Hello again, folks, long time no see.
I realize I haven’t published anything in well over two months. I had my best friend from college visit me in July, and in the midst of that my little Mac iBook, the one I bought in 2006 with my grandmother’s money and took to Italy, finally bit the dust. With any luck (and some money I don’t currently have) I’ll be able to retrieve the hard drive data at some point. I lost the entirety of the post I’d been working on in June/July, but now I’m back in business with a Powerbook G4 (the same vintage as my iBook), which I obtained from our old coffeehouse buddy Dex for a hundred bucks.
The good news is that he left a whole cornucopia of music in the iTunes library for me, from classic jazz, salsa, and soul to newly minted alt-rock bands — including all kinds of indie hipster music I’d never even heard of. (I’m listening to Arthur & Yu as I write.) Dex may just make me cool yet. What’s more, I finally have MS Office, which means that creating documents (like resumes and cover letters) in my computer’s word processing program will no longer create obstacles or present major compatibility issues when it comes to prospective employers and writing gigs.
So at the end of the day I’m essentially better off than when I started.
Some adversities are blessings in disguise.
**
That statement could apply to all kinds of situations, as a matter of fact.
Oh, where to start? Anyone who took the time to read the comments thread on my May post knows that that cute little artist guy Nick turned out to be disconcertingly paranoid. Whether it was because of being alone in the studio all day to obsess upon his neighbor troubles, or because of the quantity of weed he was smoking every day, I have no idea, but I didn’t stick around to find out. He backed out of our dinner date, amid some rambling about being busy (did I mention that he also called himself “fucked up” and “out of my mind?”) – which I found to be an actual relief. I was sorry to see those sinewy arms go, but even I’m not willing to deal with a whole lotta crazy anymore. I’ve got my hands full maintaining my own mental health.
That’s the new policy: no more blank checks, no more extending limitless credit, no matter how tasty a guy is. (Or how smart or talented, for that matter.)
But that brings me to our old friend Eli.
**
Eli texted me right on schedule, wanting to get together for a drink. I was happy to hear from him after the letdown over Nick. After all this time, Eli was a free agent again. What might happen with us now?
In my last post, I framed Eli as a possible Mr. Darcy figure, someone who had caused me to revisit my initial impression of him as a curmudgeonly misanthrope and intellectual snob. I had become impressed, over time, with his attentiveness to his ailing mother and grandmother, and had been pleasantly surprised to hear that he had read Eckhart Tolle (without derision or irony). More recently, I had wondered if his renewed interest in world travel had been in any way prompted by my divulgence a while back that his commitment to staying in-state with his family had been something of a crush-deterrent.
So I was primed to explore the possibilities with Eli – short or long-term. I felt ready for anything. I arrived at the neighborhood bar (our favorite meeting place, owned by the same couple who owns my neighborhood coffeehouse), snagged us an outside table, and waited.
And waited. The tables filled up with the chattering happy-hour crowd. I began to wonder if Eli had forgotten. It wouldn’t be the first time – although the first time it happened, I reasoned that any busy person could forget a single date. (Not that I would ever forget about a drink with anyone who even remotely interested me romantically.)
Finally, after twenty-five minutes, I called him.
Indeed, he had forgotten. He was there within the half hour and was apologetic; I made his penance my second glass of wine. But I couldn’t shake the knawing thought that he found me so forgettable. So I drowned it in alcohol. Under the table, our knees were touching; looking at Eli’s model-worthy face in the fading twilight, I found myself thinking that even at his current heft, he was a damned handsome man. I was purring uninhibitedly about how I had often managed to “get my needs met” outside of relationships, and referring to how his ex had “starved” him. He was regarding me with an inscrutable (but what I thought was an interested) look. When he walked me home, he declined my offer to “see my apartment,” but I felt hopeful nonetheless. He had, at one point during the evening, proposed taking a day trip to the mountains next week, so I emailed him the following afternoon with my work schedule.
His reply, several days later, was brief to the point of curt, and seemed more like an evasion than a genuine excuse. He’d hit a curb, supposedly, and didn’t want to go anywhere until he got the car looked at. “Bummer,” he appended unconvincingly.
Disappointed by his anemic response, I replied: Well heck, Eli, if you changed your mind and don’t want to go, just say so! You don’t have to go and hurt your car!
I didn’t hear anything from him for three weeks.
**
At this point I guess I had to have been pretty clued in that I couldn’t (and shouldn’t) expect more than lukewarm ambivalence – at best – from Mr. Eli. (Whooee! More ambivalence! Be still my beating heart!) So why did I consent to go on a hike with him when he finally emailed me back? Well, for one thing, I was just so darn surprised that he got back to me at all. Two, I like going for hikes in the mountains. And three, I was still willing to extend him some credit, because of our two-year relationship, because I thought I might be wrong – like Elizabeth was about Darcy – and because, let’s face it, he’s a damned handsome man.
