Terrible Errand
The lawyer announced he was at my apartment on the premise of a terrible errand.
This made me laugh, though I knew immediately what he meant and that it was me.
Before that Thursday, I had never actually been on the receiving end of a breakup, but when a man enters your apartment, does not remove his shoes and places you in the same category as a trip to the DMV, the writing is on the wall. He does not want to see you anymore.
The lawyer and I met three months prior after we matched on a dating app with an algorithm that clocked my preferences for mustaches, dry humor and men with more than one jacket. There I found the lawyer with an admittedly good beach photo and shared political beliefs, living just two blocks from my apartment.
Call it fate. Or modern dating. Or the perpetuation of social echo chambers via technological meddling. It hardly matters.
I must have laughed for a long time in the entryway, because the lawyer shuffled his feet and reminded me that he likely had a speech. I imagined it to be succinct but final, not unlike the court proceedings he oversaw. Neither of these occasions indulged inappropriate laughter. I shut up and gestured towards the couch.
He claimed the left cushion. I took the right. By this point, I had sobered up from his opening line and was acutely aware of everything all at once: my ill-fitting sweatpants, the cold leather couch under my hands, and the fact that for whatever reason, I had chosen to light an obscene number of candles before his arrival. The result was an ambiance too intense and dramatic for a couple that only officially began dating twelve days prior. It felt in many ways like low-budget theater. The candles flickering, casting shadows on our faces. The lawyer with his furrowed brow and folded hands. Me, the girl next door (or more accurately two blocks down), falling from grace to become the dumpee, not the dumper.
I was also aware that whatever was about to happen would be entirely new for me. Before, I initiated these very conversations. I navigated the landmines that are lost feelings and one-sided attraction but never witnessed another person dance across that same field in an effort to escape me and my potential emotional outbursts, and as cold and callous as this may sound—I was excited. Not necessarily about the breakup, for I did like the lawyer. He was smart and funny, with shoulders shaped by years in the military. He always arrived on time and in an outfit that suggested forethought. He was also the type of person who could go anywhere and figure out how to have a good time. Together, we swayed at rock concerts and tried to decipher the meaning of odd-shaped furniture at a museum. In the evenings, we often sat at his kitchen island with a bottle of tequila and a bowl of grapes. He would destem the fruit before handing it to me and massage my calves while I chewed. We had a good thing.
At 25 years old, I was largely convinced I had blown through every interesting or informative experience with abandon and the next 60 years would be a series of hopefully pleasant but predictable sequences that would usher me into old age. Then it was Thursday, and I was being dumped on my own sofa by a man who had blissfully agreed to date me a week and a half ago while we sat at our favorite bar and signed our names in a shared conversation journal under a date that never became any type of anniversary. So, yes, I was secretly excited and slightly reassured that at the very least my theory was wrong, and life was still strange and happening to me.
The final realization was also the most obvious: the lawyer had not said a word since sitting down. As the dumpee, I felt this was unfair. If I knew anything about my new role, it was that the weight of this conversation was not mine to bear.
Finally, he turned to me. He looked incredibly solemn, an emotion magnified by the candlelight and his handlebar mustache.
“Rachel, I think you’re great and very smart,” he said. “But I need to end things.”
Vague compliment first, truth second. This is the breakup template I myself tended to use, and it stung to notice we too had this in common. Damn those all-knowing dating apps.
I could lie and say that I let the sentence hang in the air for dramatic effect or in the hope that he would change his mind.Truthfully, I was speechless at that moment. I seemed to forget entirely about his earlier announcement, the sameness of our break-up script, or that seconds ago, I was halfway excited to witness this very scenario.
Unable to think, I asked the only question that matters in equal measure to both a dumpee and a lawyer: “Why?” As expected, the lawyer was incredibly prepared to discuss motive. He cited low compatibility and poor communication as his primary grievances. Essentially, too much happened to me too often, and the dramas of my day left little room for his own. Other times, he added, I was either unable or uninterested in asking the necessary questions that allow a person to open up and feel important and larger than they really are. This was selfish behavior, he decided, and the lawyer did not see a future with a selfish person.
“How long have you felt this way?” I asked him.
“Couple weeks.”
I flipped through the previous month. We spent several evenings at a wine bar with the conversation journal between us. Enjoyed live music and enormous plates of ziti at an Italian restaurant. Took a trip to the vintage market, where neither person rushed the other while browsing costume jewelry. He repeatedly complimented my witty text messages and general vernacular, and I extended these same compliments back to him. Hadn’t we just strolled the cemetery? Debated literature not 24 hours ago?
He must have caught my realization as it formed, because when I asked, “Is this about the book?” he simultaneously assured me that this conversation “had absolutely nothing to do with the book.”
There was not a doubt in my mind that this was about the book.
The evening before, the lawyer and I walked the neighborhood holding hands and discussing one of my favorite reads—a collection of short journal-esque entries that confronted the realities of aging, the ebb and flow of creativity, and the difficulty of striking the correct balance between observing the world and participating in it. I recommended the title to the lawyer at the beginning of our romance, but now, solidified as a couple, he admitted that he did not care for it.
Not liking a particular style or genre is hardly a crime, but I was deeply curious as to what the lawyer did not care for. Upon further questioning it became clear he read only a few pages, and his opinion of the author as “pretentious” and his work as generic self-help advice were unfounded. I pointed this out, in part because I am a fan, but also because I finished the book. Several times over.
Also, as a stickler for the correct usage of words, the book could not simultaneously be penned by and intended for blue-collar nobodies while also being deemed “pretentious.” To be pretentious was to exist with an omnipresent air of superiority, maintained to exclude or magnify an imaginary gap between the general public and the person to whom the adjective applied. The overlap is impossible. So, was the writing pretentious and inaccessible or lowbrow and commonplace?
The lawyer dropped my hand after this line of questioning, but I was still having a good deal of fun. The sun was shining, I was winning the debate, and though I knew the lawyer would probably never finish the book, I considered it a lovely evening. I was blissfully unaware our exchange had become an argument.
When the lawyer and I neared my apartment, we paused to lean on a chain-link fence outside of the veterans association. His mood had visibly soured during the final blocks, and neither of us spoke for several minutes, focusing instead on a delivery man in the distance dismounting a bicycle. Finally, with his eyes still on the hill in front of us, the lawyer explained that my suggestion that he was unable to relate to certain insights of the book because the advice had been intended specifically for writers was on par with the pretension of the work itself. It was, according to the lawyer, far more likely that his career and hourly rate were the reason he had no use for the title or patience for its author. The disconnect had nothing to do with his personal status as a non-writer—of which the lawyer would make no apologies for, nor would he be made to feel guilty for his position in life or lack of interest in the “self-help” genre that I was clearly reliant on.
For the second time that day, I found myself wondering whether the lawyer knew what “pretentious” meant. I don’t believe the adjective pertained to me then or now. Pretentious people don’t rifle through bins for their clothing, enjoy gas station coffee, or find their apartments on Craigslist. They do, however, critique books without finishing them and declare they are exempt from self-reflection or the necessary work of trying to understand another person because of their tax bracket. I shoved off the fence and walked into my apartment. The lawyer returned to his. A fault line had clearly formed between us, and I remember thinking perhaps he was right and there were too many zeros between a lawyer with a swanky office and an off the grid author, who abhorred modern luxuries like a cell phone or conventional toilet. If so, perhaps there were also too many zeros and too many blocks between my life and his on top of the hill.
If my living room were a courtroom, this exact moment is where I would have turned to the jurors, stroked my chin, and wondered aloud, “Why would the defendant have agreed just twelve days before to date a woman he felt incompatible with—and I quote—for ‘a couple weeks?’ Is he a naïve romantic who builds relationships on rocky foundations? Or is it possible that the timeline is more condensed? And that an argument on literature, started by the lawyer but won by the English major, is the reason we are here today and they, on the couch?” Soft murmurs would ensue. His counsel would place their heads in their hands, and I would strut back to my seat, fueled by the fault in his testimony. However, my living room is my living room, and the lawyer is the lawyer, and having replayed the previous night’s exchange, I no longer cared enough to submit evidence.
Back at the door, I handed him the conversation journal, a small leather notebook that had been tucked in a drawer and with us on every date since the first. He accepted it, thanked me for my understanding, and turned to leave.
This might not have been a story at all had what happened next not happened. Without his parting words, it’s possible this entire night would have lived in my mind as a bizarre episode with a man I briefly liked and thought I understood. Or perhaps the story would simply be recorded as a silly rite of passage for a writer—dumped for her taste in literature and ability to defend it. But that is not the story now.
He turned back to look at me, and I was once again aware that the candlelight was transforming the moment from a “situation” to a “scene.” I wanted nothing more than to blow out the candles and accelerate this moment, the pinnacle of the performance, our final goodbye, but it had become abundantly clear over the past hour that the lawyer and I possessed different scripts, and his contained more lines.
He stared at me with an expression that I can only describe as that of a person who is about to leave a dog at the pound. Someone who wants what’s best for the poor scamp or the newly single woman in her ugly sweatpants and old apartment but is simultaneously aware that the best is an unlikely outcome.
“You’re still a writer, you know?” he said.
I had accepted a lot of insults and half-baked assumptions over the past twenty-four hours. I shrugged off “pretentious.” I did not scream or thrash around when a man who I previously informed of my spatial issues and general hesitancy to have people in my apartment broke up with me … in my apartment. I did not protest his reasons. I am even willing to admit that I have a middle child propensity to talk too much about myself, and sometimes this is selfish. These had not been easy interactions to swallow but were certainly made easier by the simple fact that the lawyer and I were not in love.
But I cannot accept someone insinuating that my life will be fundamentally changed without them in it, or that I must now in their absence find some way to get out of bed, put on clothes, buy milk, and remember to hold tight to an identity that existed long before their arrival and was never contingent on their presence.
I could have said these things. I should have. But I was angry and lacking a comeback, so I squeaked out a measly, “you can go,” and shut the door. When it closed, the room remained almost the same, except my candles were significantly lower, and I was out a conversation journal containing some of my best business ideas. The next day everything was mostly the same again. I did remember to buy milk, and put on pants, and have continued to check these boxes in the months since. The only real difference after that Thursday, I suppose, became the necessity of telling the story, and I have.
Because I am a writer, here now, on my own terrible errand.
