I Like You Just the Way I Am (8 page)

I half expected to find Lance asleep on the couch covered in udon noodles, his own vomit, and a pile of our old Christmas cards. I vowed that if I saw any of his urine in Arrowhead bottles around the room, I’d promptly take back full custody of Jaggy and force him to get medicated.

The sun had completely set when I rounded the corner of our cul-de-sac. As I got closer, something caught my eye. There was a car identical to mine parked in the driveway. I pulled up next to it and got out to look in the windows. Inside I could see a Mentos wrapper and a single, solitary hooker boot. I had no idea whom the car could possibly belong to. I walked up to the garage door and punched in a code to open it. The slats on the door inched their way back to reveal an even greater surprise: Lance was not at home.

I walked in the house, and Jaggy came bounding out of the darkness. She seemed to be trying to tell me something with her eyes, but I couldn’t decipher what. I turned on some lights, and the two of us walked upstairs to the kitchen. There, I saw an opened bottle of wine and two glasses.

Lance was clearly on a date.

I grabbed my phone and furiously dialed my friend Cab, whom I’d used for a rebound fuck two days before. “I—I don’t even know what I’m feeling right now,” I cried. “I can’t breathe. Seriously, I think you may need to call an ambulance.”

“Why do you care? Just get out of there,” Cab urged me, using a tone of voice that suggested I should swing by for another quickie.

“It’s just a little soon for him to already be dating,” I said, now going through his bathroom trash can, checking for used condoms.

“Do I need to remind you of all the reasons you told me you left this guy? And doesn’t this kind of put me in a weird position?”

“Cab, he’s literally moved on with his life in, like, a matter of days!” I pulled out a naked collage I’d made of myself one Valentine’s Day and placed it delicately on his nightstand.

“You are being nuts. Come over and let’s go to dinner.” I could tell by his tone of voice that he meant “come over and let me try anal on you.” And so, after forty-five more minutes of sabotage, I left the house to go hate-fuck Cab.

“You feeling better?” Cab asked me later, while gnawing on a postcoital Cliff Bar.

“Yeah, I’m good,” I lied.

I spent the rest of that night alone in my apartment, trying to get some catharsis by painting a picture of a woman bleeding all over herself. Before I knew it, it was 8
A.M
. and still too early to drive back to the house to confront Lance. The thing that upset me most was the fact that I’d spent the last week feeling sorry for him. He kept telling me how he hoped I’d change my mind about us, how he might be developing an eating disorder, and how he still pictured me wearing his mother’s wedding veil. He even got me to fucking make a Sophie’s Choice between my dogs! By 8:05, I was furious and already in my car, speeding up Mulholland.

When I arrived at the house, the mystery car was still there. This time I didn’t bother with entering through the garage. I marched straight through the front door.

“Bubby? Hello?” I called out, feigning innocence and walking briskly toward the bedroom.

When I entered, I saw a blonde, not-as-cute version of me with weird eyebrows looking up from my side of our bed.

“Hi,” she said awkwardly as Lance charged out of the bathroom in his Christmas pajama pants to intervene.

I eked out a hi before my macho exterior crumbled and I dashed out of the room in a cold sweat. Whatever harebrained schemes I’d been plotting seemed to vanish from my mind as I ran into the workout room (read: empty guest bedroom with a shitty treadmill) and tried to regain composure. It wasn’t the visual confirmation of Lance fucking someone new that bothered me so much as the fact that he now had a part of his life that I had no involvement in. I felt like I’d just walked in on my father with another family he’d been hiding from me. (Thank God my real father had a vasectomy the minute he realized the shelf in the back of his convertible wasn’t considered a legal seat for passengers.) My pain didn’t stem from wanting to be the chick with weird eyebrows lying in our bed; it stemmed from feeling out of control and abandoned. In seeing Lance with someone else, I was being forced to accept that I no longer had any power. Lance wasn’t going to die without me. In fact, he was doing just fine. Up till this point, I’d managed to preserve all my exes, like a butterfly collection on the wall. Every one was color coded, with a needle through their hearts and a vague look of approval in their eyes. The relationships might have ended, but their love was forever frozen in time.

