Chapter 20: New York

Characters from my vignette “OSL: New York” have prominent roles in this chapter. Prior familiarity with them will greatly enhance your reading experience.

-- SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 2008 --

The sky outside was dark and gray, not only because “foggy” is the standard daily weather forecast for San Francisco, but it was still quite early, way too early for any reasonable 23-year-old to be awake on a weekend morning. At this hour, the sun would have just barely cleared the horizon, its rays not yet powerful enough to cut through the thick mass of hanging precipitation.

I stood at the east-facing floor-to-ceiling windows of our apartment’s great room, taking in the “view”. Despite being less than a mile away, the San Francisco Bay itself wasn’t visible at all through the mass of hanging water droplets that surrounded my apartment building, and the rest of the entire city for that matter. I remembered Mom telling me as a kid that fog was just a cloud that came down to the ground, so we could pretend we were “walking in the clouds”. But today I wasn’t walking in the clouds. The clouds were just one more thing in my way.

No matter; I wasn’t really looking at the view. My thoughts were inward, selfishly pointed straight at my own life. And my thoughts were also outward, five or six thousand miles away to Switzerland, where Adrienne and Sasha were right now on their latest vacation/modeling shoot.

They’d packed up and left on Tuesday, New Year’s Day, not long after what wound up becoming Adrienne’s “Coming Out” party. The party itself had gone really well. Those decorations and arrangements Adrienne had gotten so stressed about turned out just fine. The music was good, the drinks were flowing, and the fashions were fabulous. And then Adrienne went and dropped her bomb only a few minutes before Manhattan dropped the Big Ball.

A big projection screen behind the stage was playing the ABC telecast of Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve. Everyone knew we were getting close to crunch time, so it actually didn’t take very long to get the crowd to settle down and shut up when Adrienne stepped on-stage, grabbed the microphone, and called for the DJ to turn off the music. She’d started a speech thanking everyone for coming, and talked about celebrating the past year while looking forward to the next. She spoke of people making resolutions and sometimes giving up on them a few weeks later, ribbing some of her friends for knowing who they were. Then she declared that she was ending an era of her own, and starting something new for herself in the New Year. The room got quiet real fast, and from the back of the room I heard some murmurs wondering whether or not Adrienne was about to retire from modeling.

Instead, Adrienne extended her hand, and Sasha stepped onto the stage to take it. People started cheering even before Adrienne announced into the microphone that she was coming out. The cheers got louder when she announced that a formal press release would be given to the media tomorrow. And the room burst into a roar when she and Sasha kissed.

A few people nearby had noticed I was standing at the back, and they gawked and whispered to each other while rather obviously staring at me. I supposed I should just be glad they didn’t whip out cameras and start taking paparazzi shots of my reaction. I smiled, shrugged, and gestured for them to pay attention to Adrienne at the front of the room. A minute later, Adrienne and Sasha started the final countdown to midnight while the DJ cut in the audio feed from the ABC broadcast. The Times Square Ball dropped on tape-delay, confetti exploded into the air, and everyone started cheering and kissing and cheering some more.

I’d thought it would be a good time to slip away, to go back the apartment and unwind after everything that had happened tonight. But before I could leave, I was surprised to find both Adrienne and Sasha making a beeline for me through the crowd. And despite having announced both the end of our engagement and her public status as a lesbian in a relationship with Sasha, my ex-fiancée wrapped her arms around my neck and gave me a passionate nuclear kiss in front of two hundred of her closest friends.

Of course, ten seconds later she gave Sasha a passionate nuclear kiss as well. Ten seconds after that, Sasha gave me a passionate kiss too. But once the three of us stopped kissing each other, the newly-public lesbian couple wrapped their arms around each other’s waist and turned around to accept the congratulations from those two hundred closest friends of theirs while I stepped off to the side.

