“I advise you to contact your boyfriend,” he told me in monotone, fingering the bump with his latex gloved fingers.
“HE’S NOT EVEN MY BOYFRIEND!” I wailed to an elderly Jew with patients who needed moles biopsied waiting for him in the lobby.
After my appointment, I called Dr. Nussbaum obsessively to get my test results, even though he wouldn’t answer his phone on what was then Yom Kippur. But I didn’t need to know the swab results to know that I’d gotten that cold sore from Rob. Finally, the doctor called me back, and it looked like I was right. This was my first exposure, and that schmuck I’d dumped my boyfriend to date had given me a cold sore. I was “lucky” it was the mouth kind, and not the south kind.
This time, I didn’t play it all “9/11 coy” with Rob. I didn’t send him a blank e-mail with an all-caps header (“YOU GAVE ME HERPES?!?!”), hoping he’d think I was a cool cuke. After I calmed down, I called Rob and told him exactly what had happened. What my doctor said, how he swore to me it was no big deal, how there was an excellent chance that I’d never see a cold sore again—which I haven’t—and how it looked like I got it from him. Rob called me late at night, after work at his new job. He was livid, hysterical, and accusatory.
He went to a doctor of his own soon after that, like he was retaining the services of a divorce lawyer, and called me a couple of days later. It was the most I’d ever heard from him in such a short period of time! But he wasn’t calling with niceties or any kind of gentlemanly understanding that I imagine would have been greatly appreciated between sexual partners during a STD-themed crisis. “My guy said I was clean,” he told me, which was gambler-speak for the news that he’d gotten a blood test that came back negative for the herpes virus, which only means that it wasn’t active at the time, another myriad cold-sore-related factoid I’d learned within the course of four days in a time pre-dating my familiarity with Wikipedia. He was as paranoid and defensive as he was when I snooped his VHS tapes while he peed. Then it got worse.
“Also,” he added, “I’ve been asking around, and I know I’m not the only guy you’ve been with.”
What? I mean, first of all, yes. I wasn’t a virgin. I’m writing this book, and what am I on, page one hundred? And I’m twenty-two? I mean, of course I’d “been with” other guys before, in the prudish manner of speaking Rob used in order to couch what was sort of a disgusting allegation. Not that we were committed to any kind of exclusivity or even formally “dating,” but now that there was a cold sore and a couple of doctor bills, all of a sudden, I was the Whore of Babylon, even though since I started sleeping with Rob, I hadn’t even given a second look to another guy. And before that, I was with my boyfriend, whom I hadn’t strayed from, except if you count that night Rob walked me home from Bendix and planted one on my then bump-free mouth. I asked him the most appropriate question I could think of at the time.
“What the fuck do you mean you’ve been ‘asking around’?”
Again, Rob was concerned about gossip, like when he worried that tongues would flap if I showed my face around the theater after his performance. Here he was again, reporting to me that people were talkin’. Who was he, Bonnie Raitt?
He told me he’d “heard” that I’d slept with one of my former improv teachers—one who’d had an on-again off-again heroin addiction. I never touched the guy. And Rob also heard that I’d slept with somebody we both knew, a writer, which was true—I totally had. But it was just once, and back when I was in college, and, like, nineteen, and we used a condom, and who cares. “And,” Rob added, I’d had sex with “way more guys” than the guy I was going out with when he started hitting on me.
I pressed him for his source and did not relent, and he finally revealed the name of a girl I knew, who was friends with Nate. This girl was always icy to me and I never knew why. I assumed it was for dum-dum reasons having to do with being Nate’s best hag or other bullshit girl-feud stuff I want nothing to do with. And now, apparently, she’d been talking trash about me to the guy I’d been sleeping with. And when Rob had pressed her to reveal her source, she had the balls to say she knew it was all true because she’d heard it from Nate.
And that’s when I started hating Rob.
Hate is a lot closer to love on the emotive spectrum, and I’d officially crossed over into the “Fuck You” zone the moment Rob dropped Nate’s name, as though he was trying to argue a case and revealed his surprise witness in the form of my best friend who, according to his story, “betrayed me.” The hubris and ambition of that kind of ill will stunned me. Rob’s talents as an actor were modest at best: being a terrible jerk was where he shone bright.
INSTANTLY, IT all came crashing down. I learned more from breaking up with Rob in that short period of time than I had in twenty-two years on the planet. Like how there’s no such thing as fucking somebody good-bye. And that I apparently can’t hold a “real” job at an office. And that there are a ton of boys like Rob: impudent ten-year-olds in thirtysomething clothing, which apparently can include jeans designed to fit a woman with enormous hips. That people exactly like that shit clown will happily screw you just as long as you don’t touch their stuff or burden them with “grown-up problems,” like herpes, or feelings. I learned that when a guy dates you for three months and you still can’t call him your boyfriend, it’s time to figure out why it is you’re still hooking up with him. And learned that there’s no time more ideal than your early twenties, when you’re unemployed and haven’t yet found the discipline to write, to become obsessed with a guy with no interest in catching you after you initiated a trust fall from your last relationship. I also learned that forgiveness is a slow burn.
I got around to granting amnesty to that girl who spread those rumors about me like warm peanut butter on floppy Wonder Bread. She cut off all her hair soon after Rob dumped me, which he did, after reading me that laundry list of guys I had and hadn’t slept with over the phone. She apologized to me after I accidentally sat next to her at a bar, because I didn’t recognize her new look, and she was pretty sincere.
“I never in my life acted like such a cunt, and I’m so sorry,” she said, and I forgave the human being looking into my eyes. But I still don’t even make eye contact with Rob when I see him around. Of course I’m over him, even though it took a long time to go from hating and hurting to not caring at all. But that experience acquainted me with the sorts of things a spoiled man will take from you if you let him charm you into it. And I guess, by now, I forgive him. But just like that terrible day and all its collateral damage—I will Never Forget.
SECTION THREE
“crazy” is an std
“He would always act like he was passively a victim . . . But really he was just trying to get away with whatever he could get away with, walking all over people.”
—Kathy Goodell, R. Crumb’s ex-girlfriend, from Crumb
“During a certain period of my life I attracted some rather bizarre characters. The reason was quite obvious. I was behaving like a bizarre character myself.”
—Liz Renay, How to Attract Men
sweet sweeney agonistes
This is not a book about successful relationships, so I’m not going to bore you with stories about boyfriends.You didn’t dole out your well-earned clams to hear about how blissful it is to wake up next to somebody on a Saturday morning, eat a frittata, go to the planetarium high and make out during the laser show. What I will regale you with, in keeping with thematic schadenfraude, is a story about how shitty it is to break up with somebody you did, at one point, love, because you were given the chance—and then things changed.
PATRICK AND I dated for a year, and had delirious, retarded fun together, and then he moved in with me, and we had one more year together after that. Because we were both in our mid-twenties—I was twenty-six and he was twenty-three—nothing we did had any import beyond feeling good the moment we did it. But he was able to make me laugh so hard I cried, and we liked hanging out with each other all the time, and fo
r a while it was all euphoric and silly, with the low stakes of youth fueling the time we merrily killed. We were high constantly, we performed for fun, and neither of our jobs mattered. It was like Narnia, or Neverland, or Ork (is that a fake place where things are great?). It only took two years for the reality to settle in that our relationship was not good for me: I wasn’t doing what I needed to do when I was Patrick’s girlfriend. I was too lazy or fucked up to write anything that was any good or to have any ambition beyond throwing together a sketch or short film here and there, and every day Patrick went to sit at a desk at a job he couldn’t stand, then went and did improv onstage with his friends at night, and I’d resent him for not wanting more than that. And I guess I felt entitled to judge his fulfillment as well as my own because we were basically married, which is what it’s sometimes called when people live together, don’t date other people, and share living expenses.
