Sleeping With Paris (19 page)

And, it will help you to avoid taking desperate measures just to be in a man’s company.

Case in Point: Now that I have my new, charming tutoring student to hang out with, I will (hopefully) not feel the need to knock on Half-Naked French Hottie’s door just to experience male companionship. Since he hasn’t attempted to see me in a month, contacting him would be desperate behavior on my part. Having a handsome French male friend in my life will keep me on track in my quest to avoid messy, sketchy men and more importantly, love. (Although the handsome part is irrelevant since he’s only a friend, and more appropriately, a tutoring student whose mother turned out to be my evil advisor—but we’ll get into that another day).

Rule # 2 – Do not attempt to find out what is going on in your ex’s love life. Even if you think you can handle it, please, spare yourself the second dose of heartache and keep moving forward with your life. Because, once you hear that he’s still with the woman who stole him away from you in the first place, you will feel as if someone has ripped your heart out all over again and spat on it.

Trust me, I know.

I started to type a third rule about how being a bridesmaid in a wedding where your ex was going to be the best man is about the worst thing you could ever do, but then I remembered that I had forwarded my blog to all of my friends back home, including Hannah. I doubted she was reading it, seeing as how she was busy planning a wedding and being in love and all that, but I didn’t want to make the situation any more awkward than it already was. So, I bit my tongue on that one and kept it to myself.

Fourteen

jeudi, le 18 novembre

Save yourself the drama and buy your own damn chocolate bar.

Two weeks had passed since my phone call with Hannah, and as I closed the curtains in my room to block any light from coming in and poured myself another glass of wine, I realized I had officially plummeted to the depths of despair.

For days now, I hadn’t been able to erase the thought of Jeff and Brooke from my mind. I had absurd visions where they were holding hands and frolicking through daffodil covered fields, then stopping to make love in the grass while Jeff would whisper in her ear how happy he was that he’d finally found his soul mate. I had nightmares about walking in on them having sex in Jeff’s bed, and when they saw the horrified look on my face, they simply laughed and kept at it. I woke up more than a few times that week covered in sweat with tears streaming down my face.

I was in no state to see anyone, so I holed up in my room, ignored my friends’ messages, skipped classes, slept, and drank
a lot
of cheap wine. I didn’t eat much either, and the few times I did get dressed to go buy more wine, I noticed that my jeans were falling off of me. I’d cancelled my sessions with Marc, telling him I’d come down with a bug that I just couldn’t shake off, and even when Luc had finally knocked on my door the day before, I’d stayed in bed.

I’d hit a new all-time low, and I wasn’t sure how to get myself out of it. The only person I had any desire to talk to was my mom, but I couldn’t get in touch with her or my dad. They hadn’t answered any of my calls or emails. I probably should’ve been worried, but I was too depressed to think about anything other than Jeff and Brooke’s love-making sessions in the daffodil field.

The only thing that gave me even a remote sense of comfort was thinking about spending Christmas back in Ohio with my parents. So, on that chilly November evening, after I’d made the mistake of digging my engagement ring out of my jewelry box and slipping it back on my desolate ring finger, I downed two more glasses of wine on an empty stomach and dialed home.

“Hello? Charlotte?”

“Hi, Mom.” I let out a sigh of relief at the sound of her voice.

“Hi, sweetie. I’m so glad you called. I have something very exciting to tell you!” My mom hadn’t had sounded this excited in a long time, so I knew it must be big.

“Really? What’s going on?” I thought that maybe she and my dad were planning a trip to come see me or that she had bought a new comforter for their bed—who knew?

“I’m leaving your father,” she announced, very matter-of-factly.

My jaw dropped to the floor. The two of them had been together for over thirty years now, and even though I knew they weren’t “in love” so to speak, I
never
thought my mom would leave him.

“So . . . what are you going to do?” I asked, fumbling to come up with the right words.

“Oh, I have all sorts of plans. As a matter of fact, I’m packing right now to take a trip to Florida to visit Aunt Liza. I may just stay down there for a while. Who knows? There’s a whole world of possibilities now that I won’t be tied down to a man!” She sounded a little too excited, manic actually.

I really couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My mom had always been the passive type who seemed like she would be content with a mediocre marriage for the rest of her life as long as Dad mowed the lawn and paid the bills. That brought me to my next concern. My mom hadn’t worked a full-time job since as long as I could remember. She had held odd, part-time jobs, like working at a flower shop and a bakery, but she had never gone to college and instead had become an expert at spending my dad’s money on making the house perfect. It’s what all the women in her family had done before her, so it’s all she knew, and she did it well. Without my dad’s money to support her, what on earth was she going to do? Plus, Aunt Liza was a wild woman. She had never settled down or had children, she was always dating someone new every time we talked to her, and, for all I knew, she had more sex than I did—which, at this point, since I wasn’t having any sex, wasn’t that difficult to do. My mom had never approved of her lifestyle, so they'd never gotten along too well over the years.

I tried to calm the frenzied thoughts that were zipping around in my head, but I couldn’t. I felt like a needy little girl at the thought of my parents separating, and as I struggled to think of the right thing to say, I decided I was entitled to ask questions. This was my family too, after all.

“You’re going to live with Aunt Liza? But you hate her! Are you going to work? How are you going to make money? What does Dad think? Did you tell him you were leaving?”

“Yes, of course your father knows. It’s been coming for quite some time, you know. I just didn’t have the courage to go before now. And money isn’t an issue; your father and I will split everything equally. You don’t need to worry about me, dear. I’m happier than I’ve been in years!”

