Several months into our bicoastal relationship, I flew out to California to shoot an ad campaign. When I invited Jimmy to come, he told me to pick him up on the corner of his street. (Here’s a tip: don’t ever agree to pick anyone up on the corner.) As I drove up, my phone rang. “Hit the pedal!” he screamed. “Don’t stop driving! Go, go, go!”
Before I knew it, I was being chased down Wilshire Boulevard by a silver soccer-mom Volvo station wagon. Oh fuck, I thought. It’s Jimmy’s wife. (Here’s another tip, sisters: a married woman who is not sleeping with her husband will not chase her husband’s lover down Wilshire Boulevard at ninety miles an hour in her silver hatchback soccer-mom Volvo. Translation: wife is still sleeping with husband, boyfriend is a liar, and you are in danger.)
I stomped on the pedal of my rented SUV and tore off with the Volvo hot on my tail, weaving through traffic, trying to make a right turn while keeping my speed up. Eventually I lost her, which is when I had to admit Jimmy’s behavior was affecting my work. I was now late to my shoot. Fuck him!
If you have the bad luck of entering a relationship with someone who’s still in the process of leaving his last one (or hasn’t yet), I suggest you put on your listening ears. He will probably try to tell you his ex-wife or girlfriend is crazy or, better yet, hysterical, a word that is derived from a term meaning “in the uterus,” and go on to describe her faults. What he’s actually about to give you is a list of everything that’s wrong with him. It may sound at first as though the woman is in fact out of her mind, but there’s a good chance a lot of the problems she’s complaining about are the ones you’re about to inherit.
When my first ex-husband’s fourth wife—did you get that?—called me years after my divorce to complain about him, I was antiquing in southern Virginia with my daughter. It had been years since I’d been married to Ronnie—I was now a happily single mother—but hearing this woman talk about him made me feel as though my divorce had been yesterday. “He won’t let me take his car; he’s saying I should have thought to get my own tires changed. He looks like the Wolfman. He’s chasing me around saying he’s going to kill me!” she moaned. I mean, it was basically a play-by-play reenactment of my own breakup with my husband! Yes, Virginia, history and our lovers’ bad behaviors tend to repeat themselves.
It was just this past year, while working on this book, that I told Ava’s father, an Italian, the story of the German rock star and me, and how I confronted him on that fateful night. Ilario started laughing in his beautiful Italian accent.
“That’s funny,” he said. “That’s the difference between an Italian and a German man. A German man will tell you, ‘Yes, there is a baby,’ ” he said. “An Italian man will say, ‘Baby? What baby?’ ”
10. Just because you’re great lovers doesn’t mean you’re going to live happily ever after. News flash: there is a huge difference between being great lovers and being partners. Just because a guy can throw down and fuck your brains out does not mean you’re going to be able to grocery shop together and get your bills paid. Yes, sex is superimportant, but it’s a small part of partnering. We shouldn’t call someone our partner or even our boyfriend if they’re really just our lover. Sometimes in life, you’ll have a lover who is not meant to be a partner. And sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy having a lover for a few years. We need to figure out the reasons we want a relationship, anyway. In some cases, we just want someone to baby-sit us, because we don’t want to be alone with ourselves.
This was the case when I married my second husband, Jeff. I had just been signed to a deal with Atlantic Records at the time, meaning I had a lot of time on my hands (I mean, what was I supposed to do all day? It only took me a few minutes to write a song!) and very little money, a lethal combination. It wasn’t long before I’d ditched the record deal and started my own company, though, while my husband remained a struggling actor. He’d always say things like, “We’re partners, baby.”
Oh really? I’d wonder. How exactly are we partners? You’re doing exactly what you want, which is working on your acting career, which generates no money for this house, while I’m earning cash, going to the grocery store, cooking the food, and doing all the other things that have been considered feminine responsibilities for thousands of years, only to be told I’m escalating and need some rest!
I know from friends that if you’re going to attempt to be the breadwinner in the relationship, you’re going to need some regular checks and balances. It doesn’t have to be about male/female; it can just be about person/person. Who is doing what, and how is each partner contributing to the overall relationship? Is one person feeling like shit? Does one feel like the other’s friends think he’s a loser? Jeff never wanted to go to any of my work events, because he said no one wanted to talk to him. Which was ironic, since for decades women have been showing up to work events of their husbands assuming that no one wanted to hear what they
