Hot Little Hands (15 page)

“Yeah.” I laugh. “I'm thinking of switching to ultralights.”

Sy is waiting for us alone at the lights opposite Zeitgeist. I ride up and tell him, “Everyone's nicer to me than you are.”

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

“You don't even want me here.”

“I'm sorry. My friends were in a rush, I thought you were right behind me.”

“I don't even care.” I glare at him. “You can do what you want.”

“There's something wrong with you,” he says. He sits back on his bike and rides away.

We make up again, but it's not the same between us. When I show up at his workplaces to visit him, he flashes me this big fake smile and talks about how tired he is—“I'm dying,” he says—and how he doesn't have the energy to go out that night. When other people come in, he gives them his real smile. Even when we do hang out, for breakfast at the St. Francis or sandwiches at Pal's, I can't get him to talk about anything. He's receding, right across the table from me. On nights that we sleep together, I pull my underwear on afterward, and he doesn't even protest.

One morning, after he's left for work, I can't get back to sleep. I turn on his computer and check my email. Then I scroll through his Internet history, to see if there are naked pictures or movies of girls in there. But there's no porn, just a bunch of Craigslist missed connections ads.
Women for Men, Café du Nord Bluegrass Night,
is one that he looked at.
Women for Men, Make Out Room Saturday,
says another. They're all about him. They're all looking for “the pretty one.” I close the laptop and I realize, anything at all can be porn.

Amanda rents a City CarShare car, picks me up, and takes me for a hike in Marin. We climb a grassy hill and sit and look at the ocean and the cars curling their way south on Highway 1, down to Santa Cruz or Los Angeles. All I can think is, I want to get away.

“So big deal, you got drunk and freaked out,” Amanda says. “When I first met James I freaked out constantly. Even now I still do, like, once a month.”

“And what does he do?”

“He asks me what's really going on. Then he says, ‘Shut up, you
know
I love you,' and I feel calm again. I mean, what girls our age haven't had a couple bad relationships that still fuck them up?”

“Girls our age,” I repeat.

“Listen,” she says on the car ride back. “This guy's young. The fights probably brought stuff up that he's too scared to deal with. You need to give him time to process. He'll come back to you when he's ready.”

We round a bend in the road and the city comes into view, silver and small and covered in fog.

“Do you ever think the fog might be divine punishment for all of us here?” I ask. “For being so liberal and gay?”

“Listen to you.” She looks over at me. “Have you ever been shut out by a guy before?”

“Only once. When I was sixteen.”

“Well, not much has changed since then,” she says. “Except for cellphones and caller ID. You can't call all day and hang up as soon as he answers.”

“I hadn't thought about that,” I say. “Hey—”

“Forget it,” she says, before I have time to ask. “You're not borrowing my phone.”

We cross the bridge and drive on to my house. “Remember,” Amanda says as we hug goodbye. “Give him some space.”

So I do. I give him the whole afternoon at work, and then I call. We meet up at Toronado and sit at the bar, drinking beers and eating vegan sausages and sauerkraut from next door. I tell him about Amanda and James. I promise I will try not to lose it again but, if I do, I need him to just be calm.

“Yeah,” he says, wiping the ketchup from the corner of his lip. “I can't do that.”

I tell myself not to end it, but then I say, “Well, I guess we have to leave it at that.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking down. “I guess it's that.”

I give him the rest of my food and we sit and drink our beers. “Just so you know,” I tell him, “even though this is an amicable ending, I'm gonna have major separation anxiety when we leave. I'm probably not gonna want to let you go. And I'll probably try to convince you to take me home.”

He laughs like I'm not serious.

We finish our drinks and head outside, and it all goes to script. He kisses me goodbye and I say his name in the quietest voice.

“Yeah?”

“Can I come home with you?” I ask.

“Claire.”

“I've never broken up with someone and not slept with them after.”

“I don't do that,” he says. “The more I wanted to do that, the less likely I would be to actually do it.”

He turns to go. “Sy,” I say again.

“What?”

“It's just that—” I look down at my shoes and I feel tiny small. “I used to look at your tattoos and think I would still be looking at them when I was old.”

“I know,” he says, nodding. He puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “My tattoos thought the same thing.”

So it's over. But to me, it's not really. I call him the next day. I tell him that what I'm asking is something really simple, and I'm sure we can work it out.

“I need baby steps,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you stress me out, and I need some time away.”

The next day I call him again. I tell him I'm heartbroken and I miss him, and if we can just get back together it'll be okay.

“Stop thinking about it so much,” he says. I hear a car horn in the background and I realize he's riding his bike. “You have too much time on your hands.”

“So you're not thinking about it?” I ask.

“I'm trying not to. I'm keeping busy.” He's slightly out of breath. “I mean, I went to yoga yesterday and I thought about it for the first five minutes. It felt good to, like, meditate on it.”

“Can we meet up for a sec?” I ask.

“I'm late for work,” he says.

“You're never late for work.”

“Exactly. Stop calling so much. Give me a minute to miss you.”

When I ring him later that night, he doesn't answer, and he doesn't call me back.

I shut myself in my room and look at his Facebook obsessively, but he hasn't updated it in days. I block him on gchat. Then I unblock him. I do this twice more. It doesn't make a difference; he's never online. I write three heartbreaking heartbreak songs on my keyboard and play them for Lars at our next rehearsal.

“These are terrible,” he says, letting go of his guitar and letting it hang around his neck.

“Wait,” I say, playing the opening notes to “Let Me Sleep Over and I'll Let You Sleep.” “Just listen to this one.”

“I'm suspending you from the band,” he says.

“What? You can't do that.”

He lifts his guitar over his head and kicks open his case. “Come back when you're happy,” he says. “This is a pop band. And you're way too miserable to keep up the tempo.”

That night, I call Sean. “Hey, who's the tattoo artist who does the text on all your friends?”

“Why, you gonna get one?”

“Thinking about it.”

“What's it gonna say?”

For a second I'm embarrassed, but then I tell him. “ ‘He's gone, he's gone, he's gone.' It's Junot Díaz.”

“Hello, overreactor,” he says. “Yeah, I know who it is. But that line is about the character's dead brother. You can't use it for some guy. How about ‘he's young, he's young, he's young'?” he suggests. “Or how about you let me come over?”

“I don't think so.”

“Come on. Don't mess with your body in a permanent way. Just do something temporary and self-destructive.”

“I don't know.”

“Come on,” he says. “What would Junot want you to do?”

Half an hour later, he's in my living room. My roommates aren't home so we do it on the couch. I try my hardest not to think about Sy and his bed, but eventually that seems harder than thinking about it, so I just do. Halfway through, I realize I'm going to cry as soon as it's over. When Sean finishes, I start.

“Wow,” he says, “do you always cry after you come?” But I didn't come, and that makes me cry harder. I want to curl up fetally, but he's squashing against me, so I stop sobbing long enough to ask him to leave.

“Are you sure?” he asks. I nod.

When he gets to the door, I say, “Please don't write about this.”

“Why not?” He lifts his laptop bag onto his shoulder.

“Because maybe I want to.”

“You're gonna start writing fiction now?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Isn't that what all the miserable people do?”

I'm losing weight and my roommates are worried. They take me to the Knockout for sugary cocktails to fatten me up. On the walk over there, I can't concentrate on what they're saying. I scan the street, looking for him. I look into every restaurant, every store, hoping to see curly hair, a white hoodie, an orange hoodie, a green one. I look at parking meters and street signs, searching for his locked-up bike. Then I realize he might have gotten a new one, as a breakup present to himself, so I look at every single bike on every single street.

At the bar, we order Manhattans and the bartender makes them strong. We grab a table and I scour the room looking for him, but they can be strict about IDs here; he probably couldn't get in if he wanted to. I check out all the guys. Though they dress like they're my type, none of them is as pretty as him, and I can't bring myself to work up an attraction. The only pretty people are the girls. I'm on an extra play at the pinball machine when one of them taps me on the shoulder. “I like your dress,” she says. She has pink lipstick on, and dark brown eyes, and her hair is dyed so blond it looks white.

“Thanks,” I say.

An hour later she pulls me into the photo booth and shoves quarters into the slot. In the first picture we're laughing. In the second one we have frowns, and fingers above our top lips like mustaches. In the third and fourth ones, we're kissing. She puts her hand inside my bra, then pulls it out. “Oh my God,” she says. She peeks out around the curtain and turns back to me. “My boyfriend's out there somewhere.”

“Don't worry,” I tell her. “If it happens in a photo booth, it doesn't count.”

Late that night, alone in my room in desperation, I Google
messy breakup.
An advice website for teen girls comes up. I examine the thing for any signs of hidden Christian fundamentalism but it looks legit. The website tells me, and the brokenhearted teenage girls of the world, to look at what we've done, to apologize and tell the boys we've been tormenting that we forgive them for anything they did, and would like to do whatever it takes to start again.
Wait a few days to call him,
the anonymous writer tells us.
Guy time is different from girl time.

He meets me at Dolores Park the next day. We know too many people there, so we walk over to Precita. We sit on the grass in the sun and his phone keeps ringing. He looks at the screen but doesn't answer it.

“I fucked up,” I tell him. “I came into the relationship with all this vestigial insecurity and fear. Now I know I didn't need to feel those things with you. I should have trusted you more. I should have known you were going into this with good intentions, and had good intentions all along.”

The wind is blowing but his hair somehow stays where it is. He has his sunglasses on but I can tell he's not looking at me.

“Well,” he says finally. “It must feel good to have a new perspective.” I wait for him to say something else, but that's it. All this talk about baby steps and giving him a minute, and he's only used the time to run farther and faster away.

“I'm gonna wait till you're twenty-seven,” I say. “And if you're not back in love with me by then, I'll move on and find somebody else. You have eight years.”

He clears his throat. “I think you should move on now. That's what I'm doing. I just want something lighthearted and easy and fun. I don't want to work on this. It's not worth it to me.”

He's gone, he's gone, he's gone.

And then a little miracle happens. Nick and Rafael go to Burning Man to shoot a horror movie, and say I can house-sit their place for two weeks. I pack a bag and move over to the East Bay, where I can't look for him, and my roommates can't cheer me up, and I can finally wallow in peace. I go off my birth control pills. I stop drinking alcohol and stop drinking coffee. I smoke a cigarette about every ten minutes, and watch every Kate Winslet movie they have in their collection. I replay the bit in
Sense and Sensibility
where she throws herself onto her bed, miserable over some pretty guy, and I tell myself I'll never end up like that. Then I throw myself onto the bed. I only eat what Nick and Rafael left behind in the fridge: cottage cheese, blackberries, almond butter, and chocolate chips.

On my third day there, I get out my laptop and look at my dissertation. I read through the first few chapters. Then I tear myself out of the house, go to the library on campus, pile books around me, and start to write. The work is the only thing that keeps my mind busy and away from him. I write, and write, and I ignore my spelling mistakes and scrambled footnotes. I write two chapters in ten days, and at the end of it I realize that the one thing the teen website didn't advise the girls is that you also have to forgive yourself.

I call my sister in England, and pray that my ex-boyfriend doesn't answer.

“Yes,” Meredith says when I say hello. “Me and Alistair are still together.”

“Good,” I say.

“Really?”

“I'll give him a huge hug when I see him next, and I'll take you guys out for a posh dinner. I'll be a bridesmaid in your wedding. But can you please hear me out about something?”