There he was.
There he is.
Trenton, New Jersey, on the last day of 1998.
* * *
Ted and Rachel are standing on Cynthia Krazewski’s front porch. Rachel has prepared herself as though for battle. She is clad in a skintight black dress and shiny high heels, her hair sprayed and bound in a tight French twist. Ted rings the doorbell, and after what feels like a pointedly long time, Cynthia Krazewski opens the door.
“Hi,” says Ted. “I’m Ted.”
Rachel nudges herself between them. “Anna invited us,” she says.
Cynthia says: “Who?”
“Anna Travis,” says Rachel.
Cynthia shrugs her shoulders like she’s never heard of Anna Travis. Maybe she hasn’t. “Whatever,” she says. “Beer’s in the fridge.”
Inside the party, Ted locates Anna immediately. She is in the corner, talking to Ryan Creighton. She’s wearing a dowdy smock dress over leggings, and she’s dyed her hair an unbecoming shade of red. In contrast to Rachel, Anna looks a little . . . bland? She looks what Ted knows her to be: tired, overwhelmed, and sad. Ted thinks: Is it possible that Rachel is hotter than Anna? Or that they’re both equally hot? His world trembles on its foundations, but then Ted sees Anna put her hand on Ryan Creighton’s bicep and laugh flirtatiously, and once again she body-slams his heart.
Rachel sees Ted looking at Anna looking at Ryan Creighton. She stiffens, and she grips Ted’s hand until it hurts.
Realizing she’s being watched, Anna takes Ryan Creighton’s arm and leads him over to Rachel and Ted. There is a bunch of superficial hugging and some Oh my God it’s been so longs. Anna and Rachel giggle over some small embarrassing habit of Ted’s—Have you ever noticed how he—while Ryan Creighton looks seriously bored.
Ted thinks: Everyone at this party could die tonight, including me, and I wouldn’t even care. He gets very drunk.
At some point in the night’s festivities, the doorbell rings, followed by a slight commotion. Anna disappears from sight. Ted tries to go after her, but Rachel holds his wrist in a firm and brutal grip. Rumor filters back to them that Marco Hernandez was at the party briefly, but left when he found out that Anna was there. There is more talk about the restraining order, and whether it’s real or not, and how that would even work.
Midnight comes.
Ted kisses Rachel with tongue and squeezes her ass. In doing so, he discovers that it is possible to enjoy something and yet not care about it in the slightest. He finds this sensation—feeling pleasure, and simultaneously feeling detached from the pleasure—to be, itself, quite pleasurable. He wonders if he has miraculously become a Buddhist, or suffered a psychotic break.
When Ted finally withdraws his tongue from Rachel’s throat, he sees that Anna is watching them. Anna looks upset. Rachel sees Anna watching them, and kisses Ted again, in triumph. Ted once more feels like a patch of peed-on grass.
Anna disappears, but when Rachel leaves to go to the bathroom, she returns.
“Ted, can I talk to you?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says. “What’s up?”
“In private.”
She leads him outside, onto the porch. It’s freezing, sleeting a little, but he’s wrapped in enough drunken warmth that he doesn’t really mind it. Anna lights a cigarette. She exhales a gray wave of smoke and scratches at her thighs. It’s news to Ted she smokes.
“I can’t believe you,” she says at last. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Did what?”
“Made out with your girlfriend like that. Groping her and everything. Right in front of me.”
“Huh?” Ted says. “What?”
Anna slumps forward. “I don’t know . . .” she says. “I guess I just thought . . .” She starts again. “I guess, we’ve been talking for weeks about how hard this was going to be for me, and about how worried I was about how it’d be, seeing everyone. You knew I didn’t even want to come here, but then you decided you were going to come with your new girlfriend, so I had to. And then Marco showed up, and it was like, super traumatic, and when I come to you and try to get support, you’re in the corner making out with Rachel Derwin-Finkel. It just . . . I feel like our relationship isn’t the same anymore, that I’ve lost you somehow. I miss you, Ted.”
There are tears in her eyes. Ted has never seen her look so despondent, and Anna often looks very, very sad.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Anna asks, sniffling.
