“Great, I’ll walk you,” he says. And the two of you ride in silence down his elevator and brace yourselves the moment his building’s doors groan open and eject you into the wind and slush and blinding snow that tears at your exposed skin and begins creeping its dampness into every crevice.
You aren’t sure exactly which direction the subway stop on the map is located, but you’re almost positive the Lawyer begins setting out in the wrong direction. He knows the neighborhood, you think. He knows where the closest subway stop is. And so even as the two of you trudge through the frozen tundra, along abandoned streets and sidewalks only shared by the foolish, for ten, then fifteen minutes you don’t say anything. Your hands tingle with numbness at the fingertips, and you’d reach for the Lawyer’s hand if it didn’t mean an excruciating moment of your hand not being in your pocket. All you can do is follow him, eyes nearly shut, step after step, knowing that you’re in good hands and if you just follow along you’re not going to get hurt and, like a roller coaster, everything is going to work out.
Finally, from the tiny gap of street you can see beneath the hood pulled over your face and the ground, you see the forest green of a subway sign with the promise that the train below will take you to Manhattan. When he kisses you on the head to say goodbye, it all seems worth it. This kiss has the tenderness of a romantic hero. Lovers kiss their women on the forehead. You are his, and he has delivered you safely to the subway station, even if it is one, you realize now, full stop farther along on the train’s route than the station that would have required just half a block of backtracking.
There are four of you on the subway (mercifully running without delays), all dripping onto the floor and shivering in wet, heavy coats. You all stare straight ahead in silence. None of you were supposed to leave the house today. This is one of the blizzards that grinds New York City to a standstill, freezes its taxicabs and halal carts in place while its residents stay in their apartments performing a hundred thousand mini-pantomimes in which they are the type of people who play board games and make hot chocolate on the stove.
When you get back to your new apartment, your roommate is sitting on the floor, in a corner, propped up with pillows and reading a book. Neither of you have furniture yet—the only light in the room is the sun coming through the two narrow windows on the southern side of the apartment that looks out onto an alley and a brick wall. You shake your boots off and smile and pull a blanket out of one of your boxes and flatten it on the floor, and then add your pillows to the pile. You smile and pretend as though this was how you wanted to spend the snow day after all. In a way, it was. The two of you sit together on the blanket on the floor, curled under an unwashed comforter, and watch Netflix on your laptop while you grab alternating handfuls of popcorn and Australian licorice. And when the light from the windows becomes dimmer, you make hot chocolate on the stove, using what you have (almond milk, cocoa powder, Splenda) and clink your glasses together, toasting to the snow day.
Objectively, he fucked you over on this one. If a friend described this scenario you would instantly transform into Samantha from Sex and the City. “Honey, dump the dummy,” you’d say in your drawling Kim Cattrall voice. “Even if his jury was…hung.”
Do you break it off with the Lawyer?
A. Yes. He doesn’t get your sense of humor, making you feel dumb every time you try to make a joke, and then even dumber for being willing to dumb yourself down for him. Plus, he couldn’t even spend a blizzard with you without going on another date. He’s not The One, whatever that is.
Turn here.
B. No. You’ve already told your friends that you were seeing someone, and he’s the first person you’ve met in New York City who seems to genuinely like and understand you. Or at least, that’s willing to continually sleep with you. You can make it work; you just need to communicate better.
Turn here.
Tinder fills a human need, a need as palpable as thirst or hunger or taking an Instagram picture of your brunch so you can let the outside world know you were able to drag your ass out of bed at noon on a Sunday and spend $16 on eggs. Tinder fills our need for attention, to be seen by someone, to be wanted, and to not quite know what will happen next. It’s a slot machine pass that you always win: Put in a bit of time and a few swipes, crank the lever, and out comes a parade of choices of people who might call you pretty and say they want to buy you a drink. The need strikes you at different times, usually after you’ve been drinking with a friend, or spending too much time on social media, when you’re lonely and scrolling through Twitter and realizing every guy you follow is married or gay or both and that, upon checking your phone, no one has reached out with even the offer of a booty call. No one wants you. But you can change that.
It’s midnight on a Thursday and you open Tinder.
You swipe right on Kyle because he went to an Ivy League school and although you can’t exactly see his full face in the three pictures he offered, it seems like he had a good head of hair and nice, blue eyes. None of his pictures show him with a gun. He seems fine, and he’s also on the Upper West Side, which means you’d be spared the inevitable midnight subway ride home alone from a mediocre date when you realize you want to escape as soon as possible.
Fuck it, what do you have to lose? “Hey,” you type, and the message from him comes back immediately.
“How’s it going?”
Generic, but harmless. It seems you have swiped right on the taupe wallpaper of people.
“Oh, you know,” you type back. You’re emboldened by the version of him you’re building in your mind: bookish, lonely, way too excited that a girl messaged him first. You attempt to reshape yourself into the flirtatious, fearless ingénue you’re pretty sure he wants, but you still only manage a, “Bored, spending the night in.”
“So let’s go out.”
Your eyebrows rise. It’s midnight. You didn’t expect him to be quite so gutsy this early on. Tinder etiquette means you exchange a few awkward preliminaries on the app, flirt atrociously, then exchange numbers. If the texting doesn’t fizzle out in a few days, then the two of you play chicken until one of you suggests a date. On the off chance neither of you cancels before (a sure sign the date will never be rescheduled), the two of you will meet in public.
“Now?” you respond. “It’s midnight.” Your hair isn’t washed. You already took off your bra.
Do you go on the date?
A. Yes. This is New York, baby! Time to be young and impulsive and do things that objectively sound awful—like say, putting on your bra.
Continue reading.
B. No. You can always meet up with him another time when you’re a little bit more desperate.
Turn here.
“Why not?” he types back immediately. “I’ll come to you.”
There are a thousand reasons why not, but you’ve been in your bedroom, in a nest of unwashed sheets for days. You are starved for human attention, to feel attractive, to flirt with someone who isn’t the Lawyer. You sent him two texts yesterday, in a moment of weakness, one asking him if he wanted to hang out and then, an hour later when the first yielded no response, sending along a toothless, “hope you have a great weekend!” He never replied, and you, cheeks burning, deleted the conversation from your phone as if by not having to look at it you could pretend it never happened. He is probably out with one of his female friends that he may or may not be sleeping with. And you are alone, with no one to text.
Romantic comedy heroines are always up for anything. Why can’t you be too? You are young and you live in New York City and that means you should be doing more exciting things. You are constantly measuring yourself against the idea of what a young person in New York City should be doing, and you have had nowhere close to the requisite number of mischievous adventures. You pull a pair of jeans on that were turned inside out on your floor and wrestle your hair into a relatively acceptable ponytail. “There’s a diner around the block from me,” you write, and send him the name o
f the diner and the address.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he writes back. “What’s your number, in case I need to reach you?”
It’s a normal request, but it catches you off guard. You wonder if he’s been abandoned before by girls he’s matched with on Tinder, if he’s built this routine—meeting immediately, getting her phone number—as the only effective strategy to actually meeting women. Something about it feels ominous, a little overbearing for the boy you had assumed was passive, nerdy, desperate to please. But it’s too late now. You’re meeting him in fifteen minutes and your pants are on. What do you have to lose? You give him your number and leave your house exactly fifteen minutes later so you’ll arrive at the diner a minute or two after him and make him wait.
As soon as you see him, you know you’ve made a mistake. He’s wearing a newsboy flat cap, and his button-down shirt is rumpled and stained at the hem. He’s tall, but gangly in a way that makes his entire posture resemble the letter C. When he smiles, a row of tiny, yellow teeth stare out at you. He is not your type.
Luckily, you’re around the corner from your house. You are here to get to know someone, and then you never have to see him again. Maybe it won’t be that bad.
