My Year with Eleanor (23 page)

The relationship lasted a year and a half. In that time, we engaged in romantic one-uppery with the kind of vigor that doesn't make it past your teen years. He hijacked the school's PA system and asked me to prom over the loudspeaker. On his birthday, I sent him a singing telegram. I took out an ad professing my adoration in the
Houston Chronicle
. He covered my car in roses while I was at work.

“That could never happen in New York, by the way,” Jessica interjected. “Someone would steal that shit.”

“And the hood ornament, just to make a point,” Chris added.

The night he first said “I love you,” Josh showed up on my doorstep in a three-piece suit and took me to a candlelit restaurant in downtown Houston. Strolling hand in hand through a nearby park afterward, we came upon a majestic fountain. He scooped me up, carried me into the fountain, and slow-danced with me in his arms. “I love you,” he said. Then, grinning wickedly, he dunked me, completely soaking me and my cocktail dress. I shoved him down and he splashed me. Eventually, our peals of laughter drew a crowd, and everyone applauded as we dragged ourselves out and bowed.

My relationship with Matt was steady to the point of being predictable. Josh had written long letters, detailing every aspect he loved about me and how he would die for me. Matt gave me a card on our third anniversary that read, “I'm grateful to have you in my life. I love you. Love, Matt.”
I'm grateful to have you in my life.
It was lovely, but it was also something I said to my friends. Hell, I think I'd even said it to my hairdresser. Was that enough passion? Would that sustain me over a lifetime?

Jessica smiled thoughtfully, swirling her wine around the glass. “In New York, we can have the best of everything. It's a city with limitless options. So we get accustomed to thinking that there's always something better out there, because there usually is: a better apartment, a better job, a better meal at a better restaurant around the corner. We're never satisfied. This city trains us to worry about the possibility of something better, so we're unable to recognize when we actually have The One. Why do you think New Yorkers get married later than the rest of the country?”

“Why did you and Josh break up?” Chris asked.

“He was a year older than me and he went to college in Boston. We stayed together long distance, but it was too hard being in such different worlds,” I said. “You know how I knew it was over? On our eighteen-month anniversary, I'd planned an elaborate scavenger hunt for him, leaving clues at various landmarks in our relationship, leading to his anniversary gift, which I left at the fountain where he told me he loved me. But when I'd handed him the first clue, he'd sighed and looked annoyed. ‘How long is this going to take?' he asked. ‘My mom needs the car.' ”

T
he next day I stepped off the bus in D.C., uncomfortably aware that Josh would see me before I saw him. Finally I caught sight of him waving happily behind the tinted window of his silver station wagon. His hairline had receded slightly, but otherwise he hadn't changed at all.

“How about hamburgers for lunch?” he asked when I climbed in.

Between bites, we caught up on each other's families. I was happy to hear his mother's breast cancer was still in remission. He was a little appalled to hear that my little sister, who had been an infant when he and I dated, was now fourteen and had a boyfriend of her own. He told me he had recently applied to several business schools and was waiting to hear back.

After lunch he drove me by the White House and various monuments whose significance was pointed out through the car window at fifty miles an hour.

At a red light, he turned to me and asked, “So where do you want to go to do the interview? At a coffee shop somewhere?”

I hesitated, suddenly overtaken by a wave of vulnerability. I was worried that if I were looking into his eyes and he told me something I didn't want to hear, I might cry. And I didn't want my blubbering to alter his answers. But I sensed I could keep it together as long as we were sitting side by side, each of us staring straight ahead.

“How about we just drive around and I ask you the questions in the car?”

If he thought this was a bizarre request, he didn't show it. “All right. But you're buying gas later.”

He maneuvered the station wagon into Hains Point in East Potomac Park. We were driving in a big circle, I realized. There was a soothing, meditative quality to these laps. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that the act of drawing circles encouraged one to venture into his or her subconscious. The first objects that children draw are circles. To Jung, they represented the struggle and reconciliation of opposites and the eventual reunification of self.

