Grandma's Got a Boyfriend... and I Don't

“How’s your love life?”

“Not as exciting as yours, Grandma.”

My grandmother is 86 years old and she has a long distance boyfriend. She’s just been telling me about how every night at 8 pm her time and 10 pm his time (she lives in New Mexico, he lives in New Jersey), he calls her and asks, “Ready to pour?”

They drink one gin and tonic and talk for an hour before bed. This happens every night. She tells me that he’s started calling in the mornings too, “Just to say Good Morning.” I ask how they constantly find things to talk about.

“I don’t know, honey, we just do. We talk about politics and the people we used to know. We tell each other about what we did that day.”

I remember that feeling of wanting to tell a partner everything—purposefully remembering things from your day just so you could tell them about it later, every mundane little detail. I had that with Mr. Intimidated, which is how I knew I actually really liked him. Grandma tells me that her boyfriend admitted to making notes throughout his day so he wouldn't forget to tell her things.

“He makes me feel like a girl,” she tells me earnestly. “I never thought I’d feel that way again.”

My grandmother and her boyfriend, Bob, grew up together in the same tiny New Jersey town where he still lives. They knew all the same people, most of whom are now dead. Bob remembers more than she does about their high school days together—he remembers things about my grandmother that she doesn’t remember herself. Like about that time they were playing tennis in gym class and she got a cramp in her leg and had to sit down and the gym teacher came over and asked Bob, “What did you do to her?” Or when she fainted outside the school and knocked down a professor.

Bob remembers these details because he’s been in love with my grandmother for 60 years. My grandfather died three years ago and this man—a widower himself—waited a respectable two years before swooping in on the long lost love of his life. She wasn’t sure at first and she resisted him for several months—I think she felt some moral obligation about being faithful to the memory of my grandfather. But Bob just kept on coming, undeterred by her reticence.

“I feel silly now about resisting him,” she admits.

When Bob came to visit her in Santa Fe several months ago, my grandmother laid down the ground rules: “Hopper seat down” (she calls the toilet a hopper), “you have to help with the cooking, and... NO SEX.” Her boyfriend joked: “If you wanted to have sex, I’d have to bring someone in.” At first I interpreted this to mean a prostitute and I was momentarily shocked. Then my grandmother laughed, apparently charmed by his little joke. I guess he meant a doctor or something. Someone to administer the Viagra? I don’t know.

One of her favorite things about Bob is the fact that he can keep the names of her three daughters straight. The fact that he remembers that her granddaughter lives in Los Angeles.

“He has a good memory and he obviously cares about you,” I say.

I consider telling her about the guy I had been chatting with on OKCupid for a couple weeks who then, a year later when I got back on the site, opened with the same pick up line he’d used on me the first time around. I remembered the line and I remembered him. We had gone so far as to exchange numbers and had texted on a daily basis—we were pretty close to actually meeting in person before it fizzled out. He’d apparently forgotten all these details and was starting from zero with me. I wondered if he still had my number in his phone. I consider telling her about the chef I was chatting with recently and was really excited to meet. We had made a date, he had to cancel at the last minute, he wanted to reschedule. I said okay and then never heard from him again.

When my grandmother asks about my love life, I’m tempted to mention the fact that I recently deleted all my dating apps after reading a particularly depressing article about Tinder in Vanity Fair. Midway through the article, I grabbed my phone and promptly deleted ALL the apps: Tinder, OKC, Hinge, Happn, even Bumble. I decided I didn’t want to feed into this culture that was turning men into sociopathic pussy-monsters and women into simpering attention whores. I decided I would meet someone the old fashioned way: IRL.

I can’t explain any of this to my grandmother because it simply wouldn’t make sense to her. On a fundamental level, her generation doesn’t understand having a game on your phone where you swipe through millions of human faces trying to find someone to have sex with. Her boyfriend has been in love with her for 60 goddamn years! They talk on the phone every night. She’s living in some nostalgic Nora Ephron romance flick from the 90s. Every time she tells me about Bob, I get off the phone and quickly jot down some notes.

“I have to write this story!” I tell myself. It’s too good to be true. This isn’t real life. It’s some relic from a sweet unattainable past.

I remember my grandmother watching this short film I made in which the three young women gather in the kitchen explicitly talking about sex and masturbation. I had been nervous to show it to her, but her reaction was amazing.

“Do you girls really talk like that?” She asked, intrigued.

“Yeah, we do,” I told her.

“That’s really great,” she said to my surprise, “In my day you simply didn’t talk about that stuff.”

