Bream Gives Me Hiccups

by Jesse Eisenberg

  And she’ll probably ask what I’m doing tonight. Once again, I’m in the perfect position to tell the truth. I got tickets to a Knicks game. That’s too lowbrow for you? Well, I’m actually going with my friend who’s a cultural anthropologist. That’s the kind of people I hang out with. Now who’s lowbrow? Knicks game, cultural anthropologist. Lowbrow, highbrow. I’m hard to pin down. I’m all over the map!

  Where is she? I really thought she’d be coming by about now. I mean, I’m pretty sure she’s in the city. Jerry mentioned that she’d be in the city this weekend. I’ll wait a little bit more. She’ll be here.

  And when I see her, I’ll act surprised and say hello and then take the tiniest of pauses before I say her name to give her the impression that I was scrolling through a Rolodex of other names. “I’ve got a lot going on these days, you understand.”

  She’ll probably ask me where I’m living. And, again, I’ll just tell her the truth, which happens to be fucking awesome:

  I’m living in Queens.

  Just moved there. If that doesn’t seal the deal, I don’t know what will. If that doesn’t make her completely reevaluate me, I don’t know what will. I mean, it’s Queens! It’s the most interesting of the boroughs. What is it? It’s so mercurial! Queens!

  If I lived around this area, in Manhattan, she’d think I’m stuffy and elitist. Manhattan! Like I’ve retired or something. Like I was given a golden parachute that I decided to land in the center of the universe. It’s so obvious. Manhattan.

  And the Bronx? The Bronx! It’d seem like I’m trying to make some kind of violent statement. Why would I live in the Bronx? Who am I trying to impress? What kind of battle did I lose in life to wind up in the Bronx?

  And Staten Island? Telling her I moved to Staten Island? I may as well tell her I moved to Jupiter or Kansas, or I’m shooting myself in the face tonight because I have absolutely nothing left to live for and no one would give a shit if I suddenly fell off the face of the earth by moving to Staten Island!

  And Brooklyn. Move to Brooklyn? That is the worst of the boroughs. It’s such an awful borough that I’m embarrassed to live in Queens because it’s also a borough and that tenuous association is enough to humiliate me. Brooklyn! Overtaken by hipsters with thick-framed prescription-less glasses and ironic banjos and graphic designers who work for Saatchi and Saatchi but call themselves postmodern artists. If there was a draft, and Brooklyn was in Canada, and I could either go to Brooklyn and be safe or Vietnam and be killed, I’d go to Vietnam and I’d gladly be shot down instead of going to that hellhole that God would forsake, except it would mean that He would have to step foot in Brooklyn!

  But I’m in Queens. Queens. It’s so perfectly diverse. Queens: Who am I? I can interact with anyone! That’s what Queens says. I’m open-minded; I don’t see color. She’d probably want to come over to my house. Just to see Queens. “Hey, can we go to a little midnight diner?” she’d probably ask. Sure, we can go to Astoria. There are little midnight diners on every corner. “Can we go dancing?” Absolutely. Let’s go to Corona, there are Latin Quarters on every block. There are so many Latin Quarters in Corona, we call them Latin Dollars! That’s a little joke we make in Queens. It’s silly. It’s a Queens joke. Wanna see a Mets game? Sure! Why don’t you take a few more days before you gotta head back up to school and we’ll stay in bed late and check out a Mets game together. We can eat a late breakfast at this little hole-in-the-wall where the Greek guy knows my name and we could rent bikes and head out to Citi Field and hold hands in the bleachers and she’ll say something like, “These seats are actually amazing because you can see the whole park.”

  Jesus, what time is it?

  I should probably just head home. Where is she? How could she not walk through Central Park? Who doesn’t walk through Central Park when they’re visiting their parents on spring break? Who doesn’t think to do that?

  This is the best park in the city. Maybe the state. I don’t know. But this is definitely a good park. I mean, I don’t think anyone would be disappointed by this park. I don’t think anyone’s ever walked out of Central Park and said, “Not For Me.”

