by Gina Fattore
She figured out what the friggin’ deal was with George Owen Cambridge. She classified it. She gave it a name. She decided he meant to be a “particular & intimate friend, yet no more.”
Or as we would say in modern parlance: he just wasn’t that into her.
Crushes happen. They do. They happen to the best of us. Sometimes I think I might actually be having one now, but I’m thirty-eight years old and I know better than that, so I fight it. I resist. After all, a crush is like an orchid: it has to be cultivated. It has to have water and light and special plant food and god knows what else to survive. Emotional encouragement, perhaps. They’re delicate things, crushes. Katie, the delightful twentysomething assistant-girl who brings me a double tall cappuccino every afternoon, has one right now. It’s on the guy who delivers the copier paper, and we have all, as an office, rallied together and become invested in this crush. We ask her questions about it, detain the poor guy in banal conversations, send her on pointless errands to his end of the lot. The shoe girls will even sit Katie down from time to time and dispense sage advice on how she should go about transforming the crush into something real—although I tend not to participate so much in this part of the process, because one of the many important life lessons I have learned from my decades-long obsessive study of the fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Miss Burney is that nothing good ever comes from a crush.
Or wait, shit—that’s not entirely true.
I once got a job from a crush.
In the spring of 1994—a simpler time, if ever there was one—I had an obsessive crush on the goateed latte guy who worked at my local Starbucks. Since there weren’t any shoe girls around to give me well-meaning advice—shoe girls didn’t actually exist yet circa 1994—I didn’t put on makeup and a sexy outfit and attempt to “accidentally” run into him at different places around town. Instead, I wrote a story about the obsessive crush, and then I sent that story to my local alternative newspaper, and they gave me a check for $267 and a job as an assistant editor. And even though it was a little embarrassing when they published the story and the goateed latte guy found out I had an obsessive crush on him, and after that everybody kinda pointed and stared at me whenever I went into the Starbucks on Diversey—still, that job was a good thing.
It kept me fed and clothed and paid for my teeny-tiny studio apartment on Sheridan Road, and everybody else who worked at the alternative newspaper seemed to be reading the same books I was reading, and every once in a while I would get to go to a concert for free with one of the rock critics; and probably if I had never gotten The Phone Call That Changed My Life and packed up and moved all my writerly dreams to LA, I would still be living in that teeny-tiny studio apartment on Sheridan Road and working at the alternative newspaper and trying in vain every week to get the rock critics to listen to me about where the semicolons should go.
So technically speaking, you could say that crush changed my life for the better.
But not every crush ends so happily.
Fanny’s certainly didn’t. Which is why, at this point in our saga, it starts to be a good thing that the impoverished academics who make it their life’s work to edit the official, unabridged version of Fanny’s diaries and letters haven’t reached 1783 yet. Apparently they’re quite painful to read—all the sad, crazy bits of Fanny’s diary where the most successful female novelist on the planet goes on and on in lots of angst-ridden, excruciating detail about the not-so-fascinating subject of whether some douchebag clergyman likes her or not. That’s what Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction, wrote during the years 1783 to 1786.
And that’s all she wrote.
Instead of following up her first two phenomenally successful chick-lit novels with a third phenomenally successful chick-lit novel—which, hello, any self-respecting literary agent would totally advise a person to do—instead of honing her craft and grasping for the higher sort of literary immortality achieved one short generation later by a clergyman’s daughter named Jane, Frances Burney, in her early thirties, took a break from the arduous, fever-inducing task of writing novels and devoted herself exclusively to Journaling for Anxiety™.
Interesting career choice, no?
And even though she knew how this whole wretched episode turned out—even though she knew that in the end, George Owen Cambridge wasn’t that into her, that he didn’t love her back, that they would not live happily ever after—still, she kept all the evidence of her angsting and obsessing around.
She didn’t toss it or torch it or whatever.
She lugged it around with her from 1786 till she died in 1840, to and from all her various jobs and lodgings and so forth.
And then she bequeathed it all to her niece Charlotte Barrett, and luckily she didn’t torch or trash it, and nowadays it’s all stashed away for posterity in the research collections of the New York Public Library.
Which is where I used to work right after I graduated from the less-famous Ivy League university I attended.
Sort of a funny coincidence, no?
Only back then, I was not so inordinately obsessed with Frances Burney. Her troubles, her times, her romantic difficulties, these things didn’t preoccupy me so much. I’m not sure what did. A logical guess would be my own romantic difficulties, but I swear I was a spinster back then, too—I’ve always been a spinster—so I didn’t really have any of those.
Or if I had them, I guess I didn’t realize I had them.
Like sometimes, I would have these odd work-related encounters I couldn’t quite parse—Israeli art dealers would tell me they liked the sound of my voice on the phone, or restaurateurs would give me their business cards at fancy charity events, or the waiters at the fancy charity events would try to engage me in conversations about the class struggle—and it would always have to be explained to me after the fact that the guys in these scenarios had been trying to hit on me. But it’s not like life ever throws you back into the paths of those exact same cater waiters or restaurateurs or Israeli art dealers, so I guess I never really got a chance to rectify those mistakes.
