Miss Misery (2 page)

THE DAY AMY LEFT was the first nice day of the year–at least in terms of weather. She had told me not to bother going with her to the airport, so I didn't. When I woke up that morning, all the windows were open and she was gone.

It was early, still—well, early for me: ten a.m. I briefly considered spending the rest of the day in bed. It certainly was comfortable enough, and with Amy absent I could stretch out diagonally if I wanted. Her side was still warm; it smelled of herbal shampoo, and I burrowed into it. My mind began to dance at the possibilities of hibernation: I could spend the entire summer underneath the covers, master the art of controlled dreaming, and finally strip the excess layers of fat from my 135-pound frame. This was going to work; this was going to be an excellent solution. I turned onto my back and stretched, letting my eyes fall lazily toward the open window, where a small, mustachioed Mexican man was sitting—dangling, really—with a giant spackling tool in his left hand and a friendly wave in his right.

“Hola!” he said cheerily. “I paint the house today!”

“Hola,” I said. And quickly scurried from the bed toward the bathroom.

The home that I had shared with my girlfriend up until that morning was somewhere between a railroad apartment and an incredible bargain. It was big enough to be a two-bedroom, but unless you enjoyed high-fiving your roommate on the way to the bathroom, it was ideally suited for a couple. It was a third-floor walk-up in a three-story brownstone in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood with faux-French bistros and glowingly pregnant junior book editors in equal proportion. I liked living there because it was comfortable and not too hip—I liked the bars and I liked the trees and I liked not having electroclash bands vomiting PBR outside my window at three in the morning. Amy liked living there because I did.

The building was owned by Mrs. Armando, a tough-talking, Italian-born widow who still lived on the first floor. She kept her door open all day, occasionally made me soup, and seemed to have no idea what exactly I did for a living. I was fine with all three of these realities.

The apartment itself was a clash of Amy's sensibilities with my lack thereof. In the living room, she had contributed the coffee table (which she'd painted herself), the large Mucha print, and the stuffed bumblebee hanging from the closet door. My offerings included the futon-as-couch, the potato-chip crumbs currently nestled into the futon-as-couch, the pile of newspapers on the floor, and the Xbox. A fair trade-off, no doubt.

The strangest thing about the apartment—aside from it now being eerily empty and quiet save for the lusty Mexican painting songs emanating from the general direction of my bedroom—was that the bathroom was right off the kitchen. I'd spent hours thinking of it as a major health risk, but then again I didn't cook all that much, so why complain?

Just past the doorway to the bathroom, to the left of the kitchen sink, was a tall window blocked from the inside by a sliding security gate. Outside the window was a small fire escape upon which I'd set up a starter-kit herb garden that my friend Carrie had sent me for my birthday. The directions seemed simple enough: Fill with soil, sprinkle with seeds, set outside, water, repeat. Soon, Carrie promised, I'd be drowning in fresh basil, thyme, chives, and chervil. Innocent and excited, I'd asked, “Won't the pigeons eat all of the herbs?” She'd laughed at me, said of course not. Pigeons don't eat herbs. Carrie, it should be noted, lived in San Francisco. She didn't even know what a pigeon
was.

I slid back the metal grating and stared at the mordantly obese, slate-gray pigeon that had taken up residence in the soil of my herb garden.

“Hey,” I said.

The pigeon looked at me, no fear showing on its beaky visage.

“Get out of there,” I said weakly, waving my arms. “Shoo.”

The pigeon's beady eyes registered something between pity and disgust. A few days after the first green sprouts had appeared in the dirt, the neighborhood birds had ganged up and made their move. Carrie was right about one thing: Pigeons don't eat herbs. Pigeons do, however, rip baby herbs out of the dirt with their mouths, spit them onto the ground, and use the now empty planters as La-Z-Boys.

“She left today,” I said. “She's gone for at least six months. To The Hague.”

The pigeon rearranged its feathers to be more comfortable.

“What kind of city begins with ‘the,' anyway?” I said. “It doesn't even make any sense.”

The pigeon looked away.

“OK,” I said, closing the gate. “Enjoy the chervil.”

I went into the bathroom and took a shower.

 

Amy and I had been together for five years and living together for three of them. We had met senior year of college during a picture-perfect New England fall—we were introduced at a Concerned Democrats of America meeting and first made out at an Arab Strap show (though it could have been the other way around). She was the older of two girls, from St. Louis, tall and thin with hair that couldn't decide if it wanted to be brown or red. I was an only child from Providence, Rhode Island, not that tall and very thin. She was serious about lots of things: human-rights abuses, voter fraud, history as a construct, Albert Finney movies. I was serious about nothing, apart from my CD collection and her. It was a pretty good match.

The first few years in New York were pleasant ones: She was in law school, and I was always more than happy to adapt my freelance-writing schedule to her days and nights filled with homework and stress. In between the various exams, we had inside jokes and vacations with her family. We had rituals. We had matching sheets. I liked going to the movies and out to brunch and going to bed together by midnight. I liked not going anywhere in particular.

Except that then I started the project and she finished school, and it turned out she'd been going somewhere all along. I just wasn't necessarily along for the ride.

Usually I can spend all kinds of time in the shower—zoning out under the hot water, thinking about sports, thinking about nothing. But my shower had a big, barely curtained window that faced the backyard. I decided to wash quickly before the painter turned loofahing into a spectator sport.

