A Monster Love Story
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I met my first boyfriend Monster by way of the Hebrew Home for the Aged when I was sixteen and he was eighteen. His great-grandfather had a room across the hall from my grandmother. My mother and his grandmother were often the only relatives visiting the retirement home. They started talking about this and that and soon planned to fix up their children.
Monster’s grandmother brought his high school picture for my mother’s inspection. A portrait really — retouched in rosy-cheeked pink and framed in a heavy dark wood. He was exactly the kind of boy she had in mind for me and for her. Monster’s grandmother saw the proofs of my high school yearbook picture — raw and unfinished and scarred with acne. Monster called anyway.
Rugby-shirted, tall with dark curly hair, he was was the handsomest, most grown up boy I had ever seen. He asked if my big sister was home when he picked me up. That first date lasted eight years.
Shortly after, Monster left me behind in high school for his freshman year of college. I wrote to him like crazy and thought this is what love feels like — the urge to pen long letters about everything and nothing. He wrote back that everyone in his class, including him, wanted to be a doctor.
The next year, I went to college locally. Monster’s mother cooked food for him that she froze and delivered to me. I took a train down to see him and brought those meals in a duffel bag I could barely carry. My roommate called me Judy Birdseye and Monster called me Burger after the frozen hamburger patties. By the time I reached him, the bags were sweating, beaded all over with drops of water.
After I graduated from college, I went to New York to continue with Monster who was in medical school by then. I found a publishing job that came with a meager paycheck. I rented a hole of a room six blocks and two avenues away from my boyfriend in an unairconditioned, overheated Y. This all seemed reasonable at the time.
But as soon as I arrived at the Y Monster abandoned me. He wanted to compare. He met women everywhere — in restaurants, bookstores, buses. Two months later I took him back after just one phone call. He was flunking out of medical school.
I quizzed him until he passed two out of the three classes, but he couldn’t make a go of microbiology. He would have to repeat the entire subject and the only accredited course was in Philadelphia. I lied to everyone about Monster’s whereabouts that summer. I told his roommate that he was on an extended vacation in Mexico recuperating from a tough year.
In an era before cell phones, Monster waited at the same phone booth each night for my call. “Why do I have to learn so much microbiology?” he lamented. “What does it have to do with being a doctor?”
At the end of the summer I walked Monster to his microbiology test. It was like accompanying a condemned man to his hanging. He passed, but barely, and I moved in with him in his third year of medical school. He gave me half of his closet, two drawers and insomnia.
Monster and I never broke up exactly. But I knew our time had run out when I watched him walk across a dais to receive his medical school diploma. Soon after I moved back to the Y and waited for him to call anyway.
Twenty years later, one of my mother’s daily scans of the obituaries in my hometown newspaper turned up a notice that Monster’s father had died. My condolence note brought us to a restaurant in Boston. Monster wore a dark suit to lunch. He gave me a dozen roses. He was bald. His hands shook when he held his turkey club sandwich. He had a lawyer on retainer to keep his teen-age son out of trouble. His soon to be ex-wife frequently locked him out of the house.
That afternoon I talked and Monster listened. I told him that a man should only have to apologize once. I told him that I was happily married and the mother of two beautiful children. I told him that I still have a recurring nightmare in which I call information and the operator says that his number is unpublished.
I almost felt sorry for Monster during that lunch. But then I didn’t. Lunch was finished and so were we.
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