You don’t want to become a stereotype of a crotchety octogenarian, proselytizing about the Good Old Days when people just talked to each other goddammit, and when you didn’t need to remember all of these goddamn buttons to just send a simple message. You don’t want to become one of those people who wear their technological ignorance with a prideful superiority either: “I just don’t understand all of those FaceTweets!” and all of that. You want to be Cool and In The Know and Trendy and, if possible, Internet Famous. You just don’t have the mental energy to catch up on something you’re already so far behind on when instead you can curl into a metaphorical ball and only let it graze you on the surface level.
“Dildo jokes? Anyone?” the producer asks. The comedian brings up how there’s a town called Dildo, maybe somewhere in Montana.
“That’s perfect,” the producer says. “We can do like, a little animation with a Welcome to Dildo town sign.”
“All of the town buildings can be dildos,” the comedian says.
“Amazing,” the producer says, typing.
You have your laptop open to a website listing fun facts about dildos. You are contemplating bringing up a diamond-encrusted dildo worth $13 million (that can’t be…comfortable) when you get the ding of a Facebook notification. It’s from the Lawyer.
“Yeah, I don’t think I can come to the thing tonight,” the message reads.
You type back immediately. “????? what’s wrong”
“The thing” is a PR event at a clothing store whose wares you probably don’t fit into, but those things have free drinks and free appetizers and you get to leave with a free hat or towel or flask that you’ll throw away in three months. It’s also a chance for you to arrive at an event with a tall boy on your arm, a boy with muscles visible through his shirt and a nice smile. And you—the girl he thinks is smart, the girl he prizes because she’s successful and connected—will get to show off how comfortable you are flitting among the well-dressed Gossip Girl types and the PR flacks. Will he feel insecure, you wonder, about his lack of sophistication, his middling literary ideas, his friends who work at renaissance faires and not Ralph Lauren? Will he be impressed and filled with a sense of longing urgency, and love you more? Relationships are always about domination. At this, you have the upper hand.
“I just don’t think I can make it.”
“What do you mean,” you type, trying to make it look like you are still Googling dildo facts. “I told you about this like, a week ago.”
“Okay,” his message pops up. And then a second message. “It just seems a little…relationship-y.”
You become a hissing medusa in your mind, all of the tiny moments of proof that you have built a relationship flaring around your head like shrieking snakes poised to attack. You are in a relationship! the snakes hiss in unison. You have been dating for months! You spend more nights at his apartment than your own! He cooked you dinner, he talked about taking you on a trip!—but you are Cool Girl. You don’t type any of that. You take a deep breath, and type: “If the party thing bothers you, it’s not important at all. Let’s do something else tonight.” The snakes settle, disappointed, as you hit SEND.
Bubbles appear on the screen, indicating that he’s typing, and then the bubbles stop. Then they appear again and you watch with the rapt attention of a woman possessed. The producer and the comedian have moved on to discussing butt plugs. The Lawyer’s message finally comes through: “I don’t think that’s really the issue.”
“What is the issue?”
“Danaaaaaaa.” It was written but you can hear him saying it, the exasperation and the condescension in his voice. “Okay. Fine. You wrote about being jealous about me sleeping with someone else. You were the one who asked if I wanted a threesome the other night!”
You pause. How do you explain every version of yourself to someone who’s barely met you? You’ve written about your jealousy—tweets, a short piece for a freelance publication online, all with his identity obscured—and tried to reconcile dating a man who’s polyamorous with your own insecurity, with the visions you get of him fucking and falling in love with a girl skinnier than you, with prettier eyes and good abs and hamstrings that don’t prevent her from touching her toes. You were exorcising your sins to the online public, turning your faults into quirky, relatable content. Being jealous feels less awful when it gets a hundred favorites, a hundred beeps of recognition, of “This is normal. I feel the same way.” And you get to feel above it all for writing about it, because nothing can be really that painful if it’s put in a jokey tweet.
The threesome offer came when you were Cool Girl, when you were in bed beside him, one of the rare instances when you fell asleep together. You put on your best R-rated Zooey Deschanel impression: “Tell me all of your secrets. Tell me your fetishes. Threesome? Want to have a threesome? We can have a threesome.” The words weren’t an offer so much as an offering. Put me on your team, they pleaded. I will do anything as long as we are doing it alongside one another. He had his knives and his Velcro restraints under his bed and you had your words, verbal parries and retreats, weak as paper airplanes hitting a brick wall.
You weigh your options and decide on surrender: “I do get jealous. It’s something I have to deal with. I’m sorry.” White flag, belly up, being a sub is about giving up control, and maybe it’s the same with being in a relationship with a dom.
His response comes so quick you know that he’d already typed it out: “This isn’t working. It was always supposed to be a sex thing.”
You are still sitting in the random conference room, with two strangers, pretending to be a cool, competent, funny millennial, and you start to cry. Real, heavy tears, building and dropping, heavy as water balloons. “Ugh, allergies,” you say to the room. The producer and the comedian don’t look too closely at you.
How do you write back?
