Choose Your Own Disaster

by Dana Schwartz

  The Lawyer opens the door and wraps you in his arms with an exaggerated smack of a kiss, almost lifting you off your feet, which makes you acutely aware of all 156 of your pounds. “You bring gym clothes?” he confirms.

  You lift your backpack. “So that’s what we’re doing?” you ask, all innocence.

  “Yeah,” he says, already unbuttoning his shirt and walking into the bedroom to put on a T-shirt he can sweat in. “It’s been like three days since I worked out and I needed to work out tonight but I wanted to see you.”

  Are you flattered or insulted? Is both a valid option? Going on a date to the gym is not something you can brag to your friends about, but it is something you feel like Couples do. The type of couple that you never imagined yourself being a part of. You always envisioned yourself in more of a Doctor-Who-and-microwave-popcorn couple, not a bouncing-ponytail-and-matching-track-jackets-jogging-in-the-park-together-and-looking-like-Norse-gods-which-is-how-all-joggers-look-to-you couple.

  It’s 8:15 now and you’re starving. He wipes his nose and pulls his headphones around his neck, looking at you expectantly. What do you do?

  A. Kiss him. Hard. Pull off his shirt. Pull off your shirt. Take him to bed and try your hardest to make him forget about the exercise plan.

  Turn here.

  B. Change into your shorts, sports bra, and strategically sexy tank top. You are Game. You can be that girl who goes to the gym with her boyfriend.

  Turn here.

  The Lawyer leans into the kiss for a few seconds and then pulls away. “Ah, ah, ah,” he says. “After.” And he rolls his eyes. You’ve never seen a thirty-year-old man roll his eyes before. “Get dressed,” he says. The shadow of his pecs are visible through his T-shirt that broadcasts his mediocre law school. “Don’t worry, it won’t be a super tough workout.”

  Turn here.

  “You want to do it on an incline, see?” the Lawyer says, leaning over from his treadmill where he was running with heaving strides and punching up the incline so your treadmill shudders and lifts its head like a curious animal. You want to be an easygoing girl, a cool girl, God forbid you’re “high maintenance,” so you pretend as if running is something you do all the time and not the three times a year that you think, “Hey, do you know what would be fun? Almost puking.”

  You concentrate on your strides instead of how your hair is probably frizzing into a halo and stare at the LED clock on the treadmill, counting by the seconds. On one hand, this is a very bad date. This is the date equivalent of taking someone to the Laundromat because you needed to do some laundry. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s a sign that he sees you as a possible partner, and not one of a harem of sex partners in his polyamorous life, added to the rotation as a favor to your mutual friend Suze.

  Him being polyamorous doesn’t bother you, not really. When he’s with you, he’s affectionate and interesting; he pulls up old B-horror movies on TV that he thinks you’ll like and watches your face during the exciting parts to make sure you’re fully enjoying them, and he carries you, like a bride across a threshold, when he takes you to bed. Besides, he’s an adult with an apartment that has a doorman, a wall of windows, and a table shaped like Westeros from Game of Thrones that he made himself. He has a respectable job and a cute smile with dimples—if finding a good man in New York is as hard as Sex and the City has led you to believe, he’s a catch, even though he’s probably having sex with other girls.

  You know couples who are in open relationships—who have their primary partners and then ask permission to hook up with ego-boosting strangers on the side. Sometimes it feels like everyone you know is in an open relationship. Maybe it’s the modern way to do it when you’re young and in love and fully trust one another. Maybe it’s the only way to do it, and the resistance you have is just you being selfish and possessive and jealous.

  It’s been fourteen minutes on the treadmill and your heart is four pumps away from exploding. You begin a trotting walk. “I’m…going…to…head back upstairs,” you get out between dry heaves. He looks at you like a disappointed parent and rolls his eyes (again).

  “It’s fine,” you say quickly before he can get a word in. “I’ll just go back to your place and hang out.”

  “I’m probably not going to be done for a little while,” he says, not looking over at you.

  “That’s fine. Where are your keys?”

  You catch your breath in the elevator back up to his apartment and you realize (1) wow, you should really get in shape; that was harder than it should have been, and (2) you are starving.

  Upon examination, his fridge contains two containers of Fage Total 0% Greek yogurt, a slab of raw meat, a bundle of asparagus, and four cans of Coke Zero.

  You contemplate ordering Seamless but you remember as you sit on his couch and crack open your computer that you haven’t gotten his Wi-Fi password yet. So you peel the tab open on a can of Coke and sit on the couch, pressing buttons until Say Yes to the Dress comes up on his enormous television, refreshing Twitter on your phone. You pull a book from his shelf (Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman) so when he comes in, you can be reading—the perfect image of the shy intellectual love interest. See? the book will say. I’m more of a reading type than a working-on-the-treadmill type.

  You jump when you hear the door clatter open even though you haven’t been doing anything wrong (you don’t have time to snatch the book onto your lap). “You here, babe?” he calls. He’s panting, and so covered in sweat he might have been swimming. The sweat stains bloom in Rorschach stains across his T-shirt. You see a butterfly and a guillotine.

  “You didn’t shower,” he says, using the bottom of his shirt to wipe the sweat off his forehead and flash a truly wonderful strip of abdominal muscles.

  “Oh. I didn’t want to not hear you knocking if you needed to be let in. I had your key.”

  He smirks. “The door was unlocked.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  You’re not sure exactly what you’re apologizing for, but you want him to like you. And that seems to mean playing the deferential guest in whatever way fits best against his rough edges without friction.

  “You hungry?” he asks, opening the fridge.

  “YES.”

  “Sit your pretty little ass back down, then. I’m making us dinner.”

  He pulls out the raw meat and the asparagus and a large stick of butter, and half an hour later you are eating steak with a boy, the first boy who’s ever cooked you a meal. And it’s very, very good—asparagus crisp, butter dripping down the steak. Cooking this dinner feels like something a boyfriend would do for you, even if there are no carbs.

  When he takes you to bed that night, he starts by restraining you with the Velcro straps that are attached to his bed, under the mattress, and then he leaves the room, forcing you to writhe to try to see where he went and to get into a comfortable position. You had never been tied up in bed before you met him.

  The Lawyer returns brandishing a long, thin knife (knives are always brandished), and he straddles you, knife casually tracing the surface of your skin.

  “This is one of your carotid arteries,” he says, pressing the knife’s tip just a little too hard into your neck, “which brings blood to your brain. I could stab you right here.” He raises the knife slightly. Of course, this is all just part of his game; this is just the sex thing he’s into. Suze would never set you up with a murderer; he has to be perfectly safe. But what if he isn’t? You’re tied up, a man much stronger than you is above you, and he’s holding a knife. Maybe he gets off on torturing girls. Maybe this is how you die. But of course it isn’t. It can’t be.

  “One slit and you’re gone,” he whispers. The knife returns, softly, to your skin and it continues its route across your collarbone, down your chest, around one breast. “I could hack off a breast,” he says. “Or just a nipple. Would you do that for me? Let me cut off a nipple?”

  Before you can answer, he drowns you in kisses. “No, no, no,” he coos. “I would
never. I would never. But I don’t even need a knife, do I?” To demonstrate his point, he drops the knife off the bed, where it lands on the carpeting with a soft ting. He rubs the left side of your lower stomach. “These are your kidneys, right here. If I punch hard enough, it would hurt more than anything you’ve ever experienced.” He lifts a fist with a sharp inhale of breath and you wince and try to pull away. The punch comes, but not with much force. “No, no, no,” the Lawyer says. “I would never.”

