One Less Problem Without You

by Beth Harbison

  Either way, no guy has ever done it for me in a way that shook me to my very core. I have had boyfriends, crushes, dates, hangouts (particularly in groups), and (many) (very) meaningless hookups. I have delivered the lies that get me out of further interaction so many times. I have snuck out while they pee. I have been awkward and then left giggling with a friend even though it probably hurt a guy’s feelings.

  Some of my disinterest, ambivalence, whatever, comes from my confidence. I have a healthy amount of confidence. I think I have earned it, so I refuse to be the kind of girl who apologizes for having it. I have made an active effort to be intelligent and an active learner in and out of school. I have a beautiful family who have blessed me with healthy, thick blond hair, nice eyes, and a smile that looks real even when it isn’t. I work on my insides and I care about my outsides. I think it’s okay to love yourself when you’re making the effort and not just complimenting yourself for something that was always out of your control.

  I’m a good listener. I’m not big on “let’s talk about me” conversations, even when people ask.

  One of the reasons I believe I’ve never quite found myself sinking my teeth into a guy, so to speak, is because I’ve never felt seen. Again—maybe that makes me sound like a brat … but aren’t we allowed to be brats about the person we end up sharing our lives with? Especially when writing in a diary?

  I think so.

  I want someone to see me for exactly who I am and get what’s so great. I don’t want someone I’m with to miss the things I think matter about me, and then I also want that person to tell me reasons I’m great that I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for him. And I would love to care enough to do that for someone else in a real way. But so far, I have not been able to really, authentically provide this for my boyfriends, nor any of them for me.

  Which has been okay. I get that I’m still young and silly enough to be arrogant and in no rush. I have listened enough to my mom and her friends talk to realize that I am young, silly, arrogant, and on a timed schedule for all of these things.

  As they’ve all told me:

  Your metabolism will catch up with you!

  Enjoy it now! (This they apply to everything from romance to career to dinner choices.)

  Eat up every experience life offers you—trust me, you will regret it if you don’t!

  NEVER. GET. MARRIED.

  You’ll remember the days when you had options!

  To admit some weakness here, I have feared that lack of interest or enthusiasm was an actual missing puzzle piece within me rather than just a matter of time. But even if I am completely wrong and this guy ends up meaning nothing in the end, in the last few weeks he has shown me a side of myself that feels valuable.

  Well, the last few weeks have shown me a guy that made me realize things about myself. Healthy, interesting things, because he’s definitely no ordinary guy.

  The first night I met him, I almost didn’t even go out. (Ugh, can you believe that? Fascinating how one little choice can change everything…)

  It was one of those nights where I had to decide to do it. I almost didn’t. I almost stayed in with the essay that I had another week to finish, and a cup of my kava tea. Sometimes I feel I need to afford myself these nights, since ninety percent of my life is about social interaction. But on this night, I wisely made the choice to do what I “shouldn’t” and sneak into the pool of a model home with thirty of my closest friends.

  It was warm still—actually a bit warmer than the surrounding nights—and we had a keg of some cheap beer, two handles of raspberry vodka, and another of Captain Morgan. No food, but who needs it? Our parties don’t involve crockpots full of meatballs served on toothpicks. At best, someone remembers they have a bag of potato chips in their car and everyone crowds around it and empties it like vultures with a carcass.

  Real drunk vultures.

  So anyway! I was in my black bikini with the gold fastenings, the one that always makes me feel good. I have no crush, I have no person of interest. (This can be such a relief, while all of my friends stress about unanswered calls, possibility of appearance/nonappearance of said love interest, etc.) My intention is to go out, have fun, and probably field interest from several different people. It’s a high that I enjoy, one that I prefer to any drug-induced ones. I revel in the compliments or harmless flirtation and then go home feeling clean and happy.

  (This is something that wins surprising favor from people. I don’t do any drugs at all—simply not my thing. Not that I’m judgmental about it, because there are a whole lot of us with trouble getting through the night and I get it, I just don’t get it.)

  So this party. It was typical. Loud, drunk, music blasting, girls singing along to music, guys watching girls, girls watching guys. Except we were in an uninhabited pre-residential development with no neighbors to worry about. And in an exciting turn of events for me, there were actually people there that I didn’t recognize. I feel a bit like I’ve run through my gamut at school (and come up with nothing but a few horror stories). So it was a nice feeling to see a group of guys I didn’t know.

  They were evidently athletic from their build, charming, destined for good jobs, big fans of beer. And I had enough self-assurance to walk over to the keg where they stood and just be in front of them before wandering back to my friends. One of them captured my attention right as I finished filling my cup.

  He was sitting on a three-foot stone wall that held in the landscaping. He was in a gray T-shirt. His body was tan and sculpted—that is the word, because the angles of his body follow the meter of the word. Curved with sharp angles. He had straight eyebrows, piercing eyes that seemed to be x-raying me, and a beautiful ease in his relaxed stature. He was so obviously completely comfortable in his own bronze skin; that was something I couldn’t realistically imagine.

  I could tell he was a bit older; that his friends were a bit older. They had this “down to have a good time” but “thank God we aren’t this age anymore” vibe about them.

  And then, of course, there’s the thing I couldn’t quite put into words that had me wholly startled. I had smiled and glanced at the guys when I started filling my cup, but hadn’t locked eyes with him until after I dropped the keg tap and was already walking away. He was looking at me in the way that told me he’d been staring at me the whole time. I wanted to turn back and look at him too, but you can’t do that. I tossed a glance back to see him still watching me, but that was it.

  No matter what anyone says, a person’s apparent interest in you can be extremely appealing. Or irretrievably unattractive. But it really just depends.

  For a while after this, I could feel his eyes on me. I felt his interest, and almost saw myself through another set of eyes. I laughed and talked, but I sat a bit straighter and smiled a bit broader knowing that he was watching me. Knowing it was only a matter of time until one of us had enough nerve to go to the other and say something. I was pretty sure it would be him, but knew that if it wasn’t, I needed to make it happen.

  In the end, it was him (thank God). I emerged from the pool and threw my head back to get some of the water out of my hair. As my luck had it, he walked up during this movie-moment. He had two cups in his hand.

  “Would you like to do a shot with me?” he asked, handing me a cup.

  I smiled. I could feel now the gaze of my girlfriends. Surely envious. Surely giggling. Surely they were going to be willing to dissect this later with me. (They totally were, we totally did, we talked about it for forever afterward.)

  “Sure,” I said, and took the one closer to him instead of the one that he held out. “You never know. You could be trying to drug me.”

  “Or maybe I’m pulling a Princess Bride, and I put the drugs in my cup.”

  “Could be. Or perhaps in both, and like Rasputin, you’ve made yourself immune. All I can do is try to be cautious. There are endless risks here.”

  He grinned. “Or I think you’re stunning. And I’m a dumb guy who coul
d think of nothing more creative than a shot of shitty rum to come over and start a conversation with you.”

  I laughed. It truly made me laugh. Especially because of the tiny hint of nervousness in his voice—a voice you could just tell was usually brimming with confidence.

  It turned out he was a bit older. He was only there because he lived down the road and he and his friends had picked up the beer so his friend’s little brother could be the Hero with the Booze Connection. When they got there, they decided to hang out and make sure everything was cool.

  That explained why they were so much better composed than the other guys there.

  I maintained my composure that night. I could tell I was transfixing him, and hid my own fascination as well as I could. I could tell that he could tell that I was different. We both knew that I wasn’t the same as so many of the shrill, simpleminded girls that surrounded us. I could tell that he was on a slightly elevated level compared to his friends. We knew that we were the outliers. There was something the same that we spotted in each other, and I was so excited to find that in someone else for once. Especially when—as is always promised by the cliché—I was definitely least expecting it.

