Graduates in Wonderland (8 page)

Me: WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

Him: NEW ZEALAND.

Me: OH! Like Chris! NEW ZEALANDERS UNITE!

Him: NO! BRAZIL.

I said it wasn't a good story.

The rest of the rugby team attempted to sit down in a crowded booth and I ended up on top of him. Bruno. His name is Bruno, and it turns out he is half-­Chinese, half-­Brazilian. He has a heavy accent and he is a male god. Dark beautiful skin, thick lips, broad shoulders. Somehow, sitting on his lap turned into full-­blown making out, and I just didn't care that I was in public. At all. This is growth, right? I'm growing. Since we're both part-­Asian, we compared our Asian glows. Do you remember this phenomenon? It's when I (and most other Asians) drink alcohol, and our skin turns bright red, our eyes become bloodshot, and our skin becomes hot? Well, Bruno has it too (as will our children).

At 4 
A.M.
, he came home with Chris and me, because he lives outside the city, and now he's fast asleep in my bed. I can't sleep when boys are in my bed! One person tells you that you snore and you're doomed for life (Damn you, Astrid!). Besides, there is a Brazilian god in my bed—­who can sleep at a time like this?!

How do I make him stay there...forever? He was a really good kisser.

He is completely naked. Nothing happened besides making out, but in his drunken tiredness, he flung off all of his clothes.

What do you say to a naked Brazilian god when they wake up in your bed? I would try to Google this, but currently Google is blocked in Beijing AGAIN.

Text me your reply. I don't care if it costs three dollars to text China.

AHHHH,

Jess

DECEMBER 30

Later that day

Rachel to Jess

Look, are you even sure he speaks English? I have no advice for you! In movie scenes like yours, the girl often brings back a bag of bagels and coffee and then they walk around Central Park, and the guy sort of brushes the girl's hair out of her eyes, squints, and says, “Let's do this again,” and he gets into a yellow cab. So...do that.

I am at home and just finished a juice fast. I will never drink juice again. I did lose four pounds (all back now, in case you were wondering—­WORTHLESS). I would not recommend.

Even back home and faint with hunger, I've gotten more writing done than I have in the six months since graduation. My dad and I just sit up in his office with our backs to each other and type, type, type.

It's such a peaceful life.

It hasn't snowed here yet, so everything is brown and muddy and gray, with bare tree branches and huge flocks of blackbirds, and in this world, New York City does not exist.

Back there, I still have really low periods maybe once or twice a week, where it's impossible to see anyone. Here, though, I feel steady and calm and peaceful, and I start to wonder: Even though I love my work environment, do I really love my job? Is that what I want to be doing for the next twenty years? And why am I even in New York, other than the fact that it was the default graduation plan?

To my older sister, who traveled around forever and then moved to Madison after graduation, these questions seem so stupid. “Rachel, nobody is making you stay! Can't you just leave?” she asks.

I hadn't even considered that. When you want to work in the art/publishing/creative universe, New York seems like the only place to be. But when you hear it said out loud like that, it seems so obvious that there are other great places.

I've been going back and forth with my future plans. I always thought I'd go to creative writing grad school at a certain point, but I feel like that's just following too closely in my father's footsteps. Also, I really only want to go to one school, and the deadline for the Iowa Writers' Workshop is in just a few days. On the other hand, I just read a book of short stories from the Workshop's alumni, and so many people just write about being middle-­aged professors who hate their spouses and have affairs with their students, or who have to run their English departments. It's hardly fiction, and I feel like I haven't lived enough to really focus on my writing. I don't think I'm ready.

When I really let myself dream big, in my fantasy I get to study film and live in Paris, the city I love the most. The six months I spent there during college made me so happy, and I've always vowed to find a way to return.

And so I've applied for a Fulbright fellowship. I just want to see if I'll get it. No, that's a lie. I applied for it because I want one SO BADLY. Instant ticket to a new life. Rosabelle also applied for one, to Argentina. I think being at home makes adventures seem both more exciting and more possible, but also somehow more imaginary (like, I don't think about how to sign up for French health insurance, only planning my outfits for wandering along the Seine).

Also, you don't deserve this, because you were far too flippant toward Oprah and her wisdom, but she had some advice that I think you should know about.

You can make your own potpourri and turn it into sachets!

Just kidding.

ACTUALLY, her advice was: Stop looking for The One, but before you do, think hard about what you really want. You're supposed to write a list of everything you want in someone, and you should be very specific, even down to eye color, height, weight, etc., and then you just let it go. So of course I did it. Thinking, I'll never be able to let it go.

Okay, and yes, this might be embarrassing, but here is the list (you make one too):

1. Must be very sensitive and yet strong and decisive about everyday life

2. Hilarious but in the throw-­off sort of way (not trying to make everyone laugh all of the time)

3. Must kind of sort of want children but be willing to wait a very long time

4. Pretty eyes

5. Foreign is ideal. I like making fun of accents.

6. Medium build, slim but fit

7. Athletic but not obnoxiously so

8. Interested in the arts, especially books

9. Must think that I am delightful and endearing, always

10. Must never fight with me, or be very satisfying to fight with (as in, I can always convince him that I am right)

11. Loves dogs

12. Speaks more than one language

13. Has interesting family, so we are not bored over the holidays and I am reassured about our children's genetics

14. Charm too is most important but must not flirt with other women

15. Between five ten and six feet

16. Interesting career, must not work too much (no more than ten hours a day
usually
)

17. Love to travel, desire to live abroad

18. Calm, deep, pensive

19. Should smoke some of the time, socially, but not too much; be willing to quit eventually

20. Have interesting group of friends, much like mine: very smart but also charming

21. Must be intelligent about obscure topics

22. Should appreciate my writing

23. Should always over-­respond to my text messages and e-mails and initiate contact much of the time

24. Should be adept at hunting, playing polo, and other terribly aristocratic activities

25. Should be wonderful in bed

STOP JUDGING ME.

Oh: The point of that list being (and this is important) that you write it, you let it go, and then you get him! The universe just sends him your way. Like custom-­ordering stationery or a monogrammed pillowcase. That is the magic of it. And apparently it totally happened to all of these women in
O
magazine.

You have to remember, though: You can't go out looking for it. And you can't live your life eliminating guys off your list because you think they don't have these qualities. You just do this exercise once, give it to the universe, and then completely forget about it.

Okay. There's your daily dose of my self-­absorption. Now, yours.

Love!

Rach

DECEMBER 30

Two hours later

Jess to Rachel

“Wonderful in bed” is a little vague to me. I imagine him performing magic tricks for you while you sit up in bed wearing a silk robe, clapping your hands, delighted. “It's just wonderful!” Also, hunting and polo? Seriously? Well, at least someone will love those guys.

For mine, I had to remember everyone I have ever dated or tried but failed to get.

I took this pretty seriously with the mantra “Be careful what you wish for!” running through my head. What if I met the perfect guy who fit everything on my list, except he was a Scientologist who likes talking about motorcycles? What then? The universe would just reply, “Look, you gave me a list and I delivered. I gave you a man who has
no body odor
who likes
Fleetwood Mac
and now you want me to tweak him? Deal with it.”

This is what I came up with:

1. Very funny in my particular taste

2. Adores me and only me

3. Dark hair

4. Beautiful hands

5. Gorgeous smile

6. Has close friends he confides in (If a guy doesn't share his feelings with anyone, he doesn't have any. Friends or feelings. Period. I'm not going to be the one to fix him.)

7. I must find him very sexy. (Don't care if the world thinks he's gross as long as I don't.)

8. Secure enough to dance in public and be silly with me

9. Will carry a conversation when I am being too awkward

10. Intuitive

11. Open-­minded and intelligent, but never condescending

12. Nonreligious

13. Taste in music is 80 percent like mine—­I couldn't bear to resign myself to long drives listening to heavy metal or classic rock for the rest of my life.

