A funny thing happened at my local independent bookstore today.
I had stopped by with V., who's still home sick from school, to pick up an order that had come in. I knew the cashier by sight but not name, so chit-chat was at a minimum, but then Dave walked by.
Dave is one of the book buyers. He's also dreamy. Curly dark hair, blue eyes, handsome, sweet, charming, my age, and -- get this -- raised two children on his own after he and his wife split when they were little and she didn't want them. They're now in their mid-teens, which means he must've been barely out of his when he got hitched the first time.
Amazingly, he almost always seems to be in a good mood. He's one of those people whom everyone loves because he's so nice. His hotness is significant, but even that is overpowered by the sheer force of his goodness. And with a bio like that, he's a single mom's wet dream.
Regrettably for all the voracious single moms like me would've snapped Dave up like coyotes would steak, he's also remarried and the proud papa of a five-month-old boy. Which is great for him, really, and I'm not even shedding tears over it since I (unfortunately) don't tend to go for the nice type. I like them a little mean. Just a little. And I'm not necessarily proud of that fact (more on this later). I'm just hard-wired that way. Guys like Dave I hang out with and love as friends. Guys that make me want to drop trou tend to be a little rougher around the edges.
Anyway, lest you think I'm a crazy, lovelorn bookstore employee stalker (a breed not unknown in this town), let me explain that I know many of the employees of this particular store pretty well because a)I used to work at another branch of same in MY teens and some of my coworkers transferred there, b)my boyfriend way-back-when worked at this store, and c)the ex's uncle-by-marriage works there currently, and we are on cordial terms. Plus, d)my good friend and also long-ago ex W., who is an independent book dealer, is in there a lot. So I get to shoot the shit with these guys without coming across as a desperate former housewife.
Anyway, Dave's cool and I like him. I had quite a few distressed and TMI-filled conversations with him about being a Divorce Survivor while my divorce was fresh. I wanted to know how his single parenting experience was, etc. But I haven't seen him in a while and it's not like I ever talk to those guys outside their work, so I try not to importune them.
Today, though, he was in a mood to talk. And he was laughing. "W. cracked me up the other day," he said, "he told me something funny that your daughter said and I almost spit out my drink."
"Oh yeah?" I asked. I imagined that it was the anecdote about how my daughter turned to W. when he was over one day and, referring to her brother, remarked, "He's stupid." W. thought that was hilarious and called me the next day to tell me about it.
"Yeah," Dave said. "He said that your daughter saw that picture of the Christian Militia that's been making the rounds, pointed at one, and said the name of your ex's girlfriend."
"Oh, that!" I replied. "Yeah, she saw it on my Facebook page, pointed right at it and was all 'Mar-o-lyn, that's Mar-o-lyn.' I told her it wasn't, but she insisted."
"That's awesome!" Dave laughed. "Out of the mouths of babes."
"Shhhh!" I said, "You know my ex comes in here!"
He smirked, took a swig of his coffee.
"So do you think I should tell him?"
That was when we had to get the paper towels.
But despite the damage to my sweatshirt, I have to say that incident buoyed me up for the rest of the morning. And I belatedly realized why: because it means those guys are pulling for me. They're rooting for me. And it's not that they'd ever be rude or insulting to my ex, but they watched us together and they watched when he left and they see me with the kids and him without and nobody there truly dislikes him, but they're also not overcompensating, the way so many mutual acquaintances do, by pretending that the playing field is equal and there are no bad guys and everybody needs validation and blah blah blah insert more of the kids of things my mother-in-law would say here to explain why she was buying presents for the ex's girlfriend, whom he started dating before he left me, just weeks after my father-in-law and I found, aghast, the sexy text messages he'd sent her while still married. (To her credit, she started wooing the girlfriend after she stopped urging me to win him back and buy some condoms against the diseases he might've picked up.)
These guys -- Dave, another guy, Josh, and the ex's uncle Alex -- are in my corner. It's not even that they're against the ex. It's just that they're behind me. And they're not shy to say so.
