How Did You Get This Number Page 19

  The second category was information about Daryl himself. I learned a lot about what made Daryl Daryl, most of which I am no better for knowing. He hated in general and liked in specific. He hated most music. He hated the homeless. He hated desktop computers. He hated subway lines that never went aboveground. He hated pygmies, and when I asked him to provide me with an example of pygmy exposure, he described, in detail, the Puerto Rican Day Parade. He liked certain strip clubs and certain strippers on a pole-to-pole basis. He loved his car. He thought tropical places were overrated, except for South Beach in Miami, because the one time he went there it was quiet and there weren’t any homeless people. When I told him this was not the standard impression of South Beach, he told me that everyone I knew was going to the wrong part. He liked chicken sandwiches and bought them constantly, despite being critical of their mayo-to-meat ratio.

  “Why don’t you just make your own chicken sandwiches and bring them in to work? Sometimes I make my lunch.”

  “I can’t.” Daryl rubbed his belly, leaning on a traffic light on the corner of Twenty-third and Park. “Because then I’ll have all this chicken lying around the house and I’ll eat it before it gets to the sandwich.”

  “I have that problem, too.”

  “And I’m not allowed to eat in the stockroom.”

  “Oh, okay.” I laughed, and took my most recent packing slip.

  Siphoning off thousands of dollars of merchandise from the company was one thing, but a Subway sandwich wrapper in the trash can? The man had his limits.

  ONE NIGHT I WAS COMING HOME LATE, TREATING myself to a post-midnight cab tour of the city, when I realized I had developed Ben’s tic of wanting to see him all day. And by “tic” I mean complete infatuation. We were, in a word, disgusting. Slightly inebriated, I reached for my phone. Finding lip balm instead, I applied it, distracted like an animal. What was I looking for again? Oh, yes. I held the phone close to my face. Nothing goes together quite so well as drunk people and buttons. I left what my drunken self was sure was an adorably articulate message. Which is when Ben’s voice mail came to life, calling me from the other line. “How dare you,” I hiccupped. “Your voice mail was about to say something brilliant.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  The phone went dead.

  It had been just under a year since I’d met Ben in the bar. Just when I was becoming entirely relaxed in my relationship (as a show of good affection, I had put Ben’s middle name in my phone), he started behaving oddly. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but while I wasn’t looking we had thinned from two very busy people to one very busy person.

  The faucet of affection had slowed to a drip. One morning I got up early and went downtown. I waited on his stoop with coffee. He kissed me on the cheek. Was this how relationships worked? One person always at the foot of the stairs and one at the top? That actually seemed pretty accurate for most couples I knew, but surely it did not apply to us. Soon I became hyper-aware of when I had called him last. I began fishing for compliments, picking fights, inciting jealousy whenever possible through a variety of pulse-checking activities that registered on the same scale as a lightbulb going out. You just think, Oh, that happened, and screw in another one. While Ben was in the bathroom, I flipped over a postcard on his refrigerator and found myself at once comforted and disappointed to see the “Love, Mom” at the border. When he returned from a trip and called me, I heard a noise and asked him if he was at baggage claim.

  “No.” He seemed perfectly bored by the question.

  “That’s the TV.”

  “Oh, so you’re home already?”

  I had an antique hair clip that I used very judiciously. The clasp was on its last screw. Given its advancing age, I knew I was allotted a limited number of uses when I bought it. Ben loved to play with it every time he came to my apartment, pressing it open as if it were a mechanical pen. Click, click, click. This thing I had opened and shut no more than a dozen times. Click, click, click. I could feel one eye narrowing as though afflicted with a cartoon migraine. Every word out of his mouth was eclipsed by the sound of metal breaking away from tortoiseshell.

  “Could you stop that, please?”

  “Stop what?” Click.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I leaped off the bed, ready to grab it from his hand.

  “That.”

  One thing that’s embarrassing is standing naked in front of someone, having transformed from a sex object into a scolding maternal figure. Or the reverse, a little girl who puts such proprietary stock in meaningless things. It’s especially awkward if this comes at a point when you have morphed into every bad cliché about your own gender, like some mutant multiwinged butterfly come out of the crazy cocoon that looked so smooth from the outside.

