51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life

by Kristen McGuiness

  We sleep in our underwear. His strong arms wrap around me. My hands flit through his hair. And he smells so good that any awkward conversations are soon lost in this impossibly lovely thing that happens when the cameras are rolling. He drives me home the next morning, and I go to work. As I drive to pick up pastries for my boss’s morning meeting, I realize that I am not in The Way We Were. Though this recent romance feels like it has broken open my year of peace and quiet and paid bills and boring meals, I have to remember that my life is real. And as Jimmy goes off to his day as an electrician, and I go off to mine as a secretary, I try to let go of these Robert Redford romances of the way we are, or one day, might be.

  9

  Date Nine: Cowboys and Peter Pan

  Two days after my slumber party with Jimmy Voltage, he calls me at 7:50 a.m. on a Friday morning.

  “What are you doing later?” Jimmy asks, and though I am still slightly asleep, his enthusiasm brings me to life.

  “I don’t know. I’m not even awake.”

  “You wanna go shoot some guns tonight?” I am groggy, but I like shooting guns, and I like Jimmy, and together it sounds dreamy.

  Last year my mom bought me a book called Cowgirls in English Saddles, and if I had a band that would totally be its name. Because I got back into horses about a year ago. And guns? Well, I fell in love with guns in 2005.

  I was visiting my uncle Vic in Florida and had about three months sober. Though I was living in Dallas as that point, my family decided, since I had managed to not get myself into trouble for ninety days, that I would be the perfect person to go save my uncle. My uncle Vic had always played a special role in my life. Gay, short, with a penchant for leather pants and fancy antiques, he taught me that it was beautiful to be different. But over the last few years, he has been going through a slow financial and psychological breakdown that I am sad to say still isn’t over. Because we’re Sicilian and Hungarian, I think there’s an inherent “you’re blood, go do something” policy that isn’t always effective. So though I was in my own worst life crisis, and though I had recently gone through my own financial and psychological breakdown, off I went to Ft. Lauderdale to save the day.

  I spent the next week on the Master Cleanse because I figured, if nothing else, I might as well lose weight while I was there. But after four days of sitting with my uncle in his flower shop (yes, he owned a flower shop), I had begun to get a little bored. I had been doing nothing but chain-smoking, drinking cayenne lemonade, and helping my uncle find naked men on manhunt.com. His shop was right next to a shooting range so one afternoon I decided to go shoot my first gun. And that’s when I found out: I’m kind of a cowgirl. Maybe it’s just an easy rush when my old easy rushes are no longer an option, but, man, do I love pulling that trigger. Feeling that blast. Watching as my awkward aim rips a hole in the target.

  So when this new cowboy in my life invites me out for a night of shooting guns, I could not be happier. Someone takes a picture of me firing his shotgun that night, and I look so happy; I look like I have always wanted to look, in my tight, ripped jeans and my quickly slimming figure. The minute I introduce romance to my diet, I just don’t need sugar as much, and so I have been watching as the weight drops off me. Jimmy and I don’t spend the night together because we are still trying to take this quickly-paced romance slow. Instead, we meet the next morning for breakfast. Jimmy invites me to his family’s house for Thanksgiving because we’re both still alcoholics, and this is about as taking-it-slow as we get. We agree to go back up to John and Teresa’s in Oxnard afterward for the rest of the weekend.

  It all feels so perfect. Me and this cowboy rising above the social fray to create a romance of family dinners and road trips and sweet breakfasts in our shared neighborhood of Silver Lake. The fact that I was supposed to go on 51 dates in 50 weeks feels like a distant memory because I am getting exactly what I want in only eight. As I get dressed to go out with Jimmy that night, I feel like a lottery winner. Jimmy and I had planned to go to the Observatory on his motorcycle, but then one of our mutual friends was having an art show and that seemed to make more sense. I walk outside, and he stands waiting for me in front of his truck. And then I am in his arms, and he is telling me how beautiful I am, and I am in awe that after all this time, I finally won. I won. I won me a cowboy.

  I sit across from him at the restaurant, and the magic continues. We talk about our fathers and God and sobriety and whatever awkwardness was there is quickly fading in the candlelight.

  Jimmy tells me, “My dad was such a good man. Conservative as hell. But he was honest.”

  “Even when he was drunk?” I ask.

  “Yeah, in a way. I mean I come from drinking men. It’s what they do.”

  “Yeah, my dad isn’t so much like that.” I look around because my recent trip to visit my father is still raw. I want desperately to share all of this with Jimmy, but maybe this is where the awkwardness comes in. I am trying not to be the babbling, let-me-share-everything-with-you type of girl, but I don’t really know what else to say in its place. Still, I think Jimmy understands.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Kristen. My dad was fucking miserable.” He catches my eye, and we smile because we share this thing with our fathers, and though we don’t say it, I know that we are both sober because we didn’t want to end up like them. He comes and sits next to me on the booth during coffee, and it feels so nice leaning into him, making out in the back of the restaurant, believing in romance again.

  We go to the art show, and if ever there was a coming-out party for us, this is it. Everyone we know is there, and I float around on his arm, feeling not like the nerdy girl I was so determined to make myself out to be, but like the cool, country girlfriend, glowing in the bask of my man. We are walking away from the party, and Jimmy keeps kissing me, so much so that we nearly trip over ourselves. I can see our silhouettes in the light, all tall and sexy and free.

  He looks down into my eyes and says, “God, you’re so refreshing.”

  I should know better right here. Oliver once called me that. Others have before. Like a tall glass of lemonade, I satisfy the thirst but am put down after a few quick gulps. That is what refreshing will get you. But in the moment, it works, and I want to be refreshing. I want to be so different from anything he has dated that he actually sticks around this time. Because I sense from the looks I get at the art show, and from the way his friends shake my hand, that there is often a new girl on Jimmy’s arm and that many of them are here tonight. And I do not want to be just another stop on this cowboy’s adventure.

  We stop by my apartment so I can pick up some things, and I watch as he walks in front of me down the hallway of my building. There is nothing like Jimmy Voltage from behind: his shoulders, his arms, the way his jeans hang off his ass. I don’t know that a man has ever actually made me go weak in the knees. But this one does. He can feel me watching, and he knows the effect. He shoots a glance behind him, cocky and innocent at the same time, and I know and he knows and everybody knows that we are going to have sex tonight.

  I haven’t had sex in a year and a half. Jimmy will be the fiftieth man with whom I’ve slept, if we’re keeping score on those things. And so though Jimmy and I are still getting to know each other, and though I really just met him a few weeks prior, and though I have said I am not going to sleep with him yet, my hormones lurch and I do, that night, and it’s beautiful. I tell him about having herpes, and he kisses my forehead, looks into my eyes, and says, “It’s okay.” And it is, it’s all okay. Afterward, we talk in bed. It feels so safe and so right that I begin to relax. I begin to believe that this thing is real.

  “So how could someone like you not be snatched up already?” Jimmy asks me as I lay cuddled in his arms.

  “I don’t know,” I giggle as I kiss the tattoo on his wrist and pull myself in tighter. “I guess I’ve been focused on sobriety, but that’s not all true. I’ve fallen for a couple of people. I tried to date someone, but he ended up being kind of mean
.”

  Jimmy squeezes me as he kisses the back of my neck and whispers, “How could anyone be mean to you?”

  I love hearing that. But again, it’s not the first time. My mom was once walking down Third Avenue in New York when she heard a little boy ask his mother, “Mom, why are boys happy and girls so sad?” My mom and I laughed—it’s because boys make girls sad. But at the moment, I am not sad. I am incredibly happy, and I am staying present with this man as I curl naked into his form.

  And I forget that others have looked at me with the same intensity and lost it just as quickly. And I forget that sometimes we are mean to each other without meaning to be. And I forget that I don’t know this man at all but am making hopeful assumptions about kindred spirits, and kind cowboys, and these kisses that finally feel like the destination to my very long search. As my eyelids begin to close, I look around this man’s room because at thirty-nine, Jimmy is a man. I look at the stacked cans of tuna in his kitchenette, the motorcycle helmets on his armoire, the wooden horse beside his bed. I draw it all in with my last sleepy breath. And though it all screams Peter Pan, I am Wendy Darling, and I have been waiting sometime for this trip to Neverland.

  10

  Date Ten: And the RAD Played On

  I am beginning to wonder if there might be something wrong with me. If I were, in fact, born with a very rude pheromonal magnet that pulls my instincts in the wrong direction, or worse, that I have simply lost the ability to make people stay.

  A year ago I met a man who was mean to me; the one I told Jimmy about. I had ten days sober when Sunshine sauntered into my life. Now, I should have known right then. The name Sunshine was pretty much a dead giveaway.

  Sunshine kept telling me that he couldn’t date me; that we needed to take it slow, because I was just newly sober again, and he didn’t feel it was right for us to be in a relationship.

  Since I was working under the pretense that I wanted a man named Sunshine in my life, I went with it. I went with it when he failed to call me for weeks at a time. I went with it when I got the feeling he was hitting on my friends. And I went with it when he looked me deep in the eyes and told me that we had a spiritual connection that would last forever. I leaned over the emergency brake in his car, and I showed him just how spiritual I could be, and that was the last time I saw him.

  I walked away from that brief but not so sunny romance telling myself I would never need to learn this lesson again. And the lesson is this: Don’t take candy from strangers. Because the kind words, the generous offers of romance, the moony, starstruck eyes are all wonderful, but if you don’t know who is giving them to you, then I wouldn’t advise getting in their truck. But only a year later, I end up in Jimmy’s truck.

  I know the minute Jimmy closes the trunk of my car that something is, in fact, different. Perhaps it’s in the way he tosses his bag in my car, or his distracted embrace upon greeting me, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t kiss me or tell me I look pretty or even really smile when he walks up and sees me. I try to pretend that he is just going through something, busy worrying about work or his family or anything that has nothing to do with me.

