Alone

by Michelle Parise

  Angolan and Portuguese

  Scorpio like me

  Dreadlocks

  Great dresser like amazing

  Beautiful face

  Even beautifuler smile

  So unpretentious kind and funny … Is this guy really this perfect?

  This memo is still in my phone, stamped with the 2:00 a.m. date of August 23, 2013. We had our first date later that night.

  The next morning at breakfast in a diner nearby, I took a photo of him and he snapped one of me. That photo is still the one that pops up on his phone when I call or text. I printed out the one I took, wrote the date on the back, folded it and put it in my wallet where it would live for five years. It’s hard to let go of magic sometimes, what can I say?

  Anyway, after that whirlwind of the first 48 hours together, we continue to text and talk and see each other as much as possible. We do real dating things. He’s fun and bright and just brims with positivity. He’s gorgeous and dorky and exuberant. He talks a lot, and he listens so well, and he always, always says the exact right thing but it never feels like a line, even though maybe it is.

  There are downsides, which the spun-like-sugar me is ignoring. He’s a bit of a bohemian, which is to say, a musician, and his friends all seem to be burlesque dancers that he’s slept with, or still is sleeping with. He doesn’t have a career, doesn’t own anything. He lives like my friends and I lived when we were twenty-two, his apartment small and untidy, crammed with instruments and recording equipment, and in the kind of building and neighbourhood that make me feel positively bourgeois. But all spun like I am, all butterflies and unicorns and cotton candy, I ignore all this. I just want to be with someone kind. Someone who looks at me like they can’t believe I’m in front of them. So I focus on his gorgeousness, his charm, the way we can talk for hours and still have more to say. It’s bliss, pure bliss, this romance thing, this we-saw-each-other-from-across-the-room-and-wow! thing.

  I like this hazy glow of magic that surrounds us. This golden mist. Those eyes, goddamn it, those eyes. I don’t want to pull back the curtain just yet.

  INDEPENDENT WOMAN

  I get a letter in the mail. It’s stamped: Supreme Court of Justice. Shit, am I being called for jury duty?? Jury duty happens to be my biggest fear, after being abandoned or having to be alone for the rest of my life. Yes, that’s right, that’s the hierarchy of things I’m afraid of:

  Being alone forever and I’m not even forty, God.

  Being abandoned. (Check.)

  Being called for jury duty.

  Lucky for me, it isn’t jury duty. It’s a notice of divorce. Not the divorce itself, but a warning, a friendly reminder that yes, the divorce is coming. On October 27, 2013, it will finally be official and legal.

  I burst into tears and call my friend, The Practical One, but she isn’t home. Who else, who else? Now, there are a lot of people I could call next, but I call The Man with the White Shirt. Don’t roll your eyes at me. Don’t say I’m crazy to call a guy I just started seeing to cry about my divorce. I mean, maybe I am a little, in the sense that my new crazy is just being me, and not hiding my emotions or trying to play it cool. This guy feels like the real deal.

  I’m not crying when he answers, but he knows something’s wrong. I say, “I just got the ‘Congratulations, you’re divorced!’ letter.”

  “Oh honey, I’m sorry. But also, that’s awesome!” he says, and I break into a huge smile. “It must be really hard for you to see it just printed on a page like that,” he says, all best-guy ever, all unicorn-like. I tell him honestly, I feel numb, punched in the gut, achingly sad, incredibly free, angry and happy.

  As I’m talking, he texts me a link that makes me want to drive straight over to his house and tackle him, bury my head in his shoulder, and wake up three days later. It’s an old music video by Destiny’s Child, the song “Independent Women.” What a hilarious thing to send me! Instead of letting me feel sorry for myself, The Man with the White Shirt sends me a badass lady anthem.

  It makes me laugh. It makes this heavy moment light. And with that, the divorce becomes just the divorce, the next logical step. Just a piece of paper that says in two weeks’ time, I will be an independent woman.

