Dogboy was a creep, too. Except that, really, he was just a more jaded, more confident, definitely more well-endowed version of me. A little lost, definitely a little lost. But then, so was I.
“Go screw the guy again,” decreed Dogboy, from his tub. “See if there’s really any love there. If there isn’t, you’ll be cured.”
“But he doesn’t want to sleep with me,” I said. “Or love me, or anything me.”
“Excuse me. Is he, or is he not, a guy?” said Dogboy. “He’ll sleep with you. Particularly if you offer him no strings. Take it from one who knows the male mind. If you offer it, they will come.”
I decided to ignore the fact that he was paraphrasing Field of Dreams.
“But he’s gay,” I said.
“He’s not gay, or he wouldn’t have slept with you to begin with. You’re not the kind of girl that can be mistaken for a boy.”
“But what if there is?”
“What if there is what?” said Dogboy. He’d gotten out of the tub. “Mind if I handcuff you to the bed?”
I held out my wrists.
“What if there is love?” I asked.
“If there is, Maria, you have to chase him until he falls down,” said Dogboy, looking at me with his blue eyes, looking at me with his unsatisfied face. Dogboy hadn’t had an easy life. The week before, he’d told me about his father’s suicide by hanging, and how he, a fourteen-year-old, had found him.
“Hey, Dad, why are you still hanging around?” he’d said, laughed wryly, and then submerged in his bathtub before I could really tell what he’d been thinking. There was more to Dogboy than met the eye. He seemed to care enough about me to help me get over the Actor, and for that, I was grateful.
“Blindfold,” said Dogboy, unfurling a black silk scarf.
“You or me?” I asked.
“Both,” he said.
AND SO, POSSIBLY IN A SUICIDAL maneuver, I went to a play the Actor was in. There he was, two hours of him, his radiant skin, his Puckish curls. There he was. His Celtic tattoo, his amber eyes, his mind, his walk. His everything that I wanted, and nothing that he’d let me have. There were all the things that had made me love him, and, even with the history of heartbreak, made me love him still.
“Hi,” I said, and he came and sat next to me. “Good work tonight.”
I was lying, but it didn’t really matter. The Actor’s performance hadn’t blown me away. He was the thing that blew me away, and even as I could now see that it wasn’t really justified, that he was just a guy, I was still up there with the hurricane, clutching Toto, not in Kansas anymore.
“That means a lot to me,” he said.
Skip the long, lame conversation in which we dealt with nothing of our past pain and misunderstanding. Skip the theater history we discussed instead. Skip the section where he asked me where I was going, and we both had déjà vu when I said, “Nowhere.”
Arrive back in the East Village, the Russian baths still steaming, the weather still freezing, and my heart still wavering on the brink of dreaming and denial.
Skip the part where I unbuttoned his shirt, memorizing and then forgetting every inch of his skin, tracing and then erasing his ribs, inhaling and then exhaling his neck. Skip the part where I stayed dressed myself. Skip the part where I held him tightly to my heart, needing to give him something, even if he couldn’t give anything back.
Finish it up in the shower, early the next morning, the water running cold, he kissing me, me kissing him. Finish it up with me looking into his eyes and seeing lots of things: sadness, ego, insecurity, drama. There was plenty to this man, but there was nothing there for me.
“What’s this?” he asked, standing behind me at the bathroom mirror, as I twisted my hair up. He was running his finger across a bite mark left over from Dogboy. Since he hadn’t looked at me the night before, he hadn’t noticed it.
“This is me getting over you,” I answered. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, looking puzzled, his hand still on Dogboy’s kiss.
“See you around,” I said, and walked out the door, sad, but no longer brokenhearted.
“I’ll see you, Maria,” he said.
When I got to the street, I could see him standing in his window, watching me leave. I raised my hand to wave goodbye, but he’d already closed the curtains.
