How Did You Get This Number Part 11

While I had been belatedly paranoid and prematurely blind, Lauren had been on the case for months. I imagined her like a lawyer with a highlighter and a Visa bill as she rattled off Ben's crimes, a parakeet perched on her shoulder. The parakeet is wearing an eye patch, though I can't say why. He repeats the word "b.a.s.t.a.r.d" a lot.

Her reason for calling, I had to understand, lay in her loyalty to other women. It wasn't to confront me. Though she was sure yelling a lot for a nonconfrontational person. The trash talk swirled around, cycling up like a tornado until it was just a wind of generalizations about herself and the power of her relations.h.i.+p with Ben. I immediately questioned the strength of a relations.h.i.+p in which one party waits for the other party to get Chinese food and scrolls through his or her cell phone, hunting for mistress aliases. Instead, I let her wrap up a tirade that was mostly rhetorical, including questions like "How can I respect myself if I can't respect myself respecting him?" and "I mean, Scorpios, right? "

The party inside was filing out, off to their respective homes or second evenings. Someone handed me my bag, which I accepted in a zombie-like trance. Despite the cliche generalizations about female empowerment only a women who designed lingerie could produce, I liked Lauren. Maybe I wanted to keep her on the phone because I felt outside myself, and from this third-party perspective, well-this whole thing was pretty juicy. Talking to her was like talking to the part of Ben I had been missing but unable to identify. Mostly I think it was because we both loved the same thing. And we had both paid too much for it.

"I don't like to press the fates, mind you," she said.

"Of course." I nodded.

"But I tried to call you once. He had you in his phone under Doug. Then I wasn't sure it was you, so I hung up."

"Really?" My voice cracked. "Just 'Doug'?"

I GUESS YOU COULD SAY I WAS HURT. THAT WOULD be fair. When Ben returned home, dumplings in hand, Lauren confronted him. Dim and then some, he denied the whole thing. Ben and I had met once, perhaps twice. Just the two of us? No, never by ourselves. When? Oh, who can remember these things when all other women meld into one giant as.e.xual b.o.o.b? Denial in the age of e-mail. Gutsy. When Lauren explained that she had spoken to me directly, Ben explained back that I had constructed the entire relations.h.i.+p out of whiskey and psychosis and glue. I know all this because Lauren called me the next morning to tell me about it.

"Why do you still have his phone?"

I was lying on my beautiful carpet and looking up at my pointlessly high ceiling, still wearing the same outfit I had worn the previous night. I was compiling a list in my head t.i.tled Reasons to Get Up: You Don't Have to Leave, but You Can't Pee Here. Reasons to Get Up: You Don't Have to Leave, but You Can't Pee Here.

"I turned it off and hid it in my underwear drawer," Lauren said proudly.

"That would be the first place I'd look for it if I were dating you."

"I also hid his contact lenses."

I wiped mascara-laced chunks of sleep from my eye.

"What I don't understand is why he didn't just use my real name. Why have a stranger's name under a pseudonym? Aren't I strange enough already?"

This didn't scratch the surface of what I didn't understand. The fake name seemed the least essential detail on which to focus, a two-second lie at the end of a yearlong relations.h.i.+p. It was like nailing Al Capone on tax fraud. But the bigger picture was too difficult to understand. In that picture, the person I loved not only stepped out of the frame but turned around on his way out to tell me he was never there.

"He said he could barely picture your face."

My heart shuffled past my spine, out my back, and melted into the carpet.

"I guess he can't be expected to picture much if you hid his contacts. I have to go now."

I hung up the phone. For days it rang with his number. I could never be sure who was on the other end, so I just watched it go, watched it become silent after each ring. Then, like the movie villain who seems dead but comes back to life to grab the closest ankle, the message beep would jar me afresh. The messages were long and mostly from Ben, who had clearly located his phone. It occurred to me that if Lauren was the kind of girlfriend who knew to check her boyfriend's address book and Ben was the kind of boyfriend who knew where to find stolen items, maybe they really were destined to be together. The messages vacillated between begging and chastising, between affection and reprimand, often in the course of one monologue. Then they got tired of chasing their own tails and just stopped.

I couldn't cry. Within a week, I had transitioned to a kind of purgahurt where the idea of being mollified by pints of ice cream and the idea of stabbing myself in the chest seemed equally unviable. And yet the world seemed h.e.l.l-bent on handing me daggers. Every cab ride home managed to swing me past his sublet apartment, which was apparently his actual apartment, or his office building. Who was he, the Church? NYU? It seemed greedy for one individual to have so much landmark property. I'd look out the opposite window, longing for a time in the near future when it wouldn't occur to me to look or not look. Every restaurant suggested was one I had been to with Ben. Horribly insensitive friends marked their own birthdays with celebrations, re-signed leases in his neighborhood, used words with vowels he also used. Unsolicited advice came pouring in, each serving as lovingly doled and useless as the next. I'd nod and agree to make it stop. You're so right, they do call it a cliche for a reason. You're so right, they do call it a cliche for a reason. All the while reminding myself to keep a list of people to punch in the face when I had opinions about things again. All the while reminding myself to keep a list of people to punch in the face when I had opinions about things again. Plenty of fis.h.!.+ Plenty of fis.h.!.+ said the friends. True. But why is it that when you don't need them, all the fish are in a barrel, waiting to be shot, and when you'd like them around, they're all in the sea? said the friends. True. But why is it that when you don't need them, all the fish are in a barrel, waiting to be shot, and when you'd like them around, they're all in the sea?

The worst, because it is always the worst, was the music. Maybe Daryl was right when he eschewed it altogether. "I" is the loneliest vowel that you'll ever do. At first, most songs I heard became poignant. This included ones that were in no way from a woman's perspective or even the jilted party's perspective. I was a good girl-but I did not love horses or Jesus and I'd burn America to the ground in exchange for a sliver of my former happiness. But surely this is what Ben felt: free. Then songs with no conventional poignancy whatsoever became poignant. It takes a level of creative depression to hear "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and weep. After a while, my masochism grew impatient, deviating from the path of daily activity to seek out voluntary torture fixes. I bought Dolly Parton's greatest hits. I'd wake up before dawn with the lyrics of Carly Simon's version of "In the Wee Small Hours" running through my head and lazily out of my mouth. It was like the worst poetry slam you've never been to. When I fell back asleep, my subconscious was lazy and repet.i.tive: There was the dream in which we attend a kid's pool party and he lets me drown. Then there was the other one in which I am trailing him in a rental car and lose him, a flash of Lauren's arm dangling a bra from the pa.s.senger-seat window.

Almost everyone has the identical response to such behavior: That sucks. How long were you dating? That sucks. How long were you dating?

This is, without exception, the first thing people want to know. I can never figure out what they're really asking. Do they want to know if you have a right to your reaction? Are you to be dusted off and sent to play or rushed to the emergency room? How stupid are you, exactly? They hang on to the math. Math, friend to so few in this life, is now like a s.h.i.+pment of cheese fries at fat camp. Math will save you. Math-proportional, statistical, syllogistical-has your back. Simply fork over the answer to one harmless little question and math will show you the end of the road.

There's one formula for two months and another for five years. Suddenly everyone's a break-up numerologist who will stop at nothing to convince you of their infallible relations.h.i.+p with time and s.p.a.ce. It takes half the duration of the entire relations.h.i.+p to get the other party out of your system. s.e.x with strangers can speed the process if it's the right stranger, delay it if it's the wrong one. There are rules for that, too. You listen intently to your friends. You marvel at what an exhausting enterprise this is, quantifying grief. You let them purchase alcohol for you. This will work out nicely for everyone. They get to believe you are absorbing valuable wisdom, and you? You get drunk. After drinks, they go home to their girlfriends and boyfriends, who ask: How is she? Not so good, How is she? Not so good, they respond. they respond. Well- Well-the girlfriends and boyfriends shrug-how long were they dating again?

Meanwhile, in a bed built for one across town, you look meaningfully at your ceiling, believing you have glimpsed into the heart of The Matrix. The Matrix. What is What is wrong wrong with these people? How can they be so cold? with these people? How can they be so cold?

Nothing. Nothing is wrong with them. You must not blame them for believing that heartbreak is one size fits all, more like a shoelace and less like a perfume. They, too, have been heartbroken. Their pain was no less than yours. In some cases, it was worse. There is a pecking order to pain. Deference is due to those who have recently gone through a divorce. If there are children involved, their parents win. Coming in behind them are those who purchased property or own a business together. Deep down, you are grateful for these people. They are generous with their own lives, happy to turn themselves into cautionary tales, starting each conversation with "It could have been worse." Unfortunately, because you are actually out of your mind, you think, It was worse. It was worse.

