The Encyclopedia of Exes Read online

  Mona called out my name. Timothy.

  I knew what she wanted: she wanted me to forget about Ethan and his self-destructive bullshit. She wanted me to lock the door to our place. She wanted to have that talk about graduate school. It was a perfectly reasonable desire. But I wasn’t ready to be improved just then.

  Overhead, we could hear Anthony taking the stairs a couple at a time.

  Mona shouted, “Don’t go out there.” At least, I think that’s what she said.

  But I was already heading for the porch, down the stairs, onto the front lawn. Anthony was a few paces in front of me. For a tall man, he moved slowly, which implied deliberation. His girl and Ethan were no more than a few inches apart. Their bellies were touching. And then—and this happened with an abruptness no one quite expected—Ethan pushed Anthony’s girl down. It wasn’t much, just a light shove. But it caught her off guard and she toppled onto the dried grass and landed heavily on her backside.

  Ethan looked proud of himself, that same dumb, half-embarrassed grin he used to wear on those mornings after he’d first starting sleeping with Franny. But then he saw Anthony—the thick, mottled arms, the slope of his brow—and his grin disappeared. He began to back up immediately, out into the street, and then he simply turned and ran. I figured Anthony might give chase. But he wasn’t that sort of guy. His girl shook and spastically wept, and I wondered if I had been right at first, if perhaps she was mildly retarded.

  I walked toward her, hoping to apologize. But Anthony turned on me. He took hold of my arm. “You,” he said. “You.” And then, quite suddenly, I was on the ground and Anthony was stepping over me and seating himself on my chest. He weighed a thousand pounds.

  I kept saying things like, “Be cool. I didn’t do anything. Be cool, man.” But he wasn’t hearing any of that. He had a queer look of concentration on his face, of needing to complete a task. He pinned one of my arms beneath his knee and held the other one in his fist.

  “Be cool,” I said. “Come on, man. Chill out.”

  Then I turned my head, preparing to be punched.

  But Anthony did not punch. He turned to his girl. She had quieted some. And now I could hear her crawling toward me, the wet heaving of her breath. Then I saw her face above mine, the spots of angry red acne and smeared lipstick. I watched as she reared back and, with a rattling from her throat, spat on my cheek.

  Anthony leaned close. The pores on his nose were tiny black craters and his breath smelled like kerosene. “Do not,” he said, “mess with my girl.” Then he lifted himself off me and lumbered back to the porch with his girl on his arm, perched there almost primly, as if he were escorting her to a cotillion. I looked up and saw Mona staring through the window. Her big green eyes were sad and unsurprised.

  For years afterward, when I recalled these events, I told myself things would have gone differently if I’d been hurt, bloodied; that Mona would have been given reason, by my injury, to see that I had been, in some misguided way, defending her, defending us. This is the sort of shit I said to myself. It is human nature to say such shit.

  What Mona said was this: “You should have locked the door, Timothy.”

  We were lying on our mattress, trying to settle in for sleep.

  “We’ll laugh about this someday,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “We won’t.”

  I could feel that something had been broken between us, some bond of trust or indulgence, though I was young enough then to suppose that such breaks, with the proper attention, can be mended.

  Upstairs, through the ceiling, Anthony’s girl begin to wail again. Was it ecstasy or grief? I couldn’t tell.

  And so I made a joke, just to demonstrate my poise. “She’s saying that she wants to spit on me again, that it turns her on.”

  Mona, who felt good beside me, who felt like every good intention I might have held back then, and whose skin glowed with the absurdity of our evanescent joy, who never failed to giggle at my jokes, now sat up in bed and looked at me for long time, with her hair shining under the moon and her sad, green eyes.

