Five Things I Can't Live Without (5 page)

I hadn’t written anything in at least a year, though I nursed the assumption that deep down, no matter what, I was still a writer. But if I opened that drawer, and read what was inside, I might learn that I didn’t have talent. I might learn that even my dream was wrong. I’d have nothing.

No, I’d have clarity. I needed to know: did I have talent or didn’t I? If I didn’t, I was going to walk away, once and for all. If I did, well, that was another problem entirely. Taking a deep breath, I opened the drawer.

Three hours later, I collapsed in despair on top of a libretto I’d attempted my sophomore year. The best I could say was that I was not untalented, but I surely didn’t have enough talent to wait around to be discovered. I’d actively have to do something, probably a lot of something. I’d have to practice my craft. I’d have to figure out my market. I’d have to work hard, and suffer, and buttress myself against rejection, and take risks.

I was no good at those things.

Which was why, at that point, I started e-mailing everyone I knew to ask for a job, any job. Some were people I’d met only once, some were friends of a friend, some were men who’d tried to date me. Finally a real-life application of my coordinator skills. I sorted according to categories. Men who’d tried to date me got e-mails that made no mention of my relationship status. “Friend of a friend” e-mails featured a prominent mention of that friend in the introductory paragraph. People who knew how the game was played—i.e., that everyone has to use any connection in a market like this—got to-the-point e-mails with a resume attached. People who were more sensitive to exploitation got chatty e-mails that sandwiched my job situation in the middle of the update and had no resume attached.

Taking action was calming. I’d never had a problem getting a job before, especially since I’d cultivated such low standards; something would come through. And just when I’d sent the last e-mail, the phone rang. I leaped for it. Kathy, with her impeccable timing. But something told me to check the caller ID first.

It was my mother, the very reason I had caller ID. My mother has always seen disaster lurking around every corner, particularly when it comes to me. She called every other week, and a maximum of five days could elapse between her screened call and my return call. If it took me longer than five days to respond, she called again and insinuated that I hadn’t called her back because I had something to hide. But by varying the number of days between her call and when we actually spoke, I could manipulate the system so that we’d talk about every three weeks. During our phone calls, she asked the same series of questions, all designed to make sure I wasn’t screwing up my life too badly. These calls did not in any way resemble normal conversation. When I made any overtures to find out about her life, she deflected them and acted like I was just trying to throw her off the scent of my own troubles. She’d tell me about my sister Casey’s academic successes, but just about nothing else.

Please let someone e-mail me back in the next five days
. Otherwise, I would have to call my mother back and confess what I’d done. I didn’t even want to think how that call would go, but I knew what would come next. Panicked, my mother would increase the frequency of her calls. She might, at some point, start sending cash, which I would accept because I had no pride, but that would be far, far down the road.

Of course my mother would want me just to take another job, any job. Those e-mails were exactly what she would have told me to do. For the past two hours, I’d been channeling my mother. Less than a week and I was already selling out my dream. This was my chance to change my life, and I was giving up without a fight.

I paced, stared at the drawer, paced again, stared again.

You have no talent.

I have some talent.

It’s not enough.

Well, not if I never take a chance. Not if I sit around waiting for something to happen.

All right, then. What is it you’ll do?

I’ll be a writer.

Specifically, what will you do?

Oh, shut up.

You’re almost thirty. You own nothing. You have no savings. The Social Security system is collapsing.

I’m only twenty-nine. There’s time. There’s plenty of time.

Everyone else got on the publishing track years ago. They all got started when they were twenty-two, but they didn’t just quit when things got hard.

I didn’t just quit. I went to India. It was very spiritual.

It was cheap. You went because it was cheap.

I can do this. I can be a writer.

That means
doing
something. What will you do?

I’ll take whatever job I get offered through those e-mails, that’s what I’ll do.

You mean you’ll give up again.

I’m being realistic. I can’t just drift along indefinitely. I’m not twenty-two.

Then give up.

But I didn’t want to give up. Not yet. Not until I talked to Kathy. If anyone could help me, it was her. I called her cell phone.

“Hello?” she said, her voice rising above a din.

“Kathy, is this a bad time?” I asked. “Can you talk?”

“Nora?” she queried. She knew my voice, of course; it was just loud enough to need confirmation.

“Yes.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Let me pack up my things. I brought my laptop down to a cafe because I couldn’t stand being cooped up in my apartment for another minute. I’ve been working on this book nonstop.” We chatted to fill time until she could get out on the street and give me her undivided attention. After another minute, the line was clear. “Okay. Much better. So, are you okay? I mean, fundamentally intact.”

“No shattered limbs.”

“Glad to hear that.”

“But I’m going crazy. I don’t know if what I did was crazy but necessary, or just crazy, but I quit my job and I have nothing lined up.” Saying it out loud made it even worse. What had I been thinking? Oh, right. I hadn’t been thinking. For once in my life, I decided not to think, and look what happened.

“Huh. Really?” Her response was inscrutable. She was waiting for more information.

“This was not the time to act hastily, right? I have no savings, I’m about to move in with Dan, he probably thinks I’m a gold digger—”

“Has Dan said anything about you being a gold digger?” she asked calmly.

“No, but he wants to make sure I can pay my half of the rent. Which is pretty reasonable, actually, and soon I won’t be able to. And then what’ll happen to us?” I realized that my mother’s brain would have followed that precise sequence, and ended on just that question.

“Let’s go back a few steps. How did you decide to quit your job?”

