Alone

by Michelle Parise

  I say, “See you in a few days.” And he says, so quietly, “Okay.”

  We stand there for a long time, just looking directly into each other’s eyes. I turn around and head into the school, my heart like a deflated balloon after the world’s best party. The next day, to ease the sadness, the immense jealousy and confusion I feel, I fall back on the familiar, comfortable, and unbelievably satisfying Revival, who’s happy to make his return after a three-month hiatus.

  “Been a while since I’ve seen you,” he says as he walks in my door with that swagger, that casual smirk. “Yup,” I answer, and that’s all we say on the matter, falling into each other’s arms like no time has passed, like no other lives are lived, like there’s only this moment, this time and place that has no tie to anything or anyone before or after it.

  So this is what everyone wants? This is what’s so great? Moments?

  It isn’t long before I send The Matchmaker an email with the subject header: I am back on the market. She replies, Bummer, my friend. Back in the saddle! And I say my favourite thing to say when there’s nothing else to say, stolen words from a favourite author — “So it goes.” Because really, so it goes.

  LOSS, REVISITED

  And so this is why I’m a little mean to The Man with the White Shirt, here in this fancy bar with the tarot card reader, as we celebrate my thirty-ninth birthday. He knows it, but he’s being sweet and generous anyway. Well, what’s he going to do? Be impatient with the cake? It’s his cake, come on! Instead he smiles for photos, he holds my drink, he laughs with my friends, he looks perfect in his jeans. I continue to be petulant. Then I take my one-millionth fancy cocktail and stumble down a hallway to see the tarot card reader.

  Here she is, the giant chair, the giant wine glass. Here she is turning the cards over, Loss, Fear, Futility, which may as well be Your husband cheated on you and Now you think no one can love you. Then she says the stuff about how all the bullshit I’ve been through over the past few years is really a test, a test for me to learn how I say yes to things, and how I say no. Not if. How.

  I wake up the next morning in his bed, my head bashed in by French liqueurs, my veins filled with lead. Massively hung-over. It’s my thirty-ninth birthday. I shouldn’t even be here, I should leave, but instead I’m dead from having torn my body apart because my heart and mind couldn’t handle things.

  The Man with the White Shirt gets up and makes me an espresso. I just lie there and look at my phone. There are birthday greetings in every possible format — emails, texts, Facebook messages, Instagram comments. I feel loved. But it’s not enough. I want a man to love me. I want this man to love me. Just me.

  I lie there some more, staring at the cracks in his ceiling, thinking how that’s a metaphor for the fissures inside me, then realizing it’s a crap metaphor actually. I lie there and I think about how last year, on the morning of my thirty-eighth birthday, I woke up in the bed of The Ex-husband. How I snuck away before 7:00 a.m. back to my apartment across the street so my own daughter wouldn’t find me in bed with her own father. Well, at least I’m done with all that. White Shirt’s cat climbs up on the bed and stares directly into my eyes. I stare back in case she has any advice for me, which she doesn’t. So we stay like that, her purring, me staring at a crap metaphor above us.

  White Shirt makes eggs. He’s No Shirt right now, which I wish you could see because wow, but that’s beside the point. He serves me the eggs in his bed, cut fruit and avocado fanned out beautifully on the plate. He massages my tired shoulders. He brings me Extra Strength Advil and water in a mug with his name written across it. We laugh and talk and kiss and fool around and talk some more. The hangover starts to lift, and yet I continue to just lie there in his cozy apartment of confusion. I don’t know what I’m doing or who I’ve become but I realize I can’t move. I’m just exhausted — physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’m at a crossroads with myself, again.

  “This isn’t for me,” I say to him, over and over. It isn’t for me, I’m right. I don’t want to share him, to be shared. I don’t want to feel this magic we say we both feel, and then feel the empty despair on nights when I know he’s out with some other woman. Although I’m not ready to let him go just yet, I know this will last another week, tops, before I break things off. I’m already feeling farther away, the cement all set in the wall around my heart. His face is sad. He holds me tight.

  How did I get here? What happened to my life, to love? I wonder this all the time now.

  THIS IS THE LAST TIME

  I have a confession to make. Oh, you’re going to be angry with me, worried even. But it’s fine, I’m fine. Here it is (deep breath). Later that night, still on my thirty-ninth birthday, I sleep with The Ex-husband.

  “Man, what are we doing?” I say to The Ex-husband as we tear each other’s clothes off.

  “It’s your birthday!” he says. “Whaddaya mean?”

  “I’m still angry at you.” I’m on top of him as I say this.

  “You should be. I’m a jerk!” His hands on my skin.

  “We aren’t going back to being friends after this. It’ll be right back to not talking about anything other than Business.” Business is the word we use to refer to our daughter.

  “Okay,” he says, but do I detect a little sadness? Our bodies move together, effortlessly, as they have for fourteen years now.

  I say, “Okay, hurry up now, my boyfriend’s waiting for me, remember?”

  “Right! Your pretty boyfriend!” he says.

  It’s true, White Shirt is expecting me to sleep over at his place that night. Whether or not he’s my boyfriend, well, let’s just say that inspired by him, I’m exploring a disbelief in categories at the moment.

  Here we are in the bathroom together afterward, showering, bumping into each other, pinching, joking, comfortable, just like we’re still married. Instead, the divorce will actually be official in two days’ time.

  I want to say that something profound came out of this, that I get in my car and realize something deep about myself. But I don’t. I just put on my clothes and kiss The Ex-husband goodbye. As I go to leave, he flashes me a peace sign and I flash him one back.

  “See you around, jerk,” I say, and he smiles with his eyes and his face and his everything, all parts of him shooting directly into me, like a quiver full of arrows launched all at once. I smile, too, and shut his apartment door behind me.

  Actually, just before the peace signs and the invisible arrows, I said, “I really hope when I turn forty next year I won’t see you at all.”

  He pouts, then says, “Ah, of course you will! Why not?”

  But really, Lord in heaven, I sincerely hope that I will make it through my entire fortieth birthday without sleeping with my cake-eating, lucky bastard of an ex-husband, without seeing his face, or hearing his voice. Electrical current be damned. This has to be the last time.

  PERFECT DAY

  Two days after my thirty-ninth birthday. It’s a Sunday afternoon. My kitchen counter is littered with empty bottles and dirty dishes. I had a party last night, where White Shirt played co-host, cutting lime wedges, greeting guests, arranging a tray of vegetables, inventing a rum punch with me, all kisses and laughs and “God, you’re so incredible,” his hand on my waist. I enjoyed it all, but in the back of my mind there was a ticker tape that kept scrolling round and round: If I’m so incredible, why do you need to be with other women too?

  The party was fun, filled with some of my oldest friends, and some new. White Shirt played the piano, and then my guitar, and we all sang songs until 2:00 a.m. Once everyone was gone, I stood there tipsy, eating crackers as he put Saran Wrap on leftover food. He said something to me but I didn’t hear him because I was remembering cleaning up with The Husband after the parties we used to throw. It was one of our favourite things — washing the dishes, putting the food away, talking about the night, and then slow dancing, always dancing. In the morning we’d wake up and the place would be spotless, because we enjoye
d the end of the party as much as the party itself.

  When he put the last wrapped food in the fridge, White Shirt said, “We don’t have to clean the rest of this now. Let’s go to bed.” And we did, inhaling each other for a couple of hours, not falling asleep until sometime after 5:00 a.m., when the sky was starting to turn that eerie navy blue.

  Now it’s afternoon and he’s long gone. The dishes and empty bottles are still strewn around but I don’t care. I haven’t cleaned a thing yet and it doesn’t matter. And then I get a text from The Ex-husband saying, What are the chances Lou Reed died on the last day of our marriage?