DESPITE SENDING ME AWAY, Dogboy continued to whistle in my direction every couple of weeks. I’d listen to his phone ring, his answering machine picking up, the suggestive messages left by women I didn’t know. He’d give me their one-line biographies. The forty-five-year-old stripper, who wanted to be a concert pianist. The pretty blonde, whose angry eight-year-old daughter kicked him in the shins every time she laid eyes on him. The bulimic Hawaiian trust-funded artist, who wanted to move into his bachelor building. I’d feel superior for a moment, and then I’d wonder why I wasn’t as willing as they were, and why he wasn’t willing, either, why we didn’t just want each other. I wondered why nothing was easy. I wondered what he said about me, when one of them was sitting on the rim of the tub. “The neurotic writer who…who…”
That’s as far as I ever got, because as soon as I referred to myself as neurotic, I started to feel defensive and had to begin proving my perfect stability.
At least Dogboy and I understood each other. He was a player, and I was playing. Though there was no great love here, there was plenty of sex and Scrabble. Maybe people wondered why I was willing to date a guy who was dating half the women in New York, and maybe I wondered that, too, but then I took a look at myself. What was I doing? What was the Year of Yes? Maybe he was a little more like me than I wanted to admit. We were both throwing ourselves completely into the quest for love, at least. We were trying, in whatever way we were capable of trying. He told me a story about one of his girlfriends asking how many girlfriends he’d had before her. He’d rounded down. Way down. He hadn’t wanted to upset her.
“Only twenty,” he’d said. Her face had fallen. He’d cringed. He’d aimed too high.
“Two,” she’d said.
“Two what?” he’d said, though he’d known.
“Two boyfriends.” She’d broken up with him shortly thereafter. He’d told me he was glad he hadn’t told her the real number, which was somewhere more around a hundred and twenty. And that was girlfriends, not just women he’d slept with.
“You’d better not be counting me,” I said. He smiled. He was. And that was sort of okay with me. Not ideal, but what was? I was treading water until it was time to swim again.
One morning, Dogboy handed me my bra and then ruffled Felonious Monk’s head. She growled a happy growl. She was the only woman in his life, the only constant, and she knew it. He was getting rid of me.
“You can have whatever you want. Now go and get it,” he said and kissed me hard for good measure.
“Besides,” he continued. “I need you to leave. One of my friends has a broken bathtub, and she’s coming over to take a bath.”
“And sleep with you,” I said.
“See how much you don’t want a guy like me?” he said.
I went home, kind of happy, kind of blue. It was the end of the eleventh month of my year, and here I still was, bitten and bruised, walking down India Street, toward some sort of vision that hadn’t appeared.
Meeting Mr. Write
In Which Our Heroine Finds a Happily Ever After…
WE’D ALWAYS KNOWN THAT ZAK was moving back to Berkeley. He considered it home, and I didn’t blame him. It was a great city, and most of his favorite people lived there. No surprise that I didn’t want him to go. It was just that I felt like I was losing an arm. More than an arm. Half of my brain. Half of my heart. Maybe more than half. I wouldn’t think about that too much.
Zak was insanely planning to take a cross-country Greyhound, and so he packed everything he owned into a duffel bag, gave me his mattress and some of his books, and got ready to leave.
“I can’t wait to write you letters,
” he said.
“I’d rather have you here,” I said.
“Yeah, but in letters, everything looks better than it really is,” Zak told me. “You can tell me all about every perfect man you meet, and I’ll pretend I really think they’re perfect.”
“You can tell me all about every perfect girl you meet, and I’ll pretend I really think they’re not jailbait.”
“Very funny,” said Zak.
Both of us suspected that there was no such thing as perfect. If we weren’t perfect together, who would be? And we weren’t. We loved each other, undoubtedly, and that was miraculous. It wasn’t miraculous enough, though. We were, in the end, just destined to be friends. Ultimately, maybe that was better. As friends, at least, we could love each other without anyone’s issues getting in the way. I’d only lived with Zak a year, but I felt like we’d been together forever. Maybe this’d be how it would feel when I finally met the right man. Except that, if I had any luck at all, that man wouldn’t get on a Greyhound and leave me.
