Learning the hard way November 13, 1985

  

He woke me up to ask me about Louise, his voice filled with the same terrible tone I had in my voice when I was hooked on her, when Sledge Hammer Harry at Nevins was warning me against being involved with her.

This poor guy hooked on a hooker – and a happy hooker at that.

He said he once had it all or at least enough of the world to be happy with it, letting his feelings over yet another woman take it all away.

Perhaps there is a whole breed of men like he and I who invite tragedy somehow seeking out all those women we know can destroy us.

He said he wanted to marry Louise and start from scratch, the poor fool asking me for my advice.

I only met him twice: once coming; once going

He seemed a pleasant chap but his voice on the phone sounded so almost like a little boy whose mother was not around or around the next corner at the supermarket and he didn’t want her to overhear what he had to say.

The best advise I could offer him, I couldn’t offer, since it would be cruel, like rubbing salt into a fresh wound. Such talk would only cause him pain.

His kind of love – as mine had been with Louise – is little more than self-deception, an illusion we create for ourselves and then are foolish enough to believe.

Louise told him that she was coming to see me two weekends ago, which confused me since she didn’t come to see me at all, and I later learned, she’d been hired to do a party in Clifton, and only came to see me in order to have a place to change her outfit before she drove back to PA to meet him, neglecting the whole Clifton bit or what she had to do there.

She wanted me to take care of my daughter while she did her business at the party.

She decided to stay the night -- not my bed. I was a little peeved when she finally told me about the party. She didn’t need to tell me what her duties were. I refused to ask.

She has a hard time lying, something about her expression giving her away, the wrong kind of timing.

I let her sleep – maybe hoping to upset her plans a little, and to get to spend a little more time with my daughter.

One quick dinner did not seem long enough.

Louise had given him my phone number so I could verify her story if necessary. The fact that he waited there alone for her to call him or return should have said something about his character, and the fact he used the number and got me on the line while Louise was still sleeping, needing to talk to her, and when I said she could not talk, he started to talk to me, gushing out about his affection for her – to me, a man who had already burned the bridge behind me, who would not go back even if the bridge was reconstructed.

He was different from her usual lovers in some ways, but in other way, exactly the same, heartbroken even before there was reason to be, looking for love from someone like Louise who charged by the hour.

He was also angry at the fact that he would have to wait an extra two hours to see her even if she happened to wake up and rush out as we talked.

“I just want to be with her,” he said.

Louise before going to sleep had told me about the man at the Halloween Party in Clifton, and here I am talking to her boyfriend, trying to keep the truth out of my voice, trying not to be like Sledge Hammer Harry, trying not to be the harbinger of bad news, he reminding me of me 15 years ago when she did as much on her “girls’ night out” while I stayed home with our baby.

He asked me what he can do to make things better with her, and I resisted the urge to tell him, to tell him to run as far and fast as he could before he got sucked up into her powers of darkness, before he got consumed by misery the way I had been.

But I stayed silent. I am a different person now than I was back then. It is not my job to warn men who are too stupid or gullible to fend for themselves in the real world, knowing the best lessons are the most painful ones, and if he is ever going to learn the truth, he’s going to have to learn it the hard way, the way I did.


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