by Lauren Oyler
*
EVENTUALLY I WENT ON A DATE UNASSISTED BY THE DATING APP. I noticed a guy at a Greek café on a Monday, and then on Wednesday, and then on Friday as I was checking Twitter and looking miserably at the TK form, which despite my drunken initiative I had not yet filled out, he came over and asked me if I would go to a bar with him that evening. So simple! So old-fashioned! I said not that many people hit on you in person anymore, and when he doubted me I said I’d just read an article about women who refuse to date anyone they didn’t meet on an app. He said, as if unable to stop himself, “Well, we’ll have to get married,” but then he seemed to be embarrassed about it.
*
I DECIDED THAT I SHOULD SOON PICK A DAY TO TRY TO GET A walk-in appointment at the Ausländerbehörde. I picked May 29, a Monday. I would show up at 4:30 a.m. and wait, surrounded by more deserving applicants, for the doors to open at seven. When I asked Frieda if she would come with me to interpret she said, “No, it is really too early.” I said she wouldn’t have to come until just before seven and she looked at me and said, “I knew that when I made my answer.”
*
CAPRICORN: I HAD MOVED TO BERLIN TO FOCUS ON MY CAREER AS an entrepreneur, I told an Australian hairdresser. His business was mainly house calls, on his bike; when he asked what sort of business I was starting I said I didn’t know, but maybe he and I should collaborate on an app. Maybe many hairdressers would want to advertise their services on our app, where they could also post profiles and before-and-after photos, and where users could schedule appointments for hairdressers to come to their houses. Seamless for hair! Hairless! No. Less hair? No. It would have to be a pun, though, because there are so many opportunities to make puns out of hair. He said he didn’t feel like he needed an app; he liked getting business by word of mouth, which had served him well so far, and he would feel stressed by something in his phone constantly telling him he had the opportunity to work more. I said I didn’t understand that but after years of alienating those around me with my ambition I had come to accept that some people were just not ambitious and that was OK. More for me, ha ha. When he began to talk about himself, I acted closed off and dismissive, nodding with my mouth closed, inscrutable.
*
AN IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER WHEN LYING, TO REMAIN cool and not nervous, is that other people care much more about themselves than they care about you. It never occurred to me that some of these men might be faking it with me.
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I TOLD MYSELF THAT THIS WAS WHAT SEPARATED ME FROM FELIX: I never used the average person’s presumed self-centeredness to make the men think I was something they might want in order to manipulate them long-term. If anyone had wanted to go out with me again, I reasoned they would have had to have something seriously wrong with them, and it was for their own good that I was unavailable. One wasted night is a fun story, not really wasted. A wasted extended period of time is likely to inspire you to waste even more.
*
THE EX-BOYFRIENDS THINK THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS SELF-EXONERATION and delusion, which surprises them, because I was always so grounded before, ha ha. They feel some obligation to finish, having gotten this far, but they have to admit, they’re looking forward to reading other things.
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AQUARIUS: I REMARKED ON WHAT WAS, TO ME, THE MOST ANNOYING difference between Europe and the United States: no one brought you tap water here. Were Europeans walking around dehydrated? Did they need less water? The Turkish ad salesman laughed and said they were just lazy and didn’t want to have to get up to pee all the time. He had just been skydiving and when he asked if I had ever been skydiving I said yes, and then I said that it was unfortunate that it was a cliché to say you enjoyed “trying new things,” because I just loved trying new things. I was trying to teach myself to DJ, for example, because I also loved new technologies. I watched his facial expression flicker at “DJ” but he dutifully asked what sort of new technologies were arising in techno and I said most people just used their laptops, but there were lots of different programs and that maybe once I got good he could design a brand for me.
