I Don't Care About Your Band (27 page)

But a single girl dating a married man is begging to be dragged by her hair back into the cave. Because while no man deserves a harem, all of them think they deserve more than one woman to slake their multicompartmentalized male brains. Just because men are able to separate “this one takes care of my children” from “this one does this thing with her bare feet on my taint,” it doesn’t make it OK for them to multitask once they’ve committed to being faithful in front of friends and family and an expensive cake.

THINK OF
all the secretaries in the 1950s and ’60s who weren’t necessarily married off after high school. They were smart enough to strive toward the workplace, but unable to ascend any merit-based ladder, because of their dumb old vaginas—the ones that may as well have been sandbags. These were the smart girls—like Shirley MacLaine in
The Apartment
—who fell for their peers and had to settle for half their attention, then go back to their apartments and read. Meanwhile, their paramours took the train upstate back home to their wives, once they were done dabbling with their colleagues. They had their cake, and, as Big Edie put it in
Grey Gardens
, “loved it, masticated it, chewed it, and had everything [they] wanted.”

I wrote back and I told Leo that Nate wasn’t my boyfriend—just a gay guy in a shitty mood, adding, “Though I have been known to pit different kinds of unavailable men against one another for sport.”

I’m embarrassed to admit that our e-mails went on for a couple of months after that, because I am weak and because Leo said and did things that guys who were available did not. There were gifts messengered over. Poetry transcribed. He bestowed tons of flattery; about my work, about me being adorable.

 

WE MADE
a date for our lunch at his office, and I picked out a dress. I was turned on all the time then. That’s another one of the pitfalls of getting yourself involved with a Married, or even thinking about it; you’re distilled down to your purely sexual self, like you’re fuck meth. You’re not floating around in the glow of being unequivocally loved by the man you want putting babies inside of you. You’re slinking and bounding across avenues in back-breaking heels, strutting like a pole dancer and choreographing pornography in your head all day.

I changed my mind about our lunch date after I saw
Manhattan
at an outdoor film festival.
Manhattan
is a movie I’ve seen a thousand times—it’s in black and white, like the non- Leo men in the room the night we met. Usually I relate to Mariel Hemingway’s character in the movie; the seventeen-year-old who’s wiser than all the neurotic adults around her who cheat on one another and sweat minutiae like brownish tap water. She dates Woody Allen’s character and gets dumped, and he comes back for her at the end, but it’s too late. But when I saw the movie again that summer, it was Diane Keaton’s character who made me think of me.

Keaton plays Mary Wilkie, the permed know- it-all from Philadelphia who went to Radcliffe and calls her therapist Donnie. Mary has a dachshund named Waffles and nearly un-scalable emotional walls until she concedes to Woody Allen’s character one late night at a diner that “he has a good sense of humor,” which he didn’t need her to tell him. They fall in love after they take a walk and it starts raining and they have to take shelter in the planetarium. But it’s complicated because Mary Wilkie is involved with a married man.

“I’m smart, I’m young, I’m beautiful,” Mary repeats to an audience of herself, and of course she is, but she also blew her chances with someone who dumped his seventeen-year-old moon-faced girlfriend for her. And it’s sad because nobody gets what he or she wants in the end, really, even though they still get to live here; a place whose skyline is scored by
Rhapsody in Blue
.

I didn’t want to be Mary Wilkie. And I was no longer seventeen and pie-eyed. I had to write Leo and cancel lunch, even though it killed me to delete the only thing on my calendar I was looking forward to. This is what I said:

That was a hard e-mail to write, and most of my motivation for hitting Send was the possibility that he’d only see the last five words of the e- mail and dump his wife. You know, just like that. No big whoop. Like when you have to break up with somebody, but you hope deep down that saying “it’s over” is just giving your mess of a boyfriend an obstacle he’ll circumnavigate for the reward of being reunited with you, and it feeling so good. But really, you’re just saying “This is why this isn’t going to work out.” You’re not asking someone to change so that it can. Because unless you are dealing with a good old-f ashioned intervention, with letters family members read out loud and black coffee and sobbing, you can’t get somebody to do something they don’t decide to do themselves. It is actually ridiculous to think that you can. What’s more, a married guy leaving wifey only to settle down with his girl on the side is no sure thing.

 

RECENTLY, I
had drinks with an old friend, Sam, beside whom I used to tend the register at an artsy video rental place back in college, when I was a flirty chubbo with bad taste in clothes, music, and boys (Hawaiian prints, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and avante-garde puppeteers, respectively). Sam was the only guy at the shop who would chat and laugh at my jokes, while my other coworkers would broodingly shelve VHS copies of Truffaut’s oeuvre along to Philip Glass music.

When we caught up after I spotted him solo in the audience of one of my shows, Sam told me he’d just separated from his wife of five years in the wake of what he called an “emotional affair” with a woman he worked with at his office. When I asked him to clarify just what the ass that meant, he said that there had been a lot of flirting and e-mailing between the two of them after a business trip they took together, but zero actual hanky panky. His linguistics were baffling. Had I just ended an “emotional affair” with Leo? Or were we just e- mailing? Stupid Marrieds, inventing names for activities they want to lead to actual cheating.