Most people claimed they already knew. They all had known that Adrienne and I had a very close relationship, but the rumors that I was merely her public beard had long been widespread amongst the attendees. Likewise, the fact that Sasha had constantly been by Adrienne’s side – especially at parties much like this one – while I’d been absent for the past year, had lent itself to its own set of rumors, now apparently confirmed. Still, everyone celebrated the couple taking this quite difficult, often scary big step. And for the next hour or so, Adrienne and Sasha spent all their time in one conversation or another getting encouragement and support for their decision to come out.

Still, Adrienne kept me close to her. Part of me still wanted to slip away, but the bigger part of me realized it would be more helpful to Adrienne for me to stay. Photos from this night would show up on social media soon, and Celebrity Sightings not long after that, so it was best that we make it clear this was an amicable split. It wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable with the situation, but I did get tired of repeating the same thing over and over again: that I only wanted what was best for her, and that we of course were still close friends, and that everything had been decided mutually. Every now and again, somebody would ask me quietly if our relationship had always been a sham for public consumption. I told them the truth: that what Adrienne and I had shared had been special and completely real, not just made up for the media. Unfortunately, it was over now.

The three of us didn’t leave the restaurant until after two in the morning. We were all tired, both physically and emotionally, but at least we hadn’t been drinking much. I let us into the apartment, closed the door behind them, and gently took Adrienne’s hand. I hugged her, pecked her lips, and told her I was proud of her standing up for herself like this. And then I wished the girls goodnight.

Adrienne and Sasha slept in the next morning, as usual, while I got up at my usual time to take care of my kid. When Adrienne finally showed up in the living room, she told me that she’d already contacted ICON, her modeling agency, to issue a formal press release. That’s when she also told me that she and Sasha would be leaving for Switzerland that afternoon.

“Running away again,” I’d muttered, unable to keep the bitter tone out of my voice.

“Giving each other space,” she’d insisted. “It’s not like we aren’t coming back.”

Helpless, I’d shrugged my acquiescence. There was nothing I could say or do to change her mind. Mom had called around lunchtime after hearing the news and seeing some of the social media photos. There was nothing SHE could say or do to change Adrienne’s mind, and she didn’t try. Really, Adrienne and I had broken up before Christmas. Nothing much had changed; our breakup was simply public record now. No big deal. We were all moving on.

A few hours later, Sasha and Adrienne were both gone.

Dawn came to the apartment thirty minutes after they left. I told her everything I could. Only afterwards did I break down in her arms.

Paparazzi met me in front of the JKE building on Wednesday morning. I told them the same thing I’d already told everybody else: That what Adrienne and I had shared had been special and real. Unfortunately, it was over now. Inside the building, my co-workers asked me more of the same. Dayna and Brandi came by for dinner and to make sure I was doing alright. I gave them the same answers I’d given everyone else.

Thursday morning, I got asked the same questions, but from fewer people overall.

Friday, both the media and my co-workers more or less left me alone. There wasn’t much of a story to tell with Adrienne and Sasha in Europe and me not being very camera-friendly. Friday night (and Saturday morning), Dawn and the twins came over to the apartment to cheer me up.

Saturday, Kim and I stayed in the house playing with BJ, just our little family unit alone. There’d been a lot of that this week, the three of us having the apartment to ourselves and me not in the mood to leave it except for work. It was kind of nice, actually, to enjoy our simple domestic situation for a few days without thinking too hard about the world outside. Just me, my baby mama, and our son. Of course, I could never forget Kim’s outright refusal to ever marry me, which somewhat tempered my sense of contentment, but I’d take what I could get.

Now it was Sunday morning. And I had some packing of my own to do.

“You’re up early,” Kim commented quietly from behind me, her voice sounding like it came from the hallway.

With arms folded across my chest and eyebrows furrowed, I glanced back over my shoulder towards the voice that had interrupted my reverie. Taking a deep breath, I exhaled slowly and shrugged while returning my gaze out the window. “Is BJ awake?”

“Not yet.”

“Then you should be in bed. Get as much sleep as you can.”

“I didn’t like falling asleep in your arms and waking up to find you were gone.”

I sighed, not having a response for that.

