Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir

IT WAS APRIL FOOL’S DAY
, 2003—
FOURTEEN DAYS FROM TAX
time—and the biggest joke of a day. I sat on the floor of his closet, my head between the hems of his pants. His suede loafers made imprints on the backs of my thighs. I’d bought him those herringbone pants at a Zanella sample sale, that reversible leather belt, and all those fine sweaters and tailored shirts. I’d shop with an index card of his sizes so he wouldn’t need to return things. I wanted to make him happy.

He’d said pleats were outdated and told me to return them, but you can’t return samples, so they remained, tags intact, toward the back of his closet. I could touch the grain of his wooden shoe trees, finger his cashmere sweaters, and cry into his shirts. I still had his things. His smell was still there, but he was a stranger.

The ties were the hardest part to leave. I’d bought more than a handful of them for him in Paris, when he’d proposed marriage to me at the Eiffel Tower in June of 1998. Charvet, Ferragamo, and Hermès were all he’d wear. I didn’t know from any of it. Unlike him, I wasn’t raised on a diet of designer. So I made an effort by introducing him to Etro ties, hoping he’d tell people I’d turned him onto something new. But he didn’t like Etro—he liked what he knew. “I’m sorry Stephanie, but your taste, uh…” he said shaking his head in disproval, “it’s from hunger.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You know how when you’re starving you’ll eat anything?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” then he closed the lid on the tie box and pushed it toward me as he said, “you’re looking at anything.”

My twenty-eight-year-old husband Gabriel Rosen never pretended to be a retrosexual. I mean the boy was a hardcore metrosexual before its emergence in the lexicon. He always knew from hair product and thread count. Then he joined a new gym and never missed a tanning appointment. For the five and a half years we’d been together, I’d occasionally joke when he revealed his chest at the beach: “Oh look, you decided to wear a Gap sweater.” Back then, he was too fixated on his bald spot and Propecia to ever contemplate hair removal. But suddenly, after two and a half years of marriage, his Palm calendar included laser sessions for his arms, chest, and back. A foreign cologne hung heavy in the air, clinging to his new Prada button-down. His new shirt wasn’t red, but the flag was. The signs were there, an article straight from a woman’s magazine:

• JOINS A GYM
  
• VISITS A TANNING SALON
  
• SPORTS A NEW HAIRSTYLE
  
• WEARS HAIR PRODUCT AND COLOGNE MORE OFTEN
  
• PURCHASES VARIOUS NEW AND DIFFERENT CLOTHES
  
• SUDDENLY AND INEXPLICABLY CHANGES HIS CLOTHING STYLE
  

He wasn’t gay. He was cheating. I didn’t say adultery. I didn’t say sex. I said cheating as in living as if I weren’t in his life.

WHEN I CONFRONTED GABE, HE SWORE. NOT “SHIT” OR
“oh, fuck.” He swore, “
Nothing…happened
.” In his pause between “Nothing” and “happened” he was devising the next lie. “Nothing,” I would later discover, consisted of movie premieres, courtside seats at Madison Square Garden, Bungalow 8, text messages, late night phone calls, meeting her friends, and a string of missed electronic pages. “Happened” was a forty-three-year-old socialite. If recklessness were currency, he could have purchased all of Prada. When tax season approached, he had nothing left to expense. I’d already written him off. Dependents: 0.

Enough with his designer closet; none of it was mine anymore. I needed to finish packing. As I sat cross-legged on our hardwood floor, I smelled packing tape and was surrounded by brown. Brown packing boxes, brown shadows cast on barren walls, left only with brown rusted picture hooks and sun rings, revealing what was no longer there. Depleted from a day of instructing movers which boxes would go to storage and which would go to my new smaller apartment across town, I sat alone. All I had were the keys I’d need to turn in and the last wheel of brown tape in my hands. I sealed my last box, the Gabe box—full of vacation itineraries, smiling photographs, our certificate of marriage, old tax returns, printed e-mails, and folded notes signed with xxx’s, ooo’s, and
Always
. The box was leaving the Upper East Side and heading for storage. I was heading to the Upper West without any of it. I closed the door behind me.

“I HAVE TO START MY WHOLE LIFE OVER. AGAIN.”

“Please, your life was for shit before,” I could almost hear my younger sister Lea say over the phone in my new apartment a week later. Instead she responded, “Oh, stop. Starting your life over is a good thing; it’s an opportunity.” Lea spoke in semicolons.

“Don’t do that. Don’t bring up the whole door-window thing.”

“Well it’s true; it’s a makeover. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, Stephanie, but this is a blessing in disguise.”

She went there, like everyone else, reaching into their heavy bags searching for the appropriate cliché to smack on my condition: betrayed. I wanted time to fast-forward, so I could awake happy and over it. So I ate Benadryl and cried into the buttery neck of my shorthaired furkid Linus.

“You get to redecorate and cut your hair. You get to go and buy new clothes. Oooh, and new bedding. I need to hurry up and get married, so I can get divorced too. You’re so living
A Fashion Emergency
; I should send them a tape.”