  “I think someone’s being a li-ttle paranoid,” he said, and clicked it one more time.

  It broke into pieces.

  I held still, waiting for things to go back to the way they were. This behavior, right now, was the abnormality. It reminded me of when I was in elementary school and had a textbook with a drawing of a woman in it. Some kids looked at the picture and saw an old witch and some saw a young girl. Whatever you saw you could unsee if someone showed you how. Change the nose to an elbow, a neck to a skirt, a wart to an eye. See her now? I always saw the witch first. I’d try to surprise myself, sneak up on the book with the young girl in mind, open my eyes and... Nope. Witch.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said my teacher. “The point of the exercise is to see what you want to see.”

  “But what if I don’t want to see the witch?”

  It’s not the worst thing in the world to choose to believe the bad is temporary and the good is permanent. It’s just not the smartest.

  Lauren! It had to be Lauren. He needed closure, not coffee. I suggested they have lunch together. At this point, I was friends with all my exes. Not in a forced “Collect all five!” kind of way, but in that way you make nice with everyone in your early twenties. When it seems impossible that a deep connection with another person could just go away instead of changing form. It seems impossible that you will one day look up and say the words “I used to date someone who lived in that building,” referring to a three-year relationship. As simple as if it was a pizza place that is now a dry cleaner’s. It happens. Keep walking.

  As soon as it left my mouth, I realized that it wasn’t my place to suggest. I would have to be dating Ben for years before I lapped Lauren in the area of personal wisdom.

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Ben confirmed my intern status.

  My plan negged, I felt oddly like the child of Ben and this woman I had never met. Up until this point, I had thought we could all be like a Woody Allen film. We could be great friends, and our humor would stem from the fact that there was no way in hell we should get along this well. In addition to an emotional suspension of disbelief, that would require us all being equals. Suddenly, I was the Soon-Yi. I did not want to be the Soon-Yi. I also didn’t want to be the Mia, the one who finds the Polaroids. It was bad enough I was turning over the postcards. Woody was the only pure option, and that role had already been cast.

  BEN WAS OUT OF TOWN AND I WAS IN THE MIDDLE of a work dinner, seated at a packed table covered in baskets of calamari and advance copies of books, when my phone rang. People around me held conversations on the diagonal. I fumbled in my bag underneath the bench and grabbed it. Unknown Number.

  “Hello?” I shouted. “Daryl?”

  “Doug?” the voice said. “Is this Doug?”

  “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number.”

  For Christ’s sake, was there no one in this town who could get my name right?

  “Sloane?”

  “This is she.”

  “It’s Lauren. Ben’s girlfriend.”

  You know that sensation when you lift up a carton of milk you expect to find full but it’s empty, and it goes flying through the air with surprising force?

&nbs
p; “Could you hold on for just one second?”

  I slid roughly over the knees of people next to me and went outside. By now there was no confusion about the weather. It was cold cold. I held my jacket closed with my fist.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. Not to be rude, but how did you get my phone number?”

  “It was in Ben’s phone.”

  “Not to be dense, but how did you get Ben’s phone?”

  “He went out to pick up food and I took it off his desk.”

  And there was Ben’s face, stuck to the side of the milk carton, missing. I sat on the curb as the bombs went off: Lauren and Ben had never broken up. True, they were having problems grave enough to warrant an auxiliary housing situation, but every absence from our relationship could be explained by his attendance in theirs. Unlike her underwear line, their relationship wasn’t retro. It was happening in the present tense. She asked me where I was on his birthday, and when I said it had not come yet, she said, “Yes, it has.” I asked where she thought he was going all those mornings when he appeared on my stoop.

  “He told me he was going to work out.”

  “Maybe he was,” I suggested. “Maybe he ran to my place.”

