LITMIR.BIZ

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in eighth grade: I love this book, but I don’t want to meet this man. But, in this case, it was: This story is okay and its author has already come in me.

⁷ The first week we met, I slept at his house every night. Time stopped in his bedroom, which was windowless and overly warm. Each day we took a new step together: flossed our teeth, shared a bagel, fell asleep without having sex. He admitted to having an upset stomach. By the time I emerged from his home on Friday morning, we had essentially performed the first year of a relationship in five days. I got on the plane to Los Angeles, unsure of when we’d see each other again. I was pretty sure I’d seen him cry a little bit when he dropped me at the subway.

⁸ Perhaps, yes, in that way.

⁹ As an experiment. It was similar to looking at an empty vase or staring out a window.

¹⁰ On this trip, my first as a working woman, I was renting a house in the hills above Hollywood. It had been pitched to me as “chic” and “within walking distance of chic things” but was small and damp, windowless on three sides, and had the boxy nondescript façade of a meth lab. Sandwiched between the homes of a failed TV writer with a set of pit bulls and a queer-theory professor who wore a bolo tie and collected Murano glass, I decided that the amount of fear I felt alone in this house was directly proportional to all I would learn from living there. And so I stayed, for five months, calling it growth. One night I put on a nightgown, stepped onto the porch, looked up at the moon, and said, “Who am I?”

¹¹ I remember being so impressed with this turn of phrase that I carefully clocked who I had already shared it with and who I could still try it out on.

¹³ Paraphrasing Freud.

¹³ I wanted a boyfriend. Any boyfriend. This boyfriend, this angry little Steve McQueen face, fit my self-image nicely, but let’s face it, he was in the right place at the right time. About a month into the relationship, it started to dawn on me that spending time with him gave me an empty, fluish feeling, that he hated all my song choices, and sometimes I was so bored that I started arguments just to experience the rush of almost losing him. I spent an entire three-hour car ride crying behind my sunglasses like my thirty-year marriage was ending. “I don’t know what else I can try,” I wept. “I can’t do this anymore.” “Can’t or won’t,” he hollered like Stanley Kowalski, backing angrily into his least favorite parking spot and jerking the gear into park. Upstairs I paced, cried; he cried, too; and when I told him we could try again, he turned on his PlayStation, content.

¹⁴ At one point I asked him this, and he responded with a trademark silence. I attempted to engage in a “sext” session, starting off with “I want to fuck you above the covers.” This seemed like something Anaïs Nin might request. No, she would say. Leave the covers off. He responded with texts that read “I want to fuck you with the air conditioner on” and “I want to fuck you after I set my alarm clock for 8:45 A.M.” I closed my eyes and tried to inhabit the full sensuality of his words: the cool recycled air on my neck, the knowledge that the alarm would sound just a bit before nine. It took about eleven of these texts for me to realize he was doing some kind of Dadaist performance art at my expense.

¹⁵ I desperately wanted this to be a metaphor for the ways love stretches us, changes us, but never betrays us.

¹⁶ See? I’m just a chill girl writing a chill-ass email, bro.

¹⁷ At Christmas we had to end it for real this time. After all, he said he was incapable of love and only seeking satisfaction. I, on the other hand, was passionate and fully alive, electricity in every limb, a tree growing in Brooklyn. I headed to his apartment the moment he returned from his parents’ house, determined to make it easy, to cut the cord on his home turf. His landlord, Kathy, tended to sit on the front stoop. An elderly woman with a mighty tattoo of a panther on her wide, fatty shoulder, she and her Yorkshire terriers kept watch over the neighborhood. But tonight Kathy was absent. Instead, a shrine of candles and flowers crowded the path to the door. Upstairs, he told me that he thought one of Kathy’s dogs had probably died. We called her to see if everything was okay, but Kathy’s daughter answered—Kathy had slipped in the shower. It may have been her heart. They weren’t sure yet. The wake was tonight. So, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and I made our way across Brooklyn to the funeral home, where we paid our respects to Kathy’s gray, powdered body, stiff in a red velour sweatsuit, a pack of menthols tucked into the front pocket. Later, on A.’s couch, we held hands while he wondered whether she’d felt pain and whether his rent would go up. I clutched his hand, ready: “I love you, you know.” He nodded solemnly: “I know.”

¹⁸ Five minutes after I pressed send on this email, he called me. “Wait, what?”

      “What did you think of it?” I asked. “Do you disagree with anything I said? I mean, if you do just say so.”

      “I stopped reading after you said the thing about jerking off.”

      On the morning of New Year’s Day, we had sex one last time. I didn’t fully emerge from sleep as he pushed himself against my backside. We were visiting my friends, adult friends, out of the city, and I could hear their children, awake since 6:00 A.M., sliding in socks on the hardwood floor and asking for things. I want children, I thought, as he fucked me silently. My own children, someday. Then: I wonder if people fucked near me when I was a child. I shuddered at the thought. Before we could get back on the road, another guest rear-ended his car, and the fender fell off. Back in the city, I kissed him goodbye, then texted him a few minutes later “don’t come over later, or ever.” We do what we can.

¹⁹ I would argue this email is funny, just not in the manner it was intended.

      

       There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

—JOAN DIDION, “On Self-Respect” ¹

       I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.

       —ANDY WARHOL

      I’VE ALWAYS BEEN ATTRACTED to jerks. They range from sassy weirdos who are ultimately pretty good guys to sociopathic sex addicts, but the common denominator is a bad attitude upon first meeting and a desire to teach me a lesson.

      Fellows:

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