I Know What I'm Doing (10 page)

Luckily, Ryder was as uncool as me. Within a few minutes I got an e-mail from him. The e-mail began, “Jenny, Jen, Jen! It’s Ryder! This is my e-mail address!” Hang on. Needle-scratch on the record bought at a vintage store in Ryder’s neighborhood. “Jenny-Jen-Jen” is what my older sister Violet has called me since I was a little girl. Wow. Within three minutes I decided to do some very complicated math. Ryder and I meeting almost a year earlier and me feeling sexually excited for the first time in a long time, plus him randomly contacting me almost a year later when I was newly single and calling me my sister’s very private nickname for me equaled that he is my soul mate, and the reason my husband and I met and split up was so that I could meet Ryder. Age is just a number. Don’t judge us. Ever hear of a little couple named Ashton and Demi? (Ryder and I happened before those two imploded and Demi ended up checking into rehab for a condition known as “Being Fifty and Dating a Thirtysomething Is Stressing Me the Fuck Out. I Want a Pizza but I Can’t Have One.”)

Ryder and I volleyed for a bit over e-mail. His last one said, “Don’t leave after the show. Make sure to stay for a drink.” I knew enough not to write back. I knew it was important to maintain some mystery. Maybe he would wonder,
Why didn’t she write back? She must be on a yacht with some dashing billionaire as only a charming divorcée does. Oh, wow. I’m jealous. I’ll have to play the bass extra-hard next Tuesday night to try to woo Jen.
I lay in bed and tried not to have excited insomnia. Besides, I was a mature woman. I had to face facts. Did I really think that I was the only one that he was listing? Come on. It’s a numbers game. I drifted off to sleep on my side of the bed—not ready to stretch out and take up the entire mattress just yet.

Tuesday night I stared into my closet and realized that the beauty of a wrap dress is that it helps cover you up when you’re packing on some extra pounds, and if you’re thinner—the feeling of pulling that belt around your waist more than twice is so satisfying. It can give a false sense of underweightness.
Wow. Should I check myself into a hospital? Can my body even function at this weight? Well, I’ll deal with that tomorrow. Let me go out tonight and have one more last night of fun
. My short-sleeved brown wrap dress was the perfect call for my night out seeing Ryder’s band. It was more sophisticated than all those other jean shorts–wearing floozies on his guest list and yet kind of seventies—so I didn’t seem like your mom but maybe your friend’s hot mom.

I walked into the Hollywood bar and Ryder was right in front of my face. “Jen, you came!” Big hug. “I’m about to go onstage. Will you please come watch? And get a drink. It’s on me. I have a tab at the bar.”

I sat off to the side. And I’m not just saying this because I wanted to have sex with Ryder—his band is good. And he’s a good bassist. I looked around the room trying to find the other women who were on Ryder’s list. I stood alone on the side of the room, nodding my head to the beat when I thought Ryder might be looking in my general direction. And he was. He looked up and winked at me. WINKED, like he’s goddamn Engelbert Humperdinck or something. After their set I retreated to the bar. I felt like it was too emasculating to watch Ryder dismantle the set. I sat at the bar nursing my pinot grigio that sadly the bartender would not let me put on Ryder’s “Pabst Blue Ribbon Only” tab.

Ryder approached me again. “Jen, I saw you watching the show! Did you like it?” He took my hand and led me back into the show room. He really wanted me to watch the headlining band. They were great. But if I wasn’t sitting knee to knee with an exquisite young man whom I’d coveted for almost a year I might have paid more attention. Ryder whispered in my ear, but this time not to ask me to buy his underaged girlfriend a drink.

“What do you think of the lead singer?” he asked.

I whispered back, “He’s incredibly charming and he kind of reminds me of Robert Smith from the Cure.”

Ryder’s young breath tickled my ear. “Wow. You have a thing for Robert Smith of the Cure? That makes me kind of happy because now that I know you’re into someone as gross as Robert Smith I think I might have a shot with you.”

This was my moment. I took a deep breath and whispered back in his ear, “Oh, you have more than a shot with me.”

I don’t know if Ryder heard me because the guy in back of us at that moment swiped his arm like Moses parting the sea and separated Ryder and me. His arm made an audible smacking sound that could have easily roared above the sound of my cheesy divorcée come-on. “Quiet, you two! Or go into the bar area!” Ryder—whether responding to my careless whisper or perhaps his wrist fell asleep—placed his hand on my knee as I tried to pretend that I cared about the music.

After the show, Ryder tried to order me another pinot grigio on his tab and I gave the bartender a nod when Ryder’s back was turned to put it on
my
tab. I gave a second hand signal to indicate “let me sign off on that tab when the kid isn’t looking.”

I stood next to Ryder as we watched the show from a safer distance—no threat of being swiped at, just leaning against the bar and reflecting.
I really have this divorce thing down. I thought I was going to spend my entire thirties just gaining more weight, shutting down emotionally, and not trying new things. I was way too young to have done that. I never imagined that I would get a second chance at being single and would have this lust at first sight.
I wasn’t projecting my future happiness on him; I was simply noticing how attracted I was. That’s normal. Then I thought,
When our extreme lust dies in thirty years because I’m an old woman and he’s more age-appropriate as my caretaker not lover . . . well, we will deal with it then.
I just felt so free. I hadn’t even told my parents I was separated yet. It wasn’t anybody’s business and I wasn’t in trouble. I was just a woman, out on a weeknight, sipping a pinot grigio and planning a young man’s conjugal visits to my old age home in between his band tours.

Ryder reached over and let his finger touch the palm of my hand while he was answering some questions from other girls about how long he’d been a bassist. That little move of staying connected to me while talking to another woman is what women all over the world are complaining to their spouses about. “You can’t just take me to a party and then walk around talking to everyone else!” Ryder wasn’t coming off as a player. He seemed truly sweet and sincere. A boy with good Midwestern values. (What. His Facebook page said that’s where he’s from. It’s not like I went to the library and did a book report on him. I’m not obsessed!) Ryder leaned in to whisper to me, “Jenny-Jen. I’d rather talk to you than everyone else. Do you want to go sit down at a table away from it all?”

First I had to signal the bartender to get a mop and bucket because I was officially a puddle and I didn’t want any of these girls in their kitten heels to slip on me, then Ryder and I held hands and walked ten feet to a table where we could no longer hear the music.

“I’m so glad you came. So, you’re divorced now?”

“Yeah. Separated. With the intent to divorce but you know, legal stuff, and it takes a while and I don’t want to bore you with details.”

“You could never bore me. You’re handling it so well. My parents are divorced and it was an ugly scene.”

Ryder thought I was handling it well! And I fully bought into the fact that going out to see a band—something I would never want to do on a Tuesday night—meant I was a new person. I didn’t know that I was in the midst of a cliché. I was the same person who was in sort of a mid-divorce crisis. Trying new things isn’t necessarily always the beginning of the perfect next era of your life. Every new era has its awkward adolescent phase. Nobody congratulates anyone for trying crack. “Good for you, Melissa! Get out of your comfort zone. You’re always so responsible by eating gluten-free and taking weekend excursions to local beaches to test the pH levels of the water and writing to your congressperson about pollution. But I’m so glad you smoked some rock tonight and just put yourself in that dangerous situation in the alley when you bought the drug and then took the first toke. This shows that you’re a well-rounded person! The ocean will be there tomorrow for you to protect after you’ve been up all night chewing on the insides of your cheek.”

Being out with Ryder—I had to admit that deep down I just wished this could be my new life. So far it felt manageable, fun, and if the next stage of my life could begin NOW—after only four days of being unsure—that would really work for me. That is the kind of streamlined simplicity my life needs. I tuned out the fact that he was saying things, not dumb things but just young things, things like, “Noam Chomsky should be taught in schools, man, but people don’t want to do what’s best—only what’s easiest. No, actually what they should be teaching is more art and music and that the banks actually steal our money—not protect it. But they call it ‘interest’ to trick us into thinking they care.” Look, he’s not wrong, but you know what I mean.

I couldn’t stay out all night. I had things to do; starting with Ryder. I asked him, “Do you want to get out of here?” I even turned myself on saying it.

“I have my truck parked here but it’s out of gas. I can leave it parked overnight but I have to get back here early in the morning before it becomes bank parking.”

