by Tara Conklin
“And where is Renee?” Noni said, looking at her watch. “Her shift ended an hour ago.”
“It’ll be a miracle if she makes it,” I said. Renee’s job was demanding, complex, the justification for any number of late arrivals and missed events. I always expected Renee to be engaged in more important work than spending time with us, her family.
“She’ll come,” Noni said. “She promised Joe. Send her one of those phone-message things.”
“Text, Noni. It’s called a text.” I took out my phone and typed, where r u?
“Are you nervous to read your poem?” Noni asked, looking around the room. “This is a big group.”
“A little,” I said. I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t the crowd that worried me, it was the presence of Will, Man #23, and how he might somehow reveal my identity as the Last Romantic here, in front of Noni and my siblings. Probably Noni had never before read a blog, but undoubtedly she had her views on them. Especially a blog about female sexuality researched and written by her youngest daughter.
Noni must have seen the discomfort on my face; she took hold of my hand. “You’ll do great, Fiona,” she said. “You’re a firecracker.” Her palm was dry and warm, and the weight of it startled me, the give of the fingers as they circled mine. Noni was not generally a toucher, a hand-holder, a you’ll-be-okayer. What I’d learned about self-reliance I’d learned from her. Now her unexpected touch calmed me down more than I expected. It was exactly what I needed.
“Fiona, you’re here!” It was Sandrine’s voice behind me. I released Noni’s hand and turned in to Sandrine’s skinny hug.
“You look beautiful,” I said. This was what I always said to Sandrine, because this was what she always wanted to hear. Tonight it was true. Sandrine’s dress was the color of cream, short and tight at the waist with a flared little skirt and a wide neck that showed off clavicles thin as chopsticks. Fat diamonds sparkled on her ears.
She smiled. “Can’t wait for the poem. Just watch for Kyle. He’ll start the speeches.” She winked. “Oh, and, Fiona,” she said, pulling me and Noni closer to her. “I already told your mom, but I’ll have my hairdresser do you both for the wedding.” Her eyes rested briefly on my hair—curly, loose, still wet from the shower. “That way we can all be on the same page. Okay?”
Noni looked at me with wide eyes and shook her head the slightest bit. No, Fiona, do not make a fuss, not tonight.
“Sure, Sandrine,” I said, smiling brightly. “Whatever you want.”
Flutter, flounce, ripple, bony, toothy, tart, brittle.
For a few uncomfortable minutes, Sandrine remained in our small circle while Noni issued compliments about the food, the view, the very nice waiters. Then Ace appeared beside us.
“Fiona Skinner, how the hell are you?” he said, and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. “You look fantastic.” Ace made a show of looking me up and down in a way that was not flattering but appraising, the look you’d give to a length of wood you were considering for a fence post. Was I durable? Would I need two coats of paint or three?
Ace had expensive shoes and impressive biceps from sessions with a personal trainer, but he still laughed with the same sharp bark I remembered from the pond. To me he would always be that little boy: not necessarily someone who acted with bad intent, merely one too weak and careless to follow through on the good. Now Ace worked in the music industry—not the creative side, something related to marketing—but still it lacquered him with a certain artistic patina when placed alongside Joe’s college friends in finance and law. He wasn’t a drug dealer, I learned later. It wasn’t that simple. He was the guy who knew how to get things, lots of things. People invited him to parties not because they liked him but because he was glamorous and useful. In Joe’s demographic no one was an addict. No one was losing their hair or teeth or sleep over the drugs, but they wanted them at certain times, and there was no way they’d hail a cab or walk down a seedy street to meet some stranger in a back alley. This was where Ace fit in.
“Thanks for being here,” I said carefully.
Ace grasped my hand and held it even as I began to pull away. “I love your family, you know that. I’d do anything for Joe. And I hear you wrote a poem for the happy couple.” He smiled. “Good for you, Fiona.” He released my hand and patted me on the cheek like a poodle.
