His name was Jim. And first he was one of my very best friends.
I met him in a meeting, along with his friend, Freddy, the guy who shook, nonstop for four years straight. Jim was tall and articulate, funny and somewhat attractive. He fancied himself a raconteur. Please. He was from Troy, New York. Nothing eloquent or savvy about hanging your socks on the hot water pipe to dry in a studio apartment in Troy. But in the big city, Jim had a way of attracting the soon-to-be and already famous right from the start.
He called me almost every single morning for my whole first year in recovery and read from the 24-hour-a-day book because I couldn’t read for that long. We went to dinner, often with friends, and then as time went on and I got better, alone. We became best friends and stayed that way for years. While we were dating other people we used to get together and dish about our respective lovers and what was up with them and us and laugh and laugh and feel not so alone in the scary world of impending intimacy. Which neither of us ever actually reached, mainly because our choices made that impossible. We chose people for their looks or their money or where they had a summer house. Jim liked women who knew a lot of words, or women who knew very few words with big tits. I liked men who were "deep" (aka depressed) who wanted to save me. A mixed bag of nuts, yes?
One night we had gone out to eat with friends and later it was just us walking home, late, down 14th Street in the East Village. We had stopped for Jim to get an ice cream cone at some all night ice cream shop (remember, this is New York City) and were strolling down the street, nearing the corner. Jim asked me if I wanted a taste of his ice cream and I said yes and leaned in to lick when, all of a sudden, he pulled the cone away and leaned in and kissed me. It was a big, very big, very wonderful kiss. I was stunned.
There was a garbage truck on the corner, and the guy leaned out to shout, “Man, you sure took her by surprise! Right on!” and honked the truck’s horn. Which made me jump all the higher.
“Wow…” I said.
“It’s been Wow for me for quite a long time, Nancy” said Jim.
And that’s how it started.
And it all made sense, you know, we hung out all the time anyway. The only one surprised I guess was me and everyone we knew seemed to take it in stride. What a change for me, though, how easy this all seemed to be. We still did much together and talked every day, several times a day. But things were a little more tense, as things can be when you’re getting to know someone AND sleeping with them at the same time. But we really had a lot of fun.
Everyone I knew just assumed that this was it, that we would probably just be together from then on, get married. Including me.
On Memorial Day weekend I was trying to decide whether or not to go out to Southampton for the weekend and Jim had said, yeah, go out, I think I’m going to go Upstate and see my son. Okay. Simple enough. I spent the long weekend with friends and this was pre-cell phone era, so we didn’t talk at all that weekend. I got home and left a message on his answering machine Monday evening. Tuesday goes by, Wednesday, Thursday…that afternoon he called and said we should meet for dinner. Cool.
We met on the East Side at a little bistro. We ordered dinner and Jim seemed really giddy and smiley and stuff and I think he’s going to maybe ask me to move in or make some kind of more solid commitment when he started laughing and bursts out, loudly, “Nancy, I think I’m in love!!”
I laugh back and say, “Wow, Jim, me too!”
And he says, “Oh my god, did you meet someone too?”
Wha…? “What are you talking about?”
And he starts talking loud and fast, without stopping, in a way that would make me and anyone else listening think we had never started an affair and that we were still just friends:
“Oh, my god, she’s beautiful, she’s perfect and I’m so in love, I can’t believe it. I met her on the train, I never made it to Rochester, she was going to go on to Martha’s Vineyard alone, but I decided halfway up there that I was going to go with her and we made love on the train and then spent all weekend in each other’s arms and I am just so in love I can hardly sit still!”
What? What the fuck! I stand up at the table and knock over the water glasses. I am furious and beyond hurt and I simply can’t believe the manic state he’s in. He’s completely negated the last six months, hell , the last five years, as though they never happened and treated me like one of the guys!
“Oh, god, Nancy, wait” he comes out of his reverie.
But I'm up and running out of the restaurant and down toward the East River walkway. He catches up and says wait, wait and I finally run out of breath at the railing. He falls to his knees, grabbing my hand and says, “Is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?”
And I say, “Not when one of them is me!”
And he says, “Wait, please, you have to wait for me. I don’t know what’s going on or what I feel. I feel sick, really I do, but feel so in love with her I’m sick, really I’m sick. Can’t you just wait for me to sort this out, just give me a week, Nancy, just a week. I love you.”
This is so freaking dramatic. But I can’t stand the tight knot in my chest that feels like it’s going to bust up through my throat and so I just walk away. “Don’t follow me. Please.” I just walk all the way home alone.
A week later Jim calls and wants to meet for dinner. I say yes and meet up with him. He tells me her name is Carly Simon. You must be kidding, right? No, it’s really her. And she’s been in town and he’s seen her all week. “And I think I’m going to marry her.”
Did I mention this was a week later?
And he did. He married her less than a month later.
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