Chapter 4

Version 1

Note: I changed Nica and Jeremy’s relationship to be only 2 years, not 10 as stated in Chapter 1. I’ll say more why in the next podcast, where I will also address character development, generally, and how that is playing out in this story, more specifically.

Chapter Four

I stood on the front porch for a few minutes assuming she’d wrap up her call, especially if she could see I was waiting for her.  But she turned off the engine and kept talking instead.  

She waved at me before putting her left arm up on the open driver’s side window, and then she leaned into the side of the door and tilted her head back into her arm.  The whole production reeked of intentional theatricality, like a Saturday Night Live skit about dramatic teenagers.  It was meant by her and perceived by me as a signal…I’m taking my time, she was saying.  And I don’t care what you think of that.

By this point, I knew Nica well.  She wasn’t targeting me, per se, but the “patriarchy.”  Men have been treating women like shit since the dawn of civilization and she hit back whenever she could.  Since I was her boyfriend, I was often the target of microaggressions or thinly veiled verbal jabs, but not exclusively by any means.  Nica had a love/hate relationship with men that was …complex.

And unrelenting.  Only long after our relationship was over would I comprehend it was the defining struggle of her life.  Each of us has, I believe, such an inner conflict.  For me, it’s being able to form close male relationships owing to the fact I never did with my brother or my dad. I’m troubled by it still, even at my age, and it’s why I often find myself alone on a park bench instead of having a beer with my buds.

In this sense, our life traumas were a toxic mix, something that we eventually named quite consciously.  I'm not sure why we pushed each others’ emotional buttons, but we called it the 90/10 rule because, 90 percent of the time, we got along great, had this great connection, soul mate shit, we called it.  But the other 10 percent of the time?  We were explosively ill matched and hurtful towards each other, not in a consciously mean spirited way, but in a way that’s even more frustrating and painful: we didn’t understand each other.  

And 90 percent soulmate and 10 percent callous, incomprehensible stranger is a mind bender, pure and simple

For Nica, her inner conflict was over how to feel about men.  She used to share with me, quite crudely sometimes, how much she liked sex with men, and then graphically describe what she liked.  This was one of those microaggressions, meant to hurt my feelings - which it did.  But I also believe it was a manifestation of that inner turmoil and, in a way, she was expressing sincere wonderment.  How can I want and like men this much when they have hurt me so?

I suspect she suffered some abuse as a child or young girl in her many foster home experiences, as she made vague allusions to that effect every now and again.  But she never talked about it directly, and I never asked her about it explicitly.  Nica built her walls and I soon learned not to try to breach them or she would simply build them higher.

We didn’t have yelling fights very often, but one time when we did, I brought this defense mechanism up and the frustration it caused for me.

“Those walls have worked for me,” she said.

“I get that,” I replied.  “But they’re not working for me … and they’re not working for us.”

She shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly and walked away.

After a few minutes of watching her talk in the car, I turned around and walked back into the house, not because I had a reason to go back inside, but in a feckless attempt to feign nonchalance and preserve some dignity.  I fumbled with the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table and the internal questioning began.

Was it me?  Was I wrong to expect her to respect my time and give me some sense of when she might be there?  Was I being clingy and, as she had suggested before, unable to “live my own life?”  Or were my feelings simply hurt because I missed her and was anxious to see her, hug and kiss her, and she appeared not to feel the same about me?

By this point in our relationship, I had considered these questions many, many times, as this situation was repeated over and over. Maybe she was right, something that made me feel ashamed whenever I considered it.  Or maybe I wasn’t unreasonable to have these expectations, and we were just ill matched.  She needed a guy like her, that was distracted, not present, which I don’t mean as an insult but as a true characterization of her orientation.  

I used to ask her how she’d feel if I did to her what she did to me, time wise.  How about if I just showed up whenever I showed up and you couldn’t make plans or know how to use your time, I asked her once.

“I’d deal with it,” she said derisively. “I’d find something to do.”

I always wanted to test her on this, but it always felt petty and childish to me to do to her what I didn’t want done to me.  I thought to myself, bullshit, you’d be pissed - as you should be. It’s inconsiderate.

