Stori Telling Read online

  Charlie was different from every guy I’d ever dated before. Not just in appearance—I’d always gone for somewhat fashion-conscious pretty boys with twenty-twenty vision, and look where that had gotten me. But we also had pretty different personalities. If we’d gone to the same high school, we wouldn’t have been in the same group of friends. If I’d been in the social, “in” crowd (I know, not necessarily something to be proud of), he’d have been part of the geeky theater group.

  On the set of Maybe Baby, It’s You, I’d flirt with Charlie. Nothing over the top—I’d try to dress cute for rehearsal, and I’d smile and talk to him. He didn’t respond at all. That seemed odd. I never had great self-esteem, but I did feel pretty confident that I could get a response from a man if I wanted one.

  Then one day after rehearsal a bunch of people from the theater went across the street for a wine and cheese party. Charlie and I were sipping wine and chatting. I had this habit—which came to play in many of my relationships—where I’d be talking to a guy and, within a few minutes, I’d sense what personality he wanted me to have and transform myself into that. If he wanted low-key, I was low-key. If he wanted to go deep, I went deep. If he wanted witty repartee, I gave witty repartee. If he wanted vampire fetishist, I was…outta there. Girl’s gotta draw the line somewhere. Anyway, it was my own fault that most guys I was with thought we had everything in common when we didn’t. I followed his lead and entered the relationship as a skewed version of myself that leaned heavily toward who I thought the guy wanted me to be. It happened partially because I had a case of Why Would They Want the Real Me Syndrome, but I certainly didn’t do it on purpose. And nobody was more deceived than I was. I’d think we were having this amazing conversation even though it wasn’t remotely a conversation I’d have with friends. I’d just convince myself that it was: “Yeah, yeah, I do find the world of custom motorcycle paint jobs fascinating—finally someone’s talking to me about it!” That night Charlie and I lingered over our wine while I subconsciously tried to make myself into his dream woman.

  The next week we went out for drinks. I still wasn’t sure if he liked me when he grabbed my hand under the table. I looked at him and he smiled. After dinner he walked me to my car and kissed me good night. The feeling wasn’t so much fireworks as it was like playing a game booth at a fair. You fire your water gun, hear a balloon pop, and realize you’ve won the competition of the moment: Ding ding ding! He thought I was funny, took my hand, walked me to my car, and kissed me. Ding ding ding! I win the prize! Score one for my womanly wiles. (But the metaphor ends there. No jokes about taking home the cheap stuffed animal, please.)

  From the moment Charlie and I got involved, it was hush-hush because of the play. Maybe Baby, It’s You was Charlie’s big break, and I was the high-profile actress starring in it. He didn’t want anything like romance or gossip to interfere with this opportunity. And—though I had for the first time in a long time picked a genuinely nice person—taking second place to his work only made me want to be with him more.

  As the play ran, we’d rehearse during the week, then the show would play on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. The reviews talked about the electrifying chemistry onstage. Maybe I should have given more credit to my acting, but I figured what everyone was seeing onstage had to be true in life. We must be good together. Sure. And that ghost in Scary Movie 2 really loved me too.

  After the Friday-night shows my best gay friend, Mehran, and his boyfriend, Jeremy, would pick me up and we’d go out for drinks. Jeremy was skeptical of Charlie. “I don’t see him with you,” I remember him saying. “He’s not your type. I mean, look how he dresses. He looks like a massage therapist. You can’t date a massage therapist.” It was true that Charlie’s typical getup seemed to be tennis shoes and sweats, T-shirt, jean jacket, and a fanny pack, but I wasn’t about to cop to being so shallow. The more my friends told me he was wrong for me, the more I’d push back. “No. That’s how I’ve gotten into trouble.” I was done with cool, handsome, and well dressed, and the more I said it, the more I convinced myself it was true. Even when it came to (wince) the cutoff jean vest. I let it go. Besides, Mehran and Jeremy weren’t the final word. When Jenny met Charlie, she gushed. “We love him. He’s amazing. He’s the nicest guy. He so adores you.” Jenny is tall, thin, and gorgeous, with long blond hair and a turned-up nose, but she’s the biggest Jew you’ve ever met. She declared Charlie a “mensch,” and she was right.

