First real snow of the season. Oh, so Currier & Ives. In the Buffalo area, two feet of snow fell and shut down the interstate for seven hours. We were lucky we picked Robin up at the airport Monday night and not Tuesday.
###
Believe it was Abraham Lincoln who once said, "Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be."
An interesting thing for Lincoln to have said, given the fact that he was such a famous melancholic himself -- minor statesmen were always running across him in the back of various legislative chambers weeping copiously into his sleeve (how people wept before Kleenex was invented.)
###
Vivid dream the other night: I was in a vast kitchen, all stainless steel and telepathic kitchen appliances keyed to thought – Bake for exactly 37 minutes at 367 degrees. And I was making chocolate candy, chili chocolate candy to be exact, from roasted green Hatch peppers and bittersweet chocolate.
Woke up and thought, Lindt’s doing chocolate chili bars now, and then there are all the artisan candy bar makers. But I wonder if anyone in the Ithaca area is actually doing chili chocolate truffles? Might be something to investigate, an entertaining way to pick up a little extra cash come this summer…
I still think like an entrepreneur.
###
A few days ago I asked Ben, “So do you think you’re going to end up doing to the new Girlfriend what you did to me? I mean the psychopathic lying and all?”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Well. I’m incredibly comfortable with her, I mean we both grew up here, there’s a shared language, a shared history. And I’m not afraid to tell her when I’m scared. If I can’t get enough hours at the call center, if I’m nervous about the state of the world. Plus, I mean – well. She’ll take one of my shirts out of the laundry basket and sew a button on to it. Nobody’s ever done that for me before.”
Right, I thought. I didn’t sew your fucking buttons on your shirt. I just supported your sorry, lying ass for 17 years.
Asshole.
###
Robin was getting into the Buffalo airport from California at 11 o’clock last night. There was no way I was going to be able to make that drive alone. I had to conscript Ben to drive with me. We were going to take the Veedub.
Around four in the afternoon, Ben called me. “Would you mind taking Jayne’s car?”
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I would. But there’s no denying that the Girlfriend’s car is better equipped than mine for a 350 mile round trip.
But when departure time came around, I got a call from Ben. “I don’t know where Jayne is,” he said. His voice had that quavery, high-pitched note it always gets when he’s being petulant because he’s not getting his way. “We’re going to have to take your car.”
“Fine,” I said.
I picked him up in the parking lot of the furniture store half a mile from his house. “What? You guys had some sort of big fight and I’m not supposed to be seen? Is that why I’m picking you up here?”
“No,” he said between gritted teeth. Clearly irritated. “She’s not there! I’ve been calling and texting for hours and she’s not answering!”
“Well, maybe something bad happened to her,” I said.
“No, she’d tell me if it had. More likely she’s getting jealous of you.”
“She gets jealous of me?”
“From time to time. But this is the wrong time because Robin is involved.”
“Huh,” I said. “If it was my girlfriend, I guess I’d be worried that maybe she got on the wrong side of an eighteen wheeler or something. By the way, don’t you think it’s time that we normalize this situation like real grown-ups and the two of us meet?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe?”
“If she wants to!” he snapped.
“Well maybe if she met me, she wouldn’t be jealous of me. Why is she jealous of me by the way?”
“Oh, because I’ve told her how smart you are and how talented you are, and she’s insecure about her own intelligence. She thinks I’m going to get bored with her.”
“But I don’t sew buttons on shirts.”
“I told her that!”
“Still,” I mused. “I suppose if sewing buttons was a priority, we’d all be fucking Chinese laundries. Why on earth would you tell the woman you’re living with how smart and talented I am?”
“Well. Because it’s true.”
“Boy, you are just in the catbird seat, aren’t you? Two women fighting it out over you! All we need is a video camera and about five tons of green jello! Buy her some flowers.”
“She doesn’t care about flowers.”
“Oh, right. She’s too tough for courtship. Or did you skip the courtship and go straight to the chase – taking her for granted like you’d been married for seven years.”
We pulled into the gas station. At the cash register, he pulled out some money for gas.
“You know,” I said, “I budgeted for this trip without relying on contributions from you. Buy her some fucking flowers. I’m serious.”
I scanned the pathetic array of convenience store bouquets and picked out the least pathetic. Alstroemerias! Peruvian lilies. (I was 27 and living in Berkeley the day all color disappeared from the planet. I was also a jock whose daily exercise consisted of riding 30 miles a day up the steep canyons in back of the University of California, and on this day – seeped entirely in that thick, swirling grey mist – I discovered where God stored color when He wasn’t using it: he stashed it in Peruvian lilies! The Berkeley Botanical Gardens’ alstroemeria plot was in full bloom, vermillion and scarlet and lemon and copper and magenta.)
