I Know What I'm Doing (11 page)

Finally, Ryder bounded out of the front door and down his steps, looking back as though a monster might be chasing him. Driving home with Ryder in my front seat, I realized he was the first man—er, boy-man—who had been in my car since my separation. Every single thing I was doing became “the first XYZ with a man since my separation.” I would have to stop counting because there were many, many firsts that night. (No, I’m not talking about anal.) (Wait, that sounded like I meant that I totally do anal all of the time. No. No. I mean, I’ve never done it and don’t plan to.)

I suddenly felt slightly disheartened that this was how I was spending my night. I had been a responsible, normal adult. Technically, legally I still had a mother-in-law and here I had waited for someone sixteen years younger than me to put his live-in ex-girlfriend to bed before he could come over. I was immediately re-heartened when I started to unlock the door to my apartment and felt Ryder’s arm around my waist. I think he was about to try to kiss me but I didn’t want my neighbors to see. They didn’t know that Matt had moved out and I didn’t want them to think I was having an affair. I rushed Ryder inside and one look at an adult living room temporarily threw him off of his kiss game. “Wow. This place is dope!” He was particularly taken with my china cabinet.

“This must have been really expensive.”

“Oh, not at all. It’s, like, a thousand bucks.”

I forgot to account for twentysomething inflation. A thousand dollars in my years was like ten thousand in his. I explained that it was a wedding gift. But still the sight of a piece of furniture that cost the same as the rent that he and his girlfriend were paying was leaving him speechless. I wanted to say, “Listen. At some point people have a thousand dollars. It doesn’t mean we’re rich. You’ll find out when you’re older.” But I didn’t want to remind him of my age.

Ryder poked around my living room, admiring my
Sassy
magazine with Kurt and Courtney on the cover. “Oh my God. Where. Did. You. Get. This?” he asked in wonderment.

“I got it in the mail. At my parents’ house. In Massachusetts. In 1992. When I was seventeen.”

That issue had survived my adolescence from the day it arrived on my doorstep and my mom tried to throw it away, not wanting her seventeen-year-old daughter to admire two very obvious (to her) junkies who were wearing “rags” on the cover of a magazine.

“Jennifah, why does he wear that old gray cardigan? Your grandfathah had one of those sweaters. It doesn’t even fit him. And look at her hair. It’s like a rat’s nest that was left out in the rain.”

That issue survived my college years, moves to three different neighborhoods in Boston, one move to Brooklyn, and a move to Los Angeles where it found four different homes—to arrive safely on my glass display-style coffee table in West Hollywood.

“Man, I wish I had known Nirvana when they were actually around.”

I laughed. “What, were you not always this cool? Were you listening to New Kids on the Block or something?”

“No. He was dead.”

“What?”

Ryder’s words confused me even more than when I found out from Kurt Loder that “Kurt Cobain was found in the garage above his sun house with a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.” I was in disbelief. I had a twenty-three-year-old in my home. He was three when Kurt Cobain took his own life. Meanwhile, I was not three when Kurt Cobain took his own life. I had been getting my period for five years at that point. I was nineteen. TECHNICALLY old enough to have a baby. In fact I was sixteen when Ryder was born. I was old enough to have birthed Ryder TECHNICALLY if I had been some kind of Teenage Whore (nod to you Courtney Love/Hole fans out there).

This is where I differ from many guys. I don’t find it sexy to “teach” the kids about where I was when Kurt Cobain died. I didn’t want to be some baby boomer telling a girl who’s the age of his coworkers’ daughters about what Woodstock was like. I didn’t want to answer Ryder’s questions about what “the vibe” was like on April 5, 1994. I thought it would be much sexier to stop talking about a dead rock star and start getting it on. But I didn’t want to make the first move. I already felt like a cross between an alpha male and his great-aunt. I needed to submit a little. I offered him some wine, hoping to maybe lube him up a bit more, to bring him back to the moment when he had his hand on my knee at the bar. I asked what I thought was a simple question.

“Would you like some wine? I’m going to have a glass.”

Ryder looked around as if needing to see proof of this wine I was talking about.

“Wait. When did you get the wine?”

“What?”

