Love Sick Page 20

  I am obsessed with stripping down my life, crumbling my debt. Dad and Daisy can have all the time they need because I want to be free.

  The farmette hasn’t disappeared from my future but Kevin has largely disappeared from my present. The game of collecting dishes from a year ago is over. I have no more jam to sell.

  “I was suicidal a couple of weeks ago,” I tell him in one of our few phone calls. He is in his car with fifteen minutes on Lily’s caregiver’s clock.

  “I saw your blog,” he says. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  I brush his response out of the conversation immediately, asking about Lily, his roster of haircuts, Sarah and Grace’s travel plans. It takes a couple of days for me to grow angry that he read the Klonopin story and didn’t call me, even if he had to wait for Lily to go to bed and it was one in the morning in New York.

  Did he care?

  I don’t know. I still don’t know. A former drinking buddy of his dies in the spring and his response is that he’s so sorry he hadn’t had time to make his amends. He tells me more of the story later and sighs. “He died and I didn’t. It’s so weird, Frances. If he’d gotten sober, maybe . . . You know,” his voices changes from sad to final, “this program really works. The more thorough I am about my shortcomings, the more peace I have. I’m more patient with Sarah and Grace, more grateful that they can afford to go out and have such good times. I have to stay upbeat and positive for Lily and I can do that. I don’t want to have regrets about my attitude when she doesn’t know me anymore.”

  I murmur appropriate things but I am in no sympathy with contentment, largesse, gratitude, love.

  After the call, I text Will that I think I should come visit him. He writes back that he’s on his way to Hong Kong for a conference. After he returns, I tell him I’m free in July but he never does set a date. When does life happen? Do we have to wait until Step Nine? Do we wait until Lily is babbling in diapers? Would ECT shake me out of my clenching agoraphobia, my chains to Debt, Dad and Daisy? Is one night in Chicago an infringement?

  My psychiatrist increases my antidepressant dosage but only after making an appointment with her has been a note on my desk for two weeks.

  I tell Jane some of this as we photograph our barely worn Eileen Fishers and Dana Buchmans.

  “I think you should cut Kevin a break,” she says.

  “Why? Is it so hard to pick up the phone and say, ‘Boy, you sound like you’re in a really painful place. I feel for you’? He could have emailed that and it would have been a glimmer of hope for me.”

  “Men aren’t good at this sort of thing.” She holds up her hand to stop me. “Even gay men. I’m pretty good at it, though. Come to me. Go to Jean. Call your therapist—I’m sure she’d rather talk to you when you’re in a hole than find out you were in it later.”

  “I thought he was my best friend,” I say as I fold a pair of trousers over a hanger.

  “He’s been drunk more than he’s been sober. He has to learn how to be a friend and it’s harder to be a friend to someone in pain than it is to someone you just laugh with.”

  I think about that as we continue to measure inseams and sleeves. I’ve abandoned friends when it got too hard to help them. I abandon them when it’s too hard to help myself.

  I tell Jean about these conversations with Kevin after he repeats his peace-patience-gratitude-attitude litany to me a month or more after he’d said it the first time. In the sunniest patches of my routes with the dogs, the roses are frowsy and the hollyhocks are beginning to bloom. I’ve moved from clothes to books now and have brought over a pile of Tudor history for Ben.

  “And just who else is he going to say this to?” Jean asks sharply.

  I look up from the table and rearrange their Labrador puppy’s face, smooshing her forehead down over her nose and pulling her lips up into a ferocious snarl that still makes her look like the happiest creature on earth. Is Jean taking Jane’s side? Bridget grins and clamps her teeth on my arm.

  “I’m tired of hearing the same old thing,” I say. “I’m tired of not being probed a little for how I’m doing.”

  “It’s the same old thing because you’re probably the only one he can say it to. Is he gonna sit down with his sister and say, ‘You know how pissed off I always was when you went away for weekends even though I never told you? Well, I’m happy for you now’?”

  At the sound of my laugh, Bridget takes a standing leap into my lap and turns to laugh with me. Actually, Bridget is a year old now and is quite a lapful. She is the happiest dog I’ve ever met and sometimes I turn up here just to love her.

  “Of course he repeats himself, Frances. What else is going on in his life?”

  “What’s going on in mine?” I demand. “I’m depressed. I have to take Klonopin in order to walk dogs. I sleep a lot. I edit. Nothing new ever happens to me either.”

  “If that’s the case, do you really need to say that to him? Say it to me. Say it to Ben. Say it to Jane. You have at least three times as many people to tell how depressed you are and he pretty much has you.”

  “He has his sponsor.”

  “Now you’re nitpicking. You have a sponsor, too.”

  Bridget twists in my lap and washes my face and glasses. Damn. I’ll have to walk home in a dog spit fog. I hate dog spit fog. I gather her ears together and turn Bridget into Brigitta and sing a bit of “The Lonely Goatherd.”

