My story from the 5/24/21 Moth grand slam:
I was 27, living in a loft with no walls with my ex who had cheated on me with over 100 women and given me herpes. We were still living together because he was my business partner. Life was messy. After going six months without anyone asking me out, which felt like a lifetime at that age, I told my friend Jim I just wanted to date someone who read The New Yorker. He delivered the Novelist to me, who had given him a subscription for his birthday, so it was clearly meant to be. The Novelist had written a doorstop of a cult classic book that Jim made me read before we met, which is even better than deep Googling someone, should you ever have the chance. He was charming and successful and super smart. When we first met, I was reading an old paperback while I waited for him and after introducing himself he asked if he could see my book, then he flipped through the pages and smelled it. I was hooked. After years in fashion and not having anyone to talk books with I had found someone who wanted to talk about them all the time. I mean, when he went on a mini book tour, he bought us both copies of All the King’s Men so that we could read it and discuss it every night on the phone. I had never been so head over heels completely engrossed and caught up in love with anyone before.
We spent every night together at his tiny apartment because, again, still living with the ex. After many visits spent waiting in my car for him to show up because I didn’t have a key, I asked if I could have one, given the whole every night of it all. He said no. He’d never given anyone a key and the thought of it freaked him out. That kind of shocked me. I guess I assumed once he realized how much time I was spending sitting in my car, that of course he’d give me a key and that would just be that. I guess I should also mention that he was 40 and maybe too old to have never given someone he was dating a key before. But, he showered me with love letters, a first, and told me he’d never been so in love with anyone. His friends said he’d never introduced any of his girlfriends to them before and that this was a big deal. We had dinner every Sunday night at his composer friend’s house then watched The Sopranos in his giant ballroom. Things were pretty magical there for a minute. It felt like I had been plucked from my messy life and dropped into the one I had always dreamed of.
Under this spell I didn’t see, or maybe I just excused, the bad stuff. The controlling stuff, telling me that I couldn’t hang out with certain people, that I dressed too provocatively, that he knew better than me how to do just about everything from grocery shopping to purchasing car insurance and I certainly wasn’t welcome to write around him. It was the first time in my life that friends and family told me they didn’t like someone I dated, which was weird, because clearly I had made some truly awful choices before him. When my parents came out from Florida for one of my fashion shows I was so excited for them to meet. They hadn’t met my business partner before either and after the show they told me how much they loved him-–the man who had cheated on me with over 100 women and given me herpes, but sure-–and kind of danced around how much they disliked the Novelist. Maybe it was the way he spoke in know-it-all monologues and mentioned he went to Yale any chance he could get. Maybe it was how much like my dad he was. But no matter what anyone said, I still couldn’t see it.
One night we went to The Chateau Marmont for drinks after a boozy expensive dinner with a professor who taught his first novel. He was pretty high from the piles of praise at dinner, the man considered himself a great talent and especially appreciated it when other people noted that as well. He told me he wanted to marry me, knew that we would make beautiful babies and couldn’t wait to start a life together. It was everything I wanted to hear and made all the bad stuff seem worth it.
The next day it was 97 degrees out and I headed to the farmer’s market to buy his groceries for the week while he wrote--as I was expected to do every week. When I came back, sweaty and slightly annoyed by all the hauling in the heat, he asked where his change was. The man wanted change. I snapped listing all the things that had become my job on top of running my own business like helping him finish his book, helping him entertain people who came through town that might give him an edge with the upcoming National Book Award, making him clothes for his book tour, copy editing his galleys, cooking all his meals, buying his groceries, doing his laundry. It was a lot. And then he broke up with me. And I was devastated. Like the kind of devastated where the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is start crying devastated. And that lasted for a few years, not the crying all the time, but the feeling like I had lost everything.
A couple years ago I ran into the Novelist at Jim’s 60th birthday party. He’s now married to a woman who he describes as type C. I had to look that one up, but basically it means someone who will do all the things I was doing and put their partner’s life first without ever complaining. Clearly it was the complaining that was my undoing. I now have a partner of 6 years who is also a writer, who also went to Yale and who also has been known to tell people that on occasion. But he’s a TV writer, not a novelist, which makes him more of a collaborator than a monomaniac. It took me years to recover from that breakup and to finally realize that I hadn’t lost out on my dream life, I’d probably escaped a life of abuse. The TV writer doesn’t really read novels or want to talk about them, but he does love doing the laundry and I am fine with that trade off.
