Mr. Unavailable #126: Emotional Chicken

See The Imprinter, Business or Pleasure?, Spellbound, No Picnic in the Park, Squatter Love, Who Falls First?, Trouble, Purgatory, Pre-Disintegration, Sanity Takes a Turn, In Heat, Fireworks, Part 1, Fireworks, Part 2, Don't Tell Mama, Mr. Leaky, A Game of Text and Friends, Zero Benefits for the background on this one.

It had very much occurred to me that #126 may have offered me his apartment to get me into bed. He was leaky. It made sense. He may not have even been aware he’d done it. The best liars, after all, lie to themselves first.

When I got home, I told Zoe what happened.

“What a tosser,” she said.

“He said he sold himself short.”

“That’s not your problem,” she said. “The thing is-is, a deal’s a deal. And it was his idea. It’s not like you came to him and said, ‘I’ll give you $1,200 for your place.’ He came to you with it. And now, you’ve had that deal for more than a month and he goes back on it. As far as he knows, I was planning on moving in here and now I have to find another place. That’s not on. The deal he made could hold up in court. He doesn’t deserve your friendship.”

“I can’t have any more bad blood,” I said. It was true. There was already too much of it floating around. I didn’t have the energy to hate him.

Zoe put down her hair straightener and came over. “OK, you do what you need to do, but, after this, no more half-people. You need a fresh start. When I get my loft, there will be more lofts and you can get a nice, big place with lots of light.”

That made me feel better. For a little while, anyway. Zoe went off to wrestle the Williamsburg real estate market into submission and I tried to write, but I couldn’t concentrate. I called Kevin and told him the latest.

“Do you think you’d really be friends with him? At this point, he’s shown himself to be, frankly, a pretty sketchy friend.”

I explained the bad blood thing.

“It doesn’t have to be bad. You can really nicely say that you can’t be friends with him. And then it’s done, nothing to feel bad about.”

The most brilliant things are sometimes the most obvious—like spoons and wheels and chunks in ice cream. Letting him go nicely hadn’t even occurred to me. I couldn’t have planned a better set-up if I'd tried: I’d offered him friendship. But what one can giveth, one can taketh away. He’d changed his mind about our apartment deal, so I was changing mine about our friend deal.

“I know where I can tell him,” I said to Kevin. “The Bean.”

Yes, The Bean. The coffee shop where I’ve been dumped, half-dumped and anticipated getting dumped. It was payback time.

At 7:28 a.m. the next morning, I sent him a text: Can you meet tonight for coffee? It’s important. 9:30 at The Bean on 3rd St./1st Ave.

#126: No. I’m meeting a friend in Soho at 10. Working before that. Maybe in-between.

Me: OK. I’ll be in Soho so I could meet you at 9ish somewhere over there.

He called me at 6:30 p.m. as I was heading out the door.

“Yeah, I, uh, just got home,” he said.

So much for working until 10.

“Do you want to, uh, talk now?” he asked.

“Can you meet me at The Bean?” I said.

“No, I, uh, have to eat something before, uh, going to yoga. Do you want to come over and talk while I, uh, eat a bowl of cereal?”

“No, actually, I don’t,” I said. “Why don’t you call me after yoga when you’re in Soho and we can meet up before you meet your friend.”

At 9 p.m., I was in Soho at dinner with some friends waiting for his call to come in. Finally, at 9:45, he called.

“So, where are you? Where should we meet?” I asked.

“Uh, I’m still at home.”

“You are? You didn’t go to yoga?”

“Uh, no. And it looks like I’m, uh, going to have to take a cab to meet my friend so I’m not, uh, late.”

“So you won’t be able to meet tonight?”

Silence.

So much for meeting up in Soho. On the bright side, he was clearly terrified to meet me—a terror that made him skip yoga and spend money on a cab.

“OK. Well, then I guess it’ll have to be Wednesday,” I said.

On Tuesday, I sent him a reminder text about Wednesday.

Me: 5:30 at The Bean. And it is important, so please don’t blow it off like you did last night.

He didn’t respond.

Finally, Wednesday arrived.

#126 texted: Can we make it Whole foods at 5:30? I’m going to need to eat.