“Penny for your thoughts.” Kim slid in behind me, wrapped her arms around my waist, and pressed her cheek against my shoulder blade. She hugged me firmly, but not intrusively. Although her remark invited me into conversation, I could probably have gone on staring out that window for another half-hour without her further disturbing me, and yet her embrace told me with absolute certainty that she was here for me, in whatever way I needed, should I choose to ask for her support. I could stare out the window. I could turn around and talk to her. I could probably even order her to her knees to suck me off. She was simply ... here ... for me.

But I didn’t stand there staring out the window for another half-hour. And I didn’t order her to her knees to suck me off. I WAS interested in talking to her, tired of talking myself in circles. I figured I might as well talk HER in circles. Deep conversations with Kim were usually different from deep conversations with anyone else. They tended to be pretty one-sided in one direction or the other, Kim either lecturing me while I struggled to keep up, or me just rambling out my thoughts while she listened, soaked everything in, and verbally mirrored me in an attempt to get me to draw my own conclusions. From the way she’d invited me to do the talking with her “penny” remark, I figured we were due for the latter. Hopefully I could voice my inner thoughts, and she’d find a way to ultimately cut off my circular arguments and help me find some kind of resolution.

Turning within her grasp, I gently removed Kim’s arms from my midsection and gestured toward the couches. Kim obediently walked over to the nearest one, taking a seat on the middle cushion so that I had to sit next to her on one side or the other. Crossing her right leg over her left, she interlaced her fingers together atop her right knee, sat up straight, and gave me her full and undivided attention.

I didn’t know how long we’d have before BJ woke up, so I took a deep breath and started at the point I’d come to on my own.

“I’m not in love with anybody anymore,” I began. “I love everybody but I’m not ‘in love’ with anybody. Not Adrienne. Not Sasha. Not Dayna, DJ, or Dawn ... not you...”

“Understandable, since you’re not presently in committed romantic relationships with any of us. It’s only logical that you no longer feel ‘in love’ with any of us.”

Shaking my head, I sighed. “Thing is: I can’t figure out when I stopped being in love with them. Brandi and Dayna ... I guess I never really was. Brandi’s my sister, of course, so not being ‘in love’ with her is to be expected. Still, I wanted her to be happy, to feel pleasure, and to feel loved. I knew she could never be an official girlfriend, but she had nobody else and I never wanted her to feel like she had to take a back seat to the other girls just because we’re blood-related.”

“Not your problem anymore. She seems happy with Jared.”

I nodded. “She does, and I’m glad for her.”

“And Dayna?”

“Dayna was never ‘in love’ with me. We were casual. We were fuck-buddies, more or less, despite the official title. We were fun, and we were safe, and we enjoyed each other. Like Brandi, I always thought she deserved better than what I could give her, even though she never really asked for more.”

“Dayna was satisfied with what you gave her. Like you said: she never asked for more, and in this case, it really meant she didn’t need anything more from you. You didn’t let her down. You didn’t let Brandi down either. I hope you realize that.”

“Didn’t I let them down? If I didn’t let them down, then why aren’t they both still with me? Why did they choose to leave, if not for my failures as a boyfriend?”

“Both of them got everything they reasonably could from you. Both of them knew you couldn’t be their ‘forever’ man. Do you really think they left because you failed them? Or do you think they grew beyond you and moved on with their lives?”

“I’d like to think they grew beyond me.”

“I think so, too. That’s normal. That’s natural. You should feel happy for them.”

“Happy that they’re both no longer significant parts of my life?”

“They’re still significant parts of your life.”

“Not like before.”

Kim gave me a disapproving glare. “You mean they’re no longer part of your harem, ready and willing to bend over and pull their panties down at your beck and call.”

I scowled at Kim, but she shrugged and looked back at me with an impertinent expression.

“Poor Ben,” she continued. “Lost two pieces of fiiine pussy.”

I scowled at her again and shook my head. “It’s not about the lost pussy. Besides, if that was all I cared about, I’m rather positive I could go downstairs and Dayna wouldn’t deny me a hookup.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that it’s not just about the ability to get sex. I’m feeling lost, abandoned, and alone... emotionally.”

