Read online book «The Year of Yes: The Story of a Girl, a Few Hundred Dates, and Fate» author Maria Headley

The Year of Yes: The Story of a Girl, a Few Hundred Dates, and Fate
Maria Dahvana Headley
Headley, a wise-cracking New York City girl with as much wit as any character on Sex and the City, is jaded and cynical about men in New York. She vows to say yes to any and every person who asks her out – a taxi driver, a homeless man – you name it, she'll say yes for an entire year. By the year's end, she meets the man she eventually marries.‘The Year of Yes’ is the hilarious and hopeful true account of one woman’s quest to find a man she can stand (for longer than a couple of hours). Frustrated by her own pitiful taste, writer Maria Headley decided to leave her love life up to fate, going out with everyone who asked her: homeless men, taxi drivers, and yes, even a couple of women. Opening her heart and mind to the possibility that her perfect match might be the person she least expects, she spent 12 months dating most of New York City, and beyond, including:JARZHE: A Microsoft Millionaire who still lived with his motherTHE ROCKSTAR: A young homeless man who believed himself to be Jimi HendrixIRA: Her high school nemesis, whom she’d spent seven years rejectingTHE MIME: A man in the Marceau Mold who proposed with hand gesturesCHUPA CHUPA: A 70-year-old neighborhood eccentric who spoke only SpanishAnd finally, a man whose baggage should have taken him off her list – at least until ‘The Year of Yes’ taught her what was really important: love and perseverance always wins in the end.



the Year of Yes
The True Story of a Girl,
a Few Hundred Dates, and Fate

Maria Headley






For Robert Schenkkan,
Whom I adore beyond all reckoning.
How did I ever get so lucky?

Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u1d7b829e-6c27-5f5c-9e1b-0b61af9883f8)
Title Page (#ufffc40b5-a332-52c9-8091-8b68ed18039a)
Dedication (#u12d99d8b-eead-5860-8e3f-31b9120bd153)
A Day in the Life of a Naysayer (#u04662448-f068-5bf4-8652-126bf51f8599)
Mister Handyman, Bring Me a Dream (#u385b9b5a-05ca-5dff-aca5-467a0b014432)
Jack the Stripper (#ub26a8e17-d0cc-549f-8b8c-a8cc16affb01)
Le Petit Cornichon (#litres_trial_promo)
Te Amo, Chupa Chupa (#litres_trial_promo)
Innocence, A Broad (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy (#litres_trial_promo)
Remembrance of Things Crass (#litres_trial_promo)
Journey to a Ten-cent Universe (#litres_trial_promo)
Long Day’s Journey into Trite (#litres_trial_promo)
Once Smitten, Twice Shy (#litres_trial_promo)
Meeting Mr. Write (#litres_trial_promo)
Author's Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

A Day in the Life of a Naysayer (#ulink_211ab2ee-d6b2-5ddc-8ac5-331614f983e7)
In Which Our Heroine Decides to Start Saying Yes…
That woman speaks eighteen languages,
and can’t say “no” in any of them.
—Dorothy Parker
IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT THAT YOU are young, female, and appallingly, possibly unattractively, well read. You grew up in a small town in Idaho, but now you live in New York City, the most exciting and romantic place in the country, and feasibly in the world. According to the literature you’re choosing to apply to your current situation (you’ve carefully forgotten that you ever read Last Exit to Brooklyn), you are supposed to be wearing sequins to breakfast and getting your hand kissed by a heterosexual version of Cole Porter. Incandescently intelligent men are supposed to be toasting you with Dom Perignon. Instead, you’re sharing a cockroach-ridden outer-borough apartment with two roommates and one dysfunctional cat. You’re spending your evenings sitting on your kitchen floor, drinking poisonous red jug wine, and quoting Sartre. Hell is not only other people, it is you, too. You’re not getting laid, because even if you were meeting something other than substandard men, you don’t have a bedroom to call your own. And instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you’re getting stupefying lines like: “I’m listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?”
That would be a direct quote.
Let me back up. Seven a.m. on February 14th, and I was lying on my lumpy mattress, alone again. The noises of NYC had ceased to metamorphose into the hopeful bird trills and tender love songs I’d imagined when I’d first arrived, a year before, and instead sounded like what they were: garbage trucks, honking horns, and the occasional cockroach scuttle. Granted, my last doomed relationship had been significantly more crow than canary, and more Nirvana than Sinatra. Still, it was Valentine’s Day, and I was considering a backslide. It didn’t matter that ceasing communication with my most recent disaster, Martyrman, an actor twice my age and half my maturity, had unquestionably been the right decision. It didn’t matter how many times I told myself that I was the brainwashed victim of propaganda created by sugar lobbyists in order to engender mass consumption of chocolate. Waking up on February 14th without someone to love was depressing.
I was becoming convinced that I was going to be lonely for the rest of my life. It wasn’t that I wasn’t meeting men. I was. It was just that they all drove me crazy. I was not a member of a modern-day Algonquin Round Table, populated with the pretty, witty, and wise, as I’d moved to New York envisioning I’d be. Instead, I was a denizen of something more along the lines of the Holiday Inn Card Table, populated with the zitty, twitty, and morally compromised. I wasn’t yet to the point of Dorothy Parker’s infamous quote—“Ducking for apples. Change one letter and it’s the story of my life.”—but that was only because I didn’t have time to approach my own bed, let alone anyone else’s. The main problem of living in the city that never slept was that neither did I.
When I got home from my usual exhausting day of racing uptown and downtown between classes at NYU and my various temp jobs, all I did was crumple up on my mattress, muttering to myself and reading books that made my problems worse. The night before, for example, when the front neighbor’s lullaby of sternum-thumping bass had made it clear to me that I wouldn’t be sleeping, I’d picked up Prometheus Bound. Reading Aeschylus had thrown me into a waking nightmare of being stretched on a rock, my liver plucked at by rapacious turtledoves.
Somewhere nearby, someone was practicing an aria from The Ring Cycle. Whoever was singing Brunhilde was flat. Worse than that, someone small, soprano, and canine was singing harmony, sharp. My downstairs neighbor, Pierre LaValle, had started his daily apartment sanitization process. For someone with linoleum floors, the man had an unhealthy relationship with his vacuum. Add to this the revival tent set up at the end of the adjacent block, the house party two buildings down, and the fact that the back neighbor’s illegal psycho rooster couldn’t tell headlights from sunlight, and the night was pretty much a wash.
The opera singer switched to “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” The canine backup started in on a rousing counterpoint of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” I let fury course through my veins. My sleep deprivation was partially my own fault, admittedly, but since I hadn’t had a good time the night before, I was blaming it on everyone else.
I’d arrived home at 3:00 a.m., having spent the evening with a fellow New York University student. We’d eaten Korean barbecue, discussed Kierkegaard, and split the check in half, despite the fact that he’d eaten four times more than I. He’d then tried, and failed, to wheedle the traditionally clad waitress’s phone number from her “perfectly symmetrical lips.” At the subway, he’d given me a rubbery smooch on the cheek and told me he thought we’d really had a meeting of the minds.
I levered the window open and stuck my hungover head outside. Everything looked bleak. I felt disturbingly Steinbeckian, as though, at any moment, I might find myself begging my roommates to “tell me about the rabbits.” My life was a great big fat NO. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to be happy. It just seemed that happiness was eluding me.
My landlady, Gamma, was standing outside in our Astroturfed courtyard, feeding a pack of feral cats a platter of shriveled hot dogs. Gamma’s six-year-old granddaughters, the twins, were sharing a ketchup-covered hot dog with a notch-eared tabby. One bite to each child, one to the tomcat. Gamma was not known for her vigilance.
“Probably rain,” Gamma announced.
“Probably flood,” I said. Never mind the clear skies. I was embracing pessimism.
“World’s ending sometime next week,” Gamma informed me. Gamma liked to talk about only two things: the Apocalypse and the Weather Channel. One of the twins gave a war whoop, and pitched the rest of the hot dog at my window. It landed inches from my face and slid down the building. The twins shrieked with mirth.
“What do you think you’re laughing about?” demanded Gamma, and herded them indoors. It was clear from the rear view that one of the twins had wet her pants in the excitement. This was my home. These were my neighbors, the urban equivalents of the hicks I’d been desperate to leave behind in my home state of Idaho. Give Gamma and company a little more space, and they’d have had a few rusted-out cars, some scrabbly hounds, and a stockpile of The Book of Mormon. I’d thought things would be different here. No.
“NO,” I SAID, TO THE WORLD AT LARGE. “No. No. No.” I thought that maybe if I chanted it enough times, all the aggravating things in my life would stumble away into oblivion. Then I’d be free to have the existence I wanted, something much more glamorous and gratifying.
The “no” was nothing new. It had, after all, been the first word I’d ever spoken. There were photos of me, posing prissily as an infant, my arms crossed over my chest, and a look of pointed fury on my face. By the time I was two, the initial no had become a string of nyets, neins, and the occasional sarcastic ha! I’d swiftly learned to read, and books had been the end of any social aptitude I might have possessed. I’d retreated from whatever unsatisfactory experience was coming my way, be it hamburgers (I was, from birth, vegetarian) or PE class (steadfast refusal to play for anyone but myself caused issues with team sports), a volume of something clenched firmly in my hand. My mother maintains that I wasn’t rude, but I think about the kind of child I must have been, interspersing meows (my cats were my only real friends, and I’d developed an unfortunate nervous tic that caused me to meow in stressful situations) with the vocabulary of a seventeenth-century noblewoman, and I do not know how I survived my childhood. Time was spent in both Special Education and Gifted and Talented programs.
From a second grade report card: “Maria has a good sense of humor, but doesn’t tend toward social interaction and instead just laughs to herself. She could also use some supervision when it comes to her school clothes.”
I’d learned to use a sewing machine at the age of seven. Sometimes I came to school dressed in quilt fragments and safety-pinned togas.
In high school, I got in massive trouble during an assembly, because I’d laughed at soon-to-be-elected Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, who’d pleaded ignorance of her own policies. I was not the only person in opposition (Chenoweth turned out to be embarrassing even to the Republicans—in 1996, when her GOP primary opponent stripped nearly naked during a televised interview, and spent the month prior to the election in a psych ward, he still got 32 percent of the vote), but I was the only one dumb enough to think that everyone else would laugh, too. Moreover, I was, alas, sitting in the front row, wearing a ruffled orange frock and purple combat boots. When Chenoweth started crying, her cohort, Senator Larry Craig, shook his finger in my face and told me that I was a “very, very bad girl.” It was a familiar theme. The only thing that kept me from being expelled was my friend Ira petitioning the principal with the suggestion that I was “a little bit retarded.” My mode of existence obviously didn’t work for everyone, and half the time it didn’t work for me, either, but I was resigned. It was how I was made. I was a protestor. I was such a protestor that I regularly protested things that might have been good for me.
When I’d moved to New York, after high school, I’d begun to suddenly, miraculously, sort of fit in. Unfortunately, I’d said no to so many things that I wasn’t sure how to say yes anymore. This was problematic, considering that what I’d thought I’d wanted had turned out to be a shifting target, and that every day, the city gave me new things to say yes to, things I’d resoundingly denied in the past. My nos had begun to tremble, particularly in the dating category. I’d tentatively started saying yes, but it had turned out that my judgment of who to bestow my yeses upon was deeply flawed. After a year in New York City, I’d dated plenty of people, but none that had even come close to whatever I thought my ideal was. That was the other problem. I was looking for something different, but I didn’t know what it was.
Certainly nothing that was outside my window. Across the way, I could see my neighbors wandering around half-naked. It seemed that everyone in my neighborhood was always in a state of unappealing undress. Not only that, they were always screaming at each other, even at 7:00 in the morning.
“Please be quiet,” I whispered, not just to the neighbors, but to the whole damned city. “Please, just let me sleep.” And for a moment, peace. I closed my eyes. I tucked myself back into bed.
Rrrrrrrrrringggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg!
I’d never been a person who could just let a telephone ring. I always thought that the person on the other end might be someone I’d been dying to talk to for my entire life. Say, William Shakespeare calling from beyond the grave. Never mind that this had never happened. Lately, it had been the Sears collection department, searching for another Maria Headley, who owed them $15,000. She’d apparently binged on appliances, and was even now hidden in some dank cave full of stand mixers. Even though I wasn’t the right Maria, I always ended up talking to Sears for at least half an hour. I’d grown up on one of the last party lines in the known universe, and phone privileges still seemed precious to me.
“Good morning!” I trilled. It wouldn’t do to have Will Shakespeare thinking I was cranky. Particularly on Valentine’s Day. What if he thought I preferred Kit Marlowe? I suspected that the last good man on the planet had died 413 years before I was born, but some part of me was still waiting for Mr. Shakespeare to whisper some sweet iambic pentameter into my ear.
Alas, no. Instead, I heard the husky voice of the Director, an acquaintance from a writing workshop I’d attended the year before. The Director was in his mid-forties and divorced. He was an intelligent person, with extensive knowledge of two thousand years of theater history. There was just one problem. Sweater vests. I couldn’t date a man who wore sweater vests, any more than I could date a man who was a mime. Everybody had phobias. Sweater vests threw me back, not to my charming grandpa, as they would some people, but to my skeezy high school geometry teacher, who had recently gone on trial for attempting to calculate the surface area of his female students’ breasts. (My phobia of mimes was simpler: I was a playwright, and words were my business. I took miming as a personal insult, but more on that later…)
The Director, with his sweater vests, with his husky voice, was not my first choice for someone I wanted to speak to at 7:30 in the morning. I liked him, but I didn’t like him like that. We were supposed to see a play that night, and he was suggesting we meet up earlier. I said sure, but that I was still in my pajamas. He said he was really looking forward to seeing me, I said great and tried to say good-bye, and then, something went very wrong.
“I’m listening to NPR,” he suddenly stammered. “Do you want to come over and make out?”
Well. I was finally going nuts. It was about time. Other people in my family were nuts. Why had I thought I’d been skipped?
“I didn’t quite hear you,” I said, just to make sure I was really losing it.
“I’m listening to NPR,” the Director repeated. “Do you want to come over and make out?”
It wasn’t a delusion. He’d offered me a radio rendezvous. Making out to Morning Edition. I had one question.
WHOSE LIFE WAS THIS?
“Is 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 fortune of four hundred scraped-together dollars hidden in my bra, because my mom had told me I’d probably get mugged immediately upon leaving the airplane.
Taylor, a brilliant actor I’d met the summer before, had speedily taken the role of my only friend in the city and met me at JFK.
“You have to learn to take the subway sometime,” he’d announced.
I was fully ignorant of mass transit, and had to be led onto the train. Upon disembarking into the flattening heat and humidity of August, we’d discovered that we were roughly five thousand miles from my dormitory. Taylor had manfully carried most of my luggage, as I’d begun to have a total nervous breakdown and was unfit to be responsible for anything but my backpack. The elevators in my building were, of course, broken, so Taylor had lugged the endless bags up eleven flights of stairs. Then he’d taken me to a burrito joint, bought me a beer, and told me it would be okay.
Taylor’d been right. I’d fallen in love with New York City anyway. In the cripplingly Caucasian Potato State, my olive skin and brown hair (“ethnic”) had rendered me dateless. Revise. I’d been asked out, yes, but I’d never any intention of accepting the offers. Only creepy people liked me. Gray-ponytailed hippies often stalked me at all-ages poetry slams, reciting lascivious odes that referred to me as “a luminous, nubile woman-child.” They’d get my mom’s number from information, and then call incessantly, inviting me to accompany them to the beatnik mecca of Denny’s for “coffee and cigarettes.” No thanks. I’d been delighted to discover that the men of New York City were not only ponytail free, they had no reservations about my skin tone.
I’d met the first of my failures only hours after hitting the city. He was a dweeby Cinema Studies major from Cincinnati, who did not, in all the time I knew him, ever manage to zip his fly. It had only gone downhill from there, but still, I’d been dazzled by the dating options available to me: Men with Books! Men with Biceps! Men with Encyclopedic Knowledge of French Farce! I’d felt like I’d been wandering in a cultural desert for my entire life, and had miraculously stumbled upon a shimmering city of intellectual splendor, every man bearing a bejeweled braincase. It was a mirage, of course, but that hadn’t kept me from repeatedly immersing myself in its sand dunes.
I’d wasted the year flinging myself into abortive relationships with a bunch of brilliant losers. I’d been forced to imagine myself as a thesis committee, so that my dates could practice defending dissertations on such varied topics as Misery and Maiming in the Russian Literary Canon; Masturbation Metaphor in Shakespeare—A Design for Contemporary Life; and Images of Insects in the Films of David Lynch. I’d spent a month or two in Drama with Donatello, an NYU graduate film student who preyed on freshmen. He was Haitian, via rich parents in Florida, and in possession of a rickety skateboard on which he could perpetually be seen flying half-drunk from the marble banisters of historic campus buildings. He’d been so peerlessly self-confident that he’d managed to convince me he was necessary to my emotional development, and thus had enjoyed the privilege of torturing me with a recurrent alleged joke: “You’re so racist. I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
“If I’m racist, why am I hanging out with you?” I’d point out. But his argument involved subtleties, like me being inherently against ethnic mingling even as I was kissing him. He’d taken me on a date to a screening of the unfortunate 1952 Orson Welles blackface Othello. During the Desdemona murder scene, he’d stage-whispered, so loudly that every cinephile in the theater could hear him, “Are you worried?”
I felt that I somehow might have deserved this. It was a given that I was underexposed to any kind of racial diversity. Maybe I was racist, and just didn’t know it. I was white, after all, even though in Idaho I’d been frequently assumed to be Mexican. Anytime I’d foolishly admitted my home state (which had been, for many wretched years, the home-base of the Aryan Nation’s skinhead compound), people would say things like, “Huh. So you’re a neo-Nazi?” Donatello had been ingeniously confrontational with everyone. One day, walking on Broadway with him, me hoping that we were finally having romance, he’d pounced for an hour on a Hare Krishna, “just because.”
We’d finally imploded one morning in my dorm room, as he’d meticulously directed the application of my makeup, forming his hands into the universal symbol for “I Am Now Framing a Shot.” Initially, I’d been flattered, but then he’d started using the close-up to point out zits. When I’d thrown him out, he’d earnestly declared that he’d expected to be my boyfriend for “seven years, but now you’ve fucked it up, so it’s your loss.” Then, he’d called for weeks, aggrieved that I was no longer speaking to him. I’d picked up the phone once.
“No,” I’d said.
“No, what?”
“Just. No.”
It wasn’t that I had anything against intellectual men. I liked them. Indeed, I sought them. The problems happened later. We’d be on the verge of kissing, and they’d suddenly lurch away, whispering irrelevant lines clearly memorized in high school. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was a favorite recitation among college-age males. “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” indeed. I was unravish’d far too often for my taste. “Never, never canst thou kiss” seemed to be a life philosophy for some of my paramours. One guy, engaged in the study of possibly pedophilic Victorian authors, had given me a scrap of “Jabberwocky” (“And, as in uffish thought he stood/The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/Came whiffling through the tulgey wood/And burbled as it came!”) before attempting to do something that I speedily decided was anatomically inadvisable. Other guys tried quoting the drunken renegade poet Charles Bukowski’s “love is a dog from hell.” Frankly, I was weary of hearing about dogs as an excuse for not being able to deal with pussy. The poem was about neither dogs nor love. The title was the best thing about it. This was often the case with men, as well as poems. When I’d called my mom to tell her I was going out with a PhD in English Literature, it had sounded terrific. But what it’d really meant was that I was planning to subject myself to endless discussions of Middle-march, capped off with the theoretically kinky suggestion that I pull a George Eliot and crossdress. An evening with a sensitive Virginia Woolf expert had ended with him gently closing his apartment door, and suggesting that perhaps “you just need a room of your own.”
I did not want a room of my own! I just wanted to find a guy I wouldn’t mind sharing a room with. It didn’t seem too much to ask. New York City was theoretically populated with the most attractive and intelligent men in the world. I could think of no explanation for my failure. Except that, as Shakespeare would no doubt have informed me, the fault was not in my stars, but in myself. Or rather, in my no policy. I’d always believed that I knew exactly what was good for me, but clearly this wasn’t true. I was no longer a trustworthy guardian of my heart. I was twenty years old, and I hated everything.
I was sick of the intelligentsia. I was sick of poetry. I was sick of theses and screenings of student films. I was sick of sweltering theaters, populated with unintelligible actors in Kabuki makeup and vinyl loincloths. I was sick of expensively disheveled tweed jackets and designer spectacles.
I was sick of the species of man I was meeting.
I was from Idaho, goddamn it! The Wild West! I wanted to meet a real man! Well. Maybe not a cowboy. I’d had significant interaction with cowboys, and it had been less than positive. At some point, in high school, I’d seen one engaged in intimate dealings with a bovine. I was a vegetarian. Anything that enjoyed meat, in that way, had no business coming near me. And, since I was being specific, maybe I didn’t want a banker. And maybe not a trucker. And maybe not a lawyer, a construction worker, a fireman, a goth, a taxi driver, a mime, a Republican, anyone with blond eyelashes, anyone in tight jeans, anyone I knew…
And maybe I was a bit too judgmental.
“Zak?” I called to the kitchen. “Am I too critical?”
“Is that a question?”
“Vic?”
“Obviously,” said Vic. “That’s why we get along.” Victoria and I had met as assigned roommates in the NYU dorms, and become friends largely because we hated everyone else.
Fine. I could change. I could switch my acid-green tinted glasses for a rose-colored pair.
IT WAS TIME FOR A NEW POLICY. I decided, in that moment, to do with men as I’d done with books. Read them all.
In seventh grade, I’d started in the A section of the library, and by the end of high school, I’d made it to N, checking out twenty books at a time. If only life were like the library! My mother had no idea the kind of guys I’d met between the stacks. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Allen Ginsberg. John Irving. Franz Kafka. D. H. Lawrence. Some hadn’t even been guys. Marguerite Duras. Anaïs Nin. Toni Morrison. Between A and N, there was not only a lot of great writing, there was a lot of hot literary sex. Granted, I’d allowed myself, by F, the luxury of judging books solely by their covers, and I’d been doing it ever since, probably to my love life’s detriment. At J, I’d been at once daunted by, and desirous of, James Joyce. My gaze had wandered to the Rs. The Satanic Verses seemed an easy read in comparison with Finnegans Wake. What could be more enticing to a rebellious teenage girl than a fatwa? Once I was in the Rs anyway, I’d taken a foray into the smutty paradise of Tom Robbins, with whom I’d fallen rather speedily out of love. He had far too many sex scenes involving things that did not sound pleasurable to me. Goat horns. Engagement rings lost in cavernous vaginas. I’d fled Robbins for Ulysses, where the proclivities of Molly Bloom had scared me even more.
Regardless of the overall quality, I had, with my reading policy, found plenty of things I’d liked. I’d found authors I would never have given a second glance, predisposed as I’d initially been toward pretty covers and Piers Anthony. Surely, I reasoned, it’d be the same with guys. If I just went out with all of them, there’d have to be some in there that I’d want to read again. See again. Either.
AND SO, I DECIDED that I would say yes to every man who asked me out on a date. I’d go out with all of them, at least once. I’d stop pretending to be deaf when my taxi drivers tried to tell me I was cute. I’d stop pretending to be crazy when strange guys walked too close to me on the street. I’d turn toward them, and smile. And if they wanted to go out with me, I’d say, “Sure.”
No more nos.
Well. A couple of exceptions. No one who was obviously violent, or too drunk or drugged out to walk. No one who introduced himself by grabbing me. And the dates could be flexible. “Date” was an almost obsolete term at that point, anyway. Mostly, you’d end up “hanging out,” possibly going to a bar, possibly going to dinner, possibly getting naked. Most of the women I knew yearned, at least a little bit, for the days before the sexual revolution, when men were forced to commit to the Official Date, arrive in a sport coat (yes, it was dweeby, but at least it signified a certain intention), and take the girl out for surf, turf, and Lovers’ Lane. Now, it was hard to know whether or not you were actually dating someone. He might call you up and blurt a string of frenetic phrases involving anything from Star Wars to Egon Schiele before he finally got to, “So…you wanna, like, hang out?”
You might “like, hang out” for six months, and still have completely different ideas of whether or not you were a couple. At least if I went out with guys who asked me out on the street, they’d be asking me out based on some kind of established attraction, as opposed to the guy who (for example) happened upon my number while making spitballs.
LOSER: I was, like, so intensely bored, and I called a couple of other people, but no answer, but then I saw your number, and wondered if you wanted to, you know, hang out.
MARIA (trying in vain to sleep): I’m busy.
LOSER: But, like, I wanted to, you know, get busy. (He emits a maniacal stoned giggle. A water bong burbles into the receiver.)
MARIA: Wait. Who are you? Do I know you?
LOSER: Devin’s roommate.
MARIA: I don’t know a Devin.
LOSER: Devin got your number from Kevin.
MARIA: Kevin?
LOSER: Kevin is, like, in your Modern Drama class.
MARIA: I didn’t give Kevin my number.
LOSER: Classroom directory. He made a list of cute girls. Wanna hang out or what?
MARIA: Not at all.
LOSER: Your loss, man. Whatever. Yeah, crossing you off the list. Finito.
(Maria throws the phone and addresses the audience.)
MARIA: You get the picture. At least guys I met on the street would be asking me out due to something other than boredom. No matter how pitiful this sounds, it was better than the current situation.
HOW TO PUT MY NEW POLICY into action? It wouldn’t be hard. I was in New York City, after all. There were around four million men in the five boroughs, and one thing that could be said of the men of the Big Apple was that they invariably had Big Balls. If you were female in New York, you’d been hit on by a stranger. It was built into the way the city functioned. Pedestrians. Subways. Contact with strangers, 24/7. In my travels around the city, about ten guys a day offered me everything from wedding rings to highly specific pornographic solicitations. Sometimes I got weirder offers, too. While I’d been dating Donatello, I’d agreed to be an extra in his student film. This had entailed a 4:30 a.m. walk to a bar on Avenue D, during which I’d heard, from behind me, a mysterious chirpy sound. It had turned out to be the inhabitant of an aluminum bagel cart, trying to get my attention in order to gift me with a cream cheese schmear. I’d crossed the street to evade him, but he’d chased me, waving a bag of bagels.
“Baby doll! Baby doll! My coffee is the best in New York! I wanna give you a present! You don’t need a present? I got bialys, you don’t like the bagels! I got danishes, sweetheart!”
“I’m not actually hungry,” I’d said, walking faster.
“Baby doll! You can’t turn down my pastry,” he’d yelled, his bagel cart teetering as it built up speed.
“Yeah, I can,” I’d said, and then sprinted to the bar, barely escaping him.
It seemed that I exuded some sort of pheromone that caused strangers to stop whatever they were doing and follow me home. As far as looks went, I was nothing compared to New York City’s Aphrodite-quality women, but I got hit on a lot. I attributed this to several factors.
(1) I was five foot three, which put me at the right height to enable all men, whether sitting or standing, to grab various unwilling parts of me.
(2) I had a big, uncontrollable smile, which I couldn’t keep from bestowing on strangers. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to master the Look of Frigid Death that most New York City girls could turn on at will. My best attempt, judging from the feedback that was forever getting shouted at me, seemed to be the Look of Absolute Willingness.
(3) I was curvy, and the men of New York seemed, for the most part, to approve. In Idaho, my curves had been yet another indication of my inappropriateness. In second grade, I’d started imitating my mom’s sexy sashay. A snotnosed boy named Jimmy (who would, a few years later, knock up my best friend) had crept up behind me in the lunch line and hysterically shrilled:
“Why does your butt wiggle when you walk? Wiggly-butt! Wiggly-butt!”
The other second graders had been roused into a mob.
“Wiggly-butt! Wiggly-butt,” they’d chanted, the sloppy joes on their sectioned trays shifting precariously.
I’d grabbed Jimmy’s grubby hand and bitten it savagely, then spun on my heel and departed the cafeteria, my bottom emphatically twitching my disapproval all the way to the playground, where I’d crawled beneath the tire pyramid. Too bad for them if they couldn’t appreciate a spectacular walk when they saw one.
It’d been the beginning of a bad thing. As I’d gotten older, the walk I’d imitated had, by virtue of genetics, become my own. My butt did wiggle when I walked. I couldn’t help it. It was something about the width of my hip bones juxtaposed with the small size of my feet. And the butt in question had inarguably become curvaceous. It was always getting grabbed. My mom complained about the same thing, her most memorable story involving a youthful trip to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a long ascent up the twirling staircase, her appalled bottom cupped by the hands of an Italian stranger for the entire 294 steps. My slender dancer sister had, for years, been traumatized by a boyfriend dubbing her round and muscular ass Shelfie. He’d shared with her his revolutionary feeling that her derriere should be used as a kind of knickknack ledge, and brokered ass grabs to his friends in exchange for pot. His band had collaborated on an ode to the ass, entitled “She’s a Shelf,” which, years later, still echoes through the post-grunge clubs of Seattle. At least, living in New York, most of the comments about the family rump were positive. And if it incited men to ask me out, who was I to judge them? Maybe they liked me for my ass, I thought, but surely they’d like me for other reasons once they got to know me. They’d like me for my capacity to quote from The Canterbury Tales, for my ability to sew them a quilted toga, for the entirety of my personality. Of course they would.
RESOLVED, I MARCHED into the kitchen, where Victoria and Zak were pretending not to be sharing the table. Vic was wearing headphones to block out Zak’s muttering. Zak was wearing an expression straight out of Edvard Munch. Taken as a trio, Zak (half-African American, half-Caucasian), Vic (Chinese), and I (Northern European mishmash) had the look of a multicultural Three’s Company. I got along with both of my roommates, but they didn’t care for each other.
Vic had been born in Taiwan and had spoken only Chinese until she was five, at which point her family had moved to Lafayette, Louisiana. She had a fascinating accent—slightly Chinese, slightly Southern—and her cooking accommodated both fried chicken and thousand-year-old eggs. She also had a pierced tongue, which, with extreme difficulty, she had so far managed to keep hidden from her mother. Vic was an interesting compendium of personality traits: both hypercritical (she’d been known to wail, in the manner of a flaming gay fashion critic, after seeing a large woman dressed in a tube top, “Oh no, she didnnnn’t!”) and maternal. She could be counted on to wrap blankets around you and feed you soup when you were sick, and hug you and feed you ice cream when you were crying over some bad boyfriend. She’d also be clicking her tongue in annoyance that you’d been so dumb as to get your heart broken in the first place, but nobody was perfect.
I’d met Zak on the first day of classes. He had curly, close-cropped black hair, big glasses, and a brain that never stopped. Zak was almost ridiculously Berkeley, the child of a wayward Vietnam vet and a lesbian. He was stunningly bright and incredibly well-read, and, for these traits, as well as for his enormous, though unpredictable, generosity, I had promptly developed a crush on him. The crush had ended midway through the year, when he’d bleached his hair yellow. I’d found Vic, and shallowly announced: “I’m over him. He looks like a duckling.”
I’d had the crush reprieve for about a month and a half while the duckling grew out, and then summer hit, and I’d moved to a sublet in a sketchy bit of south Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the end of three months, Vic had returned from her sister’s house in New Orleans, and she and I had set about trying to find an apartment. One day we’d been walking through Washington Square Park, and had stumbled over Zak sitting with his back against a wall, meditating on his lack of living space. We’d offered him a slot in our undetermined home-to-be. Though my crush was on hold, I’d been excited to imagine that we could potentially become best of best friends by sharing a bathroom. I’d never had a male roommate before.
Now that Zak and I lived together, I was constantly on the verge of falling madly and idiotically in love with him. Considering that he insisted he didn’t want me, I pretended a similar disinterest. To our mutual best friend, Griffin, I maintained that Zak and I were soul mates, but Zak denied it. Ha, I said, though quietly. We had chemistry, damn it. Since we’d moved in together, we’d stayed up late every night discussing the meaning of life. Who did this but people who were meant to fall in love? When we both fell hard for Denis Johnson’s difficult, gorgeous novel Already Dead, it was confirmed. We were meant to spend the rest of eternity together. Victoria did not think that this was true. She circled the edges of our friendship, justifiably declaring us pretentious, but jealous of our communion. She’d been my best friend in New York until Zak had moved in.
It was fitting that the only time they’d really gotten along had been the day that our toilet had mysteriously exploded. The two of them (I had blessedly not been home) had been forced to fight the toilet monster together, and had, after two and a half hours of fierce plunging, slain their enemy. By the time I’d come home from work, they’d been sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking beers, and recounting choice moments from their war. The next day, Vic had gifted Zak with a Star Wars pillowcase, as a reward for his courage in the face of her repulsion. Their camaraderie had, unfortunately, lasted only as long as it took for the mops to dry, and then they’d gone back to mutual irritation, which was constantly aggravated by our too-small apartment.
Victoria had won the bedroom lottery, as a result of her disregard for the enormous power cables that ran inches from her window. Her room had space for a dresser, a queen-size futon, and hell, even a Shetland pony, had she so desired. Zak was paranoid about electricity too close to his brain, and hadn’t even tried to claim the room, but this didn’t keep him from feeling bitter about the fact that his own room was four by six feet, just large enough for a mattress, a television, and a significant collection of comic books and pornography.
I had needed their rent checks too desperately to challenge either one of them, and had therefore ended up with the only space left: a single mattress in the corner of the living room, inside a rickety hut I’d constructed of a neighbor’s pruned tree branches and some brown paper grocery sacks. This was a bummer, of course: no privacy, no escape from the noise of the television, no door to shut against the nocturnal malfeasance of Big White Cat, who liked to sneak up and drool into my sleeping ear. I generally tried to pretend that my hut was a yurt, and that I was living a romantic, vagabond adventure. I’d pull shut the doorway drape I’d engineered out of half a skirt, and imagine myself in a cloud of mosquito netting, on my way to a secret assignation with my lover, something like Ondaatje’s The English Patient, minus, of course, the dying in a desert cave.
AS I MADE MY WAY into the kitchen, Zak raised his enormous coffee mug to me in weary salute, then sighed heavily and put his head down. Clearly, the night had not been kind to him, either.
“Too much vodka,” he muttered. “I tripped over my arm and rolled down a flight of stairs, in front of Brittany and all her friends.”
He turned his head to display a rug burn on his cheek.
“How exactly did you trip over your arm?” Not that I was surprised. Zak and I were both left-handed, and we theorized that the difficulties of living in a right-handed world had made us prone to bizarre injury. We were thinking of investing our meager funds in Band-Aid stock.
“Caveman lapse. Thought I was upright. Wasn’t. Massive humiliation.”
“Are you okay?”
“Severe emotional damage,” he said. “But I, my friend, am a survivor. Who called?”
“I just got an offer to make out to NPR,” I replied.
“I told you to stop answering the phone. You complain about every guy who calls.”
I collapsed dramatically onto the third-hand coffee table we pretended was a couch.
“I’m changing my ways,” I informed him. “The intellectuals aren’t doing it for me, and I’ve rejected everyone else. I’m gonna start saying yes, to everyone. Who am I to judge who’s appropriate? Just because a guy might be sleeping in a cardboard box doesn’t mean he isn’t worthy of me.”
“It might,” said Zak.
“I’m sleeping in a cardboard box,” I said, and pointed at my hut.
“What’re you talking about?” Vic asked, plucking the headphones off, and giving me the look that said she’d interrupted deep thoughts in order to tend to my perennially tortured love life.
“The men I meet are emotionally crippled, arrogant, scum-sucking lowlifes, pretending to be evolved. I can’t deal with them anymore,” I said. It was necessary to exaggerate, or Vic wouldn’t take me seriously.
“Some were hot, though,” said Vic. She pointed at a photo above the stove, which depicted one of the good-looking, vapid ones. I kept it there to remind me not to be deceived by beauty.