A. A full retreat. Go back to the last save point in the game, keep spending time with him, make him like you more: You’re right. You’re right. I’ve been reading into things but I get it. Just sex. Let’s talk about this in person, but you’re right.
Turn here.
B. Press your tongue against the rotting tooth, just to make sure it hurts: So, what? Are you just breaking up with me on Facebook message?
Turn here.
You’re trying not to cry, really, really trying. But the game isn’t over. “You’re right,” you type. “You’re right. I’ve been reading into things but I get it. Just sex. Let’s talk about this in person, but you’re right.”
His gray text bubbles appear, and you hold your breath, and then his message comes through: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Now the rage comes through. “What? Meeting in person or still having sex?”
“Both of those. Maybe in a week when you cool down we can get coffee or something.”
Turn here.
“So, what? Are you just breaking up with me on Facebook message?”
Do it, you chant silently. Just fucking do it. You walk straight into the knife and lean to the side so he doesn’t have to go through the effort of twisting it. Make it hurt.
“I think you feel like this relationship is something it isn’t,” the response comes. Tiny letters attached to someone whose face you can’t see.
Turn here.
You could argue, bring up the nights you cuddled and watched movies, the Home Depot runs, the smiles and the “I’m really starting to like you’s.” But said knife has already punctured your small intestine and your tears are stinging and the anger has nowhere to go but through your fingers and straight back into you.
“SO you’re breaking up with me,” you write. “So that’s it.”
“Well, jeez, if you want to put it like that. I still like you. I want to be friends. But I just don’t think we should be having sex anymore.”
And so your non-relationship that was only about sex can’t even be about that anymore. You are unloved and unwanted and soon to be ignored.
“Dana?” the producer asks. “Did you want to take the cock rings section?”
“Yeah,” you murmur, “I just need to run to the bathroom quickly.” You bring your phone and keep your head down so no one in the hallway will see your flushed cheeks and wet, fluorescent-pink eyes.
“Oh btw,” another message from him comes through. “If you want to, let me know if your writing publishing people are looking for other pitches. I feel like I could write a piece about the jealousy thing, but from my side.”
You can’t quite laugh and cry at the same time, and if the wound didn’t still hurt, you would have smiled. That message is the best parting gift anyone has ever given you. The guy dumped you on Facebook chat, and then had the gall to ask you for your connections. He is so instantly and unambiguously the villain in the story. Those two details are so easy to pull out, at brunch, in tweets, in one-sided storytelling with a clear and straightforward thesis: “Once I dated a bad man, a dumb bad man.” There is no fault to be parsed out, no introspection necessary, when he made such a fatal error in victory. (Months later, he will make another glorious, unforced error: He will ask you, via wonderfully screenshot-able text message, if you might be willing to resend the naked pictures you had sent throughout your relationship, as currency, bribes for attention. His phone broke, you see, and its trove of content with it. It doesn’t matter that the two of you had, at that point, made up, or he might have been mostly joking, probably flirting just a little, teasing to try his luck. It still gives you the brilliantly sympathetic role in a funny story: the victim of a clueless douchebag of an ex-boyfriend.)
Relationships are all about domination. You have the last word in a way. Nothing was your fault, and even though now you are crying and unlovable and alone, you don’t need to ask yourself what you did wrong. Your only mistake, you’ll say, three days later over mimosas with your most sympathetic friend—in a ritual of performative basicness, of pretend Sex and the City—was not breaking up with him first.
But you aren’t ready to tease out the story of your relationship just then, when you are in the bathroom in the office building in Long Island City. You come out light-headed, with red eyes, and say again, “Ugh, the worst allergies. I am so, so sorry,” praying they’ll either be oblivious enough to believe you or tactful enough not to ask while you get back to your computer and put out there that it might qualify as a fun fact that the vibrator was invented in the Victorian Era.
Turn here.
“Being social requires effort,” your mom would always tell you. “Sometimes you need to just take a shower, blow-dry your hair, put on a pair of jeans, and go out even when you don’t feel like it.”
Tonight, you don’t feel like it. The party—a housewarming—is in the lower bowels of Brooklyn, somewhere optimistically still labeled “Bushwick” that requires a subway transfer and a twenty-two-minute walk. But you’re young, you tell yourself. You have two working legs. You’re a twenty-three-year-old in New York City, and that means you’re supposed to have a social life. And so you force yourself to go to a party that starts at 10:00 p.m., even though you sincerely believe that 10:00 p.m. is when every party should end.
You hadn’t worried about not bringing a gift until you were half a block away. Do recent college grads give each other housewarming gifts? It feels like we’re all moving between walk-ups and sublets so often, there would just be an unceasing wheel of regifting novelty kitchen knickknacks. But you could have brought a bottle of wine or something. Too late now—you’re at the threshold and it’s time for your fake high-pitched voice to come out, your “Oh my God, you look so good!” and “This place is amazing!” Hugs are exchanged, introductions are made, and then you’re sitting on a couch trying to keep yourself from eating too much Brie even though there’s Brie right there in front of you and you already ate some so tonight is a lost cause; there’s no use trying to be healthy anymore until tomorrow morning.