Here's a little window into the arrangement I have with my ex. He usually comes Wednesday afternoon for 3-4 hours and Sunday afternoon from 12-7 (though he has been an hour late the last two Sundays -- hard to get up in the morning). On Wednesday they stay here. On Sunday they used to stay here, but then his girlfriend told him that he need to take control and have the kids "experience his environment"* (never mind that the kids, or one of them, anyway, are asthmatic and allergic to her cats and that environment fucks them up for a minimum of 24 hours), so they wait here until the younger one is done with her nap, then go to his place.
As previously mentioned, my daughter V. is sick. She's her normal, charming, really, really good-looking two-year-old self most of the time, then she bursts into tears and projectile vomits. She's been doing so for five days, and I am really tired of watching her cry, tired of wiping her puke off the floor, tired of hopefully feeding her bland foods, tired of worried she'll go into a dehydration coma. So we spent two hours at the doctor's this morning (fortunately, I'm on spring break, or this Week on Vomit Comet would send my stress from Ernie to Elmo). As a courtesy, I emailed the ex about the events. Here's the reply I just got:
I am sorry to hear that V. is sick. Please tell her I hope she gets better really soon. Let's skip tomorrow in light of this. I can't risk getting sick and coming for less than three hours is silly anyway. I have something to do for most of the day anyway and was thinking of asking if it'd work to do Thursday instead. OK?
I wasn't fantastically impressed by this, but it also sounded like maybe he still wanted to come Thursday, so I replied:
Skipping tomorrow is fine, but you should keep in mind that she (or he, or both) will probably still be contagious Sunday.
I am planning to make dinner with/for your parents on Thursday. They are planning to be here at four. If you want to come and show up with them, you're welcome to stay for dinner. We'll be eating early, around 5:30. Let me know if you want to come. I need to buy some fish or something.
Backstory: the ex's parents are coming to town Thursday. They will be staying with me, in order to spend time with the children (they ostensibly also give two shits about me, but I'm not sure I believe them, nor do I really blame them for it; I find them excruciatingly irritating and have long been fed up with various aspects of their hypocrisy and disingenuousness, but I'm judgmental like that, plus they did raise the dude that I am now happy to be divorced from, for which I try and fail not to blame them). Yes, you read that right. My ex-laws will be staying with me. For two nights. Even though I never got along with them in the first place. BECAUSE I AM INSANE.
So here's the ex's reply:
I realize that. I am more concerned about making rent before I expose myself to the possibility of illness... Can't do dinner on Thursday, but I appreciate the invite.
You see what I mean when I say that I used to try to chase him down and I gave up on that.
And, in a larger sense, you may see why the last year has really made me question the role of a father in a kid's life. I'm not saying I don't think fathers are important -- a good father is great. But I didn't have a good father, and in fact most people I know didn't. Most people I know had abusive fathers or unavailable fathers or absent fathers. The two men least likely to treat women like shit I know (my boyfriend and my old friend W., whom I dated about a thousand years ago when I was still in my teens) both grew up without fathers, and neither one especially regrets it. So to chase around trying to facilitate my ex's being the man he's not seems...just a little bit silly. And it also seems like missing the point; after all, now that we're divorced, aren't I supposed to be free of the stress of being his personal assistant, motivational coach, and scold?
*This is not my imagination of how things went down. When I met with her -- at my request to 'establish cordiality' in light of her potential ongoing contact with my kids -- she told me so.
(The expression of dubiousness is not so much because I'm not sure he's my boyfriend as because I'm skeptical of that position and what it means. "Boyfriend." Hmm...lemme see...OH, you mean "guy you're sleeping with but aren't actually committed enough to to take any risks with?" OK then! Yes, I'm a cynic. I should curb my judgment. Because really, "boyfriend" is probably a necessary step now that arranged marriages are passé. But it seems so half-assed, and there's nothing I love less than half-assed.)
He's not the guy I lost my post-divorce virginity with. He's the guy who caught sight of me at a coffee shop at the beach, invited me to share his table, and subsequently managed to discover that I was a single parent, get my number, and send me two text messages that day to tell me he hoped we would hang out back in town.