  While I had been belatedly paranoid and prematurely blind, Lauren had been on the case for months. I imagined her like a lawyer with a highlighter and a Visa bill as she rattled off Ben’s crimes, a parakeet perched on her shoulder. The parakeet is wearing an eye patch, though I can’t say why. He repeats the word “bastard” a lot.

  Her reason for calling, I had to understand, lay in her loyalty to other women. It wasn’t to confront me. Though she was sure yelling a lot for a nonconfrontational person. The trash talk swirled around, cycling up like a tornado until it was just a wind of generalizations about herself and the power of her relationship with Ben. I immediately questioned the strength of a relationship in which one party waits for the other party to get Chinese food and scrolls through his or her cell phone, hunting for mistress aliases. Instead, I let her wrap up a tirade that was mostly rhetorical, including questions like “How can I respect myself if I can’t respect myself respecting him?” and “I mean, Scorpios, right? ”

  The party inside was filing out, off to their respective homes or second evenings. Someone handed me my bag, which I accepted in a zombie-like trance. Despite the cliché generalizations about female empowerment only a women who designed lingerie could produce, I liked Lauren. Maybe I wanted to keep her on the phone because I felt outside myself, and from this third-party perspective, well—this whole thing was pretty juicy. Talking to her was like talking to the part of Ben I had been missing but unable to identify. Mostly I think it was because we both loved the same thing. And we had both paid too much for it.

  “I don’t like to press the fates, mind you,” she said.

  “Of course.” I nodded.

  “But I tried to call you once. He had you in his phone under Doug. Then I wasn’t sure it was you, so I hung up.”

  “Really?” My voice cracked. “Just ‘Doug’?”

  I GUESS YOU COULD SAY I WAS HURT. THAT WOULD be fair. When Ben returned home, dumplings in hand, Lauren confronted him. Dim and then some, he denied the whole thing. Ben and I had met once, perhaps twice. Just the two of us? No, never by ourselves. When? Oh, who can remember these things when all other women meld into one giant asexual boob? Denial in the age of e-mail. Gutsy. When Lauren explained that she had spoken to me directly, Ben explained back that I had constructed the entire relationship out of whiskey and psychosis and glue. I know all this because Lauren called me the next morning to tell me about it.

  “Why do you still have his phone?”

  I was lying on my beautiful carpet and looking up at my pointlessly high ceiling, still wearing the same outfit I had worn the previous night. I was compiling a list in my head titled Reasons to Get Up: You Don’t Have to Leave, but You Can’t Pee Here.

  “I turned it off and hid it in my underwear drawer,” Lauren said proudly.

  “That would be the first place I’d look for it if I were dating you.”

  “I also hid his contact lenses.”

  I wiped mascara-laced chunks of sleep from my eye.

  “What I don’t understand is why he didn’t just use my real name. Why have a stranger’s name under a pseudonym? Aren’t I strange enough already?”

  This didn’t scratch the surface of what I didn’t understand. The fake name seemed the least essential detail on which to focus, a two-second lie at the end of a yearlong relationship. It was like nailing Al Capone on tax fraud. But the bigger picture was too difficult to understand. In that picture, the person I loved not only stepped out of the frame but turned around on his way out to tell me he was never there.

  “He said he could barely picture your face.”

  My heart shuffled past my spine, out my back, and melted into the carpet.

  “I guess he can’t be expected to picture much if you hid his contacts. I have to go now.”

  I hung up the phone. For days it rang with his number. I could never be sure who was on the other end, so I just watched it go, watched it become silent after each ring. Then, like the movie villain who seems dead but comes back to life to grab the closest ankle, the message beep would jar me afresh. The messages were long and mostly from Ben, who had clearly located his phone. It occurred to me that if Lauren was the kind of girlfriend who knew to check her boyfriend’s address book and Ben was the kind of boyfriend who knew where to find stolen items, maybe they really were destined to be together. The messages vacillated between begging and chastising, between affection and reprimand, often in the course of one monologue. Then they got tired of chasing their own tails and just stopped.

