#5 Galit

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Pushkin

Hello.

Hey, Jackie.

Hey, Jackie.

John, I'm not doing it.

Hey, Jackie.

I was reading and taking notes on Lyme disease.

I feel like it's more important right now.

Hey, Jackie.

John.

Hey Jackie.

I said hey Jackie.

I think I hear my name.

There we go.

Hey Jackie.

I think I hear it again.

You're wanted on the telephone.

And if it isn't Johnny, I'm not home.

See, there you go.

Could I go now?

Do you remember when we used to sing that song on the school bus?

Yeah.

When's the last time you sang it?

It's been a while.

I sing it all the time.

Bye.

Have a good one.

YouTube.

Bye.

From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight.

Today's episode, Galit.

When Galit found out I was living in New York, she sent me a Facebook message.

Hi, Jonathan.

I ran into an old friend from Montreal who mentioned that you got married and moved to New York City.

Hope you are happy and thriving.

Smiley face.

I close Facebook, then open it again, reread the message, then close it.

Open it, close it, check Twitter, open it back up again, and read it one more time.

Galit was my first love.

We dated when I was 18.

It turns out that Galit was also now living in New York.

Before her, the only people who had ever even seen me naked were my parents and my family doctor.

There was one experience with a girl named Darlene.

As we kissed, she waited patiently as I snaked my left hand around her back in order to touch the breast kitty corner to the opposing hand.

This maneuver almost left my shoulder dislocated from the socket.

But it was worth it.

I had reached second base.

For U.S.

listeners, the Canadian base system is metric.

Two of our Canadian bases only equal 1.4 of yours.

So I really knew nothing.

But what need could a mama's boy, a boy loved openly, lavishly, and oftentimes insanely by his mama, have for romance?

Until the age of 18, the mere act of making my bed in the morning was enough for my mother to proclaim me a genius, a saint.

My great-aunt, fingers brittle with arthritis, played endless games of go-fish with me.

And my grandparents, diabetic, palsied, and in continuous pain, would drop everything to watch me lip-sync to the Bee Gee's tragedy, a song they could have only taken to be about the pogroms.

This feeling of unearned love, love for merely existing, that would all end with Galit.

After asking around, I learned that like me, Galit had remained single into her mid-40s.

I only got married last year, and for me, this unusually long and circuitous path to the altar certainly began with my heartbreak over Galit.

I'd always wondered if our relationship had the same impact on her.

It now looked like I'd get my chance to find out, because a week after the first message, another one arrived.

Galit wanted to see me.

Why did she want to see me?

Let me get a level on you.

Hello, hello, one, two, three.

My name is Emily.

This is my wife, Emily.

Unlike most people, she doesn't seem to mind when I bring along a microphone to hold between myself and the world.

I'm from Watertown.

Hello.

Hello, hello.

Hello, hello, hello, hello.

We're walking to work together when I bring up Galit's invitation.

In the short time I've been married, if I've learned anything at all, it's this.

In matters of connubial delicacy, it's best to get straight to the point.

So, um.

Um.

So, you know, my

um

my first girlfriend,

Galit,

just recently got in touch with me on Facebook.

I know her name.

You do?

Did you know that it means little wave in Hebrew?

Yes, you've told me that like six times.

Anyway, it's a long time ago.

I don't know what you're getting so worked up about.

So jealous about.

She's living in New York now

and she wants.

Look at the smile on your face before you even get any words out.

Look at the delight.

It's a delight to be walking to work with you.

I don't know why I'm so giggly about this.

But anyway, she asked if I wanted to get together.

I think maybe that's a question you should ask yourself, Jonathan.

Why are you so giggly about it?

I think you're making me giggly.

But she asked if I wanted to get together.

You should.

Emily is not jealous.

She trusts me.

She's accepting not only of my quirks, but of my shortcomings too.

Among them, a tendency to cut myself off emotionally.

Where are you right now?

She asks sometimes, when we're arguing, and I recede so deeply into myself that she can no longer see even a flicker of the man she married.

What Emily doesn't know is how this defensive crouch all started.

Like, I know sometimes you feel I could be sort of emotionally,

I don't know, like stoic, I guess.

It's a generous term for it.

In some ways, I feel like

as much as my upbringing or my education or my whatever, like I just feel

as though she probably played as major or maybe

even

more major a role in my

in who I became.

And that like I don't think I've ever been able to make myself quite as

vulnerable as I was in that relationship.

I just didn't know any better.

I had no defenses, I had no game.

Isn't that what love is sort of about?

Just being vulnerable in that way.

I want to be vulnerable with you, but I think in some ways.

Sorry, I just dropped the recorder.

After we say our goodbyes, I'm left wondering whether, like me, Ghalit also now finds herself incapable of laying her heart out, wide open like a dropped gimlet-issue tape recorder that I know Alex is totally going to blame me for breaking, even though it never really rewinded properly.

And there's peanut butter smeared into the headphone jack that I didn't even do.

So I head into the subway and set off to see Ghalit.

It was soon after we started dating that together, Galit and I discovered New York.

Twice a year, our junior college would charter a bus that set off at midnight from Montreal to New York.

Getting off the bus at 8 a.m., I tilted my fedora towards my ponytail.

and took it all in.

New York was where we discovered my two new best friends, art and culture.

It was where my friend Parker and I stayed up until 3 a.m.

inventing the philosophy of what we called the even now, a tractatus that, best I can recall, had to do with how life was continually and constantly happening.

Even now.

And now.

And even now.

And it was.

A typical journal entry from the time would read, saw a man on the subway with no shirt, reading a book about life and other galaxies.

Every thought, every sight, was a new journal entry because life was brand new and my heart was wide open.

Ghalit had my heart at its most open.

After me, Galit, did your heart start to close up too?

Outside the Arlington, waiting for Galit.

Our plan was to meet outside the old hotel where the bus used to drop us.

It's where our love affair with New York began, a love that would eventually bring us both back here in adulthood.

It's hard to imagine Galit as a woman in her 40s.

I'll be dead by 32, she would say, when we were teenagers, if not physically, then spiritually.

She was precocious about death, a gothy kind of girl before there was such a thing.

Galit would dress in black, cutting off her black tights at the thigh to make them into old-fashioned stockings.

She looked like one of those creepy Edward Gorey children, all grown up.

Would she still dress in black, still possess a frown that lit up a room?

As I wait, I study the women walking towards me.

Any one of them could be Galit.

A heavyset woman with something of Galit's slinky, tentative gait.

A businesswoman making eye contact as she speaks into her Bluetooth.

Someone eating a honeydew.

Had Galit become that type?

With each person, I audition a different feeling.

Panic, regret, cowardice, and.

Just got a text that she's going to be 10 minutes late.

Of course, my go-to.

Gum chewing, pocket watch, swinging casualness, masking a bad case at the trots.

And then?

Hi.

How are you?

I recognized your walk.

Bye.

I'm recording.

Is that okay?

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

I feel like it's self-conscious.

Do you want me to turn it off for

now?

Yeah, maybe just a few minutes.

Yeah,

I mean, yeah.

Yeah, okay.

You're gallant, boyish, as though any change from the Jonathan you were at 18 will mark you as a phony.

You are the way you always were, and she is smilier than you remember.

Pretty, with long straight hair, big eyeglasses, and in tights that are no longer black, but colorful.

What do you remember about those trips?

I remember tons about these trips.

Uh.

For the next couple of hours, Gleet and I tour through the lobby and hallways of the old Arlington.

Oh, do you remember this?

And through the nearby parking lots that housed flea markets, where we once shopped for broken pocket watches.

Yeah, remember we would spend hours like going through people's junk.

Now it's just filled with cars.

It used to be filled with magic.

We catch up, but mostly we reminisce.

Remember looking for Kerouac tapes?

Remember that?

Yeah, Kerouac recordings and Ginsburg recordings.

Galit's memories run towards the splendor of youth.

Buying bootleg audio cassettes on Spring Street.

Drinking peach schnapps on the Hotel Fire Escape.

But I have other memories, too, and questions.

Among them, how did I get this way?

I just don't know how to bring any of it up.

Uh, do you wanna sit?

Or yeah?

Seems like the benches are named after racing horses.

You haven't changed.

I'm bald.

You know you were joking about being bald when you were 16.

I wasn't joking about it.

I was.

You must remember I my hair was already thinning.

Right, so it was an ongoing narrative that you've embraced completely.

I have embraced it.

It's very healthy.

My therapist encouraged me to go bald.

You are saying, see, I'm still funny.

Back then, when alone, you tell her jokes in your head to get the wording just right for when you'd see her next.

Keeping Galit loving you felt like a full-time job.

But now your full-time job is hosting and producing a podcast, which requires sponsors.

After the break, the breakup.

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Uh.

Do you have any more memories?

As the daylight starts to fade and the weather turns cool, I try to guide our reminiscences away from the feel-good, I've had the time of my life, and I owe it all to you, Montage, to the digging up memory lane to expose the soil from which this clenched, constipated flower of my heart refused to bloom, Montage.

As hard as it is,

I have to ask the question.

Do you remember, like, what do you think went wrong?

Like, why didn't it work out between us?

Um.

Um.

I'm trying to remember.

Galit looks off to the side and screws up her mouth.

It's the same move as when we were teenagers.

I can never tell whether she was being reflective or just buying time.

I still can't.

I don't remember the end of our relationship.

I guess I just remember that

that feeling of biting.

But I don't know what it was about.

But do you remember like a lot of weeping?

I do now that you mentioned it.

I do remember.

I wept over Ghalit a lot.

In weeping, I was a brave barbarian.

I wept at friends' houses, on park benches, in darkened video arcades.

While in the past 10 years, I've only cried once, I used to cry in front of Ghalit all the time.

If she failed to choose me for her trivial pursuit team, I'd be sure I'd blown it, that it was all over between us.

When we went to the movies, I'd stare at her face more than the screen.

And one day, while following behind her on the highway, she and her mom's Honda, me and my dad's station wagon,

I was so afraid of any cars getting between us that I almost lost control of the car.

In my mind, she was always trying to get away.

I mean, I don't think I was probably

very fun to hang out with at all.

I mean, I think that I was probably

anxious and depressed and

not a lot of fun, really.

Yeah, I guess I don't.

I just

remember

our relationship as my first love, and so I just think of that part of it.

I don't remember the rest, but now that you bring it up, I guess maybe you weren't that fun to be around.

Maybe I wasn't that fun to be around.

I remember how one day as we watched a couple chase each other around a maple tree, trying to spray each other with water, how Ghalid had wistfully asked, why can't we be more like that?

And I'd said, because we're nothing like that.

And then she started to change, wanting to be like that.

leaving me behind because I didn't know how to be like that.

No matter how hard I forced myself, and I forced myself with clench-fisted determination, I could not come off as unforced.

Whenever I tried to be free and easy, foot racing, tickle fighting, a lamp would get broken, a testicle accidentally sat upon.

Instead of allowing her to grow away from me, I tried to impose a closeness that only pushed her away faster.

I remember, like,

we were in Westmount like on Grosvenor Street and

like a huge thick blanket of snow had fallen.

It was nighttime.

We were outside my dad's house and we were having like a huge fight.

And I remember these huge snowflakes just kind of like falling down around us in slow motion.

It's like one of those moments where it was just so picturesque and so emotionally painful that you know you're gonna remember that moment.

Maybe we were breaking up.

Was that the breakup moment?

I don't remember.

I did remember.

As she talks, I see us on the driveway like figurines in a snow globe.

Neon snowflakes the size of boxing gloves gently somersaulting to earth all around us.

There were so many false endings and trial runs, but that evening, her resolve was strong.

She had guests inside that she wanted to get back to, and I begged her, all pride gone, to please stay with me a little while longer, so we could talk, but all I could do was sob and shake.

I was still on the cusp of childhood, and it all had something of the toy store tantrum about it.

My reasoning was that if someone I loved as much as her thought I wasn't worth being with, then I didn't want to be with me either.

In solidarity with Galit, I wanted to walk away from me too and go with her.

I wanted the impossible.

It was a scary feeling to want someone that much, and I spent the rest of my life running away from that feeling.

I don't know if you would call it traumatized, but I definitely don't think

I ever allowed myself to be quite as vulnerable in relationships.

Did I leave lasting, like a lasting impact?

I wish I could answer your question.

I wish there was one like

way that I could frame

our relationship having a monumental impact on the rest of my life, but I don't know, it was so long ago, and we were together for like a year.

I don't know.

Two years.

Two years?

Two years?

That's like 20 years in dog years or whatever.

For U.S.

listeners, Canadian dog years are measured on a metric scale.

Oh, who am I kidding?

This hurt.

It's beginning to dawn on me that the real reason Galit wanted to see me, her big secret agenda, was to have a nice afternoon.

She wanted to catch up and have fun, and I wanted to overanalyze and parse.

In other words, our dynamic hadn't changed.

But even if I wanted to, I couldn't stop asking these questions.

You can't really point to like things that you've learned from our relationship in retrospect, can you?