*
WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD MY MOTHER TOOK ME TO SEE THE film adaptation of Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 classic children’s novel Harriet the Spy. The movie starred Michelle Trachtenberg as a sixth grader who keeps a notebook of “spy” observations, which include field notes on “missions” (breaking and entering) as well as mean commentary on her friends and family. The notebook is a classic black-and-white marbled composition book with the word PRIVATE taped over the front; this mandate is ignored by the rich popular bully, Marion Hawthorne, who finds the notebook while Harriet and her friends, Janie and Sport, are playing in a park. Marion, in a precocious houndstooth blazer, gathers the class around and begins to read aloud, to the tiny Michelle Trachtenberg’s freckled distress. “The only thing more pathetic than being Marion Hawthorne,” Marion begins, in her taunting nasal singsong, “is wanting to be Marion Hawthorne.” Janie and Sport try to stop her, but their entreaties only spur Marion to flip to the pages detailing their own shortcomings. “Janie really creeps me out. I wonder if she’ll grow up to be a total nutcase.” “Sport is so poor he can’t even afford food. Why can’t his father just get a real job?” “If I was the boy with the purple socks, I’d hang myself.” Etc. Harriet’s friends abandon her, joining a collective “Spy Catcher Club” to prevent her from carrying out her missions. Her parents confiscate her notebook after her grades drop; eventually, there’s a Carrie-esque scene involving blue paint. Harriet begins to enact cruel, specific revenge, made possible by her sleuthing campaigns, on all the kids individually, deepening their animosity toward her. It sounds dark, and it is. The resolution happy ending only arrives after Harriet’s former nanny, Rosie O’Donnell, advises her to apologize to everyone and to lie about how she didn’t mean the cruel things she wrote.
When I saw this as a child, I didn’t take away the lessons intended, which were that lying or omitting the truth is sometimes necessary to maintain friendships, and that if you’re going to keep a private notebook you should be careful about where you leave it. Instead, I began to fantasize about undergoing Harriet’s dramatic ordeal myself. The idea that everyone I knew might care about my private thoughts was appealing, as was the possibility of people knowing my negative internal monologue without my having to tell them. When the class became obsessed with making Harriet miserable, all I could see was that they were obsessed. I asked my mother to get me a black-and-white composition notebook and began to write down all the mean stuff I could think of. My report focused specifically on one friend, Kayla, who lived down the street; I wrote that she had stringy hair and that I never had fun when my mom made me spend the night at her house. We had recently begun painting our nails ourselves, and I wrote that I found it disturbing that she painted her toenails with horizontal strokes instead of vertical ones.
A day later, I went over to Kayla’s house with my notebook ostentatiously guarded at my chest. “This is my private notebook,” I told her. “I got it yesterday. You can’t look at it.” She asked what I wrote in it. “None of your business,” I said. After we spent some time on her swing set, I left the notebook in the yard and went home. Soon after, my mother received a call from Kayla’s mother, saying that Kayla had read my abandoned private notebook and was crying. I can’t remember if I was punished—it’s possible I wasn’t—but I do remember panicking as soon as I realized that what I’d done would have consequences beyond being sent to my room. I had ceded my thoughts in exchange for becoming the focus of attention, and now I had less control over who I was to other people. Kayla and her mother would forever see me a certain way—as a careless little bitch who didn’t know what she was talking about. But a careless little bitch who didn’t know what she was talking about is not as bad as what I actually was: someone who would rather other people think of her as a careless little bitch who didn’t know what she was talking about than not think of her at all.
*
PISCES: I LOVE SLEEPING, I SAID TO THE MAN WHO HAD JUST bragged that he slept four hours a night. He was German and worked at an art gallery and wrote articles for magazines and wore nice shoes and glasses. What’s more, I had vivid dreams that I loved to describe to other people. For example: Last week I dreamed that an ex-boyfriend had called begging me to come to his house, but when I got there it was under construction. There was dust everywhere, except in the bathroom where he could be found sweeping up pine needles, morosely. For example: Two weeks ago, I dreamed another ex-boyfriend was lying on the floor of a large and endless high school gymnasium, rolling around like a modern dancer and yelling that I needed to stop drinking so much because it was giving me breast cancer. Later in the dream I was flying over Albuquerque, which I somehow knew was Albuquerque, in a very small plane. For example: Three weeks ago, I dreamed I was in a field of wheat and a man I’d never met before was speaking to me in Russian, but I somehow knew he was my brother, reincarnated after having died when I was eight. The poor German man said quietly that he was sorry and asked if I kept a dream journal. I said yes, every day. Then he asked if I was liking Berlin and I said that it was OK except that I had been scammed out of a deposit for an apartment, being a very gullible person.
*
DID I EVER CHEAT ON FELIX? YES. OF COURSE. I CHEAT ON EVERYONE.
