Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's ＂Learned＂(21)
Devon appeared on the set of Girls while I was directing the season finale. He was a friend of a friend, brought in as some additional manpower on a tough shoot day. Small and puckish, with a meaty Neanderthal brow, he threw sandbags around with deceptive ease and coiled cables like an expert. I noticed a piercing in the cartilage of his right ear (so ’90s), and I liked the way his jeans nestled in the top of his pristinely maintained work boots. When he smiled it was a mean little smile that revealed a gap between his two front teeth. After several interactions in which he questioned my authority and pretended not to hear me speaking, it was clear he was my type.
When Devon arrived I was in the middle of a full dissociative meltdown. The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form. I felt like I was outside my own body, watching myself work. I didn’t care if I succeeded or failed because I wasn’t totally sure I was alive. Between scenes I hid in the bathroom and prayed for the ability to cry, a sure sign I was real. I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread. In this moment I had plenty to be anxious about: pressure, exposure, a tense argument with a beloved colleague. But I had even more to be thankful for.
Yet I couldn’t feel anything.
Three days later he showed up at our wrap party. His arms were as muscly as a Ken doll’s but also as small. I ignored his presence, mingling with my cast mates and drinking a thimble or so of red wine (which is enough to get me wasted). Eventually, sloshed and sure the evening held no other prospects, I sat down beside him at the bar and announced, “You’re rude and I think you have a crush on me.”
A few minutes of unremarkable conversation passed before he leaned in and lowered his tone. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m going to leave and wait on the corner. You’re going to wait three minutes, then you’re going to leave. You’re not going to say goodbye to anyone and we’re going to take a cab to my house.”
I was struck by the tidiness of the plan. After months of frantic decision making, it was such a relief to have it laid out for me.
I tried to kiss him on the walk to the cab, and he held me off. “Not yet,” he said. In the cab his credit card didn’t work, and I paid drunkenly and showily. I followed him up the stairs to his fourth-floor walk-up. When he opened the door, he called out: “Nina? Joanne? Emily?” His roommates, he explained. As he turned the lights on, it became apparent we were in a studio apartment. No girls lived here. We were alone. I laughed too hard.
Before he would kiss me, he had to pack his bag for a job the next day. I watched as he carefully filled a backpack with tools, checked to make sure his power drill was charged, and examined his call sheet for details. I liked the careful obsessive way he prepared to do his job. It reminded me of my father teaching me to wash dishes. His room was painted red and didn’t have a window. I sat on the bed and waited.
After what felt like months, he sat across from me, one foot still on the floor, and looked at me a long moment, like he was preparing to eat something he wasn’t sure he would like. I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t even sure I was real. When we kissed it was dizzying. I fell back, unsure of where I was or what was happening, knowing only that the part of me that had left had come back, and the reattachment was almost painful, Wendy attempting to sew Peter Pan’s shadow to his body. I was amazed by the fluidity of Devon’s movements, how slick it was when he reached for the condom, reached for me, reached for the light to make it dark.
When we had sex, he was silent, and that, along with the pitch black, created the impression that I was being penetrated by a succubus of some kind. He felt oddly far away, and when I asked for confirmation of his name, he would give none. The next morning I awoke with a horrible feeling he was called Dave.
We spent the rest of the week together. I’d finish work and go straight to his house. We would talk—about movies he hated, books he was okay with, and people he avoided. His misanthropic spirit was apparent in everything he said and did.
“I like you,” I told him on the third night, sitting between his knees, up past my bedtime.
“I know you do,” he said.
He was odd, certainly. He kept his shower cap on the ceiling on a pulley he had rigged so he could lower it whenever it was needed. He had only orange juice in his fridge, and Hershey’s chocolate “because that’s what girls like.” He kept matches by his toilet for when he shit, which seemed both polite and tragic due to the amount of time he’d been spending alone. He spoke of his high-school ex with the kind of lingering bitterness more often felt by husbands who have been abandoned and left to care for multiple children.
After that week, I had to go. To LA, to work. He wasn’t an excuse to stay, even though he felt like one. He walked me to the subway, and I headed to the airport, teary-eyed. I was myself again, and I didn’t like it.
The rest of our relationship (five months) went swiftly downhill. His critical nature proved suffocating—he hated my skirts, my friends, and my work. He hated rom-coms and just plain coms. He hated Thai food and air-conditioning and “whiny” memoirs. What had initially seemed like a deep well of pain caused by unattainable women was actually a Philip Rothian disdain for the fairer sex. It’s become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I’ll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology.