Fakebook (18 page)

The funny side story of awful-amazing neck art aside, the way Fake Dave's new perspective resonated with my audience didn't surprise me, but the way it resonated with me did. For the first time, Fakebook also became an outlet for my own anxiety, as the idea of roots vs. wings lingered in my mind.

My sense was that I had neither. Living in New York felt like trying to grow roots in a raging river, where people passed through but never stayed put. Needless to say, I had a lot to think about during my twice-delayed flight back to New York after New Year's Eve. I stared out the window at the blinking red light on the wing of the plane and thought back on my own romantic history.

The truth is, I'm no good at relationships. I think the reason is that I don't handle ambiguity very well. That uncertain stage before all the cards are on the table is crippling for the overly analytical like me. The vast majority of my relationships were either long, drawn-out false starts or short-lived, low-stakes flings. I mean, I broke up my fictional relationship out of jealousy—I could stand to be a little more self-assured.

And while I'm perfectly familiar with the hazards of nostalgia, that night I gave in and thought about the girls who got away and the girls I'd chased away. It's always been easy for me to canonize them, and maybe, for a moment, that's what I did. The truth is, I don't really know what I meant to them, and I don't have the courage to ask.

But it's not just our memories of the past that we need to manage—these days we have to cope with the present. Our profiles have us living in plain sight of one another; we don't even need to indulge in Facebook stalking to see how our old flames have moved on. For example, I never asked to see photos of my ex-girlfriend, Laurie, hanging out with a bunch of hot surfer dudes in Australia—as it was happening. But one day, there they were on top of my news feed, stirring up old feelings.

Witnessing the next phase of Laurie's love life unfolding at that very moment—from literally the opposite end of the Earth—created a surreal hyper-present. I'd moved on long ago, and she was completely within her rights to hang out with hot surfer dudes. But I didn't need to see it happening. Nor would she have been so cruel as to post them with the point of me finding out. I knew I was the furthest thing from her mind that night, just as she was the furthest from mine before the photos were passively presented on my news feed. But these snippets of unsolicited information still felt oddly pressing because I knew it was happening right now.

There comes a point when the past should be the past, when you need to get out of each other's orbit and escape that unintentional influence, those obstacles to new opportunities. But social media makes that almost impossible. How can we expect someone to be out of mind if they are never out of sight?

I didn't know what kind of impact this could have. I just wanted to not think about it anymore.

When I finally touched down, I walked outside the terminal through the bitter cold toward the JFK Air Train, which would connect me to the subway system for a long but inexpensive trip home.

Steps from the platform, I noticed a woman struggling to get her luggage cart over the curb.

“Do you need a hand?”

She turned around, and her blue-green eyes offset by her light-brown complexion caught me completely off guard. Standing nearly six feet tall, she was utterly stunning. “That's very sweet of you,” she said. “Were you on the flight from Chicago? The delayed one?”

“Sure was. I've been on worse, though.”

“Me, too. My name's Dhara.”

“I'm Dave.”

We began to chat, exchanging stories of delayed flight trauma. She seemed completely at ease, even though I'm sure I was tripping over my words. About halfway through one story, a train pulled up.

“Is this the right one?” she asked. “Actually, I'm sure it's the right train—I'm a natural at public transportation. When I was only seven years old, a set of train doors separated me and my little sister from our parents. I got us off at the next stop, switched to the other side of the tracks, and made it back to my folks, all before my sister had the chance to stop crying.”

“That's pretty impressive.”

“Oh, I know. My mom tells the story every Thanksgiving.”

The train PA system announced the next stop. We were on the wrong train. “I promise not to cry for very long,” I joked, looking slyly at her out of the corner of my eye.

“Well, this is all your fault,” she replied, playfully hitting me on the shoulder.

“I think your mom's going to be really disappointed.”

“You can't tell her anything! She'll be crushed to hear that my train skills are…deproving? Is that even a word?”

We ran across the platform and she leaned into her luggage the way a kid would before racing a shopping cart. You could see a manic brain behind her eyes, always darting from one thing to the next.

As we dashed onto the train through the closing doors, I turned and said to her, “We're halfway there.”

She paused for a moment before cocking her head to a silent beat. “Whoa-oh,” she sang under her breath, “we're living on a prayer!”

Had she just cited Bon Jovi? Could this be…a Jersey girl? I'd spent most of my life trying to dissuade people of New Jersey stereotypes, but it's true that it's absolutely impossible for someone from Jersey to hear the phrase “we're halfway there” without finishing the lyric.

“I have to ask…Are you from New Jersey?”

She laughed. “Well, sort of. I lived there for a couple years as a kid, and I went to college in New Jersey. But I was born in India, and I went to high school in North Carolina. I'm from all over, but I'm enough of a Jersey girl to sing Bon Jovi. I'm guessing you're from Jersey, too?”

“Yep. I grew up on the Jersey Shore.”

Her eyes went wide. “Really?”

“Yes, I'm an Italian American from the Jersey Shore. You're making me nostalgic for the days when that was only mildly embarrassing and
The
Sopranos
was the defining show assassinating our character.” I was starting to relax. “So you went to school in New Jersey…?”

She turned away and sheepishly replied, “Princeton.” It was the first time she'd spoken without looking right at me. Ivy Leaguers can be strangely insecure about their accomplishments.

“I love Princeton. You can't walk ten feet in that town without tripping over a statue.”

She seemed put at ease by my light response.

The truth is, I did love Princeton. In fact, as a Rutgers undergrad, I was Princeton obsessed. The two campuses are only sixteen miles down the road from one another, but light years apart in every other conceivable way. Princeton, both the town and university, is perfectly idyllic. It's almost like Main Street USA in Disney World—not a real town, but the true potential, the promise of what a town could be. Full of buffer spaces in between parallel parking spots and stores selling sweaters meant to be tied around shoulders (or as my roommate Paco put it, “sweater necklaces”). It's an oasis of calm compared to the urban sprawl of Rutgers's five campuses.

And contrary to what television has taught us, smart and nerdy-looking need not walk hand in hand. I was routinely floored by how attractive the Princeton women were. I even developed a couple of working theories—about the offspring of old rich men and their hot second wives. I wanted in. I shamelessly abandoned the Rutgers scene to go to Princeton bars with grand visions of being the dude a Princeton girl used to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. But all of these stunning scholars disappeared when the sun went down. It was completely maddening.

But I soon learned that I wasn't the first overreaching state-school type to develop a Princeton infatuation. Those overachievers locked us out by moving the entire social scene behind closed doors, inside members-only “eating clubs.” With the Princeton women quarantined away, I'd all but given up on my dream of being used like the piece of publicly educated meat that I aspired to be.

And yet here I was, hitting it off with Dhara on a shuttle train. This was a landmark moment, not just for me, but for state school alums everywhere. If I'd known the Rutgers fight song, I'd have sung it.

“So what were you doing in Chicago?” she asked.

“Visiting my brother and his wife—and their house. It's like he's a grown-up or something.”

“What does that make you?”

“Me? I'm clearly a child,” I said.

She smiled and went on to tell me all about her family, and the initial wish fulfillment of talking to a Princeton girl quickly gave way to the simple pleasure of talking to, well, a charming and intelligent supermodel. This was someone I wanted to see again.

A few minutes later the Air Train dropped us off at the subway entrance and she said, “Thanks so much, Dave. It was really sweet of you to help me with my suitcase.”

Her train was fast approaching, and as a commercial artist, I understand the importance of deadlines. I asked, “Do you have a card? I don't want you to think I had ulterior motives or anything, but…”

“Sure!” She handed me her number and stepped onto her Queens-bound A train before it sped off into the tunnel.

That night I was the happiest guy on the J line. Only in Bond movies had the inexplicable combination of nuclear physicist and lingerie model been revealed to me before that night.

Now, I had a date with a real-life Bond girl. The fifty-minute subway ride had felt like five. A light dusting of snow made the Lower East Side shimmer, and there was magic in the crisp air. I looked behind me and saw that I left no footprints. I was floating toward my building, right next to the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. My mind wandered as I shuffled through a week's worth of mail—until I found a letter from Kate's father.

That is, a letter from an imaginary Amish farmer. A letter from the imaginary father of my imaginary Amish girlfriend.

My nemesis had struck again.

Suddenly, it all came crashing down. The air wasn't crisp; it was just miserably cold out. I was simply confused—instead of the air smelling like wet garbage, it smelled like frozen garbage, which was a slight improvement. I lived under a bridge, like a troll.

I sent a quick text to Elizabeth, hoping she was still awake. “Hey. If you met someone on the subway, what are the chances you'd look him up on Facebook before having a drink with him?”

She wrote back immediately. “100%.”