The Year of Yes (24 page)

“You remember my name, right?” I couldn’t help myself.

“Maria,” he said, grinning. “
I once met a girl
…yeah, I think I know your name…Jesus! Are you okay?” He suddenly sat bolt upright. I’d forgotten about the nosebleed. He was out of bed, grabbing something that I hoped was a tissue, but which turned out to be a dirty sock. He pressed it to my nose, and pinched the back of my neck between two fingers. I felt brave, like a swaggering boxer, blinded by
punches, collapsing in the corner of the ring, being ministered to by my coach. The room was spinning, ever so slightly, ever so slightly.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” He was rubbing my back.

I shrugged, and smiled weakly.

“I had such a good time with you last night,” he said. “Don’t bleed to death, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I could promise anything. “Bathroom?”

He looked both ways outside his bedroom door. The roommates had departed, but his cat was still home. He had a cat! Better and better! A friend for Big White! The cat meowed, then climbed my sheet-draped body and nestled into my neck.

“My roommates are all allergic,” he said, by way of excuse. The cat nuzzled my chin. “Clean up, and we’ll go to breakfast. Want to?”

It was so stunningly normal. It was not only normal, it was romantic. That was what blew me away. Could I have a normal existence? I never had before. A normal boyfriend? It had not occurred to me that I might actually find someone I could love in any way other than in vain. It had not occurred to me that functionality might be possible, that I could, conceivably, be half of one of those Sunday morning couples eating bagels and doing the
New York Times
crossword. I could give and receive affection in a healthful manner! I didn’t need to live in consistent dysfunction! Love! Love! Love!

I flung myself upon him, hugging and kissing him.

“Okay…” he said, raising an eyebrow at me. “It’s only scrambled eggs.” He was getting dressed.

But it was more than scrambled eggs! Much more! I was feeling radiant. An entirely new world had opened up in front of me, one with possibilities, one with shared enthusiasms and multiple orgasms.

I’d finally, after all these months of dating inappropriate candidates, be able to introduce someone to my family! I wanted to sing love songs, but brushed my teeth instead. Love was possible! I didn’t have to be alone forever, as I’d been beginning to think.

“Shit,” said the Actor, looking at his watch.

“What’s wrong?” Nothing, that was what.

“I’m late for something.”

I wasn’t paying much attention. I still felt like dancing. I grabbed him and lurched him into a little pseudo-tango.

“So, I can’t do breakfast,” he said. I was dipping him.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Want to have dinner tomorrow?”

“Yeah, that’s not going to work, either.”

“I’m free on Friday,” I said.

“You know, I’ll check my book, but…”

It occurred to me that I was, as usual, leading, and leading badly. I sat down.

“When
will
you be free?” I asked.

“Um…I’m not really sure. I mean, I’m actually pretty busy,” he said.

This conversation suddenly felt nauseatingly familiar.

“Me, too,” I said. “You’re not the only one! I mean, I’m busy, too, I have school, and work, and life, and writing, a whole play, I just started this play! I have things to do!”

“So, I don’t know,” he said. “Can we just play it by ear?”

“Sure,” I whispered. I could have given him his next line. I’d said it plenty of times myself. I felt like I’d written it.

“I’ll call you…” he said.

“Great!” I said.

“Great,” he said, sounding relieved. He picked up my atomic nectarine panties, looked at them with mild amusement, and handed them to me.

My nose started bleeding again.

“Okay, then, see you!” I was practically running to the door.

“Do you need a tissue?” Drops of blood splattered onto the floor, like sealing wax closing a letter.

“Nope,” I yelped, staunching the blood with my bra. I made it to the hall before the tears fully overflowed, but I wasn’t fast enough. I had to endure the tremendous indignity of the Actor putting his arms around me in an attempt to comfort me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and kissed my hair. What was wrong? I was the thing I always dreaded: the One-Night Misunderstand. I’d left a trail of tears behind me, too, and I knew it. I’d broken hearts, all the while thinking that I was being kind, that I was saving them from me. And now, here I was, standing in a strange hallway, in the arms of the man who’d done me in. I couldn’t even blame him. It was my own damned fault. Despite all my vows regarding actors, I’d fallen for him. And, despite what I’d thought the night before, despite the long and profound conversation we’d had in the bar, it seemed that he was so far from falling for me that the possibility hadn’t even occurred to him. For him, this was casual. This was meaningless. For me, this was my previously state-of-the-art heart hissing and smoking, sending off emergency alarums, and finally, wretchedly, breaking down entirely.

“I’m late,” I said, ridiculously. “That’s why I’m crying. It’s not because of you, or anything.”

“You’re late?” he said.

“For a very important date.” I sniffled. I had lost my ability to talk. All that was left was
Alice in Wonderland.
No time to say hello, good-bye, find me a fucking rabbit hole to dive down.

“Okay…” the Actor said. “I’ll see you around, Maria, okay? Don’t cry.”

And I
would
see him around. That was the worst part. He was no perfect stranger. He was someone that I regularly ran into at parties and plays. Every time I saw him, I knew, I’d be reduced to this again.

I went home on the subway, crying all the way. An old woman gave me tissues. Some guy on an acoustic guitar languished through “Homeward Bound,” and I gave him all the money in my wallet. He smiled at me in thanks, and so I took my bra and panties out of my purse, and dropped them into his guitar case, too.

“Peace, lady,” he said.

“Likewise,” I replied, and got off the train.

“OKAY, I’M KIND OF GUESSING he didn’t tell you this, and I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but—”

“Tell me what?” I was sitting at my temp job, trying to look like I was working. I’d been writing soggy poetry all morning and putting it into spreadsheet format, in case someone walked by and glanced at my screen. Taylor had called for details, and I was too exhausted to lie to him. Now,
even though he clearly thought I was an idiot for falling for the Actor, he was trying his best to make me feel better.

“He’s mostly gay. So don’t feel bad. It’s not you.”

“What is ‘mostly’ gay? What does that even mean?” I didn’t care if the Actor was 99/100ths gay. I loved him!

“And, he’s engaged.”

“To a man?” This was new. “No, to a girl,” Taylor said, as though my question was insane.

“Then how can he be mostly gay?”

“He’s confused?”

“He slept with me! I’m not male!”

“Clearly, he doesn’t know what he wants.”

“Engaged?”

“His college girlfriend. They’ve been together forever. You’d like her.”

No. No, I would not. I liked no one, least of all myself.

I’d already called the Actor three times, and this was supremely humiliating, because I only had his message service number, which meant that I had to speak to a woman somewhere in Long Island, who gently told me that he wasn’t available, as though she had him in the next room and he was simply in the shower. I could hear her typing my message as I dictated it. I feared typos, not that that would even matter, considering he’d never call. I never responded to people who did this to me, why would he? This didn’t keep me from spelling my last name meticulously, obsessively, idiotically, every time I called, like he didn’t know who I was. He knew. And he was cringing. I could feel it. I was cringing, too.

I’d spent three days lying flat on my face on my linoleum, weeping, Big White Cat butting me periodically and
squawking for catnip. At least he could get high. Nothing could make me feel better. I couldn’t believe I’d been such a daredevil, climbing without any of my gear, and inevitably falling hard. I’d known better. Tomorrow, I kept telling myself, early tomorrow morning, I’ll find my ropes and hooks. I’ll start back up. It was funny, though, the air at the bottom. It was as thin as at the summit. I felt light-headed.

I called the Actor’s message service.

Message from Maria Headley 4:37 a.m., Wednesday
She says she is “fine.” She says she is really sorry about falling in love. It was accidental. She says she is now planning on staying on solid ground and that you don’t need to call her back. Unless you want to. If you do, please call. Please. Here’s that number again, in case it accidentally got thrown away with the other garbage in your life, which she doesn’t blame you for…

Yes. I was that pitiful.

THE WHOLE WRETCHED AFFAIR had brought back, in excruciating detail, an incident during my first year in New York. I’d unwisely rendezvoused with one Ivan, a Russian graduate student, who had the tiniest, most irregular teeth I’d ever seen. He was so needy, so unlaid, and, in fact, such a very nice person. When it became clear that he was gaga over me, I’d thought I could charitably do something kind. I’d made out with him in a stairwell, and then walked away, thinking, Okay, that’s done.

It was not done. Ivan had called, many, many times. He’d left myriad messages in his thick Russian accent, always beginning like this:

“Hhhhi. This ees Ivahn. I vas just calling to say…hhhi. Okay, then…bahhye.”

He’d become a running joke among my roommates. “Hhhhi,” they’d say, and crack up. I’d been mortified by the depth of his desire. In a last attempt to recover my affections, he’d brought me an enormous houseplant, some sort of lily with large, phallic blooms. It had weighed approximately seventy-five pounds, so he’d carried it to my apartment, clearly hoping to be invited in. I’d given him a glass of water, and sent him away. When the plant had died of dehydration, I’d discovered a love note stuck in its soil, Ivan asking me to forgive him for whatever he had done.

What an ass I’d been, and how worldly I’d felt. Now what had gone around had come around, and for the rest of my life, I’d be itemizing my sorrows to the Actor’s voice mail.

“Hhhhhi,” I’d say. “It’s Maria. Headley. I was just calling to say…hhhhhiii. Okay then…bahhye.” I’d arrive at his apartment bearing unwanted foliage. I could see my future strung up in front of me like frozen laundry.

I BOOKED A TICKET TO IDAHO for Christmas, feeling adrift, and thinking that a stint at home would help. Wrong. My dad drove up on Christmas Eve. He looked relatively okay, if you ignored the fact that his pupils were spinning like slot-machine cherries. For a moment, I entertained a fantasy that I really
had
cured him with my conversation
with the Rockstar. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Maybe he could, like a run-down motor, still be repaired. No. He went out to his truck and returned bearing an enormous grocery sack full of cantaloupes, a misbegotten attempt to declare himself the family provider. He then brought out a thick sheaf of short stories in which I was the main character.

He read them aloud for us, sitting in my mother’s living room, grinning his head off. We tried not to cry. In one of the stories, I’d written a musical that bore suspicious similarity to
Cats,
and became a wild success on Broadway. My sister, who, for some reason, he’d written as crippled, danced onstage in her “hobbled little way,” and my dad got to come to the podium with me when I gave my Tony speech. All of us but him ended up sobbing on the floor. He kept reading for hours, powered by the super-strength batteries of his manic phase.

When he left, it was midnight. We got drunk on eggnog and tried to pretend that he was okay. “At least he’s creative,” we said. “At least he’s doing something productive.” Really, we were all flattened by grief, and I was already so miserable over the Actor that this pushed me over the edge. I searched through my phonebook for Idaho friends, someone to take me away from the house and remind me that I wasn’t a child anymore, that I lived far away and had control over myself.

Did I have control over myself? No. I dialed Ira the Reincarnated Dachshund’s number, but he didn’t pick up. I dialed Zak in California, and talked to him for not long enough. I dialed Vic and got one of her relatives, someone who didn’t actually speak English.

I dialed my dachshund again, and this time he answered the phone.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Ira picked me up, no questions asked. His life was as messy as mine.

It was snowing hard, and he drove up in a borrowed car.

“Hey,” I said. “Merry Christmas. Sorry I called so late.” I was still crying, but Ira always made me feel better. I had no idea why. We’d certainly had our share of furies, but our relationship had maintained, even when we’d wanted to kill each other.

“No worries, babe,” he said. He’d picked up a British accent since I’d last seen him.

“Works well on the ladies,” he explained.

“But you’re from Idaho,” I said, sniffling.

“They don’t know that. They think I’m from London.”

“Come on. Drop the British thing.”

“How about Australian, matey?”

“No.”

“Transylvanian? I vant to fuck your…damn. No rhyme for blood.”

“Shhh,” I said.

I decided that we had enough history that we didn’t even really need to talk. He seat-belted me into the passenger side, and we drove, for lack of an apartment without roommates, to a Barnes & Noble parking lot.

All around us the snow was piling up, and there were no cars but ours. Everyone else was at home, waiting for reindeer hooves. It was pitch black. If you looked up, the
snowflakes were like stars falling. We might as well have been early settlers, transiting the plains and the prairie, waiting for spring to come so that we could dig out and get moving. Either that or we might, sick and snow-blind, resort to cannibalism. It’d always been a mixed bag with Ira and me.