“For the next year, I’m going out with every man who asks me. Like on the subway, on the street, whatever. I’ve been too picky, and it’s making my life suck. I’m going to stop saying no.”
Somewhere, a gong was rung. Somewhere, lightning struck. In our kitchen, Vic and Zak were rendered speechless. “No” had been my theme song, my mantra, my favorite word. A whole year without no?
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“Whoa,” said Zak. “I so wish all girls were like you.”
“Where do you think we live?” said Vic. “You’re going to date dog walkers.”
“If a man is good with animals, he might be good with me.”
Zak eyed me, clearly considering some sort of comeback, then thought better of it and went back to his caffeine.
“I’m going to leave that alone,” he said. “Say thank you. You owe me.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind,” I said.
“Dog walkers from New Jersey,” said Vic.
“Parts of New Jersey are attractive.”
“Dog walkers from New Jersey who keep severed heads in their freezers.”
“Not all serial killers are from Jersey,” I told her. Many were from the Northwest, where I was from. I felt safer in New York, frankly.
“I could be missing really cool people, just because I don’t think they’re cool enough for me,” I continued. “Maybe I’m meant to be with a taxi driver.”
Vic looked skeptical.
“You’ll only date the hot ones. And you’ll end up with the same guys you always date. Actors. Writers. It’s your destiny. They like you, you like them. Stop complaining.”
“I cannot fucking wait to see what you bring home,” said Zak. “If you really do this,” he added. “Because you won’t.”
“I will,” I said.
“Swear,” he said.
“On my future happiness, on all matters of the heart, on true love, and on satisfaction. If I don’t say yes, let me die alone,” I said, and stuck out my hand. Zak nodded in approval of my melodrama. We shook.
“Oh my God,” said Zak. “This is fucking great.”
“Big fun,” said Vic. “Just don’t give our number to any more weirdos.”
She had a point. In the past, I’d been somewhat too generous with our phone number. Victoria had tried to tutor me in the brush-off, but it did no good. I’d end up cringing in the corner, as Vic answered the phone and told whoever was on the other end that I had food poisoning/schizophrenia/moved back to Idaho/died tragically.
“I won’t give anyone our number,” I said, suspecting that I was lying already.
“And are you planning to sleep with all of them?” Vic made no bones about the fact that she believed that if a girl slept with more than nine guys total, she was automatically a slut. She called this the Double-Digit Rule. By her definition, I might as well have invested in a few pairs of platform vinyl boots and some Lycra hot pants, because I was past the point of no return. I, on the other hand, believed in dividing the number of men by the number of years on the market.
Looked at that way, my number was minuscule.
“Obviously not,” I said.
“Really,” said Zak, raising one eyebrow.
“Why would I sleep with someone I didn’t like?” Never mind that I’d done it before. Hadn’t everyone? Sometimes you just didn’t know you didn’t like someone until it was too late.
“Antonio, Judah…” Vic started to count on her fingers. “Martyrman for two years!” I headed her off.
“Yes to conversation, yes to dinner, yes maybe to a movie, yes to a bar. That’s it. No other guaranteed affirmatives.” Big White Cat nipped my ankle. He liked to sit in strange men’s laps. So did I. It was a problem. Obviously, though, sleeping with everyone I went out with would be a colossally dumb thing to do.
Vic and Zak were still looking skeptical, but I was resolved.
I felt intrepid, like an explorer setting forth into the frozen wilderness with a few snorting sled dogs, a parka, and some pemmican. Revise. No pemmican. Unless there was such a thing as vegetarian pemmican. Revise again. Dating was supposed to be the opposite of the Arctic. My adventurer’s uniform, then, would include a push-up bra, a pair of stiletto heels, and some lipstick. Not too difficult. This was my usual uniform anyway. I couldn’t help it. I liked being a girl. And provisions? I turned to Zak.
“Where’s my hardtack?”
Zak looked at me blankly.
“I so have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
“For my adventure.” Zak hadn’t read as much Jack London as I had, apparently, but I would have thought he’d have read some Joseph Conrad. I decided not to think about Conrad. Heart of Darkness was an inappropriate reference for this, my Year of Yes.
Zak grinned in understanding, and handed me a pen.
“Eat your words,” he said. “Live on love.”
“Funny,” I said. “Woman cannot live on love alone.”
“If anyone could,” he said, “it’d be you.”
I was excited. I was ready. I was going to force open my heart and make myself willing. It wasn’t that I was lowering my standards. Just the opposite. I was expanding my faith in humanity. I was going to say yes, not just to a different kind of man, but to a different kind of life.

Mister Handyman, Bring Me a Dream (#ulink_9e99b9ac-4739-5870-88ed-b3feb6e43090)
In Which Our Heroine Plays Cowboys and Native Colombians…
MY FIRST DAY OF YES WAS, in my brain anyway, going to involve me going to the West Village and planting myself at a sidewalk café, where I’d pose nonchalantly in a cleavageenhancing white sundress, my dark red tresses tossing in a balmy breeze, and a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in my perfectly manicured hand. Ideal Man Number One, preferably in possession of a pair of piercing blue eyes and some endearing, but nonemotionally disabled shyness, would approach. He would be straight, despite our location in the West Village. He’d sit down at the table next to me, steal a few glances, and then, overcome, he’d rummage through his worn, leather bookbag until he found a scrap of paper. Make that a scrap of paper with a few lines of Rilke already written on it. He’d scribble a note and get the waiter to bring it to me with my cappuccino. I wasn’t dictating what it should say, but whatever it was, it’d be Pulitzer-worthy. I’d flip the slip of paper over, write the word “yes” on it, and send it back over. He’d smile at me. I’d smile back. My teeth, by some miracle, would be free of lipstick. He’d move to my table, we’d both be smitten, and we’d live happily ever after. Or, at least, for the rest of the night, which would, by the way, not require any rudimentary lesson in female anatomy from me.
Things did not work out quite the way I’d planned.
There were several initial difficulties with my scenario. Some of them, like the fact that it was thirty degrees outside, I could do nothing about. I could, however, address the fact that my hair was not red. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Skin a strange shade of sagebrush. I was, overall, the color of drought. My entire childhood had been spent being mistaken for a tiny, transient farm worker. Since moving to New York, I’d been taken for Puerto Rican, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and Colombian. I’d been Israeli, Armenian, Italian, and Turkish. In actuality, my ancestry was appallingly blue-blooded. William Bradford had sailed in on the Mayflower in 1620, become the governor of the Plymouth Colony, and begat a variety of diminishingly Puritanical descendants until, a few hundred years later, his bloodline reached its nadir with me. Had I wanted to, I could’ve joined the Mayflower Society or the Daughters of the American Revolution. I was not inclined. There was one pleasing exception to the whiteness: an ancestor who’d fallen off the rails and married a Mohican Indian. Very plausible, in my opinion, was the notion that the merger with my family had taken the whole tribe down. Further down the chain was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose Sonnets from the Portuguese I’d learned to loathe as bad pillow talk. My dad’s side was a string of blacksmiths, a couple hundred years of guys who pounded molten steel for a living, and came out only rarely into daylight. Family photos showed a lot of men with blackened skin and pale eyes. On that side, as well, in none-too-distant memory, was a woman who went by Bobo, because her name had been forgotten by everyone, including herself. The mixture of lines had resulted in me, looking, apparently, like everyone’s ex-wife, lost love, or childhood baby-sitter. On the street, I was routinely entrusted with whispered confidences in a variety of languages. There seemed to be nothing to be done.
I’D RESERVED THIS SATURDAY morning for staining the bathroom floor, my ears, my hands, and theoretically my hair, with henna, a hashish-scented paste resembling, when I was in a good mood, creamed spinach. When I was in a bad mood, it looked regrettably like the maggot-filled mud puddle my sister and I had, as children, once stationed my younger brother in for “spa treatments.” Because my hair was long, almost to my waist, the hennaing was a foul process of several hours. Length was not advantageous in New York City. I’d once felt a mysterious tugging while on the subway, only to turn and discover a man blissfully stuffing my ponytail down his pants. Now I usually wore it in a pile, dubiously secured with whatever bobby pins and takeout utensils I could unearth. I suspected that I looked like a small swami, carrying a coil of miserable infant cobras on my head. I convinced myself that this wouldn’t matter. I’d get that sidewalk table, and morph into the self I wasn’t. The reddened hair, I was certain, would make all the difference. Happiness would be mine!
However, within seconds of my starting to rinse the henna, the shower plugged up, and Pierre LaValle’s version of Morse code started shaking the floor. Whenever Pierre heard something disagreeable from our apartment, he immediately began a militant march around his kitchen, banging his broomstick against the ceiling like a bayonet. This was supposed to signal that we should cease and desist. Unfortunately for Pierre, his banging had created a karmic perforation in his ceiling. I stomped on the floor of the shower a few times to signal that I was aware of the problem, then wrapped myself in a hand towel as Pierre grumbled up the stairs and pounded on our door.
Though he had a sexy exterior, tall, dark, handsome, and extensively tattooed, Pierre’s personality was that of a snapping turtle. Despite his French name, he was a Puerto Rican boy from Miami. We speculated that he’d been raised not by wolves, but by retirees, playing canasta and developing a way with melba toast. He was twenty-five, but acted seventy. He was a chef, and going to business school on the side. Vic had a semisecret Scorpio-Scorpio crush on him, but I thought he was a pain in the ass. Pierre believed in shoe polish and expensive hair pomade. My muddied locks were twisted into stalagmites, and a glance in the tiny mirror had confirmed that I looked very swamp mummy. I didn’t think Pierre deserved pretty.
I flung open the door, mud dripping down my face. Pierre, his trousers neatly creased, his hair perfectly spiky, blinked several times.
“Can I help you?” I prompted.
“Maria?” Pierre managed.
“Yeah?”
“Leak. I thought it was Zak, blowing up the toilet again,” he said, averting his eyes from the horror of my appearance. Zak and Pierre had hated each other on sight. Pierre believed that Zak was an anarchist, and Zak believed that Pierre was a pod person. Added to this, Zak typically ascended the stairs at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, roaringly drunk and stomping his combat boots. Pierre’s bedroom was just below Zak’s. He was regularly rudely awakened, which was his justification for vacuuming in the dead of night. Revenge.
Pierre’s eyes flitted to my towel, then back to my aboriginal head. Henna had a distinctively contraband odor. He probably thought I was stoned.
“Sorry,” I said. “Bo told me he replaced a valve.” Bo was the middle-aged, possibly mentally handicapped son of Gamma. His only claim to maintenance man status was his tritely sagging waistband. He used things like masking tape to fix broken pipes.
“What’s up?” Pierre said. “I haven’t seen you for a while.”
What was his problem? Couldn’t he see that I was fully involved in glamorizing myself for my meeting with Mr. Right? I tried to radiate go-away vibes. Pierre shuffled his feet and gave me an attempt at a smile. My go-away vibes were never very successful. I relented.
“Wanna come in, Pierre?”
“That’d be great,” he said. I was instantly suspicious. Hanging with a hostile neighbor was akin to hanging with a vampire. You’d end up drained of blood, and it would be your own fault for inviting them across the threshold. I thought he might be trying to case my apartment for violations that would get me kicked out.
Pierre sat down at our kitchen table, crossed his legs, and prissily plucked a strand of Big White Cat’s fur from his knee. I couldn’t turn my back on him, because the towel gapped. My clothes were in my hut. Granted, this was supposed to be the Year of Yes, but I hadn’t planned on beginning it this way. At least I could count on Pierre not to ask me out. According to Vic, he was “utterly unattracted” to me.
“Want coffee?” Maybe I could placate him before he reported the fact that my floor tiles were stapled down, and my kitchen was illegally painted with a mural, the centerpiece of which was Zak’s contribution, a villainous comic book creature, and a morbid quote by Nietzsche: “Of all that is written, I love only that which is written in blood.”
“So. You’re pretty much naked,” said Pierre.
“That’s pretty much true,” I said. I eased myself onto the other kitchen chair. Big White eyeballed Pierre, gave an ecstatic chirp, and then hopped into his lap and wallowed whorishly. So much for my guard cat.
