I Like You Just the Way I Am (3 page)

After my studies ended, I took the first train out of Paris to Mannheim, Germany. Bruno, along with his parents, greeted me when I arrived. We went back to Bruno’s house (yes, he still lived with his parents) and had cake and cigarillos. Not only was I an amateur smoker, but I’d also never smoked in front of anyone’s parents in my life. It was sort of liberating how they didn’t seem to give a fuck and even offered me a pipe for my tobacco, as if I were Sherlock Holmes.
So maturely European,
I thought. Neither of his parents spoke English, so the conversation was mainly just a series of head nods and giggles. At one point I drew a stick figure of my father, then exed out three different wives. Bruno’s mom gasped and shook her head, thinking I was saying that my dad killed the women. Through the gift of interpretive dance, for which I have zero gift, I managed to clarify that he was just divorced but that there was one step-mom I wished he’d killed because she was a cunt. As the night drew to a close, Bruno’s mother escorted me to Bruno’s bedroom, which she tidied up with new sheets and bedding. She tucked us into bed and turned out the lights as she left.

Maybe this isn’t totally fucking weird. Maybe in Europe all twenty-year-old men live with their parents and get tucked into bed at night by their mothers. Maybe, but I didn’t care either way. I was too caught up in the idea of Bruno, the brooding musician who caused me to forsake my American ideologies and question everything I ever believed in. I wasn’t going to let a little infantilizing dissuade me.

That night, with his parents mere feet away, Bruno and I made love. It was unique for several reasons:

1. He wasn’t circumcised. His penis looked like a normal penis wearing a skin turtleneck.

2. He had a tramp stamp tattoo, just above his ass, of a dolphin jumping into a cluster of stars.

3. I was apparently Bruno’s first.

The next day Bruno and I walked around Heidelberg with our tongues stuck eight inches down each other’s throats, only breaking hold for rehydration and bathroom breaks. As dusk settled over the city, Bruno seemed to be growing more and more anxious.

Dear God, was I right about him all those years ago? Was he a vampire? Was our consummation morphing him back into the monster?

I didn’t know what to do, so I just tried to keep my cool. Sweat seemed to pour down his face every time we made eye contact. We met up with some of his friends at a discotheque called Bikini that was straight out of 1989. I assessed the scene and instantly determined I was the coolest person for miles. Dudes were wearing neon gummy bracelets and high-waisted Guess jeans and the women all had side poytails and looked like they were being roofied with human growth hormones. Partying in a sea of people who would have gotten stabbed at my high school helped me momentarily forget about Bruno’s anxiety and my eating disorder. I basked in how superior I was to everyone else in the building.
I’m the hippest, skinniest girl here, and I fucking
love
my body!
I thought, dancing around like I was Kate Moss in a CK One ad. When it was time to go, Bruno tapped me on the shoulder with his baby hand and helped me down from the giant birdcage I was swinging in. We hopped in his car and prepared to leave when suddenly, he slammed the brakes and jumped out. I sat there confused as he bolted back into the club filled with Hypercolor T-shirts. Through the front entrance, I could see him talking frantically to some guy. He returned to the car with his friend Leo, a Mohawk in a fishnet tank. They mumbled back and forth in hushed tones for several minutes before addressing me directly.

“We have to go to the hospital,” Bruno said.

“Wha—? Why? For who?” I was scared.

“For you,” he stoically replied.

I thought,
I’m sorry, what the fuck are you talking about?

“Meine Mutter is eine Krankenschwester komm vorbei,”
said Leo.

I still didn’t speak German, so I didn’t know what was happening. Was it time for my steroid injection? Was my boyfriend an incubus? Would I eventually look like a total cougar dating an ageless undead boy with porcelain fingers?

Leo accompanied us to a small house mere blocks away. He walked in front and greeted the woman standing in the doorway, who I eventually gleaned was his mother. More German was exchanged as she appraised me like a piece of meat. The only thing preventing me from having a panic attack was the pride I took in knowing I was
definitely
the hottest/skinniest girl Bruno had ever been seen with. Bruno explained that Leo’s mom was a nurse, and they were inquiring where we could find some morning-after pills.

