A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (16 page)

I.

Being a muse isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Best-case scenario, you wind up with a statue of yourself in a museum, posed at an unflattering angle. Worst-case scenario, someone makes
(500) Days of Summer
about you.

My situation was somewhere between the two. My ex-boyfriend wrote a play about me.

Yup.

It’s my go-to crazy ex story. “Yours keeps messaging you on Facebook?” I scoff. “Please. Mine literally wrote a play about me. With a Greek chorus.”

His name was David. We’d been friends for years. We met right after arriving at college, at a prefrosh program for artsy people. It concluded with a pageant where I played a Robot King and he played a backpacker who was bad at picking up on social cues. We stayed friends because we kept getting rejected from the same things. It’s amazing what that will do to cement a friendship.

When we did get together, it turned into one of those
tumultuous relationships you hear about: on-again, off-again, like a defective lamp.

It started cute. He spent a summer abroad. We talked. He missed me, which was . . . novel. I’d never had a guy miss me. I’d been overlooked, sure, but never missed. Every New Year’s, I’d spend a week with my grandparents listening to my male cousins call their girlfriends and murmur, “I MISS YOU! I LOVE YOU! NO, I LOVE YOU MORE,” into the phone. It seemed like a cruel joke they were playing on me, not an actual thing that happened to people.

When David got back to campus, he informed me that I was the type of girl that he wanted not only to date, but also to cuddle with and take out to dinner in a respectful manner.

I was on board. For once in my life, I really, you know, liked someone. I thought he was cute, and not just in the way that I think every Jewish guy is cute. (I don’t undress people with my eyes; I just picture them in yarmulkes.)

For about a week, it went well. Then he realized that dating might ruin our friendship. Why this had not occurred to him before, I have no idea. At any rate, he broke up with me.

No way was that happening.

So I did all the things that you are supposed to do. I took him out for coffee and reasoned with him, using logic. “All relationships,” I explained, “end in breakups or in death.”

Two months later he had a change of heart and asked me back.

After that he was on board, too.

He listened to me. He laughed at my jokes. He made me watch
Tootsie
and
The Ben Stiller Show
and he recited monologues from
Hamlet
and asked for my feedback on his acting. We had long conversations about his friends and relatives and my friends and relatives and all those daily bits of news that seem so pressing. Shit was getting real.

But when he told me he was in love with me, I was flummoxed.

Everything I had heard about love was terrifying. Love sounded like a diabolical Santa. Love, they said, came for you when you least expected it. Love put all your secrets out in the open. You came home from work one day, and Love was waiting in your garage with a knife, breathing heavily.

Well, I hadn’t experienced anything like that. I did give him a watermelon one time. He seemed to appreciate the Happy Administrative Professionals Day card that I bought him—for Valentine’s Day. And sure, I’d had the urge to write him a couple of sonnets, but they were casual, ABABCDCDEFEFGG sonnets, nothing formal or Petrarchan or anything. Surely that didn’t count.

“Thank you,” I said. “Uh. Likewise.”

Afterward I went back to my room, feeling both shaken and stirred, like a martini that James Bond would complain about.

Was I supposed to be having feelings for him? I was Scandinavian. I came from a long line of emotionally frigid blond people. To say that we were in touch with our feelings would be a gross exaggeration. At most, they send us a postcard every six to eight years to say that they are enjoying life in the new country. What was I supposed to do with this?

“All relationships,” I reminded myself, “end in breakups or in death.” I wasn’t ready to die!

So I broke up with him.

Turning him into my crazy ex-boyfriend was a snap. I’d barely referred to him as my boyfriend to begin with. To call someone my boyfriend would imply that I was someone’s girlfriend. I had gone to an all-girls’ school, and I knew better than that. A girlfriend was somebody with a purse who went to your sporting events. I wasn’t a purse. I was a PERSON.

And when I read his play, that just sealed the deal.

•   •   •

A few weeks after our split, we were in playwriting class, the Big Fancy Playwriting Class where they perform your play at the end of the semester, and something seemed a little off.

When we read one another’s drafts, I realized what it was. There I was, right there on his page.

But he’d started
revising
me.

Every draft came back with my character looking worse. She delivered extended monologues about how she had realized that she was missing out on a good thing. She cried more. David glanced hopefully across the classroom at me.

Who was this girl? Why was she writing sonnets and showing up at his events with watermelon? Why was she telling him that all relationships end in breakups or in death?

With every rewrite, it got worse. “That seems unrealistic, for the character to say a thing like that,” I would say, pointing out one of my best lines, transcribed verbatim from one of our GChats.

“Does it?”

“It wasn’t like that at all!” I glanced nervously around the classroom. “In this, er, fictional world of the play that you’ve created.”

“Wasn’t it?” He frowned. “I think it was.”

That’s the trouble with being a muse.

It’s not what it’s cracked up to be at all.

•   •   •

And I hadn’t even set out to be a muse. I’d just been mistaken for one, a specific kind of muse: the manic pixie dream girl. Manic pixie dream girls, for the uninitiated—lucky you!—are the lazy man’s modern-day muse. They don’t have personalities. They have quirks. They wear rain boots and call coffeepots “elf beaneries” and talk about how the stars are God’s daisy chain. They descend on nebbishy male writers in search of muses the way seagulls descend on a French fry.

Their hobbies include but are not limited to: running in the rain, dancing in the rain, listening to better bands than you in the rain, playing the ukulele in the rain (it sounds no worse), coming up with twee nicknames for household objects in the rain, and breaking up with nebbishy male writers for reasons that said writers find completely impenetrable, sometimes also in the rain. And then, as the writers sob over their departure, they realize that this heartbreak was just the impetus they needed to create That Elusive Masterwork That Was Always Lurking Just out of Reach.

They’re catalysts. They are airy free spirits who, since the dawn of manuscript time, have come waltzing into the lives of nebbishy male writers to urge them to Get Out and Experience Life. They generate plots.

Unfortunately, all the plots are about the same: A young girl sparkling with life, often but not always with erratically colored hair, comes pirouetting into your humdrum existence and teaches you how to feel, love, and throw away whatever medication is keeping you from alarming the neighbors. But then the relationship ends, and you transform your whimsical, credulity-straining romance into a classic work of fiction, and the plaudits come pouring in from all corners.

I never thought of myself as one of them. I hate rain. I hate rain almost as much as I hate ukulele music. Also, they are fictional. So I thought I was safe. It was certainly not my intent to unload turdkilograms of whimsy into anyone’s life.

And more than that, I always knew I wanted to tell stories. That’s something manic pixies never do. They’re not the protagonists of their own lives. They’re characters in yours.

II.

Yet David had come to think of me this way. I’m pretty sure it was because of the night I mentioned I was crashing the publication dinner for an International Textbook on Geriatric Care, which is, I confess, the sort of thing these pixie dream girls do in movies.

But I was not motivated by whimsy. I was motivated by food. I have always prided myself on my ability to crash things. I viewed
Wedding Crashers
as a kind of life blueprint. Why would you
not
want to go and get free food among strangers? That’s the whole point of human existence: free food. I mean, art, and perpetuating the human race, and everything, but—come now. Tell me you don’t want finger cheese.

I was always trying to expand my crash roster. Once, I accidentally wandered from a New York bar into a gallery opening for a Russian artist after someone gave me confusing directions to the bathroom. I walked through one door, then through another door, and—there I was, surrounded by people in fine array, sampling wine and cheese and staring at the art with awe written on their faces. Never one to pass up free champagne, I took a glass and wandered around, trying to look like just one more art appreciator in my natural art-appreciating habitat. I gradually became aware that most of the people around me were speaking Russian. This didn’t seem like a problem. I could do a Russian accent. I’d seen
Borat
.

I got another glass of champagne and murmured appreciatively at the canvases. A couple approached me. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” they said.

“Yes, yes,” I said, trying my Russian accent. “The painting, it is beautiful. Most lovely, yes.”

They nodded. Emboldened, I continued. “That, I hear, is the artist there, yes?”

At this point the man began speaking to me in actual Russian. I struggled to maintain my composure. I had no idea what he was saying. This is it, I thought. There goes my cover. They would boot me out unceremoniously and I would not get to try any more of the finger cheeses. I cast desperately about me for a solution.

“Ah ah ah,” I said, wagging a finger at him. “I wish to practice my English.”

We switched back without incident. I grabbed another glass of champagne. By the time I had worked my way to the bottom of it I was shaking the artist by her gloved hand and repeating the word “beautiful, beautiful” in halting, accented tones. I still have her somewhat bewildered autograph.

Leaving the reception with a belly full of champagne, a guide to the exhibit, and a handful of postcards depicting the art in it, I quite justly felt that I could crash anything on Earth.

Sadly, college life left few opportunities for me to test this hypothesis, until one day, walking through the Harvard Faculty Club, I spotted a sign for the Publication Dinner for an International Textbook on Geriatric Care.

That sounded like a swank time. Nothing says “swank time” like “We’ve figured out how to care for elderly people so their hips stay intact when they fall over!”

I put on a black dress and showed up during the cocktail hour. One of the nice things about being a white female in your twenties, apart from the VAST MOUNDS OF UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE, is that if you show up to a nice dinner in a nice cocktail dress, people generally assume you’re supposed to be there.

I had a cover story, which was that my boyfriend worked for the publisher. Sadly, he hadn’t shown up yet! Oh well! Here I was anyway. Mm, canapés! How do you know Mr. International Textbook?

This was perfect because it required me to have zero knowledge
of or connection to the textbook, and it put the onus on my boyfriend for telling me to come to this dinner, then failing to show up himself. I wound up talking to the son of one of the scientists who had contributed a chapter. The scientist had flown in from Korea and his son spoke limited English, so we communicated mainly by gesturing and eating the hors d’oeuvres at each other.

I managed to secure a seat at his table, away from the actual people who were responsible for the textbook, and figured I was safe.

But then things started to go downhill. His father came over and insisted we join the high table. Tonight, he conveyed through words and gestures, was a great night of celebration, and we should spend it together.

Then I got a text from David. “Where are you?” he said. “I thought we were hanging out.”

“I’m crashing the Publication Dinner for the International Textbook on Geriatric Care,” I typed.

A pause. “I’ll be right there!”

I watched in terror as my cover story began collapsing in on itself like an ill-constructed cake. If he showed up, it would be clear that he did not work for the publisher and that in fact I knew zero people involved with this textbook, and then we would be rousted out of the dinner. And I was already three courses in! This could not pass. I wanted to make it to coffee, at least.

I glanced up in horror as he walked in.

Remember that David was an actor. He had decided that “My Boyfriend Who Works for the Textbook Company” was a character, and that a character required a costume. Accordingly, he had gone to Urban Outfitters and bought plastic glasses with fake lenses, which he was now wearing. The fact that he was wearing these glasses did nothing to change the fact that nobody at the dinner knew him. My only hope was that we were all too drunk, on wine
and the joy of publishing an International Textbook on Geriatric Care, to notice this fact.

Maybe, I thought, it would be a good idea to greet his arrival by saying, “Oh, this isn’t my boyfriend who works for the textbook company! This is my other boyfriend, who complicates things by arriving when he is not expected! My relationship status is complicated, almost as complicated as dealing with bursitis in a septuagenarian, isn’t that right, Linda?”

Instead I decided to tough it out. “You made it!” I said.

“Yes!” he said. “I made it! I am Her Boyfriend Seth Aaron Who Works for the Publisher!”

This was when I expected one of the people at the table to say, “You work for Susan?” and David to say, “Who’s Susan?” and everyone at the table to start pelting us with dinner rolls. Instead, we pulled up a chair for him.

“Who are you?” one of my dinner companions, a rather drunk lady who had written the chapter on Caring for the Aging Kidney, inquired.