What Love Looks Like (2 page)

Waking in the middle of the night had
become commonplace. My apartment was downtown, and my already poor sleep habits
were at the mercy of city noise. And living in the heart of the city had its
own set of challenges. It was four thirty in the morning, and I was already dreading
the hours ahead of me. As I did every morning, I knew I’d feel like just
another set of feet scurrying into the coffee shop, another groggy-eyed person
scraping ice off of her car on a freezing January morning. I felt that I was
one of millions just trying to get through the day. I was sometimes plagued by
the notion that I could go twenty-four full hours without talking to anyone.
There was so much anonymity, and not the peaceful sort that celebrities sought
from paparazzi, but rather the type where you have an accident and die in your
apartment and no one finds your body until a week later. Morbid, yes, but those
were the alarming images my forlorn psyche created.

Apart from the background city noise,
which had become a dull roar around the clock, silence dominated my life, and I
habitually looked to things outside myself to get away from the incessant
quiet. Whenever I shopped, I got a rush from overspending. I’d either consume
junk food excessively or go days with very little food at all. I still had a
penchant for martinis, which I’d developed in college, and drank to excess at
least a few nights per week. Hemingway said he drank to make other people seem
more interesting; I drank to make myself seem more interesting. And judging by
my most recent offense, the occasional one-night stand wasn’t foreign to me.

I regularly found myself in need of a
little pick-me-up, so on any given day I drowned my problems in my compulsion
du jour. While Josh and my other vices did provide moments of pleasure and
escapism, I felt no happiness upon waking. I was always chasing my next high; I
always needed something to get me going. My life didn’t excite me whatsoever,
so I filled my inner void in any way I could. And living in such a way was
terrifying, if only for my inability to sustain it.

Trying to make peace with my
self-destructive inclinations was an ongoing balancing act. I always feared
that a new dress that I’d dropped a few hundred dollars on wouldn’t fit by the
time the time Monday rolled around if I’d gone on a bad enough junk food
bender, or that I’d fall into bed with the wrong person after having one too
many free drinks. But I’d spent years finding ways to compensate for
overindulging in my vices, and I could usually fit both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
into my life, though not without consequence.

2

“Yes, Mom,” I said. “I promise.” I sat in my car in the office parking
lot trying to get my mother off the phone.

“You always say that.”

“Well, this time I
really mean it. I’ll get out to see you in the next couple of weeks.”

“That’s not soon
enough!” she said.

“It’s the best I can
do. I’m working overtime every week.”

“What are you doing
with the dog all those hours? Leaving her alone isn't fair to her.”

“I have a very good,
very expensive dog walker that comes over twice a day.”

“I don’t get it. Your
brother and sister both have free time to see their mother. Why don’t you?”

“Max works for Dad, and
you babysit his kid all the time,” I said, “and Emily’s a student. Plus she
lives with you. It’s not a fair comparison. Listen, I have to go. I’m going to
be late. Love you, Mom.”

“Bye, darling. See you
soon!
”

The morning after my
impromptu sleepover was agonizing to say the least, and my mother’s nagging
made me feel even worse.

With dark circles under
my eyes and unwashed hair, I dragged myself to work on less than five hours of
sleep. My nausea was a hefty price to pay for simply wanting some company the
previous evening. What made me feel worse was that my office environment was
the opposite of energizing. Monotonous, droning, and dreary were all more
accurate descriptions for where I spent most of my waking hours. Fluorescent
lights highlighted stains on the drab beige walls, and the office-pink carpet
that was coming up slightly was a throwback to the early nineties.

Whenever I mentioned
to a new acquaintance that I planned events for a living, they’d ooh and aah,
assuming that I had some sort of glamorous career. On the contrary, the bulk of
my time at work was spent in front of a computer in a cold, dingy office.
During those countless hours, I focused an inordinate amount of time on
completing reports that were really just busywork. My coworkers and I were
herded like sheep, pressured to turn our reports in on time, immediately
implement new policies that came down from corporate, and satisfy our customers
by “thinking big” and coming up with new ideas—just nothing good enough
to warrant a raise.

Of course, I
understood the company’s motives. They had a bottom line—call it revenue,
profit, or simply cold hard cash. But it often felt as if the drive to fulfill
the bottom line was at the expense of my coworkers and me. No one seemed to
care about our bottom lines, which in my case were autonomy, happiness, and
living bountifully. The structure of corporate America made me question the
very concept of having a job. I believed in hard work and making my own way in
the world, but not at the expense of my independence and creativity. My job
felt like slavery: the higher-ups were the masters, and my coworkers and I were
the slaves. There were just a few of the higher-ups and so many of the rest of
us. They benefited greatly from our sixty-plus-hour workweeks, while we
collected a mere pittance.

