by Lena Dunham
“I can’t wait to fuck you. I hope you know why I’m saying that. Because nothing’s changed. I’m planning how I’m going to do it.”
“You’re going to do it?”
“All different ways.”
I cry harder. “You better.”
I have to go put on a denim vest for a promotional appearance at Levi’s Haus of Strauss. I tell Jack I have to hang up now, and he moans “No” like I’m a babysitter wrenching him from the arms of his mother who is all dressed up for a party. He’s sleepy now. I can hear it. Emotions are exhausting to have.
“I love you so much,” I tell him, tearing up all over again.
I hang up and go to the mirror, prepared to see eyeliner dripping down my face, tracks through my blush and foundation. I’m in LA, so bring it on, universe: I can only expect to go down Lohan style. But I’m surprised to find that my face is intact, dewy even. Makeup is all where it ought to be.
I look all right. I look like myself.
If you cut a piece of guitar string / I would wear it like it’s a wedding ring.
—CARLY RAE JEPSEN
He plays the guitar, this guy. Not professionally but, oh, it’s nice. Yes, I’m seeing him and he’s laughing at me. He’s so funny. He’s coming in April.
—TERRY, my mom’s psychic
I HAVE UTTERED THE WORDS “I love you” to precisely four men, not including my father, uncle, and assorted platonic neurotics I go to the movies with.
The first was my college boyfriend, whom I have tortured enough in the public forum, so I will not rehash our affair here. Suffice it to say, I told him first, and he did not reciprocate. It took weeks of crying and begging for him to reply in kind, and shortly after that he took it back. When he finally gave it again, the words had lost their charm.
The second “I love you” was Ben, a rebound from that relationship. I knew him from college, where we had slept together a few times before he ruined it all by getting into a freezing dorm shower, then hurling himself, nude, upon my unmade bed, screaming “I WANNA KNOW WHERE DA GOLD AT!” (He then ruined it further by ceasing contact with me.) But college ended, and I became lonely, as one does, and for the first time in my life bored, and soon I had maxed out my brand-new card on a plane ticket to the Bay Area, where he now lived on a block that was reminiscent of the credits of Full House, with big bay windows and a poster of the slain Mexican icon Selena on his yellowed bedroom wall. We spent four days trekking up and down hills, sitting on trolleys with our hands clasped, having drinks with guys who worked in bike shops, and coming together in sexual communion. One morning at breakfast, his roommate announced, “You two have sex like clockwork, once in the morning and once at night. Just like a married couple.”
At night we sat on his back porch and ate the ravioli he’d spent all afternoon making by hand. He had a lot of time to cook: his job, editing the newsletter for a nonprofit that promoted the global language of Esperanto, was “flexible.”
When he finally had to go to work, I visited friends on Telegraph Hill, where wild parrots live and where the view has the kind of urban grandeur that is incredibly satisfying to yuppies. This was before I had any conception of the financial reality of my friends. “Oh,” I’d explain about a friend living in a massive West Village loft, “I think he makes tons of money at his internship for Food Not Bombs.” It was only later that I realized these friends on Telegraph Hill, a filmmaker and a poet, were house-sitting and couldn’t actually afford a mansion with a roof shower. At the time, I marveled at what San Francisco real estate could provide for artists. If we worked hard enough, Ben and I could move up here, with a mutt and a bookshelf and a little orange smart car.
I cried when I had to go home, giving him a mix that included several obscure covers of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
Through the winter I dreamed of my new life out west. Ben sent pictures of pancakes and sunglasses from the dollar store and of parties where hippies parked boats in their living room. New tattoos of dollar signs and Communist symbols. Help-wanted postings from sex shops and children’s literacy programs. He mailed me a tin of brownies with a note that was ironically signed “platonic regardz, Ben.”
I came back again on a Friday afternoon, and he met me at the airport. We took the BART to his house, which is sort of like the New York subway system only you can apparently trust the people of San Francisco to respect upholstered seating. As we sat, smiling and satisfied, an old Chinese woman passed and hocked a loogie on his shoe. “Oy, bitch!” he yelled. Surprising myself, I secretly sided with her.
On Sunday, a homeless man camouflaged as a bush jumped out at me on the pier, laughed when I screamed, then demanded money. Ben seemed impressed with his ingenuity. Later, Ben removed the Selena poster from the wall so he could snort Adderall off her breasts. I got a terrible cold and couldn’t find anything resembling a tissue in the apartment. Both of our credit cards were declined at the health-food store.
Wherever you go, there you are.
The night he told me he loved me, he was sloppy drunk. We were in his bedroom, and I was straddling him in his desk chair, listening to a party winding down in the living room, when he blurted it out. I declined to answer him until I was beneath him in bed ten minutes later. He told me that “I love you” during sex doesn’t count. The next day we ate too much In-N-Out Burger (we were both kind of fat, which at the time seemed like a revolution) and lay in bed beside each other and I cried, ostensibly because I’d miss him when I left but truly because I felt dead inside.
I did love Ben, in a sense. Because he cooked for me. Because he told me that my body was beautiful, like a Renaissance painting, something I badly needed to hear. Because his stepmother was the same age as him, and that is really sad. But I also didn’t: Because his vanity drove him to wear vintage shoes that gave him blisters. Because he gave me HPV.
He called me terrible names when I broke up with him for a Puerto Rican named Joe with a tattoo that said mom in Comic Sans. Admittedly, I didn’t handle it too well either when, several months later, he moved in with a girl who taught special-needs preschool. I didn’t utter the words “I love you” again in a romantic context for more than two years. Joe turned out to consider blow jobs misogynistic and pretended his house had caught fire just to get out of plans.
The third “I love you” was said to Devon. I was nearly done shooting the first season of Girls, and I had entertained a few crushes throughout the duration of production. One was on our assistant property master, a meek bespectacled fellow named Tom, who, I eventually concluded, was a lot stupider than he looked. Next I set my sights on an actor with the face of a British soccer hooligan. He took me to a bar on Eleventh Street, cried about his former fiancée, tongued me against a lamppost, then told me he didn’t want a relationship.
It wasn’t just that these crushes made the days pass quicker or satisfied some raging summer lust. On some deeper level, they made it all feel less adult. I’d been thrust into a world of obligations and responsibilities, budgets and scrutiny. My creative process had gone from being largely solitary to being witnessed by dozens of “adults” who I was sure were waiting to shout This! This is the reason we don’t hire twenty-five-year-old girls! Romance was the best way I knew to forget my obligations, to obliterate the self and pretend to be someone else.
Devon appeared on the set of Girls while I was directing the season finale. He was a friend of a friend, brought in as some additional manpower on a tough shoot day. Small and puckish, with a meaty Neanderthal brow, he threw sandbags around with deceptive ease and coiled cables like an expert. I noticed a piercing in the cartilage of his right ear (so ’90s), and I liked the way his jeans nestled in the top of his pristinely maintained work boots. When he smiled it was a mean little smile that revealed a gap between his two front teeth. After several interactions in which he questioned my authority and pretended not to hear me speaking, it was clear he was my type.
When Devon arrived I was in the middle of a full dis
sociative meltdown. The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form. I felt like I was outside my own body, watching myself work. I didn’t care if I succeeded or failed because I wasn’t totally sure I was alive. Between scenes I hid in the bathroom and prayed for the ability to cry, a sure sign I was real. I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread. In this moment I had plenty to be anxious about: pressure, exposure, a tense argument with a beloved colleague. But I had even more to be thankful for.
Yet I couldn’t feel anything.
Three days later he showed up at our wrap party. His arms were as muscly as a Ken doll’s but also as small. I ignored his presence, mingling with my cast mates and drinking a thimble or so of red wine (which is enough to get me wasted). Eventually, sloshed and sure the evening held no other prospects, I sat down beside him at the bar and announced, “You’re rude and I think you have a crush on me.”
A few minutes of unremarkable conversation passed before he leaned in and lowered his tone. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m going to leave and wait on the corner. You’re going to wait three minutes, then you’re going to leave. You’re not going to say goodbye to anyone and we’re going to take a cab to my house.”
I was struck by the tidiness of the plan. After months of frantic decision making, it was such a relief to have it laid out for me.
I tried to kiss him on the walk to the cab, and he held me off. “Not yet,” he said. In the cab his credit card didn’t work, and I paid drunkenly and showily. I followed him up the stairs to his fourth-floor walk-up. When he opened the door, he called out: “Nina? Joanne? Emily?” His roommates, he explained. As he turned the lights on, it became apparent we were in a studio apartment. No girls lived here. We were alone. I laughed too hard.
Before he would kiss me, he had to pack his bag for a job the next day. I watched as he carefully filled a backpack with tools, checked to make sure his power drill was charged, and examined his call sheet for details. I liked the careful obsessive way he prepared to do his job. It reminded me of my father teaching me to wash dishes. His room was painted red and didn’t have a window. I sat on the bed and waited.
After what felt like months, he sat across from me, one foot still on the floor, and looked at me a long moment, like he was preparing to eat something he wasn’t sure he would like. I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t even sure I was real. When we kissed it was dizzying. I fell back, unsure of where I was or what was happening, knowing only that the part of me that had left had come back, and the reattachment was almost painful, Wendy attempting to sew Peter Pan’s shadow to his body. I was amazed by the fluidity of Devon’s movements, how slick it was when he reached for the condom, reached for me, reached for the light to make it dark.
When we had sex, he was silent, and that, along with the pitch black, created the impression that I was being penetrated by a succubus of some kind. He felt oddly far away, and when I asked for confirmation of his name, he would give none. The next morning I awoke with a horrible feeling he was called Dave.
We spent the rest of the week together. I’d finish work and go straight to his house. We would talk—about movies he hated, books he was okay with, and people he avoided. His misanthropic spirit was apparent in everything he said and did.
“I like you,” I told him on the third night, sitting between his knees, up past my bedtime.
“I know you do,” he said.
