51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life

by Kristen McGuiness

  “I just think we should take it slow,” he says.

  And the smile on my face slides into sadness because I know what that means. I’ve heard about slow before. It wasn’t long after Sunshine that my own sponsor and I discussed my habit of falling for what we call Counterfeit Romeos. Like Sunshine, like Jimmy, like that man I call Dad, they tell me all the things I want to hear, but they can’t actually be there in any real way. They have things like RAD or a prison sentence that prevent them from putting action behind all that powerful romance.

  I silently fight back the tears that have begun to surface, and I take his hand in mine, “Okay, hey. All I ask is that you’re honest with me. Because otherwise, well, it’s just a waste of our time.”

  “I don’t believe that anything is a waste of time,” he says.

  “You’re right. I guess it’s our romantic foibles that really show us what it means to be human.”

  “That’s good,” Jimmy tells me. “You should use it in one of your books.”

  So I do. Right here. That one is for you.

  Jimmy and I try to enjoy our last day in Oxnard, but the jig is up. There is nothing like watching a three-week relationship with all its hope and possibility die in the same place it blossomed. It’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable, and it breaks my little heart. I wanted so badly for this man to be my boyfriend. As I sit on the other side of the living room from him, both of us pretending to care about the football game that is on TV, I feel like I want to throw up right there. But I don’t. I get up, and I offer him tea, and I pretend that we are just friends, that we’ve always been just friends, and I secretly hope that his kind smile means that there might still be a chance for more.

  But then Jimmy doesn’t call for days, and whatever hope I had that RAD was just a forty-eight-hour bug quickly begins to fade. For Jimmy, RAD is something far more chronic. I don’t know why this keeps happening to me, but when Jimmy sees me at a meeting and says he’ll call and he doesn’t, I know that I don’t have to let it. I can’t keep falling for these Counterfeit Romeos with their California heartbreak names and their easy compliments. I break up with Jimmy via voice mail, and I thank him for the good time. I say I just see us as friends, and he leaves a voice mail in turn.

  “God, Kristen, thanks so much for your message. Wow, you’re such a fucking gem.”

  I couldn’t have written the line better myself. Though in some alternate reality we might have shot guns and rode horses and zipped through the night on yet another motorcycle I never got to ride, that was not our reality. The reality was that Jimmy has RAD, and I have a bad sense of direction when it comes to cowboys. I lie alone once again in my bed, and I begin to cry. Because I know I can’t keep taking candy from strangers and not expect to find myself hurt and used in the back of their trucks. After a while, I can’t even blame them.

  11

  Date Eleven: Finding Faith in Chatsworth

  I was sitting across from Noelle when she asked me, “So what qualifies as a date then?” She found me crying in my office and because she is a boss who cares, she sat me down to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I had told her about my visit to my dad, my fling with Jimmy, and my fear that this whole idea of 51 dates in 50 weeks was a pointless attempt for me to change an unchangeable situation.

  “I have someone for you,” Noelle offers.

  Noelle and I have never discussed men before. We talk about work and our families, and though I know she is divorced, she seems to have evolved past the point where needing a man is part of her life. She is everything I want to be, and fear I never will. Whereas I can never wake up in time to put on makeup or blow dry my hair, Noelle comes in every day looking like she’s been hand-painted. Her soft voice, her warm green eyes, her perfect auburn hair speak of a femininity that I can only imagine has won her a number of suitors.

  When she tells me that she has someone for me, I think she is referring to a guy. I begin to decline, but she stops me, “No, I think you might need some spiritual work.”

  I nod and begin to cry again because I do. I do very, very badly. Noelle is the first female boss I have ever been able to trust. In my years in books and film, I worked for a slew of notorious female executives. Most of them came up in the wild and rowdy seventies when to make it as a woman you either fucked the boss or were mean as hell. I generally worked for the latter. When I landed on Noelle’s desk, I had just moved back to L.A. after six months working for the most notorious boss in book publishing. She was my best friend one minute, taking me to movie sets and fancy restaurants and introducing me to celebrities like I too was someone important. But then, like all look good megalomaniacs, she turned, and she not only made it impossible for me to be her friend, she made it impossible to be her employee.

  I had returned to L.A. with her company in 2006 after first getting sober. I had so many hopes and dreams about what my life would be. I was going to be a famous book editor under her tutelage. I was sure that once I saw Oliver, the movie producer ex who I thought would change it all, we would reunite, and life would be what I had been waiting and hoping and staying sober for it to be.

  The minute I arrived back in L.A. with the publisher, I texted Oliver. We had broken up a good six months before I had moved back home to Dallas, and though we didn’t talk at first, we started reaching out to each other again after I left. And then I came back. It had been two years since Oliver and I were together. Two years since we fell apart. And I knew so fully, like I had never known anything before in my life, that we would get back together. Because I was sober now. I had been fixed. And there was nothing to stop him from loving me.

  He picked me up at the fancy Sunset Boulevard hotel where I was staying with the notorious publisher and took me to a restaurant near his house. He looked at me all starry-eyed and overwhelmed like he did when we first met. He told me how he had been working with a shaman, that the spiritual work had been teaching him about healing and wholeness and making right all the things that had been wronged. He said he would love to take me sometime. I wanted to reply, “Yes, yes, please take me. Take me wherever you’re going, and I will gladly follow.” But I didn’t. I might have tried to smile, but I was scared. I didn’t want to ever stop sitting across that table from him. I wanted that invite to stay there extended forever. And so the conversation stopped because I just couldn’t find the words to keep it going.

  “You know what’s always confused me about you, Kristen?” he asked.

  I came back to him. “What?”

  “You’re so smart, and yet, why do I sometimes feel like I am hanging out with a teenager?”

  It was a mean comment, but I didn’t have the strength or esteem to give it a proper response. “I don’t know, Oliver.” And I didn’t know. I still don’t.

  We drove back to his house, listening to Mozart. We sat in his driveway, and I smiled as I said, “He was just a child. Can’t you hear him? He’s playing with the music.”

  And Oliver looked at me as he picked up my hand, his eyes filling with love. He whispered, “I knew you got it, sweetheart.”

  We went into his house, and he put on Fellini’s 8 ½. We lay down on his bed as the opening sequence began. We had barely kissed or touched or even held each other, and then Oliver was asleep. Two years apart, so much had changed, and finally we were together again in the same bed that had once meant so much. And he falls asleep? I looked down at him just as I had done years before when we were actually dating, and I realized that even though I lay there sober and sane, for some reason, there was still a bridge between us that we just couldn’t cross together. He dropped me off at the hotel the next day, and though I didn’t want to admit it, I knew it was finally over.

  And so, as with most of the men in my life, I didn’t get what I wanted or expected at all. The fancy job, the romantic boyfriend, the big, bad, beautiful life I thought was almost mine—it was taken away just as quickly as it was offered. Two weeks afterward I quit the job with the publisher, relap
sed, and a month later found myself working as a secretary for Noelle, who today sends me to get some spiritual work.

  I drive out to Chatsworth for the appointment. Previously, I have only known Chatsworth to be horse country and the capital of the porn industry, but apparently it is also home to a large shamanic community, which includes the woman I am meeting today. Lidia is a therapist, but she has been trained by spiritual leaders throughout the Native Americas. She is also Jewish, and I like the idea of a Jewish Shaman. It’s like having the power of the two oldest tribes harnessed into the body of one woman.

  When we spoke on the phone a couple of weeks back, she asked me to write down any interesting dreams I had before I came to meet her. Oliver used to say, “If you want to lose anyone’s attention, start your sentence with, ‘last night I dreamed…’” So last night, I dreamed I was still dating Oliver, and we are out to dinner with two of my current friends, Nat and Reggie, who happen to be engaged, both in the dream and in real life. In real life, I am the bridesmaid in their wedding, so the bridesmaid/bride cliché is fully in play here. In the dream, however, it is Oliver who pulls out the diamond ring. He looks at me in full earnestness. And I look down, and I realize that he has gotten me some tacky modern number from the local mall jeweler.

  “Will you marry me?” he asks.

  I am upset that this man who I thought knew me so well has gotten me such an ugly ring. I want to say yes, but I am also in shock. He knows what kind of ring I would want. And the fact that he has gotten me something that I know even he would think is ugly tells me he really doesn’t care about this. Reggie and Nat eagerly await my response. But again, I can’t say anything. I am caught between everything I want and my fear that it’s not real, that it’s not going as planned, that if I say something, it might go away altogether. And so I sit there, frozen, until I wake up and wish desperately that I could go back.

  “It’s a good dream, huh?” I ask Lidia, whom I like immediately. She is small, toned, with yoga arms and graying blonde hair. She sits opposite me in a chair, sipping tea in a pair of loose white pants and a white tunic. But she uses the word “fuck” enough to throw off the stereotype.

  She nods, “You got a lot trapped in there, don’t you?” Like that perfect bolt of truth, it hits. I do have a lot trapped in there. And I can talk, and I can write, and I can do all the things we’re taught to do to get it out, but when I am forced to really speak, to really say the things I think, I just sit there staring dumbly at the person across the table from me.

  I am told to choose a stone out of the twelve sacred rocks she lays out on the ground. I want to choose the big, shiny, round ones that look like crystal balls. But I always want the big, shiny, round ones that look like crystal balls.

  Instead, I choose a grayish quartz that feels safe in my hand.

  “Good choice,” Lidia tells me. The entire time I am going through “the ceremony” as Lidia calls it, I wonder why it was a good choice.

  I lay still on the floor. I don’t cry. I barely emote at all. Lidia puts the stone on my sacrum. I can feel the tension flowing there before she even decides where to place the stone. She whistles, she blows, she passes magic wands over my body. I cannot help but hear the Woody Allen that lives somewhere in my psyche thinking, “So, it’s come to this.” I am becoming the California loony I always thought I’d be. But I let go of Woody Allen. I let go of daddies, and mommies, and being a secretary, and not having anyone, and all the bullshit that I like to wallow in to feel sorry for myself. I let the energy pulse through my body.

  And I feel something in me pulse back.

  Years ago, jacked up on booze and coke, I walked outside into a rainstorm and believed that there was so much energy in me that I could create balls of fire in the palms of my hands. The thing is, I still kind of feel that way. And as Lidia guides me with her stones and her blessings to the ancestors, and asks of the earth and sky and mountains to lead us through, down this path, I feel that energy course down my arms and into my palms once again. I feel spheres of power and hope, and I know that my path is so much bigger than RAD or Jimmy or Oliver or any who came before them. I know that my path is larger than 51 dates. I know that I understand very little and that all my words and alliterations and pretty poetry are just translations of a much larger source. And though that source feels deeply hidden, it’s there. And it’s real. And it’s what I need when I am sitting across from love, and I am terrified to respond.

  And then Lidia puts away her stones and opens the blinds, and we are back in her house in Chatsworth, home to horses and porn stars and this strange magical woman sitting across from me.

  12

  Date Twelve: Love Is a Lot like Basketball

  I’ve never actually seen a game of basketball, so I might be off on this, but I believe a rebound is when the ball is sent flying toward the hoop, with the hope and/or expectation that it is going to go in, only to bounce back out and return to play. In my life, rebound is just the easiest way to get over someone. And since my recent expected slam dunk with Jimmy Voltage wasn’t meant to be, I hope that my date tonight with Peter will put me back in the game.

  I was complaining to my friend Ivan the other day that I was having trouble finding dates when he told me that he had been going out on almost a date a day by using the Internet. The Internet. Why didn’t I think of that? Here I had been trying to meet people the good, old-fashioned way, and all it was getting me was a bunch of my friends with their faces twisted up, thinking, until they say, “Yeah. I don’t know anyone that you would like.” I try to explain that I would prefer to make that decision on my own, but apparently it’s not even worth the risk.

  Ivan is the friend who one would expect to become my perfect boyfriend at the end of this journey. We can talk about anything, we crack each other up, he’s there for me unconditionally, and we’re both sober. Unfortunately, there are just some men who will never be more than your friend.

  Outside of Ivan, however, I am beginning to wonder whether I might be willing to date anyone. Anyone who can take my mind off the strapping electrician with whom I spend way too much of my time having imaginary conversations. I am a big fan of the imaginary conversation. I could claim it as one of my hobbies—a bit like talking to yourself but on steroids, mixed with a healthy dose of chardonnay.

  A few years back, I once got so enraptured by my brilliant parting shot, my Oscar worthy speech to the mirror, that I forgot I was in my own apartment, alone. I walked dramatically across the length of my studio apartment, put my hand on the knob of the front door, and then stopped. I woke up from the fantasy and realized, “Holy shit. I’m storming out on myself.” To add insult to insanity, I was about to enter the hallway of my apartment building in a great big huff, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. But that’s fantasy for you: it’s dangerous at its worst, downright embarrassing at its best. So I do what any self-respecting woman with a habit for talking to herself does. I go online, and I find Peter.

  I’ve never dated a Peter before. The name is cute enough. Peter is an attorney from outside of Boston. He spent the last fourteen years in Chicago until last summer when he moved to L.A. for a job in Business Affairs at Fox. I don’t think people move halfway across the country at the age of thirty-seven without being prompted by something, and though he doesn’t say it, and I don’t ask, I’m going to assume it was a very serious breakup. She’s probably still bitching him out in the mirror.

  Peter and I meet at a local coffee shop because we’re not sure how long this date is going to last. The holidays are coming, and the place is decorated with just the right amount of red and green and depressing all over.

  “It’s hard to feel like it’s Christmas when it’s still seventy degrees outside,” Peter comments.

  “How long you been here, again?” I ask.

  “Eight months.”

  “Oh, yeah. It still sucks at eight months. Give it two years. It takes two years.”

  “In two years, will it still
be seventy degrees in December?”

  I feel for him, because coming out here with not much to hold on to, and an apparent taste for cold weather, was bold and brave, if not a little stupid. Peter looks like Clark Kent. He has a delicate nose, a sturdy jaw, and beautiful hazel eyes with thick dark lashes. He wears glasses and looks good in them too. Just like Clark Kent. And he’s hilarious. I don’t even think about what I would say to Jimmy if he walked through the door right now because I am too busy laughing. And then I remember the power of the rebound and that I have been here before.

  When Oliver and I first broke up, I already had someone lined up to take his place. I didn’t mean for it to happen that way, but in the midst of my movie-star love for that man I met someone else who caught my eye. Sabbath was tall and lovely, with rich black skin that seemed to warm itself from the inside out. His parents were from Côte D’Ivoire, and unfortunately for Sabbath, had never heard of the Ozzy Osbourne band when they named their only son after the Lord’s Day. Sabbath was a fashion designer at a downtown studio and was good friends with my neighbor. I still remember watching him walk up to me and my friends at a party and not being able to take my eyes off this too-cool man with his Christian Dior glasses and his friendly smile. When Oliver ended it, my neighbor made the call, and I learned the power of rebound.