The Year of Yes (2 page)

At some point, my dissatisfaction had hit critical mass, and things had started to overflow. The Director didn’t really deserve my contempt. He was probably just trying to woo me in some new and intellectually stimulating way, but the result of his comment was an extreme allergic reaction. NPR? What had I done to make the Director think he could get into my pants with NPR? I knew some kinky people, but I didn’t know anyone who’d spread her legs for
Car Talk.

I needed coffee, I needed sleep, and I needed better judgment when it came to men. In the scant year I’d lived in New York City, I’d accumulated a sheaf of romantic failures roughly comparable in length to
Remembrance of Things Past.
There were entire genres of food I now had to avoid as a result of Proust’s madeleine effect; memories of bad dates
that I didn’t want to conjure up with an errant bite of ramen noodle. Because many of my worst debacles had occurred in dives misleadingly named Emerald Garden and the Cottage, I was having to avoid cheap Chinese food, normally a collegiate staple, altogether. Not to mention art house movie theaters, the NYU library, and basically all of Bleecker Street.

“Is it Brittany?” asked my other roommate, Zak, trying to grab the receiver. Brittany was his girlfriend that week, and I was lobbying heavily against her. Zak usually dated what I called Perilously-Close-to-Underage Nymphets, and what he called “Oh God! So Hot!!”

I shook my head at Zak, and pressed the heel of my hand into my eye socket. The existential crisis had grown into something the size and shape of a hamster. I moaned.

“That sounds pretty good,” said the Director.

“I have a headache,” I protested, weakly.

“I can fix that,” said the Director. There was a growl in his voice, the kind of anticipatory rasp usually heard in commercials for sex hotlines.

“
Mrrrooooow,
” said Big White Cat, our demonic angora adoptee, introducing his claws to my pajama pants. On Big White Cat’s list of favored things to annihilate, silk was second only to expensive leather jackets belonging to visitors. He’d been an inadvertent acquisition, a friend-of-a-friend cat-sitting episode made permanent when his actor-owner went on tour and abandoned him. Big White had a Dickensian past: The actor had abducted him from a front lawn in Alabama, during a production of
The Diary of Anne Frank,
and named him Mr. Dissel, after his character in the play. I liked my cats dark, sleek, and self-sufficient.
Big White (we couldn’t bring ourselves to call him Mr. Dissel) was needy and bitchy, not to mention fluffy. It was yet another example of how my life had gone awry.

“NO,” I yelled, prying Big White Cat’s talons out of my thigh, and forgetting to cover the receiver.

“But,
Morning Edition
is on,” said the Director, trying to somehow excuse himself.

“You’re kidding,” I informed him, attempting to keep my crisis contained. Surely, he didn’t think that NPR was my open sesame. We hadn’t even kissed!

“I’m not, actually,” he said, sounding a little hurt.

“No? Come on!” I laughed uproariously, hoping to lead him to confess that he’d been joking. Even if he had to lie. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

“So, you’re not coming?” His voice seemed to be trembling.

I stopped laughing, chagrined.

“You know, I guess I’m not,” I said, trying to modulate my tone into that of a Compassionate Rejecter.

“Right. Good-bye, then.” Dial tone.

Damn it. Now he’d go out into the world, telling all our mutual acquaintances that I’d brutally laughed at his heartfelt declaration. And I really wasn’t a bad person! I tried to be kind! Unfortunately, for every pleasant date I had, there were equally as many messes. I got asked out frequently. It wasn’t that I was gorgeous; I wasn’t. In my opinion, and in the opinions of plenty of people in my past, I was distinctly odd looking. It was location. The Hallowed Halls of Academe were known for their tendency toward echoing loneliness, unnatural partnerships, and flat-out desperation. As a result, a significant percentage of my recent life had been
spent dashing through campus buildings, my collar pulled up to hide my face from the scattered tribe of the Miserably Enamored—NYU men who’d spend hours comparing me to Lady Chatterley, who’d try to pass off Philip Glass compositions as their own, who’d diagram their desire for me in interpretive dance cycles pilfered from Martha Graham. This might have been fine for some girls, but it wasn’t turning me on. At all. Maybe it was ego run amok, but I thought I deserved better.

The existential crisis was now the size of a rabbit. It beat its back feet against my sinuses and gnawed a piece of my brain. The crisis grew into a rat terrier, then a mule, then an elephant. It trumpeted. It stomped and shook my foundations, and then unfurled a banner, which informed me that I would never be happy. No one would ever, ever love me. Furthermore, I would never love anyone, because, in fact, I was incapable of love. My life was going to be a ninety-year no.

I frantically opened my address book and searched it for someone, anyone, who’d moved me, who’d been good in both bed and brain. No. A slew of the so-so. A list of thes and the irrevocably lost. And, oh yes, my mom. I shut the book, nauseated.

The existential crisis had evolved into a dinosaur. It opened its toothy maw, raised its shrunken front legs, and gave me a mean pair of jazz hands.

“You’re screwed, baby, seriously screwed,” it sang, in the voice of Tom Waits.

Senior year of high school, I’d written a play, the title of which,
Tyrannosaurus Sex,
had been censored to
Tyrannosaurus
…At the time, I’d been bitter, but now it occurred
to me that I much preferred the ellipses to the actuality. The whole world of sex and love had turned out to be far too much like living in the Land of the Lost. I’d wander across lava-spattered plains for a while, miserably lonely, and then run into some Lizard King, who would seem nice, until he bared his teeth and went in for a big bite of my heart. Even more depressingly, there’d been times when the lizard had behaved perfectly pleasantly, but I’d somehow found myself spitting and roasting him anyway. True Love combined with Great Sex was the goal, but I had a feeling I was going to end up fossilized before I found anything close. I held my head in my hands and whimpered.

Zak approached, cautiously. He shook two Tylenol into his hand and offered them to me, patting my shoulder. He’d had significant personal experience with existential crises, usually related to the same topic as mine: love, and lack thereof. I swallowed.

I FELT LIKE I’D DATED and then hated every man in Manhattan. This was, I reminded myself, not strictly true. In fact, I’d gone out with a lot of writers and actors, a lot of academics—the kind of men who maintained hundred-thousand-dollar debts as a result of graduate school, the kind who possessed PhDs in Tragedy. In order to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program, I’d moved sight unseen from Idaho to New York, dragging all my worldly belongings in a bedraggled caravan of psychedelic pink Samsonite suitcases from the Salvation Army. I’d had my fortune of four hundred scraped-together dollars
hidden in my bra, because my mom had told me I’d probably get mugged immediately upon leaving the airplane.

Taylor, a brilliant actor I’d met the summer before, had speedily taken the role of my only friend in the city and met me at JFK.

“You have to learn to take the subway sometime,” he’d announced.

I was fully ignorant of mass transit, and had to be led onto the train. Upon disembarking into the flattening heat and humidity of August, we’d discovered that we were roughly five thousand miles from my dormitory. Taylor had manfully carried most of my luggage, as I’d begun to have a total nervous breakdown and was unfit to be responsible for anything but my backpack. The elevators in my building were, of course, broken, so Taylor had lugged the endless bags up eleven flights of stairs. Then he’d taken me to a burrito joint, bought me a beer, and told me it would be okay.

Taylor’d been right. I’d fallen in love with New York City anyway. In the cripplingly Caucasian Potato State, my olive skin and brown hair (“ethnic”) had rendered me dateless. Revise. I’d been asked out, yes, but I’d never any intention of accepting the offers. Only creepy people liked me. Gray-ponytailed hippies often stalked me at all-ages poetry slams, reciting lascivious odes that referred to me as “a luminous, nubile woman-child.” They’d get my mom’s number from information, and then call incessantly, inviting me to accompany them to the beatnik mecca of Denny’s for “coffee and cigarettes.” No thanks. I’d been delighted to discover that the men of New York City were not only ponytail free, they had no reservations about my skin tone.

I’d met the first of my failures only hours after hitting the city. He was a dweeby Cinema Studies major from Cincinnati, who did not, in all the time I knew him, ever manage to zip his fly. It had only gone downhill from there, but still, I’d been dazzled by the dating options available to me: Men with Books! Men with Biceps! Men with Encyclopedic Knowledge of French Farce! I’d felt like I’d been wandering in a cultural desert for my entire life, and had miraculously stumbled upon a shimmering city of intellectual splendor, every man bearing a bejeweled braincase. It was a mirage, of course, but that hadn’t kept me from repeatedly immersing myself in its sand dunes.