“We don’t have time,” Ben said, but he took the flowers anyway, paid for them sheepishly.
“And take the price tag off,” I said. “We’ll go back by your place. You can drop them off.”
“We don’t have time,” he objected feebly, but of course we did.
###
The boyfriend before Ben was Matt. Excellent writer, incomparably droll & witty observer. Sexy in a Welsh coal miner kind of way. Considerably shorter than I am which made our public appearances as a couple somewhat problematic, but for all that we had a lot of fun between the sheets.
When we broke up, Matt told me, “You are one of the most monstrously self-absorbed people I’ve ever met. Except for Max. I will give you Max. You are an unfailingly selfless and excellent mother.”
Ben never echoed the same sentiment exactly. But he came close. We ended up spending quite a bit of time together last week while The Girlfriend was off visiting her grandchildren. What Ben said was, “You made a hell of a lot of money for a while. And I think to myself, Wow. She didn’t really get a lot out of all that money. I mean, Max got a lot – an expensive private school education, the satisfaction of every whim his teenaged heart desired. But you didn’t get anything. No vacations, no expensive jewelry. You worked like a dog. And for what?”
Well, I supported your sorry ass, I wanted to snap. Although obviously not in the style you wanted. But didn’t. What would the point have been to that? Being defensive when someone is telling you the truth is a stupid thing to do.
###
Facebook is the great trough from which all us feed in these opening years of the 21st century, yes? So naturally I rediscovered Matt there. We began emailing on a regular basis.
I’ve turned into a bitter, bitter man, he wrote me.
Turned into? I wanted to write back. He’d always been bitter, the cynicism was part of his appeal, that and the deep, drawling voice with its Midwestern twang that turned, “Honey I’m going to the store for beer and cigarettes,” into a verbal caress.
Oddly enough several years after we broke up, Matt and I both moved to Monterey at exactly the same time. Matt and his wife lived in a charming little cottage on Larkin Street, three blocks away from where Ben and I lived on Franklin Street. I used to walk the dogs past Matt’s cottage and if he was standing on the porch smoking, we would nod cordially, essay polite conversation, although the glint in the back of his eyes told me exactly what he thought of me.
When he wasn’t standing on the front porch, I would peep in through its windows. Try to get a feeling for the domestic bliss that went on behind those walls. Sure, I was spying. But it was more complicated than that. He’d been a character in the ongoing drama of my life; I was trying to get some sense of how that narrative arc continued.
One morning I walked the dogs past the house, peered inside – and was taken aback: the outside of the house looked fine; the inside of the house, though, was charred and black.
Eleven years later, he wrote this to me about it:
Burnt through the cushions, turned the interior of the house into a kiln (actually melted the glass on the front of pictures hanging in the living room) and baked everything in the house. Very little in the way of open flame, apparently, but enough to burn several thousand books, every bit of paper, both computer backups (including the aforementioned manuscript, a series of sketches and interviews with Anderson Valley and Mendocino eccentrics, leading to some nice talks with City Lights Books and lots of unfulfilled promise), and smoked everything else so thoroughly that it was a complete loss.
I got a phone call, came back from Chicago, and felt like it was over. I was sitting in the back yard, Christmas eve morning 1999, having a cup of poppy tea, soothing my nerves; looking into the blackened interior of the house, remarkably like a cave, expecting bats to emerge. It was one of those rare, beautiful midwinter coastal mornings, no fog, 60°. The house and everything in it was destroyed. My family was safe and warm, in Chicago with grandparents; they were happy. And so was I.
I knew that all I ever wanted was to be in that place, and it was unraveling, at that very moment. I just didn't know it…
Still such a terrific writer…
Epiphany time: Ben is not the only person who can be the other voice in my inner dialogue. No, I have no romantic interest in Matt whatsoever. But I felt as though the words I’d read of his had been whispered in my ear, perhaps during a picnic on the banks of the River Lethe, as part of an ongoing conversation that had taken place over centuries, that would continue to take place over centuries more.
###
Ben and I were supposed to go to the Farmers Market together Saturday, but it was 29 degrees out, with the wind chill factor 20. So instead we sat in my living room drinking coffee and talking.
Eventually we began deconstructing our marriage.
“You always wanted to be the real writer. It was like my writing was unimportant,” he said. Angry flash in his eyes -- this was something that still pissed him off apparently.
“No, Ben,” I explained patiently. “I got gigs writing. I was making money writing. That money was supporting both of us. So, yeah, I would steal your lines to make that writing better. Your lines, your ideas. You know in a lot of ways, you’re a much, much better writer than I am. Your commercial instincts are much better. So, yeah, I used you. Know what? Under the circumstances, I’d do it again. It wasn't like you were using you.”
“I gave you my novels to read, and you didn’t even read them.”
“I read them,” I said.
“I don’t know if I believe that.”
