On a Tuesday night, I meet the last man I loved. Genesee and whiskey shots.
“Who you been fucking?” he asks.
“You first.”
As he tells me, I count prime numbers in my head to distract my brain from pairing images with his words.
“Careful,” I say, trying to sound as casual as he does. “Fuck too much and you’ll end up a dad.” Alex wants to live his life alone in an A-frame house he’s built with his own hands, or a converted van. Whichever comes first. Alex—the name crunches like a mouthful of crystals.
I fell for him when he was sitting at the end of a bar, showing off the hole where his front tooth should be. Now both front teeth are fakes, his beard is full, and his long hair is knotted at his neck with a rubber band. Still, he is beautiful.
There is no “I miss you.” Or there is, but it’s garbled into the hollows of green cans, and then crushed.
Alex was always trying to outmaneuver the magnetic field between us—believing, fitfully, that no responsibility outweighed the chemistry we shared. His resistance only convinced me otherwise. I wanted him, even if we had nothing to talk about, even if we only mildly enjoyed each other’s company when we finished having sex, even if we fought over back scratches and who gets up from bed to get the water, even if we couldn’t agree on where to live together or were uninterested in each other’s career pursuits or fed off one another’s anxieties, differed on which addictions were worth the trouble, disagreed on politics but conceded to the other’s worldview because it wasn’t worth another fight. We tiptoed around each other and still set off bombs, because each of us had laid them inside the other when we thought we were just fucking.
The problem was that I didn’t always respect him. The problem was that I thought he was exceptionally cool. There’s a difference. Respect is vertical—an upward-looking aspirational reverence, reserved for someone who has reached a point, in age or wisdom, that you haven’t yet, but might. Coolness is more nebulous and ageless, a force field that surrounds someone—an attribute you can’t even bother striving to reach because it’s not gained, it’s gifted. Coolness is rule-resistant, untrustworthy in its nonlinear trajectory, cruel in its evasiveness, something we grow to dismiss as impermanent, contextual, unproven, immaturely experienced, and all because we know the more we try to attain it, the more unreachable it becomes. Coolness doesn’t hinge on wisdom or kindness, financial success, talent, or intelligence. It was the currency established before any of those things mattered, when we were kids, when the data points were simpler, and we judged others by how they made us feel. Coolness could make you feel a variety of emotions—excited, relaxed, self-conscious, unsafe. The uncertainty it provoked was how you knew you were in the presence of someone who possessed it. Coolness excused all the qualities I was taught to fix. There was no fixing to be cool. You had it or you didn’t.
Alex had it. He wore Vans because he thought they were good shoes, black Levi’s because they were resilient, and black T-shirts because his clothes got dirty when he worked his day job. He taught himself to play the drums and played in a semi-successful band, but not anymore. He wasn’t on social media because fuck that shit. He lost his front tooth racing BMX bikes as a kid, and lost it again in a bar fight in Berlin. He could work a charcoal grill with precision. Crisp a whole chicken to perfection without ever watching the clock, choke me when prompted, throw me down, hold me tight, burp and have it be funny. He built his own bed frame, which faced his record collection, which bordered his drum kit, which he played naked once, black hair tossed about, muscles striating. But only for a few seconds, until he dropped the drumsticks and said, “Nah, I’m just messing around.”
He was tall but not too tall, thin but muscular. His body was built from biking through Brooklyn and working a job that required heavy lifting. He’d never go to a gym or use hair products or admit that he was beautiful. But when he’d run his fingers through his black hair, walking down the street with a hand in his back pocket, he knew he was. Of course he did.
And when I was walking beside him, I felt beautiful by proxy. He was an outfit I wore, a full bodysuit that temporarily resolved the conflict between who I should be and who I was. I was Alex’s girlfriend and Alex was a beautiful mess who tenuously approved that I was a mess, too. It was all I wanted to feel, that delirious infatuation fueled by sweat odor, the bodily urge to combine insides, that messy mixture of fluids, so molecularly matched that their dried-up stains seemed meaningful enough to wear on a T-shirt as a badge of honor. Animal love.
It didn’t matter that he didn’t want kids, or that he was considering moving into his van, or that he was always in the hole with money, or that he spent so much of it on beer and malt liquor. It didn’t even matter that he shit in a bucket in his backyard and left it there for the winter. It mattered a little, but not as much as it should have.
I should have wanted more from a partner by my thirties—I have been told this plenty. But Alex was the boy I’d wanted as a teenager—the one I’d wanted to want me and sometimes just wanted to be. The adult me was powerless to resist the teenager’s stubborn urges, or she claimed to be. I liked the powerlessness I felt in the relationship and its sideways-moving momentum. It was an addiction, and I like addictions. They make all the decisions for you, so you don’t have to think too much about whether what you’re doing is good for you. You will take it as long as it’s given, because there is a built-in end date and you know you’ll miss your poison when it’s gone. Might as well enjoy.
At the bar, we talk about what I’m doing now, and I tell him I’m writing a book about Gary Wilensky.
“You were always interested in that shit,” he says, not really interested in that shit.
But when he asks what I’m doing “after this,” I believe he still loves me.
It’s been a year since he broke up with me. Two since he left me at an abandoned bus stop in Maine to get drunk with his friends in a tent. Two since he said even if he wanted kids, he wouldn’t want kids with me. Three since we made snowflakes out of white paper. Three since we holed up in my apartment for days making homemade dumplings and working through a thousand-piece puzzle. Four since I first saw his face across the bar, and I didn’t care that he didn’t support unions or whatever came out of his mouth, I just needed him, and we made out in a doorway holding cigarettes before cabbing to my apartment.
Four since he slept through our first official date, and our third. Two since he quit smoking and became disgusted by my habit. Two since he played me a song about a boy who drinks too much because his girlfriend doesn’t understand him. Two since the point was taken, but not enough to shake me off. One since he called to tell me he was shaking me off.
We leave the bar to slow dance to a Linda Ronstadt record back at my apartment. He was always good at slow dancing, and at convincing me singer-songwriters I’d written off were underappreciated. Later in the night, when our skins lined up, eyeball to eyeball, I mouthed “I love you,” twice in case he missed it the first time, which was one or two times too many because when I texted him the following day, asking, “What was that song we were dancing to again?” he texted back “Different Drum” and nothing else.
“You weren’t his favorite,” the criminal psychologist had said when I asked him why Gary Wilensky didn’t drive off with me that one night in his car. Such a simple explanation for such a loaded question. It landed plunk in my lap and made me realize the question I meant to ask wasn’t why I wasn’t his victim, but why I wasn’t his favorite.
This need, still so vital, to chase male rejection as if it were the answer to the riddle of me. A film negative of what I’m not rather than what I am, which can be used to see the perceived deficiencies clearly and adjust accordingly.
The notion of self-improvement is particular to girls and women. That perfection myth that begins with our bodies in adolescence continues to rear its head through adulthood, even when reframed as empowerment.
When my relationship with Alex failed, I was told not to question what I did wrong, but why I chose such unhealthy partners, why I didn’t love myself enough to recognize the right ones. Not bad advice, but still, reinforcement of the issue that might have kicked off my poor choices long ago. Something was still wrong with me that needed to be fixed in order to be worthy of love.
The onus is on us to change, be better, be less like who we are. We’re at fault for caving to our impulses and encouraged to steer ourselves toward more calculated decisions. Once we called this pursuit purity, now we call it evolving. But as much as women are expected to override their own urges, men are expected to cave in to them. If they do, we wonder if we are somehow to blame. If they don’t, we wonder the same.