Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  “Hey, Sophie, are you OK?” Joe asked. I had spaced. God, I needed LAA. I needed something. I was getting jealous of a potential girlfriend of a man I had once shared a slice of banana cream pie with after lying to him at his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I was so far from normal. Not for the first time since I had moved home I envied my grandmother’s love life. Not only did she find her soul mate in my grandfather, but when he finally passed on, she just flitted from man to man without a care or a regret in the world. She just had it figured out.

  “I’m great. I was having inappropriate thoughts about pie.” Ohmygawd, what did that even mean? “I mean about, you know, eating it.”

  “Yeah, I can’t wait to get this one home. Give me a ring after your first LAA meeting.” Joe smiled warmly as I gave a little wave.

  “Was that the infamous Dr. Alchy?” Dave asked.

  “It was.”

  “He looks like a nerd.”

  Annie threw a napkin at him. “Why do you hate everyone? You hate women, you mock men. Sometimes I think you are a self-hating gay!”

  Dave shrugged. “I like vagina. So can I come to your meeting?”

  “Dude, that’s like inviting Jose Cuervo to AA. You’re the problem, Dave. You’re the one who drives these girls bananas,” Annie said.

  Dave couldn’t deny it. He was a serial womanizer and he simply treated women like shit, which often made them simultaneously hate him and continue coming back for more. He once admitted to us that when one woman asked him what he liked about her, he told her she was brunette and had a vagina. He was inside her at the time. And as if to underscore the point, our waitress, Maggie, dropped the bill on our table and with no regard for how her tip would fare, she picked up a half-empty glass of Coke and splashed it in Dave’s face.

  “Fuck you,” she said and walked away.

  “What a turkey,” Dave muttered.

  “See,” Annie said. “You can’t come.”

  We called Megan and told her about the meeting, set it for the following Sunday, and asked her to spread the word. Megan said she knew at least ten women currently in the throes of some kind of love addiction. She also gave me a hot tip on a Diane von Furstenberg sample sale taking place the following Thursday.

  Sunday is a good day to make plans with other single women because it is such a bad day for them. On Sundays couples sleep in late, wake up and have missionary morning sex, and then brunch before heading to Home Depot to pick out new blinds or area rugs for the apartment they just moved into together. For singles, Sunday is waking up with a hangover, maybe a strange man in your bed, figuring out how to get said strange man out of your bed, and then sending a dozen text messages to your other still-single friends to see who wants to have brunch with you somewhere they have unlimited Bloody Marys because, one, you’re footing the bill; two, you need to get a little drunk to erase the pain of not having someone to go to Home Depot with; and, three, you woke up with a strange man in your bed and you are already bummed that he didn’t want to have brunch and hasn’t texted you.

  We didn’t invite Joe to the meeting. We thought it would be strange to have a guy there even though we never specifically said that LAA was for women only. Men nurse broken hearts too. But still, they do it in a different way than women. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

  Come Saturday night I was cooking dinner for Annie and me. She had pretty much moved into one of the spare bedrooms in my grandmother’s house and had turned over her duties at the bar to her assistant manager, Fredo. We were a de facto sexless couple. I would cook. She would complain. I would clean. She would make things messy. It was like most hetero relationships after about a year. But even Annie couldn’t listen to me talk about Eric anymore. When I began recounting his day with Floozy from memory and asking her what she thought it all meant for maybe the hundredth time, she calmly strode across the kitchen.

  “Put down the spoon, Sophie.” She nodded to the utensil I had been using to smash potatoes.

  “They’re almost smashed,” I replied. “So then I think they went to the High Line with his sister and her two kids because Floozy took an Instagram … OUCH!”

  Annie had slapped me. She used her open palm to slap me across the face. I had never been hit before. My first instinct to lunge at her was quickly replaced by an urge to cry and feel horrible for myself, but Annie wasn’t giving me the opportunity to have those kinds of feelings.

  “I need you to shut the fuck up about Eric and Floozy Mc— WHAT THE FUCK IS HER REAL NAME?” Annie bellowed. “You need to shut the fuck up.”

  I squared my shoulders and rolled my eyes to the ceiling before responding to her.

  “I’m going to try. I want to try.”

  Annie was already at the freezer searching for a bag of something frozen to put on my face.

  “Will a Skinny Cow work?” She calmly offered me a low-calorie ice cream treat. I took it without saying anything.

  She breathed deeply. “I want the old Sophie back. You have become a crazy person who is fixated on a single thing, a thing, I might add, that is poisonous for you. I understand the irony of the alcoholic in the room saying that. Yes, this may be the pot calling the kettle an addict, but I just want my friend back.”

  I didn’t have anything to say. She was right. I gave her a nod and headed upstairs to my room.

  In bed that night, thinking about the LAA meeting, I was nervous and my face stung. What if no one showed? Megan told me a lot of women said it sounded like a good idea, but New York ladies are naturally flaky. They love everything in theory, but trying to get them to do anything that doesn’t involve booze and men and does involve trains and New Jersey is hard. I sat awake until three in the morning, wondering if we would have an empty house on Sunday. I was pegging this meeting to lifting my spirits and giving me something to focus on besides my horrible, no good, very bad love life. I really didn’t want Annie to hit me again, but more than that I didn’t want Annie to hate me. I was starting to hate me a little. I understood the irony of all this planning. Lifting my spirits involved an event whereby I was going to sit for a couple of hours and talk about my terrible, no good, very bad love life. I wanted to talk more with Annie about it, but I was a little bit afraid of her. Plus Annie was sleeping like a baby. She would do that for at least four hours at a time, then she would wake up and pace on the back porch with a cigarette. Chain-smoking had become a new addiction for her, but I was happy to let her substitute the lesser of two evils. Cigarettes didn’t make her steal cars.

  I did my hair for the first time in a month on Sunday morning, curling it under at the ends. I willed myself not to look at Floozy’s Twitter feed. I plucked a few stray eyebrows, vowing to get them waxed next time I went into the city, and put on what I thought was rehab chic: skinny jeans with a cozy Tucker cardigan. Comfort was something I imagined people in rehab would embrace.

  I checked her Facebook, just once.

  Noon came and went without anyone arriving. And 12:20 and 12:30, and finally at 12:45 the doorbell rang. Then it just kept ringing so I finally had to leave it open. I had assembled every chair in the house in a circle in the living room. Thirty seats in all. And by 1:00 p.m. they were all filled. Sure, everyone was a little late, but they had come. A lot of people had come. Some of the women I knew. I recognized Olivia as one of Megan’s many cousins. (Megan’s family is very Irish Catholic and by her own admission they breed like rabbits.) Cameron was a girl I had gone to college with whom I had e-mailed toward the end of the week when I got spooked that no one would show. We saw each other socially and tried to have a drunk Sunday brunch once or twice a year, and each time we met she regaled me with stories about another man who had done her wrong whom she desperately wanted to marry and have babies with. One of the women I didn’t recognize was an enormous Indian girl, who introduced herself as Prithi. She was swathed in several of her own long cardigans. (I gave myself a pat on the back for our shared sartorial sense.) Prithi practically had to waddle to h
er seat.

  I got up in front of the group the way Joe had at the AA meeting.

  “Welcome to the very first meeting of Love Addicts Anonymous,” I said, my voice shaking a little from nerves. I balled the ends of my cardigan up in my hands and kneaded them across my sweaty palms. “This is a safe place.” Joe had instructed me to use that introduction even though it sounded a little creepy, along the lines of “show me on the doll where he touched you.” “We’re all here because we recognize a problem in ourselves and we want to try to fix it. I think women give themselves a bad rap. We’re always competing with one another instead of helping each other out, when we all go through the same things. This is a chance for us to get together and help one another through a tough time.” Looking at the hopeful and somewhat needy expressions of the women in the audience gave me a sense of confidence. I felt stronger now and more sure of myself.

  “Let’s face it; our friends and family are sick of hearing us whine about our crappy relationships. There are some things we do that are so crazy we don’t even tell our friends, and then we feel guilty about it because it’s our secret crazy. All those fake e-mail accounts we create to send one last message and times we’ve just happened to end up in the same bar because we’ve stalked a status update—that’s shit no one likes to admit to anyone else. Now we’re in a space where we have license to whine and admit the secret crazy, and the goal is that by talking about these things we won’t make the same mistake twice. We need to break our cycle of love addiction. We too can be those carefree women who live and love and go on to love again without going to a dark place.” In my head whenever I pictured this kind of woman she was always like one of those ladies in the Tampax commercials who were carefree and easy breezy running on a beach. Not only did her heart never get broken, but she also never bled through her white pants.