“You felt lost, abandoned, and alone a week ago. Nothing’s changed.”

“Something’s changed. Adrienne’s not wearing her engagement ring anymore. And she’s in Switzerland.”

“The engagement ring was a sham for the media. Your actual engagement ended before Christmas. Her taking the ring itself off is irrelevant, at least in that regard.”

I shook my head and sighed. “It means she’s not coming back. Even though we ended the engagement before Christmas, in the back of my head, I sorta thought she and I might eventually work things out and get re-engaged. If she’d kept the ring on, as far as the public knew we’d have never been split up. But now it’s public. Now everybody knows we’re broken up. My sense of abandonment has only gotten worse now that the one last thread keeping our old relationship together has finally been severed. True, she’s coming back from Switzerland, but the Adrienne that had been engaged to be my wife is NOT coming back. And knowing that makes me feel worse than before.”

“Dawn’s still in your life, solid as ever.”

“As a best friend. The only way she’ll ever marry me is as a backup plan if all else fails. She doesn’t want to settle for me. It’s like a reverse situation with DJ. Sure, I think Dawn and I could be happy together, but I’d always know in my heart that she didn’t really want to marry ME. She’d only settled for me. And speaking of DJ, now I find out this Robbie guy made it to a second date with her.”

“Robi.”

“Huh?”

“His name is Robi, not Robbie.”

“Whatever. Now SHE’S moving on. And now I’m feeling even further abandoned.”

“You’re right. Everybody’s left you. Your life must really suck.”

I frowned at Kim.

“What?” She shrugged. “You were expecting me to blow sunshine up your ass?”

“Is this your way of telling me to maintain perspective on everything? Remind me that I’m clothed and sheltered in this palatial 35th-floor SoMa apartment with a full refrigerator, a great job, a growing bank account, and friends and family who still love me even if my romantic life isn’t going all that great at the moment?”

Kim blinked, smiled, and replied, “You said it, not me.”

I sighed and sagged against the backrest, staring up at the ceiling. “It just feels like my life had been going so well. I was engaged, I had two other girlfriends, Brandi had gotten over her moral barriers, I’d reconciled with both Dawn and DJ, my job was going great, and life was just...”

“Perfect?”

“Well I was gonna say ‘awesome’, but yeah, it was kind of perfect.”

“Perfect means ‘without flaws’. You really think your life before was flawless?”

“Well not flawless but pretty damn good. I’ll point out that it was you girls who started calling yourselves ‘the harem’, but I’ll admit it was a more accurate term to describe the arrangement of women in my life than ever before. And isn’t a harem the ultimate male fantasy?”

“Was having a harem really your ultimate fantasy? Or would you have traded it all to have just one committed love of your life by your side? If you had a choice for how to go forward from here, which of the two options would you choose?”

“Huh?”

“It’s a straightforward question, isn’t it?”

I frowned and thought about that.

“Put it this way: You’ve been in both situations before. You had the harem recently, yes. You also had Tri-Delt West, which was a different kind of harem situation. But you’ve also had periods in your life where it was just you and a single committed romantic partner, like your junior year with Dawn, even if the two of you played together with others from time to time.”

I arched an eyebrow. “I also picked up a second girlfriend for a few months...”

Kim blushed, giving me a sheepish look as if she’d forgotten that she had been that second girlfriend the end of our junior year. But she soon sat up straight and gave me a serious look. “Which situation did you prefer?”

“Can’t I have both?”

“Didn’t you already have both?”

“You’re talking about right after I proposed to Adrienne. You’re talking about all that time she was my fiancée but I ended up splitting my time amongst all the harem girls anyway.”

“And how did that turn out?”

I snorted. “It turned out like this. It turned out with me right here.”

“Abandoned and alone?”

“And numb. I feel burnt out. I feel like I don’t even know how to be ‘in love’ anymore.” Shaking my head, I sighed. “Where did it all go wrong?”

“I tried to warn you.”

I arched an eyebrow. “When?”

Kim raised both eyebrows.

“The stuff about me being spread too thin?”

Kim continued to look at me expectantly.

“But you said June wasn’t supposed to tell me that.”

Kim sighed. “She wasn’t. I was hoping for a gradual course correction, not you diving into the piled-up mess without a plan or even a damn shovel to dig yourself out of the holes you were about to make.”

I frowned.

Kim took a deep breath. “Confrontation can often be the right course of action, but it can just as often not be. When problems arise suddenly, fixing them just as suddenly will sometimes be the right thing to do. A broken toy. An unkind remark. An accidental mistake. But when problems happen slowly, almost unnoticeably, it makes more sense to me to correct them just as slowly. Especially when the problems are emotional in nature.”

“Adrienne and I drifted apart. It didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t come after a major event, or one big explosive fight. I lost her without even noticing it happen. And by calling her on it, making a big deal over it, I scared her away.”

“Actually, I don’t think ‘calling her on it’ was the problem. Rather, it was your solution: forcing her to choose between you and Sasha.”

“What? I shouldn’t have asked my fiancée to actually start planning a wedding with me?”

“She wasn’t ready.”

“She wasn’t ever going to be ready.”

“And that’s just it, isn’t it? You never believed she’d ever be ready to marry you, did you?”

I sighed. “I guess not.”

“Then why’d you propose?”

“How many times do I have to say this? It was an accident.”

“So what? Rather than correct your mistake and explain to her it was accident, you just went along with the engagement? Would you have gone all the way through with it? Married her even though you never intended to propose?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit. ‘I don’t know’ means ‘I know, but I don’t want to look like the bad guy’.” Kim gave me a hard look. “THAT’S why you didn’t push any wedding plans forward yourself. YOU weren’t in any hurry to get married either. You figured that SHE’D eventually get cold feet about settling down, moving to the suburbs, and popping out a few kids. You figured that SHE’D eventually end the engagement on her own, or give YOU a reason to end it. And with her falling in love with Sasha, you finally had your excuse to walk away without looking like the bad guy.”

I arched an eyebrow at the vehement tone in Kim’s voice, so unlike her usual tone in these conversations. “Adrienne accused me of the same thing. I wasn’t trying to walk away without looking like the bad guy,” I muttered. “I would have married her. We would have been happy together.”

“Sure, if something in Adrienne changed and she suddenly matched up with everything you ever wanted in a wife. But the kids thing...” Kim leaned forward, on a roll and ready to pounce. “I almost forgot you actually told Dayna that if Adrienne ultimately decided she didn’t want to have kids, you’d call off the engagement. You were WAITING for that time bomb to explode.”

“I wasn’t waiting for it to explode. Having kids has always been a condition for marrying me. I’ve made no secret about wanting to raise a family with my wife. YOU were the one who pointed out that I wanted the life my parents have, and that includes having children.”

“But you knew Adrienne doesn’t want them. And until she came around and changed her mind, YOU never actually BELIEVED you’d get married. So when you two broke off the engagement, you weren’t devastated the way SHE was. You were... relieved.”

“I wasn’t relieved. I was hurt.”

“Hurt, perhaps, but not distraught. Your whole world hadn’t been emotionally shattered the way hers was.”

“Yes it WAS,” I insisted angrily.

“Shattered by the loss of your harem, not the loss of your fiancée.”

Taking a deep breath, I shot Kim a harsh look and narrowed my eyes. “You weren’t THERE. You weren’t around to see what I was going through.”

“I WAS there when Dawn first broke your heart, saw the crushed shell of a man she turned you into.” She stepped up and touched my chest. “I was HERE – right under you – when DJ left you after the abortion and you decided to knock ME up then and there. Don’t TELL me I don’t know what a truly heartbroken Ben looks like. I may have missed Lake Tahoe, where you got into drunken orgies with Kenzie and Deedee, but I was here when you got home, spent Christmas with your family, and took the twins’ virginities. I’ve been here to watch you mope all week about feeling abandoned and alone, crying ‘woe is me’ because the three of them have all declared themselves out of your romantic life: Dawn, DJ, and Adrienne. Yes, you complain that your life sucks and you whine about how things aren’t going your way. But don’t even TRY to pretend that losing your fiancée has been the great epic tragedy of your life.”

I blinked at the fury in Kim’s voice. Leaning back, I gave her an evaluative look and asked, “Where is this anger coming from?”

“You didn’t LOVE her, your supposed fiancée. Maybe you did before, months ago before you got distracted by DJ and Dawn and started going over to Berkeley as often as you did, but by the time you two broke off your engagement, you weren’t in love with her anymore. That’s why Adrienne agreed to end it: not because of Sasha, but because she could tell your heart was no longer in it. You didn’t LOVE her anymore. You didn’t DESERVE her anymore. You didn’t deserve to marry her! The same way you’ll NEVER deserve to marry ME.”

My head rocked back at Kim’s last statement. There were tears in her eyes, and a second later, as she wiped at the moisture on her cheek, she looked just as surprised as me to see them. Staring at her hand in shock, Kim blinked several times before looking up at me. Her expression clearly said she only now realized that her emotions had gotten loose, and without a second’s thought, she bolted off the bed and literally ran down the hallway.

Great job, genius. Now you’ve gone and fucked up another relationship.

What did I do?

Just being you, dude. Just being you.

Should I go after her?

Chasing girls down and demanding explanations for their behavior hasn’t exactly been working for you lately, has it?

So what? I just let her supercomputer brain reboot and everything goes back to normal?

Something like that. She’s Kim. Let’s face it: despite her protests to the contrary, she really doesn’t need you.

What, she’s actually wrong about something, about needing me?

Not exactly wrong...

Well she is right about one thing, though.

What’s that?

I got greedy. I valued the harem over valuing Adrienne.

Adrienne was PART of the harem.

But she should have been above it. She was my fiancée. I thought I had the perfect life. I thought I had all the toys to myself. But beneath the surface, things were falling apart. I tried so hard to keep everyone in balance. I tried so hard to not lose any of them, because I wanted to keep ALL of them. Adrienne and Sasha ... Dayna, Dawn, DJ ... Kim and even Brandi. I wanted to keep them ALL. I wanted to love them all.

But you got spread out too thin.

I did. I got burnt out.

You got worn out.

I guess there really can be ‘Too much of a good thing’. I got spread out so thin, I spent so much effort trying to love everybody, that I ended up ‘in love’ with nobody.

Annnd you’ve now talked yourself in a full circle, right back to the same idea you first said out loud to Kim half an hour ago.

I did?

You need me to rewind your memories?

I’ll take your word for it.

So what now?

I dunno. Have to pack, I guess. My flight leaves at noon.

Something tickled my arm, so I pulled my arm away. My eyes remained closed, and the brief blip of consciousness melted away as I fell back asleep.

But that something followed my movement and irritated my arm again. My ears heard the sound of someone’s voice, but I ignored them and started drifting back to sleep.

Pain suddenly blossomed in my right hand, and I jerked upright instinctively, eyes flying open wide as I immediately searched for Professor Ice with an apology already on my lips.

“Ben! Wake up!”

June’s hissing voice was not part of my current perception of reality. Rather, it was a memory, already starting to fade. She’d said those three words alright, but they were a part of the recent past, like something I’d heard in a dream. But as I drowsily took in my surroundings, recognizing the long-haul domestic business-class seatback monitor in front of me, the airplane window to my left, and my co-worker to my right, I finally realized what the hell was going on.

“Sir, I’m afraid you need to elevate your seatback now,” the flight attendant in the aisle informed me, polite but firm.

“Right, right, sorry,” I muttered, still blinking the cobwebs out of my eye. I obediently raised my seat as requested, and after a big yawn, I glanced down at the red mark on the back of my hand where June had pinched me.

“Did you... ?” I began as I looked over at her.