There was a moment of silence, Ace and Sandrine standing stiffly side by side, and I suddenly realized they might not know each other. “Joe and Ace are friends from the pond,” I explained.
“Oh, I’ve already met Ace,” said Sandrine with a flap of her hand. “I’ve met all of Joe’s friends.” She paused. “But what’s the pond?”
“The pond?” I said. “Joe hasn’t told you about the pond?”
“Noooo.” Sandrine shook her head. “Is there something I should know?”
“Nothing,” Ace said smoothly. “There’s nothing you need to know about the pond.”
I opened my mouth to contradict him, to explain how much the pond had meant to us growing up, how that time was the foundation of Joe and Ace’s friendship, but before I could speak, a woman long and sleek as a heron moved in to greet Sandrine. “Look at you!” the woman said loudly, and then Ace sighted someone else across the room, and Noni and I were left standing alone.
I wish now that I had been more aware of the dynamics of that small interaction. Noni, Sandrine, Ace, and I, all of us positioned beside that mammoth, glorious window as the night descended and the view turned to shadows and sparkle. I had never seen Ace and Sandrine together, although I should have known they’d already met. Perhaps they had met many times.
From across the room, Man #23 was trying to catch my gaze. I studiously ignored him. What had I written about him? The sex itself had progressed according to convention: kiss, kiss, touch, stroke, clothing dropped, bodies positioned, give, slide. Nice, sweet, unremarkable sex. Afterward pale moonlight fell across the sheets. The city breeze and distant street noise drifted in like smoke. It was then that I looked at him, really looked. Freckles marked his entire body, up and down his legs and arms, across his shoulders. On his lower back, where the skin was smooth and hairless, lay a constellation of freckles. I traced those freckles with a finger. Yes, that’s what I’d written about for TheLastRomantic.com: Man #23, the freckles at the small of his back, their position nearly identical to the constellation of Andromeda.
* * *
How to describe the blog? It was a project that began innocently enough as the product of my healthy libido and a newfound sexual attractiveness that took everyone by surprise, myself most of all. What happened was that I became thin. I was twenty-four years old, newly arrived in New York City, still without health insurance, and I began to run. There was no grand plan, no Twelve Steps to a New You. The running was simply a free activity that took place outside the cramped apartment I shared with college friends of similarly pinched circumstances. Along with the exercise, I maintained a strict weekly budget that allowed for only two meals per day. Or one meal and alcohol. The combination led to the initial weight loss—some twenty pounds in two months—and by then I was hooked. Cheekbones emerged, an ass and a waist. It was fun, like shifting your image in a funhouse mirror to see the shapes you could make.
With my new body came a certain kind of power. Men’s heads flipped like Ping-Pong paddles as I walked past. Taxis were easier to come by, and good tables at restaurants, and drinks, so many drinks, sent my way by well-wishing, generally far older men. At first I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust the men. I asked Renee, “How do you deal with it?” This was before she met Jonathan, when I believed my oldest sister to exist on a plane beyond the base needs for sex and affirmation.
“I just ignore it,” Renee said. “I never make eye contact, and I don’t wear makeup. And I have a can of Mace in my bag.”
But Renee and I had different perspectives. I didn’t want to think about risk or violence. I knew how to be careful; I’d learned the lesso
n of the man in the car. Now I only wanted a free martini. I only wanted to have some fun.
So I did. It was the grand transformative fantasy of every pudgy teenage girl who’d been overlooked, taken for granted, ignored by the many and diverse objects of her affection. Over the next year, I flirted and slept with every type of man I’d lusted after in high school and college—the jocks, prom kings, bad boys, stoners, and class presidents—and then I moved on to all the others. I dated some men for a few weeks here and there, but I happened upon a relationship only once: Eli, a tall and earnest publishing intern who broke his leg in a spectacular bike accident that required a twelve-week convalescence. During this time I brought him groceries and toilet paper. I held his cast outside the shower curtain to keep it from getting wet. Something about this vulnerability and need made me want to stay, plus the knee-to-thigh cast and the pulleys installed above his bed made the sex interesting and acrobatic. But once Eli’s physical therapy ended and he was walking again, I broke up with him. Eli cried.
