Alone

by Michelle Parise

  Also, I am wearing “the dress.” The dress is the dress that for whatever reason renders them all dumb. It’s my best dress for man-killing. He looks over at me, his hands dirty from food prep, his brow slightly beaded with sweat. “Damn, how am I supposed to cook with you looking like that?”

  It’s so unreal this way he has about him, this thing where he tells me every chance he gets that I am fucking awesome to behold. Remember, my self-esteem has been depleted to a big fat zero thanks to The Ex-husband, and I’m only slowly building it back. So in this kitchen, one year after The Bomb, with my self-esteem hovering at only 30 percent, yes, I am wearing “the dress” to get exactly this reaction. And yes, I’m wearing high heels in my own apartment. So what. It’s distracting the hell out of him.

  I feed him bits of crackers and cheese as he works. He kisses my fingers with each bite. We just met but this feels like heaven to me, two people in a kitchen making dinner. I snap a photo of him as he cooks. I feel like this might never happen again, this thing where a sweet, good-looking man cooks for me in my kitchen, so I need photographic evidence. It’s just his back in the photo, you can’t see his face, just the gorgeous place I like to rest my head, there between his neck and his shoulder blade, just his waist, his arms, all the places I love in this world because they are a man’s body. A man’s body doing regular things like reaching for the pepper grinder, or trying to figure out how to work the timer on my oven.

  Once he figures out the timer, he puts the salmon in and turns, grabs me up into his arms, and says, “I don’t even care if we eat that anymore.” I swoon, literally, and then we do it right there in the kitchen, and it is so beyond all the other guys put together. It will stay that way, actually. More than a year later, we will find ourselves still talking about it, that’s how large and mythical it is. “I always think about that time in the kitchen,” he says in my bed one night, and I say, “So do I.”

  But back to February, and the salmon in the oven. After the magic goes down, we put all our clothes back on, smoke half a joint on the balcony, and sit down to dinner. “You have such nice things!” he says about the table setting, and I say, “Of course, I was married, remember?” and we laugh. My things are nice — crystal wine glasses, silverware, classic white china edged in platinum — all wedding gifts, all the “good stuff,” as The Husband and I used to call it, as opposed to our “everyday” cutlery and plates. Now in my new life, I use the good stuff every day. Why the fuck not. One year exactly from the end of my marriage that I didn’t know was ending, I’m sitting in my own home with this sweet man eating a dinner he made me, on the wedding china.

  The next day I brag to two of my friends, Big Laugh and The Bright One, about how that was the greatest night I have experienced since The Bomb. We’re having lunch at work, and I can’t talk about anything else. I describe the dinner, and then the sex with waaaay too much detail, but they are good sports. They were at Revival (the club) the night I met Revival (the man) and they approve, but they’re wary of how quickly I’m getting carried away.

  They are right to be.

  ADVICE FROM AN EX-HUSBAND

  I have a little black book. Well actually, it’s red, a little red notebook that I began writing everything in after The Bomb. I have hundreds of notebooks, I write everywhere, all the time, everything, but I also write lists. Lots of lists. So the list called “black book” inside my little red book should be no surprise to anyone. It’s a list of all the men I’ve slept with since The Husband and I broke up. Like I said, before that, I could count the number of men on one hand, and now … well I’m not going to say, but it’s definitely more than that. Significantly.

  The list is in order of appearance. It has their first and last names and the date(s) we slept together. There’s a star rating system — some have no stars (lousy, or just whatever), there are a few with one or two stars, and the best of the best have four stars (Way to go, Cute/ Crazy Guy! Nice job, PG24!). There’s also a symbol system only I can decipher that indicates whether we went all the way or just fooled around. I know, so high school of me … that is, if I had slept around in high school or even university, which I certainly did not.

