by Ben Dolnick
I didn’t think I’d get hurt (though I also couldn’t really see how this would end well). Mostly I didn’t think about it at all. Instead I kept tutoring Nicholas and Teddy—often on the same nights that I slept with their mother—and while I was with them Nicholas would say, “My mom said I can get an Xbox for my birthday,” and the woman I thought of when he said this wouldn’t be the same at all as the one who’d been clawing at my neck a few hours earlier.
Bit by bit I learned about the men before me, probably more than I should have. There was Andrew, the polite, nervous father of a boy in Teddy’s class, who had eventually asked her to run away with him. And Max, the dumb, handsome guy who worked at the coffee shop in Tenleytown, who performed freestyle rap. Was there really this entire world of affairs bubbling away? Was that the great secret business of adulthood, the way alcohol and parties were the secret business of adolescence?
I kept my resolution about not telling anyone, almost. It was March before I told Joel (by then he’d seen a condom in my bag) and he said, “Are you serious? You’re serious?! Holy shit. Ho-ly shit. Are her pubes gray? Wait, why are you wearing condoms?” That night at a bar he made a toast “to Anna, the cougar who brought my friend back to life,” and the strangers next to us roared and clinked our glasses.
I did imagine, periodically, telling Claire about her, and a couple of times I even started typing an email (leaving the “To:” line blank, in case I sneezed or some craziness overtook me).
You should know I’m thinking about you less than I have since we broke up, and feeling much better than I was. I’ve started sleeping with the mother of one of my tutees, which is not exactly the rebound I had in mind, but what I’ve come to think about happiness is …
I stopped myself and deleted it unsent, but I really was feeling better than I’d thought I would. Sleazy, yes, guilty and jumbled and occasionally in a kind of panic, but also awake; I had enough energy now to go for runs along K Street some mornings (there were still, somehow, patches of gray snow on most of the curbs), and my appetite was back, even if it pushed me mostly in the direction of eating chocolate chips and Saltines while standing at the kitchen counter in my gym shorts.
Not since first discovering masturbation had I overused myself quite like I did with Anna in those months. I felt like a wrung-out washcloth. It was as if we were conducting some sort of experiment, as if we’d been sent to keep each other from ever getting anything done. I hadn’t thought about law school in I didn’t know how long. I hadn’t done laundry in so many weeks that I had to take socks and underwear from Joel’s dresser. I would have said that I wasn’t much of a tutor before, but now I’d go through whole appointments without opening my mouth to do more than yawn.
“How long do you think we can keep going like this?” Anna said once.
“I have no idea. We should be submitting records to Guinness.”
“What do we do if we fall in love?”
“More or less what we’re doing,” I said, pushing her bedroom door shut.
I had rarely in my life been more certain that what I was doing was foolish, and I had never cared so little. At Nicholas’s birthday party, during which a horde of boys raced around the house waving lightsabers, Anna pulled me into the guest bedroom and kissed me with lips that tasted like ice-cream cake. On a Sunday in April, when the weather was on its annual campaign to make D.C. seem not just habitable but glorious, we hid behind a tree off the Billy Goat Trail and, while I peeled off her shirt, I whispered that I loved her. Maybe I did love her, I thought. Maybe love didn’t have to be so complicated and bloody; maybe “I love you” could be not much more than a sexual exclamation, a way of expressing happiness and disbelief.
But then the strangest thing happened, as suddenly as an attack of hay fever: I got jealous.
It started, I think, when I asked her one day (we were getting dressed in her bedroom, she was brushing her hair in front of the closet mirror) what was the longest that one of her affairs had ever lasted. She thought for a few more seconds than I would have liked and said, “I think with Max it was like five months.”
I made a noise that apparently conveyed something pathetic, because she came over and cradled my head. “I never liked him half as much as I like you. He was full of himself.”
That night when I was home, and for the next couple of days afterward, I found myself returning to the thought of Max like a loose tooth. He’d watched her clasp her bra, just the way I had. He’d felt the notches on her spine and the pale fuzz at the bottom of her back.
“What’s wrong?” she said the next time we were together. “You’re not kissing me normal.”
And it was true: I wasn’t doing anything normal. I had a miserable new pastime. On the afternoons I wasn’t with her, when I usually went to the bookstore/coffee shop near my apartment to sit with my laptop, I found myself going to the one where Max worked in Tenleytown. She’d pointed him out to me once that March—she’d made us cross the street—and at the time he’d meant nothing to me, or if he had meant anything it was what a conquered people mean to their conqueror: Look at him scuttling along! But now that seemed impossible.
Now I watched him replacing the milk in the fridge, ringing people up, leaning on the counter reading Black Book, and I seethed with the private insanity of an assassin. I performed Google searches in the idiotic hope of learning his last name. I watched him get into his car (green Camry, COEXIST bumper sticker), and one afternoon, before shame or sanity stopped me, I even started to follow him.
A large part of the problem was that he was, in just about every measurable way, more attractive than me. I say this now as if it were a sad but simple fact, but at the time I felt as if my entire future depended on my finding an angle from which it wouldn’t be true. He was definitely taller and stronger than me; that was a lost cause. But there had to be things I had over him, didn’t there? Maybe something about my eyes? My stomach dropped the first time I heard that he had a slight southern accent (he was instructing a customer—wrongly!—on the fastest way to the Tidal Basin). He was Texan, I learned, after I’d overheard two women in the same day ask in just the same scarcely-controlling-themselves voices where he was from.
He was long without being quite lanky; his forearms were the forearms of someone with a gym membership. But there was a delicacy to him too, the little bit of stubble on his cheeks, the strands of black hair that hung over his eyebrows. He looked like someone who’d talk to you about the global food system, or how he was trying to phase plastic out of his life. Once in a while he wore a little flat-brimmed black canvas hat, which I wanted someone to join me in laughing at.
And he had tattoos. Tattoos! (Had Anna ever kissed them? Had he given her a tattoo-by-tattoo tour?) I was consumed for the better part of a morning in figuring out what the one on his left arm was—if it could only be something moronic, then I felt that I would finally be vindicated. A wheel? A ship’s steering wheel? Was it a naval thing—maybe he was from a Texas military family? Or was it the kind of wheel where each spoke represents a different realm of reality, and at the center is your desire to demonstrate that you once spent three weeks in Tibet?
I’m not sure there’s any emotion worse for you than jealousy. Anger, sadness, pity—even at their worst, they have a kind of purity to them: you’re suffering but you’re righteous, the world is failing to cooperate. But jealousy, oh, what a shameful and wincing performance. You’re not just suffering; you’re afraid of being exposed for your suffering. On the days that I sat there watching him, pretending to work, I wouldn’t have been any more ashamed if I’d been spying for North Korea.
I never told Anna I’d gone to see him, though I did, via some of the most faux-casual, unconvincing conversational maneuvers I’d ever made use of, try to get her to tell me more about why they’d broken up. And I never spoke a word to him, except for once when he came over to ask if I was using the other chair at my table (I grunted something that we both understood to mean, No, take
it, leave me alone).
Instead I went on seeing her at night, always denying that there was anything the matter, and I went on fixating on him, imagining the noises she made under him, thinking of the things she must have said to him, if she thought that my arms were strong. It seemed to me that for the first few months of our relationship (when had I started thinking of this as a relationship?) I’d somehow missed the most basic fact of all: I was just a placeholder, something to keep her occupied between the men she actually wanted to be with. The truth of it seemed mathematical and terrible. I could only love her so long as I could be tormented by her; and the more I was tormented, the more convinced I became that my love, which had started out as an absurdity, was the genuine article.
There is, I’ve noticed, a direct relationship between the handle I have on my life at any given moment and the handle I have on my email. On the laptop glowing in front of me while I strained to see Max’s tattoos, my emails were multiplying like termites.
Hi sweetie— Quick question about setting up the new speakers in the living room. Probably easier to show you in person. Any night this week you might be able to stop by?
Hi Adam, I got your name from David Shapiro, who mentioned that you were potentially interested in UVA. I graduated last spring and now I’m clerking for a 2nd district judge and living pretty close to you in D.C. (I think). No pressure, but if you ever want to get together and chat about the pros and cons of your different options …
And from Thomas’s mom:
Dear Adam, I just thought I’d try writing to you again, since we ran into your mother the other day and heard all about what you’re up to. It sounds as if you’re doing just as wonderfully as you deserve. I’m sure your mother mentioned it, but Thomas continues to travel and continues to drive Richard and me up the wall with worry. I know you’re very busy, but we’d love to catch up at some point, if you ever find yourself with a free afternoon.
Responding to Sally—or even responding to one of the messages not from Sally—would have been as far beyond me as doing a cartwheel across the room.
Instead, when I did look at the computer, it was either to reread months-old emails from Claire (“dinner at 7:30 or 8?” “my boss is actually I think maybe mentally handicapped”) or to do research into questions like: What’s the name of that actor with the cleft palate?
Or, Is Rosetta Stone really supposed to be good for learning Mandarin?
Or, Are there any good places for a solo traveler in South Dakota?
Or, How do you know if someone’s going to break up with you?
Or, How do you work out your forearms?
Or, and this one I could never actually formulate into a searchable question, so instead the thought just worked its way through me like the caffeine from all of those free refills of coffee, Does it feel this way for everyone else?
When friendships start to die, there’s a temptation, the same way there is with crops or civilizations, to appease the gods with sacrifices. That’s sometimes how I think about what happened—Mira was the unlucky person on the rim of the volcano at the moment when Thomas and I needed a way to make our bad luck stop.
But that makes it sound deliberate, when of course deliberate is the one thing it wasn’t. There’s a part of me, though, the part that takes over when I’m falling asleep, say, or waiting for a plane to take off with my forehead against the window, where the distinction between deliberate and accidental seems about as formidable as rice paper. Anyway:
Our friendship, by the time we were a year into high school, was in definite trouble. Some of this may have had to do with my having made the baseball team, which had pulled me off toward upperclassmen, guys more like my half brother than like Thomas, who took me to parties and got me drunk and turned me, for a few hours a week at least, into exactly the sort of person Thomas couldn’t stand. And some of this, or maybe just another way of looking at the same part of it, was that Thomas had started to become puritanical. It was one thing to spend a Friday night reading about the history of railroads when you were in eighth grade and the only wildness you were missing out on had to do with who’d kissed who at a dance; it took a much stranger, harder personality to keep on claiming that your greatest pleasure in life was talking philosophy with your dad when suddenly there were actual pleasures to be had: girls willing to do the kinds of things that until then we’d only been able to see between static bands on channel 153; alcohol, the getting and consuming (and occasional vomiting) of which was now as important a pathway in most of our lives as the getting and consuming of sunlight in the life of a plant.
Thomas wanted no part of any of this. I wondered, at the time, if this might be a kind of slow-motion tantrum he was throwing on account of no longer being, in any obvious or indisputable way, the smartest kid in the grade. Two or three other D.C. schools had merged with Dupont for high school, so now all of us who’d gone to middle school together were like small-town folk who move to the city; it turned out there were other best singers, other best athletes, other geniuses—maybe Thomas thought he needed to ratchet up his strangeness if he was going to hold on to any sort of perch in the grade’s collective brain.
None of this means, of course, that I didn’t still think of Thomas as my best friend. It was just that it felt more and more like a friendship between a healthy person and a person in a home for convalescents, and I had to be careful not to bring too much of the outside world’s cheeriness and nuttiness in with me when I went to see him. Except that’s not quite right, because I don’t think Thomas thought of himself as missing out on anything, when I did make the mistake of referring to a party I’d gone to or a girl I’d hooked up with. In his mind maybe I was the one in the home for convalescents and he was the one who had to pretend not to notice how much I’d changed, how much I’d deteriorated since my good years.
