So, before I ever met Maris, I knew of her from Twitter, which means I knew she was well read and sarcastic (but not “fluent in sarcasm,” as assholes claim to be in their online bios) and pretty and enthusiastic and feminist.2 I knew of her blog, Slaughterhouse 90210, a sharp and charming mashup of images from television and quotes from literature. The party we met at was in honor of Slaughterhouse’s fifth anniversary. She, most likely, knew that I was a fan of pizza and the Notorious B.I.G. and Bruce Springsteen, that I had at some point read at least a book, and that I performed stand-up comedy at some of America’s most illustrious, most storied, most renowned venues.
In addition to our general awareness of one another, we’d also had a couple of public back-and-forth interactions and one brief DM (direct message, to those in the know, a.k.a. nerds who are online too much) exchange. I had tweeted that I was a little offended how often people recommended Portnoy’s Complaint (Philip Roth’s novel about an unpleasant Jewish guy who masturbates compulsively) to me. Maris had faved the tweet, which is a series of words that I understand is causing basically everyone over the age of sixty to search for the nearest well to throw this book down. Let’s just say it’s internet-speak for “she indicated that she enjoyed my joke.” I then sent her a DM to thank her for acknowledging my Philip Roth reference, in hopes that she did not think that I was an unpleasant Jewish guy who masturbates compulsively.
So, that’s the slightly wonky, slightly less classically romantic version of the story. We didn’t “meet online” in the traditional sense of the phrase, but we did have a sporadic online correspondence before we met in person. But that’s all complicated to explain to people who aren’t regularly on the internet for personal or professional reasons. So we leave that part out depending on whom we’re talking to. After that, it’s basically the same as the short-and-sweet version.
Unless one of us tells you the rest of it.
The Whole Story
Here’s the thing: nothing about the earlier versions of the story is false, or even misleading. The conversations were all accurately quoted. The emotional core of the events was not altered or embellished. Everything happened exactly as I related it. The one exception being, in reality it was way drunker.
I had already had a drink or two by the time I showed up at the party, which was unlike me. Years earlier, a headliner I was opening for asked me if I ever drank before my sets.
“I don’t,” I replied. “I don’t really drink much at all.”
“That’s good,” he said, before continuing, “I usually have two before I go on, and then I bring a third up with me. You don’t want to have too many.” He paused. “But God forbid you have too few.” Those words stuck with me the way Hamlet remembered the dire proclamations of his father’s ghost, a cautionary tale in seven words.
I showed up at Maris’s get-together at Botanica, a Houston Street dive whose dim lighting didn’t so much provide ambiance as plausible deniability of what the floors and seating would look like under direct light. Recognizing only Drew, the friend who invited me, and whom I also barely knew, I headed straight for the bar and ordered a cheap glass of terrible whiskey with enough ice to kill most of the taste. You don’t want to deaden all the flavor, though, because otherwise you forget that it’s poison and you drink it too fast. The trick is for the booze to taste bad enough that it cuts down on the danger of overconsumption. At least, I think that’s how you’re supposed to do it.
By the time I met Maris, she had a head start on me beveragewise. I finished my first drink, which was really my third, and I got another one, plus one for her in honor of her blog’s anniversary.3 We bullshitted and drank. Exuberant and, unbeknownst to us, three years from being married, we kissed at the bar, which by now you understand was not usually something I did. Not that I was opposed to making out with people immediately upon meeting them; it’s that other people didn’t often feel that way about me. In the past I usually needed more time to prove I’d be good to kiss and not just someone who could calculate the tip at a group dinner or help you jump-start your new boyfriend’s car six months after we broke up. But it was happening that night. I was being fun. I was having fun. We were having fun.
As Maris and I talked more and kissed more, Drew sensed that our experience of the party no longer required more than just the two of us, and she began peeling other friends away, gently guiding them toward the door. She shepherded the stragglers out of the bar, and I had that same thought I’d had every time a woman showed interest in me: Does this lady want me to take her home? Oh! Great! Going back to her place would also avoid the embarrassment of her seeing my messy bedroom, which looked like burglars had trashed it looking for valuables, found none, and then trashed it further out of spite.
Maris paid her tab and we left the bar together. But in the cold late-night air and the hot wash of the streetlights it quickly became clear to me that Maris was a little tipsier than she’d seemed in the bar, a little wobbly on her feet in a way that hadn’t registered before. The situation presented a problem, because thanks to Drew’s Top Gun–level wingwoman skills, there was no one else around.
My entire state of mind shifted. Does this lady need me to take her home? I thought. Oh, great. My life in a nutshell. Always the designated driver.
“I promise I’m not going to murder you,” I said, like a murderer also would. “But it’s late, and I want to make sure you get home safely. Do you live near here, at least?”
Without answering, Maris hailed a cab, crammed herself inside, and beckoned for me to join her. I figured I’d escort her the (presumably) short distance home, watch her safely enter her building, and then direct the cab driver onward to Harlem. The night was winding down at last.
The taxi driver asked Maris her address, and she gave him a pair of cross streets I’d never heard of. I pulled out my phone and Googled the names, which turned out to be in Brooklyn Heights, a cozy neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront, twenty minutes in the opposite direction from where I needed to go. Never mind. The night wasn’t exactly young anymore, but it was still acting like it, like a white guy in his thirties who still used slang terms like “dope” and “lit.”
When we got to Brooklyn, I asked Maris which building was hers, and I couldn’t make out where she was pointing, so I paid the driver and got out of the car behind her to help complete the last leg of her journey. I’d never spent much time in Brooklyn Heights before. It wasn’t cheap enough for most people I knew to be able to live there, and there weren’t any comedy shows in the neighborhood that I was aware of, so I never really had an occasion to go. The streets all looked the same to me. Two- and three-story brownstones interspersed with a few larger buildings, none of them new, all of them distinguished, repeating themselves in a regularish pattern. It was like walking through a Hanna-Barbera cartoon remade by Wes Anderson. I hoped she knew where she was going.
“That’s it!” Maris said. Her keys jangled for a while, like the intro to a Christmas carol, as she experimented to find the one that would open her front door. She swung the door open, and we hugged goodbye before she disappeared through the lobby.
I walked out toward the mainest street and waited a few minutes for another cab. This is what the money’s for, I thought, like a just-recently-not-broke Don Draper. I got home shortly after one a.m., which I realize does not even crack the top ten million latest nights in New York City history. One in the morning in New York is like ten at night in most other American cities. People just expect you’re willing to be up that late on any day of the week. Still, for a newly employed, historically unfun person, it counted as an adventure.
On top of that, I liked Maris right away. And, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve formed the opinion that if you like someone, you should tell them (unless you’re married or they’re married or they already told you they don’t like you or they’re a stranger on the bus or any other disqualifying circumstance arises). Playing it cool gets you nowhere. If you play it cool, and the o
ther person plays it cool, then chances are you’ll end up as two cool players who never kiss. Where’s the fun in that? The worst thing that happens if you tell someone you’re into them (a.k.a. “playing it hot”) is that you find out they don’t feel the same way about you. That is functionally the same as not doing anything and never finding out whether they are into you or not. Take your destiny into your own hands! Risk rejection for the sake of (potentially) finding love!
What that bravado looked like in action was a one p.m. text from my office. I tried to time it soon enough that I seemed on top of things, but not so fast that it seemed like I’d been lying awake, eyes wide open, waiting to talk to her.
Hey you seemed like you were in some rough shape last night. Hope you’re feeling better today.
Not my finest work, but it got the ball rolling. Maris wrote back that she was feeling, improbably, okay. I then texted her the second-coolest thing I’ve ever said, which was a considerable drop-off from the first.
It was really great to meet you. Let’s hang out sometime soon before it gets weird that we haven’t hung out.
She agreed (hooray!), but between her work schedule and an upcoming trip out of town I had planned, there weren’t many open windows for the two of us. We settled on a late breakfast (but still too early a meal to qualify as brunch) the following Saturday. I drove back to Brooklyn Heights, which was more charming in the daylight, when I wasn’t exhausted and lost.
Because of the timing of our unconventional first real date, we were both clear eyed and alert. More than sober, we were fully caffeinated. Not that you need to drink for a date to be good, but the woozy glow of two drinks can help light the way toward a pleasant evening. (You don’t want to have too many, but god forbid you have too few, after all.) On my ride to the restaurant I worried that maybe our daytime versions wouldn’t be as compatible as our nighttime selves. There are some people who are fun to hang out with only when you’re drunk, after all. Everyone has had friends whom you wouldn’t go to a museum with and whose judgment you don’t fully trust, but they’re great for pounding booze, dancing, and talking shit. Conversely, there are also the friends you can never party with. Either they turn weird and dark, or they go too hard, forcing you to hit the eject button on the night after saying something like, “What? I didn’t even know it was possible to take cocaine rectally!”
What if Maris liked only Party Josh, the Josh who had three drinks over four hours and invites you to Europe impulsively, even if he hopes you don’t take him up on it, because it would be a little weird to meet his family that way? Scheduling the date felt like saying yes to a totally different kind of adventure than that earlier in the week, a high-focus, low-distraction situation in which I couldn’t just duck out after ten minutes if things got weird.
To my great relief, we had a wonderful time eating omelets at a café before the brunch rush even started, like parents on vacation do. We talked about our new jobs and where we grew up. We drank iced coffee and resolved to see each other again soon. I don’t remember if I kissed her goodbye,4 but I do remember thinking, Either way, it’s going to be a little weird, which it was, which was fine. And then I got in my car and drove to Rhode Island.
After that we dated for a year, in which time Maris saw my apartment exactly once. It was the Dorian Gray portrait of my recently much more stable life, and I didn’t want her to see it, so I made the effort to visit her in Brooklyn, despite the distance. It was exactly the opposite of what I’d intended. We moved in together5 and dated for another year before we got engaged. Then, a year after that, we got married. And now you know pretty much the whole story.
