And we stand outside the dressing room.Īnd it's an automatic setup situation. Who among us has not been on both sides of that? No matter how subtle and dignified and interesting that yapping happens to be, just kind of not wanting to deal with this, not wanting to face this situation, walking ahead about three paces. The other person ahead, a little bit put off by the yapping of this puppy. No, you won't meet my eyes anymore.Īnd in each of our histories of love, who has not played both parts in this drama? Both parts, who hasn't been both people in this picture at one time or another? The person walking a little briskly ahead, not meeting the eye of the other person, and the person walking behind, a little over-eager, a little extra edge of anxiousness, wanting to make the connection, a little bit like an eager puppy. It was like she was holding a certain emotional distance.Īnd that's the thing that gets to you. And she was walking ahead of me, just a step or two ahead of me, never quite meeting my eye.Īnd I realized that, oh, that's the way this has been for an hour or two, isn't it? When we were walking up the street, it was like that. And it wasn't too crowded, and it wasn't too empty. So we're walking through that big, cold-floored Fifth Avenue store, the mannequins everywhere and Anne Klein and Anne Klein Two and Anne Klein Contemporaries- there are actually three different Anne Klein departments at Saks Fifth Avenue- and all the other designers. And that's how we ended up in Saks Fifth Avenue, where the first moment of our screwball comedy weekend occurred. And we're trying to hang out and be buddies. We're going to see how this new thing between us feels. "I really like him." And then two days later, I found myself in New York City.Īnd your wish in this kind of situation is you want a sense of, OK, we're going to be friends. That was our thing.Īnyway, so two days before I came to New York City to visit friends there- real friends, not just friends, just normal friends- and Danielle, she informs me that there's a guy that she had started dating. So all the work of the relationship, but none of the sheer physical pleasure. In other words, that kind of weird, post-relationship situation where there's no more sex, but you depend on each other for all your emotional needs. And we talked on the phone several times a week. OK, Danielle and I had been broken up for half a year. And that's where you get the screwball comedy aspect.Īll right, I'm going to try to keep the mundane personal information to a minimum here so we can focus on the bigger, universal truths this story may offer. So when you put "just" in front of it, it suggests the imbalance. But- but, but, but.īecause automatically, it implies a negotiation's happening, just friends. Friends may disagree." If they have nothing to do with each other, maybe it's OK. You know you are in trouble when the word "just" appears in front of the word "friend." It's almost hard to think of a context where those two words are used together, a sentence constructed- unless you're using the word "just" in some radically different way, like, "I think the verdict was just. And it was our first time together as just friends. We had done that to ourselves.Īnd how did we not know? Here we were, Danielle and I. She said that Danielle and I had put ourselves into the kind of situation that 1,000 comedies had been built on, situation comedies, screwball comedies, every kind of TV, theatre, movie, drama thing. Well, it was Danielle's cousin, Lynn, who said it best.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |