It was time to pick it up, find a new knife, and hack my own trail through the woods.
It was a busy morning, so it was noon in September before I made it to the cavernous lobby of the Boston tower where John had asked me to fetch him. Hovering behind a dais, humorless security guards pointed me to the express elevator to the 15th–20th floors. The lawyers were all wearing the same dark suit, but only one was pacing the perimeter with his head down like the bears in the Paris zoo. That was John.
In greeting, he gave me a jar of jelly his mother had made from wild blackberries picked from the back of the house in Maine. I gave him a glass Christmas ornament shaped like an alligator. We were opposites right down to the kinds of gifts we’d exchanged. He’d given me a jar of sentiment. I’d given him box of symbolism. The ornament didn’t survive the final leg of its journey; the tail had snapped off en route. I was mortified. He just chucked the broken shards in the bin and whisked me to a French bistro around the corner.
There was so much chemistry between us that even total strangers commented (to me, in the Ladies’ Room, giving me “thumbs up!” under the stalls): “Are you guys on a date? He’s really cute!” Uh, thank you? This date was a beacon of hope for pudgy women everywhere. But I wasn’t besotted, infatuated, or convinced I’d met my destiny. He happened to be six feet tall with thick hair and broad shoulders. So what? I don’t eat with my eyes. I smell with my tongue. Why should I care what he looks like? All that matters is that his skin whiffs of honey. To another woman, he might stink like an elephant after a hard run. He was, after all, a Republican in a liberal town, exuding white male privilege from his well-scrubbed pores. Didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. Loved this great country, and liked to shoot guns.
“Err,” I started, casting around for a conversational-type response. Finally, I squeaked: “I don’t shave my armpits!”
“Good,” he replied, and polished off the last bite of his steak.
Man-like, he ate everything placed in front of him without comment or complaint. The only problem with his food was that there wasn’t enough of it. Hungrily, he eyed the other half of my lunch. “Would you like to finish it?” I asked politely, thinking that he really should. He waited two beats and polished off the rest of my meal.
Beep! Time’s up!
He’d warned me that he had a business meeting at one, and so lunch ended with a swift peck on the cheek and a bellowed, “Bye!” as he hurried down the street.
What?
John wasn’t the kind of man who’d say, “I’ll call you,” just to have something to say. I’m not the kind of woman who sits around waiting for a man to call, because I hate the phone. Even for me, though, the end to this meeting was abrupt and strange. The more I thought about it, the more perplexed I became. Jumping on the T, I took the Red Line to Harvard, where I sat and fumed at Widener Library, working myself into a furious lather until I finally reached the point where I folded my arms across my chest, crossed my legs, scrunched up my face, and told myself: “If he doesn’t call me in ten seconds, I will never speak to him again.” Then I started a silent countdown. “ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”
My cell phone rang.
This is why I hate the phone. Having a phone gives callers the strange idea that you’ll answer it.
The horrible device kept ringing. Students were giving me dirty looks, so I grabbed my bag, dashed into the vestibule, flipped the phone open and hissed, “What?”
“Hello?” John said in a slightly perplexed tone. “You called. So I’m calling you back.”
“I didn’t call,” I said sulkily. “I’ve been in the library. You called me.”
There was a silence. “But I heard you . . .”
Let’s not start up with that, shall we? “How was the meeting?” I cut him off.
“Fine.” There was another silence. “Do you want to have dinner?”
“No,” I replied peevishly. “I’m not hungry. We just ate, remember?”
“I didn’t mean right away,” he sighed in exasperation. “Tomorrow. That’s Friday night. Okay? ”
“Okay.”
“Come meet me in my office, and we’ll go from there.”
“Fine,” I grumbled.
“Fine,” he grumbled back. “I gotta get back to work,” he said abruptly, and hung up the phone.
No wonder chit-chat over lunch was a disaster. To communicate, we had to bicker.
To my great relief, we never made it to dinner. We argued all the way to Wellesley, and I ended up staying all weekend. He took the opportunity to explain to me that when a woman puts off meeting a man for months, and then makes a date for lunch and shows up wearing pants, the man will assume that she’s not very interested in him. As a rebuttal, I pointed out that a) I’d been in France, 2) the pants were Parisian, and iii) I’d warned him from the outset that I was fussy, and it was unlikely that I’d be attracted to him. I didn’t want to give him ideas. My argument was just as convincing as you’d expect, given that I’d spent the past three days in his bed.
My sister was not amused. “What if he’s an axe murderer?” she objected, because she thinks all corporate lawyers are axe murderers.
“He’s not an axe murderer,” I said firmly.
“But how do you know?” she fretted.
I knew because of the third law of Newtonian mechanics. We were equal actions and opposite reactions, agreeing on nothing, alike only in our stubbornness. He was bullheaded and impatient. I loathe being rushed. We fought. Real sparks flew, the kind that singed my skin and vanished in a tiny puff. John could make me so angry that I refused to talk to him for days, imposing utter silence that was worse that ignoring him. It turned him into a thought bubble yet to be filled. He had to come find me if he wanted to have words.
And where was I? I’d gone to Arizona for a semester. Surprise! We fought about the fact that I was in Arizona. Then, bellowing loudly, he came to visit. We went on hikes through red rocks in the desert. I returned to New England. Pretty soon, I was back in Paris for the summer. Howling furiously, he came to visit me. We had a hilarious time chasing cows in Normandy. I returned to the U.S. Before long, I landed in London. We fought about the fact that I was in London. Then, complaining bitterly, he came to visit me. We laughed our heads off riding the double-decker buses to the Tower. This back-and-forth went on until I got so tired of him calling me all the time that I moved in with him in Wellesley. The only thing that changed was that I started doing more of his laundry.
Little things for me started appearing around the house as if clever mice were making them. A baking dish. A purple hairbrush. A pair of fuzzy slippers. A list bearing a strange similarity to the “pan, a comb, and maybe a cat” that Scientologist grooms promise their brides. In what unfathomable place in the male psyche are these things located? Thankfully, there was nothing sentimental about any of these items. They were even less personal than the nylon stockings my halmoni would send every Christmas, the thigh-high kind with tourniquet elastic tops sized for legs the size of chopsticks. By the time I’d become a decrepit spinster of twenty-two—“Too old! Why you not marry?”—she’d given up the stockings and switched to bath sheets, which is a Korean grandmother’s way of saying “Too fat! Regular bath towels too small!” John knew perfectly well that the fact that I was living with him did not make us a couple. There was him, there was me, and there was lizard brain. The reptile kept me coming back, because it really liked honey. But I will leave, as I always do, because the world is wide and it is my nature.
Then, one day, he surprised me with a gift. It was a plastic grocery bag coated in crumbs from the forest. I opened it. Inside was the heart of a deer he’d shot himself.
Perplexed,