Falling for Me Read online

  Falling for Me

  How I Hung Curtains,

  Learned to Cook,

  Traveled to Seville,

  and Fell in Love . . .

  Anna David

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE: Falling Apart

  CHAPTER TWO: Coming Together

  Part Two

  CHAPTER THREE: Feathering the Nest

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Cook Out

  CHAPTER FIVE: Fashion Focus

  CHAPTER SIX: The Outside Me

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Inward Me

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Behavior Modification

  Part Three

  CHAPTER NINE: The Don Juan, the Younger Man, and the Married Man

  CHAPTER TEN: The Eligibles

  Part Four

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Honing In on the Issues

  CHAPTER TWELVE: The Rich, Full Life

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Anna David

  Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  Falling Apart

  If you’d like to be loved, then love.

  —Sex and the Single Girl

  I’m not supposed to be here.

  I don’t mean “here”—standing in an unmoving line in the middle of Madison Square Park waiting for a cheeseburger I don’t want on a hot June day.

  I mean that I’m not supposed to be the 30-something with two cats, one toolset I don’t know how to use, and zero prospects on the horizon.

  I’m not.

  And yet I am.

  How in God’s name has it taken me so long to see this?

  Hey,” he said as he sauntered over to where I was on my phone in the corner of a room. We were at a party in an L.A. warehouse and I was checking my voice mail. Thrown by his directness, by the way he walked right up to me even though I was busy, and then by how he looked at me—again, so directly—I hung up the phone even though I was in the middle of listening to a message I’d been waiting for. “You look stressed,” he said. He appeared bemused.

  This guy wasn’t gorgeous; his brown hair was starting to gray, his face was a little pinched, he wore glasses and was neither rugged nor slim. But for some reason, I shook as I smiled at him. “And you look amused by that,” I responded.

  He laughed—a loud, guttural guffaw. “You were very focused on what you were doing,” he said. “It made me want to see if I could break your focus.” I noticed that stubble decorated his cheeks and chin.

  “Mission accomplished,” I said. Under normal circumstances, I would have been annoyed—being accosted by a stranger doesn’t tend to bring out my good-natured cheer. But nothing about what was happening felt normal: the air was suddenly charged with energy from some otherworldly place.

  We introduced ourselves. When he told me his name was Will, I suddenly realized he was the painter my friend had been telling me earlier was going to be at this party. Since my knowledge about art was somewhere between minimal and nonexistent, I’d only half listened when she’d talked about how he was a hero of sorts in the art world, credited with creating some new medium that enraged purists but was celebrated by modernists, and how his work sold for millions of dollars. But I didn’t tell him that I’d just figured out who he was; by this point, I was focused on his eyes, which, now that he’d removed his glasses and tucked them into the front pocket of his white button-down shirt, I could see were swimming-pool blue. They contained vestiges of pain in the irises but they also looked simultaneously delighted and seemed to be pleading with me to stare back at them, a request that felt so overwhelming I had to look away. And when I glanced down, I noticed the wedding ring. Of course, I thought. The first man to captivate me at first sight couldn’t be single.

  We continued talking. I didn’t understand what was happening—I’m a realist, practical and pragmatic, someone who believes in the right timing and compatibility, and not soul mates and Cupid’s arrows. But I couldn’t deny the fact that this stranger was eliciting something in me that I hadn’t ever experienced instantaneously—a feeling that was simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, like a song I used to love but had long since forgotten the words to. Our communication, I soon discovered, was just as unusual: words began coming out of my mouth as sentences before I had the chance to experience them as thoughts, and I had no desire to try to impress him or make him laugh or showcase my intelligence. Somehow, he—or the combination of the two of us—rendered my omnipresent self-consciousness obsolete. Time both slowed down and sped up. I wanted to crawl inside his eyes and take a swim. I wanted everything else to disappear. Within three minutes of being introduced to this man, I felt like he was the only thing in the world that mattered.

  I tried to act normal. He was married—and, he told me, had two kids—and I wasn’t going to go there. We made small talk, jokes. I pretended I wasn’t having trouble breathing. But at the same time, there was only so much I could deny. A part of me knew, even then, that I was in serious trouble.

  • • •

  The Shake Shack line continues not to move and tears stream down my face—something so common these days that it takes me at least a minute to even notice. They’re certainly not my first tears of the day. Before I ventured out to get this burger, I’d actually been curled up in the fetal position sobbing for a good week straight, one sentence making an endless loop in my brain:

  I’m going to be alone forever.

  Then that thought elicited an endless stream of far more disturbing editions of it.

  I’m going to be alone forever while the rest of the world is coupled off.

  I’m going to be alone forever while the rest of the world is coupled off because there’s something terribly wrong with me.