“I guess . . .” Ted says. “I’m not sure what to say.” Awkwardly, he puts his arms around her. “I’m here for you, Anna. You know that.”
“I know,” she says. She puts her head on his shoulder, and for a second, it’s like that other good night, the night of the bonfire, the brief lifting of the yoke, freedom from the circle: Marco hurting Anna, Anna hurting Ted, Ted hurting Rachel, these endless rounds of jealousy and harm.
Anna says, weeping, “I’m so tired of chasing after all these shitty guys. I want to be with someone I can trust. I want to be with someone good.”
And then Anna, luminous Anna, beautiful Anna; Anna, with her dimples and smooth skin and the freckles on her nose and her pretty, pretty hair; Anna, whose smell enchants him; Anna, who has ruined him for all other women; Anna, the one he’d die for. Anna, the most perfect girl in the world—
Anna kisses him.
I will be good for you, Anna, Ted thinks, embracing her. I will be good for you for the rest of my entire life.
Just give me one quick minute to break up with Rachel first.
* * *
Anna waits on the porch while Ted goes back inside to tell Rachel he is leaving. “It’s Anna,” he says. “She . . . We . . .”
He doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t have to. The look that Rachel gives him penetrates deep, deep, deep into whatever tattered mess he has of a soul.
Of course, there is screaming.
There is crying.
There is beer-throwing. (Just the liquid, not the glass.)
But then, at the end of it, Ted leaves the party with Anna. He walks out of a party with Anna Travis that he walked into with Rachel Derwin-Finkel, and if there is a heaven, this is the feeling he will be allowed to live inside of for eternity; the greatest, most triumphant moment of his entire life.
* * *
Twenty years later, from the perspective of his hospital gurney, he has to admit that everything pretty much went downhill from there.
* * *
Ted loses his virginity to Anna Travis on March 13, 1999, in the top bunk of her dorm room, after they’ve been dating long-distance for three and a half months. To the surprise of both parties involved, Ted has difficulty maintaining an erection. The reason for this, though he would never, ever confess it, is the look on Anna’s face. She just seems so dutiful. She looks like she is taking medicine, or eating vegetables. She looks like she is thinking, Whelp, my life sucks so bad I guess I might as well have sex with Ted.
No, that’s not fair. Anna is having sex with him because she loves him. Since they started dating, she’s told him that she loves him, dozens and dozens of times. She’s having sex with him because she loves him, and because he loves her, and sex is a normal part of this equitable exchange. She loves him because he is “good.” But by “good,” she means “safe.” And by “safe,” she means “You love me so much that you’ll never, ever hurt me, right?”
Anna loves Ted, but she does not want him in a way that causes her to suffer; she does not want him desperately, despite herself. And it turns out that is how Ted has always wanted to be wanted: the way he has always wanted women. The way Anna wanted Marco, and he wanted Anna, and Rachel (or so it seems, in retrospect) wanted him.
In the absence of this painful wanting, Ted has trouble getting hard. At first, he tries to address the problem of his vanishing erection, by shouting at himself, TED YOU ARE HAVING SEX WITH ANNA TRAVIS! But that doesn’t work. What lifts his dick, finally, is thinking about Rachel. Ab
out how, if she knew he was having sex with Anna Travis, she would be so jealous and so pissed. Look at me now, Rachel, he thinks triumphantly as he comes.
You fucking slut, you stupid fucking bitch.
* * *
Ted dates Anna, long-distance, for the next year and a half. For the first year, he struggles valiantly to make it work, but for the last six months, he cheats on her: first with a girl on the floor of his dorm at college, and later, with the girl who will eventually become the next in his series of girlfriends, and in between these women, he also cheats on her with Rachel Derwin-Finkel, while they’re both home over Thanksgiving break. The whole time Ted is having sex with Rachel, Imaginary Anna flutters around him, waving her angel’s wings in his face: I’m so beautiful and perfect, she sighs. How could you possibly prefer having this creepy weirdo sex with Rachel Derwin-Finkel? Is that really the kind of person you are?
