“Lauren and I are having some trouble,” he finally told me. “We’re probably going to break up.” His brow was furrowed, his voice breaking a little.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. He was confiding in me, I thought—surely, this was a good thing? I didn’t think about or talk to Lauren. I didn’t want to know her side of the story; if Andrew said they were having issues, then she must have felt the same way. Maybe Lauren herself was instigating their issues and wanted to break up! Andrew did seem really upset about it, after all.
One evening after work, we shared a train ride back to his neighborhood and took a walk with his dog. Lauren wasn’t home. Andrew seemed skittish, like he didn’t want to be seen with me. I wasn’t sure if he was nervous about running into Lauren, or if somehow seeing me on his home turf was disorienting. Maybe whatever fantasy he’d had about me wasn’t holding up. I wasn’t sure how to feel—perhaps it was better if I just backed away slowly from the situation and pretended it never happened. But I couldn’t. I now had a hardcore, couldn’t-shake-it crush. I obsessed over Andrew’s every move at work, dissected his emails to me, wondered what he was doing at night. Was he thinking about me as much as I was thinking about him?
A few days later, Andrew emailed me that he and Lauren had broken up and he was leaving their apartment that night. “I feel like absolute hell. I’m not sure I can really go through with this,” he wrote. “Thanks again for hanging out. I’ll do my best to not make this situation any weirder than it already is.” I read this email over several times. By “go through with this,” did he mean “break up with Lauren”? Why did he seem so conflicted about someone he said he wanted to break up with so badly?
I wondered what this email was supposed to mean. He still brought me coffee and sent me flirty emails, but it seemed like the situation was weighing on him, which he kept me abreast of in great detail. I felt like maybe I shouldn’t know these details about his relationship, but I also wanted them; they confirmed that they weren’t right for each other—right?
This went on for a few more weeks, until it was time for the Rolling Stone holiday party, which was going to be held at a bar in the East Village. “I’m not going to go,” he told me, as I stood by his cubicle. “I’m worried…” He paused and looked around, as though someone might be listening. “I’m worried Lauren is going to be…violent.”
A few minutes later, I got an email from him. “Lauren knows we’ve been talking,” he wrote to me. “She’s extremely pissed—at me, not you. I’m really sorry for dragging you into this.”
I forwarded his email to Alison. “Can you believe this shit?” I wrote. For a while now, Alison had been not so subtly encouraging me to step away from the situation, pushing the theory that Andrew and Lauren had enlisted me as a sort of pawn in a revenge game they had going. She wrote back: “They were obviously bored with their lives, and now they’re really enjoying this bit of drama.” It had taken me months, but finally the endless back-and-forth, the secrets—it was obvious, in a way it hadn’t been before, that Andrew was telling Lauren one thing and telling me another. I felt stupid for falling for it.
He had made it clear that ultimately whatever he felt for me was eclipsed either by what he felt for Lauren or the drama that my having a crush on him had created in their relationship, and I needed to move on. I thought about that old chestnut of “when people tell you who they are, believe them.” Andrew was telling me exactly who he was in seven-foot-tall neon signage. What had I been thinking? I resolved to ignore him, to decline his offers of coffee, and try to move on.
It worked for a couple of weeks. I was able to put him out of my mind, even though I had to see him every day. But soon, he started sending me emails and advance copies of albums again. He brought me coffee when I didn’t ask for it. He told me he missed me. Finally, he said that Lauren had officially moved out and asked if we could maybe hang out again sometime.
This is a terrible idea, I thought…and agreed to do it anyway. I was still attracted to him, even after everything that had happened. I was also curious—what if it turned out that we had an amazing sexual connection and were destined to be together? Maybe the story of how we met would become a funny cocktail party anecdote—“Can you believe Andrew was actually dating someone else in our office when we met?!” Har, har, har, pass the truffled almonds! Plus, I had won. Lauren had moved out! He had chosen me.
