Over the next few days, a routine emerged. Each evening, I’d have an interaction and then I’d walk over to the Golconda, where Errol would greet me. Then I’d report to Vadis and Jin, the two of them coming just shy of shoving a thermometer up my ass. Errol began escorting me everywhere I went, which seemed more than a little Pyongyangy. Each time, I was told the meditation room was off-limits, under construction, or no “chaperone” was available. This, despite the fact that Errol was standing right in front of me. Meanwhile, if Clive was around, he’d breeze through, confer with his staff, and thank me for my participation as if I’d signed up to taste-test gum. Then he’d take his leave, off to some event requiring cuff links.
Soon I knew this stretch of Chinatown better than my own neighborhood. I could draw every street corner, reproduce the font on every window. I knew which buildings were diligent about breaking down their boxes and which weren’t, which had window ledges wide enough for me to put drinks on.
But the repetition was chipping away at me. Instead of dressing up in anticipation of the past, I began dressing down for it. So what if someone I used to sleep with no longer entertained the idea? Who cared what these men thought of me? There would be another one of these jokers along at any minute. I felt like a human Etch-A-Sketch—all I had to do was blink and a new chapter of my past would be waiting for me. They say you only hurt the ones you love, but it turns out you can hurt lots of people you only moderately like. I began to feel like my dating life had been some elaborate logic proof, showing me how to wind up with someone not for the one person he is but for all the people he isn’t. If human partnership was founded more on trait elimination than trait gravitation, what were all those years of heartbreak for?
There’s an acceptable degree of slovenly that anyone can attain, the point at which one’s sex appeal still shines through and becomes more appealing for the challenge. I blew past this point quickly. I wore different combinations of the same set of clothing, which I did not wash. I stopped tucking, tweezing, or shaving anything. I decided that moisturizer was unnatural. The cavewomen didn’t have moisturizer and some of them made it to forty. My scalp began to itch. Ponytails were painful to the touch when released. I gnawed at my cuticles until they bled. When I bathed, I did so poorly. Waxy flakes of soap would lodge themselves in the hair at the base of my neck and I’d still be picking them out at noon, sniffing to confirm they were soap.
Spending this much time in the past, with men as the common denominator, wasn’t doing my mental hygiene any favors either. On top of being repulsed by the digestion of romance as identity—the world was on fire and I couldn’t pass a Bechdel Test with myself—my behavioral borders were disintegrating. Devoting my nights to a parallel world made this one feel like a simulation. I stared at people on the street as if I were wearing sunglasses. A woman sitting next to me on the subway would be shaking her foot, and the urge to bash her knee with a book was so overwhelming, I’d have to get up and move.
On the phone with Boots, I’d drift off or stare at the cat while he was talking until it felt like his voice was the internal monologue of the cat.
In the mornings, I’d brush my teeth and stare at the tube of toothpaste, cowed by the mental feat it would take to buy another one when this one ran out, by the repetition of all existence. I imagined some corner of a museum, piled high with empty toothpaste tubes.
At work, people followed up about emails they’d sent and I looked at them as if through a scrim. They were addressing old me, daytime Lola, before my world was flipped over, chunks of the past falling into the well. They’d ask about my weekend plans, which was how I knew it was Friday. I’d stare at my monitor, brightness cranked up, as if trying to blind myself. Oh, how much easier it is for the sane to imitate the insane than the other way around. Who could understand me now? Recently revived coma patients, that’s who. Those were my people. People stuck in the past and flung, without their consent, into the present.
Fernando was the son of a prominent commercial director who told him that all women would be after his money. Brush your teeth, go to sleep, don’t dream of gold diggers. He eschewed any behavior that teetered on generous. We always split the bill. “Since I got” was a common refrain. Since I got the tickets, you can get the snacks. Since I got the car, you can get the gas. Since I got myself out of my mother’s womb, you can get your ass to Queens. Fernando was supposed to help me move apartments, which I’d told myself would be a cementing experience. I had visions of U-Hauls and “Do you really need this many cookbooks?” But he never showed. At first, my texts contained photos of overstuffed garbage bags, accompanied by captions like “thinking of leaving it like this.” Then they escalated to “REALLY?!” until, eight hours later, settled in my new apartment, I dug out a cedar stick Oscar had given me and smudged every room.
I saw Fernando through a restaurant window on Hester Street. He was on a date. He had ghosted me in my hour of need, but he had thought of me again after that day. Feeling emboldened by my new role as the Night Mayor of Chinatown, I walked into the restaurant, gave the maître d’ a twenty-dollar bill, and nodded at Fernando’s table. I told him that if two credit cards were presented, the money was to go toward the woman’s half of the bill only, but if only one credit card was presented, the maître d’ was to keep the money. Then I took a gratified step back out into the night.
Phillip I met in the nascent days of online dating, which meant I half expected him to burst into pixels. The idea that we had plucked each other off a shelf and could just return each other with no consequences was distracting—though quaintly inhuman compared with the swiping of faces that would become muscle memory years later. This is my online boyfriend ran like a news crawl across the back of my eyelids. Phillip, on the other hand, had no reservations about how we met. He opened up. He shared. He was getting his PhD in plant genetics, he wet the bed until he was fifteen, and he carried an EpiPen. I was inconsistent, divulging my deepest fears one moment, neglecting to tell him my office was a block away from his lab the next. Three months in, we were still seeing each other only once a week. In the most polite breakup of its generation, he suggested perhaps it would be easier for all parties to bring that number down to zero rather than up to two.
We should’ve left it there, but we got back together a month later when I ran into him on a crowded crosstown bus. Having had an IRL breakup animated the relationship for me for the first time. I no longer knew Phillip from online. I knew him from no longer knowing him. Now I wanted to see him all the time.
Phillip’s defining moment came during this second chapter of our relationship, when he punched me in the face.
Surpassed only by the time, ten minutes later, when he dumped me. Again.
We were asleep and he was dreaming that he was in a boxing ring, taking swings at the air. He rolled over in the middle of the night and clocked me awake. He bolted to the kitchen and came back with a dish towel and a pint of ice cream, handing me these items like a child hands an adult a broken toy. As I ice-creamed my eye, he sat sheepishly at the end of the bed and informed me that “this” wasn’t going to work. I still wasn’t “letting my guard down.” This was rich, coming from someone who’d just hit me in the face.
What had always interested me about that breakup, in addition to the fact that I had to look as bad as I felt for a week, was that Phillip refused to share any further details of the dream. He was fighting someone or something … but what? The obligation to stay with me? The fear of wetting the bed? Was he punching through my barriers? Maybe it was the eight-year relationship from which he’d recently extricated himself, which we never discussed. His attempts to not talk about her were painful to witness.
I watched Phillip through the window of a men’s clothing store, examining strips of houndstooth, and was tempted to march in there and ask him about the dream. I wondered if he remembered that night as well as I did. Phillip had sent back a sweater of mine a few weeks after the breakup, accompanied by a note, which I kept. It was my only evidence of him. The note, written on a piece of scrap paper, hoped I was well, which I found to be a grievous glossing-over of events. But seeing Phillip again inspired me to think of the note in a softer light. They were just words, written by someone who didn’t know what to say. Prior to the note, I’d never seen Phillip’s handwriting. How badly can you be hurt by someone whose handwriting you’ve never seen?
I followed Phillip as he exited the store, trying not to be seen. He arrived at a bus stop just as a bus pulled up. Then my phone started ringing. It was Boots. We hadn’t spoken in a couple of days, kept just missing each other. I sent it to voice mail but it was too late. I was too close to Phillip, who turned and spotted me. I had a flash of worry that he wouldn’t be able to place me. I was out of context, a time traveler. And I felt so haggard, part of me felt recognition would be an insult. But as he boarded the bus, he pointed into the open door, and yelled “Bus!” Phillip had places to go, people to see, plants to graft. And it was as if all the feelings I’d ever had about our relationship drove off on the M22 with him.
Aaron was wheeling a baby carriage down Mott Street. He wheeled right past me but I could tell it was him. All these men had lost or gained weight, changed their style, become estranged from their hairline, but their mannerisms were as indelible as fingerprints. I followed him to a bakery famous for its bear claws. There was still a line out the door at 6 p.m. He greeted a petite woman with bluntly cropped hair who handed him a beverage from a cup holder in a second stroller. They looked like they had come downtown for the express purpose of obtaining bear claws. One or both of them had been issued images of pastry by the Golconda.
