Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir by Stephanie Klein Read Free Book Online Page A

It made me feel like a lesbian and anything but gay.
     
    “He’s an idiot,” Smelly added, “and has a lot of growing up to do.” Oh God, please don’t whip out the “his loss, you’re so much better off” speech. It’s what’s done. Lines are drawn, sides are taken. I didn’t know where I belonged. I wanted to hate him.

    In the years we’d been together, he’d spent nights making promises in whispers and sighs: “I’ll never leave you.” Signed his letters with “always” and “forever.”

    It still amazes me how fast everything important can be undone. In a phone call, a text message, an e-mail, an instant message conversation. Weddings that took months of planning can be called off. Engagements broken. A phone call to a moving company and real estate agent and you’re as good as gone. Complicated relationships, where promises and truths were shared in dark theaters, through a bar with his hand on her back, in the backseat of cabs, in the rain when he shared his umbrella, can unbutton in a beat. It saddens me how a lifetime of promises that mean everything to us can be unraveled faster than something as trivial and maddening as fine tangled thread.

    I wanted to feel angry with him. I was too focused on being victimized. Had I taken the time to let myself get to anger, perhaps I would have realized I ought to have been angry with myself. I knew he wasn’t ready to marry me, but he asked on bended knee, so I answered. Yes. His asking was good enough. It shouldn’t have been.
     
    Give him time, space, move out and see what happens. Check, check. I cried to realtors. I cried on the subway. I cried in the shower. Strangers offered me tissues. I’d ride the subway wondering how people went on with their lives, how they functioned. What it was like not having to remind myself to breathe or eat. How appreciative I became of the smallest gestures. Someone helped me with a bag, and I thanked her as if she’d rescued me from sudden death. The smallest consideration was amplified in the wake of grave disappointment. I wanted to find normal again.

     

    “WILLIAM IS MISSING,” I HEARD SOMEONE WHISPER OUTSIDE the bridal suite. Was the groom detained, running late, what? All I heard was “missing.” I began to pace and clutch my stomach. I knew this feeling all too well. Yanked my cuticles. I wanted to save Electra from it. I’d just bitten the nail polish off my index finger when I heard Electra’s voice.
     
    “Whatever,” she said when someone else mentioned it to her, “he’ll be here.” She was examining her eyelashes in the mirror without a wrinkle of concern. I didn’t know how she did it.

    “How can you be so calm?” I asked, surveying her face for concealed signs of anxiety.

    “Because.”

    “Because? That’s your answer? Because?”

    “Because I know he loves me and that we’re meant to be. I just know. Completely.” I was in awe of her.

     

    WHEN WE’RE MISSING, PEOPLE LOOK FOR US. IT’S THE ENTIRE philosophy behind playing it cool. When someone is gone, we imagine the best for them and the worst for us. “I bet he doesn’t even miss me,” I’d said, once I moved out of my apartment with Gabe. “I bet he’s fucking playing golf while I’m sitting here with eye compresses.” Oftentimes, our imaginations are crueler than reality. We’ll whine to our friends, using words like depressed and miss interchanged with sooooo much ! Then they’ll sling an “if it’s meant to be” your way because that’s what friends do…remind us that life exists beyond our own tortured selves.
     
    “If it’s meant to be, Stephanie,” Smelly had cheered while I searched for a new apartment. I wanted to pull out her blond hair and see how she’d manage bald. “Meant to be” allows for lazy. The idea of destiny alleviates anxiety; it comforts us. We stop believing that we had ownership, that we could have done something to change the outcome. It’s lazier than The