Falling for Me, page 6
“And have you even read all of them once?”
I don’t even bother to feign offense. The fact is, I have plenty of books I’ve never cracked open as well as a number that I started and didn’t like enough to finish. I trail my fingers over to where the D’s transition into the F’s. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (which I’d grabbed off my mom’s aforementioned bookshelf at one point and never considered reading, since I was far too intimidated to even try to say Dostoevsky’s name, let alone read his work) and Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls (which I bought after hearing that she was a literary sensation and never read, for pretty much the same reason). “You never know when—”
“You’re going to be in the mood to pick up”—Chris bends down and pulls out You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder—“something with the word ‘crazy’ in its title that implies you have a disorder?”
Embarrassed, I grab the book from him. “A friend who thought I had ADD gave me that.”
“And do you?”
“I’m not sure.” I look at him and smile weakly. “I never actually read the book.”
Chris bends down again—alas, he’s in the self-help section—and I brace myself for what’s coming. “Toxic Parents? Affirmations for the Inner Child? Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction? Jesus, are you trying to reel men in or keep them away?”
I take the sexual dysfunction book from him and place it on my bedside table. “This one’s for a class I’m taking.”
“Well, a man glancing at your bookshelf doesn’t know that! The point is: you need to get rid of at least half of what you have here.” My eyes graze quickly over the shelves and while I see many books I passionately love, I notice a number of others that I don’t want: freebies sent by publishers looking for press, tomes I’d needed for magazine stories but never looked at again, odd publications I’d accumulated without even realizing it. I nod.
Then I watch Chris look at my armoire, coffee table, and dresser, all of which seem to be drowning under a sea of magazines and tchotchkes and other useless crap I hadn’t noticed until now. He points to a blue ceramic bowl on top of the armoire. “Why, for instance, do you need that bowl? What purpose does it serve?”
“My mom gave it to me.”
“And the purpose it serves is what? Reminding you that your mom gives you presents?”
He does have a point. And my mom’s gifts tend to break my heart a little: they’re always things that would be perfect for the daughter who would enjoy picking out antiques for the French provincial bedrooms or might want to create her own Spanish-tiled bathroom. Not that I’m willing to admit this. “There’s nothing more important than holding on to the things that have sentimental value,” I say to Chris. “I mean, when people’s buildings catch on fire, they don’t—”
“Oh, God,” Chris interrupts me as he lifts up my bed skirt, and I cringe, knowing he’s discovering that I’ve made the under-bed area into a place to keep everything I don’t want to see: boxes and boxes of things I never seem to need, gloves that have lost their mates but I still somehow haven’t given up on, and a sea of suitcases, all linked together through an unhappy combination of pet hair and dust. “You need a storage space,” he says as he stands up.
“But I’ve never understood the point of a storage space,” I say. “If you don’t need the stuff now, then why would you need it later?”
“Oh, you won’t,” he says cheerfully. “It’s so that we can avoid my having to ask you why”—he smiles and picks up a small square pillow that’s sitting on top of my white wicker chest—“you need this in your life?”
“My mom did the needlepoint on that! It’s a picture of her dog . . . which she made me because . . .” My voice starts to trail off. “Well, she made one for my brother of the dog he gave her and then she wanted me to have one, too.” Chris doesn’t say anything. “Both dogs are dead,” I finish feebly. A pause. “I see what you mean. And actually I think we have storage in the building.”
“Perfect.” Then he motions to the couch and says, “This has to go—and not to storage. To a place where we never need to look at it again.”
“Agreed.” I had this hideous brown couch because, on my way to Pottery Barn one day to buy a good couch, I’d wandered into the Housing Works thrift shop and seen what looked like a nice one on display. The sign next to it said “Bauhaus,” and while I didn’t know exactly what that meant, I was pretty sure it was a style that was considered elegant. Only when I got the thing inside my apartment did I come to understand why someone had donated it to Housing Works: it was potentially the ugliest thing on earth. I opt not to tell Chris that tale.
He’s examining the bookshelf again. “I’d say, donate at least a hundred.” I nod; purging myself of that many sounds like a relief. “And we need to get you a new bookshelf,” he adds.
I’d been quite proud of my dark wooden bookshelf, or more about how I’d gotten it by befriending an aspiring comedian selling furniture at an L.A. flea market and talking him into custom-building it for me at a very low price just before he was cast on a reality show where he redesigned people’s living spaces. I explain all of this to Chris.
“Meaning it was custom-built for your apartment in L.A.?” he asks. I nod. “Where you no longer live?” I nod again. “As soon as we get rid of it, we can put two smaller bookshelves in its place,” he says as he takes out measuring tape and holds it against the wall. Then he glances at the red aluminum table and chairs and smiles. “And who knows, maybe we can get rid of the patio furniture?” I nod yet again, not bothering to tell him that the red chairs leave indentations on my butt every time I sit in them.
Chris then moves into my entryway and begins to examine the cat litter box. He turns to face me. “Now I have a question.”
“I think I know what it is.” I glance at my gray-haired cat, now sniffing her ass, and brace myself to defend her.
“So you’re attached to them?”
“Very.”
“Had to ask.”
“Look, I get it,” I say. “Living with two furballs in a place this small sometimes makes me feel like I’m a few bad days away from Grey Gardens territory. And I know that cat hair, cat food, and cat litter are about the least alluring things on earth. But what am I supposed to do—give my cats away so that I can be sexier?”
Although this speech may make me sound like PETA’s proudest member, the truth is that I fantasize about a life without my cats on a semiregular basis. I’d acquired them before I got sober, back when I thought nothing of making a spontaneous decision that would impact the rest of my life. But no matter how crazy they drive me and how sick I am of cleaning up after them and arranging pet sitters and opening cans of wet food, I’m equally terrified of the day when I no longer have fluffy little beasts burrowing against me. I don’t say any of this to Chris, nor do I share with him the kitty voice I only use for talking to them.
“I understand,” he says. Then he looks from me to my ass-sniffing cat. “Still, the goal of this project of yours is to find a man?”
“No,” I say. “The goal is to prepare me for the next stage in life but also help me to appreciate where I am now.”
“The next stage being a serious relationship with a man?” he asks.
I nod. He looks at the litter box and then at my orange cat, who’s emerged from her perch under the bed to throw up a hairball and is now hissing at Chris with the fervor of a Bengal tiger. “I admire your determination,” he says quietly.
• • •
I meet Derek online.
As a woman, a right brain, and a Jew, I’m not remotely handy around the house and I have a lengthy history of finding incompetent scammers who charge me exorbitant fees to, say, install shelves that tumble to the ground once they’re gone and their number’s been changed. Never do I feel more single than when those shelves fall or I’m attempting to hang curtains or put together an IKEA table; I’m actually semiconvinced I kept dating someone who was wrong for me my first summer in New York because he knew how to operate a drill and equally convinced I broke things off with him when I discovered that he didn’t know how to operate the drill very well. Helen knows my pain. As she writes, “One of a single woman’s biggest problems are the pippy-poo, day-to-day annoyances that plague her.”
Derek, a carpenter and all-around fix-it guy with an ad on Craig’s List, is excellent at handling the pippy-poo. Dark-haired, with tattoos snaking around his bulging biceps, he’s completely different from the handymen of my past. For one, he’s a professional carpenter—does it as a full-time job and is merely picking up work on the side—which means that, unlike everyone else I’ve ever hired, he doesn’t take each request and try to handle it as quickly and cheaply as possible. Instead he analyzes, assesses, and takes his time. And, for reasons I can’t understand but am nonetheless incredibly grateful for, his prices are the most reasonable I’ve come across. This allows me the luxury of looking around my place and really seeing the way I’ve been living, which is when I notice a sea of horrors I’d been managing to mostly tune out: how my plasma TV is attached to a piece of wood on the wall of the main room because one of the previous carpenter scammers had drilled the wood up there when pieces of the wall kept falling off. And how my plastic Wal-Mart desk, purchased solely because it was the smallest one I could find and the alcove is tiny, is falling apart and sliding slowly to the ground. When Derek walks in, laughs at the random piece of TV-holding wood on my wall, and then says he can buy and install a linoleum block exactly the size of the space between the alcove walls for me to use as a desk, I feel certain he’s my karmic payback for my having endured all those handyman shysters over the years.