  I walked away from the front of the room right after I stopped talking and was caught off guard by the spontaneous applause that erupted from the group. Had these people been to AA before or was this some kind of ingrained group dynamic? Whatever it was, it felt good; my spine grew an inch longer, and I stood a little taller before taking my seat. I had never gotten applause all for myself before.

  I told my own story about how I caught Eric cheating with Floozy and staged my pathetic faux breakup in his apartment. I continued through the sad weeks of calling and texting and culminated with the man bits ending up on the Internet.

  The room agreed that breaking up with someone to try to force them to (a) become more serious or (b) stop doing something hurtful to you just about never works. That seemed like a good rule to remember.

  Rule 1: Staging a dramatic outburst

  never leads to a grand gesture.

  We went around the circle and everyone shared just like they had in the AA meeting, except each of these women’s stories involved some kind of neurosis about men and relationships.

  Everyone started out by putting their hands in the air, saying their name and “I’m a love addict,” like we had seen people do in the movies. It made us giggle at first, but I have to admit there was something therapeutic about saying it out loud.

  Cameron: Was addicted to online dating, despite several disastrous dates that resulted from her efforts on Match.com, J-Date, and something called A Lot of Fish. Among these disasters was Vegan Biter. In his online profile on A Lot of Fish, Matthew had seemed totally datable. He was a lawyer, living in Brooklyn, nonsmoker, social drinker, liked travel, loved animals. When they got to the bar, Cameron found out that Matthew loved animals so much he didn’t eat them. Cameron let this go despite her own near addiction to medium-rare hamburgers with blue cheese and continued with the date. Over the next three hours, Matthew told her he was from Staten Island, his dad was a racist, his sister had two illegitimate children, he never went in the ocean because he was afraid of sharks, and he didn’t fly because he was afraid of planes. “I thought you said in your profile you liked to travel?” Cameron asked. “I’ve driven to Disney World seven times. Have you been to Epcot? It’s like seeing the whole world without getting on a plane,” he said.

  When Cameron told him maybe he was sharing too much for a first date, he replied, “Wouldn’t you rather have everything out on the table at the very start of things?” Since this seemed entirely rational, Cameron agreed and kept drinking dirty martinis, maybe a little faster than before. He invited her back to his place to see his fish. He wouldn’t shut up about his damn fish, and against her better judgment she went. She blamed the gin and the fact that he promised some of his fish glowed in the dark. They did indeed glow in the dark and before Cameron knew it they were making out by the light of the glow-in-the-dark fish in the bedroom of his junior one-bedroom in Chelsea. That’s when he started biting. The first one was right above her left hip and it was a sizable bite. Cameron bruised easily and yelped, “Hey, cut it out.” And he did for about ten minutes until he got his teeth close to the fleshy part of her thigh and then, CHOMP! That was the last straw, and Cameron called it a night. She couldn’t wear a bikini for weeks while the welts healed.

  Annie got a good laugh at that one.

  “He was hungry. He hadn’t had protein in nine years!!!!”

  The other online outcasts Cameron picked up included a banker who brought his mom along on their first date, a television producer who she caught wearing her black La Perla panties after he spent the night at her apartment, and the dog walker who left a Chihuahua at her house and never returned her calls. She calls him Paco. He was in her purse. Still Cameron kept at it. And the worst part was that she was never the one to call a spade a spade. She usually stuck around until they stopped calling or texting or erupted in an admission of hatred.

  Melissa: Five months ago her husband, a doctor in Manhattan, cheated on her with one of the nurses in his hospital. She found out because another nurse, in a fit of altruism or maybe smuggery, e-mailed her about it. When she confronted him, he didn’t deny it, and since it was the second time she had caught him cheating, she was finally ready to kick him to the curb and she told him she wanted to file for divorce. She may have been ready to end her marriage, but she certainly wasn’t finished talking about it. She began nearly every conversation with everyone she met, “I don’t know if you’ve heard but I’m going through a tough time. I found out my husband was cheating on me,” and from there she would launch into the entire torrid story, sometimes varying the details. Occasionally she would mention how she left the other woman a birthday card on her windshield that said “Happy Birthday” on the front and “You Dirty Whore!” on the inside. Other times she would talk about how her two boys, Chase and Brandon, were holding up, or the latest thing that Dr. Mike had told her in therapy. She finally realized she might need to seek some kind of help when she pulled up to the gas station last week and, when Fred the attendant asked her if she wanted unleaded or regular, she said, “Fred, I don’t know if you’ve heard,” and he cut her off screaming, “Of course we’ve heard and I don’t think that birthday card you left on that poor woman’s car was the right thing to do!”

