The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  AMBIVALENCE

  BERNICED

  CALL-HELL

  DAGENHAM

  ETIQUETTE

  FAQ

  GREEN

  HONEY MOON

  ISLAND

  JUSTICE

  KID

  LDR

  MUAY THAI

  NIGHT MARE

  ORGASM

  PAIN

  QUEER

  REGRET

  SAVAGE

  THREE SOME

  UNDER DOG

  VITRIOL

  WORSHIP

  X

  YUPPIE

  ZERO

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Acknowledgments

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  FOR MARY, EVELYN, AND LESLIE

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  This epic and scholarly work began with a failed relationship: mine. I was dating a photographer in Philadelphia, the beautiful city where I make my home. One sunny afternoon, I told him, “I can’t hang out tonight. Richard invited me to a cocktail party at the French consulate in honor of a visiting French designer.” He heard, “I’m going out to have hot sex with a French lesbian.” I have heard many stories about Mars and Venus, about miscommunication, about crossed signals, but this moment stands out in my mind as a truly exceptional manifestation of the great, unbridgeable gulf between human beings. And so this moronic photographer, who for narrative purposes we’ll call Tony Columbo, heard what he wanted to hear—that his girlfriend was going out that evening to emasculate him.

  Tony Columbo decided to strike back with the handiest weapon at his disposal (not counting the gun he kept in the trunk of his car, along with his golf clubs and camera equipment, the ammunition for said gun having fallen out of the glove compartment and bruised my knee on our second date). While I was at a mild-mannered cocktail party, drinking cheap Chardonnay and trying out my rusty, broken French half-remembered from college, Tony Columbo went and had sex with his ex-girlfriend.

  It is important to note that the ex-girlfriend only became an ex-girlfriend because I had found out about her. Three weeks into my romance with Tony Columbo, I discovered that he was seeing another woman, who he’d been seeing for a year or so. I insisted that he choose between us, professing that it was his choice, that I didn’t really care who he chose, but that I wasn’t interested in a nonmonogamous relationship, and that it would be better to stop things before they really got started, rather than later when it might involve significant heartbreak. Secretly, of course, I hoped he’d choose me.

  I didn’t know at that point that the ex-girlfriend was the reason that Tony Columbo’s wife had kicked him out a year earlier. I also didn’t know that Tony Columbo had gotten her pregnant and paid for her abortion—the ex-girlfriend, not the wife—and I sure as hell didn’t know that the ex-girlfriend lived two floors below me in my apartment building. These things were only revealed in the fullness of time, after I’d repeatedly had unprotected sex with Tony Columbo, invited him to Easter dinner with my family, and given him a set of keys to my apartment. Even when he told me that—surprise!—his divorce was not quite final, that technically he was still married to his ex-wife, I was too far gone to care.

  I liked the long, lazy afternoons that Tony Columbo and I spent together. I liked the way his black curls drooped over his forehead; I liked the way his muscles looked in a wife-beater T-shirt. I liked having a boyfriend.

  In my most paranoid moments, I wonder if I was brainwashed. When a person is routinely deprived of certain nutrients, she becomes highly suggestible. Cults use this technique to control the minds of their members—many “religious retreats” are actually opportunities to starve the minds of converts and plant the cult’s beliefs. Celibacy isn’t so far off from starvation. Take an otherwise intelligent woman who’s been deprived of nooky for a few months, keep her in bed for a few hours every day, tell her she’s beautiful and brilliant—and she’ll believe almost anything. For three months, Tony Columbo and I were doing it three, four times a day, and I was so blissed-out, I didn’t care that he was an obvious cad.

  But then came the French Lesbian Episode. Tony acted strangely quiet for a few days after the cocktail party, occasionally asking me questions that came out of left field. Finally, after an interrogation worthy of Perry Mason, Tony admitted that he’d been with his ex-girlfriend. But only, he insisted, because he thought I’d been with the Hypothetical French Lesbian that night.

