51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (9 page)
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Authors: Kristen McGuiness
BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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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.
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?
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?
“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.
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.
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, relapsed, 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.
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