Swish (12 page)

What if it was me?

Could it be that my refusal to let him in or show him any real part of myself or see any real part of him had something to do with why I had felt it wasn’t working?

He did, after all, fit most of my requirements: he was handsome, smart, funny, compassionate, and a top. What if he was stimulating too and I just hadn’t noticed? Furthermore, not only was he a medical student and a gifted painter, but he had at one point in his life actually
hung drywall.
I have never even touched drywall, for fear that I might die or get dust on my clothes.

In the weeks following our Yom Kippur conversation, we spent more time together than we ever had when we were dating—he said he felt a lot better having gotten things off his chest—and I found myself wanting more and more to try again, if he’d even remotely consider such a thing, that is, given the cad I’d turned out to be the first time around.

Eventually I realized that the only thing to do was to ask him. I was prepared for unequivocal rejection—what sane person, after all, would stick his finger in that pencil sharpener again?—but held out a slim hope that he might not be sane.

So we went to another movie (this time it was
Runaway Jury,
the quality of which augured far better for the subsequent conversation than
Underworld
had) and then to dinner at Burritoville. I ate my chips and salsa and tacos in a fugue state, wanting at every moment to speak but unable to do so.
If I can just say one word,
I thought,
I will have committed myself and I can finish.
So finally I choked out, “There’s,” thereby committing myself, and followed it with “something I want to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” he said.

The silence that followed this exchange lasted not for periods but for eras. Staring at the table, because once again I couldn’t look him in the face, I kept beginning. “I…I wa—…I…”

And finally, hidden somewhere in the Cimmerian depths of my psyche, I found a store of courage previously unknown to me, screwed it to the sticking place, and said, “I want to ask you out on a date.”

He looked at me briefly and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

It is difficult to walk while trying at the same time not to explode in flames, but somehow I managed. Eventually he said, “I like you. And I’m really attracted to you. But…what’s going to be different this time?”

I started speaking, stammering even more than I usually do when I’m nervous. I talked about the powerful effect our conversation on Yom Kippur had had on me; I talked about coming to see him in a new light; I talked about my understanding of what a blackguard I’d been. “I’m a different person than I was a year ago,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“I mean, you can think about it, you don’t have to give me an answer now, or if your answer’s no I completely understand and—”

“No, I mean, okay, I’ll go out on a date with you.”

Then I burst into tears.

Which was the first time I’d done that in front of him, despite having dated him for nine months. So I was already doing better on the emotional honesty front, as I have the urge to burst into tears at least twelve times every day but I always bottle it up. A couple nights later we went to dinner at a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn and I spent the whole evening in agony because the umbilical hernia left over from when I was fat opened up and started letting my intestines out through my belly button. Since I couldn’t walk, we took a cab back to E.S.’s apartment, where he manually reduced the hernia—that’s really what it’s called—and we’ve been together ever since. He stopped reading my blog long ago.

For Valentine’s Day, I baked E.S. an apple pie. He said it was the best apple pie he’d ever had, including all the apple pies I’d baked him before. He said it was perfect. I was quite pleased with this praise, as he is never so effusive unless he really means it.

But two days ago, as we were bringing the now-empty pie plate back to my apartment, we had the following conversation:

FAUSTUS:
I need to find a smaller pie plate. The piecrust recipe I use doesn’t generate enough dough to fill this one comfortably.

E.S.:
Yeah, the crust on that pie was a little bit thin.

FAUSTUS:
I thought you said it was the best apple pie you’d ever had.

E.S.:
It was.

FAUSTUS:
But when you said it was perfect you were
lying
.

E.S.:
No, I wasn’t! It was perfect!

FAUSTUS:
Except for the tissue-thin crust, which you hated.

E.S.:
Look, there’s going to be a flaw in any pie.

FAUSTUS:
Oh, so I’m incapable of making edible pastry.

E.S.:
It was perfect. But I think of perfection in human terms.

FAUSTUS:
Why on earth would you do such a ridiculous thing?

E.S.:
Are you going to be like this forever?

FAUSTUS:
Yes.

—The Search for Love in Manhattan,
8:26 a.m., February 26, 2005

E.S.’s real name is Mike. He does not speak eight languages, or even five. His conversation is more taciturn than sparkling. He misspells words and mispunctuates sentences. He is losing his hair and when I am with him my faults do not disappear; they are often in fact grotesquely magnified. His teeth are crooked and no whiter than anybody else’s. He is not the man I wanted.

But he is smart and funny and handsome and stimulating and profoundly compassionate and great in bed. He has a stronger sense of empathy than anybody I’ve ever met. He is a psychiatrist in a hospital where he cares deeply about very sick people who think they are the Emperor of Japan or the sun’s sister or a butternut squash. He paints beautiful and complex pictures of my dog. He admires me and my work and finds me handsome and puts up with the fact that I am crazy. He likes me even though I am vengeful and punitive. He is the only man I’ve ever dated who I didn’t want to be when I grew up and I love him very much.

