Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me (17 page)

Lesson#44

Get Dumped Before It Matters

by David Rees

Unlike most of the “winners” in this book, I’ve never been dumped.

Let that sink in for a moment: never been dumped. A perfect record. What’s that thing in baseball, where batters are graded on some sort of numerical scale? Like, “Joe Smith is batting .300; he’s hitting one out of every .300 balls.” Well, when it comes to not being dumped, I’m batting 1,000.00. One thousand percent perfect. One thousand percent never-have-I-been-dumped.

You ask: “How did you get those awesome stats?” And, “Are your relationships available on baseball cards, so that I might learn from them?” And, “If so, what does the bubblegum taste like?”

The answers are, respectively, “Read on”; “Yes, from ToppsAdult”; and “Monogamy.”

Although I am proud of my remarkable statistic, there’s something you should know about it. Let’s turn it over like a nursing sow and take note: How many relationships suckle at its teats? One and . . . two. Ah! You see, I’m not such an intimidating badass, I’ve only had two relationships: A girlfriend in high school and a wife, presently.

My high school girlfriend never dumped me. Or, whenever she did, I made sure to resuscitate our relationship and counterdump her down the line—effectively canceling out her dumps, which is how I maintained my perfect figure. (Like how -3 plus -3 winds up equaling +16, remember?)

That is to say, our relationship ended without the definitive, full-glottal stop of an asymmetrical dump. It was more like the slow, years-long decay of a mighty oak tree, where every few months a woodsman staggers by and makes out with the oak tree when he’s tipsy, even though the better angels of his nature say, “Why complicate things in the forest, tipsy woodsman? Didn’t you promise to stay away from that ol’ oak tree?” And then the whole affair is immortalized in a mournful Appalachian fiddle tune.

Still . . . when all is said and done, I closed out my first “at bat” without getting dumped.

As for my second relationship, the one with my wife, things are starting to sound less like a mournful Appalachian fiddle tune and more like a Keith Moon drum solo being swallowed by a Cannibal Corpse song. Yes, sadly, my wife probably WILL dump me—and dump me hard, with extreme prejudice, like how Russell Crowe expresses his feelings in hotel lobbies.

The rub is, when you’re a professional, grown-up man with a wedding band, a Roth IRA, and a funny feeling about that mole on your back; when you see all teenagers as irascible enemies of the state; when you start enjoying toast—when you get to that mature, married stage, it’s not called “getting dumped.” It’s called “getting fucking divorced.” And unlike getting dumped, getting fucking divorced ain’t free. There’s a whole legal element involved. Namely, you pay a lawyer to notarize your life as “Failure, Pending Lottery Win.” He stamps your soul with his embossing machine so you can carry within you a legally binding bruise, for all time, to your grave, you colossal loser. Also, your tax return gets more complicated.

In short, divorce is an expensive, life-shattering, and inconvenient way to learn elementary lessons about life and love.

Lessons like these:

1. The fact that you mope around your “home office,” sighing and scratching the five o’clock shadow spilling down your neck, while you “work on your screenplay in your mind,” wearing sweatpants on a Wednesday afternoon, does not mean you are a tortured creative genius. It means you are a LOSER. If you’re old enough to drive, you may no longer wear pants with drawstrings—even if they are your “dressy sweatpants.” Look respectable for your woman, even while she’s at work. It will comfort her to know you are wearing a belt. And by the way, if it’s before noon, it’s not called a “five o’clock shadow”—it’s called a “shave, you loser.”

2. The fact that you used to bake bread back in college, and now refuse to do so, even when your wife asks sweetly, longingly, does not mean you are a post-hippie citizen trying to carve out new paradigms of consumption in a post-9/11 world. It means you’re lazy. Your depression has somehow turbo-charged your entropy. Congratulations! You are now the exact opposite of a Hadron Super Collider. If you don’t act soon, and show some initiative in the kitchen, your molecules actually will leech out of your toes and stain your socks. Then you’ll have to spend money on socks! Instead, bake a loaf of bread for your wife. In fact, shoot the moon and bake her a goddamn cake. She works much, much harder than you.

