Five Things I Can't Live Without (11 page)

S
o I finally have my therapy goal. It’s been months in the making, many tears have been shed, but here it is.” Larissa made a trumpeting sound. “I am going to live more in the moment!”

It was, frankly, underwhelming. I couldn’t help thinking that the goal—not its achievement, merely its articulation—had probably cost her a thousand bucks. “That’s great, Larissa,” I said, trying not to let my true feelings show. She had seemed so delicate lately, ever since the matching site had paired her with men who were professionally successful and interpersonally crippled, with seemingly identical upbringings to her own. I speared a cucumber and thrust it in my mouth to avoid a follow-up remark.

Larissa read me instantly, though. “After all that time, anything was going to seem anticlimactic.”

“You’re probably right.” And she was. But still, all that she could have bought with a thousand dollars …

“It’s a good goal, right?”

“It’s a great goal.”

“So why do you have that look on your face?”

I put down my fork. “Every time you and I get together, we review your therapy sessions. Essentially, we analyze your analysis. And now your goal is to live more in the moment, and I applaud that. I really do. I’m just wondering about the method for reaching that goal.”

“Therapy,” she said, like the star pupil she’d always been.

“Right. What I’m saying is, living more in the moment is about thinking less. It’s about less analysis. Isn’t it kind of paradoxical to live more in the moment by analyzing more in therapy? I mean, can something be both the disease and the cure?”

“Debbie and I have already gone over this,” Larissa said. “Through more concentrated analysis, I free myself of the need to analyze in the moment.”

“So what you’re saying is that you confine your analysis to the therapy session. Once you leave Debbie’s office, you’re in the moment.”

“Exactly. See, it’s not about disease and cure; it’s about disease and vaccination. I swallow an attenuated form, and then I’m protected.”

Vaccination against meta-life. It was a compelling idea that I didn’t buy at all, but debating the point with Larissa could only end with hurt feelings. She was invested in this, financially and emotionally. “I guess I can see that,” I said, hoping she was ready to let this go.

Thankfully, she was. “So I need to tell you about Liza’s wedding.”

“Oh, right. I’d forgotten about that.”

“I don’t think I told you this, but Liza set me up to share a room with this guy, Martin. His story is much worse than my Dustin story. He got married less than a year ago, and his wife decided after a month of marriage that it wasn’t for her, he wasn’t the one, and they got it annulled. Can you imagine? I guess they’d been together for like seven years.” Her eyes were wide. She took a sip of diet soda. “I have no tolerance for these women who don’t know themselves at all. She couldn’t dump him on the eve of the wedding like a decent person?”

I shrugged. “Buyer’s remorse?”

“It’s gross, in my opinion.”

I didn’t want to point out that her vociferousness might be more about being unceremoniously dumped by Dustin than about Martin’s plight. “So how did you wind up sharing a room with Martin?”

“It was a Sunday-afternoon wedding, but I had to be there the day before for this spa-day bachelorette party and the prewedding dinner on Saturday night. And between the spa day and springing for a wedding gift, the whole affair was costing me a fortune, so when Liza called a few weeks back and said she had this harmless guy for me to share a room with, I agreed. I wasn’t thinking that anything was going to happen. He’s still heartbroken, I’m still heartbroken—”

“Precisely why something was going to happen.”

“How do you know anything happened?” she asked coyly.

“If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t be dragging out this story.”

“So Martin is a textbook harmless guy, like Liza said. He’s the groom’s cousin from the Midwest, stocky and corn-fed and soft-spoken. He flirted with me sort of ineptly during the prewedding dinner, and of course, we both had a few drinks, and then we went upstairs to the room together.” She paused dramatically. “The shocking thing was not that he moved in. It’s the way he moved in. The door shut behind us and he pounced. He grabbed me and pushed me up against the door and jammed his tongue down my throat.”

“Classy.”

“I know, right?”

“So you told him to stay on his side of the room?”

“No. I made out with him for a couple of hours.”

“Why? Did his technique improve?”

“It did, actually. I was into it for stretches of time.”

“The endorsement every man wants to hear.”

She shrugged. “He’s the first guy since Dustin. What could I expect? It’s good to get it out of the way with someone who doesn’t matter and who I’ll never see again.”

“I just hate when these guys skip the preamble. It’s one thing if you’ve had some seething sexual tension all night long, but it doesn’t sound like that. What made him think he could just jump you?”

“Circumstance,” she said with certainty. “Weddings. All the movies about weddings. I was going to be a bridesmaid.”

“He didn’t even wait until you actually were a bridesmaid.”

“He couldn’t. This was his moment of opportunity. I was driving home the next day right after the wedding.”

“So you made out with him for a couple of hours, and then what?”

“That’s it.”

“You didn’t sleep with him?” I asked, a little surprised. I’d just figured that if she wanted to get her first rebound out of the way, she would have gone all the way.

“No. I made it clear that wasn’t happening. Like, he kept trying to go down and I kept saying, ‘No, I don’t want you to do that,’ and then, ‘No, I
still
don’t want you to do that.’”

“Have you noticed how the tides have turned on oral sex in the last couple of years? They’re all leaping face-first down your pants now.”

Larissa considered. “You know, that’s really true.”

“Remember dating five years ago? Men didn’t try to go down before you’d had sex. Now it’s just a regular part of foreplay.”

“I’m not into that,” she said emphatically.

“Into oral sex?”

“Not before we have sex the regular way. It’s too intimate.”

“I agree. All of a sudden men act like that’s between third base and home plate and I think it’s more of a grand slam.” I paused. “So why didn’t you sleep with him?”

“Because of Dustin.” She lowered her eyes. “I know, I know. It’s just, the kissing was fine and I was getting turned on, but I also felt like Dustin’s image was barely at bay. It was like, I wasn’t actually thinking about Dustin, but I could, at any second, and then it would be unbelievably painful and I’d start crying and I’d be there with this stranger to comfort me, not Dustin. I thought if I had sex with Martin, Dustin would definitely break out of his pen.”

“Maybe it would have been cathartic. You’d be there with someone who gets what it’s like to be left by someone they love. You could have both started crying and comforted each other.”

“That’s a completely heinous thought.”

I thought for a second. “You’re right. It is.” I took a sip of wine. It was so nice to be able to drink in the middle of the day. “So you didn’t sleep with him. Was that awkward? I mean, did you stay in the same bed?”

“Definitely awkward. For the last half hour, I was preoccupied with how to end things gracefully. I was trying to decide what my obligation was in terms of getting him off. I mean, I’d made it clear that there wouldn’t be sex. He took his own pants off, but I never reached down there. But then, it
had
been a couple of hours and his erection was pressing into me the whole time.”

“But he’d been such a Neanderthal when you first got into the room.”

“Exactly! And the irony is that if he hadn’t jumped on me, if we’d hung out in the room and talked for a while, I probably would have had sex with him.”

I nodded in complete understanding. “I wonder how many men get that.”

“The good ones get it intuitively; the rest never do.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense here. Did you or didn’t you?”

“I gave him a hand job.”

“Larissa!” I didn’t like Martin. I was hoping he’d walk away with nothing. Actually, blue balls would be preferable.

“But listen to this. When I reached for it, that’s when I discovered that he’d brought his own lube. He grabs my hand, tells me to ‘hold my horses,’ and goes into the bathroom to get it. ‘Hold my horses!’ Can you imagine? Maybe it’s a Midwestern expression, I don’t know. When he came out of the bathroom, I almost changed my mind. I mean, that’s pretty forward, bringing your own lube into a hotel room with a woman you don’t even know.”

“Maybe he was planning on using it on himself.”

“In a hotel room with a woman he didn’t know?”

“Good point.”

“But I gritted my teeth and did it, like the good girl I am.”

“Ah, the good girl’s dilemma: to jack them off or not to jack them off.”

“And after all that, the next day at the wedding, he basically ignored me. He didn’t do it pointedly or anything. He smiled at me from across the room a couple of times. He just never came to talk to me. I went up to him once while he was in conversation and he introduced me, then went back to his conversation about astrophysics or something. He didn’t even shift the topic to be a bit more inclusive. And he underscored this decision by saying, ‘This must be a real laugh-a-minute for you,’ or something like that. At that point, I just walked away.”

“And he never asked you to dance, even?” I wasn’t surprised by his breach of etiquette by this point in the story, but I was still disgusted on Larissa’s behalf. I mean, one hand job equals at least one dance.

“Not one dance. It’s not like I was expecting him to be my date just because we fooled around in the hotel room, but it would have been gentlemanly for him to at least check in with me occasionally. You know, the occasional conversation, maybe a dance or two. But pretty much nothing. That’s while we’re inside. When I went up to him to say good-bye, he offered to walk me to my car and once we got there, he actually tried to kiss me again.”

“And did you kiss him?” I asked, smiling at what I suspected the answer would be.

“Yeah. I didn’t want to be rude.”

At that, we both cracked up.

“Okay. Enough about Martin,” she said. “Tell me about how things are going with you and Dan.”

“Things are good.” I stuffed some bread in my mouth and looked away.

Larissa gave me a knowing look.

“They are! There’s nothing wrong at all. It’s been two weeks of us living together and no problems, really.”

“So you’re happy?”

I reflected for a few seconds. “It’s complicated, you know? I’m stressed out. Rent is due in two weeks, and I’ve only had the one client. That went great, and I figured there were more where she came from, but no one else has panned out. A few people e-mailed me to ask more questions and I wrote them back and then never heard from them again. I never responded to one guy because he seemed to think I was an undercover hooker. When I go home today, I’m going to work on my ad and post it again. Though it’s kind of disheartening. I mean, I’m advertising to help people write their profiles and I can’t net anyone with my own ad.”

“It’ll just take a little time, that’s all. I mean, you’re good at this. You said your profile for Kathy worked wonders.”

“She did say that.” I sat up and squared my shoulders. “Right? She actually used the term ‘miracle.’ That’s got to mean something, right?”

“Of course it means something.”

“‘Of course’ is what people say when things are most definitely in question.”

“I don’t. I’m a lawyer. One wrong word can get you sued.” I laughed, and she continued. “You’re just panicking. You made a big change, and now you’re panicking. You just need to stay the course.”

“I want to, but I’m getting really anxious. I have all this free time now, and I spend most of it wondering why I ever thought this would work out for me. It’s kind of crazy, actually. I turned down my leads for nonprofit jobs, and I can’t go back to them and say I made a mistake. So now I have no leads for real jobs once this fails.”

“That’s why you’ve got to go all in. Like, in poker. You’ve got to bet everything you’ve got and hope for the best. Often it scares off your opponent and they fold.”

“First of all, I don’t have an opponent. Secondly, since when do you play poker?”

“I’ve been watching poker tournaments on TV. They’re oddly fascinating.”

“I would never have pictured you using your limited free time to watch televised poker.”

“All single people watch way more TV. You want to hear people talking.” She shrugged and ate the last bite of her sandwich. “But you didn’t exactly answer my question about Dan. You started talking about your career instead.”

“It wasn’t instead. That’s my answer. I’m stressed and I’m panicking, so it’s hard to be fully happy about anything. And you know how much I love Dan. But I’ve been so on edge, and I’m just so nitpicky. It’s not that stereotypical stuff, where he leaves the toilet seat up or dishes in the sink. It’s meaner than that. It’s like, he says something and I dissect it in my head. I think, ‘How can I spend my life with a man who says that?’ And there was nothing wrong with what he just said! I know that, but I can’t stop thinking that way. So then I get frustrated with myself, and I think how Dan’s the only thing I’ve got going for me right now and I’m going to screw it up. And this just goes around and around. It’s a brutal cycle.”