When I emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel—dripping, red-faced, and nominally clean—my answering machine was blinking. My heart did a half skip because I thought that it had to be Amy calling from the airport: Her flight was canceled; her job was canceled; she had mistakenly booked her tickets to
A
Hague instead of
The
Hague. Anything that would get her back to me safely by lunchtime. But I pressed play and found out otherwise.

David? David, buddy! It's Thom calling. We haven't spoken in a while and you know I love to check in with my struggling authors! Not that you're struggling! Or not that I'd know! Ha, ha! Listen, David—call me! The manuscript is due in a month, and I'm very curious to hear the latest. You know my number. We should get drinks. Call me. Call me!

Thom Watkins, my editor at Pendant Publishing: the only man I knew who laughed like he was spelling the letters out, with exclamation points attached. Not that I really knew him; the only day Watkins and I had ever met face-to-face was back in March, when he took me to lunch, put a contract in front of me, and said, “You sure you don't want to get dessert? It's not like you're getting another one of these free meals! Ha, ha!” That was nearly three months ago. In the contract I was given four months to write a book. The funny bit—really “ha, ha!” funny—was that I still hadn't started the thing. Which is why I had yet to return any of Watkins's increasingly shrill phone messages.

Oh, did I somehow neglect to mention that part? That I was writing a book? And that I'd never written one before? That I was unable to get past the first paragraph, which led my girlfriend to leave both me and the country because I was paralyzed with indecision and she had a career to think about? Funny, that was usually the first thing I thought about in the morning.

Just then, a voice came from the living-room window.

“Señor, sorry to disturb, but you're dripping water on the wood floor!”

I turned to the painter, who was dangling in a different spot now but still smiling. “Gracias,” I said, and walked back to the bedroom to get dressed.

Ha, ha!

 

The book was about diaries. Not itself a diary—who would want to read about a self-obsessed twentysomething with writer's block?—but a history of the medium written for a new, confessional generation: a handy, user-friendly tome that would trace the heretofore unseen connections between Samuel Pepys and the personal Web site of Emolover48. The whole thing had started innocently enough: I was writing freelance stories about rock and roll, etc., for glossy magazines, making enough money to go out to dinner but not enough to take cooking lessons, when I received an assignment that interested me far more than the usual hand-jobby band profiles and navel-gazing record reviews. It was to be a quick, “newsy” piece on the explosion of teen-oriented online diary sites: the phenomenon that keeping a public, daily journal of life's mundanities was suddenly required behavior for the black-clad, occasionally pierced, under-eighteen set. Coming as it was after a run of five straight reviews of records that I'd only managed to listen to once, the assignment seemed promising. Plus, I had run out of adjectives.

So back in March I had logged on to LiveJournal.com and its bubbling competitors Diaryland, DeadJournal, iNotebook, and DailyCry. I “met” sad-eyed surfer girls in Orange County and furious hardcore boys in the Florida panhandle. I met Jaymie who cut herself and Margo who had a friend who did. I met crazy Theresa, drinking and fucking her way through freshman year at Ball State, and quiet, comic book–obsessed Edward, who listened to Cursive and Billie Holiday alone in his bedroom at night. I met Mike C., wry and funny, who was desperately in love with anyone in the tenth grade who would kiss him back if he made the first move during the third act of
Amelie.
And all four feet eleven inches of red-haired Emily, who took too many pills on Christmas Eve two years ago and will always regret it, even now as she applies to Yale.

I followed Lizzie through three boyfriends, two career goals, one major surgery, and more than 200 horrible, recklessly indulgent poems. I followed Gus on his first ever rock and roll tour—with his deathcore quintet Funereal Winch—which took him and his $150 bass (paid for by a miserable summer working at Quiznos) through suburban Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania, and I followed him through all the exploded friendships and busted feelings that resulted from it. I followed Ronald and Chelsea from first date to first kiss, from awkward courtship to miserable, shrieking breakup, all without leaving my apartment.

Once I met these people and their friends I couldn't look away. I knew them, intimately—ridiculously intimately—but we'd never been in the same room. I knew their hopes, dreams, fears, crushes, likes, dislikes, and permanent scars, but I didn't know their last names. I started early on a Tuesday morning, tripping from one noisy shout of a life to another, and didn't stop until late the next day.

Because the thing was, it was possible to lose yourself in other people's online lives. Completely. Spend hours and days and weeks in other people's contexts, fill up your browser's bookmarks with pages like xBlueStarsx and WHITNEY'S JOURNAL, stop taking phone calls from your real friends, and forget what was new in your own existence. I certainly did.

It was all the voyeuristic thrills of eavesdropping, of reality TV, played out in front of me in real time, in real lives. It was messy, it was constant, it was happening. And more than anything else it gave me a feeling—a catch in the throat, a fuzziness in the stomach—that lay somewhere between nostalgia and hunger. It was the same feeling I got when I flipped through my high-school yearbook and read the strangely familiar things written in blue ink by people whose names I didn't remember; the same feeling I got when I Googled nursery-school playmates and summer-camp crushes. It was missed opportunity and lost youth and a fleeting memory of a time slightly before regret. Once I started, I couldn't stop. It felt like falling down the stairs.