Choose Your Own Disaster

by Dana Schwartz

  Every joke Brooklyn Guy makes, every invitation to a party, every hug, every time he offers to open a beer for you, become tallies in your mental column for all of the reasons he loves you, or at least reasons he is interested enough to have sex with you. Because really, once a boy has sex with you, it’s only a matter of time before he falls in love with you. Sure, he’s a guy who sleeps around, but you’re not like other girls. You’re the heroine in the story. He’ll have the best sex of his life with you and tumble back onto his mattress, bare chested and heaving, and whisper, “Wow.”

  You sleep together one time, when he is at your place late, talking about how he and the sort-of girlfriend (she of the long freckled limbs and blond hair) broke up or went on a break and how her boyfriend found out (she had a boyfriend, it turns out, in California) and how Brooklyn Guy and her boyfriend will never speak again (Brooklyn Guy and her boyfriend had been best friends, it turns out) and he’s crying at your kitchen table at midnight and you should be thinking anything but what you’re thinking, which is, Maybe now he’ll want to be with me.

  You hug him to comfort him, and he hugs you back, and you have that unspoken but obvious moment where a hug being face-to-face turns into a kiss and you go into your bedroom and peel off your clothing before he can change his mind. While he’s thrusting inside you and his Hugh Grant hair is flopping in his face, you smile your gummy shameless smile and you know that even though all of the girls in Brooklyn and half of the girls in Manhattan have fallen in love with him, he’s having sex with you. You’ve done it.

  As soon as he comes, you can see on his face that he thinks he made a mistake. How can two people who were just physically inside one another have such different understandings of what just happened? You just had sex with Brooklyn Guy, the boy of your dreams. You just passed the first massive hurdle of your love story together. It’s an easy roll downhill from here. His face is contrived thoughtfulness.

  “That was a mistake,” he says. “I’m only going to hurt you.”

  Here is the thing about assholes: They seem to believe that by outwardly declaring themselves assholes, they absolve themselves of all responsibility for subsequent assholery. “I will hurt you,” a boy warns, and then hurts you, and then you’re left blaming yourself because you knew what you were getting into. They act like being an asshole is like being diabetic or a professional mime. Sorry, this is just an unchangeable fact about my life and who I am. A boy can walk through his twenties in bulletproof armor if he tells every girl he ever sleeps with in advance that anything bad that he’ll ever do is her fault.

  But. You’re sure that’s how it is with other girls. Not with you, the girl he watches TV with in bed, who he invited to watch West Ham play football at a bar on a Saturday morning, the girl who, once he decides to date her, will become bone-thin and long-haired and tattooed and drink matcha tea.

  “Just stay,” you say, almost pleading. You’re still naked. He hasn’t even taken off the condom yet. Why do you have to plead? You shouldn’t be pleading, you know that, but it’s too late now.

  “I’m just too complicated right now,” he says, condom peeled off at this point, already pulling on his boxers. You move onto your elbows, the international sign for “I will give you a blow job if you stay in bed with me.” He acquiesces for about fifteen seconds, and then pulls away, which makes it all even worse. “I really have to go.”

  And so he leaves, and you go to the window and watch him, in a ripped parka with its fluffing contained by duct tape, walk through the snow, lit yellow by the gas station sign across the street, toward the subway.

  You text him the next day because it’s not like you’re a person who’s good at making decisions. And he responds.

  What do you do?

  A. Keep spending time with him. The longer you hang out, the more likely you’ll get another chance to get him into bed with you. The more times you’ll make him laugh, the more he’ll have to grow comfortable with you, the type of comfortable where he’ll realize maybe, just maybe, you’d be an okay person to call his girlfriend.

  Continue reading.

  B. Fuck him. Or rather, never fuck him again. It makes you angry, his indecisiveness, his self-conscious-but-oh-so-self-aware, pity-me-because-I’m-so-complicated-I-just-don’t-want-to-hurt-you act. He thinks he can make women fall in love with him by acting like their boyfriend in every area of their lives except the actual being their boyfriend, and you fall for it, but it’s not your fault; it’s his. You will be the seductress from now on. You don’t need an underemployed man-child with greasy hair who doesn’t want you. You can do better.

  Turn here.

  Things go back to the way they were: the television shows in bed together, the hanging out, the small acts of flirtation. The two of you arrive at a party together at a bar, and since you came with him, you feel entitled to jealousy when you see him flirting with a pretty girl with silver hair and a low-cut top an hour into the night. You leave without saying goodbye. Later, when you complain about him to your friends (“I mean, what are we?”), you’ll hear the gossip, told to you with the faux-sympathy of someone who just can’t wait to crush you. God, he is such a shitbag, they’ll say. The fact that he would make out with that girl at that party when he came with you? I mean, awful. You don’t care. You still spend time with him. You still text him first and drop everything to see him when he offers a sliver of his time. If you’re cool enough, maybe he’ll realize what you realized a long time ago: You two are meant to be.

