Choose Your Own Disaster

by Dana Schwartz

  “This has been great,” you say, before he does something dumb like invite you back to his place on a Sunday afternoon. “We should do this again sometime.”

  “How about drinks?” he says. “Saturday?”

  Considering that this is a real Saturday night date from a real guy and not another night at home with your laptop, you are elated. But there’s a skinny literary heartthrob still waiting in the wings and the possibility of a better unknown is basically the basis of modern civilization. Is the grass actually greener? What do you do?

  A. Go on another date with Charlie and see how it goes. A bird in the hand, and all of that. You know he’s cute and non-crazy. When it comes to meeting strangers on the Internet, quit while you’re ahead.

  Continue reading.

  B. Go out with Matt next week instead and cross all your fingers that he isn’t a huge DFW fan.

  Turn here.

  You know how in every romantic comedy, the leads who are certainly going to end up together begin the film by dating other people? Statistically it’s Greg Kinnear or James Marsden. Sometimes it’s their fiancée. This person is always a little too buttoned up and too close to their parents. They made reservations at the club at 8:00—is that too late? They kiss the lead actress on the cheek as they leave for work and she gives a small smile in return but already her heart belongs to the random stranger that she happened to run into at the park or Save the Puppies rally or during the emergency surprise earthquake that descended on San Francisco. The audience never feels too bad when the lead actress gives him back his ring and says, “We’re just not right for each other, are we?” because he wasn’t on the poster, so we knew not to care too much about him.

  That’s what dating Charlie is like. It’s nice. It’s safe. You’re an altogether pleasant version of yourself but one who swallows her words sometimes and feels as though Something. Is. Missing. There is some symbolic version of soul mates that the screenwriter lazily inserted—knowing your favorite book is The Little Prince, wanting to share desserts—that he falls short on.

  Now the wedding is in two weeks and all of the invitations have been sent out but what if he’s not The One? Your free-spirited (perpetually single) friend tells you to follow your heart.

  What’s a leading lady to do?

  A. Break up with him. Maybe Matt is still single. You can metaphorically run from the chapel (er, synagogue) into his arms (er, Twitter DMs), still wearing your wedding dress.

  Turn here.

  B. Get married.

  Turn here.

  Surprise! You live happily ever after, because you know that good relationship that’s safe and content? Turns out that was a good relationship after all and the one that was built entirely on trickery and witty banter was incredibly toxic—good for a weekend of adventure maybe, but not an entire lifetime. Sure, Matthew McConaughey’s come-what-may attitude seems charming now, but it won’t in a year’s time when he’s an unemployed former surfing instructor with a beer belly masking his abs. Charlie, with the stable job, who loves you and gets along with your mom, is a supportive and warmhearted husband. The love that compelled you to agree to marry him in the first place wasn’t diminished by that small bout of cold feet before the wedding when you thought that your charming neighbor played by Chris Evans might be your soul mate all along. Guess what? Soul mates don’t exist. You build your own soul mate by committing to someone and working through the challenges that come from daily frustrations in every relationship, and that’s the type of commitment that carries you and Charlie through a lifetime of laughter and mutual respect. You have three kids and eleven grandkids. You die within a week of each other.

  THE END

  You choose the place for your first date: Johnny’s Bar, right off 14th Street—a tiny dive that always has seats and offers homemade pickle juice for their picklebacks. It’s the only bar in the city you know to recommend. He’s taller than you imagined, and incredibly cute when he smiles. You had gotten to the bar early and decided 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. He was right on time.

  This is just a plan B date, just a warm-up with someone who seems nice enough. You’re not expecting anything magical. You came straight from work, wearing a baggy sweater and leggings. Your hair, which you hadn’t had time to wash the night before, is in a messy bun. Whatever drugstore concealer and lip balm you had put on in the mirror that morning had been wiped off by a day’s worth of sweat and napkins. He signed up online to date you, you tell yourself. It doesn’t matter how you look.

  “Diet Coke, please,” you say to the bartender when the two of you claim your stools at the bar. He orders a beer.

  Before he arrived, you’d already planned out your evening: don’t even get a drink, just a diet soda, so you don’t owe him even the price of an Old Fashioned and therefore won’t feel obligated to stick around any longer than you want to.

  “So,” you say, swirling your legs around closer to him, “what made you want to sign up to date a random stranger online?” Despite pledging to play it cool, your flirting instincts are coming out like an X-Men power you haven’t learned to control. You are the Rogue of flirting. If a guy over six feet tall gets within touching distance of you, your body involuntarily begins to flirt. The government wants to put you on a registry.

  “I’ve been following your tweets for a while,” he says. “Mostly out of jealousy since we’re the same age. Actually”—he takes a sip of his beer—“I think I saw you last summer at the Brooklyn Book Festival. I was interning at Lapham’s Quarterly and working their booth. I recognized you from Twitter but I was too embarrassed to say anything.”

  A glow from your chest radiates through your entire body. “You should’ve said something!” you say lamely. He shrugs.

