The Year of Yes

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  My mind flipped forcibly to Chekhov. Moscow! Moscow! I yanked it back.

  “Not at all,” I said, much too loudly.

  Why would I mind? We were on a date. Sure, go and get some unknown Masha to squirm in your lap, and I’ll just sit here and fight off the fourteen-year-olds. Great! Exactly how I wanted to spend my evening! Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, we weren’t on a date? Maybe he really did want to be buddies. Maybe he wasn’t attracted to me at all! I could feel myself turning red. Oh God. I’d completely misinterpreted everything. He didn’t like me. Obviously. Anyone who liked me would not leave me sitting at a wobbly little table in a room full of pubescents on the prowl.

  I watched the Boxer put his arm around the tattooed shoulder of a girl I’d noticed before, a skinny girl, with long black hair and iridescent blue eyes. She smiled, fake adoration appearing on her face. I could see the Boxer grinning. I could see him believing her.

  I put a handful of ice cubes in my mouth and crunched them until they melted away. I put my face down onto the sticky table and let my eyes overflow.

  SOME UNFORTUNATE SIDE EFFECTS of humiliation: Three drinks later, I lost my senses and went home with the Boxer. I climbed five flights of his stairs, and ended up in his bedroom, participating in some truly awful sex. The Boxer, startlingly, ended up crying on my neck. I thought I knew why. Who wanted this to be their life? Not me, and apparently not him, either.

  I thumped him on the shoulder. We were buddies, after all. But we weren’t. We were two people making a naked mistake. I called a car service at 5:00 a.m. Some knight came in a shining white car and took me home.

  I dabbed at my eyes the whole time I dressed for work. Things already sucked, and they got even suckier. I went looking for Vic, but she wasn’t in her bedroom. Her diary was open on her bed, though, and I glimpsed my name. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t pick the book up, but I read what was on the page, and it wasn’t pretty. I knew Vic was annoyed at my yes policy, but I hadn’t known she thought I was an irredeemable, arrogant slut. Apparently so. I walked to the train, sleepless and sad.

  That afternoon in class, the Boxer acted perfectly normal, and I was relieved. I thought maybe I’d been wrong about him. Afterward, however, the whole class went to the basement bar, ordered drinks, and got down to bitching about the state of the universe. Suddenly, the Boxer slammed his glass down and announced, in his booming voice, “Do I have a story for you.”

  I cringed. Somehow, I knew what was coming.

  “So, I was having sex with this girl last night, who actually came home with me after we went to a strip club…”

  Here’s the thing about sitting at a table where someone is telling a story about you, in the third person. It sucks. Not that I’d never done it, but I’d never done it in a kiss-and-tell vein. It had only been eight hours.

  Pause for a short discussion with the male members of the group about strip clubs in New York City, advantages and disadvantages of going to same, and a small story from an otherwise shy member of the group about the broken finger suffered by his brother-in-law while attempting to stuff dollar bills down the G-string of a stripper in New Orleans during a bachelor party. Pause for a short discussion with the female members of the group about feminism versus stripping, G-strings, comfortable or not, and, “What the hell kind of girl goes with a guy to a strip club, anyway? None of us! Where do you find your girls?”

  Pause for me, unnoticed, turning purple, drowning my misery in Maker’s Mark and wondering if there was any way to make a graceful exit without everyone figuring out what was going on.

  And back to the point, the Boxer declaiming like William Jennings Bryan.

  “It just wasn’t happening, no matter how much I wanted it to. I was on top of her, and she was looking at me like she didn’t really know me, which she didn’t. And halfway through, I looked at her and it hit me. I actually wasn’t even into her. What was I doing there? I was in love with Masha. This girl, there’s nothing wrong with her, per se, but she’s not Masha. I mean, this girl, she’s pretty and smart, but not like Masha.”

  For a moment, I clung to the fact that at least he’d said that I was pretty and smart. Unfortunately, there was the rest of the sentence to consider. I wanted to scream nasty things, statistics on the small size of both his penis and his soul, but I didn’t. It wasn’t like I was blameless. I’d gone home with him. It was me who’d made that stupid choice, and now I was getting a little bit of just reward. I stayed silent.

  People had been cruel before, but it’d rolled off my back. For some reason, this one hurt. Maybe it was because the Boxer was a writer, too, and my brain had granted him automatic comrade status. This was friendly fire. No dignity to getting shot by one of your own. I don’t even think he meant to be cruel. I think he was embarrassed himself, and trying to excuse his behavior. No one wants to start crying in bed. There was plenty I didn’t know about him, and likewise, but that didn’t really matter in the moment. I still felt like I was bleeding all over the bar. And that was seriously uncool. I wanted to be the kind of girl who could tolerate her heart being translated into a story the morning after, the kind of girl who didn’t care so damned much. I was not that person. I never had been.

  The Boxer was sitting next to me, and he started to grope my thigh. I didn’t get it. He was telling all these people he wasn’t attracted to me, and his fingers were kneading me like bread. And people were sympathetic. I could see on their faces the fear that maybe the Boxer would never find love. If the Boxer remained alone and miserable forever, so too might they. I agreed. Love was looking less and less likely to me. I’d been saying yes for three months, and though I’d met some nice people, I hadn’t even come close to meeting anyone I wanted to spend much of the rest of my life with.

  I swatted the Boxer’s fingers away. He was onto a discussion of boxing: the macho factor, how he’d had his nose broken a few times. I was thinking about athlete’s foot, willing fungus and jock itch upon him.

  I BELATEDLY NOTICED that two of my classmates had been watching me during the Boxer’s monologue. The Princelings, so called for their extreme family-bestowed affluence, were not only rich, but good looking, too. They unexpectedly offered to buy me a drink at the bar. Though I’d never really talked with either of them before, I was glad to escape. Much more of this, and I was liable to either sob, or try to throttle the Boxer. I was thinking that maybe I could compensate for my lack of muscles with a series of swift jabs to his throat. Then I could bake him into a pie, à la Titus Andronicus, and serve him to Masha.

  I was competitive with a stripper. How sad was that?

  The Princelings asked if the story had been about me. They’d been watching me during the exchange and were “interested in the dynamic.”

  “Yes,” I whispered, applying Kleenex to my eyes.

  “What an asshole,” said Princeling One.

  “Dickhead,” agreed Princeling Two.

  I instantly became their friend. I hoped that the Princelings, in the grand tradition of the Dramatic Writing Program, would write a seven-hour play about the Boxer, and how he was scum.

  Over the next few weeks, the Boxer and I saw each other in class every couple of days, and he acted as though he’d done nothing wrong. Of course, I refused to discuss the things I thought he’d done wrong. I had no intention of giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d messed me up.

  I banished my heart to Baden-Baden, where I directed her to wear a bright bathing costume, take the waters, and read peacefully plodding, romantic novels by E. M. Forster. Instead, she lurked sarcastically in a cabana, savagely pinching the pool boys when they were too slow in bringing the refreshments she incessantly rang for. She clutched dog-eared copies of The Stranger, Death in Venice, and The Last Temptation of Christ (look where love got him), and spent the entire day meticulously decrying everything on earth. She refused to shed her dark glasses, slugged down pitchers of stiff drinks, and occasionally laughed in sardonic barks. In the eve
nings, she’d get herself up in bugle-beaded, bias-cut satin. She’d languish delicately on a fainting couch, until some man was fool enough to ask her to dance, at which point she’d eviscerate him with her smile, fling his entrails to the spaniels, and request that the band play a tango. She was Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, and Dorothy Parker rolled into one. If, however, I accidentally allowed her to take the dark glasses off, she turned without warning into the post-lobotomy Frances Farmer, and I had to dash from the room. She wasn’t healed. Not by a long shot. I had hurt feelings, but I pretended I cared nothing about anything.

  To bolster that notion, I went with the Princelings to Japanese restaurants, ate raw fish, and engaged in a sort of bizarre verbal ménage à trois. I flirted openly with them during class, while the Boxer watched with slitted eyes. It seemed he was jealous. He’d been attracted to me, after all. One of the boys? Ha! I was so not a boy. Never mind that Princeling Two was gayt. Never mind that Princeling One was stray, and too good looking for his height of roughly five foot four.

  PRINCELING ONE WAS NINETEEN, which meant that he called me an “older woman.” I was still young enough that I thought that was funny. He had black hair, blue eyes, and a constant tan. He was from Florida.

  Princeling Two was from a Kansas family furniture empire, and so deep in the closet that he was basically a cashmere sweater. He looked like a slimmer hybrid of the Campbell’s Soup Kid and Bob’s Big Boy, his hair combed into a hipster pompadour. His parents had bought him an apartment in the West Village, where he lived blissfully (and bafflingly) on deliveries of French food and cocaine.

  I was a prude when it came to drugs. I’d never even taken a drag of a cigarette. I had an idea that persons who snorted things off of hand mirrors would automatically be punished by looking like Jeremy Irons. My time with the Princelings was spent with them high and me sober. I hadn’t been around people with expensive habits before. Idaho had topped out at marijuana, and so I was both familiar with, and annoyed by, the lugubrious hilarity of the pothead. The coked-up dialogue of the Princelings wasn’t irritating to me, because I talked that fast naturally. I’d just assumed that I’d found two other people like me, at least until I learned that their hyperactivity was chemical, not innate.

  Princeling One’s parents had been drug smugglers, until his father had fallen off a sailboat and disappeared into the Atlantic. Now he had a millionaire stepfather, and owned a significant portion of Miami. I studied him as one would study a strange and somewhat rare bird, the kind of bird whose females are dusky brown and whose own plumage is sparkling and gaudy. Princeling One had slept with everyone, including Zak’s current girlfriend. He wore sexy button-down shirts and expensive pants that looked like old jeans, but were really replicas. He was beautiful, beautiful enough that one day, when Vic and I were walking down the street and ran into him, Vic deigned to be amazed, although she said, “Why do you want to sleep with a tiny gay guy?”

  Princeling One wasn’t gay. Just well-groomed. He had a defiant unibrow, but it didn’t matter. His self-confidence transcended his facial hair. I’d been lured into his bedroom by this point. We’d sat on his bed and watched a DVD of Walkabout. It’d been strange foreplay, this movie about an Aborigine kid on his vision quest, meeting up with a couple of stranded Australian kids, but when the movie had ended, Princeling One had turned to me, put his callus-free hand on my breast, and said, “So. Are you going to put me in one of your plays as a fucked-up cowboy?”

  Um. No. The boy did not radiate open range. He radiated martini lounge.

  “Do you want me to write about you?” I’d asked.

  “Yes, because whatever it is, it’ll be famous.” Well. Flattering, anyway.

  “You probably won’t be a cowboy,” I’d said. He was a psychoanalyzed rich boy. But whatever. He was a good kisser. And what they said about the stamina of nineteen-year-old boys was true. I outweighed him by fifteen pounds, and so I felt like Jocasta, but he didn’t seem to care. There were no crying fits. There were no buddy slaps. Good enough for me.

  “Superfun,” he’d declare, postcoitus, and then we’d discuss Picnic at Hanging Rock or Chinatown, or go to Princeling Two’s apartment, where, to my amazement, the Princelings had only to make a quick call to summon a delivery guy with a backpack full of every drug imaginable. They’d take their drugs, and I’d sit there, rapturously listening to them talk five thousand words a minute. I was their groupie. I felt like I was going back to the parts of teenage life I’d missed out on by being my deeply unsexy self and living in the library. It was kind of great to act my age. It could have gone on indefinitely, had they not had the other problem of nineteen-year-old boys. Acute immaturity.

  “Our generation is way cooler than our parents’ generation,” said Princeling One one afternoon as the three of us sat eating sashimi.

  “Totally,” said Princeling Two.

  I knew what was coming. A version of the thing that young men had been saying since young men started speaking.

  “Nothing from the past has any relevance beyond entertainment,” they’d say.

  “Live in a hut, write a tortured manifesto, and then eat it,” I wanted to reply. “You’re at the stupid age.”

  Princeling One gave equal cultural impact to the Zapruder JFK film footage and Pulp Fiction. Never mind that the Zapruder film was real-life horror and Pulp Fiction was, well, fiction. The Princelings were the kind of people who watch Faces of Death while eating foie gras.

  “We can look at something like…okay…perfect example: the Zapruder film, and since we weren’t around, since these things don’t mean anything to us, we can say, ‘Look, there’s the gun, there’s the hit, wait, wait, yeah! There’s the brain, there’s Jackie’s hat flying off!’ Rewind! Or we can make fun of Hitler’s mustache, I mean, Hitler looked so stupid. Our parents get all upset; they can’t be objective about anything, because they’re thinking about genocide, or where they were when they heard about Kennedy. Whatever.”

  I put my head under the table.

  “Why do you have your head under the table?” he asked me and I could give no coherent answer. The conversation continued above me. The Princelings argued semantics for a while, and then Princeling Two’s face appeared, bending down to check on me.

  “She’s still under the table,” he noted. “Is she epileptic?”

  “I think she has PMS,” said Princeling One.

  I put my head back above the table, ready to lecture on the merits of empathy.

  “Were you checking me out?” asked Princeling One.

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re very small.” Maybe I didn’t have any compassion, either. Maybe I wanted something that no longer existed. The Princelings slapped hands.

  “I told you she had PMS,” said Princeling One, unoffended. “Good one. Okay. New topic. Would you rather be seen as a winner or as a hero?”

  I didn’t understand the question.

  “Like, do you live your life to be seen as the culturally acceptable winner, or to be seen for a moment as a hero?”

  “Neither. I just live my life,” I said. “Why would you want to live like that?”

  “Like, do you want to be immortal, but maybe tragic, or do you want to be successful and make lots of money, but maybe have no one remember your name?”

  My existential crisis was tapping at my eyeballs again.

  “I wonder what happened to Hitler’s teeth,” said Princeling One. “It’d be so cool to have them. On display? Like, get them…fuck, yeah! Bronzed! Or, Dude! Make them into a windup toy.”

  “Totally,” said Princeling Two.

  “They’re holding your screenplay together,” I said from beneath the table, where I’d retreated again.

  “You’re so cool,” said Princeling One. “Even if we don’t really get you. I’m writing a horror-western. Hitler wouldn’t understand it.”

  “He wouldn’t, huh?” I said and laughed a terrible little laugh that turned into a terrible little sob halfway
out. I’d been having sense of humor problems. When men on the street said obscene things to me, I had visions of how awful it would be to be a female dog, genitals forever exposed to the scrutiny of panting male dogs. I wondered if female dogs had the same problem I did: They saw an attractive male dog, walked closer, closer, only to witness the male dog suddenly shitting all over himself. Maybe it was just that they were high, and I was not. Maybe if I’d been high, too, I wouldn’t have noticed the glaring lack of compassion that the Princelings displayed as part of their daily routine. But I was me.

  I didn’t like anyone enough to come out from under the table, and so I started to crawl. I stood up when I got out from under, and walked to the door. I turned around.

  Princeling One, applauded by Princeling Two, was trying his thesis on some other girl. They gave me a wave. “Later,” said Princeling One.

  “Later,” I said. In about twenty years, I thought that the Princelings might have enough empathy to be around other humans. Until then, though, I had better things to do.

  I WAS SCHEDULED TO GO the next day to a playwrights’ conference at the Kennedy Center. I’d been looking forward to this for months, not because I was plotting to acquire any dates while in D.C., but because a writer whose work I was crazy about was supposed to be there, too. I was hoping to pick his brain about the business. As far as the Year of Yes was concerned, I was planning on keeping to myself.

  After the last few NYU-related traumas, I wasn’t keen to throw myself into the fray at a writers’ conference. I’d been very open for three months, walking around New York, consciously making eye contact with everyone, and smiling even more than usual. I’d decided that I’d just turn it off. No eye contact. No smiles. And I damn well would not flirt. It wasn’t saying no, exactly. It was just putting up a force field. This conference would be a pool of people I already knew I shouldn’t date. Writers and actors: my downfall. The last time I’d been to a thing like this, I’d fluttered wildly around from attractive actor to attractive actor, looking at their scrapbooks of laminated reviews. Never again. I didn’t need to see Ophelia in black leather bondage gear, nor Hamlet in a rumpled T-shirt and dilated pupils. I didn’t need a man who was so uninhibited that he could urinate fearlessly in front of an audience. Public peeing was not a virtue.