Chapter Three: Noticing Grape Tomatoes: The First Step

So the smell was gone. I wandered around in a daze for the next few weeks. Actually, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, since I seem to spend a large proportion of my normal waking hours in a daze. Let’s just say that I was dazier than usual.

I felt rather strange, as though I had lost one of the five senses, or at least had woken up color-blind. At night, I tried to bury my face in the pillow (yes, the snot-riddled pillowcases had been washed a-plenty, but the actual pillows might still contain some DNA), but the smell was gone. Most peculiar.

A few days later, we were blessed with a gorgeous spring day, breaking the oppressive frigidity of March, and the warmish breeze on my skin felt wonderful. And I actually noticed it, which was quite unusual.

About a week after the odor-evaporation, I was at my weekly Sunday night girls’ get-together. I had facilitated this gathering of neighborhood; we all knew each other from the local stoops and Starbucks, where most were trying to meet that elusive creature known as an Eligible Man.

Sunday nights were reserved for the female gender, and although we could look, speculate and certainly discuss, none of us made a play for the male specimens that lurked around our table. I had ordered a salad and let out a gasp after my first mouthful. Amanda, convinced that I had found a false eye or something equally appalling on my platter, halted in the middle of a lurid retelling of her Saturday night of passion, and stared wide-eyed at me.

“Omigod,” she moaned (presumably in a different tone than the one used less than twenty-four hours earlier), “Are you OK?”

It was a quiet night, and the waiter caught her horrified expression and approached the table, eyebrows raised in anticipation.

“Fresh ground pepper?” he enquired nervously.

I groaned back in delight, in a fashion more reminiscent of Amanda’s escapades from the previous night. “This just tastes SO GOOD!”

The women exchanged glances. Joan challenged me. “Sweetie, it’s the same salad you had two weeks ago. When you said it was just ‘so-so.’ What’s the deal?”

I scooped another mound of dressing-soaked spinach into my mouth.

“The deal is,” I mumbled, “that these slow-roasted sweet red peppers set off the bitterness of the broccoli rabe, and the garlic combined with the soft, ripe Brie, just melts into these tomatoes - and they are amazingly fresh!”

Then to the waiter, “What’s different?”

Joan and Amanda exchanged glances. The salad was a signature dish at this local bistro, and the waiter insisted that there had been no alterations made to the recipe. But something had changed. It was me: I had recovered my sense of taste.

This was highlighted a few weeks later when the breezes began to soften, and air conditioners were lugged in from their precarious perches on Manhattan window-ledges. I dragged out my winter clothes and discarded many an item I had bought since E.J.E. (the End of the Jimmy Era): narrow-leg jeans, high-neck T-shirts, bulky clogs: what had I been thinking? I replaced these with my pre-Jimmy uniform of low, clingy T-shirts and sexy, baggy denims, my cute basketball shoes, and my adorable suede pumps, my cowboy boots, my Lycra skirts. Out went all things asexual. Yes, my taste had returned.

Unfortunately, right in the footsteps of my returning appetite came the weight. Some women can control their eating when they are happy. Not me. I starve myself when I am miserable. Thanks to a high metabolism in my teens, I never went through a chunky phase, having to spend adolescent lunchtimes downing Slimfast and smoking by the bike sheds. OK, I did smoke by the bike sheds, but that was because I wanted to, not as a means of weight-loss. I was always skinny. Up until a few years ago.

The Jimmy breakup had occurred just in time, coinciding precisely with the onset of fat and cellulite. Luckily, I hadn’t eaten properly since his disappearance, so the weight had stayed off.

But my taste buds had been awakened from a long sleep: the fresh, ripe tomato had played the role of the gentle kiss from the magic prince.

I now recognized what I’d been missing, at least on a culinary level. I swept away those unhealthy Ding Dongs, but replaced them with young, plump lamb chops, luscious crisp onion loaves, eggplant parmesan and, if I was feeling particularly sinful and could get the image of cramped baby cows out of my head for a minute or two, plump veal meatballs, floating in a sea of fresh marinara sauce, poured onto steaming bowls of al dente fettuccini, topped with a mound of hand-grated cheese. At least the black pepper wasn’t fattening.