This is why I don’t like dating anyone with instruments, children, or cats. There’s always some need to “get up early, check on them/drop them off/feed them” situation. And it had been so long since I’d been single I forgot to bring my “emergency gym bag.” That’s when you carry your gym bag in your car with a change of underwear, deodorant, eye-makeup remover, makeup, a blow dryer, and clothes. The average guy who knows nothing about fashion accepts that what you’re wearing the next morning are gym clothes but they’re actually stylish-enough-to-wear-in-public cotton clothes. This way the guy doesn’t think you packed an overnight bag which would immediately scare him into thinking you’re trying to marry him, when all you’re trying to do is take precautions so that everyone at the office doesn’t look at you and think, “She got fucked last night.”

I don’t know what you call something that’s like a nightmare but even worse because you can’t wake up from it because you already ARE awake and in it, but that something was suddenly in Ryder’s lap. A big-boned blond girl who was so drunk that her body had taken on that Muppet-like floppy quality walked over and splayed herself all over my boy toy. I was concerned that she might be breaking his penis. I was planning on using that later.

“Ryderrrrr,” she cooed. “You guys were sooo good.”

She swayed to me.

“Weren’t they sooo good?”

Our eyes locked. It was Daisy. A rather heavyset, now-blond, no-longer-youthful wispy-twig Daisy. It’s like we had both used the last roughly three hundred days to morph into each other’s former bodies. Daisy recognized me too.

“Heyyy. I knew you were coming tonight.” (Loud whisper) “Ryder told me not to bother you guys . . . but I didn’t know this was you. Congrats. You don’t look your age at all and shit.”

Ryder tried to lift her off of his lap like a mall Santa who wanted to keep the line moving.

“Okay, Daisy. We’re just finishing up a drink.”

“I’m getting another.”

Daisy stumbled off. I guess she was more emboldened to drink underaged and get away with it now that she suddenly looked like she was as rode hard as Britney Spears.

“Are you guys still dating?” I asked Ryder, trying not to sound jealous but more like an open-minded, inquisitive, neutral therapist.

“Nooooo. We broke up, like, six months ago. But we still live together. I don’t have any money so I can’t afford to move out. But it’s starting to get awkward.”

“I can imagine it would. You’re sneaking girls to your room at night and out in the morning? What? Do they have to climb out the window so that Daisy doesn’t get jealous?”

“Well, um, we live in a one-bedroom. So, I can’t take anyone home.”

“You sleep in the same bed as your ex-girlfriend!?” I said in a completely closed-minded, judgmental, like-an-old-woman-who-doesn’t-understand-how-kids-today-handle-ending-relationships way.

“I know. It’s okay. We’re like best friends but she gets a little drunk when she knows I have a date.”

I softened. A date? He thought we were on a date? Awwww . . . CRASH. Daisy was back and this time like a dinosaur with an inner ear infection causing her to lose her balance and a huge purse acting like a Triceratops’s tail. Everything was on the floor. Our drinks. The LED candle. The table itself.

Ryder took me aside. “We have to get her home.”

“We? Just call her a cab.”

“No. She’ll just get home and go back out again. I have to put her to bed.”

I put both Daisy and Ryder in my car and drove them to his/her/their apartment building. I felt like I should be driving them to school. I called to my adopted alcoholic daughter in the backseat. “Honey? If you’re going to throw up can you try to aim it in that Trader Joe’s recyclable grocery bag?”

I pulled up in front of my potential lover’s apartment that he shared with his ex-girlfriend. Ryder and Daisy walked inside their home-slash-hell and stayed inside there so long it was quite possible that they had made up, gotten back together, had make-up sex, conceived a baby, birthed it with a bathroom doula, had it baptized, watched it graduate high school, college, and eventually welcomed it back home for Christmas with a baby of its own, delighting in what a long and happy life they’d had together. I looked at my watch. I had to work in the morning and the morning was no longer a next-day concept. It was seven hours until I had to be awake and eight until I had to be at my desk writing jokes about celebrities who forgot to wear underwear when exiting a car and politicians who didn’t know that their invitation to a college girl to see their penis was not a private message on Twitter.

I thought,
I’m a grown woman. I should drive away and let Ryder know that I don’t put up with this nonsense
. But the other part of me thought,
Yeah, but he can’t come back after me. His truck is broken down at the venue and I am not waiting one night longer to see what it’s like to kiss another man.
I felt the same as an angst-ridden teen writing in her diary. “I’m so ready! When am I going to kiss a man???”