Including Matt, I'd dated only three guys since Josh. The few times I'd had coffee with Josh in the last ten years, I'd never once asked about who he was dating. I took a deep breath.

“Okay, first question. How many girlfriends have you had since me?”

He laughed in an affectionate way that made my question feel very young. “Gosh, let me think for a second. That's hard to quantify. Does casual dating count or just relationships over a year?”

Josh, I was both surprised and not surprised to learn, had a substantial inventory of exes. There was an entire category, in fact, devoted to girls named Amy. With sudden embarrassment, I realized that our relationship wasn't one of the defining love affairs of his life, that I hadn't meant to Josh what he'd meant to me. I was just a blip, a non-Amy.

“How did you and Monique meet?”

“Mo-Mo and I have been friends for years, but we realized last year our chemistry was more than friendship. It's been absolutely wonderful.”

This last line stung a little, as did his use of “Mo-Mo.” I busied myself with my list of questions and tried to betray nothing. Now it was time to dive into our relationship.

“What attracted you to me initially and what ultimately turned you off?”

“Your self-confidence, your vivaciousness. You could go into any room and be part of it immediately.” He said with a smile, “You could tell a story better than anyone.”

This saddened me. The last time I'd felt like part of a room, I'd smoked some bad pot and believed I was a piece of furniture. I could hold my own one-on-one, but as I'd gotten older, groups had started making me nervous. “Why do you always clam up at dinner parties?” Matt used to ask before I stopped going to dinner parties. Everyone else seemed to have funnier, more intelligent things to say, and the more people who spoke, the lamer my opinions felt. The more time that went by without my saying anything, the more significance was attached when I finally did say something. (“She waited all this time to say that?” I imagined them thinking.) When I finally did speak, I'd be okay for a sentence or two, then I'd start to panic, lose track of what I was saying, and abruptly wrap things up by concluding, “So . . .
yeah,
” baffling everyone in the room. It started in college. I began writing out a few talking points the night before and kept the piece of paper on my lap during class in case I blanked out. I made sure to recite my talking points toward the beginning of class, before they could be judged in comparison to what everyone else had said. I contributed just enough to get my participation grade and no more.

“And what about me didn't you like?” I was scared that he'd rattle off a laundry list of negative characteristics I didn't even know I possessed. Things that I couldn't change. I tried to remember what Eleanor said: “A mature person is one . . . who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally.”

“You were too possessive,” he said immediately.

One incident came to mind. Josh and I had been in line outside an eighteen-and-up club and a limousine had rolled up bursting with a bachelorette party. Standing up in the sunroof had been a group of drunk women with big hair that brought to mind tulips in a too-short vase as they wavered back and forth.

“Lookin' good, ladies!” Josh had shouted. No sooner had they beckoned him with their long acrylic fingernails than he'd started running toward the limo, leaping onto the roof and diving headfirst into the sunroof. His legs were still hanging out. I could see groping hands full of fake fingernails reaching up from inside the car, trying to pull him all the way in. I'd marched over, plunged my hand into the sunroof, and dragged him out by the back of his pants.

“Well, to be fair, you did
cheat
on me. It's not like I didn't have reason to be paranoid.” I could laugh now, though his infidelity had been devastating at the time. “Do you have any regrets about our relationship?”

“I really regret cheating on you.” A few months after we started dating, Josh and his friends had taken a trip to Austin, where he hooked up with a UT sorority girl. “Do you regret punching me in the face when you found out?”

“Not in the slightest,” I said cheerfully. “Have you ever cheated on anyone else?”

“No. How could I after seeing what that did to you? We never got past it.”

He was right. The cheating incident upset the power balance in our relationship. For the rest of the time we dated, it came up every time we disagreed about anything, no matter how small. Sometimes while we were kissing, I'd picture him making out with the sorority girl (who I knew—after demanding every sordid detail—was short, curvy, and brunette, my polar opposite) and my mood would instantly sour. It haunted me for years, long after we'd broken up.

“I'm a big flirt, though,” Josh said. “A girl can't hold on to me too tight.”