So why is it that I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night paralyzed by doubt, staring out the window until the closest thing to certainty I can find is the fear that I’m settling and that really I should hold out for the polyglot millionaire?

And if I’m on a search for love in Manhattan, then why am I moving to Brooklyn with Mike in two weeks?

Why am I frightened that, if I ever do to him in bed what he usually does to me, I will despise him afterward for allowing me to take care of him rather than the other way around, for abdicating his responsibility as my protector and leaving me undefended and alone?

He is an extraordinary man and even after these paragraphs appear in print he will love me.

And as I go to sleep beside him I pray that when I wake up tomorrow that will still be enough.

O
N
T
EACHING
A
EROBICS

I
would probably never have become a step aerobics instructor if the first step aerobics class I attended had not been taught by my soul mate. John was not only scorchingly hot but also, I discovered by Googlestalking him after I got home, a Doctor of Physics. Oh, and just for fun, fluent in Italian.

Naturally I became a regular at his class. I made prodigious efforts to help him understand that he was my soul mate, including but not limited to spending days drafting an e-mail asking him out and then sending it and then going mad with fear when I didn’t hear back from him immediately and finally doing the bravest thing I had ever done in my life, which was calling him and actually
leaving him a message asking him out on a date.
(This might possibly have been a braver thing to do if I hadn’t written the message out beforehand because I was going to call when I knew he was teaching, after I had called earlier and he had answered and I had hung up and he had *69ed me and called back and I had pitched my voice a major third higher than usual and affected a Southern accent and apologized for dialing the wrong number.)

The voice mail he left in response to my message did not contain the word “yes.”

Due to poor planning on my part, I couldn’t go to his next class, and I was leaving town the day after that, which meant it would be weeks before I saw him, and he would think I had stopped coming to his class because I was in love with him and couldn’t deal with being rejected, and I would never be able to go to his class again because then I would have to see him and be humiliated. I was about to start vomiting in frustration until I checked his website and saw that he would be subbing for another instructor the next morning. The class was at an appallingly early hour but obviously I had no other choice.

When I ran into John on the gym floor before class, he seemed pleasantly surprised to see me; I pretended to have had no idea he was going to be there, and deceitfully claimed that I had a meeting in the neighborhood and had figured I’d just stop by the gym beforehand. I knew from a mutual friend that John had recently returned from a trip to Italy, so I’d practiced several amusing things to say offhand in Italian once he mentioned that he spoke Italian, but by the time I realized he wasn’t going to mention that he spoke Italian I’d already said all the amusing things in English, and I didn’t trust myself to improvise, so I told him I had to get a drink of water and ran into the locker room.

Class actually went quite well once it started, and I managed to fix my mouth in the semblance of a smile for most of the hour, though this was made more difficult by my uncertainty about whether my staring at him would come across as appropriately watching the teacher or inappropriately gazing at him in pitiful doomed love.

When John went over to the stereo to change the tape, muttering rhetorically, “What’s next?” I said, “Chocolate,” a piece of humor for which I think I should receive a great deal of credit given my emotional state at the time.

He stared at me, looking baffled, and said, “What?”

Obviously he hadn’t heard me, so I took a deep breath and croaked “Chocolate!” a little louder.

“What?”

“CHOCOLATE!” I screamed. He continued to stare at me, and somebody else said, “Abs!” and he turned to her and said, “No, abs is later.” Then he put in a new tape and I killed myself.

Unfortunately, John didn’t notice, so I had to finish the class. I spent the cooldown period deciding to give up step aerobics in despair, but I knew that I would never actually do it, because sadly I had come to enjoy step aerobics too much.

My problem with most exercise is that, while it engages me physically, it leaves me mentally unfettered, which is never a good thing. I’ll lie on the bench or sit on the stationary bike or stand on the treadmill for however long I’ve committed to doing so (well, for however long I’ve committed to doing so minus fifteen minutes), and as I grunt conspicuously with each repetition or pretend I’m pedaling as fast as I can or bop my head in time to my iPod while sauntering along there is absolutely nothing for my mind to do but spin around in ever-tightening circles far more agonizing than the torture to which I am subjecting my body. This is the main reason I find step aerobics so appealing: you have to pay really close attention to what you’re doing for an hour or so, or else you risk getting the steps wrong and looking like a moron in front of the entire class. And when you’re paying really close attention to what you’re doing for an hour or so, well, that’s an hour or so you can’t spend thinking about how if you had just gotten Thad Sapphire the small Valentine’s Day basket in your senior year of college instead of the big one with the teddy bear you wouldn’t have freaked him out and he would have wanted to date you and now you would be happy.

