Choose Your Own Disaster

by Dana Schwartz

  “I am soooo tired,” you say.

  “I don’t mind,” he replies. He doesn’t look away from your face. “Hey, did you ever role-play?”

  “What sort of stuff do you have in mind?”

  “Oh, you know,” he says. “Typical daddy/little girl stuff. But I do have this one fantasy.” He moves his hand farther up your thigh and you don’t move it. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Lena Dunham?”

  People, unfortunately, have told you that you look like Lena Dunham. You don’t particularly take it as a compliment—aside from being slightly chubby with a Jewish nose, you don’t look very much alike at all. People saying you look like Lena Dunham is a socially acceptable way for people to say, “Hey, if you were famous, people would say it’s brave for you to wear a bathing suit in public!”

  “Yeah?” you offer. You are not entirely a fan of wherever this is going.

  “Well,” he says, “I have this fantasy that you’re Lena Dunham and I’m your daddy who’s so proud of my successful, artistic, creative little girl.”

  You don’t say, “That sounds a little weird.” You do say, “I’m really tired. I think I’m going to lie down.”

  You don’t know how long you were asleep before you feel him on top of you, peeling off his T-shirt and pants until he’s just wearing boxers, the tip of his penis peeking through their slit. “Take off your panties,” he whispers. You do. You’ll have sex with him, you think, and you’ll get it over with.

  He begins rubbing his erection between your legs. “Do you have a condom?” you whisper through the haze of alcohol and sleepiness.

  “Shhhhh, don’t worry about it,” he says.

  “No, no,” you say. “You have to put on a condom.”

  “Just go back to sleep,” he says, and you try to acquiesce because you don’t want to be here right now, but his pumping is awkward and painful and his hands are clammy and overeager. You try to push him off but he holds your wrists down and grins with relish. “That’s it, my little girl. My talented little Lena.”

  What do you do?

  A. You try to leave.

  Continue reading.

  You’ve forgotten the word for stop and you’re not entirely sure he’d pay attention anyway. And so you say the one thing that comes to mind: “I have to pee. Get off me, I have to pee.”

  He reluctantly complies, and you waddle your way to his filthy bathroom, a room so small that if you closed the door while sitting on the toilet it would graze your knees. But Kevin follows you to the bathroom and he doesn’t close the door.

  “I have to pee,” you whisper. You realize how drunk you still are—you think it’s drunkenness that’s causing the room to spin and your head to bob.

  “I know,” he murmurs. “I know, little girl. But I have to watch.”

  “No,” you say. “I’m okay.” The truth is you don’t have to pee; you just wanted to get away from him, and now he’s right there, blocking your way out and you’re sitting on the toilet with nothing to do but look up at him.

  “I have to watch. I have to know if you’re okay.”

  You’re not sure if the entire thing is part of the fetish, that he likes watching girls pee, or if he knows you’re drunk and drowsy on sleeping medication and he’s worried you’ll crack your head open on the tiling or something.

  Eventually, a tiny stream trickles out, and you take longer than normal to wash your hands before you head back to his bed. “I’m really tired,” you say, and lie on your back.

  “I know, baby,” he says, and he crawls on top of you.

  He’s lying next to you when you wake up again, the sun barely managing to brighten the room through dusty windows on the opposite wall. You go to the bathroom, pee, and let the remnants of the night before drip from your body into the water below with a sickening plop. You pull on your shoes and take your phone and purse while he rouses himself. “Do you want me to make you a cup of coffee?” he asks. You look at your phone. It’s seven in the morning.

  “No, thank you,” you reply, and dragging your coat behind you, you try to leave his apartment. He has to come over to help you with the latch.

  “Maybe we can do this again sometime,” he says.

  “Maybe,” you say, holding back tears. You’re still dizzy as you make your way down three sets of stairs and then press out onto the shining concrete outside.

  You speed-walk to Broadway, farther north than you’ve ever been on Broadway, and after five minutes of frantically pacing, you find a cab going the wrong way and you make it do a U-turn. It takes twenty minutes to get down to your house.

  When you finally get home, you peel your clothes off and squat in the shower, scrubbing every inch of your skin with scalding hot water. You want to turn your skin inside out and clean the fleshy pink underside of your skin too. You want your entire body to be created out of new cells.

  You don’t tell anyone what happened, and when you eventually do, it’s only the barest details. You’re sure the more of the story you tell, the more your friends will believe what you secretly believe: that it was all your own stupid fault.

  You text him a few days later, asking him to delete your number, telling him you hadn’t consented to him not using a condom, to fucking you in the ass (had he fucked you in the ass?), to using your body when you were asleep.

  “I am so, so sorry you feel that way,” he replied. “Genuinely, I never meant to do anything wrong. I thought that was what you wanted. Hadn’t you been talking about the BDSM stuff? But if you feel that way, I can only genuinely say that was not my intent.”

  You read it once, and then delete all evidence of him from your phone. He makes the bile curdle in your throat.

