go ahead and destroy this

The following mostly-original fictional sketch^[*] is intended for mature audiences only. It contains graphic language and frank expressions referring to certain sexy behaviors. It may be inappropriate reading for small children, several teenagers, certain adults, many senior citizens, most pets and almost all household appliances.

Backwards

Glossy pictures of her stuck to his fingers as he shuffled them in silence.

God damn this furnace, he thought. Sweating through his cotton shirt on what was otherwise an icy night, Jeff momentarily fretted about his hair and whether it was still laying flat. He was careful not to lean back, not only because it would be so easy for him to fall asleep right now, but because to do so would seriously mess with his coif.

( keep reading )

"It's supposed to be cold."

I knew that. I knew it when I ordered it, so I was ready for the first tepid spoonful. But I must have made some kind of face as I was sipping it, which is probably why Christi gave me her little tutorial. Cold, I thought. Cold, I smiled. Cold.

"Gazpacho is supposed to be cold, because it's usually made in the summer, when the tomatoes are ripe and fresh, like now, I'm growing these tomatoes in my garden, although I bought the tomato plants with the tomatoes already on them, and they don't seem to have gotten any bigger since I planted them, so I haven't picked any yet. Maybe they're those small kind of tomatoes, not the cherry tomatoes I mean, but smaller than the big ones? They're kind of small and round? Not the roma tomatoes? Because those are long and egg-shaped?"

She was talking about plum tomatoes.

"Anyway maybe that's what I have, whatever they are. What are those good for? I never see any of the chefs on TV using those. I watch the Eat Network, like, constantly. They have this one show where the guys make all their foods with swords and stuff. It's wicked. And they have this one show that's all about steak, and I've been learning about where, like, all the different kinds of steak come from? On the cow? Like the round? That's your butt."

I raised an eyebrow as I slurped another tablespoon of soup.

"Well, not your butt." She smiled. "Cow butt. There's also the loin and the sirloin, and the flank and the shank and the chuck. I like the plate? Which is right between the shank and the flank? Because those make the best fajitas. We should have gotten fajitas. This salsa is good, but it could use a little cilantro. I put cilantro in everything. It's so much healthier than salt. How is your soup?"

"It's pretty good," I said between my fourth and fifth spoonful, though I hadn't actually tasted it yet. My mind, and my lips and my tongue, were on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Christi had asked me out for dinner two weeks ago, before I even knew Vanessa's first name.

Vanessa was previously known to me only as visamson@looksee.com, some cut-up from the design department who accidentally group-replied to the mass e-mail about the company picnic with a scathing review of the author's grammar. We quickly bonded over a shared frustration with people who don't understand where to put apostrophes. I withheld my loathing for people who group-reply to mass e-mails.

We met for coffee after work one day to rant about people who end sentences with prepositions, with segues into passive voice and the beauty of the semicolon. The conversation smoothly ballooned into a full-blown discussion of English class, which led to literature, which led to Shakespeare, which led to Shakespeare in the Park on a brisk July evening.

It was Twelfth Night, one of the Bard's less remarkable comedies, but nonetheless noteworthy for the very first line of the play:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

And even though it was chilly and she was wrapped tightly in a pink cardigan over a mint green sundress, she refused a cab and walked me all the way down to my midtown apartment. There was music playing in Rockefeller plaza, Debussy's Clair de Lune, when she stopped and sang to me:

"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die."

And she shivered.

"It's cold out here," I said.

"Yeah, I'm a little cold," through clenched teeth.

"I could give you my jacket."

"Then you'd be cold."

"I have an idea." I unbuttoned my sportcoat, slid my hands in the pockets and opened arms like wings as if to glide into flight. I shuffled toward her and she inched toward me, and as she curled her arms into my chest I enveloped her with the flanks of my jacket. We stood there, rocking quickly back and forth for a minute.

"Better?"

"Yes," she said. "But my nose is still cold."

I touched her nose with mine, felt the clean sting of her skin, and kissed her. Her lips were warm, her breath steamy and soft. I felt her hands, once balled up under her chin, clutching the fabric of my shirt like talons. It lasted two minutes.

"When can I see you again?"

She exhaled. "Two weeks. I'm flying to Paris in two days to talk about the fall line. But I'll call you when I get back."

"How about..."

"Yes. I've got to go." She shrugged out of my jacket and hailed a cab. "I had a nice time. Goodnight."

That was two nights ago. Two minutes, two nights ago, and I was on my 48th hour of thinking about it. Those lips were halfway over Greenland, and there I was sipping cold soup in Spanish Harlem. Listening to Christi talk about ... what? Samuel Beckett? Somehow she had gone from cilantro to Samuel Beckett.

"I waited in line forever for tickets to 'Godot,' " I said, smirking.

"Oh, I've never done Godot but we did read parts of it in this workshop I'm taking, with this guy, have you ever seen Inside the Actor's Studio, with that guy? My workshop's not with that guy, but with another guy. Like a similar guy? Except his place is in Brooklyn? Next to that deli I was telling you about? They also have the greatest provolone."

Provolone, fajitas -- I swear, I have no idea how she stays so thin. Christi was a postcard picture of glamour, all legs and springy curls of blonde hair. Since performing as Stella in the Broadway revival of Streetcar, she seemed to have grown three inches and two cup sizes.

And still, all I could see in the opposite seat was Vanessa, barely breaching five feet and comprised entirely of chocolately brown eyes and dark pink lips. Her mousy brown hair was tucked back in a perpetual ponytail, except for a few bangs that hadn't quite grown out yet. The fuzzy image in my head was so beautiful I felt like crying.

"That soup must be pretty good, just look at that big grin on your face," Christi said, and she dabbed my chin with her napkin. "Or you've had too much wine already." She poured herself a glass just as a passerby glanced her way and whispered "Look -- Christina Renee!" Christi raised her glass to the admirer and flashed a photo-op smile.

Christina Renee! had always been Christi to me. Her real name was Christina Renee Tulevski, though she shortened it to Christina Renee for the stage. She shortened it further to Christi around friends and family, unaware or apathetic of the fact that it made her sound like a porn star. Her decision to spell Christy with an "i," not a "y," always seemed to me a carefully contrived bit of post-modernism, an effort to capture some kind of sweet girlish femininity, but not the innocent kind; she was the girl in pigtails who kicked you in the shins and wrestled you into the back seat.

We had met three years ago in an improv comedy class. She was not remotely funny, but she was smart, and she had impeccable timing, and she thought I was hilarious. She was strikingly beautiful in a sharply angular way, the spitting image of Gwenyth Paltrow in "Shakespeare in Love," and when she was paying attention to me she made me feel bright and shiny. After a few drinks one night, I joked my way into a first date.

It was an epic date, spanning seven hours, two states, three different modes of transportation, three meals, an extended snuggle and a brief kiss, all fueled by nothing more than summer air and diet cola. There were dozens of other dates, but none of them ever lived up to the first one. And three months later she was gone, bored or distracted or something, until now.

On a random Tuesday, she showed up in my inbox, a few slots up from someone named visamson@looksee.com. How had I been, what was I doing, could she take me to dinner. "I've missed you." I tried to parse that sentence -- with the verb in the present perfect tense -- searching for motive. Eventually I gave up, content just to be asked out for once and thinking that hell, anything could happen with enough wine.

"This wine is good. I get this same label sometimes, at a great liquor store next to my new place. Esprit du Jacques? In SoHo? Right next to Ben's Pizzeria? Isn't that your favorite? You should stop by sometime. We've got this great place. Hardwood floors, great big bathtub -- I take 45 minute showers, I kid you not. I love it. I just love it. Love it. Are you still in that same place?"

I took the last sip of soup, and it was quickly whisked away by a busboy. "Yeah, same place. Same doorman, same furniture, same water stains on the ceiling." Christi's eyes widened and she tilted her head with curiosity. "Oh, right, you never actually saw my apartment. Same place though."

I had the honor of occupying the smallest, shittiest apartment in the grandest residential building in midtown Manhattan. It was a perfect square of space containing my kitchen, bed, television, four rickety bookshelves and a chest of drawers whose volume perfectly matched that of my college-era clothes hamper. Off in one corner was a small matchbox-sized bathroom big enough for a stand-up shower and toilet. It was, technically, a separate room from the rest of the apartment, though its proximity to the living area defied any notion of privacy.

"I've seen it from the outside, though," she said. "I walk by it all the time."

In the few months we saw each other, I remember wanting never to bring Christi up to my place, for fear that it – or I – would spoil whatever mystery had unwittingly been constructed. I much preferred to take the No. 5 train through a war zone all the way up to Baychester so that we could spread out in her and her roommate's two-bedroom flat. If we had dated much longer, I would eventually have had to invite her over, but she stopped returning my calls just in time.

It was barely enough apartment for one person, much less me and all of Christi. And yet I lay in my bed the night before, my ears still ringing from Vanessa's "Good night" and wishing that we were sprawled – that is, scrunched – on my floor playing Chinese checkers and drinking spiked lemonade.

Vanessa lived somewhere in SoHo. I didn't know where, though.

I interrupted Christi in mid-sentence, something about window treatments. "Are you still living with the same roommate?" I asked. "What was her name? Akila? Aquila? Tequila?" I took another glug of wine. It was indeed very good wine, and working efficiently after my four hours of sleep in two days.

Christi clammed up suddenly. "Oh." And she stared at her plate for a moment before peeking up with one eye. "I thought I mentioned. I moved in with my boyfriend six months ago."

She must have seen something in my expression -- surprise, confusion, embarassment, everything but the relief spreading out under my muscles -- because she frantically began to explain.

"Carl and I started going out -- Carl, that's his name -- started going out like, um, almost three years ago, and we moved in together in the new place, and he's great, he's great, he and I are great, totally. He's from Boston, a real Red Sox fan, it drives me crazy, and sometimes that accent, it really drives me crazy. But he's a banker, a big-shot banker with one of the firms downtown, I'm not exactly sure what he does, but he's flying back and forth to Boston all the time? And it's just me in all this space? I barely know what to do with myself."

"Moving in, that's a big step," I said. "But it's great. The city can be so lonely, it must be nice to have someone to come home to." I thought of Vanessa, and it warmed me a bit, until I felt the pinch of realization that I wasn't going to see her that night or the next night, or who knows when, and the only person I was going home to was the curiously fat homeless man on my front stoop.

"Yeah," Christi said. "Lonely and cold, sometimes."

A team of waiters brought our entrees, a southwestern chicken salad for her, jalapeño steak for me. I momentarily considered asking Christi what part of the cow it was from, then thought better of it.

She sighed, then shrugged her shoulders and leaned in. "What about you, are you seeing anybody? Anybody waiting at home for you?"

"Not yet," I smiled as I addressed my steak. She picked at the iceberg lettuce in her salad. "I just met a girl though, a woman really, a young lady, an amazing ... we've only been out a few times, but I think she's ... I mean, I like her a lot." I looked up from my meat. "It's kind of up in the air right now." I laughed at my own joke but didn't bother to explain it.

She smiled, a gentle smile without teeth. "I'm so happy for you," she said. "She's lucky, you're a great guy, you know, I always knew it, whatever I did, I always knew it." She shivered. "Aren't you going to eat your steak?"

Clair de Lune, a cheesy mariachi version, was swelling underneath the chatter of patrons, and I heard Vanessa's voice:

"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die."

"Actually, I think I'm full."

On my way home, coming out of the Rockefeller Center station, my cell phone buzzed against my thigh. A text message:

"Hey you'l never guess what song is playing here: if music B the food of love play on! CU soon -V from Paris"

And I am warm.

Andy Warhol is famously quoted as saying, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Being famous is nice, I guess, because it makes you stand a little taller and smile a little brighter. But what good is it, really? Unless you can parlay your notoriety into dating a supermodel or getting a nice table at restaurants, being famous is excruciatingly temporary and generally useless.

Being cool, though – that's currency. And even if you're only cool for a mere five minutes, you can deposit those five minutes in the bank and live off the interest forever.

For five minutes, Jacob wasn't just cool. He was the coolest person on the planet, momentarily leapfrogging Jack Nicholson, Joe Montana and Snoop Dogg. For one moment of one day in July 1997, they were all merely living in Jacob's world as he spun it on his finger.

In the summer of 1997, Jacob was 20 years old and he was seeing ghosts.

Back home for his summer break, there were ghosts of Estella everywhere. Four years of memories hovered low in the air, a thick fog blurring the horizon in every direction. Estella and Jacob first started their courtship in the autumn of 1992 and quickly became the sweetest of high school sweethearts. There was romance, sex, love, fights, breakups, make-ups and prominades.

With every step and every glance around their shared neighborhood, Jacob was again and again confronted by those ghosts. And their love, once a delicately assembled string of pearls, had become twisted into knots in his stomach.

# # #

The second-biggest knot in Jacob's stomach represented the moment in August 1996 when they sat on her back porch sipping lemonade and Estella told Jacob – with a kind of determination he had never seen before – that she didn't want to be his girlfriend anymore.

(This was probably fair. A year of college had taken its toll; the only thing holding them together now was history and sex, and both of those things were fading with atrophy.)

The biggest knot in Jacob's stomach formed the next day in a friend's driveway, when Jacob learned that for all of July 1996, Estella had been secretly and intimately involved with another man -- a bodybuilder named Paul, who was a real "guy" in all the ways Jacob was not. It turns out that Estella had not only been lying to Jacob but parading this new guy around behind his back like the goose that laid the golden... well, you know.

(This was not fair. Estella had been Jacob's "first" everything, so perhaps it was fitting that she was his first lesson that life was unfair. He handled it the way most 19-year old boys would handle it: he went cuckoo.)

Jacob was understandably and by all accounts shattered by this news. The pain and humiliation stung like paper cuts, but what really sliced him open was the undeniable verification that Estella would not be coming back. He still loved her, and now he hated her too, each emotion strangling the other.

The following morning, Jacob confronted Estella with her crimes. He yelled, he called her names, he made her cry. He cried a little, too. The whole thing was not a particularly manly display. Still, he walked away feeling justified and righteous, if not proud.

Things would have been okay -- shitty, but okay -- if they had stopped there. Unfortunately, situations like this commonly involve too many bad feelings, too much bad behavior to be shouldered by one person. When couples explode, there is ground zero --total devestation where the relationship used to be -- and then there are all the free radicals of highly charged emotion that shower all the survivors with radiation. It rained on Jacob, hard.

Estella deserved and blithely accepted most of the blame, though it was plainly evident that she did not spend a whole lot of time worrying about it. Jacob, now drenched, tried to heap a little more weight on her back, and inadvertently carried some of the load himself.

Quickly back at college for his sophomore year, Jacob impishly dashed off a pair of silly e-mails, one a playfully cruel mass mailing to Estella and all their common friends, the other a blatantly insecure and self-gratifying treatise to Estella herself. Cuckoo.

If these e-mails had a point, it was conspicuously absent. Instead they made Jacob look ugly, bitter, like a loser. They made Jacob feel empty, devoid of the closure he desperately wanted. He would have to wait.

# # #

By July 1997, Jacob hadn't seen or spoken to Estella in nine months. At school, he had been able to blot out her image temporarily with other girls and other interests and a steady diet of internet porn. But at home, there were the ghosts. One day, as he strolled the neutral ground between his house and hers -- an artificial duck pond in the middle of a gaudy housing development -- he decided he was tired of turning around and thinking that she might be there, and worrying about what might come out of his mouth. And so he scheduled an exorcism.

That evening he called her at home, her phone number still stored in the muscle memory of his fingers. She answered casually, an unfamiliar echo of innocence in her voice.

"Hello, Estella. This is Jacob."

Silence. Perhaps fear, definitely confusion.

"Estella?" Jacob smiled, reveling in the control.

"Hi, Jacob. Um." Estella tried to switch to auto-pilot. "How are you?"

"I'm good," Jacob said, and took back the wheel. "Say, are you busy right now? I was wondering if we could get together so I could talk to you about a few things."

"What things?" More fear, and nerves. "What kind of things?"

"It'll just take ten minutes. I promise to be good," Jacob lied.

"I don't know..."

Jacob didn't want to play this card, but he had to see her soon or he would lose his nerve. "Come on. I think you owe me."

A deep breath, or a sigh, Jacob couldn't really tell. Either way, "Okay."

Jacob smiled. "Meet me at the duck pond in twenty minutes. I'll have you home before dinner."

Click.

Jacob dressed in shorts and a simple white t-shirt that showed off a slightly leaner body than the one Estella would remember. He ran his fingers over a two-week beard that he thought made him look tougher and wiser. (Actually, it just made him look older and hairier.) He told his mother he was going out for a bit, but he didn't say where.

He was already sitting on the small dock of the pond when she turned the corner, walking toward him in her tightly coiled gait, looking just as pretty as the last time he had seen her, prettier still for the setting sunlight that was making her hair glow light brown. As she came closer, he saw her cloudy green eyes -- green eyes that used to twinkle like supernovas. He didn't inspire the twinkle anymore. But he did get a hug.

And they sat there on the dock, like a Norman Rockwell painting bizarrely aged, sharing small talk. How is school? How is the family? Any exercise tips?

Then the medium-sized talk. "Still with Paul?" he asked. (Yes, she was.)

"Are you seeing anyone?" she asked. (No, he was not.)

"Do all your friends hate me?" she asked. ("Yes," he said.)

"Do all your friends hate me? he asked. (Your name never comes up, she said.)

The sun was sinking faster, now. Jacob turned to her at the next lull in the conversation.

"Listen, 'Stell. The reason I wanted to talk to you was so that I could tell you four important things, okay?"

She nodded.

"First, I want to say that what you did last year, how you handled things, was really rotten. It hurt me a lot, and it's taken me a really long time to get over it.

"Second, I want to say how sorry I am for acting like such an asshole after it all happened. If anything I said or wrote hurt you, I hope you'll accept my apology and not think any less of me for it.

"Third, I want you to know that I love you and I will always love you, no matter what happened or what happens. And I want you to be happy, more than anything else.

"And the fourth thing -- actually, I originally only had three things to say. But then I saw you again, and now I want to tell you that you're still the most beautiful girl I've ever seen."

And then Jacob smiled, and stood up. "We've got to get you home."

Estella stood up, partly dazed, possibly freaked, and followed Jacob off the dock.

With a short walk, they found themselves in the middle of the intersection of Samson and Timberline Drive, with Jacob's destination east and Estella's south. They exchanged good-byes and take-care-of-yourselfs and finally embraced one last time.

And as Jacob pulled back from Estella's hug and stepped away, he looked at her with devil's eyes and said:

"By the way. I want to apologize in advance. For later."

Estella froze. "Jacob. What did you do?"

Jacob grinned ear-to-ear and leaned in a few steps.

"You won't be able to stop thinking about me tonight."

And he turned around and walked away without looking back.

# # #

Jacob didn't hear from Estella in the few days following their rendezvous. He didn't really expect to, either, since she was still dating Paul and friendship was the farthest thing from his mind. But at least the fog was lifted and his stomach was free of knots, and Jacob could see and breathe again.

It was a satisfying ending to a bittersweet story.

Then, a week later, Jacob got a letter in the mail. It was from Estella, dated two days after their meeting. It started out, "Jacob, just like you said, I haven't been able to get you out of my mind." And the following two pages contained the most heartfelt, moving apology ever committed to paper without the benefit of tear stains, and a plea for friendship.

This was a highly satisfying ending, making the bittersweet story a little more sweet.

It got sweeter. Soon, Estella was calling Jacob several times a week, just to talk. Eventually, she started complaining about Paul. Late one night, they were driving home from a movie, and Estella looked at Jacob with the supernovas in her eyes. Jacob pulled the car over -- alongside the duck pond -- and kissed her with a year's worth of kisses. Estella dumped Paul the next day.

And here comes the most satisfying ending of all: they lived happily ever after. But not like you think.

Yes, Jacob and Estella played out their summer together, giving themselves the coda they deserved before it all got messy. But they also realized in those final weeks that they had outgrown each other, like a comfortable flannel shirt that's been so stained and torn and worn through that you can't wear it outside anymore. Instead, you pack it up safely and take it with you wherever you go. Just like Jacob's five minutes of cool.

Estella fell in love and married a fine man who fits her beautifully. Jacob, who is still shopping for the right shirt, remains happy for her, and proud of her, and in love with the idea of love.

That, in itself, may not be particularly cool. But it lasts a lot longer.