“Let’s get dinner, Julie.”
Duh, OK.
We went to a glorified diner called Bendix, and it wasn’t a date, because I had a boyfriend. Rob wasn’t initially attractive to me, but because he was so gooey and determined, I grew fond of him quickly. I think there’s something beyond the grass being greener that fuels one’s attraction to men who exist outside of a relationship you’re in. It permits you to twist the reality of meeting what’s merely a self-centered guy who wants what he can’t have into a self-congratulatory progress tale. You think to yourself, “Well, I’m different
now
—I’m
girlfriend material
—so, of course he wants to be with me. If only I weren’t in this dumb relationship with a guy who’s already proven he wants to be my boyfriend, I’d be in the throes of what is an oyster-like world of pearl-paved streets. Dumb Guy Who Loves Me! Doesn’t he realize how explosively the universe has changed since I’ve been cooped up being loved within the confines of reality?”
After Bendix, and its ensuing meatloaf, Rob walked me home and kissed me. And as soon as he did, I felt every last cell in my body rush with guilt. I am too inherently neurotic to ever cheat on somebody without treating myself to a concurrent crucifixion, so the day after I was kissed, I broke it off with the guy I was dating so I could begin to legitimately fall for Rob. I was positive that he, liberal gusher of my own name during seduction, was a sure thing. I couldn’t wait to tell Rob I was newly single; he was going to pounce on me like I was a Beggin’ Strip.
Hahahaha! When people are wrong, it’s funny.
MY ON-THE-MARKETNESS
was like an unsolicited homework assignment for the guy who, twenty-four-hours earlier, was falling over himself to charm me with compliments lavished over too-expensive loaves of meat. I saw his behavior flip a bitch. Clearly, Rob was freaked out that I’d actually gone through with the steps I had to take in order to date him with a clear conscience, and now he felt responsible for my being available.
After that, we would get together for what I suppose are technically dates to a twenty-two-year-old, which is how old I was at the time, but since he was thirty-one, I can’t really call what we were doing “dating.” We were hanging out and hooking up, which is what girls in their twenties expect and men at any age want, because it preserves the ambiguity of an affair and absolves guys from any responsibility when somebody gets hurt. By the time the sex began, we weren’t on a level playing field.
After we started sleeping together, I began showing red flag signs of wanting not just sex but all its trimmings (intimacy, brunch, etc), and Rob started showing more and more signs of “Get Out of My Roomism.” That’s what I call the disease that comes from the boyhood instinct to yell at one’s little sister when she gets her chocolaty fingers on a rare issue of
MAD
magazine, or at one’s mom when she wants to use the bathroom and you’re still in the tub, playing with yourself. It’s only when a guy passes thirty and still wants girls to leave him alone and stay away from his stuff does that behavior become disconcerting.
When Rob and I were hooking up, we would always sleep at my apartment. He was superprotective of his space, and also, as it turned out, paranoid about being seen with me around his friends, because, he explained, he was concerned they would “gossip.” That’s a double-threat of sorry-ass. It was quickly becoming clear, even to a self-congratulatory progress tale in her early twenties, that there was no fucking way in the world Rob wanted to be my boyfriend. He’d invite me to see one of his shows, then he’d have me meet him a block away once he got offstage, so nobody would see us leaving the theater together and speculate that we were an item. It wasn’t because he was cheating on anybody; he was just sort of a dick.
I’d never had the experience of being anyone’s
secret lover
—the girl who hides in the garbage can or shows up wearing a false mustache. “Dating” Rob was the closest I’d come to being with a guy who cared more about what his friends thought than how the girl he was screwing felt. I didn’t get that at all. Why didn’t he just fuck his friends? If he was that concerned about what they thought, they must be pretty great!
I chewed him out over that “wait for me around the corner” bullroar, because even with the self-esteem of a twenty-two-year-old, I was never a doormat. I told him that he was pushing me away, and what the fuck was that when paired with intense sex, and also, why hadn’t I been to his apartment yet? It had been a couple of months already—what was he hiding? I didn’t know that this is just how some guys are, and that you should avoid them, like people with tattoos on their faces or relatives who want to borrow money. I just couldn’t reconcile the way Rob was with the way he changed after I no longer had a boyfriend.