Even though you’d only just confirmed the date, he seems surprised when you walk in. He rises and you, still in romantic comedy heroine persona, reach in to give him a hug, a thank-you for coming all the way to your neighborhood. You have never been in this diner before but you find, to your surprise, it’s not entirely off-putting, even after midnight. There’s comfort in its archetypal diner-ness. There are a few other patrons at tables, sitting in silent Edward Hopper tableaus. The menus are thick, vinyl, and slightly sticky. There’s a rotating display of mostly-intact pies glowing in the fluorescent light of the counter.
The two of you sit in a booth and mercifully he removes the hat. You smile politely and ask about his family. He orders pork chops with mashed potatoes and a side of steamed broccoli. You get a black coffee.
When the check comes, and he pays for your coffee with only the smallest gesture of benevolence, you give him a flirty smile and demurely say thank you. Sure, you could have paid for your own coffee, but you sat for twenty-five minutes pretending to be interested in his undergraduate thesis on Thoreau and his ex-girlfriend. You considered it a $2.50 tax for your presence. That was the point of ordering coffee in the first place: You are Cool New York girl, drinking her coffee on a date, not allowing herself to get invested but taking what’s given to her.
“All right, I think it’s time for me to head back home,” you say, pulling your coat over your shoulders. He wiggles his cap back on.
“Do you want to take a walk for a bit?” he asks. “Even just around the block.”
He isn’t awful; you could at least give him that. And the way he asked for a walk seemed almost sweet, if it didn’t verge on pathetic. Anyway, you just drank coffee, and you aren’t sleepy. Sure. You could go on a walk with him. Maybe he’d flirt and you could go to bed with a full tank of attention. But, you don’t want to.
“It’s late,” you say in a tone meant to shut him down. It isn’t an eyebrow-waggling, “It’s late,” delivered from underneath your eyelashes with an implicit dot dot dot at the end, but more of an exhausted-housewife-who-is-planning-on-leaving-her-husband-and-turning-down-his-half-hearted-attempt-to-initiate-sex-after-fifteen-years-of-marriage “It’s late.”
“Just around the block,” he says, and you are tired, but you have nothing else to do except surf the Internet mindlessly in bed, and you’ve done that every night more or less for the last three years.
“Okay.”
And the two of you walk on the darkened sidewalk beneath the construction scaffolding that’s been there since you’ve moved to this neighborhood, and although he pulls the usual seduction moves—alluding to his own sexual prowess in a way you just know he thinks is casual, brushing his hand slightly against your leg—you are so uninterested they come across as almost comical. You’re like a kindergarten teacher smiling at a five-year-old student who tells you he has a crush on you.
Eventually, you reach the logical point where he seems to expect a kiss and you offer a stern but polite, “Maybe another night. No, I’m sorry, maybe another night,” before walking with long Girl Power strides back to your apartment, opening the door, and mentally confirming that you’ll never see him again.
One of your friends is a Tinder maniac, swiping and matching endlessly and arriving at every brunch the two of you have with a new story and a new boy’s first name. This week, it’s Aaron, a six-foot-tall Australian finance bro. Last time, it was a count (an actual count) from England who she dumped when she slowly realized he was a quiet Trump supporter.
For you, Tinder is just the Uber of mediocre dates, on demand, just a swipe and a click away. When you first arrived in New York, you made plans with a boy who had promised unparalleled proclivity as a BDSM dom, until you brought him back to your room, got on all fours, and realized he immediately came on your leg without even entering you. And then there was the boy you met in SoHo, a cute redhead with an athletic build who you knew within fifteen minutes of meeting that you weren’t sexually attracted to. When he suggested the two of you head back to his place (a subway transfer and a bus ride away) and you declined, citing a headache, he stormed out of the bar without even paying his bill.
