The Ultimate Trump Card
I was miserable. I was sitting outside, in the courtyard of the Pleacy Motel, struggling to drink my coffee and rubbing my tired eyes. I felt a dull pain in my head, my neck, and a sharper pain in my nostrils and throat. This all made sense, given the fact that I’d slept about six hours after drinking two bottles of cheap red wine, and then spent all night tossing and turning and thinking about how I’d screwed things up with Claire.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I was alive, I could breathe, hell I could still see, hear, taste, and smell, so I was capable of living life to its fullest. But if this was really true, then why was I feeling so damn lousy?
I looked up to see the waiter approaching me. Despite his black jacket, white button down shirt, and neatly pressed black slacks, I could tell that when work was over, he was the type to throw on a short sleeved t-shirt and jeans and head to the bar to get wasted. He was just another drunk hiding behind a day job, waiting for something better in life to attract his attention.
He faked a smile and asked me if I needed anything. I waved him off with my hand and said “No, thanks.” He nodded, which is supposed to indicate an agreement with what I said, but I could tell that he was pissed at me for ordering a single cup of coffee and taking up his precious table space. I didn’t give a shit. I felt lousy, so why should I care about the plight of anyone else.
Everything had been going so well with Claire the night before. Our conversations had been exciting, romantic, and full of amicable agreement on subjects ranging from literature to social ethos.
But as the evening raged on, one bottle of red wine had turned into two, and by the time things got real lousy, a third bottle was left embarrassingly dry as it could only provide enough wine to fill a half a glass. Yeah, somehow, things had turned sour.
She had professed her admiration for some politician who I thought was a self serving, lying bastard, and I’d replied to her honest feelings with my own loud, vigorously rigid opinions, and when I should have stopped, to allow her to retort, I instead continued to lambaste her remarks with sarcastic analogies that served no purpose except to further inflate my red-wine induced ego.
At this point, in my recollection, things get pretty fuzzy, but I certainly remember forcibly grabbing her by the wrist as she attempted to grab her purse and run outside the restaurant and into the pouring rain, and I remember that I told her that even if she thought I was a total asshole, I wasn’t going to let her walk several miles home, alone, in a storm at this time of night.
She refused to make eye contact with me and instead picked at her nails as she silently sat back down and waited for me to pay the bill.
Then I got my drunken ass into my rental car and I silently drove her back to her apartment. As she got out of the car, she stumbled a bit, laughed at herself, and told me again what a complete and utter asshole I was whenever I got drunk.
I told her that maybe I wouldn’t be such an asshole if she could grow up a little, and learn to form her opinions through “careful discrimination” instead of relying on her heart and her empathy.
Now I sat at a table, underneath an umbrella, watching rain splatter against the pebbled Southern California Spanish style cement that surrounded me in the courtyard. I was a zombie, transfixed with my phone, hoping and praying for a call from Claire.
It’s not that I’m positive that Claire is the one for me, or anything like that, but I never feel alone when I’m with her, and not feeling alone is far better than the empty void that is my life when I’m alone.
Being with Claire is better than being alone. And I’ve been with women in the past who even when I was physically in the same space as them, still allowed me to feel terribly alone.
Claire understood enough of my character and my emotive processes to allow me to relax around her, and when I was relaxed, I was less inclined to feel depressed about the world and my life.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not the type to get hung up on depression, but I’m also certainly not the type to ignore my own, basest feelings and desires, and to cover them up with denial infused activities like eating binges, drug use, or even alcoholism.
So why in the hell did I keep running into this holding pattern with Claire, in which I couldn’t respect her different views on life, and her very different ways of coming to conclusions using her own perceptions? Why did I find it necessary to try and sculpt and mold her process of understanding the world?
Did I really want to date a parrot that agreed with me in every aspect? That sounded absurd, it sounded lame; it sounded like a nineteen fifties happy housewife scenario that made me want to wretch.
And damn this hangover for furthering my already negative state of mind. And screw this coffee for churning my bowels and causing my hands to shake and my breathing to become uneven. All I could think about was Claire and how much I wanted to resume smoking cigarettes. I thought about those two notions, and about how much I wanted to show the world just how much I hated it.
Suddenly, the phone rang. I reached forward and stared at the caller ID. The caller wasn’t Claire; it was one of my closest, most trusted friends from Back East. I hit the ignore button and continued to ignore the obvious solution to my temporary problem; namely, that I should pick up the damn phone and call Claire myself.
But calling Claire was an admission of guilt, and it would net Claire another point in the scorebook of our relationship, a competition that I preferred to win. Every time we’d ever fought before, which didn’t happen often enough to warrant our relationship unhealthy, but did happen often enough for me to keep a mental list of who was ahead in these fights, she’d usually broken down and mediated our reconciliation. So I suppose I was just used to her fulfilling this necessary role in our relationship.
But somehow, this time, I had a feeling that things were going to work out differently. She hadn’t yelled enough at me last night. Her usual passion to verbally go for my jugular during a fight just hadn’t been there as I’d dropped her off at home, and this frightened me. A lot.
It reminded me of watching a boxer going down for the count in the ring. A boxer can only do this when they’ve lost their will to fight, and I took Claire’s lack of a fight as a not so subtle sign that perhaps she was in the process of giving up for good on our relationship, and this didn’t just hurt my ego and my pride, it hurt my heart.
The heart is a funny thing, because no matter how sharp your intellect is, the heart will beat and berate your mind at such a steady pace that its message always seems to surface in your mind above any message that your intellect is trying to trick your heart into believing.
I sat in the courtyard of the Pleacy Motel thinking about Claire. I tried to focus on all of the superficial qualities of hers that I hated; like her absurd fashion statement art school glasses that didn’t really serve a purpose, and about how much time she spent thinking about art projects she wanted to begin, rather than just beginning them, and finishing them, in order to accomplish things.
But my heart retorted with remembrances of the cute way she chewed on the end of her fingers when she was struggling to candidly express her emotions, or about the child-like intensity that would fill her eyes when I said or did something that made her truly happy. My heart swelled and then began to beat in a foreign and disconcerting rhythm, which in turn ruined the carefully orchestrated symphony of logic that I had conducted in my mind.
My intellect wanted to hate Claire. My intellect wanted to hurt Claire for making me vulnerable. My intellect wanted to stress how much better I could do for myself. My intellect told me to reach into my pocket, take out my plane ticket, check my watch, and be sure to check out of the motel in time to catch the return flight back to my apartment in another state, so that I could resume working my intellectual job in my intellectual world, in my isolated, lonely, intellectual life.
I took out the plane ticket. Flight 81, departing at 12:55 p.m. I checked my watch. 10:06 a.m. I had plenty of time to take a shower, pack, check out, and drive the rental car back to the airport.
Of course, this also left me with plenty of time to repair most of the damage that I’d caused to my relationship with Claire. She would be pretty easy to forgive, I figured. After all, we were both getting older, and as we aged, neither of us was oblivious to the fact that the pool of relationship worthy candidates was diminishing at a rapid pace. Besides, we had a certain history, a Je ne sais quoi, as the French would say, and this was important to our personal narratives.
I stood up and dropped three dollars on the table; two for the coffee, and one for the bitter looking waiter who probably disliked his life more than my lack of business. My heart continued to demand my attention, telling me that I was making a huge mistake.
***
As I boarded the plane I felt my cell phone vibrate, and my heart began to swoon. But as I checked the caller ID, I was disappointed to see that it was my mother, who was probably calling to ask me how things were going with Claire.
I felt a stabbing pain of guilt for ignoring my own mother, but I did not have the appropriate energy it took to remain composed on the phone with her.
Soon thereafter, I followed the stewardess’ instructions and turned off my phone. My heart objected to my every action, it screamed at me, saying, “Getting on this plane was a mistake.” And my intellect argued that while it was okay to be on this flight; failing to call Claire and attempt to properly say goodbye before the flight was certainly a mistake of epic and catastrophic proportions.
But I liked to make mistakes. When I made mistakes, it made me feel alive, and feeling alive allowed me to feel more human. Plus, mistakes gave me something to feel a guilty pride about. And there is something eerily satisfying about stewing in a pool of your own guilt infused pride.
The plane took off, and I felt oddly satisfied with myself as I concluded that I was in the right to leave Claire without a phone call or an apology. After all, in the inner-personal biological hierarchy, the intellect can always trump arousal, and the heart in turn can trump the intellect, but nothing, not even love, can trump the brutal power that is the self absorbed maniacal pride of a man’s bruised ego.
