Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's ＂Learned＂(11)
3 Me: So…
[Beat.]
Me: Are you still there? I’m feeling kind of … I just wonder if perhaps when I say something you could say something because that is called…
[Beat.]
Me: A conversation.
4 Ironic references to rom-coms are a great way to show that you are NOT the kind of girl/woman who cares about romantic conventions. A. and I often disagreed about what to watch. His interests lay mostly with masculine classics from the 1980s, while I tended (and still tend) to want to watch films with female protagonists. Rather than admit that he didn’t want to waste two hours watching a woman’s interior life unfold, he would tell me these films “lack structure.” Structure was a constant topic. He built shelves, wrote scripts, and dressed for the cold weather with a rigor and discipline that, while initially intriguing, came to feel like living under a Communist regime. Rules, rules, rules: no mixing navy and black, no stacking books horizontally, pour your beverage into a twenty-ounce Mason jar, and make sure something big happens on this page.
5 This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.
6 Although he worked a job that involved heavy lifting and hard labor, his true passion was writing fiction, and after much cajoling on my part he gave me one of his stories to read. It was the twenty-page account of a young man very much like himself trying, and failing, to seduce an Asian girl who worked at J. Crew in Soho. Although the prose was unusual and funny, the story sat with me like a bad meal. It took me about twenty-four hours to realize the issue: that I could feel, in nearly every sentence, an essential disdain for womankind that was neither examined nor explained. It was the same feeling I had experienced after my initial read of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in eighth grade: I love this book, but I don’t want to meet this man. But, in this case, it was: This story is okay and its author has already come in me.
7 The first week we met, I slept at his house every night. Time stopped in his bedroom, which was windowless and overly warm. Each day we took a new step together: flossed our teeth, shared a bagel, fell asleep without having sex. He admitted to having an upset stomach. By the time I emerged from his home on Friday morning, we had essentially performed the first year of a relationship in five days. I got on the plane to Los Angeles, unsure of when we’d see each other again. I was pretty sure I’d seen him cry a little bit when he dropped me at the subway.
8 Perhaps, yes, in that way.
9 As an experiment. It was similar to looking at an empty vase or staring out a window.
10 On this trip, my first as a working woman, I was renting a house in the hills above Hollywood. It had been pitched to me as “chic” and “within walking distance of chic things” but was small and damp, windowless on three sides, and had the boxy nondescript fa?ade of a meth lab. Sandwiched between the homes of a failed TV writer with a set of pit bulls and a queer-theory professor who wore a bolo tie and collected Murano glass, I decided that the amount of fear I felt alone in this house was directly proportional to all I would learn from living there. And so I stayed, for five months, calling it growth. One night I put on a nightgown, stepped onto the porch, looked up at the moon, and said, “Who am I?”
11 I remember being so impressed with this turn of phrase that I carefully clocked who I had already shared it with and who I could still try it out on.
13 Paraphrasing Freud.
13 I wanted a boyfriend. Any boyfriend. This boyfriend, this angry little Steve McQueen face, fit my self-image nicely, but let’s face it, he was in the right place at the right time. About a month into the relationship, it started to dawn on me that spending time with him gave me an empty, fluish feeling, that he hated all my song choices, and sometimes I was so bored that I started arguments just to experience the rush of almost losing him. I spent an entire three-hour car ride crying behind my sunglasses like my thirty-year marriage was ending. “I don’t know what else I can try,” I wept. “I can’t do this anymore.” “Can’t or won’t,” he hollered like Stanley Kowalski, backing angrily into his least favorite parking spot and jerking the gear into park. Upstairs I paced, cried; he cried, too; and when I told him we could try again, he turned on his PlayStation, content.
14 At one point I asked him this, and he responded with a trademark silence. I attempted to engage in a “sext” session, starting off with “I want to f*ck you above the covers.” This seemed like something Ana?s Nin might request. No, she would say. Leave the covers off. He responded with texts that read “I want to f*ck you with the air conditioner on” and “I want to f*ck you after I set my alarm clock for 8:45 A.M.” I closed my eyes and tried to inhabit the full sensuality of his words: the cool recycled air on my neck, the knowledge that the alarm would sound just a bit before nine. It took about eleven of these texts for me to realize he was doing some kind of Dadaist performance art at my expense.
15 I desperately wanted this to be a metaphor for the ways love stretches us, changes us, but never betrays us.
16 See? I’m just a chill girl writing a chill-ass email, bro.
17 At Christmas we had to end it for real this time. After all, he said he was incapable of love and only seeking satisfaction. I, on the other hand, was passionate and fully alive, electricity in every limb, a tree growing in Brooklyn. I headed to his apartment the moment he returned from his parents’ house, determined to make it easy, to cut the cord on his home turf. His landlord, Kathy, tended to sit on the front stoop. An elderly woman with a mighty tattoo of a panther on her wide, fatty shoulder, she and her Yorkshire terriers kept watch over the neighborhood. But tonight Kathy was absent. Instead, a shrine of candles and flowers crowded the path to the door. Upstairs, he told me that he thought one of Kathy’s dogs had probably died. We called her to see if everything was okay, but Kathy’s daughter answered—Kathy had slipped in the shower. It may have been her heart. They weren’t sure yet. The wake was tonight. So, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and I made our way across Brooklyn to the funeral home, where we paid our respects to Kathy’s gray, powdered body, stiff in a red velour sweatsuit, a pack of menthols tucked into the front pocket. Later, on A.’s couch, we held hands while he wondered whether she’d felt pain and whether his rent would go up. I clutched his hand, ready: “I love you, you know.” He nodded solemnly: “I know.”