The Year of Yes (11 page)

“I will take you to France to meet my family tomorrow,” Jarzhe said casually. “You will meet my mother tonight. You like escargot, yes?”

Something went wrong in my brain, and Jarzhe’s question provoked a frightening image of a chic Frenchwoman living as a snail. I could see Jarzhe proffering a silver spoon, in which was the butter-sopped matriarch of his family. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to extract Jarzhe’s mother from her exoskeleton, and this was aside from the fact that I didn’t want to eat her anyway.

“
Oui! S’il vous plaît!
” she shouted furiously from her place on my spoon. “
Crème brûlée! Kir royale! Louvre! Merde! Madeleines! Café! Merci! Oui! Oui!
”

It was not as though I spoke French. I knew only the names of desserts, drinks, and shit. In the mouth of Jarzhe’s bitch mother, though, these words were plenty. I did not like her, particularly when she used the silk scarf tied around her neck as an impromptu noose to strangle my fingertip.

I began to use my CD case to pry at her shell.

“Non! Non! Non! NON!”
she said, and I muffled her in my napkin.

Obviously, this date was not going well.

We’d been discussing marriage. I’d told him that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married, ever. He’d poohpoohed this. According to Jarzhe, every woman wanted to get married. Particularly once they hit the old maid age of twenty-one.

I’d speedily become convinced that Jarzhe was a pathological liar. He’d shown me an Apple ID card, claiming to have worked in high-level management for fifteen years and recently retired, at the age of thirty-five. He was dressed in a costume of “office-casual” clothing: a windbreaker over a sports jacket, a polo shirt, and khakis. There were Mont-blanc pens arranged in his pocket and a Rolex displayed on his furry wrist. I suspected that all this was smoke and mirrors.

I had ideas about Jarzhe, and they did not include self-made corporate millions. They included filthy rich parents and Jarzhe being raised from birth by a disturbed nanny. Meeting Jarzhe felt similar to the way it might have felt to meet Howard Hughes. It was a disaster waiting to happen, but it was a fascinating disaster.

“Do you know the film
Pretty Woman
?” Jarzhe asked. “That film is my existence. Women in this country offer me only beauty. And that is not enough for a person like I am. They offer me beauty and want me to support them financially. They rent me a space beside them! It offends me deeply, to be wanted only for my money. I want a wife who looks up to me! That is what I deserve for myself.”

I pulled out a notebook. “Would you repeat that?” I asked. Maybe I could use his character for a playwriting assignment.

He was happy to.

“We will be married in less than one year, with our first child on the way,” he continued.

“I can’t marry you, Jarzhe.” I felt that this was an important point.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know you. Because I don’t love you.”

“
Pfffft.
Let me tell you something about yourself: You will. I saw it in my dreams last night. It ees the truth. I have a talent for these things. Let me tell you something about yourself. You are born in April? No? October? No? I am a Libra on the cusp of Scorpio. Scorpios are known for their passion, yes? I have a talent for guessing the names of people. Sometimes I walk into rooms, and I am not giving you the joke, I know the names without asking. I will call you Maaaaawhrie.”

People often tried to use Marie instead of my name, saying that it was “more elegant” and that I shouldn’t mind being addressed that way. Also Maya. Marian. Mhari. Mary. The occasional telemarketer calling me Murray. Murray? I was relatively resigned, but that didn’t mean it made me happy.

“That’s not my name,” I said.

“It was written in my soul.” Jarzhe’s eyes flickered sideways, possibly guiltily, possibly due to excess caffeine.

I looked down at my notebook. My name was on the cover. About half of everyone I met attempted to sing
I just met a girl named Maria
when I introduced myself, and the other half made me suffer through “They Call the Wind Mariah.” Who exactly called the wind Mariah? No one I wanted to know. I’d been forced to befriend a bedraggled hippie child named Mariah when I was a kid, and our names were always being mixed together. I’d never really gotten over my egomaniacal fury at being confused with someone else. Particularly someone who believed that dried fruit and carob were “just like candy.”

“I will fall in love with you now. But first, I must introduce you to God,” Jarzhe said, banging his empty cup down on the table. His eyes were frighteningly earnest. I’d envisioned my punishment for my teenage attempts to tempt Mormon missionaries as something more along the lines of being forced to hand out pamphlets outside the Pearly Gates for a few millennia. Apparently, I was getting my just reward while still on earth. Month four of my Year of Yes, and I was on a date with a horny zealot.