What kind of question was that? Oh. Wait. Was my young date actually a little wine connoisseur? “Do you mean what vintage year is the wine?” I asked.

He said, “No. I mean how do you know you have any wine? We didn’t stop at 7-Eleven on the way home or anything.”

I wanted to hold him in my arms and protect him from the world. I wanted to say, “Oh, no, baby-sweetie. When you’re a grown-up, you can just have wine waiting at the house! You’re mature enough not to be tempted to drink it and sometimes you’re just so old and tired that the mere task of opening it seems too much and you just look at it on your wine rack—happy to know that it’s there. Especially when you live alone. It’s like having quiet roommates who you know will be a good time once you open them up. And when you’re all grown up you don’t have to buy wine at 7-Eleven or cash your work check there either.” But I refrained. I was nervous that he would follow me into the kitchen, see my wine refrigerator, and his mind would explode all over my white stucco walls.

He asked me if instead of pouring the wine into one of my goblets, I could just put it in a red plastic Solo cup. He explained that he didn’t want to drink out of the goblet because he was afraid that he would break the glass. I explained that I didn’t want to have people drinking out of red plastic Solo cups in my home because I was afraid that I would have a flashback to bad college keg parties. I further explained to Ryder that not only did I have twelve goblets, I had twelve champagne flutes and twelve white wine glasses as well. I could afford to break one. I wasn’t about to throw a thirty-six-person dinner party with three types of wine anytime soon or ever. In fact, I think we had only used the same two wine goblets over and over since we got that stupid hutch. But at least glasses were there and ready in case I ever became a completely different person and held a wine tasting party. Who knows? That’s what adulthood is all about. Being prepared at a moment’s notice to start acting like how you were told you were supposed to act; hence a vegetarian owning a gravy boat.

When I handed Ryder the wine he took the glass out of my hand and then took
my
glass out of
my
hand and put it on my coffee table—maintaining eye contact with me the whole time. Silence is sexy. And so is Led Zeppelin. Ryder put his iPod on my dock. (Not a euphemism.) And the sounds of “Ramble On” rambled in. I was confused. Why was he playing music? I thought we were about to kiss or something—until he came over to the couch, grabbed my face, and kissed me. He was putting on music to kiss to. I had totally forgotten that people could and even bothered to do that! I whispered to him, “I haven’t done anything like this to music in a long time.” He whispered back into my ear, “Aw, baby girl. That’s about to change.” Suddenly
he
seemed like the mature one with something to teach this lady who, sure, had a hutch complete with gravy boat and six different kinds of serving spoons for salad, but who hadn’t remembered that sex could be playful, fun, and set to the rhythm of John Bonham’s drums. I wanted to send my soon-to-be ex-husband a thank-you text for joining me in fucking up a marriage enough to make this moment possible.

There’s nothing like a first kiss and there’s nothing like the first kiss you have after you took a vow and assumed that you’d never have another first kiss. I don’t care how in love any couple is—if you asked them if they thought on the altar,
This kiss signifies that I’ll never have another first kiss
, I bet most would say that they did. And most people are happy about that, which is the difference between a marriage that ends and one that is endless.

I took Ryder to the bedroom. I mean, he walked alongside me. I didn’t tell him, “It’s time to pick out your jammies and go night-night. Let me brush your teeth!” I was relieved to find out that sex hadn’t changed in the seven years I’d only been having it with one person. Maybe there was a wandering finger nearing my butt, but like JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis, I negotiated that he did not get to bring that thing in that area. As he hopped under the covers to spend the night, I rolled over and looked at my alarm clock. It was six a.m. I had to be up in one hour. It seemed like the sun was rising extra early just to judge me. I immediately regretted telling all of my coworkers that I was going to see a band last night. I could have called in sick if that information wasn’t out there. Now it would be obvious that I was calling in hungover. Actually I think I was still drunk. I told Ryder that he couldn’t stay behind when I left for work because I wanted the door dead-bolted and I didn’t have an extra key to leave him. “Dude, I have to get up at seven anyway to get my truck.” I went from Baby Girl to Dude in the morning light.

