Mr. Unavailable #120: Life is Great

See Sweet Virginia, The First Date, Just Desserts, To Nobu or Not to Nobu, The Duel, The 36-Hour Freakout, Him, Himself and He, Million-Dollar Me, One Block from Heartbreak

and I'd Like to Introduce You to the Curb

for the background on this one.

I’m not going to lie. Once I make a decision and act on it, I spend the next two or three weeks second-guessing it, wondering if I made a mistake and asking myself if I’m too unreasonable in my requests.

After I told #120 I couldn’t see him anymore, it was no different. I tried to keep busy, keeping the voices of regret at bay. 

I kept busy for the rest of the week, occupying myself with heavy sugar intake, writing and parties, one of which was a Thursday night St. Patrick's Day party. It was a low-key affair and Nora and I hid out on the couch after consuming all varieties of green sweets. I admitted that I was sad about #120. She said she was sad about her guy, too, who she'd finally dumped a month and a half before. "I just thought he was so great," I said.

"He wasn't really all that," she said.

"Really? Thank you!" I said.

"How about mine? Was he anything special?"

"Not at all," I said. "He was extremely...regular."

"Thank you," she said. And then we doubled over over our plates of green foodstuffs and laughed.

There was something deeply healing about putting down each others' exes. I always wondered why she thought her guy was so great because I certainly didn't see it, and now she was telling me the same about #120. It was a relief.

On Facebook later that night, #120 instant-messaged me.

“How are you?”

I was stunned. He messaged me in a complete sentence. He told me that he took the job at the restaurant up the street from me and that he’d therefore be seeing me around the neighborhood. And then he said. “Will I see you on Monday?” Again, a complete sentence. I told him I would be there.

“I KNEW IT!!!” Nora emailed after I told her he’d IMed me. “If he wants you back, make it really hard for him.” It was true. The first time around, I’d made it too easy.

When Monday rolled around, I showed up early at the usual gathering of like-minded downtowners and saw what looked like his coat on one of the chairs. As more and more people arrived, I still didn’t see him. And then, once things got started, I looked over, the coat was gone and someone else was in the seat. Either he’d never been there in the first place or he’d shown up, hidden somewhere, changed his mind about being there and escaped unseen. As the gathering wound down, though, I didn’t see anyone with that coat. And he never appeared.

“Why would he ask if he was going to see me and then not even show up?" I asked Zoe later.

“Why would he talk about taking you to Nobu and then say that he wasn’t going to take you after all? It’s the same thing. He makes promises he isn’t going to keep.”

The next morning, I was back on Facebook and saw a post of his from the night before. In it, he said that life was great and he was having a great time with school and work and loving life.

I began to spin out. “I’m sure he knew that you would see that,” Zoe said.

Then I got a message from the freelance job. They needed something pronto. I threw myself into it even though I was unable to concentrate. As I tried to power my way through it, Jo’s phone rang and she called from the other room, “My gay boyfriend wants to know if you want to come to dinner?”

"I'd love to, but I can’t," I said. I was angry and upset, feeling powerless over work and boys. Finally at around 5 p.m., I got a note from the project manager on the freelance job that said if I needed more time, then that was OK. I went out into the living room where Zoe was, collapsed on the floor and cried.

“I’m coming to dinner,” I said.

An hour later, we jumped in a cab, made a pit stop in the West Village to pick up live casting supplies—inadvertently taking our cab driver hostage as we forced him to keep the meter running and wait as we got the supplies and then had him keep driving—and headed out to Green Point. The apartment was an old, rickety railroad apartment that looked like it had been decorated by a museum curator on acid. Old, framed paintings lined the living room from floor to ceiling and the centerpiece of the neatly cluttered room was a massive chaise longue with a tiger-print throw thrown on it.

The kitchen was done in bright pink and green and lovingly strewn with paraphernalia from the 1960s and '70s. For dinner, we had grandma's fried chicken and the champagne and sparkling water flowed.

Somehow, we got onto the topic of otherworldliness and they told me that they saw ghosts in the apartment on a fairly regular basis. “We think our dressing room is a portal." I pressed them for more details. They talked about harmless, floating half ghosts, evil sickly-looking apparitions and red-eyed demons.

“Are you feeling better now?” Zoe asked. I was.

After dinner, we set to work making live casts, making a supreme mess of the kitchen. At about 2:30 a.m., I went to lie down on the chaise longue. Zoe and her gay boyfriend were finishing up making a cast in the kitchen. I was secretly hoping to see a ghost, but, at the same time, terrified to. Then I fell asleep. Zoe came in about an hour later and we decided to stay over on the tiger-print chaise instead of taking a late-night cab ride home. In the morning, we peeled ourselves off the sofa, packed up the live casts and rode the L train into the city.

We saw no ghosts and, later that day, I posted photos of our devilishly fun night on Facebook. #120 was right. Life is great.