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