One friend tells you a story of breaking his ankle running through the steep hills of San Francisco in his boxers at five a.m. on the way to bang on the door of a girl who broke his heart. And who wasn't home, anyway, because she was sleeping with his best friend. What you take away from this is: don't get broken up with in San Francisco. But what he is trying trying to say is that the math has done wonders for him. Time has pa.s.sed, and he tells the story as if it didn't even happen to him. The fact of it makes him laugh. Laugh! to say is that the math has done wonders for him. Time has pa.s.sed, and he tells the story as if it didn't even happen to him. The fact of it makes him laugh. Laugh!

"What are you going to do?" he says. "You have to move on. You deserve better."

You are encouraged to focus on the other person's flaws, which, come on, shouldn't present much of a challenge in your case. You say you feel stupid. You say that you loved him, as if this will win whatever argument you're having with yourself. Your friend puts his arm around you and says that part of growing up is realizing that love is a lot of things, but it isn't everything. People bring their own stories and their own issues to the table.

"It has nothing to do with you," he says.

By now four months have gone by. You get asked if you still miss him. Don't answer that. At this point in your life, you are about as stable as a table made even by sugar packets. Anything you say comes from the same self-involved brain that only weeks ago brought you such gems as "Is there is a difference between wanting to be unconscious and not caring if you're unconscious?" In your spare time-and let's face it, all of it is spare-you have been quietly ticking off private holidays and "this time last year" anniversaries. If you want out of this conversation, you're going to have to cough up the big lie.

You miss the idea idea of him. of him.

There you go. Was that so hard?

"That goes away, too," says your friend.

Through the magic of the biological imperative, his brain has been reprogrammed. He has been forced to gloss over his own romantic carnage so that he might once again start down that road of procreation. He has nineteen layers of skin; you have three-fourths of a layer.

They're all like this, the recovered. Sometimes you want to hop across the table, curl up in their laps, and beg to be made one of them. How does it work? Hypnosis? A chip in the neck? A radioactive spider with Xanax venom? Your brain is oatmeal, and they can separate it for you. They can wield their sanity like a metal spoon because they have what you don't: math. They can predict the exact day you will congratulate yourself for not thinking about him. That day is a placeholder for the real day, which will follow about a month later. This is the day when you actually won't think about him. Your very happiness, you see, depends on how long. How long? How long? Say it fast enough and it sounds like the name of a dead emperor. Ho-Lung of the Sad Sap dynasty.

My whole life, okay? You have been silent for months, and more than anything, this is what you want to say: You have been silent for months, and more than anything, this is what you want to say: We were dating my whole life. And I don't mean symbolically, as in I keep going for the same type of guy and this is a pattern that needs exploring. Like paisley. I mean, I was born and he was born and then we fell in love. And now all I have is a memory that won't quit and some choice words for Carly Simon. We were dating my whole life. And I don't mean symbolically, as in I keep going for the same type of guy and this is a pattern that needs exploring. Like paisley. I mean, I was born and he was born and then we fell in love. And now all I have is a memory that won't quit and some choice words for Carly Simon.

Instead, you just round up by a month and leave it at that.

I BOUGHT MYSELF A JUICER. THE EXCURSION TO BUY the juicer was something to do on a weekend morning. It made me feel good to fake human interaction, to ask the salesperson questions. I liked the weight of the plastic bag, and I liked taking it out of the box and throwing away the instructions. I bought a sack of oranges, carrying them with the confidence of someone who is happy and healthy. I was going to juice the living s.h.i.+t out of these oranges.

My mistake, after a year of spending too much on things and people I couldn't afford, had been in purchasing the second-cheapest juicer available. This was a counter s.p.a.ce- friendly device equipped with the same handle used to roll down the windows in a Ford pinto. And with about the same end result. The juicer was far more interested in splitting the skin of the fruit than it was in procuring juice from it. I a.s.saulted orange after orange, squeezing the lever harder each time. The only noticeable result of my brute force was the seeds that appeared in the juice.

Finally, I shoved the juicer aside. I sat on my kitchen floor with a salad bowl and a pile of orange halves in my lap. I dug my fingers into them, squeezing the fruit against the skin, crus.h.i.+ng them with my bare hands, frustrated and crying. I was never going to fall in love again. I was going to die alone, surrounded by juicers and bread makers and a hundred other DIY gadgets meant for people who have too much time on their hands and never have s.e.x. I cried the dry, openmouthed kind and then the dripping kind and then the kind where you can't breathe. Which is when the phone rang. I sprang to my sticky feet, grabbing it like a track-and-field baton.

