“True. He’s never had kids, so he’s not an expert on that. Plus he’s not being at all sympathetic or supportive. What else?”
Sara sounded like she was going to keep asking me questions about Jake until even I saw his flaws.
“Well, one of his favorite sayings is ‘For every beautiful woman, there’s a man who’s tired of fucking her.’ He says it almost every day.”
I heard Sara suck in her breath over the phone.
“Leslie, that’s not unkind, it’s cruel. Can you hear the threat in that? You’re the beautiful woman he’s going to tire of one day.”
No wonder I hated it every time he said that. Why could Sara see so much that I couldn’t?
“Leslie, why are you putting up with this? You need a man who wants to be with you, one who doesn’t run away from problems, who solves them. The way you do. You can’t settle for less, no matter how long you’ve known him. No matter how hot the sex is.”
I thought of how Jake made me come in the sunshine of Tulum and in front of the fire in Southampton. I needed that Jake.
“We’re a ‘We’ now, Sara. I want his imperfections. I want to let him see mine. That’s part of commitment. Right?”
“I get that, Leslie. That ability to love wildly is one of the best parts of you. But it doesn’t sound like Jake is capable of returning that acceptance, that fierce love. He sounds terribly emotionally fragile to me. At times like this, it’s wise to check yourself, to slow down.”
My head couldn’t argue with her. My heart felt differently.
“You know, it sounds to me like Jake is your burn ointment. Your sexual healing after years of Marty’s sabotage. But that doesn’t mean he’s your soul mate. Each man you date now is a building block for your self-esteem. Not the foundation. Don’t confuse the two.”
I knew she was right. It didn’t make a dent in how much I wanted, and needed, Jake in my life. And my bed.
* * *
The first Tuesday in March, Rittenhouse Square was exploding with pink dogwood blossoms, orange and yellow daffodils, and fresh young grass. Early one morning, I spotted a female wood duck, far less glamorous than the males with their metallic purple-green heads, paddling peacefully in the children’s pool near the Duck Girl statue. I thought wood ducks mated for life. I looked around, but her drake was nowhere to be found.
Jake and I had known each other for thirty-four years.
Our six-month anniversary was in twelve days.
He was turning fifty in ten days.
Jennie was fading. She would leave him soon, no matter what he did.
Were these milestones to Jake, too? I wasn’t sure.
Jake’s key turned in my brownstone door, and he walked in, looking like he hadn’t showered or shaved yet today. He was lugging Jennie’s food and dog bed. She wobbled behind him. She hadn’t needed a leash in weeks.
He didn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t hug me. Or kiss me. Even after he put down all Jennie’s supplies.
My chest seized.
While he went back out to his Jeep, I got Jennie a bowl of fresh water and gave her skinny ribs a pat as I figured out how to proceed. Should I ignore Jake? Wait for him to bring up whatever was troubling him? Marty had withheld his emotions for so many years, the silent treatment had become intolerable to me. Withholding emotion is a form of manipulation, Sara had told me. Jake had pulled enough vanishing acts. My last therapy session had convinced me: I had to know if he was all in.
“Hey, Jake, what’s wrong?” I asked as soon as he came inside. I stood next to him in my white-paneled foyer. He dropped his backpack, heavy with his computer.
“Nothing,” he said, looking down and sighing, still not meeting my eyes.
“Sit,” I said, moving to the Italian silk couch next to the fireplace. The same spot where he’d first kissed me six months before. “Tell me. I want to know.”
“Come on, Leslie. Later.” His voice chafed with irritation. Irritation with me. “Let’s talk about this another time.”
He was still standing, a few feet in front of me, his hands on his hips. This person did not seem like Jake.
The cold feeling in my chest got colder. But not knowing what was wrong, feeling invisible, would devastate me. I deserved better.
“No,” I said, reaching for his hand. My mouth was dry. “Talk to me. Please.”
He pulled his hand back. He stood a good yard from me, stiffly, like a child facing a reprimand. He crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes were a cloudy, cataract gray.
“I’ve been thinking. This past week, it was nice to have a break from you.”
My head jerked as if he’d slapped me. The week before we’d gone to Tulum, he’d confessed that the maximum he could stand to be apart from me was seventy-two hours. He pivoted his jaw, his upper torso, away from me. But the look on his face before he turned away was full of hurt and yearning, as if he actually wanted to be closer to me, to be assured that I needed him.
I stared at Jake, wearing his usual button-down oxford and jeans, speechless.
“It was nice to not feel jealous, for a change.” He was spitting the words at me. “You’re so intense. And inflexible. You always make me come to you.”
He surveyed the living room where we’d first kissed and made love six months before. He glared at the fireplace, the bookshelves filled with Shakespeare, Anne Lamott, Jon Krakauer, Cheryl Strayed. My favorite writers. He looked down at the handwoven Persian carpet. He looked everywhere but at me. He sounded like a stranger. A furious one.
I sank into the love seat, stunned. Me, inflexible? The intense part, damn straight. But Jesus, so was he. We both were. It was something I loved about us.
My brow furrowed and my mouth hung open as I looked at him, trying to decipher his body language. That body I’d come to know so well. What was all this you you you talk? Why couldn’t he say I?
Jake was still speaking.
“You make all your decisions without thinking about me. You and your kids are totally dominating my life.”
What the hell? My kids? He barely saw them.
Who was he talking about? None of these qualities described me. It felt like he was talking about an invented character, rather than his lover, his friend since we’d been teenagers. Jake had once told me that his ex-girlfriend required him to call her at eleven o’clock to check in. Every night. No matter where he was or what he was doing. Maybe Jake equated that kind of mutually controlling, mistrustful relationship with love. I could never live that way. Although I had my flaws, I never came close to being possessive or calculating. It seared me to hear Jake paint me as a strict, unforgiving woman.
But underneath the anger, I could sense panic. He paced around the room in a circular swoop, like a bird trying to find its way out of a barn. Was he embarrassed about his irrational jealousy over the helicopter pilot? Was his birthday freaking him out? We’d been planning a ten-day skiing trip to Colorado with his family and a motley crew of friends later in March to celebrate. Jennie was dying. Was the juxtaposition between growing older too much for him to absorb? Was this some kind of male midlife crisis, incomprehensible to me, despite how well I thought I knew him?
This conversation was moving too fast. I wanted to hit pause. I didn’t know how, because his words, and the fury behind them, ripped me apart like an ax splitting firewood. Tears slipped down my face. He made no sense. I sat motionless on the couch, my palms cupping my face, watching him, afraid to even blink.
“I think I need some time apart from you,” Jake said. “I know I need some time apart from you.”
Sara’s advice and KC’s words came zinging back to me: like the abuse victim I’d been in my twenties, I was still willing to pay too high a price to feel loved. I’d made progress, sure, by vowing to never put up with physical abuse again. But Jake, like Marty, like my first husband, was turning my insides into black tar. Was this another chapter in the seemingly endless story of how I failed to protect myself from men I loved?
>
I had to take a stand, right then on the love seat salvaged from my failed marriage.
“Okay, Jake, then go,” I said through my tears. I stood up. “I love you. I love us. But I can’t take this kind of pain and distance from you. Either you have to leave right now, or I will.”
By this time I was crying too hard to say anything more. Somehow we made it to the foyer. I squeezed my arms around his body in a fierce embrace, trying to connect with him physically one final time. Then I sank to the cold marble floor and crumpled into myself, hugging my knees to my chest. Jake put on his leather jacket and picked up his backpack. He whistled to Jennie. She came to him slowly, tottering by me sobbing on the floor, and they both walked out my front door.
* * *
The next morning I texted KC. And Winnie. And Sara. I had the mailman’s cell, and I felt like using it, so he wouldn’t ask why I wasn’t getting any more chicken-scratch love letters. That’s how bizarre I felt.
