Читать книгу Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” - Lena Dunham - Страница 13

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September 27, 2010

A.,¹

Before I get back to writing I had to jot this down to you.² Like, the last six times we’ve spoken it has ended with a series of long silences where I say something, then another thing to modify it, then I sort of apologize, then I sort of unapologize.³ That would be funny as a scene in an indie rom-com,⁴ funny the first few times it happens, but it doesn’t need to happen because I should just be able to get off the phone and say “enjoy your day, A., I’ll talk with you soon.” I’m obviously fishing for stuff and then explaining it away between silences.

I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.)⁵ The dynamics of romantic relationships are obviously fascinating to us both, artistically and theoretically.⁶ Ditto sex. But it’s harder to incorporate into your actual working life in a way that’s comfortable.⁷

I obviously like you a lot. Not in a scary oppressive way⁸ and not in an “I just came looking at a picture of you” way (though I did do that)⁹ but in the way that I am going out of my way to make you a part of my life, or just to figure out what it could be. I was so ready to spend four months in Los Angeles really embracing this alien city of bad trees, letting my parents visit me and hiking and maybe dating some douche bag just for the story.¹⁰ A week before I met you I quipped to someone “I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.”¹¹ Jokes aren’t just jokes.¹²

It feels really good to check in with you, and I’m intrigued by the possibility of sharing certain kinds of concerns regularly.¹³ Because I’m here and you’re there it can’t happen totally organically, and because I’m me I have a hard time sitting with that. So that’s why I try to understand if I’ll see you when I come home, or if you think about me when you jerk off,¹⁴ or just how available you are to have your life futzed with a little bit.

The night of the party when we met, when you told me to meet you on the corner, I was really sure that I would go out there and you’d have tricked me and gone someplace else. And then you weren’t exactly where you said you’d be but you were nearby.¹⁵

OK,¹⁶

L¹⁷

p.s. If you don’t have anything to say back to this email it will be some kind of incredible poetic justice.¹⁸ Also, sorry this email is so unfunny.¹⁹

¹ Addressing my beloved by a single initial seemed romantic, like the desperate and secretive correspondence of two married intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Lest the meddling postmaster discover our identities and reveal our affair to our vindictive spouses, we will communicate using a code. That code shall be: the first letter of our names.

² “Jot” is a pretty casual word for the dissertation on emotional dysfunction that follows. Throughout the course of this relationship, I wrote A. epics that he would answer with either a single word (“cool,” “sure”) or a screed on a totally unrelated matter that was currently nagging him, like the impossibility of finding fashionable winter boots or the lack of modern-day Hemingways. I would comb these emails, searching desperately for a hint that they were truly for and about me, and come away knowing only that they had, in fact, been sent to my address.

³ Me: So…

[Beat.]

Me: Are you still there? I’m feeling kind of … I just wonder if perhaps when I say something you could say something because that is called…

[Beat.]

Me: A conversation.

⁴ Ironic references to rom-coms are a great way to show that you are NOT the kind of girl/woman who cares about romantic conventions. A. and I often disagreed about what to watch. His interests lay mostly with masculine classics from the 1980s, while I tended (and still tend) to want to watch films with female protagonists. Rather than admit that he didn’t want to waste two hours watching a woman’s interior life unfold, he would tell me these films “lack structure.” Structure was a constant topic. He built shelves, wrote scripts, and dressed for the cold weather with a rigor and discipline that, while initially intriguing, came to feel like living under a Communist regime. Rules, rules, rules: no mixing navy and black, no stacking books horizontally, pour your beverage into a twenty-ounce Mason jar, and make sure something big happens on this page.

⁵ This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.

⁶ Although he worked a job that involved heavy lifting and hard labor, his true passion was writing fiction, and after much cajoling on my part he gave me one of his stories to read. It was the twenty-page account of a young man very much like himself trying, and failing, to seduce an Asian girl who worked at J. Crew in Soho. Although the prose was unusual and funny, the story sat with me like a bad meal. It took me about twenty-four hours to realize the issue: that I could feel, in nearly every sentence, an essential disdain for womankind that was neither examined nor explained. It was the same feeling I had experienced after my initial read of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in eighth grade: I love this book, but I don’t want to meet this man. But, in this case, it was: This story is okay and its author has already come in me.

⁷ The first week we met, I slept at his house every night. Time stopped in his bedroom, which was windowless and overly warm. Each day we took a new step together: flossed our teeth, shared a bagel, fell asleep without having sex. He admitted to having an upset stomach. By the time I emerged from his home on Friday morning, we had essentially performed the first year of a relationship in five days. I got on the plane to Los Angeles, unsure of when we’d see each other again. I was pretty sure I’d seen him cry a little bit when he dropped me at the subway.

⁸ Perhaps, yes, in that way.

⁹ As an experiment. It was similar to looking at an empty vase or staring out a window.

¹⁰ On this trip, my first as a working woman, I was renting a house in the hills above Hollywood. It had been pitched to me as “chic” and “within walking distance of chic things” but was small and damp, windowless on three sides, and had the boxy nondescript façade of a meth lab. Sandwiched between the homes of a failed TV writer with a set of pit bulls and a queer-theory professor who wore a bolo tie and collected Murano glass, I decided that the amount of fear I felt alone in this house was directly proportional to all I would learn from living there. And so I stayed, for five months, calling it growth. One night I put on a nightgown, stepped onto the porch, looked up at the moon, and said, “Who am I?”

¹¹ I remember being so impressed with this turn of phrase that I carefully clocked who I had already shared it with and who I could still try it out on.

¹³ Paraphrasing Freud.

¹³ I wanted a boyfriend. Any boyfriend. This boyfriend, this angry little Steve McQueen face, fit my self-image nicely, but let’s face it, he was in the right place at the right time. About a month into the relationship, it started to dawn on me that spending time with him gave me an empty, fluish feeling, that he hated all my song choices, and sometimes I was so bored that I started arguments just to experience the rush of almost losing him. I spent an entire three-hour car ride crying behind my sunglasses like my thirty-year marriage was ending. “I don’t know what else I can try,” I wept. “I can’t do this anymore.” “Can’t or won’t,” he hollered like Stanley Kowalski, backing angrily into his least favorite parking spot and jerking the gear into park. Upstairs I paced, cried; he cried, too; and when I told him we could try again, he turned on his PlayStation, content.

¹⁴ At one point I asked him this, and he responded with a trademark silence. I attempted to engage in a “sext” session, starting off with “I want to fuck you above the covers.” This seemed like something Anaïs Nin might request. No, she would say. Leave the covers off. He responded with texts that read “I want to fuck you with the air conditioner on” and “I want to fuck you after I set my alarm clock for 8:45 A.M.” I closed my eyes and tried to inhabit the full sensuality of his words: the cool recycled air on my neck, the knowledge that the alarm would sound just a bit before nine. It took about eleven of these texts for me to realize he was doing some kind of Dadaist performance art at my expense.

¹⁵ I desperately wanted this to be a metaphor for the ways love stretches us, changes us, but never betrays us.

¹⁶ See? I’m just a chill girl writing a chill-ass email, bro.

¹⁷ At Christmas we had to end it for real this time. After all, he said he was incapable of love and only seeking satisfaction. I, on the other hand, was passionate and fully alive, electricity in every limb, a tree growing in Brooklyn. I headed to his apartment the moment he returned from his parents’ house, determined to make it easy, to cut the cord on his home turf. His landlord, Kathy, tended to sit on the front stoop. An elderly woman with a mighty tattoo of a panther on her wide, fatty shoulder, she and her Yorkshire terriers kept watch over the neighborhood. But tonight Kathy was absent. Instead, a shrine of candles and flowers crowded the path to the door. Upstairs, he told me that he thought one of Kathy’s dogs had probably died. We called her to see if everything was okay, but Kathy’s daughter answered—Kathy had slipped in the shower. It may have been her heart. They weren’t sure yet. The wake was tonight. So, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and I made our way across Brooklyn to the funeral home, where we paid our respects to Kathy’s gray, powdered body, stiff in a red velour sweatsuit, a pack of menthols tucked into the front pocket. Later, on A.’s couch, we held hands while he wondered whether she’d felt pain and whether his rent would go up. I clutched his hand, ready: “I love you, you know.” He nodded solemnly: “I know.”

¹⁸ Five minutes after I pressed send on this email, he called me. “Wait, what?”

“What did you think of it?” I asked. “Do you disagree with anything I said? I mean, if you do just say so.”

“I stopped reading after you said the thing about jerking off.”

On the morning of New Year’s Day, we had sex one last time. I didn’t fully emerge from sleep as he pushed himself against my backside. We were visiting my friends, adult friends, out of the city, and I could hear their children, awake since 6:00 A.M., sliding in socks on the hardwood floor and asking for things. I want children, I thought, as he fucked me silently. My own children, someday. Then: I wonder if people fucked near me when I was a child. I shuddered at the thought. Before we could get back on the road, another guest rear-ended his car, and the fender fell off. Back in the city, I kissed him goodbye, then texted him a few minutes later “don’t come over later, or ever.” We do what we can.

¹⁹ I would argue this email is funny, just not in the manner it was intended.