  Right. The divorce. It’s actually official today. Poor Lou, like some kind of punk rock bookend to the story of us. His song “Perfect Day” was our wedding song. So what are the chances? I mean, really universe, when you get married Lou Reed sings a song? And when you get divorced he dies?

  Like everyone else in the world does when a musician dies, I immediately put on his music, starting with the first Velvet Underground album. Then I listen to all of the solo Lou Reed songs I have. When it gets to “Perfect Day” I freeze. I haven’t been able to listen to this song in two years. I cannot listen to it. I’ve walked out of rooms when it’s come on. I’ve frantically launched myself at stereos to quickly click it to the next song. But today I steel myself and let it roll. It’s such a beautiful song.

  As it plays, I catch my face in the mirror. My hair is so much curlier now than when we got married, my face is so different. Whoever I was when I was a bride, it isn’t the same person I am now, not inside, not out. Whoever he was, that groom dancing to this song with me, he isn’t that person now either.

  For a second I struggle to remember the feeling of dancing to this song as our friends and family watched. It all comes back to me when it gets to the part in the song that always made us hug each other a little bit tighter when we danced to it — in our first apartment, in the kitchen of our house when I was pregnant, and certainly on our wedding day when The Husband sang it to me, so sweetly and low, half-whispered.

  As our marriage was falling apart, he told me, “When I asked you to marry me, I believed in it. The day we got married, I believed in us. I didn’t think I would do this. I really didn’t.” He thought he was someone else. Someone good.

  I walk away from the mirror and sit on the couch in a bit of a daze, my whole being transported back to 2002, to promise, to the belief that we would hold each other up, keep each other hanging on.

  RIP Lou, and RIP our marriage. Everything turns into something else, and that’s all right.

  SOMETHING ELSE

  Find me here, in a washroom stall, in a bar, taking out my phone to look at a picture of The Man with the White Shirt. This. Again. I’m on a third date with a really cool guy. He’s great, but like everyone I meet, he can’t compare. And so, even though I’m on this date with Totally Acceptable Guy, my fingers ignore my brain. I text,

  I don’t know how to stop.

  And White Shirt texts back immediately,

  You’re asking the one who doesn’t know how to start.

  Two years later. It’s no different. The two of us, back and forth. Beating a path between our houses. Years of not being my boyfriend, of being the best not-boyfriend. Of me dating Totally Acceptable Guy versions 1 through 8. Of him “not dating at all” and “not getting involved with anyone,” which I can only take to mean having excellent casual sex with women who are super-cool about it.

  We say we will stop. We say we will try.

  We say we tried, but now we should stop.

  We say, I love you. I love you, too.

  We say, You aren’t right for me! YOU aren’t right for ME!

  We say, I can’t let go. Me either.

  We say, We should take some space, we can do it this time.

  Yes, I believe in you. I believe in you, too.

  We say, I can’t imagine not having you in my life but we have to do this.

  I need this. Me, too.

  We say, Of course you can come over, of course.

  Our love is a serpent eating its own tail. So tell me, what should I do? Because I still don’t know how to say goodbye, how to be alone. Because I’m forty-one now and I still don’t know how to stop. Because he’s forty, and he still doesn’t know how to start.

  PART THREE

  I want a love that doesn’t need to wring its hands so much.

  A love that puts all its money down on one horse.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BLOW AWAY

  THE BAD ONE

  The first time I break up with The Man with the White Shirt is on his thirty-eighth birthday, Hallowe’en 2013. The very same week as my own birthday and the tarot card reader and Lou Reed dying and the divorce coming through. What a week!

  I tell The Man with the White Shirt it’s over. I’m upset that he’s spending the next night with another woman, Rockabilly Redhead. “I gave you tonight!” he says, “I chose to spend my actual birthday with you, and see her tomorrow!” like he’s awarded me the highest honour. I’m repulsed by him for a moment. This ranking. This sharing of himself — what a great guy. “This doesn’t work for me!” I shout. “This is over between us!”