Apparently, Bruno was concerned he’d knocked me up. And now, apparently, everyone in his goddamned village was concerned he’d knocked me up.

When you can’t speak a language, the impression you make on others is really determined by how your translator presents you. And my translator was presenting me like a fucking asshole. As soon as it dawned on me that Leo’s mom wasn’t checking me out because I was an adorable specimen clearly out of Bruno’s league, but because she thought I was some mail order cum receptacle, I was pissed.

“But you wore a condom and didn’t even cum inside me!” I explained.

“Jen, women can get pregnant with what happens first, ‘before-cum,’ you know?” he said condescendingly.

He insisted we go to a pharmacy the next morning for, as he put it, a “baby-killing pill.”

The next day, as instructed, we went to the pharmacy and got a pill. I swallowed it and waited for Bruno’s nonexistent child to die inside me. In retrospect, I probably should have extricated myself from the relationship after that. However, the drama surrounding our union was enough to hold my interest for another two and a half years.

Every three months, Bruno and I would take turns flying to see each other. After the first year and a half, I spoke fluent German, was completely anesthetized to goatees, and loved weighing myself in kilograms. I’d graduated college a year early and was content with a geographically unrealistic partnership that enabled me to avoid reality. The majority of our relationship took place over the phone, saving me tons of calories in unswallowed semen. Bruno lived on another continent, where he couldn’t see the effects of my now massive eating disorder, and thought my being in a commercial meant I’d made it in Hollywood. The truth was, I was freshly out of rehab for anorexia, being supported by my father, and not even a SAG member. But Bruno helped me see how trivial my problems were in juxtaposition to those of the rest of the world. Whenever I tried to talk about being afraid of cashews, he’d say something like, “I’m afraid of flagrant Western interference disrupting the political process in the Balkans.”

What I’m trying to say is, he could kind of be a dick. But at this particular time in my life, I told myself that I needed my worldview broadened by a dick, even if he did wear ascots and stonewashed denim jeans jackets. I believed in him, trusted him, and subscribed fully to his rigid ideals, including his belief that Kylie Minogue was the next John Lennon.

But for all the insights Bruno offered, he was still just twenty-two. And ours was the quintessential young love destined for a fiery plane crash into a tall building.

*   *   *

It was late July,
Bruno and I had just spent two weeks together pretending to be an autonomous adult couple in Los Angeles, and now it was time for him to head back to his parents’ basement in Deutschland. His flight departed out of San Diego, so we decided to spend our last few nights at my mom’s latest condo, in the Gaslamp Quarter. She welcomed us down and was more than happy for the excuse to spend a few days living with her new boyfriend across the hall.

Craig was fifteen years her junior and closer to my age than to hers. He was a strapping Navy SEAL type who, if he didn’t already have a tribal tattoo, was definitely sketching one. Craig had a naïveté that screamed “one day one of my totally hetero guy friends is going to try to suck my dick and I’m gonna be completely shocked but probably not stop him.” I knew he and Bruno would have zero in common, so I kept their interaction brief in the hopes of avoiding another lecture from Bruno about the merits of socialism. My mom was constantly introducing me to new dudes who I knew I’d be lucky if I saw more than once. I found the best way to deal with this was to act really interested, talk about the future a lot, then erase them from my memory the minute they were out of arm’s length.

Bruno and I spent the rest of the day shopping around town and talking obnoxiously loudly about how offended we were by SUVs. Who knows where my mom went. Much like the high school vampire, Bruno, I just assumed she morphed into a bat, a wolf, or a mist, and I’d catch up with her later.

That night, she did reappear (after sundown conveniently), and the three of us went to dinner.

“Are you two just gonna miss each other soooo much?” she asked, as if she had any concept of love.

“So much!” Bruno said. He gripped my hand like I was a child about to step in front of a bus.

“I was thinking tomorrow, for Bruno’s last night, we could do the San Diego harbor cruise. Great appys, great view of the city skyline…” My mom trailed off, suspiciously avoiding eye contact.

“That sounds great,” Bruno said.

