365 Nights Page 18

  I know, I can’t believe it either.

  I went home to visit my parents and scheduled to meet my oldest friend, Marcie, for a drink. I worked my entire day to accommodate this evening out with her. I wore out the kids at the pool. I fed them early and I transitioned them to Brad so that I had enough time to take a leisurely shower and blow out my hair. I left the house and was off to meet Marcie at The Usual Suspects, a local bar on the other side of town. It was summer in the mountains and the weather was so gorgeous it deserved a special name, like breezi-abulous or something. I was relaxed, free, and clean—feelings that were hard to come by in those days. I was listening to the Eagles, basking in a peaceful, easy feeling.

  I drove past my high school—a proud, impressive stone building that sits regally on a hill. I remembered my high school career—friends, beach trips, teachers, and of course, Alex, a high school boyfriend. We had a bad breakup—primarily because I thought I would marry Alex and he did not think he would marry me. Not exactly on the same page, the two of us. He was a nice guy, and as far as high school beaus are concerned, I did okay. “Hmmm,” I found myself thinking, “I wonder what he’s doing now . . .” So I decided to find out. I called Information, and before I knew it, Information had connected me to Alex’s home phone, and that phone was ringing.

  This is a good time for me to share a few bits of advice for those folks who decide out of the blue to call an old boyfriend from high school. The first and most critical piece of advice is this: Don’t do it! Forget about closure. Forget about fond memories. Forget about that lame excuse that he really cared about you and you want to know how he’s doing. Forget that you are freshly bathed, driving across town with the windows down and feeling great. Just put down the phone and walk (or drive) away and meet your friends. It’s just not going to go well. I promise.

  I didn’t call for closure. I had gotten that many years back when Alex had called to “check in” and hinted at a possible reunion. “Are you kidding me?” I screamed into the phone. “Really! After you totally hosed me for a college cheerleader and stomped all over me and left me for dead, now you want to check in?” I was lathered up, I mean this breakup was a major emotional setback that I was still recovering from. “Listen, Alex,” I fired into the phone. “I don’t want you to ever call me again. In fact, I don’t want you to ever ask my friends about me or even think about me—do you understand? We are so done.” There was a long pause.

  “Well, you don’t have to be such a bitch about it,” he finally said and hung up. That was some serious closure, girls. So in a way, I guess it was my turn to “reach out.”

  If, however, you choose to ignore my first line of advice, please work through a few key elements before you dial.1. What exactly are you going to say that doesn’t make you sound like a pathetic idiot?

  2. If the call goes to voice mail, what exactly will you do that doesn’t make you seem like a pathetic idiot?

  3. If you choose to leave a message—again, what will you say that doesn’t make you sound . . . well, you get the idea.

  You’d be right if you guessed that I was totally unprepared to address any of these questions. One of the curses of twenty-first -century technology is that it is nearly impossible to stalk and/or hang up on people without being found out or being terrified that you will be found out. So I was stuck.

  “Hello?” a small, reedy voice asked.

  Oh, crap. Critical Element No. 4: What will you do if someone other than your ex answers the phone? Oh, the clumsiness of it all.

  “Um, hi, is your dad there?”

  “You mean Daddy? Uh-huh, hang on.”

  “Dddddaaaaaaaaddddddddy. Telephooooooone.”

  Wow, now everything was moving in slow motion. And it dawned on me as I cruised across town with the wind blowing in my hair that this was a royally bad idea. I won’t even bore you with the details except to say that it took Alex forever to get to the phone because he was on his business line when I called, and when he picked up my call, he asked if he could call me right me back. And then I said no and he insisted yes and then I said no and we had this uncomfortable back-and-forth exchange until the caller on his other line actually hung up on him and suddenly he had all the time in the world. As if things could get any more awkward. I managed to find out that he worked in technology (I think that’s what he said) and was married (that I’m sure of) with three sons (or maybe daughters), including a set of twins (from what I can recall). But this is what I did remember—he was not going to our twentieth high school reunion because (and I’m paraphrasing) “I got so knee-walking drunk at our tenth reunion I’m not sure anyone will talk to me this time around. I was hungover for days. Hell, it was awful.”

