Lucky Me
No one wants my guy on Valentine’s Day — except me
“Yeah, I’ve had two women break up with me on Valentine’s Day,” Leon says, looking up briefly from his plate. “I think it was two.” He cranes his head towards the ceiling and briefly closes his eyes. “I don’t think it was more than two.”
I gape at him across the table. I’d never heard anything about this before and Leon and I have been in love for over eight years. I look at his hair curling handsomely over the shoulders of his dark green cashmere sweater. I can’t imagine someone telling him no — about anything.
“Did you have flowers and candy and the whole deal with you?” I ask, cutting into the open-faced sandwich I’ve made us for lunch from the small amount of eggs and smoked salmon and celery leaves and parsley left in the fridge. It is our last day at the ocean cabin and I’m having to find speculatively “creative” ways to use the final odd bits of food.
“Yup, flowers and candy and the whole deal,” he says, pointing with his fork. “This is good!”
“Like, dressed up and took a shower and ready to take her to dinner and holding red roses and chocolates and she answers the door and looks at you standing there smiling and says, ‘We have to talk.’ Like that?”
“Like that,” he says, adding, “I like the capers in this.”
“I used an anchovy, too,” I say. “But, what did you do? I mean, how did you go home? Did you throw the flowers in the trash for some poignant bad movie close-up, did you eat all the chocolates yourself, did you get mad? Didn’t you guess this was coming?”
“I don’t remember,” he says shortly, clearly beginning to regret he had mentioned this to me. “Is there any more tea?”
I stand up to get the teapot, cooling in the foggy light from the kitchen window. “I wish I had the ingredients to make cookies,” I say wistfully.
“I wish you did, too.”
I mimic his tone: “You don’t remember,” and return to the table with the tea pot. I sit down and pour us both a fresh cup. “If someone did that to me . . . no! If two people did that to me, I’d remember!”
I lean aggressively across the table. “So, who was it? Was it The Woman Who Didn’t Know You Were Her Boyfriend? The Woman You Mentioned In That Song About Indiana? I hope it’s not her because I’m still mad about that. Is it The Bad Painter Who Baked Amazing Desserts? Is it The Lady Who Only ‘Needed’ Sex Once a Month? Is it. . . .”
He stops the litany by raising a hand. I look at his long tapered fingers, the tips calloused from the guitar he practices three or more hours a day, and think about how he closes the door to his studio with finality each morning, leaving me alone on the other side, standing in the hallway with nothing to do but go to my own room to work, and how I am more lonely for him then than at any other time, and how it happens most days.
“They’re not anyone you’ve ever heard of,” he says. “I don’t have any great stories about these women, other, it appears, than the fascinating information that they each dumped me on a day that has a name to it. Oh, and they let me buy the gifts first.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me about them?”
“No, I am not going to tell you about them.” Leon smiles, but his eyes look decided. He’s not going to tell me about them.
I try to imagine knowing Leon and not much liking him. I see him standing at the condo door of A Woman Who Dumped Him on Valentine’s Day’s house waiting for her to open after his knock. Maybe she doesn’t like plaid. He owns a lot of plaid. I think of how his skin smells when he’s newly showered and how the fur on his belly is so curly and clean.
She opened the door and he gave her a toothy smile. She looked down, then stood aside and let him enter. “I brought you something,” he might have said, holding out a bouquet. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Did she take the flowers and go to put them in a vase or did she just keep them in her lap as she sat down on the couch? Maybe she didn’t accept them at all. “We need to talk,” she probably said either way.
I’m betting he answered, “Uh oh,” because he must have known, I mean—you can’t really not know when someone is over you, right? I bet he didn’t know. I mean, he brought flowers.
“I just don’t think this is working out,” she would have said, or some other rubbish that is a softer version of “I don’t like you.” I wonder if he had a toothbrush to retrieve or a plaid shirt left behind, newly hung in the hall closet where she’s moved it so that it’s easier for her to give him on his way out. She would have kept the damned flowers, I’m sure of it.
Maybe they’ve only been dating for weeks and she doesn’t know him very well. That’s certainly got to be the case with The Second Woman Who Dumped Him on Valentine’s Day, she must have been a quick fling. Perhaps she was just dating Leon while her husband, from whom she was newly divorced, was on safari in Mali or scuba diving near Spain or engaging in some other irrationally glamorous diversion that would keep him away just long enough to let Leon make his move.
I bet she was planning to remarry her first husband all along. I love it when people do that when they divorce and remarry — even if they divorce again. The passion!
It’s also possible that Leon didn’t buy cut flowers but had brought her a potted cyclamen for Valentine’s Day and her husband had always paid to have six dozen tulips flown in straight from Holland because Valentine’s Day was their “big” day and that small pot of pink flowers in Leon’s hands was reason enough to break up with him on the spot.
“I’ve made a decision. I’m going back to Ken,” she would have said because giving him Barbie’s husband’s name seems reasonable enough right now.
“I understand.” Leon would have nodded gravely, because he’s smart and empathetic and kind, unlike Ken who probably needed to have everything explained to him. Leon would have given her the cyclamen anyway and she would never have watered it, just selfishly left it on the counter dying for days.
“But we do have ice cream,” Leon suddenly says, interrupting my reverie with the teacup.
“We do,” I agree, standing up. “Better than ice cream. Gelato!”
Bringing him a bowl of sea salt caramel chocolate chunk, I smooth his hair. “You didn’t really have two women dump you on Valentine’s Day, did you?”
He pulls the spoon slowly through his lips, letting the cold richness melt. “I did,” he smiles. “And I’m glad. Because otherwise, I’d never have met you.”
“Well,” I sniff. “That’s true. I’m awful glad they dumped you, too. Hey, did you check the handout for this place? Where’s the outdoor garbage can?”