While he paints my apartment walls the sky blue color that Chris and I believe will be cheerier and cleaner-looking than the pale yellow I inherited from the previous tenant, I begin going through my bookshelf and pulling out every book I know I’ll never read, stacking as many as I can into my portable shopping cart that makes me feel like I’m a little old lady. I wheel them over to Housing Works and return for more, making six trips in all. Then I box up and bring down to my newly rented basement storage space everything I’ve determined I don’t need right away—work and tax files from the past decade, cords that have long since lost the devices they’re meant to power, lamps, suitcases, copies of my books, and everything else that was creating clutter. Despite my intention to make the storage space organized and well marked, it quickly becomes a horror show—brimming with objects stacked on top of other objects in a way that ensures it will all tumble to the ground at some point. I close the door behind me, hoping I never need anything from the middle of the pile and knowing full well that I will.
Next, as Derek continues to paint, Chris and I examine my curtains: four cheap-looking green panels from Pottery Barn that hang over two windows with bars on them—the whole look suggesting either tenement or state-subsidized mental institution. I can’t do anything about the bars—there’s a fire escape right outside my window and even though I’m willing to have the bars removed and take my chances with would-be thieves, my landlord isn’t. While I’ve known for some time how terrible the windows look, nothing I’ve tried seems to help: the green panels were preceded by even uglier shades, which were preceded by even worse blinds.
“What, exactly, is the problem with my curtains?” I ask Chris.
“Everything,” he answers without hesitation. “The color, the fabric, the length, the rods, and the fact that the rods look like they’re falling off the walls.”
“Yikes.” I think back to the day in college when, hungover and irritated by the bright sun poking through the flimsy dorm shade, I nailed my comforter to the wall in front of the window and allowed it to serve as my curtain for the rest of the year. I opt not to tell Chris about that.
“Why don’t we go deal with it now, while the horror of what’s wrong is still fresh?” he asks.
At Restoration Hardware, we figure out that four panels of light silver sage, casual twill, grommet-top, floor-length drapes that we both like, along with the required rods, will cost close to a thousand dollars. I feel dizzy but Chris reminds me of our conversation about how there are certain things you have to spend on and explains that curtains is one of them. While a part of me pines for the days a comforter nailed to the wall seemed like a perfectly adequate window covering, I also know that having to dip into my savings account in order to shield my domicile from the outside world is something of a rite of passage—a thought I have to repeat to myself again when Chris reminds me that we need the curtains to be 94 inches and since they only come in lengths that are shorter or longer than that, I’m going to have to get the 96-inch panels and then pay more to have them shortened. He tells me to go home and measure the distance between the wall and the shelf below the window so I can make sure the curtains will hang out far enough. The list of things I never knew about grows longer.
I end up doing everything he suggests—measuring the space, returning to the store to buy the curtains, having them shortened, and bringing Derek back to do the hanging. And although I can’t believe I could have bought a round-trip ticket to Paris for the amount I spent, I have to admit that they’re gorgeous and hang perfectly. Helen says that “an elegant apartment has unmistakable traces of grandeur around it,” and while some may not consider my wall of curtains the embodiment of Versailles, for the first time since I moved in, the window area looks so good that I stop even noticing the bars. A man spending the night could open his eyes, glance at the thick panels, and feel basked in luxury.
Before I even have time to relish this new addition, however, Chris announces that we’re taking a trip to the Brooklyn IKEA.