  The first time I went to Charlie’s apartment, I noticed that there was a Bible on the nightstand next to his bed. That should have been a red flag. Not that I’m hard-core Jewish. I’m not religious so much as spiritual, but—because of that—it was extreme for me to see a Bible sitting out on a nightstand. What’s on your nightstand says a lot about who you are as a person. It’s the last thing you read before going to sleep. He had a Bible. I had a stack of Us Weeklys. He was obviously serious about religion and I wasn’t. Then, I think it was that same night, he told me that he was afraid of commitment. I remember telling my manager about the Bible and the commitment phobia. She said, “Forget the Bible. The commitment phobia is the real red flag. You can’t go out with this guy. He just gave you the biggest gift he can give you: telling you you should get out now.” She sent me the book Men Who Can’t Love with key passages highlighted and a note that said, Read this book. Get out now. But the idea that I couldn’t have him only made me want him more. Are you with me, girls? Wanting to “get” him made me stay. (Now, reflecting on that conversation with Charlie about commitment, I think the reality was that he’d never had a serious relationship. Ever. He was thirty-five or thirty-six at the time. Once he’d dated a girl for six months who’d broken his heart. It might have spared us both a lot of trouble if he actually had been hard to get.)

  Soon after we started dating, I went to meet Charlie to see his friend’s play. The show was in a small theater in a seedy area of Hollywood. His friend was starring in it, and Charlie had gotten there early to help her sell tickets. As I pulled up to the theater I saw him out on the corner, waiting for me, looking up and down the street for my car. My stomach turned in an Ew, that is pathetic way. I parked, and then I sat in my car and thought about it. He was out there waiting for me. Why did I find that pitiful? What the hell was wrong with me? I thought to myself, For the first time in your life here’s a guy who cares. He’s being a gentleman, looking out for your car, making sure you’re safe. If I found that unattractive, the problem wasn’t with him. It was with me.

  I’d turned thirty. Ever since I was a child, I’d felt unworthy of being loved. I picked men who weren’t available. They were present, somewhat, but they never took care of me the way people who love each other take care of each other: listening, helping, understanding. I never felt like I had a true companion. A person who was by my side, looking out for me as I would for him. For a long time I never thought I deserved more. Now I wanted to break that pattern. I wanted to enjoy being doted on. I wanted to be married. I wanted to have kids. I wanted to rent movies and eat takeout and tell my husband not to leave the toilet seat up. I wanted that whole life. I was ready to change my path.

  So I changed it in my head. I told myself I was a good person. I deserved devotion. I deserved a man who would dote and care as much or more than I did. My mother liked to tell me, “Always remember: A man should love his woman a little bit more than she loves him.” Charlie was different from anyone I’d ever dated. He cared about me the way a man should. So if my reaction to him was wrong and unhealthy, I would simply correct it. It was kind of an inward struggle—having a negative reaction to the man I was supposed to love and making a mental adjustment to correct it—but eventually it became such a habit that I forgot I was doing it. I thought it was a huge step.

  Charlie’s family was a major part of the attraction. After we’d been dating for six months, he took me to his mother’s house in Peabody, Massachusetts. It was total suburbia, something I’d only experienced on TV (speci
fically, Leave It to Beaver), and I loved it. The house was a pale yellow gingerbread clapboard row house with white trim. Inside it was decorated in purple and yellow with floral fabrics everywhere. And wreaths.

  His mother had little knickknacks that said things like GARDENS GROW WITH LOVE. (My mother’s version of that knickknack would say GARDENS GROW WITH A LARGE, FULL-TIME STAFF OF HORTICULTURISTS.)

  I even thought it was adorable that Charlie’s mom wouldn’t let us sleep in the same room unless we were married. So quaint.

  Charlie’s parents were divorced, but they still did everything together for the sake of the family. He had two older sisters, both married with kids, within a ten-mile radius. When I first came into the house, his mother gave me a big hug. She asked me questions about my life. She was clearly proud of me, and she didn’t even know me yet. My family never showed that kind of affection.

