The Year of Yes

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Dogboy returned with a carton of chocolate ice cream. He squinted at Señor Chupa, who was dancing into the distance.

  “Know him?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Louie.”

  “He stole my girlfriend’s underwear from a dryer once. He hangs out at that Laundromat, stealing G-strings. Disgusting.”

  “Always been nice to me,” I said. I preferred to keep the mystery of my association with Señor Chupa to myself. Dogboy was clearly intrigued.

  We walked to the end of the India Street pier and looked out toward Manhattan. Even though the water was polluted beyond repair, it was still a fantastic view. And though I’d expected Dogboy to be dumb, a Neanderthal with preternatural bedroom talents, he turned out to be both intelligent and funny. We walked back to his apartment, and he used an enormous ring of keys to let us in. At last! I rejoiced. And shivered. Nightgowns in snowy weather were a bad idea.

  The building was cavernous, and seemed to have no interior walls. There was a large metal staircase flanking one side. It was a testament to Dogboy’s personal charisma that he’d ever managed to get a woman into this, the ultimate bachelor lair. Not a pillow to be seen. All iron filings and half-full soda bottles. And then there was the thing I could see at the top of the staircase. A freestanding toilet.

  “What exactly do you do?” I asked.

  “Sculptor.” Relief! Clearly, the toilet was an art piece. Some sort of Duchampian tribute. Still, a toilet at the top of the stairs. Gaaaaah.

  “Wanna see my coal bin?”

  Somehow, I didn’t think it was weird to climb down a ladder into a coal bin, forty-five minutes into a first date. I liked him, I guess. I knew that Vic would have been screaming at me for my stupidity. Pretty much every horror movie we’d ever seen began this way. Brainless Girl says, “Sure, Mr. Creepy, I would love to see your coal bin.” Aforementioned Mr. Creepy proceeds to whack her on the head with a shovel, and bury her in coal. Dogboy, however, was just proud of his coal. Real coal. Real bin. Real welded-iron tulip, seven or eight feet tall, balancing against the wall. He told me he was planning to install it secretly at the edge of the East River, so that it was sometimes visible, sometimes not. Obviously, I was into this. A subversive sculptor. I ascended the ladder, and the stairs, ignored the toilet and bathtub next to it, and sat down on a couch that was also in the middle of the room. Next to the bed.

  “Not even gonna ask about the toilet, huh?” Dogboy gave me his best grin.

  “I assume you put it there on purpose. Fountain Number Two, right? Ironic commentary on the nature of modern art?”

  I was showing off. I happened to be midway through a colossal survey of modern art, taught by a professor improbably named Pepe Carmel. The good thing about the class was that Pepe Carmel loved female nudes, and would happily have devoted the entirety of the semester to various representations of them. The bad thing was that the class was on modern art and, therefore, the female nudes we were looking at, with the exception of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, a pre-porno close-up of an amply fleeced female crotch, were abstract. I’d discovered sometime in week two of the class that I found most of modern art to be a pretentious load of bullshit. Signed urinals. In five hundred years we’d gone from Sistine Chapel to pissoir. If this was cultural evolution, it was depressing.

  “It’s a test. I happen to like women with brass balls. Want to play Scrabble?”

  I assumed he meant the board game, and not some sort of wall-climbing erotic escapade. I didn’t see a climbing wall. That didn’t mean there wasn’t one. The place was huge, and not exactly well-decorated. He rattled a box. Scrabble. This was just weird. However, it was a better weird than some things. I sat down at the coffee table.

  “Bring it on,” I said, falsely confident. I was awful at Scrabble. The moment the little tiles appeared in front of me, I lost language completely. Dogboy was a Scrabble fiend. He had the Scrabble Dictionary, and used it. He kept score on little tablets. This was not what I’d expected. At all. After an hour, Dogboy gave up on me. I’d forfeited many turns, and his score was in the stratosphere. I’d also marched to his freestanding toilet and peed, largely a distraction tactic.

  “I’m impressed,” he said. “You passed the test.”

  “Why?”

  “No one ever does that on the first date. They all make me close my eyes.”

  “I thought it was part of the deal of dating you?”

  “Nah. Girls are all modest.”