  The night The Husband asked me to marry him, back in 2001. Remember? 9/11, the Italian restaurant, the diamond ring. That night, before I agreed to take a chance, I said to him, “Look, I really, really don’t want to get married just to get divorced.”

  “I know. It won’t be like that,” he said, but I wanted to be sure. So many people in my family have gotten divorced. They all said vows, believed them, and then broke them. A marriage contract meant nothing to me.

  “I’m only going to ask you one thing,” I said to him that night. “If we get married, do you promise you will fight? Even when things get hard, or confusing, will you fight to make it work, fight to stay together and do everything it takes not to get divorced? I want us to fight for what we’re saying today: that we love each other and want to take care of each other for the rest of our lives.”

  And he said, “I will always fight for you, Parise. That’s who I am.”

  But it wasn’t true. As I suspected, our vows held no currency. They just got us a piece of paper that said we were married. Just like this piece of paper that says we aren’t.

  THE UNICORN

  “The Unicorn.” That’s the nickname my friend Solo Time gives to The Man with the White Shirt. You know, him. Dreamy, dreamy him.

  “I didn’t know unicorns were real!” she shouts from the back seat of my car the night she first meets him. We erupt into fits of giggles as he climbs into the passenger seat beside me, saying, “What are you two laughing about?” with such an impish fire behind his eyes.

  “Oh, nothing,” I say smiling, and for the millionth time since we met, he says, “I love your smile.”

  “Shut up, because I love yours.”

  He squeezes my hand. We’ve known each other for one month.

  Okay go ahead, I don’t care, go on, you can make gagging sounds here, because you know what? I’m on Cloud 9. He likes me and he tells me so. Out loud. It’s like a fucking dream come true. For that exact reason, “Dreamcatcher” is the nickname my friend The Bright One gives him. My friend The Painter just calls him “The Man” because a man doesn’t have to play games or hide his feelings.

  And yet, I will admit to you, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I sometimes think it’s all too good to be true. What if seeming like he isn’t a player is what actually makes him a player? The trusting part of me has been short-circuited by The Ex-husband, and now I feel like I’ve lost my sense of instinct, my ability to read cues. What if he seems like a unicorn, but is really just a pony, or … whatever this metaphor is trying to say, you know what I mean?

  There’s an undercurrent of worry, of knowing the bubble is going to burst at some point and probably soon. But I can’t let this darkness get the better of me at these early stages. I actually really like this guy, and I don’t want to mess it up. One day after I express my insecurity about us he says, “Are you afraid of me just, I don’t know, running screaming or something?” And I tell him yes, I’m afraid I’m too intense, too damaged, have too much baggage, I cry too much —

  He stops me. He holds me very close and looks right at me, hard. “I like you,” he says. “A lot. Even the sad parts. I like you. All of you. And I just want to keep getting to know you. All of you. Okay?”

  I nod and my heart feels like it’s going to bust right out of my chest and bleed all over us. He kisses and kisses me. I’m grateful, but I know better. I know in reality I’m cautiously on Cloud 9. I know that unicorns aren’t real.

  Cautious or not, the cloud I’m floating on prevents me from seeing anyone else. I just don’t want to. From the moment I meet The Man with the White Shirt, I don’t sleep with anyone but him, not even Revival. It’s not a conscious choice, it’s just what happens; I am that enthralled, that focused. It feels like magic. />
  WHAT MAGIC FEELS LIKE

  The Man with the White Shirt sits on the edge of my bathtub while I fix my hair in the mirror. He has my guitar and he’s singing to me as I get ready. It’s like I invented this man, like I conjured him or something, he’s so exactly what I need and want in my life right now.

  And then he starts singing a song I just love. “The Messenger” by Daniel Lanois. I sit down on the floor, there in front of him, my kindred spirit, brought to me from an unknown cloud. His eyes locked to mine, he finishes the song then puts the guitar aside. We lie down on the cool tiles and kiss, and I’m sure there’s never been anyone who gets me like he does. We understand each other on a level that I’ve never experienced. I’m sure that we need each other, that we’ve been given this magical gift for a reason.

