The Getting To Know You Phase

From New Yorkers

Eric had been lonely throughout his adolescence and then he had a string of relationships stacked one after the other – a serial monogamist, his friends called him – and then, around 30, he was single for awhile, which baffled him a bit: he was used to having a girlfriend, to, frankly, wrapping his whole life and identity around a girl, and now he was falling into habits that at first had seemed like an arresting novelty – being ‘single’ – but that, with time, were starting to seem depressing. There was his run, there were all the omelets he made for himself, for every meal – he hadn’t learned to cook anything else – the pots of coffee he kept pretty much in rotation on the stovetop. There was the thrill of the chase, the long pursuit until he finally managed to lure some girl up the long flight of stairs to his apartment, the way she would sit nervously on the couch and the edge of the bed, how he would top off her wine glass, keep changing the record on his phonograph. And then there were the gaps, sometimes whole weeks, when no girl visited his apartment and he watched TV shows on his laptop until he fell asleep, and when he was in a maudlin mood, when he was shaving himself, for instance, or drunk, he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and wondered how these habits of his would look and feel if he were 50 or 70, a lonely single man, if this really would be all there was to him.

He complained about it to his friend Jack – he didn’t think he was complaining, he was sharing the point about what his life habits would look like if he were old, if he weren’t a young guy in between relationships, he had meant to be amusing, but Jack made a sputtering sound with his lips and said, “Eric, just get yourself a fucking girlfriend,” and then pulled out his phone right there in the bar and scrolled through the contacts keeping up a running narrative with himself. “Taken,” he said. “Taken. Butt-ugly. Married. Saving her for myself. Almost – but not right together.” He was a cool guy, knew a lot of people, had a worldly cynicism that made him an ideal male friend. “Oh Elizabeth,” he said and made a wobbly motion with his head – later on, Eric would spend a long time trying to decode that gesture. “Yeah, you’ll like Elizabeth,” he said. “It’ll work with her.” He started typing on his phone. “Do you want me to message her or do you just want her number and you’ll do it?” he said. On his phone, he’d written, ‘Hey! Are u still single? Have some1 for you.” Eric thought about it for a beat, said he would reach out himself.

***

He and Elizabeth agreed to meet at a wine bar. She seemed surprisingly pleased about receiving his text message – she answered him with lots of exclamation marks and emojis. He supposed it was a sign of how beloved Jack was with women – that she would go out on a date with any friend of his. It made Eric wonder if she’d really prefer it if Jack were the one asking her out. 

She was pretty, actually stunningly pretty. She had the kind of clean, spaced features that, secretly, he preferred – secretly because they seemed so conventional, so ‘50s, and his most recent ex had tried to broaden his standards of beauty, but really, deep-down, this was what he liked best, her light, slim frame, the way her curling hair brushed against her long neck, the wide smile that came easily to her, even if it maybe stayed a little too long on her face, became just a touch rictus-y.

He was very hit-and-miss when it came to girls, especially very pretty girls. He could be stiff, he had a talent for saying exactly the wrong thing, but, with her, he found his charm, he told her college stories about Jack and those segued into other stories that all seemed to organically connect with one another. Talking to her, he found himself to be quite a multi-faceted, interesting person – she mentioned different places, Morocco, Bali, as places she wanted to visit, and he was able to tell her that he’d been to both of them. He told her about insane drunken moments he’d had with Jack’s group in college – playing chicken with cars, for instance, lying down in the middle of a street and seeing how close they would let a car come before they ran away screaming – stories that made her cover her gasping mouth with her hand and clutch the tabletop. But then he was also able to tell her about having done theater shows in college, about playing the drums – really, the more he talked, the more incredible it seemed that someone with all his expertise, all his accomplishments, would still be single and available.

She seemed to be thinking along similar lines. They went for a long walk back to her apartment building and when they got there he reached playfully for her jeans jacket, he asked if he could kiss her. She said, “Of course you can.” They kissed for a long time. At one point, he bent her back and she responded to it, kicking her foot in the air behind her. There was something fierce about the way she kissed. When he put his tongue in her mouth, she was waiting for it, swiveled her tongue around his. She drew her nails along his back and dug them into his hair.

Three weeks later he told her he loved her. They were in her apartment – the side of the apartment that belonged to her, not her querulous, arguing-into-a-cell-phone roommate. It was late afternoon. A streak of sunlight came through the window and slivered across the wood floor. It reminded him of when he was a kid and the family cat used to spend hours chasing those streaks of light. Elizabeth was very quiet, so much so that he wondered if he should repeat himself. She sat on his lap, side-saddle. She brushed his hair. He realized that she was being very serious, she was inspecting his face from her high angle. “I love you too,” she said and brushed her lips against his eyebrow.

This started the happiest phase of Eric’s life. He thought of the early period of their relationship in distinct phases. There was that hard-to-surpass first meeting. They reviewed it every so often, as if it were a classic film. He could reconstruct virtually the entire conversation and in her quiet way she supplied missing details, what shirt he had been wearing for instance. Then there was the phase of walking around and making out, on street corners where they missed their traffic lights, on brownstone stoops where they shuffled aside as residents passed by them, on the benches and knolls of city parks. It was beautiful but ephemeral – he wasn’t sure if she really liked him, every time he sent a text he imagined her responding with one of these brush-offs girls use, or even ghosting him altogether, and he tried to tamp down the relief when she proposed a meeting time or just sent back something normal. He was apprehensive for instance that after several dates, longer than was standard practice, he continued to kiss her good night at the lobby of her building. After a few of these – they were meeting every day at this stage – he asked if he could come up and she looked surprised like it was something she’d forgotten about. That initiated the next stage, which was all about scattered sheets, errands to the kitchen to fetch water or adjust the thermostat. He found her to be a willing if not exactly inspired lover, but he was completely charmed by how she was in the aftermath, the purposeful way she sent him on these treks across the apartment and occasionally to the deli, how she would instruct him to come back quickly, her tricks for dodging her roommate, whose constant phone spats and grievances seemed to come from another universe, and the pleased way, like a conceited child, that she sipped at the glasses of water or pecked at the cartons of raspberries he brought her. His declaration of love came in the middle of that phase and was its apex. The phase following that was a merging of their lives. Much of it was logistical – he had to buy an extra set of towels to use when he was at her apartment, he had to figure out where to place his phone at night so that he could hear the alarm in the morning but that at the same time it was far enough to assuage her paranoia about cellular radiation. A parallel track of that phase was the getting-to-know-you, the excavation of each other’s back stories.

In retrospect, the first weeks of their relationship were all about tastes in music and in television, in which they were surprisingly aligned, and a certain similar chord in their sense of humor – for instance, the declaration of love was triggered by, of all things, his claiming that John Malkovich wasn’t really a very good actor and her insistence on hunting around the web to disprove him. She was putting in search terms like ‘Movies in which John Malkovich was extraordinary,’ staring at the screen with the intensity of a detective working a lead, batting him away when he tried to caress her, and something about the sliver of afternoon sunlight and the floor and her quiet seriousness in front of the computer made him want to spend the rest of his life exactly like this. But once, at dinner in a Thai restaurant, he said, “You know, you haven’t told me anything about your parents.”

She looked surprised – the same look when he asked to come up to her place – and she said, “What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Anything you want to tell me.”

She looked off towards the hostess station and she said, “My mom and I get along pretty well, not great but pretty well – we talk maybe every other week. My father is a different story. What about you?”

And he told her. He talked at length about his family, his childhood. It felt like one conversation that lasted several days or maybe weeks and was interrupted from time to time by logistical details from the merging of their lives. He told her about how his parents had met, about how opposite their personalities and interests were, but how they had endeavored to get to know one another, to pick up all the best traits of the other one, how that had failed – they had both been too stuck in their own patterns – but how that seemed to carry over to him, how he had his mother’s musical taste and his father’s ease in a workplace, his mother’s wanderlust and his father’s ability to just get and pursue the things he wanted without second-guessing. It felt as if he were the culmination of some kind of personality and psychology experiment. He told her about that idea as the organizing thread of his life, how he had been made to feel like he was a miracle child, a perfect kid, how that idea had come to a crashing end the day he started middle school, how he had reconstituted himself in high school and college, started to find a path that, to his surprise, had nothing to do with his parents – was interested, for instance, in women who were very different from his mother, how he was affectionate to an extreme degree, poured love into a partner in a way that was very different from his rather standoffish parents. “You don’t say,” Elizabeth said.

He had the same sensation that he did on the first date – listening to himself, even with his usual critical ear, he was intrigued by what he was hearing. He seemed to be an intelligent and entertaining narrator, gliding over his life in broad, critical strokes, not getting too bogged down in detail but cutting straight to the most difficult, important points. She was similar in serious conversation to how she was in bed – she didn’t volunteer much but she was open and giving and fully kept pace with him. She asked good questions, she was interested in what he was telling her. In spite of her initial reticence, she told him different things, she told him about discovering at age 10 that she was the primary caregiver for her younger sister, about learning to use a kitchen knife and a peeler, all the mishaps in which she cut and sliced herself, the times her sister Laura wandered off and she realized that she was supposed to somehow find her. She was funny and crisp, her stories always left him wanting more.

They were in her apartment, reorganizing her bureau. She was creating a shelf for his clothes. He sat on her desk chair and talked to her while she folded. He said blithely – he was in a wandering sort of mood, it was raining hard outside – “you haven’t told me your parents’ names.”

She finished rolling up the t-shirt she was working on and she put the stack of clothes to the side. With slow dignity, she sat sideways on his lap, just as she had when he said he loved her. She said, “My mother is Shelley and I really don’t want to say my father’s name or talk about him ever again. I’m sorry – I know you want to know more, and I definitely get why you’d ask, but he was really bad with Laura, I mean went to prison for a bit and really should have gone in for longer, and it was awful, and it altered my whole life.”

“Abuse?” he said. The word was metallic in his mouth. It came from another world – a world of psychologists and television dramas and grey institutions, courthouses and jails.

She nodded airily, sideways. She was getting to the end of everything she was going to tell him.

“And you?” he said, with the same clanging feeling. “Were you abused too?”

“No,” she said, “I was very lucky. I was out of the house already when that happened – I went to boarding school. My mom thought she couldn’t raise Laura alone so she decided to try again with him, which she really shouldn’t have done.”

The getting-to-know-you phase continued but its tone changed a great deal. He was much more cautious in his long jazzy monologues, in the way he would riff from one subject to another. He felt that what he was describing in his past was a dollhouse, was made of these very thin and insubstantial materials, and that his stories would really start to pale if he heard about the court officers and social workers who must have peopled her childhood but whom she kept discreetly hidden from him. What he felt more acutely was the way in which she upbraided him for the occasional ill-advised joke.

“There’s a streak of eccentricity on my mom’s side,” he said once. “You could say that eccentricity gallops down that side. But it’s not crazy – I want to be very clear about that. They would get so upset, all the eccentrics would get so upset, if you called them crazy – and I don’t want you to think I’m crazy either.”

“Why not?” she said, suddenly sharp.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the most attractive quality in the guy who’s spending every night in your bed.”

She pursed out her lower lip. She stared dully in front of her. It was that surprised, forgetful look, which, he was starting to discover, was how she greeted all dramatic developments. “I don’t think that would be so bad,” she said. “I mean, I’m crazy. Clinically crazy.”

She shrugged – a gesture that meant that she didn’t see anything wrong with that and didn’t know why he would either. He was reminded of a mother cat picking up a kitten by the scruff of its neck and returning it to its place. As was her habit when she was sharp with him, she suddenly revisited the topic an hour or two later, apologized for before, explained herself a little more fully – this was the usual method through which he got the shards of information he did about her past.

“I had a bit of a checkered time in college,” she said. “I went to three schools, transferred out of one, was kicked out of another. It took me a long time to graduate. What had happened with my dad was a few years old at that point but that’s when it got to me – I think it was something about everybody being so happy and drunk all the time. It just wasn’t what life had been like for me, and it confused me – more than anything it confused me, so I swallowed sleeping pills. I did that twice, well, really, more like five or six times. Other girls were anorexic or cutting themselves – actually, all the girls I knew were like that, those were the friends I seemed to attract, but I didn’t do any of those things, I thought they were sort of lame actually, what I was into was sleeping pills, and I was like a scientist about it – first, I was like a hoarder or a master thief collecting pills from all over – and then I was like a scientist taking maybe twenty at a time, seeing if I would wake up or not wake up. And if I would wake up in my bed, with this horrible, like world’s worst hangover, which somehow made a lot of sense to me, which somehow felt like what I had gone through, then I would know that I could push it a bit further – and the next time I had enough pills assembled I could see how close to the line I would get. And twice I kind of miscalculated, and I ended up where I didn’t want to be, which was in the university clinic and that meant the university psychiatrist and that meant a diagnosis, which is how I came to be clinically crazy.”

“What was your diagnosis?” Eric said very levelly. He was careful to keep air and lightness in his voice.

“Borderline personality disorder,” she said in the same casual way that she had announced she was clinically crazy. “It’s not easy to be around,” she added. “I mean, it’s not easy for me to live with so I imagine it’s not easy for anyone around me either.”

***

It wouldn’t be fair to Eric to say that he was scared off by her diagnosis. He was a good New York liberal, was highly tolerant of mental health issues (it was almost fair to say that just about everybody he knew had some form of depression and saw a therapist), even had a certain appetite for what he, in college, had learned to refer to as ‘abnormal pysch.’ The life merger continued in the form of clothes, books, even a couple of furniture pieces, lamps and ottomans, that they picked out together. She said that drinking triggered her so he quit around her – didn’t even order a beer when they were out at a restaurant; and he found that his moods and his headspace were better without. At work, he listened to audiobooks like Prozac Nation and An Unquiet Mind and actually took notes on them on his laptop the better to expand his understanding of Elizabeth. But it was difficult – there was no way to pretend it wasn’t difficult. He texted her asking if he should come over and she wouldn’t reply for a long time. When she did, her tone would be weary and cried-out. She would tell him that tonight wasn’t a good night or that tonight was good but it was a rough day and she couldn’t do much talking. Maybe she had a conversation or she was stressed from work – which he found to be a bit incomprehensible, she was getting a master’s, didn’t have all that much to do, was in the long wind-up process of getting ready to write her thesis. He started to realize how much she was keeping from him – he’d started to think of her as a very good person who was fighting tooth-and-nail, fighting hard every day, to stay sane, or at least maintain the façade of sanity. Her surprised, forgetful look, her long silences – they all started to make more sense to him. It was as if she had gone far away into her own personal battle and something he said, some dramatic gesture from him, jolted her suddenly out of it – forced her to come up with some socially legible response, to invite him upstairs or agree that she loved him too. She was trying so hard to hide sides of herself from him, he saw that now, but once or twice he was there when it happened, when an e-mail from her faculty advisor or some complaint from her roommate sent her into a tailspin, and she was suddenly face-down on the pillow, her arms crossed over her head, or sitting on the couch with a thousand-yard-stare.

He reached out to his friend Jack to see if he wanted to meet up for a drink – found himself following up with Jack more often than he normally would, really staying on his case to make sure he didn’t flake.

“So you and Elizabeth are a thing,” he said sliding into their booth.

“And when we have our first kid, we’ll name you the godparent,” Eric said.

Jack had a wry, wiry smile, which always made you feel that he was never amused by anything he was laughing or smiling at. He was a very facile, very likable guy, with such a brilliant imagination for pranks and practical jokes that everybody decided he must secretly be a genius. It took some work on Eric’s part to put it all together, but it turned out that he knew Elizabeth from the first school they had attended on what Jack referred to as their journeyman college career. Jack had found it too easy and transferred from there to Eric’s school. Elizabeth had eventually transferred out after a long medical leave. What Eric wanted to know, really wanted to know, was what Elizabeth had been like in freshman year, the single year they overlapped, what had her campus reputation been, had the hospitalization been some sort of a scandal. He fished for that, he asked about that year. “Were you she and close?” he wanted to know. “I don’t know,” Jack said. “She was fun to be around. I mean, it was freshman year – everybody seemed fun then. It’s not like we were besties or anything.” 

“How come she was single?” Eric persisted. “It’s hard to believe that a girl that pretty would just be hanging around single.”   

Jack had a lost look like he was trying to remember the name of some distant relative. “I have no idea,” he said. “Why don’t you ask her herself?”

Too bad. That was the problem with guys like Jack. They were incapable of being serious; you could never ask them for anything that mattered.

Eric broke up with Elizabeth a couple of weeks after that. It felt as if – and he made the mistake of saying this out loud to her – their relationship had gone in an orderly series of phases but then they had gotten stuck in the merging phase. “We lost our momentum,” Eric said.

“What’s supposed to be the next phase after that?” she asked.

“Happily ever after,” he said.

He had seen her angry before – the way her faculty advisor set her off and she would sputter at the computer. It had never been directed at him but now it was. Now it came out, all in a torrent, and there was an uncanny accuracy to everything he had suspected she might dislike about him – that he was a prince, that nothing had ever happened in his life, that he was clingy, that he was needy, that he couldn’t get a regular, normal girlfriend so he had poured everything into her, that he was a coward, that he couldn’t tolerate her mental illness. It all came out in precise, machine-gun fire speech, very different from her normal sleepy tone.

“That’s not true,” he said with dignity. “Your being BPD, that stuff, that doesn’t bother me.”

“Of course it bothers you!” she shrieked. “That’s what you’re saying. You’re too much of a coward to be with me – and you’re too much of a coward even to say it. What you’re saying, and you can’t manage to say, is that you can’t be with a girl who’s crazy.”

***

Eric was back to the walk-up apartment, his specialty dinner of beer and omelets. Before bed, he was in the habit of scrolling through Tinder. God, the girls there were ugly, and if they weren’t ugly they were just so basic. He scrolled in a kind of trance. Sometimes he jerked off to the prettier ones.

She called him from New York-Presbyterian. She seemed pissed off, irritated. They wouldn’t let her leave without someone to discharge her to. She said she couldn’t think of anyone else – there was some complicated reason why her roommate couldn’t do it.

When he got there, she was in a waiting room. She was in her jeans jacket, which wasn’t nearly warm enough for the weather. She looked very small and swan-like. Her hair was brushed back, which made her neck even more elongated. She was very businesslike about presenting Eric to the medical staff, getting her discharge papers signed.

In the cab, she said, “Jesus Christ, I can barely afford rent. How in the world can I pay for a suicide attempt?”

“Can you pay it in installments?” he asked. She nodded grimly. Her mood was crisp, very New York. It was very different from how she’d first presented herself to him.

After he’d ushered her back into her apartment – the floor, the ottoman, strewn with clothes and cups and wrappers – he offered to tidy up a bit. He did the trash and the dishes. It was a bit hard to work out what had happened to the roommate, but it seemed like she had gotten Elizabeth into the ambulance and then high-tailed it to her parents’. Elizabeth was curled in bed on her side, facing the wall.

“Should I make you dinner?” Eric said.

“You can’t cook.”

“I can a bit. I just don’t really like to do it for myself.”

He found some beans in the cupboard, a few stray vegetables from the roommate’s refrigerator shelf, and he actually did a good job, put together a stew that seemed, amazingly enough, well-spiced and well-salted. She was in the same position on her bed. She turned around to eat. She didn’t use a spoon, just drank the broth straight from the bowl. “It’s amazing,” she said drily and handed the bowl back to him.

He turned out the light for her. He asked if she wanted a sleeping pill. He was sure that was tasteless, hated himself for saying it. She took a long pause, said completely flatly, “That’s very funny.”

He was tying up his shoes when she said, “Can you stay in bed with me?” and of course he agreed. She was in her clothes and he stayed in his. He wrapped his arms around her and she kissed the knuckles of his hand.

It was a different feeling now, the clothes, the blanket lightly draped over them – she didn’t have the strength to crawl under the sheets – the way they clasped onto each other during the night. It was very different now, it was harder and crueler and there was a charge to it, no denying that. He was in it now, really in it.