  Now you think I’m creepy, maybe even crazy. But I’m a record keeper, and always have been. I’ve written in a journal since I was eight. I used to keep detailed lists where I ranked my favourite songs, my favourite members of Duran Duran, the boys in my class from cutest to ugliest, then from nicest to meanest. There were lists ranking the concerts I’d been to, my favourite bands, my best friends, the teachers I hated. Even at a young age, I liked order, inventory. I guess it’s my way of making sense of this crazy world. If that makes me crazy, so be it.

  In addition to my “black book” list, the red book also has a list that’s just about The Ex-husband. It details every single time we’ve slept together since we moved into separate apartments. There’s the date, followed by the location, followed by a short description of the action and our state of mind.

  June 20 — my place — after tense phone call, he comes over. No alcohol.

  Sept 18 — my place — he stays for hours and hours after, lying around and talking in my bed. He kisses the top of my head and says “I love you” when he leaves.

  Jan 26 — his place — middle of the day for a whole two hours while Birdie is at a birthday party.

  There are a lot of entries. In fact, according to this list, for the first six months after we moved into separate places, we were sleeping together three times a week. That’s more than some married couples, I know. But somewhere in the second year of separation, things started to change.

  March 11 — his place — me despondent, go over in moment of weakness. Feels like nothing. Big, awful fight afterward. He is terrible to me.

  After that night, I swore it would never happen again. I felt oddly at peace with it. Every time I saw him after that, he seemed more remote. More of a stranger. The longer I went without feeling his familiar body next to mine, the easier it was to defamiliarize myself with his heart, too. Over time, all that was left was a residual hurt. A precise but dull pain. A dent that was never fixed properly and just rusted over, corrosive and exposed to anyone else I tried to love.

  “You shouldn’t be too good in bed, you know,” The Ex-husband says on that terrible night, the one I swore would be the last. We’re in his apartment, lying in his bed, post-sex, Birdie asleep in her room.

  “Guys won’t like that,” he continues. “You really shouldn’t be this good the first time you’re with them.” And there it is. Dating advice from my ex-husband. Is this how it is then? Honestly, is this what I want? I feel like throwing up. There’s suddenly no reason at all I should be lying there naked beside him. I don’t want advice about sex from my own husband! Ex-husband! Especially ridiculous advice. I get up and put my clothes on and practically sprint across the street to my own bed.

  But oh, I would be lying if I said it didn’t scorch my heart from the inside out. If I said that stupid sentence hasn’t haunted me since. Is it true? Am I supposed to just lie there or something? Not say what I like, what I want? Will that make a man like me more? The fact that I’ve seriously asked myself these questions means he still has an idiotic power over me. So that’s why this time has to be the last time.

  VANISHING

  Revival is sitting across from me. I haven’t seen him in over a month. Not since the epic night of the salmon and the sex and the swirly excitement of a man cooking in my kitchen. It was a slow fade. He’d text, but could never make plans and his reasons were vague. But now, he wants to explain why he vanished after that amazing night.

  So here we are, staring across the table from one another in a noisy bar. He has a Manhattan and I have a Sidecar. We drink them pretty quickly. Revival says he thinks about me all the time and still wants to see me, but too much is going on in his life.

  I nod. He says he bought a house for his son and his son’s mother to live in and that’s why he disappeared for th
e past month.

  I blink. “Are you moving in, too?” And he says he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. All he knows is he wants to see his son more, he needs to see him more, he doesn’t know what else to do. There’s a sinking feeling in me, but something else, too … relief? In the month since our last amazing night together, I had time to consider what this thing with Revival was, or wasn’t. His disappearing act hurt my feelings at first, but not as much as you’d expect. Not as much as I’d expect.

  Revival was my first real dating experience since The Bomb. My first brush with “normal” courtship — movies and dinners and an incredible sexual chemistry. But beyond that, there actually wasn’t much else. We didn’t have all that much to talk about. He wasn’t the total package. And so as he explains his complicated situation to me in this bar, I realize I don’t need him to be my boyfriend. I just want to see him from time to time, just have him come to my bed and make me feel the way he does. That’s it. I tell him so. And that becomes our MO after that.

  He comes and goes, I never know when, and I never ask questions. We stop the real dating, no more movies or dinners, our meetings always at my place where I answer the door barely clothed and we only bother with a few minutes of small talk before falling into hours of incredible sex all over my apartment. In this way, he is my favourite. My favourite lover. That’s a thing now, in this life I still don’t recognize and never could have imagined or wanted. I was once a wife who was loved. Now I have a favourite lover.

  I ask no questions about Revival’s situation. The situation with the son and the son’s mother and the house and the does-he-or-doesn’t-he-live-there. I don’t ask him about anything. He doesn’t ask me. I see other guys. More ones-and-dones because no one is right. Because I’m not right.

  Winter turns into spring. I start to feel more conflicted about Revival’s situation. Morally it feels indefensible — what if his son’s mother is more than he is letting on? What if they really are a couple? That would make me the mistress, a thing that aside from just being plain ironic, also makes me hate myself, makes me a hypocrite. I decide to stop seeing him, no matter how comfortable he is, no matter how easy and amazing it is when he’s in my bed.

  I make a final push to stop the incessant drinking and hooking up with men. I’m actually tired of it — the small talk, the awkward first meeting and the more often than not awkward first fumbling in the dark. I’m tired of having sex with people I don’t know, and in many cases don’t even like that much. Now, I want to find a real boyfriend. So I try to go on real dates with men my own age, dates where no sex is involved. But finding a real someone isn’t as easy as landing a superficial hook-up. There’s a lot more rejection and disappointment this way, and it’s trying. The small talk can be excruciating, the way they don’t laugh at my jokes, or the way I don’t get theirs. The times I think the date was awesome but then I never hear from them again. The times they are fun and sweet and nice and into me but of course I am not the least bit attracted to them. All spring, I go on what feels like a hundred first dates, and never a second date. They are all just wrong.

  Here’s what I’ve learned about dating — it feels like an unending audition. And you never fucking get the part, nope, you’re always just this close. But I want to get the part. I want someone to wrap their arms around me when I’ve had a tough day. I want to have someone trace my face with their finger, to look me in the eyes and tell me they think I’m a beautiful, walking bonfire. I want to walk down the street holding hands with someone. I want to drive my car with the windows down while he picks our favourite songs off my iPod. (Yes, I still have an iPod.)

  I want someone whose neck I can kiss after I pick a fluff off his sweater. I want to iron his shirts and give him a hundred orgasms. I want to look up from a book I’m reading and find his eyes looking at me, eyes that smile even before his mouth does, and when it does, that smile is the thing I live for. If I exist, he must exist too. Cross your fingers for me.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE LONELY

  What Lonely Feels Like

  Loneliness is every cliché imaginable.

  It’s me, adrift on an ocean, unmoored, nothing to be anchored to, no land for miles.

  It’s me, standing at the bottom of a well,

  a canyon,

  a crater,

  nothing but vultures circling overhead, waiting for me to just give up and die already.

  It’s me, waiting. But I don’t even know what I’m waiting for.

  It’s me, except my humour, warmth, and self-esteem have been siphoned out, replaced by a wispy, petulant yearning that everyone can spot from a distance and smell up close.

  Loneliness seeps out of my pores.

  It floats around me like a cloud no matter how I try to be normal, to be nonchalant, to be a person that’s okay with being alone.

  Lonely is a parasite that invaded my body and now I’m host to it. I serve it hors d’oeuvres and champagne.

  Lonely is here with me in the bar, getting round after round so I can forget why I’m here in the first place.

  It drunk-texts people who really wish I would stop doing that.

  It flags down a cab for me and … whoever this guy is beside me.

  Lonely wakes me up in the morning and says hello first thing, so I know it’s still there with me.

  It squeezes my hand when I drop Birdie off at school knowing I won’t see her again for

  six

  whole

  days.