The thing is, it’s such a relief, having sex with Rachel Derwin-Finkel. He doesn’t have to pretend around her. She knows exactly who he is.
* * *
As he gets older, he finds himself refining the technique he first used, however inadvertently, on Anna; his secret seduction trick. This is what you do: drag your heart like bait in front of them. Pretend to be an easy catch, while always staying slightly out of reach. Oh look, it’s me, here I am, I’m just nerdy old Ted. You’re so much better-looking than me, you’re so much cooler than me, you’re the greatest you’re the smartest you’re the best. With you, for you, I’d be the greatest boyfriend who ever, ever lived.
Pathetic Ted, short nerdy Ted, ladykiller Ted, using a thousand tiny hooks to catch onto a woman’s ego, like a burr clinging to the cuff of her pants. All he has to do is smile, and make a few self-deprecating comments, and women start telling themselves he’s so “nice” and “smart” and “funny.” They argue themselves into settling for him, talk themselves into just one date. They feel proud of themselves for giving him a chance.
The older he gets, the higher his stock rises. More and more women want out of that endless chase after Marcos; they yearn to collapse into the arms of their Teds.
Ted hears other men congratulate themselves on this new reversal of power, the fact that now, in their thirties, it’s so much easier for them to get dates. Maybe there are men who can enter into this bargain wholeheartedly, who can look into the eyes of their Annas and not mind the truth of what they see there . . . but not Ted. What Ted saw in Anna’s eyes, he also sees in Sarena’s and Melissa’s and Danielle’s and Beth’s and Ayelet’s and Margaret’s and Flora’s and Jennifer’s and Jacquelyn’s and Maria’s and Tana’s and Liana’s and Angela’s: that tiredness, that willful giving up. He sees how smug they feel about settling for a “good guy,” which means: a guy they secretly think they’re too good for. He sees them think they’re safe.
He gets pleasure out of it, a kind of pleasure, fucking these women, but it’s entwined with loathing, both for them and for himself. He gets his revenge in his fantasies, which grow more and more elaborate, until at last they involve sharp knives and utter desperation. It’s like the game kids play: Why are you slapping yourself? Stop slapping yourself! Only in this case, it’s: Stop impaling yourself on my dick!
The women he dates all turn on him eventually, of course. The more they feel like they’ve compromised themselves by being with him, the more passionately they pursue him when he launches his retreat. He becomes an instrument of pure self-punishment: What is wrong with me, that even this fucking loser won’t give me what I want? They identify all sorts of problems in him that he needs them to fix: he isn’t “in touch with his emotions,” or he’s “afraid of commitment,” but they never question the basic premise, that somewhere deep down, underneath it all, he wants to be with them. Of course you have feelings for me, Angela might as well have been saying, right before she threw the glass at him. Admit it, dammit!
I’m me.
And you’re Ted.
* * *
In 2018, Ted is Facebook friends with both Anna and Rachel, though he hasn’t seen either of them in years. Rachel is married, a pediatrician, and the mother of four kids; Anna lives in Seattle as a single mom. She seems to be doing okay, now, but for a while she was going through a rough time; Ted suspects she may be in some kind of recovery program. She posts inspirational quotations that strike him as beneath her: I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination and It is in the darkest moments that we must try to see the light.
He thinks of Anna, now, as he’s lying on the gurney. In fact, he sees her. She’s coming at him through the rainbows, accompanied by a chorus of voices, a fluttering of wings.
What time is it? What day is it? What year? Here is Anna, but she’s not alone. She’s with all the women of the tribunal. They’re here, at his bedside, whispering about him, observing him closely, judging him the way they always have. They’re fighting, disagreeing about something, and he senses there is a misunderstanding at the center of all of it, some base confusion. He could clear it up, if only there weren’t a giant shard of glass embedded in his forehead, if only this blood would stop pooling in his mouth.
I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, he tries to tell them. I just wanted to be seen, and loved for who I am. The problem was, it was all a misunderstanding. I pretended to be a good person, and then I couldn’t stop.
No, wait. Let me start over. That’s not right.
All I’ve ever wanted is to be loved. Well, to be worshipped. To be desired, madly and painfully, to the exclusion of all else. Is that so wrong?
