Confessions Of An Ex-Girlfriend

“You know how I feel about models.”

“Well, you don’t have to marry him. And consider how good you’ll look together in the wedding pictures.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, reluctantly.

“Now there’s the Emma I know and love. Don’t worry. Everything will be just fine.”

Confession: I would marry for a below-market one bedroom.

I somehow managed to muddle through the rest of the week without any major emotional disasters. And after making it through a second weekend alone without completely falling apart, I felt almost proud of myself. In fact, as I walked down my tree-lined street on my way home from work on the verge of week three of the Post-Derrick Period, it suddenly occurred to me that being single in the greatest city in the world wouldn’t be all that bad. I even lived on the nicest street, I thought, as I passed the pretty brownstones on West Thirteenth Street.

Then I reached my building, with its faded facade of peeling paint and row of dented garbage cans and I couldn’t help but sigh with dismay. Why, oh, why, couldn’t Derrick and I have made it as far as shared real estate? He would never have left me if we had landed a below-market one bedroom downtown. No man in his right mind would walk away from that kind of find.

And no woman, I realized now, hating Derrick more for denying me my real estate dreams. With another sigh, I started up the steps.

Derrick was fond of calling my twenty-four unit apartment house The Building of the Incurables, because it was filled with tiny studios that housed—other than students struggling through until graduation—old people with ailments either mental or physical, which kept them from moving on to apartments with a living space large enough for an area rug that didn’t say Welcome on it. There was Beatrice on the first floor, for example, who had been hit by a piece of scaffolding on West Thirty-ninth Street sixteen years ago and whose injury required a metal plate in the head that had put her on the permanently disabled list. Now in her fifties, she was collecting social security and painting watercolors, which decorated the walls of her tiny cube on the first floor. Then there was Abe, who could have been anywhere from sixty-five to eighty-five and who, every morning, emptied the entire contents of his apartment (except for the furniture, which wasn’t much) into two trash bags, loaded them into a shopping cart, and went off to God knows where for the day.

Then there was me. Neither student nor psychotic, yet stubbornly holding on to my rent-stabilized studio as if my very life depended on it. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a great address—just a few short blocks from the subway, the Film Forum, the downtown bar scene, the Peacock, NYU and just about anyplace anyone wanted to be in the downtown area. And it was easy enough for me to bear up to my lack of closet and living space for the kind of location that drew looks of envy whenever I spouted my address at parties. Besides, with Derrick in my life, there was always that lingering hope of the one bedroom we would one day share, once Derrick realized the two-bedroom dive on the Lower East Side he shared with a foul-mouthed bartender just wasn’t cutting it. I used to fantasize about our dream apartment, complete with wall shelves displaying our combined, heady collection of film and literature titles. It was that hope that kept me sane, and safely apart from my in curably psychotic and old, or annoyingly young and transient, neighbors.

But once Derrick was gone from my life, I fell out of my Safely Coupled category and into…Something Else. And that something else was yet to be determined, I realized, as I entered the building.

“Emma!” came Beatrice’s shrill cry as I stepped into the foyer and found her at the mailboxes, arms laden with every mail-order catalog you could imagine, and an assortment of envelopes.

“Hi, Beatrice, how are you?” I said in the usual singsong voice I reserved for small children and adults like Beatrice, who weren’t, as they say, all there.

“Oh, I’m all right—”

“Good,” I replied quickly, starting for the stairs.

“—except for this crazy sinus condition. Every morning I wake up, stuffed nose, clogged ears. And my molars. Oh—” Her gray eyes opened wide behind her thick glasses. “It’s unbearable.”

“I hear what you’re saying, Bea,” I replied, bracing one foot on the steps, preparing for flight at the first opportunity. Beatrice did like to get into a thorough discussion of her ailments, and I still hadn’t managed to figure out how to effectively avoid listening to her litanies. She’s lonely and it means a lot to her that I listen, I often rationalized after a good ten minutes hearing about everything from nasal congestion to hot flashes.

