How Did You Get This Number (26 page)

“He said he could barely picture your face.”

My heart shuffled past my spine, out my back, and melted into the carpet.

“I guess he can’t be expected to picture much if you hid his contacts. I have to go now.”

I hung up the phone. For days it rang with his number. I could never be sure who was on the other end, so I just watched it go, watched it become silent after each ring. Then, like the movie villain who seems dead but comes back to life to grab the closest ankle, the message beep would jar me afresh. The messages were long and mostly from Ben, who had clearly located his phone. It occurred to me that if Lauren was the kind of girlfriend who knew to check her boyfriend’s address book and Ben was the kind of boyfriend who knew where to find stolen items, maybe they really were destined to be together. The messages vacillated between begging and chastising, between affection and reprimand, often in the course of one monologue. Then they got tired of chasing their own tails and just stopped.

I couldn’t cry. Within a week, I had transitioned to a kind of purgahurt where the idea of being mollified by pints of ice cream and the idea of stabbing myself in the chest seemed equally unviable. And yet the world seemed hell-bent on handing me daggers. Every cab ride home managed to swing me past his sublet apartment, which was apparently his actual apartment, or his office building. Who was he, the Church? NYU? It seemed greedy for one individual to have so much landmark property. I’d look out the opposite window, longing for a time in the near future when it wouldn’t occur to me to look or not look. Every restaurant suggested was one I had been to with Ben. Horribly insensitive friends marked their own birthdays with celebrations, re-signed leases in his neighborhood, used words with vowels he also used. Unsolicited advice came pouring in, each serving as lovingly doled and useless as the next. I’d nod and agree to make it stop.
You’re so right, they do call it a cliché for a reason.
All the while reminding myself to keep a list of people to punch in the face when I had opinions about things again.
Plenty of fish!
said the friends. True. But why is it that when you don’t need them, all the fish are in a barrel, waiting to be shot, and when you’d like them around, they’re all in the sea?

The worst, because it is always the worst, was the music. Maybe Daryl was right when he eschewed it altogether. “I” is the loneliest vowel that you’ll ever do. At first, most songs I heard became poignant. This included ones that were in no way from a woman’s perspective or even the jilted party’s perspective. I was a good girl—but I did not love horses or Jesus and I’d burn America to the ground in exchange for a sliver of my former happiness. But surely this is what Ben felt: free. Then songs with no conventional poignancy whatsoever became poignant. It takes a level of creative depression to hear “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and weep. After a while, my masochism grew impatient, deviating from the path of daily activity to seek out voluntary torture fixes. I bought Dolly Parton’s greatest hits. I’d wake up before dawn with the lyrics of Carly Simon’s version of “In the Wee Small Hours” running through my head and lazily out of my mouth. It was like the worst poetry slam you’ve never been to. When I fell back asleep, my subconscious was lazy and repetitive: There was the dream in which we attend a kid’s pool party and he lets me drown. Then there was the other one in which I am trailing him in a rental car and lose him, a flash of Lauren’s arm dangling a bra from the passenger-seat window.

Almost everyone has the identical response to such behavior:
That sucks. How long were you dating?

This is, without exception, the first thing people want to know. I can never figure out what they’re really asking. Do they want to know if you have a right to your reaction? Are you to be dusted off and sent to play or rushed to the emergency room? How stupid are you, exactly? They hang on to the math. Math, friend to so few in this life, is now like a shipment of cheese fries at fat camp. Math will save you. Math—proportional, statistical, syllogistical—has your back. Simply fork over the answer to one harmless little question and math will show you the end of the road.

There’s one formula for two months and another for five years. Suddenly everyone’s a break-up numerologist who will stop at nothing to convince you of their infallible relationship with time and space. It takes half the duration of the entire relationship to get the other party out of your system. Sex with strangers can speed the process if it’s the right stranger, delay it if it’s the wrong one. There are rules for that, too. You listen intently to your friends. You marvel at what an exhausting enterprise this is, quantifying grief. You let them purchase alcohol for you. This will work out nicely for everyone. They get to believe you are absorbing valuable wisdom, and you? You get drunk. After drinks, they go home to their girlfriends and boyfriends, who ask:
How is she? Not so good,
they respond.
Well—
the girlfriends and boyfriends shrug—
how long were they dating again?

