I couldn’t wait for sunset! I knew if my roommates caught me burning candles and reciting voodoo chants they would assume I’d made the leap from despair to insanity and raise my rent. I set up a makeshift altar in the depths of my closet, placing the candle on a photo of Michael playing guitar, and every night I entered into the dark arts and quietly performed my return-to-me ritual.
You might wonder if I was so far gone that I really thought this would work. I will say that performing my witchcraft prayer every night gave my life much-needed structure and meaning. It was grasping at straws, ridiculous, maybe a little stupid, but it was all I had. Not only did I think it would work—I was counting on it.
At the end of two weeks, I got out of bed with a huge smile on my face, drank some coffee, and skipped off to class. Every passing minute was part of a countdown to the season premiere of my life. As soon as I got home, I dropped my bag and coat on the floor and ran across the room to the phone. As I dialed, I felt clearheaded and healed.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Michael, it’s Ophira.”
And then it happened. Again.
Sigh. “Hi, Ophira.”
I didn’t hear angels singing or witches cackling; I heard the sound of a sad trombone go wah wah, followed by Natasha laughing. Nothing had changed. He was still dating that flautist, and the only one dumber than her was me for believing that some bullshit candle-burning could make Michael forgive me and fall back in love with me. It’s not like Natasha had offered a money-back guarantee.
“Ophira?” Michael said.
I swallowed hard.
“Yes, Michael?”
“I think you should stop calling me for a while.”
I searched for something to say. This was the opposite of what Natasha said would happen. This was not worth forty dollars. Maybe I didn’t concentrate hard enough or said the wrong words. In a last-ditch attempt to get something out of the call, I said, “Okay, but promise me this: If by the time I’m thirty, we’re both not married, you have to promise to give us another chance. Do you promise?”
It was hard to hear those pathetic words come out of my mouth, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“Okay, Ophira, whatever,” he muttered, and hung up.
Thirty years old seemed ancient to me. I had almost a decade to become the person he’d want back.
I was furious at Haiti and marched to my closet to throw away the remnants of my voodoo crap. I also threw out his photo, but then thought better of it, pulled it out of the trash can, and stuck it in the middle of a random book, hoping to forget which one. I wanted an immediate fix, someone to hold me, so I called Leo but he wasn’t home. Instead, I walked down the street to the bagel store and ate a piping-hot poppy seed on the street, without even once looking up at the useless stars.
CHAPTER 9
THE TROUBLE WITH FIELDWORK
According to my anthropology texts, if you really want to understand another culture, you need to immerse yourself in it, and the surest way to do that is by sleeping with the indigenous population. It’s called “doing fieldwork.”
The textbook didn’t exactly say that, but that was the approach I planned to take.
As I emerged from my smooth-jazz trance, I couldn’t believe I’d almost thrown away my barely-legal years on one guitar-strumming man. I reembraced my original belief system that for women, love and marriage was a stealth attack on our potential to take over the world, and sex was the quickest way to get to know someone.
Combining my own philosophy with anthropological theory, I decided that going forward I’d approach love/romance/relationships with the detachment of a social scientist. Screw postmodernism; I was a postromantic. No longer would I succumb to the Eurocentric construct of a relationship. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend; I wanted an informant: someone I could sustain three months of a one-night stand with—at least enough time to try on his life, pick up a new skill, and get out before we got attached. It was like fostering rescue dogs. I also bought a black leather motorcycle cap and insisted on wearing it every day. I thought it made me look dangerous—the kind of person you wouldn’t want to fuck with. In my mind, it also distinguished me from that weak, feeble girl who had loved and lost Michael.
I didn’t know where to find “my people” at McGill, so I explored a few subcultures. Naturally I joined the college radio station again, and for the first few months I followed a motley crew of Goths and indie rockers to a variety of punk gigs. At a concert featuring an up-and-coming thrash-metal band, I looked in the graffitied mirror of the dive bar’s filthy bathroom and admitted to my reflection that I hated both the scene and the music. I had filled my mosh-pit quota in life when I dated Tommy. I needed to move forward, not revisit adolescent angst. I kept the radio gig but ditched the scene in search of one that was more novel—at least to me.
