I’m deciding to believe the week drained me just enough to start a fresh. When i was little there was something that puzzled me about the mind. How could i think two things at once? How can I think one thing and know another? I remember sitting under the mantle and trying it out, thinking two opposite thoughts at once. Which was my favorite doll?: “Molly” I would tell myself. Deep down, I knew it was Cici. I decided the mind must run on many tracks, like the roller coaster, Space Mountain, with its networks of overlapping avenues suspended in the dark. Though I couldn’t explain it, at that time I thought “deep down” was something I would understand some day when I grew up, like what my dad did for work. I still understand neither. On Sunday morning I rode with CH in a cab to drop him at Grand Central. On Friday I’d known deep down that we would be back together by now. Or was it that I’d been telling myself we would be, but deep down I’d known nothing would change? I’d known deep down that he would extend his stay another night, and he had. As the bridge at Park Avenue grew nearer and nearer, I stopped plying Charles for concessions and felt surer and surer I would not contact him again. When he got out of the car I saved the melodrama and thought, It could be for long time. I’d said this to myself before, but deep down I’d always known I’d call if something came up. This time felt different. Today, he contacted me a few times before I quickly caved, and I realized deep down I’d known I would. Wondering why I’d felt so certain just a few days ago, I’m telling myself it was because at the train station I’d been tired and moody.
Looking back on the week, many moments look like they belong to someone enjoying a fulfilling and exciting city life. I’ve dined with friends or family every night, been out to the movies, a reading, a concert, a few different art shows. I discovered a new neighborhood and finished two books, not to mention hundreds of short stories, which have got to be good for something. I took pleasure in chance encounters, like someone walking by scribbling down a thought in a notepad, people laughing on a park-bench, overhearing a conversation between two hip hopsters comparing notes on what they’d heard of misogyny in India’s factories. Women are only allowed to use the bathroom at work when they can prove to their male supervisors they are menstruating. No joke, I learned this fact from walking behind two horrified, swaggering guys in cool sneakers.
On Tuesday Gail introduced me to a magical hidden city gem. She picked me up by town car at the office and we took lunch at her private club. The club is hidden on the top floor of a landmarked building and filled with leather couches, art, and framed letters. A long communal table seats members united by their interest in literature. I was the only one under sixty, so they were thrilled to talk to me. I knew the scene from many a time spent at the private clubs of CH parents. Conversation about intellectual topics is expected and your own interestingness, just for being seated at their table, is assumed. These are people who take an interest in other people (especially people who are friends with a well-liked member and look reasonably comfortable in the dress code). You invariably leave feeling like a delightful young lady. At Gail’s club, a rule requires visitors to fill in the next available seat at the lunch table, and I was sandwiched between retired journalists, who weren’t, by club rules, supposed to be discussing their work, but who talked to me about the philosophy of interviewing and their ideas about research before the internet. Over chicken salad and the signature corn bread, they volunteered to sponsor my membership. It sounded like a fabulous idea.
That night I went to a reading with friends and we heard a moving piece about Michael Jackson, in yet another hidden upstairs club. This is the piece he read: http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/200908/michael-jackson-john-jeremiah-sullivan-tribute
During the Q&A someone asked about the process of researching, and the author said something I totally related to. He said he wishes he could have just faxed out the documents he found in his research and had GQ publish them instead. Certain quotes he had to throw away, he said, were worth more than his whole piece.
It’s true, the interviews he quoted were full of insight about MJ’s relationship to his own creativity, a heartbreaking saga, his essay convinced me. But really it was the author’s perspective and not MJ that made the piece interesting. Even in journalism, we want to know more about the author more than the subject. Like, what kind of person would be so moved by Michael Jackson to invest in this kind of research and passionate description? Not that we’d rather hear a story about the author, just that his particular view is attractive. We want to see it as he does. I would like to write something similar about Britney someday. I think my view of her, if I could communicate it well, is similarly one that only I could have. I find her innocence and likeability beyond charismatic. I had thoughts like this all day: inspiring, fun.
But on my way home, I was shocked and amazed only that Charles hadn’t called, despite my attempts to get a hold of him, which had been near constant and through every imaginable avenue of communico short of messenger dove. I called a few more times that night to no answer, swallowed some nyquill, and had to wake up before I was ready.
The next day it was pouring rain and I dressed improperly. Was drenched and angry by the time I arrived at work, only a few minutes late. It was my turn to open but the other intern had arrived too early, and was already waiting to be let in when I arrived (we alternate days with the key). The sight of her minuscule body waiting outside the door irritated me in spite of myself and I prayed she wouldn’t want to talk. “You’re so wet,” she said, in a typically obvious conversation style that makes up the bulk of my interaction with her. Most mornings she can be counted on to ask me whether or not I rode my bike. Why she cares is beyond me. I used to follow up her question racking my brain for an interesting explanation. I used to make things up. “I had to leave it at home because the CRAZIEST thing happened.” In fact the decision whether to ride my bike or not is completely random and i’ve started answering with a simple “yes” or “no”. She reminds me of a hummingbird--so fluttery that she comes off as still and peaceful, but is actually a living dart of nervous energy. On her fact checking assignments she is all color-codes and perfect cursive, but when it’s her turn to answer the phone, she snatches it like it’s a ticking bomb. Literally no sooner than the ring has stopped she is whispering a greeting into the phone--literally whispering, because she is overly careful not to disturb the office silence. The effect is much more sultry secretary than chipper receptionist. I find the transition from ring to voice so sudden and jarring I have to stop myself from physically wincing every time. When it’s my turn to man the phones I intentionally exaggerate the time between the end of the ring and my greeting, to set an example. I might shake out my wrist a few times just after lifting the phone, and then slowly stretch my arm over my head before bringing it languidly down to rest at the side of my ear in a pleasing arching motion. Then I say the greeting in as casual and normal and even a tone as possible.
Being soaked through to the bone by rain enhanced my irritability and when I finally got a text from Charles, ostensibly in apology for having “just noticed” a missed call, I collapsed with self-pity and had to step outside. At the end of the day, I wrote back to say, with every ounce of restraint, how lonely I’ve been. I don’t bother to ask what he’d done with my emails, chats, and facebook messages. Until I do, a few lines later. And he is immediately defensive, until he’s sincere and tells me it’s been a hard week for him, too. His review did not go as he’d hoped, and he feels humiliated. I feel a literal swelling in my heart of empathy for him and back down.
On my way out I wanted to respond to Charles but it was raining and I knew I couldn’t call under the cover of the building because my coworkers would be coming down. I was paralyzed under the lip of the roof, wondering where I’d go for cover. I was just starting to cry silently when an attractive guy about my age in a hoodie and a beanie turned to me and said, “Do you by any chance work at the paris review?” Was it my melancholy or my corduroy? “Why yes, yes i do.” “Thank God,” he said. “I have an odd request,” wielding a manuscript. He works for a man as a typist (?) and had been instructed to drop this off in person. He described his boss’s apartment (sweet, TriBeCa) and said “He’s pretty legit.” He asks me about myself: “Are you a writer?” An intern. “Do you want to be one?” Doesn’t everybody. He looked like a jock dressed up as a hipster, sounded like a bit of a ditz, but was dressed like an intellectual. “So your boss,” I asked, “does he know an editor here? Because it doesn’t have a chance if not.” “I have no idea.” “Well is he a real writer?” Long answer, but no, it seemed, a rich hobbyist. “So what do you do for him again?” He is payed absurdly well to re-type manuscripts. Is your boss an older gay guy, by any chance? I wanted to say, because I know a guy just like you who does this kind of work for a wealthy aspiring painter in Chelsea. The guy was clearly distressed about his role at his odd new job, so I brought up the manuscript for him and dropped it in the slush pile, told him it not to worry, it would get read, and started to walk away. As I did the wind picked up and some reflective silver poster boards the size of door-frames flew out of the back of a truck parked outside the next door print shop. It’s a sign! I thought. We will both run to help load them and I’ll catch his reflection on the silver board, and we will fall in love. He is sweet, ditzy and handsome, and would never put his career ahead of me. We both rushed over and helped the workers recover their beautiful flying objects. “You’re just saving the world today,” he said to me. Then the rain really picked up, and I got nervous, and ran away.
All week sadness has sharpened my perspective, I’m convinced, like Hemingway says that hunger does. I noticed things. Little city scenes. A Chinese couple crouched on the ground between a stoop and the sidewalk, hovering over something I thought was an argument, but turned out to be a lottery ticket they were scratching off together. When I walked by boring down at them, they gazed up at me in what seemed like slow motion as if I were a sign or an omen. Also, I was more shaken by homeless people than I ever have been. On the subway, a man begging for change in a wheelchair passed between cars as the train was moving, cackling in acknowledgment of his recklessness, and I thought I might throw up.
Friday I got to travel to the reading room of the Morgan Library and fill out multiple applications to photograph documents in a supervised room. I got to trace the discussion which took place in a series of letters that vacillated between friendly and catty about whether to publish an interview with Richard Stern. The time flew and I can’t remember whether I hardly thought about CH and his imminent arrival, or if I thought of nothing else. When I finally did see him later that night I thought it had been the worst week of my life, but maybe I knew it wasn’t so bad.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
date with a man
The date was kind of exciting at the time, but on reflection the best thing that came out of it was a new dress. yesterday morning I received a very business like email from the aging executive I agreed to go out with denoting a selection of all the most obvious cocktail bars and restaurants. Tonight is the night the email said. I was confused because I had planned for the next night, and when a quick look through my email confirmed he was right, immediately panic- stricken about my outfit. Through some deep subconscious resistance, I had dressed like a child that day in a cloth dress with canvas sneakers and ankle socks. This is not a joke. Ironically, this was the very first day I had indulged in my preferred style of dress at the office.. I had even brought my bike along. I thought I would choose a place from his list near home so I could quickly change into something that would set Humbert's mind at ease. Alas, like the predictable banker he is, he'd only listed places downtown, probably thinking he had a hip twenty-something to impress. Little did he know I am closer to a teenager in both style and substance. Thankfully I had the good sense to tell Rand about my predicament and she had a solution: we meet in a coffee shop and switch outfits in the bathroom. When we met thirty minutes before my date, we decided to go shopping instead. In no time Rand like a pro had picked out something grown-up for me, a flowy Laura Day number. A very fun whirlwind of a Cinderella adventure, we got the salesgirls in on the mission. They sprayed me down with anti-static potion and took the censor off the dress as I was wearing it, calling "have fun on your date!" as I skipped out the door to cobblestones streets.
The next good thing that happened was finding the great new bar that the man had picked out (Weather Up is the very same that joanna godard frequents on all her first dates, so no surprise there, but in good taste nonetheless.) He's attractive enough, as they say. Tall and thin with a completely normal face of bones. He wears suits (on both occasions) and little rimless glasses. I would say not my type, but he is typeless. Right away he started asking me about work and books. He seemed to have read everyone. But I was careful not to be dazzled by his knowledge, realizing that in years and years I will probably have read much more too. Then quite out of the blue he asked what i thought of Occupy Wall Street. I thought he was testing me to see if I remembered he was a money man himself. He talked about his job, which he claims doesn't involve any evil-doing. "Though I used to work for the most evil," tongue in cheek, I think. I knew from Chax what he was talking about. "You worked at Goldman Sachs?" He had. His most interesting project now is one he sees as very ethical indeed: advising a client who has developed a technology to ease the environmental effects of FRACKING. "All i know about fracking is that it's very bad and should be illegal," I said. He didn't take it as an accusation, luckily I guess, but as an invitation to describe the process in great duhTAIL (as he would say, in his fake British accent). Try as i might, I could not listen to a single word. I wondered, does he have any idea how boring this is? I had assumed his English accent was fake, but really it's just a bit muddled because he has not lived in England since he was nineteen, which is a very long time ago for someone who is...thirty-six. Yep. He sounds Australian if you ask me, though in some roundabout way he was trying to assure me it was posh). As the convo progressed, he asked me lots of questions and then insisted we move on to a restaurant.
Over a sixty dollar bottle of wine at dinner, the conversation became much more interesting, especially when we came to the topic of the devolution of his MARRIAGE. Dear God. Looking back I'm embarrassed at how interested I seemed in him. I guess he will come to think of me as quite the tease. Trying to be smooth (was he?) he came off as weird. He reclined way too much in the booth at dinner and refused to mirror my body language as I exaggerated an upright posture and literally perched on the edge of my seat like i was balancing a book on my head. He touched my arm a lot to punctuate conversation, like to emphasize points, even though he made no points. I was trying to think "here is a person that wants desperately to talk to you, take advantage of getting to know anything you want about him." In other words, use him to learn about people in general. I was able to use him to learn what it's like to work in a very serious bank and make lots of money. What it's like to have been married and gone through marriage therapy and have drifted apart all the same. A few good stories came out of this, like the day he told his boss he was getting a divorce and how understanding his boss had been, saying he'd personally see to it that he got all the financial support he needed during this difficult time. Also how his brother got married soon after the divorce and asked if he would feel comfortable giving a speech at the wedding.I remember thinking the speech (which he recreated for me) was profound but looking back it seems lifted from Hugh Grant. I feel like a traitor and ashamed today, even though he was nice enough. I would like to make these things more fun in the future, less educational.
The next good thing that happened was finding the great new bar that the man had picked out (Weather Up is the very same that joanna godard frequents on all her first dates, so no surprise there, but in good taste nonetheless.) He's attractive enough, as they say. Tall and thin with a completely normal face of bones. He wears suits (on both occasions) and little rimless glasses. I would say not my type, but he is typeless. Right away he started asking me about work and books. He seemed to have read everyone. But I was careful not to be dazzled by his knowledge, realizing that in years and years I will probably have read much more too. Then quite out of the blue he asked what i thought of Occupy Wall Street. I thought he was testing me to see if I remembered he was a money man himself. He talked about his job, which he claims doesn't involve any evil-doing. "Though I used to work for the most evil," tongue in cheek, I think. I knew from Chax what he was talking about. "You worked at Goldman Sachs?" He had. His most interesting project now is one he sees as very ethical indeed: advising a client who has developed a technology to ease the environmental effects of FRACKING. "All i know about fracking is that it's very bad and should be illegal," I said. He didn't take it as an accusation, luckily I guess, but as an invitation to describe the process in great duhTAIL (as he would say, in his fake British accent). Try as i might, I could not listen to a single word. I wondered, does he have any idea how boring this is? I had assumed his English accent was fake, but really it's just a bit muddled because he has not lived in England since he was nineteen, which is a very long time ago for someone who is...thirty-six. Yep. He sounds Australian if you ask me, though in some roundabout way he was trying to assure me it was posh). As the convo progressed, he asked me lots of questions and then insisted we move on to a restaurant.