Aaron was a relic. The summer before high school began, I was hopelessly infatuated with him. He was a lifeguard at our local summer camp, where he was a senior counselor and I was a junior counselor. He used to twirl a lanyard with keys to the equipment shack around his fingers, moving in controlled circles. I spent all summer thinking of ways to get those fingers inside me. I hiked up my shorts, pulled down my V-neck. I had a well-fabricated nightlife. I casually dropped Jerky Boys references in front of him and rented the action movies he liked from Blockbuster. I paid a king’s ransom for a vintage Bruce Lee Fist of Fury T-shirt. When he complimented it, I pretended to have fished it out of a secondhand bin.
As the summer wore on and Aaron made no overtures of affection, I didn’t give up on my forced metamorphosis into cool. I wanted to seem like I had good taste and so I accidentally became someone with good taste. I wanted to seem elusive and so I accidentally became elusive. Aaron took notice on the last day of camp. Men, even boys, are very good at knowing when a woman’s heart has left the building. By the time Aaron asked me to help him collect the kickboards, I was inconvenienced.
The walls inside the equipment shack were covered in cheap panels with the manufacturer’s logo on them: Beaver Lumber. Aaron had me up against one of the panels, his tongue exploring my ear. This guy wanted to eat my brains. He dug his hand over the waistband of my shorts and under the spandex of my bathing suit, his forearm cut off by two types of elastic. I’ll never forget the look of concern on Aaron’s face, that I might be unimpressed with his putting his fingers in me. I wanted to tell him there was no need to question if it felt good because of course it didn’t feel good. I had not expected it to. But I was suddenly responsible for this creature who noticed I wasn’t reacting how women reacted in the movies. Neither of us knew how to fix this so Aaron freed his hand and kissed me. He left the shed first.
“See you next summer,” he said, even though I’d already told him this was my last summer at the camp.
I watched him through a crack in the door, moving up the slope of a path. Another counselor came up behind him, a girl his age, and punched him affectionately in the arm. I reached my hand down to smell myself. As suspected: chlorine.
Out of everyone, I least wanted to see Knox. I was hoping that Clive had overlooked him, but if the Golconda’s net had caught the likes of Howard and Dave, there was no way it was letting Knox slide.
Knox was an emotionally distant librettist and latent sadist from Detroit who looked like a young Daniel Day Lewis. I interviewed him for a Modern Psychology feature on prodigies and we had drinks after the story ran. Knox seemed cultured, confident, and unassuming about both, the kind of man who extended himself as much as he retreated, a function of being an in-demand artist who must answer email eventually. The kind of man I thought I should be dating. In this way, I was perpetrating the same crime against Knox as Dave had perpetrated against me. Whenever Dave assumed I’d like to go cliff diving with him, I thought: Do I even need to be here for this relationship?
I blamed Knox for why I’d later fall for Amos, because I was hoping to date an artist who was also an intellectual. Boots didn’t count because Boots was too practical about his art to risk insufferability. I’d never managed to strike the right balance with creative types. Either I tiptoed around these men, letting them stop me mid-sentence to point out a cloud, letting them expect to be rewarded for banal observations, or I felt self-conscious about my own creative limitations and transformed myself into whatever they wanted me to be.
That’s why I was scared of seeing Knox. Because of the monster I became around him.
Knox’s concern for my physical well-being was the entry point of his affection. At first, I thought his compulsion to nurse stemmed from his immersion in an older art form and, by extension, an older world. He insisted on walking closest to the curb. Or sending cars to pick me up. He would nonchalantly move our café table away from foot traffic and glare at anyone who jostled me, as if prepared to draw his sword. I had a sharp sense of my own body whenever I was around him. I found myself doing things like blowing into my already-gloved fingers, announcing that it was cold. I’d touch the glass of an airplane window, knowing he was beside me, appreciating the silhouette of my ladylike fingers, speculating about the soft field of my thoughts. I was a fragile product of this big bad world. If I stubbed my toe, I’d say something like, “I don’t think it’s broken.” In bed, Knox was adamant about cradling my head to keep it from banging against the wall, even though our sex presented no danger. I’d sigh as I fell asleep, like a baby bear, with a little whistle out the nose and a nuzzle into the pillow, while Knox stroked my hair.
It made him so happy to do these things, it seemed like no sacrifice to pretend to want them.
One morning, our bodies skimmed by the sheets, Knox confessed the reason he taught himself to play the piano was so he could make something beautiful while his father beat his mother. On multiple occasions, the father tried to choke her to death. It fell to Knox to comfort her and then, when he was older, to call the police. The whole neighborhood knew how bad things were in that house, but they did nothing. They had their own problems.
After some prodding, I discovered that every woman Knox had ever been with had been assaulted, abandoned, neglected, or sexually abused, often by a relative. Knox’s broken-bird complex was not a tic, his aspirational Munchausen by proxy ran right up to the edge of causing trauma before backing away. The heavier the topic, the more Knox engaged with it. When I tried to move on from my own insufficient wounds, I could practically hear the cord of his attention being snipped. A hero without a damsel is a mere man. I found I could capture Knox’s attention only if I was upset. I’d leave parties in a huff, indulging in momentary emotion. Or I’d imply that Vadis and I had been discussing dark things, secret woman things when, in reality, we had devoted the better part of breakfast to identifying the color of a celebrity’s hair.
As our tolerance grew, we needed bigger hits of narrative pain to achieve the same high. I was running out of material. So I began telling flat-out lies. My dalliance with Aaron in the equipment shed became him cornering me against my will. Plus, I was a virgin. That much was true. But when that incident started running on fumes, I exaggerated a story of bad drunken sex in college. Smooth as silk, the drunken sex turned into assault “or something like it, these things aren’t always so cut and dry,” a reveal I made almost casually, over a plate of shishito peppers.
“I think of men like these peppers,” I said, folding a whole one into my mouth like a complete lunatic. “Sometimes they hurt, but mostly they’re sweet.”
I was a sane person imitating a broken person imitating a sane person, which did not feel sane, not at all.
“Did you press charges?”
I bowed my head and shook it. There was no end to the shame, the unfathomable, bottomless shame, I felt on behalf of women who had been sexually assaulted. I was perpetuating one of the more harmful betrayals of womankind. And yet I felt a perverse sense of vindication on behalf of every woman who is told a nonsense story by a man to get her into bed. Men going through an artistic block, men sad about the death of a distant relative or the closing of a record store, men passed over for a promotion who need pussy to heal. But there was no turning back. Knox lit up only when we discussed my turbulent sexual history, and became disengaged otherwise.
I tried to remember: Had something more than a little unpleasant happened that night in college, something more than stylistic differences? Probably. I did not have a great time, that’s why the night stood out. But it was so long ago, I had obliterated the truth of it. And now my fake rapist had set up camp, hanging above our bed like a bat.
No longer in the mood to faux-sodomize myself in order to keep my boyfriend, I knew what I had to do—kill the bat. So one afternoon, I showed up at Knox’s apartment. I sat on his settee, demonstrably upset. Knox put his hand on my knee while I stared at the carpet: My rapist, I explained, had died. How? A skiing accident. Where? Canada. How did I know? Google alert?
Guess we can explore the psychological soundness of that another time.
“Once a bad person,” Knox said, “always a bad person.”
“And now not even a person.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel free,” I said, the first honest thing I’d uttered in months.
The fake tormentor of my fake nightmares could no longer be tracked down. I had achieved closure by pressing Control-Alt-Delete. The problem was, I had finally told a lie so big, there was no way I could stay with the person I’d told it to. Keeping Knox around would doom me to this narrative, folding it into the couple’s counseling that was clearly coming. I could not stomach the idea of paying to lie to a therapist.
After I left his apartment, I told myself that at least I’d never have to see Knox again, never be reminded of my own capacity for manipulation.
When I saw Knox on Centre Street, he was with a woman who was looking intently at her reflection in a store window. The sunset was filling in the glass with the same blazing pink as the rosebuds on her sundress. She had a black surgical boot on her right foot and was fishing something out of her eye. Knox had his hand on her back, soothing her as she manipulated her eyelid.
I ran to the Golconda as if it were an embassy on foreign soil.