by Lauren Oyler
I took my own slice of casserole and smears of Brie back to my table, and because I was the last to return the men all shifted down to let me take a seat on the outside, so that I had my back to the room and was facing only them. This made me feel more secure, like I was a representative for the rest of the people in the shop, who were not jerks. When he was handing me back my purse and jacket, the Scottish one attempted to joke, withholding the bag as he smirked like a third grader with a crush on me, and I played along, saying, “Give it!” in a babyish voice that made them laugh because they saw me as a child, naive as well as a potentially lovable pain in the ass. After this they acted for several minutes as if I did not exist, the conversation going back and forth between UK politics, of which I had a very superficial understanding, and a rant published in the expat newspaper about the importance of learning German to live in Berlin. I tried to interject—did this editorial not have a whiff of anti-immigrant sentiment?—but was rebuffed. No, the Scottish guy said, it’s about you. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if Nell and her friends had left; they had finished picking at their plates and were talking among themselves, ignoring the couple seated across from them who were going over a guidebook. One of the men, maybe attempting to make up for the others, asked me if I spoke any German, and when I said no but that I didn’t really live in Berlin, he turned on me and said, well, that was the problem, wasn’t it, and added that he suspected he would show up to a bookshop dinner six years from now and see me there, chatting with the owner, in possession of more or less the same level of German I had now. “Ein Bier, bitte?” he mimicked, scrunching up his muffinish face as he attempted a nasal Valley Girl accent, drawing out the last syllable. I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I stood up to get another beer. The man from the desk asked me to bring him one and I said no; I assumed he thought I was joking and would do as he said, and I took pleasure in thinking about how surprised he would be when I came back down the stairs with only one bottle. On my way out, Nell asked me to type my email address into her phone. She said, “You’re a writer, right? We can do a writing group! I also write.” I didn’t think I’d said I was a writer; I wondered if she had intuited it from the fact that I had listened to her.
When I came back down without a beer for him, the man from the desk was nonplussed. He asked the Scottish guy to get him one, took his seat next to me, and asked me what I was doing in Berlin. I told him my boyfriend had died and I was on a soul-searching journey to understand our relationship because we had met here about two years ago. He looked surprised and said he was sorry; I paused, looking soberly at my plate, before laughing and saying I was just kidding. He leaned back in his chair, to illustrate he had been blown away, and put his hand on his heart. He was in his forties, probably, and wearing a ratty flannel with the cuffs unbuttoned and flapping around and beat-up dress shoes. He asked me again why I was in Berlin. I said I didn’t know, really: it was just something to do, and as a dancer I thought it would be interesting to try dancing in another language. He undertoned that I looked like a dancer, and as if possessed I collected my hair, which was hanging around my shoulders, and twisted it into a bun with an elastic I had around my wrist. I then raised my arms in an elegant oval above my head before lowering one to the side, keeping my elbow and wrist in the soft curves I still occasionally employed in yoga classes in order to pretend I wasn’t doing yoga but something more elevated, less accessible to amateurs. I often joked that I had practiced ballet long enough to be graceful; I stopped when I was fourteen and the rest of my class was moving to pointe shoes, which I too had bought, as if I’d had any chance of success. I have flat feet, and the teacher hated me.
“Oh, so you’re a real dancer?” the man asked, his peaky accent rising on the real. “Not one of those modern ones.” I wished that only the people I wanted to talk to me would talk to me, and only when I wanted. I easily rustled up offense to this and told him I guessed I was a fake dancer with classical ballet training, like most modern dancers. I stopped myself from saying professional modern dancers because I had no idea how one reached such a distinction; leaving it assumed seemed safer. Abruptly, as if he had not just insulted what I had led him to believe was my art form, he said he would love to see me dance, and I replied, “Why? You don’t know me. I might be terrible.”
For the rest of the evening, which I hate to say for me went on four more hours, he did not stop looking at me, a purposeful, disturbing stare. There was something about the room—that it was warm, that it was subterranean, that at 11 p.m. people brought out their packets of tobacco and weed and started smoking, that we all knew it was cold and raining outside and were putting off facing it—that made me stay much longer than I intended, until around one in the morning, when the proprietress came downstairs to ask us to help her clear the dishes, at which point I received a vision of myself as part of this group, a weekly attendee of dinner for socially unconscious adults seeking English-speaking companionship among theater lovers and science fiction paperbacks, and I knew I had to escape.
But before that, after “I might be terrible”: The Scottish man came back down from his beer-gathering venture after what we realized then was a long absence. He had with him not two but six beers, one for everyone, and announced upon his return that we would be getting “rowdy.” I think in the past this would have alarmed, or at least annoyed, me, but I had no thoughts on it at all. As soon as I began operating under a false pretense, even one as dull as a swapped profession, my head was empty of concern or consideration for anything other than tasks or questions immediately presented. I accepted my beer only to realize I had no bottle opener; I held it in my hand and looked around, thinking there might be one on top of the refrigerator. The man from the desk took the bottle from my hand, pulled a scuffed green lighter out of his pocket, grasped the neck of the bottle, and paused: He held his hand toward me so I could see the proper position, his pointer finger and thumb hooked around the lip of the bottle, forming a tight space into which he wedged the wrong end of the lighter and used it to confidently pop off the cap. People, including me, did this in New York, but he nevertheless claimed it was “the Berlin way” and gave me his bottle to try. I waited for his approval on my fingering before setting up the lighter totally incorrectly; I warped the edge of the bottle cap and said fuck when it hurt me. He told me to try again with my hand a little lower, so the lighter could cover the maximum area of cap. I twisted the bottle around to give myself a fresh start and did it, though with a much less satisfying popping sound. I handed him his beer and asked what he had said his name was again. He said it was Paul.
