Cult Classic(55)

Spending this much time in the past, with men as the common denominator, wasn’t doing my mental hygiene any favors either. On top of being repulsed by the digestion of romance as identity—the world was on fire and I couldn’t pass a Bechdel Test with myself—my behavioral borders were disintegrating. Devoting my nights to a parallel world made this one feel like a simulation. I stared at people on the street as if I were wearing sunglasses. A woman sitting next to me on the subway would be shaking her foot, and the urge to bash her knee with a book was so overwhelming, I’d have to get up and move.

On the phone with Boots, I’d drift off or stare at the cat while he was talking until it felt like his voice was the internal monologue of the cat.

In the mornings, I’d brush my teeth and stare at the tube of toothpaste, cowed by the mental feat it would take to buy another one when this one ran out, by the repetition of all existence. I imagined some corner of a museum, piled high with empty toothpaste tubes.

At work, people followed up about emails they’d sent and I looked at them as if through a scrim. They were addressing old me, daytime Lola, before my world was flipped over, chunks of the past falling into the well. They’d ask about my weekend plans, which was how I knew it was Friday. I’d stare at my monitor, brightness cranked up, as if trying to blind myself. Oh, how much easier it is for the sane to imitate the insane than the other way around. Who could understand me now? Recently revived coma patients, that’s who. Those were my people. People stuck in the past and flung, without their consent, into the present.



* * *



Fernando was the son of a prominent commercial director who told him that all women would be after his money. Brush your teeth, go to sleep, don’t dream of gold diggers. He eschewed any behavior that teetered on generous. We always split the bill. “Since I got” was a common refrain. Since I got the tickets, you can get the snacks. Since I got the car, you can get the gas. Since I got myself out of my mother’s womb, you can get your ass to Queens. Fernando was supposed to help me move apartments, which I’d told myself would be a cementing experience. I had visions of U-Hauls and “Do you really need this many cookbooks?” But he never showed. At first, my texts contained photos of overstuffed garbage bags, accompanied by captions like “thinking of leaving it like this.” Then they escalated to “REALLY?!” until, eight hours later, settled in my new apartment, I dug out a cedar stick Oscar had given me and smudged every room.

I saw Fernando through a restaurant window on Hester Street. He was on a date. He had ghosted me in my hour of need, but he had thought of me again after that day. Feeling emboldened by my new role as the Night Mayor of Chinatown, I walked into the restaurant, gave the ma?tre d’ a twenty-dollar bill, and nodded at Fernando’s table. I told him that if two credit cards were presented, the money was to go toward the woman’s half of the bill only, but if only one credit card was presented, the ma?tre d’ was to keep the money. Then I took a gratified step back out into the night.



* * *



Phillip I met in the nascent days of online dating, which meant I half expected him to burst into pixels. The idea that we had plucked each other off a shelf and could just return each other with no consequences was distracting—though quaintly inhuman compared with the swiping of faces that would become muscle memory years later. This is my online boyfriend ran like a news crawl across the back of my eyelids. Phillip, on the other hand, had no reservations about how we met. He opened up. He shared. He was getting his PhD in plant genetics, he wet the bed until he was fifteen, and he carried an EpiPen. I was inconsistent, divulging my deepest fears one moment, neglecting to tell him my office was a block away from his lab the next. Three months in, we were still seeing each other only once a week. In the most polite breakup of its generation, he suggested perhaps it would be easier for all parties to bring that number down to zero rather than up to two.

We should’ve left it there, but we got back together a month later when I ran into him on a crowded crosstown bus. Having had an IRL breakup animated the relationship for me for the first time. I no longer knew Phillip from online. I knew him from no longer knowing him. Now I wanted to see him all the time.

Phillip’s defining moment came during this second chapter of our relationship, when he punched me in the face.

Surpassed only by the time, ten minutes later, when he dumped me. Again.

We were asleep and he was dreaming that he was in a boxing ring, taking swings at the air. He rolled over in the middle of the night and clocked me awake. He bolted to the kitchen and came back with a dish towel and a pint of ice cream, handing me these items like a child hands an adult a broken toy. As I ice-creamed my eye, he sat sheepishly at the end of the bed and informed me that “this” wasn’t going to work. I still wasn’t “letting my guard down.” This was rich, coming from someone who’d just hit me in the face.

What had always interested me about that breakup, in addition to the fact that I had to look as bad as I felt for a week, was that Phillip refused to share any further details of the dream. He was fighting someone or something … but what? The obligation to stay with me? The fear of wetting the bed? Was he punching through my barriers? Maybe it was the eight-year relationship from which he’d recently extricated himself, which we never discussed. His attempts to not talk about her were painful to witness.