And maybe it was. I guess I wasn’t sure. But once it was happening, I was OK with it. I mean, it didn’t
feel
good. I’m not a reticent rape victim or anything: It was consensual like a fox—and conceptually exciting, I suppose. The kind of action you settle for in high school because you’re not used to having an orgasm, and the youth of your inexperienced partner is not unique. It was actually
funny
, the abrupt timing of it all, after my weak protests. Maybe I could recommend his writerly instincts to my agent with more confidence than I had earlier in the evening.
Afterward, I took a moment to think about what to do. I’d been getting ready to pack up and head home moments before, but then, there had been sex. I figured, “Well, now, I
have
to sleep over, because if I
don’t
, then I’m a huge slut.”
So I did. And in the morning, when I got up to brush my teeth with my finger, Noah’s bathroom door opened with the sound of a flush, revealing a shirtless
dude
in his twenties with a half-up/half-down ponytailed hairstyle. I was taken aback: I usually don’t see anybody that early in the morning, and because I don’t live in Tampa, I never see hair like that.
“Oh, that’s Doug. He’s an investment banker/body builder,” Noah explained to me once I told him who I’d met. And of course it was. Of course it was Doug. I had to get out of there before I met more of his roommates with career/hobby hybrids. I slipped on the summer dress and jacket I’d had on in the bar ten hours earlier and raced home so I could take a shower. I felt sort of gross.
It wasn’t until I was back in my apartment when I realized how itchy and irritated my skin was. There were bites all over my legs and under my arms, and my eyes were red even after I showered. I looked more closely at the bites, and my heart sank.
Fucking bedbugs.
SLEEPING WITH
Noah exposed me to the trendiest and most notorious of New York City’s formidable vermin population. He had given me the real estate form of an STD. I went to
bedbugger.com
and studied examples of the bites I was certain came from that stupid fucking bed Noah sawed and nailed together with plywood and capped with a mattress that probably came from the street. I pictured his cotton dorm room comforter and his flannel sheets. I remembered the pigeon’s nest outside his window; rats with wings defecating over the A/C. The filthy pre-war walls, mauve with lead paint. That bathroom. I took another shower and made an emergency appointment with my dermatologist, a nice man.
I started seeing Dr. Steingart a while ago, when I called the office of Dr. Nussbaum—the 9/11 herpes informant—to find out that he had died of old age. “I’m sorry to hear that. When can I come in to get this acne scraped?” I asked the grieving receptionist at the time.
Seven years later, after spending the night with Noah, I waited for Dr. Steingart to look at my bites while my favorite of his nurses made small talk with me, as she always does, about her favorite stand-up comedians, all of whom are black. Barbara is a tiny Italian American woman who lives in New Rochelle and has worked as a nurse, seemingly, since the beginning of time. The only thing she likes more than reprimanding me for picking at a zit is telling me how much she loves Sinbad. It was comforting to hear her voice that afternoon: Barbara was suddenly the only person I wanted to be around that day, in the aftermath of an evening plagued with vermin bites and intercourse absent of clitoral stimulation.
When she asked what the reason was for my seeing Dr. Steingart that day, I told Barbara that I’d slept in a guy’s bed the night before and was convinced I was pecked to death by the bugs that dwelled in its crevices. She told me the doctor would be right in, and also, how much she was looking forward to seeing Steve Harvey at Mohegan Sun the following weekend. And soon enough, there was Dr. Alvin Steingart to look at my bites, shake his head, and remind me that I should be careful about whose bed I sleep in.
I felt like I did in college, going to the gynecologist for confessionlike absolution after each one of my sexual misdoings. Even though Noah and I used a condom, the Xeroxed
New York Post
article about the bedbug epidemic Dr. Steingart handed me was a black-and-white reminder that there are still sticky wickets besides chlamydia, to circumnavigate after the deed.
AND OF
course
I should have been more careful about whose bed I slept in. Because there are so many complications that come from sex you assume is casual and non-reoccurring—the “failed pilot” kind of sex. If something bad happens after what turns out to be a one-night stand, from heartache to bedbug bites, there’s an excellent chance you won’t feel comfortable contacting your one-time partner to report the somber findings, unless they are life-threatening and you’re at a genuine moral crossroads. But if you’re entertaining the idea of maybe seeing him again, and nobody has any oozing sores, part of you is still compelled to stay mute, because we’ve been indoctrinated by people who make the rules about how a girl who wants another date should
keep it light.
Women, even when plagued with problems that transcend wanting to be liked by a cute boy, are still under the impression that you shouldn’t contact a guy after he schtupps you, especially the day after, even as you’re writing a check out to your dermatologist because
nobody fucking takes Freelancers Union Insurance
. But you don’t send the guy the bill, even though you’re tempted to, because you’re wise enough to know that as soon as you’ve consented to sex of any kind, no matter what you hope comes of it, as soon as it’s over, you’re back in the business of taking care of yourself.
SO I
sealed off the clothes I’d worn the night before in a Ziploc freezer bag and sent the whole mess to the cleaners, and after I cleaned my place like a Stepford Wife on the diet pills they used to make that had cocaine in them, I took a third shower and changed my sheets. And then I was done.
As far as ailments go, I was relieved to have come down with the kind of sick that can be treated with some Cortisone cream and good apartment hygiene. And I was disappointed that Noah never followed through on his e-mails after that night to get together again, after what I’d had all intentions to be a proper date. I felt like I blew it by coming home with him in the first place, but I guess it was good to have Noah’s failed test of interest up front, so I didn’t waste more time wondering whether he was a long-term contender.
But it still hurt to see him shift from caring enough to impress me with cute texts to ignoring my e-mail about the Nicolas Cage movie that came on late at night—the one we were talking about back at the bar. I blamed myself, but who knows if anyone besides the bugs were actually culpable. In the end, I made a clean break, and didn’t carry Noah into my thoughts any more than I carried vermin into my apartment. Sometimes you have to be your own preemptive exterminator.
did i come to brooklyn for this?
I
substitute-taught a class one time and ended up going out with one of my students. It was a writing class—for
adults
, so calm down—and one of the students was a really good-looking guy in his late thirties. He was wearing a button-down plaid shirt and had a generous smile, and as soon as I saw him, I thought to myself, “Hello.”
One of the things I do when I teach a class, whether it’s my first session or when I sub and I’m teaching a bunch of people I don’t know, is go around the room and have everybody introduce themselves. It’s a good frame of reference for me so I know what people’s backgrounds are, and everybody likes talking about themselves. Plus I get to engage in a conversationlike experience, which is the best part of teaching—when you feel like you’re not actually working.
So, we went around the room and my students for the day gave me their bios. A middle-aged woman with eager eyes who half-smiled at everything I said, like she hoped I was about to say something funny so she could laugh, told me about her former broadcast journalism career and subsequent divorce. A heavy blonde in her early twenties said she just graduated from the New School, where she majored in creative writing. A bona fide freak—there is always at least one in any adult education class in New York City, God bless and keep them, rambled on about Bush’s war on terror, Monty Python, how he lived in the housing complex on Twenty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue, and how if it weren’t for his Latin neighbor’s loud macaw, he’d be able to concentrate on drawing his own political cartoons. And then, Alistair, the cute guy with the plaid shirt, said he worked at AOL as his day job, that he was an artist when he lived in Austin, Texas, and that since he moved to New York, wanted to do more writing.
And that was, frankly, enough for me to know to decide I wanted to go out with Alistair. He was cute, and he could string a sentence together. That was literally it. It wasn’t like I heard “Austin . . . AOL . . . Art . . .” and decided “Yes!” It was more like “Sure. Fine. He’s not unemployed. Maybe he’s normal.” It is an optimistic assumption we all have about good-looking people.
Alistair may have been able to speak lucidly, but the piece he wrote for the class, however, was absolutely incomprehensible. It wasn’t that it was
bad
—though I guess it was that, too. It just didn’t make any sense at all. It was a sketch that took place at a Senate hearing, and the premise of the whole thing was based on this really obscure FAA motion that had gone out the week before, and all the FAA chairmen were shouting at the senators, but not about anything I could understand. And there weren’t any jokes in it. Maybe there were lines in it that he
thought
were jokes, but it was all pretty cryptic. But sadly, at that point I didn’t really care how good of a writer he was. I just wanted to go on a date with him and maybe make out.
I FOUND
Alistair on Facebook and asked our mutual friends about him, and he got decent marks, so I wrote him and asked if he wanted to go to a show we’d talked about after class, during which I was certain we were flirting. “I can’t,” he wrote back, “I have a girlfriend. . . . I mean plans.” Then he used an emoticon—a sideways sticking-its-tongue-out smiley face. He continued. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I just find you really attractive, and wanted to be as upfront as I could. And I don’t think going out with you would be the best idea under those circumstances.”
Adorable! I mean, I was disappointed, but I was also positively tickled at how Alistair showed me his hand. “Here’s my deal, here’s what I’m saying, here’s why I’m saying it.”That’s what
I
do! I’m totally transparent and excessively forthcoming too!
Here’s the difference, though: I’m not crazy. Alistair was, which is something I should have known right away from the writing he brought to class. At first I just wondered if he was just not very bright. There were some inexcusable spelling mistakes in his piece, and not of the “you’re/your” variety. Plus, like I said, the content of his scene was totally bats. But handsome passes for normal and intelligent when you decide you want it to.
I wrote back to Alistair, thanking him for being honest, and moved on with my life, only to hear from him six weeks later. He asked me out, and when I asked, “Wouldn’t your girlfriend mind?” He wrote back and told me that they’d gone their separate ways. That was fast! We made a date for Saturday night: I told him I wanted to see the new Indiana Jones movie.
That was another premonition of bad things to come.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
is not only the worst movie of the
Indiana Jones
franchise, surpassing the one where they eat brains out of monkey skulls and there’s an “Oriental Little Boy,” but it’s also, quite possibly, the worst movie of all time. There are aliens, mind control, Russians, Shia LaBeouf playing a character called “Mutt,” and it makes no sense at all. It made Alistair’s sketch for class look like
Lawrence of Arabia.
Alistair didn’t understand why seeing that movie caused me to become psychotic. He thought it was all right, but wasn’t overly familiar with the other
Indiana Jones
films, which seemed odd, considering he was roughly my age and male. I had a hard time connecting with him over the abomination we’d just sat through, and so I changed the subject over the course of our walk to a restaurant.
That was when Alistair told me about how much he was looking forward to going back to Burning Man that summer. And
that
was the moment when I figured that in terms of us not having anything in common, it couldn’t get worse.
DON’T YOU
love that expression? “How could this get worse?” If ever there was a transitional phrase that better telegrapheds a bit of storytelling, I’d like to know what it is. You’re planting a red flag into the ground, and printed on that flag is, SOMETHING HORRIBLE IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. What could be a more obvious foreshadowing device? “Well, at least it’s not raining?”
So, we’re at this Mexican restaurant. And over chips, Alistair, whose candor I’d found endearing in his e-mails about how attractive he found me, quickly lent itself to a
Hall of Presidents
- style illumination of all of his skeletons, which any half-sane person with the social skills of a high-functioning idiot savant would have had the foresight to know belonged safely tucked away behind psychological winter coats and formalwear in the hall closets of our minds. He simply did not know what to keep to himself on a first date.
He told me at length about his ex-girlfriend; that they met after spending a weekend together when one of his friends married her sister. After that, she went back to Cyprus, where she was from, obviously. And after a month of long distance flirting, Athena or whatever quit her job and broke up with her boyfriend in order to move to the States into Alistair’s apartment, and then, within two months, acquired a pretty serious Vicodin habit after she had his abortion. So there was that.