Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  The hotel was small and mostly clean. A brown man, probably Algerian (unloved by the French), greeted me in French. I pulled out my translation book; he smiled warmly and spoke to me in lovely accented English. The transaction was quick, too fast for butterflies to take hold. But the elevator was tiny, with an old-timey gate that you had to tug open and closed, and for some reason that gave me pause. What the hell am I doing? I thought, but my other voice said, Let go, lâche.

  I opened the door to a tiny space with just enough room for a twin bed, a small dresser painted light green, and a nightstand. There was, however, the requisite French floor-to-ceiling window with the wrought-iron fence across a tiny terrace. It overlooked a deserted yet charming avenue. I was giddy with excitement and, although I was sleepy from the flight, I couldn’t shut my mind off enough to rest on the lumpy twin bed. I went into the hall to find the communal bathroom to wash up. I changed my clothes, conscious of trying to achieve that casual yet sophisticated look that the non-French have a hard time emulating. I might have failed, but I left my hotel to walk outside. I didn’t know where I was going. After I’d wandered till my feet were starting to blister, I sat down at one of the million outdoor cafés and had dinner and a glass of white wine. It was nine o’clock and still light out, the sky a magnificent beryl, a color I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since. I breathed it all in until the jet lag and wine kicked in, forcing me to limp on my blistered feet back to my hotel. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find it, but I did. Once upstairs, I immediately collapsed in my bed.

  The next two days were more of the same. I did get myself to the Louvre and managed to bypass the throngs viewing the Mona Lisa, which I’d seen before on a stopover en route to Egypt six years earlier. I walked the parks; I went to shopping areas; and I took the Métro to the edge of Paris to a famous flea market, Porte de Clignancourt, where I bought a sleeveless beige jacket that had an off-center zipper. I wore that thing until it fell apart. I took myself to a light lunch and to dinner on my birthday, my last night there. I sat outside, and a group of Parisians and Americans at the neighboring table started a conversation. When I told them it was my birthday, they ordered champagne, and we drank and talked until it got dark. I thanked them and walked back to my hotel feeling like Holly Hunter in Living Out Loud, a movie about a spunky medical school dropout who rediscovers her free formidable self after her divorce.

  I had to leave early the next day to catch the train to Montpellier. I didn’t know about the weekend sardine-like train-station traffic, and while I don’t think the French have a monopoly on rudeness, if I’d had only that experience I would have said that they absolutely were. But everyone I encountered before that had been nice to me, perhaps because I always greeted them with respect, a smile, and my very limited French—my knowledge of the language consisted mostly of “hello,” “good-bye,” “thank you,” “see you later.” I’d always believed that when traveling abroad, it was important to acknowledge that you are a guest in someone else’s country. Something else occurred to me about why the French like Black people: Could it be that we inherently understand that you treat people the way you want to be treated? Entitlement doesn’t get you anywhere, especially there. What I also observed at the train station was that the pushing and shoving wasn’t reserved for foreigners; they treated each other the same way. Although the French do suffer from tourist fatigue—can you blame them?—even with the mass exodus at the station, the no-frills hotel, and my blistered feet, I was euphoric.

  Montpellier was quiet, with beautiful cobblestone streets and wisteria-covered buildings. But virtually no one spoke English in the countryside. While my stay was lovely, it wasn’t Paris.

  I went back to work the following week and announced that I wanted to move to Paris. It was impractical and completely out of character for me. And while I knew deep down I probably wouldn’t pursue this dream, people around me could sense that I had been transformed. No one saw it more clearly than my boss, Susan L. Taylor, the legendary editor in chief of Essence. Susan was a force, and to me she had always been loving, kind, and encouraging. I don’t know what she saw in me, but we bonded from my first day working at the magazine. Susan, who constantly traveled the country speaking, increasing the Essence readership, had taken it upon herself to find my Mr. Right. She had never approved of Bruce and had sent me on several blind dates that she’d arranged. When I went into her office, post-Paris, and told her that I’d found my spiritual home, she looked at me and said, “Now, you’re going to meet him.”

