My ex Malcolm and I have a relationship of false starts. When he and I wish to start trying again to become a we — hoping that somehow our years of dates eventually amount into something resembling what couples are supposed to be: healthy and loving and supportive — it’s like revving a car battery and thinking the flickering headlights and the coughing carburetor are sure signs of life, that it will start on the next try if we just touch it the right way, utter the correct incantation, close our eyes and want it bad enough.
Last autumn, we had our fifth 3rd date. I followed him through the Catskill Mountains, rambling, as he called it, because rambling isn’t walking when done between trees with a stick. In the five years of our false starts, it was the first time we’d ever hiked together, so he offered to label things for me he knew I wouldn’t recognize: a flourish of rhododendron sprouting out of a rock reminding him of a summer-long girlfriend from Blowing Rock, NC. A squall (not just a gust of wind) ruffling the canopy told him rain was coming soon — pulling the drawstring of his hood so tight, his body from behind looked like a rambling purple condom.
I told him I had spotted a possum darting through the underbrush, but I was wrong. He’d seen it, too. And it was an opossum.
There was a colossus of a tree — more a house with rounded edges — and he wanted me to rest near it because I looked ill and was not used to the altitude as he was. So I did as he prescribed, sitting on a tumor that had swelled from the trunk of the tree, out and downward. It was coated in red orange and brown leaves, as if plastered in strips of colored construction paper, like a papier-mâché project.
I told him about the tree tumor, then began to repeat myself because I’d sworn he hadn’t heard: his back was to me, feet apart, standing over the Catskills, surveying it like an inherited possession, saying something about me investing in a time share here, because this would be for him. And it wasn’t a tumor. It was a burl.
That night, on the drive home, while he slept in the passenger seat, I whispered into his ear that this was the end: we were never having another date, or a relationship, and that this was the last time I’d have to pretend to laugh at his story about bumping into and spilling his vodka-Coke on a guy who looked like Bill Murray, but passed out at the bar with penises drawn over his face. He’d say it with a half chuckle each time, as if unconsciousness was inherently funny, the laughs just a given.
“10:30 PM. Call it,” he mumbled, never opening his eyes.
It is true that each time we decided to try again, it was in the day, usually the morning after sex, and each time we decided it wasn’t going to work, it was at night. It was the night that brought death to our relationship every time. Last year was the first 4th of July party my family had allowed me to attend in years, so when Malcolm puked into the drawer of my mom’s vanity and laughed out an apology, I ended our relationship. The previous winter, he caught me taking the antenna topper off a car (and only one car that one time) that had parked over two parking lot spaces, and so he remembered at that moment why he’d broken up with me before, calling me a raging klepto and ending our relationship.
There was something about the late odd hour, when people think, act, and say things they’d never think, act, or say in the harsher, more critical light of day. It was the pitch emptiness of the sky, or the brain that had been thinking all day of reasons, of ways, of means, and by that late hour too exhausted to say no, that would make us reject one another, fall into old habits, and once and for all say your dead to me.
Halfway between the Catskills and Hoboken, I checked to make sure Malcolm was asleep, that his snoring was real, because I knew the next song on his playlist for the entire ride to and from the Catskills was Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B. I didn’t want him to know that listening to it still makes me cry. I wanted to skip the track entirely and pretend I never heard it, but it has been my favorite song since I heard Malcolm perform it with the Garden State Philharmonic.
He explained the song to me while in line on our first 4th date, at a yogurt shop, when the scarf-wearing woman in black cut in front of us. I was about to get out of the line and complain when Malcom touched my shoulder, not wanting to be interrupted, and continued to tell me how the song was the epitome of unrequited love. And as soon as he said that, I knew it was true: I could see Dvorak chasing after this woman he’d loved all his adult life, and, only at the end of her life, did she turn around to kiss him faintly on the forehead, and smile, before turning away and ascending into heaven.
I started to cry and excuse myself when the woman in black (who had cut the line) walked away from her table without her scarf. The woman was a rich-looking socialite, all-black everything, who dared to believe she owned every grain of sand on Earth and could leave her stuff anywhere and know that it would still be there when she returned. Convinced no one would notice, I pulled it from the table and fought the desire to wrap it around my neck, as if it had been mine the whole time, and decided to pocket it, instead, excited to watch her bargain with others to get it back, or walk out of the yogurt shop trying to warm her skinny little neck with her hands.
Only when I returned to our table did I realize Malcolm had seen the entire thing because in that instant, I’d forgotten he even existed, forgotten my promise to myself not to do this in front of him. He looked at me in horror, like he was watching a woman give birth to a pinecone, and said he didn’t want to hear from me again. I wore that scarf during our hike, but I don’t think he remembers where I got it.
A little out of Hoboken, I stopped at a tiny fluorescent gas station, a blip almost swallowed in the blank void of I-87, because Malcolm wanted a beer and needed to use the restroom. When he walked inside, I stepped out of the car to find somewhere in the sky a giant moon, a search light, or even the blinking nodes of airplanes on their way to somewhere else, and I was disappointed in just how much nothingness there was.
A few gas pumps away a couple was screaming inside of a dark green Saturn who I had tried to ignore, but when I looked over there was a tuft of fabric sticking from the bottom of the car door from a part of the woman’s kaftan that hadn’t made it inside when the door shut — it was hot-pink leopard print.
Comfortable knowing Malcolm would be a while talking to the gas attendant, moving his arms around, slushing his beer onto the floor, I stared at the yelling couple in the car, trying to place what had happened, how the women in a hot-pink leopard print kaftan could have gone so long without noticing the catch of her dress.
At first I figured the couple just left wherever they’d eaten dinner when she slammed the door, furious with her boyfriend because, back at dinner, he admitted to not being sexually attracted to her, pointing out the only reason she wears kaftans in autumn is because she is embarrassed about being fat, dressing in things that will hide her body. But when I noticed that she was doing most of the screaming, raising her hand repeatedly like she was going to slap him, and that he mostly just sat there, eyes down, I realized he must have tried to surprise her with a trip somewhere but forgot to tell her to dress for cold weather. He had tried to be nice, and all he was going to get for his efforts was conflict; she didn’t love him and was stringing him along for sex, or money, or both. And so, I grabbed a pair of scissors from Malcolm’s car trunk and started inching my way to the yelling couple’s car on my knees, tracking rain-wet specks of asphalt on my palms, constantly checking to see if either of them could spot me on the ground next to them. When I reached out and grabbed the fabric, I was surprised by how wet it was and how the leopard print melted in my hands. I cut the tuft of fabric and freed it from the car door.
I tied the wet fabric around the car’s driver side mirror and kept waiting for Malcom to point it out, to ask where it came from, but he had decided years ago never to ask why because he knew how much the “why” meant to me, how happy it’d make me to explain it to him.
I told him I hoped he’d heard me say the first time that we are over because I meant it. He never asked why I do what I do or cared enough to help me stop or even ask me to. Does he break up with me because of it? Sometimes. He assumes he knows why because he likes to think nothing is unknown or unexplainable to him.
For the rest of the drive, we were silent. I drove the final few turns into Malcolm’s neighborhood and stopped in front of his house. When I told him to get out, he placed his hand on mine and admitted to hearing me cry when Dvorak’s Cello Concerto played a while back, that he knew me, and how the story of Dvorak’s life scares me — that I’d love someone and they’d never return it.
The entire day, from the Catskills to our drive home, I fought my impulse to agree with him, if only out of spite. The truth is, it is incredibly comforting. I’m sure I was supposed to feel helpless, but I don’t, and I guess I should be ashamed of how little shame I feel, but I don’t: By the end of that night, we would be over, and I would sleep by myself, in my own space, surrounded by only my things, just as he would his.
But eventually we’ll grow tired of only surrounding ourselves with our own singular company, and some morning a few days, a few months, or a few years later, we’ll decide to try again, convinced we’ve already found our other half, hoping to cure each other, make each other the healthiest, best people we can be for one another. Love is supposed to be everlasting and steadfast — like a repeated routine — so we are, by that definition, in love.
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