I cry harder. “You better.”
I have to go put on a denim vest for a promotional appearance at Levi’s Haus of Strauss. I tell Jack I have to hang up now, and he moans “No” like I’m a babysitter wrenching him from the arms of his mother who is all dressed up for a party. He’s sleepy now. I can hear it. Emotions are exhausting to have.
“I love you so much,” I tell him, tearing up all over again.
I hang up and go to the mirror, prepared to see eyeliner dripping down my face, tracks through my blush and foundation. I’m in LA, so bring it on, universe: I can only expect to go down Lohan style. But I’m surprised to find that my face is intact, dewy even. Makeup is all where it ought to be.
I look all right. I look like myself.
If you cut a piece of guitar string / I would wear it like it’s a wedding ring.
—CARLY RAE JEPSEN
He plays the guitar, this guy. Not professionally but, oh, it’s nice. Yes, I’m seeing him and he’s laughing at me. He’s so funny. He’s coming in April.
—TERRY, my mom’s psychic
I HAVE UTTERED THE WORDS “I love you” to precisely four men, not including my father, uncle, and assorted platonic neurotics I go to the movies with.
The first was my college boyfriend, whom I have tortured enough in the public forum, so I will not rehash our affair here. Suffice it to say, I told him first, and he did not reciprocate. It took weeks of crying and begging for him to reply in kind, and shortly after that he took it back. When he finally gave it again, the words had lost their charm.
The second “I love you” was Ben, a rebound from that relationship. I knew him from college, where we had slept together a few times before he ruined it all by getting into a freezing dorm shower, then hurling himself, nude, upon my unmade bed, screaming “I WANNA KNOW WHERE DA GOLD AT!” (He then ruined it further by ceasing contact with me.) But college ended, and I became lonely, as one does, and for the first time in my life bored, and soon I had maxed out my brand-new card on a plane ticket to the Bay Area, where he now lived on a block that was reminiscent of the credits of Full House, with big bay windows and a poster of the slain Mexican icon Selena on his yellowed bedroom wall. We spent four days trekking up and down hills, sitting on trolleys with our hands clasped, having drinks with guys who worked in bike shops, and coming together in sexual communion. One morning at breakfast, his roommate announced, “You two have sex like clockwork, once in the morning and once at night. Just like a married couple.”
At night we sat on his back porch and ate the ravioli he’d spent all afternoon making by hand. He had a lot of time to cook: his job, editing the newsletter for a nonprofit that promoted the global language of Esperanto, was “flexible.”
When he finally had to go to work, I visited friends on Telegraph Hill, where wild parrots live and where the view has the kind of urban grandeur that is incredibly satisfying to yuppies. This was before I had any conception of the financial reality of my friends. “Oh,” I’d explain about a friend living in a massive West Village loft, “I think he makes tons of money at his internship for Food Not Bombs.” It was only later that I realized these friends on Telegraph Hill, a filmmaker and a poet, were house-sitting and couldn’t actually afford a mansion with a roof shower. At the time, I marveled at what San Francisco real estate could provide for artists. If we worked hard enough, Ben and I could move up here, with a mutt and a bookshelf and a little orange smart car.
I cried when I had to go home, giving him a mix that included several obscure covers of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
Through the winter I dreamed of my new life out west. Ben sent pictures of pancakes and sunglasses from the dollar store and of parties where hippies parked boats in their living room. New tattoos of dollar signs and Communist symbols. Help-wanted postings from sex shops and children’s literacy programs. He mailed me a tin of brownies with a note that was ironically signed “platonic regardz, Ben.”
I came back again on a Friday afternoon, and he met me at the airport. We took the BART to his house, which is sort of like the New York subway system only you can apparently trust the people of San Francisco to respect upholstered seating. As we sat, smiling and satisfied, an old Chinese woman passed and hocked a loogie on his shoe. “Oy, bitch!” he yelled. Surprising myself, I secretly sided with her.
On Sunday, a homeless man camouflaged as a bush jumped out at me on the pier, laughed when I screamed, then demanded money. Ben seemed impressed with his ingenuity. Later, Ben removed the Selena poster from the wall so he could snort Adderall off her breasts. I got a terrible cold and couldn’t find anything resembling a tissue in the apartment. Both of our credit cards were declined at the health-food store.