  The games last another hour before the sex happens the way sex always happens—thrusting, increasingly sweaty thrusting, pretending it doesn’t hurt when it goes too deep, moaning so he thinks you come—and then he flops down on the bed next to you, depleted. You didn’t come. For all of the foreplay and excitement, all of the novelty and props, you never physically got any farther than just simply being turned on. It’s your fault, presumably. You just take too long. Here is a boy bringing out an entire circus of BDSM party tricks and the most your miserable body can provide in response is, “Cool. Not bad.”

  But you have never been able to orgasm from a man’s attempts, either frantic or lazy. Orgasms are reserved, it seems, for those moments you open incognito mode on your computer and find some shameful porn that becomes more shameful the moment you finish. You watch things similar to what the Lawyer does to you and says to you. Why is it so much hotter when it’s happening to someone else? There is literally nothing you can think to ask for in bed that would help you finish. A boy’s mouth always feels wet and tickling, never pleasurable, and always eclipsed with the self-consciousness of Oh God, how long is he going to want to do this, he can’t really enjoy this, he’s probably resenting me right now, how bad does it taste down there, I can’t believe I didn’t get a Brazilian. The only scenario you could imagine requesting that might actually work would go something like this: “You wouldn’t mind me closing my eyes and touching myself while thinking about something else and pretending you’re not here, right?”

  It’s one in the morning. You shuffle to the bathroom and rinse off in his shower, and by the time you’re back, he’s gone, already half dressed, in the living room on his computer. “I’m going to go to sleep,” you say.

  “Sure,” he says. “I’m just finishing some things up.”

  You wake up in his bed a few hours later. It can’t be morning. The lights of the city are still dim, and the sky is a smoky gray. A lamp you left on still burns orange on top of his dresser. He’s still not in bed with you.

  You slink through his house in the dark. You don’t remember where in the apartment you left your phone and so you’re walking gingerly, arms out in front of you like a mummy, guided only by the flashes of sound coming from the living room. The lights are all off, but the television is aglow with flashing lights and low-pitch noise. The Lawyer is asleep on his couch, a blanket pulled over his legs. You kiss him on the cheek.

  “You fell asleep on the couch,” you say, trying to sound like a sweet, long-term girlfriend. “Want to come to bed, baby?”

  He murmurs and you’re not sure if he hears you.

  You try again. “Wanna come to bed?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he mutters, and because good girlfriends aren’t nags and aren’t difficult and don’t just tell people that sometimes they need to be held, you go back to bed and fall asleep in the big bed, alone, for the rest of the night.

  Turn here.

  You and the Lawyer are taking a trip to Home Depot for wood so he can build a bookshelf. Yes, you are dating a boy in New York City who has a job as a lawyer, a doorman apartment, and a six-pack, and he builds furniture. He is a walking pro list. On the subway to where he keeps his car, he wraps his arms around you and kisses your face. The two of you are talking about trips.

  “I’m so jealous of everyone on my Facebook feed going to Harry Potter World in Orlando,” you say. The subway rattles and he tightens his arm around you.

  “You want to go down there, take a trip to Disney World?” he says. “We should do that sometime.”

  “Really?” you ask.

  “Yeah, it would be fun.”

  You hope other people on the subway are looking at the two of you, because you probably look so in love, like a couple that has it all figured out. (Eventually it will be these moments—the promises of trips, the home-cooked dinners, the sex that at least isn’t boring—that you replay in your head when you begin questioning whether you should be with him.)

  When the two of you are in the Home Depot parking lot, he turns and says, “I think you’re the smartest girl I’ve ever dated.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Don’t think I’m not impressed. The Ivy League, the perfect ACT score—it’s impressive.”

  “Thank you,” you say, and it suddenly occurs to you for the first time that he makes a list of your attributes too.