  A half hour later, your legs are tangled with his. In five more minutes, you lean in and kiss him in the bar. “Do you want to take a walk?” you say.

  You’re halfway down the block before Matt stops. “What is it?”

  “Shit,” he says. “I forgot my backpack in the bar. I’ll be right back!”

  He dashes back into Johnny’s and comes out with it slung over his shoulders, the tips of his ears burning red, visible even in the dark.

  “I was distracted,” he says, looking into your eyes and smiling. He’s like the adorable protagonist from a romantic comedy, clumsy and lovestruck and totally into you. He’s one prat fall away from being Justin Bartha. His hand grasps yours.

  You walk around the block once, finally ducking into an archway of a church to make out, back to the stone, while he stands above you, grinning every time he pulls away.

  “You wouldn’t want to come back to my place to hang out some more, would you?” you ask.

  “Yeah, I would like that a lot.”

  You smile and take his hand, leading the way to the subway. “Okay, but you have to promise me something. You have to promise if we sleep together on the first date you’re not going to leave and then never speak to me again.”

  He looks at you like you’re joking. “Dana, I would not do that. I like you.”

  The next day, the two of you text for hours. You barely look at your work computer because every time you finally focus, your phone dings an alert that this cute, funny, literary boy who seems to like you has sent you a message. You see each other the next day, and the day after that. Within a week, the two of you are boyfriend and girlfriend, and even that talk, the “what are we?” feels like a bygone conclusion, a hilarious formality you share out of tradition even though it was so obvious that this is someone you’re meant to be with for as long as you can be.

  One morning, he’s brushing his teeth at your sink, and you’re headed off to work, almost early for the first time since you were hired. “Bye,” you say, whipping out the door, “I love you.” You catch your step and pop back. “I mean, I don’t love you. I really like you but, I was just, you know,
‘goodbye, I love you!’ as a whole thing, like one word. You know?”

  “I know,” he says, and grins.

  That night, in the shower, he plops a handful of soap onto your left breast. “That thing you said this morning. I feel like it’s just going to keep happening naturally. Next time, I think we can just probably go with it.”

  You try to hold eye contact. You can’t say it first. “Hey,” you say. “I really love spending time with you.”

  “I love spending time with you too.”

  You test the words in your mouth, like you’re reading from a foreign language or testing out a secret password. “I love you,” you say.

  He grabs both your arms and looks right into your eyes.

  “I love you, Dana.”

  He meets your parents and your little sister and he’s very polite and looks nice in a button-down shirt. He brought you a Shirley Jackson collection he found at his office because you told him on your first date that your favorite book was We Have Always Lived in the Castle. He comes with you to the musical adaptation of American Psycho and you deconstruct it later, under your covers until you’re both sneezing with laughter (the songs from the musical are stuck in your head for a solid six weeks). He goes out to brunch with your friends. You go to Christmas at his house. You help his little sister pick out a dog. Sometimes, you see him sleeping in bed, still wearing whatever button-down he was wearing the day before (Matt, it turns out, wears only regular clothes as pajamas). He’ll be still asleep, but if you nudge his arm with your head, he’ll reach over and scoop you into the nook of his body, and your two bodies will fit together so perfectly that you feel as though the slightest pressure will cause the spaces between your molecules to line up perfectly and condense the two of you into one. When you’re under the comforter in the morning, and you see the lopsided succulent in the window, the succulent he went with you to buy when you were depressed and angry with the world and he stayed with you all day and helped you water your new succulent for the first time and it seemed so hopeful and perfect (even though your bedroom doesn’t get enough natural light, and so the succulent began stretching and now it looks like a stalk of asparagus), and you feel his arm around you, you feel so lucky to get to feel as close to the real version of yourself you can ever be with another person. That’s how it is sometimes. Sometimes it’s ordinary, but it’s usually the first feeling.

  Your past comes back to you in a text message, innocuous and small, just a tiny series of letters on the screen you look at most of the day every day from a number in your phone that you never actually typed a name in for. Just a little blue bubble from a series of too-familiar numbers that says: “I miss you.”

  It’s the easiest game in the world, a glimmering slot machine in a Vegas casino that lets you win every single time. Just write back. “I miss you too.”

  His reply: “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  The dialogue would be on the nose in a telenovela. But here you are, stopping on a city street before you make it into your office to reply.

  “You know I can’t stop thinking about you either.” It’s rote at this point, like delivering lines from a school play that you forget the context for, but the muscle memory of the words are permanently ready on your tongue. “Where are you?”

  “Back in Austin. Cat is asleep on my legs.”

  You take a sharp inhale of breath.

  “And your wife?” you text.

  “She’s at a conference this weekend. Home alone.”

  You don’t reply, and so he writes again. You’ve moved to the edge of the sidewalk, back up against a Chipotle while the commuters of the financial district whiz past you in their khakis and brown shoes.

  “I’m coming to New York next week. I’d really like to see you.”

