Love at the Speed of Email (11 page)

He tasted like potato chips. His stubble hurt my chin. It
was slimy and not all that much fun.

I never saw him again after that night.

I can’t remember his name now, but I can remember his
girlfriend’s name. And I can remember how I felt even before I learned her
identity and realized that she was a friendly acquaintance from school.

Dishonorable and ashamed.

And twelve years later, finding myself undeniably interested
in both Jason and Ryan, I wasn’t at all happy to feel the first faint stirrings
of these same uncomfortable feelings.

I tried to tell myself that since we hadn’t met face-to-face
I wasn’t really dating Jason yet. Not
really
.
So he didn’t yet need to know that I was regularly sending emails north, to a
man I found curiously intriguing, right? After all, I had lots of friends I
regularly emailed.

And Ryan – I was barely getting to know the guy. I didn’t
owe him full disclosure on other people I talked to, did I?

* * *

It was Jason I fretted over most.

On the one hand, telling myself that it would be better to
wait until after we met before we decided whether to date more seriously was
eminently sensible. The only problem with this was that I had
not
thus far been eminently sensible in
how I set about getting to know Jason across the miles.
  

For the first six weeks that Jason and I were talking, my
entire emotional world revolved around our phone calls. Emboldened by the
safety of distance and titillated by the mystery that distance enforced, we
took the initial spark we had felt and fanned it energetically.

I skated through work, storing up tidbits to share in long,
lazy conversations with Jason that night. Nothing I said and no detail he
offered me seemed too boring or trivial for us to discuss or laugh over. For
the first time in seven long years, I tasted that sweet narcotic of belonging
that seems to come only with knowing that you are being treasured and adored by
someone else.

We had no idea how the other person moved, smelled, acted
around others, or dealt with frustration. We had no sense of what it would be
like to look into each other’s eyes. But the immediate warmth of our emotional
connection over the phone and an untarnished sense of possibility proved
giddily intoxicating. With big decisions as far away as across the country and
as accessible as the voice in our ear, we mentioned marriage as a possibility
before we ever met.

More than once.
 

I so enjoyed talking to Jason during those early days that
it never even occurred to me that it would perhaps be wiser
not
to overdose so eagerly on the
emotional intensity we were manufacturing, or to settle too quickly into a
pattern of talking every day, or to get into the habit of returning every one
of his text messages and calls as soon as humanly possible.

I didn’t realize that he would become accustomed to, even
dependent on, knowing where I was and what I was doing all the time.

I didn’t realize that a couple of months in, when I felt the
first stirrings of needing more space and the first flickering of resentment at
the enormous amount of time and energy I was devoting to these daily telethons,
that I would also find myself feeling totally unable to risk the frustration
and disappointment that I feared would come from him if I sought to reshape
these communication patterns.

* * *

In a plot twist that any good romance
novelist would fear being labeled as the banal use of coincidence to
conveniently foment drama, Ryan and Jason both wanted to come visit me for the
first time on the same weekend.

“Who are you, Lisa McKay?” Ryan wrote to me. “Are you in the
habit of writing to strange boys
you’ve
never met and
inviting them to visit you? If not, why are you inviting me?
Because
I will come, for some reason.
I like your spirit. I like the way you
tell your secret doubts and smile. I like that all your words have winks hidden
in them. But let's be honest, it would be a bit of a mystery grab-bag of a
visit. What if you find me hopelessly boring in person? What if your
boyfriend/husband (?) takes exception to you sitting and talking for hours with
some boy from the northland?”

“As far as finding you hopelessly boring in person, highly
doubtful,” I wrote back.
“More prosaic than your prose
probably.
People usually are, in person. If we run into trouble and find
ourselves staring at each other over a Starbucks cup looking trapped and
thinking, ‘Crap! It’s only been 20 minutes and we’re stuck in this crazy
stranger-drama all weekend,’ we can always take laptops to the pub and sit and
email each other. Then we’d be on firm ground.”

And, no, I continued in that email, I wasn’t in the habit of
inviting strange men to visit me, but while we were on the topic he should know
that it just so happened that I’d branched out twice in the last couple of
months. Would the weekend
after
Labor
Day, when this other guy named Jason was already scheduled to visit me for the
first time, suit Ryan just as well?

“I must say I admire your fearlessness,” Ryan wrote, “lining
up two, um, ‘visitors,’ one after the other. That, if nothing else, makes you
either fascinating or mad, both of which are worth coming to see. I’ll be
there.”

Except … a couple of weeks and more than a few emails later,
Ryan had either had second thoughts about that or fate intervened.

His brother needed help moving, Ryan announced unexpectedly
via email one day. He had to drive their car across Canada. Could he take a
raincheck
on coming to Los Angeles?

I was initially gutted, and then relieved, when I got this
letter canceling Ryan’s visit.

It was all for the best, I told myself. For whenever I
wasn’t thinking about Ryan, I was happily caught up in the dizzying intensity
of my burgeoning whirlwind relationship with Jason, and whatever true
fearlessness I possessed had not extended to full disclosure with Jason as I
had risked with Ryan.

It wasn’t that I didn’t
want
to tell Jason. It was just that I was pretty sure that something like “Hey,
Jason, I really think I might love you, or that I might come to love you, but
there’s this other guy I’ve never met, or even talked to, and there’s a very
small chance that he
could
just be my
soul mate. Can I get back to you on us in two weeks?” would not go down well.

I simply figured that with Ryan having taken himself out of
the picture, surely things would get less complicated with Jason.

* * *

For a while – leading up to my first visit with Jason,
through the second, and heading towards the third – things
did
get less complicated.

Marginally.

But there was still plenty of complexity to my feelings as I
waited at LAX to pick him up for the first time. Sick of pacing, too scared to
sit alone with my own thoughts, I called Michelle on my cell phone as I waited.

“Am I crazy?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she answered. “But it’s a little late to do anything
about that now.”

I groaned.

“I think I’m going to throw up. Do you think it’s too late
to leave and just disappear?” I asked.

“Do you
really
want to do that?” Michelle asked.

“No,” I finally answered, slowly. “It’s just that … I think
we may have moved a bit fast.”

“How?”
Michelle asked. “You haven’t
even met yet.”

“Yes, well … You know how sometimes you say or write things
to people when they’re not there and you forget that you’ll probably actually
see
them someday?”

“Uh,” said Michelle, who the year before had married the guy
she’d been dating since she was fifteen, “not exactly.”
 

* * *

I rang Michelle again three days later while I was driving
home from dropping Jason off at the airport. The weekend had been full of sweet
moments and the novel heat of proximity. When I kissed him goodbye at LAX, I
promised I’d see him again the following month in Colorado as planned. But I
was, if anything, only more confused.

“I had fun, but I really don’t know if I can see us together
long term,” I said.

“Do you think you can figure that out in a single weekend?”
Michelle asked.

“No,” I finally answered. “That’s what dating
is
, right? You spend time with different
people until you get sure one way or another.”

“Apparently,” Michelle said.

There was a brief silence.

I was wondering whether I was even capable of getting sure
enough to make that sort of commitment. I wondered whether Michelle was
thinking she’d committed too quickly, too young.

“Do you think we might have figured this out earlier if we’d
been normal teenagers?” I asked.

“You had boyfriends as a teenager,” Michelle said.

“Yeah,” I said, “and as far as I know I’m still dating most
of them. After Dion I never actually broke up with anyone – I just left the
country.”

“What about Pete?” Michelle said, naming the last guy I’d
dated seriously – Pete and I had made it a whole six whole months when I was a
21-year-old university student.

“
Awwww
,
Pete
!” I said, smiling at all the good memories. “He was awesome.
Technically, though,
he
broke up with
me … after I kept talking about how I was planning on leaving the country.”

“It is sometimes beyond me,” Michelle said, “how you can be
a respected expert in stress management.

“That’s work,” I said. “I’m good at work. This is love.”

“I think I should go to Colorado,” I said. “Maybe things
will become clearer if I see him on his home turf.”

“Go to Colorado,” Michelle said. “But don’t do anything too
dumb.”

* * *

I came back from Colorado excited and exhausted.

“I had a really good time!” I said to Michelle the night I
got back.

“Where
are
you?”
Michelle asked.

“LAX.”

“That’s what it sounds like. But didn’t you get back this
morning?”

“Yeah, I got up at 3 a.m., flew back to L.A. this morning,
went home, repacked, and now I’m back. I’m going to South Africa tonight.”

“I can’t keep up with you,” Michelle said. “So what was the
weekend like?”

It was really good, I told her. It was fun. His family all
seemed lovely. His nephew was adorable. His mother was a great cook. It
snowed.
 

“I haven’t heard you say a whole lot about Jason,” Michelle
said after half an hour.
 
“What are the
three things you like most about him?”

“He is very attentive,” I said, starting to think out loud.
“And he’s really good at affirming me.”

“What are things that will be there if the attentiveness and
affirmation fades?” Michelle asked.

There was a long pause.

“I need time to think about that
one,
and I’ve got to go. They’re calling boarding. Hey, remember,” I said, starting
a preflight dialogue we had often, “just in case the plane crashes …”

“I know,” Michelle said, finishing the sentence, “you love
me.”

* * *

There were moments when I’d see Jason’s name on my phone and
simply stare at it until it stopped ringing
 
– feeling panicked and trapped, wondering how we’d careened so far down
this path of emotional and physical intimacy so rapidly.
 

There were moments when I buried my face in a bouquet of red
roses he’d had delivered to my office, or felt the warm weight of his arms
around me during those charged weekend visits, and smiled at the thought of
marrying him.

And in the midst of all this confusing and exhilarating
sweetness, like a mosquito in my mind, there was still Ryan.

Ryan with whom I was still exchanging
sporadic emails.
Ryan who represented his own brand of
mystery and passion to me.
Ryan who, to use his own analogy, seemed to
promise a raw, deep adventure to Jason’s gentle home.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to figure out whether Jason and I
really had something unless I threw myself completely into our relationship.
But I feared that I might never be able to throw myself fully into our
relationship and really commit unless I also met someone like Ryan, someone who
stood a chance of putting my ideals about a true soul mate to the test.

A soul mate, I believed, would meet me on a visceral, darker
level. He would have an instinctive understanding, borne out of experience, of
the elements that made up my own particular potpourri of angst – constant
change, the guilt of privilege, too much witnessed suffering, a battle between
hope and cynicism, and a search for God that wouldn’t let you rest even during
times when you weren’t at all sure you believed in God.

There would be the companionship of keenly felt questions.

Similarly to God, I wasn’t at all sure that soul mates actually
existed. But, also similarly, I rather hoped they did.

What if this
comfortable sweetness I felt with Jason now would someday not be enough? What
if my soul mate belonged down the other end of the spectrum, where I had placed
Ryan?

There were choices to be made, choices that felt impossible
to make in isolation.

“I need to meet both of them,” I told Michelle. “If Ryan
won’t come here, I’m going to Canada.”