But Enough About Me (17 page)

I met Sean at an East Village roof party. He was standing off to the side of a knot of art-school types who were animatedly talking—the males in cutoff fatigue shorts and Chuck Taylors, the females with girly tattoos (fairies, a flower chain around the ankle) and hair adroitly piled on their head in that careless knot I could never quite approximate. Did they use bobby pins?

Sean was wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans that were spattered with paint. Unlike everyone else at the party, he didn't look self-consciously hip. He just seemed vulnerable with his sad brown calf's eyes and tumble of honey-colored curls as he attempted to break into a conversation monopolized by a guy in a T-shirt that said Total Dick. To me, his skinny shoulders said “underfed” rather than “fashionably slinky.” He needed to eat, but the only vittles were some soggy ruffled potato chips still in the bag. There was never any decent food at these hipster parties. I would have happily settled for some “ironic” onion dip.

He caught my eye and smiled shyly.
Save me,
he mouthed.

I walked right over to him.

We were still talking as the last guest left the roof. Sean was the only child of Vermont professors who enthusiastically supported his career as
an illustrator, even after they paid for his degree in Eastern philosophy from Sarah Lawrence. Unlike the tightly strung p.r. executive I had recently dated, Sean didn't own a suit. He was gentle and shy, and he liked to cook and go on excursions upstate in one of his parents' castoff Volvos. He laughed at even my lamest jokes. I'm a sucker for a grown man who giggles—not a high-pitched serial-killer sort of giggle, but a lighthearted laugh.

He took my phone number, and the next night we went to dinner and the movies. Some of my friends complain that this sort of outing shows a distinct lack of imagination, but I find those top-of-the-Empire-State-Building dates too artificial. He brought a flashlight to the cinema, tucking it into a messenger bag. When a couple a few rows ahead of us started arguing loudly about whether the leading man had had some work done on his face, Sean walked over with his flashlight and shined it right into their eyes. “The movie has started,” he said in a brisk, official tone. “Let's keep it down.” The couple gaped at him, confused. Was he an employee?

He clicked off the flashlight and returned to his seat. “Works every time,” he whispered.

Well. I was smitten. Sean had the kind of freewheeling personality that I envied. At home wherever he was, he rebuffed the New York eyes-forward rule and struck up conversations with any schmo in speaking range. Tattered old gals spotted his friendly face at fifty paces and sensed correctly that he wouldn't edge away from them but would happily chat away, sometimes for hours. When he started to make me dinners in my tiny apartment, they wouldn't be served until late, because we could never get out of a grocery store. He would end up trading recipes with some lady named Sylvia who had lipstick traveling up to her cheek and a Lord of the Onion Rings T-shirt.

With Sean, no activity was mundane. If we were on the subway, he didn't filter out the noise as I did but would troll the car for conversations that amused him. Once he nudged me and flicked his eyes in the direction of a gaggle of burly guys of various hues who were intently comparing the merits of cheese fries throughout the city.

“The ones at Brothers Bar-B-Cue have a lotta cheese,” said one guy with a thicket of back hair poking out of his tank top. “A lotta cheese. You really get your money's worth.”

“There were some good cheese fries at that Yankee game,” his friend broke in. “And the fries had the skins on them.”

Another guy waved his hand dismissively. “I don't ceh for that,” he said. “I don't ceh for the skins.”

“What about the ones we had at Rockaway beach, on the boardwalk?” put in a third. “That was some mad cheese.”

“Those cheese fries were three dollars and fifty cents,” said the tank-topped man indignantly. “Them shits was expensive. Yo, for three-fifty I could buy a pound of cheese and make my own damn cheese fries.”

The debate raged on for fifteen station stops. “I love this town,” said Sean as we stepped out onto the subway platform.

Sean told me I was his soul mate two weeks after we met. I felt that the polite response was
You're my soul mate, too.
I didn't know whether this was true, but I didn't mind when he promptly moved most of his stuff into my apartment. Isn't that always the way? Is it because women have clean towels? He was never eager to go back to his place in Brooklyn, which he shared with two roommates, one of whom wrote his initials on his particular third of the eggs.

Even though our space was cramped, I loved playing house. It was a tonic to come home from a trying interview to a sunny greeting and some new stir-fry concoction that he had made for dinner. Sean was an avowed vegetarian, and I admired that he had organized his life around his beliefs, while I was largely belief-free. He didn't eat “anything that had a face” and spent his weekends doing volunteer work for the Earth Society and the Waterwheel Alliance and some organization that worked to prevent “environmental racism,” whatever that was. Most impressively, he didn't own a TV. “I'd rather experience life than watch it on a little box,” he would say. He was horrified by my viewing habits. One night he clicked off the TV and brought me to Red Hook, in Brooklyn, a semidecrepit port where we peered
inside old warehouses and climbed the rocks along the shore. “Wasn't that better than TV, the opiate of the masses?” he demanded as we rode the F train home.

“I thought that was religion,” I said.

“That, too,” he said.

There's something seductive about the whole crunchy lifestyle, with its scented oils and sexy yoga instructors. I soon fell into step alongside Sean. I may have been glitzy on the weekdays, but on the weekends, when I was shopping organic and writing checks to the Save the Manatee Club, my life was rich with meaning!

Sean's easy disposition made up for the fact that orders for his illustration work weren't exactly pouring in, but as he often told me, he didn't need money to have fun. He would laugh at my careful financial planning, the money charts and graphs that would arrive weekly from my father.

His favorite expressions were “No worries” and “It's up to you,” which I found refreshing after Ritchie, who hijacked every plan and found my friends “boring.” I thought Sean's willingness to hand over all decision-making to me was actually a confident move. He was happy to absorb all of my friends as his.

“What do you want to do tonight?” I asked one evening after we had finished a chick-pea-and-cumin concoction. “There are a couple of good movies at Film Forum.”

“I don't care,” he said. “It's up to you.”

“Let's go to a movie, then,” I said, grabbing my purse. “Let's get a big tub of popcorn and some Sno-Caps, and we'll sit in the air-conditioning and hold hands.” I had picked up this habit of setting the stage from Heather, who liked to drum up advance excitement before any activity with a vivid picture.
Let's go to the mall, and we'll sit at the counter at the Neiman Marcus café and have their Confucius chicken salad and iced tea, and then we'll go buy lip gloss, and try on shoes, and then we'll walk around the bookstore, oh and then we'll get ice-cream cones. Maybe Rocky Road.
Or, if you'd had a hard day:
I know what you should do. Go buy a big pile of guilty-pleasure magazines
and some slice-and-bake cookies, then turn off the phone, take a bath, and get in your pj's. Camp out on the couch with a cup of peppermint tea and a big fat blanket and a couple of pillows so you'll be all cozy. Turn on some soap operas, put the cat in your lap, and then just enjoy yourself and flip through magazines and have some nice, warm cookies.

In a short while I thought of the apartment as Sean's. Somehow he had managed to physically coat the place with his presence. Even when he wasn't around, little piles of organic souvenirs abounded: loamy mounds of discarded socks that still held his foot shape, Fritos-like fingernail clippings, crumpled napkins with a smeary mouth print of lentil soup or vegetarian chili. A light sprinkling of his cast-off chest hair seemed to blanket every object in the place, and he wasn't even particularly hirsute. He had a habit of lounging around the place nude, which I would have found annoying with anyone else. Instead, I would just shake my head and laugh—proof, I felt, that I was adopting Sean's freewheeling ways.

After a few months, I felt it was time for him to meet the family. I started by inviting Dinah and Patrick to dinner.

“Why do I have to meet them?” Sean pouted. “I can meet them later.”

“You know from all of the phone calls I get that we're very close.”

He came over and gave me a hug. “I'd rather have you all to myself,” he said. Was that endearing? Or creepy?

“It's just one night,” I said.

That Friday, Dinah and Patrick burst in the door in their usual typhoon. She was four months pregnant but had as much energy as ever. “Hi, Sean,” she said, giving him a kiss.

“Hi,” he said, hugging her woodenly.

