My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  “I’ll be damned if you’re going to go around picking up other chicks using my good taste!” I shouted over the pile in my arms.

  “You can’t do that!” he protested. “Those were presents!”

  “And presently, I’m taking them back,” I said, marching off. Begrudgingly, I returned the repossessed shirts the next morning after a firm lecture from my roommate, Amanda, on the spirit of giving.

  “Okay, last question,” I said at the end of our interview. “People change a lot in relationships. Or sometimes the person that they always were just becomes clearer. How did your opinion of me change from the beginning of the relationship to the end?”

  He thought for a moment, started to speak, then stopped. I nodded encouragingly and he admitted with a grimace, “By the end of our relationship, you were no longer attractive to me. Like, I knew I’d once thought you were pretty, but by the end you’d become ugly to me.” Well, that stung, but I could tell that it had pained him to say it. To break the tension, I laughed—then so did Ben. I thanked him for his honesty.

  The third ex-boyfriend, Josh, was my high school sweetheart and most serious relationship of the three, and therefore the scariest. My fingers were actually shaking as I typed my pitch: “Hey, I’m working on this project where I try to face all my fears before age thirty so I’m going back and interviewing all my ex-boyfriends about our relationship (because how scary is that—right?! LOL!). Would you want to sit down and chat sometime soon? I can come to D.C.”

  “Hey there. Sounds dangerous! Ha!” Josh wrote back. “Can’t wait to hear more about it. You should come down the weekend after next! You can stay on my couch.”

  My surprise that he agreed quickly turned to worry. I hadn’t mentioned Matt in the e-mail and didn’t know if Josh was dating anyone himself. What if he thought this was an elaborate booty call? Surely he didn’t think I needed to cross state lines to get some action? But a few days later another e-mail from Josh arrived.

  “By the way,” he wrote, “my girlfriend, Monique, pretty much sleeps at my apartment every night. But don’t worry—she is happy to have you stay with us. We’re really looking forward to it.”

  Both relief and alarm surged through me. Relief because I now had a non-awkward reason to write back, “So am I! And the next time you guys are in New York you’ll have to meet my boyfriend, Matt.” The uneasiness came from the realization that not only would I be hanging with my ex-boyfriend for two days, but I’d also be sleeping fifteen feet away from him and his current girlfriend. Suddenly my decision to stay the night felt a little aggressive.

  “I can’t believe that you’re doing this,” Jess said when I called her in a mild panic the night before I left for D.C.

  I opened my laptop. “What? Going to D.C. to spend a weekend with my high school sweetheart and his practically live-in girlfriend? Or planning to cyberstalk the girlfriend before I go?”

  “Both. You know what? I’m coming over,” she told me. “I’m just leaving the gym, so I’ve showered but will be adorably sans makeup. Adorably meaning frighteningly.”

  “Bring a bottle of wine.” I was too addled to even remark on the revelation that Jessica had joined a gym.

  “I brought wine and Chris,” Jessica said when I opened the door to find the two of them on my doorstep. As soon as we had poured the wine, Jess hauled my computer into her lap.

  “First of all, let’s get a visual and see what we’re working with.” Within seconds, she’d pulled up Josh’s Facebook page and had identified the girlfriend via one of his photo albums.

  “Oh shit,” I breathed, reaching across Jessica and pressing a button to enlarge one of the pictures. Lustrous black hair and rich olive skin filled the screen. She was stunning. I made a despairing face at Chris and Jessica.

  “Okay, so she’s uncomfortably pretty,” she conceded.

  “She looks really fun, too,” I said miserably.

  “You can tell from a photograph that she’s fun?” Chris asked dubiously.

  “It’s her earrings—they’re fabulous.” Suddenly a horrifying thought entered my mind. “Oh God, do you think they’ll have sex while I’m there? Is that a turn-on? Like having sex when your parents are home?” I was down to half a pill a night, but it still took me at least an hour to fall asleep.

  “Hell yeah!” Jessica said. “A girl’s gotta mark her territory when her man’s ex is in the next room.”