  I’m going to be alone forever while the rest of the world is coupled off because there’s something terribly wrong with me that’s obvious to everyone but me.

  Occasionally I’d switch to beating myself up for feeling this way while giving relationship advice on TV. It was shameful for someone who’d written so many articles on sex and dating, someone who’d been the relationship expert on a cable show, someone who regularly shared her thoughts on romance on major networks, to be in this state.

  As I inch closer to the Shake Shack counter, I rationalize that it’s okay that I offer relationship advice but can’t seem to maintain a long-term one in my own life. How, I remind myself, could someone who easily found and married the man of her dreams early in her life help the lovelorn, the struggling, the confused, and brokenhearted? I can understand people’s mistakes because I’ve made them myself. The fact that I’ve fallen in love with a married man and am now falling apart as a result will give me the experience and knowledge to be able to counsel someone else in the same situation.

  But that still doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be here.

  Before my trip to L.A., I’d managed to keep depressing thoughts about my single status at a simmer whenever they bubbled to the surface. Through a combination of optimism, denial, and a collection of other single friends whose lives appeared to be exciting and glamorous, I walked with relative ease through every form that asked for my husband’s employment information, every singles table at a wedding, every conversation about marriage. The “Have you met anyone special?” queries from my mom and other curious parties had, essentially, eased up, and I didn’t ask myself if this was because everyone had given up on me or was just assuming I was gay and in the closet. In therapy, where I dissected my relationships, the conversations tended to focus on the particular guy I was involved with—the micro, not the macro—so I usually avoided seeing the big picture. Whenever a romance fizzled, an I’m-going-to-be-alone-forever-mindset would set in and I’d agonizingly flip through people’s happy family Facebook photos and wonder why I couldn’t seem to do something that everyone—even the girl from my high school with the implacable body odor—had seemingly pulled off effortlessly. But those bouts tended to be ephemeral.

  Of course, by the time I hit my 30s, I’d begun reacting to pregnant bellies and women or couples with children. I’d always smiled at, talked to, and played with children, but these activities took on a more panicked intensity once I started to pass through my prime childbearing years; a sensation that I’d better wave, smile, and coo at these kids since I might not ever have my own. I’d be struck with the feeling that the mothers of these children were much happier and better adjusted than I, no matter their circumstances. But I didn’t experience this all that often and whenever I did, I never let the thoughts fester or cling to me: instead I’d turn back to the manuscript I was working on or keep walking to the gym or check to see if a stranger had written something nice about me on my blog, and the fear that I might not have a husband or be a mother would be replaced by whatever thought I’d slid in there.

  Most of the time, I convinced myself that I’d be fertile well into my 40s, that I was simply someone who would not settle, and that when I did eventually commit to a man—a man whom I would of course feel had been well worth waiting for—our future children would never utter words like “dysfunctional family” or “I hate my mother” because I’d have worked out all of my issues during those long single years before I brought them into the world. I’d talk about this with friends, most of whom were childless and felt the same way. Phrases to explain my situation poured out of me almost
subconsciously whenever necessary. I’m happy being alone. Or: I haven’t met the right guy. Or my favorite, for when I was feeling particularly sanctimonious in the face of what I perceived to be smugness: People think they need a relationship in order to be complete but I don’t.

  And I really didn’t think I did—until now. Interacting with Will had unearthed something so primal and overwhelming in me that not having a deep romantic connection suddenly feels unbearable. It’s like a dam inside of me has tumbled down and I’m mourning all the years I’ve felt this way without ever allowing myself to know I felt this way. I’m in my 30s, in other words, and just finding myself in the state most girls enter when they’re in their teens. I’ve never had a 10-year-plan or a must-be-married-by age and never worried about either of these things. Now it all feels like it’s too late—like while I was off screwing around and building a career, the men I’d want to partner off with went and married younger girls who were happy to put their work lives second or possibly not even have them at all so that they could focus on a relationship. It’s like coming out of a blackout and discovering that you’re in the process of losing a game of musical chairs you didn’t even know you wanted to play.

  So how come you’re single?” he asked as the DJ finally gave Lady Gaga a rest and put on a Rufus Wainwright song.

  “How many weeks do you have to hear about it?”

  He laughed as he leaned against the wall. “Actually, I tend to think of these things as easily explainable.”

  “Is that so?”

  He shot his pointer finger up. “One: Dad issues—either you hate him or idealize him so much that no guy’s ever going to measure up.”

  “Go on.”

  His middle finger joined the pointer. “Two: you’re still not over a heartbreak you should have worked through a long time ago.” Now the ring finger, with its gleaming wedding ring, united with the other two. “Option three: you have overly idealized notions of what a relationship should be. You expect every moment to be like a romantic comedy—red roses, perfect sex, trips to the Eiffel Tower.” I smiled and he looked pleased with himself. “Of course there’s always option four, but I find that one to be rare.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  He cradled his left pinkie finger in his right hand. “Pure self-hatred. You don’t think you deserve love.”