  “Not when their bladders might explode.” Let it never be said that I was unable to learn from my mistakes. Half of my accidental love for the Actor had probably been caused by the fact that he’d shown me where his bathroom was. I wasn’t going to let a full bladder make me get my heart broken again. Irrational? Maybe. So what?

  “Point taken. Still, you’re better than I expected you’d be,” he said.

  “What’d you expect?”

  “Emotional wasteland.”

  “Why would you expect that?”

  “I’ve seen you crying every time you walk past my house, for weeks. Ice cream?”

  He fed me a spoonful of chocolate ice cream before I could answer.

  “You’ve been watching me?”

  “You’re kind of hard to miss. Every day you’re wearing a cocktail dress and high heels. Every day you’re carrying a backpack the size of your body. Every day you fall up the subway stairs. Plus, in case you didn’t know this, you’ve got like five or six old men trailing behind you like a pack of stray dogs. Wait. Excuse me. Singing and dancing old men. Tell me how I wouldn’t notice that?”

  However illogical this was, I’d thought my weird life was visible only to me.

  “Hang on,” said Dogboy, putting out his finger and wiping ice cream from my chin. “And, you’ve been spying on me for the last week or so, which, for an egomaniac like me, is totally intriguing.”

  This was disarming. I’d thought I’d been so discreet.

  “Believe everything Kitty says, by the way,” he said. “She’s right about me.”

  “I met your girlfriend, too,” I said.

  “The Alaskan? She’s great, right? She could break me like a toothpick.”

  “But you cheat on her.”

  “I’m not cheating. We’re just eating ice cream and playing Scrabble,” Dogboy said, giving me another spoonful. Felonious Monk barked a bark of yearning.

  “She’s jealous,” said Dogboy, and then he picked me up and carried me to the bed.

  “Who’s jealous?” The pit bull or the Alaskan? I was scared of both.

  “Now, this might be cheating,” he said, as he slid his hand up my thigh.

  “Who’s jealous?” I asked again, but Dogboy didn’t answer me. He’d torn the strap off my slip, and he was happily sinking his teeth into my left breast.

  “Actually, I want to keep that,” I told him, grabbing him by the ears.

  “Come on,” he said, and grinned. “Self-destruct a little. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  I considered his logic. I pictured myself asymmetrical. Picasso. Guernica. No.

  “I don’t know you well enough to give you body parts,” I said, prying his jaw open.

  “Some girls would,” he said. “Most girls.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not most girls.”

  “Clearly.” He went back to eating ice cream. He dripped it onto my collarbone and nonchalantly licked it off. Felonious Monk whimpered and threatened to board the bed. Dogboy waved his hand and she desisted, though not happily. He went back to applying his mouth to my skin, this time my neck.

  “Why do you think I’m self-destructive?”

  “You’re letting me leave tooth marks. For one thing.” A growl floated up, rattling in the air for a moment like the chains of Jacob Marley. Dogboy dropped a spoonful of ice cream. The growl shriveled. Sounds of lapping.

  “That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me,” I protested.

  “Don’t get me wrong. A broken heart wil
l always make for great sex.”

  He sunk his teeth into my thigh. I let him. He bit my neck. He bit my arms. He bit my stomach and my calves. He bit everything, and I rejoiced. Witch doctor, sex therapist, asshole, or angel, I was getting cured. No more leaving messages, no more wailing on my floor, no more wandering around the East Village hoping to run into the Actor. Nope. I was over him. So. Over. Him.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I did the walk of shame down India Street, clutching my torn slip to my chest, and feeling pleased with myself.

  I ran into the Handyman, who said, “Damn, mamita, I bet you need me to rewire that buzzer, ‘cause the way you’re lookin’, some dude’s gonna be ringing at your door.”

  “Nothing’s broken,” I said. Not my heart, anyway. Maybe some capillaries. I hadn’t seen a mirror, but I figured I might have a hickey or two.

  Pierre was standing in his window when I got to my building. He opened the door and beckoned me into his apartment.

  “What exactly happened to your neck?”

  “Nothing.”

  “If you say so.” Pierre went to his refrigerator and casually got out an egg.

  “I do,” I said. “I do say so.”

  “This is your heart,” Pierre said, holding the egg up to the light.