  Not surprisingly, I freaked out. I’ll spare you the gruesome details; suffice it to say that it was an episode of massive proportions, with copious amounts of tears, recriminations, accusations, and groveling. It wasn’t pretty, and it lasted for days.

  I wish the story ended there. I wish I could say I dumped his sorry ass when I found out that he cheated on me. I wish I could say I never looked back, that I went on to triumphantly write about my experience and that I became a heroic role model for all women whose boyfriends have ever cheated on them. That would make a great story.

  The truth is, I took him back. Tony Columbo had sex with another woman in my apartment building, knowing full well that he was cheating on me and lying to the other woman, and I took him back. Someone should’ve hit me over the head with my copy of Smart Women/Foolish Choices.

  Tony and I settled into our routine again, rapidly. We’d sleep late and hang around in bed, alternately giggling, bonking, and watching reruns of “A Dating Story” and “A Baby Story.” Tony really wanted to get married again and have kids, he said, which made my recently discovered biological alarm clock start clamoring in my ears. Our days went like this: After breakfast, Tony would go off to the golf course while I wrote for a few hours. After his return, we’d go to bed briefly, go out to dinner, hang out with friends somewhere in the city, then crash, and start the whole thing over again in the morning. Occasionally, Tony dog-sat for his friend Carlo, and we’d set up shop at Carlo’s place for a few days. It was a grown-up version of playing house—Carlo’s town house was impeccably decorated, as long as you ignored the giant collection of anal porn in the bedroom closet. Tony was extraordinarily thoughtful toward the dog, a giant slobbering mastiff. The three of us would go to the dog run together, and I’d pretend it was our dog, our cute town house, and our happy-couple life together.

  I loved the way I felt with Tony Columbo. He made me feel sexy, smart, capable, able to take on the world. His major problem was that he simply couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.

  Less than a month after the French Lesbian Episode, Tony told me he was going to Columbus, Ohio, for the weekend to photograph a wedding. It seemed perfectly plausible to me; I wished him luck and spent the weekend by myself in Philadelphia. Tony returned on Sunday night, called me Monday morning, and we met for coffee and took “our” dog out for a walk.

  He’d brought me a refrigerator magnet from Columbus but was acting weird again. I let it go until Wednesday. That day, we walked to his place so he could pick up his car keys to drive me home. While I was in his bedroom, I noticed some letters lying on the bookshelf. I glanced at them and spotted “Dearest Tony” written in a female hand. Tony noticed me noticing the letters, and he guiltily shoved them inside a dusty book of Ansel Adams photos. We talked; we laughed; we made out. As soon as he went downstairs to the bathroom, I stuck the letters inside my purse.

  I don’t advocate stealing. I’m not even proud that I did it. Part of me promised that if I were wrong, if he weren’t cheating on me again, I’d return the letters to exactly where I found them. But I was right. T
ony dropped me off at my apartment building, and I dug his letters out of my purse while rushing through the lobby. In the elevator, I read “Dearest Tony,” and I realized that the letter was dated only two weeks before. Most damning was the letter he must’ve received that morning, detailing how much fun the woman had with him in Ohio that past weekend, how he was everything she’d dreamed of and more. She had loved holding him in the bathtub, she said; she couldn’t wait to see him again.

  They’d met on the Internet. From what I gathered, she was an unemployed chiropractic assistant in Columbus, a single mom who’d had custody of her daughter taken away.

  Tony Columbo’s affair with Miss Columbus showed a truly egregious lack of good taste. Honestly, an unemployed chiropractic assistant? My ego couldn’t take it. I dumped Tony Columbo that evening. I would’ve dumped him into the Fresh Kills Landfill, or at the bottom of a river, if I could.

  In the subsequent weeks, I worked out my emotions by telling the story to anyone who’d listen—friends, family, strangers in restaurants, even the doorperson at my apartment building. I wrote so many e-mails about Tony Columbo’s perfidy that I had to give up typing the story anew. I simply saved the text as a document on my computer and sent it, along with appropriate comments as to my state of mind at that moment, to anyone unwise enough to inquire how I was doing.

