A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  I glanced up in horror as he walked in.

  Remember that David was an actor. He had decided that “My Boyfriend Who Works for the Textbook Company” was a character, and that a character required a costume. Accordingly, he had gone to Urban Outfitters and bought plastic glasses with fake lenses, which he was now wearing. The fact that he was wearing these glasses did nothing to change the fact that nobody at the dinner knew him. My only hope was that we were all too drunk, on wine and the joy of publishing an International Textbook on Geriatric Care, to notice this fact.

  Maybe, I thought, it would be a good idea to greet his arrival by saying, “Oh, this isn’t my boyfriend who works for the textbook company! This is my other boyfriend, who complicates things by arriving when he is not expected! My relationship status is complicated, almost as complicated as dealing with bursitis in a septuagenarian, isn’t that right, Linda?”

  Instead I decided to tough it out. “You made it!” I said.

  “Yes!” he said. “I made it! I am Her Boyfriend Seth Aaron Who Works for the Publisher!”

  This was when I expected one of the people at the table to say, “You work for Susan?” and David to say, “Who’s Susan?” and everyone at the table to start pelting us with dinner rolls. Instead, we pulled up a chair for him.

  “Who are you?” one of my dinner companions, a rather drunk lady who had written the chapter on Caring for the Aging Kidney, inquired.

  As long as you aren’t too obvious about it, you can deflect almost any inquiry by turning it back on the person who asked you and looking like you genuinely care about the answer. “So, where were you on the night of the crime?” a police officer will ask me someday, and I will smile and say, “Well, you know, here and there, but what were you up to, Carl?”

  Thus my response to Kidney Lady. “He’s nobody. TELL US ABOUT THE KIDNEY. YOU WERE SAYING SOMETHING REALLY INTERESTING ABOUT THE KIDNEY,” I said.

  “Wine is good for the kidney,” she said. “Bud naat too mush wine. That’s the trick: knowing when to stop with the wine.” She swayed a little, gesturing, then lurched into an explanation.

  The secret to a good backstory is that nobody actually cares about your backstory. You can let this depress you (“The universe is vast and indifferent and nobody really listens to what you tell them!”) or you can get really excited by it (“The universe is vast and indifferent and sometimes this means free cheese!”). I know which option I’d pick.

  “Seth Aaron” and I managed to make it all the way through dessert and coffee, and at the end we escaped with the business cards of several of our dining companions and a promise to dine with them the next time we visited Korea.

  “That was exhilarating,” David said. “I can’t believe we did that.”

  You could see the screenplay writing itself.

  III.

  When David told the class he had been working on a play about exactly where he was in his life right now, he was not kidding. It was exactly where he was in his life right now. Any moment of confusion, pent-up insult, or sharp spike of agony worked its way into the draft. Midway through the rehearsal process, sensing that the play was not “edgy” or “theatrical” enough, David decided that all the female characters should be played by men in drag. Then he changed it back.

  There was also a Greek chorus that spoke in verse. Did I mention that there was a Greek chorus that spoke in verse? There was a Greek chorus that spoke in verse.

  I giggled. After kindergarten, your feelings can’t really get hurt too badly by anything that rhymes, unless you make a point of seeking out rap battles.

  The play ended with David’s character, “Woody,” all alone and being lectured by the Greek chorus on his inability to make decisions.

  David claimed that some of the play was from his imagination, but even in the play, a character picks up the play, glances at the dialogue, and complains that he is being quoted verbatim.

  “He’s a composite,” Woody tries to argue.

  “Composite?” Dick says. “His name sounds exactly like my name and he says the exact same things that I have said to you. He is your roommate, and I am your roommate.”

  That was the play all over.

  As the revisions went on, my character cried a lot more than I remembered crying and delivered a long speech about how rueful she was to lose him. “Enter June,” every stage direction would read. “She was hot, but kind of a butterface. She was crying. ‘How can you do this to me?’ June would say. ‘I COULD HAVE HAD YOUR BABIES.’ Exit June, sobbing wordlessly.”

  Sitting there with our classmates and his parents while the actors painstakingly dramatized conversations that he had had with his roommates about his love life was the kind of thing that should have been a nightmare—for him.

  I sat next to a friend who kept nudging me. “Did that happen?” he kept asking. “Did that happen?”

  “No,” I huffed, irritable. “None of it happened. Not like that.”

  When he broke up with me, in the play, it was extremely dramatic. June cries. June carries on. June brings up children. June is, in short, a psychopath.

  The way I actually remember it, we left Au Bon Pain to sit on a scenic footbridge down by the Charles River, and people kept walking between us, and I kept yelling, “Don’t mind us—we’re just BREAKING UP OVER HERE! YA HEAR ME?”

  So maybe it wasn’t undramatic.

  You know how they say people resemble their pets? Your dog’s a psychopath, take a good hard look in the mirror? Exes are like that, too. It takes two to make a “crazy ex” story.

  Sure, he wrote a play about me. But me?

  I paid a man on the Internet to teach me how to get “your man back, or your money back, in ninety days guaranteed.”

  Maybe that is how I should have started the story.

  IV.

  In the play, my character wandered around making jokes constantly and everyone else had to guess her feelings from context clues. One sensed that it was sort of an exhausting process for them.

  I did this in real life, too. After a few days of Googling, crying, and Googling while crying, I took prompt, completely logical action: I found T Dub.

  I found him the way you find anyone these days: the Google genie. That’s not a cutesy way of addressing Google. I just mean the different Google that exists for the dark watches of the night when you have a wish instead of a question. “How do I get him: back/to marry me/to ask me out/to notice me/to kiss me/to propose/to fall in love with me/to love me again/to want me/to like me again?” Google, how? “How do I stop: snoring/coughing/being lazy/eating/drinking/hating myself?” How? Tell me, whatever it is, and I’ll do it. I’ll do it, Google. Here, have an arm. Have a toe. Have my firstborn.

  Usually what happens is you come across a page of Yahoo! Answers people patiently explaining that you can’t make anyone love you, but there’s always a telltale misspelling that gives you hope. The person can’t tell your from you’re. What can he possibly know about love? Besides, you’ve been on there yourself, under an alias, giving people flawed advice about what medicines to give their cats. Maybe you got yourself on the other end by accident. And then there are the people who insist you can do it after all, using “psychological tricks.” They, too, have misspellings, but what’s a misplaced apostrophe between friends?

  And then there’s T Dub.

  T Dub is on YouTube. He speaks slowly and soothingly and redundantly.

  “I’ve come up with this system,” he says, “where you can speed up time so that you don’t have to spend months or years healing. You can just do this magic, this healing, and get yourself right there in no time.”

  Now YouTube’s full of people like him. Maybe it was then, too. At any rate T Dub was the first one I found, and I latched on like a bur with dependency issues. No man making videos in his kitchen where he spoke in such a slow, reassuring drawl
about getting your ex back could possibly be mistaken about love or psychology, I thought.

  After watching a couple of videos in which T Dub extolled the virtues of the complete “Time-Compression Healing” system, I decided to go for it. It was that or drinking to excess and watching Sherlock Holmes over and over again. And the latter was going to lead nowhere good—kidney failure or deciding that a deerstalker hat was a good investment.

  I paid T Dub the forty dollars he demanded and clicked DOWNLOAD. Soon I was reading through the accompanying e-pamphlet as I listened to T Dub’s words of encouragement. My roommate came home to find me doing sit-ups on the floor as a man’s slow drawl encouraged me to “wait sixty days before you contact him.”

  “What in God’s name?” she would have said, once. But this was a full year after the time she’d come home to find a baby pool full of water on the floor and an animatronic Elvis head in the window, so nothing surprised her. “Hi, Petri,” she said.

  “I’m going to get my man back or my money back,” I informed her. “Ninety days, guaranteed.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “Good night.”

  • • •

  How none of this made it into his play, I will never know. This, to me, is the real meat of the story. I ate better. I did sit-up(s?). And, more important, I spent a few days really intending to wait sixty days before contacting him.

  That was impossible. College is basically a big fish tank. You don’t see fish breaking up. Where would they go? How would they avoid each other around the plastic shipwreck? They never break up. They eat each other instead.

  • • •

  At the sixty-day mark, he asked me to come to his house formal with him. I called T Dub to thank him.

  “Mailbox full,” T Dub’s voice mail said.

  I was too elated to care.

  “Why did you decide it was worth giving this another go?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve been writing this play. About, you know, my life, this fall.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  • • •

  And this time I broke up with him, and all heck broke loose. The revisions began.

  The revisions were ugly.

  In my defense (this is all in my defense) I didn’t know that it was normal. That the moment you attained something it stopped being unattainable and started to pick at its pimples and ramble on too long about subjects that bored you.

  In my defense, I kill plants. The first few weeks I’m excited to have them, and I remember that plants need water. Then afterward they slip my mind and I don’t notice they’ve died until a month later when they’re sprawled helpless on top of my radiator, frozen in their final gesture of making a desperate play for the window latch.

  In my defense, I had been reading Proust, and it had gone to my head. This was what he said would happen. He hated Albertine when he had to spend time with her. She bored him stiff. But when he was without her he was miserable. Proust had his share of issues.

  In my defense, this was my first time at this, really.

  In my defense—I’m sorry.

  • • •

  When we wound up in the same playwriting class the next semester, I discovered that he had not been kidding about the play. There had been no reason to think he was kidding, but—it was, if anything, more faithful to life than I had been capable of imagining.

  It was strange seeing myself on the page. I was used to narrating.

  “Again, it seems unlikely that the character would actually say a thing like this,” I pointed out, flicking my pencil over the portion of the story where June yelled, “HEY, SORRY, FOLKS, NOTHING TO SEE HERE WE’RE JUST HAVING AN ACRIMONIOUS BREAKUP.”

  David glared daggers at me. I assume. I was studiously trying to avoid eye contact.