“What about the house? Dad will stay there while you’re gone, right?”

“Um, not exactly,” she answered hesitantly. “We put it on the market last week.”

“Where’s Dad going to live?” The thought of losing the house I'd grown up in made me feel frantic. I'd already lost so much this year, I couldn't lose my home and my family too.

“He’ll be moving in with Joan,” she said in a dry tone.

“Who the hell is Joan?”

“Joan is . . . well, she’s Dad’s
friend
.”

“Friend? Mom, I’m not five years old anymore. You can tell me. Is Dad already dating someone else?”

She paused and took a deep breath. “Your dad has been seeing her for quite some time now.”

“And you knew?”

“Of course I knew, Charlotte. A woman always knows.”

“But I didn’t know that Jeff was cheating on me. I had no idea.”

“Well, I’ve been with your father for over thirty years now, and I just knew. What made me finally realize that it was time for me to leave though was when I read your blog. You gave me the strength to do this, Charlotte. You're such an inspiration.”

“What? My blog? How did you even know I was writing a blog?”

“You sent it to me in a mass email with your friends. Don't you remember, dear?”

I plopped my forehead into my hands. I must've added her to the email by accident. I
never
wanted my mom to see those posts.

“You're taking
my
advice?” I asked.

“Of course, dear. Why not? You're absolutely right. It's time to throw love out the window and get in the game!”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “But mom, I'm
twenty-five.
You're fifty-five. That advice isn't meant for parents! You can't use that as a reason to break up our family.”

“Charlotte,” my mom's voice came stern over the line. “
I
am not the one who has broken up this family. Our marriage has been broken for years now. Don't you remember what happened when you were a teenager?”

I closed my eyes, the memories I'd stifled for so long threatening to burst to the surface. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop them.

My mom had been out of town visiting her best friend, and I'd come home sick from school one day only to find my father climbing into his car with a tall blond woman, kissing her on the lips, then driving away with her.

With the secret of my father's infidelity ripping away at my insides, I'd confessed what I'd seen to my mom the next week. After an entire month of knock-em-down screaming fights in our house, and me fearing that my little family would forever be torn apart, Dad finally realized what he needed to do. He sent Mom flowers every day for a month, cooked her dinner, took her to the theater, wrote her love letters. He even flew her to Italy for their anniversary. But after about a year, the grand gestures died down and life returned to normal.

Except it wasn't normal. It was never the same again. All of the flowers, the dinners, the letters, even the trip, couldn't earn Mom's trust back again. She never looked at Dad with that adoring gaze she'd had before. Dad stopped kissing Mom before he left the house every morning. And once I left for college, they even stopped sleeping in the same bedroom.

I guess I was naïve to ever have thought a marriage could sustain like that. But their thirty-plus years together had made me believe that they would never separate. That I would always have my quaint little home in Ohio to return to. That even though their love hadn't survived the test of time and infidelity, the
appearance
of my family would always be there.

All the while, I was never able to erase the thought that it was all my fault. If only I would've kept my mouth shut, my mom's heart never would've been broken. My family would've stayed intact.

And now, to find out it was
my
blog that had spurred my mother to leave. What a disaster.

 “Charlotte?” my mom said, calling me back to the present.

“Yes, mom. Of course I remember what happened. I should've never told you what I saw that day. Maybe things would be different now.”

“That's nonsense. None of this is your fault. You did the right thing. But now, I've realized that I want your dad to just go and be with Joan. If she makes him happy, then so be it. The point is that we don’t make each other happy anymore, and we haven’t for years. You know that.”

“I know. But what about you? You’re going to Florida and then what?”

“Well, Aunt Liza has a few people she’s going to introduce me to down there, and I’m going to start a whole new life. An exciting one! There’s no time to waste!”

“Well, I . . . I’m happy for you then,” I said, trying to sound supportive even though I was totally lying. I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going home for Christmas. The thought of visiting my mom at crazy Aunt Liza’s house or going to Ohio to see my dad and his new girlfriend made me feel sick to my stomach. Neither option involved going to
my
house, having Christmas Eve dinner with
my
parents, or drinking hot chocolate and opening presents on Christmas morning like we had done every year since I was born. Instead, I’d be spending Christmas with weird people I barely knew, so it wasn’t an option at this point. My mom was disappointed, but too bad, I was disappointed too. This whole situation just confirmed my feelings about marriage.

As an institution, it was a total disaster.

Not wanting to hear another word, I hastily got off the phone. I tore the giant rock off of my finger and buried it back in the depths of my jewelry box. As I kicked around at the empty wine bottles littered all over my floor, I knew I had to get out of there. If I stayed in my room another minute, my life was certain to take the plunge from depressing to hopeless. Plus, even though I’d been buying cheap wine, I’d bought a lot of it and I’d managed to deplete a nice portion of my bank account. So, I dialed Marc’s number, told him my flu was gone, and he agreed to meet me at a café across the street in fifteen minutes for a lesson. It was time to work on divorce vocabulary.

Marc was sipping a cup of espresso at a tiny table in the back corner of the café when I arrived.

“Hey, Marc” I said, taking a seat across from him.

“Hi Charlotte, how’s it going?” he said as he chuckled to himself. During our first lesson, I had instructed him to use phrases like “How’s it going?” and “What’s up?” instead of always saying “How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” I lied. “How about you?”

“Pretty good. I . . . I just have a question for you though.”