  The first 547 times I told the story of the French Lesbian Episode, I cried. It felt good to be patted on the back and for various people to tell me that Tony Columbo was a jerk and that I was better off without him. By repetition 1,000 or so, I started to enjoy telling the story. Partly because it made great shtick, partly because people began telling me their own stories in return. At a Halloween party, a woman told me about the German photographer who’d taken her to a gallery opening in Chelsea—and asked if she was as turned on as he was by the photos of seminaked, preadolescent girls. An old guy at a bar told me about the heartbreak he had suffered at the hands of the She-Devil of the Harvard Club of New York City. And then there were the rehashings of past breakups that I discussed with my girlfriends—we’d go through our mental lists of past lovers, deciding whether the French Lesbian Episode was better or worse than other breakups. By the time I realized I was having a good time talking about relationship disasters, I was practically over Tony Columbo.

  So, I began working on this anthology. I wanted to put together a directory, A to Z, of the myriad reasons that relationships fall apart. The Dictionary of Failed Relationships is the kind of book I’d enjoy reading after a breakup, before a breakup, or even in the middle of a great relationship. Think of it as the literary equivalent of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—delicious any time, but especially appropriate for times of PMS or heartbreak.

  The story of this book ends where it began. As a side effect of focusing on failed relationships, I got over my heartbreak with Tony Columbo. Sort of. I met a really wonderful guy (a stockbroker, of all things) who reminded me that not all men are dogs. I learned that love, fidelity, and trust can do a lot to bridge the fundamental gap between human beings. I also learned that wanting to get married and have babies (me) plus fear of commitment (him) equals failed relationship. Oh, well.

  That failed relationship story doesn’t have a title yet; it’s too raw. It doesn’t even have a narrative. There’s still a gaping, bloody, Grand Canyon–size hole in my chest where I think my heart used to be. It’ll cost me at least ten thousand dollars in therapy to repair it, without a doubt.

  But now, at least, here’s a book to keep me company on the road back from heartbreak.

  AMBIVALENCE

  By Heidi Julavits

  am·biv·a·lence am-’bi-v-ln(t)s noun [International Scientific Vocabulary] (1918) 1: simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action. Such feelings may be constant in a relationship. 2a: continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite). b: uncertainty as to which approach to follow, especially in the days preceding a breakup.

  Let me put it plainly: It was summer. We drove down to Mexico.

  This was not a vacation, because we were already on vacation. Vacation from a vacation from a vacation brings us full circle. “Business,” Tim said to the customs official. It was July, and Texas wasn’t hot enough for us, it wasn’t screaming bloody cicada murder enough for us, so we had to drive down to Mexico in a white rental car and look for campsites with the word superstition in the name.

  What’s the word for superstition in Spanish? I asked. I sought Tim’s advice when it came to certain languages. He was brought up by a grammarian mother, a feisty little Shreveport looker who raised her son to fear clichés more than venereal disease, who didn’t give a hoot if he failed to make his bed for forty years, as long as he said give it to Bob and me.

  Better you don’t know, Tim said, fending off the little Mexican boys at the Nuevo Laredo crossing. They wanted money from the Americans in the white rental car. We were good-looking Americans, too, gleaming with a certain kind of ironic roadtrip sexy. Secondhand guayaberas factored in, and fake leather boots, and the paper-stink of truckstop potatoes extruding from our pores. Forget that I was a debutante, once, that I said crudité, once, at a party. Forget that Tim was pursuing a degree in comparative literature (he was a Lacanian with a concentration in Chilean protest poetry), forget that he grew a goatee to hide his thin upper lip, that he kept an antique prophylactic in the lizard wallet bequeathed to him by a dead man, his grandfather, that he was prone to saying things with a put-on Louisiana drawl like you’re so dang fetching when you’re scared. He believed there was no more novelty in the world, so the knowing cliché was the only antidote to banality.

  This is the great thing about America. You can slum smartly in a fool instant.

  But these little begging boys, they were not without a certain degree of original menace, in my opinion. They had a little mantra. Tim translated.

  They claim we’re having a party in our bank account, he said.

  Did you tell them it’s BYOB? I asked.

  He didn’t laugh. He blew past the little boys after giving them our Einstein air freshener. I saw one boy put it in his mouth as we cruised toward the Whatever Mountains, listening to Border Oldies.

  This is bad, I said. The Border Oldies station played mostly seventies tunes that made me doomy.

  What is bad? he asked. He liked to ask little things like they were big things, philosophical things, not like what is bad, but what is bad?

  What is bad is the following, I said: That little boy will suck on the Einstein air freshener, because he thinks he’ll ingest some glorious piece of America. His sister will find it clenched in his rictused hand tomorrow morning, and the authorities will trace the serial number back to your mother, who sent you the air freshener on your birthday as a joke-not-joke, because everyone knows your mother thinks you’re a genius. Subsequent tests will determine that the air freshener—bought from your derelict brother’s tchotchke headshop in Atlanta—was soaked in a tremendous amount of PCP. The Feds will prosecute your mother for drug dealing and for overestimating the very average intelligence of both her sons. Your SAT scores will be printed in all the national papers, corroborated by quotes from your elementary school teachers testifying to your mediocre preteen performance. You will be thrown out of your graduate program and forced to sell your grandfather’s antique prophylactic on eBay to pay your student loans, which will come due immediately.

  The wallet belonged to my grandfather, not the rubber. But that was a good one, he said.

  Thanks.

  Don’t you ever worry you tell me too much about yourself?

  Meaning . . .

  Meaning, don’t these morbid fantasies conceal an actual desire?

  What is actual desire? I asked.

  If you hate my mother, just say so.

  I don’t hate your mother. I am humored by your mother, which is a generous way to be exhausted by a person.

  It just seem
s a little passive, he said. Thinking about doing things versus simply doing them.

  He cranked up the Border Oldies until the bass line fuzzed. So, he said, changing the subject, what do all these songs have in common?

  Death by vomit? I guessed.

  They’re all in minor keys. The seventies was a minor-key decade. That’s why we’re such an anxious generation. We were children raised on popular menace.

  So that’s why, I said, licking the knuckles of his driving hand.

  We never found the Superstition campsite. We settled for a roachy hotel in a big, noisy city. How come I’ve never heard of this city? I asked. It’s so terribly big and noisy. We walked around the monolith and stared up at the Whatever Mountains. With confidence, he told me the word for “whatever” in Spanish was zapata.

  I wanted to have sex all night to keep my mind off the roaches, but he wasn’t up to it. It’s all that Chilean protest poetry, I said, fingering his jellied crotch. The revolution is a flaccid cause. Viva la Deflation!

  I drove twelve hours, he said, yawning.

  But this is a road trip, I said. Carnality is part of the knowing cliché. We can have facile sex and I’ll yell, give it to Bob and me.

  He wanted to go to sleep.

  But the floor is seething with roaches, I said. We’ll wake up and they’ll be in every orifice, laying eggs or just plain hanging out.

  You’re acting faux-scared and I’m fucking tired.

  I was raised during the minor-key decade, I said. Blame it on Jethro Tull.

  If you feel like I have a limited capacity for intimacy, just say so, he said.

  Zapata, I said, over and over, into his sleepy ear. Worst-case scenarios were just another clichéd joke to him. There was no turning him on to the attendant promise of doom, there was no inspiring him, in short, to see the world the way I did: full of an inventively crippling kind of illumination.

  The next morning we went to a museum. This was neither of our ideas, but we didn’t know each other well enough to admit we hated museums. We were both scared of appearing artless.