“What's Mo-Mo like?” I asked, testing out the nickname.

“Mo-Mo is very chill and not possessive. She's the most easygoing person I've ever met.”

“Okay, anything else you didn't like about me?”

“You hated traveling, and I remember thinking I could never be with someone who hated traveling.”

It was true. Even on vacations that required nothing more than drinking on a beach, traveling left me uneasy. I hated the feeling of being in transition. There was a nervousness in my stomach like when I was having a problem but hadn't yet figured out the answer. The problem only felt solved once I'd returned home, my belongings were unpacked, and I was back to my routine. Josh spent the year after college backpacking his way across three continents. He ran with the bulls in Pamplona, hiked the jungles of Thailand, climbed glaciers in Argentina, and found work picking grapes on a vineyard in France. International travel—especially alone—had been on my list of fears from the start. I was tempted to tell Josh about my plans to climb Kilimanjaro to show him how much I'd changed. I knew he'd be both jealous and impressed. But that wasn't what I'd come here to do, so I stuck to my questions.

“Why do you think we didn't work out?” I asked.

He thought about this for a few seconds. I thought he'd say something like “We were too young” or “After I went away to college, the distance became too much of a strain.” Instead, he said, “I was more willing to throw myself out there and you liked things you were more used to.” I blanched. One of the things I'd loved about Josh was how he'd forced me out of my comfort zone. But maybe to him I'd simply been dragging him down? The idea hit home because it was one of the things that worried me about my relationship with Matt. Every time he criticized me for not being more social, I wondered how long until he just got fed up and left me for some girl who loved dinner parties and didn't need a therapist to coax her into trying new things.

Joey pulled over near a thick assemblage of bushes and opened the car door. “After an hour of driving around, my bladder is at breaking point,” he said. Then, after making sure a cop couldn't see him, he headed toward the bushes and peed.

T
he plan was to go back to Josh's place, meet up with Monique, and head out to a bar. That way if meeting her was awkward, we could drink after. Immediately after. Josh and I were sitting on opposite sofas chatting in his living room when a key turned in the lock. My breath caught. This meeting, I knew, would set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

“Anybody home?” a pleasant female voice called out.

“We're in here!” Josh called.

When Monique walked in, I saw it was worse than I'd thought. She was even more beautiful in person. The Facebook photo had also failed to convey her perfect sumptuous breasts.

She shook my hand. “I'm so happy to finally meet you,” she said so warmly I actually believed her.

Josh scooted over and made room for her on the couch. I was relieved that they didn't kiss hello. We chose a safe subject and chatted about work. She was an international program specialist at the U.S. Department of Commerce. She asked me questions about my Year of Fear, and I recounted some of my latest adventures. At one point she reached over and stroked his hair. It was hair that I'd stroked ten years earlier and would never stroke again, hair that had receded from me. The intimacy of the gesture caught me off-guard, and my stomach dropped a little. Then the moment passed. I was starting to relax when there was a knock at the door. Before anyone could answer, a tall woman with dark wavy hair bounded into the room. “Noelle, this is our friend Trouble,” Josh told me. “She's coming out partying with us tonight.”

Soon we arrived at a spirited Georgetown bar called Mr. Smith's. A few of Josh's college buddies stopped by, and everyone took turns buying drinks and shots. Mr. Smith's had in its employ a gifted piano player with a marginal singing voice, not that it mattered when every patron was trying to drown him out.

“Sweeeeeeeet Caroliiiiiine! Buh-buh-buh! Good times never seemed so good. So good! So good! So good!” we thundered, pumping our fists in the air.

“I got this round,” I said. “Who wants whiskey?” Josh and Trouble raised their hands, while Mo-Mo stuck to her vodka cranberry. The three of us tossed back the shots. Josh slammed his shot glass on the counter, planted his face between Trouble's sizable breasts, and shook his head vigorously while vibrating his lips, a gesture known as motorboating. Trouble unleashed a howl. Appalled, I glanced over at Mo-Mo but she was laughing with delight.