And then he launched into his argument, about how the sex was so awkward and so bad because we were still thinking about our exes when we did it. And the only way we would ever stop thinking about our exes during sex is to have more sex.
“Besides,” he said. “What else is there to do?”
I looked down and out my window. Faces on the sidewalks were obscured by umbrellas, hats, and hoods. I could tell from their hunched-over hurrying that no one was happy to be outside, dodging the icy rain plunging down like minidaggers from the sky. There was nothing interesting on TV. I'd read all my National Enquirers. My Internet access was inexplicably hosed.
He had a point. And hadn't Dexy prescribed the same remedy?
So we went for round two.
And three.
And four.
And I'm happy to report that it was better, and not only because it couldn't have been any worse. I guess we're getting used to each other, which kind of makes an argument for monogamy. Or serial monogamy at least.
The way I see it, Kieran and I are helping each other. It's only practical for me to get out of this love limbo—this purguytory, so to speak—I'm in right now. There's no point in pining over Marcus. My relationship with him was bound to meet its end, and not only because his newfound New Ageyness would always be at odds with my innate nihilism. No, it was doomed because every relationship ends. The only notable exception is the one you happen to be in when you die, in which case it only ends for the lonely soul left behind. You, on the other hand, are unaware that it's over because you're very conveniently dead. This isn't pessimistic, but pragmatic.
So it makes sense to move on, bringing myself one guy closer to, not The One, but The One I'm with When I Die. Kieran is the perfect candidate for the job—attractive enough that hooking up will be fun, but youngish and annoying enough that I won't try to turn him into The One. Likewise, I'm that girl for him. It's really quite simple. To be even more sensible about it, I'm only going to let this last as long as winter break. When it's over, we're over.
Done.
the eleventh
Kieran's annoyances are becoming, well, if not less annoying, then something else . . .
Arousing?
One minute we're fighting, the next we're fucking. Psychologically speaking, arousal is arousal is arousal. But I never knew how true that was until Kieran.
the twelfth
We're really getting the hang of this now. It's almost a shame that it, like all romance, is doomed.
the thirteenth
Must stick to the plan: Break over, break up. Period.
the fourteenth
The unthinkable is happening:
I'm falling for an assclown.
the fifteenth
Marcus who?
* * *
June 1st
Kieran:
“Nomen et omen” was the first of many things you said that annoyed me. But perhaps there's truth to this aphorism after all. If only I had looked up the definition of your name sooner, I could have been warned about the “small” and “dark” nature of your heart. Because I waited until it was already too late, here are . . .
Some Things I've Always Wanted to Tell You
1. Wearing AXE deodorant body spray is not funny in an ironic, po-mo kind of way.
2. Ditto listening to the Grateful Dead every single time you smoke up, or shouting, “We're fuckin' to ‘Truckin''! We're fuckin' to ‘Truckin''!”
3. And don't even get me started on your obsession with I Love the 90s. Guess what? We all fucking love the nineties because we are all complete narcissists when it comes to the commercialization of pop cultural nostalgia and we all want to think that our own appreciation of “our” decade supersedes everyone else's so just GET OVER your need to prove that you know more than anyone about Furbies and Soul Asylum and Beverly Hills 90210.
4. I never minded your problem with premature ejaculation. In fact, I appreciated that sex was over before it ever really began. Intercourse didn't interfere with my studies, which enabled me to make the Dean's List.
5. You play your heartache like a party trick, don't you? You've been damaged in some profound, important way. You need to be helped. Fixed. Made whole again. And as a result of your deep, deep suffering you can't be blamed for the pain you inflict on fools like me who make the mistake of trying to be your savior. We are both victims here, so you can't be the bad guy. Oh no, not a sensitive soul like you, who waxes poetic about “feeling” but is, in fact, too much of a selfish little boy to be capable of feeling anything real at all. As someone who knows the difference between “love” as an amusing abstraction and genuine love, I can only feel pity. And that's because I never cared enough about you to hate you.
Respectlessly,
J.
* * *
the first
Kieran cheated on me.
And I'll be homeless next fall.
I'm not sure which is worse.
Like too many couples in Manhattan, I think I'd be willing to shack up with someone I despised if the apartment had a doorman and adequate afternoon sunlight. The small but furnished, off-campus-but-not-too-far-off-campus one-bedroom sublet that Kieran and I agreed to share this summer and next year had both the doorman and the sun, plus a ridiculously low rent (thanks to his parents' generous housing subsidy), so neither of us had any reason to enroll in the university lottery. This is the same apartment that he will now share with his ex-girlfriend, now his re-girlfriend, who just turned eighteen and will be attending Barnard next September. They reconciled during her campus interview in late January and continued reconciling on the weekends, on the sly, while I was working two jobs to pay for the twenty-two credits I was taking. I'd only seen Re-girlfriend in pictures on his laptop, but I was never intimidated by her plain-faced, dishwater-tressed ordinariness. What should have bothered me was Kieran's unwillingness to drag every last pixel into his desktop trash can.
“You were gone all the time,” he whined when I questioned him about the black thong I found in the folds of his unwashed sheets. I'm aware that this is just so cliché. So excruciatingly uncreative and cliché it made me want to take a long, slow drag on a tailpipe. “I missed you, and you weren't around so . . .”
“So it's my fault you fucked your ex-girlfriend!” I screeched loud enough for everyone in Morningside Heights to hear.
“According to your take on monogamy, I was just fulfilling my human instincts. Don't blame me. Blame the traditional model of relationships.” His face was the picture of newborn baby guilelessness. The only thing missing was his mommy's teat in his wanting mouth. It's this put-on innocence that has allowed him to get away with such bratty, self-absorbed behavior his entire life. All I could do was shut up and storm out because I was afraid of saying something equally stupid that would somehow come back to haunt me in the future.
So ended my relationship with Kieran. The relationship I never would've had if I'd stuck to my first impression. I have long acknowledged that my first impressions are always for shit, so I figured I was safe. But no. This time I was right all along. He really was a pompous, pretentious assclown who used the oh-so-sensitive trappings of emo to mask his sadism. I was so right when I told Bridget that he was nothing, nothing like Marcus. Marcus never hurt me on purpose.
With no boyfriend and, more significantly, nowhere to stay in the city, I'm back in Pineville with my parents. This is appropriate punishment for a semester-long lapse in judgment. I am trying very hard to look on the positive side of things. For example, I was grateful that when I opened the door to my parents' condo, they weren't bumping elderly uglies on the couch. That was good.
I guess another good thing is that I've got a job here that actually pays better than anything I could get in the city. I've been working for ACCEPT!, the Accelerated College Coaching and Educational Preparedness Tutorial! ACCEPT!'s motto: YOU ARE YOUR APPLICATION.
The awkwardly named strip-mall institution conducts a series of get-in
to-college classes during the school year, followed by a longer get-into-college camp in the summer. Test prep, AP class counseling, campus tours, mock admission interviews—none of this is unusual in this übercompetitive college market. But ACCEPT! doesn't leave anything to chance. For example, a skill that high schoolers should have mastered in first grade—Perfecting Your Penmanship!—is part of the curriculum now that handwritten essays count for one-third of the new SAT. Every lesson is intended to give an edge to those who are already considered the best and the brightest. And at almost $3,000 per session, the richest. Five years ago, Pineville was too blue-collar (okay, white-trash) for ACCEPT! to set up shop around here. But times have changed and Pineville is—however improbably—becoming a bedroom community for new-money families from Manhattan who are buying up all the waterfront property. So my mom was right, the new house is an investment that will make me very wealthy thirty years from now—if I survive that long on the streets.
I'm still in training, but in five days I start working with a small group who signed up for the presummer minisession. This is the three-week-long after-school presummer-session session for those who want a jump start on their jump start. In other words, the most neurotic nutcases of all.
My teaching credentials? I got into Columbia. I am who they want to be. Of course, they'd demand a refund if they had a clue as to who I really am.
the sixth
I walked purposefully into the university-style classroom and headed for one of the stadium seats facing the immaculate dry-erase board. Then I noticed that three front-and-center spots were already occupied by students with open laptops at the ready.
I'd forgotten that I was the teacher here. Oops.
Could it also be so easy to forget what it was like to be sixteen or seventeen, at the top of one's class, with stellar standardized test scores and a transcript maxed out on athletic, academic, and philanthropic activities?
Apparently so. Otherwise my students wouldn't annoy me so goddamn much.
“If you didn't take the new SAT, how do we know how smart you are on the 2400 scale?” asked Will. Number one in his class. Captain of the forensics team. Champion hurdler. AIDS activist. Wants Harvard.
“Were you a National Merit Scholar?” asked Geoff. Has already earned twelve college credits. Scholastic Poetry Award winner. Founded school's archery team. Taught English in Kenya. Wants Harvard.
“Why didn't you go to Harvard?” asked Maddie. Intel science talent search semifinalist. Classically trained pianist. Varsity tennis player. Volunteers at a homeless shelter. Wants . . . you guessed it . . . Harvard.
These kiddies need to unclench.
And this is coming from someone who has been grinding her teeth down to the nubby nerve endings for years. The only students enrolled in ACCEPT! are those who, at least back in my day, would've been the only ones who didn't need it. And yet they—or more likely their parents—are convinced that none of it is enough. Their paranoia is contagious, which is why “college preparedness training” is one of the fastest-growing sectors in education.
“Colleges rely on standardized tests to help them weed through twenty thousand applications,” said Will. “If you're not at the top, you get tossed.”
“There are eleven in my class who have GPAs over 4.0,” said Maddie. “I need something that will help me stand out in a district where everyone has something that makes them stand out.”
“Students who wouldn't have gone to college twenty-five years ago do now,” said Geoff. “Which puts the Ivy League at an even greater premium.”
Christ. The kiddies almost had me convinced that Columbia would retroactively revoke my acceptance. I never thought I would be thankful for coming from a high school where most students went to community college or not at all. All my get-into-college stress came from within. If I had gotten external pressure from my fellow classmates, my noggin would have imploded in a quick but powerful puff of brain cells and smoke. Pffffffft!
When I think back to that time, I was certain, just like these kiddies (even though they are only four, maybe five years younger than I am, they are still children) are certain, that my college choice would have an irrevocable effect on THE REST OF MY LIFE. And so, nearly every decision I made was with one question in mind: Will this look good on my college application? And once I made my tortured decision to apply to Columbia, it was Columbia or nothing. Success or failure. Live or die. It was all very dramatic and important in the way that all things are dramatic and important when you're in high school and never will be again. And now that I'm entering my last year of college in a homeless, boyfriendless, clueless (as to what I want to do after graduation) state, I think it's safe to argue that I might have been better off if I'd had my heart set on somewhere else. Or at the very least, equally bad off.
But these kiddies need to relax because they've already got it made. They were born into a fancy-schmancy suburban advantage in what is already the most privileged place on the planet. The gift of hereditary meritocracy practically guarantees that whether they excel in life has less to do with what they do than what life they were born into. For that advantage alone, they will always lead very charmed lives.
This reminds me of one of many arguments I had with Kieran, this one about the concept of free will. He believed that all men are responsible for creating their own fate. I told him that I agreed to a point.
“Some are freer than others,” I said, slipping out of my Chucks.
“We're all free to exercise our autonomy,” he said, pulling his T-shirt over his head.
“What about the tens of thousands of babies who were wiped out in the tsunami? Or the comparable number who die every single month from totally curable diseases like malaria? How can you tell me that they have free will?” I said, unbuttoning my jeans.
“They can choose how they wish to perceive their reality,” he said, unzipping his pants.
“They're babies!” I shouted, unhooking my bra.
“They're human beings!” he shouted back, sliding on a condom.
“You're an assclown,” I said, stepping out of my skivvies.
(I'm not proud to say that arguments like this fueled the hate fucks that were the cornerstone of our sham of an ex-relationship.)
Later, when we were finished and Kieran was asleep, I lay awake and thought about my brother, Matthew, who died when he was only two weeks old. What free will did he have?
It's Matthew, and more recently, William, who remind me how lucky I am to simply exist. Though I might have trouble remembering that next semester when I'm bunking on a bench in Riverside Park with a crackhead named Shifty-Eyed Pete.
the eleventh
I was startled out of my slumber this morning by the sights and sounds of my mother waving an unidentified object in my face.
“Jessie. Jessie! JESSIE! JESSIE!!!” my mother yelled with escalating urgency.
Despite a long history of her needlessly waking me up in this manner, I instinctively sprung out of the sheets, ready to make an emergency evacuation in my underwear. “Holy shit! What's wrong?! Is everyone okay?!”
“Phone for you,” she said sweetly.
I fainted into the goose down duvet. “You've got to be kidding me,” I said. “I know I don't get many phone calls, but do we really need all the drama?”
“She said it was of crucial importance,” my mom said, handing over the cordless. Her eyes shined with excitement. She lives for this ridiculousness. She really does. I am a big disappointment in this arena because I keep my melodrama to myself.
“Who is it?” I asked.
My mother gave a thoughtful pause. “I don't know.”
I pressed the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Omigod!!”
I waved at my mother to let her know that her presence was no longer required. She pouted before descending the stairs.
“Sara?”
“Omigod! Who else would it be?”
Uh. I could name about a bizillion people I wou
ld expect on the line instead of her. I cannot remember the last time Sara called me. Definitely not in this millennium. I'm pretty sure Ricky Martin was still livin' la vida loca at the top of the pop charts. That's how long it's been. Considering how his career is faring these days, I would have been less surprised if Señor “Shake Your Bon Bon” himself had called to say, “Hola.”
“Have you heard?” she shouted into the phone. I could barely make out what she was saying. It was like talking to a faulty squawk box.
“I'm sure I haven't heard or you wouldn't be calling me,” I said as I scraped the polish off my toenails for amusement. “Let's end the suspense.”
“Len and Manda broke up!” she shouted.
I took a deep breath and exhaled loudly and deeply, trying to extend the sigh as long as I could. Then I inhaled and did it again. That's how bored I was by this conversation.
“Len and I were over three years ago. Why would I care about this?” I was about to hang up.
“Manda cheated on him!” she shouted.
“Again, none of this is surprising,” I replied, flicking the red specks of nail polish onto the city-country (or was it country-city?) bed quilt. They looked like dried blood.
“MANDA CHEATED ON HIM WITH A GIRL.”
“Oh, whatever,” I said with a yawn. “Straight girls kiss each other all the time. It makes guys hard.” I've never gone girl-on-girl for show, but I'd seen enough drunken faux-lesbo makeout sessions to speak with authority.
“Okay,” she said tartly. “But how many straight girls GO DOWN ON EACH OTHER?”
If I were able to speak, I would have apologized to Sara for doubting her all these years. Because it was clear to me that the entirety of our fake friendship had existed merely to set us up for this exquisite moment.
“DID YOU HEAR ME?”
How could I not? “I'm just a little shocked is all.”
Sara's voice took on that very pleased-with-herself tone I know so well. “I thought you would be. Can you believe it? Manda is a total quote carpet muncher unquote. EWWWWWWW.” If Sara is any indication, gay relations have a long way to go in this country.