"Yo. Solange."

"Oh. Hey, Daryl," I said, detaching wisps of hair from the citrus-salt mixture that coated my face.

"How'd you know it's me?"

"Because, Daryl, that's not my name, and you're the only person who calls me that."

"Oh. I'm sorry. You want a tuffet?"

"What's a tuffet?"

"You know, like Little Miss m.u.f.fet."

"Oh, right." I sniffed.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine. You been crying?"

"Where do you want me to meet you?"

"Is this about a man?"

"That's a big word for what he is."

I told Daryl that this was the last time. One tuffet and I was out. I knew what I needed, and it wasn't math. I needed this year to be over. I needed to start rounding my time with Ben down instead of up. I needed the anniversaries to run their course. And Daryl was a part of this year. In recent nights I had been breaking a cardinal break-up rule by fantasizing about the interior of Ben's apartment. I'd try to think s.e.xual thoughts that didn't involve him. When that proved difficult, I tried to find loopholes. Like replacing him with his friends. But why did his friends persist in taking me back to his apartment all the time? Where was their loyalty? So I'd move the whole show over to my place. But the friends got lost in the transfer, and when I shut my eyes, all I saw was Ben, lounging on my bed or my carpet. Annoyed, I'd try to remove every piece of furniture I owned, hoping his ghost would be sitting on the sofa when it left. But things always snapped straight back to the way they were. It was too hard to imagine my apartment unfurnished anymore. It was filled with such beautiful things.

THE NURSERY RHYME ENDS WHEN A SPIDER COMES along and frightens Miss m.u.f.fet straight off her tuffet. I have wondered about what kind of lesson this is for a young girl. If you're eating your curds and whey and a spider comes along, I don't think there's anything wrong with picking up a newspaper, smas.h.i.+ng it, and going back to your breakfast. Perhaps if the rhyme was ill.u.s.trated not with a young girl in pigtails but with the image before me-that of Daryl on West Eleventh Street, sitting on a pastel tuffet-it would end differently.

"What the h.e.l.l, Daryl?" I said, coming down the street toward the West Side Highway.

His thighs spilled over the sides of the tuffet so that it looked less like he was sitting on a cus.h.i.+on and more like he was s.h.i.+tting ottoman legs. He wobbled up into a standing position. This was going to be less portable than a packing slip.

"It's a sample from the store."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, I know. They're all 'samples.'"

"No." He easily lifted the tuffet in the air to show me the scratch marks on the bottom. "For real."

I rubbed my fingertips against the worn base and touched the cus.h.i.+on. If it could remain fluffed with a bunch of rich ladies and then Daryl sitting on it, it was probably worth having. He offered to help me load it into a cab if I wanted. Then he asked me if I wanted to talk about it.

"About what?"

"You look skinny," he said, still holding the tuffet against his chest like a teddy bear.

He didn't mean it as a compliment. I c.o.c.ked my head at him. Daryl's beard was growing in everywhere except over a white scar and some pockmarks on his chin. His nose, perhaps once in proportion to his face, had become oddly narrow in adulthood, and he sniffed a lot. His forehead had one big wrinkle across it that touched down on both temples like a fleshy rainbow. I can still picture that face perfectly.

"Pull up a chair, Daryl," I said.

He placed the tuffet gingerly on the pavement. I looked around me. I had not yet run into Ben. I couldn't shake the feeling that such a run-in and requisite awkwardness were inescapable. The same love affair runoff that had melted New York into a quaint town had become worrisome once I stepped back over the line. Or, rather, once I was pushed. Ben could be anywhere. He could be sitting on the next crowded subway car I squished my way into. And I would have to stand there, my crotch in his face, his face in a folded magazine, his magazine still warm from his back pocket. Though he never was on the subway cars. Or the street corners. Or anywhere else outside the confines of my brain. I longed for invisibility but was sincerely shocked when I got it.

Daryl tugged at his pants until he could sit comfortably in them. I told him everything, starting with the moment I slid the stool away from the bar, and when I was through, he said, "That's some Jerry Springer s.h.i.+t right there."

"There wasn't any pulling of the hair or applying of Vaseline to the face."

"Some Ricki Lake s.h.i.+t, then."

"I'll give you that. But people are f.u.c.ked up, Daryl. They bring their own stories and their own issues to the table. Part of growing up is realizing that love isn't everything."

"You don't actually believe that, do you?"

"You know." I smiled and gave up. "I don't."

