by Melissa Ford
“This birthday really sucks,” I tell her.
“I’m sorry, this restaurant was a terrible choice,” Arianna agrees.
“It wasn’t the restaurant that was the terrible choice. It was my second first date who sucks. And my first ex-husband. All men suck.”
I am not nearly as drunk as I would like to be. I test the counter for dryness and then lift myself butt-first onto it, leaving my legs swinging underneath the marble shelf. Arianna leans against the stall door and watches me.
“I’m spending the rest of my birthday in here. In the shitter. It’s fitting, you know, to spend this birthday in the bathroom.”
“Gael sucks,” she agrees.
“Did you think he sucked before this?” I question. Could anyone have predicted that this evening would go this horribly wrong?”
“No, he seemed fine . . . great, in fact, at the dinner party.”
“He was great. He was a great guy, until we saw Adam at the party. That fucked up everything. Everything changed. Seriously, what kind of boyfriend picks up another woman at a bar during his girlfriend’s birthday dinner? Your boyfriend is giving you orgasms through backrubs and mine is picking up random Spaniard señoritas.”
She looks distinctly uncomfortable with this, but I can’t stop myself. “Am I that unlovable, Ari? That men don’t want to come home to me or even eat lettuce dipped in butter with me?”
“You are very lovable, sweetie. You’re just having a run of bad luck with men.”
“Where did you find your boyfriend? Was it a set up?” I ask.
“Who would set me up?” she questions.
“Well, where did you meet him? What does he do?”
“Rach, I don’t want to talk about him.”
“You’ve found this great guy. Are you going to marry him?” I ask.
“I don’t know. It’s really new.”
“What’s his name? Can I at least know his name?”
She squirms around uncomfortably, making some excuse that we should get back to the table because Ethan will have paid the check, and we can all leave to get some real food somewhere else. And with perfect clarity, I see her eyes moving back and forth from the door to my face, and I know.
My best friend is dating my brother.
“You’re dating Ethan? Ethan fucking Katz, my brother?”
“Yes, I’m dating your brother.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” I screech incredulously.
“Honestly, we didn’t hide it. You’ve caught us together a thousand times. I didn’t think it would take this long for you to put two and two together. We didn’t keep it secret to hurt you . . . it just happened.”
I want to shout out a long tirade about friendship, loyalty and brothers being off-limits unless she asked for my blessing up-front, but even in my drunkenness, I’m mortally embarrassed by how self-absorbed I’ve been for the last few months, how I’ve somehow missed that my best friend and brother have hooked up. Were clues really dropped in my path? How could I have missed all the signs?
All right, I know how I missed all the signs—I was too busy obsessing about myself and Gael and Adam. My fixation on my ex-husband turned me into a terrible friend. The worst sort. One who doesn’t even notice that her friend might have something she wants to talk about too.
I never get a chance to tell Arianna everything that is running through my mind in a matter of seconds, because I have just enough time to gurgle a bit then hop off the sink before I am vomiting up four appletinis and a piece of lettuce into the toilet with Arianna holding back my hair. That is a good friend; someone who will hold your hair while you vomit. I am a terrible friend who doesn’t keep track of what is happening in anyone else’s life, and she is a wonderful friend not even commenting on the amount of alcohol money that is literally being flushed down the toilet.
We don’t say anything else while she helps me clean myself up, and we leave the bathroom. I am too embarrassed to even start my apology; I don’t know where I’d begin.
I go out into the main dining room to pick a fight with my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. Who is standing next to the table, thankfully without Valentina, who has miraculously disappeared in my absence. This fact alone, though even more so coupled with the fact that I have vomited up a large portion of the alcohol, makes me feel better.
Though, by better, I mean seething mad. And I finally find my voice.
“You are taking me home,” I tell Gael.
“The others thought that maybe we’d do better at another restaurant. There’s a place up the street . . . ”
No one else looks as if they want to accompany us to another location and be privy to the argument that is about to go down. They shuffle towards the door, muttering things about babysitters or needing sleep. I don’t even bother responding, I just link my arm through my sister’s elbow and totter unsteadily towards the door, wishing I hadn’t consumed quite so many appletinis because I do my best fighting when slightly buzzed. No inhibitions about shouting out the truth, and the alcohol haze dulls any unkind words tossed back. My brother hails us a cab, and Gael enters docilely, giving everyone his lopsided smile as a goodbye.
I don’t talk to Gael for the whole cab ride back to my place. I would be hard-pressed to come up with a worse birthday, including the time when I was eight and missed my own party due to chicken pox. Even through my appletini smog, I’m so livid I can’t even look at him. I read the taxi driver’s name over and over again, thinking of a hateful word for each letter of his name. Monstrous. Offensive. Shithead. Evil. Sorry-assed-loser. The poor cab driver did nothing to deserve this abuse of his name, but I know that if I pick apart Gael’s name instead, I will start flinging the words I come up with directly at his skull.
Moses delivers us to the front door of my building. The unpromised land where the lack of definition to our relationship howls around in my heart like a maelstrom as Gael pays our cab driver. I don’t even bother taking out my wallet and pretending that I’ll split the cost.
