Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me (13 page)

Lesson#20

I’m Easy

by Paul Simms

Well, well, well. Just look at you, walking into this dreary bar and lighting the place up like the noonday sun at midnight, twirling a lock of your long auburn hair pensively as you search the room—for what? For a soul mate, perhaps?

(I know, I know—I hate that phrase, too. Maybe that will end up being one of those things we both hate.) Maybe a few weeks from now, lying in your bed on a Sunday morning, I’ll ask you, “What’s your least favorite word or phrase?,” and you’ll say, “‘Soul mate,’” and I’ll laugh till you say, “What? Tell me!,” and I’ll tell you how I knew that from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and then we’ll have sex again.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You haven’t even noticed me yet. That’s okay, I can wait.

Maybe when your gaze settles on me, and we lock eyes in that mutual Hitchcockian tunnel-vision effect where the camera is, like, pushing in at the same time it zooms out, or however they do that, you’ll come sit down next to me and we’ll—

Now you’ve spotted the friends you came to meet. They look like good friends.

Maybe they’ll be my friends, too.

Our friends.

Your eyes just came to life like emeralds lit by subterranean torches, and as you move across the room toward your friends you shriek at them, “What the fuck is up, yo?,” in a voice so piercing that the entire bar goes silent for a moment, and I have to check my glasses to make sure the lenses didn’t crack. You continue to bellow your every utterance (including the lines “Jägermeister is the bomb, dawg!” and “Just ’cause I’m a white girl don’t mean I don’t got some serious junk in the trunk!” and “Random! Random! Random!”), and the bartender leans in and whispers something to his bar back, and they look at you and laugh.

You must be a regular here.

(
Duration of crush: seventeen seconds.
)

Oh my. What have we here? A rainy night in the city has cleared the sidewalks of all but the most intrepid pedestrians, and those who didn’t brave the elements have no idea what they’re missing.

Because there you are, gliding along on your bicycle, just a few feet ahead of me.

You’re obviously not one of those tedious hard-core cycling enthusiasts—no skintight black spandex for you. No, just a simple white T-shirt (soaked through to the skin, clinging to the small of your back) and a long blond ponytail, whipping back and forth like the tail of a cartoon pony, as those long legs of yours pump the pedals and you raise your face to the sky, letting the raindrops freckle your cheeks with sweet diamonds of moisture.

Dare I try to catch up to you? I’m on foot, carrying a bunch of shopping bags, but you’ve paused at a red light, and—what the heck? I don’t know what I’ll say to you, but even the clumsiest of introductions on these glistening nighttime streets will give us a romantic how-we-met anecdote that we’ll love telling for years to come.

Caught you! Here I am!

And there you are. I see now that you’re a dude. My mistake. It was the ponytail that threw me off.

(
Duration of crush: thirty-three seconds.
)

Another restaurant dinner with my boring girlfriend, another lecture about how I never really listen to whatever she’s yammering on about.

But how can I listen—how could anyone?—when across the room, alone at a table, reading the newspaper and nursing a glass of white wine, is a silent confection like you?

You, with your jet-black hair (like a latter-day Veronica from
Archie
) and your skin so pale that the bubble-gummy pinkness of your pouty lips seems almost obscene, especially when you scrunch them up the way you do every time you lick your forefinger and turn the page.

And I know you see me, too. Your first glance betrayed a glimmer of recognition—as if you knew me but couldn’t remember from where—followed by puzzlement, your eyes entreating me to silently remind you, which I couldn’t do at the time because my current girlfriend was staring across the table at me, apparently waiting for my answer to some kind of relationship question that I thought was rhetorical.

And so it goes. For an eternity, it seems—through the entire meal, until I watch you ask for the check, and pay it, and get up to walk out of the restaurant, and my life, forever.

But what’s this? You’re crossing the room toward me? So brazen—just as I knew you’d be. Are you going to surreptitiously slip me your number, written on a sugar packet, perhaps dropping it in my pocket as you fake-jostle me, like a spy handing off microfilm?

My heart beats like underwater thunder in my ears, until you tap my girlfriend on the shoulder, and she sees you and says, “Hey!,” and you say, “I thought that was you!,” and I realize that you are one of my girlfriend’s college roommates.

After you leave, my girlfriend tells me a hilarious story about how one time in college some guy broke up with you, so you found some photos of him nude with the word
Patriarchy
written on his chest in Magic Marker which you took for an art class, and you sent them to his parents and then posted them on your blog, where you apparently like to write incredibly detailed confessionals about the asshole guys you always end up dating, and also, while you don’t use the guys’ real names, everyone knows that the guy you immortalized as Pencil Dick is actually a guy I used to work with.

(
Duration of crush: forty-five minutes
.)

So silly does my impatience now seem, stuck as I am in the Starbucks line during the morning rush. But that was before I noticed you in line ahead of me.

And now that I’ve seen you—with your gossamer hair still damp from the shower, with your well-moisturized ankles strapped and buckled into high heels that make you wobble and sway like a young colt just finding her stride, with your scent of lilacs and Dial, and, most of all, with your infectious sense of calmness and serenity, which makes me wish that the world itself would stop spinning, so that gravity would cease and we two could float into the sky and kiss in the clouds, giddy with love and vertigo—

Now you’re at the register, and the dreaded moment when we part without meeting rushes toward me like a slow-motion car crash in a dream.

You’ve been at the register without saying anything for, like, fifteen seconds now, still scanning the menu board with those almond-shaped eyes that would make Nefertiti herself weep with envy.

Seriously, you’ve been to a Starbucks before, right? I mean, it seems like there are a lot of choices, but most people find a drink they like and stick with it. And order it quickly.

But maybe I’ve caught you on a day when you’ve decided to make a fresh start. To make a fresh start, to try a new drink, to walk a different way to work, to finally dump that boyfriend who doesn’t appreciate you.

Okay, even if that were the case you could have picked out your new drink while you were waiting in line, right? I mean, come on.

Well, you’ve won me back, my future Mrs. Me—by turning to me and mouthing, “Sorry,” after you finally noticed me tapping my foot, looking at my watch, and exhaling loudly. Sensitivity like that can be neither learned nor taught, and it’s a rare thing indeed. The rarest of all possible—

Jesus Christ, you’ve ordered your drink and paid; do I really have to stand here for another forty-five seconds while you repack your purse, the contents of which you’ve spilled out on the counter like you’re setting up a fucking yard sale or something?

That’s right, the bills go in the billfold, the coins go in the little coin purse, the billfold and the coin purse go back in the pocketbook—no, in a side pocket of the pocketbook, which seems to have a clasp whose design incorporates some proprietary technology that you haven’t yet mastered.

I think I hate you now.

(
Duration of crush: five minutes.
)

Lessons#21 to 36

Things More Majestic and Terrible Than You Could Ever Imagine

by Todd Hanson

We are told the healthiest way to think about life’s seemingly near-continual parade of tragedy, pain, and humiliation is to view each of these defeats as a learning experience—“Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” as the saying goes. Technically, that’s not true—multiple sclerosis, an inoperable disability, or a nonfatal debilitating injury that results in permanent brain damage are just a few of the examples I could name—but let’s just pretend it’s true for the sake of argument.

IF getting dumped is a learning experience, it is fair to say I’ve not only earned several PhDs, but also put in an impressive amount of postdoctoral work as well. So, alas, there is no way I could explain everything I’ve learned, not in the space provided here nor even in the remaining years I have on this planet.

Of these truths I have learned, some were so fantastic I never would have thought them possible if I hadn’t experienced them myself. Others, so soul-searingly awful they beggar description. Still more fall into a Nietzsche-esque “Beyond Good and Evil” category that defies classification altogether.

What follows, therefore, are three unbelievably abbreviated lists—a highlight reel; a mere overview, if you will, of a vast, unwanted body of knowledge.

Things Positive

1. That high school girlfriend you dated so long your young, naïve self is desperate to break up with her, but has such a hold on you you can’t seem to get away no matter what you do? Don’t worry—you won’t be stuck with her forever after all.

