Garrulous

We were only 20 minutes or so into our second counseling session with Charlotte when Genevieve jumped onto the subject and train of thought that would speed inexorably towards our end. We sat in a triangle, Gen and I in chairs a few feet apart and both facing Charlotte, carefully considering us from the other end of her small office. I’d been all for the counseling – anything to save the relationship – but speaking was a little painful; a cluster of canker sores had been troubling me for a few weeks, enough that I had gone seven days without a cigarette, my longest smoke-free stretch in years. I left most of the talking to Gen. Possibly a mistake. She looked from me to Charlotte, from Charlotte back to me.

“… and I asked Lilli a few days ago who she would like to live with if something happened to me and she said Granny, and then Linda, and then Eddie’s sister in California.”

“Come on,” I protested, “she’s only 10, and she doesn’t have to follow any rules at your grandmother’s or Linda’s, it’s all ice cream and Disney channel and…”

“No, it’s not that – ” And Gen was off, springing from that damning bit of information and sprinting again through the litany of charges against me, the issues that had brought us to this place, this counselor: over seven years we’d been together and her daughter and I still hadn’t formed a real father-daughter type of bond, weren’t truly close, not close enough that Lilli would want to live with me if something happened to her mother; seven years, and I still hadn’t been brave enough to flee bar and restaurant work, despite Gen’s complaints about our differing schedules (“We’re always two ships passing in the night!”) and mine about squandered potential; seven years, and we still weren’t married! Sure, I had put a roof on her house, but not a ring on her finger. I hadn’t made any sign to the world of how I felt about her. I hadn’t made any commitment. I was still hedging my bets. Seven years, and Gen still had to refer to me as her “boyfriend.” Think of her! And think of Lilli, at school talking to her friends and referring to her mom’s “boyfriend” back at home. God, it was trashy! And think about Lilli if anything happened to her, to Gen!

I remember her eyes narrowing as she wound up and sped furiously through her argument, and Charlotte’s eyes widening. I think that Charlotte – who reminded me of a younger Lili Tomlin – sensed what was coming, and I suppose I did too, but it still felt a surprise when the blow landed.

“No, you know what? I’m done! No more. I’m sorry, Brent, but I’m through. We’re through.”

Charlotte winced, as if struck too, and tried to reel her back, as if Gen hadn’t already leapt over the precipice: “Now wait, wait a moment here, can we talk about this some more? I don’t want something to happen here that can’t be taken back.” She tried, but it was like trying to hold back a bull, a truck, a speeding train. Good luck lady, I remember thinking: this was the girl who once expressed a desire for a window in the rear of the kitchen, a spot where there was only wall, and I woke one morning some days later to the sound of her attacking the back of the house with a crowbar and power saw. This wasn’t someone who devoted a lot of time to careful and considered planning, the weighing of options. There was no turning back.

Gen sat suddenly tight-lipped, shaking her head. There was no turning back.

Charlotte sighed and eventually conceded. The session apparently continued for the next half hour, and I believe there was talk of how to break the news to Lilli, how to respect each other, and separate gracefully, and honor the years we’d spent together and… I don’t know, I was in a daze, working to keep my stare fixed on the counselor and my head from bobbling drunkenly the way my vision was. At the end, Charlotte took my hand, fixed me with a regretful, pitying look, and offered her continued services – to me alone, should I want to talk about any of this.

After we stepped out of the sprawling old home that housed Charlotte’s office and into the dull spring afternoon, Gen asked if I wanted to talk about any of this.

I declined. I wanted to go home. And cry. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

This was not even close to the worst thing that had ever happened to Gen.

And there it was, one of the towering differences between us, a thing she had long fretted over and I was prone to shrugging off: the wide gulf between our experiences. I was a little older, but she was years more worldly. She was my first girlfriend, really, but she entered the relationship with a three year-old daughter and one failed marriage already behind her. The loving and supportive parents who’d given me a functional, pretty un-dramatic upbringing were still married. Gen’s father was on his fifth wife, her mother was once imprisoned for shooting her stepfather, and both were responsible for neglect and leaving their daughter vulnerable to unspeakable abuse as a child. She’d fled home as a teenager. She once almost died in a horrible automobile accident. She’d lost brothers, cousins, an aunt, friends… No one close to me had ever died. I’d broken a few fingers and toes and once developed an irritating little cyst over my tailbone but had otherwise always been in good health. My story? A gentle situation comedy. Gen could write epic poetry or an Oprah-approved novel about the pageant of adversity and affliction she and her family had endured. It’s the stuff of Faulkner or Morrison, a multi-generational saga filled with fortunes won and lost, divorce and adultery, abuse and addiction, death and disease, and so on and so forth.

She could lose sleep worrying about where Lilli would end up should something happen to her (anywhere but with Eddie, her degenerate ex!) because in Gen’s world, things, terrible things, did happen to people. I approached the question indifferently: “What? Oh geez, c’mon, you’ll be fine.” Nothing really bad had ever happened to me. I was soft and secure. I had an unspoken faith in the safety net and always believed deep inside that no matter what horrible traumas befell other people, things would always turn out at the very least OK for me and mine.

This isn’t to say I didn’t worry. Oh, far from it. I could agonize over small decisions and overreact to trivial inconveniences. For example:

Sometimes while driving, I’d make a certain noise (let’s call it an “alarming squawk”) that made Gen start in the passenger seat and look for the oncoming car, the tree, the pedestrian about to roll up the hood of my Civic and into the windshield. Failing to spot any imminent crushed metal, shattered glass, or torn flesh, she would look at me, hand over her suddenly racing heart, and demand: “What? What is it?” And then I’d have to admit, sheepishly, that I’d only missed a turn, entered the wrong lane, remembered the wallet left on the desk at home. She’d growl in frustration and get a look that said if crumpling car parts weren’t about to cave in my skull, she’d gladly do the job. And then I’d get an injunction –

“Stop doing that! Just… stop it!”

– and a lecture on proportion. Which I lacked. Obviously. You didn’t make these noises of animal panic over a forgotten wallet – you saved them for when the wolves were actually at your heels, about to devour you. You saved them for the real thing.

And so, every so often in the car, my girlfriend had opportunity to give my self-image a swift kick in the groin. I liked to think of myself as a cool customer, the kind of man who could stare down crisis with an Eastwood squint and maybe even a bit of a Bruce Willis smirk, but I knew she was right. I could disintegrate into a sweating, sighing, hand-wringing mess of nerves and indecision when shopping for t-shirts or a new toothbrush. And faced with something bigger, like a camera purchase? I lay awake several nights in a row anxiously weighing the pros and cons of a few select models.

Gen was right. I’d been living in her house for years paying half the mortgage (sometimes more), putting money into repairs and remodeling, parenting her daughter, playing at married life, but I’d never gone all in. I’d just sat there forever fidgeting my chips, hedging, worrying, weighing.

And for that, I lost a fortune. The worst thing that ever happened to me.

I went home from the counselor’s office. I lay on the couch and cried. I got up and, for the first time in a week, smoked a cigarette.

It hurt, the cigarette. I found a flashlight, went into the bathroom, and, for the first time since the sores began, I looked into my mouth, really looked to see what was happening in there.

I went online. I called Gen at work, crying, to tell her my fears. She told me later she thought I was just being a melodramatic asshole. Crying wolf.

Two weeks later I was diagnosed with cancer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under The Big C. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.