Marriage is for Losers: The Blog Entry with the Romantic Comedy Ending

“Shuddup, Bob,” she tells me without looking up from her book.

“Nicole, let’s get go,” I plead, as an angry gust of wind tattoos my spine with a fleet of sand. “This sucks.”

I know she can hear me as she turns a page. I stare at the grey horizon frown of the ocean. Waves babble with acrimony, like an old man shooing children off his property; and if I give my folded towel a ruffled pocket of opportunity it will join in, flapping like his miserable wife.

“Nicole, I hate it here. Let’s leave,” I start again moving my fingers over her wrist. She draws back her hand as if my touch were seething. Seething like the grains of sand burning my skin like hot ash.

She makes a point of putting on her sunglasses. Particularly, a pair of sunglasses she knows I hate. They give her the look of a horse fly.

“You’re absurd, you know that?” I tell her, but I unfold my beach chair and sit back down. “Absolutely absurd,” I repeat, realizing that Late August Beach day is a stormy souvenir she can’t live without.

“What’s your sick fascination with the beach?” I ask perfunctory, knowing the beach is the only thing in the world she loves more than clam pasta with white wine.

Sometimes, I like to think I’m a close third.

Sitting there that day, in the midst of horrendous weather and a mute girlfriend, I found a sanctuary. Not that Nicole would have known that, being I complained the entire time.

But at least she knew how I truly felt.

I lie to girls. Or girls get me to lie to them. It’s a sick cycle. One I have found myself caught in since I first realized that teacher imposed “boy-girl” order was a good thing. My lying began in that grammar school alternating congregation of the sexes. As we’d scamper down hallways I would assert, in a hushed voice to the girl in front of me, I had pet alligators; I was building a hovercraft; I was whatever I thought would impress. Now my lies have become more refined, more abstract. The lies I tell are no longer one-liners; they’re personas.

Example 1: A few Saturdays ago, I found myself talking to this girl Katie, whom I had a class with in freshman year. We sat next to each other, and as she remembered that I was a science major I remembered the huge crush I had on her. As we talked I noticed she kept asking about medical school.

-Was I applying?

-How hard is it to get into?

-What kind of doctor did I want to be?

My responses were answered with smiles. Despite never wanting to go to med school, and even going as far as to loath many of the pompous pricks of the biology department who can’t stop talking about med school, I completely bullshitted this girl. I invented every minor detail from the hours of my MCAT review class to my plastic surgeon epiphany.

As we conversed, a song by The Outfield blared from the speakers. “Josie is on vacation far away,” they sang to me. Subjectively I substituted “Josie” for “Nicole.” The chorus to that song goes, “I just want to use your love tonight.” Again, I changed the proverbial “your” to “Katie” which effectively tailored the song to relate to my life at that moment.

Which brings me to my next vice: yes, I cheat on my girlfriend. And she cheats on me. So it’s cool. We both know about it. We don’t care. I’m in New York when she goes to school in Ohio. Being faithful to one another is just not worth the effort, so we don’t make it.

Therefore, Nicole wasn’t a consideration when I left with Katie. We ran to her Townhouse, intoxicated off alcohol and the prospect of each other. We left the wintry night like a set of newly weds off to our honeymoon, as we escaped the cold like it were a shower of dried rice. We crashed onto her doorstep, propelled by the momentum of our insecurities.

She looked at me. I knew I should have done something. Kiss her? Ask for a phone number? Instead I walked away. I left that stoop because I was unsure as to how a medical school applicant would have handed the situation.

Example 2: Weeks later I would meet Tara in a Graphic Design class. She had olive skin that could trick my fickle tongue into all kinds of falsities. Her interest in art made me interested in being an artist. So it goes. I’d hand her sketch books from a junior year drawing class. She’d thumb through them with squinting eyes, cuing me to supplement comments like: “I feel confined by the monochromatic of charcoal.” Her adoring stare was all the positive reinforcement I needed.

Our liaison ended in a train wreck the night we tried watching a Fritz Lang movie together. As we watched the movie, I was constantly reminding myself to refer to it as a “film.” I found it necessary to interject, “Lang’s cinematography is rather provocative.”

“Oh yeah?” she broke in. “What’s the significance of that shot?” she asked.

“Oh, that one?” I mumbled, pointing to the screen, hoping it would flip to a different angle and she’d go back to watching the movie.

“Yeah, this one,” she repeated as the camera zeroed in on a close up of the shot. “I’m really interested in hearing what you think,” she said hitting the pause button.

Fuck, I thought to myself. “Well, the aesthetic elements coalesce constituting a social commentary on…um…society,” I muttered tentatively.

“Let me call Felix and ask him,” she said. Felix, being her ex-boyfriend at NYU (not studying, but) “perusing” a degree in directing.

The black and white glow of the television kissed the outline of her face as she smiled into the phone: “Uh huh…yeah?...Yeah, I know….hahaha…Oh, Felix!...uh huh, yeah, I agree…” The silence of the film patronized me to no end.

She hung up and left; leaving the film in my VCR like an unrewound bastard child.

I cited those two pathetic occurrences partly for my own amusement. And like writing about it, cheating on Nicole is also fun. But the enjoyment lies in the acting. It lies in an innate human fascination with being someone I’m not. For a few hours I like creating character details for a pretentious doctor or inventing dialogue for a bohemian asshole. Though, at midnight things do turn back to pumpkins, and the Fritz Lang tape left behind never fits like a glass slipper.

Therefore, cheating on Nicole is carpe diem. It’s for the moment; not for a lifetime. Marrying Katie or Tara would sentence me eternally to Example 1 or Example 2. I would forever be stuck changing the lyrics of Outfield songs to suit my life, because I would never have a wife that I could just say: This song describes how I really feel about her.

I realized for Nicole that song was “Here, There and Everywhere” by The Beatles. I told her one night as the line “But to love her is to need her everywhere/Knowing that love is to share” drifted over the radio.

Then I felt sappy, so I added I tell that to all the girls I date at school.

Even though I was lying (obviously), she still screamed at me in her native Italian tongue. It’s a habit she has when she gets so angry she can’t convert the way she thinks, (in Italian) to the way she talks (in English). As I got berated in what sounded like a witch’s hex, I was comforted knowing exactly what she was thinking was what she was speaking.

When she got out of the car that night, I followed her chanting “I’m sorry” as if it were the sound of her shadow. Following someone like that and knowing, somewhere between fifteen and twenty apologies, that person was going to turn around and kiss you frames my ideas of marriage. Marriage is letting a person see you for what you are. It is allowing them to see you naked with the lights on. Letting their eyes see your flaws, your unhappiness and your shortcomings.

But that is letting them see you. Therefore, I don’t know for certain if I’ll marry Nicole. But I do know that when we’re home together, simply Bobby is good enough for Nicole. Bobby may be a loser; and he may make idiotic comments; and he may even write essays about Hulk Hogan for his blog, but Nicole is allowed to see that.

One day I could end up making Nicole so angry she’ll never be able to speak English again. Or I could end up marrying her on a beach somewhere. Or possibly my complaints about the weather at our wedding on a beach somewhere might make her so angry I will be forever bound to a Italian speaking wife. In any scenario, it reflects the true nature of who we are, together.