I thought it was at once generous and creepy of Sam to call something like flirty e-mails back and forth an “affair,” emotional or otherwise. The word “affair” the way he used it seemed quaint, like an antique political scandal or a cocktail party.

Things heated up with his coworker, he continued, and eventually, for reasons including but not limited to the existence of his emotional mistress, Sam and his wife separated. When I asked him what now, he told me that he was “figuring out his head.” He’d started dating and sleeping with his colleague, emotions and all. She had a kid from a previous marriage and was, he said, bright and compatible with him in practically every way. In Sam’s words, “It’s hard for me to find somebody as smart as I am.” That lucky girl must have been a genius.

So, Sam continued, he had feelings for his new girlfriend, coupled with guilt about leaving his wife, and his new studio apartment was lonely. When he spoke of his coworker, his lust for her was apparent, but globs of superiority marked his description of who she was. He spoke of wanting to cook for her. He told me she ate “crappy, processed food” and that he wanted more than anything to make her an organic meal.Yeah. I mean, who did this woman think she was? How dare she cut corners to feed herself and her son by shopping at Stop & Shop instead of splurging at Dean and Deluca. He also told me that he didn’t want to commit to her yet—now that he was single, he wanted to play the field a bit.

I warmed my hands over the campfire Sam kindled with his own self-regard, digesting the organic information he was nice enough to serve me. I told him that, in my opinion, his coworker had probably been waiting for him to leave his wife so, she assumed, he could be with her. That she’d been patient and probably wanted Sam be a father figure to her kid, but instead, she wound up graduating from an emotional affair to become another girl with soil worth tilling while Sam sowed wild oats.

He seemed flummoxed by my response and pulled the kind of maneuver they only teach you in Advanced Placement narcissism classes. He said he didn’t understand why I wasn’t sympathetic to his
wife
? Why did I care so much about the girl who eats junk food? I guess, I admitted, I felt bad for both, but related more to the girl who waited around.

I couldn’t deal with Sam for much longer that night, and I haven’t hung out with him since. I was turned off by his view of the world as some crazy mecca, waiting for him to cast off his marital shackles so he could partake in its cartoonish abundance. Didn’t he know how tough it is to find people you like enough to actually date? How “playing the field,” for every girl I know, means “going to bed early at least a couple of nights a month to make the loneliness stop screaming for the night” or “occasionally having to try making conversation with a man who’s told you, unironically, how great he thinks Billy Joel’s
Glass Houses
record is”?

I know there are guys who feel that marriage—to anyone—is a trap and unnatural. I know monogamy is wrong for some people, and certainly it’s human nature—at least as a kid—to want as much as someone will let you get away with. But don’t expect me to side with a bachelor soliciting sympathy for the burden of juggling women devoted to loving him. I will give that guy nothing.

 

 

I HEARD
back from Leo after sending him my e-mail, and he was pretty relentless pursuing me the day after I cancelled lunch. He told me that his “situation” was “vague” lately. I wondered if his wife knew how “vague” he thought their “situation” was, because I’m pretty sure there’s no less vague situation than being
married
, or, you know,
not
.

I resisted my lizard brain’s attention to the “vague” qualifier he tossed out like a rope from a height, and asked him, in spite of what I really wanted, to evaporate. As though he had been programmed to do the exact opposite, he sent me, in response, a promise that lunch would be platonic, two poems, a link to a photo gallery of the sea grotto he was going to that weekend, an MP3 of a Pretenders song, and an admission that he didn’t know what a maxi dress was, then, a follow-up e-mail saying that he’d Googled, to find that a maxi was “precisely the kind of summer dress he found ‘über-hot,’ ” adding, “Ouch.”

“You want to have an ouch-off?” I replied, done with him. “You’re married. I win.”

And so it went. Leo went away. I was re-lonely. But the silence was brief and soon met with a chorus of “well done’s” from friends who told me I did good, heading off at the pass a could’ve-been affair before it ruined my life, or at least the first half of my thirties. It was not easy to turn down the advances of a guy so out of touch with single-hood that he actually made romantic gestures, like sending poetry and coming right out and telling me how sexy I was, and other things I wasn’t used to getting from men without wives.

And who knows if it would have even swelled to an actual affair if Leo and I had actually gotten together for lunch that day. I just knew that an hour and a half across a table from his fortyish good looks would’ve made me even hotter for him. And, like I said in the e-mail, I’m not in my twenties anymore. I don’t want to seek out drama any more than I want to stub my own toe in the hopes it would make me a better artist, able to “feel more.”

At that point, I just wanted to fall in love with somebody who was available and uncomplicated, so that things wouldn’t be so hard anymore. And though I didn’t know it was around the corner, I wanted to clear the table, in case the waiter came around with the kind of cake I could chew and masticate. I wanted to know then that, just like Big Edie, I’d, one day, have everything I wanted.