"Good." Daryl seemed satisfied that I had not crossed over into the bitter and black-hearted. "So now I'll tell you what no one else will."

For all the many bits of trivia I knew about Daryl, I did not know if he was in a relations.h.i.+p. I knew nothing of his track record with women, only that they probably weren't homeless pygmy computer owners. Besides, I already knew what no one else would tell me. I had known it forever. You shouldn't wear anything you can't afford to lose. Which is exactly what I did when I put all my eggs in Ben's bottomless basket. I had the citrus carnage to prove it, dried and rotting in my kitchen trash. Daryl looked up at me from his cus.h.i.+on, a sidewalk Buddha.

"What won't people tell me?" I asked him, bracing myself for another cliche about chocolates or fish.

"It wasn't as real as you thought it was. Whatever anyone else tells you is bulls.h.i.+t."

Then he slung the tuffet under his arm in headlock position and we waited in silence on the corner until a cab came. He closed the door slowly behind me, making sure it didn't smash the delicate and already-scuffed legs of the tuffet. What a tragedy it would be to drag it all the way out here for nothing.

TIME Pa.s.sED, AND I FOUND MYSELF WANDERING into Out of Your League-where I was apparently wearing an outfit that indicated I should be followed around like a fourteen-year-old shoplifter. I took the elevator up to the third floor. The inlaid pine still reflected the lights of the chandeliers above it. The layout was the same, but a few new items had come in, including a line of bath products. Just in case you wanted to smell as expensive as your oven mitts. I went over to the carpet wheel and spun, but I couldn't find one to fall in love with. I think I had just outgrown my fascination with the store in general. A thin, older saleslady in pearls lowered her gla.s.ses and asked me if she could help me with anything. But I could tell she didn't mean it.

"I think I'm set." I waved, repeatedly pressing the b.u.t.ton for the ground floor while she pretended not to judge me.

What can you do? Time grabs you by the scruff of your neck and drags you forward. You get over it, of course. Everyone was right about that. One mathematically insignificant day, you stop hoping for happiness and become actually happy. Okay, on occasion, you do worry about yourself. You worry about what this experience has tapped into. What will be left of it when the surface area shrinks? How will you make sense of it after the compulsion to have others make sense of it for you has faded? There is one thing you know for sure, one fact that never fails to comfort you: the worst day of your life wasn't in there, in that mess. And it will do you good to remember the best day of your life wasn't in there, either. But another person brought you closer to those borders than you had been, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. Knowing what you can afford is useful information, even if you don't want it. It dawns on you that this is what's in that last nesting doll that won't open. Somewhere in the center of all that bargaining and investing and stealing is meaning and truth and the lessons you have always known. You hope so. Because without meaning, it was all just a bunch of somebody else's stuff.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

It's pretty awkward when you write a normal-size book but have a lot of people to thank. It says everything good about the generosity of the thankees and nothing good about my ability to dress and feed myself. So here's to the people without whom I would be less of everything: At Riverhead: Sean McDonald and Emily Bell (patron saints of Preventing Me from Looking Stupid), Geoff Kloske, Kate Stark, Michael Barson, and Katie Grinch. It is a privilege to be published by people who laugh at the same things.

At WME: Jay Mandel (a living retort to the "No one will care about your baby as much as you do" adage), Lauren h.e.l.ler Whitney, Erin Malone, and Jake Sugarman.

At Vintage: Russell Perreault, Jennifer Jackson, Lisa Weinert, Anne Messitte, Sonny Mehta, Chip Kidd, and every editor, publicist, and author who has looked up from their own ma.n.u.scripts to ask, "How is yours coming?"

At home: Luc Sante's Low Life Low Life was invaluable when learning about the door policies of nineteenth-century brothels. Also helpful but not as good a read: was invaluable when learning about the door policies of nineteenth-century brothels. Also helpful but not as good a read: In Flight Portuguese. In Flight Portuguese.

At 3 a.m.: Dana Naberezny, Elizabeth Spiers, Kate Lee, Paula Froelich, Josh Kendall, Ethan Rutherford, Kimberly Burns, Sean Howe, Chris Wilson, Chris Tennant, Mickey Rapkin, Boris Kachka, Leigh Belz, Eric Lovecchio, Elizabeth Currid, Megan O'Rourke (for the sharp eye), Nick Stern (for the t.i.tle), Heather Gould, and Angela Petrella (for the permanent loans), and L.D. (for wherever you are).

Thank you.