  Well, there you have it.

  I gave him a quick update on me (as if he really wanted to know), wished him well, hung up, and pressed down on the accelerator. I sat up straight in my seat, shaking my head as if to get rid of the mental picture of a slightly balding guy knee-walking drunk at our reunion and his wife having to lug him into a car. As I pulled into the parking lot of the bar, I realized I was sweating. So much for that peaceful easy feeling.

  Marcie and her friends could not believe I called him. Marcie, my friend since practically birth, was impressed. “That took a lot of guts, sweetie. I’m proud of you—you should feel empowered.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “It was the most gawky, discombobulating thing I have brought upon myself in a long time. Can I still be a dork at thirty-nine? What was I thinking?”

  Well, clearly, I still wasn’t thinking when I got home because I couldn’t wait to repeat the tale of my awkward phone encounter with Alex. My brother and mother were appalled. “You did that?” My dad laughed out loud—“Good for you, how is old Alex anyway?” My sister-in-law was indifferent—“Who’s Alex?” But here’s the kicker: Brad was peeved—“Why would you ever want to call an old boyfriend?” And really, I had no idea. For Brad, it’s like watching José Mesa’s blown save again. Why would he want to relive that kind of thing?

  “I mean, what were you thinking when you decided to call Alex?” Brad asked me later that night as we were getting ready for bed.

  “Clearly, hon, I wasn’t thinking. Which is what makes the story so funny and painful.”

  “Well, I don’t find it funny, I think it’s weird that you would want to call Alex after all these years. Would you approve of me calling an old flame?”

  Well, it would depend. There is a big difference in my book between a high school girlfriend and a former fiancée. High school was, sadly, dog years ago . . . but a fiancée? Well, that was practically yesterday. So the same rules just don’t apply. I guess I could probe deep, deep inside my psyche and come up with some explanation for why on that beautiful day I felt the need to call my high school boyfriend. But I don’t think there is any explanation. I think, for once, it is what it is. “Well, there’s nothing really to it,” I answered. “And if there were anything to it, I wouldn’t have shared it with the world and I certainly wouldn’t have told you.”

  He studied that point for a while. And I studied him. I was really intrigued by the fact that he was bothered—okay, maybe even jealous—that I called my old high school boyfriend. I mean, Brad Muller is pretty great and so much more than I deserve day in and day out (except when he refuses to eat breakfast for dinner) that to compare him with Alex is very nearly impossible. So on the one hand, it made me feel good. But on the other hand, it felt so, well, “high school,” almost silly and very unnecessary. Like when Marcie and her boyfriend would pick me up for high school in his white Camaro with AC/DC blasting so loud that I had a viselike headache before AP English with Mrs. Reinhardt (it was usually the other way around). If there was some emotion other than nosiness embedded in this gesture, then I am not self-aware enough to know what it is. So instead I just pinned it all on Brad and his stuff, which was silly, unnecessary, and very “high school” on my part.

  So then I asked some girlfriend
s about it, and while I find this terribly hard to admit, they disagreed with me. “Just because you don’t care about an old boyfriend doesn’t mean you don’t care about an old boyfriend.” Well, that was a bit cryptic. “Why did you call him? Why didn’t you just Google him?” Apparently, Googling old boyfriends is practically an art so I dropped everything and immediately Googled Alex (as I suspected, nothing to note on the World Wide Web). Another asked why I didn’t coordinate a “run-in” with him so I could check him out in person. As my girlfriend noted, “I ran into a Top Five All-Time Crush the other day and I thought, “Damn, he’s still cute after twenty years.” I don’t know why I didn’t do a run-in.