  Dinner that night was served family-style. At the Manor a butler used tongs to deposit homemade dinner rolls on bread plates garnished with frozen balls of butter that the chef had carefully rolled in the kitchen. Here we passed around store-bought rolls and a stick of butter on a plate. At the Manor the wine, which dated from before I was born, was stored in a categorized, temperature-regulated wine cellar and recorked on a regular basis. When I couldn’t find the red wine in the kitchen, his mother said, “Oh, but it’s right there in the refrigerator!” I looked around at the house, his sisters, his parents, the meal. These people were everything my family wasn’t. Close. Loving. Accepting. Interested. I wanted Charlie’s family. I wanted to want him, but I didn’t. I wanted the idea of him. I was completely in love with the idea of him. He was a nice guy, we were great friends, and I enjoyed his company on some level. I knew I wanted a nice guy, but I had too little experience with nice guys to know that one could actually be selective while staying in the nice-guy category.

  Charlie doted on me, and in return I set out to be the best girlfriend I could. I tried to embrace everything he was and to become everything he wanted me to be. Sort of like my manager, he liked the sweet, funny, girl-next-door side of me. When he moved into my place, we didn’t do it cavalierly. It was a big deal for both of us, and we knew it meant we were serious.

  When Charlie moved in with me, the biggest change was that I became a churchgoing lady. Early in our relationship, soon after I’d caught a glimpse of that bedside Bible, he told me, “Religion is very important to me. It’s a huge part of my life. I need a partner who understands that and participates in it with me. If you’re not open to that, I don’t know where this can go.” After he moved in, we started going to church every Sunday. To me church was a foreign concept. I didn’t have any friends who went to church other than with their families on Christmas Eve. Charlie never pushed it on me, he never forced it. He just said, “If you’re interested in coming, I’d love that.” I wanted to be his ideal mate. I decided to go with him every single Sunday.

  I did it because it meant so much to Charlie, but I can’t say I enjoyed church. The organization and structure of it weren’t how I connected to God. For me spirituality is abstract and very individual. I believe in God and past lives and afterlife and angels, but not in a defined, “Here’s how it all works” way. Honestly, in church with Charlie, I just wore the right clothes, sat politely, stood up when everyone else stood up, sat back down when everyone else sat back down, and got nothing out of it. It was like an acting exercise. Or a giant game of Simon Says. And even though I was doing it faithfully (so to speak), I didn’t quite think of it as a life commitment. Then Charlie told me that when we had kids, they would go to church every Sunday. I said nonchalantly, “I don’t know about that.” But he said very certainly, “No, they will. My children will go to church every Sunday, and they’ll go to Sunday school. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. That’s your choice.” Yikes. Red flag number one was at full mast and waving heartily, but (surprise, surprise) I put off pledging allegiance.

  Inevitably, the longer we were together, the more I let down my guard. I figured, I’m with this person, he likes me, I can relax. I’d tailored my overcoat of a personality to fit him, but little holes began to appear. One Sunday afternoon we were having drinks with a group of his friends in someone’s backyard. I was talking with a few of the girls, and we started talking about sex. I said something raunchy, who knows what. Raunchy comes naturally to me—I don’t log my raunch. It may have been something as relatively tame (for me) as using the f-word or talking about poo.

  At home that night it came out that Charlie was totally offended. He said, “The way you behaved was not acceptable for someone I’m with.” I was surprised. It seemed so old-fashioned for him to think I was unladylike. I was telling a story! The girls were laughing. I was being dirty, normal-dirty, the way I am with my friends. He said, “A girl I’m with isn’t going to say the f-word and talk about sex in a joking manner.” He’d caught a glimpse of the real me and didn’t like it. How could I not be myself?

  This old-fashioned side of Charlie wasn’t completely unfamiliar. One day the two of us got into a car that a guy friend of ours was driving. I climbed into the passenger seat, leaving Charlie to slide into the back. Later he said it was inappropriate—that if there were two men and one lady in a car, the lady should always sit in the backseat. “Lady”? Hello, ginormous red flag number two.

