Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [47]
Mistake #6
This really is the killer and I will say all the others can be dismissed as mistakes only in retrospect. They are situation specific, original, and unprecedented. This, however, is a really stupid thing I did and something I should have known not to do. I introduced her to all my friends and encouraged her to hang out with them on her own. Now, the operative word here is all. Some is fine. Many is all right. Just about every one would be okay, too. But not all. Not the ones you know are dodgy. Not the ones whose dodginess you have personally witnessed for years. A dodginess legendary amongst his contemporaries. That’s just buying a ticket for an express train to Crushtown.
The Dumping and the Damage Done
We drift. We don’t break up, but we don’t try too hard to address issues either. She tried. I know I tried to try. One time we were in a car with my dad and he mentioned casually how his mother died. Turns out I never knew. I was embarrassed because I was twenty-six and you should probably know this kind of stuff at that age. Especially since by my standards my dad and I had a “good” relationship. According to Jill, that was “telling.” I thought about trying to turn my emotional retardation into a plus. “Won’t it be exciting to watch me grow up before your very eyes? And there’s nothing illegal about sleeping with an emotional preteen!” Alas, I didn’t know how to talk to her. Or at this point, if I even wanted to.
Time to take stock of the relationship. Not together. That would have been foolish. I decided to go someplace exotic, but not too exotic so as to undercut the weight of all the stock-taking. I chose Scotland. I had some friends in Edinburgh and I could go and wander around soft mossy hills, awash in sheep dung and low clouds. I went in the dead of winter, so there were only five or six hours of light per day. Then I went to the northernmost part of the country, as if I was trying to escape the revealing light of the sun itself. This added gravity—especially since I was the only person in all the hotels I stayed at. Do you get it? I was alone. Isolated. A four-year-old could psychoanalyze what I was doing! I thought long and hard about where we were at. What I wanted. What was fair. What was right. I also spent a good deal of time wondering why they call eggplant aubergine. That’s just way too fancy a word for, let’s be honest, a pretty shitty vegetable.
Soon after I returned to the States, a letter arrived. It was from one of my best friends—the dodgy one—telling me he had developed strong feelings for and was now in love with my . . . I guess ex-girlfriend. The letter made no explicit mention of “bath” time, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine.
What followed wasn’t pretty. Letters and accusations flew. On more than one occasion I uttered the words “I would rather starve than eat your bread.” (Thanks for the assist, Pearl Jam!) Gifts and baubles were repackaged and left on doorsteps. Not a small thing, considering one such gift was a decoupaged coffee table. That bitch was heavy.
Then the sadness. Prolonged, boring, mopey. Plotted countless acts of revenge. Odd how there’s no plural for the word revenge itself. I wanted revenges. And not of the “living well” variety, either. I longed for calamity. Locusts. Fire and brimstone. A pox on their house and cars that gave them endless mechanical problems. But mostly I felt bad for myself. Overly bad, like “I’ve been martyred on a cross of two people I had dared to trust” bad. I admit here and now, I started writing poetry as an outlet. Buried somewhere in a storage facility or a basement thick with spiderwebs and creaky ski boots is a yellowed legal pad with the words “The Night Table Years” scribbled on the first page. When I die, someone will find it, be momentarily excited, then read it, and then, I hope, burn it.
Years passed before I found myself in something even remotely resembling a serious relationship.