The Year of Yes (4 page)

Victoria had won the bedroom lottery, as a result of her disregard for the enormous power cables that ran inches from her window. Her room had space for a dresser, a queen-size futon, and hell, even a Shetland pony, had she so desired. Zak was paranoid about electricity too close to his brain, and hadn’t even tried to claim the room, but this didn’t keep him from feeling bitter about the fact that his own room was four by six feet, just large enough for a
mattress, a television, and a significant collection of comic books and pornography.

I had needed their rent checks too desperately to challenge either one of them, and had therefore ended up with the only space left: a single mattress in the corner of the living room, inside a rickety hut I’d constructed of a neighbor’s pruned tree branches and some brown paper grocery sacks. This was a bummer, of course: no privacy, no escape from the noise of the television, no door to shut against the nocturnal malfeasance of Big White Cat, who liked to sneak up and drool into my sleeping ear. I generally tried to pretend that my hut was a yurt, and that I was living a romantic, vagabond adventure. I’d pull shut the doorway drape I’d engineered out of half a skirt, and imagine myself in a cloud of mosquito netting, on my way to a secret assignation with my lover, something like Ondaatje’s
The English Patient,
minus, of course, the dying in a desert cave.

AS I MADE MY WAY into the kitchen, Zak raised his enormous coffee mug to me in weary salute, then sighed heavily and put his head down. Clearly, the night had not been kind to him, either.

“Too much vodka,” he muttered. “I tripped over my arm and rolled down a flight of stairs, in front of Brittany and all her friends.”

He turned his head to display a rug burn on his cheek.

“How exactly did you trip over your arm?” Not that I was surprised. Zak and I were both left-handed, and we theorized that the difficulties of living in a right-handed
world had made us prone to bizarre injury. We were thinking of investing our meager funds in Band-Aid stock.

“Caveman lapse. Thought I was upright. Wasn’t. Massive humiliation.”

“Are you okay?”

“Severe emotional damage,” he said. “But I, my friend, am a survivor. Who called?”

“I just got an offer to make out to NPR,” I replied.

“I told you to stop answering the phone. You complain about every guy who calls.”

I collapsed dramatically onto the third-hand coffee table we pretended was a couch.

“I’m changing my ways,” I informed him. “The intellectuals aren’t doing it for me, and I’ve rejected everyone else. I’m gonna start saying yes, to everyone. Who am I to judge who’s appropriate? Just because a guy might be sleeping in a cardboard box doesn’t mean he isn’t worthy of me.”

“It might,” said Zak.

“
I’m
sleeping in a cardboard box,” I said, and pointed at my hut.

“What’re you talking about?” Vic asked, plucking the headphones off, and giving me the look that said she’d interrupted deep thoughts in order to tend to my perennially tortured love life.

“The men I meet are emotionally crippled, arrogant, scum-sucking lowlifes, pretending to be evolved. I can’t deal with them anymore,” I said. It was necessary to exaggerate, or Vic wouldn’t take me seriously.

“Some were hot, though,” said Vic. She pointed at a photo above the stove, which depicted one of the good-looking,
vapid ones. I kept it there to remind me not to be deceived by beauty.

“For the next year, I’m going out with every man who asks me. Like on the subway, on the street, whatever. I’ve been too picky, and it’s making my life suck. I’m going to stop saying no.”

Somewhere, a gong was rung. Somewhere, lightning struck. In our kitchen, Vic and Zak were rendered speechless. “No” had been my theme song, my mantra, my favorite word. A whole year without no?

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“Whoa,” said Zak. “I so wish all girls were like you.”

“Where do you think we live?” said Vic. “You’re going to date dog walkers.”

“If a man is good with animals, he might be good with me.”

Zak eyed me, clearly considering some sort of comeback, then thought better of it and went back to his caffeine.

“I’m going to leave that alone,” he said. “Say thank you. You owe me.”

“Thank you, that’s very kind,” I said.

“Dog walkers from New Jersey,” said Vic.

“Parts of New Jersey are attractive.”

“Dog walkers from New Jersey who keep severed heads in their freezers.”

“Not all serial killers are from Jersey,” I told her. Many were from the Northwest, where I was from. I felt safer in New York, frankly.