Just as I heard the front door shut behind the girl, Lance walked into the room.

“I wanted to tell you, but I was just scared. You know I’m not over you or us. It’s been a fucking week. But it’s just like you said, we have to accept that this is happening. This other person is good for me. She is helping me heal, and I really need that. I need company. You know I can’t be alone without ending up covered in udon noodles and my own vomit.” He tried to hold me.

“I just— I— Her eyebrows scare me and she was touching Jaggy—and—she’s clearly seven to eight years older than me.”

“Jenny, she is three years older than you and very sweet. She knows all about you. You and I are always going to be in each other’s lives. It’s all going to be okay.”

As I left, I convinced myself that Lance was right. I even started to like the idea of him being with someone I wasn’t remotely threatened by. I kind of couldn’t wait to buy her something stylish and take her for a spa day, where we could reshape her brows and I could judge her naked. I always thought of Lance as a sort of father figure, so I decided to look at his taking a new mate as giving me a much-needed mother figure.

I spent the next month doing all the things I would have done if Lance and this new woman were my parents. I stopped by the house for mail, ate all the unwashed blackberries out of the fridge, and showered there when it was more convenient than driving all the way back to my apartment.

Then one day, without warning, I got a call from Lance. He asked for my keys to the house and told me that we should stop speaking until Carmen, his now “official” girlfriend, was able to feel a bit more comfortable with the idea of all of us being friends.

“But, how am I gonna see Jaggy?” I asked, appalled at the idea.

“That’s the thing. I kind of think it’s best if you don’t.”

“If I don’t see my own child? I agreed to let her live with you! This isn’t fair to me!”

“Jenny, it’s temporary,” he said. “Carmen is insecure.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have told her what I said about her eyebrows!”

“Jenny, I obviously didn’t. She knows nothing about that. She hates you for other reasons—” He stopped and refocused. “My therapist thinks I need to cut you off.”

“Cut me off? Your therapist said that? Dr. Shaw? I thought he loved me!” I made a mental note to write a scathing Yelp review of Dr. Shaw as soon as I got home.

“I have to do it, Jen.” His voice was drenched in maturity.

Seething with anger and frustration, I went to the Ralphs and used our joint credit card to buy groceries for everyone in the store. Loading my car with cases of wine, crates of tampons, and a whole king salmon, I got a text. It read:

“This is my last correspondence. Let’s touch base in six months. I love you always, Lance.”

I stood in the parking lot as a wave of silent anguish washed over me. Despite my best efforts to stay completely connected, Lance was cutting the cord on our friendship.

Six months came and went, and aside from one or two logistical phone calls he made to me from work, we had no contact.

Despite the unwelcome change, my life had taken a major upswing. I was busy traveling the world, working once every two months and tripling the number of guys I’d ever slept with. There was little-to-no time to focus on my ex-boyfriend-best-friend-pseudo-father-figure and his nonthreatening-new-girlfriend-who-I-was-convinced-would-love-me-if-she-knew-me. That was, until the unthinkable happened: I met Jason.

My Future Husband

I won’t bore you with the details of how we got together right now. I still have a whole goddamn book to fill with shit. I can’t give you
everything
in this chapter, so just relax!

For now, let’s just say, I met him: the man that would change the course of my life forever.

On rare occasions, I’d think of Lance and wish I could share my newfound happiness with him. My world was flipped upside down and he was the only person who knew me well enough to appreciate what that meant. One night after Jason and I made a sex tape with the video camera Lance’s mom gifted him for Christmas, I expressed my sadness about the situation.

“It’s a shame because you guys would really love each other,” I said, scratching dried semen off my navel. “What pisses me off the most is that I would never have left Jaggy had I known I was going to meet someone and get into something so serious, so fast. I really think we should just go up to the house and steal her back.” I laughed, only half-serious.

“Yeah, and for shits and giggles, let’s just take Carmen too.”

“Totally, and then she’ll see how cool we are and—”

He cut me off. “Jenny, I’m kidding. We aren’t kidnapping anybody.”

“But—”

“No.”

“Like, not even in a fun way?”

“There is no
fun
way to kidnap someone. People don’t like it. Ever.”