But instead of carrying on with the details of sinus drainage, which I thought was sure to come next, she abruptly stopped talking, her eyes roaming over me from head to foot in a way that made me feel faintly ill. Beatrice, with her thick, squat body shoved, more often than not, into flannel shirts and stretchy pants, always looked to me like the butch half of a lesbian couple—except she was permanently sans her other half—and so her inspection, especially during this vague Post-Derrick Period of my life, was anxiety-producing. “You do understand, don’t you?” she said, her mouth dropping open as it did whenever she was captured by some thought.

As I started to proceed up the stairs with a hurried wish that she feel better soon, she called out, “Wait!” and turned her attention to the mail in her hands. Shuffling through the catalogs, she pulled out a thick, glossy volume and held it out to me. “I thought you might be able to use this,” she said as I reluctantly took the catalog from her.

I stared dully at the cover, which featured a tall, large-framed woman dressed in a flannel shirt similar to the ones Beatrice favored, and dark jeans.

“It’s got great deals on styles for women like us,” she continued, staring up at me, a pleased expression on her face.

Women like us? I started to get defensive, but thought better of it and made my escape. “Thanks, Beatrice. I’ll return it when I’m done.”

“Oh, no need,” she replied, beaming a mouthful of brown teeth at me as I fled up the stairs.

Confession: I’m not convinced a fish wouldn’t be happier with a bicycle.

“Why aren’t we married yet?” I asked Jade later that night on the phone.

“Because we’re strong women,” she replied.

This answer was beginning to bother me. “What does that mean, exactly? That I’ve got metal in my head and can withstand numerous blows?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe we aren’t looking hard enough.”

“Oh, I’ve been looking all right.”

“Oh, yeah. So how are things going with Ted Terrific?”

Big sigh. “Turns out he’s more likely to be Ted Bundy.”

“What?”

She sighed. “He didn’t call.”

Needless to say, I was shocked…and slightly horrified. Of every woman I knew, Jade was the only one who never got snubbed by a guy. Men always called Jade. She was my one last hope that women didn’t have to forevermore be left waiting by the phone. Good grief. What did this mean for the rest of us if Jade, the Über-Single Girl, was having trouble getting to date number two?

Understanding all too well the frustration that followed such blow-offs, I offered the one thing every woman who has been left hanging by a man always needs: anger. “Clearly he’s an asshole.”

“Hmm.”

“Or gay. Or mentally deficient. I mean, what kind of moron goes out with a beautiful, intelligent girl like you and then neglects to pick up the phone, even just to tell her he’s happy she’s alive and he had the opportunity to spend a few hours in her presence?”

“He probably couldn’t handle the fact that I beat him in two out of three games of pool.”

“Wimp.”

There were a few moments of silence, while we ruminated over the question of how Ted Terrific had taken a turn for the worse.

“Maybe I was too aggressive,” Jade offered.

“You’re kidding, right? Jade, I’m sure you did nothing—”

“I did invite him up. I mean, not to sleep with him or anything. But I’d just gotten the new Jamiroquai CD, and I knew he was into the same kind of music, so…”

“Did he come up?”

“No. He said he had to get up early. Gave me this killer kiss in front of my building, then took off. It just doesn’t make sense. The whole night, right down to that kiss, was amazing. We had drinks, shot pool and talked like we’d known each other all our lives. We liked the same music, hated the same clubs. I couldn’t believe how well we clicked. How much we had in common. And the chemistry…forget about it! I wish he had come up, so at least we could have had sex before he disappeared. I’m sure it would have been nothing less than incredible.”

In truth, I was stumped, but concluded that maybe we had just assumed things all wrong. “Maybe he’ll still call. What night did you guys go out?”

“Last Saturday. As in the weekend before last. Granted, I did leave town on Thursday to go on a shoot for the weekend, but he didn’t know that. I came home on Sunday morning to no message.”

It didn’t look good. One week, okay. But to go to week two without even a quick hello-had-a-great-time-wish-I-could-see-you-again-when-I’m-less-busy call, was not a good sign. He was history. “Maybe he got hit by the Second Avenue bus. Doesn’t it run right past your gym? He could have been coming out late, after a workout, and wham-o.”

“Yeah. If he’s lucky.”

I knew we would never truly find an answer. Why He Didn’t Call was one of the great mysteries of single life. A life, I realized, I was now reluctantly a part of.

Confession: Marriage—any marriage—is beginning to look good.

As if the idea of newly tackling single life wasn’t exhausting enough, the next day at work I was forced to take on the facade of one of the Happily Coupled-Off when Rebecca dropped by my cubicle to regale me with tales of her romance-filled evening with her boyfriend, Nash. “He just seems different lately,” she said with a glimmer of excitement in her eyes. “More committed.” Then she went on to tell me about the great little French restaurant on the Upper East Side where they’d had dinner the night before. “Maybe if you and Derrick ever venture uptown,” she added, “we could all go to dinner there together sometime.” To which I responded, with what I hoped was a convincing smile, that maybe we would, all the while knowing that it would be a miracle if Derrick ever ventured to the East Coast again, never mind the Upper East Side.

By the time I dragged myself home that evening, I was convinced that the key to life was finding someone—anyone—who would stick around long enough for you to lure him to the altar. Someone stable and reliable like Nash. Or better still, Richard.

As if to punctuate this realization, my father called. Though he had managed to drown a good portion of his life in Johnnie Walker Black, there was no denying that my father had been a good catch in his day. By age thirty, he had worked his way to the top of a financial investment firm. Even when he’d asked my mother to marry him at the tender age of twenty-five, he was making a respectable salary and had “upwardly mobile” stamped all over him. Life had been pretty cozy growing up in our sprawling Garden City home. It was no wonder it took my mother twenty years to realize her husband loved no one and nothing more than the bottom of a bottle.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, “how are you?” This question was still asked with some trepidation, despite the fact that it had been over a year ago that my father’s second wife, Deirdre, had dragged him off to the rehab center for the third time in their twelve-year marriage. It amazed me that Deirdre, who hadn’t realized what she was getting into when she’d married him, didn’t leave him at that point, despite his big house and fancy landscaping. But maybe she had made the right choice. After all, he had managed to stay sober since that last incident, and passing the one-year mark constituted a new record for him. Still, none of us quite trusted that he wouldn’t fall off the wagon again.

“I’m fine, fine. Finally got that settlement on that toaster oven that exploded on us,” he said, satisfaction in his voice.

The end of my father’s drinking career did have one side effect: He had become extremely litigious. Ever since he’d made his first attempt to go off the bottle a few years back, he’d begun suing anyone he believed had slighted him—whether it was his firm, which forced him into early retirement three years ago without (according to my father) sufficient compensation, or this most recent episode, in which his toaster oven allegedly burst into flames unbidden. It only took a little research for my father to find out the model had been recalled six months earlier.

“How’s my little girl?” he asked now. “Make your first million yet?”

“You’ll have to count on Shaun for that, Dad.” At twenty-nine, my baby brother was making more money annually at the dot.com he’d gone to work for three years earlier than I’d ever hoped to make in my four years combined at Bridal Best.

He laughed. “I don’t know, Em. You might still be in the running, with that good noggin of yours. How’s what’s-his-name?”

Despite the fact that I had been with Derrick for two years, my father always made a point of not remembering his name. And though I knew it would give my father great delight to know I was no longer dating a dog-walking, bartending “bum” (my father never did buy into Derrick’s claim that he was in the service of a higher cause and thus couldn’t chain himself to a real profession), I could not seem to tear myself from the path of lies I had only begun to traverse. “He’s okay,” I replied. “Did I tell you he sold his screenplay?”

No matter what had happened between Derrick and me, somehow I still felt the need to defend him to my father as a perfectly suitable and upwardly mobile sort of boyfriend. It all seemed silly now, but here I was babbling on about how many opportunities would open up for Derrick now that he had his foot in the door. I neglected to mention that the rest of his body had followed that foot to L.A.

“Hmm,” my father responded, distracted. This was the part of the conversation where he usually tuned out, probably to contemplate how his daughter would survive if she married a man who had no hope of a pension plan. “How’s that Alyssa doing?” he said now. “Still dating that lawyer?”