Ryder convinced me to just stay up for that extra hour instead of trying to sleep. I wanted to tell him that I invented that trick back in college but I didn’t want to begin another round of him asking me questions about the 1990s. It was bad enough that I didn’t have any food in the house to offer him for breakfast and so I had to breastfeed him. Do you know how hard it is for a young man to latch when it’s not his mother?

He said to me, “Can we do this again? Can I, like . . . text you if, you know, I feel like doing this again?”

“Of course,” I said, being the laid-back cougar that I had become, just chewing on some blades of grass.

As he watched me dress for work, I was flattered that he said, “You’re hot,” but I wasn’t used to a man being fully awake and just . . . watching me. There’s something to be said for having a husband who is still sleeping when you have to bend over naked—the least flattering pose for a naked body.

I walked into work three hours later and my writing partner, Chris, said, “Why do you look like you’re all cracked out? You smell like wine.”

I said, “I showered!”

He said, “Well, the second round is now making its way through your pores.”

My drunk wore off and my hangover began around noon. I decided to go home. I simply explained that my ragged appearance was from a night of crying after I had gone to see a band and I wished to go back to bed. I was splitting up from my husband, after all.

Back in bed by one p.m., I wondered why Ryder hadn’t texted yet. He wanted to “do it” again but why wasn’t he texting to make “do it again” plans? I called a friend, who explained that a booty call happens in the moment. I knew that. I was separated—not my mother. But I thought that maybe because I was an older woman he would respect that I can’t just drop everything last minute and that I need to kind of make a plan to be spontaneous?

I went to his Facebook page. Facebook for me was mostly just a place to keep in touch with my extended family and put the occasional “like” on my friends’ pictures of their kid’s first day at school, first tooth loss, first time wearing red, first time looking slightly to the left, baby’s first exorcism—the whole laundry list of parental pride. I was becoming self-taught in the fact that Facebook is also a great way to police someone, which I think is a word I’m more comfortable using than “stalk.” Facebook can show you what time the guy who wants to “do it again” with you last logged on, and according to this website—he was online now. Just like me! So if he could be on Facebook why couldn’t he be texting me to say, “I can’t get enough of you and your wine goblets. When can I come back over, baby girl dude?”

I started to look at his Wall. He was friends with so many women. He was either quite the feminist or . . . a twenty-three-year-old dude in a band. His Wall looked so different from mine. People (like my cousin) wrote things on my Wall like, “Are you coming home for Christmas this year?” My friends wrote things like, “Here’s the picture from our five o’clock dinner we had last night and you held my baby! Maybe you are maternal enough to have kids! Lol!” Ryder’s Wall was like a bathroom wall. Women just writing their e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and then other random things, like emoticons. I sat there wondering,
Who is Charlene and what does . . . ‘Call me I’m still at the 323’ and then a picture of a watermelon mean?

I sat there wrought with confusion. Did he just sleep with me because I was drunk? Did he think of me as a cougar? Was I the last stop on some twentysomething scavenger hunt? Was he fucking with me when he was fucking me? I called my friend. She assured me that young men these days sleep with older and younger women and they aren’t comparing. They are still men and happy to be getting some. But my mind wouldn’t stop. When he was watching me get dressed did he really mean I was hot? Was I as hot as a twenty-year-old with thigh gap, or was he studying me—appreciating me like an ancient work of art? Analyzing me the way a young boy gets dragged by his mother into a communal dressing room and experiences seeing his first underwire bra and saggy thighs?

Then I spotted the T-shirt that he’d had on underneath his button-down shirt hanging off my doorknob. A-ha! Finally. An EMERGENCY. I had to contact him. I had to tell him. He’s a young man. I don’t know how many T-shirts he can afford to have. He could be out there freezing to death. Los Angeles is a dry heat but come afternoon, brrrr that desert chill. I texted Ryder.

“Your T-shirt is here.”

He wrote back. TWO HOURS LATER. Do I even really need to tell you how I spent those two hours? Napping. With my ringer turned UP so that every “bloop” of any possible text from that bassist would wake me so that I could immediately respond to what would probably be his text saying,
I KNOW I’M YOUNG AND STUPID BUT YOU’RE THE WOMAN FOR ME. CAN I MOVE IN AND JUST CALL YOU BABY GIRL AND MAKE YOUR STOMACH DROP FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?
Ryder’s actual text read: