51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life Read Free Page A

That’s, yeah, that’s what a lot of people think. I guess I see it as much more than that. I think L.A.’s dark side is her sweetness, her quaint neighborhoods and her palm trees. The rest of it…”
     
    Phillipe interrupts, “They are nice, but no, it is a rape of human kind.”
     
    I am not sure if Phillipe is simply uninterested in what I have to say, or whether he is just confused by what I am actually saying. He tells me, “You don’t sound like a California girl. You sound like a New Yorker girl.” When I finally do speak, he sits back, much like I do while watching Telemundo—interested if only I could understand. Then he changes the channel. Back to him.
     
    The thing is for all of Phillipe’s knowledge, he doesn’t know how to laugh. Maybe he hasn’t yet learned to tell jokes in English. Or maybe he’s just not funny. Frenchie was hysterical. And perhaps that’s what made our otherwise fantasy romance feel so real. Because for all the slow dancing and long romantic talks, he could also make me laugh. We stayed together for one year, and then Frenchie graduated. The following summer I was working at High Times as an intern, beginning my journey into alcohol-induced bad behavior and rushing to the mailbox every day to see if I had received another one of the fountain pen-scrawled letters that contained the words, “I cannot stop thinking about when I will have you in my arms again, feel you. When I do, I forget everything, I’m just happy. Past, future, everything disappears when I am with you, ma chere. J’attend, j’attend, j’attend.”
     
    I wait, I wait, I wait.
     
    There are days when I still pull out those letters. They remind me that though it’s been so long since romance held me close, at one point it did. At one point, I sat with that man on a porch in France. We read our books and breathed softly. As his foot rested on mine, I looked over to find him watching me, and I knew that this was all that love ever needed to be. And though ten years have gone by, and he lives in France with his wife, and in many ways, feels as though he was a movie I once saw and not a man I knew, those letters always remind me that he believed in who I was, and he loved me for it.
     
    I was almost afraid that Phillipe would remind me of him. That some long-healed wound would feel fresh for a moment. But he didn’t. He did remind me that my dating life since the first Frenchie has been a game of Goldilocks—always searching for the romantic perfection I found in some silly relationship that I had before I was even twenty. I hold them all up to that prince, and I judge. Too smart. Not smart enough. Too wild. Not wild enough. Too funny. Not funny enough. And it’s not to say that I didn’t fall in love again because I did. For the most part though, I find myself slowly shaking my head that this one just won’t do. Never just right, like that man, who ten years ago held me on a Paris street and told me he would love me forever, then put me in a taxi and never saw me again.
     
    When I look at it that way, I can feel the years of disappointment. And tonight, as the minutes drag by, as Phillipe launches from one story to the next, as I pretend to listen, I can feel the wound. And I know I need to let go of this fantasy. I can’t keep thinking that it’s only the romances that take place across daunting odds that are the ones worth having. It hasn’t served me in years, if it ever did.
     
    Phillipe doesn’t seem to notice that I am making life-altering resolutions across the table from him. Instead, he leans back, cocks his head, and asks, “Do you know who you look like little? I hope you don’t sink it’s an insult. Zee woman with zee curly hair, and zee big eyes, she sings, ‘I love you like a woman.’”
     
    I don’t know this song. He attempts to sing it, but I am even worse at that game. “Oh you know, she was in zee operas in zee seventies.”
     
    I smile, “Barbra