“Hey, buddy,” said Patrick heartily, vigorously shaking his hand. Patrick was the sort of burly, reliable, self-deprecating guy that most men liked on sight—the one presiding over the barbecue that the kids hang all over because he's not afraid to be silly—but Sean hung back.

“Cute,” Dinah whispered when he went to the kitchen to check on the tofu Mee Grob that he had made. “He looks like that singer from INXS.” When he
returned, Patrick was standing by the window to cool off. A self-described “large, sweaty man,” he was frequently seen at family parties out on the deck, swabbing his face with his ever-present bandanna. Dinah, meanwhile, was unpacking a potted begonia and a candle for me. She always brought gifts. “It's more money than it needed to be, but I know you love candles,” she said.

Sean examined it. “You could get one of those religious candles in the supermarket and save yourself thirty dollars,” he said.

Dinah started for just a second. “Right,” she said brightly. “You're right.” Where was the perpetually smiling Sean, the one who did funny imitations?

At dinner, Sean swatted away Patrick's attempts at sports talk and Dinah's stab at politics. I steered the conversation toward travel. “Sean and I are going camping,” I announced.

He brightened. “We're headed for Utah next month,” he said. “Zion National Park. Eight days in a tent. It's going to be awesome. Also, I've worked it out so that if we eat protein bars for breakfast and lunch, we'll only spend a few hundred dollars for the whole trip.” I could feel Dinah's eyes singeing the side of my head. I knew what she was thinking. I was the one who made her throw out her old sheets for something with a higher thread count, and urged her to buy pricey “investment” shoes. But Sean had sold the idea so well: nights under a blanket of stars, skillet corn bread in the morning as the sky grew pink. Sean had said that he wasn't going to bathe the whole time, just to see if he could do it.

Sean jumped up. “Anybody hungry?” He brought back the Mee Grob and plopped it ceremoniously onto everyone's plate, then passed a big salad festooned with sunflower seeds and carrots and raisins.

“Wow,” said Patrick, carefully examining his dish. “What's in here? I'm a chef, you know, so I love trying new things.” I could tell he was going to stop for pizza on the way home.

“It's a Thai dish,” Sean explained. “It's just rice noodles with some tomato paste, and shallots, and cilantro. Stuff like that. And tofu, because I don't eat meat.”

Patrick looked up, alarmed. “Nothing? Steak, chicken, pork, nothing?”

Sean shook his head. “And I'm trying to eliminate eggs, although it's hard. But it's not like you need meat to live.”

This was like tossing chum in the water to Patrick, the barbecue enthusiast. “I understand where you're coming from,” he said slowly. “But I always kind of believe that we're at the top of the food chain. To be honest, what purpose do chickens serve?”

Sean shook his head. “There are so many great man-made foods that you really don't need to eat meat, okay?” he said, raising his voice. “Soy products can taste like anything you want.”

Patrick was barely listening. “God. I would be so depressed without meat,” he said, his eyes staring blankly. “It's like a…” He searched for a properly bleak analogy. “It's like a…like a world without football. Maybe I'm being dramatic, but to me, it's like a world without loved ones.” He put his fork down. “It's everything that's associated with meat,” he said feelingly. “It's family and summer barbecues, and what would Thanksgiving be without a turkey? Imagine you're going to someone's house for Thanksgiving. You're sitting around, you've watched some football, and your relatives and friends are there and they say, ‘Dinner's ready, let's come break bread,' and you're all sitting around the table. What's the moment you're waiting for?” He looked meaningfully around the table. “For ninety-nine percent of the people in this country, it's the turkey. It's the golden brown turkey that's been roasting in the oven for eight hours. It's, it's, it's the
thrill
and the anticipation of how it's going to
taste,
and the fun you're going to have tearing into this turkey.”

He paused. “Now imagine the same scenario,” he said darkly, “and on that same platter where the turkey should be, there's a head of
cabbage.
” He took out his bandanna. Clearly, he was worked up. “You'd think, ‘Fuck, you've gotta be kidding me.' Cabbage? Even if you eat turkey once a year, the turkey's the centerpiece. Do you know what I mean?”

Dinah and I gaped at him admiringly, but Patrick, exhausted, didn't notice. He had a brow to mop.