As my father had been handing most of his own pension over to the attorneys he hired for his various lawsuits, he had developed a new respect for this particular breed of boyfriend material. “Yes, they are still together. I imagine they’ll eventually get married, though Richard is so focused on trying to make partner, he probably won’t pop the question until after that happens.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” my father replied.

“Jade’s doing great, too,” I continued. “One of the layouts she worked on last year just won an award.”

“Oh, yeah?” he replied. Then he laughed. “That Jade. She al ways was an artsy one. I guess she’s still not dating anyone, huh?”

“You know Jade. She’s always dating someone,” I replied, trying not to remember that her latest someone had suddenly turned into a no one.

“Hmm…” Again my father had tuned out, probably worrying that Jade’s success at singledom might spur me into some kind of complementary spinsterdom.

“So how’s Deirdre?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s having a ball now that I’ve given her my blessing to purchase a new living-room sofa. I’ve never seen so many swatches of material pass before my eyes in my life. She was just asking about you. Wants to know if you’re planning on coming in for Memorial Day weekend.”

Uh-oh. How was I going to come up with a Derrick-double by then? “Umm… I haven’t really decided. Uh, Derrick and I might be doing something in the city.”

“You’re going to spend Memorial Day weekend in the city?” he asked. My father, who had spent the last thirty years as a com muter into this “dirty rathole,” as he referred to Manhattan, still couldn’t believe I willingly chose to live here, and in a postage-stamp-size apartment no less. He was one of those homeowners who always went bigger with each new house he bought, despite the fact that his family had gotten smaller after the divorce. His current house, a sprawling Victorian in Huntington, was a monument to this philosophy.

“I don’t know what I’m doing over Memorial Day. I haven’t decided yet,” I said, anxiety creeping into my voice.

“All right, all right. No pressure. Deirdre was just asking because we were thinking of going away that weekend.”

“Oh.” And here I was worried my father and Deirdre would suffer from my absence at the annual family barbecue. “Okay, well, don’t let me stop you from making plans,” I said, hoping he and Deirdre would go out of town and leave me and my phantom boy friend to ourselves.

We talked for a little while longer before hanging up. Then, with a sigh that descended into a groan, I gave in to temptation and grabbed a photo album off my bookshelf. Flipping to the first photo of Derrick and me that I came across, I stared deeply into his enigmatic eyes looking for answers as to what went wrong. And as I studied his smiling face, I realized that despite all the good times we’d had, our relationship had amounted to a whole heap of nothing. Then I remembered the admiration in my father’s voice when he’d asked about Richard.

Maybe my father had something there. Maybe I should be going for a man with more prospects and a solid career. A man who had made a name for himself in the world and was now looking for a wife to come home to. That’s the kind of man I should be dating. Someone like Richard, where there wasn’t a question of Will He Ask, only How and When.

I called Alyssa, hoping to hit her up for a hot lawyerly prospect. At the very least, I would get a date for Memorial Day weekend. Maybe even for my mother’s wedding as well.

“Why a lawyer?” Alyssa asked when I made my request.

“You say that with such disgust in your voice, Lys. And last time I checked, you were not only living the life of a lawyer, but living with one.”

“I’m talking about you, Em. You never wanted one of my fix-ups before.”

“That’s because I hadn’t realized the value of dating a lawyer until now.”

“Uh-oh. Here it comes.”

“Well, all my observations of the male species over the years have led me to one conclusion: Men will only consider marriage when they reach a certain income level. And assuming most lawyers our age would be just about hitting that comfort mark—or are even likely beyond it—I figure my odds of marriage are better with a lawyer. At the very least, I could argue my way to the altar.”

“Wait a sec here. Back up. Since when are you so gung-ho about getting married?”

“I’m thirty-one years old. I ought to start thinking about it, don’t you think?”

“I’m thirty-one, too, and you don’t see me rushing out to buy a dress.”

“Lys, not to be mean or anything, but it’s a lot easier to be brave about your unmarried status when you have Husband 1 living under your roof.”

“Nothing’s definite between Richard and me.”

“Yeah, but you guys are clearly in—” A twinge of panic shot through me as realization dawned. Something was up. “Wait a sec. What’s going on with you?”