  “My heart is not an egg,” I said.

  “This is your heart on Dogboy.” Pierre cracked the egg into a frying pan. It sizzled.

  “Are you about to segue into the Just Say No campaign? Because that didn’t work very well,” I said.

  “I’m about to scramble your heart with a little butter,” Pierre said. “And then I’m going to eat it. Want some?”

  “Can’t. I’m late for class.”

  Pierre shuffled the scrambled egg onto a plate and took a bite. “Not a bad heart,” he said. “I wouldn’t give it to that guy, if I were you. He won’t appreciate it.”

  “Thanks for your cooking lesson,” I said.

  “What are neighbors for?” Pierre smiled at me.

  BY THE TIME I GOT OUT of the shower, I’d forgotten about what Pierre had said about my neck. I was late for my sign language class.

  I was in sign language because I’d thought it could pass for a foreign language requirement. Foreign languages were something I was awful at. It turned out that ASL was not considered a language, but a dance form. I’d already been halfway through the semester when I’d found that out, though, so I was screwed.

  I went into class and took off my sweater. The teacher started laughing in his high-pitched way. He pointed at me. He put his hand beneath his chin, wiggling his fingers, and then made a sign I recognized. Two Ps, banging together.

  “Dirty fucking,” the teacher wrote on the board, and then signed it again, slowly, for the remedial students. I looked down at my arm, and saw a trail of bite marks beginning at my wrist. My sign language partner informed me that my neck was covered, as well. Several others in the room attempted to ask why they didn’t get laid as well as I clearly had. Why lie, I thought. Sign language was a blunt thing and everyone was obscene, all the time. It was the only part of the language most of us really understood. Plus, extra points were given for successful dirty joke tellings.

  “Yes,” I signed. “He bite.”

  “Fun!” signed the teacher.

  “Fun!” agreed several students.

  “Love is big hurt,” I signed, in a paroxysm of honesty. “One month before today, me heart break from a boy actor. Boy actor maybe gay, but sex with me anyway.” Here I got exactly the right facial expression, and the teacher applauded.

  “Men bad,” I signed, and the teacher agreed. He was himself gay, and his regular complaint was that the gay deaf community was tiny, ugly, and not well hung.

  “But poor me love bad men,” I continued. “Now, I meet another bad. He bite!”

  The class applauded. It was the longest sentence I’d ever managed to get through without breaking into an inappropriate smile.

  “Introduce me?” signed the teacher.

  “Straight,” I signed.

  “Shit,” signed the teacher.

  “Shit,” signed several other people in the room.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, ZAK, Griffin, and I went to a horrible margarita bar deep in NYU’s backpack jungle. The bar’s claim to fame was that its sign was an enormous yellow taxi cab careening out over the street. You could get a pitcher full of soapy, lethal margaritas there for about seven dollars. The bathroom of the bar was difficult, involving a teetering descent down the steepest staircase in New York. When I’d first moved to the city, I’d once fallen all the way down the stairs and been picked up from the floor by a tiny Mexican busboy, who’d balanced me like I was just another tub of dirty dishes.

  Zak, Griffin, and I ended up waiting in line for the bathroom together and Zak could not restrain his impulse to question me.

  “How exactly did you get tooth marks on your arms?” It wasn’t just my arms. I looked down and saw tooth marks on my upper chest. I slowly raised the hem of my skirt to my thighs.

  “Attacked by a vagina dentata?” I said.

  “Latin will not save you. Attacked by a pit bull-owning neighbor,” Zak said. “What is he? A vacuum cleaner? A suction cup? No, wait, I know. A giant leech. That’s what that looks like. Leeches.” He put his hand over his eyes and groaned. He peeked out and groaned again. “That’s horrible. Go back to Pierre. At least he was repressed.”

  “Want to know the worst part?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” said Zak.

  I danced down the cramped hallway.

  “It was SO MUCH FUN!” I sang.

  “Oh God,” said Zak. “You’re a freak.”

  “Why do you always have stories about biting?” questioned Griffin. “What’s the deal here? What is this pattern?”

  “I can’t believe you let some strange guy bite you,” said Zak.

  “You’ve never done anything kinky, huh?” I said.