He was right not to believe it: I was lying. I didn’t read his novels. I haven’t even read the stuff he’s written for the Steinbeck book. I don’t know why. You’d think if you were harboring a psychologically unhealthy attachment to someone, you’d hang on their every word. But no.
I leaned closer. “You know, here’s the deal, Ben: you actually had an agent from a top agency who was really interested in working with you, developing your talent –“
“Chris Whateverthefuckhislastnamewas,” Ben mumbled.
“Right. You had it in your pocket. All you had to do was rewrite it. And you didn’t. You threw the opportunity away.”
“Well, at the time, I thought it would be easier just to write a new novel. I was wrong as it turns out.”
“All I can tell you, Ben, is that if I’d had that opportunity, if a big agent had been interested in me, I would have done whatever it took to make that sale. Anything. So don’t get down on me for being unsupportive of your writing. You sabotaged yourself. You were unsupportive of your writing.”
Ben glowered.
I sighed. “You know it’s important to me that you forgive me for whatever wrongs you think I did you.”
“Oh, sure,” he’d said. “Why not? Forgiveness is great.”
“Is it important to you that I forgive you?”
“Well, that’s a good question. A very good question. No, I don’t think it is important to me.”
###
Somewhere around two o’clock in the morning, on the road between Interlaken and Trumansburg, I realized: he’s afraid of me. That’s why he treated me like shit.
I feel like I should write about that moment if only to remember its peculiar emotional resonance, the mist on the dashboard window, the half moon hiding behind a cloud, the garish displays of Christmas lights we passed along the road. “Did you really win poetry prizes in New Mexico like you said you did?” I asked. Although we were well past being friends at that point, I was still pretending.
“Yes, I really did” he said. “I mean, you can still find the anthologies in the Steel Memorial library in Elmira. Here’s something that’ll make you sick: Jayne saved all my high school poetry. For 35 years. She saved it.”
You’re right, I thought. That does make me sick.
“Don’t you think it’s time to normalize this situation?” I asked. “I should probably meet your girlfriend.”
“I told you before. Maybe,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘Maybe?’”
“If she wants to. I don’t want her to be uncomfortable.”
“Why would she be uncomfortable?”
“I don’t want her to feel intimidated.”
“You don’t want me to bust you on any of the lies you told her, you mean.” I laughed. “JP, the imaginary roommate, was a pretty well realized character, I must say. Though not as good as Dr. Melvi, the imaginary shrink you saw for three months in Monterey. A Costa Rican soccer coach! Who was always borrowing money from you! Does the Girlfriend know she was a Costa Rican soccer coach for three months?”
“No,” he said tiredly.
“I remember feeling so-o-o sorry for you having to do all that couch surfing in Watkins Glen before JP became your roommate. Poor Ben! Orphan of the storm. I actually felt very bad for you. Maybe if you’d said to me, ‘I’ve become involved with a woman,’ I could have spared myself feeling sorry for you, having to do all that Facebook spying to figure out what the fuck was really going on. Although I really wish Robin hadn’t told you I wanted to slash her tires. Now I’m going to have to put sugar in her gas tank.”
“Why do we have to talk about this now?” he asked.
“You’re never going to leave Ithaca, you know,” I told him in a soft, murderous voice. “Within five weeks you’re going to have a major health crisis. You’ll marry her to get on her health plan.”
“Oh, are we channeling the Psychic Friends Network now?”
“You’ll see,” I said. “So does she pay your rent too?”
“I pay a third. We halve the utilities.”
We were crawling down the hill into Ithaca proper, a cop car tight on our trail. I hate being trailed by cop cars, even when I’m not doing anything illegal. I saw him grimace.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Cramp. In my foot.”
“Umm,” I said. “It’s called intermittent claudification. It’s a symptom of heart disease. Getting worse now isn’t it? In your legs.”
He shot me an entirely irritated look. He was biting his lower lip.
“Better see that doctor, Ben,” I said. Really, if he’d had a heart attack at that moment, I would have rolled him onto the white line in the middle of the road and proceeded merrily on my way. That’s how heartily I disliked him. I never wanted to see him again. And I felt good about it.
###
Next afternoon, a knock on my door: Ben. Smiling broadly. “I figured I would check that outside socket to make sure it works so you can put up your Christmas lights,” he said.
“That’s so nice of you,” I said.
And it was nice of him. I was genuinely touched. But at the same time pissed off and irritated: did it even occur to him to call and ask if he could come over as I have repeatedly suggested he should?
And just five minutes ago: Ben. Not quite as smiley. (Had I done something to piss him off? Was the Girlfriend giving him a hard time?) With a 25 pound sack of rock salt and a scraper for the front window of my car. But no phone call.
And this is why I line my pillow with regrets.
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyme and I took of each other:
