I went home on the subway, crying all the way. An old woman gave me tissues. Some guy on an acoustic guitar languished through “Homeward Bound,” and I gave him all the money in my wallet. He smiled at me in thanks, and so I took my bra and panties out of my purse, and dropped them into his guitar case, too.
“Peace, lady,” he said.
“Likewise,” I replied, and got off the train.
“OKAY, I’M KIND OF GUESSING he didn’t tell you this, and I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but—”
“Tell me what?” I was sitting at my temp job, trying to look like I was working. I’d been writing soggy poetry all morning and putting it into spreadsheet format, in case someone walked by and glanced at my screen. Taylor had called for details, and I was too exhausted to lie to him. Now, even though he clearly thought I was an idiot for falling for the Actor, he was trying his best to make me feel better.
“He’s mostly gay. So don’t feel bad. It’s not you.”
“What is ‘mostly’ gay? What does that even mean?” I didn’t care if the Actor was 99/100ths gay. I loved him!
“And, he’s engaged.”
“To a man?” This was new. “No, to a girl,” Taylor said, as though my question was insane.
“Then how can he be mostly gay?”
“He’s confused?”
“He slept with me! I’m not male!”
“Clearly, he doesn’t know what he wants.”
“Engaged?”
“His college girlfriend. They’ve been together forever. You’d like her.”
No. No, I would not. I liked no one, least of all myself.
I’d already called the Actor three times, and this was supremely humiliating, because I only had his message service number, which meant that I had to speak to a woman somewhere in Long Island, who gently told me that he wasn’t available, as though she had him in the next room and he was simply in the shower. I could hear her typing my message as I dictated it. I feared typos, not that that would even matter, considering he’d never call. I never responded to people who did this to me, why would he? This didn’t keep me from spelling my last name meticulously, obsessively, idiotically, every time I called, like he didn’t know who I was. He knew. And he was cringing. I could feel it. I was cringing, too.
I’d spent three days lying flat on my face on my linoleum, weeping, Big White Cat butting me periodically and squawking for catnip. At least he could get high. Nothing could make me feel better. I couldn’t believe I’d been such a daredevil, climbing without any of my gear, and inevitably falling hard. I’d known better. Tomorrow, I kept telling myself, early tomorrow morning, I’ll find my ropes and hooks. I’ll start back up. It was funny, though, the air at the bottom. It was as thin as at the summit. I felt light-headed.
I called the Actor’s message service.
Message from Maria Headley 4:37 a.m., Wednesday She says she is “fine.” She says she is really sorry about falling in love. It was accidental. She says she is now planning on staying on solid ground and that you don’t need to call her back. Unless you want to. If you do, please call. Please. Here’s that number again, in case it accidentally got thrown away with the other garbage in your life, which she doesn’t blame you for…
Yes. I was that pitiful.
THE WHOLE WRETCHED AFFAIR had brought back, in excruciating detail, an incident during my first year in New York. I’d unwisely rendezvoused with one Ivan, a Russian graduate student, who had the tiniest, most irregular teeth I’d ever seen. He was so needy, so unlaid, and, in fact, such a very nice person. When it became clear that he was gaga over me, I’d thought I could charitably do something kind. I’d made out with him in a stairwell, and then walked away, thinking, Okay, that’s done.
It was not done. Ivan had called, many, many times. He’d left myriad messages in his thick Russian accent, always beginning like this:
“Hhhhi. This ees Ivahn. I vas just calling to say…hhhi. Okay, then…bahhye.”
He’d become a running joke among my roommates. “Hhhhi,” they’d say, and crack up. I’d been mortified by the depth of his desire. In a last attempt to recover my affections, he’d brought me an enormous houseplant, some sort of lily with large, phallic blooms. It had weighed approximately seventy-five pounds, so he’d carried it to my apartment, clearly hoping to be invited in. I’d given him a glass of water, and sent him away. When the plant had died of dehydration, I’d discovered a love note stuck in its soil, Ivan asking me to forgive him for whatever he had done.