Meanwhile, in a bed built for one across town, you look meaningfully at your ceiling, believing you have glimpsed into the heart of
The Matrix.
What is
wrong
with these people? How can they be so cold?

Nothing. Nothing is wrong with them. You must not blame them for believing that heartbreak is one size fits all, more like a shoelace and less like a perfume. They, too, have been heartbroken. Their pain was no less than yours. In some cases, it was worse. There is a pecking order to pain. Deference is due to those who have recently gone through a divorce. If there are children involved, their parents win. Coming in behind them are those who purchased property or own a business together. Deep down, you are grateful for these people. They are generous with their own lives, happy to turn themselves into cautionary tales, starting each conversation with “It could have been worse.” Unfortunately, because you are actually out of your mind, you think,
It was worse.

One friend tells you a story of breaking his ankle running through the steep hills of San Francisco in his boxers at five a.m. on the way to bang on the door of a girl who broke his heart. And who wasn’t home, anyway, because she was sleeping with his best friend. What you take away from this is: don’t get broken up with in San Francisco. But what he is
trying
to say is that the math has done wonders for him. Time has passed, and he tells the story as if it didn’t even happen to him. The fact of it makes him laugh. Laugh!

“What are you going to do?” he says. “You have to move on. You deserve better.”

You are encouraged to focus on the other person’s flaws, which, come on, shouldn’t present much of a challenge in your case. You say you feel stupid. You say that you loved him, as if this will win whatever argument you’re having with yourself. Your friend puts his arm around you and says that part of growing up is realizing that love is a lot of things, but it isn’t everything. People bring their own stories and their own issues to the table.

“It has nothing to do with you,” he says.

By now four months have gone by. You get asked if you still miss him. Don’t answer that. At this point in your life, you are about as stable as a table made even by sugar packets. Anything you say comes from the same self-involved brain that only weeks ago brought you such gems as “Is there is a difference between wanting to be unconscious and not caring if you’re unconscious?” In your spare time—and let’s face it, all of it is spare—you have been quietly ticking off private holidays and “this time last year” anniversaries. If you want out of this conversation, you’re going to have to cough up the big lie.

You miss the
idea
of him.

There you go. Was that so hard?

“That goes away, too,” says your friend.

Through the magic of the biological imperative, his brain has been reprogrammed. He has been forced to gloss over his own romantic carnage so that he might once again start down that road of procreation. He has nineteen layers of skin; you have three-fourths of a layer.

They’re all like this, the recovered. Sometimes you want to hop across the table, curl up in their laps, and beg to be made one of them. How does it work? Hypnosis? A chip in the neck? A radioactive spider with Xanax venom? Your brain is oatmeal, and they can separate it for you. They can wield their sanity like a metal spoon because they have what you don’t: math. They can predict the exact day you will congratulate yourself for not thinking about him. That day is a placeholder for the real day, which will follow about a month later. This is the day when you actually won’t think about him. Your very happiness, you see, depends on how long. How long? How long? Say it fast enough and it sounds like the name of a dead emperor. Ho-Lung of the Sad Sap dynasty.

My whole life, okay?
You have been silent for months, and more than anything, this is what you want to say:
We were dating my whole life. And I don’t mean symbolically, as in I keep going for the same type of guy and this is a pattern that needs exploring. Like paisley. I mean, I was born and he was born and then we fell in love. And now all I have is a memory that won’t quit and some choice words for Carly Simon.

Instead, you just round up by a month and leave it at that.

 

 

 

 

I BOUGHT MYSELF A JUICER. THE EXCURSION TO BUY the juicer was something to do on a weekend morning. It made me feel good to fake human interaction, to ask the salesperson questions. I liked the weight of the plastic bag, and I liked taking it out of the box and throwing away the instructions. I bought a sack of oranges, carrying them with the confidence of someone who is happy and healthy. I was going to juice the living shit out of these oranges.

My mistake, after a year of spending too much on things and people I couldn’t afford, had been in purchasing the second-cheapest juicer available. This was a counter space- friendly device equipped with the same handle used to roll down the windows in a Ford pinto. And with about the same end result. The juicer was far more interested in splitting the skin of the fruit than it was in procuring juice from it. I assaulted orange after orange, squeezing the lever harder each time. The only noticeable result of my brute force was the seeds that appeared in the juice.

Finally, I shoved the juicer aside. I sat on my kitchen floor with a salad bowl and a pile of orange halves in my lap. I dug my fingers into them, squeezing the fruit against the skin, crushing them with my bare hands, frustrated and crying. I was never going to fall in love again. I was going to die alone, surrounded by juicers and bread makers and a hundred other DIY gadgets meant for people who have too much time on their hands and never have sex. I cried the dry, openmouthed kind and then the dripping kind and then the kind where you can’t breathe. Which is when the phone rang. I sprang to my sticky feet, grabbing it like a track-and-field baton.

“Yo. Solange.”

“Oh. Hey, Daryl,” I said, detaching wisps of hair from the citrus-salt mixture that coated my face.

“How’d you know it’s me?”

“Because, Daryl, that’s not my name, and you’re the only person who calls me that.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. You want a tuffet?”

“What’s a tuffet?”

“You know, like Little Miss Muffet.”

“Oh, right.” I sniffed.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine. You been crying?”

“Where do you want me to meet you?”

“Is this about a man?”

“That’s a big word for what he is.”

I told Daryl that this was the last time. One tuffet and I was out. I knew what I needed, and it wasn’t math. I needed this year to be over. I needed to start rounding my time with Ben down instead of up. I needed the anniversaries to run their course. And Daryl was a part of this year. In recent nights I had been breaking a cardinal break-up rule by fantasizing about the interior of Ben’s apartment. I’d try to think sexual thoughts that didn’t involve him. When that proved difficult, I tried to find loopholes. Like replacing him with his friends. But why did his friends persist in taking me back to his apartment all the time? Where was their loyalty? So I’d move the whole show over to my place. But the friends got lost in the transfer, and when I shut my eyes, all I saw was Ben, lounging on my bed or my carpet. Annoyed, I’d try to remove every piece of furniture I owned, hoping his ghost would be sitting on the sofa when it left. But things always snapped straight back to the way they were. It was too hard to imagine my apartment unfurnished anymore. It was filled with such beautiful things.

 

 

 

 

THE NURSERY RHYME ENDS WHEN A SPIDER COMES along and frightens Miss Muffet straight off her tuffet. I have wondered about what kind of lesson this is for a young girl. If you’re eating your curds and whey and a spider comes along, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with picking up a newspaper, smashing it, and going back to your breakfast. Perhaps if the rhyme was illustrated not with a young girl in pigtails but with the image before me—that of Daryl on West Eleventh Street, sitting on a pastel tuffet—it would end differently.

“What the hell, Daryl?” I said, coming down the street toward the West Side Highway.

His thighs spilled over the sides of the tuffet so that it looked less like he was sitting on a cushion and more like he was shitting ottoman legs. He wobbled up into a standing position. This was going to be less portable than a packing slip.

“It’s a sample from the store.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I know. They’re all ‘samples.’”

“No.” He easily lifted the tuffet in the air to show me the scratch marks on the bottom. “For real.”

I rubbed my fingertips against the worn base and touched the cushion. If it could remain fluffed with a bunch of rich ladies and then Daryl sitting on it, it was probably worth having. He offered to help me load it into a cab if I wanted. Then he asked me if I wanted to talk about it.