He's the guy who impressed me as someone thoughtful, grown up, and yet unconventional and interesting. The guy who was consistent enough, communicative enough, and present enough to keep sending me those texts (but not so often it got creepy) until I felt like I had to at least go on one date with him.
Six months later, here we are.
I could write a lot of posts about how my boyfriend is funny, is caring, is passionate, thinks about my kids, has good ethics in general, and got me a kickass birthday gift despite the fact that we'd had exactly one date by my birthday. Not to mention the fact that very frequently, sex with him makes me want to swoon, then die, then sell my soul to Satan. If you know what I mean. I recently used the phrase "magical penis" to my old friend E. And I MEANT IT.
This, however, is not that post.
This is the post I'm writing in which I acknowledge that the man I'm dating, and men in general -- yes, pretty much all of them -- frequently impresses me not with his finer qualities, but with his ability to think only about himself.
Yup. Because I'm a Man and I'm Looking Out For Number One and Since I Have No Significant Responsibilities or Commitments, that means How Can Number One Have the Most Fun?
Seriously.
Seriously, I know we live in a culture of gratification, a culture where "fun" is supposed to be the apex of happiness, a culture where amusing oneself gustatorily, sexually, or otherwise equals identity and maybe even happiness, but come ON.
One of my favorite books series when I was a child, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper (which I highly recommend you read if you enjoy literate, interesting fantasy, and which I demand you buy for any child you care about between the ages of eight and twelve, depending), posits, at some point, that "loving bonds" are the most important thing in this world and that they, in fact, define identity and belonging as much as genes and chronology do. And I guess in some way that resonates with me. Because I am of a family that very much defines me (despite our dysfunctions and silent treatments) and because I head a family that very much requires me to rise to the occasion. And because, perhaps, it's my nature to think that the relationships we form in this world are more powerful and more important than anything else we form here.
So you can understand my dismay when, in the third and last week of his trip to Asia, my boyfriend phones me from Shanghai, and it's an hour after he said he would and I am worried because my two-year-old has been throwing up and is getting dehydrated and the first thing he does is launch into a description of what's happening with him, the fact that he's postponing the day trip to Suzhou until tomorrow, the coffee he's going to drink after we get off the phone, and blah blah blah.
And I'm sitting there listening to him thinking, wow. I emailed you to say I was worried about my daughter, you replied that you'd call me and were concerned as well, and now you're talking about coffee and trains?
It got worse, of course. His next few moments of conversation consisted of detailing why he likes Hong Kong better than Shanghai, including the remarks that the women are "stunningly beautiful" in HK and not so much in Shanghai (which is, for the sake of full disclosure, the city my father is from, and my grandma was plenty hot, thank you very much. Not to mention What The Fuck Are You Doing Checking Out Chicks Anyway? And If You Are, Why Do You Lack the Class Just to Not Tell Me About It? Not to mention that I'm worried my kid is going to die from this strange vomiting thing that the doctors could not explain and could you therefore SHUT UP already about the relative hotness of chicks who aren't me? Okay thanks. Great. Awesome).
Meanwhile every other word is cut off and there's a lag that means we keep interrupting each other and I'm worried my daughter is gonna keep vomiting water every time I feed her a measly teaspoonful. Which I've been doing. Through a syringe. Every twenty minutes.
I don't rant. I am civil. I acknowledge that people have other perspectives. I know that my family is not the center of the world.
But when he says that he might go surfing this Sunday -- Sunday afternoon is my one kid-free day and he gets back, after three weeks away, Friday night -- I blanch. I think, are you seriously not going to stay in town and hang out with me and the kids you claim you love? I think, is it seriously more important to you to surf than it is to see the person you claim you love and are "deeply committed" to?
He doesn't hear these thoughts, of course. Because it's not worth my fighting the static and lag to communicate them. Because I know that he's not actually trying to illustrate that he's not going to make me a priority.
"Gotta get in the water," he says. "Gotta do it."
Oh yeah? I think. And what else do you have to get into? Because it might not stick around waiting while you hare off to wherever it is to amuse yourself with outdoor activities.
I know, I know. I can be a real bitch sometimes. And my expectations are too high. And I should live and let live. And mostly, I do.
