10.15.2001
A long list of things come to mind when I think about my most recent ex-girlfriend. When we first started to see each other and had the usual bout of jubilance that every relationship has for at least a short period in the beginning, the two of us sat down and composed a list of all the things that we wanted to do with one another. A lot of them were silly but then some of them were serious. It's almost amusing how the silly things were the ones we accomplished. We went ice-skating in Central Park, we visited the Met, we ate at every Belgian fry shop that we came across at least once, and we took interesting if not lewd photos of each other in very public places. The list of ridiculous items went on much longer, but out of them two were never achieved. We never had sex in a public place - though not for lack of trying - and we never did pop open a fire hydrant during the summer to dance around in like two newly adult fools pretending to be children again. Those two - upon looking over the list - never bothered me in their failure to become reality. What did weigh on my mind was the lack of notable and truly worthy things we'd set out to do but let fade into the background as our relationship eventually slid into apathy.
I don't believe that I ever stopped loving her - Clara was her name though my friends seem to have already forgotten it, which when I think about it, is probably more for my benefit than theirs. It's just that I think at some point I just stopped caring. It's happened with every girl I've ever dated. The pattern of bliss followed by comfort, then minor annoyance and eventually dislike. But with every new one I hope that it won't happen again because this girl might actually be different. It wasn't so with her. I still loved her when we declared it over – I just didn't like her anymore. It was like we were brand new tubes of toothpaste when we met each other and at first we cared about squeezing from the bottom to keep everything neat and orderly but then found ourselves wrestling with one another just to get something new out. The fact that we were spent - we felt like all that was to be known about us was already out in the open - made the task all the more arduous. She was a writer who talked about getting published but never submitted anything and yet she still complained about the modern state of the printed word. I was a painter who complained about art but hadn't picked up a brush in, well, a very long time. Everything we had to say had already been said and everything that there was to do had already been done.
Except that we forgot about the list.
I found the list completely by accident one Saturday morning as I was cleaning my apartment while listening to the President on NPR give a conference about whatever was on his mind that day. It was perhaps the first time my apartment had been cleaned in over six months and there were noticeable tracks made in the dust on the hardwood floors where I frequently traveled. My socks seemed dirty every time I bothered to look and the bathroom was in no better shape. In fact, it was worse. I was doing a top to bottom spring cleaning in December starting with dusting, moving on to sweeping, finishing with a mop I bought down at the corner hardware store the day before, and then cleaning the bathroom while the floors dried with cleaning products picked up at the same store..
There was a bookshelf on which Clara used to store her personal belongings that I never bothered to add anything to once the space was cleared and I moved it out of the way to find the creatures formed out of my own hair and dust that I couldn't otherwise reach. Aside from the stray coins, old receipts, and other detritus, I found a neatly folded piece of notebook paper. Throwing the rest either away or into a jar to be rolled later, I sat down on my sofa and gently examined the document.
Doctors would say that the benefits of living in a clean apartment are many, but as for cleaning, when it's done as often as I am prone to, the only upside of it all is the ability to play archeologist to my own life. I've found pictures and love letters and all sorts of other items long thought lost to the sands of time only to be discovered and cherished once more after being thoroughly dusted. The list was one of those.
I daintily unfolded the paper that had turned yellow with almost a years worth of dirt and cigarette smoke and held it by the edges so as not to sully it any further with my unclean hands. It was written in her neat and practical handwriting, subdivided into categories and things that could be done together. Clara made a lot of lists and had perfected them. The list I held was proof. Each was bulleted with a number and after each item was a set of parenthesis that referenced other like items. A file clerk upon seeing such a piece of brilliance would have felt a pang of murderous envy. I looked at it and thought that it was typical Clara and remembered the other lists she would make then later revise as things were completed or purchased. When we broke up, I stripped off a dozen similar documents from my refrigerator, tossing them in the garbage and leaving the door bare save for a few magnets that no longer had any purpose. This was more than just another one of her pointlessly organized scraps of paper though. The list I held in my hand was the report card of our entire time together.
