Dumped Over Tapas, Eight Hours From Home

I had intended to submit this story to The New York Times for potential publication in the Styles section "Modern Love" column ... but who am I kidding. I'm too lazy and probably would get sued for libel, even with my (half-hearted) name change to protect the far-from-innocent. Anyway, here goes....

Rich was quieter than usual as we strolled from our hotel to the craft market in La Recoleta. The streets of Buenos Aires were deserted on Easter Sunday, with the locals in church or spending time with their families. As irreligious tourists with limited time, we forsook the holiday in favor of wandering the streets on our last day in Argentina.

At first I thought Rich was just tired. Undoubtedly the lavish wedding we attended the night before had taken its toll on us both. When we tried to leave at 5 a.m., the groom’s brother chastised us. "But pizza is being served an hour!" we were told. “You can’t leave yet!" At 6 a.m., after devouring a slice apiece, we snuck out of the celebration. Our 11 a.m. check-out time loomed and we knew our four days of revelry had taken its toll on our room. On three hours' sleep we packed and began our meandering stroll.

At first I thought perhaps exhaustion prevented conversation and we wandered the streets in silence. As the day wore on, I stopped trying to make conversation because I realized Rich’s characteristic reticence was in full gear. After two months together I had realized that my idle chatter irritated him and I learned to keep my musings to myself. But it was more than that – my tendency towards verbosity is one of my defining traits and as my friends later noted, I was not myself with Rich.

Upon our first encounter in Miami, we decided our parallel lives meant our meeting was fated. We attended the same college (he was a senior when I was a freshman); we both lived in Manhattan at the same time; we frequented the same restaurants and bars and stores; we attended the same law school, albeit years apart. Our paths probably crossed many times and when we met, it seemed like a story worthy of the Sunday Styles Wedding section. Of course thousands of people do all the same things we did – but they didn’t all meet as expatriates in exotic Miami.

Rich’s behavior started as attentive (or perhaps obsessive): text messages first thing in the morning; the 3 pm phone call; the 7:30 pm call on the way home from work, the barrage of e-mails, dinner at his parents’ house with the extended family. In the hot period, he sent me a text message saying “Want to go to Buenos Aires? My treat.” One cannot offer a Sagittarian free travel to an exotic locale and realistically expect any answer but yes. The trip became my Valentine’s Day present, personified in the form of a “Time Out” Guide to Buenos Aires. But by the time the trip rolled around, Rich had noticeably cooled. I felt like I lost points on his mental checklist every time I opened by mouth. So I became uncharacteristically quiet and nervous and never settled into the relationship. I convinced myself he would break up with me before our trip. Then before I knew it we were sitting on the plane, taking recreational doses of Benedryl to knock us out for the overnight flight.

We left the craft market and grabbed a cab to Palermo-Hollywood, a hip neighborhood populated with quaint outdoor cafes, stylish boutiques, and adorable apartments. We shopped for a while and decided to have tapas for dinner before catching a cab to the hotel to retrieve our bags and then head to the airport. Towards the end of the meal, Rich said, “What would you think about taking some time off when we get back to Miami?” Of course I knew my moment had come, the axe was falling, and after a weekend in which he had not only slighted and insulted me, but had been distant and downright cruel, I couldn’t restrain my bluntness.

“If something is bothering you,” I said, trying to maintain my calm, “a month will not help anything. If you have something to say, say it now.”

Of course I didn’t really expect him to dump me over a light dinner in a foreign country. And then he said the words I had long expected to hear:

“I don’t see this going anywhere.”

Silence.

And then conversation. The only real conversation we ever had, and the only conversation where I was very much myself. I was unrelenting and candid, and more than a little out-of-line. I am not a person you want to dump before embarking on an eight hour plane flight (though Rich objected to the term “dump” as being “too high school” – there was no point in arguing semantics, I replied, because the result, rejection, was exactly the same). Giving me eight hours to think of anything I might have forgotten to say is unwise, because I will say it the moment it comes to mind, without a censoring mechanism such as picking up a phone or logging onto e-mail to say it.

We kept talking as we hailed a cab and went to the hotel to pick up our bags. I was numb. One night after being out at a club, Rich had told me that trusting him was a mistake. That statement reverberated in my head. I could not hold back tears – from rejection, frustration, exhaustion, and a strange sense of relief – and I sobbed. I pulled myself together and we talked more, about his problems this time, classic Rich, always pulling the focus back to him, when I was the one being abandoned! I treated myself to a Cohiba from duty free and smoked one in the airport lounge while drinking a beer. He kept talking about his issues, his problems, him him him. And my silence probably evinced intent to listen, when in fact I was merely sedated by alcohol and nicotine, locked in a familiar position of self-loathing mixed with self-pity.

Within the hour we were buckled in our adjacent seats and he took my hand. He kissed me. He said he was sorry for hurting me. He held my hand nearly the whole way home and kissed me periodically. I pointed out that this was the most affection he had shown me in four days and he admitted it to be the truth. And he cried, I suspect for himself, not for hurting me. And I cried, because once again I had dated the wrong kind of guy. And we fell asleep, everything changed, curled up together in coach.