  So I’m sure she’ll probably amble through here in a bit. In high school, her parents were on Seventy-Ninth Street. I’m sure they’re still there. So she’d most likely enter through that north gate. Unless they moved. I can’t imagine they would have moved. Unless, with the economy and everything. But they probably paid off their apartment; people don’t rent up here. They were pretty rich. She always dressed so nicely. Like everything was tattered, but it was somehow still nice. Her little woolen pea coat, her torn little woolen pea coat. She was able to make wool sexy somehow. She was able to bring out the animal side of the wool, which makes sense ’cause it’s from an animal. But people don’t do that with wool anymore. It’s latex that’s supposed to be sexy. Or spandex. Or something else totally unnatural. Not for me! I like what’s real. I like what’s honest. I like her. I’m sure she’ll be here any second.

  I’ll just wait it out. I’ll just be ready. That’s all I can do. “When opportunity knocks, you gotta be ready.” Who said that? I think it was my father. No, it must be somebody more famous. I think it’s a famous quote. I must’ve paraphrased.

  I can’t imagine she’s still dating that idiot, that abstract painter idiot. That couldn’t possibly last. It was going nowhere. They both knew it. Last time I saw her, at that stupid party, she said, “He’s sweet. You don’t know him, he’s actually really sweet.” What the hell is “sweet”? I’m “sweet.” Anybody could be “sweet”! That’s literally the easiest thing to be to someone else. Sweet. What a douchebag loser idiot. Sweet. I suffer for my life! I suffer every day! And for what? To mean something! To contribute, which I plan on doing. But oh no! He’s sweet. Go sell car insurance! Sweet. He should be shot and he knows it!

  And what the hell am I doing here, letting all these people pass me by who aren’t her! What the hell am I doing? Who are these idiots who aren’t her, just passing me by! I’m being wasted on them! They don’t care that I’m going to a Knicks game with an anthropologist! They don’t care that I just came from my ninety-four-year-old aunt’s house! They’re not her! They don’t care that my dark blue jeans are perfectly fitted right now and my veins are protruding in the best possible way. No! They’re just going on with their dumb day like their lives are important, while I’m sitting here EXPIRING!

  And they’ll pass me by not noticing everything I’ve done, everything I am right now, everything that, from this moment on, will be less and less good as my life expires and I start to die without her, without ever getting to show her that I, at one point, was great! That I am, right now, before the fibers of my jeans begin to loosen and the veins recess back into my emaciated arms, great! That I am, now and only now, great! And for what?!

  What’s the point of going to my aunt’s house? What’s the point of living in Queens? I hate Queens! It’s nowhere near anything! I have to take three fucking subways just to get to the fucking subway! I hate doing push-ups! I hate basketball! And I hate my dumb cultural anthropologist friend – all he ever talks about is Samoa! I am at my goddamn peak and no one is even looking! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! You non-entities! You stupid morons! You imbeciles! You blind moron tourist imbeciles! Where the hell is she!?! This is so ridiculous!!! Where the hell is she? I’m getting furious!!! I am in my jeans!!! I AM IN MY JEANS!!!

  Okay, relax. Calm down. Stay positive. You have no idea what her life is like. You have no idea what she’s doing. She’s probably sitting somewhere waiting for me. If anything. She’s probably waiting for me. That’s the irony of it all, right? That’s the irony of life, right? The cruel irony of my life.

  No, I’m sure she’ll be here any minute.

  Yeah.

  I’m pretty sure Jerry said this weekend. Although, next weekend is Easter, I think, so maybe that’s what he meant. Maybe it’s next weekend, I never actually celebrated Easter. No. No, I’m pretty sure it was this
weekend. I should give him a call.

  Or I could just give it another few minutes. That’s probably the best thing to do. Just give it another minute or two. And then I’ll head home.

  Yeah, just another minute.

  A BULLY DOES HIS RESEARCH

  Well well well, if it isn’t little Tommy. Gimme your lunch money, dweeb! Hand it over! What? Are you scared? Are you worried about your family’s financial situation now that your parents are separated? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably think it’s your fault, don’t you? And even though your mommy told you that it had nothing to do with you, that you didn’t make Daddy fall in love with his hygienist and run away to that ashram in Oregon, it still feels unsettling. You lie awake telling yourself, “If I had just loved them more, if I had just gotten better grades or was nicer to Grandma when she was in the hospital after her stroke in November, they would still be together.” And now you have to give me the money your mother gives you every morning because she can’t pack a bag lunch since her insomnia and reliance on Ambien makes her too groggy. Well, cry me a river!

  Well well well, if it isn’t Mr. Sellowitz, the science teacher, catching me in the act of stealing little Tommy’s lunch money. Well, Smellowitz, smell this: I’m not Claude Monet! Yeah, that’s right. I know you’re threatened by me, but unconsciously associating me with Monet’s not gonna help. Yeah, I know you wanted to go to RISD since you were my age but you couldn’t get in and now you’re stuck teaching sixth grade science. Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably thought you were the future of impressionistic painting, doing your high school art project on a postmodern take on Monet’s Water Lilies, with real lilies mounted in a 3-D diorama inside a tank of water. Well, guess what? It wasn’t good enough for RISD and it’s certainly not good enough for your stepfather, Aaron Segura, the beloved art critic who never liked your work to begin with. Sorry, teach!

  Well well well, if it isn’t Principal O’Malley, here to suspend me for stealing little Tommy’s lunch money and talking back to Mr. Sellowitz. I bet it feels good punishing me, right? Lording your limited power over an adolescent bully? Makes you feel big and strong, doesn’t it? Especially since I have such a nice head of hair and you started experiencing rapid male pattern baldness when you were only sixteen years old. Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You tried everything, didn’t you? First the natural remedies because you were too embarrassed to tell your doctor that you were going bald and couldn’t afford a prescription for anything that would actually work. So you tried eating sardines every day for a year in the faint hope that it would help. And then, by the time you could afford Propecia, it was too late because your hairline had already receded and Propecia has little success of actually regrowing hair shafts from dead follicles, especially in the temple lobe region, where you were most explicitly affected. Suck it!

  Well well well, if it isn’t my father, here to pick me up from school after I was suspended for stealing little Tommy’s lunch money, talking back to Mr. Sellowitz, and showing Principal O’Malley that his need for power is rooted in unresolved trauma relating to his early male pattern baldness. Thanks for the ride home, Pops! Is it weird to pick me up in the middle of the day or does it highlight the fact that Mom’s the one with the real job? Does it reconfirm, in some unconscious or even conscious way, that you’ve lost all sense of pride and masculinity? Did it initially seem interesting to have Mom keep her job at the law firm while you stay home to raise the kids? Did you brag to your friends that you were proud to be eschewing gender norms? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! I bet you feel a burning sense to go out into the world and get even the most menial job just to feel like a person again, once you realized the novel you thought you’d write with your new free time wasn’t ever going to materialize and you’d be stuck walking around the house in dirty sweatpants, looking at the clock and waiting for the woman you used to know to come back with the bacon. Psych!

  Well well well, if it isn’t the town bully, grounded in his bedroom, looking in the mirror and questioning his behavior after stealing little Tommy’s lunch money, talking back to Mr. Sellowitz, revealing Principal O’Malley’s inner demons, and emasculating his father. So, has it really come to this? A clichéd moment of self-reflection from the hardened aggressor? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably think that endlessly harassing people with your well-detailed and overly analytical personal criticisms will make you feel better? You probably think you can keep everyone at a safe emotional distance if you put everyone down? You probably think that, if no one can get close to you and you remain hardened against the world, you’ll never get hurt? That if no one likes you, you could remain a safe little bubble?! Bite me!

  VIII.

  LANGUAGE

  NICK GARRETT’S REVIEW OF RACHEL LOWENSTEIN’S NEW BOOK, GETTING AWAY

  Cara Dawson, the hapless heroine of the “must-read” novel Getting Away, proclaims, “The world and all its people love me!”

  One assumes that Rachel Lowenstein, Miss Dawson’s creator, must share the feeling. The literary world has been taken by storm with its new darling-of-the-moment, the auspicious twenty-six-year-old Lowenstein, and though the excitement seems only to be building, one gets the wary sense Miss Lowenstein’s literary prospects seem gloomy at best.

  Lowenstein has been praised for her tragicomic treatise on one woman’s journey from hopeless romantic to empowered, staunchly single woman, and book clubs around the country have taken up Lowenstein’s “authentic” criticism of the male gaze as their new cause célèbre.

