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“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.
I was sick of the intelligentsia. I was sick of poetry. I was sick of theses and screenings of student films. I was sick of sweltering theaters, populated with unintelligible actors in Kabuki makeup and vinyl loincloths. I was sick of expensively disheveled tweed jackets and designer spectacles.
I was sick of the species of man I was meeting.
I was from Idaho, goddamn it! The Wild West! I wanted to meet a real man! Well. Maybe not a cowboy. I’d had significant interaction with cowboys, and it had been less than positive. At some point, in high school, I’d seen one engaged in intimate dealings with a bovine. I was a vegetarian. Anything that enjoyed meat, in that way, had no business coming near me. And, since I was being specific, maybe I didn’t want a banker. And maybe not a trucker. And maybe not a lawyer, a construction worker, a fireman, a goth, a taxi driver, a mime, a Republican, anyone with blond eyelashes, anyone in tight jeans, anyone I knew…
And maybe I was a bit too judgmental.
“Zak?” I called to the kitchen. “Am I too critical?”
“Is that a question?”
“Vic?”
“Obviously,” said Vic. “That’s why we get along.” Victoria and I had met as assigned roommates in the NYU dorms, and become friends largely because we hated everyone else.
Fine. I could change. I could switch my acid-green tinted glasses for a rose-colored pair.
IT WAS TIME FOR A NEW POLICY. I decided, in that moment, to do with men as I’d done with books. Read them all.
In seventh grade, I’d started in the A section of the library, and by the end of high school, I’d made it to N, checking out twenty books at a time. If only life were like the library! My mother had no idea the kind of guys I’d met between the stacks. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Allen Ginsberg. John Irving. Franz Kafka. D. H. Lawrence. Some hadn’t even been guys. Marguerite Duras. Anaïs Nin. Toni Morrison. Between A and N, there was not only a lot of great writing, there was a lot of hot literary sex. Granted, I’d allowed myself, by F, the luxury of judging books solely by their covers, and I’d been doing it ever since, probably to my love life’s detriment. At J, I’d been at once daunted by, and desirous of, James Joyce. My gaze had wandered to the Rs. The Satanic Verses seemed an easy read in comparison with Finnegans Wake. What could be more enticing to a rebellious teenage girl than a fatwa? Once I was in the Rs anyway, I’d taken a foray into the smutty paradise of Tom Robbins, with whom I’d fallen rather speedily out of love. He had far too many sex scenes involving things that did not sound pleasurable to me. Goat horns. Engagement rings lost in cavernous vaginas. I’d fled Robbins for Ulysses, where the proclivities of Molly Bloom had scared me even more.
Regardless of the overall quality, I had, with my reading policy, found plenty of things I’d liked. I’d found authors I would never have given a second glance, predisposed as I’d initially been toward pretty covers and Piers Anthony. Surely, I reasoned, it’d be the same with guys. If I just went out with all of them, there’d have to be some in there that I’d want to read again. See again. Either.
AND SO, I DECIDED that I would say yes to every man who asked me out on a date. I’d go out with all of them, at least once. I’d stop pretending to be deaf when my taxi drivers tried to tell me I was cute. I’d stop pretending to be crazy when strange guys walked too close to me on the street. I’d turn toward them, and smile. And if they wanted to go out with me, I’d say, “Sure.”
No more nos.
Well. A couple of exceptions. No one who was obviously violent, or too drunk or drugged out to walk. No one who introduced himself by grabbing me. And the dates could be flexible. “Date” was an almost obsolete term at that point, anyway. Mostly, you’d end up “hanging out,” possibly going to a bar, possibly going to dinner, possibly getting naked. Most of the women I knew yearned, at least a little bit, for the days before the sexual revolution, when men were forced to commit to the Official Date, arrive in a sport coat (yes, it was dweeby, but at least it signified a certain intention), and take the girl out for surf, turf, and Lovers’ Lane. Now, it was hard to know whether or not you were actually dating someone. He might call you up and blurt a string of frenetic phrases involving anything from Star Wars to Egon Schiele before he finally got to, “So…you wanna, like, hang out?”
You might “like, hang out” for six months, and still have completely different ideas of whether or not you were a couple. At least if I went out with guys who asked me out on the street, they’d be asking me out based on some kind of established attraction, as opposed to the guy who (for example) happened upon my number while making spitballs.
LOSER: I was, like, so intensely bored, and I called a couple of other people, but no answer, but then I saw your number, and wondered if you wanted to, you know, hang out.
MARIA (trying in vain to sleep): I’m busy.