Toward the end, our differences were racking up, and I knew I didn’t want to end up as his wife—not “be” his wife, but “end up as,” because, like I said, he was twenty-three, and twenty-three-year-olds usually don’t get married unless they live within twenty miles from where they grew up. I knew Patrick and I were not going to make it to grown-up land after I went home with him for Christmas and landed up to my tits in culture shock, and not in a fun “I’m on safari!” way, but in an “I don’t want this for the hypothetical children I haven’t even decided I want” way. I witnessed his family’s exchange of large-ticket electronics and stocking stuffers after their “drop in whenever” Christmas Eve party, which was unheard-of to me, having only celebrated appointment-only family gatherings centered around brisket meals for a definitive amount of guests who come at four and leave at seven.
I remember Christmas Day, the last one I’d spend with Patrick, and going to his uncle’s basement to sit around two fold-out tables shaped into an L. The men talked about sports and pulled from their Silver Bullet tallboys as I pushed my ham around my paper plate and waited for somebody to talk to me or at least embarrass me, like I was used to. I remember thinking at the time how far that basement was from Scarsdale, which all of a sudden seemed, like they say in that song, “At The Ballet,” if not like paradise, at least like home.
So gradually and inevitably, Patrick’s and my bond dissolved. He drank, smoked, and ate more, and I started to nag him about the symptoms of his unhappiness. We stopped having sex, and I bought a king-size bed so we could sleep next to each other without touching. Patrick started snoring and picking fights with me about how he thought circumcision was institutionalized genital mutilation, and there seemed to be points of contention at every turn. Patrick was a tech genius, and the TiVo he’d made from scratch by soldering a chip onto his Xbox had a glitch and would record his shows only—episodes of Law & Order & Penn & Teller: Bullshit!—and never my episodes of The Comeback or documentaries about cults and sea mammals.
We respected each other’s sense of humor, but we didn’t regard each other so well in the “every single other department” of being a person. It pained me to make room for Patrick in my apartment so he could store his ugly sweaters in the dorm-furniture-style dresser that ended up in my tiny bedroom. I didn’t want to throw away my cute TV to make room for his behemoth thirty-inch monitor—the one with that Franken-TiVo attached. I hated his food in my fridge. I hated his Warren Zevon poster on my wall. And even though we didn’t speak much about our relationship, Patrick—an Irish Catholic guy who regarded the concept of getting into therapy as absurd of an idea as my ever getting out of it—told me something sad that resonated, toward the end.
“Every time you talk to me or say anything at all, it’s like there’s a silent ‘comma, you asshole,’ after it.”
And he was right.
I didn’t love him enough to be a good girlfriend any more than he had the ability to love me enough to grow into the kind of partner he knew I needed. What started as a chummy alliance with a best friend you have fun making out with devolved into constant rounds of bickering with an alien you resented because he kept you from the enjoyment of the world’s getting the full benefit of your ambiguous “potential.”
During the second summer I spent on vacation with his family, Patrick and I sat on the beach after a walk. I’d watched his brothers and sisters light fireworks the night before while I sat a safe, Semitic distance away from the explosions, my hands folded in my lap. As we sat on damp sand and the tide got low, I suggested to Patrick that we try to live separately and see what it was like to take that step back, but still be “together.” We weren’t breaking up; he would just move out, and maybe our relationship would go back to being fun, like it was before we got to know each other better.
That always works! Because time goes backward, not forward—right?
He thought about it and later agreed that the plan made sense, over pulled-pork sandwiches at a shoreside BBQ joint, the mascot of which was a cartoon pig wearing a chef’s hat, jollily searing the flesh of one of its own.
