You Love Me(You #3)(121)

You say my name again. “Joe, come on. Stop.”

I pocket my knife and bang my head as I worm my way out from under the love seat. I am standing. Dizzy. My poor head. You just sigh. “I told you. There’s nothing to talk about. Go home.”

“Wait.”

You don’t move. Do I get down on my knees? No, I don’t get down on my knees. That’s not us. I sit on the bench. I don’t ask you to join me, but you do. You put your hands on your elbows.

“You were right,” I say.

“About what?”

“You told me that it’s not in my nature to love.”

“I was mad and I told you I was sorry. Can we not do this?”

“Yes,” I say. “We can absolutely not do this. I can go home. I can put my house on the market and I can move. And you can go back inside and pretend I don’t exist.”

“Joe…”

“It’s not in my nature to love, Mary Kay. And the truth hurts. And you have every reason to pretend I don’t exist because you’re absolutely right. My note to you was generic and vague. I disappeared on you. And my letter wasn’t just vague. It was bullshit because you can’t open up to someone without opening up all the way and I didn’t do that. I got scared. I ran. No excuses.”

“Can I go now?”

“Did I walk out on you when you told me about Phil?”

“Are you trying to tell me that you’re married, too?”

“Believe me, Mary Kay, I thought about running scared. The man was a rock star. I was intimidated…” I was never intimidated by that fucking rat but certain situations call for certain logic and it’s working.

You’re listening. The windows of your Empathy Bordello are opening and you’re letting me back in, a little.

“Mary Kay, I promise I’ll never chicken out on you again. I know I ran away.”

You say nothing and of course you say nothing. A liar can’t promise that he’ll never lie again. You say you should probably go back in and I tell you to wait and you throw up your hands. “I did wait. I waited all day for you to call.”

“I did call.”

“Not when you got off the plane.”

“I got mugged.”

“Oh, do you expect me to believe that you got mugged at the airport? What, Joe? You got… shot at the Starbucks in LAX?”

“I flew into Burbank.”

“I don’t care. It’s too late.”

“Mary Kay, I told you. You’re right. I fucked up. And I don’t blame you for icing me out that day and all the days after. You had every right to do that.”

“You should go.”

“No,” I say. “I have to tell you something about me.”

I have no plan and I’m not a pantser. I am a planner. But I’m not gonna win you back with schmaltz—you want me to be vulnerable and you want some fucking facts—and I have to tell you everything without telling you everything. “Okay, look,” I begin. “I went to this school shrink when I was kid. She talked about object permanence. How babies, if you show them an apple, they see the apple. And if you cover the apple up with a box, they forget the apple was there. They forget the apple exists because it doesn’t exist to them when they can’t see it.”

“I’m familiar with the concept of object permanence.”

“I did lie to you, Mary Kay. On our first date… I glossed over my relationships…” It’s true. “I wanted to come off like Mr. Independent. Mr. Evolved…” God, it feels good to speak the truth. “But in reality, I moved here because I let my ex walk all over me…” More like stampede. “I let her treat me like a doormat… And I know it sounds macho and stupid but I thought it might turn you off if I told you about what a sucker I’d been.”

“Joe…”

“See, I thought, here’s my fresh start. If I don’t tell you about Lauren…” I can’t say Love’s real name because the story online is a lie—she didn’t die of cancer—and I’m caught in her family’s web of lies. “I thought that if I didn’t tell you that Lauren existed, I would feel like she never existed, like that guy I was when I was with her, like he never existed either.”

You pick at the splintered wood. “So you ran back to your ex. And you referred to it as a ‘family emergency,’ which tells me that she still very much ‘exists’ to you…”

“I know,” I say. “Fucking stupid. Inexcusable. And if I could go back to that night, I would wake you up and tell you about Lauren. I would tell you that she just called threatening to commit suicide. I would tell you that I hate myself for not telling you sooner, for not blocking her number… but I would also tell you that I never blocked her number because I have empathy for her. The woman has no one.”

“Except you…”

“Not anymore, Mary Kay.” RIP Love. “My empathy got the best of me, but I cut the cord.”

“Well, that’s nifty.”

“Listen to me. I saw her…” Truth. “She was on the verge of taking her own life…” More truth. “But now it’s over. She’s with her brother, the only person she really ever loved, and I blocked her number. This is the end of the line for us.”