I MADE ZAK WAKE ME UP at five in the morning on the day of his departure. I handed him a mix-tape full of singer-songwriters, for listening to on the bus. We hugged until our bones cracked.
“I’m gonna miss the fuck out of you,” said Zak, and we kissed hard on the mouth for exactly five seconds, which was as long as I could kiss him without sobbing. Then he dragged his bag out the door and was gone.
I watched him walk through the courtyard, gave him what I hoped was a relatively cheerful wave, and then went into the bathroom to cry my eyes out. I curled into a ball at the bottom of the shower and sobbed for half an hour, hoping that Vic was still sleeping. After a while, though, she knocked on the door.
“Maria?”
“Yeah?” I sniffled.
“Are you okay?”
“No.” I came out in my towel. “Do you need the bathroom?”
“I’m sorry Zak left,” Vic said, and hugged me. Sometimes I loved Vic. Sometimes she loved me. Maybe we weren’t entirely compatible, but we had the weight of history behind us, and that history included a lot of commiseration. That was worthwhile, even in the face of a bunch of nonsuccesses. Love wasn’t the only thing that mattered, after all. Or maybe it was. I didn’t know anymore.
A FEW DAYS AFTER ZAK LEFT, I woke up and discovered our front door wide open and all the lights on. Since Zak’s departure, I’d taken down my hut and moved into his bedroom (where I looked nightly at the thumbtack holes he’d left behind), and the door to the bedroom had been left open, too. My light was on. Nothing was missing. Big White Cat was fine. But I’d definitely locked the door and gone to sleep in darkness. I couldn’t sleep with the lights on.
Someone had been in our apartment.
I went downstairs and got Pierre to come up with a big skillet in his hand, to patrol the closets and make sure no one was hiding. When I’d come home the night before, everything had seemed fine, but now I had the feeling someone had been hidden, waiting for me to go to sleep. I was scared out of my mind.
Vic had been sleeping at her boyfriend’s apartment, and I had a faint hope that maybe she’d come home very early in the morning and then left again, but no such luck. When she came home, we examined our door and lock to see if maybe it had just blown open. No. Instead, we discovered that someone had gotten a screwdriver and moved the deadbolt latch, so that the deadbolt couldn’t catch. Worse and worse. Who was it? Maybe Junior, the landlord’s son, who would have been able to use his dad’s keys to get in and mess with the lock. Junior had never shown the slightest interest in us. If it wasn’t Junior, though, it was someone we didn’t know, and we didn’t want to think about that. We started sleeping with chairs pressed against our doorknobs. If sleeping was the right word. It wasn’t. I tried to focus on other things.
For example: the fact that the Playwright had left me a message, telling me he was coming to New York and that he’d love to have dinner.
Dinner, I thought, not calling him back. I’d been having what amounted to dinner for eleven months, and dinner was no longer what I wanted to have. I didn’t want to get up from the table disappointed, wiping my mouth and pushing back my chair. I wanted more than dinner. I wanted to be eaten alive. I wanted to fall so far in love, I’d never be found. I wanted bliss and kisses and adoration and joy, and I was quite sure that I would find none of these things with the Playwright, a married man.
I called Dogboy, who told me that he’d just been dumped again, this time by someone he might have loved.
DOGBOY: “I’m wrapped with guilt. I have to stop thinking about it.”
ME: “Wracked.”
DOGBOY: “That’s what I said.”
I thought sadly about the predicament of the modern man, wrapped in a silky shroud of guilt, comfortably wallowing across guilty sheets. Were there any good ones left? If so, where the hell were they?
I tried to focus on school, on living, and not on the fact that the Year of Yes was almost over. Though I’d changed from the inside out, I hadn’t found someone willing to take me for what I now was. Unfortunately, there was no going back.
