Eye to Eye (4 page)

After signing off from IM, I put the Ben Franklin aside and unpack one of the boxes marked “OFFICE.” A mug swaddled in newswrap sits atop two piles of books. I unwrap it to find the gag gift that Zach bought me as a joke on our first-year anniversary. The words on the mug read, “OPPOSITES ATTRACT, THEN THEY DRIVE EACH OTHER CRAZY.” Funny, and unfortunately, prophetic. Zach and I “met cute” almost six years ago, if by cute you mean that I got really sloshed on pink wine and kissed him because he looked like Harvey Keitel, and he kissed me back because he and his girlfriend were “on a break.” Then we avoided each other for two years, followed by an intense month of summer teaching where we were thrown together by the forces that be, and our Hepburn/Tracy antics eventually gave way to love. Zach and I knew each other for a while before we started dating, and like any adults in a relationship, we learned to overlook each other's faults. I learned to love a man who groomed his toenails in public, and he learned the subtle difference between a pencil skirt from Old Navy and a pencil skirt mailed to me from my sister in New York, post-Barney's sample sale. I went to my first jam band concert, and he got his first haircut that cost more than twenty dollars. Though by the end of our third year together, the differences were starting to wear—not so much the superficial differences, but my anality versus his total lack of motivation. The straw before the final straw probably came my last evening in Indiana.

“It's only going to be Langsdale with accents,” Zach told me at the Saloon. We were at the local watering hole with Ronnie and Earl, my best friend and her ersatz-hillbilly boyfriend, a Langsdale local who had actually agreed to follow Ronnie to the West Coast for love. It was all I could do to get Zach to follow me back to my apartment at night.

“Nothing wrong with accents,” Ronnie said, squeezing Earl playfully beneath the chin.

“You better make sure to eat up when you get there,” Earl said. “Looks to me like you're wastin' away, Doris.”

Earl was right. Between arguing with Zach about his latest career change—opening an old movie theater to show classic films in Langsdale,
instead
of finishing his dissertation—and thinking about a new job, the move, everything, I'd been forgetting to eat. And not to go off on Zach, but do the words
NO MARKET
mean anything to anyone? Selling vintage movies to the locals seemed to me a uniquely vexed venture akin to opening a designer boutique next to the Wet Seal and expecting the tweens to come running. You can't just walk in and sell tofu burgers to a meat-and-potato populous. Don't even get me started.

“There's no danger of Doris starving,” Zach said. “Believe me.”

Hmm. Zach stood up and stretched, then headed for the men's room.

“Sooooo,” Ronnie asked, “A little trouble in paradise? What are you going to do about the move?” Earl's brows knit together with concern. Ronnie and Earl were wearing matching black T-shirts from a Tom Waits concert they'd attended in Chicago, a fashion accident, but proof that they were on the same wavelength. A reminder of how far off Zach and I had gone—his hippie sine running counter to my urban cosine. That night, Zach was wearing Birkenstocks to my Charles David, a Target T-shirt to my Betsey Johnson baby-doll dress, and patchouli to my Hypnotic Poison. No, things were not going well.

Things hadn't, in fact, been going well for the past few months. They had been made worse by a trip in late July to Atlanta where we both sweated for about three days straight and looked for a place for me to live. A brief snapshot from the visit:

“I like this place,” Zach had said, when we were shown the ever-so-chi-chi loft, with exposed brick walls and tin roofing in which I now live. The building seemed quiet and well maintained.

“It's a studio,” I said. “I'm not sure I'm a studio-loft kinda gal. And where are you going to put your stuff?”

Zach sighed. He'd grown his hair out long, a little longer than I like it, and had it knotted in a lazy ponytail. When he went to run his hand through it, it got stuck.

“Didn't we already talk about this? I thought we talked about this.”

“No,” I say. “I started to talk about it, and you started drinking, and you said things would all work out, and I said that I was getting older and might want a kid and marriage, and even if I didn't, that you still can't just drift and job jump forever. Is this ringing any bells?”

“That?” he said. “I've almost forgiven you for that conversation. Just let things be, Doris.”

“I can't just let things be, Zach. And don't give me some faux-Buddhist crap about not pushing the river or letting flow rule one's life. I'm totally hippied out.”

“And what's that supposed to mean?”

There are certain phrases that are never part of a healthy relationship, such as
“We need to talk. I'd like you if…”, “You remind me of my mother,”
and of course,
“What's that supposed to mean?”
(Frankly, I'd add
“You'd do it if you loved me”
when related to any and all less-than-kosher sexual experimentation, but that's a totally different story. I broke up with a boyfriend once during a stunning argument that ended with me yelling
“I intend to take my ass-virginity to my grave.”
I suppose in this day and age that makes me a bit of a prude. So be it.)

Anyway, the issue at hand is bickering. Zach and I were bickering. And once you become a bickersome couple, it's a short ride to bitter and trapped.

“Forget it,” I replied, the fear of a potential break-up beginning to feel very, very real. “I was kidding about the hippie thing. Stop being so sensitive.”

And
“stop being so sensitive.”
Another definite no-no. We'd gone from a fun, opposites-attract academic thrill ride of a couple, to a
Lifetime
movie-of-the-week, complete with recycled dialogue and the occasional semipublic tantrum. There were moments when I actually thought that all our story needed was a B-list actress to banish us forever to made-for-TV movie hell.

What he thought I meant was the fight we'd had the week before. It started out innocently enough. I'd bought a fabulous vintage piece of lingerie off of eBay, in which I felt very Marilyn. It was a baby-doll slip-type piece in sheer pink. Nothing kiddie-porn, but still naughty enough to be nice. And did Zach, the überhippie of my dreams, even
notice?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. He took one look at me and said,
“Jesus, you trying to look like Mrs. Roper?”
Then he tried to recover with:
“You know I just like you naked, baby.”
To which I responded,
“Of course you do, it requires the least amount of effort.”

So much for a sexy evening. I then proceeded to turn into someone's mother, yelling things like “YOU HAVE TO FINISH YOUR DISSERTATION.” In a pink nightgown. In false eyelashes. I was going for a look. “YOU CAN'T QUIT AND OPEN SOME STUPID MOVIE THEATER.” Just plain mean of me—stomping on the however ludicrous dreams of another.

Our final weeks together in Langsdale didn't do much to repair any of the damage. And my last night in town felt more like the last night before an execution. Painful and full of dread.

“He's still staying here in Indiana,” I said to Ronnie, sloshing around my watered-down Jack and Coke and lone cube of ice. “I think we might have technically broken up last night. But it was such a horrific conversation that I refuse to go back in and clarify. I think that when I get to Atlanta, I'm trading in the whole men thing for a dog. Something I can properly accessorize that leaves me alone when I'm trying to write poetry and shuts up as long as it's fed.”

“You think that a dog'll do that?” Earl asked, laughing. “Poor dog!”

Zach returned from the bathroom and sat next to me with his legs splayed apart at a ninety-degree angle, rubbing the fine hair on his knees and putting as much emotional distance between the two of us as possible.

“Don't know,” I replied, thinking that I still wanted to cross that distance between us, that even his knobby, hairy knees were making me sad tonight. “The way things are going, it's worth a shot.”

And then Zach and I did clarify things. We broke up, at least temporarily. Six weeks and then he says he'll visit, that we'll re-evaluate, blah, blah, blah. Two days later he called to say that it was all a mistake, that he would come to Atlanta before the semester started and we'd talk about things then. Now, he's canceled. Sometimes being in a relationship feels like having eternal detention, where you just keep getting re-evaluated and hoping that some one will either promote you or let you off the hook once and for all.

This afternoon, though, in my Atlanta office with a ninety-five-degree heat, and ninety-five percent humidity, it feels more like Doris + boxes piled all over office of fabulous new job + only Doris to unpack them = maybe Zach and I should have tried a little harder. Still, I can't turn this into Sadlanta, or I won't be putting my best foot forward at the new job, and I'll have that horrible stink of needy and alone, which potentially healthy-minded new friends
and
boyfriends can smell from miles away. I do not want to become the emotional equivalent of deershit, in which only animals with no home training are permitted to roll.

I take the opposites attract mug, wrap it back in newspaper, and return it to the box.

 

After finishing class prep for my first day, I load my exhausted self into the Toyota and head back to my apartment. Frankly, I have decided that I would be doing well if all I did at the end of the day for the next six months is go home and tune in to find out just who
will
be America's next top model. If item one on my to-do list is “do new job well,” then item two is the recycled-from-kindergarten “make new friends!”

The only thing more challenging than finding a new boyfriend in a strange city, which I honestly can't even begin to think about right now, is finding a new girlfriend. And no, I don't mean that I am taking “Make it New” to mean my sexuality. Aside from having no real inclination to lesbianism, I feel that having dedicated the past fifteen or so odd years to understanding men, I couldn't even
begin
to take on another gender and the attendant issues. No, I mean the sort of girlfriend/wingwoman you need for cruising the local hot spots, gossiping about your bad dates, and talking each other into unnecessary purchases at the Lenox mall. I don't mean a
best
friend, as I couldn't begin to replace Ronnie, but someone who is not backstabbing, overly obsessed with finding a husband, borderline in the single-white-female sense of appropriating one's hair/fashion sense or is just plain boring as sin.

I do have a candidate for girl-friendship, who is qualified in virtually every respect mentioned above, aside from the husband-hunting, which I now believe she has taken to such extremes that it almost wraps back around to not caring at the end of the day. The candidate in question is my next-door neighbor, Antonia, or “Toni” as she likes to be called.

I met Toni not long after I moved into my apartment. My first few nights in midtown, I started to wonder if I'd made the right choice about neighborhoods. When Zach and I visited Atlanta, midtown seemed like the perfect place—liberal, centrally located, dog friendly and relatively safe. At the time, Zach was happy that most of the hot boys were gay, but now it was starting to feel like one of those cruel “water, water everywhere” jokes that God occasionally plays on single women. Anyhow, my first week in the apartment, it seemed as if police sirens were going off every night: faint and intermittent, but frighteningly regular. I'd look outside my window or peek outside the doorway, but nothing ever seemed to materialize. Then I started to hear them during the day, and then, although I was beginning to question my own rational powers, it sounded as if they were coming from the apartment next door. I suppose it's possible that there was someone TiVo-ing
COPS
and playing it loud all night long, but then that raised an even more challenging question. Why would
anyone
in their right mind do such a thing? Besides, it didn't sound like television, it just sounded like a siren.

So I took it upon myself both to make new friends and find out what the hell was going on. I'd seen my neighbor once or twice disappearing in and out of her apartment. What I could tell about her was that she had a large blond afro and impeccably high-end bohemian fashion sense. Aside from that, I assumed that she was biracial, as she had toffee-colored skin and blue-green eyes. However, she could also have been an extremely funky white girl with a mystic tan obsession. Aesthetically, regardless of race, women in Atlanta tend to skew toward looking like Barbie. I pegged her at anywhere between twenty-six and thirty-five. When the sirens weren't going, I could hear her music, old-school R & B played late and loud, but not so loud that I couldn't get work done or sleep. I prayed to God that she wasn't a teetotaler and knocked on her door with a bottle of wine.

She opened the door wearing a pair of blue sweatpants, brushing her teeth and looking slightly bothered. “I'm sorry,” she mumbled through the toothpaste, “I wasn't expecting anyone.” Without waiting for me to respond, she made a “stay there” gesture and went to rinse out her mouth.