A month later, Patrick and his stuff were gone from my apartment. And not long after that, I began exchanging daily e-mails with a Broadway actor I didn’t know, on whom I developed an obsessive crush. I was handling the not-breakup very well, or the Irish Catholic way of “not at all.” Who said the Irish were the only group immune to psychotherapy? Was it Freud, or Freud via Martin Scorsese in that ham- handed movie The Departed? I’ve always found the Irish really attractive—they make wonderful writers and sexy firefighters, and if they didn’t like the Red Sox they’d be perfect. But their “not dealing with stuff” thing may have been contagious, because I handled the dissolution of my living situation with Patrick by not handling it, and instead decided to pour all my energies into corresponding with an Equity actor I had only met once; and at the stage door, for Christ’s sake.
I SAW a production of Sweeney Todd right after Patrick moved out, and fell for the guy in the lead role, all right? And I wasn’t critically appreciative from a safe blogging distance; I was bludgeoned and ravaged into crazytown by this seemingly random performer who shook me into fandom at an age closer to thirty than twenty. It was embarrassing: I hadn’t written love letters to a celebrity since I put purple ballpoint to pink legal pad to tell the actor who played Wesley how cute I thought he was in the very special AIDS episode of Mr. Belvedere. And then there were those humiliating incidents of me being way too into sketch comedians in high school, confusing what I wanted to be one day with who it might be fun to have sex with. If Dana Carvey, whom I am certain is a fan of female-author-helmed dating memoirs, is reading this one, I just want to say, “I hope you weren’t too freaked out by the birthday card I sent you when I was fourteen, or allergic to the Opium brand perfume it was marinated in,” and also, while I’m at it, “I really liked your performance as Pistachio Disguisey in the motion picture Master of Disguises.”
Only today, in the cool, Catskills-crisp air of retrospect, can I now see that my fantasy-fueled correspondence with a Tony Award-winning triple-threat Demon Barber of Fleet Street had its roots in a few different pots of batty soil.
People who love theater are often cynical, despite or maybe because they know they’re capable of being so moved by the experience of watching a play that it feels better than real life. But it wasn’t enough for me to enjoy that guy’s performance the night I saw his show. For some reason, I had to read his bio, find his website, get his e- mail, send him a note that dropped the names of friends we had in common, and then, upon receiving a personal response, pore over every last word, intention, and emoticon until I had whipped my lady parts into a meringue-like frenzy pie. What was I, Kathy Bates in Misery? Or About Schmidt? Which was the one in which she was naked, and which was the one in which she bludgeoned James Caan? She lives out the fantasies of so many women, that Kathy Bates. God bless and keep her!
Our e-mails weren’t just an isolated incident of fan mail, either. I had a good month or so of back-and-forthing with my Broadway beau. Note—
this is a legal concern to add this, per the request of the actor I’m writing about. He’d keep writing back and I’d keep putting myself out there: sending photos, inviting him to rock shows, to coffee, stopping short of asking him to shave and eat me. [Broadway Joke Alert!] I acted like a retard tween, and this after two years of bitching about being with a guy not as mature as I was.
But Sweeney kept hitting Reply, and he was as flirty as a pleated skirt every time he wrote back. It’s a no-brainer that actors have to flirt with everybody to maintain a level of success. When your product is your own face, voice, and body, you need to maintain a sense of charm and fuckability to make yourself special beyond the sum of your parts in order to remain employed, even at the expense of the otherwise attractive assets you might be lacking, like smarts or good jokes. But my critical filter was as broken as the one on the humidifier I don’t clean as I pored over Sweeney’s correspondences each morning, enlisting a team of my most sympathetic friends on e-mail forward patrol, designated to tell me things I wanted to hear, like “He wants to get together with you, it’s just that his schedule is crazy,” and “He signed it with an ‘x’; that means he wants to kiss you.” I’d think about him every night before sleeping, and wake up every morning before peeing to run over to the computer and check my inbox for the latest from Sweeney.
And all the while, I lived in the acupunctural tingle of anticipation, hoping that one day we would go on a date in real life, and that it would be as fantastic as it was when I saw that show. Meanwhile, I did not go out on any actual dates.
Then, one day, I woke up, and there was no e-mail from Sweeney. He stopped responding.
Julie Klausner Page 10