I went over to his apartment. It looked like half his furniture was gone. We had sex that was reminiscent of an oil derrick drilling into the ground, where I was the ground and his dick—which was kind of grossly meaty—was the derrick. There had been almost no foreplay, just his pale body suddenly naked and on top of me. I stared up at the ceiling and thought, This is what Lauren was fighting for? It was the kind of sex where you’re embarrassed for the person you just had it with because they clearly thought it was good sex, and you don’t want to have to be the one to tell them that actually, just because you have a big dick does not mean you are good at sex, and in fact perhaps having a big dick makes it even more likely that you will be bad at sex, because you take it for granted that you will be good at it. I couldn’t even muster up the energy to fake an orgasm.
In the morning, I woke up early and wondered what the protocol was. Should I sneak out? Were we going to have breakfast together? “Hey,” he said, waking up. “I was thinking I’d make a pork roast today. Do you want some?”
“Um, sure,” I said.
“It reminds me of being back home in Michigan,” he said. “It’s also one of the only dishes I know how to cook.”
The recipe turned out to be a pork roast with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup poured over it and baked. “So I know all her stuff is gone, but Lauren still has a key to the apartment,” he said as we ate the pork roast.
“Wait, what?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “So I guess she could probably walk in at any moment.”
“So you’re telling me she also could have walked in at any moment last night,” I said. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t told me this. I felt violated, like I had once again been outwitted by him and Lauren. He probably told her that I was coming over, I thought suddenly, and felt sickened.
“I should go,” I said, taking the plate to the sink. “I’ll see you at work?”
Monday came, and it was time to go back to the office. Along with the regular spate of emails from publicists pitching their bands’ news, Andrew continued to email me. He sent me pictures of his dog and links to videos he thought I’d find funny, but also emails about how he felt so terrible about how he was hurting Lauren, but that it also wasn’t fair to me. And could we talk? Or no, actually, let’s not talk, I can’t talk to you, it’s too painful. Wait, I’ve changed my mind. Let’s talk.
The sad thing was that I was still attracted to him, even after all the mind games and the bad sex, and a part of me still held out hope that somehow things would magically work out between us. It didn’t help that at the same time he was telling me that he needed to tend to Lauren’s feelings, it felt like he had studied a manual of me and managed to pinpoint exactly what would lure me back in—he was giving me just enough to keep me interested, and then pulling back as soon as it seemed like I reciprocated his feelings. But even as I recognized his sociopathic manipulation, I couldn’t bring myself to reject it. Lauren, meanwhile, sent me an email telling me that Andrew had been hooking up with random people he’d met on Craigslist and asked how that made me feel. I didn’t respond.
I tried to extract myself from the situation, but it wasn’t easy. He just wouldn’t leave me alone, even as he told me how he wanted to leave me alone, and I was having a lot of trouble trying to move on, because he sat ten yards away from me and I saw him every day.
Finally, I told him it would be better if we stopped talking. “It’s for the best,” Meera reassured me, when I told her things were over. She wa
s kind and supportive, but I knew she and the rest of my friends had grown tired of the drama of their thirty-three-year-old friend acting like a high school sophomore who got all her relationship tips from Seventeen magazine.
In April, I was in my apartment with some friends, having a casual Passover seder, when I saw an email from Andrew come in on my phone. We hadn’t spoken much in the last few weeks, and I had started casually seeing someone else, a guy I’d met at South by Southwest named Dustin who was Andrew’s polar opposite—an evangelical Christian who worked in tech and was earnestly enthusiastic about everything; he was like an excitable Labrador puppy—and I had started to feel that I was finally, maybe, truly over Andrew. I went into the kitchen to read it by myself. It said: “Hey. So Lauren and I are kind of seeing each other again. I’m not sure it’s the most brilliant idea; it just kind of happened. I’m also not sure I need to be telling you this, but I figure the best thing to do is say something before you saw us together or something. If I’m wrong about that, I’m sorry. I’m still sad circumstances weren’t right for you and me. I really hope you’re doing well.”
“Everything okay?” Dustin asked when I rejoined him and the rest of my friends in the living room.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Actually, everything is great.”
CHAPTER NINE
Even though the situation with Andrew was finally, truly over, and Dustin was a welcome distraction, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a melodramatic waste the past few months had been. Now that it was over, what had I learned? That I could be easily targeted by master manipulators? Or—and this was a scarier thought—maybe Andrew wasn’t even that great of a manipulator. Maybe I was just an exceptionally easy mark for someone who knew to look for my particular combination of outward bravado and inward insecurity. Again, I felt like my desperate need for validation, especially when it came to my looks and attractiveness, had won out over rationality. I had thought Andrew could see the “real” me, but he had just been able to exploit my insecurities. It turned out that Revenge Jacket Doree was just the same old me in a slightly sexier getup. I had thought she represented moving forward, but maybe she was just holding me back.
Things petered out with Dustin when it became clear that he hadn’t left his evangelicalism as far back in the past as he had made it seem—he asked me, with no trace of irony, whether I had ever considered becoming a Jew for Jesus, and when I tried to explain that Jews for Jesus are a fringe, cultlike group who are not actually Jews, he seemed let down, like he had figured out this loophole that would allow me to remain Jewish and him to not feel guilty about dating someone who wasn’t saved. But I wasn’t especially broken up about Dustin. There was someone else on the horizon. And he was someone I had never thought would actually be interested in me, mostly because he was legitimately hot.
Dustin was handsome, but Luke had the rugged kind of hotness that radiated that old saying, “Men want to be him and women want to be with him.” He was tall and tan, with black hair that he wore up in a bun, and a wide, easy smile. (I previously would not have pegged myself as someone who would be attracted to a man bun, but it turns out that being incredibly hot means you can wear a man bun.) In my head, I had just been admiring him from afar, in the same way that Daniel and I had admired Louis Foster in college. But the fact is that Luke had slid into my Twitter DMs first—innocuously and casually, but definitely first. I had tweeted something about how Target had moved everything around and I couldn’t find anything, and he messaged me that he had just been there, too, and it was overwhelming and he just needed a picture frame. But I didn’t really think anything of it—he was friendly whenever he came by the office, so surely this was just Luke being friendly old Luke. Hot people are allowed to be friendly—right?
Oh yeah: Luke also worked for Rolling Stone. Which, given my track record, probably should have warned me off right away. But, I reasoned, he didn’t work out of the office all the time—he was a contributing writer, so he popped up periodically when he was finishing up a piece or had a meeting with an editor. He’d initially come by my cubicle a few months earlier, when he was working on a story about a musician who was in prison, and asked if I had any tips for how to best ensure that he’d be able to talk to the musician when he got out. I was flattered. Luke was a darling of the magazine’s editors; he got the plum assignments, and here he was, asking me for reporting advice. Well then! After the initial Twitter DM he sent me about Target, he popped up in my DMs periodically that spring, recommending barbecue places in Austin and offering to lend me Friday Night Lights DVDs.
His inconsistent office visits were how I justified developing just the teensiest, tiniest of crushes on him. Really, it wouldn’t be like the Andrew situation, at all, I told myself—first, because there was no way in hell Luke would actually be interested in me, and, second, because he was rarely around. There was no chance of a bad, embarrassing breakup that everyone in the office knew about and where I’d have to see the person day after day after day. After day. And the day after that. And, third, it wasn’t exactly a crush; I mean, I barely knew the guy. It was more of an appreciation. I could appreciate Luke’s attractiveness in the same way I could appreciate that Brad Pitt is attractive! If that meant I was objectifying him, so be it. He also barely had any social media footprint, besides Twitter, which was both appealing and frustrating, because how was I supposed to stalk his social media if he barely had any social media?
It was fun to flirt with someone so hot, but it also felt safe. Again, there was no way, I told myself, that he would possibly be interested in me. After all, I am a person who has hated pretty much every photo ever taken of herself, except for a couple of selfies where the lighting was perfect and I was able to take approximately five hundred pictures before I found one that was acceptable to post on social media. Luke, on the other hand, had been “papped” while interviewing a very handsome famous actor, and the paparazzi just assumed he was one of the actor’s friends, because he was just as hot as the actor was. Yes, I had a little crush on him, but his hotness was an objective fact. If someone took a candid photo of me walking down the street, I would undoubtedly be scowling, they would get my “bad” side, and I’d be wearing my most unflattering outfit, and it would be like one of those mean photos that the tabloids take when the headline reads, “Can You Believe What [Formerly Attractive Famous Actress] Looks Like Now?”