Since I spend basically all my time thinking about how if I had just gotten Thad Sapphire the small Valentine’s Day basket in my senior year of college instead of the big one with the teddy bear I wouldn’t have freaked him out and he would have wanted to date me and now I would be happy, I found the opportunity to turn my thoughts elsewhere very appealing. So I started going to other step classes taught by other instructors, and then I started getting to know some of those other instructors (a process rendered less exciting but also less intimidating by their consistent failure to be both Doctors of Physics and fluent in a Romance language), and after I had been stepping for nine or ten months I was talking to one of these instructors after class and he said, “Hey, you should think about teaching,” and I froze.

Because what on earth could be sexier than being an aerobics instructor?

An aerobics instructor who had
published a book
?

And who
wrote musicals
?

And who
knew French and Italian and German and ancient Greek
though he’d forgotten most of the first three and all of the last and who
had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard
though he’d barely passed his general exams and who
spent all his time looking up things that nobody else knew anything about so that people would think he was smart and like him the most or at least pretend not to notice how pathetic he was
?

Secretly I believe that most of us have a fixed amount of talent we can distribute as we choose between our minds and our bodies. Some people spread themselves evenly and are sort of smart and creative and sort of in shape. Other people pour all their energy into developing one quality and become expert mathematicians or fashion models, but their complementary facets show a lack of focused attention: nobody admired Einstein for his well-developed quadriceps, and Giselle Bündchen’s name is nowhere to be found on the list of luminaries Ban Ki-moon has consulted about the International Compact on Iraq.

I would never be a Doctor of Physics, so I understood that the zenith of perfection John had attained was beyond my reach, and I was okay with this, except in August when my therapist was out of town. But if I was both a mental genius and a physical one, if I became not only a composer and writer and polyglot and Harvard honors grad but a composer and writer and polyglot and Harvard honors grad
and aerobics instructor
, then what conclusion could I draw but that my terror of ever making a mistake and leading the cute guy next door with the funky haircut to stop speaking to me was groundless because I am actually
way better than everybody else
?

So I practiced and passed my certification test and started teaching and was bad at it and got better and got better still and picked up gigs at fancier gyms and now I teach eight classes a week, give or take, and sometimes I even have fun doing them.

But none of that is as important as the fact that I can think of myself as an aerobics instructor. Because now, when I step into a subway car afraid of every single person I see, at least I can say to myself, well, you’re probably the only one on this train who can render the date in the style of the French Revolutionary calendar
and
bench-press more than his own body weight.

Despite my myriad achievements, however, my self-loathing has unfortunately refused to accept that I am the boss of it, and in fact has discovered an even more pernicious way to gain the upper hand. When I’m teaching, Thad Sapphire and the Valentine’s Day basket are usually far from my thoughts, but what replaces them is worse, as illustrated in the following table representing a typical class.

Of course, there are occasions on which this internal monologue is hushed too, and when this happens I tend to long for its return.

Rather than using well-known recordings, the companies that release aerobics CDs usually just get the rights to songs and rerecord them in the appropriate format. This means that, when you buy CDs for an aerobics class, even if you know the standard recordings of songs, you don’t really know what these versions will sound like until you hear them. If you are a responsible teacher, you listen to your CDs ahead of time to get a feel for the high points and the more relaxed moments, so that you can adapt your routine to the music coming out of the speakers. If you are me, you don’t.

Most of the time this presents no significant difficulties. But one day in a class I was teaching with music I hadn’t previewed, the CD moved to the next song and suddenly I began to feel very strongly that I had heard this music before. As I continued to call out the steps, I thought, wait, can this really be a cover of
that
song? And shortly thereafter it became clear that yes, this really could be a cover of that song, which was “Without You.”

No, I can’t forget this evening,

Or your face as you were leaving,

But I guess that’s just the way the story goes.

You always smile, but in your eyes your sorrow shows.

No, I can’t forget tomorrow

When I think of all my sorrow,

When I had you there but then I let you go….

I can’t live if living is without you.

I can’t live, I can’t give any more.

After about fifteen seconds of trying to teach to the song, I ran over to the stereo, said merrily, “Okay, folks, we’re going to the next song because I have totally traumatic associations with this one!” and forwarded the CD to the next track, which was, if memory serves, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

I’m sure my students thought I’d skipped “Without You” because it was a breakup song, which was fine by me. Because my traumatic associations with the song have to do not with any romantic entanglements but with my mother’s miscarriage of the child who would have been my older brother. She told me a story once, when the record player had gone quiet, about leaving her doctor’s office after getting the news, waiting in the car while my father went into the pharmacy to get her anti-cramp medication, and turning on the radio just in time to hear the DJ introduce “Without You.” I’d noticed that whenever we listened to the song she tended to get a funny look on her face, but this was the only time I ever heard her say why. And now I can never hear “Without You” and not think of my mother there in the turned-off car, mourning her dead child—whom she and my father had been referring to as Junior—and knowing that even if she had more children her diabetes would eventually ravage her body and then kill her in the prime of her life. I can’t hear that song without thinking of her blighted hopes and her constant struggle against pain and her childhood lived in fear of a monstrous mother and the magnitude of what she was able to accomplish in the world despite the forces ranged so mercilessly against her.