Five Things I Can't Live Without (4 page)

“And you don’t want to be a writer with a day job.”

“Well,” I faltered slightly. “I don’t want to be a writer with
that
day job. I could be a writer like Kathy.”

“A ghostwriter.”

“Yes.”

“If it’s so easy to break in, why hasn’t she helped you do it already?” he asked. It occurred to me that it was not an insensible question.

“I never asked her.” Which was true enough.

“What makes you want to be a ghostwriter?”

“I don’t know! I just want to be a writer.” I sank down on the couch. “Stop it, this thing you’re doing. This deconstruction of my dream.”

“I’m not taking it apart. I’m trying to help you put it together. A dream needs to be broken down into goals, right? And objectives.”

“What’s the difference between a goal and an objective?” I asked. It was my turn to stump him.

“That’s what I mean about the breakdown. You start with the dream: ‘I want to be a writer.’ Then you say, ‘My goal is to write for travel magazines,’ and then you look at the steps it takes to reach that goal and those would be your objectives.” He stood up. “You want a drink? I’m doing a shot.”

I shook my head and watched him walk to the beautiful mahogany bar he’d built into the living-room wall. He’d combed estate sales until he’d found one he both loved and could afford. He loved bars—not the actual watering holes, which he liked pretty well, but the bars themselves. He’d never been to bartending school, but he could mix anything and he came up with new concoctions all the time. Naively, that night I’d thought maybe he’d invent the Animal Liberation in my honor. Instead, I was watching with mounting anxiety as he downed top-shelf tequila.

Numerically, there are many software engineers in the Bay Area. Categorically, there are only two: those who want to stay in computers, and those who want to do something else. I only date the latter, and I’ve dated four of them. One wanted to be a musician, one wanted to be a cartoonist, one wanted to be a barfly, near as I could tell (which made for the temporarily arresting combination of the sexy bad boy in a programmer’s body), and Dan wanted to own a bookstore with a liquor license. He figured it would officially combine the bookstore and the pickup joint. He had this vision of writers doing readings there and then hanging out at the burnished, turn-of-the-century bar drinking a Scotch with him. It was an appealing vision for me, too. I liked the thought of being the proprietress of such an establishment, mingling with literati, maybe even being literati someday.

Dan’s not one of those people who tells you all his dreams the first time you meet him. He’s not the kind to doodle the floor plans for his bookbar on a napkin. I wouldn’t want that kind anyway. Dream whores get boring after a while. When you’re underemployed and you meet another person who’s underemployed, telling your dreams right off the bat is the quickest way to establish your identity. But Dan didn’t consider himself underemployed. He generally felt lucky to make a good living at something he just happened upon out of college, and he’d been living below his means for years to save up for the bookbar. He wasn’t cheap; he just figured out what mattered to him and put his money there. If something didn’t matter, he didn’t spend on it. He could probably have started the business already, but he’d done a lot of research and was trying to do it at the optimal time with the optimal amount of capital, so he figured it’d be in five years or so. He got antsy sometimes, but mostly he was okay with the wait.

And I loved him for this. I loved him for his methodical mind and his patience. I admired him tremendously. From the first time I met him, I adored the way he tilted his head to really consider what I was saying, and the confidently long pauses he allowed to elapse between my question and his answer. I adored it, but it made me self-conscious about my own answers. I wondered if what I’d said stood up to that kind of scrutiny. Scrutiny’s the wrong word, though; it implies appraisal and there was something wonderfully accepting about those pauses. It was more like I wondered if what I’d said deserved such consideration.

“I wish I was like you,” I said sadly.

He sat down close to me, and his voice was low. “What you did scares the shit out of me. You’re someone who can just say, ‘Fuck it, I’m gone.’”

I took his hand. “I’m just getting here.”

“I know I didn’t ask you to live here the right way. It should have been more of a thing, an event.” He looked at me intently. “It was like we just brokered a deal. I should have told you that I wanted you to live here so you could be the central part of my life. I should have told you it was because you matter the most.”

I teared up. “I feel that way, too.”

“I just wouldn’t have done what you did. But maybe it was right for you.”

“It felt right. Just gut-level right.”

“I hear that. But I’m big on backup plans. And sweetie, I love you, but you ain’t got any.”

“I know.”

“I can try to help you come up with some.”

“I’d like that.” I kissed him. “Thank you.”

We didn’t sleep together that night.

Rationally, I knew that wasn’t a big deal. Couples of six months don’t necessarily have sex every time they see each other. People have differing sex drives, and there are couples who have sex once a year, and if both people are satisfied with that, it’s a perfectly fine arrangement.

See, I knew all that. And this was not the first time we’d slept in the same bed and not had sex. But it was the first time we’d had a meaningful conversation that ended with us validating the great love that we shared, and
then
climbed into bed and went immediately to sleep. Rather, Dan went right to sleep. I lay there wondering why he hadn’t reached for me. Was he disgusted by my impulsiveness? Despite his declarations that he wanted me to be more a part of his life, did he doubt that I was a worthy partner? Was he regretting the decision for me to move in?

Or was he just tired? Could it possibly be that simple?

I reminded myself that for Dan, it absolutely could be that simple. He wasn’t the one lying awake contemplating the state of our relationship. There was no evidence that he had stopped loving me during the course of the evening. There was no evidence that I had become repugnant or that he had lost his potency. We just weren’t having sex that night, simple as that.

But why?
Why weren’t we having sex?

Sex was one of my habitual areas of overthinking. It was probably because the act of sex meant so much to me; it was when my brain shut off temporarily and sensation took over. Sex with someone I love is the best respite from meta-life.

I also subscribe to the “sex as the barometer of the relationship” theory. That means I look at the duration, connection, calculation, level of inventiveness, and overall quality of the sex; I try to read these like tea leaves. I’ve gotten better at recognizing the normal pattern of six-week fall-off and then the three-month fall-off, and I’ve stopped worrying about them as much as I used to. The later spikes and lulls, though, still tend to get way too much attention.

I was well aware that all that thinking was anathema to the delightful thoughtlessness of good sex itself, but I had cause to be wary. I’d had four relationships that ended at almost exactly one year. Each time, we started with strong chemistry that progressed to love and ended with me having almost no sex drive at all. And when my sex drive was low, so was my tolerance for my boyfriends’ peccadilloes. I’d get critical of them, then I’d get critical of myself for being critical of them, and the whole relationship inevitably soured like milk. But I was determined to do it differently with Dan. This time I would crack the code of my meta-sex life, and everything would fall into place.

Dan let out a snort and rolled onto his back. I thought about waking him up by going down on him. Then we could have sex and I could, literally, put all these thoughts to bed. But did I actually want to have sex, or did I just want to prove something? Would I be using sex to quiet my head?

Oh, who cared? I sunk down under the covers, and reached for him.

Chapter 3

D
an was right: I had no plan. And every time he tried to initiate one of his patented dream/goal/objectives conversations with me, I wriggled away. I hadn’t slept in four nights, and the glow of self-determination had burned out, replaced by the terrible realization that I had not a prospect in sight. I’d just been drifting along, waiting for something to lift me out of my life, as if a publisher from Conde Nast would go looking for a puppy on the animal rescue Web site and be so struck by one of my bios that she’d recruit me right then and there. I’d tripped into that job and even though I never meant to stay, I’d done nothing to leave: I’d long ago stopped looking at job listings or trying to network, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d considered the next step in my career. When was the last time I’d even used the word “career” in a sentence? Maybe meta-life was an elaborate scheme cooked up by my brain to avoid realistically thinking about the future.

On Sunday morning, Dan and I went to brunch, the meal that was always my treat. I’d been keeping my rising anxiety to myself because I didn’t want him to think he was moving in with a basket case. (He’d signed on for the manicured neuroticism of, say, Bridget Jones; I couldn’t suddenly give him Zelda Fitzgerald.) But that day, when he ordered a mimosa, it took a concentrated act of will to avoid screaming, “Are you trying to break me here?!!” My stomach was knotted with tension as I tried to distract us from the pink elephant, and brunch came to $38 plus tip. I said I had to go home and do some organizing for the move, which was true: I’d been spectacularly unproductive all week. But what I really needed was to talk to Kathy.

Kathy had been my friend for almost ten years. We’d met in a creative writing workshop in college at a time when we shared an unfortunate habit of writing in the second person (a side effect of reading too much Lorrie Moore). We were convinced we were naturals: we’d both won a slew of essay contests growing up, were extravagantly praised by teachers and family, and were generally acknowledged to be the best writers in our workshop. She loved my stories and I loved hers, with their gutsy protagonists and their even gutsier settings. She was addicted to travel magazines and confessed she’d never been anywhere she’d written about. I always suspected she was a bigger talent than I was, and I knew she was more driven, so it wasn’t surprising that she ended up being the one with the successful writing career. It was surprising that it was ghostwriting, since Kathy seemed like a novelist waiting to happen. She’d take a mean author photo: her explosion of black curly hair around her striking, pale face. She wasn’t pretty; she was formidable.

After graduating college, Kathy took a proofreading job at a literary magazine while I took an office job, figuring I’d send out some stories to magazines and be promptly scooped up by the literary world. In the beginning, I did things like mail a story to the
New Yorker
with a scribbled cover letter: “Just thought you might like this.” By the end of the year, I was poring over every story published in
Seventeen
magazine and then creating a pastiche of their themes and styles, only to be rejected some more. Depressed and demoralized, I decided to travel for a while to clear my head. After that, I lived in a few different cities, tried out some jobs (none of them lasting more than a year), met some interesting people, drank too much, had relationships, and avoided thinking about how wildly unsuccessful I was.

Until now.

“You’ve reached the voice mailbox of Kathy Pecoe. I’m not able to take your call right now. Please leave your name and phone number with area code, even if you think I have it …”

Shit. I debated whether to call her cell phone. She was probably working; she worked a lot of the weekend. I shouldn’t interrupt her. I could handle this on my own, at least for a while longer.

Plan, plan, just come up with a plan. How hard could it be? Break it down, like Dan said. What’s my objective? To be a writer. No, that’s the goal. Or is it the dream? Shit.

Go to the drawer.

It was like a command issued from my very soul. I stared over at the drawer in fright. The dresser drawer, which held my never-finished everythings, dating back to college: short stories, novellas, novels, poems, plays, screenplays. I’d even managed to walk away from a short short story—conceived as a two-pager, I went to make grilled cheese at the end of the first page and lost my will. I’d saved them all because I was a chronic recycler. One particular character named Lucius popped up no fewer than six times in completely unrelated works.