Given that my knowledge of modern dance came almost entirely from watching the reality show So You Think You Can Dance? in high school, I was a surprisingly fluent discourser on the topic. I explained the difficulties of being a freelancer with bad health insurance whose job basically required some level of injury; snapping hip syndrome; eating disorders; the frustrating public dismissal of modern dance as less difficult than ballet (not that anyone cared about ballet either) (he apologized); how to fling oneself unlooking into a kind of spinning jump, the scar from a long-ago failed attempt at this proof on the bottom of my chin, not that he had any reason to doubt me. I had sat up immediately after falling, saying it was fine I was fine, ha ha, ha ha, only to look over and see the only boy in our class, an unfairly good tap dancer, with his eyes fixed on me as the first drop of blood fell onto the waxy hardwood floor. Only three stitches, but I never went back. We talked about the budget airline I had taken to Berlin. We talked about New York, where Paul used to have a girlfriend. We talked about porn, which I estimated I watched about once a month. I was careful to maintain my posture. Periodically I looked around for better company and, finding it lacking, obviously, turned back to Paul and encouraged him with nods or smiles or facial expressions that suggested I was finding him interesting. He had a number of different jobs, apologetically, and one of those really old rents. At one point, another man inte
rjected to ask whom I would rather have sex with, Justin Trudeau or Barack Obama, and I just frowned and stared at him. Paul took it upon himself to defend my honor here, saying hey hey and reminding the man that I was new and what’s more a lady. I shook my head and rolled my eyes as I put a flirtatious hand on his bony upper arm.
After we brought the heavy serving dishes upstairs and set them on all available counter space in the dirty kitchen, not thinking of washing any of it ourselves, we bade goodbye to the owner, who for all I knew had spent the entire evening sitting at the desk playing solitaire, and we were about to go outside when Paul asked for my phone number. I felt then that my procrastination had been serendipitous, because I was able to tell him, truthfully, that I didn’t have one. I could have given him my American number, but of course I didn’t want to and didn’t mention it. He wasn’t shocked at this because as I would later realize many expats, especially those who’d arrived when it was normal not to have a smartphone, had small or nonexistent cell phone plans that required the rationing of text messages and the elimination of calling as a possibility except in extreme circumstances. He asked for my email address.
I was able to dodge this request for about a minute until my impulse to pity overwhelmed me. The desperation in his eyes, the way they shifted from mere attachment to clinging. Something was off in this man; it was not a normal come-on, not obnoxious or inappropriate so much as scarily direct. He said it again: please, I’d like to send you an email. It was so simple; it wasn’t requesting anything in return. He had not done anything wrong except produce a strange vibe, and indeed it was a strange situation, among strange people, so I didn’t know if he could be fully blamed. I rationalized that emails were the easiest form of correspondence to ignore and, relieved that I hadn’t lied about my name, wrote my address on the back of a flyer for an English-speaking babysitter looking for work. I walked away from the bookshop quickly and in the wrong direction and ended up on the edge of a stone-walled cemetery, no one around, and had to turn on my data plan to navigate home, which would end up costing me fifty dollars. Drops of water appeared on the screen as I located the nearest U-Bahn.
The next day I bought a flip phone and a ten-euro-per-month plan and canceled my American contract, exhilarated by my cool willingness to forgo the internet. When I got back to the apartment, I saw that Paul had emailed me, asking if I would meet him at a bar the next day, Sunday. He apologized for being forward the night before; he said he had been “destabilized,” the implication being by my beauty and wit. Thankfully it was not a long email. Though I got a little buzz at the unconcealed interest in me I was mostly in awe of the scheduling; in New York, plans were made weeks in advance and then rescheduled because one or both parties were having mental health issues. I knew I would regret it, but within the hour I replied to accept, thinking that a strange or upsetting experience would be at least different, and more importantly that it would give me something to do, keeping me from descending entirely into self-pity and ruminations on time death love solitude identity etc. I enjoyed the freedom from thoughts of Felix that a man being interested in me created. I looked up the place Paul suggested; photos people had posted online suggested it was like all the other bars in Berlin, mismatched furniture, dark, unevenly painted walls, candles stuck into empty liquor bottles disfigured by wax. I said I would meet him there at eight.