  Just as you begin to feel your real self creep into your interactions—dumb jokes, no makeup, actually being able to have fun—he’ll tell you about another girl (not you, not the silver-haired girl) in Brooklyn that he’s, well, sort of dating. Mariah, her name is. He says she’s special. The word lands in your stomach and splashes up bile. He also met her on Twitter, the same way he met you.

  There are about twelve people in this world, it seems, the few of you who went to good schools who now work for the same freelance websites and have all the same friends. She has brown hair and lives in Brooklyn too. She’s Jewish. She’s you, but skinnier and she’s special. She has something that makes him want her more than he ever wanted you. She is Cooler than you. You resent her without meeting her, seething when you see an article she’s written or someone retweeting her pithy posts. You stack your accolades next to hers in your mind, as if you reassure yourself that you are enough. It doesn’t matter, though, does it. She has him, and you don’t.

  But you have one more thing you can try, one strategy left before complete and utter impotence. You direct message the new girl he’s dating, Mariah, waving a carefully sewn white flag: “Heyyy (the extra y’s purposefully included, meant to induce a casual nonchalance), I know this might be weird with the whole Brooklyn Guy thing (how much does she know? Better just to be vague) but I feel like we have a lot in common and should be friends.”

  Sent.

  She responds sooner than you expected.

  “Yes! I’m so glad you reached out. Let’s do drinks soon?”

  Do you go out to drinks with her?

  A. Yes. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? This isn’t a horror movie where someone says, “Let’s go to the old Victorian mansion that someone built, inexplicably, out in the middle of the woods in an area with no roads, power, or phone lines. What’s the worst that can happen?” Obviously, in that scenario, the worst that can happen is that a vindictive nineteenth-century ghost will try to use your body for grotesque medical experiments in an ill-conceived and very contrived plot to avenge the death of his lost love. This is just drinks. You’ll probably be fine.

  Turn here.

  B. No. This won’t end well. Reach out to someone from a different world. There was the girl who asked you to coffee, the one at the Columbia MFA program. She seems nice.

  Turn here.

  You are too new at celebrity interviews to be professional about it. In fact, the only reason you took on this interview (a fr
eelance referral from a friend of a friend—hey, is this something that might interest you?) is because you Googled the subject and saw his picture: a smirking half-smile, glasses, and very blue eyes. Exactly your type in the worst possible way.

  He’s an author—a real author, who writes 800-page novels on metaphysical existence and Jewish identity. He’s been written about in the New York Times and the New Yorker. He’s a Philip Roth–style author who probably gets weekly drinks with Don DeLillo and has Thomas Pynchon’s home phone number. He teaches at an Ivy League MFA program. He reminds you of the writing professor in college who told you that he thought you might be commercially successful, as if the words were a curse that damned you to the Buy Two Get One 1/2 Off table at an airport Hudson newsstand. You are instantly attracted to him.

  You take two subways and a bus to reach the bar in Red Hook he suggested for the interview (it took two emails to convince him to do the interview at all, plus a pledge that you’d be very, very quick about it). The bar has soggy wood and dim fish-themed lamps and a pinball machine in the corner. The Philip Roth Guy is twenty-five minutes late, and he orders rye whiskey.

  Later that week, when you listen back to the interview to transcribe it, you’ll be humiliated at how fawning you sound, what a sycophant you were, how long you talked about yourself instead of dropping out of the way to let the interviewee speak. Listening to your voice recorded and played back at you is bad enough, but so much worse when you realized you were being super-embarrassing the entire time.

  But in the moment, you thought you’d adopted a perfect persona: sexy ingénue reporter who’s about to become very successful.

  Twenty-five minutes into the interview, he finishes his rye and fingers the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. “Okay,” he says. “I have to go back to work.”

  “Do you do anything but work?” Your piece is about his writing habits—he writes for ten hours a day and only takes cigarette breaks. His work has been described as “poststructural.” A profile in the Times called him a genius.

  “Sometimes I get drinks with friends. But I work most of the time.”

  “Are you happy?” you ask, desperate to get him to shed his curmudgeonly writer persona, trying to pick away at its edges the way you would the clear film on a kitchen appliance.

  “That’s a pointless question,” he says.

  You walk him home, but he doesn’t invite you in.

  You email him about it the next day. “You could have invited me in.”

  “You’re writing about me,” comes the terse and immediate response.

  “So?” you type back. “It’s not like it’s going to change anything about the interview.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” he writes back (a quick corresponder). “Invite you in, throw you down, and fuck you when you’re doing an article about me?”

  “Yes,” you write back.

  He doesn’t respond.

  And so you finish the article and post it, which gives you another excuse to email him, to send him the link. “And now I’m finished writing about you.”

  The arrangements are made via email: Philip Roth Guy sends an Uber to your apartment to pick you up. He is fifteen years older than you, and you spend the entire car ride to his place texting anyone in your life that might be remotely impressed that you are about to sleep with an actual writer.

  You arrive terrified and thrilled. He lives in a basement apartment in Red Hook with two locks on the door. He’s barefoot when he invites you in, in jeans and a soft-looking gray T-shirt.