He was either clueless or trying to gain back some semblance of control. What he didn’t appear to realize was that I no longer cared what he needed. I was going to friend-dump him on my terms and his eating routine was not a factor I would take under consideration.

Me: Can’t. Bean is better for me.

#126: OK.

I took the bus from work and it pulled up in front of The Bean at 5:20. I walked over and sat on one side of an empty bench and then put my bag in the middle to create a barrier between us once he arrived.

When he walked up, he sat down and said, “You look really beautiful.”

I should probably mention I was wearing a low-cut dress with a push-up bra. I knew he had a compulsion to stare at every passing woman, but, for this conversation, I needed him to focus, so I gave him something to look at.

“So, I’ve been processing,” I said. “This whole thing with the apartment is really not cool.” He looked over my shoulder as if something was going on behind me. I turned to look and, when I turned back, his hand was in my bag and he was rummaging around in it.

“What are you doing?!” I asked.

He shook his head and shrugged. I thought he’d spotted the pack of cigarettes and was trying to get a better view of my big secret—that I smoked sometimes. I closed my bag.

“You came to me with this deal—you said you wanted someone in there who you could trust and that you didn’t care about money. You just wanted someone responsible who would put up with construction and let you crash there every now and then. You even said before you knew you could get $1,800 for it. We had a deal. You screwed me. You screwed Jo. I don’t buy this whole thing that only after talking to people you realized that you could get that much money for it.

“I made a bad deal. It was stupid. I made a mistake. I’m a vet and I make $20 an hour in New Mexico. I have low self-esteem. I always undercut myself.” Kevin’s voice rang in my head: “Not. My. Problem.”

I thought back to when he told me he had once had three houses. “I don’t buy this whole, ‘I’m an idiot’ thing. I don’t think you’re that dumb.”

“You don’t have to, but that’s what it is.”

“I don’t trust you. I don’t respect you. So I can’t be friends with you.”

He nodded.

But I wasn’t done. “We had a verbal contract. That would hold up,” I said. The meaning was, hold up in court. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew why he’d been rummaging around in my bag. It wasn’t that he’d seen my cigarettes. He was looking for a recorder.

“I’m not that dumb,” he said. “I made a bad deal. I’m not perfect. You know, some are sicker than others.”

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I feel sorry for you. You’re 45 years old and you’re using that as an excuse. That’s pretty sad,” I said.

“But it’s better than having you in there and me feeling like I’d done a dumb thing,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m glad you told me now rather than three months down the line. Now you get $2,000 a month. Congratulations. I hope whoever goes in there doesn’t screw you over.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“You’re not a man of your word.”

“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said.

“I know that we’ll probably run into each other over the next month, so I wish you the best,” I said.

“Well, sweetie. Have a good day.” He got up and started to walk away. Without looking at me, he said, “Best wishes and good luck to you.”

“Good luck with everything,” I called after him.

Although it may look like it, nothing of the above was about the apartment.

Read the translation here.

Even before I slept with him, I sensed his offer would come to nothing. So when it did come to nothing, I wasn’t all that surprised or upset—not because I was relieved he didn't give me herpes, but because my expectations of him had been so low from the start.

But I noticed that other people—Zoe and Kevin, for instance—were pretty upset and wanted me to tell him off because he screwed me with the apartment. I wanted to tell him off because he screwed me. Period.

What we’d really been doing was playing a big game of emotional chicken. Remember, the fooling around started after we both said we could handle the whole situation, which meant that whoever admitted they’d been affected by our little liaison first lost. The apartment was the only game piece. Whoever backed out was the loser.

Signs of Hope: He finally did meet up with me.

Red Flags: He was terrified to meet up with me.

Turning Point: When I realized why he’d been snooping in my bag, I realized exactly how terrified he was.

Diagnosis: We were both losers. More specifically: emotionally unavailable losers.
For him: The real reason he didn’t want me living there was because we’d slept together and he wasn’t comfortable with the situation anymore. He had been affected by things. The rent was just a convenient excuse.
For me: I had been affected by our little liaison, too. It would have been really weird living in his place and dealing with him because some part of me would have always been hoping he’d come around. But he never would have.