Laidback, I sniff, thinking about how I described Gael in the past to myself. More like “commitment phobic.” He’d never even given me a date when we’d go to the Guggenheim. Looking back on our relationship, we didn’t go on any of the dates I wanted, the kind he said he liked, too, when we first met—the spontaneous plans formed by what seats are on tap at the TKTS booth, the concerts, the people-watching in Central Park. Fine, the last one may not have been the best idea in the dead of winter, but the others were supposed to have happened by this point. Gael was supposed to be like Adam 1.0 before Adam became Adam 2.0. Instead, Gael and I have spent the majority of our time together either eating or screwing.
I should have been more suspicious of the fact that he never took me to the Kandinsky exhibit.
I should have bought a freakin’ ticket for myself.
He waits until we’re in my apartment, after I’ve slammed down my keys on the kitchen counter and kicked my heels off angrily so that one slides half under the bed. I jerk the faucet on and fill up a cup with water, not bothering to offer him one. I only take one sip and then spill the rest down the drain.
“Why are you so angry?” he finally asks.
“Are you kidding? It was my fucking birthday party. And you invite someone at the bar to our table?”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” he stammered, as if he had predicted an entirely different reason for my anger.
“Well, it is a big deal. In America, we don’t invite random women from the bar to join us at our table and then proceed to flirt with them in a language that no one else at the table speaks.”
“Her date stood her up. What was I supposed to do when she said that? Tell her ‘Oh, bad luck,’ and then go on my way?’
“Yes! Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do. Or not talk with her in the first place,” I yell. I am certain that we’ll hear my neighbor knocking on the door in a moment, reminding me for the one-thousandth time that she has a baby, and that we have woken
him up.
It feels good to yell, like the beginning of a run when you have lots of pent-up energy. It has been so long since I’ve actually argued with someone, told them how much they’ve hurt me.
“Well, I’m not like you,” Gael tells me. “I’m not going to ignore someone just to make you happy.” He sits down on the edge of the sofa, as if these words have ended the fight. “Besides, that’s not why you’re angry.”
“Why am I angry?” I ask. “You tell me, because apparently I don’t know why I’m angry.”
“You’re angry because of the lobster pin,” Gael informs me.
“Because I don’t like shellfish? Don’t you remember? I have a lovely lobster-shaped dish—that’s how much I love crustaceans,” I say, forcing him into admitting that the whole thing was a set-up. I knew it, I knew he was trying to force the issue. He can’t claim I didn’t like the gift when I have endured being seen in it all night.
“You thought it was an engagement ring and then you were angry when I didn’t propose.”
Hearing him admit to it makes me burst out laughing. He looks hurt, as if he can’t quite translate my reaction but knows that we are not heading where he wanted us to go.
“Why would you think that I wanted to get married?”
“You brought up getting married. The next time I go on a honeymoon . . . remember that?”
I have vague memories that he was the first one to broach the topic of marriage, but maybe I did bring up the topic of honeymoons. I am too drunk and tired and hungry to untangle it all in my mind.
“You’re pushing everything too fast, Rachel.” My name no longer sounds melodic as it spits off his tongue. “We’re just having fun and then you’re bringing up marriage. I don’t know what you think this is, but we never defined it, never said that we weren’t going to date others.”
He crosses his arms over his chest as if he is admonishing me for allowing my imagination to run to future places based on a few nights of sex. And this is, of course, what attracted me to Gael, this attitude of being in the moment. That’s what you get with a commitment-phobe who can’t even set plans to see an art exhibit. I am just a woman he is dating.
The robin-egg blue box is still on the table, and I sink down onto the sofa as if I’m wilting like a daisy in her final moments, and in one graceful—albeit drunken—movement, I snap the pin off my shirt while scooping up the box and chuck both at his forehead. The pin misses, and the empty box ricochets off his hairline. He ducks, more out of habit than danger. “Why the fuck did you do that?” he shouts. “You’re crazy.”
“I am crazy,” I agree. “And you set me up. You wanted me to think that you were about to propose to test me. What the hell is wrong with you?”
This was obviously not how he thought this argument would go. I’m assuming he thought I would admit how much I wanted to be married again, and he would be able to untangle himself gently from this relationship by reminding me that he was a free spirit, commitment-phobic, or whatever euphemism he wanted to use to explain why he was so terrible at considering another person’s feelings.
“You’re not crazy,” he backpedals, maybe because it’s my birthday or maybe because he’s scared that I’ll start crying and make this even messier. “But I just don’t think this will work out. I want fun, Rachel.”
“I actually wanted fun too. But, you know, you sometimes need to plan to have fun. Some things require reservations.”
Breathing deeply, staring at the robin-egg blue box on the floor, I am filled with reservations and regrets. I should have demanded that Adam see a marital therapist with me rather than throwing myself back in the dating pool again. I should have told him what was on my mind instead of hoping that he’d guess it. He may have stayed late at the office, but I am the one who failed to communicate.