  And I did.

  It was Labor Day weekend. I had gone to the beach alone. I’d planned to meet my friend from People, Lee, who was supposed to hang out with me for the day. She’d been renting across the bay on Shelter Island. Those were the days before cell phones, and the cottage didn’t have a landline, so she couldn’t reach me to let me know she couldn’t make it. After waiting for a few hours, I grabbed my chair and a book and trudged through the sand on my own. I was wearing white Lycra bike shorts, an oversized Howard sweatshirt, a droopy khaki hat and sunglasses, and I was looking for a spot to flop when I saw Leslie,* an account executive at Essence, who was sitting with two guys. She waved me over. Cliff told me much later that he’d told her not to, because I was alone, and he thought that I must’ve been a loser.

  Leslie was dating one of the guys; he was handsome and bearded, wearing a blue T-shirt with “Yale” in letters that were eighteen inches high. The other guy was cute, shirtless, and wearing swim trucks and Ray-Ban sunglasses. He sat with his face turned upward, getting a tan. I took one look and thought “Morehouse Kappa.” I’m not sure why I narrowed Cliff down to that demographic—maybe it was the utter assurance, the successful humble brag that often marks graduates from the all-male historically Black college. Cliff emanated that kind of confidence. I sat down on their blanket as Leslie introduced me. Yale T-shirt seemed engaged; Sun Boy barely acknowledged me. After we discussed the office, books we were reading, and New Yorker articles, the conversation inevitably moved to the dating scene. We were in our thirties and had been at it for a while and were tired. I wanted to get married.

  “It’s really hard to meet a guy who is well rounded and who reads more than the business pages or the sports section,” Leslie said.

  “Yeah, it’s like the difference between someone who reads the book and someone who just reads the Book Review,” I added.

  At this point, Sun Boy, aka Cliff, turned toward us and recited:

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth.

  It was the first stanza of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” and when he was finished, he turned his attention back to sunning himself. I had to admit I was surprised and impressed. I’d figured he was strictly a Sports section reader. Now I was intrigued, but I had the impression that the feeling wasn’t mutual. Leslie and I kept gabbing away, and at some point I mentioned that I’d graduated from high school in 1976.

  Cliff turned to look at me and said, “Take off your sunglasses.”

  I removed my sunglasses.

  I looked him in the eyes, pushed my feet deep into the sand, and inhaled.

  “Okay, thanks,” he said, and continued tanning.

  More than twenty years later, I still don’t know why I responded to his request by removing my sunglasses. Normally, I would have made a sarcastic comment or offered some kind of who-do-you-think-you-are attitude. Later he told me that before he saw me without sunglasses, he’d thought that I was much older. When I took off the glasses and he realized we were the same age, Cliff gradually joined Yale T-shirt, Leslie, and me in our conversation. We were talking about the foreign film La Femme Nikita, which was playing in town and which we all wanted to see.

  We ended up going to dinner first. It was not a double date.
It was more like high school, when you’re with your friend, and she’s with her boyfriend, and her boyfriend’s friend is with him. By default, you become a couple. We walked into the restaurant, an old-style, nondescript seafood joint that had become gentrified when Sag Harbor became like the other Hamptons. Cliff walked in like he owned it. He greeted the maître d’ as if he knew him and talked to everybody who worked there the same way. I knew that I liked him—he was funny and easy to be around—but I wasn’t sure if he was a little too much, with all his glad-handing.

  One thing we agree on completely is that if we’d met in New York City, we wouldn’t have gotten together. In Sag Harbor, our guard was down; we didn’t have on our Manhattan faces, the default defensive posture of I’m so cool, successful, happening that I can’t be bothered. In the city, you get pummeled with the three questions: Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What do you do? But in Sag Harbor we went to eat because we were hungry. The place had no provenance. We never asked the three questions. We didn’t “flex.”

