“You have to learn to take the subway sometime,” he’d announced.
I was fully ignorant of mass transit, and had to be led onto the train. Upon disembarking into the flattening heat and humidity of August, we’d discovered that we were roughly five thousand miles from my dormitory. Taylor had manfully carried most of my luggage, as I’d begun to have a total nervous breakdown and was unfit to be responsible for anything but my backpack. The elevators in my building were, of course, broken, so Taylor had lugged the endless bags up eleven flights of stairs. Then he’d taken me to a burrito joint, bought me a beer, and told me it would be okay.
Taylor’d been right. I’d fallen in love with New York City anyway. In the cripplingly Caucasian Potato State, my olive skin and brown hair (“ethnic”) had rendered me dateless. Revise. I’d been asked out, yes, but I’d never any intention of accepting the offers. Only creepy people liked me. Gray-ponytailed hippies often stalked me at all-ages poetry slams, reciting lascivious odes that referred to me as “a luminous, nubile woman-child.” They’d get my mom’s number from information, and then call incessantly, inviting me to accompany them to the beatnik mecca of Denny’s for “coffee and cigarettes.” No thanks. I’d been delighted to discover that the men of New York City were not only ponytail free, they had no reservations about my skin tone.
I’d met the first of my failures only hours after hitting the city. He was a dweeby Cinema Studies major from Cincinnati, who did not, in all the time I knew him, ever manage to zip his fly. It had only gone downhill from there, but still, I’d been dazzled by the dating options available to me: Men with Books! Men with Biceps! Men with Encyclopedic Knowledge of French Farce! I’d felt like I’d been wandering in a cultural desert for my entire life, and had miraculously stumbled upon a shimmering city of intellectual splendor, every man bearing a bejeweled braincase. It was a mirage, of course, but that hadn’t kept me from repeatedly immersing myself in its sand dunes.
I’d wasted the year flinging myself into abortive relationships with a bunch of brilliant losers. I’d been forced to imagine myself as a thesis committee, so that my dates could practice defending dissertations on such varied topics as Misery and Maiming in the Russian Literary Canon; Masturbation Metaphor in Shakespeare—A Design for Contemporary Life; and Images of Insects in the Films of David Lynch. I’d spent a month or two in Drama with Donatello, an NYU graduate film student who preyed on freshmen. He was Haitian, via rich parents in Florida, and in possession of a rickety skateboard on which he could perpetually be seen flying half-drunk from the marble banisters of historic campus buildings. He’d been so peerlessly self-confident that he’d managed to convince me he was necessary to my emotional development, and thus had enjoyed the privilege of torturing me with a recurrent alleged joke: “You’re so racist. I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
“If I’m racist, why am I hanging out with you?” I’d point out. But his argument involved subtleties, like me being inherently against ethnic mingling even as I was kissing him. He’d taken me on a date to a screening of the unfortunate 1952 Orson Welles blackface Othello. During the Desdemona murder scene, he’d stage-whispered, so loudly that every cinephile in the theater could hear him, “Are you worried?”
I felt that I somehow might have deserved this. It was a given that I was underexposed to any kind of racial diversity. Maybe I was racist, and just didn’t know it. I was white, after all, even though in Idaho I’d been frequently assumed to be Mexican. Anytime I’d foolishly admitted my home state (which had been, for many wretched years, the home-base of the Aryan Nation’s skinhead compound), people would say things like, “Huh. So you’re a neo-Nazi?” Donatello had been ingeniously confrontational with everyone. One day, walking on Broadway with him, me hoping that we were finally having romance, he’d pounced for an hour on a Hare Krishna, “just because.”
We’d finally imploded one morning in my dorm room, as he’d meticulously directed the application of my makeup, forming his hands into the universal symbol for “I Am Now Framing a Shot.” Initially, I’d been flattered, but then he’d started using the close-up to point out zits. When I’d thrown him out, he’d earnestly declared that he’d expected to be my boyfriend for “seven years, but now you’ve fucked it up, so it’s your loss.” Then, he’d called for weeks, aggrieved that I was no longer speaking to him. I’d picked up the phone once.
“No,” I’d said.
“No, what?”
“Just. No.”
It wasn’t that I had anything against intellectual men. I liked them. Indeed, I sought them. The problems happened later. We’d be on the verge of kissing, and they’d suddenly lurch away, whispering irrelevant lines clearly memorized in high school. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was a favorite recitation among college-age males. “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” indeed. I was unravish’d far too often for my taste. “Never, never canst thou kiss” seemed to be a life philosophy for some of my paramours. One guy, engaged in the study of possibly pedophilic Victorian authors, had given me a scrap of “Jabberwocky” (“And, as in uffish thought he stood/The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/Came whiffling through the tulgey wood/And burbled as it came!”) before attempting to do something that I speedily decided was anatomically inadvisable. Other guys tried quoting the drunken renegade poet Charles Bukowski’s “love is a dog from hell.” Frankly, I was weary of hearing about dogs as an excuse for not being able to deal with pussy. The poem was about neither dogs nor love. The title was the best thing about it. This was often the case with men, as well as poems. When I’d called my mom to tell her I was going out with a PhD in English Literature, it had sounded terrific. But what it’d really meant was that I was planning to subject myself to endless discussions of Middle-march, capped off with the theoretically kinky suggestion that I pull a George Eliot and crossdress. An evening with a sensitive Virginia Woolf expert had ended with him gently closing his apartment door, and suggesting that perhaps “you just need a room of your own.”
I did not want a room of my own! I just wanted to find a guy I wouldn’t mind sharing a room with. It didn’t seem too much to ask. New York City was theoretically populated with the most attractive and intelligent men in the world. I could think of no explanation for my failure. Except that, as Shakespeare would no doubt have informed me, the fault was not in my stars, but in myself. Or rather, in my no policy. I’d always believed that I knew exactly what was good for me, but clearly this wasn’t true. I was no longer a trustworthy guardian of my heart. I was twenty years old, and I hated everything.
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