“That’s an interesting thing you’re doing with your hair,” Pierre continued politely. I’d grabbed a box of plastic wrap and was twisting it around my head like a turban. The henna box had said that heat would help the dye to set. At least, I was reasoning, the plastic wrap would keep it from dyeing my entire face. My ears were already a lost cause.
JUST THEN, MY BUZZER emitted a muffled quack. Who was ringing at my door? No one was supposed to be coming over. I stayed put. There was no way I was going to answer it. Probably one of the twins, prank buzzing.
Pierre stood up and proceeded to admit whoever it was into the building.
“It’s Mario,” he explained, flashing me a triumphant grin. I was instantly pissed off.
“I’m not dressed!”
“I called his pager before I came up. I knew you wouldn’t let him in, so I came upstairs to do it for you. I mean, your shower’s leaking into my copper pans. Everything tastes like soap. I can’t take it anymore.”
Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard. Every day I found new reasons to dislike Pierre.
Mario was the handyman that Bo usually brought in as a savior after he’d electrocuted himself a few times. He was a tall, skinny, Colombian guy in his early forties, with a crest of black hair, a motorcycle jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. He rode a Harley around the neighborhood. His only tools seemed to be a screwdriver and a hammer, and with these, he worked miracles.
This did not mean that I wanted him to see me dressed in a hand towel.
It was, however, too late. The Handyman walked in the door, looked me up and down, and gave a low whistle. I gave Pierre a glare that, if directed at any normal guy, would have induced internal bleeding. In Pierre, though, it only induced a smirk.
“Hola,” said someone at about knee level. I looked down. A little girl was holding the Handyman’s free hand.
“This is Carmela,” he said.
Carmela was six. She had two haphazard black pigtails, and a small suitcase in one hand. I felt my stomach drop. As a result of a couple of kids’ plays I’d written, I’d developed a horror of small children. I would’ve taken an entire audience of New York Times reviewers over one critic dressed in OshKosh. The little girls were like Elizabethan audiences: They tended to boo and throw things. Had they rotten tomatoes at their disposal, we would have been pelted. The little boys typically slept through entire performances, only to surge forth, weeping, during the quietest scenes.
Carmela dropped the Handyman’s hand, marched to the corner, sat down Indian style, and opened her suitcase. Something in her manner gave me the impression that she was carrying a disassembled sniper rifle. I allowed myself a fantasy. Maybe she’d take out the twins. Or the feral cats that hissed for hot dogs every time I passed through the courtyard. Or Pierre. Especially Pierre.
“Later,” he said, spinning on his polished heel. The Handyman and I listened to him dancing his way down the stairs, and then turned to each other.
“You gotta leak, mami? You need me to fix you up?”
In fact, no. I just liked having strange men over to my apartment when I was looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Handyman must have seen the frustration on my face, because he jerked a thumb at the bathroom and departed. I fled into my hut for clothing and a newsboy cap to stuff my plastic head into.
I could hear the Handyman banging about and swearing. Our bathroom was three feet by three feet and boasted a triangular sink the size of a measuring cup, and a shower stall constructed of what seemed to be cellophane. The water had only two temperature options: Vesuvius and Siberia.
I cringed inside my hut, having severe second thoughts about the yes policy. The Handyman had asked me out before. In fact, the Handyman asked me out every time I saw him. He was that kind of guy. He was, indeed, a handyman, in both the usual sense and in the two-fisted-assgrabbing sense. He hadn’t actually grabbed my ass, but I felt that that was only because I’d never turned my back on him.
Did I really have the balls to do this? Was it insane? Maybe I needed to be hospitalized. I had a brief fantasy of abdicating responsibility à la Blanche DuBois, deep-ending on the kindness of strangers. Attendants to bring me juice, and hold my straw while I sipped. Someone else to do my laundry. A white-sheeted bed with a real box spring. It had been years since I’d had a box spring. Unfortunately, Zak and I had recently watched the filmed version of Marat/Sade, the Peter Weiss play set in the asylum at Charenton. All those crazed inmates, flinging themselves about, babbling and scrabbling, speaking in Brechtian tongues. I’d been traumatized. Marat/Sade was appallingly similar to my own life.
“Chica!” The Handyman came into the room, wrench in hand. “Chica, chica, chica, you gotta problem, but I’m gonna fix it for you no charge, ‘cause you’re sexy.”
Let it be said that I had a severe allergy to the metaphoric conceit that women were as easy to (ful)fill as a hole in drywall. James Taylor’s “Handyman,” and the oft-covered gagger “If I Were a Carpenter,” were two of my most-loathed songs of all time. “Handyman” had verses talking about how not only would he fix your broken heart, you ought to refer him to your girlfriends, too. Obviously, all women wanted a man who could do double duty as a power drill. I found “If I Were a Carpenter” just as appalling. What kind of carpenter was this guy, proposing marriage and babies? How did that have anything to do with woodworking? Well. I’d once worked for two unsuccessful days in a theater set shop. There, “woodworking” had been a favored euphemism for “screwing” and/or “nailing” a chick. With your “tool.” In the company of men, many sex-related things developed a This Old House component. But really, if he were an actual carpenter, he’d knock up some bookshelves, not me. This carpenter seemed to just be a dude with a superficial hammer. I had my own superficial hammer.
Carmela removed a bright purple walrus, a packet of crayons, and a mystery sandwich from her suitcase. When I asked the Handyman what it was, he told me that it was her favorite, mustard and marshmallow fluff. I slid a few pieces of paper across the floor toward her, and then went to my computer, thinking that at least I could do my homework. I was thigh-deep in a class called Image of the Other, and was supposed to be writing an essay on Josephine Baker’s subjugation via a miniskirt made of bananas. I’d been more inclined to write a comparative of Baker and Carmen Miranda. Why were these women wearing fruit, anyway? The class was largely composed of privileged white kids, and most of it was spent watching things like Cabin in the Sky and Imitation of Life, and listening to the frustrated sighs of the professor, a big name in the field of race and media studies. Classes like these were making me wonder why the hell I was paying an obscene amount of borrowed money for knowledge that I would never be able to apply to the real world. Sure, I’d seen Birth of a Nation in its twelve-hour entirety, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that caused a human resources manager to hire you on the spot.
When the Handyman finally emerged, Carmela repacked her case, handed me her drawings, which were, somewhat traumatically, portraits of me, and marched out the door.
“Everything fixed?” I asked the Handyman. My head was itching wickedly. I hoped I wasn’t going to remove my newsboy hat to discover all my hair fallen out.
“The shower’s good, but I’m not,” said the Handyman.
“How come?” I asked.
“‘Cause you’re not walking out of here with me.” He winked. Clearly, he was blind. I was hideous. Maybe the wink was the result of something in his eye. Pierre arrived to check the progress of the leak, and was just in time to smirk at this.
I’d show him. Day one of the Year of Yes, not quite like the fantasy version, but what the hell. Wasn’t that the point?
“Absolutely,” I said. “Yes.”
“Yes, what?” said the Handyman.
“Yes, I’m walking out of here with you. As long as you’re inviting me.”
I had the satisfaction of seeing Pierre’s eyes bulge, and his tattooed koi flip their tails.
“Let’s go, then, mamita,” said the Handyman, who did not even seem surprised, but instead offered me a cigarette, and put his arm around me as though we’d been together forever.
“Give me a minute,” I said, and went to wash my hair. It had turned out, unsurprisingly, not at all red. Some of it was orange. Some of it was blackish. Some of it was green. It hung in long, straight, hideous strands. I squinted at myself for a moment in the mirror, and decided that I’d had enough. I got out my dull scissors, pulled a hank of hair over my shoulder, and hacked it off. Two feet of tresses dropped onto the bathroom floor. My head felt thrillingly light. I continued to chop, ending up just above my shoulders, and then, in one of those bad impulses you can never afterward explain, I cut myself some Bettie Page bangs. Crooked. Of course.
As the result of a crippling first-grade year, which the teacher spent trying to make me a rightie, I’d never properly learned how to use scissors. Usually, when people saw me cutting, they thought I had cerebral palsy. I had to cut the bangs shorter. And shorter. The last time I’d had a haircut this bad, I’d been five, and my mom had gone away for the weekend, leaving my sister and me with our father. She’d come home to find my dad looking sheepish, and my sister and I sporting super-short, slanted bangs that made us look like we were recovering from brain surgery. Screw it. I kept snipping.
I maneuvered my face into the one expression that made them look even: one eyebrow raised high, and the other crunched down. There. That was not so bad. I fluffed it up to the best of my ability, smeared on some red lipstick, and went outside to meet the first man of my new life.
The Handyman didn’t comment on the haircut. Maybe it looked good. On the way out of the building, however, we encountered Zak.
“What the fuck did you do to your hair?” he said.
“Cut it,” I said.
“Why?” he said.
“Because,” I said, getting defensive. “I should be able to cut my hair if I want to.”
“It looks completely weird,” said Zak. He had never been known for his delicacy regarding feminine beauty and lack thereof. “And the front is crooked. Did you know that?”
I rearranged my face into the expression.
“How about now?”
“Now your face looks weird.”
The Handyman cleared his throat. I’d forgotten about him.
“You know Mario,” I said.
“Mario, the handyman,” Zak said, suspiciously. I could see the memory of the exploding toilet flashing before his eyes. “Why are you here?”
“Mario the cowboy,” the Handyman corrected. “I’m taking your girl to dinner, amigo.”
Zak looked as though he was going to choke on suppressed laughter.
“My girl?” he said. “I’m just going inside.”
“I’m just going out,” I said, only partially believing what I was saying.
CARMELA WALKED TEN FEET in front of us, pretending, no doubt, that she was a princess being attended by a couple of servants far below her station. She didn’t even look back to see if we were behind her. The Handyman seemed to know everyone on every street corner. He greeted women ranging from seventeen-year-old Polish girls to their gray-haired grandmothers. He donated a buck to the yellow-eyed Kielbasa Dude, a career drunk who perpetually hung out on Greenpoint Avenue clutching a booze-filled brown paper sack and a sausage. He waved at the proprietors of the bodegas. He nodded at the waitresses in the Thai Café, which, despite its unlikely location deep in Polish Brooklyn, made the best green papaya salad in the city. It was as though we were traversing a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood arranged specifically for the Handyman.
I walked next to him, and wondered how I’d managed to live in Greenpoint for as many months as I had without getting to know anyone. I recognized the cast of characters, of course, but the Handyman knew them by name. I’d been pretending I didn’t really live in my neighborhood. Most of my time, by necessity, was spent in Manhattan anyway. Greenpoint was where I slept. When I slept. The neighborhood had, in my opinion, very little to recommend it. Greenpoint, obviously named early in an optimistic century, had nothing green to boast of, unless you counted the complexions of its residents, upon catching a whiff of the famous Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant. Or, perhaps, the neighborhood’s moniker referred to Newton Creek, which divided the northernmost tip of our neighborhood from Queens, and which was euphemistically classified as “precluded for aquatic life” due to the massive Exxon oil leak that had, for years, been drooling into the creek’s already sewage-contaminated waters. This did not keep certain neighborhood eccentrics and teenagers from cannonballing off the disintegrating India Street pier, and dog-paddling in the slurry. The Handyman seemed to thrive in this neighborhood. For the first time, I thought that maybe I could, too. I’d been rejecting my new home. If I was giving up on no, it was time to give up on that, too.
In between yelling hellos at hipsters, bums, and babies, the Handyman conducted a running monologue of his history.
“So, mamita, it used to be heroin for me, but I got clean of the devil, and now I’m here. Montana was where I came straight from Colombia, three wives ago. Her mamá, we never got married, ‘cause I got smart.”
I was alone amongst my friends in thinking that dating recovering addicts was actually not the worst thing in the world. They always told you their story, right up front. It was a refreshing change from persons addicted to other things: emotional warfare, codependence, Harold Pinter plays. At this point in my life, it seemed worth dealing with the addict’s night sweats, sievelike memory, and “bad liver and broken heart,” as Tom Waits put it, in order to get to his stories. Where else could I hear tales of piano bars and mystery scars, ballads of long-dead cronies named Mac, stories of jonesing for a hit of something or other and somehow ending up married to a waitress, and buried alive in a diner Dumpster by fried egg sandwiches? Stories like the Handyman’s.
