Words, Not Wine, Got Me Drunk: At the Table with Mr. Corkscrew

I guess a lot of people leave their hearts in San Francisco.

Perhaps they misplace it at the Ferry Building, or drop it in the Bay as they’re trying to feed the fish. It’s a lot easier to do than I would have imagined. Mine just sort of fell out of me, after squeezing its way through my esophagus. I started coughing and wheezing, sounding like a cat ridding itself of a hairball.

I guess it was a heart ball. When it landed on the carpet in front of me, I could see years of sadness and confusion tangled inside. It was blood-stained, and there were fossilized tears at the center that looked like tiny shells in a sea of moss and dirt. I’m sure the heart ball didn’t come out just because of him, but his treatment of me during our last visit had an effect not unlike that of ipecac. It was time to vomit him out once and for all. After all, it had been six years since we started this soul-crushing affair.

We met in 2002, at a communal table in a Napa Valley restaurant. I was the bored food writer, disabling a quenelle with my left hand and heralding a Cosmopolitan with my right, and he was the charming wine buyer with a puckish smile and two inebriated companions flanked on both sides of his smallish frame. We had been passing flirtations back and forth like a roto-virus in a Kindergarten class all evening, and when the drunk guy between us got up to go to the bar, our bodies were magnetically drawn to each other. We went on a date later that week and kept in touch after I flew back home, 2,000 miles away. I held out hope that things would take off from there, that we’d build something with our words and later, our bodies and our hearts.

He would send me emails the length of War and Peace, yet his prose was flowery and superficial, scattered across the computer screen like a Japanese crossword puzzle. You know they read backwards, the Japanese. Adrian felt backwards. His heart, like his words, always seemed upside down.

I said things like “potential” and “effort,” and he said things like “capricious” and “ephemeral.”

Why, then, did I always try to keep rewriting his story? Maybe it’s because I believed that if the ending were anything like the beginning, it would be worth years of patient editing to get there. Red marks be damned, I wanted a love story out of the deal.

It seemed only natural. Even the middle read like a great novel. On my last visit to San Francisco, he took me to the symphony, for moonlit walks across the city and out for tapas. There was fried chickpeas and chili powder; poached eggs and bacon on wilted Italian lettuce; wood fired broad beans and tomatoes; and celery root puree with roasted apples and Buddha’s hand oil drizzled lavishly across the top. And there was even dessert: a warm serving of his lips, drizzled across the small of my back, his arms, a shell of skin surrounding a frozen parfait of me, now thawing into a pool of sugar-crusted hope. When I was lying in the dark, so close to him we were almost sewn together, I thought I tasted a promise — an as-yet-unknown promise, punctuated by a silent announcement of consideration.

And when he dropped me at the airport, hugging me so fiercely I thought I might explode into peanut-shaped fragments, I truly believed he had invited me not only into his city, but also into his heart.

“Next time, I’ll take you to SPQR,” he said, the gleam of a small child in his eyes.

The whole way home my mind played a symphony of “next times.” Next time I will wear that red dress with the slit. Next time I will bring him my dog-eared copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” He likes Kundera. Next time I will make him a frittata for breakfast, with sundried tomatoes and freshly grated Parmesan.

But now is next time, and he is gone. Gone to see the world without me.“Was just in Vail for my annual trip,” he wrote. “Thailand is in two weeks. My business partners don’t like me being gone so long, but ah, life is out there, waiting.”

And so am I. Sometimes I want to slap myself for being one of those dreadfully obtuse girls I normally make fun of — the ones who mold their perception of reality around the first man who pays them a kind word. I’m not that girl. I’m the fiercely independent type who shuns marriage, has no desire for children and travels the world solo. But this time was different. Something about the way he touched me, the undulating swirl of blue in his eyes…

I emailed him after several weeks of an empty inbox, asking what went wrong, and he gave his usual reply: “Intention and action are, unfortunately, two very different things for me.” Yes, they always were. I had always given in to the excuse that he just wasn’t ready. He was a successful restaurateur. He was inundated with responsibility. He had no time for someone 20 minutes across town, let alone me, who lived 2,000 miles away. His superficial words and inattentiveness told me all I really needed to know, yet I waded through the years like a cautious beachcomber, hoping the next time we met, he would look at me and know I was the time he wanted to spend.

“I don’t care if you live in Egypt,” I imagined him saying. “I would scale the pyramids to get to you.”

Okay, so a little far-fetched, but I’d at least hoped he’d throw in a line or two about frequent flyer miles or something. Good thing I’m already adept at flying solo.

Now it's time to become adept at rewriting this story by creating a plot line that doesn’t result in him finally loving me, but me loving myself enough for the both of us. You know, the antithetically obtuse girl who scales her own pyramid and realizes that love shouldn't require editing. The best kinds are always a little grammatically incorrect.

In my new ending, I want to be the girl who accepts the fact that she will never catch the man who whispered into her ear the night she wore the pink orchid in her hair, “Let’s see what happens.”

Sometimes I imagine Adrian in my arms again, the way it was when I thought we were both part of the same dream. He’d confess that he has always been afraid of me. “You’re the closest thing I’ve ever known to real,” he’d say. “And I’ve forgotten what that feels like.”

For six years, San Francisco was real to me. I loved the hills; the way the wind floats magically from the Bay and blows kisses at your face and the sound of trolley cars clanging their bells in the distance. I loved a man who lived there, too. Or at least, I loved parts of him. His cheekbones, the way they seemed drawn into his face like the curves of Lombard Street, the feel of his fingertips on my stomach, like tiny flecks of sugar on a rugelach.

And his heart. So close, but like me, thousands of miles away.

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A Failed Science Experiment: Hey Kids, Let’s Make Someone’s Heart Explode! A Lesson in Internal Combustion with The Mad Scientist

He would be in Paris in two weeks.

He emailed to tell me this, though I’m not sure why. We hadn’t spoken in a year, yet he emailed out of the blue to tell me he’d be in the most romantic city in the world, which, as it just so happened, was only a two-hour train ride from where I was at the time.

Imagine that. I was studying in London and he knew this when he decided to casually mention his European travels.

“I love Paris,” I remember responding. “I have a friend who lives there and I could visit when you’re there, if you want.”

If you hadn’t spoken to a man you were in love with for over a year and he emails when he knows you’re just a two-hour train ride away, wouldn’t you assume he’s hinting for you to come visit? I did. Stupidly. And the response I got still makes the vomit rise in my throat.

“I’ll be super busy the whole time,” he said. “Besides, didn’t you say it would be hard for you to see me if you knew nothing had changed between us?”

What’s the French word for asshole? Or how about emotional tease?

Creve Coeur. I know that one. Means heartbreak. Finally a French word I can understand.

If life had dealt me a different hand, I might actually be going to Paris – with him. If he felt for me what I was beginning to feel for him right before he dumped me, he’d actually want me there. He’d say something like, “Darling, don’t you think we could come here for coffee after my lectures on electron superimposition into the centrifugal solarsphere?”I would gaze into his eyes and say, “I don’t know what any of that means, but they’ve got brioche as big as Dolly Partons breasts, so yes, coffee would be lovely.”

He is a scientist, you know. One of those traditionally geeky guys who looks at a microscope in the same hungry way a frat boy looks at a woman’s ass, and gets equally excited about encyclopedias and Nova specials on PBS. When I met him I was a jumbled mess of atoms, surrounding a porous shell of what should’ve been a heart. I wasn’t looking for someone else to pour acid on it. So when he looked at me in the crowded bookstore, it was the first time I felt something move inside my chest. It was tiny, almost imperceptible, but I know it came alive that day, in that moment. And later that evening, as we sat on black leather couches sipping martinis, the beat grew stronger. It was practically a bass drum months later, when he came to visit me and touched my bare skin as Billie Holiday crooned gently in the background.

When I visited him, he had a box of chocolates he bought me on his last trip. It was half melted, but I was secretly touched by the gesture. He hid packets of hot chocolate around his apartment and when I found them, we made steaming mugs topped with marshmallows and laughed and kissed while trying not to spill anything. I made him pancakes and he ordered in sushi. We watched movies, made love, drank lemoncello from frozen shot glasses and made love again. It was the most naked I’ve ever been in my life. Naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes but has everything to do with exposing yourself fully to another human being.

By now you’re probably wondering what went wrong. So am I. If you know anything about love, you know it often leaves you wondering. Maybe for years. Maybe forever. He told me I was beautiful. He said I was funny and intelligent. He told his parents about me. We liked the same music, enjoyed independent films, loved culture and travel and he was picking up on my love of food. But as the Bachelor said on a recent episode to a girl he’d just rejected, “You had so much of what I was looking for, but in the end, you didn’t have enough.”

That’s just how it goes sometimes. Does that mean I’m okay with the outcome? Of course not. I wanted to be the girl for Mr. Scientist. I wanted to fit inside his universe. But instead, I got to find out what it’s like to find a man who fits in mine. That’s a very cool discovery, if you ask me. Screw Halley’s Comet or extra terrestrials. I finally found where my heart was hiding.

Someday soon, someone else will find it too.

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