14. Gets excited about life and new experiences

15. Polite to strangers

16. Ambitious but not so much that he neglects me, finds me very lazy

17. His presence must emanate safety, fun, and sexiness (like a firefighter).

18. Capacity for deep feelings

19. My singing, irrational habits, and snoring are endearing to him (this is a wish list, right?)

20. Healthy

21. Must not be a father yet

22. Can be serious

23. Loyal

24. Provokes a racing heart

25. Reads fiction and history

26. Unpretentious

27. Must have been looking for someone exactly like me, give or take fifteen pounds and a social smoking habit

28. Deep voice

29. Not too hairy

30. Never smells bad (Unless stranded without access to soap—­then it is forgiven. I'm not a monster.)

31. Spontaneous but not in the “Look at the new face tattoo I just got!” way

32. Does not easily sunburn

33. Really good at sex and acts that precede it

34. Infinitely interesting, but not so much so that I feel infinitely boring in comparison

35. Not self-­righteous

36. Excellent memory (I feel like I've met so many guys who just can't remember shit. What's the point if they can't remember?)

37. Willing to live in a different country but also willing to settle down somewhere in America

DECEMBER 30

Ten minutes later

Jess to Rachel

38. cuddly

THE END

P.S.
Cuddly
is not code for
fat
.

DECEMBER 30

One minute later

Jess to Rachel

Shit. I forgot SUCH an important one:

39. Asks questions and listens to the answers

THE END!!! I GIVE YOU THIS LIST, UNIVERSE!

P.S. As I write this, Bruno is still snoring and taking up the entire bed. He fits nothing on the list except that he is brunette and sexy. That's like going to a grocery store to shop for Thanksgiving dinner and coming back with a frozen turkey and a bottle of Diet Coke. Good enough for now.

JANUARY 15

Rachel to Jess

Well, it's the New Year, and I'm back in New York. On my final night at home, I was packing and found a bunch of empty Southern Comfort bottles under my bed—­in high school, my friend Emily asked me to take them home after a party at her house. Years ago, I had shoved them behind my sleeping bag and forgotten about them entirely until I was searching for a backpack and found them ten minutes before leaving for the airport.

So guess where they still are? My parents are planning on redoing my old room, and I'm hoping they don't find them and think I've taken to drinking an entire bottle of SoCo...alone...in bed...every night for the past week. Little do they know, after they went to bed I was actually smoking a half a pack of cigarettes behind the garage in a parka and fingerless gloves.

Now that I'm back at the nonprofit and assuming my adult persona again, I am surreptitiously writing this e-mail while supposedly writing board minutes. Bored minutes—­ha. Gets me every time.

Being at work is such a harsh shift. At home, I was curling up in front of the fire, I'm in a city full of dirty snow, getting up at dawn (this is always the hardest part for me), and walking through the cold to the office, where there are about two hundred irate messages from artists all somehow pissed that we took two weeks off at Christmas.

The other big difference about being back in New York is seeing my therapist again. It was freeing, in a way, not to have to “report back” to Claudia during my Christmas break about self-­destructive behavior (smoking behind the house, sleeping eleven hours a night). She always asks the questions I don't want to answer. I know that she'll just want to talk about whether my dream of Paris will be any different from the realities of New York, once I'm there. I don't know that it will be, but I do know that Paris is more beautiful. It's so hard to make myself go to our appointments. I guess it's kind of like going to a dentist: You
know
it's beneficial for you, but in the moment you're paying so much money for someone to poke painfully at your gums.

This was Claudia's favorite topic for my first session back: “Did you apply to creative writing grad school?” No. “Why not?” I felt like I wasn't ready, and I'm not sure I want to teach creative writing. “What does this have to do with your self-­esteem?” Okay, Claudia, you got me! I am terrified of being exposed as a fraud. Also, I have a fear of an imagined group of tweed-­jacket-­wearing assholes pointing at sentences I've written, reading them out loud to one another, and laughing hysterically. Claudia thinks that I have a tendency to dramatically catastrophize things, but I think she just SECRETLY HATES ME.