I’d wasted the year flinging myself into abortive relationships with a bunch of brilliant losers. I’d been forced to imagine myself as a thesis committee, so that my dates could practice defending dissertations on such varied topics as Misery and Maiming in the Russian Literary Canon; Masturbation Metaphor in Shakespeare—A Design for Contemporary Life; and Images of Insects in the Films of David Lynch. I’d spent a month or two in Drama with Donatello, an NYU graduate film student who preyed on freshmen. He was Haitian, via rich parents in Florida, and in possession of a rickety skateboard on which he could perpetually be seen flying half-drunk from the marble banisters of historic campus buildings. He’d been so peerlessly self-confident that he’d managed to convince me he was necessary to my emotional development, and thus had enjoyed the privilege of torturing me with a recurrent alleged joke: “You’re so racist. I can’t believe you don’t see it.”

“If I’m racist, why am I hanging out with you?” I’d point out. But his argument involved subtleties, like me being
inherently against ethnic mingling even as I was kissing him. He’d taken me on a date to a screening of the unfortunate 1952 Orson Welles blackface
Othello.
During the Desdemona murder scene, he’d stage-whispered, so loudly that every cinephile in the theater could hear him, “Are you worried?”

I felt that I somehow might have deserved this. It was a given that I was underexposed to any kind of racial diversity. Maybe I
was
racist, and just didn’t know it. I was white, after all, even though in Idaho I’d been frequently assumed to be Mexican. Anytime I’d foolishly admitted my home state (which had been, for many wretched years, the home-base of the Aryan Nation’s skinhead compound), people would say things like, “Huh. So you’re a neo-Nazi?” Donatello had been ingeniously confrontational with everyone. One day, walking on Broadway with him, me hoping that we were finally having romance, he’d pounced for an hour on a Hare Krishna, “just because.”

We’d finally imploded one morning in my dorm room, as he’d meticulously directed the application of my makeup, forming his hands into the universal symbol for “I Am Now Framing a Shot.” Initially, I’d been flattered, but then he’d started using the close-up to point out zits. When I’d thrown him out, he’d earnestly declared that he’d expected to be my boyfriend for “seven years, but now you’ve fucked it up, so it’s your loss.” Then, he’d called for weeks, aggrieved that I was no longer speaking to him. I’d picked up the phone once.

“No,” I’d said.

“No, what?”

“Just. No.”

It wasn’t that I had anything against intellectual men. I liked them. Indeed, I sought them. The problems happened later. We’d be on the verge of kissing, and they’d suddenly lurch away, whispering irrelevant lines clearly memorized in high school. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was a favorite recitation among college-age males. “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” indeed. I was unravish’d far too often for my taste. “Never, never canst thou kiss” seemed to be a life philosophy for some of my paramours. One guy, engaged in the study of possibly pedophilic Victorian authors, had given me a scrap of “Jabberwocky” (“And, as in uffish thought he stood/The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/Came whiffling through the tulgey wood/And burbled as it came!”) before attempting to do something that I speedily decided was anatomically inadvisable. Other guys tried quoting the drunken renegade poet Charles Bukowski’s “love is a dog from hell.” Frankly, I was weary of hearing about dogs as an excuse for not being able to deal with pussy. The poem was about neither dogs nor love. The title was the best thing about it. This was often the case with men, as well as poems. When I’d called my mom to tell her I was going out with a PhD in English Literature, it had sounded terrific. But what it’d really meant was that I was planning to subject myself to endless discussions of
Middle-march,
capped off with the theoretically kinky suggestion that I pull a George Eliot and crossdress. An evening with a sensitive Virginia Woolf expert had ended with him gently closing his apartment door, and suggesting that perhaps “you just need a room of your own.”

I did not want a room of my own! I just wanted to find a guy I wouldn’t mind sharing a room with. It didn’t seem too
much to ask. New York City was theoretically populated with the most attractive and intelligent men in the world. I could think of no explanation for my failure. Except that, as Shakespeare would no doubt have informed me, the fault was not in my stars, but in myself. Or rather, in my no policy. I’d always believed that I knew exactly what was good for me, but clearly this wasn’t true. I was no longer a trustworthy guardian of my heart. I was twenty years old, and I hated everything.