  And before I pull out all that psychobabble about how our pasts craft who we are today and blah, blah, blah, the long and short of it is this: Sometimes you just want to know. Sometimes you’re just driving across town, listening to the Eagles and waxing nostalgic about a nice time in your life, and you just want to know how someone is doing. There is no ulterior motive or current flaw in your life other than the fact that you’re human and you just want to know. And of course, there is no wrong in that. Certainly you can’t divorce yourself from your past but it doesn’t mean you regret the present. I suppose I could have Googled Alex (less embarrassing) or coordinated a “run-in” with him (more work) or simply let the moment pass without action (definitely my best bet). And perhaps I would have felt differently had I discovered that Alex was living some over-the-top life. But in reality, he wasn’t. And if I had to say who had fared better after we “moved on,” I would have to say me (and that has nothing to do with anything except my own hubris).

  Later I would tell Brad: “Honey, I don’t know why we’re even talking about this. But here is one thing I can tell you for sure—Alex is not having sex every day with moi. You are.” It’s not like I was keeping Alex in the bullpen in case I needed to call him up later. No, we were a bad fit the first time around.

  Nice save, Charla. Batter up!

  I do have a friend who told me that if anything happened to Hubby No. 1, she has someone waiting in said bullpen. Now I haven’t quizzed her at length on this second-string guy, but I do know that he’s pals with her current husband, if that doesn’t beat all. And in reality, this probably happens more than we’d like to admit. My mother always kiddingly claimed the only man for whom she would leave my father was Robert Urich. Remember him? He was in Vega$ (I love that $) and Spenser for Hire. Unfortunately, he died in 2002, which was terribly sad for my mother and probably not so much for my dad, who surely had grown tired of her swooning.

  Who hasn’t thought, at the end of a really bad argument with her husband, what life would be like if only she had married the one who got away—especially a good-looking guy like Robert Urich? Who hasn’t sat at the computer at work, taking a break from writing up that report, and Googled her ex-boyfriend (apparently every woman in America but me). While there is something seemingly uncomfortable about this strategy, you do hear of many men whose wives have been suffering for years from cancer, and when these poor women finally pass, the widowed men are dating again within months. While this may appear shocking and upsetting, the reality of living with death for years probably made the surviving spouse want to get back in the game, and quickly.

  But sometimes that relief pitcher can be worse than the starter—I mean, they are a “backup” after all. One friend’s sister got divorced, and she looked up an old boyfriend. This is the man she’d been dreaming of—they had a really passionate relationship with fights, and drama. And he was single, and they did get back together. After a couple of weekends away together, she thought, “What on earth was I thinking?” It had been that perfect romance in her memory when she was unhappy with her husband. She was sorely disappointed when she met up again with the real deal.

  Perhaps people break up and make a trade because they think that it’s going to be better with this guy, and the grass is greener. Sure, marriages break up for lots of tragically sound reasons: infidelity, abuse, the list can go on. But to kick out the starter because you’re bored with him, or because he’s not scoring well, that’s just unfair. As a friend of mine noted on her second marriage: “I compare and contrast my first husband with my second husband all the time. Then I finally figured out the common denominator is me.”

  I think both Brad and I would be devastated if we found out that the other had somebody, at least mentally, warming up for us in the bullpen. However, I do think if either one of us died, we both would like the other to remarry . . . But on the one hand, my friend does have a point and I’m paraphrasing when she says, “If my husband dumped me for a bench player, it had better be someone not remotely like me. Because if he dumped me to marry a better version of me? Well, I would be really pissed off. And besides, everyone backslides, so he’d really be marrying me all over again. So why make the trade?”

  On an alternate tack, one of my friends says she’s not interested in remarrying should the worst happen to her marriage. But she does have someone in the bullpen, only it’s not a man. She would move in with a woman, and no, she’s not a lesbian. She just thinks everyone needs a wife . . . even women. “I would live in a house with a female roommate who would do her share of the cooking, cleaning, and maintenance,” she commented. “Wouldn’t you miss being married?” I asked. “Nah, you can always date. And then come home to a nice, clean, and well-organized house.” It does sound pretty good, doesn’t it? I guess that’s what you call a free agent.

  While we’re all dreaming of a world where men reject sports and instead favor a good Lifetime movie and a glass of chilled chardonnay, I recognize that this is never going to happen in my galaxy. Instead, Brad and I cozy up with some Bud Lights to watch some major sports drama unfold in Technicolor. While I may take breaks to read my book, thumb through a cooking magazine, or fold some laundry, we’re there together. And if his teams lose, no worries. We’re on to our game of doubles . . .