  “I mean,” I continued, emboldened, “who would actually say a thing like that? That doesn’t sound like a real person to me.”

  At least the actress playing me was hot.

  “No,” David told her, not looking at me. “Gawkier.”

  “Uh, okay,” she said.

  “Could you be more of a self-centered bitch?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not you, the character.”

  “Oh.”

  • • •

  Crazy ex stories are hard because they started out as love stories. And the key moment in a love story is the moment when you realize that—of all the improbable things!—there’s a person inside someone else! He or she is not just a character in the plotline of your life. You thought you were the only real one. You thought you were alone in the universe, twisting the dials on a radio in a postapocalyptic hut somewhere. Then one day you get a signal back. That’s a love story for you.

  I’m real. You’re real. Now what?

  But this isn’t a love story.

  This is a story about unreliable narrators, about the stories you tell yourself about the people you can’t have. In stories like that only one person is ever real. So you don’t get to tell this story. I’m the real one; you’re a character in my story. I’m the one who gets to tell this.

  Turning people into characters does a kind of violence to them. You lose a dimension or two pinning them down to the page. No, you say. Stop. Don’t move. This won’t work if you move. You are the story I tell about you.

  The instant you tell a story it stops being quite true.

  “That wasn’t how it happened,” I said, as June sobbed and the Greek chorus launched into another burst of doggerel.

  That wasn’t how it happened. Let me tell you how it happened. My crazy ex-boyfriend wrote a play about me. It’s a funny story. Not a love story.

  Tall Tales

  You know the sensation, when you’re talking, and you hear yourself talking, and you suddenly drift up above yourself until you are only dimly aware of this person speaking many fathoms below you? And the only sensation that permeates the cloud on which you are sitting as that poor person beneath you rambles on is, “That really isn’t going well”? And you watch, in a sort of disinterested horror, as this person keeps speaking and speaking, and things get worse and worse, and you think, “I really should stop talking.” And you don’t stop. And what seems like geologic ages pass, and you watch everyone around you evolve into higher forms of life, and develop the use of tools. And you’re still talking. You know that sensation, where you know you shouldn’t be talking but are powerless to stop yourself?

  Bertram Wittington has never experienced that sensation.

  Bertram Wittington is a friend of my father’s. The best way to describe him is as a mine of impressive, obscure, and totally unverifiable information. He used to spend his days riding the bus up and down Wisconsin Avenue, wearing a tuxedo, a carnation in his buttonhole, a top hat, and carrying a cane. He used to come to my home for Thanksgiving dinner. And I was never sure if he had a house.

  My father has always adored Bertram, because he has a British accent and the ability to calculate the day of the week for any date in history. When you complain about your lousy day, he will respond with the story of an eminent Panamanian who committed suicide for similar reasons. Tell him that you just ate a sandwich, and he will tell you how President Garfield really died. “Poor man! It was the doctors killed him. Terrible thing.”

  Probably because of the accent and the top hat, my father is convinced that Bertram Wittington is a great social conquest. “This man has forgotten more about the Schleswig-Holstein question than most people ever knew!” he exclaims.

  My mother, on the other hand, did not share his rosy view. This probably dates back to the evening that he came to our house and my father greeted him by plucking her prized orchid and placing it in Bertram’s buttonhole. Once, she insists, she saw a centipede crawl out of his collar.

  But I’ve always loved him.

  •
• •

  Let me explain. When you’re a kid, sometimes you’ll be on your way to someone’s house and your parents will say, in hushed tones, “Now, just so you know, Gerald is a bit of a character.” And you’ll think, “Ooh! A character!” You read plenty of books, so you know what a character is. When the car pulls up to the house you’re expecting a man to come dashing out in full nineteenth-century garb screaming “DO NOT YOU HEAR IT IN THE WALLS? THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HEART!” but then it turns out that what your parents meant by “character” was that Gerald thinks way too highly of his dog and says “mmkay?” a lot.

  But Bertram actually WAS a character. He could have slipped right into the cast of anything I was reading, completely undetected. If he’d ever wound up at one of those literary parties with Oscar Wilde, you had the sense that a vicious knock-down, drag-out fight would have ensued over who got to monopolize the conversation.

  He also sometimes drank. As a child, I viewed drunkenness as a kind of superpower. I vividly remember the first time I saw a drunk person. I was standing in a line at a church picnic in Wisconsin waiting for an old lady to give me a piece of chicken, a healthy ladling of mashed potatoes, and some runny gray gravy that looked like snail tears, when I became aware that a man farther down the line was speaking loudly and teetering.

  “They’re gonna beat your butts,” he announced, loudly, listing leftward. “TIME will SEE!”

  I’d never seen a drunk person before. It was mesmerizing.

  This man could say literally ANYTHING! Who knew what would come out of his mouth next?

  When I yelled things, my parents said, “Shh!” and “Keep your voice down!” and sometimes they addressed me by my first, middle, and last names, just to show they were serious about it. But this man could just say stuff. Any stuff! As loudly as he wanted! He might as well have flown up into the sky out over the picnic, clad entirely in spandex.