On My Knees (6 page)

Actually, I take that back. If you want a boyfriend, stop wanting a boyfriend. Life doesn’t work like that. If you want a boyfriend, start with forming a good relationship with yourself instead of looking to other people to fulfill you. Stop accepting things you don’t want. Stop settling. If you don’t wait for what you want, you’re never going to get it. That may sound like some sort of new age garbage but it isn’t and I know it isn’t because I’m not into new age garbage. These are just facts. Have some fucking self-respect. Have a little faith in yourself. Have a little self-esteem.

And for the love of God, know that you’re not going to find a boyfriend in the Casual Encounters section of fucking Craigslist. Or shit, I don’t know. Maybe you are, but it seems unlikely at best. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s been my experience at least. You find things in the most unexpected places. Specifically, when you’re not looking for them. And sometimes, dare I say
most of the time,
things don’t work out how you think they will.

If only I could have taken this advice myself, I would have been golden. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty. At the time, I was blind as a fucking bat.

6

Off the Deep End

A
s though my debacle with Steve weren’t bad enough, it was child’s play compared to what happened next. I took self-destructive to a whole new level. There is a reason they say that the quickest way to end a friendship is with sex—because it is.

Nico was, well, everything. He was my best friend, my closest confidant, and technically he was even sort of my boss. We had been attracted to each other from the moment we met, but I was still with Noam and nothing had happened. But from the moment we started to work together we pretty much became inseparable.

Nico, among other mogulesque things, owned a major ad agency. He had offices in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. He was born in South Africa and grew up between Johannesburg and London and was now based in New York and Paris. He had convinced me to do some freelance consulting, which was kind of a dream come true. I was writing copy and designing for major ad campaigns without any of the commitment that usually accompanies working for a major corporation. And because it was Nico’s company, he could do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted was me.

This went on for three years until Noam and I broke up—at which point Nico almost immediately made his move. Maybe, if the timing and circumstances had been different, we would have stood a chance and things would have worked out, but that’s not what happened. We were kind of doomed from the get-go. Nico adored me as much as I adored him, but he just wanted to have a good time. I, being in a deep, dark depression, was looking for someone to save me. And I was hoping it would be him. This, of course, was a recipe for disaster. And the harder I tried, the more of a mess it became.

I’d be just as happy, if not happier, if I could forget that any of this ever happened, because quite frankly it was fucking mortifying. In short order, I was crazy, I was depressed, and I was obsessed. For all intents and purposes, I was also sleeping with my boss. Nico, for his part, was trying to temper my insanity by distancing himself from me whenever he could but it wasn’t working. In fact, it was entirely possible that he was making it worse. He made it abundantly clear from the beginning that he was not interested in getting into a relationship, but he was also sending me mixed messages.

I nevertheless adored him. He was smart and funny and successful and stylish and he knew what I was about to say before I said it and we cracked each other up. And we drank together and we partied together and we just had fun together. He knew everyone and he traveled all the time and each day was a new adventure. And while sometimes that’s awesome, sometimes it’s not.

When everything else in your life is up in the air, taking one of your most stable relationships and turning it into a hot mess is not the best move. And I may have been a disaster, but Nico wasn’t helping. One minute he was all over me and the next minute he was telling me he didn’t want to be accountable to me. Any normal person would have headed for the hills, but I had some deluded notion that he would eventually come around and his actions weren’t helping, so I just couldn’t let it go.

We’d be out, having a great time, and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. And I would always think that tonight—whatever night tonight was—would be the night that he would tell me how in love he was with me. But it was the same story every time. At the very last second, Nico would make up some nonsensical excuse about how he had to go home or be up really early or he had a meeting or he was really tired or he had a hangnail. One night I actually pulled him aside and was like, “Listen, I know that you’re in love with me and you’re just scared.”

And he was straight up like, “Uh, not really, P. To be honest, I’m not really sure what I want.”

You would think that with all the advice I had been doling out to Hanna that I would have been less of a fool. You’d be wrong.

The debacle started a few months after Noam and I broke up. Nico and I went to a big industry event together. There was a photo booth there. And in the pictures of us we’re sticking our tongues out; we’re laughing. In one of the photos, he is biting my nose. The sexual energy is almost tangible. This was typical behavior.

After the event, we went back to my apartment and were lying on Grandma’s couch playing around when suddenly something switched. He looked at me and touched my face in a way that he never had before and seconds later we were kissing. In that moment, I remember feeling something I hadn’t felt in months—hope. It was the first time since Noam and I had broken up that I felt something other than utter despair. In that moment, Nico became my life raft. I would have fucked him right then and there but he slowed me down—which, incidentally, was also fairly mortifying.

Nico, like Noam, was a good deal older than I was. And he had the foresight to know that I was in a very dark place. He also knew that unless two people have a conversation to ensure that they are on exactly the same page, hooking up with your best friend is usually not a good idea under the
best
of circumstances. He also knew that hooking up with your best friend who you work with and who just broke up with her boyfriend of ten years is just plain stupid.

For my part, I had replaced all of the misery that goes along with a breakup with total mania. I was elated. In other words, I pretty much went off the deep end. It was much easier to be obsessed with this new “relationship” than it was to mourn the loss of my last one. The problem, of course, was that there
was
no new relationship. Nico had made it very clear that the last thing he wanted to do was to be my boyfriend. But I wasn’t interested in pesky things like facts. I was certain that he was the solution to all my problems. And so each time he would call me and tell me he was in town, I would jump like a small lapdog, convinced that sooner or later he would see the light.

It was pathetic.

I
was pathetic.

I began writing him the kinds of letters psychologists recommend you write but never send. The only difference was I was actually
sending
them
.

Nico,

There is no other way to say this . . . I’m leaving.

It’s an incredibly difficult decision, but I think it’s the right one. Or maybe it’s not the right one, but it’s the only one. Most simply, around you is not a healthy place for me to be. I don’t want to, but I’m leaving. A few months ago, when you said you don’t know what you want, I told you I didn’t believe you. I said, I think you do know what you want, that I believe you know exactly what you want, but that you’re scared. Now, I’m not sure I was right. I think I may have overestimated how well I know you, or, more likely, I was blinded by belief—in you, in me, in us. I see now, that you were telling me the truth—you really don’t know what you want. Or, you do, but it’s not me, it’s not us, it’s not the vision I’ve had in my head. I think I’ve filled a very important void for you. And you filled one for me, too. But I don’t want to keep filling your void because it makes mine bigger. So there really is nothing else to do—but leave. I’m sorry to, because I’ve so very deeply enjoyed our time together. And I wish you nothing but happiness, but not at the expense of my own. It makes me so sad because I deeply believe that we could have been so great together or, rather, that we are so great together, but the truth is, that we’re not together. And it seems clear to me, very clear, that we’re not going to be. So I wish you the best of luck. And I hope we can, one day, reconnect.

It was like the theater of the ridiculous, because less than a week after sending these nonsensical letters, it would be as though nothing happened and I’d be right where I started.

During the height of all of this drama, Nico was going to have knee surgery. He had just sold his apartment in New York and was in the process of buying a loft in Tribeca, so he was living in a hotel on the Upper East Side. Two nights before his surgery, we were having dinner there and we had a big fight. I was adamant that I wanted to take him to the hospital and stay with him during his surgery so I could nurse him back to health. And he was adamant about
not
wanting me to take him to the hospital and
not
wanting me to stay with him and
not
wanting me to nurse him back to health. And I was irate. So after dinner, in the lobby of his hotel, I said, “I’m leaving.” I was hoping he would say, “No, stay.” But, of course, he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything close to that. In fact, he was probably thrilled to get rid of me.

Instead of leaving, like anyone with even a shred of self-respect would have, I announced, “You know what? Actually, I’m going to stay. I’m spending the night.”

And so I spent the night with him. Again. I woke up the next morning thinking everything was just peachy, thinking that because he went down on me all of our issues had dissipated into thin air. And when the subject of the hospital came up again, I just assumed that he had changed his mind. When he articulated, for the ninety-seventh time, that he
still
did not want me to take him to the hospital the next day, I flipped. I was like, “I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but I’m sick of this bullshit.”

I marched out of the hotel room and swore to myself all day long that I would never speak to him again. By the time I fell asleep that night I almost had myself convinced.

A
t six o’clock the next morning, I woke up to my phone ringing. It was Nico.

Nico: “I’m sorry I acted like an asshole. Will you please come meet me at the hospital?”

Me: “I’m sorry, who is this?”

Nico: “Come on, P, really. Please.”

Me: “You’re breaking up. I can’t hear a word you’re saying. I think I heard an ‘I’m sorry’ but I couldn’t really make it out . . .”

Ten minutes later, I was in a taxi on my way to the hospital. Then, while he was in surgery, I went to go fill his prescriptions and buy him chicken soup. By the time he woke up, I was sitting at his bedside like a wet nurse, stroking his hand.

There was something about Nico allowing me to see him in such a vulnerable state that just melted my heart. There was also something extremely manipulative about how I inserted myself into this situation. Nico kept saying he didn’t want me to be there and I kept pushing him to say yes, knowing that eventually he would cave. Somehow in my twisted logic I figured if I could just get him to say yes more times than he said no, then he’d be my boyfriend and I’d be able to avoid dealing with my life—which, I admit, is
psychotic
.

And if I told you that the man had transformed into an
angel,
it would be a grave understatement. If I told you that I had become more delusional than ever about the nature of our relationship and where it was headed, it would be an even more grave understatement.

After two days of recuperating in the hospital, I went with him back to his hotel. I was like a pig in shit, more certain than ever that Nico had finally seen the light. I stayed with him that whole week, bringing him frozen bags of peas in the middle of the night to ice his knee and replacing them when they were no longer cold enough. I even tied his shoes so he didn’t have to bend down. And then, one morning as I was on my way out, he said, “I love you.”

Nico and I had said “I love you” to each other hundreds if not thousands of times, but neither one of us had dared to say it since we started “seeing” each other, for lack of a better term. Neither one of us ever mentioned it and even though nothing had changed, I felt like this incident had
deep meaning
. In my own defense, I wasn’t entirely wrong. It
did
have deep meaning—in my head.

I
n perhaps what was my first real moment of clarity, I decided I needed to take control of my life and that maybe what I needed was just some good old-fashioned therapy. This was a huge step for me. I had always thought therapy was kind of a joke. I had never seen a therapist before and have always operated under the impression that not only do I not
need
therapy but also that going to therapy was a self-indulgent, whiny, New York Jew thing to do. I mean even in the worst of times (and these were certainly them), what was so bad in my life? People were dying of AIDS and malaria and cholera and extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis. You think
they
went to therapy? Therapy was a luxury for people who didn’t
really
have problems. Nevertheless, I had to admit that while relatively speaking I didn’t
really
have problems, I definitely had problems.

Plus, I wasn’t convinced it would be that helpful. All I had to do was look at Hanna and see how much good it had done her. She had, like, three therapy appointments a week and she was even more dysfunctional than I was. But I really was at the end of my rope. So instead of calling one of the hundreds of people I knew to recommend someone, I did what was arguably the stupidest thing in the world. I went online.

To begin with, finding anything in a frantic late-night search on the Internet is never a good idea, let alone a therapist and let alone when you’re as paranoid as I am. But there I was at two in the morning digging around the depths of the World Wide Web for some assistance. I had decided that if I were going to see a therapist, I definitely needed a gay. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that there is only one thing straight men think about when they have a vulnerable, attractive woman in their clutches—blow jobs. Beyond that, straight men aren’t exactly renowned for their listening skills.

And that brought up another problem. I’ll give you a tip here and potentially save you some time. If you look up “gay therapist” on the Internet, you’re not going to find a gay therapist. What you are going to find is a therapist who specializes in helping
gay
people
. It’s like trying to find a gay dentist. Health care professionals do not share the intimate details of their personal lives. It’s not like, “Hi, I’m Dr. So-and-So. I specialize in anxiety disorders, and at night, I like to be blindfolded, bent over, and fucked up the ass.”