  Lonely gets my sunglasses out for me so the other parents won’t see me crying again as I exit the school.

  Lonely is the most consistent thing in my life now, the only constant. It’s always there for me when I don’t need it.

  Loneliness is my new boyfriend, I guess.

  We walk arm in arm through the city streets.

  SOLO TIME

  One of my good friends is the exact opposite. She’s always saying, “I love my solo time!” She just loves being in her apartment, absent of anyone.

  I don’t get it. “What do you do there?” I ask her, and she says, “I make tea, I take baths, I watch movies, I bake cupcakes …” I call her an old lady but envy winds its way through me. I want so badly to feel happy on my own with baking and baths, but I can’t. Why bake cupcakes if Birdie isn’t there? Why have a bath if not with a lover? I’ve never even watched a movie on my own. Ever. In all my life. What’s the point if there’s no one to share these things with?

  “You’ll love it one day, too,” says Solo Time. She’s right. I won’t feel this way forever. There will come a time, years from now, when I do learn to love being alone in my apartment. Sometimes. But right now, in this part of my story, all I can do is plan every moment of my life, fill every blank square in my calendar with something. Someone.

  Solo Time tells me to just do what I need to do. She doesn’t judge me, or tell me to change. She makes me tea and listens to my cringey dating stories and responds with her own stories of blissful Saturday nights enjoying her own company. She’s very upbeat. It’s part of her charm, this enthusiastic pep. Independent and assured, Solo Time is both young and old at once, perfectly happy with the life she’s built for herself. She doesn’t cry, ever, and jokes that she “has no emotions” but it isn’t true. She sees how hard this is for me.

  She tells me how brave she thinks I am for choosing joint custody. “So brave. Because you lose her half the time.”

  Leaving me alone. Really alone. While two-thirds of my little family live across the street. Far away, so close, as I navigate my own solo time.

  DIVORCE OFFICE

  We’re standing outside a door that says, I shit you not, Divorce Office. It’s June 2013. And as you may have guessed, we’re here to sign away the end of our marriage. But the Divorce Office is locked.

  The Ex-husband has made me drive us here to the northern edge of Toronto to sign the papers with some dial-a-lawyer he’s found on the internet. He didn’t bother to call ahead to
tell her we were coming, so Dial-a-Lawyer is not here. We stand in a beige hallway staring at the door while he frantically phones and emails her.

  Beside the words Divorce Office there is a graphic of two silhouettes — a man and a woman with their backs to one another. We find this insanely funny, and try to take a photo of ourselves with our backs to one another. I text a friend, Can you believe it? Divorce Office! and he replies, If that was in a screenplay, it would have been sent back with the note, “Too on the nose. Think of something less obvious.”

  I repeat this to The Ex-husband and we laugh. But the levity doesn’t last. We start talking about the end of our marriage and it isn’t long before I’m saying, “How could you do this?” like a broken record. I go outside and stare at the wasteland of the industrial park we’re in. Why am I even here? At the Divorce Office! How is any of this real?

  Dial-a-Lawyer finally shows up. We sign the affidavit and a cheque for two hundred dollars. The Ex-husband is so breezy, making jokes. He checks his phone at least three times. Is he seriously texting some woman while we’re signing our divorce?

  We get back into my car and I burst into tears. He sits in the passenger seat and waits silently for me to stop. Then I drive us back downtown, so we can both go to work. Outside of the massive old school he teaches at, we sit. I stare at the building where they both worked, and wonder if they ever had sex in there somewhere, in some long-forgotten hallway, or in one of the offices on the fourth floor. This is how I think. This is how I get.

  “Okay, please get out of my car now,” I say and he replies, “No. You’re upset. I wasn’t there for you before when you needed me, and I’m going to be here for you now. I’m not going to desert you anymore, I want to help you.” My grip on the steering wheel would win me a strongman competition. I say, “Honestly? What would help is if you just got out of my car.”