*
WHEN THE MAN WHO ASKED ME OUT IN PERSON WALKED INTO the bar, I thought that if he was interesting and we got along I would just tell him the facts, that after spending a few years in New York working for a popular but negligible website I had come to Berlin because a boyfriend I was about to break up with died and I had felt so strangely empty that when the idea to go to Berlin appeared I latched onto it, relieved to return to inclination. The boyfriend, I would add, had been operating a fake conspiracy theory account on Instagram; he had always given off an air of deceptive mystery, the evidence of which one could never quite put one’s finger on. If it went really well I might even confess to having lied to pretty much everyone I’d met so far in Berlin, a guilty and distraught look on my face as I did so, admitting that it was an obviously psychological coping mechanism that I could nevertheless not overcome . . . until now. It would be whimsical, pitiable, and direct, a strong introduction that would balance vulnerability with originality and self-awareness. With Americans you had to worry about an extended trip to Europe making you seem moneyed. What do you mean, you had no program? No job? No fellowship? But people from other countries—this guy from the café was British, and hot, with that tousled hairstyle British men have—so he knew what plane tickets could cost, how easy it was to not save the money for retirement or the purchase of a home but instead spend it on carefree visions of canals and language-barrier bloopers. Yes—if the guy from the café was interesting and we got along, I would acknowledge that my situation was strange and my response to it selfish but I would assure him that I had undergone significant reflection and now felt “over it,” did not think so much about Felix anymore, no longer connected the word grieving with myself, and was vowing henceforth to stop lying to innocent men I met on the internet. I could add that I believed I had reacted this way because my sadness about Felix’s death was incongruous with my structural view of him as a delusional, perfidious, and generally awful person, and this produced within me anguish and confusion that manifested in mimicking the delusions and perfidy that had made Felix so awful. In addition to probably offering me some catharsis, my confession would serve as a handy test to see if the guy was too sentimental about death. Anyway, it had been almost six months. Four months. It was only when I saw people in the street who resembled Felix, the square head, the smirky walk, the strutty smile, that I remembered why I had come to a country where I didn’t speak the language or know anyone in the first place.
The guy from the café and I looked at the menus without reading them, established that we would both be ordering red wine, and cautiously approached the notion of getting an entire bottle—he began the sentence and I finished it nodding. I got out my wallet and he accepted my ten euros before noting he thought we paid at the end. He was being polite; he knew we paid at the end; I felt stupid, remembering all the times I’d been left clutching unwanted currency as the waitress whisked away to fill orders or smoke a cigarette, but at least I was thus far unburdened by obligation. The hazardous candles cast a flattering dark, and this place had a chandelier made out of rusting mattress springs, a replicable ingenuity that was nevertheless impressive. Because he and I had not met online I opened with, “So. What are your interests?” to approximate the experience of meeting online, and I delivered the question matter-of-factly, crossing my right leg over my left and grabbing my wine glass as I did so. He laughed and said, “Continental philosophy,” adding “just kidding” a little too soon for the joke to click, though it was good to know he knew the term “continental philosophy”—I was also on this plane, intimidated by things I was aware of but did not fully understand. He asked if a profession counted as an interest, and I said that in New York it would but here no. He was trying to write a novel but it wasn’t going well; instead he had procrastinated by writing a cookbook, for which he’d received an advance of thirty-five hundred pounds. When pressed for more details, he explained that the cookbook included meditations on various ingredients, often with references to their occurrences in art and literature, and was based on recipes his parents had made separately. “I guess it’s kind of a memoir in herbs,” he said, smiling, performing well a sentence he’d almost certainly said dozens of times. “It’s a little gratuitous, and a little embarrassing, but.” I said there were far too many gratuitous and embarrassing memoirs by women and not enough by men, so I thought it was good for balance. Feminist. I didn’t mind this sort of thing as long as the book didn’t pretend to be anything but a memoir in herbs if indeed that’s all it was. In fact, I liked it. Were his parents divorced? He raised his eyebrows and said no but if they had been, wouldn’t that be quite a personal question? I said, “Only if you think parents matter.” He asked if mine were and I said yes. He said he was sorry and I docked two points. Among his subsidiary interests, “hobbies,” he did not mention coffee or specific types of alcohol or “travel,” which was a good sign, though he did say, unapologetically