3. The fact that you spent approximately 40 hours last year watching
goddamn-can-you-believe-I-actually-did-this Miami Ink
does not mean you revel in the twenty-first-century agora as one node of the postmodern multitude. It means you have lost your mind and secretly want to die stupid. And alone. Turn off your television, unplug it from the wall, bury it under fifty pounds of sand in another country, and spend your evenings memorizing seventeenth-century love poetry for your wife. Think about it—which will be more comforting in your twilight years: the collected verse of John Donne (WHICH YOU HAVE TOTALLY MEMORIZED) or vague memories of a bunch of tattoo-people talking about their feelings on TV?

Now that I appreciate the stakes, and understand how my shortcomings have flourished in the confines of my most important relationship, I have come to loathe my special statistic. I would happily trade my perfect dating record—that satiny, unblemished, unbedumpled sheet—for a mangy, flea-bitten patchwork quilt of “lessons learned,” stitched together by women who dumped me.

I should have learned not to wear sweatpants from Siobhan, the vapid fashionista I should have met, and dated, and been dumped by, right out of college. Siobhan would have taken one look at my “awesome” collection of “exercise trousers” and had them secretly rendered to a base in Uzbekistan, where they would have been boiled alive. (My “special scarf” would have been water-boarded.) Then, when I met my wife for an anniversary cocktail I would have represented in a sleek pair of tailored slacks, not in paint-splattered Russell Athletics with the drawstrings hanging out over my crotch.

And Starshine, the free-spirited vegetarian carpenter I should have bumped into and dated in 1999 (and been spectacularly dumped by on the eve of the new millennium because of the Zodiac!), should have sat me down and reminded me that baking bread connects me to all humanity. For I am MAN, provider. Why deny this wretched world my gifts? If Starshine had done her job, my wife would be enjoying fresh-baked focaccia as I write this. Not frozen bagels made by robots.

Then, of course, there’s Krystyn. Long-lost Krystyn. Lovely Krystyn. Sure, she had the world’s worst name, and I sometimes called her “Kyrstyn” by mistake. (How we would have laughed about that!) But I still would have wept when she dumped me for watching too much television. I would still be haunted by her final words: “You watch too much television. I’m marrying Jaysyn, my X-treme athlete frynd. Because you watch too much television.” I think that would have registered.

Alas, I have learned none of these things. Because none of those women existed.

You know those dummies with the black and yellow pie charts on their foreheads who are always smashing into windshields in slow motion? And in the slowed-down instant before impact, you can almost hear them say, in their mannequin drones, “Oh, I get it—I should have worn my seat belt?” I’m one of them, learning all these important lessons too late, in the melancholy split second before my head smashes through my marriage’s windshield and bloodies any hope I had of eternal bliss.

I blame all the women who never dumped me.

Lesson#45

It Wasn’t Me, It Was Her

by Rick Marin

I got in touch with my college girlfriend recently when her husband left her for the daughter of a famous TV mogul. We exchanged e-pleasantries. Then she asked how come in my memoir,
Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor
, I didn’t mention that she dumped me. Okay, Julia (as I called her in the book), I’ll bite. I e-mailed back, “I thought I dumped you.” Her response came fast and furious:

“Say you’re joking or I’ll lose what little faith in men I have left.”

My fingers froze on the keys. I thought we were engaging in a few gentle jabs to the ribs, but she was serious. The woman was clearly in a vulnerable place, man-wise. A TV star in her own right in Canada, where we both grew up, she had now been reduced to tabloid fodder. I needed to be giving, sensitive, understanding . . . Unfortunately, I possess none of these qualities. But I can be quite condescending.

“Well, if it was important for you to think that,” I wrote, and changed the subject. Still, she’d planted the seed of doubt. Could my first love possibly have dumped
me
? For two decades, I’d firmly believed otherwise. You might even say I cherished the belief. Now I needed proof—a forensic analysis of the death of the relationship. Fingerprints, DNA, sunglasses like David Caruso’s on
CSI: Miami
. So I snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and went out to the garage to dig out a musty shoe box of Canadian-stamped letters with 1980s postmarks. Then I went into the musty shoe box of my mind (isn’t that a Barbra Streisand song?) and dug out some memories of those years when I met the girl who almost became the first ex-Mrs. Marin.

It was my second year, Julia’s first, at McGill University in Montreal. She had a wild mane of hair that a pretentious Art History 101 student (like me, then) might call “pre-Raphaelite.” Her angular jaw-line was on a perfect parallel with her cheekbones. She had quick, appraising eyes and a slightly gummy smile with tiny perfect teeth. Big-boned, but toned, she was still coming into her looks and by no means thought of herself as the mediagenic beauty she would later become.

We met at a meet-and-greet in the quad of our dorm, Douglas Hall. I wasted no time in chatting up both her
and
her roommate. Julia would later profess amazement that this “short guy”—five feet nine, for the record—could be so cocky. Like most men, I went for the easier mark—the roommate. She was a blond innocent hot enough to have been wooed by Pierre Trudeau and chaste enough to have rebuffed his advances. I didn’t get much further than Canada’s playboy prime minister, but while I was trying, Julia and I became friends.

I was on the cocky side then, and she was the first woman I liked because she made fun of me. Her sense of humor was goofy and sophomoric, like a guy’s. She impersonated minor Canadian celebrities. (Her Brian Linehan rivaled Martin Short’s on
SCTV
.) She told Newfie jokes—our equivalent of Polish humor, directed at the good people of Newfoundland. (“How do you kill a Newfie while he’s drinking? Slam the toilet seat on his head.”) She called people “dinks” and “faggots”—both as insults and terms of endearment. Her idea of an F-word was “Fuzz!” Out of context, none of this sounds sidesplittingly hilarious, but she was very good company.

“You’re good for me because I waste all my time entertaining you (something I enjoy very much),” she wrote in one of the letters I dug out of the garage.

At the Douglas Hall Christmas party, we both got very drunk. “Julia’s blotto!” the resident Newfie announced. Blotto enough to convert our friendship into the official beginning of a three-year relationship. I lost a friend doing it—she was seeing a Tennessee preppy at the time. But he had to go. This was my first true love.

Dating during our second semester was single-bedded bliss, though I could have done without staring at her Police poster every night. She had a thing for Sting, who according to imdb.com is a full six feet tall.

That summer, she went back to Toronto—our hometown. I went to Oxford, the one in England, to immerse myself in pints of liquid Eng. lit. We wrote impassioned letters. Well, hers were impassioned. Mine were filled with disquisitions on the difference between an “Oxonian” and an “Oxonion.” Or so she complains in her letters. I’m sure she was right. I never gave her the mushy romantic stuff she asked for. In letters or in person.

That fall, we shacked up off campus. Oh, the anxiety of those first parental visits when they’d find out we had only—gasp!—one bedroom. We played house in an apartment on Summerhill Avenue, dress-rehearsing for marriage. The cutesy nicknames: “Munchkin,” “Rice,” and, inexplicably, “Tapir.” The scavenger hunt of love notes left around the apartment: “Happy October the 2nd!”—signed with her last name crossed out and mine written in. And, “I love you very much even though you’re a faggot sometimes (and I mean a big one).” Another nickname she had for me was “The Minuteman.” Hey, I was nineteen! There was chemistry. Sometimes too much.

Our test tube of premature domestication had a tendency to explode. Not just yelling or throwing capons at each other. Actual physical tussles. We were pretty evenly matched, but I could usually take her. Sucking wind, I’d just manage to pin her to the futon like a wrestler, demanding she “give.” If we were lucky, the deathmatch would take a sexy turn. This was, after all, the decade of
Fatal Attraction
. Julia wasn’t a bunny-boiler, but she could be a ball-buster. Which was how she was typecast during her college acting career. First, as Lady Bracknell in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, then Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

She got deeper into acting. I got deeper into gunning for a 4.0. The only note I have in my shoe box that’s from me to her says, “I’ve gone to the library, but I’ll be back around 11 p.m.” What does the “but” mean? Like eleven o’clock was knocking off
early
? In the space of two semesters, I’d gone from a DJ/alcohol-poisoning guy to—as she put it—“developing quite a reputation as a poindexter.”

Things started to turn dark. Her notes to me degenerated from “I gotta admit I like living with ya, so always love me, eh?” to “I don’t know what’s happening to us.”

This was after a month.

Another sign of her mounting dissatisfaction was the affair she started having with the gay guy upstairs. Not in the Biblical sense, I’m fairly certain. But I’d come home and find the two of them watching
The Wizard of Oz
, with him prancing around in a pair of her red pumps. This turned out to be another dress rehearsal. Years later, Julia got famous in Canada as host of a cooking show built around her making fun of a short (nowhere near five feet nine) gay sidekick.

I remember how mad she was that I only went one night of the twelve-night run of
Virginia Woolf
. “Term papers” was my excuse. The real reason, I suspect, was I didn’t need to sit in the audience when we were living our own George-and-Martha drama every night at home. She was asking more than I could deliver, so I retreated into my books like Albee’s toxic marrieds into their booze and bitterness. And, like them, we stayed together anyway.

I graduated. She had a year to go. Five hours I’d drive to visit her from Toronto to Montreal through blinding snow in an ailing Chevette. We’d fight all weekend. It ended, symbolically at least, when I threw up in her best friend’s hat. I should mention that I was wasted. And it wasn’t a very nice hat. There was no definitive breakup, but the visits stopped. And we were suddenly affectionate in a way unique to that relationship limbo between dating and hating.

“Rickles, I have no one to hug and talk to,” she wrote me. “Plus I can’t have tantrums because no one notices.”

A year after it was over, I tried to get back in there. She rebuffed me. My inability to “open up” was cited. I cursed myself for not being more giving, sensitive, understanding during all those years with her. I consoled myself by hugging tight the belief that I had dumped her.

When I heard her marriage had broken up, I told myself the reason I wanted to reconnect was to offer support. The truth of what I wanted to offer was more like gloating. I never met the now ex-husband but I’d always felt a vague antipathy. When they first started dating, she asked if they could stay at my apartment in New York while I was out of town. I said no. I didn’t want my first love and some bouncer-actor-hyphenate soiling my sheets. I might have cast some aspersions on the guy, perhaps invoked the word “freeloader.”

Years later, I saw her again and asked if she was “still married.” An obnoxious question, even if it proved prescient. Cut to five years ago. She and her husband were renting a house a few doors down from my mother in Toronto. I was home from New York for a visit and Julia drove by. We chatted. She was all smug about being married, having kids, living in Rosedale—it’s a fancy neighborhood—while I was still futzing around with a live-in girlfriend (albeit one on the verge of becoming my wife and, later, mother of my children).

When the tabloid news broke that a Canadian B-actor had left his wife for the TV mogul’s daughter after a torrid on-set affair, I felt sympathy for Julia—they’d just adopted a second child. And yet some part of me felt vindicated. A little petty rejected voice wanted to say, “You dumped the wrong guy.” Which meant deep down I knew all along she’d done it to me. Because if she hadn’t, why would I have cared?

When she sent that e-mail, I was certain
she
was the one rewriting history. Then I delved into those musty shoe boxes and found her side of the story. If she has a corresponding archive of my letters, I don’t think it would help my cause.

I’ve always had so much invested in being a dumper, never a dumpee. The motto on the crest of my dating life was, “It’s not me, it’s you.” And usually it was. But there was something liberating about the idea that Julia had dumped me. I lost the urge to gloat. I felt her pain, not the one I’d swept under the rug so many years ago.

“You can be very cruel, like ice, but please not to me, over something so small,” said one of those love notes from when we were living together. My friends used to pull her aside to tell her how “good” she was for me, like I was some kind of superdink until she came along. I would normally discount this as a wildly unfair assessment of my personality except my wife says they’ve told her the same thing.

I hope she doesn’t dump me, too.