  MAY

  May Flowers . . . I Mean Showers

  “Okay, honey,” I said as I came out of the bathroom, pulling my hair into a ponytail. My teeth were brushed and my face was freshly scrubbed. “You ready?”

  “You know, sweetie, I think I’m going to take a pass tonight, if you don’t mind,” Brad said, hidden from view behind the pages of Newsweek.

  My hands stopped in midair, and I very slowly turned around. “I’m sorry, but could you repeat that? I thought I heard you say you were going to take a pass.”

  He peeked around the magazine. “I am. I’m tired, and I have a big meeting tomorrow, and we’ve been having a lot of sex lately.”

  As if I hadn’t noticed.

  The children are almost done with school. The garden is ablaze with blooming azaleas, and the crepe myrtles are getting ready to show. It’s now eleven months into this year of daily intimacy. I’m feeling like I’m running a marathon and getting agonizingly close to the finish line. I go through moments of elation—a real endorphin rush that I have been able to make good on this gift to Brad. And then there are moments where I’ve hit the proverbial wall, and feel like beating myself over the head with the nearest flat iron or maybe a spatula.

  While I have mixed emotions about what we’ve done, Brad’s emotions have been pretty consistent—utter and sheer delight. It’s not until spring that he’s even exercised his right to take a pass (well, there was that New Year’s Eve thing). To me, that’s an amazingly long stretch of time, and it’s likely that if Brad had offered me this birthday present and it was Day 305, I would have “passed” on the offer about 200 times now already, give or take a dozen. Ten months into this offering and the difference between the sexes when it comes to sex couldn’t be more evident. It was an “aha” moment. I was beginning to suspect that men and women were so totally on opposite ends of the sex continuum that men would always take the opportunity to have sex, and women, after the first three years of a relationship, would try to avoid sex. It was comforting to know that after a certai
n period of satiety, and exhaustion, Brad could admit that he didn’t need to have a “go” that night. Across the huge gulf of sex drive, a bridge had been built.

  My girlfriends agree that men are so differently wired from women in this regard that we will never know what it is like to have that kind of drive. One friend, the mother of three children under the age of five, said, “My husband knows he’s a frisky dog, and I’m not. I don’t want to all the times he does— which is all the time. While sex is important to me intellectually and it’s really important to my marriage, it’s harder to turn on to it. He knows not to feel rejected because he knows I’m not wired like him.”

  But a lot of men do feel rejected, my husband included. It wasn’t until this daily gift that Brad finally admitted that my dubious dodging—while not an outright “no” to sex—still stung. “I know you’re avoiding sex and it bums me out,” he later told me. “It’s humiliating to have to barter or game for sex. Why can’t you want it as much as I do? I’m your husband, for Pete’s sake, not some cheesy college guy looking to get lucky.”

  My best friend, who has never struggled with her weight, sometimes “forgets to eat.” She is energetic, athletic, a driving Type A who is always on the go—running errands, running a marathon, or running her three kids somewhere. Now I’m sorry, you can forget to pick up the dry cleaning, or forget that it’s “Pajama Day” at your daughter’s school, or that you had a 7:30 A.M. staff meeting that you slept through. But forget to eat? Never for me. But she is tall and thin and I’m, well, not—so maybe she has a point. I take such pleasure in food, in taking a meal, in cooking and preparing a meal, and in all things gastronomical, that “forgetting to eat” is very nearly impossible for me. I mean, God intended for us to eat—that is what fuels our body. And apparently, He also designed sex for that whole procreation thing. So yes, I will never miss a meal. And no, sex doesn’t have the same urgency for me as feeding my hunger. But I wonder, is that how it works for men? Do men take such pleasure in sex, in taking sex, in thinking about and preparing for sex, that “forgetting to have sex” is very nearly impossible for them? Perhaps if I likened having sex with my pleasure in food, I could for a tiny moment—albeit very tiny—appreciate where Brad is coming from. Or maybe not.