The San Diego harbor cruise was a dinner cruise I’d gone on once when I was in eighth grade and still thought choker necklaces were cool. It was more or less a ferry that offered food, music, and a chance for people to get super wasted before fucking the same person they’d been married to for over a decade. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of spending the last night of Bruno’s visit on a booze pontoon, but it did seem less macabre than making each other tear lockets, something he suggested the last time we parted.

“Okay. Cool,” I conceded.

The next afternoon, my mom, Bruno, and I got dressed for the cruise. I settled on a simple sundress. Bruno went casual in his pink V-neck, pale blue jeans, and double-breasted black blazer. My mom spiced things up with a low-cut Tadashi cocktail dress and python pumps.

When we pulled into the harbor, my mom dropped off Bruno and me in front of the boat.

“You guys go grab our tickets, and I’ll look for a place to park.”

“You’re in heels, why don’t I park the car?” I said.

“I’m fine, just get our tix and I’ll meet you guys in a second.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Jen. Come,” Bruno said, like I was a Labrador.

We got out of the car and headed up to the ticket line. I kept a lookout for my mom while Bruno retrieved our passes.

“I don’t see her,” I said, scanning the lot, concerned.

“Oh, well. Let’s board.”

“No. Where is she? This is so weird.”

“Das macht nichts. Wir gehen uns,”
he said sternly as he pushed me toward the dock.

I started to panic. In my youth, my mom was notorious for dropping me off someplace, saying she’d be right back, and then disappearing for days. Once, I was left for three weeks with two live-in babysitters who only cooked beans. Another time, she took me to meet a woman she worked with, asked me to go play in her backyard, and then vanished for a weekend without further explanation. When she returned, she’d always act like it was no big deal and try to distract me with some sort of embroidered airport souvenir sarong from wherever she’d just been. I got back at her later in life by sleeping with one of my stepbrothers.

“I just don’t understand where she could have gone,” I said, unable to focus.

I stood on the deck of the boat, looking wide-eyed and pathetic, like Fievel from
An American Tail
.

Bruno ignored me as we boarded the boat and entered the main salon. Tables separated the long windows from a simple parquet dance floor in the center of the room. The tasteful white tablecloths struggled to stay classy in a sea of folding chairs and cheap balloons. If it weren’t for the crowd of retirees, I would have assumed I was crashing someone’s fraternity date dash.

A waiter handed us glasses of champagne and escorted us to a small table for two perched on a tiny platform at the front of the room. Once I got to the table, I realized I’d been set up. A bottle of champagne sat waiting for us with a note. I knew it was from my mom before I even opened it.

Have a magical evening, you two! Love, The Mothership,
it read.

I hated how cavalier she could be. No apology for triggering my abandonment issues, no information stating whether or not I’d ever be seeing her again. Just a “Have fun!” I wanted to have a note delivered back to her, saying, “Thanks for ruining my life.”

Bruno’s patience with me seemed to be dwindling, and since it was our last night together, I tried to put my anger aside.

“Prost!” he said, raising his engraved keepsake champagne flute and staring into my eyes like he was stealing my soul.

The cruise set sail just as the DJ started pumping Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About.” Bruno asked me to dance and I obliged. His moves were always a bit eccentric—he loved spinning me, walking a couple feet away, then pulling me by my hair back into a dip. But there was something about him that night that seemed especially intense.

Bruno looked stoical as he sipped his champagne with his pinkie in the air and started talking about the coming months we’d be spending apart. He had to go to Yugoslavia to finish his master’s then return to Germany to begin his M.B.A. Like a true German, his plan was laid out precisely. It would take no less than five years before he could even consider living in the States. And my B.A. in theater made less sense internationally than Craig’s forthcoming tribal tattoo.

Dinner interrupted our conversation and helped lighten the mood. Etta James’s “At Last” played softly in the background as I accidentally inhaled a whole basket of garlic knots—because I was still mad at my mom, and food represented the love she wasn’t giving me.

“I love this song. I want it to play at my wedding someday,” I said through a mouthful of dough.

Bruno smirked a weird “I’m Euro” smirk but said nothing.