  “We would,” Chris agreed.

  “Yeah, but we’re petty and small.” I buried my face in a pillow. “You guys! If I hear them having sex, I will seriously go into cardiac arrest.”

  “Earplugs,” Jessica advised, raising her wineglass and toasting their existence.

  “What if they’re all lovey-dovey in front of me and it’s weird?”

  “Why does it matter?” Chris asked. “You’ve got a perfectly wonderful boyfriend of your own to kiss and hump.”

  “I know, you’re absolutely right.” He was so wonderful, in fact, that when I’d asked him if he was okay with me visiting Josh and his girlfriend for the weekend, he’d replied, “This is someone you dated when you were kids and we’re not kids anymore. So, aside from the fact that I trust you unhesitatingly, it never really occurred to me to worry.” He had no reason to worry. It wasn’t that I thought I’d have feelings for Josh, but that I’d have feelings for Monique—jealous feelings. It was one of my worst qualities. I had the capacity to be jealous over guys I’d dated years ago, guys I didn’t even like. It was incredibly childish and surely spoke to some larger insecurity that should be explored with Dr. Bob, but first I had to get through this weekend.

  Josh had one of those boisterous voices that grabbed you by the shirtfront and said, “Now hear this!” He was a native Texan yet seemed like a scrappy kid from 1930s Brooklyn. One time when he was walking up the stairs, I saw him turn to the popular cheerleader directly behind him and say, “I’m gonna let you look at my ass, okay? It’s sensational, but try to contain yourself.” He was brash and inappropriate, and I loved him immediately. I figured out his schedule and rearranged my routes so that I ran into him between classes. I flirted with him stridently, slapping his butt as I passed him in the hallway.

  “Hey, no touching the merchandise!” he’d cry.

  We’d been dating for a few weeks when he invited me to the ROTC formal. I borrowed a friend’s blue satin dress that implied, erroneously, that I had breasts and my mom blow-dried my hair for the occasion. We were in the middle of a slow dance when a dozen of Josh’s ROTC buddies approached him eagerly, saying, “It’s almost time!”

  “Time for what?” I asked.

  “Actually that’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about.”

  “Okay . . .” My heart raced. He was going to ask me to be his steady girlfriend. Here in front of everyone!

  “Since my first ROTC ball freshman year, I’ve had this ritual of getting down on all fours and galloping around the dance floor while bucking like a mule,” he explained. “But I was thinking this year maybe you could ride me around the dance floor instead.”

  By the time I realized he was serious, the partygoers had formed a massive circle around us. Someone even had a video camera. Josh got down on his hands and knees and looked at me over his shoulder with a “how ’bout it?” expression. When your crush requests you take part in an elaborate donkey fantasy before your contemporaries, there’s really only one way to react. So I hitched up my floor-length gown, climbed on his back, and held on as tight as I could.

  The relationship lasted a year and a half. In that time, we engaged in romantic one-uppery with the kind of vigor that doesn’t make it past your teen years. He hijacked the school’s PA system and asked me to prom over the loudspeaker. On his birthday, I sent him a singing telegram. I took out an ad professing my adoration in the Houston Chronicle. He covered my car in roses while I was at work.
r />   “That could never happen in New York, by the way,” Jessica interjected. “Someone would steal that shit.”

  “And the hood ornament, just to make a point,” Chris added.

  The night he first said “I love you,” Josh showed up on my doorstep in a three-piece suit and took me to a candlelit restaurant in downtown Houston. Strolling hand in hand through a nearby park afterward, we came upon a majestic fountain. He scooped me up, carried me into the fountain, and slow-danced with me in his arms. “I love you,” he said. Then, grinning wickedly, he dunked me, completely soaking me and my cocktail dress. I shoved him down and he splashed me. Eventually, our peals of laughter drew a crowd, and everyone applauded as we dragged ourselves out and bowed.