Carmela dropped back to listen.
“Daddy also had a big mess with cocaine,” she told me.
“I was getting to that, baby,” the Handyman called after her, but she had resumed her place in front of us.
“Montana?” I asked. I was feeling pleased with myself for remaining unfazed in the face of the Handyman’s story. He was twirling his hammer with the panache of a marching band vixen. The zippers on his motorcycle jacket flashed in the sun. His spurs, yes, spurs, jingled. His teeth were white, and his skin was tanned, and it seemed that, even though he was a walking contradiction, a motorcycle-riding Colombian cowboy, nothing bad had ever happened to him.
“Dude ranch. The Flying Bull. We called it the Flying Bullshit, mamita, but it was not a bad place to be. First I was the dishwasher, then I was the cook. And Montana! Baby, you gotta get your sweet ass to Montana!”
Carmela led us to a restaurant called the Manhattan Triple Decker. It was neither in Manhattan, nor three stories high. One story and a lot of eggs. She greeted the aged Polish man behind the counter, and then graciously accepted his lift onto a bar stool. Without being asked, he brought her a strawberry milkshake. Clearly, she was a regular.
“I was bringing the powder to the cowboys, baby, and they were out there, on their horses, high, high, high, and all because of me, their dishwasher. Man. Those days are dead and gone now, dead and gone.”
The Handyman ordered a hamburger. I got a grilled cheese.
“Couple of the guys, they were the real thing, and the rest were the guests from everywhere, everybody who wanted to ride horses and pretend they were in a Western movie. Everybody liked the coke, though; man, mi amigo in the kitchen got me hooked up and before you knew it, we were selling the shit to the whole town. I could ride, back then, mamita, as good as the guys who were out there year-round. I had a horse I liked, and I used to ride all over the ranch, high out of my mind! And shit, baby! Did I tell you I could lasso? I lassoed whatever I felt like. One time, I put a loop around this chica in jeans and cowboy boots, and damn, damn, damn, mami!”
He paused for a moment, lost in the memory of a girl I pictured as a lot like the big-haired Rodeo Queens of my high school. There’d been one who’d been famous for the constantly visible outline of a Trojan in the back pocket of her skin-tight Wranglers.
“So, what happened? How’d you end up here?”
“He got busted,” said Carmela, turning to give me the first smile I’d seen from her. A bewitching, missing-toothed grin. She slurped her milkshake. “And then he got my mommy.”
“I met her in jail,” said the Handyman. “I was in for only five months. They busted me, but they busted me on the wrong day. I didn’t have shit. They wanted to put me away forever, but instead, they had to put me away for no time at all. She was my cellmate Victor’s wife. Fool wouldn’t see her, got pissed over some small shit, thought she was fucking his brother, so I went out and there she was.”
“The most beautiful woman my daddy had ever seen,” said Carmela, happily.
“Her name was Maria,” said the Handyman.
I was enchanted. I’d started writing a tragic motherless-child-and-widower story in my head. Death in childbirth. Grieving widower, scarred by a criminal past, trying to hack out a living through fix-it gigs, little daughter raising herself on mustard-and-marshmallow sandwiches. Horrible as it was, it appealed to my drama-saturated nature. I was already considering how I’d adapt it into a hybrid of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Sam Shepard. I was envisioning my Pulitzer. My Tony. My Oscar! The trifecta, balanced on the bookshelves I’d finally be able to afford.
“What happened to her?” I asked softly, ready to comfort him. He started laughing. Laughing hard. Slapping his knee at my apparent stupidity. Carmela drew some milkshake up in her straw. She shot it, with perfect accuracy, at the Handyman’s cheek.
“Damn, mamita, whadda you think?” The Handyman wiped his face, still laughing.
I protested that I didn’t know. How could they laugh about something as tragic as this? What kind of people were they? Had they no compassion?
“She ran off on the back of a motorcycle with some fucker she met in the 7-Eleven. Left me with this one, still a baby. I had to raise her on a bottle, yeah, Carmela?”
“Yuck,” Carmela confirmed.
“And now, we gotta go. Somebody on Eagle Street has a busted buzzer. I’m coming by your place tomorrow afternoon, to fix yours, ‘cause it’s fucked, right, mamita?”
“It quacks,” I told him.
“Yeah, I didn’t like the people who lived there before you,” said the Handyman, grinning. “I gave ‘em a joke buzzer.”
And with that, they were gone. I moved to a booth and ate my sandwich. I wasn’t sure what to think of what had just happened. It was starting to be clear to me that, though I knew plenty about Greek tragedies, I knew almost nothing about real life. As if that were not enough, I could see my reflection in the window and it looked like an obsessive-compulsive bird had built a nest on my head.
I ONLY HAD A COUPLE of minutes to feel sorry for myself, before I noticed a guy pressing his face against the outside of the glass. He was tall and pale, with lank blond hair, and looked to be somewhere in his forties. He came inside, walked straight to my booth, ordered a beer in Polish, and without any warning, started sobbing. I signaled urgently to the waitress. She shrugged.
“Are you okay? Do you need a doctor?” I asked.
He let loose with a snot-drenched stream of Polish.
“He says you look like his ex-wife,” the beautiful teenage waitress translated, rolling her eyes, and then went to get him another bottle of Tyskie beer. He opened it with his teeth. Normally, I would have moved to another table, or left the restaurant altogether. I could smell the crazy on him. But that day, I was willing to admit that maybe I was a little crazy, too. And here we were, in a diner in Brooklyn, crazy, at the same moment.
The scene in King Lear that I’d always liked best involved Lear, gone mad, wandering the beach in the storm to end all storms, running into his old friend Gloucester, who has been blinded. There they are: these two people who’ve known each other forever, in the middle of a rainstorm, at the end of their reigns. For a little while, they save each other.
And so, I stayed where I was. I ate my sandwich. He drank his beers. He talked, and talked, and talked, a monologue of Zs and Ks. I smiled. I nodded. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard.
When he left, it was dark outside. The day was over. My true love, whoever he was, hadn’t shown up. For some reason, I was happy anyway.
THE NEXT DAY, THE HANDYMAN appeared at my apartment and wired me a buzzer that turned out to be louder than the entire neighborhood combined. Its bleat registered equivalent to my teenage idiotic episodes of leaning against the speakers at grunge-era rock shows.
“So you always know when someone’s coming,” said the Handyman. I protested that the buzzer was likely to make me have a heart attack.
“Nobody wants to be safe,” he grumbled.
“Obviously not,” I said. “I just want to be happy.” I thought I was being lighthearted. The Handyman disagreed.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck everyone.” His eyes blazed.
The disadvantage of addicts, recovering and otherwise: mood swings. The Handyman stormed out of the apartment. A moment later, my buzzer screamed. And again. He rang it for an hour. Finally, I went outside to give him a piece of my mind.
“What are you doing?”
“You weren’t supposed to answer that, mamita,” he said. He was sitting on my stoop, looking calm and dejected. “I’m a crazy motherfucker, but you’re one stupid girl.”
“Probably true,” I agreed. “Don’t do that again, or I’ll call the police.”
“No charge for the buzzer. It’ll keep you safe from people like me, and shit, mami, you look like you need it. You’re too young for me, mamita, young and dumb, just like I was when I was in Montana.”
Carmela materialized, suitcase in hand, followed by a troupe of three neighborhood mutts, and a lagging older woman in worn-down red stilettos.
“You were late, Daddy,” she said, reprovingly. The old lady said something pissed off in Polish. The Handyman replied, also in Polish. She left, grumbling.
“Daddy’s got problems,” said Carmela, looking at me solemnly. “But I love him.”
There was no one in my life that I could say that about. Besides myself, that is. I envied Carmela her capacity for the unconditional. Part of me wanted to be like her, to be able to accept everyone I met. To forgive them their trespasses, their buzzer ringings, their vacuuming. Obviously, I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be.
“See you,” I said to the Handyman.
“Next time something breaks, baby,” he replied.
He swung Carmela up, and she scrambled onto his shoulders like a monkey. I watched them as they walked into the sunset, their two bodies becoming a silhouette of something bigger than both of them.
Zak sat down next to me with a bottle of beer in hand.
“Brittany?” I asked.
“Catastrophe,” he said. “Debacle, disaster, horror, nightmare. You?”
“How about I sing a little bit of ‘Handyman’ for you? I fix broken hearts…”
“No. You know how I feel about easy listening.”
“He was as broken as me, is the bottom line.”
“That’d be life, yes,” said Zak. “And the things that compensate for emotional instability aren’t constant, either, that’s the problem.”
“What would those things be?”
“Things that eventually sag,” he said, sadly.
I put my head on Zak’s shoulder as the sun went down. Maybe love was like Godot. You spent the whole play talking about it, but it never actually made it onstage. You waited anyway. Of course you did.
“Wanna go play video games?” asked Zak.
“Desperately,” I said.
And so, in lieu of love, we went out into the night to kill a few monsters.

Jack the Stripper (#ulink_e463d592-beb1-5cf1-a26f-a08f6831e58d)
In Which Our Heroine Meets a Wuss in Creep’s Clothing…
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE spent in a state of controlled chaos. I went out with guys I met on the subway, guys I met in the bookstore, guys I met in line for stupidly expensive espresso. Varying degrees of dates. Mostly coffee, sometimes a drink in a bar. I went out with a couple of PhD-holding taxi drivers (one was an Indian surgeon, the other an Egyptian psychoanalyst); a Metropolitan Museum security guard who offered to take me home to meet his family in Sicily; a couple of construction workers; a Vietnam vet who was missing three fingers (alas, he had plenty to say about what he could do with the remaining digits); a Long Island City carpet salesman who asked if I wanted to “shag,” and then laughed for a long, long time, pointing hysterically at a section of fluffy carpets. I had a glass of Rioja with a Spanish-accented painter who, in an ill-conceived effort to impress me, told me that the only medium worth painting in was your own viscera. He then gave a long diatribe about people who held down day jobs instead of “doing their art.” The next day, I happened to go into Pearl Paint to buy latex for my living room, and there he was, working behind the counter, holding a bottle of glitter glue, and sounding very much like he was from New Jersey. I went out with a goatee-wearing psychic, who told me I was from Nebraska (no), a Capricorn (no), and about to find Big Love (hopefully). Then he spent forty-five minutes reading my palm, and found a line on it that clearly said I was going to sleep with him (hell no). I went out with one of the annoying New York guys who runs up to girls on the street, telling them they have great hair, and then tries to sell them salon gift certificates. I went out with a matchstick-skinny photographer, who came up to me in a café and told me he was looking for models to pose for his “tasteful and artistic nude series.” Much to his sorrow, I didn’t take my clothes off, but I regret to say that there’s a picture out there somewhere in which there is not only far too much leg, there’s a dyed-pink lapdog and a maraschino cherry.
Despite all these dates, I still hadn’t gone out with anyone from my program at NYU. And I was glad. Dating in the Dramatic Writing Program was incestuous, on a Greek tragedy level. One mistake made at a party could find you putting out your eyes during your next playwriting workshop. Anything you did was destined to trail humiliatingly behind you, like toilet paper attached to your shoe, for the next four years. Even if you didn’t remember it, everyone else was writing it down. It’d appear in the classroom the next week, translated into a scene in someone else’s play. You’d end up sitting around the workshop table, impotently explaining why it was not good dramatic logic to include the scene in which the character based on you made out with the character based on the most flamingly gay boy in the program. Why were you making out? You were a girl. Yes, okay, he was a boy, but a boy who, if not for the joint influence of controlled substances and pure desperation, would’ve had no interest in girls. Not that you could even comment directly. All the people in my program were repression made flesh. We sublimated all our vitriol into pages, becoming not just backbiters, but backwriters. I’d dated a bunch of other NYU students, both during the months of my yes policy, and prior, but thus far I’d evaded any of the messes in my daily classes.