McGill, nicknamed Harvard of the North by the students who went there, was the country’s number one college at the time. It was so vastly superior to other Canadian universities that I didn’t have the faintest clue what anyone was talking about in my lectures. While my classmates were engaging in discourse about Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, or Edward Said, I was offering up suggestions for lodging in exotic locales. Apparently, I’d had my nose buried in the equivalent of a bunch of Lonely Planet guides, while they’d spent their first semester reading philosophical treatises.
While zoning out in Anthro 202, unable to follow the professor, I spotted the first target of my flirty fieldwork project: Ryan Peeling. I could tell by the slight upward tilt of his chin that the culture I’d be infiltrating was “the society of old money.” Old Anglo-Saxon money. He probably knew how to sail, golf, and charge a fancy dinner at the club to a house account.
We were definitely from different worlds.
I wanted a window into his lavish world—and not from the servant’s quarters. I wanted to know what a winter tan felt like on my lips, what it was like to sip an aperitif with my bank manager. Although he wore the same Nirvana-inspired plaid button-down as the rest of us, I suspected he was more at ease in a sweater vest with a blue and green Izod tie poking out. As I watched him scribble down whatever the professor was saying, I noticed he was growing out a proper short haircut. I imagined his father was probably worried that his prized heir was going hippie on him. I’m sure the pursuit of an anthropology degree over a practical degree was disappointing enough.
When the next class began, I slid into the empty seat beside him—not that he noticed. He was too busy listening and raising his hand to ask intelligent questions. There was no way I could compete or impress on that level, so I tried to ingratiate myself by riffing off the lecture and mumbling little jokes and sarcastic lines: “Who wouldn’t want to be a troglodyte? I bet they have cheap rent and dollar draft beers down there . . . must be nice to live in a mud hut. It never gets dirty! . . . The upside of bridal capture is that’s a marriage that will probably last, and parents save a shitload on a wedding.” I managed to coax one smirk out of him, which was a start, enough to say hi in the hallways.
I was casually persistent. Every time I saw Ryan sitting alone in our college lounge, “The Alley,” I’d invite myself to join him. I’m not sure he knew what to make of this smiling, slightly aggressive new girl who was constantly demanding his attention, but he never asked me to leave. We progressed to going for coffee after class. While he told me all about his life, I drifted off into a fantasy. My brain had started doing this new trick I detested but couldn’t control. I would listen to him while picturing us together in twenty years. Did other girls shamefully do this? Was it years of gender socializing, or were we hardwired to consider the nesting potential of whatever man held our current interest? There he was, likely undressing me in his head and imagining me bent over the hood of his car, while I was fantasizing about us tasting vintage wine at a Napa Valley inn. Naturally, my Ryan visions incorporated access to his wealth. First, he’d pay off my student loans. Next, I’d demand to dress only in
difficult-to-even-dry-clean raw silk. He’d be some sort of academic researcher, constantly away at conferences, leaving room for me to tend our small-dog ranch and have an affair with my sculpture teacher in between conducting my own lecture series, “The Anthropology of Amour.” Sure, it sounded more like a Learning Annex course, but I was still only a sophomore—I’d have plenty of time to revise my daydream.
After the Rituals and Shamanism lecture, Ryan and I were having our coffees when he said, “You know, I’ve never done any psychedelic drugs. I really want to try mushrooms, you know? Witness that shift in reality.”
“Really? You’ve never done ’shrooms? What, was there actual shit to do in your town growing up?” I needled.
“No, well, we smoked pot,” he said, trying to save face, “but no one in high school had anything else.”
“Ha! Not that you know of!” And then an idea occurred to me. “I bet I can get us some ’shrooms,” I said.
“How?” he asked eagerly.
“I . . . might know someone. Let me work on it, okay?”
He laughed at me. “Yeah, sure. You go work on that.”
