I HAD DECIDED that I would definitely need to break up with Anna some months before the actual event. I had become convinced that she didn’t have my back. I felt that she should have done a better job of going to bat for me with her parents and that I would punish her with dismissal. I had recently found out that I could be finicky and incredibly ruthless with people if I felt slighted by them, and I could tell that Anna had no inkling of the kind of lather I worked myself into about the situation.
Anna’s parents were upset that she had broken up with her yuppie boyfriend and immediately shacked up with another man. Furthermore, they were completely livid that her new beau was, in their estimation, a pornographer. Anna’s father was a Vietnam vet of Prussian extraction, her mother an accented German woman of aristocratic lineage, which somehow made their distain for me that much more stark.
With the holidays approaching and me unable to return home because of a visa issue—I’d lost it in the back of a cab—I’d assumed that I’d be spending Christmas with the Braunschweigers. But shortly after Thanksgiving, Anna told me that I wasn’t welcome at their Colonial Maryland home.
This came as a shock because, in general, parents loved me. Not as an ideal mate for their daughters, necessarily, but as a quirky, slightly fey but completely harmless placeholder while they sought out somebody, if not “better,” then certainly taller. In the company of parents I am polite, charming, complimentary, self-deprecating, and can chat about current affairs at length without breaking a sweat. All of these attributes apparently count for little when you are extolling the virtues of their undergraduate only child’s vagina to several thousand avid readers every month.
They just end up resenting you.
“They say that Christmas is just for family,” said Anna on the A train journey home to Washington Heights.
“But I can’t go home to mine,” I said.
My losing my visa had meant that I couldn’t even return home for my paternal grandmother’s funeral some months earlier, which I felt terrible about.
“Did you tell them that I can’t go home?”
“Yes. They didn’t really care,” said Anna.
We sat in silence as the train stalled at 103rd Street. Anna and I had been living together in Washington Heights for six months. We left the house each morning and commuted together, came home about the same time and made dinner together. It had been fun, this playing house with my beautiful, perky Aryan college senior. I began to think that spending the holidays together would be a logical continuation of our grown-upness.
“Well, I guess that’s okay, we’ll just have our own little Christmas,” I said and put my arm around her, making her flinch. “I’ll get us a nice tree and we’ll cook dinner together. I’ll buy a goose!”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? I can’t not go home for Christmas, they’d cut me off!”
“Then what the fuck am I going to do?” I said.
“Well, my mom says that you ought to volunteer at a homeless shelter.”
I’d always thought that one day I’d grow into the sort of good person who would volunteer a lot of his time to helping the disenfranchised, but I lost my shit at the suggestion that it’s something that I really ought to do, as if it would serve as some sort of penance.
“And you’re okay with that?” I said.
“I really don’t have a choice.”
“Stand up to them!”
Anna produced an emery board from her purse and absentmindedly filed away at her talons. I ended up spending Christmas with Becky and her family. Being spiteful wasn’t my intention but I got some satisfaction when it made Anna bristle.
“They’re wicked bleeders, the krauts,” said my grandmother when I gave her my sob story at being shunned at Christmas. I’d long suspected Anna of being too cold and dispassionate to have a real relationship with. I’d spent the fall trying to push her buttons just to wrangle some sort of emotion out of her, but strategic and premeditated freak-outs had become exhausting, predictable, and I was running out of plates to smash.
Ideally I would have wanted a clean break, but Anna was broke and had nowhere else to go. When she returned from Maryland I told her that for the sake of our relationship we should really think about getting our own places. I’d been forced into sharing a bed with an ex-girlfriend before and wasn’t about to make the same mistake. Once we were in separate apartments, I would sever the ties, but not before.
A few weeks after we moved to our respective new homes on opposite banks of the East River it would be time to take action. I’d never dreamed that I’d be with a sexy fashionista like Anna, and now I was breaking up with her. Something had changed.
As breakups go, it was actually fairly pleasant. I was dog-sitting at a friend’s beach house on the Jersey Shore one squally April weekend. I picked Anna up from the Asbury Park train station and we spent the time sitting around, cuddling, eating their food, drinking their wine, watching their movies. We eventually had a little cry together. But that was that. No mess, no fuss.
Michael Martin, Nerve’s new editor in chief, was delighted with the news that I was now single, as it meant a whole slew of sexual scenarios with a rotating cast of unsavory characters was now possible, or perhaps even mandatory.
When Michael came to interview at Nerve I took an instant disliking to him. From across the room I could see that he was too good-looking, too stylish, and at twenty-five far too young to be an editor in chief. I didn’t know then that in Michael I had a champion and that once he secured the position, one of the first things he’d do was make me part of the editorial team full-time. Up until Michael joined I sat in on editorial meetings, but my day-to-day work was focused on managing the interns, ordering office supplies, and monitoring the customer service situation. Before Michael took over, I felt that the previous regime had regarded me as a novelty. Michael, however, had believed in me enough to allow me to legitimately write for a living and persuaded Rufus not only to make that happen, but also to pay thousands of dollars to have my INS status put in order. In fact, after one visa application was rejected without reason, Michael ensured that Rufus paid for a whole new petition.
Michael’s vision of “I Did It for Science” going forward would require a lot more commitment from me, however.
“I think that you are at the zenith of your powers when you are at your most uncomfortable,” he said before mapping out his vision of me using glory holes, starring in porn movies, and offering myself up at gay clubs, and was willing to up my salary accordingly.