and without irony, that he liked podcasts. I said I listened to podcasts every day and enjoyed the experience about one out of ten times, knowing, as I watched his subtle frown, that I was being mean. He asked how did I find the time to listen to podcasts every day and I explained: I worked nights as a pub crawl tour guide for an exploitative company that required me to wear a dorky polo shirt and never paid when they were supposed to, so during the day I had a lot of time to take walks, which I liked because they revealed a Berlin that did not cater to screaming tourists as well as kept me away from the internet, which did not work on my phone. He laughed. I asked what his novel was about and he said he absolutely would not tell me. He had lived in York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Sydney, Cambridge, Bangkok, Tokyo, and, for three months, Los Angeles, until he finally admitted he should just move to Berlin—his mother was German, a fact somehow omitted from his biography until this point—after a relationship with the friend he was staying with in the U.S. soured. I asked if his novel was about male friendship and he said no. I asked if it was about globalization and he said no. I asked if he liked Tokyo and he said yes, but it was expensive, which didn’t really matter because he had rich parents, but he nevertheless preferred Bangkok, which was cheap but was also the only city in Southeast Asia that had a middle class. He knew it was problematic to feel comfortable in that kind of situation but he did not believe individuals were responsible for the systems in which they operated. Besides, he added, the humidity was an equalizer. He rolled his own cigarettes and was smoking them continuously, though he swore he only did that when he drank. I waited for him to ask, “And what are your interests?” but he never did. A disappointment bloomed within me, but I refused to start talking
about myself without a prompt. I kept asking questions—he had a sister but she was delinquent, he had lived in Berlin for a year, alone in an old GDR apartment block in Mitte that he suspected was going to be renovated soon, such that he might be kicked out. After I exhausted him he asked if it got boring, introducing myself to tourists every night, explaining where I was from and why I had moved to Berlin over and over, giving them the same restaurant recommendations and tips for beating the crowds on Museum Island. I told him no because I made up a different story every time. Last night, for example, I was a burlesque dancer. He looked at my breasts with exaggerated skepticism, which I appreciated. “People will believe anything,” I said, “especially if it’s a little unbelievable.” He said, “Oh, will they?” and asked me why he should think that I was who I said I was if I was such a practiced fabulist. I smiled naughtily and said he shouldn’t. Really circuitous, I know. I asked him to roll me a cigarette and he said of course. I went to light it on the candle and he yelled, “No!” It is, apparently, considered bad luck for sailors. We sat silently smoking for a moment, careful to blow away from each other, as the din of the room filled in around us. He asked if I would like a glass of water and I said I would, and through the entryway I could see him at the water station, pouring a glass and gulping it down entirely, like a child who has been running around outside with his friends and who, upon breathily crossing the threshold to his kitchen, is greeted by a motherly arm holding a drink. He poured two more and brought them back.
I suppose it was the longest I’d gone without having sex since I lost my virginity, but a few months is nothing serious. Nevertheless, now, as he looked me in the eye while setting down my glass of water, the stupid little things that people do when communicating desire, I was struck by the prospect before me. I could have sex with a confident, functional, good-looking man. I realized then that I had been worried about it, the question of whether he wanted to sleep with me. Throughout our conversation, little worries dashed in and out of the back of my mind: Was he just humoring me? Were my conversational missteps overpowering? Did I seem boring or crazy or preoccupied with some issue that he did not want to be hustled into helping me resolve? I realized right then, with the dumb locking of eyes across the flickering table, that I no longer needed to worry. When I was younger I had relished my role as a sexual gatekeeper and made a fool of myself, dangling the key in front of boys at lectures, boys at parties, boys in the dining hall, laughing, flirting, teasing, until finally I gave in and went home with everyone. Now it was chastening, to know I was pretty enough and socially aware enough and young enough to more or less get whatever I wanted. Maybe we could have had an interesting discussion about that, about the discomfort of being at the peak of your powers, of being able to manipulate even your disadvantages into tools, but I was not going to bring it up. It was not very relatable, especially to men, though he was charming enough that he would probably relate. I didn’t have a strong inclination to sleep with him or not, but I liked, too, the nerves that came with having to decide. He leaned across our wobbling table, avoiding the dangers of candle and wine glasses, and kissed me.