  More as a masochistic thought exercise than anything, you imagine the courtroom trial if you were ever to report anything that happened. You see his lawyer, looking at you with no kindness in his eyes, while your parents watch from the courtroom seats behind him.

  Do you recognize this text message? the lawyer would ask. Did you say “pay for my Uber and I’m yours?”

  What did you mean by that?

  Did you tell him what panties you were wearing?

  Did you voluntarily go up to his apartment?

  Have you ever taken an Advil PM before?

  So you know what they look like?

  And you took it voluntarily when he offered.

  Did you get into his bed?

  Did you ever say you wanted to leave?

  Did you call a cab to get home?

  Was he keeping you hostage? You were only thirty blocks away from your house. A smart girl like you didn’t call a cab to go home?

  Did you file a report with the police the following morning?

  No further questioning, Your Honor.

  You are a slut who had bad sex with a skeevy guy and regretted it. All of the guilt, all of the shame, that feeling that you want to leave your skin that no showers in the world will ever make you clean, face it: All of that anger is for you, not him. The perfect cap on the worst version of yourself that you became.

  A few years ago, you went on a trip to Rome with your dad. Between the sightseeing and pasta dinners, you were still freelancing, and you published a story about how you faked orgasms during sex. Your dad read it, and when you tried to play it off as a cool, normal thing for a young writer to do, demystifying female sex, making it less taboo, he began to cry.

  You couldn’t remember ever seeing your father cry before. “I can’t help but think…,” he managed to get out. The words were choking and difficult. “I can’t help but think, that if I had been a better dad, if I had paid more attention…” He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. If he had been a better dad, you wouldn’t be as promiscuous as you are. You started to cry too. Your dad had been there for every single major event in your life. He took you to bookstores nearly every weekend. You went to the midnight release of Harry Potter books, the two of you wore matching Harry Potter glasses. He and your mom have been m
arried for nearly thirty years. He has never not been there for you, and he’s crying because he’s ashamed of you. The two of you cried in that hotel in Rome for a few minutes, without talking.

  You think about that now and you cry, alone in your shower. The water is off, but you crouch there, in the tub, soaking wet. What have you become? So hungry for affection or attention or excitement that you walk into the lion’s den with your thong already at your ankles. You delete his number from your phone, but you can’t delete his name or face from your mind. He was wearing a dumb fucking hat when he met you in the diner. He had a wheedling, annoying, high-pitched voice. He had thin hair. He was so greedy at the prospect of a girl in his bed that he would take her, struggling and then unconscious, unwilling to confront the tiny part of himself that knew she wasn’t playing a game anymore, that she needed a glass of water and a blanket placed on top of her instead of a heaving, flabby white belly.

  You went to see a man like that. You got in his bed. You allowed him to come inside you, and you will never, ever be able to scrub it out.

  HEY, DO YOU WANT TO

  DATE DANA SCHWARTZ?

  Things are going fine.

  Really.

  You have a job, and friends you can talk to, and a nice apartment, and a roommate who is far neater than you but doesn’t get mad when you leave water glasses all over the kitchen.

  You go to your job, usually a little late, and then you take the subway home, order in dinner, and eat while watching Netflix, and then you browse the Internet in bed until you fall asleep and do it all again.

  And then, an email from an editor—a major editor at a real publishing house. They like one of your Twitter accounts, the one where you make fun of dystopian young adult novels that all have blended together in a post–Hunger Games world. (“I have been Chosen, and I will not be Sorted into your Groups in this Society that Needlessly Capitalizes Nouns”!) The editor says she likes your voice. “Have you ever thought about writing a young adult novel?”

  You write back immediately: You would love to try.

  After two meetings in their chrome office building (you wear a new dress and heels for the first time since you’ve moved to New York), you and the editor come up with an outline: a story about a high school girl who travels to Europe, coincidentally to most of the same countries you happened to visit when you graduated college. You write a sample chapter and wait.

  And wait.

  And wait.

  And then, one day, you get a phone call that begins with the magic words “Are you sitting down?” and your agent tells you that they loved the chapter and they want to buy the book. “Congratulations,” he says, and you can tell that he’s grinning through the phone. “You got a book deal!”

  You mention it to relative strangers in the office of the Late Show as you restock sodas, as casually as you possibly can shoehorn it in. Have a good weekend? Read any good books lately? Funny you should mention books…

  On your days off, you set up with a large cup of black coffee and a seat near a power outlet at the wood-paneled cash-only hipster coffee shop only two blocks from your house, and type furiously, letting each satisfying click of the keyboard propel you on to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page.

  Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night just to keep writing.

  Sometimes you go days without being able to think of a single word.

  Eventually, you finish something you wouldn’t be completely embarrassed to call a first draft and send it along, and wait for the revisions to come back. The process repeats. There is a lot of waiting, and even more waiting before your book will finally come out, in the spring of next year.

  You are okay.

