Cheating on Myself (3 page)

“It’s a great internship,” he said through thin lips. Erik’s lips stretched tight whenever he was frustrated. “It’s not Centrex, but still. And our interns are bright self-starters with a lot of great ideas.”

“Oh, come on! What is with the intern obsession today?” I reached for one of the tacos and inadvertently grabbed the beet and goat cheese one by mistake. Erik pulled it out of my hand before I could take a bite and replaced it with the carnitas taco. “What if I wanted to try the goat cheese one? Maybe I want to try something new. Is that a crime?”

“God, Stella, you’re in a foul mood tonight.” He refilled my wine glass, which had somehow emptied itself while I was on my little tirade. “What’s going on?”

I wasn’t sure what was going on. I was obviously feeling feisty, and Erik was there to take the brunt of it. I’d noticed this had been happening a lot lately—I’d get frustrated, start picking on Erik, he’d put his guard up, and all hell would break loose. We weren’t fighters, but the cold, irritable squabbling felt a whole lot worse.

“Are we ever going to get married, Erik?” It slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it, and as I said it, I could feel the tears prickling behind my eyelids. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a long, deep swallow of wine.

Erik took the wine glass out of my clenched fist and held my hands in his. This time, I felt no shivers, didn’t fool myself into hopeful anticipation, and I certainly wasn’t tempted to rub my foot up his thigh. I still had my eyes closed, but I knew exactly what expression was on his face when I heard him sigh. We were seated at the bustling kitchen table on a loud Friday night, and
still
I could hear his sigh, loud and clear.

Somehow, we got through the rest of our dinner that night. We made it home, we tucked into bed, we wished each other good night, and I read a single chapter in my book while Erik caught up on articles on his iPad. Business as usual. We predictably followed the routine of our life partnership and the monotony of each day-to-day. Unfulfilling, yet comfortable. Perfectly-matched, but taking each other for granted. We went on that way for another seven weeks.

Until I’d had enough.

CHAPTER TWO: SIX WEEKS LATER

Looking back, I guess I first let myself imagine what life might be like without Erik late in the night after our dinner at
Molto
. The sheer logistics were overwhelming at the time, so I’d considered it only briefly at first. There were the trivial things, such as the fact that I couldn’t make coffee myself. Thirty-four years old and unable to correctly figure out the right ratio of water to beans. Somehow, every time I ground coffee, I would end up with little chunks of coffee bean in the filter or a pile of ground coffee on the floor. I could learn to do it, sure, but the thing that immediately jumped into my head was the fact that the easier option—purchasing coffee for myself at the office—would add nearly five percent to my monthly budget.

Erik was also always willing to let me put my frozen feet between his thighs at night when I first climbed into bed, even if he’d already been asleep for an hour. I hated sleeping in socks, and my boyfriend was always there with a warm and toasty spot for them. He made really good chicken wild rice soup, and only fake-complained when I put “sappy” movies—anything with Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon or Colin Firth—in our Netflix queue.

The little things like hot coffee and cold feet added up, but on top of that were the big things… our life together, the carefully-negotiated morning bathroom ritual, his house that we’d made “ours,” his family coupled with my lack of family. There were enough things tying us together that it seemed impossible I could ever consider a life without him.

And more than anything, I loved him. I didn’t know an adult life without Erik, and I’d never let myself think one existed.

That, ultimately, was the problem. I’d had goals for myself—a list that told me who I wanted to become—when I’d been younger, and they were goals that had failed to evolve after I’d found Erik. At twenty-three, I’d achieved almost everything I’d ever thought I could want: I lived in Minneapolis-not-Farmville, had an enviable job, hilarious and reliable friends, and a seemingly perfect boyfriend. I’d checked off most of the things on my list that seemed to matter, but lost any desire for fun and spontaneity in the process. My life’s ambitions started to merge with Erik’s, and I found myself forgetting to think about me.

Initially, it was little stuff. I gave up pizza when Erik decided to do the South Beach diet, even though a carb-free day made me miserable. Then, Erik was always there to remind me how lucky I was to have my Centrex job, even though it was so unfulfilling I had lost my ability to be creative. I had always wanted to go to Italy, but since Erik had already been there on an art history trip during undergrad, we went to London and Brussels the only time we’d gone abroad. I’d never really thought about how much of myself and my own opinions I’d lost during our time together.

But new thoughts had crept in the night after
Molto
, and little incidents kicked me closer to the night I eventually left. I guess I started paying closer attention to what I wanted out of life, and other things began to bug me. A new list started to take shape in my mind, though this time I didn’t write it down. I just started paying attention to the little things, and when there were enough things on the naughty list, I knew it was time to go.

First, there was the baseball game. We’d decided to go to a late-in-the-season game, and Erik had gotten us good seats. We each ordered a hot dog with relish, one beer, and shared a little baseball hat full of ice cream. It was a perfectly pleasant evening, until the “Kiss Cam” turned its voyeuristic eyes our way. You know that giant TV screen where they show clips of the audience? And you know how they do that stupid thing where they zoom in on two people who appear to be in love, and wait for them to kiss while the crowd roars and urges them on? Well, I’d kinda always wanted to be on the Kiss Cam. Somehow, that night, we lucked out and the Kiss Cam came straight for us. I grinned, and turned toward Erik only to discover that he was making a disgusted face and exaggeratedly leaning away from me. The whole stadium started laughing, and I went bright red. He laughed, thinking he was Mr. Funny Pants.

The Kiss Cam moved away and got shots of other sweet couples who nuzzled and hugged and kissed and made my stomach sick with envy. I watched them all while Erik chatted about his hilarious performance with the beefy, drunk guy sitting in the seat next to him. After a minute or so, the cruel cameraman swung back around to catch
us
again—everyone obviously remembered us, since they started chanting, “Kiss her! Kiss her!” Some people in our section turned around to stare. My funny man decided to really ham it up this time, pretending I was the last person on earth he’d ever want to kiss. He held his hands over his mouth and shook his head violently. I felt the hot prickle of rejection tears stabbing at the backs of my eyes, and then suddenly, the whole crowd started “aw-ing.” I was being pitied by a stadium-full of screaming fans. The tears started flowing and then finally, with the Kiss Cam still trained on us, Erik stuck out his lower lip to pout and gave me a very unromantic kiss as a consolation prize.

He didn’t seem to realize how hurt I’d been by the whole thing, since that night he kept talking about how funny and clever it all was. How hilarious
he
was. Several people from work had been at the game and came over to say something to me the next day—I could tell they thought we were one of those couples who insult one another for sport, but the truth is, we weren’t. Neither of us was that clever. And the romance and make-up sex wouldn’t be powerful enough to handle the joking sting of fake insults. The night after the game was the first night in our entire relationship when I fantasized about Bradley Cooper while Erik and I were having sex. It was also the last time we
had
sex. A weeks-long dry spell followed that made me forget I’d ever had a sex drive.

Then, it was his obsession with the interns. Between Lily at the office and Erik at home, I was fed up with the obsession over youth and promise, and frustrated with my own shortcomings. I started to question my own choices, and began to wonder what would have happened if I’d picked a different path twelve years before. When I realized Erik and his intern-mentee were having a frolicking back-and-forth conversation via Facebook, I was understandably over interns altogether.

Ironically, it was a nimble, red-headed (and innocently unrelated) intern at Centrex that brought on the next wave of trouble.

Centrex had begun to offer a lunchtime yoga class on Mondays and Thursdays, at the recommendation of The Bears. It was good for team bonding, and studies showed that midday fitness boosted moods. I’d reluctantly started to attend, but had been struggling to get any of the moves down. Whenever our “guide” offered child’s pose as an alternative to tricky positions, I was the first to creep and crawl down to my mat. I couldn’t get the balancing poses, hated the stuff that involved upper-arm strength, and wasn’t bendy enough to do a lot of the floor exercises.

But one Monday a few weeks after my dinner with Erik, I foolishly squeezed my mat in between elderly Madelon from accounting and Stacia, the intern. When it came time to do the bridge pose, I looked over at Madelon and saw that she was just laying there, flat on her back. Then I peeked over at Stacia and saw that her body was perfectly arched into a fine, flowing bridge. Her flat stomach rounded up toward the paneled ceiling, fingers and toes perched easily on the floor beneath her.

“I can do that,” I thought, glancing briefly back toward Madelon, lying comfortably flat on the floor like a lump of old person. Then I pressed my tummy up and edged my hands and feet under my precariously-perched body. I was so elated my back was off the ground that I ignored the pinching discomfort in my back.

“I’m doing it!” I thought, grinning merrily. “I’m a yoga goddess!” That’s when I pushed my stomach further up and came crashing down with a horrible shriek.

“Oh!” Stacia cried, hopping nimbly out of her bridge to kneel next to me. My back was shooting rockets out from the lower vertebrae, and my body seemed locked in a position that was neither flattering nor particularly comfortable. “Are you okay?”

I stared at the intern, wondering if this looked “okay” to her. “Not really,” I muttered. By then, the rest of the class had turned to stare, and our instructor was huddled over my body with a horrified look on her face.

She began to rub the area in my back where it felt like daggers were carving someone’s initials into my spine. “I offered a modification,” she reminded me. “Perhaps the bridge was a bit much for you today?”

“Yes, today it must have been a bit much.” I bit my lip as my muscles continued to spasm. “I think I’ll just call it a day.”

I left my mat on the floor and hobbled from the converted conference room back to my desk. I spent the next hour flat on the floor in a corner of my cube. Lily rescued me after her strategy meeting and set up a floor bed in the corner of her office. I stayed hidden behind piled-up boxes that she ordered interns to carry up from the loading dock. She loaded me up with ice packs and ibuprofen, while I spent the afternoon entertaining her with my complaints about interns and their bendy limbs.

My body wouldn’t respond to meds, which meant the gym was out. No endorphins led to next-day depression. Depression led to angry eating. Angry eating helped me pack on a few pounds… so I was feeling fat, depressed, and bitter. And I couldn’t even run it off.

I suddenly had too much time to think about things, and had begun to lose perspective and patience. The way Erik breathed as he was drifting off to sleep irritated me, the smell of his body-wash in the shower made me sick, the fact that he never asked me what I wanted to do on the weekend was infuriating. So when I brought up marriage and how much it meant to me again, and Erik just sighed… well, that’s when I broke.

* * *

I let my engine idle in the parking lot and draped my hands over the heater for extra warmth and maybe a shot of courage. It wasn’t even October, but the temperature had already dipped into the forties and I refused to break out my gloves before the official start of fall. I also wanted an excuse to stay in the quiet and question-free environment of my car for a few more minutes. It was Thursday, and I was now ten minutes late for monthly drinks night with my friends.

Eyes closed, I breathed in through my nose, then out through my mouth, wondering if Sherri, my yoga teacher, was good for anything. But instead of my breath shooting calm zen through my system, the moment of solace was interrupted by a thudding knock on my window that scared the bejeezus out of me. I glared out the window and saw Catherine Jenkins’ perky face staring back at me.

“Shit, Cat, don’t do that!”

I turned the engine off and stepped out of my car to give her a big hug.

“Were you sleeping?” Cat said, flicking her hair extensions over the shoulder of her Burberry trench coat. “That’s not a good idea in this neighborhood, Stella.” She tapped her cell phone display. “You’re late, you know.”

“So are you,” I said, trudging at a snail’s pace alongside Cat as we walked through the parking lot out to the street. Her tottering high-heels kept her from moving fast, and indifference about making people wait made her move even slower. Even though tardy people made me jittery, Catherine had been one of my best friends for more than ten years. She was also Erik’s sister, which had made her both “family” and a friend—and the girlfriend I was most dreading talking to that night.

Cat giggled. “I’m always late. It’s my thing. You, however, ought to have arrived first.”

“I’m turning over a new leaf,” I grumbled, not ready to share my news yet. Judging by Cat’s lack of panic, Erik hadn’t told his sister—or, obviously, his mom—about our breakup yet.

“Oh em gee,” Cat said, grasping at my elbow with her tiny, manicured hand. Cat was five-foot-two and tiny, one of those people who made me feel like an ogre. She weighed less than my left thigh. Cat was also a mother of two, and had been known to eat exclusively leftover macaroni and cheese and hot dogs for three days straight. She ate like a child, and had now started to talk like one, too. Things like “OMG” and “natch” and “whatevs” had started to roll off Cat’s tongue less than a week after hiring a live-in French au pair who had apparently mastered English watching old episodes of
Gossip Girl
and
Glee
.