“Not to worry,” I said. “It’s a good thing you stopped me. I was being unkind.”
“Oh,” said Bruce again.
I kept talking. “See, I’m trying to be nicer. It’s my New Year’s resolution.”
“It’s February,” he pointed out.
“I’m a slow starter.”
“Well,” he said, “at least you’re trying.” He smiled at me, and walked away.
I spent the rest of the party getting the scoop. He’d come with a guy Brianna knew from graduate school. The good news: He was a graduate student, which meant reasonably smart, and Jewish, just like me. He was twenty-seven. I was twenty-five. It fit. “He’s funny, too,” said Brianna, before delivering the bad news: Bruce had been working on his dissertation for three years, possibly longer, and he lived in central New Jersey, more than an hour away from us, picking up freelance writing work and teaching the occasional bunch of freshmen, subsisting on stipends, a small scholarship, and, mostly, his parents’ money.
“Geographically undesirable,” Brianna pronounced.
“Nice hands,” I countered. “Nice teeth.”
“He’s a vegetarian,” she said.
I winced. “For how long?”
“Since college.”
“Hmph. Well, maybe I can work with it.”
“He’s…” Brianna trailed off.
“On parole?” I joked. “Addicted to painkillers?”
“Kind of immature,” she finally said.
“He’s a guy,” I said, shrugging. “Aren’t they all?”
She laughed. “And he’s a good guy,” she said. “Talk to him. You’ll see.”
That whole night, I watched him, and I felt him watching me. But he didn’t say anything until after the party broke up, and I was walking home, feeling more than a little disappointed. It had been a while since I’d even seen someone who’d caught my fancy, and tall, nice hands, nice-white-teeth grad student Bruce appeared, at least from the outside, to be a possibility.
But when I heard footsteps behind me, I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking what every woman who lives in a city thinks when she hears quick footsteps coming up behind her and it’s after midnight and she’s between streetlights. I took a quick glance at my surroundings while fumbling for the Mace attached to my keychain. There was a streetlight on the corner, a car parked underneath. I figured I’d Mace whoever it was into temporary immobility, smash one of the car windows, hoping the alarm would go off, scream bloody murder, and run.
“Cannie?”
I whirled around. And there he was, smiling at me shyly. “Hey,” he said, laughing a little bit at my obvious fear. He walked me home. I gave him my number. He called me the next night, and we talked for three hours, about everything: college, parents, his dissertation, the future of newspapers. “I want to see you,” he told me at one in the morning, when I was thinking that if we kept talking I was going to be a wreck at work the next day. “So we’ll meet,” I said.
“No,” said Bruce. “Now.”
And two hours later, after a wrong turn coming off the Ben Franklin Bridge, he was at my door again: bigger than I’d remembered, somehow, in a plaid shirt and sweatpants, carrying a rolled-up sleeping bag that smelled like summer camp in one hand, smiling shyly. And that was that.
And now, more than three years after our first kiss, three months after our let’s-take-a-break talk, and four hours after I’d found out that he’d told the entire magazine-reading world that I was a Larger Woman, Bruce squinted at me across the parking lot in front of his apartment where he’d agreed to meet me. He was blinking double-time, the way he did when he was nervous. His arms were full of things. There was the blue plastic dog-food dish I’d kept in his apartment for my dog, Nifkin. There, in a red wooden frame, was the picture of us on top of a bluff at Block Island. There was a silver hoop earring that had been sitting on his night table for months. There were three socks, a half-empty bottle of Chanel. Tampons. A toothbrush. Three years’ worth of odds and ends, kicked under the bed, worked down into a crack in the couch. Evidently, Bruce saw our rendezvous as a chance to kill two birds with one stone – endure my wrath over the “Good in Bed” column and give me back my stuff. And it felt like being punched in the chest, looking at my girlie items all jumbled up in a cardboard Chivas box he’d probably picked up at the liquor store on his way home from work – the physical evidence that we were really, truly over.
“Cannie,” he said coolly, still squinching his eyes open and shut in a way I found particularly revolting.
“Bruce,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “How’s that novel coming? Will I be starring in that, too?”
He raised his eyebrow, but said nothing. “Remind me,” I said. “At what point in our relationship did I agree to let you share intimate details of our time together with a few million readers?”
Bruce shrugged. “We don’t have a relationship anymore.”
“We were taking a break,” I said.
Bruce gave me a small, condescending smile. “Come on, Cannie. We both know what that meant.”
“I meant what I said,” I said, glaring at him. “Which makes one of us, it seems.”
“Whatever,” said Bruce, attempting to shove the stuff into my arms. “I don’t know why you’re so upset. I didn’t say anything bad.” He straightened his shoulders. “I actually thought the column was pretty nice.”
For one of the few times in my adult life, I was literally speechless. “Are you high?” I asked. With Bruce, that was more than a rhetorical question.
“You called me fat in a magazine. You turned me into a joke. You don’t think you did anything wrong?”
“Face it, Cannie,” he said. “You are fat.” He bent his head. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love you.”
The box of tampons bounced off his forehead and spilled into the parking lot.
“Oh, that’s nice,” said Bruce.
“You absolute bastard.” I licked my lips, breathing hard. My hands were shaking. My aim was off. The picture glanced off his shoulder, then shattered on the ground. “I can’t believe I ever thought seriously for even one second about marrying you.”
Bruce shrugged, bending down, scooping feminine protection and shards of wood and glass into his hands and dumping them back into the box. Our picture he left lying there.
“This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me,” I said, through my tear-clogged throat. “I want you to know that.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse. Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father – he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and meaning it.
Bruce shrugged again. “I don’t have to worry about how you feel anymore. You made that clear.” He straightened up. I hoped he’d be angry – passionate, even – but all I got was this maddening, patronizing calm. “You were the one who wanted this, remember?”
“I wanted a break. I wanted time to think about things. I should have just dumped you,” I said. “You’re…” And I stood, speechless again, thinking of the worst thing I could say to him,