LOSER: But, like, I wanted to, you know, get busy. (He emits a maniacal stoned giggle. A water bong burbles into the receiver.)
MARIA: Wait. Who are you? Do I know you?
LOSER: Devin’s roommate.
MARIA: I don’t know a Devin.
LOSER: Devin got your number from Kevin.
MARIA: Kevin?
LOSER: Kevin is, like, in your Modern Drama class.
MARIA: I didn’t give Kevin my number.
LOSER: Classroom directory. He made a list of cute girls. Wanna hang out or what?
MARIA: Not at all.
LOSER: Your loss, man. Whatever. Yeah, crossing you off the list. Finito.
(Maria throws the phone and addresses the audience.)
MARIA: You get the picture. At least guys I met on the street would be asking me out due to something other than boredom. No matter how pitiful this sounds, it was better than the current situation.
HOW TO PUT MY NEW POLICY into action? It wouldn’t be hard. I was in New York City, after all. There were around four million men in the five boroughs, and one thing that could be said of the men of the Big Apple was that they invariably had Big Balls. If you were female in New York, you’d been hit on by a stranger. It was built into the way the city functioned. Pedestrians. Subways. Contact with strangers, 24/7. In my travels around the city, about ten guys a day offered me everything from wedding rings to highly specific pornographic solicitations. Sometimes I got weirder offers, too. While I’d been dating Donatello, I’d agreed to be an extra in his student film. This had entailed a 4:30 a.m. walk to a bar on Avenue D, during which I’d heard, from behind me, a mysterious chirpy sound. It had turned out to be the inhabitant of an aluminum bagel cart, trying to get my attention in order to gift me with a cream cheese schmear. I’d crossed the street to evade him, but he’d chased me, waving a bag of bagels.
“Baby doll! Baby doll! My coffee is the best in New York! I wanna give you a present! You don’t need a present? I got bialys, you don’t like the bagels! I got danishes, sweetheart!”
“I’m not actually hungry,” I’d said, walking faster.
“Baby doll! You can’t turn down my pastry,” he’d yelled, his bagel cart teetering as it built up speed.
“Yeah, I can,” I’d said, and then sprinted to the bar, barely escaping him.
It seemed that I exuded some sort of pheromone that caused strangers to stop whatever they were doing and follow me home. As far as looks went, I was nothing compared to New York City’s Aphrodite-quality women, but I got hit on a lot. I attributed this to several factors.
(1) I was five foot three, which put me at the right height to enable all men, whether sitting or standing, to grab various unwilling parts of me.
(2) I had a big, uncontrollable smile, which I couldn’t keep from bestowing on strangers. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to master the Look of Frigid Death that most New York City girls could turn on at will. My best attempt, judging from the feedback that was forever getting shouted at me, seemed to be the Look of Absolute Willingness.
(3) I was curvy, and the men of New York seemed, for the most part, to approve. In Idaho, my curves had been yet another indication of my inappropriateness. In second grade, I’d started imitating my mom’s sexy sashay. A snotnosed boy named Jimmy (who would, a few years later, knock up my best friend) had crept up behind me in the lunch line and hysterically shrilled:
“Why does your butt wiggle when you walk? Wiggly-butt! Wiggly-butt!”
The other second graders had been roused into a mob.
“Wiggly-butt! Wiggly-butt,” they’d chanted, the sloppy joes on their sectioned trays shifting precariously.
I’d grabbed Jimmy’s grubby hand and bitten it savagely, then spun on my heel and departed the cafeteria, my bottom emphatically twitching my disapproval all the way to the playground, where I’d crawled beneath the tire pyramid. Too bad for them if they couldn’t appreciate a spectacular walk when they saw one.
It’d been the beginning of a bad thing. As I’d gotten older, the walk I’d imitated had, by virtue of genetics, become my own. My butt did wiggle when I walked. I couldn’t help it. It was something about the width of my hip bones juxtaposed with the small size of my feet. And the butt in question had inarguably become curvaceous. It was always getting grabbed. My mom complained about the same thing, her most memorable story involving a youthful trip to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a long ascent up the twirling staircase, her appalled bottom cupped by the hands of an Italian stranger for the entire 294 steps. My slender dancer sister had, for years, been traumatized by a boyfriend dubbing her round and muscular ass Shelfie. He’d shared with her his revolutionary feeling that her derriere should be used as a kind of knickknack ledge, and brokered ass grabs to his friends in exchange for pot. His band had collaborated on an ode to the ass, entitled “She’s a Shelf,” which, years later, still echoes through the post-grunge clubs of Seattle. At least, living in New York, most of the comments about the family rump were positive. And if it incited men to ask me out, who was I to judge them? Maybe they liked me for my ass, I thought, but surely they’d like me for other reasons once they got to know me. They’d like me for my capacity to quote from The Canterbury Tales, for my ability to sew them a quilted toga, for the entirety of my personality. Of course they would.
RESOLVED, I MARCHED into the kitchen, where Victoria and Zak were pretending not to be sharing the table. Vic was wearing headphones to block out Zak’s muttering. Zak was wearing an expression straight out of Edvard Munch. Taken as a trio, Zak (half-African American, half-Caucasian), Vic (Chinese), and I (Northern European mishmash) had the look of a multicultural Three’s Company. I got along with both of my roommates, but they didn’t care for each other.
Vic had been born in Taiwan and had spoken only Chinese until she was five, at which point her family had moved to Lafayette, Louisiana. She had a fascinating accent—slightly Chinese, slightly Southern—and her cooking accommodated both fried chicken and thousand-year-old eggs. She also had a pierced tongue, which, with extreme difficulty, she had so far managed to keep hidden from her mother. Vic was an interesting compendium of personality traits: both hypercritical (she’d been known to wail, in the manner of a flaming gay fashion critic, after seeing a large woman dressed in a tube top, “Oh no, she didnnnn’t!”) and maternal. She could be counted on to wrap blankets around you and feed you soup when you were sick, and hug you and feed you ice cream when you were crying over some bad boyfriend. She’d also be clicking her tongue in annoyance that you’d been so dumb as to get your heart broken in the first place, but nobody was perfect.
I’d met Zak on the first day of classes. He had curly, close-cropped black hair, big glasses, and a brain that never stopped. Zak was almost ridiculously Berkeley, the child of a wayward Vietnam vet and a lesbian. He was stunningly bright and incredibly well-read, and, for these traits, as well as for his enormous, though unpredictable, generosity, I had promptly developed a crush on him. The crush had ended midway through the year, when he’d bleached his hair yellow. I’d found Vic, and shallowly announced: “I’m over him. He looks like a duckling.”
I’d had the crush reprieve for about a month and a half while the duckling grew out, and then summer hit, and I’d moved to a sublet in a sketchy bit of south Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the end of three months, Vic had returned from her sister’s house in New Orleans, and she and I had set about trying to find an apartment. One day we’d been walking through Washington Square Park, and had stumbled over Zak sitting with his back against a wall, meditating on his lack of living space. We’d offered him a slot in our undetermined home-to-be. Though my crush was on hold, I’d been excited to imagine that we could potentially become best of best friends by sharing a bathroom. I’d never had a male roommate before.
Now that Zak and I lived together, I was constantly on the verge of falling madly and idiotically in love with him. Considering that he insisted he didn’t want me, I pretended a similar disinterest. To our mutual best friend, Griffin, I maintained that Zak and I were soul mates, but Zak denied it. Ha, I said, though quietly. We had chemistry, damn it. Since we’d moved in together, we’d stayed up late every night discussing the meaning of life. Who did this but people who were meant to fall in love? When we both fell hard for Denis Johnson’s difficult, gorgeous novel Already Dead, it was confirmed. We were meant to spend the rest of eternity together. Victoria did not think that this was true. She circled the edges of our friendship, justifiably declaring us pretentious, but jealous of our communion. She’d been my best friend in New York until Zak had moved in.
It was fitting that the only time they’d really gotten along had been the day that our toilet had mysteriously exploded. The two of them (I had blessedly not been home) had been forced to fight the toilet monster together, and had, after two and a half hours of fierce plunging, slain their enemy. By the time I’d come home from work, they’d been sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking beers, and recounting choice moments from their war. The next day, Vic had gifted Zak with a Star Wars pillowcase, as a reward for his courage in the face of her repulsion. Their camaraderie had, unfortunately, lasted only as long as it took for the mops to dry, and then they’d gone back to mutual irritation, which was constantly aggravated by our too-small apartment.
Victoria had won the bedroom lottery, as a result of her disregard for the enormous power cables that ran inches from her window. Her room had space for a dresser, a queen-size futon, and hell, even a Shetland pony, had she so desired. Zak was paranoid about electricity too close to his brain, and hadn’t even tried to claim the room, but this didn’t keep him from feeling bitter about the fact that his own room was four by six feet, just large enough for a mattress, a television, and a significant collection of comic books and pornography.
