The Encyclopedia of Exes Read online

  It had been over two months but the doorman still recognized me. He shook my hand.

  “Long time,” he smiled. “You must be busy busy.”

  “Is she home?” I said.

  He shook his head. “No luck, boss.”

  “Can you tell her I came by? I’ll call her but can you tell her?”

  “She moved,” he said. “Last week.”

  “Moved where?”

  He shrugged. “Home.”

  “South Carolina?” I asked.

  He smiled and spun the revolving door for me. “She’s a good girl.”

  I walked home and called her number but it had been disconnected. I called the hospital but the receptionist couldn’t release any information. I sat on the couch and thought about how much I missed her; an hour later I had a competing revelation, and realized that had she stayed we would have simply exchanged the tedium of abstinence for the tedium of sex. There are moments, when youth is leaving you, and everything is a motion toward shame.

  The following Christmas, Maryanne sent me a card that said she had taken a semester’s break after her grandmother had died. Now she was living in Boston and studying at Mass General Hospital. She signed her name and the cat’s name. I called the scribbled telephone number and we arranged to meet in March, when she would be coming to the city for a weekend conference.

  I waited for her in a café where you poured your own coffee and people left newspapers in the bathroom. She answered her cell phone from the car.

  “I’m just crossing the bridge,” she said.

  “I’m at the café,” I said. “By the window. I’m easy to see.”

  “I shouldn’t be an hour,” she said.

  “By the window,” I said.

  I waited two and a half hours but she never came. I left messages on her voice mail and then paid my bill.

  A week later a card arrived. “I don’t remember if I mentioned it,” she wrote, “but I’ve been trying electroshock therapy to cure depression and it inhibits short-term memory. It’s a sorry excuse for missing our date, and I hope you can forgive me. I’ll be in the city for another conference this July if you can make it.” This time Maryanne did not sign the cat’s name.

  But when June came I left New York. I had grown tired of the quiet derangement that life in the city offered me, with its heaviness and its hurry, its agitated, lonely provocations. Too many times I had caught myself cursing on the subway stairs as I passed an old woman. I was the man in the elevator who pressed the button over and over. At the supermarket I would snatch up the divider and bury it between strangers as soon as someone approached.

  One day at work I closed my office door and lay on the floor, and a sound came out of my body, a tiny lost sound, like the rhythmic hiss of a needle after a song has ended, and the record keeps spinning. Somebody slid a fax beneath the door. I slid it back out. Then I got up and walked home.

  I carried my furniture out onto the street and piled my books in the cardboard donation box at the library. I bought a road atlas from a man in a large yellow hat, and I drove my car across the George Washington Bridge. There is a place where the girls walk across the beach at dusk carrying their sandals in one hand, and I went to find it.

  NIGHTLIFE

  Lee Klein

  (nīt’līf’) n 1: social activities or entertainment available or pursued in the evening; arena for dashed hopes

  Lots of good things about New York City are also its least good things, like you can leave your shared three-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at 12:57 A.M. on a Saturday night, minutes after friends call from a bar near Chelsea, and you can make it there on the subway by 1:22, and even at this advanced hour you can still have nearly two-point-five hours of urban nightlife left. This is a good thing because if you’ve been home doing not-so-exciting things that haven’t made you tired, the opportunity exists to have a complete night out after all the bars throughout the rest of the eastern time zone close their doors. This is not a good thing, however, when one of your friends has been out drinking for many hours beforehand. While you were wasting the night in your bedroom (reading your own writing, drinking too much orange juice, fingering your earholes), she was splitting a big bottle of champagne, then switching to Maker’s Mark, smoothing the transition from one to the other with Valium. This all leads to Real World moments induced by champagne, whisky, Valium, the hour getting late, you showing up sober to find your friend reeling. You sip an expensive pint of pale ale as she sort of gelatinously pinballs around the packed bar, which is small and has mirrored walls and primary-colored flashing floor tiles. She drops her cigarette, spills her drink, her thin bangs pasted against her forehead. You’d once had hope for the night (that is, you’d once envisioned her spirited assistance with the removal of your clothing before she helped you through the darkest predawn hours with some first-class bonking), and now all you foresee is nothing good, and after about twenty minutes, once you and your friend get her to leave, she turns to rubber. Her legs give out, her head rolls back, she’s smiling, saying “I’m not drunk—no, no, no—I’m not drunk,” trying and failing to put on her jacket and scarf as random do-gooder strangers approach to ask if she’s okay, if she knows who you are, as though you dropped something in her drink and were involved in this terribly slow and very public process of abducting her, bothering with her jacket and scarf. You get her outside. You and your friend have her hanging between you. You’re walking toward another friend’s car, her feet dragging like you rescued her from the sea. And then this British guy, he comes out of nowhere and says, “She’s not well ah toll, not ah toll.” And you respond as natively as possible, “No, no, no . . . not at awl, buddy, not at awl”—then you turn the corner up Tenth Avenue and that same very nonthreatening British guy in a black wool car coat (there’s a lingering memory of an ascot) and his girlfriend follow after you and your friend and the pill-drunk girl, who’d once sort of been your girlfriend (that is, she’d once sort of been someone you’d sort of see occasionally and sort of certainly sleep with nonexclusively; and without a doubt she’d certainly once sent you a Polaroid of white clouds and blue sky with her phone number written along the lower border and, across the top, Brunelleschi, an architectural something such that would subtly identify the sender by stirring your memory of the long, late, lovely conversation [re: the five things either remembered about the Renaissance] you had that time at Mona’s on Avenue B when you stupidly, idiotically, cluelessly left the bar having exchanged neither saliva nor contact information; and certainly a few weeks after your receipt of that inviting Polaroid she constructively suggested you add to your diet some more peaches and fruit like that after determining your ejaculate tasted bitter; sure, you recognize how all these things might account for traces of something semisignificant existing in the space between two people, but you don’t think these traces ever really transformed that space to spell a word that ever really looked like capital-G Girlfriend, even after she gave you a copy of The Story of O, beautifully inscribed with a running joke that’d become your time-together’s mantra: “I’m all over you”)—so this British guy and his girlfriend come up and interrogate and try to make sure you know all the info on someone they couldn’t possibly know anything ah toll about, asking for your drunk friend’s name, and when the name is provided, asking for your drunk friend’s surname, to which you respond, “You’re asking for her fucking surname, man?” And then in your very best diplomatic/corporate tone, you say, “We appreciate your concern, but you are not helping in any way. All you’re doing is slowing the process of getting this very drunk girl home.” Which is enough: they recede to shadows as you very clumsily and sloppily negotiate this jelly-bodied girl into your friend’s backseat. But she doesn’t want to go to her own apartment. Says her mother is visiting. So you take Girl back to your place. Girl follows you into your room. Girl passes out in your bed. Seeing her sleeping there reminds you of times not so long ago, back when, deep into the night, you could get ou
t of her bed and look out the downtown-facing window of her apartment on the thirteenth floor of a building in lower TriBeCa and see under massive lights men working in the pit of what had dominated the sky for almost exactly as long as you’ve been alive. Such a presence a few blocks away, so much so the girl said she could feel the towers as she slept, like they protected her. First time you were there in her apartment, standing at that window amazed at the work below, Girl showed you Polaroids she took from that same window, old ones from when she first moved wherein the tallest buildings around came up to the towers’ knees. Then Girl showed you the newer shots she took, the ones right after the second plane hit. And so, at one point, in your bed, late into the night, while you sleep on your back, Girl straddles your hips. At which point, Girl commences dry humping. You try to get her off you when her dry humping wakes you up. And then you notice she’s not dry humping ah toll. She’s actually pissed her pants, which she still wears. But it’s very late now, nearly dawn, and you’re sure taking care of the dampness is no more pressing than your need to sleep. When you wake up you notice that the blankets are damp too, but thankfully she’d been drinking so much her next-day piss-dampness smells like water, like nothing. And so the moral of the story, since I think this is the sort of story that should try to explicitly provide a small lesson of smaller value to its readers, is that it’s a fine thing to help a friend (especially one who’d sort of been more than a friend) who really needs help getting to a safe haven. But never let this friend sleep beside you in bed, especially if there’s the least chance that, an hour or two before dawn, this friend might dry hump you. Always opt for the couch. And if you can remember to place a few towels beneath this friend, right before gently kissing some peace into this friend’s forehead, all the better.