I sent everyone the identical message.
Hi. Jake and I broke up last night. I don’t know why. I don’t want to talk about it.
Thank God I only had to type the words once, and then copy and paste without having to read them or think about what they meant.
I needed my girl crew to know what had happened, even if I didn’t want to discuss it yet. I felt like a Civil War general summoning the cavalry to be at the ready for battle. In case I fell apart. Which I did, over and over, during the next six weeks. Thank God they were all there, waiting to catch me.
* * *
KC sat on a high stool at the coffee shop, kicking one heel in the air. She had on a black Tahari suit and shiny black kitten heels. I had on black yoga pants covered in cat hair and a white T-shirt covered in yellow streaks of dried snot.
“I never loved anyone so much,” I said through tears.
KC took a sip of her grande iced cold brew, emblazoned with a green mermaid. She raised her eyebrows at me. Starbucks was empty except for a lone male barista. He was grinding coffee and cleaning out the espresso machines behind the counter, pretending he didn’t have a wailing customer on his hands.
“What do you love about him, Leslie?” KC asked intently, sounding like Dr. Phil, as if she were humoring an audience member missing three dozen IQ points.
Dammit, she understood exactly why I loved him. I’d written her the world’s longest text messages explaining why.
I answered anyway.
“He makes me feel so sensual, and smart, and loved,” I howled, as quietly as I could.
KC raised an eyebrow.
“Really? ’Cause that’s not what it looks like from my view, right now.”
I froze, imagining how I looked to KC. My face was wet. My eyes were red and swollen from crying. Jake Bryant wasn’t making me feel especially hot or loved at that moment. In fact, he was directly responsible for more tears, mucus, and self-doubt than I’d ever experienced. As I knew damn well, but had temporarily forgotten, I was the only one responsible for whether I felt sexy, cherished, and loved.
I looked KC in the eye and burst out laughing, shaking the ice in my Starbucks cup.
“Only a true friend tells you what you hate hearing,” I managed to blurt out.
She nodded with relief and covered my hand, cold and wet from clutching the iced coffee in its plastic cup, with her warm fingers.
“I was afraid you were gonna marry him, girl. I totally get the wanting/yearning. But you can’t end up with someone that vindictive, that immature. No guy is so great a lay to put up with that kind of coldness and betrayal. Honey, you’ve come too far for that. He’s not the one for you.”
I wiped my face with a scratchy Starbucks napkin from the table. I reached into my purse for my favorite love note, folded and refolded so many times that the paper felt like soft cotton. I want to cover you in my love, Jake had written. I handed it to her as proof.
“I’m never going to find someone else, KC. Not as smart or eloquent as Jake. Not as erotic. I can’t settle for anything less.”
I felt like the only person on the planet who’d ever been broken up with.
“Oh, girl, you can’t see it now, but you’d be settling by staying with him. He’s never going to be ready for the kind of relationship you want. You’re too independent, too confident. He’d always be punishing you because of his jealousies. Which is twisted. And unfair.”
As I watched, appalled, KC tore Jake’s note in half.
“You know about ‘unsafe’ personality types, right?”
She ripped the note again. My eyes welled with tears, but she had my full attention with her words.
“Abandoners?”
Another rip.
“Men like Jake are great at starting relationships. Can’t stick with them. They’re turned on by pursuit, by convincing women to trust them, but they always, always leave when you need them most. Like Lance Armstrong ditching Sheryl Crow when she got breast cancer. Jake probably has some kind of attachment disorder from being abandoned himself as a kid. Or he’s a narcissist. He’d never make you happy over time. This phase of your life is about finding you, discovering what makes you happy over time. Jake is probably the most important one of the boyfriends—because he’s shown you, more than anyone else, what you don’t want in a man.
She collected the shreds of Jake’s love note, walked over to the trash, and threw them away. She came back wiping her hands with finality.
I opened my mouth to protest, to explain Jake’s flaws, to remind her of how kind, sweet, and gentle he had been with me, so many times. KC put her hand on mine again to stop me from defending him. She smiled ruefully at me and shook her curls.
“Jake sucks at adulting,” she said pithily. “Honey, I know he’s not all bad. But bottom line: from my perspective, Jake seems like a cowardly, immature, hypocritical hoarder who abandoned you emotionally. And also, sweetie, maybe you were not so good at adulting, either. Maybe you needed to be a sex-crazed teenager again, as part of getting over Marty. The only thing that really worked between you and Jake was sex. And an intense erotic connection is not the same as a functioning relationship that lasts.”
My throat constricted. She was right. That didn’t make me miss Jake any less. God, sometimes I hated KC.
“Jake’s got a magic feel for beginnings, and the written word. He’s certainly in touch with his sexuality. And yours. His superpower is overpromising at the start of a relationship, and then underdelivering over time. Falling in love is easy, Leslie. Staying in love, once you figure out your angel’s got feet of clay? That takes a grown-up. How would a man like that ever have been enough for you?”
Great question. I had no idea how to answer.
“I’ve gotta head back to work, girl,” she announced, standing up and throwing her cup in the Starbucks recycling bin. I stood up, she hugged me, and I watched her outside the glass picture window, checking her phone as she power-walked up the street to her office, feeling like I’d never again walk up any street as confidently as KC did.
* * *
After suffering through six weeks of phone, text, and email embargo, one word, Jake, lit up my phone late one Sunday night. I lunged for it, and all three cats exploded off the bed to get out of my way. I had been under the covers, crying into the sheets for the third or fourth time that day, surrounded by the cats and Tigger. The kids were with Marty, so I’d had no reason to hold back the waterworks all weekend. Observers might have assumed I was training for the Olympics of crying in public. I cried Saturday in the Whole Foods cookie aisle when I saw they had Jake’s favorite kind of Tate’s, which, in case you’re curious, is Chocolate Chip Walnut. Coming home from the market, I wept behind the wheel of my car, circling the block looking for parking, because I couldn’t call Jake to help me unload the groceries. Brushing my teeth after dinner an hour before my phone rang, I noticed my left eyeball was threaded with red spiderwebs, a burst blood vessel, a nice topping for my perennially swollen face. I was too exhausted from cryin
g to care that I looked more like a real-life zombie than a fifty-year-old divorced, brokenhearted mother of two who had gone from five to zero boyfriends in six months.
It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. Which made me howl even more.
Despite obsessing over our relationship for the past month and a half, I had almost no idea why we’d broken up. Instead, I experienced a jagged combination of self-pity and self-fury. How had I been blind to Jake’s self-destructive patterns? I couldn’t even get mad at him. I felt bizarrely sorry for him as well as myself, although there was zero evidence that he felt sorry for himself or me. His Facebook pictures from his birthday ski trip showed him with a huge smile pasted on his face, as if relieved to be free of me. My sadness, on top of the confusion, made me feel like I was trying to grab fog with my bare hands.
“Jake? Hi. Is it really you?”
For a second, I tried not to sound desperate to talk to him, or like I’d been sobbing for six weeks straight. I lacked sufficient energy to manufacture fake cheer, though. I slumped back into the mess of my pillows and the comforter, clutching my phone.
“Yeah. It’s me,” he slurred. He sounded a little drunk. “I broke two ribs biking in Central Park today.”
“Oh no! Are you okay? How was your birthday? How was your birthday trip?”
“I’m fine. Juiced up on painkillers. Colorado was great. Thanks for your birthday text. It was nice to be in vacation mode. Great skiing, too. We had a great time.”
Without me, I felt like adding.
“Ah, so well, um, I have something to tell you.”
My stomach tensed as if a Boy Scout were pulling it tight with a drawstring. I rolled over and looked at myself in my mirror headboard, trying to brace myself for whatever he had to say. It sure didn’t sound like good news. My face looked as lumpy as if I’d had my wisdom teeth taken out.
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