a disastrous tea with the former film critic
Monday 7 February 2005 | I like a cookie
In the ludicrously named Maison et Thé, what the Film Critic has just said takes my breath away. He looks at me blankly, so I write our old pen names down on Hello Kitty paper, to illustrate to him what I was talking about, since he seemed to have forgotten completely, to my barely disguised horror. “But obviously it wasn’t meant to be destroyed,” he continues hastily, removing excess Brie from his baguette slice, “just like you were obviously meant to eat this Brie.” It’s a kind of a save; but a weak one. I obligingly fork up some Brie, avert my wounded rabbity gaze.
Later, waiting for the Al-Anon meeting to start, I write:
He erased it?! He tried to forget about it?! to “return it to the entropy from whence it came”?! How can I just calmly write an Oscars article with this guy? Okay, I’m melodramatic, but honestly, how can he not have cared at all? Jesus Christ I’m still a fucking mess over this; so what do I tell him? He still doesn’t care and it still hurts. And my new boyfriend only hit bottom a few days ago and isn’t in recovery yet (if that’s really defined as no more slips) and I’m trying to hang on to the relationship because I’m—because why? because I have the self-esteem of a gnat and think I can’t survive another breakup, or because I actually share something genuine with a guy who doesn’t know who Marlene Dietrich or Ingrid Bergman were?
The meeting starts, so I stop. Right off the bat I’m corrected or anyway told “…and then there’s the newcomers’ meeting at St. Vincent where you can cross-talk as much as you want.” Yelp. I sit there blinking tears out of my eyes, tell myself not to flee the meeting, just to sit there. A guy in recovery for one year does the main share, confessing his desire for peace, control, sanity at any cost; his conviction that he could control situations by himself; the benefit of having a sponsor who will tell him bluntly when he’s not thinking clearly and is caught up in self-pity; his behaving as though criticism equalled death, as though it threatened his very life; his insane people-pleasing.
All too resonant. Now it’s the next day, Monday night in fact, and I’m in mid-gauntlet. I have an enormous greeny bruise at the corner of my left eye, feline, like eyeshadow; yesterday N. held my hands behind my back and practically sat on me, conversing calmly with my snarling, growling animus. Today he’s a wreck from Effexor withdrawal, teary and feeble, and I can’t type any more, my back is too sore. What in the world is this all about. Am I being stupid even to keep trying anything, much less to have a relationship in the wreckage of—of the Film Critic—of the Librarian—of my marriage. Of my brain.
The Parisienne’s book and and Marya Morevna’s blog in the same Alumnae Quarterly! A tired-looking but beloved G. Lee. Eloise sleeping in her box in the closet and the neighbors’ big dogs Zeke and Mya having shot out through their hole in the fence and run, tongues a-loll no doubt, straight down to the riverbed; I call and call them in vain. It’s 6:40 pm and I’m afraid of N., afraid of relationship, exhausted, aversive, aversive, aversive.
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