Over a sixty dollar bottle of wine at dinner, the conversation became much more interesting, especially when we came to the topic of the devolution of his MARRIAGE. Dear God. Looking back I'm embarrassed at how interested I seemed in him. I guess he will come to think of me as quite the tease. Trying to be smooth (was he?) he came off as weird. He reclined way too much in the booth at dinner and refused to mirror my body language as I exaggerated an upright posture and literally perched on the edge of my seat like i was balancing a book on my head. He touched my arm a lot to punctuate conversation, like to emphasize points, even though he made no points. I was trying to think "here is a person that wants desperately to talk to you, take advantage of getting to know anything you want about him." In other words, use him to learn about people in general. I was able to use him to learn what it's like to work in a very serious bank and make lots of money. What it's like to have been married and gone through marriage therapy and have drifted apart all the same. A few good stories came out of this, like the day he told his boss he was getting a divorce and how understanding his boss had been, saying he'd personally see to it that he got all the financial support he needed during this difficult time. Also how his brother got married soon after the divorce and asked if he would feel comfortable giving a speech at the wedding.I remember thinking the speech (which he recreated for me) was profound but looking back it seems lifted from Hugh Grant. I feel like a traitor and ashamed today, even though he was nice enough. I would like to make these things more fun in the future, less educational.
Monday, October 10, 2011
VACATIONLAND
This is a mostly true story about a day in Maine. It's not finished at all but I thought I'd go ahead and post so if you want you can tell me what you like and don't. I changed names and other details. It's long, don't feel like you have to finish.
VACATIONLAND
Yesterday’s activity was going on a bike ride. Daniel wanted to go. I didn’t think I’d make it. I was feeling morose, I told him. A thick laziness had set in around me this morning with the island fog and showed no signs of lifting. “Drink some water. You don’t drink enough water.” “I want a coffee. I want a nap.” “You are like a bratty teenager.” I have to laugh when he says this kind of thing to me, with those cruel-kind eyes of his. Being a bratty teenager on this island is actually a fond memory of mine. Summering teenagers know nothing about empathy, and no one even cares.
By his count Daniel has had exactly zero hangovers in his life, but we’d both been at the local bar the night before, enjoying generous pours from bartenders who didn’t believe a cocktail half this size cost $14 in New York. You've paid that? Many times! Disbelief. We made a bet and won “fancy schmancy martinis” thanks to a receipt I’d materialized from my bag. Daniel woke up this morning and went on a run. I’d emptied the dishwasher, one cup at a time. I had already evaded a kayak trip (I have blisters on my hands), a grocery store trip (we might run into someone from the bar), and as Daniel’ voice was becoming shrill, I was starting to feel for him. “You owe it to me,” he said, going on about the bike-ride. He meant: he chose to spend his only vacation days of the summer alone with me on my family’s island, where I have memories, relatives, and childhood boyfriends to supplement the peaceful scenery. He has only me, the peaceful scenery, a bike. He had a point. He has a job. Have I ever imagined what that might be like? Occasionally, and it always sounded so blissfully easy. To wake up with somewhere to go, go there, and go home and deserve this fatigue.
I rallied off the couch, but I chose not to dress properly in case I could plead cold if I needed to turn around. When I emerged onto the porch, Daniel was already poised to mount the worse of the two bikes. The day before, he’d made me ride the worse one, while he claimed the bike with gears: “Tough luck. Get ready faster next time.” Today’s choice was a sign he was thinking ahead, thwarting my chance to turn around before he was ready. “God it’s bright.” “It’s fine.” Without waiting for me to change my mind, he pedaled away down the hill, looking attractive with somewhere to go. Already I trailed behind and before long his figure was lost around a bend. I was alone on the road with the pine trees, heading away from the shore and away from the fog, feeling a little invigorated, I had to admit, as I pedaled fast and adjusted my gears to the perfect resistance. I chanted my own name to myself in time with the movement of my legs. Leafy shadows seemed to dance to my rhythm on the pavement. The trouble is Daniel is a doer, an actor, living in real time. I imagined him ahead of me, coasting down the hill with no hands, beginning to feel alive again. I’m not an actor, but more like a character, I thought. One in an indie movie. But she was so pathetic! My parents might say about me if I were the star of a movie. She’s a graduate student, is what they say as the faultless loving parents they are in life.
The road was more bustling than I remembered. Now that I was enjoying myself, I worried about my choice of skirt. On the island drivers have a tradition of waving as they pass one another. Bikes count as vehicles about fifty percent of the time and I practiced the wave on flats, but ignored drivers on the hills either up or down. One of the passing cars carried a teenage summer love of mine, looking older. Mushroom cut in tact. With Daniel so far ahead by now, he’d never know we were together. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that someone as apparently mature as Daniel could be the boyfriend of a bratty teenager. My own haircut was woefully similar to the one I’d had at fifteen. I cursed my skirt and pretended to be distracted with my bike chain. Rumor had it my teenage love, now giving me half an eye in the rear-view mirror, had went on to drop out of music college with a slew of addictions. What happens at music college to make someone drop out with a mushroom hairdo? He couldn’t cut it. A large bird swept overhead and I pulled over to watch and adjust my clothing. It was only a seagull. I pedaled faster to make up for lost time, past the houses with ocean views, away from the fishing boats and further along a winding road where the lawns get increasingly cluttered with furniture, and the porches increasingly collapsed.
Soon the figure of Daniel was zipping back toward me down the center of the road. “Let’s head to the swimming hole.” “Okay” I said, aware of my shortness of breath. It’s called the quarry, by the way, not the swimming hole. I prayed once there he wouldn’t want to go swimming. He biked in circles around me. “Please stop” I said. “I’m going to crash.” I tried to sound lighthearted. He laughed and stood up on his pedals, taking on the sharp incline ahead with astonishing speed.
My legs were tired again and as I was resisting the urge to walk, a red Mustang I recognized revved around the corner. I wanted to topple over to hide in the overgrown grass on the side of the road, but the red Mustang was distinctly slowing down. A sharp headache arose in my temples from the deceptive chill in the air. Behind the tinted windows, I could see the driver lifting an undersized hand to a slow wave. Mercifully, he didn’t stop the car. I waved back, cheerfully I hoped, while fashioning a posture of direction and great hurry.
The previous night at the bar, I’d found myself immersed in a conversation marked by drunken sincerity with the driver of the red Mustang. Meanwhile, Daniel had been immersed in a much more appropriately sincere drunken conversation with the bartender, about baseball, of all things. Where does he pick these things up? He’s never watched sports in my presence. He favors the real estate section in the newspaper whenever we’ve divided one up together on a train. Just from being alive and active in the world, I suppose he might say. I’ll have to ask him what that’s like sometime. Where was Daniel now? Probably at the quarry already. Hopefully not swimming. I would risk looking like no fun when I would have to refuse to join him.
I remembered the details the driver of the red Mustang, Frank, no Jack, told me last night. He has a close friend. A best friend, really. No, did he say they were brothers? They were like brothers, Jack and this close friend who had recently been in a car accident. Hit a tree on this very road and he wasn’t found for four hours. The friend was currently laid up on the mainland on life support. He’d told me that, since the accident, he’d taken to driving in circles around the island just to be alone. He drove endlessly, shamelessly. It was true, when I thought about it. We’d seen Jack's car more than any other single sight on the island. I don’t think we’d made a single outing without passing the red Mustang, with a stampede of multicolored horses painted in a zip down the middle. The first day we arrived, we had biked to a secluded section of the island and stopped at a fork in the road, deciding which of two dirt paths to brave. Jack pulled up noisily beside us and rolled down his window to offer directions in case we were lost. “So, where ya from?” “New York,” we’d said. “We’re partyin at that house there down the way tonight.” He’d pointed down the left dirt road to a dilapidated shack. “Thanks for the invitation,” we’d said, not knowing if it was an invitation, and pedalled down the dirt road to the right.
Last night Jack told me about his consuming guilt. What he wanted was to leave the island for good, but all he could think to do was drive around it. He wanted to enroll in college. After graduating with a degree in business, he wanted to open a bar, like one from the good old days, where everyone knows your name. His words. I expressed the opposite of doubt that he would soon be opening a bar. You should do it in Portland, I offered. He looked at me with genuine surprise. How had I known? He had real estate picked out in historic downtown Portland and had a plan for how to fund it. I noticed his blue eyes were surrounded by thick curling eyelashes. “You should do it now. This year. But forget about enrolling in college. Take it from me, school is pointless,” I said. Fishing on the island is very lucrative and he’d had his own boat since he was fourteen. “Open the bar. Do it this summer. You’ve saved how much?” He named a number somewhere between a thousand and a million. The number sounded large to my ears at the time. “What are you still doing here?” I gave it until the end of the year for his bar to be up and running, the heart of made for TV friendships between tourists and local fisherman.
“How old is your friend? Tommy.” “He’s twenty, like me. Don’t tell,” because we were in a bar. “I’m twenty-four” I said. “I’m immature though.” At the other end of the bar I could make out that Daniel and the bartender had moved on to the topic of great classic rock guitarists. If Tommy lives, it will almost certainly be with brain damage. I think I cried for him, or tried to. The story and the drinks made me dizzy and I concentrated too hard on holding eye contact. Chris suggested that if tourists hadn’t prevented the installment of cell towers for nostalgic reasons, Tommy would have been able to call for help. Absolutely. It’s crazy and just typical they'd veto something that was actually useful. Injustice raged. I counted on his drunkenness to couch each of my responses, which sounded helplessly insincere to me even then. Daniel looked over at our conversation several times, with what I assumed at the time were pangs of jealousy at the intimacy I’d formed with a local pretty boy. The kid in the mustang today looked like he couldn’t be a day older than sixteen. They’d probably been looks of utter confusion.
Finally I reached the quarry, where I saw Daniel’s bike resting against a tree. The quarry is an expansive ex-granite mine that hit spring water and filled up and is where tourists now swim. Jagged rock walls surround a dark pool that steams in the rain and glistens in the sun. They’re said to be two hundred feet deep. Daniel was already relaxing on the water’s ledge, staring out at the rocks. I noticed little beads of sweat on his forehead. Apparently, he’d felt compelled to take the ride at a sprint. I’d pent him up in the house against his nature. Lethargy, along with gossip and social anxiety, were realms in which Daniel would never relate to me. I tried to assume an alert and sporty pose beside him, but fatigue set in almost immediately.
Even though it was getting late in the day, a few people were still splashing in the water, kids on the near side, old people on the far side, like always. Usually the local teenagers would be diving off the cliffs, where we sat now. As a teenager it was here that I’d envied the bodies of older girls and prayed for boys to try to push me in. Without them, I was hopelessly bored by the cliffs. They’re never as high as you remember them. At the beginning of my relationship with Daniel, I’d managed to seem the type who was up for anything. He knew the truth now. Blah, blah, blah, I said loudly to myself. It was a habit I’d adopted to drown out negative thoughts about myself. He couldn't want to go swimming. My exercise high was rapidly fading now that I was on the ground and the air was suddenly cold and sunless.
A jeep and a pickup truck filled with arms and legs of our age and build came hurtling down the dirt road. They yelled whoops and party cries out the windows at us, unmistakably not to us. “We’ll see you over there,” I fake called-out. Daniel gave me a winning smile. Luckily, he only wanted to hike around. “Okay” I said. “let’s walk to the ocean.” “No. Let’s walk through the woods,” he said. “Okay” I said, even though I knew that there were no trails, and that the dense woods led into backyards within ten yards. Up for anything. A fairly impenetrable thicket of pines surrounds the water so we were limited to walking carefully around the quarry’s perimeter, with Daniel in the lead.
We passed the old people section of the pool, with a shallow entry where they can easily descend. A woman in her stretched out suit was folding a towel, while her friend called to her from the water. “Hold on! I’m coming to ya,” the swimming women said, then ducked her head in for the crawl. We moved past them until we were directly across from where we started and Daniel decided to sit down on a particularly smooth ledge. I crouched beside him.
“Fishing” I said, and pointed to a partially hidden alcove among the rocks. A man was holding a rod and his two small sons stood beside him wearing identical sweatshirts and baby jeans with elastic waist-bands. “I hope no ones swimming over there” I said. I mimed a hook penetrating the inside of my cheek, stretching it beyond what was comfortable. Daniel continued his stare down of the rocks, like a big lithe cat. We watched the fishing family and listened to the women in the elderly section, their clear voices carrying more than they probably knew. We heard one of the old women describe the water as “indescribably beautiful” and then climb out. The water was empty of swimmers now, and just as the ladies’ car drove off, the fishing line we’d been watching tensed. The larger of the two small boys started jumping up and down and pumping his fists when he noticed.
The father said “quiet” and lowered himself carefully nearer to the water, ledge by ledge, climbing down the rocks until he balanced on a very narrow ledge at the water. The man was a smoker slim with a sparse reddish beard and over-sized feet. A piece of duck-tape covered a hole in his unfaded jeans. Locals. “Oh Lord, it’s a big one!” the larger little kid yelled. “This is awesome!” said the little one. The father didn’t say anything, and he seemed more serious than he could have been, given the enthusiasm of his kids, both of whom were now jumping up and down in time, pumping their fists.
The larger kid jumped down by the water to join his father, who said “hand me the towel.” The boy scrambled back up the rocks without losing his footing, not that the father seemed to care. “Bring me that towel.” The kid threw a blue cloth down at his father with great purpose as his father was reeling in the line. After about of minute of reeling from the father, we saw a black form break the surface. The kid gasped, “it’s an eel. Holy, holy.” “Awesome!” the little one, who was really very little, squealed. He looked more like an elf than a kid, too tiny to be jumping up and down with such control over his limbs. The older one held out the cloth for his dad who drew and continued to draw a long snake from the water inch by inch. “Oh. My God. Will it never end?” “Holy shit, it really is an eel” Daniel said. “I told you there were eels in the quarry.” It was a rumor that scared me as a kid and that I had been continually reassured was apocryphal over the years.
“It’s so slimy” the kid said. “It’s really slimy” the little brother said, too. It didn’t look much slimier than a regular fish from where we sat, but very naked, its long body desperately twitching for a rock to hide behind. The man tightened the blue rag against it and wrestled the eel off of the hook and into his hand. He seemed almost to be shielding his prize purposely from our view and the view of his kids. He turned one shoulder and worked the eel with his back to us, doing steady actions that between the leafy backdrop and blackening water, looked vaguely cultish and pagen. He started breaking off smallish tree branches from a spindly maple.The older kid asked, “Are we going to set it free?” “We’re going to eat it,” the father said. I couldn’t see it hanging, I assumed the eel was tacked up to dry on the branch-cleared tree. I imagined their prize growing limp and faded, like a ribbon on a bulletin board.
Part of me had always known that eels really did lurk behind rocks in the quarry. A lifetime suspicion confirmed, I declared the excursion a success and hoped this would sate Daniel’ need to feel something accomplished today. The shadows were creating pleasing cuts all across the horizontal slabs of rock. It was a beautiful place, and I was glad I’d come. On cue, Daniel mounted his bike and suggested the long way home. I would have to protest. The eel sighting had held my attention and I had to go home before my mind loosened again. My head was dully pounding. “What if this is the day I wake up with a hangover, and it never ends? Like the hiccups.” “You’re hungover?” It was a fear of mine. Maybe this was the day it would finally happen. “I was just kidding. I think I might be getting sick.” A revving noise swallowed my excuse. It made its way up the hill and turned down the dirt road that led to the quarry. I saw the front of the red mustang dip into the road, coming toward us. “Let’s go swimming,” I said. “It will do me good.” It was getting dark now, and the water was green and ominous. But it was nothing I hadn’t done a million times as a kid. “We didn’t bring towels.” “It’s okay. I want to jump in.” I pulled off my shoes and socks. Daniel didn’t move, but stared at me in what I decided to take as bemused admiration at this burst of joie de vivre on my part.
