But this complacency is also a malaise, invisible until it’s too late. Like some terrible STD. You glide smoothly down that line of colored squares until you find yourself sitting in front of a blank computer screen to write your med school personal statement, and realize you have nothing to say. “Describe your interest in the medical field.” You can’t think of a single thing. You write a few bullshitty paragraphs about your desire to help people. You mention your fascination with polymers, your extremely rewarding internship at NYU Langone. Your words stare back at you dumbly. Their patterns seem clumsy and meaningless, like trails left by a clod of dirt thrown at a wall.
It didn’t help that Ana’s personal statement seemed so effortless: she just sat down at the computer and this narrative unspooled onto the page in beautiful lucid prose—striking the perfect balance between ambition and humility, tough-mindedness and compassion, Mother Teresa and Jonas Salk. Everything that had ever happened to her since birth had led her directly to this moment, to the blinking cursor on her medical school application. Her essay vibrated with the force of this truth.
She didn’t understand my sudden muteness. For the first time ever, static crackled between us. She tried to give me pep talks. She spoke of my “lack of confidence.” But this was something bigger, something worse. Maybe I didn’t want to be a doctor after all. Maybe I wanted to be a high school science teacher? A public intellectual? I could host a radio show about biology! A veterinarian? I had always been good with animals.
“You’re grasping at straws,” she finally said. “Look, maybe you just need some time off. The application grind is getting to you. Why not take a gap year? Do something different, something fun?”
And so the zoo became my gap year, and the gap became two years, then three. Slowly my life became one big gap. It yawned wider and wider every day. Ana stood on the edge of it, peering in, throwing rocks down and waiting for their thud to tell her how far away the bottom was. After a while there was no more bottom. I was entirely Gap.
I was aware that her indulgence of me carried an increasingly sharp whiff of contempt. Her Colombian immigrant parents would never have tolerated this wishy-washy Who am I? crap. “You pick a job and you do it,” she said to me once. “That’s what adulthood is.” I knew that she was right. I deserved no sympathy for my malaise. My vacillations were a symptom of privilege. But wasn’t that the point of having privilege, that you got to decide what to do with your life? Wasn’t this why people like her parents, and my great-grandpa Art who came from Russia and worked his way up from shoeshine boy to head of the blah blah blah, worked so hard—so that their grandchildren had the privilege to take time and discern their own desires?
Yet my desires didn’t become any clearer. Ana and I had nothing in common anymore. “Today I learned a cool fact about lemurs.” “Today I delivered a baby.” We stopped having sex. Once in a while she’d administer a brief, capable hand job. When I tried to slide a hand between her legs, she pulled it away.
No rancor, no screaming, just slow corrosion and grudging acceptance. In the end we sold her engagement ring on eBay, used the money to cover some of the extra rent and my moving costs. I had a feeling she’d be engaged again, to someone else, within a couple of years. (I was right.)
Two weeks after I moved in, I awoke to find Zoe next to me in bed, propped up on an elbow. She was watching me, as if she’d been waiting for me to wake up.
“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” she said. She wore only an oversized John Lennon T-shirt that said IMAGINE.
“What’s going on?” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes.
“I’ve got something to show you,” she said. “But you have to promise first.”
“Promise what?” I yawned, looking over at the clock: 6:30 a.m.
“A vow of silence,” she said. “From the moment we leave your bed, we don’t speak. That means the whole rest of the day. If you want to communicate, use gesture or write me a note.”
“Why?”
“Something profound just happened in our backyard.”
“What happened in our backyard?”
She shook her head, as if it were beyond explanation. “This is the last thing I’m going to say: I believe in the power of witnessing, untainted by verbal intervention. Are you with me or not?”
I shrugged. “Fine. If you don’t want to talk, we won’t talk.”
She solemnly drew a finger across her lips. Then she zipped mine too, leaving her finger a little longer than she needed to—in order, I guess, to communicate the gravity of the ritual. Then she took my hand, pulled me out of bed, and led me outside. I was still half asleep, and her finger’s impression lingered on my lips.
It turned out a bat had visited our stamp-sized backyard the night before, given birth, and left the babies for dead. Little black-winged corpses lay strewn across the grass.
Zoe led me through the yard, pointing so I could watch my step. When we reached the back fence, she released my hand. I followed her gaze, and saw one little infant bat—the lone survivor—attempting to climb up the wooden fence post.
Something seized me, a feeling within striking range of awe: this raw newborn thing, struggling clumsily toward life. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel repulsed by this slick inch of dark winged muscle, its creepy humanoid fingers clutching at the metal, its delicate shoulder blades straining with effort, its muscles quivering beneath hairless translucent black skin. I thought: demon fetus.
I looked over at Zoe, but she didn’t acknowledge me. Without taking her eyes from the bat, she slowly lifted the John Lennon T-shirt over her head and let it fall to the ground beside her. She wore no bra or underwear. The morning sunlight spilled over her breasts. I caught a glimpse of the shadowed region between her legs. Her long blond hair fell over her bare shoulders.
I knew that her gesture didn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex: she’d told me how she’d once been kicked out of the MoMA for taking off her shirt in front of a painting, claiming in defense that it had “really touched” her “core,” that she “just wanted to get closer to the art.” (The guards weren’t impressed.) Still, I felt that this performance in front of the bat had somehow been for my benefit. And I couldn’t deny that, on some level, it was working.
Without a word I turned around, went inside, and took a cold shower. A few minutes later, toweling myself dry, I lifted a corner of the bathroom window blinds and saw her still standing there, naked, the sun on her shoulders, communing with the baby bat. Or whatever.
Like most people, I distrusted loose animals. I had a healthy respect for wildness and tried to grant it distance. Especially in the city: I knew that New York seethed subterraneously with teeth and fur, with rats and cockroaches and squirrels and—who knew?—bats. But as far as those were concerned, I believed in a good-fences-good-neighbors policy. They could have the alleys and subway tunnels if I could have my few hundred square feet of human dwelling. If they infringed on this policy, I’d squash them.
But at the zoo it was another story.
During the summer we ran a special program for kids, a kind of animal camp. That day was Bug Day, which meant that after lunch we brought out a Madagascar hissing cockroach for the kids to touch. I felt no fear or disgust toward this cockroach. I was even fond of him. We’d named him Gregor Samsa, and sometimes it was easy to imagine him as a transformed Czech bank clerk. He had a very humanlike air of resignation. He submitted to routine indignities with something like, well, dignity.
We had this routine where he crawled up my arm and disappeared behind my neck while I narrated Fun Facts about his species. While he rounded the corner of my shoulder, I thought of Zoe and the bats, “untainted by verbal intervention,” and I imagined her slinking in here at night and setting all our bugs free to rediscover their dark untame roots. She’d hinted at such desires when I told her what I did for a living. I imagined Gregor, born in a cage, trundling out into the wilds of the city, clueless and vulnerable as Kafka him
self. I felt a kinship with him then, a vibration of sympathy. He obediently rounded my other shoulder; the children broke into wild applause.
When I got home from work, I found Zoe feeding the baby bat milk from an eyedropper. It was inside something like a terrarium, or empty fish tank lined with dirt and rocks. It clung to one of the glass walls, opening its mouth while Zoe squeezed a drop from above. She was back in the John Lennon T-shirt.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
She looked up and raised a finger to her lips.
“Fuck the vow of silence,” I said. “That thing’s going to give you rabies.”
She finished squeezing out the drops of milk, giving no indication that she’d heard me. Then she looked up, raised one finger in a wait-a-minute gesture, stood, and carried the terrarium outside. When she came back in, she went straight to the sink and washed her hands vigorously, up to the elbow, using tons of soap, looking back over her shoulder to make sure I was watching her.
Finally, she shook her hands off, flinging arcs of water droplets through the kitchen. They caught the sunlight as they passed in front of the window, so it looked as though she was shaking off little beads of light. Then she walked over to me, put one finger over my lips, and put her other hand down my pants.
Dan was right: Zoe threw good parties.
Drunk on some kind of herb-infused liquor, I let a girl named Raven read my aura. It was green.
There were multiple Hula-Hoopers. There was a woman painting flowers and third eyes on people’s faces. There were many indeterminately gendered people making out with each other. I counted three women dressed as mermaids. A guy with a handlebar mustache walked around on stilts. Several women and one man wiggled their butts against me and laughed. One of them called me “Daddy.” At one point I found myself at the bottom of a human pyramid. Toward the end of the night—the beginning of the morning—a man who introduced himself as Dr. Volcano literally breathed fire.
When the party finally started to dwindle, I noticed that Zoe was missing. I went back into the house to look for her and found her on the couch, half naked, intertwined with another woman. I think it was the aura reader, Raven.
* * *
One month went by, then two, and I didn’t look for another apartment. In other respects I was clawing my way back to productive adulthood: I spent my weekends at the coffee shop with my laptop, researching various graduate programs in environmental science and studying for the GREs. I emailed my college professors and internship supervisors to ask for recommendations. I even began a few tentative flirtations with women in the neighborhood. But I found myself unable, or unwilling, to wrestle my way out of Zoe’s sexual orbit.
Sleeping with her was like sleeping with a thunderstorm. She had some kind of weird sexual intuition that enabled her to know what I wanted before I knew it myself. She also had a certain attentiveness to detail, a mastery of nuance. (I hadn’t realized that when you touched that place on my whatever while doing a little twisty motion to that part of my whatever whatever, it would result in, well…that.) I still thought of this period as temporary, an aberration—but now, I could also see it as educational.
Still, the drawbacks of the situation were obvious. A couple of times, I tried to bring home other women. Both times, Zoe was unavoidable: sitting on the couch in just her underwear, flipping through a magazine, her long blond hair only partially obscuring her nipples, or burning incense while working on a sculpture in the kitchen—saturating the apartment with her sexual dominance.