I remember when we sat down to assemble it. I was living in a different apartment on the Upper East Side, room mating with my friend from Boston who had convinced me to move down in the first place. It was shortly after I had worked up the courage to tell her that I loved her for the first time. We were a month into our year and a half together and I joked that I had a number of adventures I wanted to experience with her. I thought it sounded more romantic than saying, "Let's travel the world together" which sounded like a bad line from an otherwise good movie. I didn't yet know about her skill at listing and then indexing and hadn't realized that I was keying off an interest of hers that bordered upon obsession. We were lying in bed, her head on my chest, her finger playing with a small amount of hair that sprouted on my chest when she glanced up at me with a look that would be described as sexual were it not so intellectual.
Clara leapt out from under the comforter and pulled on some minimal clothing then searched through her little bag that was carried everywhere she went for her notebook and a felt tip pen. At first I laughed, wondering what the hell she was doing. But it quickly dawned on me that she was serious when she sat down next to me, legs crossed and pen poised over the paper, like a secretary awaiting dictation.
"Tell me what they are," she said eagerly. "I'll write them down and we'll see if we can't do them all."
I didn't really have a list of things I wanted to do with her. I just thought it sounded like a good way of saying that I wanted to do everything with her but now my bluff was called and I had to produce. I put my hands behind my head and started brainstorming. I started with cute things that I hoped she would think were romantic then moved into some strange ones when I ran out of the former. All of them were lumped under "silly." When I was done, after having dictated a good two dozen adventures, she rubbed my chest and gave me the smile that a mother gives to a son who says something sweet, stupid, and innocent all at the same time. I didn't know it then, but she later viewed me through the same eyes for the rest of our relationship, screaming at me in the heat of an argument, "Just because you refuse to grow up and be an adult with reason, doesn't mean I have to like it!" It was difficult to respond to such an accusation but I couldn't say that she was entirely wrong.
"Is there anything else," she said hopefully, doodling on the underside of my left arm with her pen.
"Well, you know...," I said as though I were holding back some that I thought might be lame. "What about you," I asked. "Do you have anything you want to do?"
"Sure," she said and began scribbling again in her notebook without saying them aloud. When she was done she surrendered the list and I looked it over. They were good. They were things that I should have thought of but didn't because I don't think like a girl. Her suggestions later became the serious ones.
"What do you think," Clara asked, knowing that mine were lame and wanting something real to work towards.
"I love them," I said. "I think they're great ideas," I said. "I think we ought to do them," I said.
"Really? Even the swing dancing?"
I could feel her eyes on me, testing me to see if I was really someone she could love or whether I was just another temporary interest.
"Yeah, really. Even the swing dancing," I said bringing my hand down to rub her knee. "It's something I've always wanted to learn how to do." I was over stating my interest in the activity but it seemed that was what she wanted to hear so I said it.
On the couch in my apartment, we kept reading then re-reading the list. We never did learn how to dance and it showed on the rare times I patronized a club. We did go to Europe but the list was subdivided into countries that we each wanted to see and only France, England, and Scotland were checked off. I skipped over Asia and the countries listed there. We never drove across the country. We never went to Canada, not that that one disturbed me. We never stayed in a cheap motel or an expensive hotel. We never did get those AC/DC tickets. I never took her to the top of the World Trade Center or Empire State building which struck me as tragic since going to the top is now an option for only one of them. I never taught her how to sew and she never showed me how to play guitar even though I still had her six-string. The list went on and on. As I read further I started to think that if I were a teacher I would have had to give a failing grade based on the number of assignments turned in. Our relationship was to be held back. We were the skaters who snuck peppermint schnapps into the classroom in soda cans who didn't care if they spent the rest of their life there.
I folded up the now yellow piece of paper and slid it into a box I kept of old letters and notes, not wanting to throw it away but not sure what to do with it either, like everything else in there.