  “That’s not what’s she saying,” Mona said. “She’s saying: ‘Listen to me, you asshole: I have a name. Listen to me: If you don’t say my name, right now, this minute, you’ll never see my face again.’ ”

  THE BREAKUP CEREMONY

  Touré

  (break’-up ceremony) n 1: a formal act or set of acts performed as prescribed by ritual or custom, marking the termination of a relationship [syn: dissolution, separation, detachment]

  “If you don’t have anything bad to say about a relationship, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  —GEORGE COSTANZA

  Coltrane Jones and Amber Sunshower are breaking up today. They’ve been dating for most of three years, living together for two, talking about marriage for one, and, for the last six months, they’ve been breaking up slowly, Chinese water torture slowly. A breakup of this sort, after so much time and so much dreaming and so much pain, is a shift of the tectonic plates of two lives. That’s why today, this warm late June Saturday afternoon, at a borrowed home in Soul City’s ritzy Honeypot Hill, the end of this long, momentous relationship is being marked by a Breakup Ceremony.

  This is a relatively new custom in Soul City, but it’s been gaining popularity over the past few years among couples that have been together long enough to have gained that plateau where people are watching and wondering if or when they’ll marry. When a breakup seems inevitable, the couple will pick a date, invite their friends, and hold a public ceremony commemorating their end. The ceremony usually starts just as the sun is beginning to make way for evening. The couples emerge together, though not touching and usually not looking at each other. They are always dressed so as to give off the appearance of doing well in that trying moment, though on many occasions it’s clear that one of the parties had been well dressed and then, consumed by their grief or finality or the grip of chemicals or both, proceeded to paw away at their dress or suit all the way to disheveledness.

  They assemble in front of their friends, who are divided by affiliation—his friends on one side of the aisle, hers on the other. This is an important segment of the young ritual, giving members of the community a chance to choose a side, to silently declare their loyalty.

  During the ceremony two preselected members from the audience come forward to say a few words about the couple (“I always knew you guys would never make it,” or “I told her to leave you nine months ago”). Then each member of the couple gets one sentence to vow, that is, to publicly state their main gripe with the other. “I vow that you are just too plain selfish” or “I vow that you never really listened to me.” But both must say their vow at the same time so no one can say they didn’t get the last word. Then a photograph of the two is burned and dropped to the ground so the ashes can mix with the dirt and be lost forever. Attendees are invited to stomp on the spot where the ashes fall, symbolically pushing them down farther. Then the group breaks into two parties. The men rumble off to a stripper-clogged rebachelorization party. Women retreat into a bridal shower without a bride, giving the newly single woman gifts she’ll need in her now manless life (maybe a VCR, a health-club membership, a set of tools). The women’s event sometimes includes a black-leather-masked male who is whipped on his bare buttocks with a thick leather strap. This whipping often lasts hours, often draws blood, and, women say, is quite therapeutic.

  Some from the outside of Soul City are amazed at these ceremonies, amazed that a volatile separating couple can occupy the same space for the ten minutes it takes to conduct a Breakup Ceremony. But many in Soul City choose to have a Breakup Ceremony because of its cotillion aspect. The ceremony spreads the word that it’s over, freeing the two from many awkward questions, sending a tacit message to anyone who’s maybe been waiting for the relationship to dissolve. Body language speaks volumes, especially when standing beside that other person, and goes a long way toward improving one’s stock within the community and
shifting the perception of fault, even though most who’ve attended more than one Breakup Ceremony know that the during-ceremony stoicness of most breaking couples owes much to large quantities of Mr. Valium and Dr. Jack Daniels.

  Coltrane and Amber’s ceremony proceeded almost exactly according to plan. Almost. Their friends knew it would be difficult for the tumultuous pair to stand beside each other for those last ten minutes and so they added a few touches to the ceremony in hopes of eliciting their best behavior. Reverend Hallelujah Jones was tapped to officiate, though really there was nothing for him to do besides stand there, barely five foot two and as fragile as a man made of aluminum foil, with a little curly gray hair clinging to the sides of his head and so much curly gray hair bursting from his ears he appeared to have the frayed ends of a Kleenex peeking out of them. He’d baptized nearly everyone in Soul City under thirty-five, including both Coltrane and Amber, and thus commanded a certain amount of respect. But even he was not enough, on this day, to keep a Jerry Springer show from breaking out.