  “I don’t want to hear this,” said Griffin. “Yuck. No, I am not hearing this.”

  “Not like that,” said Zak, self-righteously.

  “La, la, la, la,” said Griffin, who had put his fingers in his ears.

  “So the other night,” I said to Griffin, who looked at me in horror, probably thinking I was about to give a blow-by-blow of Zak and me finally sleeping together, “there was a thwacking sound coming from Zak’s bedroom.”

  “A thwacking?” said Griffin, weakly.

  “What thwacking? There was no thwacking!” said Zak.

  “A spanking sound,” I said, and Zak’s face showed revelation. “You heard that,” he said. “Oh my God.” “Thin walls,” I said. “It went on for a long time. Vic and I both heard it.”

  “So, the margaritas are really good here,” said Griffin.

  “They are,” said Zak. “Fantastic margaritas.” He was laughing, though, and laughing hard. So was I. Things were looking up. For the moment.

  “I HAVE TO FIND A GIRL to degrade,” Dogboy said, giving me a quick once-over to check my reaction to this, and then peering out onto the street again. It was a few weeks later, and he was looking for the new neighbor, who walked around in ice storms wearing almost nothing, her nipples standing up like tiny antlers.

  “I’m here,” I pointed out, unbuttoning my jeans, irritated that he wanted to go out and find someone else.

  “I don’t think I could degrade you,” he said fretfully. “You’re not in love enough.”

  “I don’t want to be in love with you,” I said. “It’s on purpose.”

  “Be my new girlfriend,” Dogboy said, turning on the taps of his bathtub, so that he could hide from me underwater. “Maybe that would help.”

  Only a fool would agree to be Dogboy’s girlfriend. From my vantage point across the street, I could easily see that Dogboy cheated on six or seven women at once. Shortly after our first night together, he’d informed me that he was madly in love with the Alaskan, and therefore couldn’t see me anymore. Not a week later, I’d
been walking past his house, on my way to a date with someone I already knew wouldn’t be anything I wanted, when Dogboy had opened his door and said, “Remember that girl?”

  “That Alaskan girl you were madly in love with? Yes. Actually, I do.”

  “She decided I wasn’t worth it.”

  “Hmm,” I’d said. “Are you?”

  Dogboy had run a finger up my thigh.

  “I have to go,” I’d said, and didn’t.

  The Alaskan had broken up with him not because of me, who she didn’t know about, but because he’d spent the night with someone else entirely. Two someone elses. If he was going to cheat anyway, why not with me? I, at least, had decided not to care.

  I’d decided that a person like Dogboy was the best possible thing for me. The parameters were clear. We’d spend a couple of nights a week having very loud, very emphatic sex, and that would be all there was to it. I wouldn’t be his girlfriend. I’d just sleep with him. We were compatible in the dark. Maybe this was as good as it was going to get.

  LOVE? HA! I WAS NO LONGER in the market for love. Why I’d thought I’d wanted it in the first place was beyond me. I didn’t know anyone who was actually in love. I knew a lot of people who were in pain. Though I could easily have loved Dogboy, I was, at least, smart enough to know that falling for him would be like hitching myself to a line of lemmings. I didn’t need him to love me. I didn’t need to love him. We had an understanding.

  So what if I was totally unhappy about it?

  So what if I still wanted the Actor?

  “You don’t want to be with me,” Dogboy said, and submerged himself in his bathtub. The man could hold his breath a long time.

  “Why not?” I asked, when he surfaced.

  “I’m bad for you, that’s why.”

  “Who said I wanted something that was good for me?”

  “You deserve something that’s good for you. I don’t care if you want it or not. I’m not going to be the guy that fucks you up and convinces you love isn’t possible.”

  Under the water again. Could it be that he had a conscience? I’d been lamenting the Actor again, having burst into tears in Dogboy’s bed because he’d put a Radiohead CD on. He’d played the song that goes, I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo…I don’t belong here. The Actor had been a Radiohead fan. Sob. Even worse, Ira had played that particular song for me, years prior, as part of a pity-me extravaganza that had also included Beck’s “Loser,” and a date to see Schindler’s List. Now I understood how Ira had felt. I wish I was special…you’re so fucking special! But I’m a creep!