Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  This caught our attention.

  “The world isn’t made for men anymore. Men naturally want to be in a tribe. Think about it. They used to be the hunters and soldiers, spending nights, weeks, months, sometimes years in the company of other men. Think about men today. How often have any of your boyfriends seen their man friends? Once a week? How often do they talk on the phone except to give a few grunts and a ‘Hey, meet me at the bar’?

  “Never. Men no longer have camaraderie. They have no tribe.”

  At this Suze pounded her chest. “Women have a tribe. How often do you tell a girlfriend she is pretty or wonderful or smart in a day? How often do you e-mail or text a friend to see what she just did or to send a picture of what you just ate? All the time. Women are intimately interwoven into other women’s lives. Women are validators for other women. And for men. We validate the men in our lives the same way we validate our female friends. We tell them they’re handsome and strong and we listen to the mundane shit details of their boring day at the office.

  “So what does this have to do with the cyber cheating? In the absence of a tribe, men go looking for outside validation elsewhere. The validation of one person isn’t enough. They need more emotional support than that. We all do, but women get it from other women. Men only get a little from one woman. So they look outside their paltry tribe of two and seek emotional support from other women. When they do it online and they don’t physically cheat, then they really don’t see anything wrong with it. The problem is that men and women are not in the same tribe, and somehow sex, whether verbal or physical, typically happens.

  “See, the world really isn’t set up for these men anymore. We should feel bad for them.

  “Except … well, except for the fact that most of them are scumbags! Am I right?” Suze jumped over Cameron’s head to fist bump Prithi.

  “Yes,” we chorused, even though she had begun to lose us on that last rant.

  “Give me a hell yes,” Suze yelled. “Hell yes!” we responded with more vigor than I thought this group was capable of mustering.

  With that the doorbell rang and Mikey from Crazy Eddie’s walked back into the living room.

  “Time for my Sunday night date, ladies.” Suze winked at us, linked arms with the startled boy, and strutted out of the living room, chalk dust trailing behind her.

  Become entirely ready to have a higher power remove all these defects of character

  I’m not sure whose idea it was to have Dave speak at a meeting (it might have been his), but surprisingly it ended up being a really good one.

  Dave was a natural-born teacher. He legitimately wanted to impart his knowledge of how men manipulate women, which was likely born of some kind of Catholic guilt about unburdening himself from all the horrible things he said and did to women. The bottle of holy water that he kept next to his bed was no longer cutting it.

  He started out with a lesson on text messaging and the ways that texts are interpreted differently by men and by women.

  “Men,” he said, pausing for effect as he strode in front of the room like one of those prissy teachers in movies where they have to teach underprivileged kids in the ghetto, “are simple creatures. I know that you think we are very tricky and very complicated and likely playing the same mind games you are and maybe going back to our friends in the bar to dissect every text message you send us and waiting a prerequisite three days before we text you because we like you and respect you. Sometimes you think we’re busy. So busy we can’t take ten seconds to text you. None of that is true. No one. No one …” Here Dave paused for effect and pulled out his phone. He punched in a few buttons for approximately ten seconds and then held it up in the air like a trophy. “Text sent. No one is too busy to do that. If we aren’t texting you, we don’t like you. Period. End of story. When we like a girl, we text. We blow up her phone with texts. We’re not complicated, and we don’t play games.

  “A lot of girls think I’m a jerk. I was an unsophisticated jerk in my early years. Sometimes I appealed to a girl’s ego and I did send a ton of text messages and then maybe I would ignore her after I finally got her to juggle my balls a few times.”

  At this Jordana gasped. For someone so schooled in healing the human anatomy, she didn’t seem to enjoy hearing about parts of it being juggled.

  “But you ladies appear to be of a certain age.”

  Now everyone gasped. I was worried Dave was about to be collectively attacked by a lot of angry women he had just referred to as over the hill. I did a quick head count. Twenty ladies. This was more than he was used to taking on.

  “I don’t mean that as an insult. None of us are in our early twenties anymore. We have all been around the block a bit. I have become more and more honest in my older age … and this seems to confound your gender even more. I may have a first date with a woman and it will be great. We’ll have a second date. She wonders why I don’t text more or call more. We have a third date and we sleep together and she really wants to chat a lot. And I’m honest. I tell her I don’t have relationships. I’m flaky. I don’t really trust women. I don’t see anyone longer than a fiscal quarter. Have any of you heard this before?”

  There were nods … maybe even a few teary eyes. “Well, it’s all true. We’re not lying to you. But for some reason it seems to turn women on even more. Why do you like us when we are assholes? Why, I ask?” Now Dave was getting a little too into the part and punctuating all his major points with a fist or a pointer finger jabbed into the air. He was becoming Suze. I guess everyone likes an audience.

  “We lay down the law. We tell it like it is. We don’t think we’re bad people because we are being honest. All you tell us is that you want us to be honest and share our feelings, and we do and you don’t believe us.

  “When do you believe us?

  “When we tell you we love you after sex. You believe us when we mutter a half-guttural ‘I love you’ after sex. That’s when we’re lying to you. When we tell you we’re not emotionally available and we don’t want a girlfriend, that’s all true. And you know what, you probably can’t fix it. Maybe we do want a girlfriend and maybe we don’t but if we tell you we don’t want one, then we certainly don’t want you to be our girlfriend. This isn’t hard. It doesn’t have to be hard.”

  At this Prithi fully burst into tears. It was either the honesty or her hormones or a combination of the two, but suddenly her giant prego body just started shaking with sobs. And Dave, the guy who had always been my friend even while he was making women cry across the tristate area, proved again that he had a heart, just not for women he was sleeping with. He walked over to Prithi and sat on the floor and just hugged her, from the front, not the side in some pussy “I don’t know what to do” man hug, but a good old-fashioned bear hug, moving her head onto his shoulder and letting her cry it out. He turned around.

  “Let’s not let the truth hurt us anymore, ladies. Use the information I have just shared with you to take the control back in your relationships. Don’t imagine yourself walking down the aisle on your first date. Do what we do. Imagine leaving in the morning after having great sex. That is my first homework assignment to you all.”

  Rule 6: Stop picturing your wedding day on a first date,

  or in Trader Joe’s, or after a drunk guy

  at a bar sends you a text message.

  “The guy you date next should just be the parsley to an already kick-ass dish of risotto. You’re great the way you are. Men are just the garnish.”

  Jesus Christ. Dave was Dr. Phil meets Mario Batali.

  And then he got a round of applause. I thanked my lucky stars I had banned him from ever sleeping with any of the women in our group. No matter how far they were coming along, every single one of them would have boned Dave that night. Despite his honesty—and he knew it.

  I walked Dave out to his car. “Why do you think you treat women so badly?” Watching him in that room of women, actually seeing him enjoy interacting with women he wasn’t actively tr
ying to insert his penis into, left me confused about why he couldn’t treat women he had sex with with the same respect.

  Dave sighed. “I got hurt, Sophie,” he said.

  “I think I fell in love just once, and it hurt so bad when it ended, I decided I wouldn’t let it happen again. The truth is that men aren’t as strong as women. You deal with your pain by doing crazy things, but you recover. We don’t bounce back the same way. When Maury dumped me right after college, I swore I would never let myself feel that bad ever again. So I go on the defensive. I say ridiculous things to women because then I know they’re rejecting me because I told them they’d look hotter if they lost about ten pounds and not because of me. And I do it no matter how awesome a girl is. Every single time.”

  It made sense. We all had our own ways of fending off rejection.

  “I listened to all those women in there,” Dave continued. “Really listened to them. I don’t think any of you realize what kind of power you have over us when you just drop all your insecurities. At the end of the day, you choose, and we feel lucky when you make the choice.”

  I gave my head a little shake. I never felt like I was the one doing the choosing or the picking.

  “Don’t you want to stop?” I asked him. “Maybe settle down? You’re not getting any younger.” I meanly flicked his growing belly.

  “Maybe I should start coming to your meetings.”

  And that’s how we got our first male member of LAA.

  We were all improving. Olivia was no longer getting blackout drunk and going home with inappropriate men. Cameron had let her membership to at least twelve dating sites lapse and replaced her trolling for men by trolling for antiques and collectibles on Etsy. It was a more expensive but healthier habit and we were all gifted with recovered-wood picture frames and T-shirt scarves for being such supportive friends. The house was now a de facto halfway house for the heartbroken and lovesick, but it was turning into a lot of fun. Karaoke had become a staple, and on Saturday nights we often gathered in the basement. Sometimes Tito and Joe would join us. We learned that Tito’s wife had recently left him for the local high school gym teacher, Michael Stern, who at age sixty could still do thirty-seven pull-ups in under a minute. In Mexico, where Tito’s family was from, people didn’t get divorced, so Tito was ashamed to admit to his family that his marriage was over and he was letting her live in the house with him (Michael had cats and she was allergic) until he got the guts to figure out another arrangement. If I didn’t mention it before, Tito was gorgeous. He had mocha brown skin with the lightest crystal-blue eyes you’ve ever seen (the result, he told us, of a Nordic explorer great-great-grandfather who inadvertently landed on the Yucatan Peninsula).

  I also learned that Joe was divorced, rather recently, but he was tight-lipped about the details, and I didn’t want to push him since he wasn’t officially a part of LAA, even though he was sitting in on some of the meetings and the girls often sought him out for advice as they continued to work through their personal stuff.

  It was during a Saturday night sing-along that I got the call from Megan right in the middle of Princess and Tito doing a really good version of “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee. I answered right away, figuring Megan was planning to schedule another Suze session for us.

  “Are you sitting down?” she asked. I laughed, high off Whitney Houston (although thankfully, not high like Whitney Houston).

  “Did Suze pull the goalie with Mikey the delivery boy?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, not that. I just heard something and I thought I should tell you before you found out on your own.”