But what if I was wrong?  What if she truly didn’t care and didn’t think it was inconsiderate?  Maybe we just needed to find partners who felt the same way we did?  Early in our relationship, I compartmentalized and put my concerns about, not just the time issue, but Nica’s general selfishness over in a tightly sealed box.  I didn’t want to upset the apple cart.  But by this second, and it turns out last year with her, that became increasingly hard to do.

I thought about fixing the broken upper rack in the dishwasher, a task that had proved trickier than I anticipated.  Just get out the tools and do it, even though it might take a while, might even necessitate calling one of the volunteers, Tim Ridley, who was a plumber, to give me advice.  And when she finally walked in, I could just tell her it was going to take a while to finish.  See if she would indeed just “find something to do.”

I should have, but I didn’t.  She’d recognize what I was doing and it would lead to a fight later on.  And on some level, it would have, in fact, been childish.  If we needed to do that kind of shit - play those kinds of games -instead of just talking it out, our relationship was doomed.

I walked back out to the porch instead and saw that she was already halfway up the driveway, carrying a couple of plastic grocery bags.

“Hey, baby,” she said.  “What’s up?”

******

Justin looked at me from his side of the bench out of the one eye that wasn’t covered by his sweeping bangs.  I could tell he wanted to say something.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked.  “Go ahead.”

“Well,” he said.  “I do have a thought …a question really.  But I’m afraid it will come off as kinda rude.”

I chuckled softly.  There was something about this kid I liked.  That I trusted.  We do that in life, don’t we?  Have an instinct about people we don’t know well, total strangers, even.  There was something in him I recognized but I couldn’t put my finger on it yet.

“Go ahead,” I said.  “We’ve come this far, haven’t we?”

“I guess,” he said, but he didn’t seem reassured.  He licked his lips, sat up straighter and angled back a little.

“I don’t get why you loved her so much,” he said.  “She doesn’t seem …all that nice, I guess.”

I understood immediately why he would think this.

“Have you fallen in love yet, Justin,” I asked him.

He cast his eyes downward and then back up at me again.

“No,” he said.  “Not really, I guess.  At least I hope not.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“Sure, I’ve had crushes on girls or whatever,” he replied. “And you think about them, you know, sexually, I guess.”

All of the sudden his pale face was flushed red.

“But I sure as hell hope real love has more to it than that,” he added.  “More depth or whatever.”

I really did like this kid.

“You’re pretty smart for someone your age,” I said. “You don’t know the half of it, Justin.  Love, that is. Neither did I at your age. Neither does anyone.”

I tried to make eye contact with him, but his one open eye was fixed on his hands while he picked at his own fingernails.

“I still don’t understand it,” I added.  “And likely never will.”

He looked up from his fingers and swept aside his bangs so I could see both eyes and looked directly at me.

“I get it,” he said.  “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

I smiled deliberately so he could see I welcomed such challenges from him.

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll try to do that in a reasonable amount of time.  I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version, okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “That’ll work.”

I settled in on my side of the bench, but put my arm over the back of it and leaned in a bit toward him.

“The reason I asked you if you had ever been in love,” I said, “is that, if you’ve never been in love, then you can’t know what it’s like to have your heart broken.”

I was struggling to find the right words, to explain something so elusive in a concise way to someone who had no real understanding or background in such a complex topic.  I imagine it would be similar to a nuclear physicist trying to explain thermonuclear dynamics to me.

“It’s like a wound that never fully heals,” I told him.  “Actually, it is a wound that never fully heals.”

He looked as unsatisfied hearing that explanation as I was in speaking it.

“That’s trite and cliched, I know,” I continued, “but I can’t think of another analogy at the moment that you might understand.  To have your heart broken by someone you were deeply in love with, in my case with Nica, someone who pledged to me her heart, mind, body and soul, someone where we talked about being each other’s “person” on this earth, someone who you were planning to spend the rest of your life with …”

I let my words trail off because I could see he understood this particular point.

“The pain of that never fully goes away, Justin, especially if the circumstances were …acute and not chronic.”

I could tell by his expression that I had lost him again.

“Especially if the breakup was sudden and dramatic, due to some hurtful event like an unexpected death from a car crash or an affair or something like that, '' I said.  “Especially if you didn’t see it coming.

Again, he looked like he had a question but was afraid to ask it.  I was getting to know this young man well enough that I could already read him in certain ways.