Jarzhe opened a small box of chocolate-covered cherries and began eating them swiftly, one after another. Pinkish syrup dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He stood up and flagged a taxi.

Was he really religious? I couldn’t tell. I’d seen a St. Christopher medal tangled in his chest hair. He’d prayed briefly prior to each cherry. He’d told me he was Catholic, but I was unused to encountering religious people in New York City.

“We will go uptown to get the blessing of my mother.”

“Where does your mother live?”

“Our apartment is on Eighty-fifth Street.”

Our
apartment? He lived with his mother? This was a new one.

“I’m not sure I want to go with you…”

“
Pffft.
You are just young and do not know what is the right thing for you. Let me to lead you.” Jarzhe put his hand on the small of my back, and ushered me into the cab.

I got in. I couldn’t help myself. The yes was done, I thought, I’d already had coffee with him, but I was too
curious to depart. I figured that if things got weird, I could always open the door and jump out at an intersection. Jarzhe turned to me.

“I have been with two women on three separate occasions, and on one occasion with two women and one man. This is a most interesting story of how this occurred, which I will tell you soon. You look as though you could deep throat ten inches cock. True? Let me tell you something about yourself. You like it most doggie style, and you trim your bush with the scissors. True? Your breasts are average sized with small nipples. You like to have your head massaged when you are sucking the cock.”

This qualified as weird. I heard the driver snort from the front seat. I moved back as Jarzhe’s tongue approached, pink and wet as a puppy’s. My eyes were, alas, open as he licked my eyeball. I blinked frantically, contact lens displaced, and put my hand on the door.

“I am French. I need no condiments. I lick the salt from your eyeball,” Jarzhe said, by way of explanation. “You did not like that?”

I settled uneasily back into my seat. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to see if the apartment actually existed. A typical problem. Even when I disliked a book before I’d finished the first chapter, I felt compelled to keep reading all the way through. I always thought it would get better. The price wasn’t so high: a little corneal lick now and then. However.

“I’m not going to sleep with you,” I informed him. “I don’t sleep with strangers.” A lie, unfortunately, but a reasonably plausible one.

He looked offended.

“
Pffffffffffft!!!
I am not wanting the sex. My mother is at home, I told you. We will make love for the first time on the wedding night. I am a Catholic!”

The cab pulled up in front of a very fancy building on Eighty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. I imagined Jarzhe’s mother, again, oozing her snail self up to peer nearsightedly out the windows. I imagined the kind of havoc an enormous escargot would wreak on Persian carpets. However, it also occurred to me that it would be kind of nice to carry your bedroom on your back. Instead of my hut, I could curl up into my shell and be spared the noise of New York. During this imagining, Jarzhe somehow got me into the elevator. I vaguely registered the fact that the doorman greeted him by name.

“Which apartment is yours?”

“
Pfffftt!
Zee penthouse, of course, but I own the building,” said Jarzhe, rapid-fire. “I have a house in Provence. It is in the middle of a lavender field. You like that, yes? You are one of the American…how do you say? The Francophiles.
Pffft.
You know nothing about France. Marcel Proust, yes?
Pfffftt
-ha! Let me tell you something about yourself. We will have four sons. I will sail around the world in my little boat. You will tend to our children. I will return home from time to time.”

He paused to swallow his last chocolate-covered cherry whole. Before he could open his mouth again, I interrupted.

“I don’t think we get along well enough to get married.”

He pulled a photograph out of his wallet and pointed at it nervously.

“Steve Jobs has had me to his home as a participant in social events! I am a friend to persons well-known in the world!”

The photo showed Jarzhe with his arm around someone who looked very much like Apple’s CEO. They were both grinning, and giving the thumbs-up sign in front of a melting ice sculpture. It had the look of a souvenir photo taken in, say, Colonial Williamsburg. Steve Jobs looked like a cardboard cutout, which was, in my opinion, very plausibly what he was. Jarzhe looked rapturous.

“Now I will introduce you to God,” Jarzhe said.

SOMEWHERE, THERE WAS a phantom drumroll, as Jarzhe unzipped his fly. I backed myself into the corner, but really, there was no need. If this was God, it was more like one of the lesser gods. Why would a man cede higher power to his penis, anyway? Penises had terrible judgment. They were known for betraying their owners. Wouldn’t Judas be a more appropriate name?

Jarzhe said, “You will suck on my cock a little bit?”

When my sister was in high school, she’d gone out with a devout Mormon guy named John. He’d been wracked with guilt over their heavy petting and had confessed his sins to his church, going so far as to drag Molly in for a joint consultation with a panel of church elders on the wickedness of tempting young men. John had then been referred to God, for a serious talk. Upon emerging from his powwow with the Heavenly Father, Molly’s boyfriend had happily explained that, while he was not allowed to do anything that might give her any pleasure, God would look the other way if Molly wanted to give John a blow job. God was a guy himself, John had explained, and so he’d cut him a break.

Apparently, Jarzhe had a similar deal.

The elevator doors opened into a gilded foyer, just in time to save me from having to respond. Jarzhe zipped up.

“We will meet in the powder room after dinner,” he said, patted my rump, and stepped out of the elevator. The apartment door was already swinging open. I glimpsed an unlucky young someone in a maid’s outfit, holding a tray of champagne glasses and smiling a frozen smile, as the elevator doors closed again, me still inside.

The last thing I heard Jarzhe say, as the elevator descended, was, “I am a millionaiiiiiiiiiirrrrrre! Where are you gooooooooooooooing?”

As I left Jarzhe’s building, the doorman asked if I’d been crying. I looked at my reflection in the glass door. Jarzhe’s lick had left mascara smeared from eyebrow to chin. I spit on my finger and tried in vain to scrub it off.

“He makes a lot of women react that way,” the doorman said, handing me a tissue.

“I wasn’t really going home with him,” I said quickly, embarrassed. I
had
gone home with him, after all. If he was a pathological liar, I was a pathological story stealer.

“I’m not judging you,” said the doorman. “I’m just the guy who opens the door.”

And with that, he opened it, and ushered me out.

WHEN I GOT HOME, I looked Jarzhe up on the Internet. He was both too good, in terms of finances, and too bad, in terms of personality, to be true. If not family wealth, I expected maybe an escaped lunatic with delusions of
grandeur and friendships with doormen in high places. I called Vic into the room.

“I met an award-winning weirdo today,” I told her.

“Shocker,” she said. “You always do.”

I’d thought that I might find a laundry list of psychiatric records for Jarzhe, but instead, I found the unbelievable. A photo and bio of Jarzhe, documenting him as, indeed, an Apple man. And here was his name funding charitable activities for the Catholic Church. And here was a photo of him on a sailboat. He’d been telling the truth.

“He doesn’t look that weird,” said Vic.

“Neither do I,” I said. “Looks can be deceiving.”

“Actually, you
do
look weird,” said Vic. I was wearing a spangled gold cocktail dress and it was full daylight. “You need someone who’s a little strange, or it won’t work at all.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe the reason weirdos wanted me was that even when I was trying to look normal, they recognized one of their own. There were clearly plenty of men in New York who’d be happy to take me as I was: gnashing my teeth, hitting myself upside the head, and wearing a cocktail dress. Given that I wasn’t sure I could change, this was yet another reason to love New York. I hadn’t found anything spectacular with either Baler or Jarzhe, but I’d learned something. I wanted a man with passion, but I also had some boundaries, no matter how open-minded I was. Greater knowledge, even if it was just greater knowledge of myself, was reason to celebrate.

I put Tom Waits on the stereo, picked up Big White Cat, and tangoed him around the room. Vic rolled her eyes a little, but she joined us. Maybe she’d forgiven me for my men. At least she was willing to have a good time. It was a
triumph to have her happy with me again. The three of us dipped and twirled a while, and then Vic and I went out and gorged on ice cream. We bought Big White some kalamata olives, his addiction. Maybe we were freaks, but we were having a good time anyway.

In Which Our Heroine Confronts Her Dirty Laundry…

A RICHARD GERE LOOK-ALIKE crawled across the floor of the downtown train. It was 11:00 p.m., and I’d been walking all over the boiling hot city for the entire day. My feet were black with grunge unknown, and there Pseudo-Gere was, down on his knees. Somehow, I didn’t think he was about to propose. He trailed his fingers over the arch of my flip-flop-wearing foot, and I looked down at him. He looked up at me. His eyes were green and intelligent. He really didn’t look like the kind of person I suspected he was.

“
Please
tell me you’re not going to do that,” I said, and Pseudo-Gere smiled. A great smile. A sexy smile. The smile of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.

And then, alas, he bent down and applied his lips to my toes. Very thoroughly. Another woman on the train looked over to me, and twirled her finger beside her ear, rolling her eyes.
Crazy.
I shrugged. Oh well. It was gross, and yes, he was maybe somewhat imbalanced, but he wasn’t hurting me. My standards for what I would and would not allow had shifted considerably in the yes months.

“Thanks,” said Pseudo-Gere. “I needed that.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied. “But you should wash your mouth out with Listerine. You don’t want to know where these toes have been today.” Toe kissing was not, in my
opinion, something people ought to do in a place where negligent dog owners lived.

“That’s the point,” he said, gave me a (literally) shit-eating grin, and got off the train.

“Eww,” said the woman. “Why are the messed-up ones always so cute?”

“Why are the cute ones always so messed up?” I replied, thinking of Baler.

“Because this is New York in June,” she said. “And I don’t like it. How about you?”

“I
do
like a Gershwin tune, though,” I said, pleased to meet someone witty.

“Life is
never
as good as Gershwin,” she said, assuredly. “The Gershwins didn’t even write that song. George and Ira would never have written about liking New York in the summer. They were smarter than that.” She went back to reading her copy of
Variety.

Such was the peril of the flippant reference. You were pretty much guaranteed to be talking to someone who knew a hell of a lot more than you, or at least felt that they did.

IT WAS TRUE THAT NEW YORK in the summer was not the best place. The city smelled like four hundred bulls doing heavy exercise. The humidity made the air as thick as Play-Doh. Everywhere you looked, there were women wringing sweat from their sundresses. Vic debarked for her sister’s house in New Orleans, where it was even hotter than in New York City. She didn’t care. She liked the Southern manners the men displayed there, and she had a point. On
my way to work one morning, I was groped not once, not twice, but
three times.
One grope on the rush-hour G from Greenpoint, one on the R under the East River, and the last on the 6 uptown. I’d elbowed the G groper, and given the R groper a growl and feral hiss that made him think I might be crazy. By the time I met the 6 groper, I’d reached my limit. When I turned around and saw that his Armani trousers were unzipped, and his penis entirely out of his pants, I screamed, somewhat hysterically, “Look! There it is! He wants you to see it!”

He inexplicably put his hands in the air. There were several black-clad old ladies on my train, and for a moment, we transited to Sicily. They all started pointing and cursing him. One bashed him with her enormous valise. The guy fled at the next stop. It was enormously satisfying, if somewhat surreal. Of course, it only made me more pissed off at all the men on the train who’d failed to defend me. They looked at me like I was a hooker turned rabid feminist. I had a recurrent fantasy of a Riot Grrrls-style project, in which cameras would be distributed to all female subway passengers. Then, when being groped against her will, a woman could turn around and snap an image of the offender. The photos would be blown up to poster size, and posted in the trains. This was the kind of master plan that always ended up dominating my thoughts when the weather was too warm.

THAT NIGHT, IN AN EFFORT to cool my blood before I killed someone, I purchased a twenty-nine-dollar piece-of-shit used air conditioner from the nearby junk store, Your Purveyor of Discontent. I’d gotten our seventies-era spontaneously defrosting refrigerator there the year before. The store did not offer delivery, and so I’d used a case of Pabst as a bribe to get three career alcoholics to help me carry it down the street and up the stairs. I hadn’t really understood mortality until I found myself holding up the bottom end of the refrigerator, in collaboration with a skinny white guy named MoFo, whose fingers felt like noodles, and who kept murmuring, “Where…what? Beer? Fuck! Yo! Heavy!” I hadn’t learned my lesson. Your Purveyor of Discontent was cheap. Frenzied with hope, I tied my new AC to a skateboard I’d bought at the Salvation Army and dragged it home to await Zak’s assistance.

Zak, however, had gone to his girlfriend’s apartment, and did not seem to be coming home. I lay in my bed, steaming like a dumpling. At 4:00 a.m., I brilliantly decided that I was fully capable of installing the AC by myself. Alas, I misjudged the weight of the unit versus the axis of the windowsill. The back neighbors, engaged in partying in their backyard, were very startled to watch the air conditioner tumble out my second-story window, nearly followed by me. The top two-thirds of my body hung out the window for a full two minutes, before I managed to right myself. I’d bitched about all the people in the neighborhood who stood naked in their windows, and now I was one of them, topless
for all to see. Fortunately, the neighbors were too drunk to give a damn.

“Come down, girl! We’re roasting the rooster!” one of them yelled.

“Die, you crowing motherfucker!” screamed someone else.

Both the rooster and the AC died. Chicken bones and AC parts were scattered across several lots. In the days that followed, I periodically looked down at my air conditioner’s skeleton and whimpered. I started sleeping beneath wet towels, rising occasionally to wedge ice cubes into my cleavage, thinking I’d reached my lowest point, but then things got even worse.

NINE GUESTS FROM ALL over the country converged simultaneously on our apartment. I was forced to surrender my hut to them. This meant that Zak and I had to sleep entwined on his single mattress. Despite the months of repressed sexual tension, there was nothing sexy about this. It was too hot to be titillated. It was too hot to exist. Everyone hated everyone else, and we were resolving the situation by drinking too much. Our living room was occupied by my sister, Molly, her friend Brynn, my friend Moon and her friend Kitty, Zak’s friend Joe, and his girlfriend Maisie. Vic’s room was occupied by my friend Leah, who was renting it for the summer, and her friends Jess and Nina. My friend Jack was sleeping on a pile of blankets in the kitchen, having come in from Idaho prior to his attendance at an acting workshop. He was a neurotic guy already, and New York
City was making it worse. His first day in the city coincided with the Gay Pride Parade, and his first excursion was onto Sixth Avenue, into the heart of about five thousand topless lesbians wearing Band-Aids on their nipples. Everything was swathed in rainbow.

“Is this how New York is every day?” he asked, fearful.

Jack spent the rest of the night listening to Joni Mitchell and Fugazi, rocking sadly, and keeping an eye out for the creepy, and apparently jobless, new neighbor who’d moved in directly opposite our kitchen windows.

The neighbor liked to stand in his own kitchen window, dressed only in an undershirt, raising and lowering his penis via a peculiar system of cords he’d hooked to his wall. Jack never saw Pulley Guy, because whenever a male walked into the room, Pulley Guy dematerialized. As soon as a woman entered the kitchen alone, Pulley Guy would reappear, hoisting his thing like an overachieving kid assigned to flagpole duty. We’d never seen our onanist’s face, because he pulled his blinds down to cover his head, but the rest of his body strongly resembled that of a rubber chicken. None of us could fathom what satisfaction he was deriving from the pulley.

This was the second summer that I’d lived in a building opposite an exhibitionist. The one before this had, at least, been insanely handsome: six foot something and the color of a piece of carved mahogany. Living across from him was like living within spitting distance of the David. Had I not known that he thought it was okay to get busy on his fire escape, both alone and with a variety of female companions, I might’ve gotten a crush on him. He’d been ridiculously well endowed, and watching his nightly show had been like a free trip to Amsterdam. Come 8:00 p.m., you’d find most
of my building sitting on our own fire escapes, drinks in hand, some of us with binoculars. There’d been a betting pool in the building next to ours, involving just how long he could keep it up. The answer?
Forever.
Eventually, we’d all just get bored and go to bed. Nobody’d gotten laid that summer. Our Exhibitionist was too intimidating. Sometimes I’d see him at the grocery store. I’d know he was there, because of the mass exodus of neighborhood men, all ducking their heads in shame. The Exhibitionist would always grin and wink, place his Goya mango juice on the conveyor belt, and say, “Hey. How’s your life?”

“Not as good as yours,” I’d say, and we’d laugh, but I had no intention of following up on that particular flirtation. I’d seen the dude naked from twenty paces, and that had been close enough for me. Sleeping with him would have been like sleeping with a baguette. Besides, it was summer. Who wanted to get close to anything? It was too damned hot. All I wanted was to find a nice ice floe and drift away.

I WAS SITTING, DRAINED and bedraggled, at my kitchen table, trying to ignore the fact that Pulley Guy was frantically flipping his penis just ten feet away, when Taylor called to invite me to go dancing. The idea of going to a club and pressing my boiled body up against a bunch of other boiled bodies suddenly seemed brilliant, even though it was what I’d been complaining about the entire day.

“You have to wear a costume,” he said. “We’re going to this club called Mother. I’m going to read you the dress code. Got something to write with?”

“Come on. I’ll remember.”

“That’s what you think. ‘Cyberslut, gothic, classic fetish, dark fetish, vampire, trekkie, anime, sexy robot, imaginative head-to-toe-black, genderhacking, gothic erotica, Russ Meyer hot mama, dominatrix debutante, or access denied! No blue denim, no athletic wear, no white sneakers, no exceptions!’ You have to dress up. Got it?”

“Could you repeat that?” I said meekly, having decided I needed a pencil after all. It wasn’t like dressing up was a problem. I spent half my life in various weird costumes, particularly given that my budget ran to Early Salvation Army. But sexy robot? What exactly did that mean? C3PO dressed in crotchless panties and a push-up bra?

I made a dubious attempt at breast cones before determining that wearing a costume made of tinfoil and Scotch tape was not just flirting with disaster, but sleeping with disaster on the first date. The next several hours were spent staring morosely at my pile of clothing. Taylor, of course, would be wearing rubber.

I gave up and put on a black miniskirt and high-heeled boots, and tied a transparent chiffon scarf around my chest. I moved the hand mirror around for forty-five minutes, neurotic and unable to get a full view. I was pretty sure I’d get past the bouncer (I’d
be
the bouncer), but what if no one else had visible breasts? Rudy Giuliani, our mayor, had recently expressed the opinion that dancing led to drug use, and so rabid police had been patrolling the nightclubs. What if I got arrested? Not to mention the fact that going topless in public was something I’d never done before. Bottomless, alas, yes. The previous summer, I’d inadvertently exposed my ass to rush-hour Grand Central Station, having somehow
tucked the hem of my skirt into my G-string, and then, clueless, walked the length of the terminal, wondering why I was getting so many catcalls.

Finally, I went downstairs to consult Pierre’s roommate, Annie, who was a dancer, and as such, always had ideas for how to keep from being obscene while in costume.

Pierre opened the door. I immediately crossed my arms over my chest.

“What?” said Pierre. He had a mixing bowl in his hand and was whisking furiously.

“Is Annie home?”

“Rehearsal. Taste this.” He stuck a finger in his bowl, and offered it to me. I opened my mouth and let him put his finger in it. It would have been almost sexy, had whatever was in the bowl not involved a psychotic quantity of habañero peppers.

“It’s too hot?” asked Pierre. I had stopped caring about exposed breasts and was bent over with my head in his kitchen sink, my mouth open under the faucet.

“Kind of spicy,” I croaked.

“So, you were coming to show me your tits?” He had his usual confident smirk, but one of his hands was fiddling with his earring.

“No, but now you’ve seen them. So? Can I go out like this?”

“Are you choking?”

“I don’t really need my trachea. What do you think?”

“Milk,” he said, and handed me a glass of it. He was right, although it was disturbing to have him appraising my breasts while handing me dairy products. He looked me up and down for a moment, and then went back to whisking.

“I think…nice rack,” said Pierre, his back to me.

I watched his shoulders for a moment. If he whisked any faster, he’d achieve liftoff.

“Thank you,” I said. For some reason, I was blushing. Why, I couldn’t tell. It was Pierre, for God’s sake. I fled, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

I WORE A SWEATSHIRT on the subway and carefully avoided eye contact as I made my way to the meatpacking district, which was, at that time, still very much about meat. I had to pick my way over cobblestones divided by runnels of blood, until I got to the end of Fourteenth Street and a crowd of what looked like circus refugees. Taylor and his girlfriend, Janet, were among them. He was wearing a pair of leather hot pants, Day-Glo-striped knee socks, and nothing else. Nothing else, that is, but flaming red paint. She was wearing a fishnet body stocking with a sequined halter dress, and a red wig that matched Taylor’s paint.