No, wait. That’s definitely not what I meant.
Listen, listen. I can explain. There’s a bad Ted underneath the good Ted, yes, but then, under that, there’s a Ted who’s good for real. But no one ever sees him; his whole life, no one ever has. Underneath it all, I’m just that kid who wanted nothing more than to be loved and didn’t know how to make it happen, even though I tried and tried and tried.
Hey, stop. Put me down. I’m trying to tell you something. Would you stop talking and listen to me, please? The light up there is hurting my eyes. But also, maybe turn on the air-conditioning? It’d be a little easier to explain myself if it wasn’t so damn warm. Are those flames licking at my feet?
I’m trying to say something important. Where are you taking me?
Listen to me, will you—
I’m a nice guy, I swear to fucking God.
The Boy in the Pool
“Let’s watch it again,” says Taylor. She’s sitting so close to the television that Kath can see its cool pastel glow reflecting off her cheekbones as the credits roll.
“I thought we were going to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board,” complains Lizzie, but Taylor is already crawling toward the VCR. Kath suspects that Lizzie likes the movie as much as Taylor does, but that she’s embarrassed to show it. Meanwhile, nothing embarrasses Taylor: “What was you guys’ favorite part?”
“Um, all of it?” Lizzie says.
Kath swirls a handful of popcorn seeds from the emptied bowl and sucks the salt off them, buying time. “I liked . . .” she begins. There was a point during the movie when Taylor had squeezed her knees together, rocking a little, as a flush spread up the hollow of her neck. Kath had been riveted. “I liked the part where the lady dunks the boy underwater, and then he comes up for air . . .”
There’s a dizzying pause as Lizzie stares at her, blankly, but then Taylor giggles and Kath knows she’s guessed right. “Oh my God, yes. The way he looked at her? Imagine somebody looking at you like that. Like Eric Harrington. Or . . .” Taylor’s eyes dart toward Lizzie. “Or Mr. Curtis. Lizzie, imagine Mr. Curtis looking at you that way.”
“Shut up,” Lizzie says, throwing a pillow at Taylor. Taylor bats the pillow away, laughing, and then slumps against Kath, unexpectedly dropping her head onto Kath’s lap. “Hey, it’s the good part,” she says, waving at the TV, where a teenage boy is doing the butterfly stroke in revers
e across the screen. “Let’s just watch from here.”
Kath is closest to the TV, but if she shifts position, Taylor will have to move, too, so she waits to see if Lizzie will start the movie, and she does.
On-screen, a boy swims in only his underwear, watched by a woman whose lips are the same shade of red as her long, sharp nails. Taylor sighs contentedly and settles herself against Kath. The woman emerges from the shadows and dangles her toe in the deep end of the pool, like bait. Kath is unsure what to do with her hands. The boy swims up to the woman and says something Kath can’t quite hear, since they’re keeping the sound low because of Taylor’s mom. The woman begins toying with the boy, teasing him, letting him come close before pushing him away. Kath decides to put one hand on the floor and the other on her leg. The boy grabs the woman’s foot, cradles it, then plants a kiss on each of her painted toes. Lizzie snorts. “That’s ridiculous,” she says. “Who wants to kiss someone’s disgusting feet?” The woman rests her foot on the boy’s bare shoulder and pushes him under the water. Very, very lightly, Kath begins stroking Taylor’s hair. The boy surfaces, gasping, and the woman dunks him under again. He kicks and thrashes, gripping her calves with his hands. The boy looks a little like River Phoenix, and a little like Leonardo DiCaprio: those soft, bruised eyes. Kath trails her fingers along the hairs on Taylor’s temple, and they prickle up beneath her touch. The woman releases the boy, and he rises, droplets of water clinging to his eyelashes, to his dark feathered hair. Opening his eyes, he gives the woman the look Kath knows that Taylor loves: the one that says, I’d let you do anything to me. Taylor tenses and shivers with pleasure, sending a sparkler of sensation fizzing along Kath’s spine. The woman laughs and kisses the boy, then slides onto his shoulders. The boy buries his head between the woman’s thighs.
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