Then 9/11 happened.
HEY, DON’T
you love memoirs? What other genre can footnote an unprecedented historical atrocity as a plot point in a fuckbuddy story?
“He made me wait for him around the corner, the asshole! Then planes hit buildings and people died just because they came to work that day, and it smelled like burning tires below Fourteenth Street for a month and people who believed in God all of a sudden had to defend their certainty after bearing witness to something so uniquely senseless and chaotic and cruel. I mean, yeesh! I can’t decide who’s a bigger jerk—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or that prick I was dating!”
Anyway, I remember being uncertain whether to call Rob that day. Like everybody else who lived in the city, I was getting concerned e-mails and phone calls from everybody I knew, and I remember being unsure if it was OK to get in touch with the guy I was sleeping with, or whether that wasn’t too
forward
. As in, maybe, if I wasn’t casual enough, he’d make me wait for him
two
blocks away next time. That was the ridiculous garbage that ricocheted around my head on 9/11, in addition to, let’s just say, more universal concerns, like whether we were all going to die.
This is the compromise I made about contacting Rob during what I decided, because I am
Einstein
, was an unusual circumstance. I sent him an e-mail message with the subject header “ARE YOU OKAY?!?!?!?” in all caps, and liberally alternated question marks and exclamation points after the phrase. There was nothing in the body of the text. That kept me
mysterious.
I sent that message off to Rob and patted myself on the back. I thought my e-mail was a great balance between concern about whether or not my friend with benefits was all right after a terrorist attack, and nonchalance, which I figured would, one day, make him treat me better. Among the unfathomable multitude of things I did not know at the time is that a “friend with benefits” is like a unicorn that shits cupcakes—fun to imagine, but not actually real.
I didn’t hear back from Rob that day, but in the wake of all the soot and emotional debris of, um, 9/11, I did manage to get him to invite me over to his apartment. It turns out that Rob felt vulnerable enough, by then, to extend an invitation for me to come over. So maybe the attacks were worth it!
Right, ladies?
ROB LIVED
alone, in a Brooklyn brownstone apartment I assumed his wealthy parents had bought for him. He answered the door dressed more casually than I’d seen him when we went out together, and I was put off by the draping of his athletic gray T-shirt over peg-legged mom jeans that seemed to accent what I only then noticed were his substantial, womanly hips.
I brought my friend’s copy of the
Yellow Submarine
DVD, which he told me he wanted to watch when I finally got him to invite me over. The DVD was like my Golden Ticket, granting me entry into the cluttered grotto he’d kept secret for so long. Now I’d finally gained admission into the apartment of the man who’d been putting his dick in me for three months. I felt so lucky.
His place was dingy with no evidence of a woman’s touch, but it wasn’t filthy, nor did it seem to house an arsenal of treasures, like it seemed it should, the way he’d protected it from my eyes. When I glanced around his living room, Rob got suspicious and quiet, visibly anxious that here I was, in his territory. I have a habit of nosing around people’s media when I’m in their apartments, and I browsed Rob’s VHS tapes—many of them homemade and labeled
Star Wars
, while he used the bathroom. When he came out, he had a hard time making eye contact, and then he took a deep breath, like he was about to tell me something important he’d rehearsed in the bathroom before the flush.
“Listen, I don’t usually have people come over here,” Rob said.
“OK,” I said.
“So,” he continued, “could you please not look at my stuff while I’m in the bathroom?”
I told him “sure,” and then took a seat on the couch and tried to stare only straight ahead of me. This guy really was the worst.
Rob put in the DVD, and, as hard as it may be to believe, I did not concentrate on the plot of
Yellow Submarine
. Instead, I marinated in my incredulity at Rob’s behavior and wondered if he was hiding anything more illicit than what I’d seen on that video shelf. Were there surveillance videos? Films of women crushing baby animals with stiletto heels? Were those VHS tapes labeled in code? Because based on the amount of other
Star Wars
paraphernalia in Rob’s apartment, I had a feeling that “
Star Wars
” was code for “
Star Wars
.” I was in a No Girls Allowed tree house with a little boy who, despite his proclivities for Chewbacca-themed entertainment, still expected to get laid. And I was the one who’d schlepped out there after a long struggle of getting him to let me come over. It was, in fact, the only time in my life I can remember practically begging to come to Brooklyn.
