caro:
So anyway, now we have this missive.
Well, now at least I know the name of the woman who sent the text that made me break up with Nick in the first place: “I need your cock right now,” or some such 1:30am drunken nonsense. From Seattle.
“There’s this girl in Seattle who might fly down to see me,” he’d mentioned. It was a whole Saturday we were spending together before I left for Mexico City for ten days (not a vacation; I was a delegate at the International AIDS Conference, something which you cannot charge to a Neiman Marcus credit card). “Her friends told her I was just using her for sex, but she said, well, what am I using him for?”
“No more meeting girls over Twitter, Nick. You’re boring me.”
The subject was dropped until the next morning, when I asked him if he knew what days I was getting back from Mexico — he was going to be housesitting for me, looking after my cat, writing (supposedly) on the typewriter he keeps here. “Oh, that weekend you get home is the weekend that girl is coming to see me.”
“Nick, I thought you said she was maybe-coming to see you. You have dates? That’s not a maybe. That’s happening.”
“Well, she hasn’t booked her flights yet, not exactly. Do you want me to ask her to move them? The only thing is the next weekend is Kinky Salon and we usually go to that together.”
(Reader note: we actually hadn’t gone to that sex party together in quite some time, as one of the other women he was seeing had told him that him sleeping around so much made her feel like one of his collection of toys, and to stop. Of course he did stop, long enough presumably to keep her around a bit longer. Yes, she has a Tumblr and a Twitter.)
“No, I don’t want to ask you to re-schedule with her. That’s not what this is about. Nick, why is seeing a woman who you don’t even know for a weekend of sex more important to you than seeing me, who you’ve been seeing for a year and a half, the weekend after I’ve been out of the country for ten days? After you’ve been looking after my cat for me? Did it not even occur to you to ask me when I’d be getting back so you could stop feeding her?”
“But I don’t even intend to see this woman again.”
“I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. I can’t see someone who values one-time-sex with a relative stranger over his relationship with me.” We have a last brunch, and a few hours together before my flight where he tells me he loves me and he’ll miss me, and that’s that.
##
I go to Mexico. I start getting “I love you” IM’s whenever I can sign briefly onto wifi. Then the “So I don’t think I’m going to see this girl” messages. And the “I think she’s being dramatic and I can’t have drama.” I don’t press for more details. “I told her I needed to see you when you get back from Mexico. She got upset.”
“Well of course she got upset,” my editor and my therapist told me later. “He played you one off the other.”
And so Nick is here when I get home from Mexico, and we fuck and “I love you” and “I missed you” is traded equally. I know it’s all lines, but it’s what we do. There was meaning beneath it at one point, and it’s a ritual now that recalls only that.
##
“I’m sorry I called last night in the middle of your date. I was drunk after the conference and I had to pee and so when you didn’t pick up I just let myself in.”
“Nick? Nick I was here on a date with someone else. You knew that. Why did you let yourself into my apartment?”
“Well there was a fifty fifty chance you were at his place, right?”
##
We get together for another Saturday, “all mine, yes?” he asks. He tells me how he’s slowing down seeing so many other women, how glad he is he didn’t see the girl from Seattle, how he’s really got to work on his screenplay (in part about us, and his inability to keep his relationships straight, and how after fucking up one too many times, I won’t take him back — at least it was that week). He tells me he loves me as he leaves in the morning, but that he has to go just be “alone online” for a while. I know his habits. There’s girls to IM, and OKCupid messages to send, and Twitter direct message flirts to initiate, and Bang Bus to wank to. And also a pitch to send back to his editor at the Tech Review, right — rent to pay. “I love you. See you.”
##
OKCupid message I sent a few days later to another woman Nick is seeing (Tumblr, Twitter, check), who he has been seeing for six months or something, who is wearing a hat of his on her OkCupid profile, which I see when he tells me to look at it:
“Nick tells me that you were upset by a joke between him and I that went awry on Friday night, about needing to come by your place? I’m sorry. The misunderstanding came from when he came into my own place, let in with keys I had given him, the night before while I was in bed with another lover. I was teasing him back about it, since it was about the same time of night, and he took it seriously. I didn’t mean for that to be an intrusion. To be honest, I’m surprised he texted me back while out with someone else.”
And well, then there was this:
“Invoice him.” 12-hour overnight dates, @ avg of 2 per month, 18 months $288,000
##
“I don’t think I’ll make it tonight until after 8.”
“I’ll be in my hearing until then. Will text you as I head over.”
“But after reading your blog I don’t particularly want to see you.”
##
I’ll paraphrase. It’s long enough, and it’s time for you not to feel like you were there. He said, I felt like I had to lie to you. Because you’d hurt if you knew the truth. Not, you’d hurt if you knew I was hurting you. Really, that I’d hurt because I knew he was lying.
If you choose to select your latest fuck-targets based on how easily you can click their names? You should also take into account that it makes their cross-referencing all of this as efficient as you checking their Tumblr to see if you’re going to actually get them into bed.