Once, I awoke with a woman I’d met at a bar the night before to find that Zoe had made breakfast for the three of us; she set out pancakes, berries, honey, and a pot of coffee and then joined us at the table, stark naked except for a moth-eaten white slip that hid absolutely nothing—that somehow seemed more obscene than nudity itself. She kept touching my arm and asking me to pass the honey, letting her hand linger just a little too long each time. The woman slunk away the first chance she got.
When Zoe rotated in a lover from her well-stocked stable, however, I always seemed to conveniently take up as little space as possible. I’d be at my computer with my big noise-canceling headphones on, and I wouldn’t even notice them come in; when I took off the headphones to pee, I’d hear Zoe’s giggles and moans. Or I’d bump into the person awkwardly on my way to the bathroom. Or I’d come in to find them making out on the couch, and have to scuttle past them like a crab.
On nights when she didn’t have anyone, Zoe would often—but never predictably—sidle up to me on the couch and slide her hand down my pants. Just like that. No prelude: one moment she wasn’t there, the next she was touching my penis. It was lightning war, sexual blitzkrieg. The mornings after she passed through my room—inhabiting my bed like a bright booming darkness, leaving me loose and empty and not quite sated—a distinct tinge of despair crept into my postcoital haze. I wasn’t in love with this woman, I wasn’t even sure that I liked her, and yet, as long as I lived here, we were bound, electron to atom. I couldn’t tell if I was over Ana or not. I couldn’t tell if I was happy. I just lived from moment to moment, evening to evening, in strict sexual survival mode.
Finally, as the two-month mark passed—as we entered October, and skulls and fake spiderwebs bloomed across the facades of rickety Greenpoint houses—I began to think seriously about leaving. But my first few preliminary scans of Craigslist showed that rents had gone up in just the few months since my last search: to live in any desirable neighborhood in Manhattan or Brooklyn, I’d have to pay double or even triple what I was paying Zoe. Even Queens was barely within my grasp. Though technically that borough wasn’t far away, and although it was traversed by all the same train lines I used every day, I didn’t know anyone who lived there; signing a one-year lease out in Astoria or Jackson Heights seemed like Napoleonic exile. Still, I looked at some listings, sent a few exploratory emails.
Then, though—then I ran into Rachel, and everything changed.
* * *
What happened was, I ran out of free online GRE practice tests, so I went to the library to get more. Lately I’d become addicted to practice tests. Studying made me feel, despite Zoe’s siren calls, as though I was finally getting somewhere, as though my ship was sailing in the right direction. Lately I’d been spending long stretches of time away from the apartment, tearing my way through analogies and algebra problems. It was my way of strapping myself to the mast, plugging my ears, moving forward.
At first I only noticed her, there behind the library desk, in a nonspecific way—in that dark region of the brain that exists specifically for noticing cute girls, that faintly hums whenever one comes into its range. Semiconsciously I registered her pretty heart-shaped face, her dark bob, her thick black-framed glasses, her red lipstick.
And then a shudder of recognition kicked in: this wasn’t just any cute girl. It was her.
My infatuation with Rachel Starr had consumed more than half of my college career. It started in a creative writing class freshman year. Rachel was the quiet girl on the other side of the seminar table who almost never spoke in class but turned in these brief, brilliant, odd pieces of writing: nuggets of dialogue that seemed as though they’d been translated from a different language, perhaps a language spoken by aliens or fish; strange little fables set in alternate universes; eerie portraits of cracked domesticity that made you feel as though you’d never really seen certain objects before (a spatula, a crocheted tissue box cover, the gelatinous web of light cast by a fish tank in a dark room).
I’d signed up for the class on a whim, faintly enjoying the idea of reinventing myself as a Writer, or at least as Someone Who Wrote. Unfortunately, I was terrible. I had no imagination. I could only research and mimic. It was exhausting: when you really thought about words, there was far too much to think about. How might a good writer describe a human nose, for example? What kind of noses were there, besides “Roman” and “aquiline”? What did those words even mean? This was how I spent my
writing time: looking up words like “aquiline” in the dictionary, and then tortuously composing some labored scene of domestic strife between an unhappy housewife and her aquiline-nosed husband. I was miserable, certain I was fooling no one.
Then, one week, the teacher sorted us into “buddies,” to exchange rough drafts and discuss our writing processes outside of class, and Rachel was paired with me. Surprisingly, she seemed genuinely interested in my stories: I could do the one thing she couldn’t (stick to a linear narrative). She didn’t write the way she did on purpose, she confessed. She just didn’t know how else to do it. She wrote what came into her head, what pleased her, but these fits of inspiration never lasted longer than a page or two. How, she wanted to know, did a plausible narrative accrue, page after page? I shrugged and said something like “I guess I just think about what the character would be likely to do next.” She nodded, eyes wide, as though this had never occurred to her.
I don’t think it took her long to see through me. But by that point we were “involved.” At the end of that very first meeting, I invited her to see a movie downtown. She hesitated, bit her lip, then said yes. After that it was she who took the initiative: she who kissed me at the end of the night, who waited after the next class meeting for me to walk her home. Soon we were spending hours at a time conducting vigorous sexual experiments in our lumpy dorm room beds.
The Regrets Page 12