So that summer, when Luke resurfaced at the office, I was still content with swooning from a safe (physical, emotional) distance. But then he came by my desk and I blurted out that we should get barbecue sometime, since he seemed to know so much about it, being from Texas and all, and he said, “Oh, yeah, we should,” but in a way where I was convinced he was just saying that to be nice, because hot people are nice to not-hot people so they don’t feel bad, but to my surprise he followed up with an email. “We shouldn’t lose momentum!” he wrote, and then a few days later we were on…a date? It wasn’t clear to me, even when he paid for my dinner and we talked for so long that the barbecue place conspicuously started to close. He was funny, clearly very smart, and still blindingly hot. This was where being debilitatingly insecure came into play, because I still—still!—was not convinced that he like-liked me, as we used to say in seventh grade.
“We didn’t make out or anything,” I told Alison the next day. “So—I don’t know? It was maybe a date? I think I might like him. This was just supposed to be a crush. Oh god.”
“It was a date,” she said firmly. “It was a date! You went on a date with Luke.”
“Well…he did email me to say he had a great time,” I said. “I guess that’s something you say to someone you just went on a date with, right?”
We emailed back and forth for a couple of days—I tried to keep the tone light and a little coy, even though what I really wanted to write was DO YOU LIKE ME? BECAUSE I THINK THE TINY CRUSH I HAD ON YOU IS NOW A REAL CRUSH AND I CAN’T STOP THINKIN
G ABOUT YOU AND DO YOU WANT TO HAVE SEX? AND ALSO, DO YOU LIKE ME? Then he said he was leaving soon for Africa to play drums with a Britpop singer for a story, because that was the kind of life he led, but he suggested we hang out again when he got back into town. It took him a month to get back into town—a month where he sent me a few emails, each of which I immediately parsed for clues about his feelings for me—but when he did, we got dinner, and then drinks afterward, and then we made out in the doorway of a small bar in Carroll Gardens for half an hour. So I guess it was a date.
But then I didn’t hear from him.
“So I guess we just made out, and now he’s not interested,” I said to Alison a few days later. Unfortunately for her, she was my premiere confidante for any and all Luke-related updates. “I mean, I haven’t heard from him. I guess it’s over.”
The look she gave me said you’re being dramatic, but she said, instead, “Are you sure? Didn’t you say he was going somewhere?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think he’s in Canada? Or Minnesota? I can’t remember. He was going to one place, and then another place.”
“He’s probably really busy and doesn’t have Wi-Fi,” she said. “Did you email him?”
“No!” I said. “Of course not.” I didn’t want to seem desperate or needy, which was what I was convinced an email would telegraph to him.
“Maybe he doesn’t think you’re into him,” she said.
This statement was so outrageous that I laughed. “I doubt it,” I said.
He emailed a couple of days later as though I hadn’t spent the last few days completely spiraling about every single comment I had made on our date, trying to figure out if that was the reason he had decided he didn’t like me. But now, I realized, I had more than a crush. I had fallen for him, and hard. I told myself that Luke was everything I thought I wanted—superhot, supersmart, an amazing writer, and seemingly, if confusingly, into me—but even after just two dates, it was clear that any kind of relationship with him was going to be entirely on his terms: He was always out of town on assignment, and when he was in town, he was often on deadline for a story and could not be disturbed. There was something Easy Rider–ish about him; I could picture him on a motorcycle, man bun tucked beneath the helmet, driving off into the sunset, without caring about anyone or anything. He also wrote for a men’s magazine, and his assignments were a hilarious collection of men’s magazine tropes: Drive, alone, across Alaska! Report on the nightlife scene in Johannesburg! Profile man’s man Jon Hamm!
Thanks for Waiting Page 7