Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [63]
“Queen Ida was out last night,” he’d say at breakfast.
“Oh yeah?” I’d say, not looking up from my cereal.
“Yeah. She was a total pain in the ass. She was drooling and eating a chicken wing in bed. And then she thought she was gonna barf. I had to run and get a bucket.”
“I’m sure she just didn’t eat enough, that’s why she got so drunk.”
My friends and I took to calling Jed “Grandpa.” On a trip to San Francisco we bought him a key chain that said “Grandpa” on it. One weekend we went to California for a wedding and he forbade me to drink the whole weekend. It was honestly the worst weekend of my life.
IT WAS GETTING TOUGH to fit writing into my schedule. Between the drinking and the hangovers, there was just barely enough time to squeeze in sex with my ex-boyfriend and then running around trying to find the perfect turtleneck to wear in April without Jed suspecting I had a hickey underneath. I hated myself. I hated that I lied to someone I really loved. I hated that I wanted better sex than we were capable of having together. I thought if I was a better person I would be okay with mediocre sex. I thought only selfish people insist on fantastic sex all the time. I also thought that creative people must have mind-blowing sex. This was just what they did. Constantly. Sex and art are made from the same source material—insanity. They need hot, hot sex constantly or they become normal, noncreative people. Mostly, though, I couldn’t get the writer ex-boyfriend out of my mind. Okay, he was a fitness writer, but he’d gone to Columbia’s MFA writing program, briefly, and he was published. And I now lived two blocks from him. And he dedicated his book to me. A book about how to achieve great abs, but it was a bestseller. He was a gay icon, a straight icon, every guy wanted to be Alex. Or at least they wanted to be his stomach. The cover was a giant close-up shot of his sweaty six-pack abs. The dedication read “To Jeanne Darst, for almost killing me but in the end making me stronger.” Okay, it wasn’t the Great American Novel dedicated to me, but it was the bible of the midsection. How was I to know the second-printing inscription would read “To Natalie Mayer, for almost killing me but in the end making me stronger.” I should have known. It’s a terrible sign, Nietzsche-paraphrasing, a woman should never ignore this.
Back when we were dating he told me his father was a confidence man and that he worked for his dad selling fake concert tickets over the phone out of hotel rooms in Arizona during summers off from college. Alex was so broke it was ridiculous. For my birthday he gave me a package that consisted of: three library books (was I supposed to return these, or would he?), some hangers, an orange, and a shirt I had left at his house. You better believe the sex was incredible.
I thought, I’m just a terrible person. I have this terrific, kind guy who can give me everything in life and all I want is to screw the abs guy? I was supposed to want marriage and financial stability and a good guy and kids. Other people seemed to be desperate for these things. But I wanted hot sex and the chance to be a writer. And I didn’t want to have to lie to get these things.
I told Jed I needed to live on my own, and while we didn’t break up, I did move to a dinky place with one window and a sloped floor in the East Village. I did it with money he lent me. In other words I said, “I’m moving out” and “Can you pay for it,” in the same breath. No wonder I hated myself.
AT MY NEW PLACE there was a particular album that was making me insane. My neighbor always blared it around four p.m., which is how I deduced he was a bartender. Restaurant and bar shifts start at four-thirty or five p.m. And if they’re getting home at six a.m. like he did, they’re bartenders, not waitstaff. People who work in restaurants