was seized with the intoxicating scent of food cooking. Wylie’s XM rock station Liquid Metal blared, as a symphony of whisks and metal bowls and oven doors accompanied the pummeling riffs.
“BABE!” he said, dropping his incredible-smelling coq au vin to run and give me a huge hug. Fuck he was adorable. “I missed you so much, honey. I’m sorry I was dead to the world when you left, I wish you’d’ve woken me up!”
“I know, baby, but you were all cozy sound asleep lovebug! I didn’t wanna disturb you.”
“You always can, you know that. I prefer you to sleep.”
“YUM, that looks sooooo good.”
“It’ll be ready in a few.”
He poured me a glass of Bordeaux.
“Holy shit, this is incredible!”
“The Pantzers gave it to me last night to thank me,” he said. “I made this wild mushroom menu with soup and sottocenare lasagna and salad with this white truffle oil dressing and they freaked out.”
“Oh god, that sounds amazing,” I told him.
I set our little nook, a table for two, with our vintage plates and hotel silver and lit the two small Juliska hurricane lamps Kira bought us for Christmas.
We ate his delicious concoction, and he told me that he’d just found out that day that his restaurant was greenlit. The owner of the restaurant where he was sous chef would back him and be his partner. They would begin looking for spaces right away. In our neighborhood, no less.
“HONEY, that’s AMAZING!” I said. I got up out of my chair to hug him. He pulled me down on his lap and kissed me.
“Congrats, I always knew this would happen. You’re gifted and have your own unique style and I love every morsel and everyone else will, too, babe.”
“It’s all coming together,” he said, his melted Hershey’s kiss eyes smiling. “Everything’s moving along perfectly,” he added, squeezing me. “And everyone loves the name.”
“You found the name?”
“No. You did.”
“Me?”
“Hazel.”
“What?”
“No, the name. Hazel. Everyone digs it.”
“Oh sweethear . . .” My voice trailed off, seized by guilt. “I can totally see that in all-caps in Zagat.”
“I thought so, too!” he said, taking my hand.
He leaned in and kissed me.
Enter Finn. Almost like in the peripheries of my cerebral cortex, walking along those spongy brain squiggles, as if on a balance beam, teetering into view. I pulled away and looked at my boyfriend’s gorgeous face. And felt so removed and distant. I walked back to my side and sat down, looking at my lap.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, sensing from my mailed-in kiss that I was elsewhere.
“I’m so happy for you. I just want that same feeling of peace for me. And I don’t . . . have it. Things’re just . . . so crazy at work. With the launch and stuff.”
“I thought everything was great,” he said, breaking off a piece of caramelized onion bread. “Noah would die without you. You’re his fucking lifeline.”
“I guess,” I said, drawing breath nervously. “I just, um, I kinda want everything to just slow down and like calm a bit. In general.”
“Like what, you mean work stuff?”
“No. Everything—I just feel a little bit like I’m so frantic and I’ve been running around like a headless chicken for two years now and it’s great but I kind of keep having these fantasies of like a desert island. Or Paris. Or just, Mars, I don’t know.”
Wylie looked a little concerned. “Well, what about here? I mean . . . with me?”
I looked at him but didn’t speak quickly enough to quash the spark of worry in his eyes.
“Wylie, I love you so much. I do. I just . . . I’m really not ready to settle down yet. I’m just not. I’m sorry, I know we’ve talked about it but I’m just . . . not in a great place right now.”
He paused, sipping his wine.
He didn’t seem totally shocked.
“I know, I can tell,” he said. He cut another bite of chicken as I sat looking at him. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for, exactly,” he said. “It’s been three years together.”
God, we were like the reverse of every other couple! Kira had to practically threaten Drew after two years with “no ring, no bring” ultimatums before she moved in. And here I was playing the loath-to-commit guy role.
“You’re right, and that’s my issue,” I said, trying to tread carefully. “I’m not . . . a hundred percent sure. Of anything right now.”
Wylie put down his fork.
“Wait a minute. You’re saying you’re not sure about us?” he asked, now with a stunned look.
“I’m not sure about anything; I’m just saying I’m really confused, sweetheart. I mean, I’m not confused that I love you, I do, fiercely, but I just don’t feel ready to say ‘I do, until death do us part’ this attosecond. That’s a thousandth of a nano, by the way.”
“Thanks, Galileo,” he deadpanned. “My question is, and this is what I want you to think about, Hazel, if you’re not ready now, will you ever be ready?”
I took a deep breath, exhaling as the remorse of my wild forest-fire fantasies crept up the back of my neck. FinnFinnFinnFinn. There was no way I could not see where this would lead. If anywhere. If I wasn’t a deranged fan with a crush gone awry. But what was the alternative? I wasn’t Kira with the children. I was free still, to go off the road most frequently traveled. What was life but to be lived before croakage! We were all gonna be dead and buried in sixty years, and I’ve always been a diem carpe-ing kinda gal. I tried to wrestle with good versus evil like a cartoon angel and devil on my shoulders, but I knew damn well the pitchfork clipped the wings before I’d even hit the ground at LAX. The full-loaded fantasy freight train had left the station.
“Wylie, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready. I’m just a little lost right now. I have been for a while and I just need to find my way back. I don’t know how long that will take.”
“And I want to help you do that, I really do,” he said, shaking his head. “But I can’t wait forever.”
“I know.” I nodded guiltily. “I just need to work some stuff out and figure out what I really want out of life. Kira was married and pregnant with her second kid at my age, but I’m so not there.”
“Hazel,” he said carefully. “I think . . . maybe we should take a little break so you can figure stuff out.”
I felt a teeny tiny sting, but it was accompanied by a relief chaser.
He’d said it, I didn’t.
“Okay,” I said quietly, looking down at our West Elm brown Moroccan-style rug.
“Okay? That’s it? You’re not even going to fight for us?” he said, throwing his arms up. Now I could tell that was a bluff, and he was pissed.
What was wrong with me? Any girl would die to marry him!
“Wylie, I don’t know what I want right now and a break might be good for us.”
“Fine, Hazel. Take your break. But don’t think I’ll be waiting for you, holding your coat while you figure it all out.”
I paused and looked around the apartment. Our apartment. That we’d decorated together with fun finds from random trips and flea market scores. I thought of all the meals we’d shared and fun times we’d had making it into our home. But the truth was, in recent months between our crazy career jugglage worthy of Ringling Brothers or Chinese plate spinning minors, we were like . . . roommates. We were ships in the (dark, stormy) night, and I felt such a pit in my stomach about hurting his sweet self. But accompanying that bitter dread was the unbridled euphoria of Finn. As Wylie continued to cook our dinner, I was basking in fantasies of our kisses, conjuring images of mad embraces over and over. I imagined Finn kissing my neck, sliding my bra strap off my shoulder, unhooking it gently as he seemed lustfully drawn to undressing me; I was so flattered by his ardor; Wy was mellower and not wildly romantic like Finn, who was tortured and bursting with emotion. Finn had a sexual avarice that was palpable when we were near each other—pure bubbling-over chemistry, the kind that burst a test tube in the science lab. Wylie was quieter and subdued; he would never rip off my blouse. But sometimes I fucking want my shredded clothes in a balled heap on the floor! I wanted to be wanted. These feelings mingled like some kind of hemlock/ecstasy cocktail—part beaming me to hell, part rocketing me to the sun, moon, and stars. I thought of Wylie’s soft light brown curls. His kind eyes squinting with shock and distress as he stirred the sauce. I even feared his turning on me. And yet, Finn was somehow a sign—I mean how crazy was it that I met him flukishly close to saying his name as my celeb crush? It had to be destiny. Right? Or was that ridick. Maybe the little now drug-addicted Terminator 2 kid was right: “no fate but what you make.” Well it was time to go and make it. And like Linda Hamilton, I had to be strong. But not with veins popping out of my arms.
I practically swooned with the ambrosial scent of caramelizing onions.
I walked toward Wylie, who was pouring sherry into a bisque swimming with minced hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.
“Your favorite,” he said, pulling out the ’shroom-smothered wooden spoon, offering me a taste. I took it and almost cried that it would be my last, and our eyes met.
“It’s intoxicating. As usual,” I said softly. “Wylie, I’m
so sorry.”
He shrugged almost coldly, and I could tell I had wounded his gentle soul.
“You’ve been withdrawing from me lately anyway,” he said. “And I knew something was up when you didn’t want me to come out for your launch. Maybe it’s just not the right time for you to think about settling down.”
“Wylie, I know myself. I would rather regret my choice than regret my lack of balls to make one.”
“Well congratulations, you have balls,” he said. “And you totally chopped mine off with a Wüsthof cleaver, thanks.”
“Wylie, it’s not about you; I’m lost right now, it’s about me.”
“Yeah, thanks, George Costanza, I noticed,” he said. “Isn’t it always, Hazel?”
He turned off the stove and walked out, gently closing the door. Just as I’d closed it on him.
He left the beautiful meal sitting there, but despite the inviting aromas, I suddenly didn’t feel very hungry.
The worst part? I felt horrible that I didn’t feel horrible. The fact was, I had something so much more electrifying waiting in the wings. I felt awful for sweet Wylie, but on the flip side I had to scratch this itch I had for Finn. I was possessed by longing.
As I heard the elevator door close behind him in the hallway, it ravaged a beat from my pulse, but it quickly was replaced by twenty quickened pumps as I looked to my handbag.
I grabbed it from the floor, rifled through it as if through the California dust searching for gold nuggets, and retrieved it, with my hand practically shaking. Message.
“Taking you to this incredible restaurant called Animal, you’ll love it.”
I paused, looking around my sweet apartment. We’d decorated it together, lugging West Elm furniture and flea market finds, splurging here and there on curtains and crystal. I took a deep breath and somehow managed to exhale the melancholy of that bittersweet space we’d inhabited.
I looked back down at the phone, with the text message sitting there. From Finn Schiller.
“My tummy’s growling already, so to speak” I wrote back. I felt my forehead get hot. I think my temperature rose a decimal point with each text, and now I was in full fever mode. I was burning up for Finn, and despite Wylie’s dear heart, I didn’t see myself cooling off anytime soon.