  We talked all night, suddenly on a different schedule of drinking than our peers. We had shots and refilled cups in time with the meter of our conversation, as opposed to that of the party. It felt good. I don’t even know what we talked about. I knew that he was funny and biting, with moments of truly insightful—unpretentious—observation mixed in with moments of being delightfully, relievingly normal.

  He was the way that I always like to think of myself, or that I aimed to seem. Smart but not irritatingly so. Able to blend in with the crowd, but able to stand out to those who cared to notice. Funny without trying to be a calculated laugh-a-minute. Intriguing and nice without being sickly, saccharine sweet. I didn’t care one bit about the rest of the party from the first second that we sat on that wall together, legs slung over the sides, facing each other.

  The party didn’t care too much about us, either, except for a few friends coming up to each of us and telling us to stop obsessing over each other and come hang out. Which of course fueled the mood of our conversation and kept us exactly where we were, on our own.

  We outlasted everyone else, and fell asleep under the stars in a big sleeping bag he’d had in the back of his truck. He gave me his sweatshirt to wear, and we used my clothes and a raincoat from his truck as pillows. He put his arm around me and didn’t try anything. To be honest, I had feared that moment of truth. I have grown so tired of explaining why my answer is no that it felt wonderful to simply not be asked. The only thing he did was kiss the spot behind my ear after he seemed to think that I had fallen asleep.

  It made my heart tremble with excitement. It lit my muscles on fire. It electrified my skin. I knew I was feeling what people say you feel. I knew I was knowing what people always promise you’ll know when you know.

  I’m not sure if I know that he’s the one—it’s only been a few weeks by the time I write this—but I know for sure that I would be happy if that’s what he ends up being to me.

  I’ve been a bit afraid to see him after that. I fear that the magic will be gone. I fear that I have put him on a pedestal and set myself up for disappointment. I have been pedestaled before … I have been disappointing after being interesting to someone. I have felt like I wasn’t “on” enough to delight someone else, and I don’t want that to happen to either of us.

  But it hasn’t so far. Magically, though a little less poetic and dreamy, every interaction with him has been something special. It’s only been a month and a half since I met him, and already I’ve done more with him and felt more than I have in my life with anyone romantically.

  I’ve danced with him to Johnny Cash in his shitty dorm room while the reek of weed clouded around us from his roommates. I showed him my favorite old movie, and he laughed in all the right places. I sat on his lap at a bonfire, his sweatshirt hood up and my hood up, both of us vanishing into a world that was only our own until one of my friends threw a stick at us. Our friends get along. He thinks my girlfriends are funny, even when they are speaking only in inside jokes and high-pitched voices. My tire went flat and he showed up at 6:00 A.M. to change it for me. We went out to a nice dinner, but both agreed that we had enjoyed the time we split twenty bucks worth of Chinese food on the floor in front of the TV just as much.

  I fell asleep while he watched SportsCenter and felt like “such a girl” lying next to her very own “such a guy.” He fell asleep while I watched a romantic comedy. He has come over to my dorm and not missed a beat before kissing me on the cheek, even though I was in no makeup and hadn’t washed my hair.

  He is real.

  He is good.

  He is everything I never knew I wanted.

  He has shown me that I have the capacity for this, and for that I owe him endlessly.

  And tonight, he told me he loved me.

  I was dressed up like a cat. A black bodysuit, little ears, black on the tip of my nose, whiskers drawn on my cheeks. He was dressed up like Indiana Jones. I like that he’s the kind of guy that will wear a costume. I also super-like that he’s the kind of guy that doesn’t go embarrassingly over the top.

  He’s asleep next to me now, lying on his side in my tiny twin-sized bed, his arm draped over my abdomen. He’s drunk, but not as drunk as any other guy on campus (it seems). We just had sex for the first time. He was good. He was giving. He made me feel sure about the choice to do it, and gave me explicit freedom to say no. He knows I’m writing in a diary, because he woke up a few minutes ago and said, “I didn’t know you kept a journal.”

  When I told him I didn’t always, he gave me this sleepy half-smile and then squeezed my hip before falling back to sleep.

  And now I feel a kind of contentedness I realize I never knew I was missing, but one which I always feared (on some level) that I would never reach.

  I am in love, and whether it works out or not, I will never deny that I have fallen in love with Leif Tiesman.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Diana

  I was embarrassed about my first impression on Chelsea. My small mothering instinct told me it was wrong to make everything seem so hopeless to a girl who had the optimism to believe she could still get it right. On the one hand, they were adults in that room when I’d spilled my soul all over the place. But on the other hand, I didn’t need to be another woman lamenting the lost illusion of love. Maybe I could find a way to say something less hopeless to her the next time I saw her.

  Then, of course, I also didn’t want to come off as such a loser. But bigger than all of that, I just barely had a relationship with my sister-in-law. (Soon to be ex-sister-in-law, I guess; what would she be then? Would she even be a friend? Or just someone who was relieved as hell to get rid of the dead weight of her brother’s ex-wife?) When I called Prinny it was because I could literally not think of another person in the world to turn to, partly because the last place he would look for me would be with her.

  It was like an emotional hangover. At the time, spilling my guts to them had felt easy and comfortable. Good, even. But by the time I got to think for way too long about it, I was sure I had talked too long, been too wordy, been too raw. Been too much all around.

  As far as Leif was concerned, that would be the definition of me sleeping with the enemy. He had counted on me for years to coo and caw and agree with him that life was horrifically unfair to bring That Woman (Prinny’s mother) into his charmed life, steal his father away, and then make that loss irretrievable with the introduction of the Little Princess.

  That’s how Leif usually referred to her, by the way. As the Little Princess. Obviously their dad did call her Princess until it was shortened to Prinny, but Leif could not bring himself to refer to her in any way that was even remotely affectionate, so he managed to make every little girl’s dream title into an insult, dripping with loathing.

  Now, I also rem
ember a time in life when I longed for the title of Mrs. Leif Tiesman so desperately that, honestly, I could practically taste it. In fact, I think in some ways I could: It tasted of blood and sweat and dark, leaden, metallic desperation. I was so sure that it would make me happy forever. That, once it was accomplished, the hardest part of my life would be over and there’d be smooth sailing forevermore.

  I could stop being Diana Warren, and I could become the one and only Diana Tiesman. Mrs. Tiesman. Mrs. Leif Tiesman. Picture it scribbled all over a composition book.

  Anything I didn’t like about Diana Warren could be completely rewritten in my new, married life. The second act of my life.

  Instead, I killed my old self, and that New Me I wanted so badly is being slowly poisoned. Now I didn’t even know who Diana was to begin with anymore.

  The bitterest part of me wants to say, And he managed to ruin that name, too, but there’s a grown-up inside me who knows that if I grant him the power to have ruined that name—my name—then I will never have the power to redeem it myself.

  Okay, then, life itself took me by the hand, gave me a new name, a new idea of myself, and then challenged me until I reached the point where I had to make my own name and create a solid self instead of perceiving some idea of one.

  And that’s where I found myself very late on the night I hooked up with Prinny, saw the store, met the crazy actress I was to work with, and got the dented brass key to the space upstairs that she said “was once an apartment but might not have much in the way of habitability now.” Those are daunting words in a neighborhood as old and trashy and beautiful and dangerous and undeniably rat-filled as Georgetown.

  All cities are rat-filled. It’s nothing against Georgetown, or the generous offer of a place that Prinny gave to me. I remember going to get a pedicure with my friend Crystal in Manhattan one evening, at a place so swanky and close to the New York Palace that even I probably could have hit a tennis ball from point A to point B. Good neighborhood, right? But just as I was relaxing into the massage chair while the manicurist did some magical reflexology on my feet, I watched Crystal’s eyes dart left to right at some unseen (by me) object at the back wall; then her face went white.