by Rebecca Dana
I was beginning the fourth year of my relationship with Chad, whose name was not Chad, but let’s go with that. Chad was on an airplane at the time. Through what was then a miracle of modern technology, he was connected to the Internet from his coach seat. But what could he do? A monsoon was raging over New York City and he was gazing out at a clear night, thirty-two thousand feet above Nebraska. I put out all the pots and pans we had and was emptying them frantically, one after another, while thunder and lightning, so violent they seemed canned, exploded outside the windows. It was midnight, and our superintendent wasn’t answering the phone. “Did you lay out the beach towels?” he typed from up there in the clouds. Yes, I had. Here we were, living in the future, connected by satellites and fiber-optic cables and all the other filaments people have built to hold each other close even when they’re far, and it was all useless. “Try the super again,” he typed. I didn’t bother.
Instead I waited up for Chad to get home that night and ran into his arms when he arrived. He brought me a box of chocolates, and I dropped down on the couch and ate one self-consciously, then wanted another but didn’t have it. A damp mass of beach towels, brown with dirt and smelling like clay, sat in a heap in the bathtub. I could hear the roaches tap-tap-tapping around on the floor of the kitchen. The storm had passed, but it had been devastating, knocking down power lines around the city, destroying 508 trees in Central Park. If there is a God, he’s a bad director, unsubtle and obtuse.
After the flood—after the cockroaches descended and the ceiling caved in and the Hudson River turned to blood—did I then stop for a moment to consider whether Someone might be trying to tell me something? Of course not. There is no Someone, and there was nothing to tell. A few weeks later, I packed a bag and flew to the Middle East, to attend a film festival in Doha, Qatar, a fake, empty city baking on the west coast of the Persian Gulf, an hour south of Baghdad. The trip was a boondoggle, arranged through work, with all expenses paid. I had my own room at the Four Seasons, overlooking the hazy blue water and a small makeshift beach built exclusively for visiting Westerners, since locals are forbidden from sunbathing. The room was decorated in mildewed floral fabrics with not a hint of Arab influence. When I closed the heavy brocade curtains and looked around in the yellow lamplight, I could imagine I was visiting a wealthy aunt somewhere, if I’d had a wealthy aunt somewhere, instead of what I was actually doing, which was biding time in the middle of the desert while my life back home continued its biblical demise.
The business-class flight back to New York was my last innocence. I sipped soup and watched romantic comedies I would never otherwise have bothered to see and nibbled on an Ambien to drift in and out of sleep in my horizontal chair. I didn’t know if we were allowed to keep the fancy pajamas they handed out for the flight so I hid them in my suitcase before we landed. I made friends with a Mormon woman, a mother of three who lived in the suburbs. We took our picture standing in the aisle, and I bragged to her about my great boyfriend, and we planned to have dinner together someday soon. I brought Chad two presents: a T-shirt from the Four Seasons lobby gift shop that had three rough sketches of donkeys and the slogan “Particularity Qatar!” and a plastic mujahideen, a children’s toy, that lit up via an on/off switch located directly above the animal’s visible rectum.
Four days later I was sitting in the living room of my crumbling apartment, dizzy from lack of sleep, staring at the man of my crumbling life and finding myself unable to catch his eye. The Particularity Qatar! shirt was long forgotten on the couch. What had happened, exactly? I wasn’t sure. While I was gone there had been a wild Halloween night and a flirtation—chaste, he swore—with a filmmaker named Christy. I found out, I left, I cried, I returned, and here we were, sitting opposite each other, not drinking a bottle of red wine. I remember little about how the fight began and less about how it progressed. What I recall most clearly about the whole ordeal is the point at which my brain and body split apart and began operating separately and in opposition.
Things with Chad had been difficult for a while—for how long, I refused to contemplate. Our life was still perfect, of course, except that he had slipped out of his law firm job about nine months into our relationship and had languished around the apartment, spending days surfing the Internet in his underwear, hammering out breathless essays on obscure topics, which disappeared into the lukewarm soup of the Internet immediately after he published them, for free, on the Huffington Post. He was drinking a lot, staying out late, sleeping into the middle of the afternoon. And he increasingly found greater fault with me: I didn’t dance well. I read too much. Couldn’t I be thinner, stand up straighter, wear more makeup and higher heels? Of course, there are two sides to every story, and if Chad was offered the chance to defend himself, I’m sure he’d come up with something, probably something breathless and obscure that he would publish for free on the Huffington Post. For now, you’ll just have to accept that my version of things is correct. If I may speak objectively, it is not only correct but also quite generous to Chad.
So Chad had had a “platonic” fling with Christy the filmmaker, but he was very sorry about that and also about all the mean things he’d said about my dancing and my posture. He would fix everything if I would just stay. He wanted me to be his wife. I would never find “compatibility” like this anywhere else, he said. I would never find anyone who could make me laugh like he could. There was just one issue from his perspective, one small detail, but he vowed we could work through it. He called this “our chemistry problem.” The issue was: I wasn’t pretty enough.
“But with Randi and Jacob”—these were our friends, on whose couch I’d been sleeping since the fight began—“he just thinks she’s beautiful all the time,” I sputtered, “when she’s tired and cranky, when she hasn’t showered for three days, when she doesn’t feel beautiful at all.” I stopped and looked at him, but he refused my eyes. “Do you ever think I’m beautiful?”
He said nothing for an outrageously long period of time, and this is when my brain walked out and my body stayed put. At last he looked up, slowly shrugged his shoulders, raised his hands in the air in a gesture of hopelessness and said, with regret, “I think you’re pretty?” Like that—“pretty?”—as if he were apologizing for putting too much salt in the mashed potatoes.
I spent a long time staring into my full glass of wine. I felt like a kid safety-belted into the backseat of a car, looking out the window at the scenery whizzing by and unable to focus on a single image. What do you do when the person you love most in the world confirms all your worst fears? All my fixing things from the outside had failed. Everything I had ever wanted—New York, the great apartment, the glamorous job, the perfect boyfriend, the shiny hair—felt like a sham.
“Why did you ask me out in the first place?” I said at last through tears, gripping the stem of the glass.
“You were cute?” he asked after a minute. Everything was a question. “I don’t know?”
His past girlfriends had been “beautiful on the outside,” he said. I was “beautiful on the inside,” an observation that should have left me more comforted than it did. He itemized the features of my body that were under par, physical attributes that hadn’t quite worked for him from the start and had only marginally improved over the years. His skin looked gray to me from across the room. Deep, dark bags hung under his eyes. He had bought a new-model iPhone that afternoon, when I had been riding around aimlessly on subway trains, crying behind black sunglasses. The torn white Apple packaging made a halo around him. His posture was that of an old man, but the scene conjured a little boy on Christmas Day. Tears streamed from his eyes.
I felt a wave of nausea and stumbled off to the bathroom, but he intercepted me in the hall, pressing his forehead into my shoulder. To me, he was perfect looking, tall and broad, “a Maccabee,” as I told my friends. I never quite understood how this man, who had been so popular in high school, who had lost his virginity to an older girl at the age of thirteen and had
had women (and men) throwing themselves at him ever since—how he could possibly fall in love with me: the late bloomer, the nerd, the girl who had lost her virginity just to be rid of it at the age of twenty-three. Truth be told, he never quite understood it either. But it had happened, and it had felt powerfully inescapable—exactly right—for a long time. Now, all of a sudden, it didn’t.
We stood frozen in the hallway for what seemed like hours that night, crying and saying nothing. It was late, so eventually we went to bed. He tried to hold me, but I wouldn’t let him. Instead I curled up on the far edge of the mattress that a few weeks earlier had been my life raft, feeling hideous and unlovable. A short time later, I woke to the sound of Chad sobbing upright next to me. “I don’t want this to be our last night together,” he said when he caught his breath. It was.
The next morning we went to get breakfast and didn’t eat it. I wondered what to do with my laundry. Where did it go if not in the laundry bag with the rest of our things? He pleaded with me to combine our clothes, as if one last trip to ABC Cleaners would be the thing to wring this misery out. I told him I thought we needed to be apart for a while. “Okay,” he said. “You take five years and go sow your wild oats and then you’ll come back and be my wife.”
It was a beautiful day outside, bright and cool with a light breeze. I sat down on our bed and straightened my legs, pressing the backs of my thighs against the corner of the mattress. It felt dry and cool inside the antiseptic room. Chad came in and sat down next to me. “I have something to tell you,” he said. I stared down at my feet. The red nail polish was chipping. My toes were turning blue from the cold. From somewhere out of my field of vision, Chad spoke. I couldn’t quite make out the words, but I gathered the gist: He’d cheated.
With strangers. Without condoms. While drunk and high. For going on three months now. While I was working. While I was off at yoga class or waiting for him to come home. Remember that time right before my birthday, when I’d had a rough day at work and he’d told me not to think about a thing, that he’d bought salmon and asparagus and was going to make me a special dinner? I’d come home and found the apartment empty, the salmon still wrapped in its protective paper, the asparagus in plastic, uncooked. He called to say he was still at a party, having such a good time, couldn’t he just stay a little longer? Sure, I said, whatever you want. I got into bed to read a few pages of my book and nodded off eventually. He came in at one o’clock in the morning, woke me up, showered and made me a fried egg on dry toast. I found out later she was one of those insufferably flawless exotic goddesses who somehow abound in New York. I found this out because he’d posed with his arm around her for a society photographer, and I came across the picture at work. The first thing I recognized was my scarf around his neck.
He kept talking. but I didn’t hear a word. I just focused my eyes on my fading pedicure. Taking pity at last, my brain came back for my body, a searchlight cutting through the fog. “This relationship is over,” I said. “Please leave so I can pack my things.”
He didn’t move.
I am the child of screamers. The sound of screaming makes my stomach clench and my head hurt. It makes me fold up into a ball, search out the nearest blanket to hide beneath. I had never screamed, not once, in my adult life. Until that moment. Just then, my cheeks caught fire, my lungs inflamed, and it suddenly felt like there weren’t enough fucks in the universe. From a safe distance, I saw the whole scene play out, as if I were back on Qatar Airways, drinking curried broth and half watching the latest Sandra Bullock flick between naps. All I consciously felt in the moment was a righteous thumping in my chest, the timpani drumbeat of a woman in love with a man, in love with her life, with the look of her life—scorned and humiliated.
I told him I would never be his wife, never have his children, that he was pathetic and would never be happy and would probably die alone. He shuffled out into the hall. I tried to slam the door, but because of the water damage it no longer fit its frame and came shuddering back open a couple of inches. The violence of the gesture caused a cascade of white paint chips to tumble down from the decomposing spot on the ceiling, narrowly missing his head. I could see his face looking in at me, while I stood there shaking.
I screamed until my throat gave out. And then, as quickly as the rage had come, it left me. My hands shook as I packed T-shirts, jeans, sweaters, underwear, laptop, chargers, contact lenses and all the other basic necessities. Chad stood in the living room, staring at the ground. I walked past him in silence, out the door and down the four flights of stairs into the crisp, brilliant afternoon.
He caught up to me just as I was turning north on Eighth Avenue. It had been a two-block sprint, and he was winded. He stopped in front of me, panting, struggling to catch his breath.
“What,” I said, not as a question. He was blocking my way.
