Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me (19 page)

“I
hated
my photograph, Harry,” she said. “Surely you didn’t expect me to give you a photograph I hated.”

Then she lowered her eyes.

“And I was afraid of you then. You were so sophisticated.”

All of this was news to Harry. The photograph explanation made sense, but the thought of Harry being sophisticated at twenty—and of someone being afraid of him—was laughable. He wasn’t sure how sophisticated he was right that minute.

“I wasn’t ready for you then,” she added, leaving the impression—unless Harry was way off the mark again—that she just might be ready for him now.

To shore up his man-of-the-world credentials, Harry stretched back and said he had done just about everything. She matched him in the erotic department by saying she had done just about everything herself. Then she cocked her head and thought for a second, as if to set the record straight.

“Except two things.”

Harry didn’t inquire as to what they were. Why take the risk of having the reunion come to a crashing halt. But he certainly did wonder what the two things were. He guessed that one of them had to do with the backdoor route. As to the second, he didn’t have a clue.

“I guess I’ve been waiting for the right time to do them.”

Harry couldn’t handle that one at all, so he let it sit for a while. Then she asked him if he was free for dinner. She was meeting her sister and brother-in-law, who was a psychiatrist. The plan was for them to attend a party on Riverside Drive for a woman who was dying. Friends and relatives had been invited to sit around with her, in a party atmosphere, with incense burning, while she continued to die.

“It’s a kind of die-in, I suppose,” she said. “Would you like to come along? Afterward, we have a reservation at a Thai restaurant.”

Harry said that under normal circumstances, he would love to join her, but he had promised Julie he would be home in time for dinner.

She pressed him on it, but he held his ground. And then he paid the check and walked her to the elevator, which took a long time to get there. While they were waiting, she tilted her head up to be kissed, in the sorority style, and Harry took her up on it, not quite getting all of her mouth, no doubt because he was torn twenty different ways. But he felt the length of her, the long legs and the spare chest. Then his hands dropped to the substantial, maybe oversubstantial bottom that didn’t quite go with the rest of it—and Harry saw for the first time that it wasn’t his youth and inexperience and fear that had kept him from taking her into the woods many years back. The fit wasn’t quite right, and it wasn’t quite right now. He had probably known it then too, but had preferred to blank it out so that he could hold on to his sweet agony in the years that followed. Still, he enjoyed her fragrance, the freshness of her mouth, the rich feel of her fur coat against his cheek. Harry had been leading a quiet, pleasant life, but there had been something missing, and now he thought he knew what it was.

“Would you like to come up for a drink?” she asked.

He looked at his watch and said he’d love to, but that he had better not.

“I have to get moving if I want to miss the rush hour.”

“Well,” she said, clearly disappointed, “if you ever get to Charlotte . . . ”

He thought about her house and the twins and the way she lived, but he knew he was never going to see any of it. All the same, he told her that if he was ever in the area of Charlotte he would be sure to look her up.

They shook hands, and with her fragrance still trailing after him, Harry headed straight for the gift shop. Because of the kiss he felt he had better pick up something for Julie. He had been struggling with a project that had to do with wood nymphs and, as luck would have it, he found a vanity table mirror that had a wood nymph for a handle. Harry picked it up and was about to bring it over to the sales clerk when he spotted a gossip columnist he knew at the magazine rack. He was all filled up with his recent experience and decided to tell the gossip columnist about it, even though he didn’t know her very well.

“You’ll never guess what just happened,” he said. And then it all came pouring out in a rush, starting with the college romance and his broken heart, the passage of time and then, years later, the letter, all of it culminating in the lunch he’d just had at Trader Vic’s. She listened without comment and when he had finished, she pointed to the mirror and said, “That is the tackiest piece of shit I have ever seen.”

There was still some daylight remaining when he got home. He went straight up to the bedroom and found Julie curled up on the bed, with a lapful of mysteries, puffing on a Nat Sherman cigarello and working her way through a six-pack of Amstel Lights. In other words, all of her favorite things to do. He wondered how one person could read so many mysteries until one day he caught her skipping ahead and unconscionably peeking at the last page of one.

“So how’d it go, stud?” she asked, not quite taking her eyes off the book she was working on.

“Just fine,” he said.

The casual tone made her look up.

“What do you mean by that?”

“What I said,” he answered, slinging his coat on top of the jumble of clothing piled up on a chair. “It went just fine.”

Harry gave her the gift and when she had unwrapped it she said it was very nice. The lack of enthusiasm didn’t bother Harry. It took her a while to warm up to gifts. In another month or so, she would go around saying it was one of the best things she had ever owned.

“Was she gorgeous?”

“In a way,” said Harry, popping open one of her precious Amstels.

“In what way was that?” she asked, her interest picking up. And then, with a playful kind of panic, she said, “
Harry,
you didn’t
do
anything, did you?”

“How can you ask a question like that?” he said, continuing the game.

And then, before she could get out another one of her queries, with her eyes dancing, he sunk down beside her in the unmade bed in the tangle of beers and mysteries and laundry and cigarettes and bluejeans that was his life whether he liked it or not and hugged her so hard he almost broke her bones. He knew then that he loved her upside down and inside out, fat or skinny, rich or poor, sick, healthy, the whole list. He loved her wet green eyes, the chuckle, her rough hands, the right one extended, palm up, when she wanted to make a serious point. He loved her whiskey voice, her teenage breasts, her crazy hair after a shampoo, and before one, too, and if she didn’t want to be buried right next to him, he’d be disappointed, but that would be all right, too, as long as she gave it some serious thought. He wanted her, and if he didn’t know it the instant he met her, he knew it ten minutes later.
Her
. The very word made him weak.

He just wished she’d wear a skirt once in a while.

Notes Towards a Unified Theory of Dumping

by Sam Lipsyte

Introduction

What is dumping? Why do people dump other people? Is it because they don’t want to be with those people? Is it because they want to be with other people? Is the drive to dump an evolutionary adjustment? Did early man dump? By early man do we mean really hairy man? Hairy like my great-uncle Seymour, or even hairier? These are not idle questions. Just because I am often idle, it doesn’t mean you have to drag the questions into it, call them idle, too.

In 1995 I was awarded The McDonnell-Douglas “Smart Guy” Fellowship to continue my work in the fields of Applied Desire and Advanced Biffing. My proposal centered on the notion of a
Unified Theory of Dumping
, an idea first broached by my mentor, Dr. Benny Wallinger, and his research partner, Shem Orsley. Many are doubtless familiar with
The Stanford Dumping Experiment
and the terrible effects it produced in otherwise healthy subject couples. Anybody unfamiliar with those unfortunate events would do well to consult Orsley’s account,
The Devil’s Data: The Corruption of Benny Wallinger.
Though both scientists died some time ago (Wallinger at the hand of his fifth wife, Gwenda), and all of their research was discredited, the notion of a
Unified Theory of Dumping
continued to haunt me, even during the completion of my major work,
Bifurcations: Penile Duality in a Multivalent World.

Still, my research remains unfinished, and I fear my empirical powers have begun to wane. Herewith I offer my notes towards a
Unified Theory of Dumping
with the hope that the next generation of scientists will not shirk from the task. Now that global climactic calamity is increasingly difficult to refute, it is imperative that the scientific community develop a workable theory of dumping so we may better understand why our society sucked so bad before it was completely underwater.

I’d be lying if I didn’t also admit to a personal stake in this project. Simply put, I am not just an objective observer of dumping phenomena. I have long been a victim of our ignorance of their properties as well. Indeed, had I been born to a future age that better understood dumping, I could have been spared a great deal of suffering. But such was not my fate. Like Galileo and other trailblazers before me, I have martyred myself to a dogged pursuit of the truth, risking penury, calumny, and many other things that end in
y.
But until my dying breath I will endeavor to understand precisely which natural forces colluded to obstruct my happiness.