“If you’d put up with all of that,” he asked, “why leave now?”
He had thick, sensitive lips and dark eyebrows marked on the right side by an unexpected shock of premature white. He was in fact a good guy.
“I don’t know exactly,” I said at first. And then I realized the problem. “I guess I just don’t want things to be normal.”
It was natural that I’d take my experiences into my poetry class. I wrote almost exclusively about sex, because sex was the most interesting thing that was happening to me.
My poetry teacher’s name was Kevin Kealey.
“I like the sex poems,” said Kevin.
Emma, an almost-model, almost-artist in the class, sighed extravagantly and rolled her eyes.
“But?” I asked.
“Listen, the idea isn’t entirely new. You’ve got Anaïs Nin, Erica Jong . . .” Kevin looked confused.
“Sylvia Plath,” I reminded him. “Sharon Olds, Eileen Myles.”
Kevin was nodding. “Yes, yes, of course. And . . . others. And your work is appealing. I mean, it’s fresh. It’s very honest.”
Again Emma sighed, louder this time, and was joined by a distinct groan from the back row. I ignored them. My class was composed of fourteen antagonistic strangers with day jobs and the kinds of literary ambitions that grew from personal torment and a scattershot idea of what might make it all feel better. Their critiques were not kind. (Soulless. Demeaning. Empty.) They all seemed to hate me, or maybe they just hated my work. Only Kevin thought I was onto something.
I submitted my sex poems to and was summarily rejected by ninety-nine literary journals and poetry magazines, and I told Kevin that was it. The number one hundred was simply too demoralizing, too symbolic. How would I ever recover from a hundred straight rejections?
One night I stayed late with Kevin after the others had trickled out. The class was held in an NYU building in what appeared to be an abandoned classroom designated too drafty and dangerous for tuition-paying NYU undergrads. There was some halfhearted graffiti on one section of the blackboard and what looked very much like asbestos pushing up the floor tiles beneath the room’s only window, which was cracked. We all kept our coats on during class.
“Kevin,” I said, pulling up a chair beside his desk, “why do I even care about getting published?”
“I don’t know. Why do you?” He was peeling an orange, and the fresh smell of citrus filled the room.
“Because people tell me I should care. You tell me that!”
Kevin looked wounded. “Fiona, I am all about the purity of the process. Don’t listen to those bozos at the Paris Review. Just write what you want to write.” He paused. “Maybe you should start a blog.”
“What did you just say?”
“A blog!” Kevin’s mouth was full of orange.
“Bog?”
He chewed and swallowed. “Have you been living under a rock? A blog. It’s like if you put your diary online and invited people to comment on it. Not for the faint of heart, Fiona.”
I considered his words. “I’ve never fainted in my life. Really.”
“I mean, I love these lines.” Kevin picked up the poem I had submitted for that night’s class. “You could turn this bloggy. Easy as pie.”
Kevin wrote down some website addresses, and I took the subway home. The year was 2003. I spent the weekend taking notes on Gawker, Dooce.com, Belle de Jour, and The Daily Dish. By Sunday afternoon I figured I had read enough. I downloaded Movable Type version 2.6 onto my iMac and, after an all-nighter of mouse manipulation and profanity, became a blogger.
Because I was a little bit chicken and because I didn’t quite trust that Kevin totally knew what he was talking about, I did not use my name. I called myself the Last Romantic.
On the blog I described the project like this: “The Last Romantic aims to record in Full Truth the Sex Life of a Young Woman in a Great City, the woman being myself, the city being New York. Or, in other words, the process of providing myself with a sentimental education, unsentimentally.”
My first post, an earnest and semi-erotic poem about kissing a man with a mustache, drew 7 hits. My next post, a wryly detailed account of oral sex with the same mustachioed man, titled “Ticklingus,” drew 288 hits. I was hooked. I could say anything in a few short paragraphs, and anyone with a computer could read it. I told only Kevin when I posted something new, and yet week by week, month by month, my audience grew.
Before The Last Romantic, dating had always seemed like a purpose-driven exercise—date men, sleep with men, to find one man—but now it became process-driven. There was no one man, I realized, waiting at the end of this rainbow. The project itself served as both pot of gold and rainbow. I applied all the five-cent homilies I’d ever heard about the journey and the destination and not investing in the outcome into this, my sex life. And it was so interesting! What was more interesting than personal foibles and predilections related to sex? Because related to sex meant related to self and self-esteem and esteem of others. How a person behaved on a one-night stand spoke volumes. After I warmed up to the basic project mechanics (flirtation, initiation, fulfillment), I liked to shake it up. I would play a woman searching for commitment, or one heartsick from a bad breakup, or (once) a prostitute, or (twice) a virgin. Dabbling in the emotional specifics varied my partners’ responses and, most interestingly, changed my own physical outcome in ways that always surprised me.
Of course, the sheer number of encounters required that I look beyond the men themselves, their personalities specifically. They became for me a sequence of responses, physical, emotional, behavioral. Perhaps I should have taken anthropology in college as well as women’s studies, because the project seemed a melding of the two. Gendered in its consciousness and goals. But those who read the blog didn’t really care about the theoretical underpinnings, what I believed about gender expectations and sexual politics, the traps of marriage and motherhood, the need for women to claim their own personal freedom and expression, sexual and otherwise. Young women read my blog about sex because my experiences matched their own and my words provided confirmation that they—the furiously typing, horny, sexy female they—were not alone.
On the night of Joe’s engagement party, I had been writing the blog for ten months. I had 5,188 followers, averaged fifty to seventy-five comments per post, and was on the way to becoming the unlikely sexual guru to a certain group of single, primarily heterosexual young women with Internet access and complicated love lives.
Since the blog began, I had slept with seventy-six men.
* * *
“Hello? Hello out there?” said Kyle Morgan. He rapped a microphone. A small platform stage had been installed against the wall facing the windows, and Kyle now stood upon it, looking down at his party guests with the amused expression of a calm and indulgent host. Kyle had a louche authority about him. As vice president of Morgan Capital under his aging father, he was the de facto man in charge, the one who enforced the
rules, but also the one who most frequently broke them.
“Children. Children, please,” Kyle said over the din. “It’s circle time now, so let’s listen up.”
All heads turned toward the stage. An expectant silence fell.
“Good, now you’ll all get a nice treat after class,” Kyle said, and grinned. “I first wanted to thank you all for being here tonight to celebrate Joe and Sandrine.” A few whoops, a smattering of applause. “I think I speak for many of Joe’s friends when I say thank you especially to Sandrine for taking Joe Skinner off the market so the rest of us have a chance.” Laughter, more hoots. “And I’m sure Sandrine’s friends would say the same. You’re a vision tonight, darling, really.” In the crowd Sandrine tipped her blond head.
I’d always liked Kyle more than many of Joe’s other college friends. Maybe it was his own brand of camp, heterosexual but not entirely. Maybe he was in love with Joe, or with one of the other fraternity brothers, or with all of them. Before Alden he’d gone to Dayton Academy, an all-boys boarding school where he was captain of the tennis team and voted Most Likely to Be Arrested for Tax Fraud. His lifestyle was paid for by his father’s bank, but Kyle wore his privilege lightly and enjoyed spreading it around. I’d gotten concert tickets from him, invitations to benefits and parties that Kyle couldn’t attend, a job interview (but not the job) at a liberal think tank. Because I was Joe’s little sister, Kyle folded me into the loose web of his concern and generosity, and it was a nice, warm place to be. For Joe, after so many years, it must have felt like home.
Kyle talked in a sweet, meandering way about his and Joe’s time together at Alden College, those years of magic and dreams, he called them, and the camaraderie of the fraternity, the enduring love these men had for one another.