“Can I go now?”
“Did I walk out on you when you told me about Phil?”
“Are you trying to tell me that you’re married, too?”
“Believe me, Mary Kay, I thought about running scared. The man was a rock star. I was intimidated…” I was never intimidated by that fucking rat but certain situations call for certain logic and it’s working.
You’re listening. The windows of your Empathy Bordello are opening and you’re letting me back in, a little.
“Mary Kay, I promise I’ll never chicken out on you again. I know I ran away.”
You say nothing and of course you say nothing. A liar can’t promise that he’ll never lie again. You say you should probably go back in and I tell you to wait and you throw up your hands. “I did wait. I waited all day for you to call.”
“I did call.”
“Not when you got off the plane.”
“I got mugged.”
“Oh, do you expect me to believe that you got mugged at the airport? What, Joe? You got… shot at the Starbucks in LAX?”
“I flew into Burbank.”
“I don’t care. It’s too late.”
“Mary Kay, I told you. You’re right. I fucked up. And I don’t blame you for icing me out that day and all the days after. You had every right to do that.”
“You should go.”
“No,” I say. “I have to tell you something about me.”
I have no plan and I’m not a pantser. I am a planner. But I’m not gonna win you back with schmaltz—you want me to be vulnerable and you want some fucking facts—and I have to tell you everything without telling you everything. “Okay, look,” I begin. “I went to this school shrink when I was kid. She talked about object permanence. How babies, if you show them an apple, they see the apple. And if you cover the apple up with a box, they forget the apple was there. They forget the apple exists because it doesn’t exist to them when they can’t see it.”
“I’m familiar with the concept of object permanence.”
“I did lie to you, Mary Kay. On our first date… I glossed over my relationships…” It’s true. “I wanted to come off like Mr. Independent. Mr. Evolved…” God, it feels good to speak the truth. “But in reality, I moved here because I let my ex walk all over me…” More like stampede. “I let her treat me like a doormat… And I know it sounds macho and stupid but I thought it might turn you off if I told you about what a sucker I’d been.”
“Joe…”
“See, I thought, here’s my fresh start. If I don’t tell you about Lauren…” I can’t say Love’s real name because the story online is a lie—she didn’t die of cancer—and I’m caught in her family’s web of lies. “I thought that if I didn’t tell you that Lauren existed, I would feel like she never existed, like that guy I was when I was with her, like he never existed either.”
You pick at the splintered wood. “So you ran back to your ex. And you referred to it as a ‘family emergency,’ which tells me that she still very much ‘exists’ to you…”
“I know,” I say. “Fucking stupid. Inexcusable. And if I could go back to that night, I would wake you up and tell you about Lauren. I would tell you that she just called threatening to commit suicide. I would tell you that I hate myself for not telling you sooner, for not blocking her number… but I would also tell you that I never blocked her number because I have empathy for her. The woman has no one.”
“Except you…”
“Not anymore, Mary Kay.” RIP Love. “My empathy got the best of me, but I cut the cord.”
“Well, that’s nifty.”
“Listen to me. I saw her…” Truth. “She was on the verge of taking her own life…” More truth. “But now it’s over. She’s with her brother, the only person she really ever loved, and I blocked her number. This is the end of the line for us.”
Whoever said that the truth just sounds different was right. You’re taking it all in and I really won’t be hearing from RIP LoveSick anymore. She was never the same after she lost her brother and if there’s a heaven, she’s with him, and if not, well, she can’t hurt me anymore. More importantly, she can’t hurt my fucking son.
You wave at my wounds. “Did her brother do this to you?”
“No,” I say, getting off on all this delicious, cathartic truth. “But I’m happy it happened.”
You sigh and that was too Phil-ish and I correct. “I mean that it was a wake-up call about what a hypocrite I’ve been, hiding the ugliness of what it was like with Lauren, as if anyone can just ‘erase their past,’ sneaking out on you with that stupid half-ass note. This gunshot, this beating, it was the universe telling me that playing the hero for Lauren, swooping in to ‘save’ her… well, you can’t call yourself a hero if you’re lying to someone you love. I won’t make that mistake again, Mary Kay, I mean that, not with you, not with anyone.”
I take the ring out of my pocket. No YouTube-style show. No flowers. No string section rounding the corner to serenade us with U2. I just put it on my middle finger. “I got this on 1stdibs.”
“Oh,” you say. “Well, that’s nice.”
“It made me think about why I ran away, what rings are for people. Because some of us… we don’t ever learn about object permanence, not really. I mean I was with that shrink because I refused to leave my jacket and my backpack in my locker because I thought if I couldn’t see them at all times… they’d be gone.”
“Are you asking me why I didn’t wear a ring when I was… when Phil was alive?”
I close my hand around the ring. “Yes.”
“Well, I don’t have one. I lost it when I was pregnant.”
“How?”
“I lost it at the beach…” You scratch your elbows. “He was never home. Anyway, he finished Moan and Groan, all these songs where he’s complaining about me and the baby ruining his life… The album explodes and he was so happy and I was so lonely. I was pregnant. I had homework. Everyone acted like I should be different, Oh, you’re still getting your masters?” You ball up your fists. “Nomi was born. He bought me a new ring. I told him I lost that one, too. I was lying. I just hid it in the attic. But I thought I was doing a nice thing. I thought he might get a song out of it… two lost rings… Anyway, a couple years later, Nomi must have been about three… Phil goes up to the attic. He found the ring, the one I said I lost. He didn’t yell at me. He didn’t cry. He left it on my pillow and I know what you mean. You’re just as evil as me.”
“You’re not evil, Mary Kay.”
“I’m gonna be completely honest with you.”
Good. “Good.”
“I loved not telling you about Phil. I got off on the danger, the reality that you might find out and hate me. It was a game and I finally got to be the horrible woman that everyone around here secretly thought I was.”