“Go ahead,” I said.  “Ask your question.”

He smiled at my understanding that’s what he wanted to do, but didn’t speak.  He started fidgeting with his nails again, but stopped suddenly if not dramatically.

“Did she die or cheat on you, or something like that?” he finally asked.

“No,” I said without hesitation.  “I wish it were that straightforward, to be honest with you.  But like all things Nica, her dramatic exit was more complicated, more confounding.”

He shrugged his shoulders almost imperceptibly but, again, I knew what he meant.

“It’s been 40 years and I’m still bewildered by it,” I said.  “I’ll never not be bewildered by it.  And if you want to stay here for even longer than you’ve been sitting with me and hear about it, I can get to that eventually.  But, first, I’d actually like to address your original question, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” he said, then raised the eyebrow over the eye I could see.  “What was it again?” he asked, laughing.

“You wanted to know why I loved her so much when most of what I’ve told you so far makes her seem not so nice,” I said.

“Right,” he said, nodding.

“I’m going to go back to my wound analogy, if that’s okay,” I said.

He nodded again.

“You may not have been deeply in love at your age, Justin,” I said, “but I take it you’ve been hurt or injured at some point?”

“Sure,” he said.  “A few times.”

“What was the most serious?’ I asked him.

“I tore my ACL playing basketball last year,’ he said.  “I played JV basketball last year, even though my real sport is baseball.  Anyway, I was going up for a layup and landed on one of the other team’s player’s foot.”

I tried to be as good a listener for his story as he had been for mine.  I nodded and attempted to convey a facial expression that told him I understood the seriousness of his injury.

“It wasn’t just a tear, either, I snapped it in half,” he added.  “It hurt like a motherfucker.”

We both laughed, and I could see he was relieved that I joined him in that.

“And when you felt the initial pain,” I said, “I bet there were no other thoughts going through your mind. You weren’t also thinking, hey, what just happened, or I wonder how serious this is, or I wonder what body part I just hurt - nothing like that, right?”

“I guess,” he said.

“I don’t mean later, even just a few minutes later,” I said.  “I mean when it first happened, the pain blotted out everything, right?  And then 10 minutes later, the pain was still overwhelming, but the shock of it was already fading enough for you to start asking those other questions I just referred to.  And then an hour later, two hours later, all that night and into the next day, you still felt pain but it was starting to wear off and gradually you could have other thoughts.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Pretty much like that.  And the pain meds helped with all that, too.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The pain meds …hold onto that thought. I’ll get to that part in a minute.”

I could see that he raised both his eyebrows at that, but decided to put that side of my story with Nica off until later.  I leaned in a little closer.

“When you are deeply in love, Justin,” I said. “And you have your heart broken in this acute way I describe earlier, in a sudden and dramatic way, the process plays out very much like your injury.  Except, it’s not your ACL that’s hurting so much, but your heart.”

I thought I saw the hint of a smirk on his face, but I decided not to say anything.

“And just like with your ACL,” I continued, “at first the pain of it blots out everything.  But then, with time, although the pain is ever present, it starts to fade and you can start to have other thoughts. Only instead of hours, days, and weeks like with your injury, think in terms of months, years and decades.”

If it had been a smirk before, I could see it was gone now.

“Also like your ACL, people who’ve had their heart broken this way often seek out pain meds, if you will,” I added.  “Although, frequently, these don’t help and, some, like drinking or drugs, make your life worse.”

He was as still as I’d seen him be the whole time I’d known him and, this time, I couldn’t read him.  He was looking over my shoulder and I hoped his expression suggested he was trying to absorb what I was saying, but it might have been confusion.  I was pretty certain it was not disinterest, so I let the silence linger.

“So you aren’t gonna tell me what she did?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said, smiling. “I hadn’t realized I was only saying bad things about her before until you pointed that out. I can rectify that and give you a few examples of why I thought she was so amazing. After all,  I’m the one who told you a moment ago that you can’t understand heartbreak if you haven’t known love, but our story, Nica and mine, is not just about heartbreak.  We had an extraordinary love, too”

I took a deep breath. “At least, I want to believe we did,” I added.  “You want to hear a little about that part of the equation,” I asked.

“Sure,” he replied quickly.  “Like you said, we’ve come this far, haven’t we?”