came up to my apartment and had his bike with him. He had been riding around the city and missed me. I was very excited he showed up. But the excitement of surprising me, meeting my friend and telling me I was beautiful quickly evaporated, and the three of us just sat there in an awkward quiet till Jane said it was time for her to leave.
“I’ll walk you down to the lobby, Janey,” I said. “David, hang out. I’ll be right back.”
I stood in the elevator with Jane waiting for approval. Nothing came.
“So?” I wanted her to say something great about him.
“He’s cute,” she said.
“Yeah. He is, isn’t he? The dark hair and eyes.”
“And he seems to like you a lot.”
“Yeah? Yeah.”
The elevator opened and a couple with a little terrier got in. We stood in front of the glass double doors.
“What, Jane. You can tell me.”
Jane looked at me with eyes that said she wanted to be a good friend and didn’t want to hurt me.
“I’m just not a fan of ambivalent relationships,” she said.
“Oh. That.” My heart sunk. I knew she was right. I wound up missing David even when I was with him. He was far away when he was right next to me. Was it the hospital, his schedule, his dad, me? Or was it just David? When I went back upstairs David was already asleep.
Now, almost two months later, nothing between us had become any more clear. Except now I would be working in Philadelphia for an unknown amount of time. I decided the distance would be good. Our visits would be great. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And I decided it wasn’t me, it wasn’t David, it wasn’t us and it wasn’t work. I decided David was just concerned about Sid.
He talked about his father our last night together before I left town with the show. “You do know, David, that you’re really lucky to have a dad like that.”
David knew. David also knew his father’s health was failing. So as the year progressed he did all he could to get through the intern program and make his father proud. But David was unhappy. He probably suffered more from sleep deprivation than unhappiness, but his undefined unhappiness gnawed at him. It colored our relationship gray. Murky. Ambivalent. Still, I wanted David. I wanted to belong to what seemed so appealing during the holiday. I spent the next six months in Philadelphia missing David, playing a nun and living like one.
In the spring David and I took a vacation to St. Barts. I had high hopes. The island was gorgeous and David and I were great travel partners. We rented a Jeep and he drove through the hills like James Bond. Every night we drank a bottle of wine on a new beach and brought in the sunset. We skinny-dipped and ate fabulous French food. We hiked and took a boat to St. Marten. We did everything you do on a vacation but make love. By the end of the week David went back into his ambivalent silence and we broke up on the plane coming home.
I was very sad to lose David and, as time went on, realized I was very sad to lose Sid. The night David brought me home from Philly, we stopped up to see Sid and Kitty. Sid had been in bed all day. His birthday party was canceled. He was not receiving guests. When we arrived, Sid came out of his room wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt and jeans. He looked ten years older than when we had first met.
“Do you know how close Sid feels to you to be able to have you visit?” Kitty asked while I was helping her in the kitchen with the coffee.
Sid was quiet that night, but let me know how important I was. How good I was for David.
“I hope David thinks so,” I told his father. I wanted to tell Sid to make David stop it. To wake up. To open up and let go. But a father cannot do that for a son. A person can only do that for himself. I needed to think about me and what I was really getting from David, and not what I hoped I would get from David “if only.”
I called the Friedman house a few times after our breakup, and ran into Kitty once in H&H buying bagels. Then one night as I was drifting off to sleep, finally feeling better having turned the corner on David, he called.
“My father died,” David cried into the phone. “He was in his bed at home, in his sleep. I just saw him that day. He told me his disappointment in our breakup. He had told me I could never do better than you. I miss my daddy.”
David came over and we made love. Real love. Free and unencumbered, tender and a little wild. We decided to try again after Sid was buried. And it worked. For a little while. A very little, little while. Perhaps I represented a link David had to his dad. However, it did not make him more appreciative of me. He was just going through the motions. I was reactive. I would react to David’s moods. His advances and withdrawals. I twisted into positions like a Gumby, until I finally made myself stop.
David missed his father. I missed his father too. And I missed my father. My idea of a father. I sure loved Henry, but it never was a substitute for not knowing my real father. Mel had become a fictional character in my life. The clown who threw all the emotions of my childhood up in the air and juggled them like colored balls, unconcerned if they stayed up there or crashed to the floor.
In my mind, David had had the perfect suburban childhood. I assumed the love David received from his dad made everything easy for him. I assumed anyone who had a dad like David’s grew up happy. I didn’t get David’s darkness. I made an open-and-shut case that didn’t hold water. Perfect father equals perfect life. Not true. Nonetheless, I kept to my theory and hoped it would turn David into who I wanted him to be. And I thought my connection to David and Sid would turn me into everything I wanted to be. That it would erase everything Mel was unable to be. Mel. An embarrassment. My secret. On dark days, the likes of Mel made me question myself. Made me think I could never get a guy like David. But what was a guy like David? Only over time could I see that a guy like David wasn’t worth having.
Life moved on and I chose to keep David out of mine.
5
Whose Party Is This Anyway
Daylight Saving Time Ends
Grand Central Station, NYC 1989
I stood at a pay phone on the corner of 42nd and Madison, checking my answering machine in the hope there would be a message that anyone called to hire me to do anything. New York City was in a recession. I suppose the rest of the country was too, but they were not my concern. I was concerned about me on the island of Manhattan. My unemployment claim was about to expire, I only had two regional commercials running and I needed a job. There were no messages. I thought I’d check again. My change fell back down into the slot and then dropped on the ground. I bent down to pick it up, but I couldn’t see a thing. We had moved the clocks back last night and now I was well rested, but felt blind. I could barely see. It was so dark out and still so early! It couldn’t be much past lunchtime, I thought. I tilted my watch up toward the streetlights and saw, in fact, that it was almost rush hour. As I gathered up my dimes and nickels, I noticed a pair of familiar feet walk by.
“Fred,” I called out, stopping my friend in his tracks. “Where are you going?” I stood up, putting my change back in my purse.
“To work.”
“Wow! Work. What do you do?” I asked.
“Oh,