The truth about Tinder is that it behaves like any vice: never as enjoyable as your craving made it seem. You were bored and empty and hungry for attention, and then you swipe until men seem interchangeable and even more boring than the alternative: watching Netflix alone. The foreplay before a date—the flirting, the texting, the speculation—becomes rote and stale, and it always deflates right when you see the guy in person, sitting at the bar in terrible jeans, shorter than he looked in his pictures, probably wearing a douchey necklace or something.
Back when you were bingeing and gaining weight in college, you decided that your vice would be smoking instead. The idea was to exchange one vice for another, and if you were successful, at least you would be skinny. Cancer you could deal with later—you were twenty, and thus invincible to all of that—but the shame of always feeling like the ugly girl was killing you now.
They said cigarettes were supposed to kill your appetite and dull your taste buds, but turns out those weren’t the reasons you were bingeing in the first place. If you weren’t hungry, you just chose more tempting foods—fattier, saltier, new, different—and ate until you needed to throw up. Then you’d try, and regardless of how successful the attempt was, you’d move on to round two of your bingeing. Hunger didn’t factor in, and, surprise surprise, neither did taste. Ho Hos and Doritos are chemically designed to bypass straight to the pleasure center of your brain: They’d still taste good if your tongue was made of cardboard.
Maybe if you could have smoked in bed, while you were mindlessly surfing the Internet. They say to break a habit you need to replace it, and that was where you binged, like a rat in its nest, curled up with a fully charged screen and a full bag of treats in the crook between your comforter and the wall. But the dorm rooms had smoke detectors and you hated the thought of anything you owned smelling like cigarettes, and so you smoked twice on the stoop outside your building and felt too fat and too self-conscious to pull off the “nonchalant smoker” thing.
You knew if you were thin, smoking would have been cool: Your jeans would hang from your ass and your T-shirt would show off your collarbone and the messy heap of hair you wrangled into a bun would somehow look elegant and serve to show off your perfect profile. And while you were not necessarily ugly—you looked pretty from some angles, in some lights, but definitely swollen—you were sure you came across as vaguely pathetic, just inexpertly sucking on a cigarette until you stomped it out with an inch left to smoke.
The habit didn’t catch on. You got through half the pack before you gave it to a smoker who lived in your dorm, a filmmaking student with legs up to his
ears and a penchant for wearing suspenders and women’s hats. “Really?” he said, his hands already extended to take the gift. “You really want to give them to me?” You did. You never bought a pack of cigarettes again, but you would spend years going on terrible Tinder dates. It was the only vice that ever matched the quick spike of dopamine that came with bingeing foods packaged in plastic. Besides, if you got home from your date early, you could have your cake too.
Turn here.
New York City, you find, is a series of odd jobs and emails about how the two of you finally need to meet for coffee (you never will) and procrastination and killing cockroaches, actual cockroaches the size of both of your thumbs put together in your tiny Manhattan apartment. You had assumed this was just New York City folklore that happened to everyone except you, like getting an STD or having to take the G train. It wasn’t.
For this odd job, you are on the third floor of an unmarked office building in Long Island City, with a stand-up comedian you know through a friend of a friend and the producer who brought you both here, with her laptop open, asking you to brainstorm penis jokes. Well, dildo jokes, specifically. The next episode of MTV’s Snapchat show is about sex toys, and because you are fifteen months out of college and spend far too much time on Twitter, the general population assumes you understand Snapchat. The truth (which you did tell the producer, who shrugged) is that you have no idea how Snapchat operates beyond its basic functions and have no understanding of its appeal. You downloaded it and deleted it and re-downloaded it a handful of times, but it seems like a complicated step to add to your social media rotation. How are you supposed to remember your friends’ usernames? Are you supposed to already know your friends’ usernames? If you see something funny, how do you know whether you’re supposed to Snapchat it, or Tweet it, or Instagram it, or just text the image to the one friend that you actually want to see it? “You just know,” your little sister scoffs. She is twenty and a college sophomore and sends so many Snapchats a day it seems mathematically impossible that she isn’t constantly looking at life through her phone.
Choose Your Own Disaster Page 17