The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint: the friendly frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him. I felt at times as if he were my relation rather than my master: yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength.2
I told her to shut it. We squabbled constantly! He wasn’t my type! I’d never even stopped to consider whether I found him attractive, which meant I probably didn’t! She pressed on:
And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could not, for he brought them frequently before me. He was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description: in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others.… But I believed that his moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say former, for now he seemed corrected of them) had their source in some cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny encouraged. I thought there were excellent materials in him; though for the present they hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled.3
Oh noooooo. For the first time in sixteen years I threw Jane Eyre off my bed and onto the floor, then turned out the light with a huff. That night I dreamed about passionately kissing Eric somewhere outside by a large body of water. I could feel his skin under my hands and his fingers in my hair. Abruptly I woke up and turned the light back on. “What is happening,” I said aloud. My copy of Jane Eyre was still on the floor. I picked it up and stuffed it into my suitcase. “Shenanigans,” I said, flipping my pillow to the cool side and trying to go back to sleep.
Back at work the following Monday I gave Eric a wide berth. I clicked into the chat window with Preeti that was always peeking from the corner of my screen.
“I think I have an inappropriate work crush.”
“That’s great!” she wrote, undoubtedly relieved. “Who is she/he?”
She agreed about the red flags of the girlfriend, the age difference, and his general flirtatiousness (he was a world champion schmoozer). Plus he was my boss, though it was not a particularly formal office. Ironically, talking about Eric brought Preeti and me closer again, briefly. And I kept talking to Eric about Preeti to throw him off the scent, just in case he had any idea that I was leaning on his desk for any reason other than reviewing the latest production schedule. A month or so later, when Preeti shut the door to a potential “us” for good, I slumped down in the extra chair at Eric’s desk to mope about it, and caught myself surreptitiously gauging his reaction for signs of relief.
Look, Jane Eyre did not prepare me to be rational about this! Charlotte Brontë made me believe it was entirely possible for a man with no earthly reason to be in love with me to be harboring a great and eternal passion without any external sign of it. Despite all my growth and maturity and life lessons and under-control laundry pile, I was still basically in seventh grade, confronted with the temptation to pass Eric a note with two boxes on it: “Do you like me? Check yes or no.” Naturally, I was not up to the task of resistance or patience or any other rational response to ambiguous romantic feelings and very bad timing (quoth Jane Eyre, “I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature”4).
I began to ask leading questions, like, “What would you do if you were seriously into someone who was in a relationship? If they really wanted to break up with the other person and be with you, they would have done it by now, right? Hypothetically?” I examined his “Not necessarily” response for signs that he had understood my meaning and was signaling me with a reply in code. He hadn’t, and he wasn’t. These are not proud moments in my life.
Somewhere in there, we actually got work done, and I enjoyed it more than ever. Even the tedious copywriting assignments we sparred through were pleasant. “Sometimes I think your curse is that only I’ll ever know how funny you are,” he said to me once. One afternoon I saw a card at The Strand with a picture of a pug in jail on the cover, and I snapped a picture and texted it to him. That was the beginning of us, really.
It was a simple start, but it soon became a constant stream of text-based conversation about everything and nothing. I felt guilty, but not so guilty I could stop myself from replying to “I’m going to Coney Island with my friend Bob to look for the Russian Mafia, pray for me” with “I’ll light a candle to the patron saint of carnies for your safe return” and fishing for updates the rest of the day. Sometimes I swore off texting him for good and deleted his number, or changed his name to “Worst Idea Ever” in my phone. But he always made his way back in. It’s his responsibility to put a stop to it, I rationalized. He’s the one with the girlfriend. In April, I finally heard I’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for two reasons—one, that I would have time to develop my writing and stay in the city, and two, I could put an end-date on yet another hopeless fixation. It backfired when I started planning an epic last-day-at-LightBulb scene for Eric and me. I’d walk him down to Battery Park where we’d have a Statue of Liberty view, and pour my heart out in a bold gesture before going bravely off to grad school and leaving him behind forever. That was my plan. Not for it to magically work out, but for it to explode dramatically, six months down the line. Girl Who Trod on the Loaf style.
But I have never been able to keep a secret; even someone as oblivious as Eric couldn’t be blind to junior varsity flirting tactics forever. I was out of town at a cousin’s wedding in June when I got a text from him.
“Can I ask you something crazy? Am I the person you’ve been talking about being into, the one who has a girlfriend?! Stop laughing!”
I wasn’t laughing. My hands were shaking. I tried to imagine what someone who was capable of playing it cool would do.
“… what makes you ask that?”
“I just had a Usual Suspects moment looking at all this stuff on my desk. Stop laughing!”
I briefly tried to distract him by admitting I’d never seen The Usual Suspects so he would get caught up in an overreaction to my ignorance of movies released before my time, but he bounced back quickly, so I had to admit it was true. “Funnily enough, yeah. Sorry.”
“Wow.”
My family was in the middle of touring a nineteenth-century courthouse-turned-museum and I dawdled in the gift shop waiting for another response. Was he angry? Was he repulsed? Was he breaking up with his girlfriend? I decided to keep things light (and crib from The Office).
“I hope this will make things extremely awkward from now on.”
“Haha,” he replied.
Mortified, I texted our coworker Sheryl, who had been treated to a running play-by-play of my infatuation for months, “omg he knows,” and was gratified by her rapid “!!!!!!!” response.
Somehow we got through the rest of the inevitable “let’s stay friends” conversation; there was no windswept declaration of love. No lightning, no garden, no proposal. Apparently those only happen in books. Sometimes you really do have to take the job in Ireland (or in this case, graduate school in Morningside Heights) and not look back. But I was gratified to hear (or rather read) him drop the banter and say sincerely that he really liked me, that he thought we’d be good together, but he was with someone. “Of course, and I respect that,” I assured him insincerely, “Just… you know… feelings.” Eloquent, Pennington. Lord Byron is facepalming in his grave.
When Jane Eyre was disappointed in love, she painted an imagined portrait of the beautiful Miss Ingram, the woman Rochester was rumored to be in love with, then drew herse
lf in stark charcoal, softening no harsh flaw and permitting no vain embellishments. I tried to do the same with words when I got home to my laptop—lecturing myself on my folly, my hubris, pointing out that whatever complaining Eric did at work, he still went home to someone else, who’d known him for years longer than I had, and in ways I didn’t. I couldn’t in good conscience vilify her, since I didn’t even know her. I was totally in the wrong here. What right did I have to confess my feelings to him, anyway? But then, what right did he have to ask me about them?! You don’t have to consider yourself a flirtatious person to know that constant daily texting with a woman who is not your girlfriend is probably inappropriate—he had to be either more invested in “us” than he was letting on, or less scrupulous than I had thought. It wasn’t the first or the last time that reconciling his words and his actions would be a challenge.
I deleted his number from my phone (again), cleared our conversation history (… again), removed him from my Gchat list (… for probably the fifth time). I resolved to be a more moral individual and an exemplary professional at work. No more giggly lunchtime walks. No more midafternoon trips to the bodega. I could buy my own soda. My emails became formal and concise, and when he teased me about my tone, I smiled enigmatically, a martyr of love. I sat on the other side of Sheryl in our status meetings. I took the elevator alone and went straight home after work instead of lingering by reception so we could ride down together.
I was so eager to put the whole embarrassing revelation behind me, I accepted a date with a guy I’d been talking to on Twitter. That June, free pianos painted by New York artists were stationed in parks all over the city by a nonprofit called Sing for Hope. Twitter guy and I tried and failed to meet up at two different pianos (it turned out I’d been playing and singing at the one in Grand Army Plaza while he waited patiently by the Prospect Park carousel). I felt bad about wasting his time, so I agreed to go with him to a vegan restaurant in Park Slope. His name was Alex, and he was a very kind music critic and poet.
After our dinner and a walk through Prospect Park, my feelings for him were lukewarm at best—he was on the rebound from his first marriage and a little too sincere. But the next day at work, I Blanche-Ingramed the heck out of him for Eric’s benefit. I inflated the “connection” we’d had and made it sound like a magical evening, something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel, but where nobody has to die. It turns out being Rochester is way easier than being Jane.
I saw Alex again, and again; too soon and too often. The next day he met me at the Bell House (an old factory turned music venue near the Gowanus Canal) for an Old 97’s show, and the day after, we watched a movie on my couch. That weekend we went to a Brooklyn food fair, then took the East River Ferry to Governor’s Island. We wandered around holding hands. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed myself, and knew I was playing with fire. I’m no Rules Girl, but two people fresh from failed relationships (even one-sided ones) have no business going all in on the first at-bat, to scramble a metaphor. Some guys give you relationship lip service (“I really see this going somewhere!”) so they can fast-forward to the part where they get to sleep with you, then dump you immediately afterward (Thanks a lot, Mike); others, those rare taxi-in-the-rain express-train-on-time unicorns, are actually intent on having a relationship, and they don’t let conventions like “we’ve only known each other a week” get in the way.
Things picked up momentum because Alex was a serial monogamist. He really liked having someone to be into and I was delighted to have someone who was actually interested in me after two rough forays in a row. Plus it was great to spend time with someone who didn’t hate musicals, who knew he wanted kids (and in fact had two), and who wasn’t already cynical about things a lifelong New Yorker takes for granted, the way Eric was. Poor Alex. He was a good guy; he deserved better.
