Awkward Walks With Unavailable Men

MY AMBITION THESE DAYS is to want nothing outside myself.

I used to have a poet boyfriend who would say things like this and, in between dumpster diving and boxcar hopping, write poems about being unemployed or sticking what little money he did have under the bark of trees. This infuriated me. Why couldn’t he just be normal, with a normal job and a normal income and normal ambitions? But I get him now and wonder: What would it be like to live life without the constant desire for something more?

Sometimes I fantasize about shaving off my long hair and retiring to the hermitage in the valley behind my parents’ house. I imagine how serene and cleansing it would be to live in a room with a handmade desk and a bed covered by a quilt and sunlight filtered through stained glass.

When I told my parents about my ascetic wishes, my mother replied, “You don’t need to shave your head. That wouldn’t look very pretty.”

“That’s the whole point,” I said. I told her how I wanted to give up my vanity, cut through all the superficiality, get back to what’s real. I told her I thought it would be amazing to live in some ashram in India for a while, but maybe I’d settle for the hermitage instead. I could write all day, then come up to the house for dinner.

She thought about this for a moment, then said, “Well, I think that’s all fine, but you still don’t need to cut off your hair.”

IT’S HARD TO PINPOINT the exact moment when my wanting became a problem. Sometimes I think it was at seventeen, when I was a Mennonite girl from a dead-end dirt lane, determined to leave for the Big City, for college, for a career and money and high-heeled shoes and shorn hair, and to have absolutely nothing more to do with the hilltop Mennonites. Other times I think it began later, after I got Cs in chemistry and dropped out of the pre-med program, sometime during the short-skirts-and-dirty-bars era. Usually, though, I think the wanting problem began the summer before my senior year in college, with the nice Jewish boy from Orange County, the shining boy wearing his ironed shirt and smelling of new-car leather and salt and skin. It began with the boy. I fell in love.

But then I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t stop the falling or pleading or fighting or loving or wanting — especially wanting — all of him, even if things between us were tortured and wrong, even if getting what I wanted meant giving up everything I had, quitting school and my job, quitting friends and food, quitting my family, quitting getting out of bed. I wanted a shady bedroom where I could stay with him forever. Instead I found myself pale and weak, crouched in a corner. I wanted for him never to leave me, please, I’ll be different and better, I’ll be who you want me to be, don’t leave, I hate you, I love you, and please please please don’t leave, and then we both flew across the country to fix ourselves in pastel-colored treatment centers, we were addicted to each other, they told us, and I wanted to make myself better, I wanted to be perfect for him, but I couldn’t, and I wasn’t, and then he broke up with me, and I was left there in the burning desert, having wanted my way into poverty in every sense of the word.

I HAD BEEN RAISED not to want, not to whine for the scrubbed white bathtub when my aunts insisted we all wash our hair in a basin. Some Mennonite practicality dictated that our long hair would clog the bathtub drain, so instead we adjourned to a damp basement room with a large, rusted drain at its middle. There, my aunts removed their head coverings and pulled out pins and dismantled their twists of dark hair, which bounced in long coils down their backs and caught the light like corn silk. They transformed from middle-aged Mennonite women to barefoot girls as their brown hair fell down their backs and fanned out around their faces. It turned black as they poured cupfuls of water over it, shampooed, rinsed, and conditioned. When they were done, they wrapped off-white towels around their heads like bandages.

Liz, Leona, Clara — none of them had married. Liz kept house for pay. Leona worked at a day care, Clara at the meat locker. A battery-operated am/fm radio on the kitchen counter played contemporary Christian hits next to a blue thermos of coffee from which they filled their white cups. They smiled and joked in their gentle way. From time to time they had male “friends” who took them to dinner or called them on the beige wall phone.

Clara eventually married at fifty-eight, Leona at sixty-seven. Liz, the matriarch, remains single, a shining woman with hair the color of snow. Lately she’s started asking me questions at Thanksgiving, after she’s had too much coffee: Am I interested in having babies someday, and might I have any “special friends”? She tells me about the men who proposed to her years ago, and I ask why she said no.

“Well, I was scared,” she says, as if this should be evident. She wraps her warm hand around my forearm. “I was so young. What did I know then?”

NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES I try to write about my wanting, the story never makes sense the way I want it to. Already I feel I’ve failed to mention important parts, like this:

That college boyfriend once sent me a postcard, even though I lived just across town. The postcard had a photo of a Japanese tidal wave on it. I taped it to the wall by my bed, and on those nights when I couldn’t be with him, I stared at it. Later, in the dark days of our relationship, I began to dream I was standing on a pebbled beach beneath marbled skies. In the distance a black wave approached, moving steadily toward me. It was so big. It rolled and thundered. It was coming, and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get away.

And this: He would be talking to me, telling me something about how messed up my life was, how messed up I was, telling me how much he loved me, how he was the only person in the entire world who really loved me, and I would simply fall asleep. No drifting off. No counting sheep. I was there one minute, and then I was gone.

What did I really want? Why did I stay with him? I don’t know. I don’t know.

And then there’s this: For a year — during the months in which I was with the boy, and then in treatment, and then not with the boy — the image I could not escape, the image I drew on paper over and over again, was of a world covered in hard gray asphalt all the way to the horizon. The sun was setting, and a girl stood there, three tiny cracks at her feet with some scraggly weeds growing out of them. Whenever I drew this, I felt panicked, but I couldn’t stop drawing it.

WHEN I WENT TO TREATMENT, they diagnosed me with “love addiction.” At the time, those words were two points of perfect sense in a nonsensical world, but now they make me wince and mumble. “Love addiction.”