He was odd, certainly. He kept his shower cap on the ceiling on a pulley he had rigged so he could lower it whenever it was needed. He had only orange juice in his fridge, and Hershey’s chocolate “because that’s what girls like.” He kept matches by his toilet for when he shit, which seemed both polite and tragic due to the amount of time he’d been spending alone. He spoke of his high-school ex with the kind of lingering bitterness more often felt by husbands who have been abandoned and left to care for multiple children.
After that week, I had to go. To LA, to work. He wasn’t an excuse to stay, even though he felt like one. He walked me to the subway, and I headed to the airport, teary-eyed. I was myself again, and I didn’t like it.
The rest of our relationship (five months) went swiftly downhill. His critical nature proved suffocating—he hated my skirts, my friends, and my work. He hated rom-coms and just plain coms. He hated Thai food and air-conditioning and “whiny” memoirs. What had initially seemed like a deep well of pain caused by unattainable women was actually a Philip Rothian disdain for the fairer sex. It’s become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I’ll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology.
We spent torturous weekends attempting to share brunches and movie dates like people who knew each other. But he wasn’t impressed enough by how funny my dad is, and I didn’t understand what was so cool about his friend Leo the puppeteer. I attempted to break up with him on no fewer than seven occasions, and each time he would cry, beg, and show more emotion than he ever had during our silent sexual encounters or our mornings drinking tea in bed. “You care about me,” he’d tell me. “You’ve never felt like this before.” And who was I to object?
I hauled Devon a lot of places I shouldn’t have, in an attempt to make him a part of my life: dinner with girlfriends, the Christmas tree at the Met, even a family vacation to Germany. (My father asked me to reconsider. I was so afraid on the plane headed there that I took two Klonopin and bought all new luggage on my layover.)
“You can’t draw blood from a stone,” my mother told me—gently, considering she’d had to tend to him for almost five hours one afternoon while I sat in the hotel room contemplating my fate. If I ended this, would I be alone forever? Sure, he hated my skirts. Sure, he wrote fiction about what sluts the girls who work at J. Crew are. But what of love?
My parents fell in love when they were twenty-seven. It was 1977, and they both lived downtown and ran with the same crowd of artists who wore Chinese slippers and played tennis ironically. My father framed pictures, and my mother took them, and so she asked him to help her, and the rest is history.
“Tell me again about how you met Mom,” I ask my father.
“Not if you’re just going to write about it,” he says. But ultimately he can’t resist—describing how odd her sense of humor was and how impossibly dramatic her friends were. “They just walked around starting fights with people.”
The story has everything: drama, jealousy, drunkenness, friendships ended, and cats inherited. He liked the way she dressed, a little mannish, and the way she carried herself—same. She had revised her original opinion of him, which was that he looked just like a mouse. They had no cell phones so had to make plans and keep them or walk over to each other’s houses and ring the bell and hope for the best. Sometimes he got drunk and made her angry. Sometimes she started fights just because she was hungry. Sometimes they went to parties and watched each other across smoky lofts, amazed. Despite different genetics and cultural affiliations, they had identical coloring, were about the same height. Weighed the same amount, too. Like long-lost siblings. I love imagining them then, knowing no more than I do, just that they liked the way it felt to be together.
Devon didn’t fix that dissociated feeling for good, and when it came back, it came back harder. I had broken up with him on my seventh try, and one try didn’t even count because all I could muster was “I love you.”
“I know you do,” he said. But he was wrong.
I lay in bed all day, rubbing my feet together and whispering, “You are real. You are real. You are …”
And when I emerged, fifteen pounds lighter but too shaken to enjoy it, I thought, I could spend the next eight years just getting to know myself and that would be fine. The idea of sex right now sounds abo
ut as appealing as putting a live lobster up there.
Then he appeared. Gap toothed, Sculpey faced, glasses like a cartoon, so earnest I was suspicious, and so witty I was scared. I saw him standing there, yellow cardigan and hunched shoulders, and thought: Look, there is my friend. The next months were a lesson in opening up, letting go, being kind and brave.
I have written all sorts of paragraphs recounting those months together: first kiss, first Mister Softee, first time I noticed that he won’t touch a doorknob without covering his hand with his sweatshirt. I have written sentences about how the first time we made love it felt like dropping my keys on the table after a long trip, and about wearing his sneakers as we ran across the park toward my house, which would someday be our house. About the way he gathered me up after a long terrible day and put me to bed. About the fact that he is my family now. I wrote it down, found the words that evoked the exact feeling of the edge of the park at 11:00 P.M. on a hot Tuesday with the man I was starting to love. But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I’ve shared, and so much that’s been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it never mattered.
I don’t love any of my old boyfriends anymore. I’m not sure I ever did, and I’m not sure if at the time I thought I was sure. My mother says that’s normal, that men are proud of every one of their conquests, and women wish they could forget it all. She says that’s an essential gender difference, and I can’t say I disprove her theory. What keeps me from full revulsion, from wanting the sexual equivalent of an annulment, is thinking about what I got from each one that I still hold on to now.
My college boyfriend got me more in touch with my gut health (both a blessing and a curse) and made me ask some larger questions about the universe that I had been ignoring in favor of buying US Weekly the moment it hit the stands every Wednesday.