I think about the fact that my grandmother has only had sex with one man her entire life. The fact that she got married right out of high school, didn’t go to college, and had three daughters. I think about how she was the star of all her school plays, a real beauty, but didn’t have enough belief in herself or encouragement from her parents to pursue a career in acting. The fact that she is also a poet and a painter, and considers these talents to be just hobbies. And that she never really liked to cook—my grandfather was the one who loved being in the kitchen. My grandmother grew up in a generation where women were expected to stay home and bare children. And that’s it. And I think if my grandmother had been born of my generation, she wouldn’t have chosen that path. She probably would have been an artist. Maybe an actress. She would have had a choice.

When I ask my grandmother if she has any plans to visit Bob in New Jersey, she says she doesn’t have any desire to, that she really doesn’t want to stay with him. She insinuates it’s because she doesn’t want to have sex.

“If I were your age maybe I’d want to visit him…. You can guess what I mean.” She laughs. I laugh too. Last time I saw my grandmother she declared that she’d never have sex again. I just stared at her, mouth dropped open, like ‘how could you ever say that?’ Especially after having had sex with the same man for my entire life, I feel like I’d be chomping at the bit to see what else was out there.

“I just don’t want to anymore,” she said at the time, resigned. I guess it makes sense. Biologically speaking it makes no sense at all for a woman to still want sex at age 86. Still, I can’t imagine myself ever saying the words, I’ll never have sex again. Maybe on my deathbed.

Considering the generation my grandmother grew up in, it’s not totally inconceivable that she never actually enjoyed sex in the first place. It’s even possible she’s never had an orgasm. When I sent her a DVD of the first season of Masters of Sex for her birthday, her response was that she found it “silly to even study these things.” I explained to her that before the studies of Masters and Johnson, female sexuality was cloaked in shame and misunderstanding and that, although imperfect, even just the fact of their study was a step in the right direction. Despite finding it silly, she still said, “I’ll probably watch the rest of the seasons.”

Although I don’t idealize my grandmother’s generation and I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to a time when women had no sexual freedom to speak of, I think something has been lost in this age of endless choice. I’m nostalgic for a time when, if you wanted to talk to the person you had a crush on, you had to call them on the phone or drive to their house. You couldn’t just send them a text or stalk them on Facebook. There was more risk involved, and therefore more investment. You couldn’t swipe through a hundred potential dates a night. You had to talk to one person at a time and risk actually liking that person. Is romance dead? No. But it’s definitely old and potentially dying. 

F*** You, Gaffer Guy

The feminist in me is screaming.  She’s fed up and irritated and totally embarrassed.  The slut in me is not thrilled either.  They both know I failed.  Because I’m hung up on a guy.  And not just any guy.  Fucking Gaffer Guy.

The slut and the feminist are both begging me not to write this blog.  They’re like “Just write something glib and funny and irreverent.”  But I can’t right now.  Because I’m in pain.  I spent a day and a half crying in bed.  I called in sick to work.

This is what happened.  Last week I had a lapse in judgment and I texted Gaffer Guy for the first time since I saw him at that party with that other girl.  Last I heard from him, he had said he wanted to do “Normal people stuff,” like “go to a movie, or a museum, or get food, or make food and eat it, or rent a movie and watch it in pajamas.”  Since then, radio silence.  And then the party.

Don’t ask me why I can’t keep my hand out of this fire.

Him: “Miss me?”

Me: “Don’t ask me why.”

Him: “Let’s meet for drinks after work.”

And so we did.  We had a couple beers and, besides some weird flirt-taunting with the bartender, he was pretty cool.  And I got pretty drunk.  So we went back to his place.  I was greeted by his two large and friendly dogs.  He showed me his house.  Not exactly the palace he had described, and definitely in need of a good clean, but a considerable upgrade from Coffee Shop Guy’s messy studio.  And then we talked for awhile.  About careers and death and this old gay guy with a Liberace voice who Gaffer Guy helps out with various tasks.  I enjoyed talking to him and I felt myself opening up, even told him about the cat scratch fever I got as a kid that made me permanently partially blind in my right eye.  I had forgotten about this because I rarely think about it, and it’s a detail many of my closest friends don’t even know.  Maybe it was him, or maybe it was the beer, or perhaps the couple lines of ecstasy we blew off the counter.  Whatever it was, I felt close to him and like maybe I had misjudged this person.  Or judged him too fast, which I have done in the past.  Maybe I misinterpreted his behavior as weird and malicious when I was the one choosing to see it that way? 

At a certain point, he started kissing me, and I have to say I love kissing this guy.  And he smells amazing, not sure what he puts in his hair but damn.  I went to go pee, and when I returned, I found the bedroom lit by candlelight with some sexy tunes playing out of his phone.  We started making out, which started leading to sex.  I wanted to go down on him but he said it would make him “come too fast.”  I appreciated this consideration, in light of our sexual history.  He went down on me, and when I pulled him up, he didn’t want to stop.  He was actually trying to make me come (unlike last time), which I also appreciated.  We had sex for awhile in a number of different positions, and it was fun and lasted longer than a minute and a half. 

