I Like You Just the Way I Am (7 page)

After a few days of silence, I called Chad.

“What the fuck? I thought you were setting me up with my soul mate?”

“Yeah. Well, turns out he’s dating someone and it just kind of got serious.”

“So, a week ago he was willing to be set up and now he’s in something serious? I don’t get it.”

“Well, he bought her a Christmas present,” Chad explained. “He said he’d still love to hang out as a group one night, though.”

Eww. Fuck this guy. He thinks I’m fucking desperate enough to go out under the pretense of “hanging with a couple of friends,” just because I
need
to meet him?

“Tell this guy to eat a hundred-calorie pack of dicks. Also, I’m really offended you would think I’m anything like this douche.”

“What do you mean? Meeting someone while you have a boyfriend is totally a ‘you’ move. You’re like the queen of the unintentional date.”

I hung up on him.

It was true. I’d often found myself having coffee or dinner or a weekend away with someone who, I’d learn over the course of conversation, thought we were an item. I’d done this with neighbors, stepbrothers, people sitting next to me on airplanes, and even my college guidance counselor (who did help me graduate in less than three years).

Chad had a point. In fact, maybe Lance
was
the male me.

For the next two months, every action I took was a strategic move to make Lance, whom I’d never met, throw himself off a bridge. I couldn’t believe I’d been rejected sight unseen. We never even spoke on the phone. He had no knowledge of my love of German literature, my eclectic taste in music, or that I was able to do a one-handed back walk-over. According to my father, whom I still kissed on the lips, I was the catch of the century. I was a goddamn debutante, and this fucking guy thought he could just pass on ever knowing me altogether? It made no sense.

I hope he dies in a grease fire,
I thought.

Six months later, Chad called me from work. Lance was apparently single now and suggested the three of us go out to dinner.

Well, well, well. Look who decided to come crawling back. I told Chad I’d need to check my schedule and get back to him, then did a victory “fuck you dance” around my apartment.

“This is what happens when you play out of your league!” I screamed at the mirror before taking a dramatic swing at it and severely injuring my fist.

An hour later, I called back and agreed to a Friday night dinner.

When Friday rolled around, I started to get nervous. I knew I had to restore the scales of dating justice. There was too much at stake (my ego). I rummaged through my closet and changed outfits three times, but nothing seemed to work with my swollen elephant hand. Eventually, I decided to go with a pair of lace fingerless gloves I had left over from Halloween and a black sweater with jeans. I was aware that maybe my gloves looked a tad unconventional, but I didn’t have much of a choice and what I lacked in style I vowed to make up for in personality. After all, my goal wasn’t to date Lance; it was to make him spend the rest of his life wishing he’d dated me. He rejected me, triggering all my infantile feelings of worthlessness. Now it was time for him to regret it forever.

Walking into the Mexican restaurant Chad picked in West Hollywood, I instantly felt transported to the places in East L.A. that I lock my doors when I drive past. The restaurant was dark and dingy, obviously something Chad had a coupon for. Standing next to the Pac-Man machine in the corner was Lance. He was cuter than I expected in an awkwardly tall, total-dork-I-would-have-cheated-off-of-in-high-school sort of way. He had long shaggy hair that he tucked behind his ears and brown eyes that almost seemed too big for his face.

Lance saddled up to the machine to take a turn. His disturbingly long spider legs angled out on either side as he whisked the joystick around. He crushed level four. And five, and six, and seven. I realized I wasn’t dealing with some cocky asshole who was going to try Neil Straussing me into fucking him. He was an actual, bona fide geek—maybe even a Rain Man.

“Hey, guys! Isn’t this place great?” Chad said with an earnestness that made me wonder how we were even friends.

The three of us were escorted to a table in the back of the room. The dinner was innocuous and the conversation light. Lance talked a lot about manifest destiny and all the things he loved about Batman.

I drunkenly got fingered by my agent’s assistant in an attempt to spite you,
I thought to myself, watching him show Chad a wizard trick with his straw.

Once we finished, Lance asked if I could drive him back to his apartment several blocks away. Reveling in the fantasy that he didn’t have a car, I obliged. This poor, innocent fool needed my compassion. Sure, he was relatively good-looking and had a job far more stable than mine, but that was no reason for me to like him. I’d shown him that I was irreverent, engaging, and uninhibited, and now it was time for him to never see or hear from me again. Unless, of course, it was on TV and I was riding Brad Pitt naked in flattering lighting that didn’t make my boobs look like penne pasta noodles.

When we pulled up to his place, he brazenly invited me inside. Taken aback, I agreed. Mainly just so I could rub my perfume all over his couch, pretend to be interested in his
Lord of the Rings
boxed set, and then leave him with the hug that would launch a thousand hard-ons.

His apartment was clean and sensibly decorated. Knowing I wasn’t there to hook up with him, I didn’t do my usual “excuse myself to the bathroom and make sure he doesn’t have a Valtrex prescription” routine. Instead, I plopped down at his desk and started fucking with some sort of model spaceship he was building.

As he sat on his couch watching, I knew there was no way in hell he could resist falling in love with me from afar. And so, after accidentally twisting off the forward fuselage and crew cabins, I apologetically put his spaceship down and stood up to leave.

At that exact moment, Lance’s home phone rang. His answering machine responded before he could.

“Hey, Lance, It’s Kate. I’m just listening to the Strokes and thinking about how we used to fuck all the time to this album. I’m sooooo wet right now.”
Beeeeeep.

The fuck!? Did I just hear that correctly?
My mind started spinning.

“I. Um. Wow. I swear I haven’t spoken to that person in at least—”

I stood there flabbergasted for about thirty seconds, trying to process what I’d just heard before finally asking, “Who has sex to the Strokes?”

Bright red, Lance looked at me and shook his head, speechless. Like Pac-Man, he was backed into a corner. And so, sandwiched between the Ghost of Girlfriend Past and the Ghost of Girlfriend Future, he did the only thing he could do. With one of his long Inspector Gadget hands, he reached out and pulled me into an embrace.

My perspective on Lance had changed suddenly and completely. Before the phone call, he was a total geekbot. After the phone call, he was a stud—or, at least, he was someone attractive to someone other than me. That meant he had someone else to think about besides me, and
that
I couldn’t allow. Passionately, I kissed Lance with my best “you’ll never forget me” semi-tongue kiss.

Then, I must have fallen into some sort of K-hole, because it wasn’t until a mortgage, two dogs, and four years of speaking Klingon later that I woke up and realized I was still dating Lance.

Unlike with Kate, Lance’s ex—the one he passed on meeting me for, the one he bought Christmas presents for after being aware of my existence in the world, the one I’d found only one picture of on his hard drive—he and I sadly had little sexual chemistry. Neither of us could tolerate real intimacy. As a result, we were present with each other physically but absent emotionally. Our make-out sessions would devolve into shadow puppet shows on the walls. Our pillow talk would be about Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, colorist John Higgins.

The relationship eventually turned into a platonic partnership. But for those few years, Lance was my closest confidant and best friend. He encouraged me to do things I never thought I could do, pushed me to conquer my eating disorder, and supported me when I had less than a few thousand dollars in my bank account. There were several times over the course of the relationship when I probably should have left, but my codependency, my fear of abandonment, and my genuine admiration for him prevented me from letting go.

My Future Ex-Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriend

In the twilight of our relationship, I’d fallen into a bit of a depression, and my resentment toward Lance was mounting. Every time I wanted to address our issues, he’d shut me up and, like a good Catholic, insist there was nothing wrong. I knew I needed to end things, but instead of facing that reality, I just started painting things like this:

I picture you in a coffin.

One night, we went to a group dinner that Kate had also been invited to at a friend’s house. I walked into the party nervous and wishing I’d had a professional do my makeup. Kate was sitting in the living room practically glowing. She was beautiful, charming, and ecstatic about meeting me. As soon as our eyes met, she jumped up and ran over. She handed me a package. I opened it to find a CD by the Strokes. Written in black Sharpie across the cover was a note:
Not wet anymore. Just mortified!

It turns out, I was right about Kate’s drunken stupor. She had no recollection of making the phone call and only learned about it later when Lance told her the story.

I spent the rest of the evening not with Lance, but gabbing it up in a corner with Kate. She was me, if I’d gone to law school and actually did something meaningful with my life. Something about having been with the same man made me feel especially close to her—like she and I had a shorthand that only people who’d had the same penis inside them could understand. Then, in a twisted champagne-induced moment of weakness, I confessed to Kate that I feared Lance wasn’t the one. I wanted him to be so badly. On paper, everything about us made sense—perhaps too much sense. He was a writer and I was an actress. We both grew up in the Southwest. We both liked Brie.

But for all our similarities, we were very different people. He hid his arrogance behind a soft-spoken, shy exterior, while I just let mine hang right out in the open. He hated talking, never liked to leave the house, and still believed his childhood was perfect. I knew I was damaged and probably left the house to avoid getting too introspective and OD’ing on Xanax. For our entire relationship, I was under the impression that Lance was wrapped around my finger, but the truth was that he would have cut a hole straight through me if the job of his dreams were waiting on the other side. To be fair, I probably would have done the same, but I would have at least made incisions that were below his bikini line.

Though it didn’t look like it from the outside, I picked a guy just like my father, who, as Chad originally promised, was a lot like me but more fucked in the long run. Kate urged me to be honest and gave me her phone number in case I needed to talk more.

I didn’t call Kate, and I didn’t say anything to Lance about my feelings for another three months. When I finally did, it was heartbreaking. After sobbing for an hour about how I was giving up on “us” and telling me nobody would ever love me like he did, Lance surrendered to the fact that I was leaving him. We spent the rest of the night lying on the floor, holding each other. A sense of peace washed over both of us as we wept and made jokes about the new
X-Men
. I promised him I’d name him anything but Lance if I ever wrote about him in a book. He promised the weird footprint I’d accidentally made on the stairs when the hardwood was being redone would remain in the house forever.

We tried to decide what to do with the dogs. Teets predated Lance and was obviously coming with me. But we’d just acquired a new “attempt to save our relationship” dog, Baby Jaguar. Lance begged on his knees to keep her.

“Please, I just—I can’t lose her too,” he cried.

So, in a lunatic fit of compassion, I agreed to let Jaggy stay with Lance. In my mind, I assumed I’d still be a huge part of both their lives. It wasn’t like I was giving back my keys to the house, or our joint credit card, or his heart. I was just moving out and on with my life.

To be frank, I never really anticipated Lance getting over me ever. I couldn’t even see how it was humanly possible. He was a shut-in with limited access to the outside world, and I was fun beyond words. Eventually, I thought I’d take it upon myself to find him a nice semiattractive woman and probably become the godmother to their children. But that was obviously way in the future. First he’d need a good two to three years to mourn my absence.

My Ex-Boyfriend’s New Girlfriend

I physically moved out on a Monday. The following Friday, I stopped by the house in the early evening to pick up some more of Lance’s things I felt he’d want me to have. Certain I’d be running into him, I rehearsed our exchange in my head on the drive over.

“Look, I will always love you. I just think we owe it to ourselves to be honest about the situation,” I pronounced as I drove up Mulholland and bravely turned down our street.