What an ass I’d been, and how worldly I’d felt. Now what had gone around had come around, and for the rest of my life, I’d be itemizing my sorrows to the Actor’s voice mail.
“Hhhhhi,” I’d say. “It’s Maria. Headley. I was just calling to say…hhhhhiii. Okay then…bahhye.” I’d arrive at his apartment bearing unwanted foliage. I could see my future strung up in front of me like frozen laundry.
I BOOKED A TICKET TO IDAHO for Christmas, feeling adrift, and thinking that a stint at home would help. Wrong. My dad drove up on Christmas Eve. He looked relatively okay, if you ignored the fact that his pupils were spinning like slot-machine cherries. For a moment, I entertained a fantasy that I really had cured him with my conversation with the Rockstar. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Maybe he could, like a run-down motor, still be repaired. No. He went out to his truck and returned bearing an enormous grocery sack full of cantaloupes, a misbegotten attempt to declare himself the family provider. He then brought out a thick sheaf of short stories in which I was the main character.
He read them aloud for us, sitting in my mother’s living room, grinning his head off. We tried not to cry. In one of the stories, I’d written a musical that bore suspicious similarity to Cats, and became a wild success on Broadway. My sister, who, for some reason, he’d written as crippled, danced onstage in her “hobbled little way,” and my dad got to come to the podium with me when I gave my Tony speech. All of us but him ended up sobbing on the floor. He kept reading for hours, powered by the super-strength batteries of his manic phase.
When he left, it was midnight. We got drunk on eggnog and tried to pretend that he was okay. “At least he’s creative,” we said. “At least he’s doing something productive.” Really, we were all flattened by grief, and I was already so miserable over the Actor that this pushed me over the edge. I searched through my phonebook for Idaho friends, someone to take me away from the house and remind me that I wasn’t a child anymore, that I lived far away and had control over myself.
Did I have control over myself? No. I dialed Ira the Reincarnated Dachshund’s number, but he didn’t pick up. I dialed Zak in California, and talked to him for not long enough. I dialed Vic and got one of her relatives, someone who didn’t actually speak English.
I dialed my dachshund again, and this time he answered the phone.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Ira picked me up, no questions asked. His life was as messy as mine.
It was snowing hard, and he drove up in a borrowed car.
“Hey,” I said. “Merry Christmas. Sorry I called so late.” I was still crying, but Ira always made me feel better. I had no idea why. We’d certainly had our share of furies, but our relationship had maintained, even when we’d wanted to kill each other.
“No worries, babe,” he said. He’d picked up a British accent since I’d last seen him.
“Works well on the ladies,” he explained.
“But you’re from Idaho,” I said, sniffling.
“They don’t know that. They think I’m from London.”
“Come on. Drop the British thing.”
“How about Australian, matey?”
“No.”
“Transylvanian? I vant to fuck your…damn. No rhyme for blood.”
“Shhh,” I said.
I decided that we had enough history that we didn’t even really need to talk. He seat-belted me into the passenger side, and we drove, for lack of an apartment without roommates, to a Barnes
& Noble parking lot.
All around us the snow was piling up, and there were no cars but ours. Everyone else was at home, waiting for reindeer hooves. It was pitch black. If you looked up, the snowflakes were like stars falling. We might as well have been early settlers, transiting the plains and the prairie, waiting for spring to come so that we could dig out and get moving. Either that or we might, sick and snow-blind, resort to cannibalism. It’d always been a mixed bag with Ira and me.
“Whose car?” I asked, and fiddled with the stereo.
“Landlady,” he said. Ira had always had a weird ability to charm those in authority.
“What are we doing?”
“Sitting in a Pontiac, babe, in a parking lot, in Boise, Idaho, U.S.A., the World. The Universe. The Mind of God,” he said, quoting Our Town. We’d both been in it in high school. His character had been called Belligerent Man.
Then he held my face in his hands and kissed me.
Consider the previous seven years some sort of warped foreplay.
“I don’t want anything to get on your landlady’s upholstery,” I said, as we took off our clothes. “That’d be rude.”
