Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [67]
Things started to turn dark. Her notes to me degenerated from “I gotta admit I like living with ya, so always love me, eh?” to “I don’t know what’s happening to us.”
This was after a month.
Another sign of her mounting dissatisfaction was the affair she started having with the gay guy upstairs. Not in the Biblical sense, I’m fairly certain. But I’d come home and find the two of them watching The Wizard of Oz, with him prancing around in a pair of her red pumps. This turned out to be another dress rehearsal. Years later, Julia got famous in Canada as host of a cooking show built around her making fun of a short (nowhere near five feet nine) gay sidekick.
I remember how mad she was that I only went one night of the twelve-night run of Virginia Woolf. “Term papers” was my excuse. The real reason, I suspect, was I didn’t need to sit in the audience when we were living our own George-and-Martha drama every night at home. She was asking more than I could deliver, so I retreated into my books like Albee’s toxic marrieds into their booze and bitterness. And, like them, we stayed together anyway.
I graduated. She had a year to go. Five hours I’d drive to visit her from Toronto to Montreal through blinding snow in an ailing Chevette. We’d fight all weekend. It ended, symbolically at least, when I threw up in her best friend’s hat. I should mention that I was wasted. And it wasn’t a very nice hat. There was no definitive breakup, but the visits stopped. And we were suddenly affectionate in a way unique to that relationship limbo between dating and hating.
“Rickles, I have no one to hug and talk to,” she wrote me. “Plus I can’t have tantrums because no one notices.”
A year after it was over, I tried to get back in there. She rebuffed me. My inability to “open up” was cited. I cursed myself for not being more giving, sensitive, understanding during all those years with her. I consoled myself by hugging tight the belief that I had dumped her.
When I heard her marriage had broken up, I told myself the reason I wanted to reconnect was to offer support. The truth of what I wanted to offer was more like gloating. I never met the now ex-husband but I’d always felt a vague antipathy. When they first started dating, she asked if they could stay at my apartment in New York while I was out of town. I said no. I didn’t want my first love and some bouncer-actor-hyphenate soiling my sheets. I might have cast some aspersions on the guy, perhaps invoked the word “freeloader.”
Years later, I saw her again and asked if she was “still married.” An obnoxious question, even if it proved prescient. Cut to five years ago. She and her husband were renting a house a few doors down from my mother in Toronto. I was home from New York for a visit and Julia drove by. We chatted. She was all smug about being married, having kids, living in Rosedale—it’s a fancy neighborhood—while I was still futzing around with a live-in girlfriend (albeit one on the verge of becoming my wife and, later, mother of my children).
When the tabloid news broke that a Canadian B-actor had left his wife for the TV mogul’s daughter after a torrid on-set affair, I felt sympathy for Julia—they’d just adopted a second child. And yet some part of me felt vindicated. A little petty rejected voice wanted to say, “You dumped the wrong guy.” Which meant deep down I knew all along she’d done it to me. Because if she hadn’t, why would I have cared?
When she sent that e-mail, I was certain she was the one rewriting history. Then I delved into those musty shoe boxes and found her side of the story. If she has a corresponding archive of my letters, I don’t think it would help my cause.
I’ve always had so much invested in being a dumper, never a dumpee. The motto on the crest of my dating life was, “It’s not me, it’s you.