What's Yours

              I am sitting in the living room watching a talk show on TV. Today's topic is Husbands Unhappy With Their Wives’ Figures. Most of these women have just had babies, nursing newborns while nature slowly replenishes what a new life took away. Giving birth is life and death, the host says. When the baby's torn from you, it takes some of your body with it, leaves you tired and depressed, and then you're expected to go back to the life you had nine months ago! The audience seems to agree that the situation's a hard one. They boo the husbands while the wives cry. Their hands shake. I can't tell whether these women are just nervous at appearing on national television, or whether they're afraid to go home.

          I wonder why these women stick with these men. I wonder if these men had mothers who raised them. I wonder how the children will turn out.

          I wonder — why I don't get out more.



              Is this a usual routine for me? I say, sometimes it's a good way to laugh; sometimes, it's a better way to cry. Some need to cry for others because they can't cry for themselves.

          For instance, what would you say to these women whose husbands call them beached whales?

          Leave 'em! Right?

          You don't need 'em! Right?

          There's a relationship expert on the panel now. He looks paternally into the eyes of the women and says, Don't let anybody tell you who you are!

          But isn't that what we want? Someone to tell us who we are? Parents tell us who we were; friends, lovers, and bosses tell us who we should be. In a few years these women will submerge their own identities for their children, who will be embarrassed by them whether they're fat, skinny, Cleopatra, or Elizabeth II. All that will matter is that someone will be telling someone else what to do and how to do it. This is the routine of love.

          So I watch, looking for signs of love. Maybe one of them will teach me how to do it. Then I can tell them the answers to their problems, which really don't seem so difficult from here.



              Today I think I am just looking for advice. I've been dating M— for eight months, and I feel a break-up on the horizon. The break-up isn't a mystery to either of us.

          He says he's in love with me, but is playing The Phone Game.

          The Phone Game goes like this.

          It's when you hear, I don't understand why I always have to call you.

          I say, I don't understand why I always have to make the first move.

          But The Phone Game is somehow a more powerful argument. In this case, it is the most powerful argument. But who's right or wrong isn't the focus here. People should leave the details of their relationships in private where everything else important goes on. Those who seek publicity are after something else — most of the time, they won't be able to say what that is.

          I just know that when the whole wide universe of romance and emotions shrinks to the microcosm of The Phone Game, what love there is starts to float ungravitated, like a ship lost in space, with a malfunctioning communications device.



              For the last two weeks this has been the routine. I started watching remakes of old movies. There was a whole marathon on the other night. I hadn't known that John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Kevin Costner all starred in the same western just some years apart. Virtually the same script, with different actors and scenery. You start to wonder how the same story unchanged for ages still has what it takes to attract an audience that has seen it all before.

          For instance, last week at the theater a girl in front of me recited every word spoken by Bette Davis, cigarette puffs and all. Her date was asleep next to her. My friend sitting next to me whispered in my ear, Can't you see? Obviously, he's her husband. What date could withstand this torture?

          But you have to admit, I say, Bette really packs a wallop.

          Yeah, my friend says over the buttered popcorn. Just count how many times she slaps her leading man as opposed to how many times she kisses him.

          What'll that do? I ask, slurping the bottom of my 32oz overpriced soft-drink.

          Well, if she slaps him more times than she kisses him, that means she loves him, marries him, and lives happily ever after; we just don't see the last part.

          Ah! Here's to real life!

          I'm down to the unpopped kernels as the silver screen suddenly flashes black numbers and finally a bright, blank white. Inevitably, I leave the theater in tears because you just know that Bette's happily-ever-after ended in loveless marriages and daily drinking binges.

          Cheer up, prods my friend. Usually she ends up leaving them to play the strong-but-lonely woman determined to make it on her own and never fall in love again. This was a happy ending. Those are rare. That's why it's an ending; if everyone was happy, why should anything end?

          This upsets me a little, especially with the uncertainty of my present situation.

          Is that all there is, though? Love 'em. Leave 'em. Wait for the next script. He knew I was no longer talking about the magic of the movies, but continued on the bent regardless.

          No, he says. Not always. Sometimes it's Garbo — nothing but long faces, tears, whiskey, and camellias all wrapped up in that languorous Swedish accent the jilted would just kill for.

          The insinuation that I was acting Garboesque was not pleasantly received by yours truly. I look away into the traffic or up at a buzzing street lamp because my eyes actually are moist. A half-hearted laugh escapes through my lips, strained open like a door at Fort Knox, into a smile.

          My friend notices, but allows me to indulge in the moment anyway, before commenting. Your eyes aglaze. Your head bobbing from side to side desperately trying to hold back the cracking dam of tears. Reflections of the moon and candleflame in your watery eyes. All that's missing is the Hollywood score and the retouching of the make-up before the next take. Zoom in for your close-up because the drama doesn't last for long; the Method eventually fails us all. Joan would be sooooo proud.



              Walking down 7th Avenue to a Bleecker Street bar where we'll drown our very separate sorrows further, we simultaneously light cigarettes. It is a film noir evening all around. At the bar, we will stand in a dim corner and watch virile bodies sweat and gyrate to pulses and vibrations that are not synchronised with the music on the dance floor. By last call, each body will have a complement attached to its hip.

          Everyone seems to have known each other for so long, I observe.

          Liquor is the glue of love, my sweet.

          This gross generalisation and snap judgment irritates me slightly.

          You have such a way with an image. I could have bitten him! But even the strongest glue wears off sometime.

          My friend's lips fold in to an evil cartoon-smile pasted on one side of his face. He sucks in his cheeks and points with an arched eyebrow to the modern version of Ozzie and Harriet exiting the dance floor. Besides having their arms entwined about each other’s waists, they also seem to be sewn together at the mouth. I wonder what is so appealing about someone's beer-breath and sweat.

          Don't look so disgusted, my friend says as he shamelessly gawks. They're exchanging life-stories.

          This time humor doesn't help. Some can get through almost any situation by simply saying something witty or cracking a tasteless joke like my friend. Anything I find emotional or serious he brushes off with a laugh as dramatic or silly. Sometimes it can get awfully annoying or obnoxious, I tell him. If you really felt that way, he says, you'd stop calling. What bothers me the most, I guess, is that I know he's right.

          I lift my glass in a toast to another couple that passes in front of us, but there are only ice cubes left.

          I hope the glue is strong, I say, like a major-general in a Tolstoi novel.

          That's all right, flies the quick comeback. This glue only needs to last till morning
.
          See what I mean.



              By the time we finish our early breakfast, the sun is rising. My friend gives me a chin-up roll of the eyes before we part.

          It'll work out, he assures. And if it doesn't there's a million more.

          He is turning the corner by now and his voice sounds like one of those that speak to you when you are half-asleep and dreaming, the voice that is trying to shake your limp body awake.

          Besides, you can always stay friends. Look at us.

          We stayed friends after an unsuccessful stab at dating. He was the first to realize how things weren't working out. But I hadn't dated for two years and my sentimental heart couldn't bear to simply let another one go and have my efforts materialize to nothing. So I invited him for dinner, trapped him with tears and horror stories of exes who would never even nod to me in public again, and threatened to burn him with a hot quiche pan if he didn't absolutely promise to call me again. The differences between us were always as apparent as the unmistakable smell of gasoline binding with oxygen in the Manhattan summer. He was always fine with being alone. Why does being alone have to mean you're lonely? he says. I hate being alone and lonely and am perpetually jealous of those who are not. I see a happy couple and go green as the water that spurts from most of the faucets in this City. I even wince as a twosome passes that I know will be a one-night-stand, wondering why the drunkenness I share with everyone else inflicts the same headaches, but not the same standards.

          One time he had the nerve to call me at six in the morning, as if he'd just been the first man on the moon, to tell me about a model who had just left after spending the night at his apartment. And he's going to be on a soap opera next week! Can you believe that! he screeched, like Cinderella must have when she squeezed her fat toes into that bloody slipper.

          I was furious.

          How could you! I lashed out. Don't you think that's just empty? Aren't you afraid? I mean, don't you feel anything?

          Stop crying for me and for everyone else and cry for yourself for once, he spit back. He was drowsy, and not in a quippy mood after I had emptied a lake onto his blazing fire. It was the only time I think he was ever so brutally honest with me. I felt like Cleopatra — after she thrust the asp into her chest. Just because you do the opposite of everything you think is bad doesn't make you a good person.

          He didn't bother to stay on the line for a response. And a good thing, too, because, for once, I didn't have one.



              The thing I wonder about the most is if people are ever really doing what they want. Here's these women on the talk show who want to eat, but if they eat their husbands won't love them. Personally, I don't see anything difficult in picking up a phone. But, there's no time because all the time we're worried about what mother, or the world, or our children who haven't even been born yet might want of us twenty years down the line. God says be happy with what you're given; but, doesn't that just leave more for everyone else to take?



              So what's yours?

          What most people say is mine, I don't want anyway. That's taking it all for granted, I suppose. I mean, I never think about the fact that I own a toaster oven, or a TV, or have a credit card while the guy living across the hall from me doesn't, or has to work twice as hard in order to keep up with the neighbors. Then I look at a happy couple walking hand in hand down the street and I say to myself, Why can't I have that? Then I think again and say, But I don't want the screaming match they're going to have later about going to the in-laws for dinner.

          What do I want? I ask.

          Keep it simple, they say, and you won't even know you have it.

          I have a goal, however, to get the most out of what I have before the glue runs out.

          Also, I want a new hobby. I've always been interested in wars. You know, a Cause. Something worth the fight.