The therapists told me my wanting problems were rooted in my dna, my neural pathways, the gaps between my synapses, and that the solution to my problems was not pills nor electroshock nor even a brisk slap of common sense. Over and over they said the solution was a spiritual one. For a decade I have been trying to understand this, honestly, but most days it just sounds like touchy-feely hoo-ha. Addiction? Spirituality? Really? I want help, but I don’t want homeopathy or therapeutic exercises involving baking brownies, doing macramé, or painting inspirational words on rocks. I do not want to bang on a pillow and scream at everything I hate. I am not interested in hyperventilating until I sob or in looking for God in a tree. I know this because I’ve tried it all.

I’ve also eaten Twizzlers, leafed through piles of celebrity-gossip magazines, smoked cigarettes, obsessed about my weight, spent hours doing my hair, performed Internet searches for ex-boyfriends, roamed the mall, turned my skin a carotene orange with the alien light of tanning beds, and given in over and over again to my lust for beautiful, broken men, men my friends refer to as “just assholes, Rachel. It’s not a mystery. They’re assholes.”

And yet the question remains: If I know so much, if I can understand chemicals and neurons and stupidity, why am I still doing this?

I’VE DATED THE SAME GUY over and over in a dozen different iterations: That coffee-shop guy who wrote bad stories based on his dreams and who could not spend the night in my bed because it was “too hot” and he felt like he was suffocating. That drunk guy who promised to take me on his yacht if I flew across the country to see him, but when I got there, he locked himself in his bedroom for the weekend and drank and drank and drank. That guy who slept with me and then afterward said, “It’s your world. I’m just passing through.” That guy who painted houses and told uncomfortably dirty jokes and who, long after I stopped dating him, threw himself in front of a car and broke both his legs and became homeless. That boy I wanted to marry when I was twenty. That guy.

And now I’m turning thirty and have, again, begun dating that guy, this time named Jack. Honestly I tried not to. I did. When I brushed by him at a crowded party, I purposefully didn’t make eye contact. And a couple of weeks later, when he strode into another party like a big cat, sniffing the air, I promptly left. He was tall and bearded, and there were rumors about him: strippers and gambling, an ego, full of himself.

Whenever I saw him, he was all lit up like Vegas, white lights outlining his frame, a neon red arrow pointing directly at his head. The closer I got, the more my internal warning system blared, Danger! Lights and bells and a puff of smoke from some circuit that had shorted out. Flashing colors. Bouncing, twirling, whirling things. A sudden handful of silver coins.

IT BEGINS THE WAY it always begins, so simply: it looks like fun.

On the first date Jack tells me point-blank that he is a mess, that he always screws things up with girls, that he hurts people, and that he has a “complicated” relationship with an ex-girlfriend whom he will be going to see in New York the next morning. He chain-smokes. He gambles. He goes to strip clubs. He says, “I just want you to know that there are a lot of girls, and I’d rather you hear this from me than from someone else.”

And how do I respond to all this? Great. Let’s date.

I call my friend Megan and tell her I have no good reason to be dating this man, that it’s a bad idea, that I’m just going to hang out with him instead — you know, for fun — and not get involved, that I’ll still date other people, that it’s really not a big deal, this Jack guy, because I know what I’m walking into. My eyes are open, wide open. I know what I’m doing. I’m thirty, for God’s sake. It’ll be fine, fine, fine.

She sighs.

I WANT TO MAKE different choices. I do. I want to develop a capacity to change. I want to be like the Zen meditator who took part in a scientific experiment on insights — those aha moments when a solution to a problem suddenly becomes clear. In order to solve the verbal puzzles presented to him, the meditator had to access his intuition, which meant he had to let go of reason by unfocusing his thinking, the way you unfocus your gaze to see the hidden image in a 3-d poster. The meditator was a very focused person, though. Problem after problem came and went, and he couldn’t solve them — until suddenly he began getting every puzzle correct, one after the other. “[T]he dramatic improvement of the Zen meditator,” says neuroscientist John Kounis in The New Yorker, “came from his paradoxical ability to focus on not being focused. . . . He had the cognitive control to let go. . . . He became an insight machine.”

My friend Megan calls this the “free-falling heart of surrender.” She throws her hands up in the air, leans back, and looks toward the sky. “You just have to let go,” she says, “and while you’re falling, you shout, I don’t knooooooooow!”

DO I REALLY HAVE TO tell you how it goes with Jack?

But here are the surprising things: He enjoys baking, particularly cinnamon buns, which we make together on multiple occasions. He has this mutt whose belly he rubs while cooing, “You’re so strong and friendly. Yes, you are.” For a while he calls me every night, and I go over, and we sit in his living room, reading or playing with the puppy or doing some other boringly domestic thing, and then we get in bed, and he reads me a story until we’re tired, and then we just sleep beside each other. That’s it. In the morning he kisses me goodbye and says, “Be good.”

I try to tell myself this more than makes up for the random earrings scattered around his house, the hair bands the dog finds and chews, the fingernail polish in the medicine cabinet. That this makes up for the extended flat eye contact I get from pretty girls at parties, his oddly chipper observation that the room is full of glaring women tonight: “Man, oh, man, do they ever hate me!” That this makes up for the way his voice gets higher when he talks about his ex until he sounds like a five-year-old: “Don’t rag on her. None of this is her fault.”

One night, over dinner at some sushi place, I say to Jack, “I’m very optimistic, especially about men.”

And he says, “That’s what makes you the most beautiful girl in town.” Pause. Chew. “You’re built for pain.”

I shove more Crazy Tuna Roll into my mouth, but what I really want to do is jam the chopsticks up my nose. I want to lobotomize myself with these wooden sticks, sloppily and bloodily digging the stupid out of my brain.

I want him to like me.

Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE