After the disruption to my regular routine, Saturday afternoon at the store was thankfully much like many I’ve spent over the past four months: rotating books from the $2 section to the “Take Me, I’m Free” shelves outside of the store at 2pm, a weekly task to ensure enough space inside on the shelves for whatever might have been bought that week; tidying up the boxes of ephemera, which some customers appear to delight in disorganizing, so that sheet music is mixed in with the line drawings; occasionally making a sale (on Saturdays, interest is usually centered around whatever we put out for free rather than our other offerings); but mostly just pretending to be alert while I hang out with my co-worker, Ben.
Ben was the first friend I made in Berkeley completely under my own steam. Of course Caitlin lives in Albany, and got to the East Bay a couple of years before I did, following a dream of a Ph.D. she eventually ditched, and I met a few people through her I’ve been hovering between friends and acquaintances with for a while. But Ben? He’s the very first Adult Friend I have ever made on my very own, not through another friend. We met at a book club I had joined to get myself out of the house during the week, since Alex and I generally operate on a Friday night-Sunday night basis for togetherness. There are four other nights of the week to fill, and of course when I first landed in the studio, I had pretty much nothing to do except wander my new neighborhood and try to get my brain together while I was still so confused about where I stood with Alex. (Another story for another time.)
Before Julian moved over to America on the fiance visa, the idea of nothing to do in a day — no job, no obligations, just an entire day to fill up with something — seemed like bliss. I was working full-time in marketing, with several demanding clients in Europe, so it seemed I was always up so early to make sure I caught them on the phone before they signed off for the day. I’d then put in a full day in the office, which was luckily only a 15 minute commute (amazing in Pasadena, but true — I lucked out on location in my bachelorette pad). Sure, I went out at night on occasion with the Jen(n)s and Sean and our old crew, but more often than not I stayed in so I could stay up late and talk to Julian when he woke up. Every day was full up more than bursting with tasks to complete and errands to run and people to make happy.
And then when Julian was finally over, the wedding vows taken, and the marriage I’d dreamed of so long now a reality, I gradually drifted out of and back into and finally (and soul-darkeningly) out of full-time work. Julian would have preferred me a homemaker, a wife and a mother, but I was… restless in the house. Too restless not to be consumed with something, whether it was a job, or decorating our too-big house, or taking cooking classes, or, or, or… anything. God forbid that “something” be my husband, who was just as always-away and never-around as his own father had been. The perfect, domestic stage I was setting at home most frequently only featured me, though occasionally Rachel would come stay for a while when she thought our mom was “making things boring” at our childhood home (read: Mom was asking her if she ever intended to finish her screenplay, get a “real” job, or start dating men who were closer to her own age). I would have traded any number of classes on making the perfect Beef Wellington or blending one’s own signature scent or cutting dainty silhouettes for Julian just to be home for me, with me.
“How do you expect me to finance your lifestyle if I am not out making money for us? It’s not like you’re the same person I met all those years ago,” he spat out at me one time, as the very end of us was drawing near, but before all the mess with Alex spun out of control at last. “You have expectations now. Not like when I met you, and you were happy with a bracelet here or there. How did you get like this, Melissa?” (I’m not like this, I wanted to scream, except to the extent that you made me like this. But I didn’t.)
I am blowing this ship fully off course here. This is about Saturday. I mean, Julian has something to do with it — but… yes. I was in Berkeley at first with no job, almost no friends, and no purpose except to try to tease some sort of sanity out of my life’s snarl by being closer to Alex. I had money from Julian — a lump sum in the bank that I’m trying not to touch too much, and a monthly stipend — to keep me afloat without having to work, but not working left me in the same position I was before: dependent on Julian for everything. And what was the point of being unmoored from him if I could not prove that I was still useful for something?
The something was elusive for a while. I didn’t want to tell Alex, but I felt sometimes that I had made a big gamble on a someday-maybe-us that didn’t always feel likely to pay off. I just don’t want him to feel he’s responsible for me too — he’s already got a mother and a sister and an ex-wife and a daughter who are too innocent or too venal or too accustomed to his support to realize that they’re taking up nearly all the space in his mind and his pockets.
I should be happy with a bit part in his life, after all we’ve been through, all we’ve put everyone else through. But like Julian used to say, I’ve gotten greedy over time.
One sunny Thursday in late December, in that straggly part of the week between the bookends of Christmas and New Year’s, I wandered out of Steve’s garden for the first time with a purpose: book club. Caitlin was the one who put me onto it, forced me into it really, worried (rightly) that I was in danger of drifting into another position of dependency on a partner to define myself — now I was the girlfriend with no other role, where once I’d been (to myself at least) “wife.” Book club would expose me at the very least to some of the cranks and weirdos I’d been watching only from afar for the past month. And this town is full of weirdos — I say this as someone from Los Angeles, this town has us beat. The first time I heard someone pass judgment on the contents of my shopping basket at Berkeley Bowl blew my little SoCal brain — that would never happen at Gelson’s!
So I ended up in a coffeeshop on a Thursday afternoon ready to discuss Dickens’ “Bleak House,” or at least to listen to other people discuss it while I sipped on peppermint hot chocolate. However, Ben and I were the only people who showed up, and neither of us had read the book. I mean, I had read the book about five or six years ago, but Ben hadn’t at all. I was only able to tell Ben was another member of the club because the coffeeshop had put out a largeish “reserved for club” card tent on a table, which Ben was fumbling with in his large hands when he wasn’t fussing with the dropped-stitched-ridden green scarf looped around his neck. His light brown hair was combed neatly to one side, and what might have been a perfect shave otherwise was marred only by a short streak of dried blood on his left jaw he was clearly unaware of. (I was polite enough to tell him of this later.) He was wrapped in a navy blue coat, which the mild weather really didn’t warrant. He looked desperately uncomfortable, overheated and out of place. I liked him immediately.
If I hadn’t been busy trying to figure out if there was even an “us” to Alex and me, at first sight Ben would have been my number one choice as a boyfriend, if I were looking, which of course I wasn’t. Nor was Ben, who is (as it turned out) gay, which meant he was definitely not the man for me (nor I for him, I guess). But like me, Ben was new in town, lonely and trying to figure out how grown-ups connect in platonic ways. He’d moved here from northern Mississippi with no real plans except to start a new job and get far, far away from there. (“You remember the rally where Trump attacked Christine Blasey Ford for drinking at a party? Just down the road from me and those morons ate. it. up. Fuck it, I was done.”)
You know when you meet someone and it’s like you never realized there was a space in your heart that was waiting for them all this time? Ben and I had (and still have) whatever “it” is — it was like a hard crush without all the complicated sexual frisson junk. I saw myself in him, saw the same awkwardness, the same drive to please any and all around me, the very same feeling of being new and raw and strange in a place that represented escape escape from the miseries we had inhabited. Kindred spirits, resonating at the same frequency, my grandma said when I told her about him.
I suppose we were. We abandoned the idea of book club within 10 minutes of meeting and spent the next five hours getting overly caffeinated on latte after latte (“I’m lactose intolerant, but whatever,” he told me, carefully stifling a belch) and spilling out the secrets that brought us to this strange city. I won’t tell Ben’s, since they’re not mine to tell, but trust me, I think I beat him handily. I didn’t tell him everything that day, but he was not expecting to hear that I was a former sort-of trophy wife who blew up her own marriage by falling in love (again) with the best man from her wedding who was also her ex-boyfriend. (“Um, YOLO, I guess?”)
It’s after midnight again. I can’t keep doing this, starting to write with a map and a compass and ending up nowhere near the shores I intended to reach, but there’s just so much to tell after being silent for so long. I feel so open and wild these days, that synapses are connecting and firing and blazing, as if I could almost see the electricity arcing across my brain. I am here and I am alive.
meandering again 