Our fifth date in a week was a late-night walk on the Highline (an abandoned elevated train track in Chelsea, rehabilitated as a plant-filled walkway and park) under the full moon. It was Bastille Day, so there were fireworks. I was dressed up from ushering a play. He brought me a Gerbera daisy. Even a less romantic woman than I would have been disarmed by that setup. It was catnip presented to a domestic shorthair on a silver platter. So I did what I hadn’t done since high school: I gave a convincing performance of enthusiasm for someone I was barely attracted to. He put his arms around me and we kissed in the moonlight, and suddenly I understood how all those people on dating reality shows wind up in the hot tub so fast. Things get away from you when the set is dressed just right. But then Alex went home and wrote a poem full of tender imagery and wonder and earnestness, which he emailed to me and posted on his blog. And linked to on Twitter and quoted on Facebook. We’d rushed into social networking the way we’d rushed into everything else, so there was no escaping his heartfelt posts and veiled references to his Very Romantic Experience. I saw them everywhere, and so did the mutual Internet friends we had. Even if I had been sincerely interested in him, I think I would have found the poem mortifying.
Eric was a private, offline sort of guy, which I had never appreciated as much as I did that day. I felt guilty, and my guilt made me uncomfortable, and my discomfort made me distant and abrupt. If he hadn’t gotten so ahead of himself (if I hadn’t let him), things with Alex might have progressed past that hasty honeymoon, maybe even blossomed into a misspent autumn in New York, before I was forced to confront my indifference (my inner Rosalie Murray). But now that free verse was involved, I had to shut it down.
It took some digging to place Alex in the Brontë pantheon. He’s not St. John, because he at least thought he had genuine feelings for me. I suppose he could be cast from the Edgar Linton mold, but that would make me Cathy Earnshaw and that I could not bear. However, even better than a fictional incarnation, there were several corresponding gentlemen in Charlotte’s actual love life who might fit the bill. She rejected four proposals of marriage (including Arthur Bell Nicholls’s first one) before finally accepting Nicholls in 1854. First, the Reverend Henry Nussey, a brother of Charlotte’s friend Ellen: Charlotte turned Henry down because she knew how much work being a clergyman’s wife was, and wasn’t willing to undertake it for less than genuine affection.
Then, in 1839, an Irish curate named David Pryce visited the Parsonage for a day and afterward sent Charlotte a letter declaring his attachment and asking for her hand in marriage. She laughingly wrote to Ellen, “Well thought I—I’ve heard of love at first sight but this beats all,” and politely declined.5 Charlotte’s third proposal was from a Smith, Elder & Co. employee, James Taylor, who wanted Charlotte to accompany him to India, which is ironic when you consider how poorly St. John’s whole plan went over. Surely any admirer who’d actually read Jane Eyre would have known its author was not likely to accompany a man she didn’t ardently love on his quest to an inhospitable climate away from her friends.
Alex was most like David Pryce—our relationship was as unlikely to succeed and based on almost as little acquaintance. Mourn the lost art of letter writing anew, because it meant there had to be an excruciating break-up dinner. For those of you looking to set free the unwanted suitors in your lives, let me recommend you do it over coffee and not sushi, unless you’re skilled at feigning genuine interest despite recently acquired revulsion for the person across from you. Or you know how to pick a fight and storm out dramatically. I am not so skilled; I’m terrible at covering up disdain. Before the miso soup even arrived he was asking why I didn’t want to hold his hand (which there is no non-hurtful way to explain without having some kind of skin condition) and why I appeared to be searching for a trapdoor to crawl through. I clearly didn’t want to be there. I had to explain that my feelings had changed, assure him there was nothing he could do to alter them, and, most painful of all, tell him I didn’t want to stay friends either. And then we had to sit and wait for our bento boxes while he looked hurt and I looked anywhere else. You could ask me how many keys were in the collage on the locksmith’s shop across
the street and I bet I would know within fifty. As soon as I could extricate myself I fled down Hudson Street; I called Eric, needing to vent my wretchedness, and as I wandered the streets of Soho, we had our first phone conversation.
The next day I could tell Eric was relieved that I was no longer dating Alex. But instead of being gratified, I was angry. I had worked hard to give up on Eric. Really, I had. Why was he still over there harboring some kind of emotional response? After one last awkward talk where I asked point-blank if he was planning on being single in the near future (he hedged, tellingly), I finally reached the knot at the end of my tolerance-rope. In being an undemanding shoulder to lean on and a maintainer of secret inside jokes, I was settling for nothing because of how badly I wanted everything. I was an emotional airbag. It had to stop. Eric would neither make room for me nor let me go. Anyway, did I really want to be a person who broke up a long-term relationship? I wouldn’t mind if they broke up, of course, but I didn’t want to be the reason.
A friend of mine had been suggesting with increasing degrees of firmness that I should go to a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the Berkshires—not just because of my obsession with Eric, but also to learn some techniques for calming a noisy mind and managing anxiety. I couldn’t let myself give in to the impulse to write desperate, confessional letters, like Charlotte had to M. Heger. At least she got to be miles away by the time he read them—I’d still be seeing Eric at the office for another month. Finally I decided to take her up on it. I was slightly afraid of discovering an internal void of unlovable toxicity, but I packed ten days’ worth of flowy pants and loose t-shirts and turned off my phone for an Eric detox. There was going to be a lot of crying.
A Girl Walks Into a Book Page 12