“Lea, I’m serious.”

“Wait—Steph, have you seen the show? It’s sooooo good; you can get a free wardrobe.”

Lea, if not reminded she’s still talking, can easily talk the shit out of a livestock auctioneer. “Seriously, enough with your pity party over there. I bet you’re still in that white bed wearing yesterday’s clothes. Have you even walked Linus?”

Linus curled himself into a small bean beneath the down comforter. Even when I’d tease him with my “Wanna go for a walk. Huh? Do ya? Huh?” he’d only lift his head temporarily, then go back to sleep. He knew it was only a tease. We weren’t going anywhere. We were both depressed.

“He’s sleeping.”

“Stephanie, it’s not like you’re some housewife. You’re a goddamn vice president at a big advertising firm. You’re a talented web designer, have all these friends, you’re thin and gorgeous, and you’re the one sitting in bed? Excuse me, but it could be a lot worse. You could’ve had children. Shit, you could be me, fat and friendless, living in your father’s basement.”

Despite the clichés, I loved Lea just then for making me laugh. If I’d heard one more person use “life” and “journey” in the same breath, I would’ve thrown her down a flight of stairs and hoped the wind got knocked out of her. If that didn’t work, there was always suffocation. According to Gabriel, The
Was
band, I was always good at that.

Lea knit clichéd quotes into a tight weave of sickening. “Winding roads,” “stay in the moment,” “when a door shuts,” and something to do with a train. I told Lea to stay out of my way and get off her fucking Bikram yoga mat. For the love of God, no one wants to hear it. “You only live once.” Jesus, she served packaged clichés as small and saccharine as Sweet’N Low.

And they helped. I hate saying it, but it’s true.

“Ah, he was an asshole anyway.” Okay, that really helped.

Of course, Gabe wasn’t my
whole
life, but when you’re in the thick of it, you don’t know from rational—you know from drama. I did have my own friends, my own salary, my health, and TiVo: all the important things we’re likely to take for granted. Still, when it hit that I’d now have to date again, I panicked. Dating meant nightclubs, heels, and black. It meant, “No, thank you. Really, I’m full.” It meant matching bras and underwear. Clothes with the word
MICRO
used to describe them.

I had to shed my identity as “wife.” Lily Pulitzer clothes fell into abandoned clumps on the floor beside my patent leather driving shoes. My diamond wedding band and engagement ring were relegated to a box atop my closet. Sometimes I’d take it down and slip the rings back on. I’d sob softly, wishing I could keep the life I thought I had. Then I’d remove the rings and push the box further back in the closet. Even my hands were different. It’s something you don’t think about, but at least there was new room for a gold Panther ring on my middle finger. All the better to say “fuck you” with.

It was time to move on, and moving on meant dating. Because until you date again, people will hiccup lines about getting back on horses. So you invest in an Agent Provocateur whip and a subscription to an online dating service.

Exactly one month after deciding to refer to The Husband as The
Was
band, I thought I was ready to date. Time spent without concrete plans was time anxious. If another man wanted me, I was valuable. I was esteemed, no matter that it wasn’t
self
-esteem. You can’t be picky when you’re up to your armpits in drama. I’d have plenty of time to mourn and autopsy the death of my marriage. I know, assbackward thinking on my part. But we can cover that later.

Dating meant “a pair and a spare,” which had nothing to do with balls or a tire. My phone therapist, who \lived in Queens, introduced me to the method early on. A therapist in Queens quickly becomes a phone session therapist for a Manhattanette who has no time to leave her borough. “Always date at least three men at once,” she instructed in a nasal whine, “because it will prevent you from latching on to the wrong relationship out of neediness.” Okay, so first I had to find
one
, never mind three. “Okay, okay, find one, but be on the lookout for two and three. If you’re out to dinner with another man it will help you deal when runner-up number one doesn’t call.” Already, we were dealing with a man who wouldn’t call, and I wasn’t even dating yet. Just kill me now.

So now you get to meet them: the men I
rodated
over the next three months.

OUR FIRST INTRODUCTION HAPPENED ONLINE. DID YOU
hear that? ’Cause I sorta whispered it. I am twenty-nine, divorced, and live in Manhattan, New York. A stranger lives in Manhattan, Kansas, has a lazy eye, a lazy mustache, and wants to marry me. This is online dating, and this is my profile:

Who knew I needed to specify, Manhattan,
New York
. I know there’s a stigma to online dating. When people manage to get beyond date numero tres, they spend cuatro creating a how-we-met story over shared appetizers and white wine. I didn’t care about stigma. I already had one: Divorcée. “Oh, come on. Do you really buy that?” Do I buy it? No, I get it for free. One guy actually hung up the phone on me when he learned I was divorced. He played the technotard card, asking me to hold while he answered his call-waiting. “Ooops,” he could say if I ever bothered to call him out on it, “uh, this whole call-waiting thing.” Right, he’s a techno-sexual crackberry who Palms at the dinner table, but he somehow doesn’t know the first bit about using the flash button? Oh, gigabyte me.