Charmed Thirds (21 page)

I cannot believe I’m getting paid to spend a long, hot season with this man. He is a man, not a boy. Not a guy. And Bastian’s not my normal geek-cute type, either. He’s too exotic, too experienced, his dark eyes bruised by a chronic weariness I’ve yet to know. His nose and mouth are so delicate they’re almost feminine, yet his visage is rendered rough and untouchable by a five o’clock shadow no matter what time it is. Bastian usually lets his thick, shoulder-length black hair hang loose. But when it gets too sticky, he occasionally ties it back in what I guess would technically be a ponytail, which sounds really nasty when I call it that, but in truth, that’s what it is, and on him it’s not nasty at all. He wears his jeans tighter than American guys; lower, too, and almost always with gauzy shirts in pale swirly patterns that become translucent when the sun hits them in just the right way. And if the rays persist and the temperatures rise, a private, peppery scent radiates from his deepest skin, and I get dizzy with . . . what? Lust?

Yes, lust.

Why not? Hetero, homo, bi, and ambiguous—everyone in the program wants to fuck him. I could feel envious eyes on me when the Storytelling Project supervisors paired up the undergrad fellows with their grad school mentors. Jessica and Bastian. Bastian and Jessica. All summer long.
Dios mio.

“Here?”

He stopped between 110th and 111th Streets, right in front of the red-and-white-striped awning of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. This is the “teensy little nothing of a pastry shop” where I had my momentous meeting with Paul Parlipiano, the one that convinced me that Columbia was the school for me. I had no idea at the time that it was a Morningside Heights institution, that dozens of poor students linger inside for hours, making the most of the only free refills on the Upper West Side, and as such, it would have been freakier if I
hadn’t
bumped into Paul at the shop. If he weren’t toiling at Kerry’s campaign HQ (Paul, via e-mail, told me that he quickly shifted allegiances after Dean’s “I Have a Scream!” debacle), I’m certain I would have seen him there today.

I didn’t even realize that I was babbling about all this to Bastian until he held up a finger and said, calmly,
“Callate, por favor.”

Shut up. Please.

“I am sure you have many interesting stories to tell,” he said, setting up the sign. “But we are being paid to listen to others, yes?”

I nodded, vowing not to say anything else until spoken to. It didn’t take long.

We were approached by a bent old man wearing a straw fedora, white Bermuda shorts, a sky blue polyester short-sleeved shirt, black dress socks, and white orthopedic sandals. He read each word slowly, deliberately.

“Tell . . . us . . . a . . . story.” He raised a hefty, overgrown eyebrow. “Why should I tell you hippies anything?”

I wanted to crack up, but Bastian’s stoic composure made me reconsider.

“Because everyone has a story to tell,” I said.

“Hooey!” the old man barked.

“We define ourselves by the stories we tell others,” Bastian added. “It is a revolutionary take on history, in terms of who is making it and who has the power to document it.”

“Hippie hooey!” he yelled as he hobbled away.

This time Bastian and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“This is going to be difficult,” Bastian said.

And it was. New Yorkers are very wary, an instinct that has always been necessary for survival, now more than ever. Hardly anyone believed us when we explained that we were sponsored by the university and that their stories would be archived for educational purposes only. Yet over the next few hours we did attract a few yakkers, most of whom fell into one of the following categories:

1.
People Who Wanted to Pick Fights with Us
(“Why the hell should I talk to you? Are you crazy people?”)

2.
People Who Wanted to Prove They Were Smarter Than We Were
(“What’s so revolutionary about your project when oral historical narratives predate Homer?”)

3.
People Who Wanted to Get on Camera Because They Thought We Were Taping a Reality Show
(“Is this network or cable? Can my agent look over this release before I sign it?”)

4.
People Who Wanted to Know How We Got the Book Deal They Were Convinced We Had Even Though We Told Them We Weren’t Writing a Book
(“Who’s your agent? I’ve got a novel that’s
Harry Potter
meets
The Da Vinci Code.”)

5.
People Who Wanted to Mock Us Because They Thought We Were Scientologists
(“Hey! Where’s my free copy of
Dianetics?
Can you introduce me to Tom Cruise?”)

6.
People Who Wanted to Have Sex with One or Both of Us
(“I’ll tell you a story you’ll never forget. I’ll tell it
all night long,
know what I’m saying?”)

And throughout our shift, Bastian maintained a purely professional demeanor. I, on the other hand, barely heard a thing because I was too busy imagining what my hot, married grad-student partner would look like naked.

If I ever do become a shrink, I’ll have to open a very specialized practice, one that only caters to the emotional needs of women and extremely homely men.

the sixteenth

Dexy is as tireless as she is exhausting. Every morning she asks the same question, and today was no different.

“Where are you and your Spanish boyfriend headed today?”

“Dexy, I’m supposed to talk to strangers, not my best friend.”

“Come on! I’ve got a ton of stories! I want to be immortalized in Columbia’s archives!”

“Isn’t it enough to be immortalized on television?” I asked, intentionally changing the subject.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, adjusting a long platinum blond wig. “Today I’m getting set up with a mechanic who, according to the producers, loves ‘hot rods and cold Bud.’”

“Sounds like a winner,” I replied.

“It’ll make good TV,” she said.

Dexy scores extra cash by appearing on any one of a number of cheesy-ass dating shows that are taped around the city. These are the late-night cable staples that make
The Bachelor
look like high art:
Blind Date, Elimidate, Extreme Dating,
etc., etc., etc. She’s become such a fixture on these shows that she’s relied on her talent for clever costuming so the producers won’t catch on to her repeat casting. She’s not looking for love, just easy money.

“If you tell me where you are today, I can swing by and introduce you to him . . .”

“Out!” I shout, literally pushing her through the door.

I can do my best to prevent Dexy from stalking me for camera time. But I can’t stop random run-ins with the most unfortunate acquaintances. Since the first day Bastian and I have gone out of our way to encamp far from campus—from the Lower East Side to Washington Heights—to avoid seeing the same faces. Unfortunately, the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library weren’t far enough.

“Well, well,” Mini Dub said this afternoon, as he approached our sign. “If it isn’t Darling, Jessica.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“You two are acquainted?” Bastian asked.

Neither William nor I acknowledged the question.

“I should have known that you would be participating in this waste of money,” William said. “Oh, I mean this important interdisciplinary yadda yadda yadda.” He opened and shut his hands like two squawking mouths. William was one of many engineering students who thought the money spent on the Storytelling Project should have been put toward what they refer to as the “real sciences.”

“What are you doing in this zip code?”

“It just so happens,” William said, “that I’m meeting a friend.”

“Another date from the facebook?”

“The facebook,” he said, clutching his hand to his stomach, pretending to laugh. “That’s rich.” If you closed your eyes and listened to William, he would sound just like any popped-collar yuppie meanie played by James Spader in the eighties. But then you’d open your eyes and see this person with the powdery-faced, black-cloaked Bauhaus look of the living dead. When combined with a GOP=NRA=
USA
T-shirt, it is an especially unsettling aesthetic, indeed.

“What is the facebook?” Bastian asked.

“An online dating service for college students,” I answered.

“Networking
service,” William corrected. “It provides users with connections of both the platonic and romantic varieties.”

“I think it is sad that even flirting is now done by computer,” Bastian said. “So much of courtship is the unspoken.”

“So true,” I said, with a serious nod.

William flicked his tongue stud at me. “That must be why your profile is missing from the site.”

He was right, my profile was missing. The reason I was hesitant to join the facebook (or CNet or myspace or any similar site for that matter) is because I didn’t want to be poked all day long by people asking me to be their “friend.” I didn’t want any friends in quotation marks. And I certainly didn’t want to get all huffy and hurt when that same “friend” snubbed me a week later by terminating our “friendship.” It seemed to me that too many people joined these sites to collect “friends” and improve their social capital in a way that didn’t require them to leave their dorm rooms, like Dexy, who had “friends” that she’d never even met listed on the facebook. (Then again, she has been equally adept at turning electronic pokes into, uh, literal ones.) And yet, despite my skepticism, I was open-minded about the possibility of signing up.