However, if someone from my program asked me out now, I couldn’t say no. When I’d put my yes policy into effect, I’d neglected to think about that. Post-Handyman, I’d felt somewhat virtuous. A foray into the nonintellectually bound male. Hadn’t turned out terribly well, but that wasn’t really his fault. I felt comfortable taking the blame for that particular failure, whereas, if I was going to date a classmate, I felt that he should take equal responsibility for any tragedy. He, after all, would have the same frames of reference I did. A Doll’s House and The Three Sisters, The Misanthrope and Long Day’s Journey into Night. A shared vocabulary of this kind of material seemed to me to be a recipe for disaster.
There were several categories of male to be met in the Dramatic Writing Program, and, with the exception of the last two, I was critical of them all:
The Rainbow Bullets. As in, gay like Liberace. One of these was writing a response to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, entitled The Penis Monologues. He claimed that the penis had been marginalized, too.
The Gayts. Gay-straight men. Obviously gay, but in denial. Usually, these guys would spend their time at NYU writing five or six scripts featuring characters that everyone knew were gay, except the playwright, who’d finish things up with a hetero wedding.
The Strays. Straight-gay men. Dated girls, but used hair products that made girls suspicious of them. Always prettier than any woman in the department.
The Comedians. Interested only in fart jokes. No one ever got a good look at them, because they never removed their scraggly baseball caps. Traveled in packs. Deadly serious.
The Tragedians. Usually strikingly handsome, and in possession of appealingly troubled souls, and extensive knowledge of French new wave cinema. Interested only in making experimental, Warhol-esque films consisting of five hours of footage of the Empire State Building. At night.
The Cult of Personality. Generally, slam poets. They paired wildly mismatched 1970s shirts with nylon workout pants and Converse high-tops, and vacillated between above-it-all silence and rabid ironic monologue. Asexual.
The Do-Overs. The thirty-something guys who were happily beginning their youth again, this time as the only “real men” in a program full of hot eighteen-year-olds.
The Gurus. The thirty-something guys who didn’t notice the eighteen-year-olds, and therefore were fervently desired by all of them. Usually yoga teachers on the side.
The Professors. Though there were rules against dating one’s students, they were not well enforced. A side effect of writerly repression was that several people in the program were obsessed with scripting sadomasochistic onstage sex. The rest of the unlucky workshop participants would have to pretend to be actors, and read the scenes aloud. “Ohh, ahh, yesssssss. Pleeease, plunge my head into a bucket of pee.” Nothing could have been more unappealing. Except for the semifamous professor in charge, lech-erously informing my friend Elise that she looked as though she’d been really turned on during her reading of a rape scene.
Zak. Lovable, but not dateable, given the roommate situation. Zak had his own in-program dating woes. He’d had a brief interlude with the blonde Russian babe that all the straight boys in the program followed around. Something undisclosed had gone wrong. Now he was forced to hide every time he saw her.
Griffin. Lovable, but not dateable, given that, other than Zak, he was my only male friend in the department. He, Zak, and I formed a triumvirate of late-night intellectual obnoxiousness. When Griffin was in our kitchen, Zak and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted to be, because he’d charmed Vic and could do no wrong. Griffin was a small Greek guy from Indiana, and in possession of a talent for making anyone, in any room he walked into, fall instantly in love with him. All of his female friends had tried to sleep with him at some point, and I was no exception. In my case, I’d hung out with him one night until 4:00 a.m., eating his trademark bad pasta and drinking wine. When it was too late for me to go home, he’d given me his bed.
“You can stay in here with me, you know,” I’d said.
Griffin had taken a couple steps toward the bed, then a couple back.
“I can’t. I’m from Indiana,” he’d finally said, and flew from the room, his pillow clutched to his chest. It wasn’t that he was confused about his sexuality. It was that he was one of the last men on the planet who believed in sleeping only with people you loved. He’d later revealed that he’d spent the remainder of the night conflicted. We were close friends. It was possible that we might really get along. Should he go back in? Should he not? What was really being offered?
“Yes,” I’d told him. “It was what you thought.”
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he’d replied, but the moment had passed, and we’d never been inclined to get naked again. Soon after, I’d hooked Griffin up with Elise, who’d conquered his resistance through a combination of sexy ankles, fishnet stockings, and braless stirring of pumpkin risotto. Now, she was taking him shopping for small, soft sweaters in the women’s department, and introducing him to the joys of high-thread-count sheets. He was slightly ashamed of how much he loved this, and worried that he’d be recategorized into a Stray. He wasn’t. He was his own thing. There was no one on earth like Griffin, and that was half of why I adored him.
THE ABOVE CATEGORIES, combined with my work overload, caused me to keep my head down whenever I had to make an appearance on the seventh floor of 721 Broadway. The boys of the DWP weren’t even on my radar. Therefore, the first time I met the Boxer, I was dismissive. He was part of the Do-Over category, and in the grad program. Not bad looking. None too tall, but making up for it with great arm and chest muscles, due to the fact that he worked out at a boxing gym. Blondish, close-cropped hair. Sexily broken pugilist’s nose. It did not occur to me to be interested in him. The thing that made me reconsider the Boxer was his voice. I heard this great, raspy boom echoing across a crowded classroom, and I looked around in spite of myself.
The class was taught by a famous avant-garde playwright. He’d assigned us the first page of Kafka’s The Castle, not a play, mind you, an unfinished novel about a poor guy trying in vain to get into a very low-rent heaven. We were supposed to do we knew not what with it. The playwright sat in the back of the house, grimacing his trademark sexy grimace. We were not experimental enough for him. His plays involved dreamlike realities and absurdist dialogue seeded with spectacular one-liners. He was a superstar for a select audience. I pretended I’d read the play the teacher was known for, but I lied. I was only interested in Sam Shepard, and I had too many day jobs to spend any time on my homework. I was getting by solely on my smile, which I spread indiscriminately around the department, hoping it would get me forgiven for not working up to my potential. When my turn came around to show my interpretation of The Castle, I sent the Boxer into the booth, to speak over the God mic, and flung all the other men in the class onstage, where they opposed my friend Ruby in her quest for a place to sleep. It was a sort of no-room-at-the-inn situation, which went surprisingly well the first time around, and heinously the second, when the professor made me repeat what I’d improvised. After class, the Boxer came up to me and told me he thought it had been “not bad.”
We shared other classes, it turned out. One was with my most beloved professor, Martin, a Guru in his own right, who always carried about twenty-five pounds of obscure and wonderful books in a beaten-up leather bag and delivered his lectures in a distinctive growl. Martin and I were close cohorts, often drinking wine after class and trading volumes. He had a pack of young male acolytes, who could usually be found trailing behind him, hoping that some of his elusive combination of brilliance, eccentricity, and badass sense of humor would rub off on them. In one of Martin’s classes, I read aloud a prose piece about the ridiculous loss of my virginity, and the Boxer laughed so hard I thought he might have a coronary. He asked for my phone number, and though Vic had again admonished me for giving it out, I did. He’d laughed at my jokes, goddamn it. My ego was enamored. Also, even though I’d seen him carrying a well-thumbed paperback of Raymond Carver stories, never a very good sign in a prospective boyfriend, I thought that the boxing made up for it. It gave him a certain working-class appeal, a grounding in the physical that convinced me that he’d never try to knock me out with references to Rushdie.
We went out to a sports bar (a sports bar! I rejoiced. It was so not my taste, and since I thought my taste had historically sucked, anything in opposition to it seemed like a great idea) and watched baseball. He had another friend with him, who was possibly there to evaluate me. I was wearing the wrong thing. Red dress. Far too sexy for a bar full of televisions and beer. I feared that my dress made me look desperate, and so I spent the entire evening tugging at it, trying to make it less bombshell and more windbreaker. Not possible. The Boxer said almost nothing to me the whole night, and I went home, feeling dweeby.
When the Boxer called me later that week, and asked if I wanted to meet up that night, I was surprised, but pleased.
“Meet me at six,” he said, and gave me an address on Broadway. Maybe he liked me after all. I could see myself liking him. He was intelligent, funny, and a gentleman! He hadn’t even tried to kiss me on the first date! I revised my opinions of him, and decided that he was just old-fashioned. Nothing wrong with old-fashioned.
LATER THAT NIGHT, I walked down the street in search of our meeting place, expecting dinner, and maybe a play, given that we were roughly in the theater district. The neighborhood got less and less likely as I walked. I checked the address. Maybe I’d gotten something wrong. There was nothing on this corner. Nothing, that is, but something called Flashdancers, A Gentleman’s Club. I’d seen this place advertised on the tops of taxis, a busty blonde in four sequins and a smile, offering herself up to traffic. Despite the fact that the sign was neon, I deluded myself into thinking that “gentleman’s club” meant the sort of dark, oak-paneled bar where you might find F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway drinking expensive scotch and smoking tobacco peddled by cigarette girls. I didn’t think I could just walk in. Probably, I thought, I wasn’t even allowed. I walked up to the big, bald guy standing outside, and nervously asked him if I had the right address.
“You wanna go inside?” He grinned at me. Gold tooth.
“I’m supposed to meet someone. But is there a restaurant? I think I might be lost.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We have an all-you-can-eat buffet.” He winked, in a friendly manner. I looked at a sign posted next to the door, advertising the buffet. I felt happier. This was good news. Maybe it was one of those secret New York places. There was a club downtown, for example, that you had to access through a tunnel that started in the storage room of a grocery store. The clammy, dark passageway was the epitome of creepy, but if you had enough faith to get through the vault door at the end, you hit paradise: an old speakeasy, with swing music, velvet couches, and great martinis. I couldn’t imagine that the Boxer would actually take me somewhere sleazy. We had to go to school together, after all, and it’d be too embarrassing. I peered into the dark hallway beyond the door, but couldn’t see anything.
“Do you think he’s inside already?”
“Shit, I don’t know. You wanna go in, or you wanna stay out?” The bouncer was looking impatient.
“I guess I’ll go in.”
“That’s twenty bucks.” He stuck out a palm as big as my face.
I’d never been to a bar that had such a big cover charge before. I dug in my purse, but I only had eight dollars.
“Only because you’re a chick. Get in before I change my mind,” said the bouncer, waving me in for free. I wadded my money into my purse and ducked through a curtain.
AT THE END OF A SHORT HALLWAY I found a holiday inn dining room: metal chairs with wipe-clean burgundy upholstery, small fake-marble tables, and little fake-crystal vases with fake flowers in them. A steam table against one wall, loaded with metal trays of anonymous fried objects. It would’ve been the kind of place I’d often ended up at during family vacations, had it not been for the fact that it was strewn with naked women.
Freaked out, I looked around for the Boxer. No sign of him. I went and got a dangerously bargain-priced glass of wine, averting my eyes from a woman who was sitting with her essentially bare bottom on the bar. I surreptitiously wiped my glass with a cocktail napkin, drank it down, ordered another, and fled to a table for two, hoping that the Boxer would appear quickly. Maybe he’d misunderstood what kind of place this was.
I’d only been to one strip club, and it had been in Idaho. I’d been dragged by some vagabond acting intern who’d thought it was local color. He’d neglected to understand that I, too, was local color, that these were my people, and if those things were immaterial, that I’d also been drastically underage. The strip club had been converted from a finger steak restaurant, but the vinyl booths and sawdust floor remained intact. The strippers had gyrated piteously around a PVC pole in the middle of the room. “Gyrated,” though, was too strong a word. Most of them had looked to be on serious drugs. They’d alternated between nodding off and racing about like wild ferrets. Sometimes they’d served as waitresses, bringing paper baskets of finger steaks. People ordered them. People ate them. People went to this place on purpose. There was a prominent sign posted: the torch lounge assumes no responsibility for consequences of viewing. I didn’t blame them.