I had needed their rent checks too desperately to challenge either one of them, and had therefore ended up with the only space left: a single mattress in the corner of the living room, inside a rickety hut I’d constructed of a neighbor’s pruned tree branches and some brown paper grocery sacks. This was a bummer, of course: no privacy, no escape from the noise of the television, no door to shut against the nocturnal malfeasance of Big White Cat, who liked to sneak up and drool into my sleeping ear. I generally tried to pretend that my hut was a yurt, and that I was living a romantic, vagabond adventure. I’d pull shut the doorway drape I’d engineered out of half a skirt, and imagine myself in a cloud of mosquito netting, on my way to a secret assignation with my lover, something like Ondaatje’s The English Patient, minus, of course, the dying in a desert cave.
AS I MADE MY WAY into the kitchen, Zak raised his enormous coffee mug to me in weary salute, then sighed heavily and put his head down. Clearly, the night had not been kind to him, either.
“Too much vodka,” he muttered. “I tripped over my arm and rolled down a flight of stairs, in front of Brittany and all her friends.”
He turned his head to display a rug burn on his cheek.
“How exactly did you trip over your arm?” Not that I was surprised. Zak and I were both left-handed, and we theorized that the difficulties of living in a right-handed world had made us prone to bizarre injury. We were thinking of investing our meager funds in Band-Aid stock.
“Caveman lapse. Thought I was upright. Wasn’t. Massive humiliation.”
“Are you okay?”
“Severe emotional damage,” he said. “But I, my friend, am a survivor. Who called?”
“I just got an offer to make out to NPR,” I replied.
“I told you to stop answering the phone. You complain about every guy who calls.”
I collapsed dramatically onto the third-hand coffee table we pretended was a couch.
“I’m changing my ways,” I informed him. “The intellectuals aren’t doing it for me, and I’ve rejected everyone else. I’m gonna start saying yes, to everyone. Who am I to judge who’s appropriate? Just because a guy might be sleeping in a cardboard box doesn’t mean he isn’t worthy of me.”
“It might,” said Zak.
“I’m sleeping in a cardboard box,” I said, and pointed at my hut.
“What’re you talking about?” Vic asked, plucking the headphones off, and giving me the look that said she’d interrupted deep thoughts in order to tend to my perennially tortured love life.
“The men I meet are emotionally crippled, arrogant, scum-sucking lowlifes, pretending to be evolved. I can’t deal with them anymore,” I said. It was necessary to exaggerate, or Vic wouldn’t take me seriously.
“Some were hot, though,” said Vic. She pointed at a photo above the stove, which depicted one of the good-looking, vapid ones. I kept it there to remind me not to be deceived by beauty.
“For the next year, I’m going out with every man who asks me. Like on the subway, on the street, whatever. I’ve been too picky, and it’s making my life suck. I’m going to stop saying no.”
Somewhere, a gong was rung. Somewhere, lightning struck. In our kitchen, Vic and Zak were rendered speechless. “No” had been my theme song, my mantra, my favorite word. A whole year without no?
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“Whoa,” said Zak. “I so wish all girls were like you.”
“Where do you think we live?” said Vic. “You’re going to date dog walkers.”
“If a man is good with animals, he might be good with me.”
Zak eyed me, clearly considering some sort of comeback, then thought better of it and went back to his caffeine.
“I’m going to leave that alone,” he said. “Say thank you. You owe me.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind,” I said.
“Dog walkers from New Jersey,” said Vic.
“Parts of New Jersey are attractive.”
“Dog walkers from New Jersey who keep severed heads in their freezers.”
“Not all serial killers are from Jersey,” I told her. Many were from the Northwest, where I was from. I felt safer in New York, frankly.
“I could be missing really cool people, just because I don’t think they’re cool enough for me,” I continued. “Maybe I’m meant to be with a taxi driver.”
Vic looked skeptical.
“You’ll only date the hot ones. And you’ll end up with the same guys you always date. Actors. Writers. It’s your destiny. They like you, you like them. Stop complaining.”
“I cannot fucking wait to see what you bring home,” said Zak. “If you really do this,” he added. “Because you won’t.”
“I will,” I said.
“Swear,” he said.
“On my future happiness, on all matters of the heart, on true love, and on satisfaction. If I don’t say yes, let me die alone,” I said, and stuck out my hand. Zak nodded in approval of my melodrama. We shook.
“Oh my God,” said Zak. “This is fucking great.”
“Big fun,” said Vic. “Just don’t give our number to any more weirdos.”
She had a point. In the past, I’d been somewhat too generous with our phone number. Victoria had tried to tutor me in the brush-off, but it did no good. I’d end up cringing in the corner, as Vic answered the phone and told whoever was on the other end that I had food poisoning/schizophrenia/moved back to Idaho/died tragically.