  “You have such a summertime way of smiling,” he says to me. And my heart grows fifty sizes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SO IT GOES

  ART

  Here in the autumn of 2013, I start to have something of an artistic renaissance. Singing, playing guitar, drawing. A lot. Somewhere in the short time since I met The Man with the White Shirt, I’ve started drawing trees — tall and bare, branches reaching out and over crazy little buildings. Cityscapes of strange futures, where trees are ten times bigger than skyscrapers.

  The drawings aren’t all that great or anything, but I love doing them. I lose myself for hours. Listening to music, feeling the smooth run of marker on paper. Letting whatever thoughts I have come in and out of my mind. Enjoying, for the first time, small moments alone.

  It’s been happening lately, a return to self. A return to a part of me that was dormant for so long, especially when I was in a busy house with a small baby. There was hardly any room for art back then. But here, with 50 percent of my time free, despite how awful and scary and hard it’s been to be away from Birdie, to be a woman without her little family, here is where the old me starts to seep its way in.

  Here is where I draw crazy trees. Where I sing songs with friends or with White Shirt or just with myself, playing guitar so much I develop calluses on my fingers, like the ones that were always there back in my twenties.

  Here is the first faint glimmer of a silver lining.

  THE RED HILLS

  The single happiest day of my life since The Bomb happens a month and a half after I meet The Man with the White Shirt. Although it’s the end of September, it’s as hot as a summer day. We’re both wearing T-shirts and jeans and big vintage sunglasses and white sneakers. Even the way we look together feels magical to me. I pick him and his dog up and we go for a drive. I don’t tell him where we’re going, just that it’s a special place I haven’t been to since I was a teenager. I’m not entirely sure it exists still, or even how to get there, but that’s all part of the fun.

  We leave the city behind and head out to the country, northwest of Toronto, driving along winding roads with the windows down. He picks songs off my iPod, and it’s like all my dreams are realized. The way the trees sway against the blue sky, the warm air on our skin, our smiles as we discover how much of the same music we love. I’m not kidding when I say that still today, no other day has come even close to being as wonderful and fun and special and fulfilling as the one where White Shirt is smiling that million-watt smile at me as I drive us to the Red Hills.

  The Red Hills are exactly what they sound like, red earth — terracotta — that just appears in one part of southern Ontario in a crazy, bumpy, beautiful way, on the side of a winding country road. As teenagers, we’d drive out to the hills for “bush parties.” These parties were really just drunken kids running up and down the hills, making out and getting lost. I never actually saw it in the daytime. Here we are though, twenty years later, parking the car on the side of the road. I take his hand, and he takes the dog’s leash, and we walk to the crest of the hill. That’s when he finally sees it, and the look on his face is just pure wonder. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, his face I mean, but yes of course, also this natural wonder that is the Red Hills.

  We walk around and talk and explore and get two young girls to take a photo of us. Then we take some selfies. These are still my most favourite photos of us. He still has one of them framed on his desk at home, where he makes music and lives his life, with or without me.

  After we explore the hills, we get back in the car and I drive us to a little town I know that’s high up some winding roads. It’s during this car ride that I tell him I have MS. He says he noticed I take a lot of pills and wonders why, but instead of lying I just tell him the truth. I just tell him, and for a moment I hold my breath. I’m certain I will lose him immediately. But he’s so kind. He doesn’t make a big deal about it at all, not then or any time after. It was like the greatest weight is lifted off me that day, telling him that.

  When we get to the little town, we walk along holding hands in the bright hot sun. We get coffees and ice cream and sit on a bench. And that’s when he asks when he will be able to meet Birdie. I swoon a little. It also scares the shit out of me. And then he goes even further, saying that if it would help he would be happy to meet her father first. I’m floored. I don’t know what to say, other than how that wouldn’t be necessary. I say that it would have to be pretty serious for me to introduce someone to her, and that I wasn’t ready for him to meet her just yet. But inside I’m freaking out. This is a real thing, he is like, my actual boyfriend! Praying the rosary worked, holy shit.