  After the movie, Cliff drove me home and came into the cottage for a drink. He had cranberry juice. We sat on stools at the kitchen counter. “Be right back,” he said, in the middle of our conversation. He went into the bathroom and fixed the toilet, which had been running all summer. I made a mental note and was impressed, for real.

  I was leaving the next day and he offered to give me a ride back to the city. He said he’d be there at eleven the next morning and at eleven he was.

  I had half a summer’s worth of stuff, including my big, fat comforter, at the cottage. How I thought I was going to get all that stuff home on the train I don’t know. I was so grateful to Cliff for offering me a ride back to Manhattan. When he showed up the next morning, he found several pieces of luggage and a few huge garbage bags to take to the dump. He made fun of me but didn’t seem fazed. He good-naturedly loaded it all up into his Hyundai. At this point all I knew was his name, he was from Mount Vernon, New York, and he lived in Bloomfield, New Jersey. It had been a relief not to know more, although the more he talked on the ride home, the more curious I became. He could’ve been a plumber (although I didn’t really think that, his fixing the toilet withstanding), a teacher, a bartender, a lawyer; nothing would’ve surprised me about him. I couldn’t place an occupation on him. On the way home, we stopped at a McDonald’s. We sat in the window and shared French fries. Being with him was easy and sweet. While he was a little cocky, he was also very considerate. He was familiar, like the boys I’d grown up with whose mothers, like his, had also been teachers. He was also a riot, like my old People magazine friends Alan Carter and James McBride, who could make me laugh until I cried and wet myself.

  When we got to my apartment three hours later, Cliff insisted on carrying my things upstairs. I let him. Once inside, I couldn’t offer him anything to drink, because there was nothing in my kitchen. Before I left him in my apartment to head to the Red Apple supermarket down the street, he pulled me toward him where he was stretched out on the couch and we had our first kiss. It was soft and gentle, considerate and generous. I dissected his kiss while I was in the aisles at the supermarket. When I got back we talked more, and kissed a little more before he left to meet his family for dinner at Sylvia’s in Harlem to celebrate his brother Raymond’s birthday. Cliff invited me, but I said no, thinking it was too much, too fast. I didn’t tell him that; I just thanked him. Later, he told me that he’d invited me knowing I’d decline.

  Back at work after the weekend, Cliff sent flowers to me at the office. The card said, “Share the fantasy.” As I was reading it, Leslie walked by my cubicle. I’d told her the flowers were from Cliff.

  “He’s a good guy,” she said. “He comes from a good family.”

  I thought the “good family” comment strange, like it was code for something I should’ve understood but didn’t.

  He called me the next day and the next day and the day after that. He’d call me from phone booths, home, work, often in between appointments. Never asking me out. After two weeks of these phone calls, I said, “So are you gonna ask me out or what?” He said he was trying to decide and revealed that he had commitments to go to destination weddings with two different women. He was trying to figure out how he could put me on the calendar in January. It was now September.

  I said, now or never.

  He said okay, and we started dating.

  7

  Yin and Yang

  CLIFF WENT to Maryland with one of the women in October and to Arizona with the other around Thanksgiving. Both times, he called me while he was away. By the time he came back from Arizona in November, I knew that I really liked him, but after a few heartbreaks I was determined to do this one right—whatever that meant. The way we got to know each other was mellow; we did the standard courtship dance, dinner, movies, drinks, and the theater. But what made me fall for him were the little things: For our first date, he brought me a copy of the children’s book Clifford the Big Red Dog. We took walks in parts of Central Park where I’d never been. He took me to the Belvedere Castle; we’d go for drives in Westchester County; and he showed me the woods where he’d played as a child and the airfield where he flew Cessna 172 planes in the Civil Air Patrol as a teenager. The biggest difference from other boyfriends, though, was that he always did what he said he was going to do. He’d always show up on time, and he was generous. I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to disappoint me, to one day just not call, to not show up, as had happened with a few guys in the past.

  He introduced me to people who had known him for years: guy friends he’d had since second grade, his very quirky extended family: Aunt Miriam, Uncle Gene, and his cousin Em Sue (Emily Susan). I loved them immediately. They reminded me of the Leary family in the Anne Tyler novel The Accidental Tourist. To this day they’re still among my favorite extended family. In Sag Harbor I had met Mrs. Day, who had been his family’s neighbor in Mount Vernon for his entire life. I met his parents—he clearly got his sense of humor from his mother, who is eerily similar to George Costanza’s mother from Seinfeld. I introduced him to all my close friends but decided he wouldn’t meet my parents until we were seriously serious. He said, “What does that mean?”

  I said, “Engaged.”

  He said, “Well, do you want to get married?”

  We were lying in my bed. I remember that had I on my white terry-cloth bathrobe, but I don’t remember what I said. I do remember feeling a strange mix of giddy and calm. A month or two later, he made the official ask at our favorite restaurant, Lola, with a two-carat emerald-cut diamond ring dropped in my coffee.

  Cliff had moved from the city to a one-bedroom in Bloomfield, New Jersey, to enter the retail stockbroker-in-training program for Shearson Lehman Brothers. When I met him, it had been two years since he’d gotten his license and he’d just finished two years of cold-calling to build a client base. He survived on whatever tiny commissions he’d earned, living on very little money. The Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happyness, based on the true-life story of Chris Gardner, is an accurate portrayal of what it’s like to become a broker.

  Prior to this, he’d been pushed out of a comfortable salaried job at the treasurer’s office at Shearson in the city. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, after he realized that trying to advance on a straight corporate ladder wasn’t going to work for him. His nonconformist style was more suited to being his own boss in wealth management, which also meant he gave up a salary, a guaranteed bonus, and paid vacations for an all-commission career. “I eat what I kill,” he likes to say, and it’s true. He has the umbrella of a company—then it was Smith Barney—and clients of his own. While that kind of uncertainty can be difficult at times, I admire him for being willing and able to do it.

  When we were dating, I was living in a one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and I’d often take the train to visit him on weekends. My Essence job required long days and that
I go out most nights, as I needed to keep up with what was going on in entertainment. I was spent on weekends and happy to take a break from the city. He’d pick me up at Penn Station in Newark and we’d go to our pub-type place in Montclair and have drinks and eat bar food: potato skins, nachos, and mozzarella sticks. I didn’t miss the nouvelle cuisine in the New York restaurants that I frequented during the week.

  I didn’t realize at the time that, for Cliff, our meeting was timed right for his life plan. He is methodical, he strategizes; once he had established a path in his career, could see his business growing, and had a respectable amount of savings, he was ready to settle down. He was going to buy an Audi, but he bought my ring instead. He wanted someone who had been with him on the climb, not someone who’d joined him once he’d reached the summit. He didn’t want to have to question whether someone was with him for his checkbook rather than for his character. When I met him, he drove a basic Hyundai, lived in a dust-covered walk-up in a blue-collar section of Bloomfield, and had a tiny amount of disposable income. He liked that I was creative. He’d dated very nice lawyers and women with MBAs but wanted someone with more yin to his yang.

  We married the following June. We moved into a luxury high-rise on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, with a glorious view of the river, furnished with our matched-up furniture from our old single lives. We lived there for three years; it was where I finished my first book and sold it, and where Baldwin was conceived. Marriage proved to be a lot different from dating; living together was hard for me. I’d never lived with anyone before. Cliff had. There was no downtime. My job was constant meetings with my coeditors or with publicists pitching their clients over the phone or over lunch or dinner, then I’d go home, and my husband would want to talk some more—it was a lot. I’d been working on my novel Good Hair for years on the side and hadn’t managed more than twenty pages and the two main characters. I had come up with the characters Alice and Jack long before I actually started writing the novel.