Truth in Advertising Page 0,75
storm was over eastern Pennsylvania. We sat on the tarmac at LaGuardia for three and a half hours before the flight was canceled (foreshadowing?). We exchanged numbers. This was two years ago. Amy asked what my feelings were about children on the third date. I lied and said I’d always wanted them. It seemed the right thing to say. It seemed the thing normal people do: get married, have children, mow the lawn.
We started dating. We went to dinner. We went for drinks with friends (hers mostly). We went to weddings (also her friends). And during those Saturday-night weddings, dancing, too much champagne, I could see so clearly that she wanted me to ask her. And yet it was as if I were watching myself from across the room.
“What are you doing, Fin?” my alter ego would ask. This Fin is leaning casually against a tent pole, sipping a gin-and-tonic, wearing a white dinner jacket. This Fin is really good-looking and I wish I were more like him.
“What am I doing? I’m doing what people do. I’m at a wedding. I’m thinking about proposing to Amy, who I almost love.”
“You almost love her?” my other self asks doubtfully.
“Yes. Almost. That’s the best I can do. Real love? Movie love? That doesn’t exist, handsome Fin.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you, normal-looking Fin.”
“But this is what one does. I want to be a normal person. I want to do normal things.”
“You are in love with the idea of love.”
“That’s terrible, terrible dialogue.”
“You’re in love with the idea of romance, with the idea of Amy.”
And, of course, handsome Fin was right. Love is not the feeling you get at a friend’s wedding on Martha’s Vineyard on a perfect summer evening, you in a tux, Amy in a sexy dress. That’s called a buzz. Love is something else.
Always, deep down, in a place I rarely ventured, I felt anything but normal. I felt damaged and wrong. I felt hollow and different. I felt I was acting all the time. We look for family. If we have none, if people scatter and die, we look for family in other forms—friends, in-laws, coworkers. I’d found that in advertising, albeit in a slightly twisted way, in New York City. Now I thought I could find it in Amy and her family, that the being-in-love-with-her part would eventually come.
That first winter together, on the sidewalk at Central Park West and Sixty-third. That’s when she first told me she loved me. It was cold. We’d gone skating. We were waiting for the light to change. We were trying to figure out what to do for dinner. I’d taken her glove off and was holding her hand, blowing warm air on it, putting it to my face.
“I love you,” she said, looking at her hand.
I stopped blowing on her hands. My expression must have changed. And I like you very much! I wanted to say.
I had what I’m sure was an inane smile on my face. I knew I was expected to say something in return. I’d seen the movies, read the books. My mind searched for the words, unable to simply utter I love you, too.
What came out instead, though somehow she didn’t find it odd, was, “I have love for you, too.” Like a bad Russian translation. Though what may have saved me was the fact that I hugged her as I was saying it and my voice was muffled by the furry hood on her winter coat. What a terrible thing it is to not love someone who loves you. Far worse is acting as if you do.
I went through with it, never questioning any of it, convinced that if I simply kept taking steps forward I’d be okay, that I was doing the right thing.
In bed, deep into the night, I would wake and go and sit in the kitchen, in the dark, stare out the window, hold my breath, try not to make a sound, as the escape plan hatched itself. I had money in the bank. I could pack a small bag, a knapsack, be on a flight by midday, to Poland or Morocco or Vietnam, places where a person could live for long periods of time on little money. I had researched this. The złoty. Polish money is called the złoty. In Vietnam, the dong (unfortunate). I sat there in the dark, cold coming through the windowpane, the small rattle when the wind blew, shaking, my heart racing and a strange rash