  “Not bad, Dr. Will,” I said. My voice sounded normal, and not like I’d just had my precise issues accurately assessed by someone I’d known less than an hour. “I’d say I’ve done a decent job of covering all of those.”

  He gave me a sad smile before breaking into a grin. “Of course, there’s always option number five: that you just think about this stuff too much and all you need to do is stop the analysis and pick a nice guy.”

  As Rufus switched to a U2 song about healing the world, I leaned against the wall next to him. “It’s weird,” I admitted. “I used to think marriage looked like giving up—accepting the fact that you probably weren’t going to do much better. A commitment to endless nights in front of the TV.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, well, it does make you pretty comfortable with your remote.”

  A waitress walked by with a tray of bottled waters and we each grabbed one. “And see, that depresses me,” I explained. “I’m like the girl from option two: I want excitement, fluttering hearts, embraces so impassioned that they could be captured on camera and displayed in college dorm rooms for decades to come.”

  “Ha, I had the Robert Doisneau print, too. But I think that was option three.”

  “Whatever.” We smiled at each other as we sipped our water. “I don’t actually know where things went awry for me in the relationship arena. I was the first girl in my class to have a boyfriend—in fifth grade! And there were a lot after that—so many that I think I assumed men came from a sort of bottomless reservoir.” I gulped down the rest of my water and told myself that I should stop talking, that only an insane person would confess her entire romantic history to a complete stranger. Then I said, “I fell in love when I was 21 but a year later, I just sort of discarded him.”

  “You thought you were too young?”

  “Yeah. The rest of your life sure sounds like a long time to spend with someone at that age.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, then there was the other guy—the one from option two, I think?”

  “He destroyed you?”

  I nodded and ordered myself not to cry, the way I still sometimes did when I talked about Brandon. “I moved from San Francisco to L.A. to be with him.”

  “Oy.”

  “No, it was good—for a while. Before that, I thought relationships couldn’t be balanced—that one person always loved the other more. But Brandon and I had this sort of mutually respectful worship for each other.”

  “Oy.”

  I laughed. “Will you stop doing that? You sound like a Jewish mother.”

  He smiled. “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. I couldn’t control my temper: I kept getting incredibly angry at him—like seeing-red angry—over anything I perceived to be a slight.”

  “I’ll refrain from saying ‘oy.’ ”

  “He told me he’d leave if I couldn’t stop losing my shit. And I couldn’t. So he left.”

  “I guess in the end one of you did love the other more.”

  I nodded as our eyes met. To break the intensity of the moment, I said, “And then—what can I say? The reservoir dried up.”

  “Come on. Not entirely.”

  “Well, after that, I only seemed to be drawn to the ones who would disappoint me: these guys who would come on strong but cool significantly when my interest level matched theirs. And, you know, I got older. A 30-year-old just doesn’t have the same options as a 20-year-old. And every year, there are fewer and fewer.”

  “Oh, save the I’m-too-old crap. Younger girls don’t have anything on older women.”

  “Well, suffice it to say that not all men feel that way.”

  “The smart ones do.” He took my empty water bottle from my hand and I felt a shiver through my body as our fingers touched. He smiled. “But good job on covering all the issues on my list.”

  “And I didn’t even tell you about my dad yet.”

  “You don’t need to. I’m no Freudian but your anecdotes revealed enough.”

  I laugh. “So what’s your diagnosis, Doctor?”

  He handed our empty bottles to a passing waitress, and then turned to face me. “I think you need to be told that you’re wonderful.”

  I felt embarrassed but pretended I didn’t. “Thank you.”

  “And then you need to believe it.”

  I’m so focused on my thoughts that I’m surprised to notice that I’ve moved from the counter to a park bench and am now sitting and eating. I want to savor the burger I waited over an hour to get but it’s useless. I might as well be eating paste and not a celebrated, much-written-about mixture of sirloin and brisket. But I didn’t come here for the culinary experience, really. I came here because I’ve been engaged in a full-blown breakdown since my birthday a week ago. And because I’d been hearing since I moved to New York that I had to try Shake Shack—a recommendation that was always followed by a warning that the line took at least an hour, which was then followed by my assertion that I don’t wait an hour for anything. So I’m here, really, to prove to myself that I’m capable of change and can thus behave differently from how I think I can. It sounds ridiculous, but the way I dried my tears and got myself out the door of my apartment was by convincing myself that if it was possible for me to do something small that was so contrary to who I naturally was—to wait in a long line by choice—then there was at least the slightest bit of hope I’d be able do something large that was also contrary to who I was. Like be in a loving relationship with a man who was available.