I looked at Daniel in the foreground, and behind him at the red Mustang stopped mid-hum, the driver, Jack, manually rolling down a creaky window to stick out his round, youthful face with lovely eye lashes. And in the background behind them, the darkening trees that seemed to go on forever, but really became backyards within a few feet. Taken together, the picture was classic American realism, pulsing with that certain active quality that never seemed to posses me. Walking deliberately to the ledge I tried a cheerful skip for their sakes, and jumped into a flash of shockingly cold, disturbingly dark water. It tasted fresh and pondy. I surfaced to see Daniel conversing with the driver of the Mustang who had stopped and rolled down his window. Maybe the subject would turn to baseball. Both waved and called to me, and I dipped once again to be under water with the eels. The eels and I shivered and when I surfaced I cleared my throat to affect a clear, actorly tone with the appropriate note of play. “Cowards,” I said. “Crazy” Daniel called back, and I heard the driver of the mustang laugh. The threat of discovery had overcome the eels and I, and I felt too tired now to imagine the idea of coming out by my own will.
VACATIONLAND
Yesterday’s activity was going on a bike ride. Daniel wanted to go. I didn’t think I’d make it. I was feeling morose, I told him. A thick laziness had set in around me this morning with the island fog and showed no signs of lifting. “Drink some water. You don’t drink enough water.” “I want a coffee. I want a nap.” “You are like a bratty teenager.” I have to laugh when he says this kind of thing to me, with those cruel-kind eyes of his. Being a bratty teenager on this island is actually a fond memory of mine. Summering teenagers know nothing about empathy, and no one even cares.
By his count Daniel has had exactly zero hangovers in his life, but we’d both been at the local bar the night before, enjoying generous pours from bartenders who didn’t believe a cocktail half this size cost $14 in New York. You've paid that? Many times! Disbelief. We made a bet and won “fancy schmancy martinis” thanks to a receipt I’d materialized from my bag. Daniel woke up this morning and went on a run. I’d emptied the dishwasher, one cup at a time. I had already evaded a kayak trip (I have blisters on my hands), a grocery store trip (we might run into someone from the bar), and as Daniel’ voice was becoming shrill, I was starting to feel for him. “You owe it to me,” he said, going on about the bike-ride. He meant: he chose to spend his only vacation days of the summer alone with me on my family’s island, where I have memories, relatives, and childhood boyfriends to supplement the peaceful scenery. He has only me, the peaceful scenery, a bike. He had a point. He has a job. Have I ever imagined what that might be like? Occasionally, and it always sounded so blissfully easy. To wake up with somewhere to go, go there, and go home and deserve this fatigue.
I rallied off the couch, but I chose not to dress properly in case I could plead cold if I needed to turn around. When I emerged onto the porch, Daniel was already poised to mount the worse of the two bikes. The day before, he’d made me ride the worse one, while he claimed the bike with gears: “Tough luck. Get ready faster next time.” Today’s choice was a sign he was thinking ahead, thwarting my chance to turn around before he was ready. “God it’s bright.” “It’s fine.” Without waiting for me to change my mind, he pedaled away down the hill, looking attractive with somewhere to go. Already I trailed behind and before long his figure was lost around a bend. I was alone on the road with the pine trees, heading away from the shore and away from the fog, feeling a little invigorated, I had to admit, as I pedaled fast and adjusted my gears to the perfect resistance. I chanted my own name to myself in time with the movement of my legs. Leafy shadows seemed to dance to my rhythm on the pavement. The trouble is Daniel is a doer, an actor, living in real time. I imagined him ahead of me, coasting down the hill with no hands, beginning to feel alive again. I’m not an actor, but more like a character, I thought. One in an indie movie. But she was so pathetic! My parents might say about me if I were the star of a movie. She’s a graduate student, is what they say as the faultless loving parents they are in life.
The road was more bustling than I remembered. Now that I was enjoying myself, I worried about my choice of skirt. On the island drivers have a tradition of waving as they pass one another. Bikes count as vehicles about fifty percent of the time and I practiced the wave on flats, but ignored drivers on the hills either up or down. One of the passing cars carried a teenage summer love of mine, looking older. Mushroom cut in tact. With Daniel so far ahead by now, he’d never know we were together. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that someone as apparently mature as Daniel could be the boyfriend of a bratty teenager. My own haircut was woefully similar to the one I’d had at fifteen. I cursed my skirt and pretended to be distracted with my bike chain. Rumor had it my teenage love, now giving me half an eye in the rear-view mirror, had went on to drop out of music college with a slew of addictions. What happens at music college to make someone drop out with a mushroom hairdo? He couldn’t cut it. A large bird swept overhead and I pulled over to watch and adjust my clothing. It was only a seagull. I pedaled faster to make up for lost time, past the houses with ocean views, away from the fishing boats and further along a winding road where the lawns get increasingly cluttered with furniture, and the porches increasingly collapsed.
Soon the figure of Daniel was zipping back toward me down the center of the road. “Let’s head to the swimming hole.” “Okay” I said, aware of my shortness of breath. It’s called the quarry, by the way, not the swimming hole. I prayed once there he wouldn’t want to go swimming. He biked in circles around me. “Please stop” I said. “I’m going to crash.” I tried to sound lighthearted. He laughed and stood up on his pedals, taking on the sharp incline ahead with astonishing speed.
My legs were tired again and as I was resisting the urge to walk, a red Mustang I recognized revved around the corner. I wanted to topple over to hide in the overgrown grass on the side of the road, but the red Mustang was distinctly slowing down. A sharp headache arose in my temples from the deceptive chill in the air. Behind the tinted windows, I could see the driver lifting an undersized hand to a slow wave. Mercifully, he didn’t stop the car. I waved back, cheerfully I hoped, while fashioning a posture of direction and great hurry.
The previous night at the bar, I’d found myself immersed in a conversation marked by drunken sincerity with the driver of the red Mustang. Meanwhile, Daniel had been immersed in a much more appropriately sincere drunken conversation with the bartender, about baseball, of all things. Where does he pick these things up? He’s never watched sports in my presence. He favors the real estate section in the newspaper whenever we’ve divided one up together on a train. Just from being alive and active in the world, I suppose he might say. I’ll have to ask him what that’s like sometime. Where was Daniel now? Probably at the quarry already. Hopefully not swimming. I would risk looking like no fun when I would have to refuse to join him.
I remembered the details the driver of the red Mustang, Frank, no Jack, told me last night. He has a close friend. A best friend, really. No, did he say they were brothers? They were like brothers, Jack and this close friend who had recently been in a car accident. Hit a tree on this very road and he wasn’t found for four hours. The friend was currently laid up on the mainland on life support. He’d told me that, since the accident, he’d taken to driving in circles around the island just to be alone. He drove endlessly, shamelessly. It was true, when I thought about it. We’d seen Jack's car more than any other single sight on the island. I don’t think we’d made a single outing without passing the red Mustang, with a stampede of multicolored horses painted in a zip down the middle. The first day we arrived, we had biked to a secluded section of the island and stopped at a fork in the road, deciding which of two dirt paths to brave. Jack pulled up noisily beside us and rolled down his window to offer directions in case we were lost. “So, where ya from?” “New York,” we’d said. “We’re partyin at that house there down the way tonight.” He’d pointed down the left dirt road to a dilapidated shack. “Thanks for the invitation,” we’d said, not knowing if it was an invitation, and pedalled down the dirt road to the right.