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I ARRIVED AT THE BAR FIFTEEN MINUTES EARLY IN ORDER TO buy my own drink. I was antsy with guilt, as if I’d waited until Tax Day or woken up after drinking too much: something bad was going to happen and it had been entirely preventable by me. I worried about what we would say to each other, whether he would begin with some comment about my looks to which I wouldn’t know how to respond, whether he would tell me sensitive things about his childhood that would make me feel sorry for him and hesitate to leave without an apology. I couldn’t remember any redeeming qualities he’d exhibited on Friday that might have shone through his creepiness, but still I was there, apparently willing to see him again. Besides his forceful interest in me I guess I had liked the look of his face—the light, round eyes against his skin tone, the tired circles around them—and the fact that he was older. But the city was surely full of men with good faces who were born before 1977, and I had made a tactical error by not forcing him to convince me; I should have suggested I was unsure about further interaction and therefore required the work of kindness, gentleness, and the appropriate level of flattery before I would agree to it. Instead I had encouraged him, by exposing my neck, by listening and responding to his conversation without easing myself away, by accepting his invitation to see each other so soon after we’d met. If he became aggressive or grotesque in my presence I had relinquished my right to the feelings of unease that would linger after our date; he had been aggressive and suggested potential grotesquerie at the bookshop and in his email, yet I had still agreed to see him. I considered downing my glass of sour red wine, getting up, and leaving, but then I imagined passing him on my way out the door, having to come up with some excuse, an emergency with my family, a problem at an imaginary dance studio for which I could pretend I held one of the only keys. But I sensed I wouldn’t be able to do it if I had thought about it in advance. I would stutter; the lie, my irresolution, would be obvious. No—I had never stood anyone up before and I didn’t want to start now; though Paul had shortcomings they didn’t (yet) justify his being stood up. It was not this man’s fault that he had a bad personality, but I was totally responsible for leading him to believe he didn’t. I wished I had a pack of cigarettes—you could smoke inside—but I had yet to master buying them. Every time I approached the counter at my local Späti my will to speak either abysmal German or rudely presumptive English floated away, and I had to pretend I was there for gum.
Eight p.m. also floated away. I began to feel less nervous; every minute he was late added a point to my tally. I had been very strategic choosing my seat, in the corner, from which I could monitor the door as well as watch a couple kiss on the couch, their hands in suggestive but not yet scandalous places. Felix kissed with his eyes open, unnervingly, and when I asked him why he said it seemed fake to close your eyes just because people did it in movies. I said I thought it was the natural response to having something so close to your face, intended as a hint that I wanted him to stop, but he kept doing it; concentrating on keeping my eyes closed while kissing him, to avoid seeing his open eyes, only made me think about how his eyes were almost certainly open. Each table had an empty bottle of gin that served as a candelabra, and though little slivers of gunk were wedging themselves under my fingernails I was finding it satisfying to pick off the long thin pieces of wax that clung to the neck as the upper hand recalibrated via Paul’s lateness. I was transforming, from foolish attention-seeker to generous soul who had put herself out there only to have her time and energy abused. What I was doing was not a big deal; whatever happened between us was the result of my open-mindedness, which should be celebrated, and it wasn’t as if I’d shown up to a dark alley or his apartment. People go to bars all the time. I sipped my wine and thought about how Felix always hated sitting at the bar. He said it made your conversations fodder for the bartender’s workplace-annoyance stories; he didn’t like his conversations being overheard. I didn’t mind this as long as the people around weren’t part of a scene or clique I was denouncing; it reinforced the ultimate irrelevance of whatever I was talking about. No one cares about your little theories, I’d told him once, unaware that thousands of people online did. I also liked the sense, sitting at the bar, that I could leave easily.
After twenty-five minutes I began to wonder if it wasn’t I who was being stood up. At eight thirty I decided it would be appropriate to leave. I waited five more minutes, returned my empty glass, the bartender saying something to me that I couldn’t understand but at which I shook my head anyway, and left. The couple on the couch was still there, no longer making out but simply gazing at each other, their glasses of b
eer half full. I was able to transition smoothly from embarrassment to indignation. I walked home along the canal until I reached a section next to a playground that was fenced off and under construction; I had to turn and walk to the street, passing another crowded bar, its windows fogged. I woke up to an apologetic, almost stream-of-consciousness email, an excuse about a “work call that extended almost beanstalk-like into the minutes of our date which I was so looking forward to.” He described my beauty briefly and then explained: “I finally got away at 2045 but by then you’d gone of course as I would have done and I’d like to make it up to you but of course if you don’t want I understand.” I didn’t reply, but that afternoon I did make a profile on a dating app.
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FIRST I HAD TO DECIDE WHICH PLATFORM TO USE. I KNEW SOME people who did all of them, casting themselves a net across the web, the idea being that while there may be plenty of fish most of them had weird facial hair, and you couldn’t find quality without quantity. But I didn’t have the energy for diversifying my portfolio; this was not a serious endeavor but a lighthearted experiment; I needed a project, not a boyfriend. When I asked Frieda if a particular service was popular in Germany she said she didn’t know because she didn’t need dating apps. Fair. She was beautiful and seemed to have polyamorous friends in the art scene, or to be a polyamorous friend in the art scene. I was tempted to defend myself against the suggestion that anyone who used dating apps needed to—I, for example, was just bored!—but reasoned this would sound more defensive than saying nothing.