This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

This is the classic tale of boy meets girl: Girl...goes home with someone else.

Meet Eve. She's a dreamer, a feeler, a careening well of sensitivities who can't quite keep her feet on the ground, or steer clear of trouble. She's a laugher, a crier, a quirky and quick-witted bleeding-heart worrier.

Meet Ben. He's an engineer, an expert at leveling floors who likes order, structure, and straight lines. He doesn't opine, he doesn't ruminate, he doesn't simmer until he boils over.

So naturally, when the two first cross paths, sparks don't exactly fly. But then they meet again. And again. And then, finally, they find themselves with a deep yet fragile connection that will change the course of their relationship - possibly forever.

Follow Eve and Ben as they navigate their 20s on a winding journey through first jobs, first dates, and first breakups; through first reunions, first betrayals and, maybe, first love. This is When Harry Met Sally re-imagined; a charming tale told from two unapologetic-ally original points of view.

With an acerbic edge and heartwarming humor, debut novelist Leslie Cohen takes us on a tour of what life looks like when it doesn't go according to plan, and explores the complexity, chaos, and comedy in finding a relationship built to last.

An Author's Republic audio production.

Release date: January 23, 2018

Publisher: Gallery Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

EVE

AN ASYLUM IN MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

It was senior year. We were having a party. The theme was trash.

In preparation, we decorated our suite with black garbage bags and blinking Christmas lights. The letters T-R-A-S-H hung from the ceiling.

We were all looking to make something happen that night. Each of us felt like something big was right there. And it didn’t matter how many times we’d been disappointed in the past, how many times we’d dressed up and then fallen into bed hours later, with zero to show for the night but a faint dizziness, an imminent headache, a morning of recovery. We were resilient enough to bounce back. We didn’t even have to think about it. As the sun went down, a greater power took hold of us. It pushed us to close books, to shake off the haze from our afternoon naps, to get dressed, plan, send messages out into the ether, and hope, with a little luck, to get a few back.

It was the power of possibility, that feeling of boundless potential that occurs late in the afternoon in New York, when the sun goes down and all the windows in all the buildings look asleep; before darkness rolls over the city like one long sheet and the lights come on. It could terrify me, all that vastness just waiting to be filled. But not that night. That night, I was ready for it. Lights on, Manhattan! I thought, clapping my hands together, standing at the window of our suite, as if I alone had the power to bring light to all those tiny square boxes out there. The illusion of control was tempting. I am not afraid of you, you had to say to yourself, when you looked out at the city. I am not fucking scared of you, you had to say. And you had to really believe it, or you were toast.

I lived with three other girls in a four-bedroom suite in East Campus, a dorm between 117th and 118th Streets that housed most of Columbia’s upperclassmen. From the window of our suite, I could see the whole campus, the Hudson River in the distance, the chemical pink clouds descending into the granite dome of Low Library. In our world, Low was the Pantheon, and beyond Low, there were only buildings—mysterious, anonymous buildings. We had a panoramic view of the city that stretched from nearly one wall to the other and yet went largely disregarded. Everything that mattered seemed to happen within the walls of Suite 1603. Every now and then, we did peer out at the rest of the universe. We liked to pretend, sometimes, from our high-up fortress in Morningside Heights, that we were running this town.

I’d invited Jesse Prescott to the party, a guy from my Poetry and Place in the Modern Landscape class with whom I’d been flirting for months. “Happily Ever After.” That was the title of the poem that I’d read out loud to him—well, to my entire class, actually. Yes, that’s right. I read it out loud. To people. With ears. It was still haunting me. Luckily, it wasn’t my first time. I’d done this to myself hundreds of times before, over the past few years of writing classes at this establishment. I’d learned to persevere. There are survival mechanisms that kick in, in a situation like that. I am not afraid of you, you had to say to yourself, before you started reading. I am not fucking scared of you.