One of the very few
perks of my job was that I worked at a satellite location, which meant that the
corporate managers were never around to check up on me. They were based in
Atlanta and rarely ventured to the Midwest. Instead they assigned Penny, a
regional manager, to oversee the territory. Penny was a rough-around-the-edges
type who made it obvious that she didn’t like me. She smoked nearly two packs a
day and regularly came in reeking of gin. Penny was thirty-seven years old and
had never been married or had children. Her life had been devoted to working in
restaurants. As a result, her appearance was worn and weathered, and she was
noticeably bitter. Her poor management style and strange appearance was the
laughing stock of our region, but I never made fun of her. As a formerly
bullied teenager, I never made fun of anyone, even when they disliked me for no
apparent reason the way Penny did.

“Good morning,” I
said, as I entered my partner Maureen’s office. I was armed with my usual grand
é
double latte, which I used daily to lift my
mood, at least until lunchtime.

“Hey,” Maureen
replied. “How was your night?”

 
The antidote to my dreadful work life
was my partner, Maureen. Together we coordinated every event at each of our
company’s five restaurants in Columbus. We shared everything in an even
fifty-fifty split, including our commissions. In addition to being a colleague,
she was the elder sister that I’d never had. Maureen was a married mother of
one adorable four-year-old girl, who I occasionally hung out with when Maureen
and her husband were desperate to get out of the house (conveniently for them,
I was desperate to be
in
a house and out of an apartment).

“It was fine,” I
said. “I met Jenna out for a couple drinks. How about you?”

“Went to Jeff’s
parents' for dinner. Jessie asked about you again! She keeps wanting to know
when she can play with Auntie Elle and her little puppy,” Maureen said sweetly.
My heart warmed a little.

Though we began our
ritual morning coffee talks by gossiping about work, we always turned to the
subject of our personal lives. Then eventually, we’d hear Penny lurking around
the corner from Maureen’s office door, and she would tell us in the most
passive-aggressive way possible that it was time to get to work. During
Maureen's annual review with the corporate bosses, Penny had gone as far as
accusing us of being too chatty. Interestingly enough, she seemed to find no
fault with chatting up all of our male staff members herself. Penny’s
management style in a nutshell was “flirt with the men; the women don’t really
matter.” Such misogynistic behaviors prompted Maureen to come up with Penny’s
nickname, One Cent, because from a management perspective, that was all she was
worth.

I was in no mood for
her tricks that morning; my body was tired and dehydrated, and I just wanted to
go back home. She performed her usual lurking around Maureen’s office. With an
obvious clearing of her throat, she whispered, “Ladies,” which in Penny-speak
meant, “Get busy.” I nodded, and Maureen, who never had trouble simulating
sweetness, warmly said hello.

The moment Penny
vanished, I said, “We’re here ten or eleven hours every day, plus we work most
Saturdays. Can’t we talk for a few minutes in the morning without being
reprimanded? It’s because she hates me.”

“She hates us both,”
Maureen said.

“No, she just has a
lukewarm disdain for you because you aren’t her preferred sex. She has an
actual vendetta against me.”

“That’s because she’s
jealous of you.”

“Jealous of what?
She’s my boss, she makes, like, double my salary.”

“Um, hello! You’re
hot, and she’s not. She looks like an absurdly tall twelve-year-old boy.”
Maureen replied.

“That’s so mean, Mo.”

“How can you defend
someone who you just said hates you?”

“I haven’t even told
you the latest,” I whispered. “Jenna called me last Wednesday right after she
got out of a meeting with Penny and Ryan from the downtown restaurant. And
apparently
,
Penny said something like,
‘Elle
needs to be careful because people are watching her.’
” Jenna was a
colleague too; she worked in the restaurants and executed the events that I
planned.

“That is so creepy!”
Maureen said a little too loudly.

“Shh! I know. I don’t
even know what that means! Like, who is watching me, and can they please stop?”
I sighed. “I better get back to work or else she’ll poke her head in here
again, and it’ll take everything in me
not
to create a Penny-sized
voodoo doll and do evil things to it.”

“Too much wine again
last night?” Maureen asked, laughing. She must have noticed my heightened
irritability.

“No, I just couldn’t
sleep, Luna kept barking at the homeless guy who sings at all hours of the
night.” I hated lying to Maureen, but the shame of my one-night stand
outweighed my moral obligation to be honest.