“I could be missing really cool people, just because I don’t think they’re cool enough for me,” I continued. “Maybe I’m meant to be with a taxi driver.”

Vic looked skeptical.

“You’ll only date the hot ones. And you’ll end up with the same guys you always date. Actors. Writers. It’s your destiny. They like you, you like them. Stop complaining.”

“I cannot fucking wait to see what you bring home,” said Zak. “
If
you really do this,” he added. “Because you won’t.”

“I will,” I said.

“Swear,” he said.

“On my future happiness, on all matters of the heart, on true love, and on satisfaction. If I don’t say yes, let me die alone,” I said, and stuck out my hand. Zak nodded in approval of my melodrama. We shook.

“Oh my God,” said Zak. “This is fucking great.”

“Big fun,” said Vic. “Just don’t give our number to any more weirdos.”

She had a point. In the past, I’d been somewhat too generous with our phone number. Victoria had tried to tutor me in the brush-off, but it did no good. I’d end up cringing in the corner, as Vic answered the phone and told whoever was on the other end that I had food poisoning/schizophrenia/moved back to Idaho/died tragically.

“I won’t give anyone our number,” I said, suspecting that I was lying already.

“And are you planning to sleep with all of them?” Vic made no bones about the fact that she believed that if a girl slept with more than nine guys total, she was automatically a slut. She called this the Double-Digit Rule. By her definition, I might as well have invested in a few pairs of platform vinyl boots and some Lycra hot pants, because I was past the point of no return. I, on the other hand, believed in dividing
the number of men by the number of years on the market.

Looked at that way, my number was minuscule.

“Obviously not,” I said.

“Really,” said Zak, raising one eyebrow.

“Why would I sleep with someone I didn’t like?” Never mind that I’d done it before. Hadn’t everyone? Sometimes you just didn’t know you didn’t like someone until it was too late.

“Antonio, Judah…” Vic started to count on her fingers. “Martyrman for two years!” I headed her off.

“Yes to conversation, yes to dinner, yes maybe to a movie, yes to a bar. That’s it. No other guaranteed affirmatives.” Big White Cat nipped my ankle. He liked to sit in strange men’s laps. So did I. It was a problem. Obviously, though, sleeping with everyone I went out with would be a colossally dumb thing to do.

Vic and Zak were still looking skeptical, but I was resolved.

I felt intrepid, like an explorer setting forth into the frozen wilderness with a few snorting sled dogs, a parka, and some pemmican. Revise. No pemmican. Unless there was such a thing as vegetarian pemmican. Revise again. Dating was supposed to be the opposite of the Arctic. My adventurer’s uniform, then, would include a push-up bra, a pair of stiletto heels, and some lipstick. Not too difficult. This was my usual uniform anyway. I couldn’t help it. I liked being a girl. And provisions? I turned to Zak.

“Where’s my hardtack?”

Zak looked at me blankly.

“I
so
have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“For my adventure.” Zak hadn’t read as much Jack London as I had, apparently, but I would have thought he’d
have read some Joseph Conrad. I decided not to think about Conrad.
Heart of Darkness
was an inappropriate reference for this, my Year of Yes.

Zak grinned in understanding, and handed me a pen.

“Eat your words,” he said. “Live on love.”

“Funny,” I said. “Woman cannot live on love alone.”

“If anyone could,” he said, “it’d be you.”

I was excited. I was ready. I was going to force open my heart and make myself willing. It wasn’t that I was lowering my standards. Just the opposite. I was expanding my faith in humanity. I was going to say yes, not just to a different kind of man, but to a different kind of life.

In Which Our Heroine Plays Cowboys and Native Colombians…

MY FIRST DAY OF YES WAS, in my brain anyway, going to involve me going to the West Village and planting myself at a sidewalk café, where I’d pose nonchalantly in a cleavageenhancing white sundress, my dark red tresses tossing in a balmy breeze, and a copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in my perfectly manicured hand. Ideal Man Number One, preferably in possession of a pair of piercing blue eyes and some endearing, but nonemotionally disabled shyness, would approach. He would be straight, despite our location in the West Village. He’d sit down at the table next to me, steal a few glances, and then, overcome, he’d rummage through his worn, leather bookbag until he found a scrap of paper. Make that a scrap of paper with a few lines of Rilke already written on it. He’d scribble a note and get the waiter to bring it to me with my cappuccino. I wasn’t dictating what it should say, but whatever it was, it’d be Pulitzer-worthy. I’d flip the slip of paper over, write the word “yes” on it, and send it back over. He’d smile at me. I’d smile back. My teeth, by some miracle, would be free of lipstick. He’d move to my table, we’d both be smitten, and we’d live happily ever after. Or, at least, for the rest of the night, which would, by the way, not require any rudimentary lesson in female anatomy from me.

Things did not work out quite the way I’d planned.

There were several initial difficulties with my scenario. Some of them, like the fact that it was thirty degrees outside, I could do nothing about. I could, however, address the fact that my hair was not red. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Skin a strange shade of sagebrush. I was, overall, the color of drought. My entire childhood had been spent being mistaken for a tiny, transient farm worker. Since moving to New York, I’d been taken for Puerto Rican, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and Colombian. I’d been Israeli, Armenian, Italian, and Turkish. In actuality, my ancestry was appallingly blue-blooded. William Bradford had sailed in on the
Mayflower
in 1620, become the governor of the Plymouth Colony, and begat a variety of diminishingly Puritanical descendants until, a few hundred years later, his bloodline reached its nadir with me. Had I wanted to, I could’ve joined the Mayflower Society or the Daughters of the American Revolution. I was not inclined. There was one pleasing exception to the whiteness: an ancestor who’d fallen off the rails and married a Mohican Indian. Very plausible, in my opinion, was the notion that the merger with my family had taken the whole tribe down. Further down the chain was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose
Sonnets from the Portuguese
I’d learned to loathe as bad pillow talk. My dad’s side was a string of blacksmiths, a couple hundred years of guys who pounded molten steel for a living, and came out only rarely into daylight. Family photos showed a lot of men with blackened skin and pale eyes. On that side, as well, in none-too-distant memory, was a woman who went by Bobo, because her name had been forgotten by everyone, including
herself. The mixture of lines had resulted in me, looking, apparently, like everyone’s ex-wife, lost love, or childhood baby-sitter. On the street, I was routinely entrusted with whispered confidences in a variety of languages. There seemed to be nothing to be done.

I’D RESERVED THIS SATURDAY morning for staining the bathroom floor, my ears, my hands, and theoretically my hair, with henna, a hashish-scented paste resembling, when I was in a good mood, creamed spinach. When I was in a bad mood, it looked regrettably like the maggot-filled mud puddle my sister and I had, as children, once stationed my younger brother in for “spa treatments.” Because my hair was long, almost to my waist, the hennaing was a foul process of several hours. Length was not advantageous in New York City. I’d once felt a mysterious tugging while on the subway, only to turn and discover a man blissfully stuffing my ponytail down his pants. Now I usually wore it in a pile, dubiously secured with whatever bobby pins and takeout utensils I could unearth. I suspected that I looked like a small swami, carrying a coil of miserable infant cobras on my head. I convinced myself that this wouldn’t matter. I’d get that sidewalk table, and morph into the self I wasn’t. The reddened hair, I was certain, would make all the difference. Happiness would be mine!

However, within seconds of my starting to rinse the henna, the shower plugged up, and Pierre LaValle’s version of Morse code started shaking the floor. Whenever Pierre heard something disagreeable from our apartment, he
immediately began a militant march around his kitchen, banging his broomstick against the ceiling like a bayonet. This was supposed to signal that we should cease and desist. Unfortunately for Pierre, his banging had created a karmic perforation in his ceiling. I stomped on the floor of the shower a few times to signal that I was aware of the problem, then wrapped myself in a hand towel as Pierre grumbled up the stairs and pounded on our door.

Though he had a sexy exterior, tall, dark, handsome, and extensively tattooed, Pierre’s personality was that of a snapping turtle. Despite his French name, he was a Puerto Rican boy from Miami. We speculated that he’d been raised not by wolves, but by retirees, playing canasta and developing a way with melba toast. He was twenty-five, but acted seventy. He was a chef, and going to business school on the side. Vic had a semisecret Scorpio-Scorpio crush on him, but I thought he was a pain in the ass. Pierre believed in shoe polish and expensive hair pomade. My muddied locks were twisted into stalagmites, and a glance in the tiny mirror had confirmed that I looked very swamp mummy. I didn’t think Pierre deserved pretty.

I flung open the door, mud dripping down my face. Pierre, his trousers neatly creased, his hair perfectly spiky, blinked several times.

“Can I help you?” I prompted.

“Maria?” Pierre managed.

“Yeah?”

“Leak. I thought it was Zak, blowing up the toilet again,” he said, averting his eyes from the horror of my appearance. Zak and Pierre had hated each other on sight. Pierre believed that Zak was an anarchist, and Zak believed that Pierre was
a pod person. Added to this, Zak typically ascended the stairs at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, roaringly drunk and stomping his combat boots. Pierre’s bedroom was just below Zak’s. He was regularly rudely awakened, which was his justification for vacuuming in the dead of night. Revenge.

Pierre’s eyes flitted to my towel, then back to my aboriginal head. Henna had a distinctively contraband odor. He probably thought I was stoned.

“Sorry,” I said. “Bo told me he replaced a valve.” Bo was the middle-aged, possibly mentally handicapped son of Gamma. His only claim to maintenance man status was his tritely sagging waistband. He used things like masking tape to fix broken pipes.

“What’s up?” Pierre said. “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

What was his problem? Couldn’t he see that I was fully involved in glamorizing myself for my meeting with Mr. Right? I tried to radiate go-away vibes. Pierre shuffled his feet and gave me an attempt at a smile. My go-away vibes were never very successful. I relented.

“Wanna come in, Pierre?”

“That’d be great,” he said. I was instantly suspicious. Hanging with a hostile neighbor was akin to hanging with a vampire. You’d end up drained of blood, and it would be your own fault for inviting them across the threshold. I thought he might be trying to case my apartment for violations that would get me kicked out.

Pierre sat down at our kitchen table, crossed his legs, and prissily plucked a strand of Big White Cat’s fur from his knee. I couldn’t turn my back on him, because the towel gapped. My clothes were in my hut. Granted, this was
supposed to be the Year of Yes, but I hadn’t planned on beginning it this way. At least I could count on Pierre not to ask me out. According to Vic, he was “utterly unattracted” to me.

“Want coffee?” Maybe I could placate him before he reported the fact that my floor tiles were stapled down, and my kitchen was illegally painted with a mural, the centerpiece of which was Zak’s contribution, a villainous comic book creature, and a morbid quote by Nietzsche: “Of all that is written, I love only that which is written in blood.”

“So. You’re pretty much naked,” said Pierre.

“That’s pretty much true,” I said. I eased myself onto the other kitchen chair. Big White eyeballed Pierre, gave an ecstatic chirp, and then hopped into his lap and wallowed whorishly. So much for my guard cat.

“That’s an interesting thing you’re doing with your hair,” Pierre continued politely. I’d grabbed a box of plastic wrap and was twisting it around my head like a turban. The henna box had said that heat would help the dye to set. At least, I was reasoning, the plastic wrap would keep it from dyeing my entire face. My ears were already a lost cause.

JUST THEN, MY BUZZER emitted a muffled quack. Who was ringing at my door? No one was supposed to be coming over. I stayed put. There was no way I was going to answer it. Probably one of the twins, prank buzzing.

Pierre stood up and proceeded to admit whoever it was into the building.

“It’s Mario,” he explained, flashing me a triumphant grin. I was instantly pissed off.

“I’m not dressed!”

“I called his pager before I came up. I knew you wouldn’t let him in, so I came upstairs to do it for you. I mean, your shower’s leaking into my copper pans. Everything tastes like soap. I can’t take it anymore.”

Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard. Every day I found new reasons to dislike Pierre.

Mario was the handyman that Bo usually brought in as a savior after he’d electrocuted himself a few times. He was a tall, skinny, Colombian guy in his early forties, with a crest of black hair, a motorcycle jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. He rode a Harley around the neighborhood. His only tools seemed to be a screwdriver and a hammer, and with these, he worked miracles.

