by Joel Derfner
He did misspell doppelgänger twice, but the second time was clearly a typo (perfectly acceptable when you’re IMing)*2 and did not contain the mistake he’d made the first time, so it’s clear that he actually knows how the word is spelled.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 5:58 p.m., June 25, 2002
H.N. was not fabulously wealthy, octolingual, or blond, but he was gorgeous and funny and skilled enough in the art of repartee to allow me to put these oversights down to a caprice of fate. We met at Tea & Sympathy, my favorite restaurant in New York, and I enjoyed myself utterly, something that hadn’t happened on a date in a long time. Our conversation ranged far and wide, touching on passion, family, our childhoods.
“My parents knew I was gay when they told me I didn’t have to go to school the day Return of the Jedi opened and I went anyway,” he said.
“How did that tip them off?” I asked.
“I went because I didn’t want to miss choir practice.”
After dinner we walked up Broadway, as easy in conversation as if we’d known each other for years. When he mentioned being frustrated because he’d finished that week’s New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in a day and wouldn’t have anything to occupy his free time during the week, it was all I could do not to rip his clothes off and ravish him right there on Seventeenth Street. I settled for grabbing him and kissing him and hoping that he could tell from my erection that I was giving him an IOU.
By exercising a Cistercian monastery’s worth of willpower, we managed to get to the end of our first date without undressing. At the end of our second date, however, we recognized that the repetition of such a feat would be impossible, so we went back to my place and resolved the last uncertainty—the question of his prowess in bed—by having terrific sex. Soon afterward I finally dumped E.S., he of the cookie dough and the strawberry-rhubarb pie (though I neglected to finish the second sock of the pair I was knitting him before he moved to Boston, which protracted the unpleasant process of dumping him, but his feet were really big, so I couldn’t go any faster); H.N. and I were obviously destined for each other, and all that remained was for us to pick out a china pattern.
Except that as I continued to see H.N. over the next several weeks, going to the Marriott Marquis with him to make out in the elevators, sharing raspberry chocolates with him on his lunch break, cuddling with him on the couch during The Golden Girls, the faintest sense of doubt began to suffuse my thoughts about him. He punctuated beautifully and in his presence my faults melted away. When I freaked out because the power had gone off in my apartment, before my computer battery ran out he IMed me, “I wish I were there so I could make you feel a little bit safe, a little bit protected.”
And yet, every once in a while, when he was talking about his stupid, incompetent coworker, I caught a hint of something that made me feel uncomfortable. I do not wish to be misunderstood: I detest the stupid and incompetent just as much as the next misanthrope, if not more. But his mockery of her seemed to have a mean-spirited edge. When he talked about her I said nothing and felt ashamed.
I began to notice this edge more and more in his conversation, but I ignored it since he was perfect in all other ways. I made lists of different places we might end up living; I wrote draft after draft of our answering-machine message (“Hi, you’ve reached H.N. and Joel”/“Hello, this is Joel and H.N.”/ “This is the dog; H.N. and Joel can’t come to the phone right now”). Then he broke up with me.
“I find myself being more drawn to this new person,” his e-mail said, “and well, I kind of want to see what might happen with it…. I hope we can still stay in touch with each other, and somewhere down the line grab smoothies and chuckle over ‘that crazy summer.’” His misspelling of “consistent” and “reunited” elsewhere in the message was cold comfort.
With the help of my brother’s girlfriend I drafted a tortuous response filled with lines like, “I was beginning to feel the same way too” and “There always was something that wasn’t quite working, wasn’t there?” My brother took one look at my computer screen and snorted in disgust. “You can’t send that,” he said. “Just write him back and say, fine.”
My brother’s girlfriend and I stared agog at the audacity of this suggestion, and then I wrote the following e-mail:
Dear H.N.,
Okay. I figured as much.
Joel
I sent it (when I forwarded it to my friend Rachel she wrote back, “ooh, you gave so little!”) and swore I would not go on another date for a year. This vow lasted a week and a half, at which point I added “compassionate” to the checklist, decided for good measure not to answer any online ads with less than impeccable orthography and grammar, and went once more unto the breach.
A week ago my friend D.R. and I spent the evening at Drip, a café that sells delicious Oreo milk shakes and has three-ring binders full of personal ads. There are four binders of Men 4 Men ads, in whose pages I have found exactly one ad to which I want to reply. But in order to reply to an ad, you have to leave one yourself. So D.R. and I sat there, trying to compose an ad for me based on what we thought this one guy (about whom we knew nothing except what he had put in his ad) would like.
The thing is, his ad is extraordinary. It has taken us three visits to Drip to write me an ad worthy of this guy’s.
By the end of the last go-round, we’d come up with answers to all the questions except “looking for.” Everything we thought of was either inferior to his answer or already in my ad somewhere else.
So we decided to buy a Middle Egyptian textbook and answer in hieroglyphs.
I have spent the last two hours poring over An Egyptian Grammar figuring out how to say “somebody who’s cute, smart, funny, compassionate, stimulating, and a top” in Middle Egyptian.