Not only had I dabbled in mushrooms numerous times and was well versed in what to expect, but I was also counting on the fact that if I helped him with his vision quest, things would progress beyond coffees.
If there was one thing I noticed about our campus, it was that the radio station was teeming with drug doers, sellers, and two-for-one deals. I walked in at lunch and very politely asked Louise, the programming assistant who was supposedly on methadone, if she knew where I could buy some mushrooms. Louise scared the shit out of me. It was clear she had no use for my big shiny face and bouncy demeanor, but she was happy to take my money. She handed me two tabs of acid and growled, “This is all I have. Ten dollars.” Apparently, I didn’t have a say in the matter, so I did as instructed and walked out with two squares of LSD in my purse. I wasn’t crazy about doing acid again. Now that I was twenty, I wanted to take care of my body and stick to the organics. But I wasn’t about to argue this point with Louise.
I saw Ryan in The Alley reading Das Kapital and flopped across from him, eager to announce that I’d purchased the traditional opiate of the masses.
“So! If you’re mad keen and wanna do acid tonight, I’ve acquired some,” I said with a faux British accent, forgetting in that moment that I can’t do accents. “It’s pretty much like mushrooms but trippier.” I was impressed with myself, proud of how spontaneous and savvy I seemed. I was no Betty Co-Ed; I was like Demi Moore in St. Elmo’s Fire. And we all know how that ends. Eventually you sleep with Ashton Kutcher.
He said he was totally in, and we agreed to meet at the Double Deuce bar after class. I planned an outfit around my leather cap, adding bleached jeans, a purple velvet blazer, and chunky high boots. Unfortunately, I’d let myself get caught up in the excitement and overlooked one very important thing about acid: It doesn’t make you touchy-feely or amorous at all. Heady and freaked out, sure, but it is the furthest thing from a sexy drug. We should have met up at the planetarium.
As the drug hit, Ryan went into philosophizing mode, relishing each word as it came out of his mouth like it was a hunk of conversational caramel.
“If Nietzsche was right and there’s no such thing as truth, because my truth is different from your truth, then this is one kind of beer to me, but it’s completely something else to you. Think about it.”
I nodded, but I’d started the trip with a specific goal in mind, and the effects of the acid only cemented my purpose and made it more urgent.
“There is no such thing as objectivity,” he continued. “We can never be anything but subjective. Ever.” He looked at me. Even with a strong chemical moving through my bloodstream, I wasn’t that interested in this discussion. Ryan continued on an intellectual rampage about how anthropological writing was about as useful as literary criticism, while I fixated on the task of how I was going to get him to kiss me. At that moment, I didn’t desire for him to kiss me, I just needed it, like it was an item on a scavenger hunt. Locking lips with him would also have the side benefit of shutting him up.
Before our third beer, I lied and said, “All these people are kinda wigging me out. Do you wanna walk back to my place? It’s closer than yours.” His eyes were two huge black pupils that seemed to spiral into outer space.
“Totally,” he replied. Then he said my face had a pretty neon outline around it. Your face is pretty would have worked for me, but we were getting closer.
In my sparse white bedroom, decorated only with a couple of postcards and one two-dollar deli plant, we lay propped up on pillows on my futon, listening to Tom Waits. Ryan was . . . still talking. He wanted to review the history of civilization in the confines of my room, starting with Greco-Roman times, and I wanted to reenact a Bacchanalian ritual. I edged over ever so slightly so our thighs were touching, hoping that if our bodies came close enough together, magnetic forces would take over. I felt nothing. I couldn’t sense any flirty vibes coming off him, and with the acid, you’d think I’d actually be able to see them. As he continued with his commentary, now about how eyesight is the most complex example of cellular division, it struck me that he might not be that into me because he was too into himself. I was a mere prop in his solo trip.