I eventually ran this idea past Lance when we met for coffee months later. He agreed with Jason that Carmen would be hard-pressed to see the humor in being kidnapped; she wasn’t even cool with the two of us getting coffee. Before we parted ways, I told Lance that I was going to marry Jason. I think he was shocked things were happening so fast, but was still able to be encouraging. The truth was, we both had new lives. My idealism about our eternal bond as friends was gone, as was his need to pretend things would ever be the same. They weren’t. And that was okay … ish.

My Future Husband’s Ex-Girlfriend

Lance’s refusal to worship me from afar forever consumed so much of my time that I didn’t get the chance to properly dissect Jason’s ex until we were engaged. When I did, I discovered something startling and yet completely appropriate. Jason’s ex was still in love with him and wanted him back. But she wasn’t the only one. Jason’s family wanted the same thing.

While Lance dealt with our breakup by shacking up with the bizarro me and not RSVPing to my wedding, Jason’s ex—let’s call her Baz—dealt with their breakup by spiraling into a mild depression. She made a Web series about how he broke her heart. She wrote blog posts about him. She even made sure to call his nephews on their birthdays (something I still don’t do, because I don’t care about kids’ birthdays).

I eventually met his mother on a trip to the Biggs household in New Jersey.

“So what am I supposed to do with all these Christmas gifts I bought for Baz? We were extrememly close,” she announced like a hormonal thirteen-year-old girl, refusing to make direct eye contact with me.

At first, I found his mother’s attachment sort of charming. I knew I was the score of the century and that all parents love me, so I didn’t mind indulging her anguish.

“I’d send them to her,” I said earnestly.

Jason shot me a look.

“I mean, if someone had presents for you, wouldn’t you want them? It’s not like you got her a bunch of framed pictures of her and Jason.” I plopped down next to her on the couch like we’d known each other for fifteen years.

Her body language said it all. She hated me. And the gifts were most definitely framed pictures of Baz and Jason.

From what I gathered, Baz was always clinging on to Jason for dear life. The circumstances under which they got together were traumatic, and Jason’s white knight syndrome kept him in the relationship roughly two years too long. I have to assume that Baz knew it wasn’t going to work out, because I don’t believe people get sideswiped in relationships. It’s always just a matter of what someone is willing to see and what someone is willing to ignore. I think we are all guilty of overlooking things if it suits our own agenda. But whenever we do, we are always setting ourselves up for disappointment.

So, as bad as I could have felt for Baz, I really didn’t. She wasn’t an idiot. In an effort to self-preserve, she overlooked the bad and embedded herself in his family. She was a “yes woman” who went along with anything Jason wanted (including his occasional desire to hit up a Chuck E. Cheese’s on the way to LAX) and voiced concern only when he wouldn’t let her move in with him.

“You know, only a woman who isn’t secure with you would feel the need to kiss your mother’s ass so hard,” I told Jason as I tossed one of his mom’s cats across the room like a Frisbee. I stared up at a five-by-seven of Baz and Jason’s mom in Mouseketeer ears, still hanging above the mantel. “That seems healthy.”

Jason conceded, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

On the last night of our visit, Jason’s older sister Holly pulled me into a coffin-sized laundry room to have a chat out of earshot of their mom. She sat opposite me and took a deep breath.

“I just had a baby so I’m really emotional right now,” she started.

Not sure if she was going to offer me a joint or ask if I wanted to try her breast milk, I kept my mouth shut.

“I still talk to Baz,” she confessed in a wispy voice that belonged on someone less than half her age.

“Okay.” I was bummed she didn’t have any weed.

“She knows you and Jason are engaged and she said that out of respect, she thinks it’s best that she and I stop talking. I just can’t imagine not having her in my and my children’s lives. She knits us each a Christmas sweater every year. What do I tell the kids? She’s just gone?”

She had worked herself into hysterics. If it weren’t for the tears pouring down her face, I’d have thought she was joking.

“I don’t know how to deal with this. Will I ever get to see her again? Does she know how much she means to me? Is she thinking about us—?”

I stopped her. “If I were her, I would do the same thing,” I lied. “She is being mature. It’s just a weird position for her.”