Who Gives a Fig?

I haven’t kept a proper journal since before I moved to London, and even when I kept one it was in fits and starts. Occasionally – very occasionally, because how many times can one pore over one’s own angst? – I used to read them and wonder if I should destroy them, because anyone coming across them would have to think how whiny and solipsistic I was. That’s because the journals would always stop abruptly just when things got interesting – either good or bad.

So I’m committing at least the outlines of the Fig to paper, if only because I feel like I ought to force myself to do things like this every once in a while. And because only a week ago I was on a dizzying high that now seems like a distant memory.

He’d e-mailed while I was in Spain, saying he’d bought me a “bloody silly present” (I loved the idea of the present, as much as the phrase “bloody silly present.”) That was when I stopped worrying about when I’d see him again – clearly he thought he’d see me again, even if he hadn’t clued me in on that yet. Later, he said he was heading to a stag ‘do (= bachelor party) in Dublin that weekend. From the airport came the call that made me decide the bloom was off the Fig.

I was sure he knew I was angry, but maybe not. On the Fourth came a one-line e-mail wishing me a happy “we-beat-the-Brits day.” I ignored it. An hour later came another e-mail, telling me I was awfully quiet and asking for a reporting-related favor. Because so many reporters have been so crummy to me (and because every once in a while someone is unbelievably generous), I am a big fan of attempting to put karma back into the world – if something is going to take me less than 15 minutes and doesn’t compromise my own reporting, I will help just about anyone. So I got the document he needed. In the course of sending brusque e-mails back and forth about the document, he mentioned he was being lazy and asking the first American he knew – not something I wanted to hear on a Tuesday, deadline day, from someone who really had little business asking me for a favor in the first place.

He called Wednesday to say thank you. We chatted briefly. I’m terrible at confrontation, but I decided to give it a shot. I said, in a half-joking tone, “When someone’s doing you a favor you might not want to let them know it’s just because you’re being lazy.”

This led to a conversation about a couple of other things, from which I figured out he had no idea I was annoyed on Saturday. After a couple of (wrong) guesses, he wouldn’t let me tell him exactly what it was that annoyed me – he told me to e-mail it to him so he could cringe in private. (I didn’t.) He also told me to e-mail him my address.

“Why?” I said.

“Because I’m clearly in the doghouse and I’m not going to see you,” he said.

I paused and said tentatively, “Well, I’d kind of like to see you.” (So much for The Rules.)

He said, “Well, I’d like to see you, too.”

There were a few more minutes of conversation – in which he accidentally called me “darling” – and we hung up. On Thursday I got an e-mail from him that closed: “See you in 57 hours” – from which ensued a ridiculous, dizzying countdown. I returned to adding rooms to my castles on air and polishing the hall of mirrors.

You could say there was nowhere to go but down, and in fact that’s where things went. Saturday night was bad enough, and Sunday morning – on the phone; hello, on Saturday we were walking as far from each other as possible while staying on the same sidewalk! – was worse. (I’ll save details for a future post, as this one is already long enough.) We haven’t spoken since.

For the record, the Fig was so named because his surname includes the word “fig” and the first time I thought he disappeared, I tried to joke to a friend, “Who gives a fig?” (Unfortunately, I did – and still do.) But figment of my imagination in terms of boyfriend potential – see comments for the previous post – seems sadly apt.