Without a real destination, we meandered along the mountain highway, through a number of old mining towns. Eli found it necessary to point out the old mine building, now a museum, where he and a girlfriend had had a quickie in the gift shop restroom. I didn’t know what to say to that. I certainly had no comparable bragging story. The precious little sexual intimacy I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime has generally taken place in the standard private locations. (Later I would remember a drunken handjob administered to Seamus while he drove down a major city boulevard, but at the moment, no such misadventure came to mind.)
Here I must observe that there’s something fundamentally unsexy about the way Eli talks about sex. It’s so detached and cerebral, he may as well be talking about a surgical procedure. I’ve encountered this phenomenon before among extremely well educated men; Erica Jong made no small fortune writing about it. The more these guys talk, the less you want to actually do anything with them; you sense that you’d feel like a bacterium under a glass slide, subject to only the most scientific scrutiny and analysis. Any shadow, any sparkle or sizzle conjured by the erotic imagination dissipates like a vapor under the bright fluorescent light of their droll and sophisticated reductionism. I didn’t have the words to name this at the time, I just knew I was the opposite of turned on.
But I digress. We finally arrived at the large lake adjacent to a popular ski resort and took the exit, driving along the lake’s edge until we found a trailhead. It was here, at the outset of our hike along a service road, that Eli decided to treat me to descriptive tales of all the fascinating women he’d been dating lately.
**
First he brought up the ever-so-interesting hipster chick with tattoos and piercings that he’s apparently been out with several times. And then there was the friend of his friend’s girlfriend, whom he was apparently successfully “vibe-ing off of” when they all went out together. But he still didn’t think either of these excellent ladies could hold a candle to the PhD in Economics from Italy (yes, you heard me right) who had given him “butterflies…for the first time in a long time.”
Oh. Is that so?
He definitely wanted to see this femme fatale again (“this could really BE something”) but couldn’t figure out what or how much he should tell Tattoo Girl. What should he do? Any advice?
Such a dilemma. I feel for you, pal. Fuck you very much.
I could feel the tips of my ears burning, the way they had so many times before when it dawned upon me, terribly, how low my status actually was in a romantic or sexual interest’s romantic or sexual ranking. I was being given the buddy treatment, yet again. As if there were nothing of any interest to him whatsoever between my legs. As if I were some benign, neutered being — a maiden aunt, an elderly nun.
That’s surely the coward’s answer to unwelcome sexual interest from a friend: waxing enthusiastic, passive-aggressively, about the people who actually excite you. I know, because I used it myself in high school on the unfortunate Jerry Baines. I don’t use it anymore. It’s really an adolescent tactic, as disrespectful as it is immature. And disappointing to see in adults.
But it did show me, once again, and very starkly, that side of Eli I had glimpsed in the beginning that had turned me away: that ruthless ranking of people on a narrow worthiness scale of his own invention, the personal vanity that brings with it a sense of entitlement to minor offhand cruelties. I had been here before. Déjà vu.
I feigned nonchalance for the rest of the hike, refusing to betray any inkling of humiliation. But my balloon had burst. The rage would come later.
**
It’s been difficult not to slide back into the depression that dogged me for years: that helpless, hopeless feeling that the relationship I’ve longed for my whole life is out of reach, that I am constitutionally incapable of drawing in or holding onto mutual love and attraction.
It was hard to get out of bed the week following my excursion with Eli. Not because I missed him personally and wanted to be with him – he had shown me some true colors, and they weren’t pretty – but because I’d invested (and wasted) so much time believing there might be something, someday, between us. In retrospect I don’t know if I’d have met him for drinks so often if he weren’t so bloody good-looking and clever – an “objective” catch. To be honest, I get ten times more enjoyment and emotional sustenance out of coffee with Greg or even just an email conversation with my best friend from college.
I picked up Calling In The One again, to find I had bookmarked a certain page:
Our fantasy is that, once we see our pattern clearly and make a definite decision to do things differently, our external world will begin to change immediately. In lieu of meeting yet another unavailable person, we will suddenly begin meeting only available people who are ready to make a commitment. Instead of meeting more mean and abusive people, we will suddenly begin attracting kind and gentle souls who offer nothing but love and encouragement. This is rarely the case. What is more likely to happen is that, instead of immediately attracting a whole new kind of person into our lives, we find ourselves attracting exactly the same kind of person, or a person who at first appears to be different but isn’t really. (Emphasis mine.) We are challenged with temptations that are similar to the ones we have faced in the past. Only this time we’re wiser. This time we know exactly where a particular path will lead. We must make the more difficult choice by saying no to the enticement of doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results. We must choose to remain empty-handed rather than settle for repeating past mistakes. This temptation will generally happen not just once, not just twice, but usually several times. It’s as though the universe is testing us –are you truly finished replicating the familiar and known? Have you really given up the need to prove that you aren’t worthy of love? Are you willing to stand in the void rather than compromise yourself again?
Now there’s the million-dollar question. It’s not exactly my choice to remain empty-handed (the choice seems to have been made for me), but my usual M.O. is to go running after the person who has thrown all manner of ambivalence and even humiliation in my direction, in the misguided belief that I can somehow win him over this time. “Doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results.”
Part of the pattern is, of course, to put the most generous possible spin on everything, no matter how unlikely it is. Eli is a busy guy…so busy that he forgets dates (would he ever forget Miss Italy 2011?) and is incommunicado for weeks at a time. He really was worried about the effect bumping into a curb would have on the car. His boast about the gift shop was actually an ill-conceived attempt to seduce me. And he talked about all those other women to…to…well, to impress me, of course – in some weird, counterintuitive way – or perhaps to make me jealous. Yeah. Because that’s just how clueless Eli is when it comes to women. Sure, that’s it. Gee, poor Eli. I’d better give him another chance
The difference now is that I can actually step back and ask myself: Why the hell do I even want Eli? Why would I want someone who thought it necessary to communicate with me in such an indirect and potentially hurtful manner, for whatever reason? Why would I want to be an easily forgotten item on his to-do list? Why would I want to subject myself to further comparisons to ostensibly more accomplished, exotic, attractive women?
Eli and I had talked in the car about Obama’s “framing” problem – that he accepts uncritically the terms the Republicans set out for him when it comes to the debt, taxes, government spending, etc. I could add here that I don’t want to be continually subject to Eli’s ways of framing things: his hierarchical ranking of people according to their surface merits, his emphasis on intellect and academic achievement, his cerebral de-eroticizing of sex. I find his “frames” quite frankly depressing. This is not what I want. This is what I thought I wanted in 1986.
**
Those origami love-cranes still hang from the “love and relationships” corner of my apartment. I lay across my bed for a while on Sunday afternoon, watching them twirl in the apartment’s cross-breeze, searching for some handle on the sadness I felt.
The choice not to do the same thing over again: surely that’s the beginning of change. What Katherine Woodward Thomas called “standing in the void” is simply refusing to repeat history, and waiting, unoccupied, in the quiet faith that there will be something else. Faith is hard for me – for obvious reasons – but I do already have one experience of “something else.”
What I can’t help but wonder is whether it would behoove me to broaden my search parameters – not just beyond the borders of city or state, but beyond the borders of country. I just found out from a mutual friend that Tony DeRocca (the surly music critic about whom I obsessed for three years) wound up in Sweden after meeting his mate online.
I wonder which site he used? Internet dating got me 50 first dates and an unstable Pole. I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should turn my efforts toward pursuing my secondary dream in order to facilitate my primary one.
**
Here are some interesting recent synchronicities, to that end:
I run into the ex of an old bookstore friend at my neighborhood coffeehouse. He urges me to get in touch with Melanie, who now lives elsewhere, via Facebook. I locate her easily, and we exchange a number of affectionate catch-up messages. I happen to mention my dream of living in Europe, and how much I miss Italy. She turns me on to the United World Colleges, whose pre-university program teaches its students socially conscious, ecologically minded, hands-on engagement with the world around them. At one time she had explored teaching there. The program sounds like something I could definitely get behind. What’s more, the UWC has a Duino campus – where Rilke wrote his famous Elegies – and when I view its campus on the Web site, perched on a high cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, I gasp audibly. I ask Melanie for more information about her experience, and she puts me in touch with an Italian alum she worked with in DC.
Yesterday I’m at a different neighborhood coffee bar using their Internet. The owner has donated some tattered books from his personal library to a bookshelf beside my table. I notice that the one on top is a beginning Italian (college-level) textbook. Excited, I ask the barista if I can borrow it, and she can see no reason why not since I live nearby. I bring it home immediately and am inordinately delighted to sit in my kitchen re-learning Italian vocabulary over dinner and pronouncing the lilting words out loud. Ah-bah-STAN-zah BEH-neh. Pretty good. The language itself makes me happy. It fills my tongue, to borrow from Rilke, like a beautiful fruit. I’ve missed speaking it.
Once more I feel as if, in some small way, I am taking steps toward the life I envision. And you know how I love those swarthy brown-eyed brunets.
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