During the ensuing weeks, the Sunday night crowd watched aghast as I waddled to the table, my cute, baggy denims now somewhat closer to my ever-increasing waistline. They stared in wonder as I worked my way through the menu, each mouthful a newfound delight. Food had for almost three years been just fuel or comfort - but now I could really enjoy the flavors, appreciate the ingredients and craved dishes that contained items other than chocolate.

Although chocolate still tasted wonderful. Always will.

Chapter Two: The Ding-Dong Diet

Memory is strange. That profound statement was circulating in my head that one auspicious morning while I tried to compose myself sufficiently to turn over the rest of my body to follow it and switch off the alarm. This feat accomplished, I fell back onto the pillow and pondered. I had awoken seconds earlier puzzled, trying to remember something, and not quite sure what.

Shrugging, I swept away the debris of bedclothes and plodded to the bathroom. The first splash of water on the face, followed immediately by a warm towel and heavy moisturizer never fails to make me feel almost alert, and by the time the coffee had percolated and the face cream had penetrated my arid skin, I was human again.

The breakfast television muffled, the fresh New York Times opened (the Sports section already recycled), and milky coffee steaming onto my moisturizer-clogged pores, I suddenly realized what I had been trying to recall: his smell. That completely identifiable smell on the back of his neck: a mixture of organic hair conditioner, generic baby oil, Caroline Herrera aftershave and a dash of musky sweat.

Intellectually, I knew the components. I had, after all, buried my face in his smell for ten months. But every morning for the past thirty-two, I had woken up missing that odor, and today I simply could not summon it from my memory bank.

This was a good thing, surely? I had wasted too many tears over a man who had treated me abominably. My friends were sick of hearing about him, which they only did if they were on my “Friends and Family” phone plan, or after nine, weeknights or on weekends. I, on the other hand, had to live with the fallout of the relationship, and was sick of talking about him.

But pining for Jimmy had been my life for so long that I was rather stumped as to what I was supposed to do now.

There are those out there in professions that cater to angst-ridden, middle-class, single women who would say that my prolonged attachment to a certainly lost love was just a barrier to protect myself from caring again. And they might be right.

But at least I had something to depend on. If I was dateless on a Saturday night, it was because there was no one who could remotely compare to him.

Once he was a dim memory, then what excuse did I have to be alone, other than the reason given by every single women in Manhattan: they’re all taken or gay, and the single ones are either mind-numbingly boring or arrogant pricks. Sometimes both.

I immediately commenced the Ding Dong diet. This consisted of existing almost entirely on caffeine, nicotine and Ding Dongs, a miraculous chocolate treat that could easily survive a nuclear holocaust and would probably be delicious to the cockroaches, its fellow post-apocalyptic roommates.

This nutritionally defunct snacking was accompanied by massive heaving sobs that racked my ever-dwindling body. I ran out of Kleenex and could not face going out to get more, so my sheets became embedded with tears and snot, combined with the remnants of our lovemaking. I stopped going to work or returning phone calls from worried friends. I lost the sympathy of these loyal companions, my job and twenty pounds.

During the sixth week, I woke up one morning (as one does in every blues song ever written. This has always made me wonder how the song would proceed had the subject not woken up one morning but had continued to sleep, or had died during the night), and looked around my bleak apartment, every crevice a memoir of my time with Jimmy.

On a whim, I called a moving company, had dozens of boxes delivered, sold everything I could on eBay, and shipped myself to a new town, just three thousand miles away from Los Angeles, and all memories therein.

When I got to Manhattan, skinny and bitter (the Ding Dong diet had worked and I looked fabulous in a Biafran, Kate Moss way), the smell of Jimmy had followed me. And it wasn’t the smell alone, but his voice, his touch, his hair. I would walk down the street and rush up to someone who wasn’t him. I heard him in every store in town, and whenever I wanted to, I could close my eyes and feel his hands on my skin.

