Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend Read online

  After babbling on for a few minutes about her job as office manager at Bilbo, a pharmeceuticals company where she’d worked since I was a kid, she got to the real reason for her call. “I didn’t want to tell you this on the phone, but I don’t know when I’m going to see you again—” This was another point of contention with my mother, who apparently didn’t believe my monthly treks to Long Island to pay homage to her in her cozy Garden City home were quite cutting it.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Well, Clark and I have decided…that is, we’re going to get married.”

  Now I must admit that upon first hearing, I was ready to completely disregard this statement. After all, this would be husband 3 (almost 4) and another in a long line of men my mother fell hopelessly in love with and considered marrying. Admittedly one could make the argument that my mother always went into marriage with the best intentions. It was the men she chose who always threw a kink into things.

  There was my father, first of all, whom my mother discovered—after twenty years of marriage—to be a raging alcoholic. “He was always such fun at parties,” she once declared, remembering happier times. Then there was Donald—almost husband 2. After a whirlwind courtship that ended in a trip to Las Vegas to tie to knot, Donald was nailed by airport authorities with a warrant for his arrest…on three counts of embezzlement. Then came Warren, whom I would venture to call my mother’s true love…had their marriage lasted long enough to stand the test of time. After an eight-year courtship—my mother wasn’t taking any chances that time—they were wed in a small ceremony in our backyard, with me standing in as maid of honor. Unfortunately, Warren died of a heart attack within weeks of the honeymoon.

  Now there was Clark. Sweet, lovable Clark, an English professor with a lopsided smile and a fondness for quoting from seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, a trait my mother found absolutely charming.

  But there was no shrugging off this announcement, I realized, when she began rattling off the details of the ceremony. “…I’m thinking mid-September…a small cruise ship, just the family. Clark and I, of course. Grandma Zizi. You and Derrick. Shaun and Tiffany…” Shaun is my married brother. Married younger brother, I might add. “Clark’s son and daughter and their kids,” she continued. “We’ll take a short sail through the Caribbean to St. Thomas, where Clark and I will be married with the waves crashing in the background and the family standing by. Kind of like a family vacation and a wedding all tied up into one. Won’t that be fun?”

  Loads.

  Two

  “Don’t knock denial until you’ve tried it.”

  —Name and age withheld

  Confession: My breakup has turned me into a pathological liar.

  The following Monday at work, I slid into the guest chair of Rebecca’s cubicle. Though Rebecca is mainly an office buddy, we have been known to make excursions out to local bars for happy hours together, to commemorate a good review or gripe over a particularly menacing co-worker. However, these outings have become few and far between, mostly due to the fact that I have been doing the relationship thing, avoiding all friends other than Jade and Alyssa, in favor of takeout and a video rental with Derrick. Though Rebecca had been with her boyfriend, Nash, for about as long as I was with Derrick, she always seemed to make time for friends, and never seemed to mind the occasional late-night crunch to make a special assignment deadline, even if good old Nash had made them dinner reservations. In fact, I think she prides herself on her ability to be both good friend to all and steady girlfriend to one, which makes me suspicious of her, and somewhat jealous, I’ll admit.

  “My mother is getting married again,” I announced, with some exasperation.

  “What fun,” Rebecca replied, peering up at me from a layout she had been reviewing, her eyebrows raised and a bright smile on her face.

  Something about her cheerful reaction to my news made me immediately put up my antennae. One of the things Rebecca and I had always shared, especially during our after-work-cocktail outings, was a healthy disdain for the perky little world of wedding planning that is Bridal Best. How else could we separate ourselves from an office of people who waxed poetic over everything from choosing the right place settings to the proper thickness of paper for invitations, except by mocking them? If I didn’t know Rebecca better, I might have thought she’d been bitten by the Bridal Best marriage zest after all. Because at Bridal Best, every marriage, even your mother’s third, is an event worth getting hysterical over.

  “Yeah, well, it’s hard for me to summon up any sort of enthusiasm for this wedding. I mean, my mother’s track record is a lesson in how not to find everlasting love.”

  Rebecca studied me for a moment, as if I were speaking in a foreign language. “You should be happy for your mother. It’s not every woman who can fall in love again after so many missteps. She has a lot of courage.”

  “Either that or she’s taking enough Prozac for it to not matter.” Ever since she lost Warren, my mother was a firm believer in the kind of happiness that was available in easy-to-swallow caplets.

  “What’s gotten into you? You seem more cynical than usual. Did you fight with Derrick this weekend?”

  Her question caused a minor panic inside me, as if my sudden state of stressful singledom had somehow become glaringly apparent. I stumbled around for a moment or two as I studied her careful blond bob and perfectly plucked brows, the neat way she had lined up her pencils on her desktop. Suddenly I was filled with distrust. Even the shiny eight-by-ten framed photo of Nash she kept in her cubicle seemed to glint evilly at me. There was no way I could tell her the truth.

  “No, no. Nothing happened with Derrick. Everything is fine. Great, in fact.”

