The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (28 page)

 

My second act of sabotage happened about a month later. We’d barely recovered from round one when I got restless. Having a boyfriend had been my ultimate goal for years, but now that I’d accomplished it, I realized: Being in a relationship is sort of boring. It wasn’t Hayes’s fault. He was wonderful; paying the phone bill, picking up my dry-cleaning, and when I was performing, he’d photocopy flyers and send out Evites. He did all the things an attentive partner does. But when you’re in a relationship without the possibility of sex it feels more like you’re flirting with your personal assistant.

And then there was all of our church drama. On the one hand it was nice to finally get to share my religion with someone; on the other, it was a real pain in the ass (or
rear
, if Hayes were writing this). It was hard enough dealing with my own insecurities, thick legs, or habit of chewing an entire pack of gum in one sitting. Now my faith was under the microscope, and boy did Hayes have his opinions.

Our first real fight happened because I skipped the last hour of church. That night, after Sunday dinner, Hayes told me that he was worried I wasn’t religious enough for him.

“I’m afraid I’ll always be pulling the weight,” he explained.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m sensitive to the word
weight
, but this really rubbed me the wrong way. I explained that there were many ways of being religious, and that my faith was personal and not his to judge. He apologized, but after that I was paranoid. I stopped making jokes that were off-color and if I read my scriptures or did anything remotely kind, I’d immediately tell Hayes, to help prove my piety.

This all came to a head one fateful fast Sunday. In the Mormon-faith, the first Sunday of every month is fast Sunday, which means you don’t drink or eat for twenty-four hours. I’m really bad at fasting because I’m always on a diet, so if I give up food completely, my body thinks it’s the end and freaks out. I tried to explain this to Hayes. Instead of letting me off the hook, he suggested we fast together—and I quote: “There is no
I
in TEAM.” Unfortunately there’s one in THIRSTY. By lunchtime, I was dehydrated. So I snuck into the bathroom, tilted my head under the faucet, and started chugging water. It was only after I finished, water dripping down my face, that I realized I was literally drinking behind closed doors and hiding it from him. I stormed back into the living room.

“Do you see this?” I pointed to the wet mark on my shirt. “I drank water!” Hayes looked confused.

“And that’s just me, I drink water, so why should I have to hide it from you?”

If I were head over heels for Hayes I could’ve put up with our religious misunderstandings—but that was the other big problem. Seeing Hayes for the first time, amid a room full of Mormons, was a delightful surprise, but it was never magic. I didn’t feel overwhelmed, lost in dreams, propelled to action, incapable of loving anyone else.

“You don’t need that feeling,” my mother consoled me. “It goes away over time. Every lasting relationship ends up being about the day-to-day routine.” She said this like it was a good thing, like love was a game of Chutes and Ladders, and Hayes and I had managed to leap all the way to the top: stability.

I wasn’t sold.

“Do you feel like our relationship is lacking passion?” I asked Hayes one night.

“I don’t believe in passion,” he answered.

“What?
How can you not
believe
in passion?” I gestured wildly. “Whether or not you experience it, passion exists,
it’s real!”

“Fine, passion exists,” he said, “but I’m not looking for that. I think it’s a hype. To me love is about inspiring another person to do good. Elna, the more good that you do, in service to God, to your family and to our friends, the more I feel you love me.”

Ughhhhh. Don’t bring God into an argument about passion.
It reminded me of “The Christian Relationship.” In the church’s “Marriage Preparation Guide” (yes, I own one) the secular relationship is represented by a picture of a man and a woman staring into each other’s eyes. Next to this, there was another picture of a man and a woman holding hands and looking skyward; a dotted line goes from the woman to the man, to the sky, and then back to the woman, making a triangle, with God at the apex: That’s “The Christian Relationship.” And while I understood the appeal of being a part of something “bigger than yourself,” after Matt I wanted God and romantic love to be separate experiences.

“Passion isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Hayes finished his speech. I thought this was the end of it, but the next morning he sent me an e-mail entitled “Passion.” It was the least passionate document I’d ever read: a well thought-out argument about the merits of service as love, with scriptures backing up his ideas.

At work that night I had a conversation with Vinny, the Nobu and Letterman security guard. Vinny’s an Italian Catholic from the Bronx who grew up around the mob; he’s also a retired cop, NYPD. After two jobs together he knows me pretty well. In fact he was at Letterman the day that Matt and I first met.

“Vinny,” I began. “Do you believe in soul mates?”

He thought about my question. “Nah,” he shook his head. “Take my wife—she grew up five blocks from me, only we didn’t meet till we were thirty-five. I’d been in the army, I’d traveled the world, and still I married a girl from Astoria, Queens. What are the odds that my soul mate grew up five blocks away? Is it fate? No. In the end, people just marry other people who are like them.”

I was disappointed by his answer, but nodded my head.

“You know what your problem is?” he continued.

“What?”

“You believe a buncha different things, you’ve lived in a buncha different places, and now, nobody’s like you.”

“Thanks, Vinny. No one tells you what being unique actually means: that you’ll die alone.”

“I thought you found your Mormon man.”

“It’s complicated.”

“You know what I think about it?”

“What?”

“I was a big kid and growing up in the Bronx, the mafia was always trying to recruit me. I coulda made a shitload of money, too. But you wanna know why I didn’t join?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m too smart and I ask too many questions. And when the big boss says to put cement boots on some poor schmuck and throw him in the river, and you ask him, ‘
Why?’
you get thrown in the river, too.”

“I see . . .”

“It’ll always be hard for you to be a Mormon ’cause you’re too smart and you ask too many questions.”

“You’re right, Vinny. Being a Mormon is a lot like joining the mob.”

When I got home from work that night, I opened up an old shoe-box and pulled out the only picture I had of Matt. Tina took it. In the picture we’re sitting on my bed, Matt’s looking down at a book, and I’m looking at the camera, smiling. I missed him.

It’s stupid what a few weeks with someone can do to you, namely prevent you from ever moving on. But I’d been thinking about him more and more each week. I couldn’t get over the feeling I’d had when I was with him. Maybe I’d imagined it, maybe it was inflated by a faulty memory; either way, I didn’t feel the same way about Hayes.
If only I could see Matt again
, I thought,
then I’d know if I was still capable of feeling passion. I’d understand if it was important to me or not
. It’d been a year since our breakup. I’d deleted his number after two unreturned phone calls, and then regretted it because I had no way of reaching him.

Facebook was invented for moments like these. I joined and looked up Matt’s name. Sure enough, he was there. I closed Hayes’s letter on passion and wrote one of my own, only mine was to Matt.

The letter was long, but basically it said three things:
I hope you’re doing well, I’m finally dating a Mormon, I miss the shit outta you.

I knew that pressing send would open up a can of worms, but I did it anyway.

 

He called me the very next day. I was walking though Central Park and picked up not knowing it was him.

“Elna?” he said.

Oh, my gosh
—hearing his voice was so momentous that I had to sit down.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he answered. “I just got your message.”

“Good old Facebook,” I offered.

“I’m really glad you contacted me,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you lately.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, I got that job in Zambia.”

“You did? Congratulations!” While we were dating Matt told me he wanted to work at a hospital in Lusaka. He’d written the president a letter, but hadn’t heard anything.

“Yeah, I’m actually moving in three days.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I’m not sure—it’s a permanent position.”

“Oh . . .”

“But I want to see you before I go—”

I said yes before he finished asking.

 

We met for lunch two days later. Ever since our breakup I’d been experiencing anxiety. The moment Matt turned the corner I realized why. I missed him.

Lunch was uneventful; we spent the majority of the meal catching up. The conversation fluctuated between feeling both natural and totally forced. If someone were to look at us, they’d immediately know the occasion.
We’re just friends now! Can’t you tell?

Kevin has a term that perfectly describes it: “The nice lady at the conference.” Let’s say you run into an old lover or ex-best friend at a business conference, both of you are wearing name badges. You say hello politely, and ask each other surface questions like
How’s your sister doing?
But all along there is this mountain of knowledge and history that’s passed between you, only neither of you acknowledge it because now things are different—now they’re just “the nice lady at the conference” to you. Like the Elliot Smith lyric, “You’re just somebody that I used to know.”

I thought we would leave it at that, but as we were walking out of the restaurant, Matt slipped up. It happened because I made a stupid joke, I don’t even remember what I said, but he laughed and caught my hand in his.

“God I wish you weren’t Mormon,” he said.

“You do?” I looked at him in shock.

“Yeah.”

“
I knew it!
I knew you liked me!”

“Of course I liked you. What makes you think I didn’t?”

“You moved on so easily. You never called. . . .”

“It wasn’t easy,” he interrupted. “And I didn’t call because, what was the point? We tried to have fun, but it always came back to the same discussion.”

“Yes, but the way we left things, it was hard for me to move on,” I argued. “We had the perfect beginning and an ending. No middle. So whatever, who knows? Maybe if we’d kept on dating we would’ve broken up a month later because you would’ve asked me to pick up bread on the way home and I would’ve forgotten and you’d yell, ‘You never listen to me, it’s over!’ ”

He laughed.

“It’s not fair,” I continued. “I never got the chance to see if you were the guy who could sit through a bunch of horrible comedians to see me do a routine you’d heard a hundred times before, and still say I was great. And you never got to see if I was the girl you wanted to come home to after a really long day of doctory things.”

“Yes, that’s what we call it . . .” he laughed again.

“Paying the phone bill, picking up our dry cleaning, making flyers, we never got to experience the normal everyday things. So who’s to say we would’ve been good at them . . .”

“I have a feeling we would’ve been great at them.”

We walked in silence for a moment. When we got to the crosswalk, I stopped and faced him.

“Do you still think about me?”

“How could I not? You’ve read more books than any other girl I dated.”

“That’s funny. I used to lie about reading just to impress you.” I laughed.

He looked me in the eye and I realized throughout the entire lunch we’d avoided making eye contact.

“I really like your face,” he said.

It totally caught me off guard. A tear slid down my cheek.

“But hey,” he stopped me. “You met a Mormon guy, and that’s what you wanted all along.”

“No . . .” I wiped my face with my both of my hands. And then I took a breath.
This is that moment
, I thought,
when you only get one chance to say what you really want to say, please help me say it
.

“I know it is possible to feel this way about other people,” I began, pointing to my heart, “I know that there are a lot of ways to love and that each person I date will bring out a different part of me and I will love them all differently. But I will always like how I liked you the best.”

“Oh, God.”

Matt pulled me into him and held me there.
Fuck, I like you so much,
I thought. And for a second, in the circle of his arms and mine, it was possible to change all of it, to be together. I wanted to live in that second, freeze time, freeze consequences, live. That’s when Matt leaned in to kiss me. I was about to go through with it, too, an inch from his mouth, when I stopped myself.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.”

“Sorry.” He let go of me. “I just got nostalgic.”

“For what?”

“For you.”

“But I’m still here,” I said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”

 

“How’d it go with your friend today?” Hayes asked me later that evening.

“Huh?” I’d been staring into space.

“The guy you saw today, the guy you briefly dated, how did it go?”

“Fine.”

I’d gotten Hayes’s permission to see Matt. I hadn’t explained all the details, but I told him I was seeing an ex-boyfriend who was moving to Africa. He didn’t seem to mind. Until after. Whether I’d intended to do it or not, it shifted my way of seeing him, and he could tell. It was like I had an invisible scale, Hayes or a fantasy.