I Like You Just the Way I Am Read online

Then, I must have fallen into some sort of K-hole, because it wasn’t until a mortgage, two dogs, and four years of speaking Klingon later that I woke up and realized I was still dating Lance.

  Unlike with Kate, Lance’s ex—the one he passed on meeting me for, the one he bought Christmas presents for after being aware of my existence in the world, the one I’d found only one picture of on his hard drive—he and I sadly had little sexual chemistry. Neither of us could tolerate real intimacy. As a result, we were present with each other physically but absent emotionally. Our make-out sessions would devolve into shadow puppet shows on the walls. Our pillow talk would be about Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, colorist John Higgins.

  The relationship eventually turned into a platonic partnership. But for those few years, Lance was my closest confidant and best friend. He encouraged me to do things I never thought I could do, pushed me to conquer my eating disorder, and supported me when I had less than a few thousand dollars in my bank account. There were several times over the course of the relationship when I probably should have left, but my codependency, my fear of abandonment, and my genuine admiration for him prevented me from letting go.

  My Future Ex-Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriend

  In the twilight of our relationship, I’d fallen into a bit of a depression, and my resentment toward Lance was mounting. Every time I wanted to address our issues, he’d shut me up and, like a good Catholic, insist there was nothing wrong. I knew I needed to end things, but instead of facing that reality, I just started painting things like this:

  I picture you in a coffin.

  One night, we went to a group dinner that Kate had also been invited to at a friend’s house. I walked into the party nervous and wishing I’d had a professional do my makeup. Kate was sitting in the living room practically glowing. She was beautiful, charming, and ecstatic about meeting me. As soon as our eyes met, she jumped up and ran over. She handed me a package. I opened it to find a CD by the Strokes. Written in black Sharpie across the cover was a note: Not wet anymore. Just mortified!

  It turns out, I was right about Kate’s drunken stupor. She had no recollection of making the phone call and only learned about it later when Lance told her the story.

  I spent the rest of the evening not with Lance, but gabbing it up in a corner with Kate. She was me, if I’d gone to law school and actually did something meaningful with my life. Something about having been with the same man made me feel especially close to her—like she and I had a shorthand that only people who’d had the same penis inside them could understand. Then, in a twisted champagne-induced moment of weakness, I confessed to Kate that I feared Lance wasn’t the one. I wanted him to be so badly. On paper, everything about us made sense—perhaps too much sense. He was a writer and I was an actress. We both grew up in the Southwest. We both liked Brie.

  But for all our similarities, we were very different people. He hid his arrogance behind a soft-spoken, shy exterior, while I just let mine hang right out in the open. He hated talking, never liked to leave the house, and still believed his childhood was perfect. I knew I was damaged and probably left the house to avoid getting too introspective and OD’ing on Xanax. For our entire relationship, I was under the impression that Lance was wrapped around my finger, but the truth was that he would have cut a hole straight through me if the job of his dreams were waiting on the other side. To be fair, I probably would have done the same, but I would have at least made incisions that were below his bikini line.

  Though it didn’t look like it from the outside, I picked a guy just like my father, who, as Chad originally promised, was a lot like me but more fucked in the long run. Kate urged me to be honest and gave me her phone number in case I needed to talk more.

  I didn’t call Kate, and I didn’t say anything to Lance about my feelings for another three months. When I finally did, it was heartbreaking. After sobbing for an hour about how I was giving up on “us” and telling me nobody would ever love me like he did, Lance surrendered to the fact that I was leaving him. We spent the rest of the night lying on the floor, holding each other. A sense of peace washed over both of us as we wept and made jokes about the new X-Men. I promised him I’d name him anything but Lance if I ever wrote about him in a book. He promised the weird footprint I’d accidentally made on the stairs when the hardwood was being redone would remain in the house forever.

  We tried to decide what to do with the dogs. Teets predated Lance and was obviously coming with me. But we’d just acquired a new “attempt to save our relationship” dog, Baby Jaguar. Lance begged on his knees to keep her.

  “Please, I just—I can’t lose her too,” he cried.

  So, in a lunatic fit of compassion, I agreed to let Jaggy stay with Lance. In my mind, I assumed I’d still be a huge part of both their lives. It wasn’t like I was giving back my keys to the house, or our joint credit card, or his heart. I was just moving out and on with my life.

  To be frank, I never really anticipated Lance getting over me ever. I couldn’t even see how it was humanly possible. He was a shut-in with limited access to the outside world, and I was fun beyond words. Eventually, I thought I’d take it upon myself to find him a nice semiattractive woman and probably become the godmother to their children. But that was obviously way in the future. First he’d need a good two to three years to mourn my absence.

  My Ex-Boyfriend’s New Girlfriend

  I physically moved out on a Monday. The following Friday, I stopped by the house in the early evening to pick up some more of Lance’s things I felt he’d want me to have. Certain I’d be running into him, I rehearsed our exchange in my head on the drive over.

  “Look, I will always love you. I just think we owe it to ourselves to be honest about the situation,” I pronounced as I drove up Mulholland and bravely turned down our street.

  I half expected to find Lance asleep on the couch covered in udon noodles, his own vomit, and a pile of our old Christmas cards. I vowed that if I saw any of his urine in Arrowhead bottles around the room, I’d promptly take back full custody of Jaggy and force him to get medicated.

  The sun had completely set when I rounded the corner of our cul-de-sac. As I got closer, something caught my eye. There was a car identical to mine parked in the driveway. I pulled up next to it and got out to look in the windows. Inside I could see a Mentos wrapper and a single, solitary hooker boot. I had no idea whom the car could possibly belong to. I walked up to the garage door and punched in a code to open it. The slats on the door inched their way back to reveal an even greater surprise: Lance was not at home.

  I walked in the house, and Jaggy came bounding out of the darkness. She seemed to be trying to tell me something with her eyes, but I couldn’t decipher what. I turned on some lights, and the two of us walked upstairs to the kitchen. There, I saw an opened bottle of wine and two glasses.

  Lance was clearly on a date.

  I grabbed my phone and furiously dialed my friend Cab, whom I’d used for a rebound fuck two days before. “I—I don’t even know what I’m feeling right now,” I cried. “I can’t breathe. Seriously, I think you may need to call an ambulance.”

  “Why do you care? Just get out of there,” Cab urged me, using a tone of voice that suggested I should swing by for another quickie.

  “It’s just a little soon for him to already be dating,” I said, now going through his bathroom trash can, checking for used condoms.

  “Do I need to remind you of all the reasons you told me you left this guy? And doesn’t this kind of put me in a weird position?”

  “Cab, he’s literally moved on with his life in, like, a matter of days!” I pulled out a naked collage I’d made of myself one Valentine’s Day and placed it delicately on his nightstand.

  “You are being nuts. Come over and let’s go to dinner.” I could tell by his tone of voice that he meant “come over and let me try anal on you.” And so, after forty-five more minutes of sabotage, I left the house to go hate-fuck Cab.

  “You feelin
g better?” Cab asked me later, while gnawing on a postcoital Cliff Bar.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” I lied.

  I spent the rest of that night alone in my apartment, trying to get some catharsis by painting a picture of a woman bleeding all over herself. Before I knew it, it was 8 A.M. and still too early to drive back to the house to confront Lance. The thing that upset me most was the fact that I’d spent the last week feeling sorry for him. He kept telling me how he hoped I’d change my mind about us, how he might be developing an eating disorder, and how he still pictured me wearing his mother’s wedding veil. He even got me to fucking make a Sophie’s Choice between my dogs! By 8:05, I was furious and already in my car, speeding up Mulholland.

  When I arrived at the house, the mystery car was still there. This time I didn’t bother with entering through the garage. I marched straight through the front door.

  “Bubby? Hello?” I called out, feigning innocence and walking briskly toward the bedroom.

  When I entered, I saw a blonde, not-as-cute version of me with weird eyebrows looking up from my side of our bed.

  “Hi,” she said awkwardly as Lance charged out of the bathroom in his Christmas pajama pants to intervene.

  I eked out a hi before my macho exterior crumbled and I dashed out of the room in a cold sweat. Whatever harebrained schemes I’d been plotting seemed to vanish from my mind as I ran into the workout room (read: empty guest bedroom with a shitty treadmill) and tried to regain composure. It wasn’t the visual confirmation of Lance fucking someone new that bothered me so much as the fact that he now had a part of his life that I had no involvement in. I felt like I’d just walked in on my father with another family he’d been hiding from me. (Thank God my real father had a vasectomy the minute he realized the shelf in the back of his convertible wasn’t considered a legal seat for passengers.) My pain didn’t stem from wanting to be the chick with weird eyebrows lying in our bed; it stemmed from feeling out of control and abandoned. In seeing Lance with someone else, I was being forced to accept that I no longer had any power. Lance wasn’t going to die without me. In fact, he was doing just fine. Up till this point, I’d managed to preserve all my exes, like a butterfly collection on the wall. Every one was color coded, with a needle through their hearts and a vague look of approval in their eyes. The relationships might have ended, but their love was forever frozen in time.

  Just as I heard the front door shut behind the girl, Lance walked into the room.

  “I wanted to tell you, but I was just scared. You know I’m not over you or us. It’s been a fucking week. But it’s just like you said, we have to accept that this is happening. This other person is good for me. She is helping me heal, and I really need that. I need company. You know I can’t be alone without ending up covered in udon noodles and my own vomit.” He tried to hold me.

  “I just— I— Her eyebrows scare me and she was touching Jaggy—and—she’s clearly seven to eight years older than me.”

  “Jenny, she is three years older than you and very sweet. She knows all about you. You and I are always going to be in each other’s lives. It’s all going to be okay.”

  As I left, I convinced myself that Lance was right. I even started to like the idea of him being with someone I wasn’t remotely threatened by. I kind of couldn’t wait to buy her something stylish and take her for a spa day, where we could reshape her brows and I could judge her naked. I always thought of Lance as a sort of father figure, so I decided to look at his taking a new mate as giving me a much-needed mother figure.

  I spent the next month doing all the things I would have done if Lance and this new woman were my parents. I stopped by the house for mail, ate all the unwashed blackberries out of the fridge, and showered there when it was more convenient than driving all the way back to my apartment.

  Then one day, without warning, I got a call from Lance. He asked for my keys to the house and told me that we should stop speaking until Carmen, his now “official” girlfriend, was able to feel a bit more comfortable with the idea of all of us being friends.

  “But, how am I gonna see Jaggy?” I asked, appalled at the idea.

  “That’s the thing. I kind of think it’s best if you don’t.”

  “If I don’t see my own child? I agreed to let her live with you! This isn’t fair to me!”

  “Jenny, it’s temporary,” he said. “Carmen is insecure.”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have told her what I said about her eyebrows!”

  “Jenny, I obviously didn’t. She knows nothing about that. She hates you for other reasons—” He stopped and refocused. “My therapist thinks I need to cut you off.”

  “Cut me off? Your therapist said that? Dr. Shaw? I thought he loved me!” I made a mental note to write a scathing Yelp review of Dr. Shaw as soon as I got home.

  “I have to do it, Jen.” His voice was drenched in maturity.

  Seething with anger and frustration, I went to the Ralphs and used our joint credit card to buy groceries for everyone in the store. Loading my car with cases of wine, crates of tampons, and a whole king salmon, I got a text. It read:

  “This is my last correspondence. Let’s touch base in six months. I love you always, Lance.”

  I stood in the parking lot as a wave of silent anguish washed over me. Despite my best efforts to stay completely connected, Lance was cutting the cord on our friendship.

  Six months came and went, and aside from one or two logistical phone calls he made to me from work, we had no contact.

  Despite the unwelcome change, my life had taken a major upswing. I was busy traveling the world, working once every two months and tripling the number of guys I’d ever slept with. There was little-to-no time to focus on my ex-boyfriend-best-friend-pseudo-father-figure and his nonthreatening-new-girlfriend-who-I-was-convinced-would-love-me-if-she-knew-me. That was, until the unthinkable happened: I met Jason.

  My Future Husband

  I won’t bore you with the details of how we got together right now. I still have a whole goddamn book to fill with shit. I can’t give you everything in this chapter, so just relax!

  For now, let’s just say, I met him: the man that would change the course of my life forever.

  On rare occasions, I’d think of Lance and wish I could share my newfound happiness with him. My world was flipped upside down and he was the only person who knew me well enough to appreciate what that meant. One night after Jason and I made a sex tape with the video camera Lance’s mom gifted him for Christmas, I expressed my sadness about the situation.

  “It’s a shame because you guys would really love each other,” I said, scratching dried semen off my navel. “What pisses me off the most is that I would never have left Jaggy had I known I was going to meet someone and get into something so serious, so fast. I really think we should just go up to the house and steal her back.” I laughed, only half-serious.

  “Yeah, and for shits and giggles, let’s just take Carmen too.”

  “Totally, and then she’ll see how cool we are and—”

  He cut me off. “Jenny, I’m kidding. We aren’t kidnapping anybody.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  “Like, not even in a fun way?”

  “There is no fun way to kidnap someone. People don’t like it. Ever.”

  I eventually ran this idea past Lance when we met for coffee months later. He agreed with Jason that Carmen would be hard-pressed to see the humor in being kidnapped; she wasn’t even cool with the two of us getting coffee. Before we parted ways, I told Lance that I was going to marry Jason. I think he was shocked things were happening so fast, but was still able to be encouraging. The truth was, we both had new lives. My idealism about our eternal bond as friends was gone, as was his need to pretend things would ever be the same. They weren’t. And that was okay … ish.

  My Future Husband’s Ex-Girlfriend

  Lance’s refusal to worship me from afar forever consumed so much of my time that I didn’t g
et the chance to properly dissect Jason’s ex until we were engaged. When I did, I discovered something startling and yet completely appropriate. Jason’s ex was still in love with him and wanted him back. But she wasn’t the only one. Jason’s family wanted the same thing.

  While Lance dealt with our breakup by shacking up with the bizarro me and not RSVPing to my wedding, Jason’s ex—let’s call her Baz—dealt with their breakup by spiraling into a mild depression. She made a Web series about how he broke her heart. She wrote blog posts about him. She even made sure to call his nephews on their birthdays (something I still don’t do, because I don’t care about kids’ birthdays).

  I eventually met his mother on a trip to the Biggs household in New Jersey.

  “So what am I supposed to do with all these Christmas gifts I bought for Baz? We were extrememly close,” she announced like a hormonal thirteen-year-old girl, refusing to make direct eye contact with me.

  At first, I found his mother’s attachment sort of charming. I knew I was the score of the century and that all parents love me, so I didn’t mind indulging her anguish.

  “I’d send them to her,” I said earnestly.

  Jason shot me a look.

  “I mean, if someone had presents for you, wouldn’t you want them? It’s not like you got her a bunch of framed pictures of her and Jason.” I plopped down next to her on the couch like we’d known each other for fifteen years.

  Her body language said it all. She hated me. And the gifts were most definitely framed pictures of Baz and Jason.

  From what I gathered, Baz was always clinging on to Jason for dear life. The circumstances under which they got together were traumatic, and Jason’s white knight syndrome kept him in the relationship roughly two years too long. I have to assume that Baz knew it wasn’t going to work out, because I don’t believe people get sideswiped in relationships. It’s always just a matter of what someone is willing to see and what someone is willing to ignore. I think we are all guilty of overlooking things if it suits our own agenda. But whenever we do, we are always setting ourselves up for disappointment.