  My relationship with Matt was steady to the point of being predictable. Josh had written long letters, detailing every aspect he loved about me and how he would die for me. Matt gave me a card on our third anniversary that read, “I’m grateful to have you in my life. I love you. Love, Matt.” I’m grateful to have you in my life. It was lovely, but it was also something I said to my friends. Hell, I think I’d even said it to my hairdresser. Was that enough passion? Would that sustain me over a lifetime?

  Jessica smiled thoughtfully, swirling her wine around the glass. “In New York, we can have the best of everything. It’s a city with limitless options. So we get accustomed to thinking that there’s always something better out there, because there usually is: a better apartment, a better job, a better meal at a better restaurant around the corner. We’re never satisfied. This city trains us to worry about the possibility of something better, so we’re unable to recognize when we actually have The One. Why do you think New Yorkers get married later than the rest of the country?”

  “Why did you and Josh break up?” Chris asked.

  “He was a year older than me and he went to college in Boston. We stayed together long distance, but it was too hard being in such different worlds,” I said. “You know how I knew it was over? On our eighteen-month anniversary, I’d planned an elaborate scavenger hunt for him, leaving clues at various landmarks in our relationship, leading to his anniversary gift, which I left at the fountain where he told me he loved me. But when I’d handed him the first clue, he’d sighed and looked annoyed. ‘How long is this going to take?’ he asked. ‘My mom needs the car.’ ”

  The next day I stepped off the bus in D.C., uncomfortably aware that Josh would see me before I saw him. Finally I caught sight of him waving happily behind the tinted window of his silver station wagon. His hairline had receded slightly, but otherwise he hadn’t changed at all.

  “How about hamburgers for lunch?” he asked when I climbed in.

  Between bites, we caught up on each other’s families. I was happy to hear his mother’s breast cancer was still in remission. He was a little appalled to hear that my little sister, who had been an infant when he and I dated, was now fourteen and had a boyfriend of her own. He told me he had recently applied to several business schools and was waiting to hear back.

  After lunch he drove me by the White House and various monuments whose significance was pointed out through the car window at fifty miles an hour.

  At a red light, he turned to me and asked, “So where do you want to go to do the interview? At a coffee shop somewhere?”

  I hesitated, suddenly overtaken by a wave of vulnerability. I was worried that if I were looking into his eyes and he told me something I didn’t want to hear, I might cry. And I didn’t want my blubbering to alter his answers. But I sensed I could keep it together as long as we were sitting side by side, each of us staring straight ahead.

  “How about we just drive around and I ask you the questions in the car?”

  If he thought this was a bizarre request, he didn’t show it. “All right. But you’re buying gas later.”

  He maneuvered the station wagon into Hains Point in East Potomac Park. We were driving in a big circle, I realized. There was a soothing, meditative quality to these laps. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that the act of drawing circles encouraged one to venture into his or her subconscious. The first objects that children draw are circles. To Jung, they represented the struggle and reconciliation of opposites and the eventual reunification of self.

  Including Matt, I’d dated only three guys since Josh. The few times I’d had coffee with Josh in the last ten years, I’d never once asked about who he was dating. I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, first question. How many girlfriends have you had since me?”

  He laughed in an affectionate way that made my question feel very young. “Gosh, let me think for a second. That’s hard to quantify. Does casual dating count or just relationships over a year?”

  Josh, I was both surprised and not surprised to learn, had a substantial inventory of exes. There was an entire category, in fact, devoted to girls named Amy. With sudden embarrassment, I realized that our relationship wasn’t one of the defining love affairs of his life, that I hadn’t meant to Josh what he’d meant to me. I was just a blip, a non-Amy.

  “How did you and Monique meet?”

  “Mo-Mo and I have been friends for years, but we realized last year our chemistry was more than friendship. It’s been absolutely wonderful.”

  This last line stung a little, as did his use of “Mo-Mo.” I busied myself with my list of questions and tried to betray nothing. Now it was time to dive into our relationship.

  “What attracted you to me initially and what ultimately turned you off?”

  “Your self-confidence, your vivaciousness. You could go into any room and be part of it immediately.” He said with a smile, “You could tell a story better than anyone.”