If they actually were mistakes.
Either way, I apologize to them all—to all the guys who lived in New York in the early nineties and may or may not have tried to hit on me at various points. I’m sure a lot of them were really nice, especially the one who wanted to talk about the class struggle. I just didn’t see it at the time. Not because they weren’t good-looking enough or because I was holding out for guys with more glorified jobs than cater waiter or whatever. It’s just that it had always been repeatedly drilled into my head during my formative years that boys would only like me if I looked a certain way—a distinctly thin, non-glasses-wearing, non-spinsterish way—and even though I can look back now, in retrospect, and see that when I was in my early twenties I wasn’t really all that bad-looking, still, it never really occurred to me back then that I looked okay enough to go on dates or have a boyfriend or try to be the heroine of my very own romantic comedy the way the shoe girls seem to be doing.
So perhaps that’s what I was obsessing on?
How un-normal I looked?
Obviously, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I should stop obsessing on myself and my many flaws and devote myself to the arduous task of constructing a six-part miniseries documenting the career struggles and romantic difficulties of Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction. I guess that’s why it never occurred to me, back then, that I should march upstairs and ask the research librarians if I could please look at all of Fanny Burney’s super sad eighteenth-century Journaling for Anxiety™.
No way I’m doing that now, though. Putting on white gloves, searching through archives? Not my cup of tea. Oh, I’m sure I’ll read all that stuff when it finally does come out, professionally edited and footnoted and such. I owe it to Fanny—heck, I owe it to my six-part miniseries—but in all honestly, it seems like it’s going to be a major bummer.
You know, watching someone who’s been one of the Top Five Heroes of My
Life lose her shit and destroy her career over some douchebag clergyman who just wasn’t that into her.
You know the drill.
Like I said before, this is a huge problem we have here in modern times: guys and girls are always hanging out together—going to movies, having sex, even buying furniture—without ever specifically defining what their hanging out means. And we certainly don’t have any laws or rules etched in stone about how, after a certain point, the guys in these scenarios should just get their shit together and decide they’re done with one girl and ready to move on to the next one. Although I would like to take a brief moment to suggest that if we did, I think we could cut down on a lot of the workplace crying that so hinders our productivity as a nation. I think some government agency might want to look into that. You know, for efficiency’s sake.
In Fanny’s day, of course, they did have those kinds of rules. Zillions of them. But for some strange reason, when it came to Fanny, George Owen Cambridge didn’t see fit to follow any of them.
Perhaps he assumed the rules didn’t apply to novelist-girls.
Or celebrities.
Or girls whose fathers were music teachers. Remember, Fanny had no money and no impressive family connections. Her father was a social butterfly and a hell of a piano player, but he was not the kind of guy who would take you out behind the Bada Bing and beat some sense into you if your courtship of his daughter deviated from the social norm into some vague, uncharted territory that wouldn’t really have a name until a novelist named Fielding, near the close of the twentieth century, coined the term “emotional fuckwittage.”
Of course, it’s also possible that the whole thing may have been Fanny’s fault.
Yes, maybe that’s it. I’m always protecting her, taking her side. But perhaps she was the one who fucked the whole thing up. Perhaps she was too guarded in her affections. Too reserved. Too, you know…spinsterish. Maybe Fanny could have landed George Owen Cambridge if she’d acted more like the shoe girls—been a little less timid and more flirtatious. Done more to “fix him,” as they would have said back then, meaning, you know, to nail him down, secure his affections, get the ring. Although, wait, I just realized, we still use that expression, don’t we? We still talk all the time about girls “fixing” guys, only nowadays we mean getting them to dress better and not watch so much football; back then it seems to have meant something more akin to “affixing” them. You know, getting them stuck on you.
Either way, time kept ticking—1783 turned into 1784, into 1785, into 1786—and George Cambridge Owen didn’t propose.
But he also didn’t go away.
He just kept sitting next to Fanny at parties and making everybody who knew them think he was going to propose, and so at the age of thirty-four, she did the only thing a super successful female writer could do, circa 1786, if she wasn’t getting any younger, she wasn’t descended from a long line of rich people, and no gentleman of means particularly wanted to marry her: she took a really prestigious, well-paying job that was super hard to get, and everybody who knew her thought it would be really glamorous and great, but guess what?
It wasn’t.
It was just like every other shitty job on the planet.
To-Do List
• Ideas for Episode 16, coordinate with Jill
• Submit proposal to BBC, finish part one, write summaries of episodes, etc., etc., &c.
• Plane ticket for Xmas
• Pick Up Dry Cleaning
• Decide When to Have Brain Surgery
• Read Dave’s Spec Script
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2006
TODAY AT THE GYM it was just me and Anorexic Unabomber Girl.
Which kinda makes me question my lifestyle choices.