That is, until I recently checked out Hope Weaver’s profile.

Hope Weaver was a flame-haired, alabaster stunner wearing a brilliant smile and an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt dipping dangerously down to her elbow. Hope Weaver belonged to more than a dozen nonsensical-sounding groups including
Super Totally Awesome Chicks & Dudes, Mary-Kate Is Better Than Ashley, Gnomes Are Gneat,
and
I Hate the Word Panties.
Her wall was filled with cryptic messages from names I’d never heard her mention. And no wonder—Hope Weaver had 491 “friends,” through whom she was connected to 4,236 other college students across the country. Looking at the evidence of her life without me at
RISD
, and now in France, I felt like I wasn’t Hope Weaver’s friend at all. With or without quotation marks.

“I guess you don’t need electronic intervention like the rest of us,” William continued. “But we all can’t be like you, Darling, Jessica. Juggling two, three guys at once.”

Bastian sat up in his beach chair. “Really?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be modest,” William said, enjoying my discomfort. “You want to hear a story? I’ve got a story . . .”

“You can’t tell a story about me!” I said, instantly knowing what he was up to.

“Why can’t I?” he asked. “It says,
TELL
US A
STORY
. There’s no qualifiers on it saying,
TELL
US A
STORY
,
BUT
IT
CAN’T
BE
ABOUT
JESSICA
DARLING
.”

I pleaded with Bastian. “I don’t really see how this is helpful.”

Bastian looked at William, then returned his eyes to me. “He is right. He can tell whatever story it is he wants to tell.”

“Gracias, amigo,”
William said.

And so, for the next, oh, I don’t know, bizillion years or so, William told, in excruciating detail, the story about how we had come up with the Barnard T-shirt bet and how he was relieved when he was wrong and I was right because it meant that guys had bought me many drinks and that I had gotten drunk enough to let down my defenses and finally act on the sexual tension that had been building between us and stop being so sanctimonious about the purity of my relationship with my long-distance boyfriend, whom I only spoke of with worshipful reverence when it sounded like this guy was as flawed as every other guy, if not more, and how it was so like me as a typically needy, love-hungry girlie girl to blame William for the subsequent breakup between me and the long-distance boyfriend, when I really should have been looking inward, and so much more that I can’t bring myself to write it down because it’s just so disturbing that this asshole has a better understanding of my weaknesses than I do.

“Well,” he said when he was finished. “I’m sure that this story will prove to be relevant for many future generations of naive college girls.”

“Don’t you have one of those girls waiting for you?” Bastian asked, as I had lost my will to live, let alone speak.

“Oh, right,” he said. And with a swagger, he was off.

“So is his story true?” Bastian asked.

“What did his face say?”

Bastian, it should be noted, is writing a dissertation titled, “Facial Metacommunications: How Physiognomy and Microexpressions Influence Interpersonal Perceptions.” (English is not his first language, but
all
dissertation titles sound like this.) A large part of it is devoted to the tiny, involuntary facial movements that reveal people’s true emotions. Most people can’t detect them because they flash past in a blink, but Bastian can.

“He did not seem to be lying,” he admitted. “But I did not want to believe it.”

“Well, believe it,” I said. “Because it’s true.”

Bastian laughed. He has a very loud laugh for someone so soft-spoken. His laugh bounces off walls and almost seems to echo, as if he’s filling up all the world’s open empty spaces with his joy.

“You,
bella,”
he said, “have very bad taste in men.”

the twenty-ninth

It’s said that there are eight million stories in the naked city. Well, it’s not true. By my count, there are exactly nine. They can be categorized as such:

1. Urban legends involving cockroaches and/or other vermin and the unlikely human orifices in which they decide to seek shelter and/or reproduce

2. Intoxication tales involving the breakdown of crucial bodily functions

3. Family sagas that seek to explain why the narrator is in therapy

4. Wistful childhood nostalgia for a time when life wasn’t so damn complicated