“That’s the thing. I just went with my gut. I went to work and I saw this dog and I knew. But my gut is not honed for moments like this, Kathy. There is nothing to suggest that my gut should be trusted.”

“That’s just not true. You’ve made plenty of gut decisions in your life, and lots of them have been right.”

“No, they haven’t. Because if they had, they wouldn’t have led me here. I’m twenty-nine, and I’m pretty much a failure. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid that realization throughout my twenties, but there’s no avoiding it now. I am going to be thirty years old, and I will have nothing. I will be nothing.” I started crying at the incontrovertible truth of it.

“Are you having a blood sugar crisis?” Kathy suddenly demanded.

“What?” I asked, disoriented by the question.

“When did you last eat?”

I glanced at the clock and dabbed at my eyes. “Seven hours ago.”

“Nora, you know you can’t go that long without eating. Are you on a cell phone?”

“No.”

“A cordless phone?”

“Yes,” I sniffled.

“Bring me with you, and walk into the kitchen, and drink some juice, if you have it,” she instructed.

“My problem is not my blood sugar, Kathy. It’s my life.” I couldn’t believe that Kathy, of all people, was reducing this to a biological event. My life was a disaster. I was a disaster.

“Nora, come on. You know how this goes. When your blood sugar drops, you get irrational, but you don’t see it.”

“Maybe sometimes,” I allowed, “but that’s not what’s going on now.” But she had planted a small seed of doubt, so I figured I might as well follow her directions. Juice never hurt anyone. And I did remember making the discovery that a decent percentage of my relationship problems could be solved by carrying a Fruit Roll-Up in my purse. “I’m drinking the juice, but it’s going to take a few minutes,” I warned. “That’s
if
you’re right.”

“Well, in the meantime, let’s talk about me.”

“I don’t want to hear anything good. I love you, but if you tell me your book’s been optioned for a telemovie, it’s war.”

“No, let’s talk about my love life. Let’s talk about my”—she said the next two words with absolute revulsion—”Internet dating. You met Dan in real time, so you don’t know about this awful process. I’ll fill you in.”

“I had a profile up on a dating Web site. I just happened to meet Dan a few weeks later.”

“So you never had to do the deed. Let me just ask you. I’m not Quasimodo, am I?”

I laughed. “You’re great-looking. You know that.”

“I’ve always thought of myself as reasonably attractive. And I’m generally okay with that. I’ve always thought, if I was given a choice to be reasonably attractive or drop-dead gorgeous, I’d go with reasonably attractive. But this Web site is messing with my head. I’ve been on it for a month now, and five guys have written me. Two were clearly troglodytes just writing to anyone. E-mails like, ‘U R from Boston? Me too.’ They actually used the letters:
U R
. And two were really, really old. Like fifteen, twenty years older than I said I wanted in my profile. Disrespecting my wishes from the get-go is always a turn-on. The last one was this really sweet, really homely guy and I wrote back to him to say I’d just started dating someone and that maybe I’d get back to him in the future if it didn’t work out.”

“Which was a lie.”

“Of course. But I didn’t want him thinking people don’t write back to him because he’s homely. I felt for him.”

“Maybe he’s just not photogenic,” I suggested. I sat down on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table. I realized how lucky I was to have my breakdown on a day when Fara was out of the apartment.

“He had ten pictures up there. And he was a different brand of homely in every one. One was ‘grizzly man homely,’ another was ‘ski bum homely.’ There was no denying it.”

“Have you been on the Web site long?”

“A month. Which isn’t that long, I know, but you get the most hits when you’re new.”

I remembered that from my brief stint. When you’re new, you’re at the top of the queue, and you have that first-day-in-a-new-school-midway-through-the-year allure.

“The worst part is that the Web site just added this new feature where you can see what other women are like you. I have no idea why someone dreamed this up. But basically, at the bottom of the screen when I log in, it actually says, ‘Other seekers like you.’ And you can click on their profiles and read about your competition.”

“How’d you fare?”

“What’s funny is that when I read that line about the other seekers, I was nervous to look down because I thought, well, it’s New York. These women are going to be goddess neuroscientists. They’ll be supermodels who’ve climbed Everest. I thought I could very well be crushed by feelings of massive inferiority, but I look down because I’m a masochist, and it’s a million times worse. It’s like Frumpfest ‘88. These women are not only unattractive, but when I click on their profiles, they’re self-hating. No

t self-deprecating, but actually self-hating. And the kicker is, they’re not even smart! I don’t even want to tell you the last book they read.”

I made clucks of sympathy. “And everyone knows even though the question is the last book you read, you don’t actually list the last book you read. You write down the book that conveys what you want the world to know you’ve read.”

“Exactly! I’m lumped in with a bunch of women who disdain themselves, and appear to have every reason to. It’s plain humiliating.” She was no longer comically distressed; she was genuinely distressed.

“But you’re the only one who sees it, right? The men who click on your profile don’t see those other women.”

“I’m convinced they’ve left their scent. I need to get in with a better class of women or I’m doomed.”

“Maybe your profile could use a makeover. How are your pictures?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“My theory is that you need to approach this like market research. Change a picture here, tweak a line there. Then you can gauge how different the response is.”

“I can try it,” Kathy said, sounding dubious. “I just know I don’t want to be that woman who’s ‘looking for her partner in crime,’ or who’s ‘equally at home at the ball game or the ballet.’ That stuff makes me want to retch.”