Do the rest of the girls notice how much Brie you’ve been eating? Is the party secretly judging you, the girl who came in without even contributing a bottle of wine? You watch other people for how much they’ve eaten and try to not be the person who’s eaten the most even though you’re almost positive you are.
The rest of these girls have known each other longer than you have. They name-drop editors and old friends and you smile along. “I’m so glad we got this space,” your hostess coos. “Rob wanted us to find somewhere we would get a decent enough kitchen so we could cook.”
“It’s amaaaaazing,” the rest of you purr back. She and her boyfriend had been dating for a year and decided to move in together. You dated the Lawyer for four months and he didn’t even want to meet your friends.
There is no more Brie. You might have eaten it all. You can’t remember. Three new girls come through the door, and all three of them brought their own bottle of wine to offer. Your cheeks flush and suddenly you feel very claustrophobic, stuck between people trying to talk to you. You cannot learn any more names or make any more small talk. You down the plastic glass of champagne you had been given and pour yourself another. You drink that one, too, and then you look up the train route to get home. You just want to be in your bed. You would give your left arm and your life savings for the power of teleportation at that moment, for you just to snap your fingers and be back behind your own door where you could take off your pants, forget about Brie and girls with boyfriends that love them, and just watch YouTube videos until you fall asleep. You feel very, very deep into Brooklyn.
There are train delays. Google Maps says to get home you’d need to take a subway and two buses, and the trip would take an hour and twenty-five minutes. You could cry. You open Uber and punch in your address. Surge pricing! a pop-up advises. To make it home, it would take fifty minutes and cost $70. You have $96 in your checking account. You are stranded among smiling, drunk acquaintances very far from home. You’ve plunged yourself into your own personal nightmare.
Then you have a quick spark of inspiration. That mediocre guy you matched with on Tinder—Kevin or whatever—he went to Columbia. He lives on the Upper West Side. You could just meet him. You could have sex tonight. That would be fine. Or you could just say you’re too tired and sleep at his place. But you can get him to pay for your Uber. And then at least you won’t be here anymore.
“Heyyy,” you text him. “Still up?”
“Yup,” comes the reply. “What are you up to?”
“At a boring party in Brooklyn. You?”
“Home.”
Perfect.
He beats you to the punchline: “Want to come over?”
“Yessssss,” you reply. The extra s’s are to make you seem drunker and sluttier than you are. “But the trains are all delayed:(”
“Uber?” he replies. He has a fish on the line and he’s not going to let you go.
“Wanna get me an Uber to your place?” you type. “Pay for my Uber and I’m yours.”
You’re playacting the seductress, the sensual escort who comes to a nervous boy’s house with an air of sophistication and sexual prowess. This boy is sweet, playing exactly into your hands. You almost pity him—sleeping with him will be an act of benevolence.
“What’s the address of the party?” he types back.
The two of you text the entire car ride to his apartment as you bump along in the black sedan toward Manhattan. “What color panties are you wearing?” he texts. The word panties grosses you out. You wish he wasn’t the type of person who said that sort of thing. But you’re already in a car headed toward his place; it’s too late for that. “Purple lace,” you type. “Need someone to rip them off me.”
His apartment is thirty blocks north of yours, past Morningside Heights and up into an area that qualifies as Harlem, all concrete and flimsy gray buildings and neon lights and closed storefronts. The driver isn’t exactly sure which building on the block is the destination. “It’s okay,” you say. “I’ll just get out here.”
When y
ou step outside, under the shadow of an overpass and across the street from an out-of-business Papa John’s, you realize how dumb it is to be in this neighborhood, alone, at one in the morning. You aren’t sure which apartment is Kevin’s either, and so you walk a bit away from the main road and try to make out the addresses in the darkness.
Finally, after a few minutes of waiting in the dark, you call him, and a few minutes later, you see a figure approaching from a building a few doors down.
“You’re actually here,” he says with surprise in his voice. He gestures to his phone. “I saw the Uber had arrived but I didn’t see you.”
“Well, I’m here,” you say.
“Excellent. Let me show you the way up.”
His apartment is a studio, with a cheap polyester comforter over an unmade bed—a bed on plastic risers, like in a college dorm. It’s separated from his living room by a Japanese-style divider, and on the other side, a television set sits crooked on an end table. You take a seat on the couch, and Kevin sits close to you, offering a drink and gently touching the skin on your thigh with the back of his fingers. You decline. You’re only a few hours out from the first glass of champagne but you’re beginning to feel the symptoms of an eventual hangover—you’re drunk still but a headache is blooming. Your limbs all feel heavy. You wish you were home, but you’re here now, and you might as well make the best of it.
“Do you have some water?” you ask. “And an Advil or something?”
He sighs and gets up and returns with two midnight-blue gel pills in his palm. They’re Advil PM, but it doesn’t matter. It’s night anyway, and if you fall asleep, you won’t have to have sex with him. You take both pills and swallow them dry.
Choose Your Own Disaster Page 18