  The perfect day continues with vintage shopping where we like all the same things and I buy us both so many of those things — plates and glasses and shoes. As we drive back to the city, he falls asleep in the passenger seat beside me. I hold his hand in mine and try to push the thoughts out that this is all too good to be true. I try to hold on to this feeling, this simple, beautiful day.

  TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

  We’re sitting on a park bench holding hands, his eyes so sad. It turns out that despite our deep connection, despite my summertime way of smiling and how crazy he acts for me, how different he says he feels about me, The Man with the White Shirt is still sleeping with other women. He always will. “That’s something I can’t change,” he says, as if he’s talking about a scar or an extra finger, not something he has free will over, something he can choose or not choose to do.

  I don’t get it. It’s been almost three months since we first met and we’ve been inseparable since the beginning. I mean, we talk on the phone almost every night, don’t we? More than once now he’s asked about when he can meet my daughter. We hold hands in public, walking along like couples do. And yet, here is the shoe dropping. He is too good to be true.

  My mind races. Walk. Walk now. If you stay, you’ll only get more attached, it will only get harder. But then I think, God, I want to keep seeing him though. He’s the closest thing I’ve had to a boyfriend, and I like this feeling, I like the way he makes me feel. His face says he doesn’t want to lose me, and my mind whips back again, The cake. The cake. I am always the fucking cake. Don’t be the cake again!

  “You act so boyfriend-y though!” is what I manage to say to him, like I’m Drew Barrymore in a fucking rom-com.

  “I don’t know what that means,” he says. “I don’t really believe in categories.”

  I roll my eyes and say, “Of course you don’t,” because truly in that moment, I’m exasperated by the whole bohemian thing he has going on. What seemed adorable and idiosyncratic about him up until this point now feels put-on and exhausting. I have no clue what to do. The relationship is still new; it’s not anything serious, right? So maybe I just keep seeing him and see what happens? But the news that he “doesn’t believe in categories” sits with me, hard, like a heavy stone, somewhere just under my heart. My heart, which during this conversation, has slowly started to put up a small wall around itself, a nice protective layer.

  It’s the Don’t-be-the-cake-again wall. The Jesus-Christ-doesn’t-anyone-believe-in-monogamy-anymore? wall. The Oh-well-back-to-sq
uare-one wall.

  Stupid wall.

  “Do you hold hands with these other women?” I ask.

  “No!” he says, like I’m crazy.

  “Do you talk to them on the phone every night? Do you feel about them the way you feel about me? Do you just say these things to me because they’re what you say to everyone?” He answers an emphatic no to each of my questions.

  He says, “There’s nobody like you. I don’t feel this way or act this way with anyone but you. I haven’t in a long time.” So what’s the problem? Why can’t he just let them go?

  “I also have casual relationships,” I say, “but I can let them all go at any moment, I don’t care!” I think about Revival, and realize I let him go months ago without even thinking about it.

  “It isn’t like that,” he says, trying to explain his theory of life and love to me. “I just think people should be able to sleep with whoever they want, if they want to.” My heart sinks. I get it, but I also don’t get it get it. I mean, sure, monogamy is a construct, blah blah blah, but I’m not asking him to marry me, just be exclusive with me while we’re dating. I just thought he was my boyfriend. Mine. Possessive, how positively mainstream of me.

  In a few days I’m going to turn thirty-nine. I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation with a man my own age. With a man who has basically been perfect in every way until now. A man that has been more of a boyfriend to me than some people’s actual boyfriends are. It’s so fucking confusing.

  I don’t make a decision. I can’t. All I keep thinking about is my birthday party coming up in a few days. The one where I invited all of my oldest and dearest friends so they could meet my new boyfriend. Ugh. We stand on a street corner near Birdie’s school and say goodbye, his face so sad I can’t even comprehend it.