  Lila: Pretended she was Jewish for a whole year because the guy she believed would be the perfect husband told her on their second date that he would only marry a Jew. She was and to this day remains a lapsed Southern Baptist. But Lila eagerly attended services and spent the high holidays with Ben Greenberg’s mother and father. She was so desperate to get a ring that she created a backstory that included her taking a trip with Birthright Israel, something she learned about when she put “dating a Jew” into Google. She was in so deep she didn’t know how she would ever get herself out of it. She figured they were so in love she could tell him and they would have a good laugh, she’d convert, and they could still live happily ever after. They moved in together, they put a mezuzah over their door, and then, unexpectedly, her not-at-all-lapsed Southern Baptist parents dropped in for a visit, arriving on her doorstep asking what that little doll was hanging from her door frame, thus outing
her as a shiksa. She and Ben Greenberg did not have a good laugh, and she was now couch surfing among her work colleagues.

  Olivia: Had a habit of blacking out during her dates. Dating made her so nervous that she drank to excess, which she realized was a problem when she went home with one guy last week and in the middle of the night got up to take a pee and ended up in his roommate’s bed—naked. She didn’t notice a thing until she spooned him and he screamed. Her date came running down the hall. When she finally came to, she realized she didn’t recognize either man.

  Annie whispered something in her ear and Olivia nodded. I saw her slip her Joe’s number and the address of the AA meeting. I was proud of her for wanting to take Olivia to an AA meeting and also a little proud of me (back pat) for doing something that was actually helping other people.

  Allison: Was also desperate to get married. (This felt like a recurring theme, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it.) She had been dating Alex for six years, since they graduated from college. They moved in together a year ago and Allison couldn’t understand why he hadn’t just popped the question yet. She tried giving him an ultimatum last April. Nothing. She tried withholding sex. He took longer showers. She tried talking to his mother. He just stopped taking his mom’s calls.

  “I was so frantic I thought about pulling the goalie. I was just about to stop taking the pill when I heard about this meeting.” Allison laughed. “I guess that would have made me pretty desperate.”

  At that the girthy Indian girl with the waddle pulled back her long cardigan to reveal a very pregnant belly.

  “I’m Prithi, and I’m desperate,” she said, holding one hand in the air, the other on her massively pregnant belly. I made a mental note not to assume people are just fat. Of course it is better than assuming someone is pregnant, since calling someone pregnant when they are not in fact pregnant is tantamount to calling them fat anyway.

  Prithi was born in the United States, but her parents were strict Brahmans from Calcutta. Since the time Prithi was a toddler her mom and dad had arranged for her to marry the six-months-younger son of their former neighbor in Calcutta, also a Brahman. He was an engineer who came over to the States when he was eighteen and attended MIT. When Prithi and Sasank finally met at age twenty, they hit it off. The problem was that they hit it off as wonderful pals. Sasank was the most intuitive man Prithi had ever met, and gorgeous. He dressed like a celebrity and his skin was as smooth as mahogany-colored butter. But he never made a move on Prithi. One night while he painted her toenails in her dorm room at Brown (his idea), he revealed that he thought he might be gay and that he was in love with a physics major named Michael. He told Prithi he would go through with the marriage because he really did love her as a friend, but he couldn’t bring himself to consummate his relationship with her. Prithi also loved this man as her best friend, but she had to admit she had never been sexually attracted to him, either. They didn’t have the hearts to break it to their parents yet, especially Sasank, so Prithi went out determined to find another suitable Indian man to marry who would please her parents and soften the blow. She met Dr. Amir Mehti the next summer when she was visiting NYU med school to decide whether she wanted to apply to go there. He was perfect—thirty-five, a cardiac surgeon, parents who still lived in Calcutta, his own apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a summerhouse in Montauk. Prithi fell head over heels and knew this was the guy she had to marry. He would make her parents so happy, and if they were happy, they might be able to help soothe Sasank’s parents when he finally told them he was gay.