When the Messenger Is Hot (16 page)

And so I went to a lot of extra meetings, because even though I was still very much in love I was feeling increasingly anxious, like the reality was somewhere in my mind that Steven would realize that he'd made a terrible mistake in dating outside of his cool habitat. Anyway, at one of the meetings they read the promises, which is this passage from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous in which it lists all these great things that will happen to you if you practice the steps, which includes a lot of things that I was always hoping for, like, “We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace,” and “We will see how our experience can benefit others,” and “That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear,” and also “Fear of economic insecurity will leave us,” and also “We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves,” and I realized that some of those things were happening, that although I was not totally experiencing the serenity, I did feel more useful to the world and somewhat less self-pitying and I was definitely feeling economically secure, and it caused me to realize that if some of the promises were coming true that maybe more of them would come true later, and that was an especially profound realization even though I'd heard the promises a hundred times by then.

But then I went to another meeting and shared that I was dating this guy and I was scared because I really liked him, and at first there was a lot of nodding, like they understood my feelings of fear but then when I mentioned that he owned a bar, not at all trying to make any point of that, they actually cross-talked to me. As a group, everyone in the room suddenly said,
He owns a bar?
Which I took to mean that I was remiss in my not realizing that that was some big problem, for which one of us I didn't know, but which was not how I saw it anyway, and the thing is, the rule against cross-talk is like the whole reason people come to Alcoholics Anonymous, that you can say absolutely anything you want and feel safe knowing that no one is going to make any judgmental comments like your family or your friends or your bosses do. And then everyone laughed (except for me), because they undoubtedly surprised themselves as much as they surprised me, albeit in their case because it was an unplanned group cross-talk. It was upsetting.

Steven was still very much in my life but I started to notice a lot of things that usually I pick up psychically on the first date, things that don't bode well for the future together that I initially had envisioned. I started to figure out that he had his own weird rule system of life, like if things in the law didn't make sense to him, he went around it and did not seem to have any worries about it whatsoever, whereas I am a person who has been worrying very much about going to jail ever since I didn't return
Old Yeller
to the New York Public Library in 1971. He got parking tickets outside of my hotel room almost every single day and would just toss them in the back seat, and he also hadn't had a valid driver's license for several years, so his idea was that he would just drive very cautiously, and also he had this other thing where he only drove really old bad cars and when one would get to the point where it would just not go, he would leave it wherever it was and take off the plates and get a new old bad car (which was also kind of his philosophy of clothes; rather than doing laundry he would just buy a huge lot of thrift-store clothing and eventually get rid of it after meaning to wash it but then not) and he was a miraculously lucky person that way, because it worked.

Plus also there was a certain point in the relationship where I felt like the conversation was turning largely to cars and dogs, all the time, and I didn't really have so much to say about cars, and although I love dogs, it's not a sustainable main topic of conversation for most people who aren't dog breeders (an aspiration of his). I'd also like to add that Steven had an idea that he was qualified to do some kind of home veterinary medicine, which was kind of disturbing to me. He would give me these graphic descriptions of how he fixed torn ears and tails after the dogs got into a fight, and he was obviously very pleased with himself, and I didn't really want to take that away from him, and probably at that point I was more upset about the downturn in conversation than I was about his home veterinary practice. But it just kept piling up, all the things that were making me feel like he was going to break up with me eventually, and because I was keeping late hours but still going to work in the morning I got a cold that wouldn't really go away.

And also, Steven, though he was totally not like Jake, would very casually say that he made out with some guy friend of his at Dr. Bob's, I guess just to be funny or open or it was some type of cool ritual I never understood, because (a) the only guys I knew who made out with guys were gay or bisexual and (b) even if he was bisexual, he was still with me. But he didn't see it as anything, and I think it bothered him that I did. And then there was one really warm night in the spring when he came over to the lake with all of his friends after the bar closed, and they were all passing around a joint, which made me feel like I was back in high school saying, No
thanks, I'm good
, like they would hopefully take that to mean I was already stoned when what they were probably taking it to mean was that I was good, meaning that I thought I was better than a person who would smoke pot. Anyway, on that night everyone started skinny-dipping, including Steven, and they were all just friends really, but I was experiencing some feelings of jealousy that he was letting this naked girl dive off his naked shoulders, and at that point I think something turned over in my mind finally to where I was just waiting for him to break up with me.

He didn't openly seem like he was less interested really, though, and we were still spending a lot of time together, and one day we went to the dog beach with his dog Wilbur, who was actually my favorite of the pit bulls. None of his dogs seemed mean like you know a lot of pit bulls are, but Wilbur especially was just like a big lap dog. Anyway, we were at the dog beach, and we were tossing around a Frisbee with Wilbur, and it went kind of far at one point so Wilbur ran after it and another dog got it and they got into a big dogfight, and Steven ran over there to stop him. I stayed put, having no desire to get close to a big dogfight, although I could see it perfectly well from where I was standing, and Steven got up to them and the other dog had Wilbur's ear in his mouth, like, off his head and separate from Wilbur, whose yelping was audible from where I was, and before I knew it Steven took out a handgun I can assure you I had no idea was on his person and shot Wilbur in the head and he went down. Wilbur was dead. And I had a very sick feeling in my stomach, again, it felt like no kind of gift to me to be feeling the sickness of watching my boyfriend shoot his dog out of what I knew he would try to tell me was some kind of home veterinary humanity, and he actually was shouting something at the owner of the ear-eating dog, which in my opinion it seemed like he was pushing things somewhat because of his just having fired a handgun publicly, and I wasn't at all worried that I was in any danger of being shot by my boyfriend, but I couldn't really pretend at that point that we weren't really different then. He didn't come back over to me right away, but when he finally did he gave me money to take a cab home without saying much of anything else and that was also the first time he didn't call me for a few days, and when he finally did he didn't say one word about Wilbur and there were those long silences that happen when you just run out of things to say to a person, and it never went back the other way, although we did stay together for a few more silent weeks after that, still.

The denouement of the Steven story is that about a week before he finally did break up with me, there was a big party at Dr. Bob's, a seventies prom theme, and due to my high school being really small and/or lacking in school spirit, we didn't have a prom, which I felt was one of those American experiences I lost out on, and so it was pretty fun, picking out a cheesy (but cute, of course) light blue polyester dress which totally but accidentally went with Steven's light blue polyester tuxedo, and he brought me a corsage and everything, actually he even borrowed his dad's car, which I thought was a creative use of humor. We danced and got our photos taken, and I was forced to stay up until sunrise, on principle, and it was one of the only times I ever really questioned his possibly addictive personality traits. He told me it wasn't any big secret, but it was the first I knew that he carried around a crack pipe with him, and he didn't seem to feel uncomfortable in any way smoking crack in front of me on prom night, and I had no inclination to sample the crack, as I had preferred a more relaxing type of altered consciousness in my drinking days, but it wasn't a good sign, even though he said he never bought it himself and that I should understand I guess that he only used crack socially

And then a week later we went to a movie but he didn't want to stay over afterward, and we had gone from talking about dogs to not talking much to talking not at all, and I knew psychically that it was over for him, I was sure because of my lack of coolness, but he wouldn't come out and just say he didn't think it was working out, it was very clear that he wanted to hand that responsibility over to me, which I had no interest in doing both because I still wanted to work it out and also I believe strongly that if you are going to break up with someone you shouldn't leave the other person to just guess about it. Not in the sort of advanced relationship where they're telling you things like,
I'm crazy about you
, no matter how short of a time it lasts. But he just wouldn't say it, for hours, until I was just like,
I have to go to bed. just say something
, and he started to get a tear in his eye out of what I was supposed to understand was his empathy for me and not because he was really sad to lose me, and said something about things just not being right. He said that friends thing, and I said,
No I do not want to be friends with you
, which surprised me, as it flowed out of my mouth so freely, and which I felt even in my worst pain of loss was another sign of the promises coming true (the one about god doing for you what you could not do for yourself), because I had a previous tendency to stay friends with my ex-boyfriends and never get over them in a complete way, and I slammed the door and then I had to get dressed because it was morning and it was time to go to school.

The first few weeks after we broke up I have to admit I had a reversal of my gratitude about the promises coming true, mainly with regard to self-pity and uselessness taking over, and I cried almost every minute of every day and I went only to work and back to the hotel and couldn't even concentrate on a magazine, I was so singly focused on trying to discover what it was that was so fully wrong with me that I could not keep a boyfriend for more than a few months ever. I had to excuse myself from the kids several times each day to go to the bathroom because I'd feel myself starting to sob while reading
Curious George
, which, you know, isn't really the saddest reading material. I felt ruined. And I wouldn't know if anyone else had ever felt the feeling of being ruined before, but the idea is that it's not reversible, like a coffee stain on a white shirt.

But also, I didn't believe him. I thought he would come to his senses, because of his having said the things he said, which I felt couldn't just go away like that. I couldn't see how you could wonder for months how someone could not have ever been proposed to, but then later you could. I was of the mind that our love was too much of a feeling for him, and also at the end I was thinking he could possibly have a drug and alcohol dependency, but one more thing they tell us in A.A. is that the disease of alcoholism is self-diagnosed, which is sort of a polite way of saying it's not really your place to judge, but also that most alcoholics and drug addicts don't quit when it's someone else's idea. So, I wasn't really sure about that, but it was a thought in my mind that was the only thought I had that didn't involve something being wrong with me personally. I could well imagine that a drug addict would have a hard time being in a relationship with a person in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, even if they were saying they think it's great for you.

Anyway, I just couldn't stop crying for very long until one day when my student, who was nearly eight and having a hard time learning how to read, suddenly read a word when we weren't even working on it, which we had been for months, working very hard on it, and I had a little bit of a spiritual experience then because I thought well maybe this was how I was meant to be of use. I thought maybe teaching someone to read was more important than having a boyfriend. I was so excited for him, more excited than he seemed to be, even, but it didn't feel as good as having a nice boyfriend. I won't lie. But I felt like it was maybe a beginning of trying to take care of myself again, which I had gotten so much better at before Steven, and I made a lot of phone calls and got a lot of suggestions, and I tried to learn to love myself with the use of a lot of candles and bath products, and always having flowers and just generally trying not to deprive myself of things that I subconsciously deprive myself of because I have feelings of being undeserving. It's a way of
acting as if
, again, one of those A.A. sayings that leaves off the part at the end which could be whatever, but is usually something that's an improvement over the way you would alcoholically act that theoretically leads to your being whatever it is you are only just acting like at first. I had come to believe spiritually that everything happens for a reason and believe me it was a struggle in this particular situation, but I felt that for sure Steven was a vast improvement over my past relationships and that maybe it would just slowly get better each time, and also I felt like god had given me a chance to go to the prom and maybe that's all it was.