  I couldn’t cry. Within a week, I had transitioned to a kind of purgahurt where the idea of being mollified by pints of ice cream and the idea of stabbing myself in the chest seemed equally unviable. And yet the world seemed hell-bent on handing me daggers. Every cab ride home managed to swing me past his sublet apartment, which was apparently his actual apartment, or his office building. Who was he, the Church? NYU? It seemed greedy for one individual to have so much landmark property. I’d look out the opposite window, longing for a time in the near future when it wouldn’t occur to me to look or not look. Every restaurant suggested was one I had been to with Ben. Horribly insensitive friends marked their own birthdays with celebrations, re-signed leases in his neighborhood, used words with vowels he also used. Unsolicited advice came pouring in, each serving as lovingly doled and useless as the next. I’d nod and agree to make it stop. You’re so right, they do call it a cliché for a reason. All the while reminding myself to keep a list of people to punch in the face when I had opinions about things again. Plenty of fish! said the friends. True. But why is it that when you don’t need them, all the fish are in a barrel, waiting to be shot, and when you’d like them around, they’re all in the sea?

  The worst, because it is always the worst, was the music. Maybe Daryl was right when he eschewed it altogether. “I” is the loneliest vowel that you’ll ever do. At first, most songs I heard became poignant. This included ones that were in no way from a woman’s perspective or even the jilted party’s perspective. I was a good girl—but I did not love horses or Jesus and I’d burn America to the ground in exchange for a sliver of my former happiness. But surely this is what Ben felt: free. Then songs with no conventional poignancy whatsoever became poignant. It takes a level of creative depression to hear “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and weep. After a while, my masochism grew impatient, deviating from the path of daily activity to seek out voluntary torture fixes. I bought Dolly Parton’s greatest hits. I’d wake up before dawn with the lyrics of Carly Simon’s version of “In the Wee Small Hours” running through my head and lazily out of my mouth. It was like the worst poetry slam you’ve never been to. When I fell back asleep, my subconscious was lazy and repetitive: There was the dream in which we attend a kid’s pool party and he lets me dro
wn. Then there was the other one in which I am trailing him in a rental car and lose him, a flash of Lauren’s arm dangling a bra from the passenger-seat window.

  Almost everyone has the identical response to such behavior: That sucks. How long were you dating?

  This is, without exception, the first thing people want to know. I can never figure out what they’re really asking. Do they want to know if you have a right to your reaction? Are you to be dusted off and sent to play or rushed to the emergency room? How stupid are you, exactly? They hang on to the math. Math, friend to so few in this life, is now like a shipment of cheese fries at fat camp. Math will save you. Math—proportional, statistical, syllogistical—has your back. Simply fork over the answer to one harmless little question and math will show you the end of the road.

  There’s one formula for two months and another for five years. Suddenly everyone’s a break-up numerologist who will stop at nothing to convince you of their infallible relationship with time and space. It takes half the duration of the entire relationship to get the other party out of your system. Sex with strangers can speed the process if it’s the right stranger, delay it if it’s the wrong one. There are rules for that, too. You listen intently to your friends. You marvel at what an exhausting enterprise this is, quantifying grief. You let them purchase alcohol for you. This will work out nicely for everyone. They get to believe you are absorbing valuable wisdom, and you? You get drunk. After drinks, they go home to their girlfriends and boyfriends, who ask: How is she? Not so good, they respond. Well—the girlfriends and boyfriends shrug—how long were they dating again?

  Meanwhile, in a bed built for one across town, you look meaningfully at your ceiling, believing you have glimpsed into the heart of The Matrix. What is wrong with these people? How can they be so cold?

  Nothing. Nothing is wrong with them. You must not blame them for believing that heartbreak is one size fits all, more like a shoelace and less like a perfume. They, too, have been heartbroken. Their pain was no less than yours. In some cases, it was worse. There is a pecking order to pain. Deference is due to those who have recently gone through a divorce. If there are children involved, their parents win. Coming in behind them are those who purchased property or own a business together. Deep down, you are grateful for these people. They are generous with their own lives, happy to turn themselves into cautionary tales, starting each conversation with “It could have been worse.” Unfortunately, because you are actually out of your mind, you think, It was worse.