Instant Love (21 page)

And I am awake. I can hear the Wall Streeters laughing their bawdy, wild laughs. They say “dude” a lot; they use the word as a punctuation mark. At some point in the night someone will make a barking sound. If I were the kind of woman who made wagers, I’d lay a twenty-dollar bill on it. There is always a bark. Then there will be a fight. Sometimes they take it outside. Not outside the building. That would be too much effort. No, they just take it outside their front door. Next to my door. It’s almost enough to make me want to find a new apartment. I’m simply not getting enough sleep.

They moved in six months ago, greased the building superintendent’s palms with thick stacks of twenties, or maybe fifties, and nabbed that highly coveted three-bedroom apartment with the deck and the view (I’ve only heard, never seen). It seems like there are more than three people who live there, though, at least four, maybe five. They are all varying degrees of a youthful prototype that rejected me years ago in college—handsome in a way that comes from a balance of good genes, preferably of the Connecticut variety; smart, smart enough to get them through the day, to make their day better than that of most people on the planet; determined because they have been told to be so; entitled and confident; and just so fucking perfect. Now as a more mature and confident version of myself I can stick up my nose at them. I have slept with a few people like them since my college days, and their fetishes are boring. (Oh, you want to take me from behind and pound me like a racehorse? And call me a slut? How creative.) All the mystery is gone.

They are also a bunch of disgusting punks. They leave bags of garbage in our shared hallway for days, when it’s not that hard to walk it down the stairs to the garbage room. And there are girls in the morning streaming out, looking like hell at 8:00
AM
, ruining my morning coffee. At least I have the good sense to kick my men out after we’re done. In and out in two hours or less. I don’t pretend to be nice. I take what I can and move on. They should have the common courtesy to do the same.

The only one of them worth anything is the fourth—fifth? one of the extras, anyway—roommate. There’s no way this kid is working on Wall Street. He’s a shaggy, pretty thing with a slow shuffle for a walk, who comes in and out at all hours of the night, always on some sort of errand, getting a six-pack of beer or late-night slices of pizza, dragging a backpack stuffed with mystery items that bulge out the sides. His thick lips and strong jaw always seem to be working on something—gum, a cigarette, or the inside of his cheek. Not that you can see much under all his hair, a blond shag that looks gray under the dim lights of the elevator. But even though he keeps his head down, I know he’s tracking everything around him. He’s looked at me before, raised his head slightly, pushed his hair up, made that connection as he dragged his feet by me in the hall. I know he’s on the ball, he’s just undercover.

I’d invite him to play with me.

I REFRESH
each of my five browser windows, squeeze my hands together, hard, like in a pissed-off prayer. My nails are ratty—I picked off the edges of the cuticles on the subway this morning, and I bit at my nails tonight at the computer, in between sips of a twelve-dollar chardonnay. (Good enough, but not great.) I should get a manicure, but I don’t get manicures. It is so hard when you know what you’re supposed to do, but then you don’t bother doing it.

It’s the same men in all the windows. Old, horny, stoned. I’m looking for the coked-up indie-rock boy who doesn’t want to go to sleep yet and has tattoos on his arms of things that remind him how he’s supposed to be in life.

This translates to “Be strong” in Swahili. This is the name of the first band I ever saw that made me realize I could get out of Oklahoma. She was my first girlfriend, and she taught me not to be afraid of love. I can’t tell you what this means, it’s far too personal. No offense.

None taken.

I would take a bartender getting off his shift, too. They’re angry and edgy, and I like that. I have an itch I need to get scratched on nights like these, and disgruntled service-industry workers, they like to scratch.

All I see is one new guy with a
Star Trek
reference in his profile name, and then the rest of the regulars. They’d beg their case once again, if I let them. You won’t regret it. I’ll make you scream all night long. Let me lick you and please you.

But they have body hair in weird patches, or no body hair at all, and lumpy asses. And they’re not funny enough, they have bad taste in music, and I sense that the little conversation we would have before we got to the sex, I would not enjoy. I used to think it didn’t matter, but apparently I can’t have anonymous sex with someone who isn’t at least a little bit interesting.

I’ve tried it before, a few months back when I was first afflicted with this fever. This guy—my age, which is why I gave him a shot, thought we might have a little something in common—showed up in a peasant shirt and blue jeans that were like a second skin; 3:00
AM
, and a peasant shirt. He sat on the edge of the couch, slowly unlacing his hiking boots, looking up at me, smiling, and I was suddenly shot with a volt of terror that he might actually say something to me, and that I would have to say something back.

He had curly hair that stood out from his head and a long thin nose with a tremendous bump on it. I wondered if he was Jewish. I actually have a thing for Jewish men. My ex-boyfriend Alan, the real-estate agent from Chicago, he was Jewish and had the nicest hairy chest. He would squeeze me all over and keep me warm. I need help with that. Keeping warm. If left alone for too long, I’ll freeze to death. Maybe this new Jew could help.

And then as he squirmed out of his pants, I thought, well, it’s winter, that’s why he wore the boots, even though it makes no sense to wear something so difficult to untie if you’re going to get naked, and maybe those absurdly tight jeans, those were the only ones he had clean, but at least he wore something clean, and that shirt, maybe he’s an artist, or at the very least, artsy.

“What do you do?” I asked him. Looking for the tiniest tinge of attraction.

“I’m an accountant,” he said.

When he finally got his pants down and shirt off, all that was left was an absurdly skinny man in atrocious tie-dyed boxer shorts, worn wool socks sagging around his ankles. If it were possible for my nipples to do the inverse of an erection, that they could somehow sink back inward, this vision would have surely done it.

But there it was—thankfully—a nicely sized hard-on. And when you are drunk, high on something new, and desperate, itching, needing to be scratched, you focus on the hard-on. It’ll all be over soon anyway.

We did it on the couch, simple sex, my head and upper back on the arm, legs up in the air, and him on top of me, doing it simply, rhythmically, like fingers tapping on a calculator, adding one number to another, totaling it all up. I was silent throughout, I am almost always silent. He did it deep, which I like. He did it without variety, which I don’t like. But you can’t ask for much from a complete stranger.

When he stopped, he lay flat on top of me, and I let him catch his breath for five minutes. I clocked it, I usually give them ten minutes, but this guy, he had to go. He could almost depress a girl. I said, “So, thanks. That was great. Just great.” He lifted his head. He looked like he didn’t believe me. “No, really.”

Why was I assuring him of anything? Why did I need to stroke his ego? I had every right to say, “You fuck just as I thought an accountant would.” Not that I had ever thought about fucking an accountant before.

“It was just what I needed,” I said. “But now you have to go.”

He pulled himself off me. I pulled on a robe, tied the sash at the waist. He pulled on his pants, jumped up in the air to get the tight denim over his hips. I handed him his shirt, the flimsy cheap cotton scratched against my fingertips. He sat back down on the couch and slipped his feet into those goddamn hiking boots, and then, slowly, began to lace each shoe up. I stood there, hands folded across my chest, hands cupping my elbows, upper arms squeezing my breasts, a shelf of cleavage pushing against my robe. He double-knotted the laces. Come on, faster. Move it on out. Move it. Fuck.

Finally, shirt, shoes, coat, done. I walked him to the door and gently pushed him through it. He stood outside—why is he still here?—and then extended his long, bony hand for a shake. I had to shake it, this hand that had been briefly inside of me just minutes before. As I reached out my hand, nails bitten, I heard a pound across the hall. There was my neighbor, hair hanging over his face, trying to get in his front door.

“Good night,” said the accountant.

My neighbor heard his voice, turned and spotted me in my robe, and then, gracefully, turned his head back. Respect, I thought. Or disgust.

“Yeah, OK. That’s fine. Just go.” I blurted it out, louder than I would have liked. “God, go already,” I said, softer. And then he was gone, I was safe behind my door, and I thought: I’m really going to need to be pickier in the future or this is never going to work.

MY LOVE LIFE
since I moved to New York from Chicago has been like a desert. I’ve had tiny little interactions of love, like finding shallow pools of water to drink from, and then I’ve moved on, hoping that I’ve stored enough love and affection and excitement to get me to the next place.

I’ve been stuck with a string of unsuccessful two-month relationships, the deaths of which have burned out almost all my romantic instinct and desire. I was in love with Alan, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. I’m probably still not ready. But being who I am—not that I particularly know who I am, I just know who I’m not—I felt that I should keep trying for love. I mixed up the real dates with the one-night stands just enough to keep myself satiated. On the dates you did not fuck, in the bars you did. Those late nights at the bars, I recognize now, were just as much work as the dates: the talking, the drinking, the questioning, the laughing
so hard
at jokes that weren’t that funny. They just never were funny. It’s not funny, none of it, I know.

But back to the dates, the relationships, my flaccid attempts at legitimacy. Online dating has been the only way I’ve met men the last few years: nice, neurotic financial analysts, law students, and advertising account executives who made it perfectly clear they were ready to settle down every step of the way—in their ads, in their initial e-mails, over those first drinks in Chelsea, they were ready to go, if they could find the right woman. Are you the right woman?

I am not young anymore. I need to say that. Or I don’t feel young.

Two months became the end point (if I could make it that far, but often I made it only a few weeks) because that’s when the first (and last) big fight occurred. This led to a gentle fadeout of phone calls and e-mails, no holiday cards were necessary. Rarely have I had a big breakup, because at two months it’s hardly necessary for any sort of scene. No one is invested. I can’t get attached to anything in two months except for cigarettes, and I gave those up years ago. Those things will kill you.

But I am attached to sex. I get this from my father, who left my mother and younger sister and me twenty-odd years ago because we were seriously impacting his social life with his graduate students. Children can be such a drag, don’t you think?

My sister, Maggie, and I would stay with him every summer in some rented house near the university hosting whatever writing program he was running that year, and try not to think too much about who he was or what he was doing while he was out with some nineteen-year-old, screwing up her head for the rest of her life. He would neatly stack a few twenties for us on the counter before he left for the night, enough to keep us occupied. Sometimes we would go to the movies; sometimes we would buy and eat so much ice cream—all kinds, Creamsicles and King Cones and Popsicles with gum balls at the center—our bellies would ache; and then sometimes we would keep the twenties and hang out and play backgammon. We never made any new friends (our father never bothered to encourage it; he didn’t really have any friends either), it was just Maggie and me, entertaining ourselves and each other.

This was fine for a few years, and then suddenly it was not fine at all, at least not for me. (Maggie always loved those twenty-dollar bills. They were an adequate love substitute, like how some people feel about Equal in their coffee, ignoring any sort of long-term damage, like to brain cells or psyches. She even went so far as to marry a very rich, very chatty, very boring man, but she’s since come to her senses and left him last year. Now she’s shacked up in Oregon with a quiet man who makes beer for a living.) The last summer I stayed with my dad I screamed at him one night, blocked him from leaving, blocked all entries and exits with the sound of my voice: Why do you do this? Why? And he said, “When you’re older, you’ll understand.”