But sometimes the total and complete selfishness, self-centeredness, of men in general and the ones in my life in particular, gets to me. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, "maybe I won't be here to welcome you back."
It's not that I hate men. I love them. It's just that it amazes me how much they're allowed to get away with thinking only of themselves -- and how long it takes to teach them to do otherwise. And then it amazes me that I put up with all that noise.
When I got divorced, nearly a year ago now, I didn't have the slightest idea how I would ever have sex again.
I'm a pretty highly sexed person. Once a day is generally good maintenance for me. I don't say no to twice. In most of the long-term relationships I've had, sex has been a major part of the deal, by some estimates too much (to those who so claim, I answer that if it's 50% of how you spend your waking time with someone, it had better be good, right?). Even my marriage, which managed to make me declare that I hated my life and to sing along with Pearl Jam's song "Better Man" with entirely too much pathos, didn't entirely kill my sex drive. I can't remember an average, but in the fall of 2008, when everything was coming to an ugly, bulbous, about-to-erupt head, we did it at least once or twice a week.
But when I got divorced, my sex drive went on vacation. I initially felt that sleeping with another man would feel like being unfaithful, especially since I was not the initiator of the divorce and would have liked to spend more time "working on the marriage" before calling it quits. I imagined with terrifying vividness the moment arriving, being naked with a man, about to consummate my divorcée status, and bursting into tears at the sight of his cock...
(This scenario was based, it must be admitted, on a convoluted Heideggerian argument I'd constructed in which I was "always already" married to my ex, therefore always already would be married to him, and therefore would be betraying that marriage by sleeping with another. At least, it started with Heidegger. I think it probably ended with that Robert Creeley poem "A Marriage," the one that ends "he gave up loving/and lived with her." But I digress.)
...Which, let's face it, isn't the most encouraging response for a dude to get the first time he flashes his Johnson.
Many would turn tail and run.
The other problem I imagined with resuming a sex life was that I had, and have, the kids full time. 100% of nights. Nearly 100% of days. The parenting plan has the kids spending one afternoon a week with their dad; we informally agreed on an additional afternoon, but it has been hit-and-miss. And I work full time. And had only 16 hours of daycare for the younger one for several months (I can work partly from home). That's going up to twenty this week, but it still doesn't leave a lot of time to get my work done and then prowl the streets for willing men. Basically, my time was all allocated, and I was very conscious, and remain so, of not letting anything but my kids monopolize my attention.
Here's how I'd put it to my friend J.: "I don't want to subject the kids to the Parade of Men. And I can't have dudes over unless they can at least risk seeing the kids. And I don't have any nights off or money for babysitting. So basically, I'm never going to get laid until I establish some kind of serious relationship with a dude who's willing to wait around for several months until I can introduce him into my life a little. And WHO HAS THAT KIND OF PATIENCE?"
Now, J. has been a single mom for fourteen years. So she just nodded and smiled, then said, "I'd be happy to babysit for you sometime. You know, it is possible to have sex at someone else's house."
Duh. Of course I continued my protests that I'd probably become a nun, that the town would erect for me a chastity arch (a practice in pre-revolution China done for women who, widowed young, remained faithful to their husbands FOREVER, thus adding to the honor of the family), etc. etc.
Don't get me wrong, I knew that something would probably happen. To put it bluntly, I'm not the type of girl who goes for long periods without a boyfriend. Which probably has something to do with how I got in this single-parent situation in the first place.
But that something was actually a long time coming. The last time I had sex with my husband was on Nov. 30, 2008. He moved out Dec. 10. The divorce was final April 28, 2009.
And I met L. on July 29.
Eight months of celibacy isn't insignificant for anyone in my book. For me, it was an eternity. Because a lot happened in that time. I went through the stages of grief. I was uninterested, a little interested, repulsed, enthused. I wept. I began to feel oddly grateful to my ex for leaving, because I wouldn't have and because I was happier without him and our family was happier without him. I changed, I grew, I became exceedingly grateful for that sex toy shopping spree my cousin took me on in June. I basically spent every night in July before L. showed up with three vibrators and a few different volumes of Penthouse Letters.