  Amber’s friends also added her mother, Peaches, to the program, giving her the job of walking up the aisle toward the couple at the end of the ceremony, taking her daughter’s hand and escorting her down the aisle and away form Coltrane, symbolic of taking her back. Amber has never been married and thus never been given away, meaning the gesture did not really make any symbolic sense at all. The hollow symbol was merely window dressing for the concrete attempt to extract ten minutes of peace from the fiery pair.

  At a few minutes to six the couple emerged from the back door of the borrowed country home, each on one side of Reverend Jones. Coltrane was impressively cool in a navy tailored suit with a mint green silk tie, matching shirt, and pricey leather shoes. Amber looked luminous in a red Versace dress with a plunging neckline, her shoes frighteningly high brown Jimmy Choo open-toe slingbacks, her ears twinkling with diamond studs, her hair swept up and laced with miniature pink roses. At Breakup Ceremonies couples dress to arouse jealousy of the other party (as if to say, look at all this you’re gonna miss), and to possibly arouse someone in the crowd because a Breakup Ceremony is always the start of an unspoken race. People in Soul City believe whoever starts the next solid relationship first is proven to be more desirable and less troublesome member of the couple, ergo, the winner.

  At the appointed time Coltrane, Amber, and Reverend Jones came out of the house and moved into view at the Reverend’s slow pace and stopped at the top of the stairs. “We are gathered here today,” the Reverend said, “to witness the conclusion of a wonderful relationship between two wonderful people.” Amber leaned away from the Reverend, afraid his lies might earn him a thunderbolt. He offered a few more fabrications intended only to put the best possible bow on a bad situation, but his fictions fooled no one. At every Breakup Ceremony, during the cocktail reception that precedes the main event, people feel compelled to swap the most gory bits of gossip about the relationship and its failure, knowing this is the last chance to spread such information. It’s a sort of going-out-of-business sale on gossip. After his final falsehood the Reverend invited Amber’s best friend, Camilla Clothespony, to come and say a few words. She was supposed to be followed by Coltrane’s friend Huggy Bear Jackson and then Amber’s mom, Peaches, but Camilla already knew she would be the day’s final speaker.

  It’s been said far too often that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But in so many cases that fury is a wet matchstick compared to the roaring blaze that is the fury of a woman scorned’s best friend. Camilla took her place at the foot of the steps and faced the couple. “If ever there were two people who should not be together it was these two,” she began with an acid voice. “You’re weak, spineless, pathetic, and ya know what, Amber lied: it’s not all about the motion of the ocean!” The Breakup Ceremony is the place to expunge one’s feelings about the breakup and so Camilla had every right to speak publicly of her anger; however, her toast, barely one sentence old, was already evidencing ire well beyond the appropriate. “And you know what she said? Sex with you is like math class! Very boring and filled with mistakes!” She was far beyond control now, eyes soaked, teeth clenched, a momma bear fierce in the face of an attacker. The crowd was paralyzed, torn between stopping her and enjoying the show. “And did you think,” Camilla yelled, looking right at Coltrane, her voice breaking from tears, “I would let you just walk away scot-free, you little rat? Amber, you would not listen to me during this so-called relationship, but now you’ll hear me when I show you what a lying little boy he is!”

  Camilla whipped around and motioned for three women from the Amber side of the aisle to step forward. The three moved from the crowd and into the open, self-righteously stuck their hands on their hips and made circles with their necks as if to say, Whatcha ya got to say now? Coltrane’s jaw dropped and his eyes sunk back into his head and his shock made it clear even to Amber that these were three women of whom Coltrane had carnal knowledge.

  The Reverend called out, “Miss Clothespony, please! This is a day for closure!”

  To which Camilla shot back, “Oh, we gettin’ closure right now!”

