Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's ＂Learned＂(20)

The second “I love you” was Ben, a rebound from that relationship. I knew him from college, where we had slept together a few times before he ruined it all by getting into a freezing dorm shower, then hurling himself, nude, upon my unmade bed, screaming “I WANNA KNOW WHERE DA GOLD AT!” (He then ruined it further by ceasing contact with me.) But college ended, and I became lonely, as one does, and for the first time in my life bored, and soon I had maxed out my brand-new card on a plane ticket to the Bay Area, where he now lived on a block that was reminiscent of the credits of Full House, with big bay windows and a poster of the slain Mexican icon Selena on his yellowed bedroom wall. We spent four days trekking up and down hills, sitting on trolleys with our hands clasped, having drinks with guys who worked in bike shops, and coming together in sexual communion. One morning at breakfast, his roommate announced, “You two have sex like clockwork, once in the morning and once at night. Just like a married couple.”

At night we sat on his back porch and ate the ravioli he’d spent all afternoon making by hand. He had a lot of time to cook: his job, editing the newsletter for a nonprofit that promoted the global language of Esperanto, was “flexible.”

When he finally had to go to work, I visited friends on Telegraph Hill, where wild parrots live and where the view has the kind of urban grandeur that is incredibly satisfying to yuppies. This was before I had any conception of the financial reality of my friends. “Oh,” I’d explain about a friend living in a massive West Village loft, “I think he makes tons of money at his internship for Food Not Bombs.” It was only later that I realized these friends on Telegraph Hill, a filmmaker and a poet, were house-sitting and couldn’t actually afford a mansion with a roof shower. At the time, I marveled at what San Francisco real estate could provide for artists. If we worked hard enough, Ben and I could move up here, with a mutt and a bookshelf and a little orange smart car.

I cried when I had to go home, giving him a mix that included several obscure covers of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Through the winter I dreamed of my new life out west. Ben sent pictures of pancakes and sunglasses from the dollar store and of parties where hippies parked boats in their living room. New tattoos of dollar signs and Communist symbols. Help-wanted postings from sex shops and children’s literacy programs. He mailed me a tin of brownies with a note that was ironically signed “platonic regardz, Ben.”

I came back again on a Friday afternoon, and he met me at the airport. We took the BART to his house, which is sort of like the New York subway system only you can apparently trust the people of San Francisco to respect upholstered seating. As we sat, smiling and satisfied, an old Chinese woman passed and hocked a loogie on his shoe. “Oy, bitch!” he yelled. Surprising myself, I secretly sided with her.

On Sunday, a homeless man camouflaged as a bush jumped out at me on the pier, laughed when I screamed, then demanded money. Ben seemed impressed with his ingenuity. Later, Ben removed the Selena poster from the wall so he could snort Adderall off her breasts. I got a terrible cold and couldn’t find anything resembling a tissue in the apartment. Both of our credit cards were declined at the health-food store.

Wherever you go, there you are.

The night he told me he loved me, he was sloppy drunk. We were in his bedroom, and I was straddling him in his desk chair, listening to a party winding down in the living room, when he blurted it out. I declined to answer him until I was beneath him in bed ten minutes later. He told me that “I love you” during sex doesn’t count. The next day we ate too much In-N-Out Burger (we were both kind of fat, which at the time seemed like a revolution) and lay in bed beside each other and I cried, ostensibly because I’d miss him when I left but truly because I felt dead inside.

I did love Ben, in a sense. Because he cooked for me. Because he told me that my body was beautiful, like a Renaissance painting, something I badly needed to hear. Because his stepmother was the same age as him, and that is really sad. But I also didn’t: Because his vanity drove him to wear vintage shoes that gave him blisters. Because he gave me HPV.

He called me terrible names when I broke up with him for a Puerto Rican named Joe with a tattoo that said mom in Comic Sans. Admittedly, I didn’t handle it too well either when, several months later, he moved in with a girl who taught special-needs preschool. I didn’t utter the words “I love you” again in a romantic context for more than two years. Joe turned out to consider blow jobs misogynistic and pretended his house had caught fire just to get out of plans.

The third “I love you” was said to Devon. I was nearly done shooting the first season of Girls, and I had entertained a few crushes throughout the duration of production. One was on our assistant property master, a meek bespectacled fellow named Tom, who, I eventually concluded, was a lot stupider than he looked. Next I set my sights on an actor with the face of a British soccer hooligan. He took me to a bar on Eleventh Street, cried about his former fiancée, tongued me against a lamppost, then told me he didn’t want a relationship.

It wasn’t just that these crushes made the days pass quicker or satisfied some raging summer lust. On some deeper level, they made it all feel less adult. I’d been thrust into a world of obligations and responsibilities, budgets and scrutiny. My creative process had gone from being largely solitary to being witnessed by dozens of “adults” who I was sure were waiting to shout This! This is the reason we don’t hire twenty-five-year-old girls! Romance was the best way I knew to forget my obligations, to obliterate the self and pretend to be someone else.