L. was a friend of a friend. We'd gotten to be friends through Facebook. We had never met. This is not something I ordinarily do, but he friended me, and he's an old college pal of my best friend in town, and I wasn't feeling like being as exclusive and unavailable as usual. So I said yes. We had a fair amount of internet back-and-forth, we sent some emails. He started phoning me during the stormiest period, December and January, when the ex had just moved out, when I thought I might not actually survive, and when I spent pretty much every moment my kids weren't awake chain-smoking and weeping.
It was a bad winter. I recommend that if you plan to undergo a miserable divorce that inspires you to resume smoking and give up food, you do it in summer. Your hands won't get chapped and your basal body temperature won't suffer as much. As it was, I was a shadow of my normally thin self, a scarecrow of Angst and Weltschmerz.
But by summer I was better. I was, at least, horny again. I'd actually had several minor flirtations, one of which resulted in a man standing outside my house staring up at it for an hour, which was sort of cute in a Say Anything sort of way. Or would've been, if he'd been 18 and John Cusack.
And the L. came to town. He had been living overseas and was moving -- with his fiancée, natch -- across the world, with a stop in the U.S. on the way. I knew we, um, liked each other, or at least had the potential for it. And somehow he managed to arrange this trip into a crisscross of geography that resulted in him being in my town after the fiancé left the country.
Arrive Wednesday noon, leave Friday morning. He was slated to stay with our mutual friend, she who had known him for 16 years. It was the hottest day of the year. I'm going to resist the urge to say that it got a lot hotter.
But you know it did.
Because, after all, when a couple of differently chromosomed heterosexuals spend eight months whispering sweet nothings in each other's virtual networking ears, it's like laying tinder at a gas pump.
Or something.
How it all happened, and how it remained a secret from our mutual friend, was very sweet. I met L. at the corner bar Wednesday afternoon. We chatted. We hung out. I took him to our mutual friend's house, came home, and got the kids in bed. Then J. came over to babysit.
When I showed up back at our mutual friend, M.'s, house, L. was out front having a cigarette. He sat on the top step, wearing a t-shirt and sweating. It was still over a hundred degrees, maybe 9 p.m., summer above the 45th parallel meaning it was still light out. Still light and hot enough to sweat without even moving.
"Honey," L. cried, "I'll give you a hundred dollars if you let me come sleep in that air-conditioned room of yours. A hundred dollars. And I promise I won't try to sleep with you."
I looked at him. I smiled. I said, "The hell you won't. But okay."
He kissed me.
M. came out and we all had a drink. We drank and shot the breeze for a while, until she and her husband were bleary-eyed and she was slurring her words and tripping. L. made his excuses. L. and I walked, upright, to the car.
When we got to my house, J. gave a wink and took off. Then L. and I retired to the attic, turned on the crappy window air conditioner that my ex-father-in-law had just helped me prop up with dowels, sat in chairs, and talked.
Sat on the bed. And talked.
Lay in each others' arms. And talked.
It was exactly like getting together with a shy guy you really like in college, when dorm rooms are easily accessible, beds are the only furniture, and nobody really wants to make an unequivocal first move, so you just keep inching together until at some point it's a tangle of limbs and nebulous intentions. Except that we were in our mid-thirties and not our late teens, and he was engaged to someone else, and we were probably never going to see each other again, or at least for years, after two days. So at some point before any clothes came off, one of us (it was probably me) called a smoke break and we retired to the sweltering (at 2 a.m.) front porch.
"So, um." I said, "Is this okay?"
"What do you mean, okay?" L. asked, "Do you mean is it okay with her or do you mean is it okay in the sense that it's not going to wreck anything?"
"Both."
"The latter, yeah, I think so," he said. "The former, definitely not."
I thought about this for a minute.
"So...how not okay is it?"
"On a scale of one to ten? Maybe a four."