This did not mean that I wanted him to see me dressed in a hand towel.

It was, however, too late. The Handyman walked in the door, looked me up and down, and gave a low whistle. I gave Pierre a glare that, if directed at any normal guy, would have induced internal bleeding. In Pierre, though, it only induced a smirk.

“Hola,” said someone at about knee level. I looked down. A little girl was holding the Handyman’s free hand.

“This is Carmela,” he said.

Carmela was six. She had two haphazard black pigtails, and a small suitcase in one hand. I felt my stomach drop. As a result of a couple of kids’ plays I’d written, I’d developed a horror of small children. I would’ve taken an entire audience of
New York Times
reviewers over one critic dressed in
OshKosh. The little girls were like Elizabethan audiences: They tended to boo and throw things. Had they rotten tomatoes at their disposal, we would have been pelted. The little boys typically slept through entire performances, only to surge forth, weeping, during the quietest scenes.

Carmela dropped the Handyman’s hand, marched to the corner, sat down Indian style, and opened her suitcase. Something in her manner gave me the impression that she was carrying a disassembled sniper rifle. I allowed myself a fantasy. Maybe she’d take out the twins. Or the feral cats that hissed for hot dogs every time I passed through the courtyard. Or Pierre. Especially Pierre.

“Later,” he said, spinning on his polished heel. The Handyman and I listened to him dancing his way down the stairs, and then turned to each other.

“You gotta leak, mami? You need me to fix you up?”

In fact, no. I just liked having strange men over to my apartment when I was looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Handyman must have seen the frustration on my face, because he jerked a thumb at the bathroom and departed. I fled into my hut for clothing and a newsboy cap to stuff my plastic head into.

I could hear the Handyman banging about and swearing. Our bathroom was three feet by three feet and boasted a triangular sink the size of a measuring cup, and a shower stall constructed of what seemed to be cellophane. The water had only two temperature options: Vesuvius and Siberia.

I cringed inside my hut, having severe second thoughts about the yes policy. The Handyman had asked me out before. In fact, the Handyman asked me out every time I saw him. He was that kind of guy. He was, indeed, a handyman,
in both the usual sense and in the two-fisted-assgrabbing sense. He hadn’t actually grabbed my ass, but I felt that that was only because I’d never turned my back on him.

Did I really have the balls to do this? Was it insane? Maybe I needed to be hospitalized. I had a brief fantasy of abdicating responsibility à la Blanche DuBois, deep-ending on the kindness of strangers. Attendants to bring me juice, and hold my straw while I sipped. Someone else to do my laundry. A white-sheeted bed with a real box spring. It had been years since I’d had a box spring. Unfortunately, Zak and I had recently watched the filmed version of
Marat/Sade,
the Peter Weiss play set in the asylum at Charenton. All those crazed inmates, flinging themselves about, babbling and scrabbling, speaking in Brechtian tongues. I’d been traumatized.
Marat/Sade
was appallingly similar to my own life.

“Chica!” The Handyman came into the room, wrench in hand. “Chica, chica, chica, you gotta problem, but I’m gonna fix it for you no charge, ‘cause you’re sexy.”

Let it be said that I had a severe allergy to the metaphoric conceit that women were as easy to (ful)fill as a hole in drywall. James Taylor’s “Handyman,” and the oft-covered gagger “If I Were a Carpenter,” were two of my most-loathed songs of all time. “Handyman” had verses talking about how not only would he fix
your
broken heart, you ought to refer him to your girlfriends, too. Obviously, all women wanted a man who could do double duty as a power drill. I found “If I Were a Carpenter” just as appalling. What kind of carpenter was this guy, proposing marriage and babies? How did that have anything to do with
woodworking? Well. I’d once worked for two unsuccessful days in a theater set shop. There, “woodworking” had been a favored euphemism for “screwing” and/or “nailing” a chick. With your “tool.” In the company of men, many sex-related things developed a
This Old House
component. But really, if he were an actual carpenter, he’d knock up some bookshelves, not me. This carpenter seemed to just be a dude with a superficial hammer. I had my own superficial hammer.