Once there, we make our way to the couch section, where Chris points to a simple, modern piece called a Karlstad; we both like the cream color. We then examine bookshelves and kitchen tables but Chris explains that they don’t have what we’re looking for. Thinking of Helen’s line about how if you work with a decorator, you should “put yourself in his or her hands” and not “interfere too much,” I simply nod. Then I watch Chris select a white file cabinet on wheels, an oval full-length mirror, and an enormous white lamp for me.
When we get back to my place, Chris helps me bring my new mirror, file cabinet, and lamp inside and, just for a second, it feels like we’re a couple putting our place together. But then he remembers that he has another appointment and the door shuts behind him before I’ve even had a chance to really let myself feel how nice it was, for once, to not be in it alone.
May I please speak to someone in customer service?” I inquire. I’ve learned to start off these regular calls to IKEA pleasantly, carried along by the delusional belief that this time, I’ll manage to unearth some information as to the whereabouts of my couch.
The initial round of calls was confusing more than anything. I’d phone the number listed on my receipt and speak to someone in a warehouse who had no knowledge of my couch, my order number, or me. Then I’d call IKEA directly and be transferred around for a few hours, after which I would either be hung up on or hear a person I knew I’d never hear from again promise that he or she would find out what was going on and call me right back.
Sometimes I’m told that my couch is on its way to the warehouse and that the people from the warehouse will be calling me any day to let me know when I can expect my delivery, but usually I encounter a person who expresses sheer confusion over my situation—who doesn’t know why my couch hasn’t arrived yet or what I can do to figure out any more information. Depending on my mood—often determined by how much better or worse the “IKEA delivery nightmare” stories I’ve found online and spent my hold time reading are making me feel—my tone is usually somewhere between irritable and abusive.
Chris isn’t the bastion of reassurance I want him to be—“Par for the course,” he trills when I relay what’s happening, though he does add, “unfortunately”—and I hate how much I wish I had a man to help me. Will, I just know, would be able to call IKEA, calmly relay the necessary information, and get the couch to show up the next day. He had that clear, calm focus that all but forced people to respond.
One of the days that I’m on hold, I break down and Google him. I had promised myself I wouldn’t and had resisted the urge so far but a combination of frustration and self-pity suddenly supersede my desire to move on. And I find an ungodly number of photos, as well as article after article praising his talent, courage, and individuality. For some reason, looking at all of this forces me to face something I hadn’t wanted to before: that who he was and what he’d achieved impressed the hell out of me. When we were out in public and people recognized him, I’d smile at the eager-to-please faces, the faces that couldn’t believe the good fortune they had to have stumbled across someone they admired so much, the faces that respected me because of my proximity to such greatness. My ego would alight at the notion that he could be around anyone he wanted, and had picked me.
Before long, my Internet search becomes obsessive. I can’t stop—I let one link lead to the next. Eventually I Google his name with the word “wife” next to it, looking for clues, wanting to see and read about the woman who got to sleep next to him at night and share his life. But there wasn’t really anything—no photos and just one interview he gave where he mentioned how much he loved her. I feel stupid, like I’ve been misled. But I know that’s silly. Of course he loved her. What did I think I was going to find—quotes about how he actually didn’t? She’s the mother of his children, the woman he’d chosen to spend his life with.
Then I start deriding myself. I’m an idiot. Everyone knows not to believe a married man. How could I have thought that this guy—this guy whose talent and courage was widely praised—actually loved me? I think about Helen’s line, “Heaven knows a married man on an all-out I Love You campaign can be one of God’s most persuasive creatures,” and curse my naïveté. At the same time, as I let my keyboard lead me to increasingly irrelevant information about him, I know that what we shared was real. In a way, it still is. A strong part of me is certain he’s thinking about me, too. But, now that the pain of finding and then losing that passionate connection has abated, I’m grateful that I can somehow stop myself from reaching out to him. I let my fingers lead me back to the IKEA delivery stories.