  The room is all books—covering every surface, overflowing on bookshelves on every wall, in stacks around the room five feet tall. What furniture there is, aside from a desk and writing chair, is made of cinder blocks. His mattress is on the floor in the corner.

  By the time you finish scanning the room, Philip Roth Guy is already sitting back at his desk, plunging his cigarette into an overflowing ashtray and lighting a new one. He doesn’t offer you one but he does offer you a drink. You accept. He pours you a glass of wine and then returns to his desk, back to answering emails while you stand, hovering, a few feet away.

  “Should I…sit or something?” you offer.

  He just looks at you, blue watery eyes peering through thick glasses. “I like you standing there. Nervous. It’s cute.”

  You are nervous. You wring your hands around the wineglass before making your decision. You place the glass down on the only few inches of desk not covered by ashes or paper and straddle him. The moment your mouth is on his, he changes. He becomes a primal, animal thing, sucking, rough, kissing, arms, chest, creature. He tells you to strip. He’s still fully clothed. He throws you—literally throws you—onto the mattress and begins to shed his jeans.

  “Are you clean?” he asks, pulling out a condom.

  “Yeah.”

  He peels the condom on and begins thrusting.

  “Why should I trust you?” he growls. “Tell me you’re clean.”

  “I’m…clean,” you say.

  “Why should I trust you? I have no reason to trust you. Look in my eyes. Should I trust you?”

  “You should trust me,” you answer.

  “Why should I trust you?” he says again, but you know somehow that he’s not looking for an answer.

  “Is this how you imagined it?” you ask, breathless. “I mean, were you thinking about fucking me during the interview?”

  “A little,” he answers.

  “Like how? How were you imagining fucking me?”

  He’s holding you down, pressing into you while you’re lying on your side.

  “On your side like this,” he answers, and a hand coils upward like a cobra and wraps itself around your neck.

  He finishes (you don’t) and the two of you fall back on the matted sheets, smelling like sweat and semen.

  He calls you an Uber back to your place and doesn’t kiss you goodbye as you exit the double-locked front door. “Can we do this again sometime?” you say.

  “I’m really busy.”

  Is he really busy? He’s writing all the time. He is home, in his basement apartment in Red Hook with a mattress on the floor, drinking and smoking cigarettes. He is a cliché. You can see through the cliché, which means you can save him. His genius can’t be sexually transmitted, but the social cachet of his genius can be. You will be his ingénue and he will be your older, handsome guide to the literary world of respect and esteem. You will go to parties with Jhumpa Lahiri and Michiko Kakutani and wear floor-length gowns while he stands next to you in a tux. “Yes, I know this year I won the Man Booker prize,” he’ll say with modesty, “but really, it’s Dana’s work that’s going to change the world. She inspires me to be a better writer. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone with more natural talent.” The New York Times will come to your Upper West Side brownstone with a photographer and take pictures for the front page of the style section. The two of you will have a bloodhound named Lord Byron and a cat named Caroline Lamb.

  “Just drinks,” you offer. “Any night this week.”

  “Fine,” he says.

  And you’re home, glowing, confident that you just met the man you’re going to marry.

  The next day, an email from him:

  Work is hectic. Going to need a raincheck on those drinks.

  You email back.

  Good luck on your masterpiece. Let me know when you’re free.

  Philip Roth Guy:

  I’m going to DC next week for work, probably won’t be for a while.

  A while is fine. He’ll come around when he realizes how lonely he is in his apartment of overflowing ashtrays and bookcases.

  At this point, you decide it’s time to take your relationship to the next level: You head to the Strand bookstore near Union Square and slither through the stacks until you find a copy of his book.

  As you’re checking out, the clerk glances at the cover. “Oh, I heard this was good.”

  “Is it? Yeah, I’ve been dating th
e guy who wrote it, and I figure it’s time to finally give it a read.”

  The clerk gives you a glance.

  “I mean, I lied about having read it when we first met, and I figure now’s the time to actually make good.”

  The clerk just gives a polite nod.

  You sit in the park and try to read. The book is halfway between poetry and prose, but with very few paragraph breaks. The main character (who happens to have the same name as the author) is a writer, writing about someone with the same name as him. You understand this is supposed to be very smart commentary on something, but only get about four pages in before you’re struck by the urge to text the author, who you’re dating.

  “How does next week look for you?”

  Two minutes go by of you frantically refreshing your phone.

  “Still in DC,” comes the reply.

  “When do you come back?”

  No reply.

  You know, deep down, that you’ve gone too far, that the rules of basic human interaction stipulate that someone who doesn’t respond to your texts isn’t into you, but the rules of basic human interaction also stipulate that you wouldn’t sleep with someone if you weren’t just the slightest bit into them. What did you do that was so egregious it would completely diminish his interest between one perfectly nice sexual encounter and the opportunity for a second?

  Besides, he told you himself, he’s not happy, and he’s not good with women. He’s a loner, and he needed you to make the first move before—maybe he just doesn’t know how to act around you. You just have to keep peeling away—no, not peeling, chiseling—at his exterior until whatever lies beneath is revealed to you.