Last night Jack told me about his consuming guilt. What he wanted was to leave the island for good, but all he could think to do was drive around it. He wanted to enroll in college. After graduating with a degree in business, he wanted to open a bar, like one from the good old days, where everyone knows your name. His words. I expressed the opposite of doubt that he would soon be opening a bar. You should do it in Portland, I offered. He looked at me with genuine surprise. How had I known? He had real estate picked out in historic downtown Portland and had a plan for how to fund it. I noticed his blue eyes were surrounded by thick curling eyelashes. “You should do it now. This year. But forget about enrolling in college. Take it from me, school is pointless,” I said. Fishing on the island is very lucrative and he’d had his own boat since he was fourteen. “Open the bar. Do it this summer. You’ve saved how much?” He named a number somewhere between a thousand and a million. The number sounded large to my ears at the time. “What are you still doing here?” I gave it until the end of the year for his bar to be up and running, the heart of made for TV friendships between tourists and local fisherman.
“How old is your friend? Tommy.” “He’s twenty, like me. Don’t tell,” because we were in a bar. “I’m twenty-four” I said. “I’m immature though.” At the other end of the bar I could make out that Daniel and the bartender had moved on to the topic of great classic rock guitarists. If Tommy lives, it will almost certainly be with brain damage. I think I cried for him, or tried to. The story and the drinks made me dizzy and I concentrated too hard on holding eye contact. Chris suggested that if tourists hadn’t prevented the installment of cell towers for nostalgic reasons, Tommy would have been able to call for help. Absolutely. It’s crazy and just typical they'd veto something that was actually useful. Injustice raged. I counted on his drunkenness to couch each of my responses, which sounded helplessly insincere to me even then. Daniel looked over at our conversation several times, with what I assumed at the time were pangs of jealousy at the intimacy I’d formed with a local pretty boy. The kid in the mustang today looked like he couldn’t be a day older than sixteen. They’d probably been looks of utter confusion.
Finally I reached the quarry, where I saw Daniel’s bike resting against a tree. The quarry is an expansive ex-granite mine that hit spring water and filled up and is where tourists now swim. Jagged rock walls surround a dark pool that steams in the rain and glistens in the sun. They’re said to be two hundred feet deep. Daniel was already relaxing on the water’s ledge, staring out at the rocks. I noticed little beads of sweat on his forehead. Apparently, he’d felt compelled to take the ride at a sprint. I’d pent him up in the house against his nature. Lethargy, along with gossip and social anxiety, were realms in which Daniel would never relate to me. I tried to assume an alert and sporty pose beside him, but fatigue set in almost immediately.
Even though it was getting late in the day, a few people were still splashing in the water, kids on the near side, old people on the far side, like always. Usually the local teenagers would be diving off the cliffs, where we sat now. As a teenager it was here that I’d envied the bodies of older girls and prayed for boys to try to push me in. Without them, I was hopelessly bored by the cliffs. They’re never as high as you remember them. At the beginning of my relationship with Daniel, I’d managed to seem the type who was up for anything. He knew the truth now. Blah, blah, blah, I said loudly to myself. It was a habit I’d adopted to drown out negative thoughts about myself. He couldn't want to go swimming. My exercise high was rapidly fading now that I was on the ground and the air was suddenly cold and sunless.
A jeep and a pickup truck filled with arms and legs of our age and build came hurtling down the dirt road. They yelled whoops and party cries out the windows at us, unmistakably not to us. “We’ll see you over there,” I fake called-out. Daniel gave me a winning smile. Luckily, he only wanted to hike around. “Okay” I said. “let’s walk to the ocean.” “No. Let’s walk through the woods,” he said. “Okay” I said, even though I knew that there were no trails, and that the dense woods led into backyards within ten yards. Up for anything. A fairly impenetrable thicket of pines surrounds the water so we were limited to walking carefully around the quarry’s perimeter, with Daniel in the lead.
We passed the old people section of the pool, with a shallow entry where they can easily descend. A woman in her stretched out suit was folding a towel, while her friend called to her from the water. “Hold on! I’m coming to ya,” the swimming women said, then ducked her head in for the crawl. We moved past them until we were directly across from where we started and Daniel decided to sit down on a particularly smooth ledge. I crouched beside him.
“Fishing” I said, and pointed to a partially hidden alcove among the rocks. A man was holding a rod and his two small sons stood beside him wearing identical sweatshirts and baby jeans with elastic waist-bands. “I hope no ones swimming over there” I said. I mimed a hook penetrating the inside of my cheek, stretching it beyond what was comfortable. Daniel continued his stare down of the rocks, like a big lithe cat. We watched the fishing family and listened to the women in the elderly section, their clear voices carrying more than they probably knew. We heard one of the old women describe the water as “indescribably beautiful” and then climb out. The water was empty of swimmers now, and just as the ladies’ car drove off, the fishing line we’d been watching tensed. The larger of the two small boys started jumping up and down and pumping his fists when he noticed.
The father said “quiet” and lowered himself carefully nearer to the water, ledge by ledge, climbing down the rocks until he balanced on a very narrow ledge at the water. The man was a smoker slim with a sparse reddish beard and over-sized feet. A piece of duck-tape covered a hole in his unfaded jeans. Locals. “Oh Lord, it’s a big one!” the larger little kid yelled. “This is awesome!” said the little one. The father didn’t say anything, and he seemed more serious than he could have been, given the enthusiasm of his kids, both of whom were now jumping up and down in time, pumping their fists.
The larger kid jumped down by the water to join his father, who said “hand me the towel.” The boy scrambled back up the rocks without losing his footing, not that the father seemed to care. “Bring me that towel.” The kid threw a blue cloth down at his father with great purpose as his father was reeling in the line. After about of minute of reeling from the father, we saw a black form break the surface. The kid gasped, “it’s an eel. Holy, holy.” “Awesome!” the little one, who was really very little, squealed. He looked more like an elf than a kid, too tiny to be jumping up and down with such control over his limbs. The older one held out the cloth for his dad who drew and continued to draw a long snake from the water inch by inch. “Oh. My God. Will it never end?” “Holy shit, it really is an eel” Daniel said. “I told you there were eels in the quarry.” It was a rumor that scared me as a kid and that I had been continually reassured was apocryphal over the years.
“It’s so slimy” the kid said. “It’s really slimy” the little brother said, too. It didn’t look much slimier than a regular fish from where we sat, but very naked, its long body desperately twitching for a rock to hide behind. The man tightened the blue rag against it and wrestled the eel off of the hook and into his hand. He seemed almost to be shielding his prize purposely from our view and the view of his kids. He turned one shoulder and worked the eel with his back to us, doing steady actions that between the leafy backdrop and blackening water, looked vaguely cultish and pagen. He started breaking off smallish tree branches from a spindly maple.The older kid asked, “Are we going to set it free?” “We’re going to eat it,” the father said. I couldn’t see it hanging, I assumed the eel was tacked up to dry on the branch-cleared tree. I imagined their prize growing limp and faded, like a ribbon on a bulletin board.
Part of me had always known that eels really did lurk behind rocks in the quarry. A lifetime suspicion confirmed, I declared the excursion a success and hoped this would sate Daniel’ need to feel something accomplished today. The shadows were creating pleasing cuts all across the horizontal slabs of rock. It was a beautiful place, and I was glad I’d come. On cue, Daniel mounted his bike and suggested the long way home. I would have to protest. The eel sighting had held my attention and I had to go home before my mind loosened again. My head was dully pounding. “What if this is the day I wake up with a hangover, and it never ends? Like the hiccups.” “You’re hungover?” It was a fear of mine. Maybe this was the day it would finally happen. “I was just kidding. I think I might be getting sick.” A revving noise swallowed my excuse. It made its way up the hill and turned down the dirt road that led to the quarry. I saw the front of the red mustang dip into the road, coming toward us. “Let’s go swimming,” I said. “It will do me good.” It was getting dark now, and the water was green and ominous. But it was nothing I hadn’t done a million times as a kid. “We didn’t bring towels.” “It’s okay. I want to jump in.” I pulled off my shoes and socks. Daniel didn’t move, but stared at me in what I decided to take as bemused admiration at this burst of joie de vivre on my part.
I looked at Daniel in the foreground, and behind him at the red Mustang stopped mid-hum, the driver, Jack, manually rolling down a creaky window to stick out his round, youthful face with lovely eye lashes. And in the background behind them, the darkening trees that seemed to go on forever, but really became backyards within a few feet. Taken together, the picture was classic American realism, pulsing with that certain active quality that never seemed to posses me. Walking deliberately to the ledge I tried a cheerful skip for their sakes, and jumped into a flash of shockingly cold, disturbingly dark water. It tasted fresh and pondy. I surfaced to see Daniel conversing with the driver of the Mustang who had stopped and rolled down his window. Maybe the subject would turn to baseball. Both waved and called to me, and I dipped once again to be under water with the eels. The eels and I shivered and when I surfaced I cleared my throat to affect a clear, actorly tone with the appropriate note of play. “Cowards,” I said. “Crazy” Daniel called back, and I heard the driver of the mustang laugh. The threat of discovery had overcome the eels and I, and I felt too tired now to imagine the idea of coming out by my own will.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
To update, even though i wrote all that, the very next night I broke down and called chax, partly out of a sense of injustice (plus a dash of drunkenness). I'm feeling bad and he has no idea, so I decide to let him know. I fell asleep at some point and woke up feeling worse. In the morning I asked if I could come see him. I just needed clarity. I didn't go but succeeded in getting a rundown of the terms of the breakup. I think that's what I wanted all along but it sounded somewhat demeaning to say, especially when I'm dealing with someone who prefers to speak exclusively in metaphor. When will we see each other again? What will it be like? How often will we talk? Are you going to date people? Sleep with them? I want to see our relationship as an intense connection sustained over time and space. But actually I have things to say that make it look petty and day-to-day. I’m jealous and insecure and I feel the need to express these things or they torture me. Also, I keep feeling a distasteful sense of entitlement: he owes it to me. I put him ahead of me last year. I paid for things, got him jobs, brought him coffee in bed, drove him around when he developed a fear of the subway, helped him with his applications, all night sometimes. Would he have done those things for me? Probably not, it isn’t his style. On the other hand, he did so much else for me. He introduced me to new interests and ideas, was a loyal friend and always on my side. He included me in everything and wanted to have me around, with his friends and family, who I adore. He showed he respected me, brought almost constant fun and good cheer into my life, encouraged and inspired me. My feelings come and go in these waves of understanding. Sometimes I’m washed over by the feeling that everything will be okay, but then it recedes again and leaves me all vulnerable and lonely.
Steve Jobs, Editors, Ashton Kutcher
I had a very powerful reaction to the death of steve jobs. i hate when people said they don’t get all the fuss. creative genius is so rare. if that’s not worth idolizing, what is? even though he was a maker of products and a corporate giant, it’s obvious he never pandered to the market. The values of the market would not have led to minimalism or beauty, unfortunately. Thea says I have to read his obit in the Wall Street Journal. Thea, you read the Wall Street Journal? She is quite more spiritual than it's typical reader. As the Wall Street Journal put it, Jobs always had “a miracle in his pocket.” Thea loved that phrase. Go figure.
Speaking of jobs, I’m not sure if my job has been worth it so far. Am I learning a lot and meeting a lot of people, which paddy johnson says defines a worthwhile internship? well define “a lot.” I meet a few new people a week. I learn a few things a week. Not very good numbers for full time. One of the most pressing tasks i’m assigned at work seems to be bringing little packages to the fancy apartments of beautiful french women. French women who then tell the editor I once so admired that “i took my job very seriously.” ugh. I can only imagine. “you’re eentern took her job verry seriuhzly” in some winking french way. What is that supposed to mean? I have no idea.
It seems the jobs that are the most interesting are also the least important. A prize winning story comes in and it is amazing. Yes, it is about an unplanned pregnancy and told from the perspective of a young girl, but these things do happen. Young girls have deep thoughts and pregnancies. The eds take their sweet time reading it and then decide it is probably not something the main man will like. True, because there was no strange, unexplained sexual encounter and it was not told by a detached narrator who may be a robot, but you’re not really sure. Neither was it about an insecure but attractive failed artist and his sexual conquests. There is not one woman being published in the upcoming issue. Typical.
Other days, you are asked to do one serious thing all day, so you do it right away and do a good job. They say “wow! didn’t mean to instill such a sense of urgency!” Or else, they say nothing. They’re embarrassed they asked in the first place because they probably won’t use it. But when you successfully deliver a soft package to a hot french girl’s west village apartment? Bravo. You took your “job” “seriously”. Good God. No one responds to emails that do not require a response. As a rule one does not hello or goodbye. They also do not as a rule respond to @mentions on twitter. I am not a twitter user and even I know that this flies in the face of online etiquette, not to mention the whole point of twitter. The weirdest part is that they are all genuinely friendly and nice people except that they’ve instituationalized standoffishness as a policy. And by the way rudeness doesn’t come unnaturally to them. Whatevahs.
Thursday i email exchanged with an associate editor all day because he wanted to come to the monthly libertarian lecture series my dad runs. I guess Assoc. is a libertarian. (weird much? Very.) We left the office without saying goodbye or acknowledging the exchange. I decide to show up anyway to diffuse things in case he did decide to come. I had not fully warned him about the wacko extent of these meetings and was worried I might have to save him from dad making him perform CPR on command in an initiation ritual. I see him there, the only normal one in a crowd of homeless people and mad scientists, sitting way up in the front. My mom and I sit in the back and take in the macabre scharade.
A word about Assoc. Normal is not quite it. He is hot. So hot I am not even attracted to him. Actually he’s like a 1970s movie star. He wears boot cut jeans that are a little too tight (just because he’s prob had them since 1999) and birkenstocks. Seventies haircut like Ashton Kutcher in “That 70s Show.” (but just cause he hasn’t gotten a haircut in a while). Actually he looks remarkably like Ashton Kutcher way back before he was “hip”. So after the “show” I invite Ashton to the after party, which unbeknownst until then to me was happening at my house. He hedges; he wants to drop off his Steve Jobs tribute at the Apple store. Wonderful! No pressure. The Apple store is on my way home (and I’d like to see it too) so we walk there together, talking about his background as an Ohio boy turned college athlete turned British boarding school teacher (turned Oxford grad student-turned intern-turned editor). And I, in turn, sound and feel like a complete underachiever. At the Apple store vigil hotAssoc basically starts crying (for Jobs). And I realize his hot face is actually a geek’s face. Kind of puffy and twisty in the mouth, Iike his hand would be at home on his chin, stroking an imaginary beard. His tribute is an apple he wrapped in black electrical tape so it looked like a solid metal apple. It’s the most clever icon of the bunch. He leaves it at the shrine while I am busy texting chax pics of the shrine (why even in the company of pre-trucker hat Ashton Kutcher am I texting chax, even though it is chax’s “turn”? Don't ask.) After we’ve both had our moments with Steve, Ashton reports that his brother’s concert at Carnegie hall (did i mention his whole family are accomplished classical musicians?) has not ended yet and offers to “walk me home.” Awks much, that he called it that? I think he actually wanted to come to the party to fraternize with his own kind (libertarians--as I keep almost forgetting). I learn a lot about him. We were talking a lot, not because we were hitting it off, but because I was deathly afraid of running out of things to talk about. But in the end that made for a fun convo. He’s very forthcoming and solicitous, quick to laugh. Extremely nice.