One place, anyway, where all of this dropped away and we continued to be the same close, clever young men we’d always been was around the Pells’ dinner table. With Sally and Richard we’d spend hours lost in the same kinds of intellectual/mystical seminar conversations that we always had, except I was more confident now than I had been when I’d first started spending time there—now I didn’t hesitate to interrupt with whatever half-formed thought I had, and I didn’t instantly go limping in the other direction if someone else at the table thought I was wrong.
“High school’s really agreeing with you, huh?” Sally said to me one night. “If it were the olden days I’d say that your humours are well aligned. You seem happy.”
And I was happy, most of the time. My mom and Frank seemed to have more or less accepted that they didn’t need to bother me about whether I was going to be home for dinner or whether I wanted to go with them to see Yo-Yo Ma at the Kennedy Center. I’d lost some quality of nose-drip-having, food-in-my-braces-ness that had clung to me in middle school; puberty, although it of course entailed occasional voice cracks and pimples in the middle of my chin, felt for me like being a malnourished animal finally given a balanced diet. At last I could have my height measured by the nurse without feeling like I was going to have to apologize for something. I was starting to get used to things going well for me, the way a musician can sometimes fall into a rhythm where he knows that whatever note he plays, whatever riff he tries next, is just somehow going to sound right.
That summer, between ninth and tenth grade, I worked, which is to say volunteered, at a camp in D.C. for “underprivileged children” (the phrase, which I don’t think struck me as weird at the time, came from the flyer in the Dupont guidance counselor’s office). Just about everyone in the grade was either doing this sort of community service or a more extreme kind, where you’d go off to live in Vietnam or Ecuador for the summer and then come back with a deep tan and a commemorative string bracelet and a transformed perspective that would last until Thanksgiving. Thomas had an actual job, or a semi-actual job, helping a friend of his dad’s with the research for a book on the history of the prison reform
movement. A few times after a day at camp I took the Metro to meet Thomas at the Library of Congress. He’d be sitting behind a two-foot stack of books, filling notebooks with his tiny scribble. “Just wait maybe … twenty minutes? Then we can go back to my house, OK?” So I’d wander around the reading room with its sunless people lost in projects, wondering whether I should just go home.
Summer’s a dangerous time for friendships—the whole predictable rhythm of the school year, with its drumroll of the week building, over and over, to the cymbal crash of Friday afternoon, is suspended; it’s music with no time signature. Could I sleep over at the Pells’ on a weekday now, since I didn’t have to be at work until ten most mornings? His parents would have been fine with it, but no, probably not, since Thomas needed to be at the library as soon as it opened. Maybe just dinner then? But wasn’t there something weirdly formal about that, as if I were an old college friend of Richard’s, just passing through town?
Anyway, we usually ate with his parents and then, because their house never got cool in summer, even at night, we’d go walk through his neighborhood, either down along Connecticut or back in the direction of the woods, where we’d sometimes bump into other groups of kids our age drinking or one of Thomas’s neighbors out throwing a tennis ball for his huffing dog. Most nights there were thunderstorms that were like indigestion in the sky, just a sort of redness and rumbling.
“I know I’ve been kind of the baddy,” Thomas said one night. “One of my regimen goals this summer is to be more fun. I feel like I’ve let myself be cornered into being anti-fun. I feel like the reverend in Footloose.”
My baseball friends were spending those same nights, we both knew, in a handful of guys’ houses, drinking beer they’d bought with laughable fake IDs, smoking pot out of glass pipes, calling around to their cluster of girlfriends to find out where the party had happened to coalesce. So I—and this must have been what Thomas was responding to—had a slight feeling of babysitting as we walked soberly along together, using all our old phrases, making all our old jokes, not quite feeling all our old fondness.