The only other stripping I’d seen had been with Zak, at a downtown cabaret that had been wildly, briefly hip. There’d been a woman dressed in a couple of plastic holly leaves and a tutu, shaking her thing to an Ani DiFranco song. Another woman had dripped hot candle wax all over herself while chanting Hail Marys. A woman dressed all in white feathers had brought out a guitar and sung a country-western ballad entitled “Did I Shave My Vagina for This?” Most bizarrely, there’d been a woman who’d billed herself as the Last Burlesque Show. (“Oh no,” Zak had whispered. “Oh no, oh no, oh God no.”) She was in her eighties, and fully dressed, at first, in a Dale Evans cowgirl suit. The Last Burlesque Show did scary things with a baton. By the time she’d gotten down to her tasseled pasties and spun them in opposite directions, Zak and I were both paralyzed, I with wonder, he with horror. The next act had been a belligerent woman who’d held a flashlight beneath her chin, campfire-ghost story-style, angrily reciting Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” When she’d finished, she’d trolled the audience for tips, and, discovering Zak, shone her flashlight on him, and demanded his wallet, yelling that she’d noticed he was cheap. We’d fled into the night, Zak fumbling for his asthma inhaler as we hit the street, me suspecting that it had been the last time he’d trust me to take him anywhere.
My glass stuck to my table. My ass stuck to my chair. I didn’t want to stand up and walk out because I was hoping that I’d become invisible. I was completely embarrassed. If this was not just a miscommunication, if this was intentional, it was because the Boxer had assumed me to be wilder than I really was. I regretted that red dress. He probably thought that I was this kind of girl. What kind of girl was this, though? I had no idea. I was on my third, desperate glass of wine, and I’d graduated to drinking it with a straw to avoid touching my mouth to the glass.
I was the only woman in the room who wasn’t a stripper. Not that the strippers were really stripping. They were dangling from poles, looking bored. They all had boob jobs. Breasts the size of cannonballs. My imagination launched to images of enormous false bosoms being shot at enemies. Civil War-era costumes. Screaming men. I squinched my eyes shut and tried not to think about exploding tits.
BEHIND ME, THERE WAS SOME ACTIVITY, and it didn’t take long to figure out that it was a table full of kids, daring each other to approach me. School uniforms, like beacons shining out of the dark. Faces scarred by inept shaving. No one in their right mind would think these prep-school boys were done with puberty. I could hear them poking each other, trying to get up their courage. I was wearing a white wrap-around sweater and jeans, and I couldn’t imagine they really thought I was a stripper. The strippers looked to have been allotted three inches of cloth each. That, and as much silicone as their hearts desired.
A skinny, freckled kid plunked himself down at my table. He blinked at me for a moment, then suddenly grabbed my glass of wine and slugged a sip. He looked triumphant. He weighed ninety pounds, at most. I grabbed it back, imagining my arrest for providing alcohol to a minor.
“Who are you?” I said.
“Peter.”
“Peter what?”
“VanHeu…” He reconsidered. “You wish.”
“Peter YouWish,” I said, “you’re too young to be here.”
“My friends want to know if you’re…” He dissolved into stammering giggles.
I gave him the best evil eye I could muster. Not so hot, considering my lower lip was starting to tremble.
“They want to know if you’re wearing a bra.”
“None of your business.” A lacy bra that had cost too much money. I’d bought it that afternoon, and put it on in the dressing room, full of optimism for the evening.
“Like, would you, like, give my friend Matt a lap dance?” he blurted, shoving a wad of ones at me. I shoved them back, but not before I noticed that there was a platinum card tucked into the cash.
“No. Never. Absolutely not.” I decided then that the yes policy definitely did not include the underage. I hadn’t realized that I’d needed to make a rule about ninth graders.
“The girls won’t. They say they’ll get arrested. We’re only allowed to sit quietly and drink soda.”
“I don’t even know how you got in here.”
“Bribed the bouncer. Duh.”
I could see one of the kids doing homework at the table. Maybe this was what you did after school, if you were a kid in New York City.
They were all clustered around my table now, sweating and shuffling their feet. Being surrounded by adolescent boys is like being surrounded by a flock of seriously awkward hummingbirds, and discovering, belatedly, that you are the feeder.
“What’d she say?” they clamored.
“She’ll do it,” said Peter YouWish.
“She won’t,” I said. “Move it.”
“I have my allowance,” offered another kid.
“Me too,” said another.
I wondered blurrily if there was a niche market in stripping for schoolboys. You’d travel from private school to private school, disguised as a substitute teacher. Four-inch-long plaid skirts and knee socks would hold no appeal for these kids. They saw them all the time. A Sexy Substitute, though, could make a killing.
Finally, the Boxer arrived, holding a beer. The kids scattered like marbles. He looked at them, bemused, and then leaned across the table.
“Need a drink?” The kids had managed to siphon my entire glass. The Boxer, for some reason, acted like this was perfectly normal. My pride hurt. If this was a test, if he thought I couldn’t deal with this, he was wrong. I was brave. And maybe he was going to apologize. And maybe he was going to morph suddenly into someone he wasn’t. In a foolish little corner of my mind, I still had hope. The alternative was too depressing.
“Wine,” I said. I was already half-drunk. I might as well keep going.
A stripper in a neon pink G-string had started to twirl, sensing the arrival of someone who might actually tip her. Over the God mic, a voice informed us that this girl was a stockbroker during the day and a stripper at night. Cannonballs. Or bowling balls. My brain dragged me to a bowling alley, where a guy in an embroidered shirt and rented shoes was hooking his fingers into the stripper’s breast, and tossing it, girl and all, down the lane. Strike! I cringed.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine. Terrific!” I nodded like a convert. “Great stripper!” Great was a misnomer. She had rigor mortits, and looked maybe seventeen. I felt like my wine might have poisoned me.
“MIND IF I GO GET A LAP DANCE? There’s this Russian girl here, Masha…”
The Boxer thumped me on the back, like I was a buddy.
My mind flipped forcibly to Chekhov. Moscow! Moscow! I yanked it back.
“Not at all,” I said, much too loudly.
Why would I mind? We were on a date. Sure, go and get some unknown Masha to squirm in your lap, and I’ll just sit here and fight off the fourteen-year-olds. Great! Exactly how I wanted to spend my evening! Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, we weren’t on a date? Maybe he really did want to be buddies. Maybe he wasn’t attracted to me at all! I could feel myself turning red. Oh God. I’d completely misinterpreted everything. He didn’t like me. Obviously. Anyone who liked me would not leave me sitting at a wobbly little table in a room full of pubescents on the prowl.
I watched the Boxer put his arm around the tattooed shoulder of a girl I’d noticed before, a skinny girl, with long black hair and iridescent blue eyes. She smiled, fake adoration appearing on her face. I could see the Boxer grinning. I could see him believing her.
I put a handful of ice cubes in my mouth and crunched them until they melted away. I put my face down onto the sticky table and let my eyes overflow.
SOME UNFORTUNATE SIDE EFFECTS of humiliation: Three drinks later, I lost my senses and went home with the Boxer. I climbed five flights of his stairs, and ended up in his bedroom, participating in some truly awful sex. The Boxer, startlingly, ended up crying on my neck. I thought I knew why. Who wanted this to be their life? Not me, and apparently not him, either.
I thumped him on the shoulder. We were buddies, after all. But we weren’t. We were two people making a naked mistake. I called a car service at 5:00 a.m. Some knight came in a shining white car and took me home.
I dabbed at my eyes the whole time I dressed for work. Things already sucked, and they got even suckier. I went looking for Vic, but she wasn’t in her bedroom. Her diary was open on her bed, though, and I glimpsed my name. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t pick the book up, but I read what was on the page, and it wasn’t pretty. I knew Vic was annoyed at my yes policy, but I hadn’t known she thought I was an irredeemable, arrogant slut. Apparently so. I walked to the train, sleepless and sad.
That afternoon in class, the Boxer acted perfectly normal, and I was relieved. I thought maybe I’d been wrong about him. Afterward, however, the whole class went to the basement bar, ordered drinks, and got down to bitching about the state of the universe. Suddenly, the Boxer slammed his glass down and announced, in his booming voice, “Do I have a story for you.”
I cringed. Somehow, I knew what was coming.
“So, I was having sex with this girl last night, who actually came home with me after we went to a strip club…”
Here’s the thing about sitting at a table where someone is telling a story about you, in the third person. It sucks. Not that I’d never done it, but I’d never done it in a kiss-and-tell vein. It had only been eight hours.
Pause for a short discussion with the male members of the group about strip clubs in New York City, advantages and disadvantages of going to same, and a small story from an otherwise shy member of the group about the broken finger suffered by his brother-in-law while attempting to stuff dollar bills down the G-string of a stripper in New Orleans during a bachelor party. Pause for a short discussion with the female members of the group about feminism versus stripping, G-strings, comfortable or not, and, “What the hell kind of girl goes with a guy to a strip club, anyway? None of us! Where do you find your girls?”
Pause for me, unnoticed, turning purple, drowning my misery in Maker’s Mark and wondering if there was any way to make a graceful exit without everyone figuring out what was going on.
And back to the point, the Boxer declaiming like William Jennings Bryan.
“It just wasn’t happening, no matter how much I wanted it to. I was on top of her, and she was looking at me like she didn’t really know me, which she didn’t. And halfway through, I looked at her and it hit me. I actually wasn’t even into her. What was I doing there? I was in love with Masha. This girl, there’s nothing wrong with her, per se, but she’s not Masha. I mean, this girl, she’s pretty and smart, but not like Masha.”
For a moment, I clung to the fact that at least he’d said that I was pretty and smart. Unfortunately, there was the rest of the sentence to consider. I wanted to scream nasty things, statistics on the small size of both his penis and his soul, but I didn’t. It wasn’t like I was blameless. I’d gone home with him. It was me who’d made that stupid choice, and now I was getting a little bit of just reward. I stayed silent.
People had been cruel before, but it’d rolled off my back. For some reason, this one hurt. Maybe it was because the Boxer was a writer, too, and my brain had granted him automatic comrade status. This was friendly fire. No dignity to getting shot by one of your own. I don’t even think he meant to be cruel. I think he was embarrassed himself, and trying to excuse his behavior. No one wants to start crying in bed. There was plenty I didn’t know about him, and likewise, but that didn’t really matter in the moment. I still felt like I was bleeding all over the bar. And that was seriously uncool. I wanted to be the kind of girl who could tolerate her heart being translated into a story the morning after, the kind of girl who didn’t care so damned much. I was not that person. I never had been.
The Boxer was sitting next to me, and he started to grope my thigh. I didn’t get it. He was telling all these people he wasn’t attracted to me, and his fingers were kneading me like bread. And people were sympathetic. I could see on their faces the fear that maybe the Boxer would never find love. If the Boxer remained alone and miserable forever, so too might they. I agreed. Love was looking less and less likely to me. I’d been saying yes for three months, and though I’d met some nice people, I hadn’t even come close to meeting anyone I wanted to spend much of the rest of my life with.
I swatted the Boxer’s fingers away. He was onto a discussion of boxing: the macho factor, how he’d had his nose broken a few times. I was thinking about athlete’s foot, willing fungus and jock itch upon him.
I BELATEDLY NOTICED that two of my classmates had been watching me during the Boxer’s monologue. The Princelings, so called for their extreme family-bestowed affluence, were not only rich, but good looking, too. They unexpectedly offered to buy me a drink at the bar. Though I’d never really talked with either of them before, I was glad to escape. Much more of this, and I was liable to either sob, or try to throttle the Boxer. I was thinking that maybe I could compensate for my lack of muscles with a series of swift jabs to his throat. Then I could bake him into a pie, à la Titus Andronicus, and serve him to Masha.
I was competitive with a stripper. How sad was that?
The Princelings asked if the story had been about me. They’d been watching me during the exchange and were “interested in the dynamic.”
“Yes,” I whispered, applying Kleenex to my eyes.
“What an asshole,” said Princeling One.
“Dickhead,” agreed Princeling Two.
I instantly became their friend. I hoped that the Princelings, in the grand tradition of the Dramatic Writing Program, would write a seven-hour play about the Boxer, and how he was scum.
Over the next few weeks, the Boxer and I saw each other in class every couple of days, and he acted as though he’d done nothing wrong. Of course, I refused to discuss the things I thought he’d done wrong. I had no intention of giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d messed me up.
I banished my heart to Baden-Baden, where I directed her to wear a bright bathing costume, take the waters, and read peacefully plodding, romantic novels by E. M. Forster. Instead, she lurked sarcastically in a cabana, savagely pinching the pool boys when they were too slow in bringing the refreshments she incessantly rang for. She clutched dog-eared copies of The Stranger, Death in Venice,

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