Falling for Me Page 2

  I watch a woman with a gleaming wedding ring and perfect French braid play with her even more perfect toddler on a bench a few feet away and think back to how I used to believe that falling for a married guy was one of those tropes it was almost my duty to stumble on, since I’d been single for so long and had made the pursuit of unavailable men into something of an urban hobby. I’d figured adultery was a rite of passage as elemental as a pregnancy scare or a one-night-stand. But somehow, like eating disorders and panic attacks, an affair with a married man was one of those experiences that I had long been able to cheerfully and surprisingly say had passed me by. I used to chalk this up to strong moral fiber; once I’d spent enough time on a shrink’s couch to leave an indelible imprint, however, I reasoned it had more to do with the fact that I’d watched my dad cheat on my mom with the kind of determined consistency he’d been unable to display in so many other aspects of his life, and my role as the person who could make her feel loved enough to cushion and distract her from this left me certain I’d never be able to do to another woman what those women had done to her. I’d even said this, if not out loud then at least to myself, feeling a bit like Rosie the Riveter from the We Can Do It poster but without any of that eau de lesbian she seemed to emanate.

  When other girls would tell me about falling for married men, I’d try not to judge but I always wondered why they didn’t seem to notice the terrible tragedies that lurked right around the corner from extramarital affairs. Diaper-wearing astronauts. Late-night TV hosts turned late-night TV punch lines. Humiliated government officials having friends pretend they were the fathers of the out-of-wedlock babies or making incomprehensible apologies while their wives stood by them—the same wives that they had surely promised someone they were definitely going to leave. If unavailable was what these women were after, I’d wonder, why didn’t they didn’t honor the sort of time-honored traditions that I had, like dating actors or other simultaneously self-obsessed and tormented people? To me, married men were a turn-off; they represented rejection, solid evidence that another woman had gotten this man to commit.

  I crumple my greasy trash and try to imagine what I could have done differently to avoid ending up here. Not assumed love was an ever-available commodity because it came along effortlessly at first? Run away from the charming bastards I’d spent most of my 30s dating? Been born with a different brain?

  The French-braided woman feeds her daughter crackers as I reflect on my trip to Los Angeles. I’ve thought about it so many times that the scenes have already been worn down, like the 45s I’d play and replay in grade school until they wouldn’t go up to full volume anymore. But instead of causing the experience to fade, this rehashing only seems to make the memories grow sharper. I have the feeling I’m shifting things a bit—adding nuances where there weren’t any, maybe editing some dialogue—but at the same time I can’t distinguish what happened from what I remember now. And I can’t prevent my mind from going here. I may have quit drinking and doing drugs over eight years ago, but thinking about Will is my addiction now.

  Look, I should tell you,” he said the day after the party as we passed two gay men walking a teacup poodle at Runyon’s Vista Street entrance, “I can’t be physical with you.”

  “What?” I responded, stalling. He’d mentioned the night before that his wife was at her parents’ house with their kids for the month. At some point in the evening, I’d decided to extend my trip an extra two weeks, figuring I could write from L.A. and telling myself it had nothing to do with him. When the party was ending, he asked if I wanted to go on a hike with him the next day and I’d said yes before I had time to consider that I shouldn’t socialize with a married man or that if I was feeling what I was certain I was feeling, I needed to run in the other direction.

  “I don’t think it’s fair—to any of us,” he said as we continued up the mountain. “I’m pretty far down the hole already, so something like that might leave me at the bottom of it.”

  I was thrilled and terrified—I’d had no idea what he was thinking or feeling up until this point and was shocked, in a way, to hear that we were experiencing something similar. I also thought that falling down a hole with him sounded almost unfathomably appealing. But I simply said, “That makes sense.” I acted like I hadn’t been hoping he might pull me off somewhere at the top of Runyon and fuck me the way Michael Douglas had a pre-bunny-boiling Glenn Close, or at least try to kiss me while I gave him a halfhearted “No, we shouldn’t” that I didn’t mean and desperately wished he’d ignore.