Fish Tacos
For years throughout high school, I carried around a can of chicken noodle soup to give to anyone I saw in the halls who seemed to be having a bad day. That seems, on its face, kind. But really what it was, was off-putting and bizarre. What is someone going to do with a can of chicken noodle soup in the middle of the school day? There’s not even anywhere to heat it up. Plus, soup makes you feel better when you have a cold, not when you fail a test or get broken up with. I was performing generosity in a way that mostly cultivated an image of someone thoughtful and quirky. I was eccentric and boundaryless on purpose because I didn’t have the confidence to be anything else.
I’d learned from movies and TV that the nerds were the good guys and the cool kids were the jerks. So I was careful to show that I knew my role in the school’s ecosystem. I wasn’t trendy, but boy was I nice.
By college, I had learned that friendship isn’t a food drive, and I quit the schtick with the canned goods. But I still practiced food-based acts of affection. Although, as I’ve gotten busier and lazier, I’ve found that the threshold for cooking for others has become nearly insurmountably high. In fact, it’s less of a threshold and more like one of those half doors that keeps horses in a barn while letting them look out at the farm. A trick I learned from my mom is that if you bring Chinese restaurant chicken fingers to a work potluck, people lose their minds. It blows your coworkers’ pasta salads and salad-salads out of the water, and even though it feels like cheating, there’s no rule against it. Still, when the occasion calls for it, I can slap together a pretty solid batch of brownies from a family recipe, but I save that for truly high-stakes events.
And when are the culinary stakes higher than in a new relationship?
For my fourth date with Maris, my now wife, I proposed that I would come over to her apartment and cook her dinner from scratch. I planned to make fish tacos because they don’t require any elaborate preparation, but they show off a little more culinary range than the meals I usually prepared for myself: a big bowl of spaghetti, or a smaller bowl of spaghetti left over from the previous night’s batch.
Cooking, I thought, would prove that I was domestic and planned ahead, two qualities Kate Hudson is always looking for in a man in movies. Maris was going to be so impressed. Unsure of what she had on hand, I bought all-new ingredients. A fresh canister of chili powder. A new bottle of olive oil. The tilapia, of course. I showed up laden with groceries and set to work.
After dinner, in true dude fashion, I felt disproportionately proud of my minor domestic accomplishment. That is, until Maris ever so gently let me know that while she appreciated my gesture, she didn’t really like fish. And, more important, Maris has diabetes and tortillas aren’t great for her blood sugar. I probably should have done a little more research before dinner. I could have—at the very least—asked a few basic questions like, “Is this food something you’d ever voluntarily eat?” and “Could this dinner accidentally murder you?”
A surprise is worthwhile only if it’s something the other person actually enjoys. Otherwise you’re just saying, “Here you go! Please pretend to like this for the sake of my self-esteem!”
Fish tacos, which I chose because they were easy and fake sophisticated, were pretty much the worst possible choice. Not only did she not like them, they were actively terrible for her health. I’m glad I hadn’t also baked brownies. It would have seemed like a low-key assassination attempt.
From that night on, I have always asked Maris what she wants for dinner before launching into some elaborate preparation (or, far more often, ordering takeout).
In five years, her answer has never once been fish tacos.
Tickle Me Fancy
I don’t remember the specific moment I fell in love with Maris, but I can pinpoint the exact second I realized I wanted to be with her always. It was sixteen hours after we buried my grandmother, and Maris and I were lying in bed at my parents’ house. Technically, we were lying in beds. We lay side by side on two twin mattresses, nestled together in a single frame. It was an apparatus my parents inherited from my mother’s parents, who slept like that for as long as I can remember, an arrangement I’ve never heard of before or since.
The day had felt like three. We’d woken up early to attend the funeral, at which I spoke. As the member of my immediate family most comfortable with pub
lic and public-adjacent speaking, I have given eulogies at several of my grandparents’ funerals. It’s a way I’m specifically qualified to contribute, and it helps me locate myself in the mosaic of my extended family. I take the responsibility of eulogizing seriously, as if there were any other way to take it, so I’d been up late the night before, trying to sum up my grandmother’s life in eight hundred words.
The burden of sadness squashed down on top of me, compressed by the additional weight of conveying Nana Kay’s vast personality. A woman of precise and far-ranging taste, she’d traveled to all seven continents and somehow returned with hideous, unwearable souvenirs as gifts for me and my sister. Even into her late eighties, she remained a matriarch of impressive gravity. She drove. She baked. She argued. Two weeks before her funeral, she had essentially hosted Thanksgiving dinner from her deathbed. She slept through the festivities, family congregated nearby. I stayed up late, typing and erasing, struggling with the words to summarize her the next morning in front of those who knew her best.
The ceremony was held at a Jewish cemetery, despite Nana Kay’s staunch secularity. In fact, she’d wrangled special permission from a rabbi to be cremated, despite the general Jewish prohibition on the practice. Even in death, she made sure things were just the way she wanted. I delivered the eulogy after brief speeches by my cousin Amy and my great-aunt Barbara, Kay’s sister. Afterward, we hugged and cried, which I think means I did an okay job.
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