On paper, it was so easy to search through your old drafts and find that darling you’d killed. You could reinstate the passage, as though you’d never even thought about murder. In life, not so. You’d change a part of yourself—a flawed part, maybe, but a flawed part you might have, secretly, been a little bit in love with. You’d know it was for the best, that you’d only manage to proceed if you revised whatever thing was messing up the overall structure of your existence. But inevitably, at some point, you’d want to go back on the changes. It would be easier to stay the same old rumpled version, the same typos and blotches, the same old severe climactic flaws.
I found myself trying to think my old judgmental things as I walked down the street. Instead I’d end up talking to everyone I saw, spending half my day sitting down next to strangers. Letting them tell me everything. Giving them love.
It wasn’t like I’d made myself perfect. Far from it. I’d just gained awareness, and now I noticed even more how acutely imperfect I was. I was willing to do all kinds of things that I knew better than to do. Like, for example, fall madly in love again. With someone I knew very well was a very bad idea.
Luckily, though, this particular bad idea was out of state. I figured that if I had to fall, at least I could be graceful about it. I’d do it secretly, in the dark, and I’d never tell the Playwright anything about my ridiculous emotional state. I’d leave him no messages. I’d send him no valentines. No one would have to know.
By the time I returned the Playwright’s call, I hadn’t closed my eyes in days. I was back to reading Prometheus Bound.
The Playwright sounded extremely enthusiastic. We agreed to meet for dinner. He said that he had something important to tell me, in person. I had no idea what. He’d written me some letters, but he’d never really gone into any detailed description of his life. We were having the kind of correspondence friends have. I’d tell him about my latest bad date, he’d commiserate. I’d tell him about my latest play, he’d send me his, and we’d exchange notes.
Unfortunately, the night before my scheduled dinner with the Playwright, I walked past the new mirror I’d installed in the kitchen and saw a red laser-pointer dot appear on my forehead. The mirror was on the same wall as the windows. Which meant that someone was aiming something at me, right that moment. I ran to my bedroom and hid under the covers, shaking. I knew this was not the perfect course of action, but I had no idea what to do. Someone was watching me. I called the police, and they said that they couldn’t do anything unless there was a concrete threat. This felt pretty damned concrete to me, but the cop who came to my apartment said, “I can’t arrest someone for looking, can I?”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
“If I did that, half the population would be sleeping at the precinct. Get some thick curtains, that’s my advice.”
“But then, if something bad happened, no one would be able
to see it through the windows and call the police.”
“This isn’t Hitchcock, lady,” said the cop. “It’s New York. Take away the girl a guy wants to look at, and he’ll find someone else. Sleep well, now.”
Was he kidding? Apparently not. Needless to say, this basically sent me over the edge. I tried to create amnesia. If someone was spying on me, if I was unsafe on a regular basis, I didn’t want to think about it.
I DECIDED TO OBSESS over what to wear for dinner with the Playwright instead. Fuck red laser dots. Screw people staring from darkness through my windows, people who obviously knew that Zak had moved out and that Vic and I were two girls living alone with one nonthreatening cat. I’d never really been scared living in New York before. Now I wanted to hide from everything for so many reasons, but there was nowhere to go.
The effect of the whole event was that I became frivolous. I put on a cocktail dress with a feather boa, walked defiantly past my windows, and went defiantly to sleep. With a chair braced against my door. And a paring knife under my pillow.
“Should I wear this?” I asked Vic the next morning.
“Only if you want to have your boobs fall out.”
I was trying on outfits for dinner. A black V-neck sweater. A black skirt. Conservative, except for the slit halfway up the thigh. I tugged at it, trying to expose a little less leg. No cigar. Maybe I could sew it shut.
“Can I borrow your black high heels?” Vic’s feet were a size larger than mine, but all of my shoes were scuffed and made of plastic. The Playwright was classy. I didn’t want to look like the poverty-stricken college student I was.