  Did I confront the issue head-on? Who, me? No, not even close. I just divided up my worlds. We’d go out with his friends. We’d go out with my friends. And then I’d go out alone with my friends so I could be silly, gross, dirty, or whatever, without worrying what he thought. There’d be a Marc Jacobs party and I’d say, “It’s a fashion party, and you’re not into that, so I’m going to go with Mehran.” True, he didn’t like that kind of party, but it was also my excuse to ditch him so I could feel comfortable being myself. It was the opposite of my life with the bad boys: Now I was the one who went out with friends and came home to find him waiting.

  That’s not to say we didn’t have fun together; we did. For example, we’d gone to look at engagement rings. I loved doing that. Wait a minute. Why were we talking about marriage? I had to have known by now that I didn’t want to be with this guy forever, right? Well, maybe I did, but I kept going. I wanted my life to fall into place. I wanted to get married. I desperately wanted Charlie to be the right guy. We lived together. We got along well. I cared deeply about him and liked his family. Everything was falling into place.

  It was fall, almost Thanksgiving of 2003, when Charlie surprised me with a ring. He concocted an elaborate scheme involving his friends from New York, Bret and Dina. They were staying at Shutters, a top-end beachfront hotel on the beach in Santa Monica, and we were allegedly going to meet their baby in the hotel room and then go out to dinner. As we drove there, Bret called and said that something had come up—they’d be late but we should get a key from the front desk and just meet them in their room, or so the story went. I didn’t think twice about it.

  When Charlie opened the door to Bret and Dina’s alleged hotel room, there were candles lit everywhere and music playing softly. In the first moment I thought, Wow, this is awkward. Is this really safe with a baby around? But a second later it was like a bunch of Polaroids assembling in my head. Flash: candles. Flash: rose petals everywhere. Flash: chilled champagne on the table. Oh my God! And just as I was putting it together, I turned to see Charlie on one knee. It was really happening. The moment every girl dreams about. I was a five-year-old girl dressed in a pink party dress realizing that her prince was coming. I was breathless. The ring was classic: a jaunty two-carat princess-cut diamond with filigree on a platinum band. It was from Philip Press. I’d spent years of my life repulsed by the showy diamonds my mother wore. I’d never wanted a classic big diamond. But for some reason, as I thought about getting married, I forgot who I was and turned to some image of what I thought a perfect wedding was supposed to be.

  And Charlie was living up to that image. The whole moment was
“perfect.” I couldn’t wait to call all of my friends. In hindsight I confused excitement with love, but hindsight and I have had lots of conversations about what happened with Charlie, most of which end in me saying to hindsight, Thanks for all the information, but you’re a little late.

  Charlie and I were debriefing on how it had all gone down when all of a sudden I said, “Did you ask my dad for my hand?” I was so caught up in the idea of our fairy-tale relationship that now I was making sure everything matched the illusion. I didn’t stop to think about who I was or what was meaningful to me. All I knew was that in the movies the guy asked the dad for his daughter’s hand. Charlie said, “Yes, actually, I did. I asked both your parents.” I was impressed. What a great guy. He did everything right. And there was a reason I was doubly impressed. At the time my mother and I weren’t speaking.

  It all started with dinner at the Four Seasons. It was a big Thanksgiving-like dinner with our family and some other couples who were friends of my parents. Nanny was coming, as she always did to family gatherings. Her birthday was around that time, and I called my mother to see if she’d ordered a cake for Nanny. She said no, she hadn’t. I said, “Well, we should call the Four Seasons. We have to get a cake.” My mother said, “No. I have friends coming. We’re not going to be celebrating her birthday.” I started to get upset. “But it’s her birthday! We have to acknowledge it.” My mother was short and dismissive.

  My next move was to get my dad on the phone. (Yeah, the old standard of parent manipulation. If Mom says no, call Dad.) I assumed my father would be horrified. But this time my mother had gotten to him first. When he got on the phone, he dismissed me, saying, “No. It’s not happening.” I called my mother back, and by the time the conversation ended I was so angry that I said, “Fuck you,” and hung up. I may sometimes be foulmouthed, but never in my life had I said anything remotely like that to my mother. She’s my parent. I was raised (by Nanny) to respect my elders. But I felt justified. I couldn’t believe she’d refuse to do this for Nanny.