Ira considered. “Babe, I never really liked this shirt anyway,” he said, and spread it, like Sir Walter Raleigh’s cape, across the backseat.
Outside, the snow built up on the glass, but inside it was summer. We were in a shopping mall parking lot in Idaho. All the other cars were gone. It was the middle of the winter, it was the middle of the night. On the car radio, “O Holy Night” was playing, and at first we laughed, but then we sang.
THREE WEEKS INTO THE NEW YEAR, the Actor finally called me back. As though our history was made of rainbows and candy hearts, I said, “Hi there, stranger! What’s up?”
“Hey,” he said, uncomfortably. Clearly, he was calling to defuse me. I was a ticking valentine. Nine million messages later, he was probably being chewed out by the women at his voicemail service.
“How are you?” I asked. Lighthearted. Bright. The Happiest Girl in the World.
“I’m great.”
“I was wondering something,” I said, knowing better than to ask what I was asking.
“Okay,” said the Actor, through the gritted teeth that came of doing the right thing.
I closed my eyes and imagined him as I wanted to remember him, sitting in the bar down the block from his apartment, before I’d gone home with him. He’d been telling me the secrets of his soul, or at least telling me things that had sounded true. I wanted to believe they had been, that the miscommunication had happened later, that he’d loved me, for those few hours before the sun rose, as much as I’d loved him.
“I had a wonderful time with you, the last time I saw you. Remember?” I said.
“I remember,” he said. His voice sounded kind, but miserable.
“And so, I need you to tell me that you don’t want to be with me. I want to be with you. You knew that already. So, if you could just tell me, if you definitely don’t want me?”
He’d been avoiding me for weeks. I was putting my heart on a chopping block and handing him a machete.
“I don’t want to date you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“What was that night to you?” I sounded angry, but I had no right to be.
“It was. I was thinking, it was a great, an amazing night with Maria, you know? Just a night? Do you know what I mean?” he pleaded.
And I did. I knew. I’d been him, so many times I’d lost count. He wasn’t breaking my heart because he wanted to break my heart. He was breaking my heart because there was no other option.
“Okay,” I whispered.
Zak happened upon me sobbing in a corner, pitifully eating a jar of artichoke hearts with my fingers. “Why are you eating that?” he asked, with obvious trepidation.
“Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart,” I said to him, quoting a bit of Stephen Crane’s morbid verse. I tried to smile.
“It’s not your heart, darlin’, it’s antipasti,” he corrected.
Later, he slid a benevolent note under the edge of my hut.
“Pssst, you’re beautiful and everyone knows it,” the note said. There had been a time when I would have killed to have such a note from Zak, but now it was only a Band-Aid on top of hari-kari. I wanted to hide in my bed forever.
But, I still had to pay my rent. Which meant I had to go to work, which meant I had to leave the house. I had to walk down India Street to get to the subway. As soon as I did, dark circles beneath my eyes, my rainboots sloshing with tears, I met Dogboy.
Once Smitten, Twice Shy
In Which our Heroine meets Dogboy…
FROM THE BEGINNING, ZAK DID NOT approve of the man at the end of India Street. “I’ve seen that guy,” he muttered, darkly. “He thinks he’s testosterone incarnate.”
“Only because he is,” I said. “You can’t tell me he’s not sexy. Well, you can. But then I’ll know you’re jealous.”
Zak grimaced. He didn’t like the thought that any other man could have more testosterone than he did. Zak wasn’t alone.
All the men in Greenpoint and the surrounding areas loathed Dogboy. Living near him was the equivalent of being Don Juan’s neighbor. Every time Dogboy stood on his stoop, stretching in the sun, male self-esteem dropped with the velocity of Wile E. Coyote off a cliff. Dogboy was very Roadrunner, sprinting away, chirping, utterly unbruised by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Meanwhile, the men of the neighborhood were peeling themselves up from under anvils.
Pierre, when Dogboy was mentioned, wrinkled up his nose and said, “That guy’s an asshole.” Pierre had started dating one of the girls who lived next door to Dogboy, and so had firsthand knowledge of his Lothario ways. I didn’t care. So what if the guy dated a lot? So did I. So what if the guy was devoid of feelings? So was I. Or at least, I wanted to be. That had to count for something.
