Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts Read Online Free PDF

morning after I had just paid for breakfast. The moment struck me as strange because Frank had just pulled the “forgot my wallet again” routine and we were suddenly surrounded by a chorus of car alarms that had been set off by an earthquake measuring 3.2 on the Richter scale which had its epicenter in Barstow.
    I should have known that he wasn’t really serious about the engagement because I never got a ring. Over the following year he would tell me that he was going ring shopping, but always ended up at an all-night gambling club in Gardena located near an off-ramp of the 710 freeway.
    Our relationship was OK as long as I bought into the cup-is-half-empty victim’s posture of life. After a while, the posture of downward mobility seemed pretty ridiculous for two people whose parents had performed heroic feats to give them the best education money could buy. And then I made a fatal mistake: I accidentally found something I liked to do. And then I did it well.
    While stumbling through my I-Hate-Litigation career, I discovered an area of the law which catered to my two strongest talents, talking on the phone and going to lunch. I gained a small reputation among clients who made staggering amounts of money for surprisingly little work as being “an attorney who didn’t seem like an attorney,” a talent not completely appreciated by my former colleagues.
    And then the fun began. It wasn’t just that Frank blew it on all of the major holidays and events. It was more that I was beginning to notice that he had a latent talent that I had not previously noticed: He had all the makings of a world-class whiner and he was beginning to epitomize the Angry White Guy.
    He was angry with his dad for leaving his mom, yet he despised his mother so much that he couldn’t be in a room with her for more than an hour, even at Christmas. He was angry at his mom for giving him a watch with a scratch in it, feeling sure that she had personally put the scratch in it to hurt him. He was angry at his father’s second wife because she was going to inherit his father’s work, and rob him of his inheritance. He was angry at his sister for deciding at age ten that she wanted to be an artist, a position he felt robbed him of his chance. And he was angry with me because I refused to live life stuck in neutral. And this was just personally.
    Professionally, Frank honestly felt that the reason his directing career had not taken off was because his student film had not been awarded a Student Academy Award. This he attributed to the fact that someone on the Academy judging committee had wanted to sabotage his career in its early stages. Nearly ten years later, he was still furious about it, and he insisted on projecting his student film on the white walls of my dining room at every dinner party I had, figuring someone would see the brilliance of his vision and hand him a sixty-million-dollar studio film to direct.
    “I just don’t feel seen in this relationship,” lamented Frank on a regular basis. It’s the skill of those who have spent too much of their lives in therapy to use jargon which they don’t understand to signify feelings that they don’t have the courage to be honest about. Roughly translated, this meant that Frank wanted me to take the attention and energy that I had to invest in my own career to be remotely successful and put it into his and make him successful.
    This was to be the Faustian bargain of our marriage—I was to do everything, including the Herculean feat of creating a directing career for him while supporting us, and in exchange I would get to be Mrs. Frank Jamieson.
    Maybe it was all those years of drinking liquid Jell-O with Roberta that made me believe that marriage was supposed to be a “shared equal partnership of responsible individuals with/‌without children.” This was quite far from what I was experiencing. In retrospect, I now know that my utopian concept of marriage was about as far from reality as the