  Before, it had only been him with the external risk factor, the wife, the ring, the promise he made. You had been testing to see how far he would go for you. Now you have a significant other too. You wonder if you love your boyfriend more than he loves his wife.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” you type back. You’re not sure if you’re feinting or not.

  “We can just do coffee,” he writes back. “Very chaste.”

  “Like we’ve ever managed to be chaste.”

  “Ha ha ha.” Artificial typed laughter has never felt stranger than when he types it.

  It’s been two years since you’ve seen him. And even when you did see him, it’d only been three times in your life. But precocious college-aged seductress still feels like the role you were born to play.

  “So, the coffee?”

  What do you write back?

  A. “Of course. I really want to see your face again. But just coffee.”

  Turn here.

  B. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for leading you on now and before. I’m deleting your number and I think you should delete mine.”

  Turn here.

  Coffee became a hotel in Midtown, at 7:30 at night. “A bottle of champagne and I’m yours,” you texted, half jokingly, while you were in the cab. You’re wearing heels, and so you couldn’t possibly walk.

  “Done,” he texted. “I’m on the champagne.” He’s very literal, and very serious, you realize. You never liked him for his sense of humor. More the way his hair curled over one eye and he spoke to you in a deep, raspy growl. And the way he seemed to be obsessed with you. You like that most of all, the gravitational pull between the two of you.

  You check your cleavage in the front-facing camera of your phone and reapply your lipstick.

  He said he’d meet you in the lobby and you check the address three times to make sure you’re going to the right hotel, a big corporate place for businessmen and their conferences.

  At first, you don’t see him. But then you move farther, past the unattended piano and the pillars of the cavernous lobby, and there he is, wearing a button-up shirt with the top few buttons undone, smiling to see you.

  You begin to move in for a kiss, but he pulls you in for a hug first, breathing you in deeply and then taking half a step back to just look at you.

  “You look beautiful.”

  You fidget all the way up to his room, touching his hand and then pulling yours away, wondering if the people in the elevator know what’s happening. You wish you’d worn less makeup.

  He has champagne in his room, true to his word. “But I could not, for the life of me, find champagne glasses in Midtown. We’ll have to go with wineglasses.”

  He rinses the hotel’s wineglasses and wipes their insides with a Kleenex, leaving a speckled residue of white bits that disappear when he pours the two glasses of champagne. “Cheers.”

  You take your glass, but you’re sitting at the hotel room’s desk, not on the bed. Your legs are crossed at the ankle. You had told Matt you were just having a quiet night at home and that you would see him tomorrow and that you loved him. You don’t feel guilty so much as guilty that you’re not all that attracted to Married Guy right this moment. Maybe it was the hotel, or how he got you champagne just because you asked. He wasn’t quite as irresistible once he was there, in his hotel room, waiting for you to get undressed but he smells like you remember. And his eyes haven’t left your body since they saw you.

  The champagne glass is still full. You don’t have much to say. “Hey,” you start, and decide to come up with the end of the sentence as you go, but you can’t think of anything and so instead you just kiss him and he kisses you back, a sloppy kiss that’s somehow all mouth and no tongue and you kiss him back even harder and the two of you fall onto the bed and without even taking your underwear off he pulls it to the side and presses up against you and into you. Five minutes later your makeup is smudged in half-moons beneath your eyes and you want to go home.

  “I’m going to go home,” you say.

  “It was good to see you,” he says. “I’m back in New York in three weeks.”

  “You’re still with your wife,” you say, just as a fact, but h
e takes it as a question.

  “Yes.”

  “You love her,” you say.

  “Yes.”

  You pull your shoes on and stuff your bra in your purse instead of putting it back on. “Think of me,” you say.

  “Oh, I will,” he says. “More than I should.”

  Was it you who broke up with Matt or Matt who broke up with you? You weren’t exactly hiding what you were doing—he saw it in the constant texts you were lingering over, the photos you scroll past in your phone that he knows you didn’t send to him, the mediocre excuses. And when the confrontation came, tearfully on both sides, there was nothing to do but release the whole thing, like a boat pushed into the ocean. I love you, I’m sorry, I’m messed up, it wasn’t your fault. He kisses you goodbye, which breaks your heart. You cry for two days and have to lock yourself out of your phone to keep yourself from texting him.

  Married Guy comes back in three weeks, and you go to a small tapas restaurant he read about on the Lower East Side. When he leaves your place in the morning, he says he’ll be back in a month, but then two days later, he texts you.

  I don’t think we can do this anymore. I want to work on my marriage.

  The easy punch line to the maudlin opera you turned your life into. The prideful, lustful woman punished, the valiant heroes redeemed and rewarded with a happy ending in the form of a farmer’s virtuous daughter. Let the woman in the red dress sing one last screeching aria and then die onstage before the happy wedding scenes.

  But hey, you have a book coming out in the spring, a young adult novel with a blue-green cover with a faceless girl looking away, one hand flung into the air. “I full on cried when I got to the end,” your sister confesses, and that’s the only early review that truly makes you happy.