Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [40]
Even worse, I had managed to screw up my second and probably last chance to make out with Bob. He had done his part this time. He’d shown up awake. He had offered me an opportunity to prove to him that I was such an inspirational life force that he could not live without me. He had come to the party ready to make out. And I had ruined everything.
No love affair, no matter how majestic or perfect, could go from a kiss to a fountain of vomit and survive. That was the awful truth. I had torn down, annihilated, crushed all that we had worked so hard to build by being a sad shipwreck … an alcoholic. Fifteen and my life was ruined. On and on and into the endless forever of night.
Bobby
LET’S TALK ABOUT YOU FOR A MINUTE.
Let’s say you had a rather long romantic liaison a few decades ago, one that started back when you were in your twenties. For the sake of argument, let’s call the guy you dated Bobby.
The relationship with Bobby didn’t work out too well because most people in their twenties are not that smart about love. It’s hard to combine clearheaded thinking and good common sense with postcollegiate identity crises and binge drinking. How were you to know then that the behaviors you regarded as “living life to the fullest” would one day appear, almost to the letter, in a list of the symptoms of mental illness?
In your case, you thought your big mistake was mixing work and love. Sure, you’d heard people say, “Don’t shit where you eat,” but that never made sense because the way you saw it, every good restaurant has an excellent restroom. And besides, wasn’t combining two things you like to make a third thing you love the kind of good idea that brought us chocolate milk?
So let’s say that when you met Bobby, he was just turning thirty-one. Bobby! Smart, funny, cute, talented, and right in the middle of a divorce from the nice girl he married when he was a hard-drinking, hard-partying frat boy. What if you laughed when you realized he was exactly the type you never would have dated in college because even back then you weren’t amused by watching guys crush beer cans against their foreheads? But now, in your late twenties, you and Bobby seemed to have as many similarities as differences. What if you had so much chemistry with Bobby that the very idea that you would have shunned him when you were in college now sounded comical and small-minded?
Okay, maybe friends who’d known Bobby longer than you had warned you from the beginning that he was a risky choice because, since his marriage had ended, he had scored an impressive number of notches on the bedpost he would have had if he wasn’t living in a one-room apartment and sleeping on a broken box spring. But for argument’s sake, let’s say you got through this unnervingly juvenile period by believing these were only the early days of a brand-new relationship. How could there not be greater stability ahead? Doesn’t everything in life have to muddle through a shaky beginning? Besides, you were so excited by the way you and Bobby had begun to deepen your bond by collaborating. Obviously, Bobby could find tons of girls to date, but how many of them could help redefine and expand his business? And what if this was something you did eagerly because combining work and love seemed like a very good example of the old milk-and-chocolate-combining model to you back then? After all, sharing a studio and having art shows with your art school boyfriend had been one of the best things about your last relationship.
So then what if, over time, this collaboration got more intense as Bobby’s business continued to get larger? And what if this collaboration went on to bring Bobby a lot of success? What if it was the kind of