Flavor of the Week: Relationship Deficit Disorder
IT WAS THE Aztec socks, monochromatically eye boggling and slightly ripped, that brought us together. Just as my new friend Kathy began to shock me with her list of issues (including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, body-dysmorphic disorder and bipolar disorder), Angelo leaned toward our table and interrupted.
I like your socks, he said. Kathy craned her flamingos neck around to stare at Angelo with bulging blue eyes, her cleavage straining from a fuchsia halter-top. Angelos dark brown eyes stared back from beneath a white beret. He was holding a book about Buddhism.
Are you Buddhist? Kathy asked.
You should come to a meditation meeting with me. She gestured in my direction. She might come too. Except shes not really my friend, I just met her. Kathy leaned over to whisper to Angelo, I dont really like her.
Kathys nose piercing, periwinkle eyes and straw-thin arms had drawn me to her. Now I feared that she hated me, and that perhaps I had approached her in the pharmacy because I was in need of medication myself.
The next day, while Kathy was at home with her husband and 7-year-old son, I returned to the coffee shop, a fivetable European-style nook hidden under a black awning. Sandwiched between crme brlée and profiteroles on one side and the baking summer sidewalk of Upper Broadway on the other, I pulled out The New Kings of Nonfiction just as Angelo squeezed into the seat opposite me, squashed into the tightest jeans possible, his chin disappearing into his neck. He glared disdainfully at his buzzing BlackBerry.
You have to have a few men on the go, Angelo said. I have an older guy who takes me out to the best restaurants and treats me like a princess. And I have a young guy whos the best fuck ever, but afterwards he acts like nothing happened. If I could make the two into one, it would be perfect. There was a man I loved once, but I cant be with him. He hurt me too much.
Fortunately, Angelo and I established early on our different proclivities. He preferred big bears with very dark skin while I liked skinny blue-eyed boys with artistic obsessions.
Ive been in love with one man for four years, I said. But hes with someone else now.
You need to wake up, said Angelo. There are plenty of men who would love to feast on those luscious breasts. You have to learn the power of the pussy.
Angelo crossed his legs and started tapping his foot nervously.
I was so relieved when a doctor told me I had restless leg syndrome he said. I feel its OK to fidget now.
I thought about it for a moment and said, Perhaps if we give our emotional condition a name, well feel better about it. How about RDD? It stands for relationship deficit disorder.
We cackled like idiots and the left lens dropped out of Angelos dark glasses, making us laugh harder.
Just then I noticed a tall, thin man sitting in a corner of the café reading Everything is Illuminated. His lower lip pouted, thick and edible, while his his long, taut limbs perched exquisitely as if he was about to pounceif all of his energy wasnt focused on his book. This made him more irresistible than if he had been scanning for fantasies like most men. When I returned that evening to the café, the book-man sat there again, and as he told me his name, Benjamin, his voice etched out a deep space in my stomach.
The next morning, Benjamin entered the cafe a few minutes after me and we started talking about his book even though I had only seen the film. Angelo burst in, oozed between us and asked Benjamin how old he was. He was 24, which meant he could have been my son. Deflated, I left and walked around the block only to find that Benjamin had taken a concentric route and we were walking toward each other, grinning.
We walked to Riverside Park and Benjamin sprawled on the grass, his sculpted limbs tantalizingly stretched across the lawn. We kissed andafter a moment of warm, blue space– he drew away and started computing how this fit into his plan. Benjamin would leave in one month to go to grad school and told me he didnt want to do anything with anyone.
You didnt expect anything else anyway, did you? Kathy said later.
It just seemed so unrealistic, added Angelo.
But Benjamin came back to visit one weekend and then another, and I hardly slept for fascination with his cheekbones and eyelids and back.
Memorizing his lines and surfaces would comfort me during the nights ahead.
Kathy, with all her labels, was still happily married, and I couldnt understand how a person could lay beside their lover every night and still possess such a comprehensive list of problems. Angelo, with his restless leg syndrome, continued to hook up with a number of lovers, sometimes men with horribly loose skin or mutated penises or who wanted him to pee on them or put them in diapers and spank them.
After my moments of intimacy with Benjamin, just remembering the scent he exuded or the curve of his shoulder immersed me in warmth almost as satisfying as if he were there beside me. I declared myself cured of my relationship deficit disorder, but Angelo remained skeptical.
Nothings normal about you, darling, he said. I knew it the moment I saw those Aztec socks.
I thought you liked the socks, I said. You know what you have now? asked Angelo. HO: hopeless optimism.
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Yolande Brener is a writer living in New York. In other lives, she has been a go-go dancer, actress, filmmaker, singer in an all-girl band, missionary, nun and minion of the media machine.