By the way, I’ve never seen any of the
Star Wars
movies. Mostly because I think it’s funny that I haven’t, and also, because I’ve never had any interest in those films, and now it’s too late. It’s a children’s movie, and I’m over thirty. I’ve also never seen the
Snorks
movie, and while I’m sure it would’ve helped to shape my pop culture worldview if I’d been exposed to it earlier, today there are more pressing things on my agenda. I also don’t like sci-fi, or fantasy, or anything more
Lord of the Rings
-ish than the Ren Faire-looking cover of that one awesome Heart record. But this George Lucas-free way of life is totally unacceptable to guys like Rob, who was horrified—simply
horrifi ed
—that I hadn’t seen what seemed to—still—be his favorite movie.
Yellow Submarine
ended (Spoiler alert! Ringo drowns.), and Rob and I retired methodically to his bedroom, which housed a dresser stuffed with more mom jeans, and a Go-Go’s poster on the wall. We started making out and I got on top of him and stared at Belinda Carlisle’s soft, pretty-dykey tan face while I altruistically gyrated until completion, then slept through Rob’s snores under flannel sheets that smelled like teenage boy. I let myself out in the morning.
As poorly as our “relationship” was going, it’s important to mention that sex with Rob, despite the giant chasm between what each of us wanted from each other, was fantastic. It is impossible to overstate how physically compatible we were and, what’s more, I think I was hungry to be fucked well and treated badly by somebody I was illogically certain I wanted to one day be my husband.
That’s the other thing. Rob was the first Jewish guy I’d ever dated, and my brain activated a subconscious launch sequence when I finally started sleeping with somebody who seemed, in the abstract, to be at least culturally compatible. I can only relate it to women in their late thirties who see a baby, and they get like me when I see a Cadbury Creme Egg. Part of what was so attractive about Rob came from some ancient instinct in my Solomon Schechter-educated, Jappy lizard brain screeching, “Marry him! Get moneyed in-laws! Wait by the Dumpster until you get a ring if you have to! Sue him for everything when he leaves you for a blonde!”
Soon after our Brooklyn sleepover, I got fired from my secretary job at a theater PR firm, which was a horrible gig at an office staffed by the only gay men I’ve ever met in my life who truly hated me. They let me go after I fucked up the setting on the Xerox machine, making too-dark copies of a press photo of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, hats to hearts, heroically singing “God Bless America” during a curtain call of a
Producers
performance on September 12, 2001, captioned, “The Show Must Go On.” I was relieved I didn’t have to work there anymore, but also panicked and bottomless: Within the course of three weeks, I’d become unemployed and lost a boyfriend, and every night brought with it another nightmare about being on a plane on fire, about to careen into a skyscraper.
Then I found a bump on my upper lip.
MY DERMATOLOGIST
at the time, an octogenarian Orthodox Jew who has since dropped dead from old age, was a gentle patriarch who would take a metal instrument to my cheek when I needed an acne breakout tamed. When I came into his office with the bump on my lip, I was certain I had an acne cyst—the kind I get on my chin sometimes. I figured getting a shot from Dr. Stanley Nussbaum’s magic cortisone needle in his billion-year-old office on East Thirty-sixth Street would be a brief distraction to break up my day of looking for a new secretary job on Craigslist and obsessing over the loser I was sleeping with—but in
his bed
now!
And that’s when Dr. Nussbaum told me I had herpes.
Well, actually, what he told me was that I had a cold sore. And that was insane to me, because it didn’t look like a sore—it looked like a bump. And when I asked him what the difference between a cold sore and herpes was, he said, “Nothing.” So when I freaked out and asked him “Are you telling me I have herpes?” he told me calmly that babies get cold sores and chicken pox is also herpes, but all I could think about was that fucking guy in his dumb bed, and how that idiot gave me a fucking STD while Jane Wiedlin helplessly watched the whole thing from her postered perch. And I was. So. Pissed. Off.