  Jane and Jean are right, of course. Maybe it’s time to see my sponsor. Maybe it’s time to think about the work I have to do before Lily moves on to her next stage. While preparing for my death, I’ve cleared my apartment of a lot of stuff and made room for more of my life. I’ve saved money to get through the lean days of my dogs going off to Martha’s Vineyard and Quogue and Shelter Island, and I’ve paid off a number of credit cards. I have a new book idea and have been asked for a short story.

  I want to care again. I want to look forward to getting up in the morning and working and seeing people. I want to wear earrings and color my hair. I want to want something—Sondheim territory again—and I have a tin box of cash that could pay for a trip to Europe next year if I keep saving. It would be heaps cheaper to go to Amsterdam from New York than from Seattle.

  I don’t want to move to Seattle in the kind of despair that comes with dependency on one friendship. I don’t want to move to Seattle thinking it is the cure for my boredom, writer’s block, weight, aloneness, indifference. I know it’s not, just as Dar wasn’t a cure, or Paul, Galean or Jeremy or any man I ever loved. All of my discomfort in life was there before they broke my heart and it was there after, with a soupçon more doubt and self-blame to add the general scratchiness.

  Kevin tells me every third or fourth phone call—which is to say, every three or four months—that he wants to live on the farmette with me. I want to stop worrying that his plans have changed. I want to trust him, trust the silence. It’s a skill set to work on, day by day.

  I want to trust myself so that if plans change—if I, for instance, decide the relationship is unsatisfying—I’ll have the hope and the investment in myself to change with them.

  • • •

  You probably picked up this book expecting a love story or a comedy. I think it is, in the end, a love story that hasn’t reached its ending yet.

  Maybe it hasn’t even advanced very far.

  Acknowledgments

  The first person I have to thank is my brother Jim Kuffel. He drew a line in the sand about my writing and I did the opposite of his advice, making him responsible for this book and my improved financial ethic.

  Bouquets of dahlias to Kenneth and Constance Wilkinson and to Kyra Becker. You are so much a part of my life that my toes would fall off if we were separated.

  Bouquets of orchids to my agent, Fredrica Friedman, who kept me on track with this book. A pitcher of margaritas to my editor, Denise Silvestro. T
here are too many things I need to thank you for, Denise, in the limitations here.

  Bouquets of moonflowers to Ann Marie Carley and Gerry Dempsey. You keep me sane.

  No woman can live well without a female posse. Love Sick’s posse includes Ann Allen-Ryan, Kaylie Beierle, Jennifer Bruno, Marian Cole, Susan Dooha, Jeriyln Hassell Poole, Susan Seidel and Jan Tessier, who have given me the perfect chorus of advice, blunt humor and the needed eye rolls. Constance, Denise and Ann Marie are a part of that chorus as well, in a big way.

  And always always always I thank my supporting cast, Daisy and Dad, Leonard Kuffel, my reasons for being alive.

  * eharmony.com. 2011. Web. May 29, 2011.

  * eHarmony defines these categories as “emotional temperament, social style, cognitive mode, physicality, relationship skills, values and beliefs, key experiences.”

  * It took the threat of a New Jersey anti-discrimination lawsuit in 2009 for eHarmony to open a sister site, Compatible Partners, that serves gay men and lesbians. queerty.com. 31 March 2009. Web. 31 May 2011.

  * Blade, Lina. Urbandictionary.com. 14 June 2004. Web. 31 May 2011.

  * http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/procroysoc.pdf. 10 May 2013.

  * Patzer, Gordon. Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined. New York: American Management Association. 2008. Kindle edition.

  * She drives everywhere, I remembered.

  * “Abstinence” is the phrase for the 12-step food plan I follow.

  * In French slang, a French kiss is a patin, an ice-skating boot. The verb for French kissing means to roll a skate. It kinda makes sense. I guess.

  * Fourteen months after writing that ad, I have to say “deeper into the beauty” is a damn good line.

  * “Mark,” of practicalpickup.com, writes of how thin men “give in” to fat women for one-night stands: “With the right combination of depression, desperation and alcohol, any man can succumb to any woman, even if she looks like the Michelin Man.” There is a new, inner ring of hell for Mark and his friends.

  * Short for poetry business. I began my writing life as a poet. That’s why, when I don’t know what to do in a paragraph, I describe the sky.

  * “Anyone Can Whistle” from Anyone Can Whistle.

  * “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George.

  * “Talent” from Road Show.

  * Stephen Sondheim, “Company,” Company, 1970.

  * Stephen Sondheim, “Being Alive,” Company, 1970.

  * Stephen Sondheim, “No Place Like London,” Sweeney Todd, 1979.

  * I had to laugh when I registered at nolongerlonely.com, a comprehensive “social community for adults with mental illness,” and wondered how a dissociative would answer the questions of activity preference. In fact, the site caters to people with depression, eating disorders, autism/Asperger’s, personality disorder, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, schizoaffective, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive and dissociative disorders. This puts a whole new spin on picking a favorite cuisine or movie genre . . .

  * And, yes, there are “1000s of Sexy Midgets” waiting to find love online.

  * Millionaire Matchmaker, Season 5: Ep. 3.

  * O’Brien, P. David, Over 50 Dating Secrets, Amazon Digital Services, 2012. Kindle edition.

  * It is time for spell check to accept “friend” as a verb.

  * Currently residing with my niece in Oregon, along with some other china and furniture. The rest of my junk is in Montana. And you wonder why I feel so scattered all the time?

  * Caramelized onion bacon blackberry jam; blueberry mint ginger jelly; papaya peach bacon jam; apple bacon butter; lavender Johnny-jump-up jelly; strawberry ginger pineapple jam; pumpkin toasted pecan butter; blackberry rosemary jam; pumpkin pear toasted almond butter.

  * My apartment, aka the Bat Cave, is a not-very-long rectangular studio apartment with windows looking into my neighbor’s garden. I have a slice of sunlight for about forty-five minutes each morning that does not cut into the perpetual dusk. I have not infrequently left the house thinking I am wearing black tights only to discover they are navy blue halfway to my destination. It’s easy to take naps there.

  * Pretty stale for a lit-boy like Dar.

  * No, I wouldn’t. Trust me on this.

  * No. You owe me public self-flagellation. I do not mean this metaphorically.

  * I know that one guy really liked me. Was it the gift of his riding crop that stanched further contact?

  * Until my inability to execute a decent Palmer Method capital “N” made Sr. M. Francesca so furious that she threw my bottle of ink at the wall, where it splattered like the blood of King Harod’s martyred innocents, then made me clean it up. My mother then switched me over to a cartridge pen, sighing at one more minor incident in the parade of persecutions against her nine-year-old passing through Francesca’s clutches.

  * I remember a diet in sixth grade, at the start of which I weighed in the 170s. It lasted about ten days. The next time I remember looking at a scale, I was fifteen and weighed 240 pounds. I found the scale useful only when I went on diets.

  * That ended the summer between eighth grade and high school, when I read The Godfather.

  * And consider how enticing it was to me that Rochester overlooked Jane Eyre’s plainness or that Darcy fell in love despite himself.

  * We had a large house that should have been designated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation because it was such an exquisite example of the early sixties ranch style. If anything could be “built in”—a blender, a rotisserie, a television—it was. Plus it had a shrine to the Virgin Mary and was almost entirely paneled in teak.

  * An irrigation ditch system, lined by old willows, bordered our yard, which was surrounded on two sides by massive fields. The ditch bifected in one of those fields and had wooden floors and trusses. It was a magnificent ditch.

  * “You could balance champagne glasses on his butt.”

  * Which I got kicked off of. His fame for writing also put a serious crimp in what had been my territory of specialness.

  * Now, of course, I know that’s a lie. He had a crush on Mark Fallon. Where there’s a crush there’s . . . Still, what else could he say to me at the time? It was dangerous knowledge.

  * Which truly began when Grace Willoughby, Kevin’s little sister, who I had a vague recollection of being in the Joni Mitchell set in high school, walked up to me outside a philosophy class and said, “You’re Frances Kuffel, aren’t you? You look interesting. Do you want to have coffee?”

  * “Did you read the part about being bored?” I responded.

  * Followed, I assumed, by fellatio.

  * “I’m interested” is not the correct answer to “I’m bored.” I mean, if my boredom is interesting it must not be boredom, right?

  * But a picture of which you?

  * A note on phone sex: For someone who is inexperienced and/or insecure, phone sex is a good tool for breaking through all those words, acts, costumes and casts of characters that our mothers and churches would be appalled to know we harbor.

  Well, most churches. I’m a malpracticing Catholic. My church may be a pioneer in these matters.

  * “No need to despair if your hourglass figure has gained half an hour,” Shirley Friedenthal and Howard Eisenberg chirp in It’s Never Too Late to Date. “It’s never too late to lose weight.”

  * New York City Black and/or Spanish patois: “I been axin’ a’ the bookstore but day don’ ’ave it.”

  * Google is good at translating my wild misspellings. A musernik is a student of Jewish morals and ethics.

  * Leviticus 15:19–23.

  * Now if someone could explain to me exactly why the Christian Right gets to use Leviticus to condemn homosexuality while lunchi
ng on crab-stuffed pork and steamed cormorant, I might give up the Big Bang and be saved.

  * Ezra 9:10–10:3.

  * Frum, which means “pious” in Yiddish, refers to Orthodox Jews. Really Orthodox Jews are known as frummers.

  * As I learned later, Leviticus is the Boy Scout manual for what to wear, what to eat, who to fuck and how to pray. Orthodox Jews shave their beards off when they are in mourning but otherwise observe the commandment, “. . . neither shalt thou mar the corner of thy beard” (Leviticus 19:27).