“You’re not fat,” I said.
“Hey, I know I’m fat. My mother says I’m fat, my doctor says I’m fat. Don’t bother lying.”
I struggled. There wasn’t a correct response. “I didn’t come here to discuss your weight,” I said.
“But you think I’m fat, right?”
I rested my head against the back of the booth, felt my back flatten against it. I shrugged my shoulders, swung my hands up in the air. “Do you want me to be the asshole here? Because I can be the asshole if that’s going to make you happy. Tell me what you’re looking for, because I’m more than willing to give it to you if it’s going to make you feel better.”
“Be my girlfriend,” he pleaded.
ROBERT COMES into the room, dish towel on his shoulder, shaking droplets of water off his hand.
“So how did you leave it with him?” says Maggie.
“Let’s just say…I was the asshole,” I say.
Robert laughs, presumably at my use of a curse word. “Are you breaking hearts again?” he says. “Don’t worry, the right man is out there for you, just waiting for the right moment to sweep you off your feet.”
Maggie takes a sip from her wineglass and looks away. I was sorry I had made her sad. Robert notices it, too, and reaches his hand down to her shoulder, but she swats it away, as if it were a fly circling endlessly around her. And then I see her do something familiar. I have done it so many times myself I know exactly what is going on in her head at this moment. I see her pull into herself. I see her recede. But I don’t think she has much room for herself in there. Me, I’m hollow inside. There is only me, just me. I know that someday she’ll get sick of being full of Robert. I know she’ll puke him out of her system. But she’ll never get rid of me. I’m in her blood.
GARETH CONTACTED me one last time. I didn’t tell Maggie that part. It somehow seemed better that she thought me only guilty of my usual callousness. He sent an e-mail a week after our last meeting. In it he apologized in a sincere and clean fashion. He had been having trouble finishing his latest book, he explained. He had been drinking too much, pints and pints of beer every night of the week, which was unlike him. “I’m not a drinker,” he wrote. “Not like that.”
There was an anger and confusion inside of him, and he did not know where to direct it so he had turned it on me, he explained. Well, he had turned it on a half dozen women he had dated in the last year, but of all of the ones he had tried to contact then, I was the only one who had responded.
“It is just hard in this city sometimes. Surely you know that.” (I did, of course.) “Sometimes you just need to get it out. And you were the one who agreed to see me. It wasn’t fair. There have been others who were much worse to me. You were, in fact, just fine.”
“I would have treated you like gold,” he wrote. “I say that not to imply that you missed out on something great, but just so you know that I had only the best of intentions.”
He asked for my forgiveness. He italicized the words for emphasis. If I could just give him that, he said he would feel better, he could move on toward attempting a life of clarity.
Telling him he was fat—that was not the worst thing I could have done to him. He already knew that. Never replying to that e-mail, that was when I was the asshole. But I could not find one word inside of me, neither kind nor cruel, to give to him. I had nothing left inside.
I TAKE THE Metro-North home from Westchester. I cannot get home fast enough. Commuter trains should have wings, I think. Wings on engines.
In my apartment I turn on the computer, speed-dial my dating site. I survey the profiles and reflect on the reasons why I should get to know them better, why they are the one for me, if I am the one for them.
“I am sick of neurotic New York women,” says one. “I know what I want. You should also.”
Another swears he’s funny. He wants to make me laugh. He is all about the laughter.
A third has the profile name “No_Strings_Attached” and he is young and his jaw is set like a rock. “Strings are for puppets,” he writes. “I am not a puppet. Are you?”
No. I am not a puppet.