Cult Classic(40)

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I had to go into the office for a day of weekly and annual meetings that had a disturbing amount of thematic crossover. Our directives for two weeks out and six months out had the same tenor, balancing ideas with branding. Our editorial director, a hyper pigeon of a woman in her early thirties, dubbed these “ideas sessions,” words my calendar liked to weaponize in bold. Even the robots knew ideas was a big word for it. It could be disheartening, working at a glorified content aggregator, covering the culture instead of creating it. Our jaws clamped down on prey with clickbaity headlines, only to find we’d caught nothing in our teeth except for the occasional lawsuit. At real media outlets, arts coverage was an art unto itself. But focusing on trends that we had no part in creating or even spotting had a bottom-feeder effect. The younger staffers took it more seriously. Radio New York was the only world they’d ever known. Their earnestness made me feel simultaneously jaded and indignant.

At least, at Modern Psychology, the publication and the field it covered were locked in a regency dance. Maybe it wasn’t Radio New York’s fault. Maybe it was New York’s fault and Amos has been right all along: There was simply nothing new or unexpected happening on this island. Except for the Golconda.

It was impossible to maintain focus. During lulls in conversation, I piped in with regurgitated ideas that gave the illusion of attention being paid. After the meetings disbanded, I wandered back and forth between my desk and the pantry, getting coffee, forgetting milk, going back to get the milk, forgetting sugar, going back to get the sugar. Stirring it with my finger. I silenced the occasional wail of the phone.

Boots texted to say he’d landed. He got a thumbs-up in return, followed by a Yay, the plane didn’t crash, yay! This elicited a befuddled: lol?

I skipped lunch to sleuth, opting for vending machine pretzels, pushing grains of salt into my mouse pad as I scoured my brain for anyone with whom I’d been on a date ever. A Rolodex of faded faces creaked in my head. Men are the sitting ducks of the internet because none of their names have changed. Every stroke of the return key brought more professional headshots, more neckties, more grinning into the camera like children trying to recall the state capitals. Or else these men were engaged in an industry that required them to lean against a brick wall, arms crossed. Their “about” pages made me feel an almost parental pride, forgetting these were the same people who’d once made me pay for more of the bill because I’d ordered goat cheese on my half of the pizza, the same people who’d exfoliated my face raw with stubble when surely not one of them would appreciate a sandpaper hand job.

My whole life, I’d been telling myself the story of every breakup so that I had more agency in it. Men do not like to entertain the idea that they have destroyed someone and so they behave as if they haven’t. I granted them the delusion, forking it over without a fuss. Everyone wins. It’s difficult to comfort oneself by shrinking one’s emotions without conceding that one has allowed those emotions to expand, unchecked, in the first place. I found it easier to skip this process. In truth, I’d been the victim of a metric ton of rejection. Already I could sense years of psychological work coming unglued as I searched for name after name, subjecting myself to condensed humiliation. I experienced these men as no one is supposed to experience them, as if being propelled from a T-shirt gun. It was like seeing every cigarette I’d ever smoked in One Great Big Pile.

There were men whose dating profiles had read like rules at a public pool: No tattoos. No couch potatoes. No heavy drinkers. No picky eaters. No taking oneself too seriously. NO DRAMA! Men who demanded a woman have a sense of humor but showed no signs of being funny. Men who posted photos alongside striking female acquaintances, as if to say, “just so you have a sense.” Men whose insecurities ran so deep, they came out as accusations: “How do you not have a boyfriend? What’s wrong with you?” I went out with them anyway, these bouquets of red flags, curious as to how repulsively I’d have to behave in order to trigger a new decree, knowing in advance the answer would be: not very. So many bloodless creatures who wanted all my blood, who offered nothing of themselves in return, who accused me of not “opening up” during the once every two weeks I was permitted to see them. The needle of curiosity goes in, the traits are sent off to the lab, the results never to be shared. There were men who told me they wouldn’t sleep with their ex-girlfriends for all the tea in China but who turned out to own an import/export business to Beijing. Men who broke up with me because I was too good for them. Ah, but when do we send our food back to the kitchen because it’s too delicious? These were the same men who were always off to the gym. To the studio. The party was lame. The party was boring. You wouldn’t have had any fun. Men who didn’t think they were misogynists because they defended the actions of famous women. Or famous minority women. Or famous trans women. Men who said I reminded them of the girl who broke their heart in college or the one that cheated on them in grad school, Tuesday afternoon kinda wounds for every woman I knew. Men who told me they would have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of this town but now lived in Idaho. Another woman had dragged them. But how? A blow to the head? Ether and a hand towel? Did she take the back roads? These were the same men who said they’d gone celibate for fear of hurting women, who thought they’d invented sadness, who told me I had no clue how dark things got in their heads, how dank the basements of their sorrow. Unrequited narcissists, these were men with a delicate sense of injustice when it came to their fellow man. Yes, life’s a witch hunt. It will magnify your sins until they are grotesque, canceling you from a program you didn’t know you were on. But is that a broomstick between your thighs or are you happy to see me? These men were like tropical fish, easily stressed by too much communication or too little. Some stared into my eyes, attempting tantric meditation over martinis, telling me I was their soul mate after minute ten, some called me their girlfriend after date two, some refused to call me their girlfriend after year one. Some called me someone else’s name. There were younger men who were the same age now as I was when they broke up with me—did they feel the burn of shame at having made me feel old, now that they were all caught up? Men who cut lines of powder with a jeweler’s precision. A one-time thing. A two-time thing. It’s hard to pass off any activity as a sixty-five-time thing. Men who’d hurt me more than once. That was my fault. I wanted to touch the stove, to see if it was still hot: It was still hot. Men who made paper airplanes out of the customer copy while I signed the merchant one. Check’s in the mail, hand’s on the thigh. Men whose texts I’d shown Vadis, who gamely looked at the time stamps. Blue, I’m blue, we are all of us blue. Sometimes we are green with inexperience or envy. Men who preferred missing me to being with me. Men who told me they were falling for me. It felt so good to say it, they’d figure out if they meant it later. But when later came, they were not falling. By God, they had tried. They detailed their efforts to the court. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client has made reasonable attempts. He has gone to great pains. He has texted when he did not feel like it. He has listened when he was bored. He has written down the birthday. Those were the worst of all, worse than the cheaters and the sociopaths. Because, as they stated their cases, they shook loose from the context in which I knew them. They were only people, mired in downy confusion, born a little broken and trying to fix it. In all of history, we had landed in the same city at the same time and, to ladle miracle upon miracle, we had met. What were the odds? What were the chances? How could I not love them all just a little? In that moment, they became unanchored from being men at all. They became genderless droplets that floated away before my eyes, drifting into the sea of human fallibility, particles rising toward the surface.