And truth be told, I really wanted to be trailed by these ghost memories. I wasn’t prepared to let go of our time together. It was unthinkable. I had given so much of myself. The fact that the relationship had meant so little to him that he couldn’t even say goodbye bothered me beyond all logic and reasoning. Because there had been no closure, we were still together, surely, if on some elongated hiatus. At any time, I would look up from my desk, or open the door and see him there, sad and serious, begging my forgiveness and professing his love. This in spite of the fact that he hated New York and probably didn’t know I even lived here now.

In any event, that didn’t happen. I managed to get out of bed each morning (a natural progression from “I woke up one morning,” I assume) and get dressed (at least on the weekdays), find myself a new job and gradually meet people in my building, in my office, at the local Starbucks.

Sting, when fronting The Police a thousand decades ago, had once sung that there was a hole in his life, and now I understood. Taking the statement of a broken heart literally, it seemed like all the bulk therein had sunk into my stomach. Each and every one of my internal organs was coated in lead, like so many airplane black boxes. Had I died suddenly, the cause would have been recorded within my heavily coated kidneys, liver and lungs.

Naturally, my kidneys weren’t doing so well, because I needed a few glasses of wine to help me sleep; my liver was suffering as a result of the painkillers I had to down to face work with the resulting hangover, and my lungs were shot to hell from chain-smoking.

It was a passive suicide attempt, no doubt about it. I was unloved and unlovable. The love of my life didn’t even care enough about me to say goodbye, and the self-doubt was crucifying me.

Chapter One: Men Ending in Y

I was foolish to fall for a man named Jimmy.

A grown man who resorts to calling himself Jimmy clearly has issues with his adulthood or, as I like to think of it, the hidden grown-up within.

Granted, it seems that anyone who uses the full name James is probably gay. I know dozens of Davids and Michaels and Donalds, all fabulously camp, and yet my friends Dave, Mike and Don are relentlessly heterosexual. So, no James. But Jim, for example, is a perfectly acceptable shortening of the proper name. It’s masculine, muscular and evokes a construction worker (the brawny arms and rippling, tanned chest, not the butt-crack and the beer belly).

I admit that it was Jimmy’s childlike quality that drew me to him in the first place. Irreverent, whimsical, impulsive and just plain silly, the man never failed to make me laugh, and swept me off my feet with what I felt was romanticism, but what was probably just another escape from reality on his part. For the duration of our time together, I really felt as though I was in one of those torturous music-video moments from romantic comedy movies, where the couple frolics through a montage of happy, hand-holding goofy scenes, and we all sigh wistfully and wonder where the nearest Tower Records is so we can rush directly there and buy the soundtrack.

I believe the first one of these awful montages was in "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid," where our heroes and some woman perform unthinkable and dangerous acts on a bicycle accompanied by Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, a song I never thought was relevant, since the entire scene took place in bright and gorgeous sunlight.
We played hooky from work, ran off to theme parks on a whim, stayed overnight in motels just for the fun of it, and generally acted like besotted adolescents.

When he just stopped calling, I was rather confused. We had spent every night together for ten months, joined at the hip (or we would have been had he not been so much taller than me; I would have had to wear hooker pumps to raise my hips to meet his). One night he just didn’t come over. I called, we chatted; he wanted to catch dinner and a movie but was in the middle of something complicated involving system software, so could he call me back in half an hour? That’s thirty minutes, people.

Counting up until the morning in question, I had spent one and a half million minutes waiting for that return phone call. I did the math. Although it felt like I had counted every individual minute, each one draining more of my soul.

At first I assumed he had died some horrible and sudden death. Or maybe had concussed himself on a hard surface while crawling around hard-wiring some wealthy person’s home office and suffered total amnesia. Or even short-term memory loss, wiping the past ten months from his brain as easily as data on a SyQuest disk confronted with a magnet. But as the hours wore into days and the days into weeks, it seemed obvious that the same immaturity that drew me to him had led him to act for all the world like a petulant ninth grader disposing of his first crush.