I was stunned that he wanted to talk to me afterward, that he still wanted to talk to me, even after hearing that overly emotional drivel:

And then, she sees everything with a stunningly harsh clarity,

the kind of clarity that makes reality seem hopeless,

which makes you wish for an entirely new reality,

something with reliably brighter thoughts.

She wonders if everything in the world is fleeting.

Love fades.

The seduction of expectation crashes.

Reality throws her into a strange, unpossessed place of which she has no bearing.

Everything seems as far beyond her grasp as the yellow lights,

spinning and dashing behind the man . . .

“I liked it,” he said, when called upon by Professor Rosario to offer his thoughts, and those words were enough to earn him one invitation to our trash party. As a self-protective measure, I told myself countless times that he might not come. Yet somehow, his presence had become critical. In the days before the party, when I thought of it, everything inside me jumped. I looked down at myself, thinking, How did you get to this place?

But before anything could happen, he would have to actually show up that night, to the sixteenth floor of East Campus, a dorm that used to be an insane asylum, and in many ways still was.

“It’s party time! It’s party time! Tell everyone it’s party time!” my suitemate Scarlett sang. “I want to meet someone tonight who will crush me. And then I want to break his heart. And then I want to fight to win him back. And then I want him to break my heart. And then I want to burn all his possessions to the ground!”

I laughed. “That’s quite an agenda,” I said to her as she balanced herself against the wall in our living room with one hand, sliding on black, shiny, five-inch heels with the other. They looked much nobler on her feet than they did in their usual position—cradled in her hands at the end of the night as she stumbled home barefoot.

Farther down the hall, I could hear the sound of a phone beeping. The noise reverberated, echoing deeply throughout the entire suite. Within a few seconds, there was the faint sound of my suitemates discussing it.

“It’s from a 917 number.”

“Ugh, but the voice mail is only thirty seconds long. It can’t be important. He’s obviously bailing.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s only thirty seconds long! What can he say in thirty seconds that isn’t him bailing? And why else would he call this late? If he were coming, he would have called earlier. And he wouldn’t have left a message.”

“Just check it! Just call the number back! Why are you being so negative?”

“I’m going to! I just want to wait a few minutes! I need to think about it. I can’t just call.”

Suite 1603 was a frenzy of emotions. Basically, it was a place for emotions to go on spring break. Like, when they wanted to run wild and really enjoy themselves and not be contained by things like logic and good judgment. Those downers.

And this was especially true before a party. Clothes went flying. Anxieties ran rampant. By the time the first guests arrived, I was somewhat surprised to be still standing.

I heard the sound of my name being called. “Eve!” I walked toward it, down the stairs from our living room to a hallway leading to several bedrooms. I went to my suitemate Maya’s room, slowly, warily. One never knew, with Maya.

I stood at the doorframe.

“I have a question for you, Evelyn J. Porter, MD, PhD,” she said.

I smiled. “Just Eve. No J. And barely going to graduate with my bachelor’s.”

“I was trying to make you sound more official. I broke up with Todd,” she said, and then, before I had the chance to respond, “Do you think I’m a selfish person?”

I paused before I answered. Maya was the most volatile of my friends. A beautiful Indian girl who wore Converse sneakers and oversize black-rimmed glasses, she was known to ask for advice, all sweetness and soft-spoken, and then explode at you if she didn’t like what you said.

“What?” she said. “I really want to know what you think. Give me your most honest opinion.” Her big brown eyes appeared to be quivering. She was intimidating, this one-hundred-pound girl sitting in front of me on a purple comforter, next to a framed picture of an ice-cream cone.

“I don’t think you’re selfish,” I said. “Not any more so than anyone else.”

“So do you think he’ll call?”

“Well, if you broke up with him . . .”

“You don’t think he’ll call?” she snapped, her eyes zeroing in on me. I stared at her blankly.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” She was turning on me. Abandon all honesty and placate! PLACATE!

