The Lonely Hunter, page 14
I’m sorry, I wrote to her on the third day of this. I like you a lot, I’m just too busy to really date, I’ve realized. It’s been wonderful getting to know you.
After a little bit she answered, I understand. I hope you feel better soon. It was nice getting to know you, too!
This kindness made me feel even worse, like I was some sort of goblin who couldn’t respond to affection. I’d tried so hard to learn to accept rejection that I hadn’t yet learned how to accept connection. At that moment, it seemed like I never would.
The heat and the guilt and feeling sick had made me insufferably cranky. I wanted to stay away from everyone until I recovered some equilibrium. I ate ice pops on the couch and watched movies. Most of them were action flicks I didn’t need to pay attention to as I simultaneously scrolled through my phone. For no good reason, I ended up watching the 2012 film Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.
The movie is about an alternate version of earth where a humanity-destroying asteroid is about to hit the planet. Everyone knows it will happen, all attempts to prevent disaster have failed, and people everywhere are doing whatever they need to do in the last month they have left to live. It’s supposed to be a comedy, starring Steve Carrell and Kiera Knightley, so almost until the very end I expected this asteroid to somehow be circumvented. Surely, it wouldn’t end with the two lovers, brought together by exceptional circumstances, being exterminated.
It did. As the credits rolled, I was engulfed in a wave of existential terror unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I don’t know if it was because it was unexpected or because I’d never really pictured a cataclysmic annihilation event, but it made me literally nauseous. I had to get up and pace around the small square-footage of my apartment as my fever spiked. I’d been confronted with death many times in my life. The thought of my own death often filled me with dread. This was different. I didn’t know until then how much consolation I took in the idea of life going on even when mine would be over.
Whenever I left this existence, I wanted it to be with the faith that somewhere people were sitting in the park, filling their bird feeders, applying eyeliner, spitting, being tired, being excited, knocking on doors, taking the training wheels off bikes, dressing up to go to a birthday party, starting the coffee maker, gossiping, having their bones set, getting knocked down by ocean breakers, crying on the phone, high-fiving ironically, high-fiving sincerely, checking the weather report, forgetting to bring out the recycling, running to catch a train, blowing on steaming cups of tea, smacking mosquitoes, celebrating, getting woken up by the neighbors, being ugly, or kind, or funny, or just nothing, because life has no necessity except to repeat itself in all of its tiny, insistent declarations. If it all ceased to be, there was no point in being right now, and that was unbearable.
These sorts of breakdowns can’t be sustained for long if your brain is functioning appropriately. I cried irrationally for a minute and then took a nap. When I woke up, I was feeling semi-normal, having managed to compartmentalize the terror of being. I stood at the window without the AC in it, and Bert hopped up to join me. I scratched his soft head. Communing with my cat, I was sensitive to all the thin threads of connection tying me to the people below, a thousand filaments of care, interest, commitment, that made living extend so much further than the borders of a single life. So many people have only one anchor holding them down. What a waste, I thought, when there was so much else out there. Soon that softness faded as well. Within a few days, that open acceptance had closed and I was just a girl alone in her apartment again, looking for a date.
CHAPTER 9
Let’s Party
The bar my date had chosen looked like an unpopular gaming lounge. Piles of giant Jenga pieces and table-sized Connect 4 sets served as centerpieces for small groups of rowdy young people. Its size muted their exclamations and flirtations. The tone was very “birthday party right before everyone shows up and you’re nervous they won’t.”
My date, Tal, was already there. I recognized him immediately because he actually looked like his photos, broad-shouldered and lean. It was those photos that had lured me from my usual haunts to Williamsburg. There was also a party nearby, making it a two-for-one train trip. If the date was bad, I’d have a consolation-prize event.
After Vanessa, I didn’t want to quit dating, even though I’d hit a limitation for interaction I didn’t know I had. I wasn’t sure how to get around it. It seemed as though I’d learned most of what I could from going on so many first dates. There was no way to “practice” interpersonal relationships on a deeper level without finding someone compatible, and that still seemed to largely be an issue of luck. Additionally, was it fair to work out your issues on someone in such a prolonged and intimate way? Your partners shouldn’t be therapists you get to have sex with, in my opinion. This is what I wondered about, instead of why getting closer to someone had felt more draining than fulfilling.
I decided to stick to my dating intentions, and there were still a few weeks of summer left. I picked Tal because he looked relaxed and handsome and wrote that he was in the arts and new to Bumble. When he saw me, he stood up, looking relieved. We hugged.
“I chose this place because they supposedly make great cocktails,” he said, pushing the moisture-warped menu toward me. Having worked in bars throughout my life, I find that cocktails hold very little mystique. I’ve seen too many of them shaken and stirred and spilled and snuck behind the bar to value them at their price point anymore. Leaning over the list, a hundred different nights of serving tables flitted through my head and I had to seal my lips to keep from babbling something inane about bar culture. When I finally ordered a paloma, the bartender seemed mad about it.