“Oh…nothing.”

“Please don’t tell me you and Richard are on the rocks. You would be destroying my last lingering belief that soulmates do exist. That people can actually follow falling-in-love with happily-ever-after.”

“Everything’s fine, I guess.”

“Lys—”

“Okay. I met someone else.”

“What?”

“It’s not like I planned it or anything.” She never did. Men just fell in love with Alyssa without warning.

“Who is it?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I promise.”

“Dr. Jason Carruthers.”

Leave it to Alyssa to go from a lawyer to a doctor. “Let me guess…your ob-gyn?”

“Don’t be ridic—”

“Your optometrist? Your dentist?”

“My vet.”

“Your what?” Suddenly my head was filled with images of a scrawny, softspoken man with patchy facial hair. After all, I had never seen a vet who hadn’t eventually turned out to look somewhat like the patients he treated.

“I told you Lulu has been having trouble with her bowel movements? Well, I went to her old vet, except he had retired. And in his place was Jason.”

“Jason? You guys are on a first-name basis already?”

“I know what you’re thinking. It’s just that I never met anyone like him before. And it’s not only that he’s gorgeous. There’s a certain…tenderness about him.”

“Oh God. Don’t tell me. Have you guys—”

“No—no! Nothing like that. I mean in the way he handles Lulu.”

I began to become suspicious. Lulu was Alyssa’s Lhasa apso, the dog she grew up with on the Upper East Side and the last vestige of her mother, who had died two years ago. Alyssa’s father had a fatal heart attack when she was a teenager, and her mom had gotten her a puppy during that difficult year. Alyssa loved that dog as if it were the last family member she had. And Lulu was, really. If you didn’t count me and Jade, of course.

“How is Lulu?”

“Not good. Jason thinks it may be her kidneys.”

Aha. “Well, don’t do anything rash, Lys. Just see this thing through with Lulu, and then look at where things stand. You and Richard have a long history together. That’s not something you should regard lightly.”

“I know. I know. It’s just that…things have changed between us. I…I sometimes feel like I don’t even know Richard anymore. Maybe he’s changed. Hell, maybe I’ve changed.”

“Lys, all I’m saying is don’t do anything—”

“Oh, shit. Got to go. Richard just got home. Listen, Em, let’s keep this between us. I haven’t even told Jade. You know how she can be—and I don’t feel like being ridiculed right now. I’ll look into the lawyer date thing. Maybe Richard knows someone. I’ll call you….”

“Alyssa—”

“Hey, maybe we should all get together for dinner Saturday night? Richard’s going out of town on business, and it’s been a long time since we’ve had a real girl’s night out. Is Jade around? Let’s plan something.”

“That’s fine, Lys, but don’t think I’m letting you get off easy with this one.”

“Okay, okay. I promise I’ll be good. At least until Saturday.”

Three

“Getting married is the easy part.”

—Virginia McGovern, mother of Emma Carter

Confession: My mother’s wisdom is starting to make sense to me (God help me).

T he next day was my planned lunch date with my mother, who was still under the lovely-though-absolutely untrue assumption that her only daughter was on the sure path to happily-ever-after with her own dream man. Though I hadn’t yet decided how I was going to handle the Derrick subject, I headed off to the restaurant she’d chosen near my office, armed with catalogs and travel brochures filled with all sorts of ideas for how to pull off this wedding she was dreaming of.

She was already there and seated at a table in the back when I arrived, and suddenly I realized where I might have gotten that five-minute-early arrival technique. Was I more like my mother than I realized? I wondered with sudden horror.

“Emma!” she exclaimed as I approached the table. She got up and gathered me into a warm, apricot-scented embrace. When we pulled back from each other, I realized that taking after my mother wouldn’t be so bad after all, at least in the looks department. Though she was fifty-nine years old, she was still a beautiful woman, with wavy chestnut-brown hair framing her high-cheekboned face. Other than the fact that she had the same hazel eyes as mine—though hers seemed more definitely green—no one would have guessed we were mother and daughter. How had I wound up with straight mousy-brown hair and no cheekbones to speak of? Maybe these things skipped a generation.