Sold. We went back upstairs. Oh, there was more discussion, but this is the gist and the important part. I wanted to confront this man that I thought I knew, through our mutual friend and through our correspondence, and see what he had to say about his situation. I didn't know, going into that conversation, if I would get an answer I could deal with. I didn't want to be a homewrecker (and in fact had discussed the issue with our mutual friend M. when his arrival became imminent; that there was "a vibe" was clear, what would develop less so -- and in fact she apparently admonished him, when he announced his intention to stay with me, to not "take advantage of my situation"). I had been the victim of homewrecking, actually, though whether it was sexually consummated was unclear (the erotic texts, Facebook love letters, etc., were there, but the ex swears he did "nothing dishonorable" -- in our last memorable fight about it, I asserted that it didn't matter where his penis went if he'd already betrayed me emotionally). And our friend M. knew this, so she thought I was vulnerable and also urged me to take the high road.
And I had thought I would. I wasn't dumb enough to think that L. hadn't come to visit at least partly to get in my pants. And I wasn't dishonest enough to think that I didn't want him to. But I had thought that I would decline. I had thought that I would find a way not to have sex with him in order to stay on my moral high horse with regard to my ex, or in order to not have to face M. and her disapproval, or in order to not let myself get attached to a man who was completely, utterly unavailable, because (as a recent episode of Grey's Anatomy put it), my heart lives in my vagina. I am not the kind of girl who has meaningless sex. And I frequently turn sex into a relationship because I can't fathom the idea of having fucked a stranger I don't care about.
I realize this might be seen as a slightly flawed strategy. On other other hand, who has a perfect one? Maybe I could protect my heart by putting a big LOCAL USE ONLY sign on my vajayjay. But I kind of doubt it. I think then I might just be sexually frustrated and lovelorn.
So I really thought there was a possibility I would say no to sex with L. But I didn't. Not because I was that desperate to get laid, actually. I was horny, yes, -- but I don't recall that being my primary emotion. And not because I wanted to wipe away the stain of the ex by, um, turning to the next chapter in Penises I Have Known (a possibly multi-volume tome that really needs to be switched to the Kindle version), although that impulse -- the impulse, quite simply, to have the ex not be The Last Person I Fucked -- was strong. But because I wanted the First Person I Fucked, post-divorce, to be L. I wanted the first person I had post-divorce sex with to be this guy who was hilarious and flawed and macho and hip-hop, this guy who wrote letters with cartoons drawn in the margins and who wrote short stories about Jesus or divorce or Robocop, this guy who, for whatever reason, had decided to let me in, and who looked at me back and got me. I wanted to lose my chastity arch with a person I really, to put it simply, liked. And who liked me back.
And at some point I had to ask myself if I was responsible for L.'s relationship with his fiancée, or for what he chose to do within or without it, and even as the woman formerly scorned, my answer was no. I maintain this is true. I don't think much of my ex's girlfriend, it's true, but she is not the one who betrayed my marriage. He is.
So we went upstairs. And we got naked. And as it happened, I wondered if all those feelings of grief and regret, the ones I had thought would make me cry the first time I had sex with someone other than my husband, would come back. But they didn't. I didn't come close to crying. Maybe it was because I was pretty clear about what I was doing. Maybe it was because enough time had passed. Maybe it was because I was with a man who (for all his apparent flaws and idiosyncrasies) was a better friend, lover, and boyfriend in 48 hours than my husband ever was.
It is a powerful thing to be looking in someone's eyes as you straddle him and realizing that he hasn't failed you as a friend.
We had sex. It was hot. And it felt like the first time. Not just because the quality of my relationship with L., and of my knowledge of myself, was so different than before -- also because, after the eight-month drought, it kind of hurt at first. But in a good way. Just exactly like when I was seventeen and having sex for the very first time with my boyfriend of six months, whom I loved, who loved me, and I knew that even though it hurt like a bastard, I wanted this, it would be good. This time didn't hurt like a bastard. But it was a little uncomfortable at first, and the discomfort reminded me of why sex is so good and why we want it and how part of me had known that, even the first time.
So that was it. It was like being touched for the very first time. And as the argument goes in Reservoir Dogs, was it like that because I was vulnerable and I'd been fucked over a few times and I met a nice guy, or was it like that because of a really big cock?
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