  And with that Coltrane dashed off into the house, trailed by Amber, her eyes burning with homicide, followed by Camilla screaming, “Get that rat!,” followed by the three neck-swiveling women, followed by most of Amber’s friends. Coltrane’s people stood their ground, seeing no way to save him from the beating of his life. As Coltrane raced through the house, zigging and zagging, breaking stuff and denting shins and tripping and falling and bolting up to sprint off, a single file line of fire-eyed females chased him up the front stairs and back down the back ones, nipping at his heels like a murderous hi-speed conga line. Soon Coltrane found himself running through Vietnamish hallways that were a jungle of broken glass and grabbing hands and flying chairs and kicking legs and spitting fires, unable to find a path out of the house, every moment less and less able to avoid the swarming bloodthirsty mob.

  Later, at the hospital, Coltrane said he had no idea Camilla had planned to ruin the day (though Amber felt Camilla had done “the perfect sisterly thing”). He winced as a nurse tended to the cuts on his face and chest from being kicked by high heels and secured the cast on his twice-broken left arm.

  “What happened to you?” the nurse said.

  “Oh, I had a Breakup Ceremony.”

  “What are you stupid? What did you think would happen?”

  “Well, I dunno. I guess I thought my Breakup Ceremony would be different.”

  “I’ve been to maybe five Breakup Ceremonies,” she said, “and I don’t even know how the ceremony’s supposed to end because every single time someone goes postal.”

  “Yeah,” Coltrane said. “I’m not really sure if these Breakup Ceremonies are such a good idea. My dad always said, ‘It’s cheaper to keep her,’ and I never really knew what he was talkin’ about cuz he was always broke. But now I get it.”

  CAR

  Matthew Sharpe

  (ka:(r)) n 1: a wheeled vehicle or conveyance desired by American teenagers upon receipt of a driver’s license; bone of household contention; can cause schism between generations

  Our daughter’s body is a reproach to us. She has recently turned into a little monster of physical fitness and moral rectitude. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t know there are shifts in a family, and that no one is ever prepared for them. I remember, for example, the entire year when I was ironic. Maybe I hit upon irony because it is the thing that terrifies me most. Irony is like an evil twin that clubs you over the head, gags you, throws you down the basement stairs, and takes your place at the breakfast table with your family. And it says exactly what you would say, only instead of saying, for instance, “I love you,” it says, “ ‘I love you.’ ” I was ironic for a year because that was the period during which I was infatuated with a certain woman in my office. I would like to point out that even during that year, I was loyal to my wife and daughter even to the tiniest scruple. It must have been awful
for them.

  Still, my infatuation ended, and so did my irony. Our family mended and moved on. It’s different with Susie, our daughter, who is sixteen years old. We’re afraid her current behavior is not merely a mood but a temperament.

  The three of us have had a tradition of eating breakfast in our pajamas, but lately Jane and I teeter down the stairs stiff and weary on our skinny legs, rubbing the crust out of our eyes, and Susie is already in some absurd yoga position on the floor of the breakfast nook. One morning we showed up and Susie was kneeling on the clean, bare linoleum floor in her little exercise getup, thighs smooth as plastic. Without ceasing to kneel, she lay back with her legs tucked back underneath her. The back of her head and the nape of her neck were touching the floor. We could see her ribs and the outline of her hard little abdomen under her soft cotton jersey. She inhaled deeply and said, “You two are like a furnace of foul odors.” She said it with such good humor that we didn’t know how to take it. The whole thing was very odd. From her position on the floor, all lean and contorted, she had this power over us. Jane and I looked at one another, and I could see that it was a bad day for Jane. We turned around and walked slowly up the stairs, no doubt with terrible posture, and we got back into bed and we fell asleep.

  She runs ten miles, she swims three miles, she rides her bike forty miles, she does her homework, she works at a tanning salon after school and saves her money, she goes out with her nice friends and has a good time engaging in moderate activities. She’s going to buy a new car. I want to say to her, “Susie, get a fake ID and have a few drinks. Buy a quart bottle of Wild Turkey and get sick. Borrow my car without asking. Skip school. Smoke pot. Have an affair with a forty-year-old alcoholic woman with a ring in her nose.” But Susie runs fifteen miles. She runs thirty miles.