It is strange how I can pour my heart out to strangers on my blog, but I never sat down with my husband—who obviously still cares somewhat about me if he’s reading my blog and sending me emails—and told him exactly what I needed before I told him that I wanted to separate. Thinking about this in my appletini fog makes it sound ludicrous.
I slammed doors and fumed. I never just turned to him and said, “You mean more to me than anything else in the world, and I want to work through this together. I want you to spend more time at home because I love you and I love being with you. Tell me what I need to do.” Instead, I only told him what he needed to do to keep me. And that isn’t a partnership, as much as I thought I was doing things right.
I loved Adam. I loved my imperfect, workaholic Adam.
Now I close my eyes, rocking a little bit as the room goes dark for a moment. As much as I thought I wanted to bring the elements of my new life back with me to the past, what I really want, more than any other birthday wish I’ve ever made, is to meld what I know now with what I had then and build something entirely new in the process, to change Adam and I to something new, to something strange. Something potentially wonderful, again.
Except that when I open my eyes, Gael is still in front of me.
And I’m not really making a very good argument against the fact that I’m not crazy.
I realize what good blog fodder I will get in the future from this breakup, somewhere down the road when the facts can be changed so the innocent can’t recognize themselves. I let him down gently, allow the fish to wiggle off the line.
“You’re right,” I say simply. “But it’s me; it’s not you. I really think I need to be alone for a bit to work out everything I’m feeling about relationships. I’m still carrying a lot of baggage with me from my divorce.”
And this allows Gael to slip into the part of the perfect gentleman, reminding me how much he really has enjoyed our time together, how he wishes me nothing but the best, how he hopes we can still see each other from time to time. Perhaps catch a future exhibit at the Guggenheim.
And then he leaves.
And that is how I spent the thirty-fifth anniversary of the start of my life.
Four appletinis and no food and I should be snoring in a pool of my own vomit, but instead I have insomnia and I'm drunk blogging. Computers should come with a special lock key so you can't blog while buzzed.
Except if you can't be honest on a blog, where can you spill out your inner thoughts without qualms?
Once when I was little, my father told me to hold my tongue while he was on an important phone call, and I literally stood for a full three minutes pinching my tongue while saliva dripped down my chin until he turned around and shooed me out of the room. I remember that little muscle under my tongue felt raw after being stretched in wordlessness.
I have done nothing but talk since I started this blog, but I still haven't said the most important stuff—here or to the people in my face-to-face world. It's like starting with dessert and never moving on to the protein-laden part of the meal. And while dessert tastes good, woman cannot live on cake alone.
I'd like to record what I've learned by age thirty-five in case I forget it before the morning: that there is no point in saving face if it makes you lose everything else. That you should stick your heart, raw and beating on the table and hope that the other person picks it up; and if they don't, deal with the consequences of having your heart outside your body rather than never letting it leave your chest. Sometimes the most messed up things can be fixed, but you only know if that's true if you try. Failure is a possibility if you’re trying hard enough.
And now that the room is properly spinning, I think I'm going to go to bed.
Chapter Twelve
Sprinkling the Pepper
I barely sleep after I return to bed that night, and avoid checking my blog comments the next morning. I can’t bear the idea of everyone running from my blog, screaming in fear at my enormous neuroses, as if they’re tearing apart the city like Godzilla while even Adam squirms in his office in the face of my raw emotions. And he knows me; he knows how neurotic I really am. He knows that my blog post doesn’t even
scratch the surface, from his experience.
I wait until close to seven a.m. to slip my coat on over the yoga pants and sweatshirt I’m using as pajamas. I walk through the bitter morning cold to Arianna’s apartment. I have the front desk call her to say I’m on my way up, and she leaves her door open a crack so I can walk right in. I find her in bed, the sound of Beckett’s deep breathing crackling through the baby monitor, and I slip into bed beside her, wondering only for a second if my brother occupied this very spot before me.
My parents had a rule that we could never share their bed. If we were sick, they would sometimes sleep in our room, but we were never allowed to sleep in their bed, this strange island, this unknown land. I feel like a child as I rest my head on Arianna’s other pillow and she strokes my head in a motherly manner.
“I read your post last night,” she tells me. “I couldn’t sleep, and then Beckett was fussing. I think he’s getting teeth. It was very good, your post.”
“I’m not even entirely sure what I wrote. I was in that post-drunk place where you’re not really sober, but you’re not buzzed.”
“You posted around two? I read it around four in the morning, and you already had over 100 comments.”
“I did?” I ask.
“People like honesty,” Arianna tells me.
“Were any of the comments from Adam?” I question.
“I looked. There was nothing there. But maybe he hasn’t read it yet. But I thought you were over and done with him.”
I look up at a stain on her ceiling. It’s in the shape of a teddy bear. Beckett snuffles in the next room, and then I hear the squelching sound of the binky. I don’t wish I was a baby again, but I would sure love to have some of his internal peace.
“Was Adam the failure you were talking about?” Arianna asks.
“One of them,” I admit. “I suck as a friend. I’m sorry about that, too. I’m sorry that I didn’t push you to talk to me about your relationship with Ethan.”
