The Perfect Man

WHEN

GOES BAD

The Perfect Man Is he too good to be true?

It was during my first trip to Britain over five years ago that my

path initially collided with Gavin’s.

My grandmother, my sister and I were three silly American women lugging suitcases around England, which contained the entire weight of each of our chest of drawers. The suitcases were like anvils tying us down to each railroad track at every station. We struggled just to move our luggage an inch, so it was always some faceless Englishman or Scot who became our hero, freeing us from the tracks. They would swoop by, attempt to pick up our luggage, struggle with the weight of it for a moment, and then drag it down to the taxi lanes. They would wander out of our lives as quickly as

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they had wandered in. We never had to ask and they never even looked back for a thank-you. It seemed to be their duty as polite British men to help out women in need.

None of us had ever really traveled abroad before. Well, what I really mean is that none of us had ever had to do the jumping from train-to-train and city-to-city thing before, so it was pretty obvious that we didn’t know what it meant to backpack around Europe.

Even so, this first trip confirmed one thing for me: I longed to travel. I wanted to experience everything, meet everybody, and learn every culture.

As I stepped off the train at each station, I would let out a deep breath, imagining myself cleansing away all preconceived notions I might have about a place. I would then open my mind to absorbing the thoughts of the people around me. I wanted to eat and drink where they did; I wanted to love and respect the same things they did; I wanted to enjoy all the things that they enjoyed.

But in order to do this fully, I needed to have a sense of freedom from my own life in the States. I needed to be able to go from place to place without having luggage tie me down—or anything else, for that matter.

Then the answer came to me. A group of backpackers walked onto our train, and three stops later they jumped off. It was that simple. Any questions I had about how my trip around the world would be completed were gone at that instant. From then on I secretly admired the travelers who carried only backpacks. I was amazed at how they moved independently with ease, and that they could just jump off of a train at will and have everything they needed to survive.

Not only did I think that a backpack was the answer to quenching my wanderlust, but Gavin was another milestone in my life during that first trip to Britain. I saw him as a way for me to quickly lose dependence on my old life and make an easy transition into a new life. He would guide me into a whole new world of experiences. It was easy for me to imagine this, because the first time I met him

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he put me under a sort of spell. The people, the circumstances, and the atmosphere that surrounded me had overloaded my senses and completely hypnotized me with their brilliance.

I really wasn’t even supposed to have met Gavin my first night in Edinburgh. My sister Gillian kept trying to talk me into going out, but all I wanted to do was lie down since my head was still pounding and swaying with the motion of the train.

But she finally convinced me to go check out the town. Of course we went straight to the pubs—which is what I knew “check out the town” really meant in her vocabulary. There was a whole strip of them on a cobblestone promenade of sorts.

She and I dropped into a few pubs before finally walking up to a nightclub called “The Underground.” There was a sign on the door that read, YOU MUST BE EIGHTEEN TO ENTER, and there was a man standing by the door who seemed to serve as the exclamation point.

“Come on, Gillian,” I said to her, glancing wearily at the door.

“I don’t even look eighteen. I’m not going to be allowed in there, especially not in jeans and a tee shirt.”

I felt really young and really American, which was probably due to the fact that my long blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail, I had no makeup on, and my feet were clad in the typical Keds and white bobby socks of a high school cheerleader.

But Gillian simply answered, “Yes, you will. Just act confident.”

Looking as graceful and elegant as she always did, she strode up to the door with her curly auburn hair falling seductively into her face. I followed, hoping that the doorman wouldn’t pay any attention to me after seeing her. It seemed to work, because we both walked right in.

The nightclub was dark and there were dance lights flashing everywhere. My eyes took a moment to adjust, but then the first thing I saw was Gavin. My breath caught in my throat and everything around me suddenly became so clear. It was like the world had come into focus and had swallowed me up in all of its

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glorious detail.

He was standing with a group of guys around a table, looking right back at me with the same fascination. He was wearing a silver button-down shirt and his black slacks had a crease down the front, which showed he had actually taken the time to carefully iron them. The black shiny shoes he wore matched the leather belt that was neatly fitted around his slim waist. His short, clean-cut hair was slicked back with gel, making it darker than it already was, and also making his smooth baby-face stand out even more.

I couldn’t move. No, I didn’t want to move. I wanted to be drenched in my surroundings. I wanted to be wrapped up in them, to savor their taste.

I had always believed in love at first sight, and I had hoped it would happen to me one day, but I never expected it, especially with someone like Gavin. I had always imagined myself with the “All-American Boy,” the type with sun-bleached hair, sun-kissed skin and blue eyes that could still shine through all that sun. So I couldn’t believe the state of shock the sight of Gavin had put me in.

Shortly after my sister had managed to sit me down at a table, a Viking (yes, he was a Viking) also sat down at our table. He was seven feet tall and had long blonde hair. I was searching for his little metal hat with horns on it and was staring at him like, Who the hell are you?

The Viking started right off with, “I am . . . uh . . . what’s the word . . . uh . . . missing home?”

“Homesick?” I asked, annoyed and distracted.

“Yes, that’s it. Homesick.” He proceeded to talk about how he was on some boat, and had been traveling from place to place for work, blah, blah, blah, and then almost in the same breath he threw in, “So, you will go back to my hotel with me?”

If I had a drink, I would have spat it across the table. I quickly turned to my sister for help, and as if to surprise me even more, she was gone. Great, I thought, just great. I looked over at Gavin and

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the other men by the door, and there she was, talking to them. I couldn’t believe it. I gave her a look that meant “SOS,” and she quickly motioned for me to come over.

“Uh . . . ” was all I could think of to say to the Viking. Finally, I managed, “Thanks, but I can’t.” I stood up to walk over to my sister, but I was quickly sitting once again. The Viking had grabbed my arm and placed me back in my seat.

“Excuse you,” I said as I pulled my arm away from him. I stood up again to show him that I wouldn’t sit down just because he had made me. So he also stood up, and I found myself suddenly staring at his belly button, which quickly swayed me into telling him that I would just wander over and ask my sister if I could go with him.

This obviously didn’t matter much because he yanked me by my arm and started forcing me out of the bar. I was a bit surprised he didn’t grab me by my hair.

Gavin and his friends immediately blocked the door, and Gavin surprised me by saying “F--- off” in Norwegian, which I supposed was just a wild guess as to the language the Viking spoke. Needless to say, it was a good guess, because it really managed to piss him off, and he lunged toward Gavin. Luckily, the Viking’s pals happened to stop him just in time. They held the Viking back, said something to him, he yelled a few words in response, and he pushed past them out the door.

I was saved, and it didn’t take long for my attention to be diverted back to where it had originally been focused. Gavin and I spoke for a while that evening, and I learned that he was staying in the Edinburgh Castle. Thoughts of royalty flashed through my head, but I soon found out that he was really a member of the Royal Military Police. He and his friends talked Gillian and me into taking a look around the castle that night.

As we walked toward the castle, I felt like I was drifting into a dream. I had only seen places like it in the books my parents used to read to me as a child. I never thought that any place like it actually existed. The castle majestically overlooked the city. A hill lined

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with lights from buildings along the Royal Mile sloped down from one side of it, and a cliff dramatically dropped off from the other. At the base of the cliff was a park that sank below the level of the city.

Fog had settled into the park, creating the illusion that the castle was floating up above the clouds, and I easily identified with it.

I noticed that there was not a single tourist to be found at the castle, only a few military people passing by every now and then.

The guys told us that tourists weren’t allowed up to the castle after a certain time. I guess they were hoping to make us feel lucky that we got this opportunity, but it actually made me nervous, and I began to think that they had an ulterior motive for bringing us up there.

I thought my age and my inexperience would soon show through, so I was relieved that by the time my sister and I were on our way back to the bed and breakfast Gavin still hadn’t tried anything with me. He hadn’t even tried to hold my hand when we walked around the castle without the others. He just talked about the castle’s history and shared a few stories about old spirits who periodically wandered the castle’s corridors late at night.

My sister and I made plans to see the guys the next night as well. They were taking us to this big military show called the “Military Tattoo” at the castle. I was so excited to see Gavin again that I couldn’t help stopping by the castle earlier in the day just to see him at work. Looking back, it was these short moments with Gavin that meant the most, when I got to see how he was in his day to day life. He had told me the night before exactly where he would be working, so I walked around to the door and peeked my head through.

There he sat at the front desk looking as bored as ever, leaning his chin on his hands, but he also looked as cute as ever in his green uniform with a red MP band wrapped around his arm. The minute I walked in the door, he jumped up out of his seat and began to fumble over his words as he attempted to explain how busy he had been until then. He showed me some files to prove to me that he had been doing something, and then quickly pulled them away,

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saying, “Oh, I forgot, that’s confidential.”

His nervousness was making me laugh, and after a few seconds things really did start to get busy for him. His phone rang, his superior walked in, people were asking him questions left and right, and he was so flustered that he couldn’t come up with a straight answer for anyone. I quickly told him I would see him later that evening so as not to be a distraction anymore, and snuck back out the door.

The first thing Gavin did when we met up that night was to hold my hand. I was amazed at how peaceful and complete my soul felt.

It was the first time I knew that my soul wasn’t naturally this way.

All the nervousness that I had previously had was washed away. I realized that there was no need for it. Later, as we walked out the castle entrance and headed down the Royal Mile, three military women came up and pinched Gavin’s cheeks and talked about how adorable he was. They finally realized I was standing next to him and apologized.

“You must be the one he was rambling on about late last night in the Officer’s Club,” one of them said. “You can’t leave Edinburgh. He’ll be so sad if you go.”

His face turned bright red and he self-consciously touched his neck as he looked away.

“Oh, we’re sorry, Gavin. Did we ruin your secret?” They looked at me. “We swear, he was drinking himself silly on orange juice last night. All of the lads were laughing at him, but we were all drowning him in pity.”

When he took me back to our bed and breakfast that evening, he finally kissed me. We stood outside by the gate kissing for about half an hour before my sister came back out to drag me inside. He quickly scribbled his address down on a piece of scrap paper, and also gave me the red MP band that he had wrapped around his arm earlier that day and told me not to forget him. Then he jumped into a taxi, and I didn’t see him again for three years.

I look at that piece of scrap paper even now—an old piece of

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an envelope I’d had on hand at the time—and it’s hard for me to imagine that this was really my only link to him. I used this piece of paper to write him letters each month. I kept his armband in my diary so that I could look at it when I opened it each day. His cologne had imprinted itself on my clothes that night, and I didn’t wash my shirt for months after I came back to the U.S. because it smelled like him.

One day, about two years after I had met him, I was walking through the airport in Seattle when the smell of his cologne drifted past me. I stopped in my tracks and turned around and around to see if Gavin was anywhere to be found. I finally laughed at myself and how stupid I must look, and woke up to the fact that there was no way he could be in Washington.

The day I returned home from this first trip to England, there was already a letter waiting from Gavin. Each time I received a letter from him I would hide in my room, and I would read it over and over again until I had squeezed out every drop of meaning from every word. He would tell me how beautiful I was, and especially my eyes.

He told me about all of his plans for when I came back to England, such as going out for “a night on the tiles,” which I later found out means “a night on the dance floor.” He sent me baby pictures, military pictures, and pictures of himself with his mates.

He would close each letter with All my love, always and forever, and sometimes he would even add in an extra And ever. To me, he was perfect. He seemed totally and completely enraptured with me, and I was totally and completely taken with his words. I created a new life for myself through these letters, and I thought about how I would make Middlesbrough new and exciting for him as well.

I put together the next trip to England merely for my own benefit.

I wanted to see Gavin once again. I had devised this great plan of working abroad in England for the summer, and then I talked my sister into going as well. I merely thought that if I was going to go all the way to England, I might as well spend a bit of time there,

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and before I knew it, I was off once again, but this time, it was for an entire summer. I sat on the plane to England selfishly making plans for all the time I would spend with Gavin under the guise that they were all plans my sister and I would enjoy together—little did I know, this is actually what would happen.

All summer long I worked, went out with my sister, and wrote letters to Gavin, but to my surprise, no response ever came. Finally, I was so fed up with it all that I called my mom and begged her to buy me a ticket home. As luck would have it, the next day, after my mom confirmed that she had bought me a ticket back to the States, a letter arrived from Gavin.

He said that he was so sorry and couldn’t believe that I was in England. He had been stationed in Germany for six months. I was so miserable that I cried in my room for three hours. I was trying to figure out what kind of game Fate was playing with us.

How could our timing be so off?

Shortly after I had received Gavin’s letter, Gillian and I decided to quit our jobs in London two weeks early, so we could have one last rendezvous with our friend, Danny. Danny was an American guy from Tennessee, whom we had become good friends with while we were in London.

We all booked train tickets up to Edinburgh, and we hung out for four days around the city—playing on the carousel in the park, dancing down the streets, singing in the pubs—basically just drawing attention to the fact that we were loud, obnoxious Americans. Even though I was having a great time with Danny and my sister, memories of my first trip to Britain and the time I had spent in Edinburgh with Gavin flooded my mind. I was secretly hoping he was stationed at the castle once again, and that I would be able to pop in and surprise him at the front desk, or that he would at least be in one of the pubs we walked into.

However, I never saw him, and Gillian, Danny and I finally managed to make ourselves board a train back to London.

During this ride back to London, we pulled into a station, and

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I noticed a sign that read MIDDLESBROUGH. When it finally clicked that this was where Gavin was from, I instantly jumped up, grabbed my pack, and told my sister and Danny that I was getting off of the train. It was a reaction, an instinct, my gut was telling me that this was what I had to do.

“Where are you going?” My sister stood up out of shock. “We have to be in London for our flight home!”

I told her I would be there, but that I had to stop here to see Gavin first. She hesitated but seemed to understand, for she had really known all along that the whole reason I wanted to work abroad in England was so I could be together with Gavin.

However, I was also her little sister, and it was difficult for her to let me just get off of a train on my own and actually trust that I was making the right decision. But I think she realized that I needed to be the one to figure that out, and I definitely wasn’t going to miss my chance to see him once again.

I stepped off the train and looked around. As I wandered around the station, an old man with a concerned look on his face walked up to me and asked if I knew where I wanted to go. When he realized that I didn’t have a clue, he finally guided me down to the taxi lanes, and told the taxi driver to take me to a bed and breakfast.

As soon as I got to the bed and breakfast, I sat down, took in a deep breath, and dialed the number that Gavin had written on the letter I had received only a few days before.

“Hello?” It was his voice! My whole body tingled.

“Hi, Gavin? This is Adrienne.”

“Oh, my God! How are you? Where are you, for that matter?”

“I’m here. I’m here in Middlesbrough.” My voice was shaking.

I had actually never spoken to him on the phone before. We had only talked in person and in letters.

“Seriously? Well, tell me where you are, I’ll come pick you up.”

I could hear the genuine excitement in his voice.

I was now eighteen, a few weeks away from nineteen, the age he thought I had been three years ago. I was nervous to tell him

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that part, but I was hoping he would understand and that it wouldn’t matter.

I waited outside for his car to pull up. When it finally did and he got out, I could hardly move once again. He ran up and hugged me, saying, “You are just as beautiful as the first time I met you.” It was so surreal to actually have him standing next to me, holding me.

The whole time we were out that evening, we could not stop smiling. It was like we were high on drugs rather than our own endorphins. We talked about everything, our entire lives, from our upbringing to what we wanted in the future. We talked about the past three years in particular, and how our relationship had grown so much just through our letters.

When he brought me back to the bed and breakfast, he told me that he would be back to pick me up the next day, after he finished work. I couldn’t let him leave my sight that soon, though. I was afraid he would disappear once again, so I asked him to come inside instead.

He did, and we kissed just like the first time we met. We were the perfect kissing partners. I always think that it’s not that people do or don’t know how to kiss, it’s that people have different styles. We had the same exact style. We had known each other through letters for three years, and we were finally able to touch each other again.

He moved my straight, blonde hair out of my face. “I’ve told all my mates about your eyes.”

The room of the bed and breakfast quickly faded around me. “Are you on the pill?”

I laughed. “I’ve never even had sex before.”

He stopped kissing my neck, and looked up at me. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I’m positive. I’ve never been more sure in my life.” I had lost boyfriends in high school and through my first year in college because I wouldn’t sleep with them. I had been saving myself for Gavin.

I floated through the next three days, constantly reminding

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myself that I really was in Middlesbrough with Gavin. I had dreamt about this meeting for so long, coming up with every word and every gesture in my mind, that it seemed like another one of those moments I had created. Even after I left, I would wonder if it all really happened. Did he really introduce me to his family and a few of his mates? Did I really sit with his mum and have tea? Did we really get our “night on the tiles?”

The morning before I left, he gave me a gold ring that his mother had given him, and we cried and told each other that we were in love. (Exactly one year after he placed this ring on my hand, I let a girlfriend of mine try it on while we were standing on a pier overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It so happens that it accidentally slipped out of her fingers and slowly rolled off the pier and into the water. I always wondered if this was a sign of some sort. Perhaps looking back, I can now figure it out.)

He called me the next day in London and told me he had a pit in his stomach and he hadn’t been able to eat all day. I confessed to him that I was sick with love as well, and that I didn’t know how I would survive another three years without him while I finished college. I promised him that as soon as I finished, I would head straight back to England to be with him.

Once again, there was a card waiting for me when I returned home. He wished me a happy birthday and he confessed to me that his life would never be the same. And then, for five months after I received this card, I ran to my mailbox at the university everyday, hoping and praying that there would be another blue letter in it. All of his letters came in light blue envelopes with dark red and blue striped borders, and sometimes with a hint of cologne that would float off of the page and tease me with his presence.

I had told all my girlfriends about this Englishman that I was in love with. I spoke to them about the first time I had met Gavin, about the three years of writing letters, and about meeting up with him again over the summer. I wanted to read each love letter to them, and debate what each sentence meant. I wanted them

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to be envious of my relationship that was reminiscent of a romance novel.

But as each week went by, and then each month, I started mentioning him less and less, and I began to feel like the foolish schoolgirl that I was. No matter how many times I wrote to him, I never saw any letters in return; nothing ever came.

That is, until one year later, when tears streamed down my face at my university mailbox, right there in the bare, tiled hallway, where hundreds of students were like an army heading toward the lunch lines. As I pulled my mail out, I saw a light green envelope with a card in it. I turned the card over, and there was his name neatly printed on the back. He had even used a heart sticker to seal it.

As the excitement built up inside of me, I could barely pull out the rest of my mail, but as I did, there was a second letter. This one was in the typical light blue envelope that I was used to, and his name appeared on the back once again. He had sent these to me for Valentine’s Day. One card said, Will you be mine, Valentine? and had a fuzzy, white teddy bear on the front holding a bundle of red roses. He wrote in this card that I completely owned his heart.

In the second letter, he tried to explain his sudden absence by saying that he had been stationed in Gibraltar. The letter contained a picture of himself with “the lads� on a military base.

He had signed off with Hugs and kisses, and then the usual, All my love, always and forever.

All was forgiven. I ran off to show my friends. The letters, the pictures, the professions of love, the search for meaning where there was none, it had all started once again.

When I finally graduated from the university, I decided to make good on my promise. I wrote Gavin a letter to let him know that I was on my way. I bought a ticket, packed a backpack, and headed off to England once again.

As my train pulled up to the station in Middlesbrough, England, my body was full of excitement and my stomach full of butterflies. I jumped up before the train even stopped so that I could be the first

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one off.

Most people never follow through on these types of promises.

They just say or write the words, but don’t really mean them. I was there to show that I was different.

As the doors opened, I saw Gavin standing there. My heart started pounding. I stepped off the train, dropped my backpack and jumped into his arms. This was it, we were together. I didn’t have to go back to the States to finish school; I didn’t have to leave because I had committed myself to someone else; and I didn’t have to return to Arizona, since I had already broken away from that life years ago to attend school. I was all his and this new way of life was all mine.