  OVER

  Jack Murnighan

  (ō’vər) prep. 1. In or at a position above or higher than: a sign over her head advertising her availability. 3. On the other side of: over the hill. 4. So as to cover: threw a shawl over her shoulders. 5. Up to or higher than the level or height of: The sheet was pulled over my shoulders. 6. a. Through the period or duration of: diaries maintained over two years. b. Until or beyond the end of: stayed over at his parents’ house for the holidays. 7. More than in de-gree, quantity, or extent: over ten lovers; over the age of consent. 8. While occupied with or engaged in: a chat over coffee or drinks, just to catch up on what you’ve been doing since we broke up. 9. With reference to; concerning: an argument over the proper amount of foreplay.

  I want more, goddamn it, more more more more more. WOMAN WITH LOVERS WANTS MORE: Ever since I came up with the title for my none-too-successful personal ad, more is my new favorite word—especially when it comes to lovers. Even if they’re not my lovers I want there to be more lovers. Lovers of cats, lovers of dogs, lovers of broccoli, lovers of my elbows and toes, lovers of my overweight niece, lovers of early Bob Dylan records, lovers of sex, lovers of tequila and spicy food, lovers of children, divorcées, neurotics, big-hearted women, and beauty past its prime. Lovers of the little things, lovers of everything. Lovers of more.

  I told this to my shrink, asking her if she thought I’d be better off with more cats, a dog, or a young energetic stud. As always, her final advice was inconclusive, so I decided to go to the animal shelter, where in the past I’ve found all of the above. I also decided that it was finally time to wear the you’d-never-guess-they-were-forty-nine-dollar-faux-Manolo-Blahniks and a tight leather skirt, and, walking out to my car, I told myself I wasn’t allowed to come home empty-handed. I felt funny in the high heels; I’d seen such shoes in magazines, but I hadn’t worn anything more than flats or Reeboks since I turned fifty—a few more months ago than I’d care to tell you. But I knew my legs were my lifeline to decades past, and I’d better do what I could.

  On the drive over I started to think about Charlie, and what he would have said seeing me all gussied up just to go to the animal shelter. My skirt and heels routine would probably fit well with his insistence that I wear the opposite of what was appropriate every time we went out. He’d buy me sexy, expensive things that I knew he couldn’t afford, but he’d never let me put them on when we went out for fancy drinks. No, then it was always jeans and an old T-shirt and he’d sit me at the bar and fill me full of overpriced Brandy Alexanders till we got so silly we’d go fuck in the parking lot like a pair of teenagers. It was only when we went to the pool hall that I could dress to the nines: tight, low-cut sweaters; pantyhose with fancy patterns; heels and lipstick and perfume and big, glittery fake diamonds in each ear and on four or five fingers. He wanted all the local boys, his people, in their flannel shirts to want me; he wanted those hillbillies to know what a classy woman looked like. We’d play a game or two of pool with me getting every kind of look, then he’d come up behind me when I was about to take a shot and whisper how they were all plotting to jump him and hold him back while they pinned me down on the pool table, lifted my skirt up, and took a turn with me. I’d get excited and beg him to take me out to the car or sneak me into the bathroom or just sit at the table and put his hand up my skirt, but he wouldn’t lay a finger on me. On the drive home, I’d stroke his crotch, but he’d take a hand off the wheel and brush me away. Then, when we’d finally get home and I’d begun to think that he really didn’t want me this time, he’d unlock the door, walk to the kitchen like he was going to get a beer, then turn, lift me right off the ground and then onto my back on the kitchen table and not even pull down my hose just rip them right open in his hurry to get inside.

  Charlie was my second husband, the one I had been waiting for, the plain and unassuming one I never would have looked at except that I was already north of forty and divorced and things weren’t sitting as high as they once did. I first saw Charlie at the plant store where he worked. He’d helped me a few times when I was buying azaleas or big pots of daffodils, and one time he simply said, I’d love to be the man to make you happy. And I said, How do you know I’m not happy already? And he said, All right, you decide. And I looked at him for a second and then just burst into tears, right there in the store. And he put my head on his shoulder and softly whispered in my ear, It’s gonna be all right. We can make it all right.

  Five years; five long years have passed and Charlie’s still got a hold on me. He’s been dead now more time than we ever had together. My Charlie. He never listened to me, not to a goddamn word I said. I loved that about him, all his bullheaded old-man ways. But he should have listened when I said he had to cut back, that the sauce was gonna catch up to him. But he always said that if the trains ran on time in Italy the pasta wouldn’t taste as good. And I’d say, What the fuck does that mean? And he’d say that you can’t change a piece of anything without changing the whole thing, and he was going to keep drinking till they rolled him into the grave. And they did, Charlie. They rolled you right in and started to shovel the dirt and then your fucking good friend Jerry came up and poured a goddamn bottle of Jack Daniels onto the casket. What the fuck? How the fuck was that supposed to make me feel? You were supposed to be mine, Charlie, and look at me now. Look at me. Driving to the goddamn animal shelter. Again. In heels.

  By the time I passed Fourth and Washington I had wiped away the tears and was starting to pull myself back together. This was supposed to be a momentous day, after all. Adding a new life force to mine, be it feline, canine, or human. We’re not meant to live alone, none of us, and certainly not me. Since Charlie died it’s just been me and my two temperamental Siamese, Paco and Silver, who I got from the shelter. Paco seems to find it necessary to eat all his food outside the bowl; he hooks bits of meat with a claw from his left paw and shakes them onto the floor, then spreads them around before he deigns to put them in his mouth. Control freak. Silver I once discovered with a piece of string wrapped first around one of the legs of the banister on the stairwell, then around her neck, hanging down the steps steadily nearing the precipice of death. She’s not too smart, so I didn’t take it personally.


  Inside the animal shelter, it was not five minutes and lo and behold, there he was: the chocolate Lab that I’d imagined in my mind as the stalwart companion of my dreams. Lord, what a mug: steady drool, pure affection, and a brain like a light switch and no more challenging. Perfect. I put my hand up by the door of his cage so he could smell me, and he came up and licked it. Licked it. That’s what I like. This one was going to be mine.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” came the voice from behind my shoulder. I turned quickly to find myself face-to-face with the lettering of a sweatshirt. NOLS Peru: Pisco, Love and Understanding.

  My sad dejected sisters, pessimistic lovelorn and lonely sisters, I tell you, there are angels living among us, but you might not realize it, for they may be wearing fleece.

  “Uh, yes,” I said, reading from his name tag, “Patrick. You can help me. I am looking for, how shall I say, a large companion, a little protection, a warm body in the bed, that kind of thing. I thought a Labrador might be just the thing, unless you had a more informed recommendation . . .”

  I didn’t let him talk that much. He tried, of course. This dog and that, the advantage of this breed or that blend. Did I work during the day? Did I have a fenced yard? Would I know how to train him? All the standard questions, but in the end we both knew that I had already picked the best one in the shelter, the real cat’s meow, so to speak.