“I’m sure he’ll call in a few days,” I amended quickly.

She sighed. “I wish I had a test to study for.” She stood up and walked over to her closet. Tests were Maya’s version of therapy. She was one of the few people for whom being in the library all night studying provided a profound sense of well-being.

“There will be another test,” I said, trying for comforting.

“Maybe I need to just sleep with someone else. . . . The theme for the night is trash.”

“That’s true,” I said. “That would be very trashy of you!” Her face lit up. We started to laugh.

“Thank God we didn’t pick a theme like the age of innocence,” she said. “Can you imagine how hard that would be for us to pull off?”

“We’d still be able to have the party,” I said. “We just wouldn’t be able to attend.”

We knew from experience that when choosing a theme for a party, it was best not to be too specific. We didn’t want to get hemmed in by thematic restrictions. Those were for amateurs. We were sophisticated city girls. We knew what we were doing. We had bags full of lingerie from the ninety-nine-cent store, this magical place on Amsterdam Avenue where you could buy a year’s worth of toilet paper, an assortment of vaguely religious lamps, and clothes perfect for theme parties but likely meant for prostitutes. At the store, we dug into cardboard boxes full of clothing, but it wasn’t long before we got distracted by other items and decided that yes, four large potted plants, taller than we were, would be a smart purchase. They would provide ambiance for the party. “It’ll be like a jungle!” one of the girls insisted. After some searching, I ended up with a black lace dress that was see-through but not totally see-through. So, tasteful. And since it was the classiest of the prostitute costumes, my friends declared, “Park Avenue trash!” That’s what I would be.

For the next few hours, my suitemates came to me with fistfuls of necklaces—long strands of fake pearls, fake diamond chokers.

“Why?” I yelled.

“Because you’ll under-accessorize otherwise, if we don’t help you.”

“ ‘Park Avenue trash’ is about collecting as much material wealth as possible and putting it into one ensemble. It requires attention to quantifiable possessions.”

“You can’t just wear a black dress and call it a day.”

Our other suitemate, Kate, came into Maya’s room and sat down on her bed. “Do I look under-accessorized?” I asked her. I put a few of the necklaces on and held the rest in my hands.

“It looks like a jewelry store threw up on you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

Kate was half Czech, half Chinese, and somehow managed to possess the prettiest features from both ethnicities. She had skin that was perpetually tan, visible cheekbones, dimples. Her eyes and hair were the same shade of perfect chestnut. Kate never bothered to use these occasions to put on a crazy outfit that just so happened to flaunt how pretty she was. She didn’t need to. On Halloween, when everyone else wore slutty angel and fairy ensembles, Kate dressed up as the Unabomber.

At eight o’clock, the delivery guy from Hamilton Deli arrived—we could throw a stone from our window and hit Hamilton Deli, but that didn’t stop us from ordering—with a crate full of orange juice, tonic water, ginger ale. We set up a “bar” in the corner, which was really just a desk covered in a black garbage bag, with red plastic cups stacked in a tall cylinder, bottles of tequila and gin, a half-gone bottle of vodka from our freezer, and the mixers from the deli. We placed the four plants we’d bought from the ninety-nine-cent store in the corners of the room and lit them up with the Christmas lights. When we were finished, we looked around.

“It looks so cracked out!” Maya said, giddy. In our suite, that was about the best thing you could say—that something was cracked out. It was most commonly applied to moments that combined alcohol, drugs, and nonsensical actions. For example, when, after a big night out, someone went on an instant-soup shopping spree at Duane Reade, or painted the bathroom doors, or started spraying people with a fire hose. “He was so cracked out!” we’d say, relishing the moment. College! We embraced it.

I made my first drink of the night and sat with Kate on my bed as our suitemates ran through the room in various outfits, occasionally stopping to ask things like: “Do you think Xanax and alcohol is a bad idea or a bad idea in a good way?” One of us would inevitably say no to something, but we didn’t try very hard. We knew that nothing we said made any difference.

Suddenly, Maya burst in, looking like she had just received the best news of her life. Scarlett was standing behind her. I thought she was about to tell us she’d been accepted to med school, but instead, she said, “Scarlett found a plastic bag full of white powder in the back of a taxi!”

We looked at her, confused.

“What should we do about it?” she said, her arms stretched out to us, her palms turned up toward the ceiling.

“Let’s snort it!” Scarlett shrieked.

“Are you insane?” Kate replied. “It could be anything! It could be laundry detergent.”

“It won’t kill us.”

“Actually, it could kill us,” Kate said.

It wasn’t what you’d expect from two girls who were premed. Maya wanted to be a surgeon, often citing her prowess at fixing a stuck zipper five minutes before a party as proof of her qualification. Scarlett wanted to be an emergency room doctor, because being a surgeon required choosing one area of the body to work on and she wanted to be able to fix any problem at any time, rather than be so specialized. Needless to say, it behooved everyone to talk to each one, separately, regarding her medical aspirations. Kate, the constant voice of reason, was applying to work in finance but only the type of finance that required traveling regularly to Buenos Aires, which made her sound like a floozy until she started firing off facts about the South American markets.

By eleven, we were dressed to kill, amped up on either cocaine or laundry detergent, and looking around at an empty suite. Scarlett, wearing what appeared to be a one-piece bathing suit from the fifties and giant heels, went out to walk the halls.

“Are you guys coming to our party?” she said to the guys on our floor, who received this question silently but then followed her back to our suite, as if possessed. With our new friends in tow, my suitemates insisted on shots. I finished the first easily and then started on the second, after which I immediately felt the rush of alcohol hitting my bloodstream. By the third, I felt sick. They were going by too fast. I already needed a break, but still I was lifting the glass from the kitchen table, watching the shots go by. It wasn’t so bad. People did this all the time!

“Is that guy from your writing class coming tonight?” Maya asked. “What’s the deal with you guys anyway?”

“No deal,” I said. I pushed away my shot glass, until it was removed from sight. Maya handed me a wedge of lime and I sunk my teeth into it. “We walk together after class.”

“You walk together?”

Sadly, that was the most accurate description I could muster. We walked from class to the pizza place, from class to Duane Reade. I’ll admit that I invented scenarios to throw us together, but so did he. We basically took each other on errands. At one point, I accompanied him to the computer lab so that I could watch him send an e-mail. Our conversations drew all my attention. I only wanted the walks to be longer. The campus was designed so that anything you needed was within a few blocks, which was doing me a great disservice. I stood at the counter of Duane Reade and talked to him about Reese’s Pieces versus M&M’s, but could only do it for so long. I was fixated on making him like me, but it was also clear that I was succeeding, and without much effort. Each time, just before we were supposed to part ways, one of us would come up with a reason to continue walking. He’d touch my wrist as we stood on the partition between the two parts of Broadway. “I think I need a coffee,” he’d say, after he’d slowed to a stop and smiled. “Oh, of course,” I’d say, relieved. “I could use one too.” And then we’d start walking again, each of us pretending not to understand what the other was doing.

“So you walk together? That’s it?” she questioned, still at a loss.

I was about to respond, but Kate waved Maya’s incredulity off. “Don’t listen to her,” she said. “They’re in love.”

I laughed. “How is it that we’re in love?”

“Okay, so,” she said, preparing for a recitation of the facts. “They make goofy expressions at each other in class. The guy comes up to her when class is over and makes up some ridiculous excuse to hang out like, ‘Uhhh, uhhh, my roommate and I ran out of Skittles yesterday so do you want to, uhhh, go to CVS with me and then um help me carry the bag back to my room?’ ”

“Well, this is exciting!” Maya said.

“It’s nothing,” I told her. “And there are a few potential problems.”

“Yes.” Kate stood up straighter and took on a serious, professor-like tone. “From his poems, we have discerned that he may be mentally unstable, but he’s a musician, so that’s probably standard.”

I had told Kate about the song lyrics he recited in class, about a poem that he wrote entitled “O Captain! My Captain!” “The title alone,” I’d said to her admiringly. The fact that it had been used before didn’t ruin it for me in the slightest. From what I could decipher, it was about someone laboring under pressure to move his life in a certain direction. Graduation was looming, two months away. The real world was no place for an aspiring musician. I read between the lines, as our writing class wore collective looks of concern. At first, he seemed to be explaining what it would feel like to catch yourself on fire while wearing a perfectly tailored suit. Then, there was something about going home for Thanksgiving and getting buried alive by his parents and a psychotic dog. So there were some red flags. But, of course, instead of getting scared off like a normal person, I found him insightful. Okay, intriguing, at the very least. I sat there, mesmerized, interested in his words, and what it all meant.

“A mentally unstable musician? That is so your type!” Maya said optimistically. “He fits in perfectly with your history.”

It seemed to amuse my friends that I had this whole other circle that they were not allowed to be a part of, and it was true, I suppose, that when I hung out with people from my writing classes, I didn’t want them to come along. They would refer to them as “artsy,” and maybe they were, but they were also just glamorous to me, pursuing things that were almost impossible to carry on after college, in the real world. These people stayed up late to work on projects with no specific purpose other than that they loved to do it, and how could they possibly not? It was foreign to me. I grew up in the Bronx with a father who installed windows for a living and a mother who forbade me from watching the Muppets as a child because they were, in her opinion, a bunch of troublemakers.

In college, I was this walking, talking well of feelings. All you had to do was press gently, and there was a tenderness inside of me, a prickly feeling. Just press slightly, and everything would come spilling out uncontrollably. There were no parameters, no telling what I might write or say, or how long I might be feeling it. Writing classes were both this wonderful and dangerous opportunity for me to tap into that place, to be a ball of emotions without judgment. Okay, with some judgment. But it wasn’t like the people around me were saying, “Don’t have feelings.” God knows, they had feelings. They were mostly saying things like “Could you have feelings but in a less confusing, more narrative-driven, punchier-dialogue type of way?”

“He does fit in perfectly!” Kate agreed with Maya. “Let’s see . . . there was the playwright with the high school sweetheart down in Florida.”

“I just thought that he should see other things!” I yelled. “Plus, I didn’t know his girlfriend in Florida was a cheerleader. I would have given up more easily. I can’t fight that.”

“And then there was the photographer who was addicted to cocaine,” Maya added.

“Only on the weekends!”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Then there was that reclusive drummer guy who lived on our floor freshman year and never left his room and wore exclusively white T-shirts with holes in them. He was very sexy though. I’ll give you that. Ugh, those T-shirts. Remember when he got drunk and ripped his door out of its socket and replaced it with caution tape?”

“At least he was being honest!”

“What we’re saying is that this particular guy fits right in. You’ve never dated someone normal.”

I glared at them. “What is normal?”

“Ugh, you sound just like them,” Kate said.

“You know what’s funny about Eve?” Maya turned to Kate and spoke as if I weren’t in the room. “If you saw her walking down the street, you’d think, Totally normal person—wouldn’t you?”

“Totally.” Kate nodded profusely.

“Maybe you’d be like, Oh, she’s pretty! But that’s about it. She’s got her straight brown hair, she’s average height, those little turquoise earrings. . . . But then she puts on the slightest bit of eyeliner and starts talking about her feelings. . . . And it’s like, oh, she’s a freak.”

“A freak?” I exclaimed.

“And that’s why you like them.”

“Like who?”

“The other freaks,” Kate clarified. I put my hands on my hips and made a drawn-out huffing noise. They laughed. Yes, come one, come all, to see the girl with the sad parental situation and the stepfather who bought us a lava lamp and an Animal House poster to increase the “cool” factor in our suite.

“But! You also look normal and wear normal clothes and like to eat frozen yogurt and watch Project Runway, which is why you’re friends with us.”

“Used to be friends with you,” I added.

Maya’s eyes widened. “So is it going to be one of those situations where you go to see his band and he stares at you as he’s playing and then you have this moment where you realize that Oh my god, this song is about me? And then you go to see him after the show and there are all these bitches everywhere vying for his attention but you’re like, Move over, ladies, that shit was about me.”

I started to laugh. “You are about one romantic comedy away from losing your fucking mind.”

“Answer the question!” she said, like a judge on daytime television.

“We haven’t been on a single date yet, so I can’t foresee that situation at the moment . . . but the night is young.” I smiled.

Once we stopped staring at the door, people began showing up, funneling in by twos and threes, like very strangely dressed moths to a flame. One of us made sure to always be behind the bar, doling out drinks with a minimum level of concentration. Everyone who entered appeared to be in a daze—as they took in the plants, the blinking lights, the trash bags. They entered into a suite that looked like a cross between a really fun jungle and a dark alleyway filled with garbage.

After the first round of cocktails and conversation permeated the crowd, people started to sway to the music, obligingly at first, then with more dedication. My job was to arrange the playlist for the night. I had decided on all jungle-related songs, because of the potted plants we’d purchased, but once I got through “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Jungle Love,” my options became more limited than anticipated. So I purchased a few songs from an album called Sounds of the Jungle. Birds chirping. Rain trickling. Crickets. It was either going to go over very well at this party or very badly. Time would tell.

My suitemates and I got together for another shot, excluding all others. This was the party within the party, and it was just for us.

“To bad decisions!” Maya cried, and then the clinking of glasses.

I pretended not to look for Jesse, but I did. My spirits began to drop as I met people I’d met a thousand times before. I started to get nervous that this would be like every other night—no new arrivals, the same faces and voices we’d been socializing with for years, but in weird clothes. I pictured myself hours earlier—putting on the black lace dress, a furtive glance in the mirror, my insides bubbling away. Right then, I was asking for trouble. It happens the same way every time. Why do you do this to yourself?

As the party went on, I noticed myself sinking into a sadness that wasn’t comfortable. Some guy wearing a T-shirt with a piece of masking tape attached to it knocked into me and spilled my drink. Worse than the vodka pooling around my ankles was that I would have to talk to him.

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” I said, irrationally annoyed. “Nice to meet you.”

“Actually, we’ve met,” he said. “I’m Ben. Julian’s roommate.”

“Oh yeah.” I nodded, pretending to have just come to the realization. I stared at the words on his chest, TACOMA NARROWS BRIDGE, written on masking tape with a Sharpie. He was tall with light features, fair skin, almost but not quite blond hair.

He looked down at them, following my eyes. “It’s a bridge that collapsed . . . so it’s trash,” he said, looking for my approval. “I’m in the engineering school,” he said, by way of explanation. “I don’t know. I tried.” He shrugged. “I’ve actually been to all your parties.”

“Really? Cool.” It wasn’t cool. It was the least cool thing I’d heard all night. And was I supposed to laugh at that bridge joke?

“They’re always fun. What was the one . . . with all the red martinis?”

I looked at him like I wasn’t sure, even though I was.

“Valentine’s Day!” he said.

“Yup.”

“And you guys served only red drinks, right?”

“Yeah.” I nodded slowly. “We did.”

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with this guy. It was just that he was yet another acquaintance I’d been bumping into for years—outside the library, by the elevators, in Hamilton Deli—hello, good-bye, should I keep walking or do I have to stop this time? I wanted something more that night. My hostility was zeroing in on this awkward social obligation obstacle. Where was Jesse?

“Okay, well, I’m going to go get another drink,” I said. Another drink. Th