“It’s not a very well-balanced drink,” she warned me, planting her hands on the surface of the bar as though daring me to go through with it.
“That’s okay, I’ll still have one,” I said, confused about why she didn’t just make it better, in that case. Her posture radiated pique as she turned away to make Tal and me our drinks. He had ordered the same thing out of solidarity, and it did create a sense of familiarity between us. Banding together against someone else over something as stupid as a cocktail choice was enough to make us a unit. How enticing the feeling of being in a unit is, even when it’s based more on rejecting others than on finding internal commonalities.
When she plopped them down, I took a sip. It tasted tart. I preferred that to something sugary, so it all worked out.
Tal sipped, swallowed, grimaced, then asked, “So, what do you do?”
Happy to get back to basics, I told him I was a writer, where I’d grown up, that I had no siblings, that blah blah blah. He was good at going back and forth, telling me about himself, asking me questions. He was an artist, one with some success. He showed me photos of his large-scale paintings. After the second paloma, I caught myself fantasizing about what it would be like to date a guy who traveled the country to install art at big-name galleries. I realized I was attracted to him beyond his good looks. Lots of people are good-looking. Getting along with someone is much rarer.
Even though I was having a good time with a hot guy, I wanted to go to my party. It was already on the late side. Tal said he actually had to go home because he was traveling in the morning. I took that to mean he wasn’t interested. Disappointing. It had been a nice evening. Outside, I leaned in to give him a hug goodbye, feeling warm due to the tequila. As my arms went around him, he tried to kiss me, missing my mouth. I stood back and we laughed.
“Can we try that again?” I asked.
“Yes, of course!”
We moved toward each other more slowly and started making out on the street, which I’m sure everyone passing by, as well as the bartender watching from inside, appreciated.
Tal leaned back and whispered huskily, “Are you sure you have to go to your party?”
“Yes,” I replied, smiling. It felt like something was flaring between us, which was exciting. There was a hesitation, too. I’d felt something similar about Vanessa and ended up pulling away. Or the hesitation could even have been from the reminder of the spring, and the first man I’d kissed in years disappearing right after. It can be so hard to take a person as they are without being haunted by all the dynamics you had with other people from your past. If only we could just start over fresh with every person we try to know. This is what people call “baggage,” or even trauma—the suspicion that all relationship patterns just repeat and repeat, and you’ll never get to have something better than what’s already come. It can be hard to remember the other person has their own shit they’re carrying around. You’re each unique snowflakes of hurt feelings and bad memories.
As I left, there was also a part of me that was cocky, certain there would be other chances to meet. I thought he liked me and would want to make that happen. There was time.
I found my way to the bar where my friends were waiting. “Waiting” wasn’t quite the right word, because when I walked into the rager taking place in the bar, I knew no one would have noticed if I’d never shown up. A smoke machine was pumping regular fresh layers of fog across the dance floor, and a disco ball reflected back a rainbow of lights shooting out of an LED display. Most of the people there were friends from my comedy life, including the DJ. Even though they wouldn’t have missed my presence, they were happy to see me, cheering over the blasting of the music.
There was nothing hesitant or slow about the dancing. Things had already cranked up to a ten. The bad palomas had loosened me up, as had the kissing. A wave of energy seemed to be connecting everyone; groups formed circles, splitting apart and re-forming, everyone consumed by a mad summer fever that made unified movement a psychic directive. I was absolutely off my head within twenty minutes, triumphant, streaming sweat, and jumping up and down.
“I’m having so much fun!” I literally screamed in my friend Patrick’s face. He took my hands and we jumped up and down together. The night spun on, and I was so joyously glad that I’d gone to be with this group of people instead of home with a man, though the promise of meeting that man again gave the dancing an added sheen.
The next morning, the cats’ demands woke me. I felt like a grapefruit someone had stepped on, split and leaking juice. I stumbled to the sink for a glass of water, opening my mouth and coughing a little fog smoke out. I wasn’t exactly hungover; it was more that my entire body was aching, particularly my neck and the soles of my poor feet. Too much head banging and stomping. After some eggs and coffee, I felt almost functional, and impressed with myself; I was inside a strong, powerful body that could process palomas all night and still get up before noon the next day. I spent so much time alone with my job, it sometimes seemed like I didn’t know anyone at all. That illusion had recently been propped up by so many dates with people I was meeting for the first time. At that party, I remembered there were lots of people who had known me for years and who knew one another.
If that kind of feverous unity was something I could participate in every weekend, or via some other community activity, indefinitely, I would have abandoned dating completely for the rest of my life. Nights like that made me understand church better. It was sort of a similar feeling to the two Dolly Parton concerts I’d been to, during both of which I’d openly wept. I rode the dance-party high for a couple of days before reaching out to Tal to see if he wanted to hang out.
He did. We made plans. He canceled. He was going out of town. I never heard from him again.
This time I wasn’t upset about being rejected. I was sexually frustrated. Complaints about dating apps are often accompanied by a secondary complaint about hookup culture—that people sleep with each other too easily, too often. Why hadn’t I managed to get laid? There are many definitions of sex, and I was flexible about what sex could mean. By my personal standard, nothing I’d done had really satisfied that craving.
Remembering my reaction to Vanessa’s texting, I left Tal alone. My high from a weekend of excess and excitement dissipated, and a more typical weekend followed, with another lukewarm date or two.
The thing about my friends from comedy was that they were as close as I had found to a self-replenishing community. My casual high school or college friends and I had grown apart. My closest friends had mostly all married, and many had children. I could visit their lives, though it seemed we rarely went out to do new things in life together. Most of my other hobbies were solitary ones. Despite my love for Dolly Parton, I wasn’t following her around the country in a little caravan of obsessives. Comedy people came and went, sure, but there was always a core of people I could reliably find things to do with. That kept me coming back even when making and watching comedy wasn’t as satisfying as it had been when I’d started.
Every year there were new people in that community, and most of them were younger. Older people filtered out, called away by the same changes my peers elsewhere had been. People tried to be inclusive. At a certain point, I didn’t know that I would still feel right dancing on weekends with people who were younger and younger than me. Or that I would even want to.
How many comparable groups were there where people could join together in a friendly way on a regular basis, and that weren’t arranged around a family dynamic? Church? Unfortunately, most popular Western religions are all about a patriarchal family dynamic, too, even if all are theoretically welcome at service. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone was published in 2000, over twenty years ago, when there was already a noticeable decline in group activities. Putnam’s overall thesis is that the quality of civic engagement, which he calls social capital, is degrading as people are separated by the technology of the Internet or television. The variety of choices available to us in entertainment splits people in so many directions that we can’t focus on the health of the communities we live in, and the country at large. Though he has none of DePaulo’s beliefs about wanting to destroy traditional family structures, he does seem to share her opinion that people have become too reclusive, withdrawing into their homes rather than seeking out town squares in their free time.
Bowling Alone was published four years before the advent of Facebook, and it reads partly as a premonition of how humanity would become so politically divided via a curated news feed, and subsequently isolated from alternate perspectives. Putnam talks about the limitations of time, too, and how people have become far too busy to sustain community ties. He wanted to see more civic engagement and suggested that it was largely a difference of generational attitude that had led to the deterioration of organizations that bolster community.
In the two decades since the publication of Putnam’s book, technology has only become more niche, filtering interests into ever more specific subsets. The political landscape became even more divisive. Putnam’s warnings about the desperate need for face-to-face interactions were not inaccurate, but the structures he had faith in as unifying groups (Boy Scouts, rotary clubs, the NRA) were not exactly neutral meeting grounds. Trying to drag people backward, to a simpler time with three TV channels, one big game on a Saturday night, and essentially one point of view, was not possible.
Personalized technology can separate people. At the same time, the cost of a phone is marginal compared to the cost of joining clubs, finding free time to participate in group hobbies, or the emotional investment required for sustaining community ties. Many of the improv and sketch classes I took were paid for in exchange for working at the theater, but not all of them. I recognize that I paid for my friend group as much as any sorority or fraternity or other exclusive club member.
Removing tech or television from your life might simplify some things, but it won’t address these financial barriers to community building. Couplehood and a shared Netflix account might be the easiest, most affordable alternative to complete isolation for many people, especially as they age and don’t have the energy or free time for other hobbies.
Another suspicious thing I’d noticed about hobbies is how rarely people are allowed to do anything for enjoyment without being asked to make money off it. An artist, a poet, or someone who knits or makes quilts will often be asked if they have an Etsy shop; they themselves may even be thinking about how to turn the thing they started doing to relax and enjoy into another job. The pressure to monetize every moment of our days, every output or bit of fun, makes hobbies that include other people seem like a waste of time—unless it’s a networking opportunity.
Comedy, of course, was no escape from that. Most of my friends were trying to be successful as actors or writers, or just famous on Twitter. I still thought I was incredibly lucky to have the outlets I did, even with their limitations. The weekend after my date with Tal, though, there was no dance party, nor the one after that. There are many moments to fill in between the ecstatic highs of life, so I turned back to my routine, eventually feeling regret about not jumping on the opportunity for finally fornicating when I had the chance.
New York is mostly penned in crossways between towering concrete rectangles. Nonetheless, the city’s residents are quite aware of the changes in nature. In winter, cold winds shoot through the corridors created by the skyscrapers as icy slush fills the gutters. A New York winter, even a mild one, seems to last an eternity. There is no giddier place than the city on the first warm day of spring. Summer is parties and concerts in the park and wilting miserably under a fan in a box of an apartment. These cycles were as embedded in me as the growth of the field is for a generational farmer. That’s why I recognized the moment when the summer began to turn. One night after the sun went down, a coolness crept in, replacing the oppressive humidity that hangs in the air on early August nights. Then the 99-cent stores hung up new backpacks and pushed the Mead notebooks to the front. Fall was arriving.