Now I just have to practice drawing the damn things so it doesn’t look as if they were done by a developmentally disabled child.
The Middle Egyptian is, as far as I can tell, grammatically correct, though probably stylistically and idiomatically atrocious. A literal translation would read “a beautiful, clever man; he brings me amusement; he cries out for justice; he causes my spirit to rejoice.”
“And a top” will have to be in English. I’m sure the Egyptians did that sort of thing, but they don’t seem to have carved it on their funerary architecture.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 1:45 a.m., September 30, 2002
I quote my ad here:
—The Search for Love in Manhattan,*3 7:31 a.m., October 23, 2002†4
Some of the things I most enjoy doing in bed are jokingly associated with timidity, passivity, and weakness. Since I am timid, passive, and weak, however, I have no problem with this. I spend most of my waking moments shoring up my emotional defenses so as to make myself untouchable. I am an expert at forcing people to talk to me about their problems without revealing any of my own; I am so helpful to others that I leave no room for others to help me. However, I realize that even I cannot be continuously vigilant, so I have decided that the one time I will let myself be vulnerable is during sex.
Depending on shape, size, and technique, the physical experience of coitus isn’t always the most comfortable. When I have sex I am opening myself up to the possibility of feeling pain, something I never do otherwise, ever. But I always feel that my partner is keeping me inviolably safe, that he is not just taking care with my physical well-being but keeping watch over the truth of who I am, that for these few moments I can loose my pinions and be infinite, because there exists someone in the world who won’t let anything bad happen to me if I do. Out of bed, I pretend that I need no one and nothing. But unclothed and coupled, protected only by trust and a Trojan, I can admit that I am not an island and that, thank God, I never will be.
I suppose I could have written that in the Drip ad, but “and a top” took up much less room.*5
Those of you who’ve been reading my blog since the beginning, as well as those of you who have joined late in the game but wh
o have read back through the archives, may remember E.S., a man whom I dated for several months before breaking up with him. He thought we were something serious and I thought we were something casual—so casual, in fact, that, while dating him, I slept with a third of Manhattan, singly and in groups, and blogged about it all.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 9:31 p.m., November 17, 2003
E.S. was one of those weird people who stay friends with their exes rather than hoping they get stranded on desert islands with just enough food and water to be lonely forever, so even after I broke up with him I still saw him, platonically, when he was in town. Every once in a while I’d think, Gee, maybe I made a mistake breaking up with him—he’s a great guy and I have lots of fun hanging out with him, but I’d always end up deciding no, I’d done the right thing.
Soon after he moved back to New York we made the terrible mistake of going to see Underworld, which I had expected to be bad but not nearly as bad as it was. Furthermore, it was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, on which we traditionally fast from one sundown to the next, so I had to watch the damn thing without any candy to distract me from its insipidity.
After the movie, we wandered around Union Square, talking about nothing in particular and having a good time. Eventually I started getting cold, so I turned toward the subway, but then he said, “Actually, let’s sit down for a while, because there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
There is absolutely nothing that strikes more terror into my heart than hearing the last nine words of that sentence. So I sat down, quivering now both from the cold and in anticipatory dread of whatever awful thing he was going to force me to discuss.
As it happened, I wasn’t quivering nearly enough, because what he said was, “I read your blog. All of it.”
I felt an immediate impulse to leap into the path of oncoming traffic in the hope that there was a Mack truck very close by. Paralyzed by cold and horror and guilt and shame and my desire to disintegrate, however, my body refused to act on this impulse, and so instead I sat there in silence, staring at my lap because I was about as capable of looking E.S. in the face as I was of flying to the moon. I’m sure only a minute or two went by, but it seemed to me as if I remained mute for the length of the entire Cretaceous Period plus half the Tertiary Period before I spoke.
“I’m trying to figure out what to say that won’t be meaningless,” I said.
“Just say the truth,” he said. So I did.
And what followed was an extraordinary conversation about honesty and letting others in and fear and facing your emotions and telling people what you really think. None of these things has ever been my forte. My standard modus operandi is to tell people what I think they want to hear so that they won’t find out who I really am and despise me. But in this case there was no escape route open. I had to talk about how I actually felt, which was a confusing mix of ambivalent, cavalier, and affectionate. I said things like, “I had fun hanging out with you but I didn’t ever think we were going to be boyfriends” and “That time I was late meeting you for dinner was because I had been having sex with somebody else,” and he said things like, “It hurts to hear that but I’m glad you’re being open with me” and “Did you really think I didn’t know that?”
And it was wonderful.
It turned out that, about a month earlier, he’d seen somebody’s online profile that contained a link to that person’s blog, which linked in turn to mine. E.S. realized it was me after two seconds—so much for Faustus’s attempt at anonymity—and went back to read the archived entries from the time we were dating.
“I understand why you did what you did,” he said. “You were just out of a serious relationship, you should have had ‘rebound’ stamped on your forehead. What upset me was that you didn’t tell me what was going on. I didn’t have informed consent.”