Eventually the drug started to wear off, and our eyes flickered with fatigue. It was 1:00 AM, and one thing was clear through my fading LSD-tinted contacts: It wasn’t going to happen with Ryan. He was a stubborn and loquacious research subject. Our parched lips briefly touched before he left, the kind of kiss you get from a confused third cousin. This fieldwork was going to be more challenging than I’d anticipated . . . and soon I’d need to apply for a research grant. Ryan never gave me the five bucks for his portion of the acid. My mother would say, “That’s how the rich stay rich.”
Back in anthropology class, I spent the entire lecture intently studying every other single male specimen in the class, sizing them up, ranking them, and mentally pie-graphing the results like I did back in Cheryl’s basement. In my kinship chart, I narrowed down the criteria to two categories: my general interest and percentage chance of it actually happening. I needed to cut my teeth on some surer bets. My top two prospects: the supernerdy redhead Kieran, because he looked like the male version of the sexy librarian and might be a vivacious animal under that maroon cardigan; and the mildly exotic Ramon, a Middle Eastern–looking boy with a bumpy nose who spoke perfect Quebecois French. I’d pursue them in that order of difficulty. Screw waiting around to get roofied at an Omega-Delta-Who-Cares keg party; I was handpicking my fraternity.
I got Kieran into bed immediately. It was almost too easy, and he was too thrilled and too thankful, like I’d granted his Make-A-Wish. I surely wasn’t his first, but I was one of four. His inexperienced hands almost shook as they touched me, and the sex itself remained in its earliest stage of development: very perfunctory with virtually nothing in it for me. All I got was a mild workout. I waved good-bye while he was still in bed, dazed in his tighty-whities, and bought myself a coffee on my way home so I could get some postcoital studying done. Nothing is a bigger turnoff than someone who is overly grateful. Blech.
Next, I asked Ramon out for a drink. He complimented my leather cap, and I invited myself back to his apartment. Things went so much faster and smoother when I took charge of the date. Ramon turned out to be so nice that I wanted to go out with him just to see if I could make him angry. If he were in a tribe, it would be with the levelheaded hunters. He was also some sort of genius who’d already obtained a computer science degree and had returned to school to get an anthropology degree, for fun! If his idea of a good time was getting a second bachelor of arts, I was about to show him another dimension. He also owned a business—some spacey company that made lasers or photons or luncheon meat or something.
Ramon didn’t have any roommates, but he certainly knew how to entertain. Once we were in his place he swiftly moved us from a glass of wine
in his kitchen to something a little stronger in his bedroom. What a relief it was to be with someone experienced. There was no discussion and no anxiety emanating from his body. Plus, he was such a good student that I stopped paying attention in class. While we cuddled after sex, I’d ask him to summarize our shared lectures. It was like sleeping with Cliff of Clifs Notes. I dragged him to bars and parties, and once even persuaded him to do ecstasy with me. Occasionally he’d complain that since he’d met me he wasn’t getting any work done. I took it as a compliment and asked him to massage my feet because my heels were killing me.
Dying to get a taste of the real Montreal, I kept pestering him to introduce me to his family. We could go together to the famous Cheval Blanc bar; they could teach me how to make poutine (a true delight of French fries, gravy, and partially melted cheese curds), and how to curse the Anglos. Then Ramon invited his mother and me over for dinner. His mother worked professionally as a fortune-teller and astrologer. (Was everyone in Montreal connected to the dark arts?) I was pretty sure Ramon was supplementing her income and there was pressure on him to become the family’s replacement breadwinner. Returning to college to take an anthropology degree was his subtle way of rebelling.
I sensed by the way she shook my hand that she already didn’t like me. After reviewing how to properly pronounce my name, she asked, “What’s your sign, sweetie?”
“Capricorn!” I said proudly.
She smiled like she had a secret. I wondered if she knew Natasha.
“You’re a Capricorn. That’s nice. Strong-minded, a dry sense of humor, a late bloomer.”
Was she or my Zodiac sign insulting me?
“You know, Ramon is a Libra. Capricorns and Libras . . .” She wagged her index finger back and forth. “It doesn’t work. The man likes balance. A goat can never give him that.” And then she glanced over at Ramon, who was making her a coffee.
Screw Everyone Page 8