  “Good,” he said, but he wasn’t smiling. I told myself that I was relieved—that I didn’t want to be a woman who got involved with a married man, didn’t want to potentially cause this guy’s daughter to see in her mom’s eyes the kind of suffering I’d seen in my mom’s. But a large part of me couldn’t have cared less and was already compiling justifications in my head—coming up with lines about how everything was fair in love and war and how I hadn’t made any sort of vow to his wife and how what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her and any number of clichés that wanton women have been uttering for years. And yet, because of his decision, I didn’t need to know which side of the line I fell on—and for that I was grateful.

  For the next two weeks, we spent most of our time together—going out for meals, taking walks, and seeing movies, essentially acting like people who were free to get to know each other—as if his wife and kids didn’t exist and the only reason I hadn’t been in a serious relationship for so long was that I’d been holding out for him. We talked about things I hadn’t admitted to myself, let alone another person: my worry that I’d never be able to have a real relationship and that it was too late for me to have children. We talked about his art and about love, and were either silly or prescient enough to confess that we thought we were in it. We pretended that what we were doing was harmless because we weren’t, after all, having sex. We weren’t even kissing. We were strong enough to see the hole and dance over it. But the space between us crackled with lust and the sexual fantasies I was having whenever I wasn’t around him were filled with multiple orgasms, sweat-soaked bodies, and constant declarations about never having been this turned on before. Despite the fact that we weren’t so much as holding hands, it was the most sexual relationship I’d ever been in.

  When we hugged good-bye outside Hugo’s on Santa Monica Boulevard a few hours before I had to leave for the airport to go back to New York, our nether regions were perched as far from each other as our upper bodies allowed, almost as if a step closer on either of our parts might cause us to tear off one another’s clothes and go at it on the street of West Hollywood boys’ town.

  “I’m only going to screw up your life if we stay in touch,” he whispered. I nodded, my head moving up and down on his chest. “I want you to have everything you want and I’d only distract you,” he added, as if I’d put up a fight. I knew I could argue—that there was a tiny door, a pet-size one, I could probably flip open, past his good intentions and determination to do the right thing. Instead I nodded again, got in my rental car, and looked back to see if he was still watching me. He was.

  I wanted to feel excellent. We’d fallen hard—if it wasn’t love, then it was the most piercing simultaneous attraction and comfort level I’d experienced—but we hadn’t acted on it because it wasn’t the right thing to do. Instead of being awash with pride, however, I fell apart—the giddy high I’d been enveloped in during the time I’d spent with him suddenly disintegrated and I felt more alone than I ever had.

  The braided woman and her perfect child are gone by the time I leave the park.

  The Barnes & Noble at Union Square is less a bookstore and more a monolith devoted to distraction: a multifloored Taj Mahal of books and magazines and anything else that could temporarily distract a girl who’s determined to stay out of her apartment but doesn’t want to have to interact with people. And unlike, say, an arcade or a library or a movie theater or any other place that could offer such all-encompassing diversions, this one is enormous enough that if that girl felt overwhelmed and had the desire to recurl her body back into the fetal position, she could potentially do so and not be disturbed, or possibly even noticed.

  But the magazine racks all seem to feature one Kardashian or another and even the tables of new releases and paperback favorites can’t seem to excite me. I get on an escalator, wander around, and ponder a latte from the café before finding myself in front of a shelf devoted to relationships. Last One Down the Aisle Wins: 10 Keys to a Fabulous Single Life Now and an Even Better Marriage Later screams one title. Single-Minded Devotion: Reflections for the Single Journey calls another. For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage offers a third. Rejecting the first as too optimistic and the second as too dreary, I pick up For Better and read that it’s by a New York Times health writer who always believed in the institution of marriage until her recent divorce. Maybe, I think, this is what I need: a smart person’s assessment of why marriage doesn’t work. I was already mentally aligning myself with the writer, deciding that she and I, as savvy, urban writers, were smart enough to realize that happily-ever-after doesn’t actually exist. But then I remember that she managed to get married and I can’t even picture myself in a serious relationship with someone who’s available. I put that book back on the shelf and pick up another one, which informs me via an alarming paragraph on its back cover that I’m never going to be able to have a happy relationship unless I can go back and heal whatever went wrong in my first relationships—that is, with the members of my family. Christ. I sit down on the floor and rest my head in my hands.

