“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.