“We’ve got to get you
out of downtown.” Maureen was always trying to convince me to move into the suburbs.
But even though I complained about it, the city noise kept me company on those
really lonely nights.
 

At my own desk, I
e-mailed each contact person from the previous night’s events to ensure that
everything had exceeded their expectations, and I received only positive
feedback. Our company upheld something of a gold standard in the area of
private fine dining.
    

I’d come to be an
event planner by way of a college job that in hindsight had probably given me
what shred of confidence I had as I took the plunge into adulthood. Until then
I had been a socially awkward student. I'd faced a constant onslaught of
ridicule for my tiny boobs, frizzy hair, and extreme shyness. But during my
junior year, to complement my PR major, I interned part-time at a public
relations company called Forte Promotions Group. It was an unlikely course of
study for an introverted, self-conscious teenager.

I was so successful
at my internship that I was quickly promoted to brand ambassador, which meant I
coordinated launches for new cocktail and spirit companies. Conveniently,
around then I began enjoying alcohol daily; in retrospect, I can attribute a
lot of the vices that I carried into adulthood to the time I spent working the
bar and club circuit. I often awoke hungover, but for the first time in my life
I felt popular, so I didn’t care. I had been an ugly, nerdy duckling that had
become a hard-partying swan. But I couldn’t deny that drinking all of the time
caused me some trouble. I had a hard time keeping my grades up, and I couldn’t
seem to show up anywhere on time, except at parties. And I was the life of all
of them.

 
After two years of interning at Forte, I
finally graduated, and my standards for living became higher. I realized that
to sustain the lifestyle that I wanted, I’d need a more substantial income and
a more adult way of life. As luck had it, a friend of a friend of my mother’s
owned a restaurant group called East Coast Prime, which included forty-some
restaurants nationally, five of which were in Columbus. They were the type of
restaurant that my parents went to only on special occasions. The company was
hiring an event planner to manage the restaurants’ private dining programs. My
name was passed along, and I interviewed three times with the director of operations.
A few weeks later, I was gainfully employed; my big-girl life had begun.

While I wasn’t a huge
admirer of my company, my regional manager, or my office, there were parts of
event planning that I enjoyed. Making a dream wedding come to life was invigorating,
and helping a nonprofit solicit donations for auction felt inherently decent.
But I regularly mulled over the fact that I could do my job independently of
East Coast Prime, and probably do it better and for more money. I knew I’d be
wiser spending my time channeling my visions for events into beautiful
realities than reporting on the prior year's audiovisual usage.

My hangover almost
completely vanished later that day, when I left the office to visit our
downtown restaurant. It was by far the largest space that Maureen and I booked
events into; in fact, it was one of the largest in the whole company.
Consequently, it hosted more events than all the others and earned me the most
commission. It was a Mecca for several different demographics in Columbus:
stylish gay guys, businessmen in suits, and suburban housewives. Each of these
was a subculture that required maintaining an efficient staff, stunning
interior design, and mouthwatering food and drink.

East Coast Prime
boasted a diverse, expensive menu and only the finest wines by the bottle. The
atmosphere was that of an old Chicago-style steakhouse. I often suffered pangs
of jealousy seeing people night after night out on fancy dates and enjoying
their lives while I worked hours on end at their watering hole. The “poor me”
broken record kept repeating in my head, and I just wanted someone to stop it.

I found Jenna seated
alone at the bar, silently working on what looked like a server floor plan. The
restaurant wasn’t open for lunch except for when we had special private events,
so we’d have the space all to ourselves for our weekly meeting. I was fortunate
to have another wonderful work friend in Jenna. In addition to being my
occasional drinking buddy, she was also my shopping partner. We met most Sundays
for mimosas and perused the downtown boutiques. On paper, neither of us could
afford to buy in such exclusive shops, but thanks to good credit, we usually
each went home with at least one new item.

Jenna was my only
newlywed friend who still envied the single lifestyle that I had (and no longer
wanted). Occasionally, she’d invite me over for dinner and, right in front of
her husband, grill me on what I’d done the night before. This inevitably led to
a disappointing story of how I’d taken my dog to my parents’ house and watched
TV while drinking wine with my sister, or killed three-quarters of a bottle of
red wine by myself while watching
Real
Housewives
. Jenna’s eyes would roll at my uninspiring tales of singledom.
Then, when her husband wasn’t in the room, she’d explain that I was wasting the
best years of my life. I guess the grass really was always greener on the other
side.