He asked, “Will you kill me if I fall asleep right now?”

I laughed.  “No.”

“I don’t want to experience your wrath in the morning.”

I assured him I was fine, that I felt good, that I had fun. 

I kissed him on the cheek and turned away to go to sleep.

“Thanks for that,” he said.

There was no cuddling, which I guess should have been a warning sign.  No spooning, no good morning kisses, no affection whatsoever.  We both had things to do so we got out of bed early-ish and got dressed and got ready separately.  He had to go help Liberace upholster a chair, and I had a plane to catch.  When we were just about out the door, I started kissing him again.  Which led to making out.  Which led to a real quickie fully clothed, bent over his bed.  We kissed goodbye and that was that.

I was flying to visit my parents for the weekend, and upon touching back down in LA, I found myself with a text from Gaffer Guy.

Him: “Are you back yet??  I want to have lunch…”

Me: “Aww you miss me?”

Him: “Don’t ask me why.”

Cute, right?  I told him I was waiting for the bus, going straight to work.

Him: “Why didn’t you tell me?  I would’ve picked you up.”

I consider picking someone up from the airport a huge favor that I don’t ask of most of my friends, let alone casual sex partners.  My usual ride, my dependable ex-boyfriend, was out of town himself and unavailable.  Gaffer Guy offered to come to my work and lend me his car while he went to work himself, and then I could come pick him up afterwards and we could go bar hopping.  This seemed very inconvenient to me, but I did want to see him and I found this proposal exciting and unpredictable coming from him.  Had we really come this far?  I’m now borrowing his car??  I agreed.

At 10:30 pm, I park his car in front of his work. 

“Give me all your money!” I jump, then quickly realize Gaffer Guy is standing beside my driver’s side window with his hand pointed at me like a gun.  He opens the door.

“You gonna go around or slide across?”

“I can drive,” I say.

“I don’t let women drive me.  Y’all are terrible drivers.”

“Why is it always guys getting in accidents then?”
“90% of accidents, you drive past, there’s a woman involved.”  Not sure where he got that statistic.

“Well, I’ve never gotten in an accident.”

Off to a good start.  I walk around and get in the passenger door.

He sniffles, sounding stuffed up.

“I can’t fucking breath.  I drank seven beers this afternoon.”

“Well, you can just take me straight home if you want.”
“Nah, let’s get a beer.”

No kiss, no nothing.  I reach out and touch his hair.  I don’t know why I insist on doing this. 

“You’re a petter, aren’t you?” He says.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you don’t like being touched.”

He doesn’t deny this.  I keep my hands to myself. 

“I sold my motorcycle today.  The one I’ve been fixing up.  Bam boom.  $3,500.  Cash.”

He beams, proud of himself.  Looks over, expecting a big reaction from me.  I smile.

“That’s great.”

We arrive at the bar, the same one we came to before.  We order beers and I’m looking at the food menu.  I didn’t have dinner.  He hasn’t eaten all day but when I ask what he’s going to order, he says “Nothing.”

I order ceviche.

“I feel like shit,” he says.

“We can go if you want.”

“No, let’s have a beer.”

I can imagine how tired he must be, having drunk seven beers that afternoon then gone straight to work.  I can’t believe he’s still drinking.

I’m having fun, high on adrenaline, ironically singing along to Blink 182 on the radio.  I like who I am around him.  I feel open and excited.  I’m like that girl in the rom-com you just can’t help but fall in love with because she’s so awesome.

He looks around the bar, checks out some girl’s ass for a long moment.

I glance across the street, enjoying the heat this late at night, feeling content.

“Oh god, that look,” he says.

“What look?”

“That look on your face.  You look so bored.”

He’s got to blow his nose.  I offer him a napkin from my purse.  He gives me a strange look.

“I’ll go to the bathroom.”

While he’s gone, the bouncer and I start talking.  When Gaffer Guy returns, the bouncer excuses himself.

“Nah, you don’t have to go man.  This is my sister.  She’s my sister from another mother.  She’s my wingman.  I bring her out to attract people.”

“Mostly guys,” I say.

We laugh about this, but I don’t understand what’s with him.

When the bouncer leaves, I decide to bring it up.

“I feel like you’re done.”

“With what?”

“With me.”

“Dude, I’m here with you.”

“It’s just that, you say all this stuff through text and then I see you, and it’s like none of that exists.”

“Look man, I’m not gonna stroke your leg in public.  I’m not into that PDA shit.  I don’t know who you expect me to be.”

“It’s just a little confusing but I’m getting used to it.”  This isn’t entirely honest.  I don’t know how to express the fact that him wanting to pick me up from the airport and watch a movie in our pajamas doesn’t compute with this person who barely looks at me when we’re together and won’t even give me a single kiss until he’s drunk.

“I think you have intimacy issues.”

This starts him off on his favorite topic of conversation, about how all women are the same.  He’s now on his second beer.  He indicates the space between us.

“This is how it starts.  They all seem cool in the beginning.  And then you’re gonna start leaving shit at my house.  And you’re gonna wanna move in.  And then you’re gonna get crazy, and I’ll still be the same guy.”

I can’t believe he’s talking this shit again.  He tells me a story he told me the last time we were at this same bar, about the other girl he was screwing who recently confessed she was developing feelings for him and wanted to be exclusive.

“She was like, all or nothing.  So I said, it’s gonna be nothing then.”

I can’t believe how cold and heartless he can be.  And what kills me, is that the look in his eye tells a different story.  In his eyes, I can see that he likes being with me/that he’s interested in me as a person, but out of his mouth comes this bulldozer of bullshit that I can’t believe.

“You’re all the same, man.”

“Then why me, why not that girl?” I indicate a girl near us, her boyfriend’s arm wrapped tightly around her.

“She’s taken.”  Wow.

“Well, I don’t see you as interchangeable.  When I look at you, I see an individual.  I don’t see a representation of all men.  I don’t make time for everybody, I’m here because I like you.”

“So, does that mean you wanna date and be exclusive?”  He looks worried.

“No, that has nothing to do with it.”

I can’t believe where his mind goes.  In this moment, I feel like crying because I’ve let this person in too close and he’s fucking crazy.  Except crying won’t work with him.

“You’re all the fucking same.  The only difference is that you get your periods on different days.  And when you all get together, you even get them at the same time.”

This is too much.  I can even feel myself becoming the crazy girl he’s describing, and I don't want to be that girl.

“Well maybe we should just call it quits now, before it goes any further.”

I’m bluffing.  I’m testing how deep his apathy goes.

His eyes look sad but his mouth says “Sure.”

We get the check. 

“I’m sure you wanna walk home, but you’ve got all your shit in my car.”

He drives me and I’m silent.  He talks bullshit, tells me “I told you I was crazy.”  I’m about to burst into tears and I need to get out of the car.  I still want him to hug me and tell me he’s being an asshole, that he’s sorry and he didn’t mean what he said.  He doesn’t.  He’s done learning, he’ll never change.  He’s living this self-fulfilling prophecy and he’ll have another crazy chick to fill my slot next week.

“I like just going home to my dogs.  I don’t like girls staying over at my place.”

He pulls over and I thank him for letting me borrow his car.  I don’t look at him as I grab my stuff and slam the door behind me. 

I open the door to my apartment and I sink to the ground in a puddle of tears.  I cry like I haven’t cried in years.  Heaving, full body sobs that I don’t understand considering this person I’m crying over.  I don’t understand why I care so much.  Why I feel such profound disappointment and loss.  My biggest regret?  That I didn’t get one last kiss.  I feel so pathetic, so fragile. 

The next day, I tell my ex all about it.  He thinks the guy is an asshole and can’t understand what I’m doing with him.  I expect this will be the response from most reading this blog.  My ex tells me I need closure with this guy.  I should meet him for coffee and tell him how my feelings were really hurt.  I text Gaffer Guy, he tells me to come to the set where he’s working.  It’s nearby.  I go.  Not sure what I’m expecting, but needing to tell him.  He steps out to meet me, in a semi-private area.

“I just needed to tell you that you really hurt my feelings with what you said.  I don’t know what kind of women you date but I’m not like everyone else.  And it hurts me that you can’t see that.  But I don’t feel great today and I just need closure with this.”

He stands there watching me, a half smile on his face – mocking or sympathetic, it’s hard to tell.  His eyes are full of regret but what comes out of his mouth is this:

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.  Have a nice life.”

And that’s that.  I turn from him, keeping my emotions at bay, feeling like I just showed my naked heart to a wolf.

I put on my sunglasses to hide my blotchy face and the tears streaming down my cheeks. 

I skip work and go straight home.  I get in bed to watch Six Feet Under on HBO-Go and I order in pho from my local noodle shop.  I burn my hand badly as I pour the broth into the noodles, spilling liquid everywhere.  I grab an ice pack and crumple to the floor, once again in a puddle of pathetic, self-pity tears.  I like to think it’s my period that’s making me so emotional, but I’ve never really had these symptoms before.  I don’t like to think that I allowed Gaffer Guy to have such a strong affect on me.  I sob into my soup bowl, then crawl into bed.  I wrap the ice pack around my burnt fingers and cry myself to sleep.