  But you are lonely. The same gnawing need for attention brings you back to Tinder but every profile makes you profoundly uncomfortable. Everyone is a sleaze bag only showing their good angles. You don’t want to date strangers in New York City. You wish you could date people chosen from the pool of your Twitter followers, the people you technically spend the most time with anyway, the people who seem to accept the strange, self-indulgent idiosyncrasies of your personality.

  And so, at 10:30 on a Thursday night, you make a Google form and jauntily title it “hey do you want to date dana schwartz?” The all lowercase is meant to seem relaxed and detached about it. You wouldn’t want to seem desperate while making an online dating website only for you. You attempt the same nonchalance with the questions—nothing too serious or probing, nothing that could ruin the defensive facade you were building if no one responded that all of this was just a joke.

  * * *

  hey, do you want to date dana schwartz?

  yes, i want to date writer/couch potato dana schwartz.

  Name? ___________________________________

  What do you do for a living? _____________

  How do you feel about dogs? ____________

  Are you willing to commute to the UWS to see me sometimes?

  ◻️ Yes

  ◻️ No

  What is your most attractive quality?

  _________________________________________

  How do you feel about Tom Stoppard?

  ◻️ Haven’t read or seen much of him.

  ◻️ Eh, I prefer Sarah Ruhl.

  ◻️ Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

  ◻️ I literally do not understand this question at all.

  Other:

  _________________________________________

  Why do you want to date dana schwartz?

  _________________________________________

  What television show would you recommend we binge together?

  _________________________________________

  Do you think it’s weird I’m attracted to Kylo Ren? Not Adam Driver. Kylo Ren the space Nazi.

  ◻️ Yes

  ◻️ No

  ◻️ I’ll accept you however you are.

  ◻️ I’m actually Adam Driver, filling this out.

  Other:

  What’s your Twitter handle?

  _________________________________________

  Actually give me an answer up there so i can ask you out bc i don’t see ur email

  ◻️ ok

  * * *

  Within two days, you have 200 replies. A dozen are from friends, people you know from school filling out the form with inside jokes. A majority are strangers from your Twitter, mostly older men or guys who live in distant red states, filling it out because filling out a form on the Internet is its own form of entertainment, flattering you but not actually proposing a relationship. A few people fill it out pretending (unfortunately) to be Adam Driver. But you look up everyone who responds, check their Twitter page for signs they might be a cute, halfway decent guy in New York City who happens to have a crush on you, probably because of all the tweets you do about Kenneth Branagh.

  If the applicant passed the initial Twitter screening (no confederate flags, no anime avatars, at least one semidecent joke), the next step was to find them on Facebook. Mutual friends were a desperately sought-after bonus—and Charlie has four of them: three of your sister’s friends from college and your sister. It looks like he has a job at a TV production company or something.

  “Hey,” you text said sister. “Do you know a guy Charlie ________ who went to Northwestern with you? He applied on my dating site.”

  Your older sister Caroline rolled her eyes but smiled when she saw the site. “I swear, you made this look like a joke, but I can tell you’re seriously looking.”

  “Yeah,” she writes back infuriatingly late. “He was cute.”

  “Nice?” you reply. “Normal?”

  “I think so,” she says.

  Good enough. You follow him on Twitter and send him a DM. “So…do we go out on a date now? Not sure what the protocol for this is, but how about coffee?”

  He replies immediately: “How about Sunday?”

  There is another boy who makes it through your application
process, a boy whose Twitter handle was a literary joke and who shares about half a dozen followers with you. From your stalking, he went to NYU, was in the sketch comedy group there, and interned at a literary journal. He works at the Barnes & Noble ten blocks from your apartment. He looks a little dorkier in his pictures than Charlie does—where Charlie is in tank tops and sunglasses at music festivals and hiking with his family, NYU Matt is making silly faces for the sketch group promotion pictures. There aren’t enough pictures of him—after just a few clicks in his Facebook albums, you are back to high school, where he was just a stalk with bad skin and a haircut too close to his head.

  Which boy do you want to go out with, or rather, which is the boy that you’re going to marry and end up on the front page of the New York Times Vows section with, because how could you not when you have a story as cute as “We met on the silly dating app she created for herself?”

  A. Charlie

  Turn here.

  B. Matt

  Turn here.

  He’s shorter than you imagined, but still incredibly cute when he smiles. You arrive at the coffee shop in SoHo early and decide to pose outside, one leg bent behind you, up against the wall so that when he arrives he finds you casual and scrolling through your phone.

  “Hey!” he says, and hugs you. You get your coffees to go and bring them to a park nearby where you sit on a bench thigh to thigh.

  “Yeah, I definitely think I knew your sister at school,” he says. “That’s so crazy.”

  “Such a small world.”

  It’s the end of February, still a little too chilly to be sitting outside, but the sky is an unbroken spill of blue and the sun reflects off the creases of snow still left in gutters, which makes it almost look like spring.

  You fish for the other few people you know in common. You talk about your jobs. And then, when you have nothing left to talk about, you both lean in at the exact same moment, the same resigned half-smile on your face, and begin to make out. It’s a good enough kiss.