Because even though working all day on your outline and then doing 3.53 miles on the elliptical trainer sounds like a vaguely healthy way to spend a Saturday, it doesn’t necessarily seem so healthy when the only other person doing it with you is a skeletal, Death-like apparition of a girl wearing the world’s largest, bulkiest hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled way down over her face and multiple towels thrown over her neck, as if she’s a boxer in a 1930s movie.
Also, the headaches have gotten worse.
But if you ask me, that’s got nothing to do with the brain tumor.
No, in my humble opinion, the headaches have gotten worse because we’re officially in high-drama mode all the time now at the office, and to make matters worse, the dreaded “holiday” season is upon us. You know, that oh-so-special time of year when presents and plane tickets must be purchased and parties attended and everyone—not just the ladies who are over thirty and still single, but everyone—wakes up every day wanting to off themselves. There just isn’t any time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, is there? It’s like you blink and it’s gone. But the good news is that I am invited to a festive holiday party tonight at the home of a friend who’s way more successful in the entertainment industry than I am, and the main reason this qualifies as good news is that it gave me something to say all week when people at work asked me…
COWORKER
Any plans for the weekend?
Like just now, when Jill sent me an email checking in about how my half of our outline was going, I was able to respond with some cheerful, vaguely normal-sounding info about how I was just about to stop working and go to a party in the Hollywood Hills, which is true.
I’m totally going to go.
I’ve got an outfit picked out and everything. It involves a new skirt I got off the sale rack at Banana Republic, and even though it might not be much by shoe-girl standards, I really would like to have someplace to wear this skirt. Plus, I already told my friend Jay I was going, and I don’t want to let him down, and, heck, at this point, it would be kind of silly not to go, because if I stay home and blow the whole thing off to watch some spinster classic I’ve already seen ten thousand times like Summertime—well, then obviously I won’t have anything to say when people ask me on Monday…
COWORKER
Do anything fun this weekend?
So probably I’ll just go.
I should, right? Just for appearances’ sake. It’s not like the party itself promises to be such a life-changing good time. I can already tell you in advance just exactly what the evening will be like. Lots of gay men will come up and talk to me. They will find me literate and charming and funny, and if I’m lucky—god willing, fingers crossed—I’ll get out of there without agreeing to read anyone’s spec script.
That would be my definition of a great Saturday night: leave the house, talk to someone a little more gregarious than Anorexic Unabomber Girl, and return home without any additional spec scripts I’ve promised to read. Dave gave me his way back in early November, and when I got back from Thanksgiving, I finally read it and sent him some notes over email. It seemed easier than having an entire conversation with him about it face-to-face. Not that we would have time for that anyway. No, right now Jill and I are in a desperate rush to finish the outline for our new episode and get it approved before December 20, when all the execs leave for Christmas vacation. That way, we’ll be able to spend our Christmas vacations writing. Plus, somehow I agreed to be the person who takes care of arranging cash bonuses for the assistants and getting a Christmas present for our boss, which really isn’t such a big deal because one of the shoe girls already came up with a funny idea about what to get him, so now all I have to do is go pick it up at Nordstrom. I kinda hate to admit this, but it is actually pretty funny.
Shoes.
You know, because of the shoe contest, which is now officially over, BTW.
The girl with the most shoes won.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 27, 2007
HELLO! IS ANYBODY out there reading this? If you are, I am probably dead. Is there a preface you skipped? Some sort of foreword written by a PhD or a learned physician? Go back and check. If there’s a foreword, I probably am dead, and the cosmic joke of it all is that it wasn’t even the
brain tumor that killed me. That would be hilarious, wouldn’t it? Here I spend all these months Journaling for Anxiety™ and obsessing like a crazy person on my brain tumor—is it getting bigger, is it changing my personality, should I get it taken out?—and then what gets me in the end isn’t the head thing. It’s the other thing: the sex thing, the gynecological thing.
’Cause that would be really funny, right?
To be a spinster and live a life virtually devoid of sexual shenanigans and then die from some embarrassing gynecological ailment that you can’t even talk about with your coworkers, except for Jill, who thinks it would be totally okay if I left work in the middle of the day next Friday to go have this weird, highly unpleasant-sounding test I’m supposed to have now that my gynecologist has found something else wrong with me?
That’s right.
With my brain tumor in a holding pattern, I went in for yet another routine ultrasound on my fibroid, and a third abnormal thing came up—a third “finding” I have to keep track of and get scanned and drive to Beverly Hills and watch and wait and worry about. To be honest, I’m not really sure what this latest medical plot twist is all about. It started yesterday when the gyno left me a message on my home machine saying my last ultrasound was abnormal and that I should schedule this additional test, and there didn’t seem to be any point in calling her back and trying to get additional info because:
a) her office is incredibly disorganized,
b) they keep you on hold for centuries, and
c) there’s not really any part of this that isn’t totally upsetting and scary.
Apparently, what’s wrong with me now has something to do with “thick endometrial lining,” and when I Googled that, I got the sort of awful, terrifying stuff that I didn’t get the first time around when I Googled my brain tumor—i.e., cancer. And then when I called the radiology place to schedule the test, they didn’t even bother to pretend that the test would be totally easy and painless.