The following cases are culled from my own experience, and are offered with the expectation that such anecdotal evidence is but the first step in the long march toward a comprehensive knowledge of dumping, a phenomenon I believe may turn out to be closely linked to certain unnamed vixens who, if you’ll excuse such a flight of lyrical fancy in a man of science, thrill to heel-stab our trusting hearts like so many crush porn gerbils, and then use the resulting organ paste to rouge their hideous death mask visages. In other words, I hope my notes will help.

Case #25

It was maybe the fortieth time I’d done that fake reach for my wallet in a restaurant. We both knew I didn’t have any money. We were very young and not really in love but we liked to drink gin together and watch
Star Trek
reruns and eat nice dinners and later have gin-soaked post-dinner Trekkie sex. She was an extremely elegant woman. I know the
Star Trek
part might make some doubt me, but think of the body and poise required for those uniforms. I’m not saying she wore one. It’s not my place to say that.

She was witty and warm. Worst of all, she had money, and I had none. At the time I preferred to view it as “dining out on Star Fleet’s tab,” but I still wonder what made her buy me a really nice dinner thirty-nine times and then on the fortieth suddenly snap, say, “You know what, I’m sick of you reaching for your wallet like you have any money in it, and I’m sick of buying you dinner and gin and I’m sick of driving you around everywhere, even to go hang out with your friends without me, like you’re my kid and you’re in kindergarten or something. So I hope you enjoyed that sushi because I’m cutting you off. We’re done. We’re not going to see each other anymore. And yes, I’ll drive you to Steve’s house now.”

Why did it happen at that dinner and not another? Did it have something to do with the
Star Trek
reruns being on hiatus for a few weeks? Again, there is much to explore, but my scientific hunch is that there may be what can only be called a “tipping point” at work here, by which I mean precisely that: a point where it was incumbent upon me to offer to pay the tip. By my calculations I believe this occurred at dinner #38. Duck confit.

Case #13

Due to reasons I still cannot quantify, it is often the end of a relationship that allows one to register its prior existence. During junior high I was “going out” with a girl who made me put my finger in her all the time. That was our big activity. I didn’t even do that much with my finger. We’d stare in each other’s eyes and not kiss, and then I’d put my finger in her. She told me to never talk to her around other people.

There was a class trip down to Washington, D.C. It was supposed to be the highlight of the year. The lead teacher on the trip, Mr. Matossian, told us it would be the “greatest experience of our lives.” He made it clear that by the “greatest experience of our lives” he didn’t mean our lives so far. He meant this would be the peak of our lives, and that everything after this would be pain and disappointment.

We were quite excited. The year before, according to rumors, a boy had been arrested for defacing the Lincoln monument with a turd doodle. The cops, Lincoln fans, beat the boy with phone books. Only because Mr. Matossian had certain contacts in the law enforcement community was the boy released without charges. We were all eager to be beaten with phone books and then rescued by Mr. Matossian. I was also eager to put my finger in the girl the whole day’s ride down to Washington. She made a big announcement about how she couldn’t believe she had to sit next to a loser like me, but she’d also brought a blanket and as soon as our bus pulled out of the ShopRite parking lot, I went to work. The trip turned out sort of boring, but that was by far the greatest bus ride of my life. Maybe that’s all Mr. Matossian meant.

But a strange thing happened afterward, or rather, the next fall, when we attended high school. We suddenly weren’t doing that thing with my finger anymore. We lost contact with each other. I asked her what had happened, but she seemed not to hear me. She looked at me as though she’d never seen me before. At first I wondered if I was witnessing the onset of some kind of cognitive dysfunction, but it later occurred to me that, against all scientific probability, or at least in contradiction to my limited sense of these matters, she had been, in fact, using me. After further research, the idea that women sometimes use men, and not just vice versa, became quite apparent to me. Some of this research was personally quite painful, but I’d be lying if I said that, given the chance, I wouldn’t conduct my studies all over again. Some pain doesn’t hurt at all. It tingles.