  I wait until 1:00 a.m. to do all this shouting, after we’ve had sex. Happy Birthday!

  The next night, the vampire version of me crawls out of her apartment and onto the streets. I am hungry for blood. The blood of anyone will do, I don’t even care. I want to forget White Shirt ever existed. I want to forget that he’s spending the day after his birthday with his second-favourite not-girlfriend. I want to forget The Ex-husband, who texted some woman he was trying to hook up with tonight, but sent it to me by accident. Honest to God.

  So I drink all the alcohol I can. All the booze I wasn’t drinking those few happy months before I realized Rockabilly Redhead existed. I dance and cry and dance more. I down tequilas. I take home a stupid boy I just met and don’t even like that much.

  I’m almost blackout drunk as he climbs on top of me. And then, instead of being numb to it all, I burst into hysterical tears. I ask him to stop. I ask him to leave.

  I say, “I’m sorry, I changed my mind.”

  I say, “I’m so fucked up, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done this. I’m too sad. Please leave. I changed my mind. I’m too sad, I’m too sad.”

  He does stop. But he refuses to leave. He yells at me for being a tease. He yells at me for being fucked up. He yells at me for changing my mind. He yells and yells. I’m shaking so hard. All I want is for him to not be here. All I want is for this to not be my life. And so I give him fifty dollars. I don’t know why, for cab fare and damages? He takes it, calls me a fucking cunt, and leaves. He finally leaves.

  I am so scared. Because he knows where I live. Because I was so busy drowning myself I almost forgot the things worth breathing for. Because I don’t know how this happened. How did I lose the life of love and safety I always had?

  I text The Man with the White Shirt. I want to call him, but also I don’t, in case he’s in the middle of having sex with Rockabilly Redhead. I don’t want her night to be ruined, too. So I text a crazed message about what just happened to me, but he doesn’t answer it. Not until the next afternoon when he calls with excuses for why he didn’t see my text until the morning, and didn’t have a chance to call until now because he was too busy with “other stuff.”

  I cry and cry to him, about that stupid boy who wouldn’t leave and how scared I was and how sad, but he can’t understand me. Not through my hysterical tears and the spotty cell reception. And even if he could hear my words, he could never understand what they mean. He could never understand what this is like for me.

  I spend the next three weeks in a trance. Hating myself for being so stupid. Again.

  Wondering how I would survive my own spiral of booze and bad choices. Missing the comfort of White Shirt, the excitement of him, the fun. I work very hard to not text him or call him or email him. I broke up with h
im because he wasn’t right for me, and I try to honour my decision. He tries to honour it, too. But as you well know, we are very, very bad at it.

  We last twenty days before we meet in a restaurant close to my house. He’s already there at a table when I walk in, and he stands when he sees me. He pulls out my chair, and waits. When I see him there, like that, it feels like the most confusing punch I’ve ever felt. It feels like knives in my gut. Like icicles. Like fireworks. It feels … great. Terrible and great, all at the same time. The best terrible ever.

  When he hugs me, I inhale as much of his scent as possible and my whole body relaxes. He says he’s so happy to see me. He says he missed me so much. He says he spent the last three weeks listening to every bit of audio there is of me: my radio documentaries and essays, the show I produce each week, recordings of me singing. Oh man, coming here was a huge mistake. If I was smarter or stronger, I wouldn’t be sitting here drugged by his scent and his voice and his eyes and his in-depth reviews of my work. But I’m not smart or strong and now I am here and his face is a beacon. I just want to stay in its light. He’s a magnet. He has actually, literally magnetized me. Shit. I should have walked away for good when I broke up with him on his birthday.

  After dinner, he kisses me on the street outside the restaurant, and I know we’re ruined. Now we’ll be tied together, from this point on, going round the same loop. Now we’re in our very own indie film and I’m Julie Delpy and he’s Ethan Hawke but browner, and we’re just gonna walk around the city having a conversation for the next ten years.