It’s not like he was some kind of serial killer. Blood held no erotic charge for him, either in fantasy or in real life. Key to the scenario, moreover, was the fact that the woman was choosing to stab herself: the idea was that she wanted him so badly, had been driven so wild with obsessive physical desire for his dick, that she was driven to impale herself on it despite the torment it caused. She was the one taking the active role; he just lay there as she thrashed around on top, doing his best to interpret her groans and facial twitches as signs that she was being crushed in an agonizing vise between pleasure and pain.
He knew it wasn’t great, this fantasy. Yes, the scene he was imagining was ostensibly consensual, but you couldn’t ignore its underlying aggressive themes. Nor was it reassuring that his reliance on the fantasy had increased as the quality of his relationships had declined. Throughout his twenties, Ted’s breakups had been reasonably painless. None of his affairs had lasted longer than a few months, and the women he’d dated had seemed to believe him when he told them he wasn’t looking for anything serious—or at least to believe that the fact he’d said this meant they could not accuse him of wrongdoing when it ultimately proved to be true. Once he reached his thirties, though, this strategy no longer worked. More often than not, he’d have what he thought was a final breakup conversation with a woman, only to have her text him shortly afterward, telling him she missed him, that she still didn’t understand what had happened between them, and that she wanted to talk.
Thus, one night in November, two weeks before his thirty-sixth birthday, Ted found himself sitting across a table from a crying woman named Angela. Angela was a real-estate agent, pretty and polished, with sparkly chandelier earrings and expensively highlighted hair. Like all the women he’d dated over the past several years, Angela was, by any objective measure, way out of his league. She was two inches taller than he was; she owned her own home; she made an amazing fettuccine with clam sauce; and she knew how to give a back rub with essential oils that she’d sworn would change his life, which it had. He’d broken up with her more than two months earlier, but the subsequent texts and phone calls had become so relentless that he’d agreed to another face-to-face meeting in the hopes of gaining some peace.
Angela had begun the evening chattering brightly about her vacation plans, her work drama, and her adventures with “the girls,” performing a happiness so clearly calculated to make him see what he was missing that he writhed with vicarious embarrassment, and then, at the twenty-minute mark, she dissolved into tears.
“I just don’t understand,” she cried.
What followed was a hopeless, absurd conversation in which she insisted that he had feelings for her that he was hiding, while he insisted, as kindly as he could, that he did not. Through sobs, she marshaled her evidence of his affection: the time he’d brought her breakfast in bed, the time he’d said, “I think you’d really like my sister,” the gentleness with which he’d taken care of her dog, Marshmallow, when Marshmallow was sick. The problem, it seemed, was that while he’d told Angela from the beginning that he wasn’t looking for anything serious, at the same time, confusingly, he’d also been nice. When what he ought to have done, apparently, was to tell her that she could get her own damn breakfast, inform her it was unlikely that she’d ever meet his sister, and been a jerk to Marshmallow when Marshmallow was puking, so that both Marshmallow and Angela would have known where they stood.
“I’m sorry,” he said, over and over and over again. Not that it mattered. When he failed to admit that he was secretly in love with her, Angela was going to get angry. She was going to accuse him of being a narcissistic, emotionally stunted man-child. She was going to say, “You really hurt me,” and “The truth is, I feel sorry for you.” She’d announce, “I was falling in love with you,” and he would sit there, abashed, as though the claim damned him, even though it was obvious Angela didn’t love him—she thought he was an emotionally stunted man-child and she didn’t even like him all that much. Of course, it was hard to feel entirely self-righteous about all this when the reason he knew what was coming was that this was not the first such conversation he’d had with a woman. It was not even the third. Or the fifth. Or the tenth.
Angela sobbed on, a figure of perfect, abject misery: her reddened eyes, her heaving chest, her mascara-stained face. As he watched her, Ted realized that he couldn’t do it any longer. He couldn’t apologize one more time, could not continue with this ritual of self-abasement. He was going to tell her the truth.
The next time Angela stopped for breath, Ted said, “You know none of this is my fault.”
There was a pause.
“Excuse me?” Angela said.
“I was always honest with you,” Ted said. “Always. I told you what I wanted from this relationship from the very beginning. You could have trusted me, but instead you decided you knew better than I did what I felt. When I said I wanted something casual, you lied and said you wanted the same thing, and then immediately you started doing everything you could to make it something else. When you didn’t manage to make what we had into a serious relationship—the thing you wanted, and I didn’t—you got hurt. I see that. But I am not the one who hurt you. You did this, not me. I’m just—just—the tool you’re using to hurt yourself!”
Angela let out a little cough, like she’d been punched. “Fuck you, Ted,” she said. She pushed back her chair, preparing to storm out of the restaurant, and, as she left, she picked up a glass of ice water and threw it at him—not just the water, but the whole, full glass. The glass—it was more of a tumbler, really—cracked against Ted’s forehead and landed in his lap.
Ted looked down at the broken tumbler. Well. Maybe he should have expected that. Because who was he kidding? This many crying women couldn’t be wrong about him, no matter how unfair their accusations felt. He reached up and touched his forehead. His fingers came away red. He was bleeding. Awesome. Also, his crotch was really, really cold. In fact, as the ice water soaked through his pants, his dick started to hurt even more than his head did. Maybe there should be a legal limit on how cold restaurant water could be, the way there was a limit on how hot coffee could be at McDonald’s. Maybe his dick would get frostbite and shrivel up and fall off, and then everyone he’d ever dated would come together to throw a party in honor of Angela, the fearless heroine who’d ended his reign of terror over the single women of New York.
Wow, he was bleeding more than he’d originally thought. In fact, so much blood was streaming from his forehead that the water in his crotch was turning pink. People were running over, but sound was coming to him kind of scrambled and he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Probably something along the lines of: you deserved this, asshole. He remembered what he’d said right before Angela had flung the glass at him—I’m just the tool you’re using to hurt yourself—and he wondered if this was related somehow to the dick-stabbing fantasy, but he was bleeding and freezing and possibly concussed, and he didn’t have it in him right then to figure it out.
* * *
He hadn’t always been this way.
Growing up, Ted was the kind of small, bookish boy female teachers described as “sweet.” And he was sweet, at least where women were concerned. He spent his childhood and early adolescence floating through a series of crushes on older, unattainable girls: a cousin, a babysitter, his big sister’s best friend. These crushes were always sparked by some small gift of attention—a minor compliment, genuine laughter at one of his jokes, remembering his name—and they contained no overt or sublimated aggression at all. Just the opposite: in retrospect, they were remarkably chaste. In a recurring daydream he had about his cousin, for example, he envisioned himself as her husband, puttering around the kitchen as he prepared breakfast. Dressed in an apron, he hummed to himself as he squeezed fresh orange juice into a pitcher, whisked the pancake batter, fried the eggs, and placed a single daisy in a small white vase. He carried the tray upstairs to the bedroom and sat down on the side of the
bed, where his cousin was snoozing beneath a hand-stitched quilt. “Rise and shine!” he said. His cousin’s eyes fluttered open. She smiled sleepily at him, and as she sat up, the quilt slid down, revealing her bare breasts.
That was it! That was the entire fantasy. And yet he nursed it so long, and with such devoted attention (Should the pancakes have chocolate chips in them? What color should the quilt be? Where should he put the tray so that it would not fall off the bed?), that it imbued his aunt and uncle’s house with a sexual aura that remained palpable to him even as an adult, even though his cousin had long ago become a lesbian and immigrated to the Netherlands and he hadn’t seen her in years.
Never, not even in his wildest imaginings, had young Ted allowed himself to believe that his crushes might be reciprocated. He wasn’t stupid. Whatever else he might be, he’d never been that. All he’d ever wanted was for his love to be tolerated, maybe even appreciated: he yearned to be permitted to linger worshipfully around his crushes, lightly bumping up against them every so often, the way a bee might brush against a flower.
Instead, what transpired was that as soon as Ted fixated on a new crush, he would start to moon over her, gazing at her and smiling like a dope, concocting reasons to touch her hair, her hand. And then, inevitably, the girl would recoil—because for some impenetrable reason, Ted’s affections provoked in their targets a reaction of intense and visceral disgust.
They were not cruel to him, these crushes. Ted was drawn to the kind of dreamy girls to whom open cruelty was anathema. Instead, perhaps understanding that their earlier small attentions had been the doorway through which Ted had entered uninvited, the girls set about locking themselves down. Instituting some universally understood emergency girl protocol, they refused to make eye contact, spoke to him only when necessary, and stood as far across the room as it was possible to get. They barricaded themselves inside fortresses of chill politeness, where they hunkered down and waited for as long as it took for him to go away.
God, it was awful. Decades later, remembering those crushes made Ted want to die of shame. Because the worst part was, even after it became obvious that the girls he adored found his attentions excruciating, he still desperately desired to be around them and to make them happy. He struggled in the grip of this conundrum, trying to exert self-control in the form of brutal self-punishment (standing naked in front of the mirror, forcing himself to look at his skinny legs, concave chest, small penis: She hates you, Ted, face it, all girls hate you, you’re ugly, you’re disgusting, you’re gross) and then losing control and finding himself awake at three in the morning, crying with frustration and typing states where its legal to marry your cousin into the internet search bar, playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with his hopes.
The summer before high school, after a particularly humiliating episode with a camp counselor, Ted went for a long solitary walk and considered his future. Fact: He was short and ugly and greasy-haired and no girls would ever like him. Fact: Just knowing that someone as gross as Ted liked them creeped girls out. Conclusion: If he didn’t want to spend his whole life making women miserable, he needed to figure out a way to keep his crushes to himself.
So that was what he did.
His freshman year of high school, Ted crafted a new persona: cheerfully asexual, utterly unthreatening, scrubbed clean of any whiffs of need. This Ted was a sixty-year-old comic in a fourteen-year-old’s body: hilarious, self-deprecating, and much too neurotic to ever have actual sex. When pressed, this Ted claimed to have a crush on Cynthia Krazewski, a cheerleader who was so unattainable that he might as well have claimed to have been in love with God Himself.
Thus disguised, Ted was free to befriend the girls he really did like, and to channel all his energy into being nice to them without ever hinting that he wanted any more than that. The truth was, he didn’t want more, not really. He had no faith in love’s capacity to cause him anything but pain. Far easier, and more pleasant, to be friends with girls: to chat with them, to hear their stories, to drive them places, to tell them jokes that made them giggle, and then to go home and masturbate himself into a frenzy, banishing his desires to the realm of the imagination, where they couldn’t do any harm.
* * *
By his junior year, all of Ted’s romantic energy had coalesced around a single target: Anna Travis, who not only tolerated him, but considered him a friend. This was the magic of his new persona: As long as Ted kept his feelings hidden from them, girls—some of them, at least—liked him quite a lot.
Though she was considerably more popular than he was, when it came to love, Anna was as hopeless as Ted. For three weeks in ninth grade, Anna had dated Marco, a soccer player who’d dumped her when he’d gotten promoted from the freshman team to junior varsity, and she’d never gotten over it. Years later, Anna still had an insatiable desire to talk about Marco with anyone who would listen, and since everyone else was sick of the topic (and, perhaps, a bit unnerved by how crazy her eyes got when it came up) her sole partner for these conversations was Ted.
Obviously, Ted didn’t exactly want to help Anna spend hours analyzing what it meant that Marco had said, “Miss you, kid,” and punched her in the shoulder when he’d seen her in the hallway the week before . . . but at the same time, he also did. Because telling Anna how stupid Marco was for dumping her, and how infinitely superior she was to Marco’s new girlfriend-of-the-week, was the closest he’d ever come to confessing how he felt. Plus, watching Anna yearn for Marco provided fuel for Ted’s fantasies in which Anna yearned for him.
Fantasy: It’s late at night, Ted’s phone rings. Anna.
“Anna,” he says. “What is it? Is everything okay?”
“I’m outside,” she says. “Can you come down?”
Ted puts on his bathrobe and opens the door. Anna is on his stoop, looking miserable: hair messy, shirt askew. “Anna?” Ted says.
Anna flings herself against Ted and starts sobbing. He wraps his arms around her, patting her back as her chest shakes against his. “It’s okay, Anna,” he says. “Whatever it is, it’s okay, I promise. Shhhh, shhhh.”
“No!” she cries. “You don’t understand. I—” and then she tries to kiss him. Her lips brush warmly against his, but then he pulls away. She’s shocked, heartbroken. “Please,” she says. “Please, just . . .” He stands there stiffly, allowing her to slide her tongue into his mouth, and after a moment of hesitation, kisses her back, tenderly, but then, once again, he pulls away.
“I’m sorry, Anna,” he says. “I don’t understand. I thought we were just friends.”
She says, “I know—I mean, I tried to keep it that way. But I can’t hide anymore. It’s always been you, this whole time. I know you don’t feel that way about me. I know you love Cynthia. But I just . . . if you would just give me a chance. Please. Please.”
And then she’s kissing him again, and pushing him toward the bedroom, and he’s trying to resist, saying things like, “I just don’t want to ruin our friendship,” but she’s so insistent, she won’t stop begging him, she’s unbuttoning his pants, and sliding on top of him, and putting his hand on her breast. Once they’re both naked, Anna is gazing at him in a way that is both worshipful and anxious, and she says, “Tell me what you’re thinking,” and he sighs heavily and says, “Nothing,” and stares off into the distance, and she says, “You’re thinking about Cynthia, aren’t you?” and he says, “No,” but they both know that he is. Anna says, “I promise, Ted, if you just give me a chance, I will make you forget about Cynthia,” and then she slides her head down between his legs.
Every so often, Ted wondered if there was a chance Anna might like him as more than a friend. She didn’t like him as much as he liked her, that was obvious, and she was never going to show up at his doorstep sobbing from frustrated passion, but . . . maaaaaaaaaaybe? She sat close to him on the couch sometimes, and she was always trying to talk him into asking girls out, which in and of itself was probably not a good sign, but when she did it, she’d say t
hings like, “You’re a lot cuter than you think you are, Ted,” and “Any girl would be lucky to go out with a guy like you.” So even though she didn’t like like him, maybe there was some latent potential that he could activate if he only told her how he felt. But there was also a kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle thing going on, whereby any serious attempt to determine the state of the relationship would invariably alter it—and because change was scary, and he was 99 percent sure Anna didn’t like him like that and never would, he let things stay the way they were: good-old friendly, utterly dishonest Ted.
* * *
Anna was a year ahead of him in school, college-bound for Tulane, and the week before she left for New Orleans, she coaxed her parents into throwing her a huge good-bye bash. The party was a performance with an intended audience of one, Marco; an elaborate setting designed to show off Anna at maximum sparkle—and sparkle, dazzlingly, she did. She wore a short lace dress with a plunging neckline, and high heels, and lots of eye makeup, and she piled her tawny hair on top of her head. She surrounded herself with a coterie of other beautiful girls, all of them crying and laughing and shouting and posing for pictures and emoting so brightly that the rest of the world went dim.
Ted lurked around the edge of the party, hating himself. He and Anna had mostly hung out one-on-one, when she was feeling down about Marco and didn’t have the energy to go out. On these occasions, they sat around on the couch and ate pizza and talked. Anna was usually wearing sweatpants. Ted had rarely seen her like this, broadcasting her charisma at full force. He was painfully aware of his natural role at the party—fawning courtier—and he didn’t want to play it. Maybe he’d been deluding himself that he’d kept his feelings hidden all this time, when really he’d been walking around with his dick dangling out of his fly, unknowingly exposed. Maybe everyone in the room was thinking, oh, there’s Ted, he’s in love with Anna, isn’t it embarrassing, isn’t it cute. Maybe Anna knew, too.
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