Laurie Graff - You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs

“Yeah,” he said, putting his hands in his pocket. “I don’t make that much of these things. I’m glad you came though. I’m worried about my dad. Okay if we walk back to your place instead of a cab?”

There it was again. Nothing that said this is great and nothing that said it was over. We walked south on Central ParkWest toward my apartment on 78th Street. We walked in the relationship silence. Not the good kind where you know you can’t wait to get each other home and into bed, but the ambivalent kind. The kind where one person has more power because they know they’re the one who’s holding back. But they’re not telling you they’re holding back, and since you don’t really know this for sure, and you certainly don’t want to make a big deal out of nothing and create a problem that may not even exist, you decide you’re overly sensitive, paranoid, insecure. All of the above. You have no choice but to smile sweetly, keep your unspoken agreement in the relationship silence, and hope the other person will break it. That any second it will be broken by him seductively pushing you up against the bricks of the next building, off to the side of the burgundy awning, gently moving his hands across your cheeks, pulling back your hair and tenderly, deeply, passionately kissing you and kissing you and whispering in your ear, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.” On the other hand, you could suddenly find yourself on 78th Street turning right to Amsterdam Avenue and wonder how you got there.

“David, do you want to come up?” The telling moment that can make or break it.

“Sure, I’ll stay.”

We rang for the elevator and I thought about the summer. One night in July I had just gotten back home after a weekend on the Cape. I felt really good, my skin was a little tanned and my hair had that great windblown look from sailing. I was wearing a pair of white shorts and a short sleeveless green tank top. My best friend Jane had come over. I looked at her when the buzzer rang.

“Expecting someone?” she asked.

The abrupt sound of the buzzer caught us in the middle of “haircut interruptus.” Jane had just gotten back from ten months on the road doing the lead in a national tour. She played a character in a fairy-tale musical where people appeared to be destined to live unhappily ever after. Despite her better judgment she got her hair cut in Detroit, just before returning to New York. We were in my bathroom pushing her thick black hair in every direction desperately trying to make it right. We had met on a national tour years earlier, rocking and rolling our way through high school in the fifties. Jane was full of passion and insight, loved her work and family. And even in the face of the haircut drama had the great vision to know that ultimately “it would grow.” I really admired her for that. I pressed the intercom and heard David’s sleepy voice.

“Hey—can I come up?”

“Yeah,” I said, before even checking with Jane. “That’s him! That’s the doctor guy. You’ll get to meet him.”

David came up to my apartment and had his bike with him. He had been riding around the city and missed me. I was very excited he showed up. But the excitement of surprising me, meeting my friend and telling me I was beautiful quickly evaporated, and the three of us just sat there in an awkward quiet till Jane said it was time for her to leave.

“I’ll walk you down to the lobby, Janey,” I said. “David, hang out. I’ll be right back.”

I stood in the elevator with Jane waiting for approval. Nothing came.

“So?” I wanted her to say something great about him.

“He’s cute,” she said.

“Yeah. He is, isn’t he? The dark hair and eyes.”

“And he seems to like you a lot.”

“Yeah? Yeah.”

The elevator opened and a couple with a little terrier got in. We stood in front of the glass double doors.

“What, Jane. You can tell me.”

Jane looked at me with eyes that said she wanted to be a good friend and didn’t want to hurt me.

“I’m just not a fan of ambivalent relationships,” she said.

“Oh. That.” My heart sunk. I knew she was right. I wound up missing David even when I was with him. He was far away when he was right next to me. Was it the hospital, his schedule, his dad, me? Or was it just David? When I went back upstairs David was already asleep.

Now, almost two months later, nothing between us had become any more clear. Except now I would be working in Philadelphia for an unknown amount of time. I decided the distance would be good. Our visits would be great. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And I decided it wasn’t me, it wasn’t David, it wasn’t us and it wasn’t work. I decided David was just concerned about Sid.

He talked about his father our last night together before I left town with the show. “You do know, David, that you’re really lucky to have a dad like that.”

David knew. David also knew his father’s health was failing. So as the year progressed he did all he could to get through the intern program and make his father proud. But David was unhappy. He probably suffered more from sleep deprivation than unhappiness, but his undefined unhappiness gnawed at him. It colored our relationship gray. Murky. Ambivalent. Still, I wanted David. I wanted to belong to what seemed so appealing during the holiday. I spent the next six months in Philadelphia missing David, playing a nun and living like one.

In the spring David and I took a vacation to St. Barts. I had high hopes. The island was gorgeous and David and I were great travel partners. We rented a Jeep and he drove through the hills like James Bond. Every night we drank a bottle of wine on a new beach and brought in the sunset. We skinny-dipped and ate fabulous French food. We hiked and took a boat to St. Marten. We did everything you do on a vacation but make love. By the end of the week David went back into his ambivalent silence and we broke up on the plane coming home.

I was very sad to lose David and, as time went on, realized I was very sad to lose Sid. The night David brought me home from Philly, we stopped up to see Sid and Kitty. Sid had been in bed all day. His birthday party was canceled. He was not receiving guests. When we arrived, Sid came out of his room wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt and jeans. He looked ten years older than when we had first met.

“Do you know how close Sid feels to you to be able to have you visit?” Kitty asked while I was helping her in the kitchen with the coffee.

Sid was quiet that night, but let me know how important I was. How good I was for David.

“I hope David thinks so,” I told his father. I wanted to tell Sid to make David stop it. To wake up. To open up and let go. But a father cannot do that for a son. A person can only do that for himself. I needed to think about me and what I was really getting from David, and not what I hoped I would get from David “if only.”

I called the Friedman house a few times after our breakup, and ran into Kitty once in H&H buying bagels. Then one night as I was drifting off to sleep, finally feeling better having turned the corner on David, he called.

“My father died,” David cried into the phone. “He was in his bed at home, in his sleep. I just saw him that day. He told me his disappointment in our breakup. He had told me I could never do better than you. I miss my daddy.”

David came over and we made love. Real love. Free and unencumbered, tender and a little wild. We decided to try again after Sid was buried. And it worked. For a little while. A very little, little while. Perhaps I represented a link David had to his dad. However, it did not make him more appreciative of me. He was just going through the motions. I was reactive. I would react to David’s moods. His advances and withdrawals. I twisted into positions like a Gumby, until I finally made myself stop.