  While I was incredibly lucky in terms of most of the outward circumstances of my life, my early bonds were also fraught with complications. Part of this is because I was a colicky baby who supposedly cried so much that it forced my mom to go back to graduate school just to get away. When I was growing up, I heard a lot about how much I cried and how crazy it drove everyone and I would feel guilty for these hysterical fits I didn’t remember, wondering why I had to be such an imposition from right out of the gate. I begrudgingly came to accept my role as “the difficult one” while my older brother, who was a genius from day one, relished his part as “the smart one.” As I got older, my tantrums continued, causing my parents to regularly declare me a monster and the whole thing to escalate more. But at some point, my dad decided that my outbursts were actually hysterical: he began to taunt me whenever I got upset by calling me petulant and jutting his lower lip out in what I would assume was an imitation of me. “My poor little actress,” he’d say in mock pity and then begin cackling. My mom, who suffered through more than her fair share of his typical depression and anger, would also start laughing, and my brother, surprised to witness his usually disconnected parents so entertained, would join the fray. This would only make me cry harder.

  My parents weren’t sadists, and I’ve always been incredibly close to my mom. And they’re actually quite loving and were just doing the best they could in a situation they didn’t know how to handle. They also showered me with affection in other ways—especially my dad, who all but clobbered me with it in the form of worshipful declarations that I was more beautiful than my mother and that he loved me more than her, whispered confessions which always made me feel incredibly guilty and like I was an unwitting participant in something inappropriate. And the shame I felt over always hearing this, combined with his insistence that I was a monster, only made me start to live up to the label as I grew up. I’d learned rage from my dad—though he never hit us, he’d lose it on appliances and other random objects semiregularly—but my fury wasn’t physical. Instead I’d take people hostage with my words. Heaven help you if you were one of my high school or college boyfriends and said or did something that I felt was remotely critical or dismissive: I relentlessly tortured these guys, coldly and repeatedly insisting that they explain their words or actions until they regretted them with everything they had in them and were in as much as pain as I was. I didn’t want to do this—in fact, the whole thing was probably more upsetting for me than it was for them—but it often felt as if there was a furious second self that lived inside of me and couldn’t not lash out at the vaguest sign of disrespect. I knew, even then, that this was misdirected anger—that I was really furious at my dad for making me feel both humiliated and complicit in some sort of secret and just taking it out on the closest male in the vicinity—but no amount of self-knowledge quelled the behavior.

  When I pulled this kind of thing with my parents, they called it, rather accurately, “abusive.” But that also became a convenient way to describe anything I did that they weren’t in the mood to deal with. “I won’t take your abuse” my dad would say if I calmly but directly explained that I didn’t want to be sent to visit his dad and stepmom because they were cruel (my grandfather having been the one who taught my dad rage). Or later, if we were on the phone and I asked him why he didn’t read a book I wrote or watch me on a TV show I’d told him I was going to be on, I’d hear, “I’m hanging up if you continue to abuse me.” If he was in a yoga phase and responding through e-mail, he’d simply write, I can’t be abused by you—Namaste, Dad. I understood that because of my eruptions earlier in life, I’d lost the right to have my feelings heard. But even if I’d been warned of this later repercussion, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything to control my flare-ups: once triggered, I seemed unable to stop until we were both emotionally bloody. The monster was relentless.

  Drugs and alcohol initially helped me control my emotions: first by quelling my insecurities, thus tempering my fear and anger before it could take hold of me, and then by helping me to check out. Drugs—especially cocaine—allowed me to float above my pain and sadness, elevating my mood to a manic joy I’d never thought possible; I went from doing it when people offered it to me at parties to seeking out those I knew had it at parties to buying and doing it with friends to buying and doing it on my own in roughly 18 months; by the time Brandon moved to New York, about a year after we’d broken up, I had a full-blown habit. When I was high, I felt like I was finally experiencing life how it was supposed to be: a stretch of time and space that crackled with excitement and giddiness, where mundane worries and familial obligations were afterthoughts, where all that mattered was continuing to stay as happy as I was. But existing in this state had some serious drawbacks and eventually my life became a succession of jittery nights when I was so wired that I couldn’t do anything but hole up in my apartment alone, feeling like I couldn’t move, nearly jumping out of my skin whenever the phone rang, peering into the apartment of the neighbors I was convinced were watching me through a telescope, thinking I was having a heart attack and welcoming the thought. Nights where I’d drive to meet a cocaine dealer at 2 a.m. in South Central or suddenly find myself at Home Depot at four in the morning because I’d been shaking so much at home that I’d become suddenly convinced I needed to buy a new heater. At a certain point, I stopped calling my family and began ducking most of their attempts to reach me, but an offer to spend the Christmas holiday with my mom and stepdad in Paris one year proved too much for me to resist; I spent my two weeks there uncovering the seedy underbelly of French nightlife—discovering, to my utter joy, that Parisian cocaine was far stronger than anything I’d tried in the States. I’d return every morning to wish my mom, stepdad, and brother a happy day of sightseeing before taking to my bed for the following eight hours, only rising to go out that night to meet my new, drug-addled French friends. One morning when my mom watched me return from one of my nights out and pop a handful of Ambien, she tried to talk to me about what I was doing, but hearing her say, “I’m worried” caused simultaneous rage and defensiveness to sweep through me; I coldly assured her she had nothing to worry about before closing the door in her face.

  I was the last girl who looked like she was going to embrace a life without drinking and drugs but I eventually got so miserable that I was willing to try it and then I shocked myself and everyone else by taking to it immediately. Even more surprising, underneath my party persona lurked a sort of inner obsessive workaholic who crossed every T, balanced every checkbook, and was determined to have everything under control.

  But, I suddenly realize as I sit on the floor of Barnes & Noble, in getting my life together, it’s like I went too far; I’m so terrified of regressing back into the colicky baby, monstrous child, and wild drug addict I used to be, of becoming the angry and hysterical girlfriend that eventually drove Brandon away, that I’ve instead transformed into a sort of automaton who won’t ever allow herself to be with someone who’s available and looks like he’ll stick around. In my nearly nine years of sobriety, my romantic relationships have consisted of a series of month- to six-month-long unions with either charming and unstable dreamers or avowed womanizers I’ve been determined to change. I meet nice ones, ones who look like they could actually make good long-term partners, but I never seem to end up feeling too attracted to them.

  Exasperated, I stand up and scan the bookshelves. Why can’t there be an answer to my particular problem—a tome called How to Make Yourself Open When You Felt Humiliated by Your Emotions as a Child and Also Always Got a Creepy Vibe from Your Dad Even Though You Know You Weren’t Sexually Abused? I wipe away tears that I hadn’t even felt accumulating and am about to leave the aisle and bookstore when I glance at a pink-covered book someone left on top of the shelf: Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown. I pick it up.

  While I know Helen Gurley Brown was the editor-in-chief of Cosmo for what seemed like a hundred years, I hadn’t realized she wrote a book. I guess it makes sense, though: magazine editors probably all get book deals. I turn to the first page and see that this one originally came out in 1962; the back cover reveals that it was on the best-seller list for a full year and was published in 16 different languages. Those aren’t exactly vanity book deal statistics. Since I don’t want to leave this store thinking about how a relationship will always be out of reach because of various family dysfunctions I didn’t cause and couldn’t help, I crack open the cover and start reading. And I’m so surprised by the first line that I almost drop the book on the floor.