  This saddened me. The last time I’d felt like part of a room, I’d smoked some bad pot and believed I was a piece of furniture. I could hold my own one-on-one, but as I’d gotten older, groups had started making me nervous. “Why do you always clam up at dinner parties?” Matt used to ask before I stopped going to dinner parties. Everyone else seemed to have funnier, more intelligent things to say, and the more people who spoke, the lamer my opinions felt. The more time that went by without my saying anything, the more significance was attached when I finally did say something. (“She waited all this time to say that?” I imagined them thinking.) When I finally did speak, I’d be okay for a sentence or two, then I’d start to panic, lose track of what I was saying, and abruptly wrap things up by concluding, “So . . . yeah,” baffling everyone in the room. It started in college. I began writing out a few talking points the night before and kept the piece of paper on my lap during class in case I blanked out. I made sure to recite my talking points toward the beginning of class, before they could be judged in comparison to what everyone else had said. I contributed just enough to get my participation grade and no more.

  “And what about me didn’t you like?” I was scared that he’d rattle off a laundry list of negative characteristics I didn’t even know I possessed. Things that I couldn’t change. I tried to remember what Eleanor said: “A mature person is one . . . who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally.”

  “You were too possessive,” he said immediately.

  One incident came to mind. Josh and I had been in line outside an eighteen-and-up club and a limousine had rolled up bursting with a bachelorette party. Standing up in the sunroof had been a group of drunk women with big hair that brought to mind tulips in a too-short vase as they wavered back and forth.

  “Lookin’ good, ladies!” Josh had shouted. No sooner had they beckoned him with their long acrylic fingernails than he’d started running toward the limo, leaping onto the roof and diving headfirst into the sunroof. His legs were still hanging out. I could see groping hands full of fake fingernails reaching up from inside the car, trying to pull him all the way in. I’d marched over, plunged my hand into the sunroof, and dragged him out by the back of his pants.


  “Well, to be fair, you did cheat on me. It’s not like I didn’t have reason to be paranoid.” I could laugh now, though his infidelity had been devastating at the time. “Do you have any regrets about our relationship?”

  “I really regret cheating on you.” A few months after we started dating, Josh and his friends had taken a trip to Austin, where he hooked up with a UT sorority girl. “Do you regret punching me in the face when you found out?”

  “Not in the slightest,” I said cheerfully. “Have you ever cheated on anyone else?”

  “No. How could I after seeing what that did to you? We never got past it.”

  He was right. The cheating incident upset the power balance in our relationship. For the rest of the time we dated, it came up every time we disagreed about anything, no matter how small. Sometimes while we were kissing, I’d picture him making out with the sorority girl (who I knew—after demanding every sordid detail—was short, curvy, and brunette, my polar opposite) and my mood would instantly sour. It haunted me for years, long after we’d broken up.

  “I’m a big flirt, though,” Josh said. “A girl can’t hold on to me too tight.”

  “What’s Mo-Mo like?” I asked, testing out the nickname.

  “Mo-Mo is very chill and not possessive. She’s the most easygoing person I’ve ever met.”

  “Okay, anything else you didn’t like about me?”

  “You hated traveling, and I remember thinking I could never be with someone who hated traveling.”

  It was true. Even on vacations that required nothing more than drinking on a beach, traveling left me uneasy. I hated the feeling of being in transition. There was a nervousness in my stomach like when I was having a problem but hadn’t yet figured out the answer. The problem only felt solved once I’d returned home, my belongings were unpacked, and I was back to my routine. Josh spent the year after college backpacking his way across three continents. He ran with the bulls in Pamplona, hiked the jungles of Thailand, climbed glaciers in Argentina, and found work picking grapes on a vineyard in France. International travel—especially alone—had been on my list of fears from the start. I was tempted to tell Josh about my plans to climb Kilimanjaro to show him how much I’d changed. I knew he’d be both jealous and impressed. But that wasn’t what I’d come here to do, so I stuck to my questions.