The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [56]
You tell him your family history. He tells you his.
When he speaks of his mother, he uses the ironic intonation of quotation marks: "Mom" still lives in the apartment he grew up in, which he refers to not as home, but by its address. He passes 680 Park five times a week on his way to psychoanalysis.
—•—
You meet a few of his friends from Choate, which he calls "Choke." They banter instead of talk, and you play audience.
"They do shtick," he says afterward. "They're shtick-figures." You wonder at how easily he dismisses them; after all, they've been his friends for almost twenty years.
Then your brother meets him and says, "What's he so angry about?"
That's when you begin to notice. He argues with the drummer in the band. The waiter is rude, the cabdriver an asshole. The token seller gave him a dirty look, the dry cleaner lost his shirts on purpose. He hates our hateful senator, but with passion.
When you mention antidepressants, he looks at you as though suddenly discovering that you have the depth of a Doublemint twin.
He explains slowly: he wants to use his pain as the impetus and guide in his struggle to know himself; anesthesia is the opposite of what he needs.
You tell him you understand, but say, "Another bourbon and beer?"
—•—
He gets a Polaroid camera and is constantly snapping your picture. In his favorite, you're laughing hard, wearing a pair of his shorts on your head beret-style.
He says that you look like Patty Hearst during her Tanya phase, captured in a lighthearted moment with the Symbionese Liberation Army.
He says he loves the picture because he can see the silver in your fillings.
—•—
In a restaurant, he notices a gaggle of girl models. "It's like looking at art. The rest of us are just people," he says. "We know we're not beautiful the way they are."
—•—
He tells you that he doesn't want to hide anything from you. He wants to be closer to you than he's ever been to anyone.
In this spirit, he confesses the thoughts that shame him. You play the role of Red Cross volunteer, impervious and good-hearted, ladling out mush—until the night he tells you that he has been fantasizing about other women.
You know men do, you would assume that he does, but this truth said aloud, confession-style, becomes your own lurid infection.
He's oblivious. He says, "It's transference," putting himself on the couch: he's hating and loving you the way he did his mother. Fantasies are his way of escaping your power.
When he says that transference is a universal truth, you say, "For you, maybe."
You break up.
—•—
Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself.
You imagine him being attracted to them.
You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.
—•—
When he calls and tells you he misses you, you invite him over. He spends the night.
In the morning, he asks where his razor is. You tell him that you threw it away when you broke up. He says, "I framed your deodorant."
—•—
He takes you to Paris for your birthday. Your friends say he's going to propose and you find yourself dressing for the event that you'll both reminisce about years later. You even put makeup on. After a few ringless dinners, though, you stop posing for the memory, and relax. You begin to enjoy the trip, just as he turns black and humorless.
He can't believe how expensive everything is; everyone is so arrogant; he's tired of walking in circles and wonders aloud if there's such a thing as delayed jet lag.
He says, "Are you wearing makeup?"
"You don't like it?"
He says, '"I think I like you better without."
In cafes, at museums, over dinner, he barely looks at you, and when he does, it's like he's trying to remember that he loves you.
"What?" you say, finally.
"It has nothing to do with you, honey," he says. "I'm doing the transference dance."
On your last night, after your birthday dinner, he's checking out. You go into his knapsack for a pen and find the engagement ring. You get chills. You lie down. When he comes back upstairs, you say that you're going out for a walk, alone.
"It's almost midnight,"