When I finally turned twenty-one it didn’t change our dynamic as much as I had hoped it would. He started showing interest in a new girl in the group named Erika, and I could feel him pulling away even more. The next time we had a vague talk about “what we were doing,” he seemed to debate himself Sméagol/Gollum style in front of me. “Well, we get along . . . I mean, we don’t ever fight . . . and I’m not saying that I want to be with anyone else right now . . . but I guess I don’t want to miss out on any opportunities.” I should have screamed, “I’M the opportunity, you asshat!” But I clenched my teeth and convinced myself once again that I didn’t need a “label.” Before I left, I at least managed to ask the question.
“Okay, so you don’t want to be with someone else, but I have to ask. . . . Erika . . . is there anything there I should be worried about?”
He furrowed his eyebrows, more in comic surprise than anger.
“Erika the brunette? Barrett’s friend? No, no, I’m not even attracted to that girl—I think that girl has a boyfriend.” It was enough for me. I figured a guy who secretly liked a girl might protest that she had a boyfriend as a cover-up, but if he hoped they might get together at some point he wouldn’t bother saying he wasn’t attracted to her or call her “that girl.” Twice.
(Yes, reader, I know you know where this is going. You are far better at everything than I am.)
A few weeks later he came over and broke up with me. I cried. So much. It was hideously embarrassing. What had happened to me? I had handled my first breakup like a champ. This guy so obviously wasn’t into me, we weren’t ever really together in the first place, and I was behaving like a messy trophy wife who’d just been told the prenup was ironclad.
He was very sensitive about it and put up with a lot of waterworks from a girl who’d claimed over and over she was fine with just “having fun.” During the following days, the finality of being dumped started to feel like a relief. It could have gone on like that for god knows how long—being ignored, making myself available, swearing I was fine with how things were, too nervous to push for the “boyfriend” status. Or worse, I could have actually transitioned it into a real relationship—I’ve seen it happen. It looks miserable. I always want to scream at the guy, “You let her get her hooks in so far that you married her? Did you even notice it happening??” And I want to scream at the girl, “This is what you put in all that work for? A husband who’s utterly disinterested in you and cheats constantly while you turn a blind eye??”
Almost immediately after we ended it, I could see that I was far angrier with myself than I was with Connor. On one hand, he must have seen I was more invested than he was, and arguably he should have let me down easy in the first few weeks of knowing me. On the other, I can’t blame a guy for believing me (or more likely, pretending to believe me) when I insisted I was happy keeping things low-key and having casual sex.
I left town a few weeks later to film an independent movie in a tiny town in Indiana. After work one night, I logged into Myspace on the slow motel internet. I’d held out on cyberstalking for a while (two days) and rewarded myself by looking up Connor and everyone remotely connected to him.
In modern movies, the dumped girl finds out about the new girlfriend through a picture: the dude and his new girlfriend smiling on a hike or kissing at a party. I found out because Erika wrote a blog post about it. There, on Myspace, was a half-page post about the new man in her life. The most surreal part was that she’d incorporated lyrics from his songs throughout, like sappy, stilted Mad Libs. You wouldn’t know those songs, so I won’t try to re-create her post, but imagine if Paul McCartney had a new girlfriend and she wrote something like this online: I knew that If I Fell it would be a Long and Winding Road, but Do You Want to Know a Secret? I need him Eight Days a Week, because All You Need Is Love.
I thought my skull was going to cave in on itself.
Thank the lord that at this point in my life I’d implemented my “no matter how upset you are, sleep on it” policy regarding conflict. I drafted ten different emails to Connor. They ranged from furious, wounded, two-page diatribes to the classic single “Wow.” It’s a dangerous word to send an ex. Ostensibly restrained and dignified but in reality self-righteous and petulant. I slept on it and in the end sent nothing.
My poor coworkers in Indiana never heard the end of it. Despite my moaning, the cast and crew were really supportive. They didn’t know the situation, they had no obligation to cheer me up, but on days I was mopey the director would say, “My landlord back in LA just called and told me there’s a toothless prostitute named Erika—with a ‘k’—hanging out behind the dumpster in our alley and she’s offering hand jobs for a dollar, but no one’s taking her up on it.”
“You’ve never even seen a picture of her. I know you’re trying to make me laugh, but she’s actually really pretty.”
“You’re right. She’s very pretty for a toothless prostitute who hangs out behind dumpsters and smells like a pile of dead rats. Oh yeah, he said she smells like a pile of dead rats.”