Instant Love (11 page)

GARETH AND I
met again at the same Irish bar, this time on a Tuesday. I was a half hour late. I didn’t really care. He wore another suit, crisp and pressed as I remembered, but the rest of him had collapsed: his posture sagged; his arms, his shoulders, his head, and his neck were all slung forward and drooped down as if beneath the floor there were a giant vacuum slowly sucking in his enormous frame, bone by bone, pound by pound. He was sitting in a booth near the back by the kitchen, underneath a framed sepia-toned picture of a baseball player at bat. The frame was crooked. He did not rise when I joined him. I tried to straighten the frame as I sat, but it dipped down on the other side so the player and his bat were askew, aiming a shot at the sky.

“Thanks for meeting me,” said Gareth.

There were three empty pint glasses in front of him, and he gripped a full fourth one.

“I will make this brief. I was sad when our relationship didn’t work out. I felt very close to you immediately, as I told you at the time. I thought you and I had a real future together, even though we didn’t agree on the whole children issue, but I think you would have come around. So I have to wonder why it didn’t work out.”

I looked around me to see if anyone was listening. “We only went out on one date,” I said.

“Twice,” he corrected.

“I would hardly count meeting for a quick beer a date,” I said.

“To me, it was a date,” he said. Something in his voice, a tenderness unfamiliar in my daily existence, convinced me to play along.

“It was a date, sure,” I said soothingly. I inched toward the edge of the booth.

“So after two dates and several phone calls and countless e-mails I have to wonder, why didn’t it work out?”

I sat there and waited to hear a theory, and then I realized he was actually asking me a question. “Oh, you want me…? OK. I just wasn’t interested. It’s not a big deal, you’re simply not my type.”

He looked down, and made an impatient noise. Then he drew himself up, pulled his shoulders back, looked at the ceiling, and then proclaimed, “It’s because I’m fat.”

“You’re not fat,” I said.

“Hey, I know I’m fat. My mother says I’m fat, my doctor says I’m fat. Don’t bother lying.”

I struggled. There wasn’t a correct response. “I didn’t come here to discuss your weight,” I said.

“But you think I’m fat, right?”

I rested my head against the back of the booth, felt my back flatten against it. I shrugged my shoulders, swung my hands up in the air. “Do you want me to be the asshole here? Because I can be the asshole if that’s going to make you happy. Tell me what you’re looking for, because I’m more than willing to give it to you if it’s going to make you feel better.”

“Be my girlfriend,” he pleaded.

ROBERT COMES
into the room, dish towel on his shoulder, shaking droplets of water off his hand.

“So how did you leave it with him?” says Maggie.

“Let’s just say…I was the asshole,” I say.

Robert laughs, presumably at my use of a curse word. “Are you breaking hearts again?” he says. “Don’t worry, the right man is out there for you, just waiting for the right moment to sweep you off your feet.”

Maggie takes a sip from her wineglass and looks away. I was sorry I had made her sad. Robert notices it, too, and reaches his hand down to her shoulder, but she swats it away, as if it were a fly circling endlessly around her. And then I see her do something familiar. I have done it so many times myself I know exactly what is going on in her head at this moment. I see her pull into herself. I see her recede. But I don’t think she has much room for herself in there. Me, I’m hollow inside. There is only me, just me. I know that someday she’ll get sick of being full of Robert. I know she’ll puke him out of her system. But she’ll never get rid of me. I’m in her blood.

GARETH CONTACTED
me one last time. I didn’t tell Maggie that part. It somehow seemed better that she thought me only guilty of my usual callousness. He sent an e-mail a week after our last meeting. In it he apologized in a sincere and clean fashion. He had been having trouble finishing his latest book, he explained. He had been drinking too much, pints and pints of beer every night of the week, which was unlike him. “I’m not a drinker,” he wrote. “Not like that.”

There was an anger and confusion inside of him, and he did not know where to direct it so he had turned it on me, he explained. Well, he had turned it on a half dozen women he had dated in the last year, but of all of the ones he had tried to contact then, I was the only one who had responded.

“It is just hard in this city sometimes. Surely you know that.” (I did, of course.) “Sometimes you just need to get it out. And you were the one who agreed to see me. It wasn’t fair. There have been others who were much worse to me. You were, in fact, just fine.”

“I would have treated you like gold,” he wrote. “I say that not to imply that you missed out on something great, but just so you know that I had only the best of intentions.”

He asked for my forgiveness. He italicized the words for emphasis. If I could just give him that, he said he would feel better, he could move on toward attempting a life of clarity.

Telling him he was fat—that was not the worst thing I could have done to him. He already knew that. Never replying to that e-mail, that was when I was the asshole. But I could not find one word inside of me, neither kind nor cruel, to give to him. I had nothing left inside.

I TAKE THE
Metro-North home from Westchester. I cannot get home fast enough. Commuter trains should have wings, I think. Wings on engines.

In my apartment I turn on the computer, speed-dial my dating site. I survey the profiles and reflect on the reasons why I should get to know them better, why they are the one for me, if I am the one for them.

“I am sick of neurotic New York women,” says one. “I know what I want. You should also.”

Another swears he’s funny. He wants to make me laugh. He is all about
the laughter
.

A third has the profile name “No_Strings_Attached” and he is young and his jaw is set like a rock. “Strings are for puppets,” he writes. “I am not a puppet. Are you?”

No. I am not a puppet.

M
elanie moved to the island around the same time my marriage with Will was disintegrating into tiny pieces. I had first started noticing the pieces after an enormous fight, when he told me, “I can see now how someone could hate you.” Bam! It was like confetti shot out of a toy gun. The pieces started high in the air, spiraled around our eyes and lips and hands, and finally landed at our feet, covering the carpeting of our home. We would try so hard not to step on those pieces, but whenever I walked from the bedroom to the kitchen in the morning to make coffee and get myself out the door before he woke up, I’d step on something, like that time I got drunk in front of his mother at lunch and talked too loudly for a long time and ordered two desserts and ate half of each.

“You’re a spoiled child,” the piece of our marriage would squawk.

Will, too, would try to tread lightly, and he was better at it than I was, but sometimes the pieces got stuck on the bottom of his shoes and would make noise, like when he was driving and put his foot down on the gas when he thought it was safe for speeding, or hit the break hard, too hard, when he thought a cop might be coming up behind him.

“You’re reckless,” the little piece would intone. “And you’re a little dumb, to be quite honest.”

Eventually we were so afraid of stepping on our marriage, we began to tiptoe around all the time. It became perfectly silent in the house, which was good, but after a while the balls of my feet began to hurt, and then slowly every part of my body followed. It freaked me out at first, but then I remembered the nerve endings to your entire body end in your feet. The tiptoes were destroying me.

Melanie’s marriage fell apart for no good reason except for personalities that didn’t mix when things got rough. She had married Doug straight out of college, just like I had married Will. I was maid of honor at her wedding, and she was matron of honor at mine. When things went bad Melanie and I stuck together, and all our other friends left us behind. It’s like there’s this stink associated with the both of us, because we were too lazy or crazy or fat to make our marriages work. We did get a little fat, the both of us, sure, but that’s not why the marriages didn’t work. Only Melanie and I can understand this, and everyone else could kiss our asses. So our friendship strengthened as everything else crumbled. It was all we had left in the wreckage.

THE LAST TIME
I saw Melanie before her divorce was when she packed the last of her possessions into Bitsy McSherman’s massive SUV. She was moving to Bitsy’s house on the island, a ferry ride away from her husband, her family, and me, her best friend. I came by to say good-bye, and to offer interference between her and Doug if necessary. When I pulled up, Bitsy was in the front seat of the SUV, her outline faint behind a tinted window. Melanie was shuffling boxes and suitcases around in the trunk, reconfiguring the layout a dozen times until everything fit, so she’d never have to return for anything left behind. Doug was standing in the living room, staring out the front window.

I walked over to the window. I didn’t think I could make him feel better—I’m not good at that sort of thing; celebrating the good times is more my cup of tea—I just wanted to see his face, to see what he was feeling. He was dressed like he needed to do his laundry, in a tie-dyed T-shirt with a Ben & Jerry’s logo on it, and baggy jeans. His neck and back were slouched, and his hands were shoved firmly in his front pockets, as if that were the only thing keeping him standing. I noticed for the first time he was going bald.

I waved at him through the window, and he waved back. A row of shrubs separated us, so we just stood there, on opposite sides of the window, and looked at each other. Melanie went back in for one more box, and then she said something to Doug. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I saw Doug’s mouth move in response, and I read his lips.

“Don’t bother,” he said.

Melanie came back outside, and I followed her down to the car. She opened the door to the backseat, and threw her last box in there. There was a small jade plant in the box, the baby stalk of which had just begun to burst with thumb-shaped leaves. I found this surprisingly optimistic. There were also some photo albums, a high school yearbook, and a tiny table lamp, the kind you get in college for late-night reading in bed, so you don’t wake up your roommate. Melanie slammed the door shut. Such vigor, I thought. She hadn’t had this much energy in a while. I guess she was fueled by desperation, though I hadn’t known it was that bad. Shows you what I know.