After he leaves the party I am overcome with fear that he had been looking for a way out for hours but is so nice he didn’t know how to leave. Plus he got such an intimate look at me, my strange house filled with strangers, my baby brother asleep on my aging dad’s lap. And the next day we are back to strangers in a strange standoffish office. And we will probably drift to real strangers again before next week is over. I’m too paranoid to pursue the friendship. I’m sure from experience he assumes I have a crush on him, as every intern before me surely has. I don’t. In fact, at the end of the night, I was happy, not because I made a hot friend but because making this hot friend provided enough distraction to quell the urge to call chax for the night. Make sense? Not really, I know.
Every second I am excercising strength when it comes to chax. I’m still holding out hope that something big will happen and we’ll realize we can’t live without each other. (I’ll just be as honest as possible, i’m fantasizing about a near death experience for me--not too near. Maybe I fall into a manhole, get trapped for an hour, just long enough to question whether i’ll ever be found, before I am found, with a broken leg perhaps, and I'm hospitalized for shock. This is when charles rushes to my bedside, skipping his final review to be there for me because “this is what’s important”). There is no point in thinking any of that. I have dreams about his ex still. Had one last night, and a few nights before that. I wake up thinking “it must end.” He has not been good enough to me. Even if i don’t really believe that (which I don’t, really), the best way for us to be together in the future is to let him remember how cool and independent I am. I can’t show neediness or make him associate stress with me. There will be other boys. I want him to know what I’m feeling but i don’t need him to. It won’t change anything.
Speaking of jobs, I’m not sure if my job has been worth it so far. Am I learning a lot and meeting a lot of people, which paddy johnson says defines a worthwhile internship? well define “a lot.” I meet a few new people a week. I learn a few things a week. Not very good numbers for full time. One of the most pressing tasks i’m assigned at work seems to be bringing little packages to the fancy apartments of beautiful french women. French women who then tell the editor I once so admired that “i took my job very seriously.” ugh. I can only imagine. “you’re eentern took her job verry seriuhzly” in some winking french way. What is that supposed to mean? I have no idea.
It seems the jobs that are the most interesting are also the least important. A prize winning story comes in and it is amazing. Yes, it is about an unplanned pregnancy and told from the perspective of a young girl, but these things do happen. Young girls have deep thoughts and pregnancies. The eds take their sweet time reading it and then decide it is probably not something the main man will like. True, because there was no strange, unexplained sexual encounter and it was not told by a detached narrator who may be a robot, but you’re not really sure. Neither was it about an insecure but attractive failed artist and his sexual conquests. There is not one woman being published in the upcoming issue. Typical.
Other days, you are asked to do one serious thing all day, so you do it right away and do a good job. They say “wow! didn’t mean to instill such a sense of urgency!” Or else, they say nothing. They’re embarrassed they asked in the first place because they probably won’t use it. But when you successfully deliver a soft package to a hot french girl’s west village apartment? Bravo. You took your “job” “seriously”. Good God. No one responds to emails that do not require a response. As a rule one does not hello or goodbye. They also do not as a rule respond to @mentions on twitter. I am not a twitter user and even I know that this flies in the face of online etiquette, not to mention the whole point of twitter. The weirdest part is that they are all genuinely friendly and nice people except that they’ve instituationalized standoffishness as a policy. And by the way rudeness doesn’t come unnaturally to them. Whatevahs.
Thursday i email exchanged with an associate editor all day because he wanted to come to the monthly libertarian lecture series my dad runs. I guess Assoc. is a libertarian. (weird much? Very.) We left the office without saying goodbye or acknowledging the exchange. I decide to show up anyway to diffuse things in case he did decide to come. I had not fully warned him about the wacko extent of these meetings and was worried I might have to save him from dad making him perform CPR on command in an initiation ritual. I see him there, the only normal one in a crowd of homeless people and mad scientists, sitting way up in the front. My mom and I sit in the back and take in the macabre scharade.
A word about Assoc. Normal is not quite it. He is hot. So hot I am not even attracted to him. Actually he’s like a 1970s movie star. He wears boot cut jeans that are a little too tight (just because he’s prob had them since 1999) and birkenstocks. Seventies haircut like Ashton Kutcher in “That 70s Show.” (but just cause he hasn’t gotten a haircut in a while). Actually he looks remarkably like Ashton Kutcher way back before he was “hip”. So after the “show” I invite Ashton to the after party, which unbeknownst until then to me was happening at my house. He hedges; he wants to drop off his Steve Jobs tribute at the Apple store. Wonderful! No pressure. The Apple store is on my way home (and I’d like to see it too) so we walk there together, talking about his background as an Ohio boy turned college athlete turned British boarding school teacher (turned Oxford grad student-turned intern-turned editor). And I, in turn, sound and feel like a complete underachiever. At the Apple store vigil hotAssoc basically starts crying (for Jobs). And I realize his hot face is actually a geek’s face. Kind of puffy and twisty in the mouth, Iike his hand would be at home on his chin, stroking an imaginary beard. His tribute is an apple he wrapped in black electrical tape so it looked like a solid metal apple. It’s the most clever icon of the bunch. He leaves it at the shrine while I am busy texting chax pics of the shrine (why even in the company of pre-trucker hat Ashton Kutcher am I texting chax, even though it is chax’s “turn”? Don't ask.) After we’ve both had our moments with Steve, Ashton reports that his brother’s concert at Carnegie hall (did i mention his whole family are accomplished classical musicians?) has not ended yet and offers to “walk me home.” Awks much, that he called it that? I think he actually wanted to come to the party to fraternize with his own kind (libertarians--as I keep almost forgetting). I learn a lot about him. We were talking a lot, not because we were hitting it off, but because I was deathly afraid of running out of things to talk about. But in the end that made for a fun convo. He’s very forthcoming and solicitous, quick to laugh. Extremely nice.
After he leaves the party I am overcome with fear that he had been looking for a way out for hours but is so nice he didn’t know how to leave. Plus he got such an intimate look at me, my strange house filled with strangers, my baby brother asleep on my aging dad’s lap. And the next day we are back to strangers in a strange standoffish office. And we will probably drift to real strangers again before next week is over. I’m too paranoid to pursue the friendship. I’m sure from experience he assumes I have a crush on him, as every intern before me surely has. I don’t. In fact, at the end of the night, I was happy, not because I made a hot friend but because making this hot friend provided enough distraction to quell the urge to call chax for the night. Make sense? Not really, I know.
Every second I am excercising strength when it comes to chax. I’m still holding out hope that something big will happen and we’ll realize we can’t live without each other. (I’ll just be as honest as possible, i’m fantasizing about a near death experience for me--not too near. Maybe I fall into a manhole, get trapped for an hour, just long enough to question whether i’ll ever be found, before I am found, with a broken leg perhaps, and I'm hospitalized for shock. This is when charles rushes to my bedside, skipping his final review to be there for me because “this is what’s important”). There is no point in thinking any of that. I have dreams about his ex still. Had one last night, and a few nights before that. I wake up thinking “it must end.” He has not been good enough to me. Even if i don’t really believe that (which I don’t, really), the best way for us to be together in the future is to let him remember how cool and independent I am. I can’t show neediness or make him associate stress with me. There will be other boys. I want him to know what I’m feeling but i don’t need him to. It won’t change anything.
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