  You become a stereotype of a girlfriend, bored and ornery, while he’s patrolling the wood aisles of Home Depot with the energy of a caffeinated drill sergeant. As he deliberates between oak and spruce pine, comparing their relative weight and price, examining each board for knots, you feel yourself slip into what the kink community calls “a brat”—a submissive, but a submissive who acts like a needy little girl, disobeying orders and demanding attention. It’s a different flavor of BDSM relationship, and it doesn’t suit you. You’ve been aiming for “take no shit outspoken partner, half of an equal couple” but you keep sliding into “petulant child.” But maybe this is what being in a relationship is? After all, you like when he takes control, when he holds you down, when he picks you up and presses you against the wall, how manly it is that he’s picking out wood to make his own furniture. It turns you on, even as it makes you cringe outside the bedroom. Maybe you’re a bad feminist.

  The Lawyer manages to fit the planks he’ll use for the bookshelf in the car by angling them from the floor of the backseat up through the gap between the two of you, a thin, red oak divider. You look out the window to help him back out.

  “Have I brought you to the family business yet?” he asks, pulling out.

  As it turns out, the Lawyer comes from money. His high-rise apartment is thanks not to his middling legal career but to a company started by his great-grandfather, which makes caskets. He drives you deep into Brooklyn, until the buildings transform from high-rises and brownstones into squat warehouses with nondescript exteriors. You wait in the car while he unlocks the door to one of the buildings and enters. Moments later, a garage peels open and he reenters the car to pull inside. “So are you ready for the grand tour?”

  Which room of an after-hours casket company owned by the family of a guy that you may or may not be dating would you want to see more?

  A. Warehouse

  Turn here.

  B. Showroom

  Turn here.

  The room is the size of an airport hangar, filled with wood and the smell of sawdust. It reminds you of the massive government storage center in Raiders of the Lost Ark, if Indiana Jones had been in the business of protecting artifacts from Nazis that all happened to be empty, unvarnished coffins. You aren’t sure whether you’re allowed to touch the wood, but you can’t help yourself—you run your fingers along the rough edges of the unfinished planks and rap your knuckles against their sides. It’s less spooky than you would’ve thought upon initially hearing the phrase “casket factory.” The panels of wood might as well be for building tables. There is no inkling of the future association with corpses, with decay, with loss, in this fluorescent cave with high ceilings and tight paths between the stacks of inert wood.

  Toward the front of the room, there are a few assembled coffins, still just skeletal boxes with wooden sides and a wooden roof, with none of the silk or varnish that will be added later when it’s wheeled out to the showroom. “You want to get in?” the Lawyer asks.

  You remind yourself that you are Cool Girl. Cool Girl is always game. Cool Girl is not afraid of anything, especially not afraid of a harmless wooden box. It’s a cool s
tory, a macabre adventure out of a Tim Burton romantic comedy. Winona Ryder would totally go into the coffin. She would be super into it. You raise an eyebrow, give him a sexy sideways smile, and step gingerly inside the coffin like it’s a tiny, bobbing boat, trying to keep the wheels beneath it from sliding away.

  You lie down and jokingly cross your arms over your chest like a mummy or a cartoon vampire. You grin and close your eyes. He slides the coffin’s heavy wooden cover back on.

  You know he wants you to scream. It’s the same thing he wanted when he dragged that knife across your skin. He wants you scared. But you’re not claustrophobic—it’s really not as bad in there are you would have guessed. Dark, yes, and quiet, but if you close your eyes, you could be lying down anywhere. You hear a creak and you know he’s putting pressure on the top of the coffin so you won’t be able to push yourself out. You wonder if he’s getting impatient, waiting for you to beg to be let out so he can refuse you. You rustle a little inside as a compromise, bringing your arms down to your sides so you can feel exactly how confining your situation is. You can extend your elbows out about as far as you’d be able to in the middle seat of an airplane. You keep your eyes shut.

  When you press against the coffin top, it’s because you’re more bored than afraid. You’re done being alone and ready to be his girlfriend again. You manage to get it a quarter of an inch up before it falls back down onto the coffin with a hefty thud, and you’re not sure if it’s because the wood is heavy or because the Lawyer is still pressing on it. He hasn’t spoken this entire time and you wonder offhandedly if he left you alone in there. That scares you more than being in a coffin.