  Two nights before, Jimmy had come over to spend the night at my apartment. This was huge because every man I have ever dated has had an aversion to staying at my place. For some reason, the idea of waking up in my bed has always caused an anxiety apparently too great for any man to sleep anywhere but his own home. I made Jimmy tea, and I offered him pie, and I attempted to show him my world in one night. I tried desperately to find my favorite quote by Salman Rushdie in my worn-out copy of Midnight’s Children, “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” But I couldn’t, and so I aimlessly rooted around the book searching for the page. This has been a bad habit of mine since cocaine. I was well-known to spend a good hour of a party sitting in a corner, searching through The Norton Shakespeare anthology, all for one line from one play I read in college years before. It typically drove everyone crazy, but thankfully, there would be enough people around that they could just ignore me, until I shouted out, “Here it is!” And then forced them to listen to whatever passage I had been so desperate to find.

  “It’s okay, Kristen. I can hear the quote some other time,” Jimmy said as he tried to get me to put the book down.

  “Just a second, I think it’s in this chapter.”

  I wanted him to know; I wanted him to hear it; I wanted him to believe like I do that “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” Because I believe that though Jimmy and I might not always share the most comfortable conversation, we share this. This bold zest for living, this power and intensity that I think might be the bond that makes what we have feel real. Jimmy went to the bathroom, and when he returned, I was still sitting in the kitchen, searching for the quote.

  “Oh my God, put it down,” he said.

  I laughed, and I thought that Jimmy would too, but he seemed more annoyed than loving when he took the book from my hands and led me into the bedroom. Then he unzipped my dress, and my lips were against his, and I forgot all about Salman Rushdie and men named Sunshine and the fear that there is something missing from this very powerful thing.

  When I awoke in the morning, my heart lurched, and I didn’t know why. His head was buried into my chest, and my lips were pressed into his forehead, and we fit together perfectly. He murmured into my skin and kissed my breast, and as we drifted back into sleep I thought, “I will be sad if this ends.”

  Two days later he closes the door to my trunk, and we drive to his family’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and though he is nice, and introduces me to everybody, I can tell, as he stands across the room playing with his little niece, that there is an estrangement here where before there was none.

  His sister and her husband are cordial, but once again I get the feeling they’ve met many before me. They ask some cursory questions but only in the way that they don’t really expect to see me again. When Jimmy’s brother-in-law jokes while passing the turkey that I’m “a quick one,” I go back to feeling like Katie in The Way We Were. The random, “quick one” Hubbell dates before going back to his more un-refreshing type.

  As we drive to Oxnard that night to spend the weekend with John and Teresa, I know, without words, without any obvious action, there is a hiccup in our chemistry. Though we do our best to make conversation, though Jimmy’s hand cups the back of my neck, and I get to relax a little, though we are laughing and listening to music and pretending that everything is okay, something has changed. And those kinds of changes are never good.

  I make it through the first two days. Jimmy’s hugs are infrequent and far away, but I have been here before. We all have. Wanting so badly for the affection we thought was ours and feeling all the more awkward and insecure as the object of that affection crawls into itself and away from us. I try to be cool about it, and I try not to cry when Jimmy doesn’t follow me to bed that first night, when he stays up in the living room watching a Lee Marvin movie by himself.

  The next day I leave for a while to work at the stables where I ride. I go into my favorite horse’s stall, and I hug that great big animal, and I cry and I cry and I cry. Because I thought it was real this time and that the candy was only going to lead to more candy. I believed that the kind words and the generous offers of romance were all just the beginning and not the end.

  I get back to the beach house that night. Jimmy is friendlier. When I yawn and get up and go to bed, he comes in soon after me. At first, we begin to make out, but then I stop it. I may not know what to say, but I know I need to say something. Though I may have found myself in this same place a year ago, I don’t have to react the same. I can ask why. I pull away from Jimmy, and I can see him brace himself for what he surely knows is coming. I tell him I have felt a shift. And I ask him. Why?

  And that’s when I find out.

  That is when the greatest revelation in my thirty years is revealed. That is when Jimmy tells me about RAD.


  RAD stands for “Relationship Anxiety Disorder” and apparently Jimmy has a bad case of it. I feel like the scientist who discovered the cellular engineering of polio. The doctor who broke the riddle of AIDS. The girl who found out why so many of the men she has ever fallen for have left as quickly as they came.

  “I’ve been working with my sponsor on it,” Jimmy tells me.

  I am trying desperately not to laugh because Jimmy is taking this all very, very seriously.

  He looks like he might cry, and I almost begin to feel bad that this nearly forty-year-old man still needs to make up acronyms for his inability to commit. Because RAD? I mean, come on. Who doesn’t have that? It could be on the cover of Newsweek. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a decent dose of it too. I haven’t been in a relationship in three years; in fact, at this point, I don’t even know what a relationship is. So though he might have anxiety over the whole deal, I can’t even tell you what the deal looks like. Does he think I’m on the verge of wearing his letterman jacket, his class ring, changing my relationship status on Facebook?