I reveled in these thoughts for about twenty seconds, before I realized that something was wrong. He hugged me, but it wasn’t the same hug that I had been greeted with before. Even though my body was against his, and I could feel his breath on my neck, there was distance in the way he was touching me. I stepped back to look into his eyes, and he was looking at me with confusion, like he had something to tell me.

I slowly slid my hands down his arms, feeling each one of his tense muscles, and stepped back even further to give him space.

I wanted him to feel like he could talk if he needed to. I let my hands sit in his for a moment, and then asked, “What is it?”

He swallowed hard, took in a deep breath, and squeezed my hands as if he was telling me how difficult it was to let them go, but he did let them go. He turned to look over his shoulder. It was then that I finally noticed the woman who was standing behind him. I remember turning my head toward her and setting my eyes on her, but I can’t even recall what she looked like.

He didn’t need to say anything. I just started shaking my head, no.

“This is—” he started. No, it couldn’t be. The tears started coming before I could even think about the strength that I had always meant to portray in moments like these, but I had never had a moment like this, and I knew that I never would in the future,

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either—I wouldn’t allow it. I started backing up before he could finish his sentence, “—my wife.”

I was tripping over people as they continued to come off the train. They were bumping into me, pushing me forward, forward to what was supposed to have been my destiny.

He took a step toward me but realized it was no use, there was nothing he could do, so he stopped and just stared at me with those eyes. Those eyes that used to linger over my body as if they were a hand running along my skin, lightly touching and tracing my knee up to my inner thigh. I used to look into those eyes and try to read the soul behind the blue-green windows. I tried, even now. I thought I could read grief, torment, hurt, and surprisingly, the same love that had always shown there. It was a love that had kept me enraptured, I now know, for too long.

The people stopped coming off of the train, so I returned to it.

Gavin’s wife had never stepped forward to join him by his side. It was like she was just a piece of the background, a part of a different life for him, and the train that had led me to the slaughter would now be my savior and lead me away to my own new life. I clutched onto the handrails as I tried to rescue myself from the whirlpool of thoughts swirling around me, tugging on me, drowning me, making me dizzy.

I finally managed to pull myself back onto the train. I stood on the steps and stared at him for a moment. But I had to sit down because I knew my legs would give way any second.

I was finally able to turn away from him, and turn away from the life that I had always dreamed of having. It had been stolen from me.

I collapsed into one of the seats by the window and wondered how this could have happened to me. I tried to think if there was some hint of it in any of his letters.

Perhaps it was when he wrote to me that his mates thought he was living in a fantasy world. I had mistakenly thought this was just another one of his sweet statements about how fantastical our

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love was. I realized that I had indeed squeezed out all the meaning of this statement—and every other one, for that matter—but that I had only ever believed the parts that I wanted to. He obviously had had his doubts. He had doubted us. I guess I couldn’t blame him, though; I had my doubts as well. I had been enamored with a few other guys over the years, but it never led to this. I never married anybody else.

The train started up and I tried to reach out to Gavin one last time. He looked at me once more before he turned, passed his wife, and walked out the door.

As I sat on the train heading away from Middlesbrough feeling nauseous, dozens of emotions swept over me—anger, love, sadness, despair, and amazingly enough, peace. Yes, I finally came to peace with everything. I was finally able to grasp the fact that I had only spent a total of one week of my entire life with Gavin. Even though I had known him for years, I knew him mostly through his letters. In person, I knew his shyness, I knew his body, and I knew that I loved him. But I had created the image of a perfect man in my own mind. I had never known him to be upset or to complain about anything. We had never fought. He had never been mad at me.

No man over the past six years could ever have matched up to all of this, and this is why those relationships had never lasted.

I realized that he must have come to this realization a lot sooner than I had. I began to think my train was not only heading away from Middlesbrough, but heading away from Wonderland as well. It was time for my life to move on. It was time to look in a different box for another matching piece of the puzzle, and maybe it wouldn’t fit so perfectly.

Perhaps now I could find someone and be thankful for the fact that he had faults. I felt free; I was carrying a backpack and I could move around the world the way I wanted to without anything holding me down. THE END