WHEN I GOT MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Dogboy, I was trudging down the street, dressed in a 1920s men’s tuxedo shirt I’d had since I was fourteen, baggy black wool tux pants, and combat boots. No lipstick. The ensemble, which I reserved for moments of deepest mourning, was meant to broadcast my disinterest in men. It was an Andrea Dworkin of outfits, a Steinem of suits. It sidled from my dresser when I was depressed, wriggling its wormlike fingers, convincing me that it was a good idea to look as shitty as I felt.
He was walking in my direction. He winked. I stopped. How dare he wink at me?
“Morning,” he said, grinning the kind of grin that makes panties fall to the floor.
I had no response to that. I was still in the throes of withdrawal from the Actor, trembling and quaking, night sweating, hallucinations of intimacy. I couldn’t be expected to take compliments. The guy looked like Steve McQueen, and knew it. His blond head was shaven, and he had piercing blue eyes. He was wearing a ripped-up T-shirt, which was tight over his chest and biceps. It’d been a while since I’d been this close to a man so exceedingly well built, aside from the Actor, whose nakedness I was trying hard not to think about. Six-pack, instead of beer gut? A brindled pit bull danced beside him, yipping occasionally, obviously expecting breakfast.
Dogboy kept walking. I watched him unlock his door. It was rusty red metal, and industrial. There was an open grate on the front. He was whistling. He turned his head and openly checked me out. How could he be checking me out? I looked like the misbegotten daughter of Kurt Cobain and Jay Gatsby.
“Hi,” I said, belatedly.
“Later,” he said, disappearing into his building. The pit bull followed him.
I stood in the street for a moment, shaking my head to clear it.
The fact that not even a guy this desirable could make me forget the Actor told me that there was something seriously wrong with both my heart and my head. I was twenty-one years old, but I felt eight hundred. I needed to stop feeling like Ophelia, which meant that I had to stop falling for Hamlets. While plenty of my stories seemed to end with bodies littering the stage, I preferr
ed the ones that concluded with a big fat Happily Ever After. I ran to the train, intent on flipping my heart onto a new purpose.
AT WORK, INSTEAD OF DOING ANYTHING that I was supposed to be doing, I sat down to compose a list of the Actor’s flaws, thinking that maybe I could meditate on them until I was cured.
UNDESIRABLE QUALITIES OF THE ACTOR (AN INFLATED LIST)
Not Even a Very Good Actor. This despite the fact that I’d dragged Griffin and Zak to not one, not two, but three performances of a play that the Actor had written, and was starring in. That wasn’t even the sad part. The sad part was that he was:
Not Really a Good Writer, Either. Not terrible, but still. For the purposes of this list, it would have been much better if he were officially illiterate. But he wasn’t. He was smart and articulate, and mildly fixated on the plays of Edward Albee. Like I wasn’t.
Dorkiest Headshots in the World, posted on his bedroom wall. Slicked-back hair. Tight black T-shirt. Half leer. Arms bent to better display biceps.
Short. Never mind that I, too, was short. Never mind that anyone over five foot six towered over me. I’d seen him in his apartment, attempting to reach a midheight shelf in the kitchen, and having to climb onto the counter, his bony little knees poking out of his saggy little boxer shorts to reveal his bony little ass. I clung to this image.
Skinny. In an I-eat-only-wheatgrass-juice kind of way. He’d been climbing onto the counter, incidentally, in order to fetch a glass for his breakfast of Vitamin-C powder.
Unskilled/Unwilling. Tendency to prefer nonpenetrative intercourse, i.e., me giving him a blow job, and he patting me on the head. This gave the whole thing a sort of pre-women’s lib feeling, which, at the time, I was too enamored to acknowledge. No doubt, this problem had more to do with number 7 than with chauvinism, though.
Homosexual. Or, if not gay, ignorant of the finer points of female anatomy, which was, in itself, inexcusable for a straight man pushing thirty.