Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [66]
We met at a meet-and-greet in the quad of our dorm, Douglas Hall. I wasted no time in chatting up both her and her roommate. Julia would later profess amazement that this “short guy”—five feet nine, for the record—could be so cocky. Like most men, I went for the easier mark—the roommate. She was a blond innocent hot enough to have been wooed by Pierre Trudeau and chaste enough to have rebuffed his advances. I didn’t get much further than Canada’s playboy prime minister, but while I was trying, Julia and I became friends.
I was on the cocky side then, and she was the first woman I liked because she made fun of me. Her sense of humor was goofy and sophomoric, like a guy’s. She impersonated minor Canadian celebrities. (Her Brian Linehan rivaled Martin Short’s on SCTV.) She told Newfie jokes—our equivalent of Polish humor, directed at the good people of Newfoundland. (“How do you kill a Newfie while he’s drinking? Slam the toilet seat on his head.”) She called people “dinks” and “faggots”—both as insults and terms of endearment. Her idea of an F-word was “Fuzz!” Out of context, none of this sounds sidesplittingly hilarious, but she was very good company.
“You’re good for me because I waste all my time entertaining you (something I enjoy very much),” she wrote in one of the letters I dug out of the garage.
At the Douglas Hall Christmas party, we both got very drunk. “Julia’s blotto!” the resident Newfie announced. Blotto enough to convert our friendship into the official beginning of a three-year relationship. I lost a friend doing it—she was seeing a Tennessee preppy at the time. But he had to go. This was my first true love.
Dating during our second semester was single-bedded bliss, though I could have done without staring at her Police poster every night. She had a thing for Sting, who according to imdb.com is a full six feet tall.
That summer, she went back to Toronto—our hometown. I went to Oxford, the one in England, to immerse myself in pints of liquid Eng. lit. We wrote impassioned letters. Well, hers were impassioned. Mine were filled with disquisitions on the difference between an “Oxonian” and an “Oxonion.” Or so she complains in her letters. I’m sure she was right. I never gave her the mushy romantic stuff she asked for. In letters or in person.
That fall, we shacked up off campus. Oh, the anxiety of those first parental visits when they’d find out we had only—gasp!—one bedroom. We played house in an apartment on Summerhill Avenue, dress-rehearsing for marriage. The cutesy nicknames: “Munchkin,” “Rice,” and, inexplicably, “Tapir.” The scavenger hunt of love notes left around the apartment: “Happy October the 2nd!”—signed with her last name crossed out and mine written in. And, “I love you very much even though you’re a faggot sometimes (and I mean a big one).” Another nickname she had for me was “The Minuteman.” Hey, I was nineteen! There was chemistry. Sometimes too much.
Our test tube of premature domestication had a tendency to explode. Not just yelling or throwing capons at each other. Actual physical tussles. We were pretty evenly matched, but I could usually take her. Sucking wind, I’d just manage to pin her to the futon like a wrestler, demanding she “give.” If we were lucky, the deathmatch would take a sexy turn. This was, after all, the decade of Fatal Attraction. Julia wasn’t a bunny-boiler, but she could be a ball-buster. Which was how she was typecast during her college acting career. First, as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, then Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
She got deeper into acting. I got deeper into gunning for a 4.0. The only note I have in my shoe box that’s from me to her