2. The average Midwestern liberal-arts campus has, it so happens, at least one budding young radical feminist who, despite her vocal opposition to patriarchal hegemony, diatribes against “the male gaze,” and propensity for declaring herself a lesbian every couple of months, is nonetheless so mind-blowingly sexy that every single guy on campus wants desperately to get into her pants. When you meet this girl, you will assume you have absolutely no chance of ever doing so. Good news: you’re wrong!

3. Sex with two heavily tattooed punk-rock drummer chicks whose breasts bounce hypnotically as they hammer away onstage is pretty much as amazing as you’d imagined. I cannot emphasize this point enough.

4. Fantasy celebrity women you’ve seen on TV—the kind who are in relationships with major movie stars and live in mansions in the Hollywood Hills—are, it’s fair to assume, permanently relegated in your brain to the “That’ll Never Happen” category. In fact, going out with one is so outside your range of expectations, you probably wouldn’t believe it was happening
even if you were in the middle of actually doing so.
But guess what? Wrong again!

5. There exists a certain type of busty Manhattan redhead that makes the girl from those classic Tex Avery cartoons—you know the one, the showgirl that causes the cartoon wolf to spin cartwheels, shoot steam out his ears, and flail helplessly as his animated eyeballs pop out and go rolling across the floor?—look less like a comical cartoon exaggeration than an example of the Italian cinematic school known as
Neorealismo
. No, I’m not making this up.

Things Negative

1. That intense desire you felt to be free of your long-term high school girlfriend can turn, overnight, into an unbearable eight-month fit of jealousy, rage, sobbing, and self-pity, just by finding out, post–high school, that she has been sleeping with the pot dealer from her dorm. Who knew?

2. Falling in love with someone every other guy on campus is
also
in love with can make you feel better about yourself than any antidepressant ever concocted by modern science. But, you’ll discover, it also has its
disadvantages
—like the fact that at any given moment there are twenty-thousand-odd guys waiting to go out with her the instant she dumps you. This is a situation she will feel no compunction about taking full advantage of with no warning, whenever the whim strikes her.

3. Punk-rock drummer chicks are considered wild and unpredictable for a reason. They can fall head over heels for you, but if you aren’t up to speed, they can just as easily—mere days after declaring they can’t stand to be without you—pull a complete 180 and get back together with their ex, even if said ex happens to be on really dangerous street drugs at the time.

4. Spending the night with a fantasy celebrity woman you’ve seen on TV and looking over and realizing the decidedly male items littering the nightstand on your side of the bed belong to the major movie star she is “still in the process of breaking up with” is far less glamorous, and much more stressful, than you’d think. And being told the following morning over breakfast, repeatedly, that she “can’t wait to see you next” doesn’t mean you’ll actually ever hear from her again—even if she continues to flirt with you every time you run into each other over the next several months. Far from being an ego boost, the experience can leave you as confused about the very fabric of reality as Philip K. Dick writing his fabled
Exegesis
—and like him, you will never be able to convince yourself you’d didn’t just hallucinate the whole thing.

5. As talented, funny, and fabulous as they may be, sometimes flabbergasting Manhattan redheads call you up at midnight and demand you take a cab from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so they can yell at you until four a.m. about how they need to break up with you because you’re too emotionally inaccessible to make a commitment. Even if you’ve only seen each other, like,
twice.
What’s more, though they’ve decided they despise you with every fiber of their being, this is somehow no guarantee the relationship will actually end there.

6. There is a saying in the entertainment industry: “Faster, better, cheaper—you can only have two.” Unfortunately, this same principle applies to romantic partners, with the corresponding categories of sexy, smart, and sane. The tendency of some (me) is to go for the first two and damn the torpedoes. The consequences of doing so, however, can be more emotionally nightmarish than an H.P. Lovecraft story, crossed with a Manson Family acid trip, and directed by David Lynch.

7. That last sentence may have come across as hyperbole. Actually, it was a drastic understatement.