I'm trying to remember.

Drawing a blank.

I mean, are your questions coming from your own

thoughts about that?

Yeah, like I think I had this idea that love is unconditional, and you could just keep testing it and testing it.

But I learnt that eventually it'll break.

And I think

going into my first relationship, I sort of felt like you just put everything out there and you make yourself vulnerable.

And if you get hurt, it's not your fault, because you're just being sincere.

And then I think I learnt that

you can't do that.

But I think at the expense maybe of feeling maybe like I need to keep myself reined in.

Yeah.

So like you got to see the face that like I ended up shutting away in an iron mask for the rest for the next 20 years.

Do you feel like

in your relationship now that that's a face that you can show again or that face that you want to reclaim?

I'm working on it.

Eventually it gets too cold outside.

So we decide to leave the park in search of soup.

Do you want to go in here?

Yeah,

okay.

I will turn this off.

At the lunch counter, as we sit there, side by side, I ask her how it feels to see me.

And she says it feels like getting together with family.

And I could feel it too.

Two people who felt comfortable and close, the details of their shared past no longer important.

We were just together.

Eating soup.

After we eat, we head to the subway, Ghalit going uptown and I back to Brooklyn.

We say our goodbyes, and something about them feels final, like maybe this is the last time we'll ever see each other.

When I get home, the apartment's empty.

Emily's out with friends.

I sit for a while in the quiet, and then pick up a novel I've been reading for the past six months.

But I keep putting it down to look around my living room at the records and paintings, both mine and Emily's, and wonder what my 18-year-old self would have made of my New York existence.

At close to midnight, I'm awoken by a text from Galit.

I had a few thoughts I recorded just now on my phone, it says.

Do you want me to send them to you?

I close the app,

then open it again, reread the message, then close it, open it, close it, check Twitter, open it back up, and read it one more time.

Then I write back saying, sure.

Hey, Jonathan.

I just

wanted to add to her conversation that I don't think I was able to absorb everything you were saying,

but walking away from it and having a chance to think just brought up a lot of emotion and sadness.

And

I just wanted to say

if

anything

I ever did

in our relationship caused you pain and

led you to put up

walls, I just wanted to say I'm sorry.

And

yeah, I don't know why I'm getting so emotional, but I just thought I'd share this and

that's it.

Thanks.

I write Galit back, telling her that there's nothing to apologize for.

Then I apologize for making her feel bad, and say that, in fact, considering how young we were, she'd been really mature and patient with me.

It feels terrible to have made her sad.

Somehow, through the course of our day, Galit and I had switched places.

My heaviness had given way to what, in my life, passes for understanding, and her nostalgia had become tinged with sadness.

Eventually, Gleet writes back.

We all get hurt, she writes, and we all build walls to protect ourselves and then spend the rest of our lives trying to take down those walls.

So, hearing you talk about that was just a reminder of my own struggle to take down those walls and open my heart.

It also reminded me of the purity of young love and how the ability to fully give and receive love seems to get more complicated as we get older.

In short, it's all good.

Ghalit was right.

It does get more complicated.

But it also gets simpler.

The one time I've cried in the past 10 years was at my wedding.

And I wasn't crying for fear that Emily would leave me.

I was crying because I knew she wouldn't.

You move from teen pain to adult pain.

You build up walls, then tear them down, build them up again, check Twitter, and then, hopefully, take them back down for good.

Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home

Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damaged deposit, take this moment to decide

if we meant it, if we tried,

or felt around for far too much

from things that accidentally touched.

Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Chris Neary and Khalila Holt.

The senior producer is Wendy Dorr.

Editing by Alex Bloomberg, Paul Tuff, and Jorge Just.

Special thanks to Emily Condon, Stevie Lane, and the inimitable.

The inimitable, Jackie Cohen.

The show is mixed by Haley Shaw.

Music by Christine Fellows.

Additional music credits for this episode can be found on our website gimletmedia.com slash heavyweight.

Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw.

Follow us on Twitter at heavyweight or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com.

We'll have a new episode next week.

Hey, Alex.

Oh, do you need the studio?

You down in here?

Uh, yeah, yeah, just wrapping up.

Get my stuff here.

Yeah, take it easy.

Okay, thanks.

Testing, testing, one, two, one, two, testing, testing.

Hello, and welcome to Startup.

I'm Alex Bloomberg.

Is that peanut butter?

Goldstein.

This is an iHeart podcast.