Jennifer Weiner - Good in Bed

But he loved me, I thought. And was always telling me so. He thought I was perfect… that we were perfect together. And ten minutes later he’s got someone else in his bed? Doing the things he swore he only ever wanted me to do?

The voice returned, implacable. But you were the one who wanted a break. And, What did you expect?

“Philadelphia, right, miss?” The driver was Russian, and was actually wearing a chauffeur’s cap. The car, as it turned out, was a limousine, with a backseat bigger than my bed, and probably bigger than my bedroom, too. I peeked inside. There was the requisite television set, a VCR, a fancy-looking stereo… and, of course, a bar. Different liquors glittering in cut-crystal decanters, and a row of empty glasses. My stomach rolled over lazily.

“Could you excuse me?” I asked, and hurried back into the lobby. Hotel lobby bathrooms are also great places to get sick.

The chauffeur looked amused when I made it back to the car. “You want to take the Turnpike?”

“Whatever’s easiest,” I said, slipping into the seat, while he held the door open and loaded my backpack, shoe boxes, and shopping bags from the Beauty Bar into the trunk. There was a telephone in the backseat, next to the stereo and the television set, and I grabbed it, suddenly, sweatily desperate to know whether Bruce had tried to get in touch with me last night. There was a single message on my machine. “Hey, Cannie, it’s Bruce, returning your call. I’m going home for a few days, so maybe I’ll try you later this week.” No I’m sorry. No It was all a bad dream. The call had come at eleven in the morning, probably after he’d had time for a morning go-round and a Belgian waffle with Miss Squeaky Springs, who would, thanks to my training, never refer to him as the Human Bidet, and who probably did not weigh more than he did.

I closed my eyes. It hurt so much.

I set the phone back as we barreled down the New Jersey Turnpike at eighty miles an hour, right past the exit that would take me to his door. I tapped two of my fingers against the window as we sped past. Hello and good-bye.

Sunday passed in a blur of tears and vomit at Samantha’s house, where Nifkin and I had decamped, the better not to hear the telephone not ringing. Samantha, I could tell, was doing her damndest not to say she’d told me so. She lasted longer than I would have – all the way until Sunday night, when she finally ran out of questions to ask about Maxi and turned to the topic of Bruce, and the disastrous telephone call.

“You wanted to take a break for a reason,” she told me. We were sitting at the Pink Rose Pastry Shop. She was nibbling a macaroon. I was forking my way through a baseball-shaped and baseball-sized éclair, the best legal antidote for human misery I’d found, figuring that it didn’t matter, because I hadn’t eaten anything since the afternoon before, in New York, with Maxi.

“I know,” I said, “I just can’t remember what it was anymore.”

“And you did think things through before you did it, right?”

I nodded.

“So you had to at least consider the possibility that he’d find somebody else?”

It felt like an impossibly long time ago, but I had considered it. At one point I’d even hoped for it, hoped for him to find some cute little Deadhead girl with ankle bracelets and armpit hair who’d stay up late and get high with him while I worked hard, sold my screenplays, and made Time magazine’s “Thirty Under Thirty” list. Once upon a time, I’d been able to contemplate that scenario without tears, nausea, and/or feelings that I wanted to die, wanted to kill him, or wanted to kill him and then die.

“There were reasons things weren’t working out,” Samantha said.

“Tell me again what they were.”

“He didn’t like to go to movies,” said Samantha.

“I go to movies with you.”

“He didn’t like to go anywhere!”

“So it’d kill me to stay home?” I poked the éclair so hard it toppled over, oozing custard. “He was a really good guy. A good, sweet guy. And I was a fool.”

“Cannie, he compared you to Monica Lewinsky in a national magazine!”

“Well, that’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s not like he cheated on me.”

“I know what this is about,” said Samantha.

“What?”

“It’s about wanting what you can’t have. It’s the law of the universe: He loved you, you felt bored and suffocated. Now he’s moved on, and you’re desperate to have him back. But think about it, Cannie… has anything really changed?”

I wanted to tell her that I had – that I’d gotten an up-close look at what else was out there in my personal dating universe, and that its name was Steve, it wore Tevas, and it didn’t even consider a night out with me to be a date.

“You’d just wind up dumping him again, and that’s really not fair.”

“Why do I have to be fair?” I moaned. “Why can’t I just be selfish and lousy and rotten, like everybody else?”

“Because you’re a good person,” she said. “Unfortunate as it may seem.”

“How do you know?” I challenged her.

“Okay. You’re walking Nifkin and you go past your car and you notice that if you pulled it up a few feet there’d be another parking space, instead of just one of those annoying gaps that looks like a parking space but isn’t. Do you move the car?”

“Well, yeah… wouldn’t you?”

“That’s not the point. That’s the evidence. You’re a good person.”

“I don’t want to be a good person. I want to drive to New Jersey and kick that bitch out of his bed…”

“I know,” she said. “But you can’t.”

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Because you’ll wind up in jail, and I’m not going to take care of your weird little dog forever.”

“Fine.” I sighed.

The waiter came by, glancing at our plates. “Finished?”

I nodded. “All done. No more,” I said.

Sam told me I could stay over if I wanted to, but I decided that I couldn’t hide forever, so I hitched up Nifkin and went back home. I hauled myself up the stairs, with my hands full of Saturday’s mail, and there he was, right in front of my door. I saw him in stages – his scuffed-up, second-best sneakers… then mismatched athletic socks… then tanned, hairy legs came into view as I ascended. Sweatpants, an old college T-shirt, his goatee, his dirty-blond ponytail, his face. Ladies and gentlemen, fresh from his engagement with the Spring Squeaker, Bruce Guberman.

“Cannie?”

I felt so strange, as if my heart were trying to sink and rise at the same time. Or maybe it was just more nausea.

“Look,” he said, “I, um, I’m sorry about last night.”

“Nothing to apologize for,” I said breezily, shouldering past him and unlocking the door. “What brings you here?”

He walked inside, keeping his eyes on his shoelaces and his hands in his pockets. “I’m on my way down to Baltimore, actually.”

“How nice for you,” I said, giving Nifkin a stern look in hopes that it would stop him from jumping up toward Bruce, his tail wagging triple-time. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

“How nice for me,” I replied.

“I was going to tell you. I wanted to tell you before you read about it,” he said.

Oh, terrific. I was going to have to live it and read about it, too? “Read about it where?” I asked.

“In Moxie,” he said.

“Actually, Moxie’s not high on my reading list,” I told him. “I already know how to give a good blow job. As you may remember.”

He took a deep breath, and I knew what it was, knew what was coming, the way you can feel the air pressure change and know that a storm’s on the way. “I wanted to tell you that I’m kind of seeing somebody.”