Limerance Fifteen Years Before Plus the History of Forgetting

So. Fifteen years ago I was in-love – in limerance, crushing, hot for, what have you – with an extraordinarily intelligent, dazzlingly sensitive and – yes, Virginia! – literate man named R__ who also just happened to look like Gabriel Byrne. He worked out of LA where I had lots of business dealings. In those days I was running the People Magazine website – which had no cred whatsoever this being the Internet Cretaceous – trying to figure out a way to lure real live movie starts to interact with their 10 or 12 fans who actually knew what 300 baud modems were and owned one. R__ was a successful unit publicist with an impressive resume. He’d just finished working on Gladiator and had the most entertaining stories of chaperoning a very drunken Oliver Reed around Rome. It was Oliver Reed’s last film, alas!

We were both strangers in LA – I suppose that’s why we liked to meet up. He lived in Ithaca, New York where he was married to an extraordinarily beautiful but exacting woman – M_______ – with whom he had two sons, C____ and S__. C____ was blind – there was a story attached to that which I can’t remember now.

I visited M_______ and R__ as a couple whenever I went back east to visit my mother-in-law, usually twice year, on holidays. (Nancy lived in upstate New York, maybe 30 miles away from Ithaca.) M_______ hated LA, flatly refused to live there and that meant R__ spent 9 months a year away from home. It was always strange, seeing him outside LA.

We would eat in Mexican and Thai places on the wrong side of Melrose, have long rambling conversations fueled by wine, exchange long rambling emails in between meetings and one night we had The Conversation.

I really wanted to sleep with him but couldn’t imagine he was coming on to me. And maybe he wasn’t. But maybe he was. I was very unhappy with B. What I didn’t see, what I blinded myself to, was how unhappy he was with M_______. M_______ – so crisp, so capable, so no-nonsense – was the exact opposite of me. I figured that made her the perfect woman. Why would he choose me over the perfect woman?

I got a long, rambling Xmas card from M_______ two years ago. Long story short – they’d divorced, he’d remarried.

Which of course made me wonder, Wow! If I’d had an affair with him would he have married me?

All of which resurfaced this morning I just got a note from him on Facebook (where else?) Not a long, rambling note. A short cheerful note with a Friend request. Huh and huh…

In other news, B told me this morning, “You know, I think it’s pathological that you haven’t told any of your friends you’re closing the store.”

“I’m not going to tell them when I leave California either,” I said. “They’ll look for me and I’ll be gone. Poof!”

B shook his head in disgust. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

“Well, I’ll keep the same cell phone number.”

“That’s just so wrong.”

“Why?” I asked. “Nobody really cares when bad things happen to other people. Oh, they may pretend to care. At first. You know. Because it’s such a blast pretending to be empathetic and supportive. But they don’t care. Not really. I think after he helps us move the store stuff into storage, I’m going to cut Max off too. He’s on an upward trajectory. It’s just going to bring him down to have a crazy, loser mother.”

I suppose it is sick and pathological. But it’s what I'm feeling in the present moment. I want to reinvent myself without this failure. I don’t want to be around anybody who knows what hopes and dreams I had for the Little Store, who feels sorry for me for ever having had those hopes and dreams.

I got lost in Marina yesterday, passed an Asian market, had to get out and explore. And wandering around that strange little store where every item on the shelves was a peculiar tint of pink or green or orange or sage, all the signage, glyphs or pictograms, I felt happy, I felt free, like the only history I had was the history of forgetting…