Because it was a gorgeous late fall day, everyone in the West Village was out for a stroll, sucking up the last ultraviolet rays before hunkering down for a long cold winter. Chad and I, standing at an angry distance on the sidewalk, were a boulder in a stream. I saw the crowds flowing around us and felt a sharp pang of envy. For one thing, their lives weren’t coming crashing down in this instant, as far as I could tell. For another, they were getting a show. One of the single best features of life in Manhattan is that occasionally you’ll chance upon a public breakup. You hear them from time to time, out on the street or in the apartment down the hall, a woman screaming and a man issuing grunts in his own defense, or the other way around. It’s free theater, better than Broadway. Voices will sink to low, furious tones outside a bar at two a.m.; paint chips will tumble from the ceiling above. Poor breathless Chad and I were collapsing dramatically, in full public view. If anyone noticed, they didn’t let on. But New Yorkers are used to this sort of thing. We are people who build towers and then spend our lives climbing them. When it all falls apart here, it falls.
Chad slumped over, one hand on his waist.
I realize now, looking back, how lucky I am. Some people agonize for years after a breakup, driven mad by ambivalence and longing. I had it easy. In that moment, watching this person I no longer recognized struggle to collect himself, I felt something pull and snap into place inside me, some unknown internal override mechanism taking control of my system, steeling my stomach, propping me up, clearing my eyes. At my feet was everything I’d ever wanted. Instead of falling down with it, I floated away.
Lush Places
The Daily Beast offices are on 18th Street and the West Side Highway in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, on the second floor of an all-glass building designed by Frank Gehry to evoke a ship’s billowing sails. Inside, the decor seems to have been provided by the makers of Skittles, with red, yellow, green and blue contemporary furniture dotting the open floor plan. The result is a futuristic Scandinavian-style work space, where you might expect to find tall pretty blondes in tight sheath dresses walking around with trays of protein shakes. The lights are large disks suspended from the ceiling. The bathrooms are covered in red, yellow, blue, green and purple wall tiles, with automatic sinks and toilets that go on and off with little warning or provocation.
My title at the Beast was senior correspondent. That work entailed reporting the occasional bit of breaking news, but it mostly meant I wrote topical essays intellectualizing tabloid news stories, or attempting to, drawing traffic without reveling too much in the muck. The day Chad met the insufferably flawless exotic goddess, for example, I happened to have written a piece called “The Immaculate Confession,” in which I praised late-night talk show host David Letterman for the candor he’d used in discussing his much-publicized extramarital affairs.
Working at the Beast was my dream job, one of those fake-seeming Manhattan gigs that require one to attend fashion shows and posh luncheons at our editor’s brownstone on Sutton Place. On one occasion, I spent an evening chatting with Meryl Streep. On another, I gave Madeleine Albright a hug. The Beast itself was a bubble, secu
re and insular at a time when virtually every other news organization was suffering through painful cutbacks. Of course, it is always more complicated than that, and the Beast didn’t remain insular and safe forever. Any workplace, especially a media organization and especially one as small and quirky as the Beast, is full of drama and intrigue. But when I squint my eyes and look back on my first year there, I just see rainbows after the flood.
The Beast was named after the fictional paper in Evelyn Waugh’s comedic novel Scoop. Its entire staff was comprised of fictional-seeming characters, led by our indefatigable, brilliant, warmhearted, blond and terrifying editor in chief, journalism legend Tina Brown. Tina was a grown-up publishing prodigy, now in her fifties and several acts into her career. She had been the editor in chief of Tatler, the glamorous British fashion and news magazine, when she was twenty-five years old. She went on to edit Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and to launch a magazine called Talk, which was more famous for its largesse than anything else—for the enormous, star-studded parties thrown in its honor—but which was done in by the economic realities of post–September 11 New York. Like any woman who attains a position of power by means other than angelic sweetness (which is how precisely no woman attains a position of power), Tina came to be known by an easy caricature: manic, relentless, willing to do anything to make her magazines sell. This portrait is reductive, unfair and also, in the best sense, true. She was a visionary editor, curious to the point of exhaustion, and her staff spent most of its time trying to channel her editorial sensibilities into the perfect mix of high high culture and low low. Like many of my colleagues, I regarded her with a mix of worshipful devotion and fear.