  “Terrific,” Rebecca said, turning back to the layout before her. “Then that will give you a clear head to help your mom out with this wedding. Gosh, you could practically plan this thing yourself, if you had to.”

  “Sure, if I had to.” If I didn’t die of heartbreak first.

  Confession: Marriage suddenly seems like a social disease.

  Back at my desk, I was faced with my greatest challenge since The Breakup: attempting to muster enough perkiness to write a short to-do list for the bride-to-be that I had secretly titled, “How to Make Your Wedding Day Happen Without All Hell Breaking Loose.” As I struggled to come up with an opening paragraph, I started to feel some of that anger Alyssa had encouraged in me. What about us non-bride-to-be’s? I wondered. Even my own mother had put me to work in the service of her wedding day by asking me to start looking up cruise ships and “getaway” weddings on my handy little database. Worse, she had gleefully offered to take one of the many vacation days she’d accumulated during her twenty-year career at Bilbo to meet me for lunch the following week to see what I had come up with.

  Why was my job so convenient for everyone else? Why was it that everyone else had a burning need to pick my brain for suggestions on everything from romantic-honeymoons-that-don’t-require-a-tan to effortless-and-elegant hor d’oeuvres? Working in the warped little world of wedding planning had led me to one conclusion: If you don’t get married in this world, you get nothing. Once, in an editorial meeting, I jokingly suggested that a woman should get a bridal shower when she turns thirty, wedding or not. Everyone looked at me as if I were some kind of nut. I am thirty-one years old, am I not entitled to free Calphalon yet?

  The phone rang, saving me from starting the dreaded article.

  “Hey, Em,” came Jade’s voice over the line.

  “Jade. Thank God.”

  “Were you expecting someone else?”

  “I was hoping for anyone who is not getting married.”

  “No fear here. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, nothing. You know, the usual. Deadline pressure high, motivation factor low. How did the date with Ted Terrific go?”

  “Terrific, of course. We did drinks, went to shoot some pool. Did I mention that he has the most beautiful forearms I’ve
ever seen? Nice and thick and just the way I like ’em. He’s even got a couple of tattoos. And you know how I feel about a man with tattoos.”

  “Uh-oh. You’re finished.”

  “If I don’t sleep with him, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “Marry him?”

  “What’s gotten into you this morning?”

  “It’s my mother. She’s getting married again.”

  I held the phone away from my ear as Jade shrieked with joy. “That is so wonderful! She and Clark are too cute together. Oh, I have to call and congratulate her. I should probably pick up a card at lunch….”

  I should have figured Jade would be my mother’s biggest champion. After all, she’d known my mom since husband 1. “Jade, am I the only person in the world who’s not excited about this?”

  “Well, you should be,” she said, censure in her tone. “She’s your mother! Don’t you want her to be happy?”

  “Happy, yes. I’m just not too clear on the fact that marriage is the way to get happy. You do realize that this would be Husband 3, almost 4?”

  “Em, I think you need to get over that. Not everybody lives a cookie-cutter life. So what if your mother has spent a lot of her life searching? As long as she finds what she wants in the end.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” I let out a sigh. “Maybe I’m not looking forward to the Big Day, especially since she’s got the whole family cruising to the Caribbean together for the ceremony. And guess who will be the only guest in the single cabin? Of course, my mother doesn’t know that yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Derrick. I don’t know why…I just…couldn’t.”

  “You’re going to have to tell her eventually. When’s the wedding?”

  “She’s hoping to get something together by the end of September.”

  There was a silence, as if Jade was pondering. “That’s not much time, but who knows what could happen before then. You might be in love with someone else. Or you might find yourself a cute waiter on the cruise ship to share that single room with.”

  “Somehow I doubt it. But maybe I can dig up someone to take with me.”

  “Ah, yes. The old Boy Under the Bed.” This was our term for the ever-present male friend who was suitable to take to such events as weddings or office picnics, though for one reason or another not someone you had any sort of desire to truly date. Mine used to be Cal, who’d been a fellow waiter at Good Grub, the restaurant I waitressed at during grad school. Cal was a perfect Boy Under the Bed—a great dancer, tall enough so you didn’t tower over him in heels, and just unattractive enough not to cause any instances of drunken groping on the dance floor that might later prove embarrassing. The problem was, Cal had up and gotten married during the Derrick Years. Men were such bastards.

  “I just realized my Boy Under the Bed went AWOL. Cal got married last year, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She paused, and I heard her inhaling on a cigarette. “What about Sebastian?”

  Sebastian was always a possibility, of course. But he was more a Boy Out of the Closet than a Boy Under the Bed, which made choosing him as a wedding date a bit of a problem. “I don’t want to be the fat older sister turned fag hag at this affair.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  “Well, you never know what could happen by September. I ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough over the weekend. And not even the frozen yogurt version. I went for the gusto—twenty-four grams of fat per serving, four servings per pint.”

  “Big deal. Don’t worry, Em, we’ll find you someone. There’s always that model I told you about.”

  “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 th
orough 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.