  But where does all this vitriol stem from? Lowenstein has stated in interviews that her awful experiences with one particularly “narcissistic” man drove her to write this bestseller, which she says “proves that women don’t need love to feel happy.” Although one wonders what Lowenstein did to this “mystery man” to make him so “narcissistic.” After all, it takes two to tango, Miss Lowenstein, two to tango.

  Like Ayn Rand before her, Lowenstein uses a “plot” merely as a vehicle to deliver her dogmatism: in this case, an attack on one seemingly harmless man.

  Lowenstein’s story begins fourteen years ago as readers are introduced to Cara, a scrawny seventh grader in the Philadelphia suburbs. Though a loner, she is starry-eyed, quixotically pursuing unrequited love after unrequited love, in search for what Cara calls her “sole soul mate.”

  A late bloomer, Cara goes through high school without ever kissing a boy, something that Miss Lowenstein has joked about in interviews as being “unfortunately based in truth.” At college she meets a young man named Mick Barrett in an elevator and later tells her roommate, “Tonight, I met my sole soul mate.”

  Cara’s premature declaration of love initially seems sweet, but her expectations for Barrett are clearly too high. Does Cara consider that placing the burden of “sole soul mate” on a nineteen-year-old college sophomore is possibly more than Barrett can handle? And, considering the pressures put on Barrett by his recently divorced parents (a detail Miss Lowenstein predictably glosses over), perhaps Barrett is not in a place to settle down with a wife and kids, something Cara conveniently never seems to consider.

  Is it only this humble critic who finds Mick Barrett to be the lone sympathetic figure of Getting Away?

  Cara and Barrett begin dating and, though their relationship seems stable, a more thorough retrospective reveals cracks in the otherwise polished veneer. For example, the young couple graduates college, Cara with a BFA in Creative Writing and Barrett with the more “sensible” economics degree that Cara encouraged him to pursue despite his inclinations toward painting. “There should only be one artist in the family,” Cara probably said in a scene presumably cut from the book. “I need a man who can support my writing and our children,” Cara most likely continued, bluntly crushing any dreams Barrett might have had for a life in the arts.

  The couple moves to Westchester (though insightful readers will get the sense that Barrett would have preferred to spend a few years in the city) in order for Cara to have her precious “quietude” for wr
iting her precious novels, a goal that readers are somehow asked to find noble because it’s creatively “pure,” as though creativity is somehow on moral par with curing cancer. And Barrett is forced to work for an Internet advertising agency in Southern Westchester, a neighborhood that Lowenstein mischaracterizes as “diverse” because, were Cara to ever actually visit Barrett at his office, she would have realized that working two blocks from the South Bronx is terrifying and that “diversity” is a euphemism that only a pampered writer like Lowenstein would use to describe the experience of almost getting mauled by myriad cultures from the world’s great diasporas on a daily basis.

  Lowenstein continues to demonize Barrett, in such an unbelievably manipulative way that readers who have never met a Machiavellian woman like Lowenstein or Cara would think she was writing the screenplay for the Mussolini biopic.

  Consider the section where Cara wants to spend the day toiling away on her Great American Novel and then attend her mother’s birthday dinner. In the morning, she asks Barrett if he could stop by the dry cleaners on his way home from work to pick up her red blouse so that she can wear it to the dinner. Barrett agrees because, frankly, what the hell else is he going to do now that his life has become a dreamless landscape of chores?

  So Cara gets to work, writing in the study she never allows Barrett access to (quelle surprise!), and when Barrett comes home from work, he is empty-handed. Lowenstein has Barrett mutter something about the dry cleaners being “closed,” but clearly readers are supposed to pity the blouse-less Cara in a way usually reserved for the terminally ill.

  However, Lowenstein neglects to report that the dry cleaners in question closes promptly at 7:00 and the last express train is at 6:36, so Barrett either has to catch the 5:48, which stops in Larchmont, or catch the 6:36 and literally sprint to the dry cleaners in his suit and after working a full day. Cara is a writer with no set schedule, but Barrett is the one responsible for picking up the clothes? Once again, readers are treated to yet another distorted image of the put-upon Cara and the negligent Barrett.