  “Did one of your Sally Tomatoes finally get you pregnant?” This was always a concern since Megan had convinced herself that older men couldn’t get her pregnant. I kept trying to explain that as unjust as it was, it didn’t work the same way for men as it did for women, but she refused to listen, saying some of her paramours had a hard enough time staying, well, hard and that a condom wasn’t exactly going to help things along. “OK, sure, I’m sitting down,” I said, though I wasn’t, the idea of bad news far away from my thoughts.

  “Eric is engaged.”

  And all of a sudden it was back. The rubber band in my gut behind my liver. I had forgotten about it. I never even felt it anymore. The Eric cleanse was slowly but surely working. I was so focused on the group and on myself and getting caught up with work that he hadn’t entered my thoughts more than a handful of times, one of which was when I found one of his ratty old gym socks static clung to the lacy black thong I had bought to impress him on his thirtieth birthday; the only thing the flimsy undies were successful in doing was giving me a rash on my backside. Now all the pain came whooshing back. I felt dizzy, and I sat down as Megan continued to tell me how she found out.

  “I was having dinner in Midtown and you know I never eat up there, but I bought one of those ridiculous deals on that Groupon site for like a five-course dinner before realizing that it was in the Fifties on the East Side and you know that is no-man’s-land around there. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I knew but then he walked into the restaurant with her. His secretary. What do you call her again? Trashy McReceptionist?”

  “Floozy McSecretary,” I quietly replied, but not quietly enough that Annie didn’t hear me from the next room and sit down next to me with alarm.

  “Right, Floozy McSecretary. Anyway, obviously she bought the same Groupon. Of course she did. She seems like the kind of girl who always buys things on Groupon, doesn’t she? I only bought it because it said they had two courses of cheese and you know I’m a sucker for good cheese and lots of it. So they walked in and Eric got all bashful and it looked like he was trying to push her behind a banquette or something when he saw me. He was holding her hand really tight too. He was holding it so hard I thought it looked like he was hurting her, and he was, because all of a sudden she broke out of his grip. You know she looks teensy tiny but this was like a feat of superhuman strength. She broke free and began wildly gesticulating and that’s when I saw it.”

  “The ring,” I whispered.

  “Yeah, the ring.”

  I knew the ring well. It was a two-carat princess cut from Harry Winston that had belonged to Eric’s grandmother. After we had been dating for about a year, Eric’s mother told me about it in confidence after she drank too much at his nephew’s christening. She had just assumed that since I was dating her son at a proper age for WASPs to get married and since I was now being invited to family events (I had begged my way into that one and Eric was too hungover from a bachelor party to say no), I would likely be the recipient of said family heirloom.

  “They got out of there after that,” Megan continued. “Gave up the dinner and everything. Eric tried to pull me aside, I think to tell me not to tell you—he seems scared of you—but she wouldn’t stop jabbering about how he hurt her hand and how she needed some ice.”

  The rubber band ball kept winding itself tighter.

  “Sophie, are you OK? Do you want me to come out? You’re not alone, are you?”

  “No, I’m not alone. There’s a bunch of people here, actually, so I should go. Thank you for telling me. I’m glad that I know.”

  I hung up the phone and laid my head down in Annie’s lap, curling into a tiny ball.

  “He’s engaged?”

  “He’s engaged.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Bad.”

  “Do you want a glass of wine?”

  “I think that’s best.”

  I stayed on the floor. Annie went into the basement, probably to alert the others to my current state. After five minutes of hushed whispers, Annie returned with a glass of Chianti.

  I sat up just enough to bring it to my lips and finished it with a gulp. She pulled the bottle from behind her back.

  “Just finish it. Your problem is love addiction, not alcoholism. It won’t kill you.”

  I had two more glasses before climbing to my feet.


  “I’m not going to call him.”

  And with that, my phone rang. Speak of the devil.

  “He’s calling because he knows that Megan was going to tell you.”

  “And he’s probably scared.” I laughed through tears that kept threatening to spill over. “Scared that this time he really will have to take out a restraining order or something.”

  For the first time since Eric and I started dating, I let his call go straight to voice mail.

  “I don’t want to hear it from him. I don’t want to hear his voice.”

  “’Atta girl. See how much stronger you are now? You rock. You’re amazing. You’re all better.”

  “No,” I said, pouring myself another glass of wine. “If I were better, I wouldn’t feel so shitty. I’m getting better maybe, but I’m not better.”

  The phone rang again, this time with seemingly greater urgency, and the tones of “I Would Do Anything for Love” blared from my handset. I had changed the ringtone from “Rump Shaker” weeks ago to remind myself of my moral inventory.

  Against all better judgment I took my laptop up to my room and was only alone for fifteen minutes when Annie found me.

  “Do you need a refill?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, I see you have a computer and I know how Google works … so do they have a wedding registry?”

  “Yup.”

  “Fuck the Wedding Channel.”

  “Fuck the Wedding Channel hard.”

  “What are they getting?”

  “A lot of things we liked … that I liked.”

  “You were the one with taste in the relationship.” Annie smoothed my hair back like my mom used to do.

  “I hate that these things are public,” I muttered.

  “I hate that you’re looking at it.”

  “How can I not? It was one Google search away. Right there for me to find.”