|
The following is excerpted from Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships and Broken Hearts, a collection of essays edited by Michael Taeckens and published this month by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
When I was a kid I daydreamed about love at the end of the world. This is probably because I grew up in the early '80s, during the years of Reagan and the late Cold War anxiety that manifested itself in dozens of film plots involving nuclear war or Russian invasion or, really, any kind of fictional apocalypse, as long as it left at least a few attractive and relatively unmangled survivors. I watched The Day After and Red Dawn and parts of the Road Warrior trilogy and even Night of the Comet. I loved anything heralding the coming disaster; movies in which all hell broke loose and martial law was enforced, and the old rules didn't mean anything anymore — which, of course, could only help with the romance part. I was a sucker for love among the ruins.
Love, or, um, something. In the movie Testament, which I have seen on cable numerous times, there is a scene towards the end where everyone is dying of radiation, and Jane Alexander's character numbly drags various expired family members to a mass grave, and the one clergyman left in town, a priest, is shuffling around having to mumble the burial rites, and Jane Alexander starts howling and shaking Father What's-His-Face by the shoulders, and then he grabs her, and then they smash their heads together and start sucking face. And how cool was that?
It's not that I didn't wish for world peace. But it was hard not to think of the apocalypse as kind of awesome. |
It's not that I didn't wish for world peace. But it was hard not to think of the apocalypse as kind of awesome, a panoramic realm of artfully torn clothes and special effects. Surely a world war could transform any mumbling indifferent seventh-grade guy into a road warrior with smudged biceps. At school I'd consider the possibilities while gazing across the lunchroom at my crush objects. You ignore me now, Joshua Kroger, I'd think, but it would be different if we were stranded in an underground bunker.
These fantasies one might lead one to conclude the following:
a. that I longed for brave new vistas in which anything, including making out with priests, was possible.
b. I had about as much self-esteem as an orthopedic shoe.
It seemed too much to ask for a relationship based on mutual attraction, but I would certainly settle for one that took place on a barren landscape of glowing rubble. Never mind that it was the sort of thing that had little chance for the long term, at least not without hazmat suits.
I'd met Ben partly through the online personals and partly through the fix-up efforts of a mutual friend who'd shown me Ben's Match.com profile. At the time, the only thing that appeared wrong with him was that his photo was sideways. I didn't get to see him properly vertical until our first meeting, where I promptly got drunk and went home with him. Now I was working with my therapist, Catherine, trying to figure out how I felt about Ben. Or, at least, how I felt about the fact that he was still living with his ex-girlfriend Lisa.
"You know, I think it's okay," I told Catherine. "Like, they went through all the weird stuff a long time ago. They're done with the open relationship thing that they tried. He said so. "
I didn't tell her exactly what he had said, which was that there were condiment jars in the back of the fridge he'd rather stick his dick in than sleep with Lisa again. "No offense to her or anything," he'd added.
"Do you believe him?" Catherine asked.
I did. Most kitchen stuff was pretty unfuckable by nature, but this was especially true of Ben's kitchen. I thought of his silverware drawer, and how the spoons and forks lay under a sedimentary layer of cereal bits and cat hair.
"What else do you like about him?" Catherine asked.
"Oh, he's very funny," I said, because funny could explain a lot.
Ben worked nights doing data entry. He had a tiny bedroom with a lumpy futon with ironically chosen Strawberry Shortcake sheets. But he also had ambitions: he'd been working on a novel for several years — he was getting ready to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship — and he rode his bike long, impressive distances.
| RELATED ARTICLES |
|
|
|
|
 |
On Jealousy by Susan Seligson
The green-eyed monster in the mirror. |
|
|
|
