LITMIR.BIZ

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it for me?” yelled my roommate Victoria, but I didn’t respond. I was itemizing the things I’d said to the Director that might have caused him to think that National Public Radio turned me on. I could think of nothing. I liked public radio, of course. Who didn’t? But my attraction was strictly platonic.

      A TINY LITTLE EXISTENTIAL crisis began to nibble at the back of my left eyeball. Maybe it had been there for a while, and I just hadn’t noticed it. My life left little time for reflection, given that my typical day involved rising at 5:30 a.m. to write a paper I’d inevitably forgotten, flying to the subway in order to get to NYU in time to attend an 8:00 a.m. lecture, where I’d usually fall asleep, flinging myself onto the train again for five or six hours of midtown temping, then a mad dash downtown for a few more hours of classes. I’d get home, write half a play, then go out again for a rehearsal until midnight, at which point I’d return home, write some more, and fall into bed for my usual three hours of sleep. I was fried. Most of my energy was spent on surviving, and I filled in the gaps in my nights with a series of unsuccessful love affairs.

      At some point, my dissatisfaction had hit critical mass, and things had started to overflow. The Director didn’t really deserve my contempt. He was probably just trying to woo me in some new and intellectually stimulating way, but the result of his comment was an extreme allergic reaction. NPR? What had I done to make the Director think he could get into my pants with NPR? I knew some kinky people, but I didn’t know anyone who’d spread her legs for Car Talk.

      I needed coffee, I needed sleep, and I needed better judgment when it came to men. In the scant year I’d lived in New York City, I’d accumulated a sheaf of romantic failures roughly comparable in length to Remembrance of Things Past. There were entire genres of food I now had to avoid as a result of Proust’s madeleine effect; memories of bad dates that I didn’t want to conjure up with an errant bite of ramen noodle. Because many of my worst debacles had occurred in dives misleadingly named Emerald Garden and the Cottage, I was having to avoid cheap Chinese food, normally a collegiate staple, altogether. Not to mention art house movie theaters, the NYU library, and basically all of Bleecker Street.

      “Is it Brittany?” asked my other roommate, Zak, trying to grab the receiver. Brittany was his girlfriend that week, and I was lobbying heavily against her. Zak usually dated what I called Perilously-Close-to-Underage Nymphets, and what he called “Oh God! So Hot!!”

      I shook my head at Zak, and pressed the heel of my hand into my eye socket. The existential crisis had grown into something the size and shape of a hamster. I moaned.

      “That sounds pretty good,” said the Director.

      “I have a headache,” I protested, weakly.

      “I can fix that,” said the Director. There was a growl in his voice, the kind of anticipatory rasp usually heard in commercials for sex hotlines.

      “Mrrrooooow,” said Big White Cat, our demonic angora adoptee, introducing his claws to my pajama pants. On Big White Cat’s list of favored things to annihilate, silk was second only to expensive leather jackets belonging to visitors. He’d been an inadvertent acquisition, a friend-of-a-friend cat-sitting episode made permanent when his actor-owner went on tour and abandoned him. Big White had a Dickensian past: The actor had abducted him from a front lawn in Alabama, during a production of The Diary of Anne Frank, and named him Mr. Dissel, after his character in the play. I liked my cats dark, sleek, and self-sufficient. Big White (we couldn’t bring ourselves to call him Mr. Dissel) was needy and bitchy, not to mention fluffy. It was yet another example of how my life had gone awry.

      “NO,” I yelled, prying Big White Cat’s talons out of my thigh, and forgetting to cover the receiver.

      “But, Morning Edition is on,” said the Director, trying to somehow excuse himself.

      “You’re kidding,” I informed him, attempting to keep my crisis contained. Surely, he didn’t think that NPR was my open sesame. We hadn’t even kissed!

      “I’m not, actually,” he said, sounding a little hurt.

      “No? Come on!” I laughed uproariously, hoping to lead him to confess that he’d been joking. Even if he had to lie. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

      “So, you’re not coming?” His voice seemed to be trembling.

      I stopped laughing, chagrined.

      “You know, I guess I’m not,” I said, trying to modulate my tone into that of a Compassionate Rejecter.

      “Right. Good-bye, then.” Dial tone.

      Damn it. Now he’d go out into the world, telling all our mutual acquaintances that I’d brutally laughed at his heartfelt declaration. And I really wasn’t a bad person! I tried to be kind! Unfortunately, for every pleasant date I had, there were equally as many messes. I got asked out frequently. It wasn’t that I was gorgeous; I wasn’t. In my opinion, and in the opinions of plenty of people in my past, I was distinctly odd looking. It was location. The Hallowed Halls of Academe were known for their tendency toward echoing loneliness, unnatural partnerships, and flat-out desperation. As a result, a significant percentage of my recent life had been spent dashing through campus buildings, my collar pulled up to hide my face from the scattered tribe of the Miserably Enamored—NYU men who’d spend hours comparing me to Lady Chatterley, who’d try to pass off Philip Glass compositions as their own, who’d diagram their desire for me in interpretive dance cycles pilfered from Martha Graham. This might have been fine for some girls, but it wasn’t turning me on. At all. Maybe it was ego run amok, but I thought I deserved better.

      The existential crisis was now the size of a rabbit. It beat its back feet against my sinuses and gnawed a piece of my brain. The crisis grew into a rat terrier, then a mule, then an elephant. It trumpeted. It stomped and shook my foundations, and then unfurled a banner, which informed me that I would never be happy. No one would ever, ever love me. Furthermore, I would never love anyone, because, in fact, I was incapable of love. My life was going to be a ninety-year no.

      I frantically opened my address book and searched it for someone, anyone, who’d moved me, who’d been good in both bed and brain. No. A slew of the so-so. A list of thes and the irrevocably lost. And, oh yes, my mom. I shut the book, nauseated.

      The existential crisis had evolved into a dinosaur. It opened its toothy maw, raised its shrunken front legs, and gave me a mean pair of jazz hands.

      “You’re screwed, baby, seriously screwed,” it sang, in the voice of Tom Waits.

      Senior year of high school, I’d written a play, the title of which, Tyrannosaurus Sex, had been censored to Tyrannosaurus…At the time, I’d been bitter, but now it occurred to me that I much preferred the ellipses to the actuality. The whole world of sex and love had turned out to be far too much like living in the Land of the Lost. I’d wander across lava-spattered plains for a while, miserably lonely, and then run into some Lizard King, who would seem nice, until he bared his teeth and went in for a big bite of my heart. Even more depressingly, there’d been times when the lizard had behaved perfectly pleasantly, but I’d somehow found myself spitting and roasting him anyway. True Love combined with Great Sex was the goal, but I had a feeling I was going to end up fossilized before I found anything close. I held my head in my hands and whimpered.

      Zak approached, cautiously. He shook two Tylenol into his hand and offered them to me, patting my shoulder. He’d had significant personal experience with existential crises, usually related to the same topic as mine: love, and lack thereof. I swallowed.

      I FELT LIKE I’D DATED and then hated every man in Manhattan. This was, I reminded myself, not strictly true. In fact, I’d gone out with a lot of writers and actors, a lot of academics—the kind of men who maintained hundred-thousand-dollar debts as a result of graduate school, the kind who possessed PhDs in Tragedy. In order to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program, I’d moved sight unseen from Idaho to New York, dragging all my worldly belongings in a bedraggled caravan of psychedelic pink Samsonite suitcases from the Salvation Army. I’d had my

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