“Yo,
Shakespeare,” said my friend Angela. “Write about unrequited love, false promises,
fake IDs, blown head gaskets, radio late at night, sex with the same man after
twenty-five years . . . you know.”
1.
Unrequited Love
All of my loves have been
unrequited, for I consistently fall in love with men who are less excited
about loving me than I am about loving them. Of course, the accuracy of this
claim depends on how one defines love—a
word that, in my case, has perpetually adolescent overtones and that, when
mixed with graying hair and housework, creates a kind of melancholy oldies-station
uproar—those oldies that I can’t believe are old, those songs with the
embarrassing end rhymes and predictable guitar sobs that I know I ought to
despise but that keep making my eyes prickle and my throat swell shut.
But in the old
teenage days, I wasn’t standing on the outside looking in: I wasn’t examining
myself for the familiar, glorious signs of chaotic despair. I was just
chaotically, gloriously, in tears. As Ray likes to inform me, over the phone,
but kindly, “You always did like melodrama,” even though he himself has been
drunk and five hundred miles away from me for most of the twenty-odd years of
our friendship.
You could say that
Ray is one of my unrequited loves, also the instigator of other unrequited
loves, also the person who most enjoys picking the scabs off the unrequited
loves that I’ve mistakenly assumed were healing up. Oh, the idiotic
conversations we’ve had: the hand holding, the beer, the
up-all-night-with-Tammy-Wynette epiphanies. But here I pause a moment to note
that I’ve shifted into the we persona,
that hopeful signal light for the unrequited—our lantern in the belfry, our torch in the corridor:
as if a pronoun, a sturdy two-letter innocent, can, by grammatical sleight-of-hand, transform distraction
into union, aloofness into a gift.
It doesn’t, which
is why, I suppose, unrequited comes into
its own in middle age—partly because there’s more time to notice that we is a less lonely way of saying I. When I was twenty years old and infatuated with the
various boys who lolled around on old couches drinking beer, smoking pot, and
listening to the Ramones, I did think, I really did think, that I would become transformed into we; that just possibly one of them might love me—by which
I meant light up joyously whenever I walked into a room; by which I meant
overlook my ugly clothes, delight in my body, coddle my fears; by which I meant
adore me.
In fact, a few of
these utopian vanities did manifest themselves, briefly, and erratically, and
often at the wrong moment. During orchestra rehearsal, a nasal and prematurely
balding flute player was the one who lit up when I walked into the room,
whereas a gay man on acid ended up being the person who happily stayed up all
night coddling my fears. But delight in my body always seemed to be entangled
with anxiety about my body, a distress that I tried to assuage by way of guilty
trysts with people who weren’t my boyfriend. And meanwhile, the boyfriend, who
I’d been sure was the man of my dreams, turned out to be a permanent
exasperation. Everything grated: I was bored by his Moby-Dick mania and terrified of his habit of changing lanes
on the Jersey Turnpike while making fervent eye contact with passengers in the
backseat. He, in turn, didn’t like my overwrought parents or my baby-white
legs. For a while, we did enjoy the histrionics of fighting and reuniting; but
he, too, was prone to guilty trysts—and so eventually, amid tears and
recriminations, our unrequited hysteria dissolved into misery into relief into
occasional dreams into the memory of this boy I used to love so much that I
thought my life would end if he left me. But it didn’t, and I married one of
the other boys on the couch. As Ray likes to inform me, over the phone, but
kindly, “You always did like melodrama.”
2.
False Promises
The aforementioned boyfriend, at
one fraught moment, made me swear that, if we ever broke up, I would not go out
with any of his friends. If I did, he would never forgive me.
Considering that
he himself not only fooled around with numbers of my friends but also
propositioned my sister, I still don’t feel too guilty about marrying his
roommate. But I do hope that, wherever he is, he’s seen fit to stop hating me.
We could be friends again. We could even love each other, and write charming
letters about the past, like maybe about the time we were at Arby’s in Ardmore,
Pennsylvania, and an old guy who looked like Howling Wolf swaggered up to us,
sitting there at our plastic table. I was probably eating French fries, and you
must have been eating one of those giant-sized roast-beef sandwiches with the
barbecue sauce soaking through the squashy bun and dripping onto a wad of
napkins. You had both hands clamped to that sandwich, your wide mouth wide open
and ready to bite, and then Howling Wolf hauled over to our table and he looked
at you, with that sloppy sandwich, and he looked at me, and he looked back at
you. And he then he poked a big finger straight into your face and he said,
loud enough so that anyone else at Arby’s who might have cared to listen in
wouldn’t have had any trouble at all: he growled, “DON’T YOU NEVER HIT A
WOMAN.”
I have to say,
under such alarming circumstances, you did behave very well. You set your
sandwich down on the napkin wad and meekly replied, “No, sir, I never will.”
You might have had some barbecue sauce on your face while you were talking, but
it didn’t matter, not in the least.
Which reminds me:
you might be interested in learning that I once took a poetry workshop from a
man with barbecue sauce on his face, and it didn’t matter then either. If you
and I were writing letters to each other, I could tell you about that
workshop—how this poet was like a ten-year-old boy trapped in a
sixty-year-old’s body; how each morning he would carefully park a toy car on
every student’s chair so we would have something to play with during class. If
you didn’t still hate me, we could talk about toy cars, and then about how you
used to eat corned-beef hash out of a can, and how the only thing you liked
about my mother was her homemade sauerkraut, but you really liked it: your eyes would light up at the sight of
kraut on your plate, and she, who on any ordinary day would have been happy to
see you being dragged away by federal marshals, would sweeten up and smile.
But if you’re
going to waste all this time being mad, just because I’ve been cooking dinner
for your ex-roommate for twenty-five years, not to mention pinning his ragged
Carhartt pants onto the clothesline and ferrying his sons to baseball games and
piano lessons and whatnot. . . . I mean, come on! In retrospect, I can see you
might have had fun with my sister. Imagine if you had married her. Year in and
year out, I would have seen you with barbecue sauce on your face. Think of
it!—think of how good it would feel to remember we’d broken that ridiculous
promise, how the four of us could all be shivering outside on lawn chairs,
right at this very second, watching somebody-or-other’s kid flub an at-bat
while the swallows begin their circle-and-dive above our heads and the tree
frogs shrill by the river.
3.
Fake IDs
I have never owned a fake ID. I’m
not actually certain I’ve ever even seen a fake ID, though once I did have fun
watching my son and his friends construct fake ride bracelets for the Harmony
Fair. The project involved hours of careful scanning and gluing; but then, at
the last minute, they chickened out and refused to wear them. Since the rides
at the Harmony Fair are notoriously lame, I think the only reason they labored
over the bracelets at all was for the joy of proving they could do it, which is
more or less the same reason I agreed to fake my neighbor’s application for a
marriage annulment. I was sitting at a picnic table slapping mosquitoes and
watching my kids splash in a lake when his wife tossed the papers at me and
said, “Want to fill these out? He can’t be bothered.” One could hardly blame
her husband, seeing as he wasn’t Catholic and had divorced his first wife so
long ago that he had forgotten what she looked like. But my friend, his second
wife, wanted to keep everything tidy with the Church, so I sat there at the
picnic table and had a good time filling out the form. Today I can’t remember a
single question it asked, let alone any of my fraudulent answers. I do recall
deciding that all-capital-letters would make my handwriting look more manly.
Anyway, the Church fell for it.
4.
Blown Head Gaskets
Blown head gasket is metaphorical shorthand for despair. When I’m standing at the garage counter waiting for
Terry the mechanic to get off the phone and I hear him mutter, “Blown head gasket,”
I know he might as well be saying “Potato blight” or “Heart failure.” His
mustache droops. His eyes turn bleak. No hope is what he means.
Though,
of course, automotive misery is nothing like death by famine.
What’s scary about
metaphor is how it works as seduction. “Mom, you exaggerate everything” is how my sons put it.
Words jump into
the pulpit: they wave their arms around; they invent a character and claim
she’s me. In real life, I don’t even know what a blown head gasket is.
According to Ray,
he doesn’t answer my emails because I spend too much time honing my sentences,
and it makes him self-conscious. Quite possibly he’s lying and is just too lazy
to answer. But on the other hand, he’s right: this morning I spent half an hour
polishing a one-line Facebook update.
“I like you,” says
my friend Donna, “because you’re the kind of person who doesn’t notice she’s
just said anon.”
5.
Radio Late at Night
is what my sons listen to when
they’re sleeping. First, it’s a long, repetitive, crackly debate about whether
the Red Sox should trade ailing Mike Lowell to the Rangers; now it’s a talk
show with Dee Snider, ex-frontman of Twisted Sister, who snarls, “If it ain’t
metal, it’s crap”; and me—I’ve been upstairs asleep for hours, wishing for sex
in my dreams, when suddenly I’m wide awake and it’s two o’clock in the morning,
and outside a barred owl is complaining about his meal, and my ex-boyfriend’s
ex-roommate is beside me snoring, and these guys downstairs on the radio are
arguing about NASCAR in their tinny little voices, and I feel like I’ve woken
up from a two-year coma only to discover I’m on the lam, waiting for the
snipers, holed up somewhere in a weather-beaten motel at the end of the world.
I really hate
radio late at night.
6.
Sex with the Same Man after Twenty-five Years
Unrequited.
As you know.
2 comments:
#6: Priceless.
I heave a sigh for all of us. XX
Post a Comment