Finally, the cold made it impossible for us to continue the conversation, so we headed toward the subway. “At first I was furious,” he said. “I thought about starting a blog called Faustus Lies. But now I feel like the whole thing is actually pretty funny.”
“Give me a month to get there,” I said. “Right now I want to go home and throw myself out of my window.”
“Don’t do that. You live on the second floor. You’ll just hurt yourself.”
And when I woke the next morning, I was still buoyed up by the unwonted freedom of having been honest in a difficult situation for once in my life. And then, remembering that it was still the Day of Atonement, I started thinking, Wait, what if it wasn’t him who was the problem when we were going out?
What if it was me?
Could it be that my refusal to let him in or show him any real part of myself or see any real part of him had something to do with why I had felt it wasn’t working?
He did, after all, fit most of my requirements: he was handsome, smart, funny, compassionate, and a top. What if he was stimulating too and I just hadn’t noticed? Furthermore, not only was he a medical student and a gifted painter, but he had at one point in his life actually hung drywall. I have never even touched drywall, for fear that I might die or get dust on my clothes.
In the weeks following our Yom Kippur conversation, we spent more time together than we ever had when we were dating—he said he felt a lot better having gotten things off his chest—and I found myself wanting more and more to try again, if he’d even remotely consider such a thing, that is, given the cad I’d turned out to be the first time around.
Eventually I realized that the only thing to do was to ask him. I was prepared for unequivocal rejection—what sane person, after all, would stick his finger in that pencil sharpener again?—but held out a slim hope that he might not be sane.
So we went to another movie (this time it was Runaway Jury, the quality of which augured far better for the subsequent conversation than Underworld had) and then to dinner at Burritoville. I ate my chips and salsa and tacos in a fugue state, wanting at every moment to speak but unable to do so. If I can just say one word, I thought, I will have committed myself and I can finish. So finally I choked out, “There’s,” thereby committing myself, and followed it with “something I want to talk to you about.”
“Okay,” he said.
The silence that followed this exchange lasted not for periods but for eras. Staring at the table, because once again I couldn’t look him in the face, I kept beginning. “I…I wa—…I…”
And finally, hidden somewhere in the Cimmerian depths of my psyche, I found a store of courage previously unknown to me, screwed it to the sticking place, and said, “I want to ask you out on a date.”
He looked at me briefly and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
It is difficult to walk while trying at the same time not to explode in flames, but somehow I managed. Eventually he said, “I like you. And I’m really attracted to you. But…what’s going to be different this time?”
I started speaking, stammering even more than I usually do when I’m nervous. I talked about the powerful effect our conversation on Yom Kippur had had on me; I talked about coming to see him in a new light; I talked about my understanding of what a blackguard I’d been. “I’m a different person than I was a year ago,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“I mean, you can think about it, you don’t have to give me an answer now, or if your answer’s no I completely understand and—”
“No, I mean, okay, I’ll go out on a date with you.”
Then I burst into tears.
Which was the first time I’d done that in front of him, despite having dated him for nine months. So I was already doing better on the emotional honesty front, as I have the urge to burst into tears at least twelve times every day but I always bottle it up. A couple nights later we went to dinner at a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn and I spent the whole evening in agony because the umbilical hernia left over from when I was fat opened up and started letting my intestines out through my belly button. Since I couldn’t wa
lk, we took a cab back to E.S.’s apartment, where he manually reduced the hernia—that’s really what it’s called—and we’ve been together ever since. He stopped reading my blog long ago.
For Valentine’s Day, I baked E.S. an apple pie. He said it was the best apple pie he’d ever had, including all the apple pies I’d baked him before. He said it was perfect. I was quite pleased with this praise, as he is never so effusive unless he really means it.
But two days ago, as we were bringing the now-empty pie plate back to my apartment, we had the following conversation:
FAUSTUS: I need to find a smaller pie plate. The piecrust recipe I use doesn’t generate enough dough to fill this one comfortably.
E.S.: Yeah, the crust on that pie was a little bit thin.
FAUSTUS: I thought you said it was the best apple pie you’d ever had.
E.S.: It was.
FAUSTUS: But when you said it was perfect you were lying.
E.S.: No, I wasn’t! It was perfect!
FAUSTUS: Except for the tissue-thin crust, which you hated.
E.S.: Look, there’s going to be a flaw in any pie.
FAUSTUS: Oh, so I’m incapable of making edible pastry.
E.S.: It was perfect. But I think of perfection in human terms.
FAUSTUS: Why on earth would you do such a ridiculous thing?
E.S.: Are you going to be like this forever?
FAUSTUS: Yes.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 8:26 a.m., February 26, 2005
E.S.’s real name is Mike. He does not speak eight languages, or even five. His conversation is more taciturn than sparkling. He misspells words and mispunctuates sentences. He is losing his hair and when I am with him my faults do not disappear; they are often in fact grotesquely magnified. His teeth are crooked and no whiter than anybody else’s. He is not the man I wanted.