by Lauren Oyler
You had to hand it to her. You really did. I was shut out of the conversation, both physically and in that I had no idea what exhibition she was talking about. Having by that point only nodded along to tedious study-abroad stories, I looked like a hanger-on. The back three-quarters of her head had the same uniformly beige quality as her face, plus a tattoo of a treble clef behind her ear, pierced several times, but impressed by her savvy I reassessed the blandness as confident, unconcerned, maybe even elevated, indicative of something like the humility of an excellent classical pianist trying to make ends meet in the gig economy, and myself as perhaps a little Polonophobic. I took a moment to reflect on my biases and then, though Felix had already begun to speak, put one of my long elegant hands out in a sort of questioning gesture over Kasia’s shoulder and asked, “What exhibition?”
An angling of eye told me he received this as obnoxious, even portentous of a dreadfully long night ahead, so I recalibrated my thinking, always better at working with something than nothing: I could prove wrong the idea that I was about to become a pesky drag, and I would ultimately seem even less annoying than I might have if I’d seemed totally not-annoying at the start. In fact, I reasoned, I had made myself an underdog, the best kind of dog a person can be. I could now come back from behind and emerge victorious. As he began to explain the exhibition—something something video something, sounded awful—I moved to refill my beer and in doing so maneuvered to the other side of Kasia, excluding the study-abroad girls, who were now gamely talking to a lone Romanian about internships and didn’t need us, and looked at Felix for the first time from a distance that allows true facial description. His nose was crooked, not with a bump but like the sculptor stuck it on at a slightly off angle, maybe initially as an accident but finding it was actually better this way, and his dark stubble, maybe a day’s worth, covered evenly to his cheekbones, with sharp divots at the tops of his laugh lines. Lips of normal plumpness that seemed, like the rest of the visage, not bloodless but faded, which made him look weary despite the sense that his features might spring into action at any moment. I think it was the eyes, which had a look about them that straddled the line between flirtation and mischief, that suggested independent thought, a challenge for the sort of circuitous ego that makes a woman wonder if it wouldn’t be good for her to have to pursue a man for once. As he was winding down discussion of the work as a cheap imitation of Martha Rosler by someone who had never heard of her—maybe this was what it was, actually, the combination of feminist art knowledge with unapologetic contempt for ahistorical hacks—I began to nod a little more purposefully than I had with the señoritas and asked, flatteringly, in a low, teasing voice, “Are you an artist?”
Kasia departed without fanfare. Here is the information I gathered:
—Yes, painter. Well, self-consciously, “multimedia,” whatever
—Moved to Berlin in 2009
—Lives in [some neighborhood I’d never heard of, indecipherable to virgin ears, I shouldn’t have wasted a question on this]
—Born in Montreal, to American college professors
—Lived in New Haven for some period of time, noncollege
—Italian nanny, unplanned by parents but good because now fluent, lover of Fellini
—Majored in art history (did not ask at what university because I did not want to emphasize that I am American, Americans being the only people who care about that and Americans abroad being the second-worst audience for other Americans abroad, after French people)
—Dropped out, on an exact date he will never forget because “it was the day the first iPhone came out”
—Likes chess
—Vegetarian, including no fish, particularly put out by the ravaging of cod
At this point two men of unannounced national origin had begun to hover as if to ask some questions of their own, and I left to refill my beer. Do these kinds of getting-to-know-you details even matter? I didn’t think to wonder at the time. The creative New Yorker scoffs at them, his performance against the cocktail-party question “So what do you do?” lasting at least three times as long as a normal response would. Don’t ask me what I do; ask me who I am! the New Yorker cries, hoping to make it big as soon as possible so that he can forget about such arbitrary distinctions. I always want to know these things. I say it’s because I like to establish a context, though it may be that I like to talk about myself while imagining the person nodding along is curious enough to want to establish a context for me, and a certain amount of reciprocity is necessary in order to speak freely about oneself without looking like an asshole. He didn’t ask me a single question!—worse than asking the wrong one. I do recognize that biographical information, likes and dislikes, the sort of stuff one puts in an online profile, can also be a red herring. People conform to type but also resist it. Where you’re from and what you do for a job can mean a lot or nothing at all; the measure of any particular tidbit’s significance usually falls somewhere in the middle, depending on how much of the story the person who came up with it has told you. Unfortunately, because of my own biographical information, I tended to be overawed by the kind of glamorous, intellectual upbringing Felix described, as well as impressed by the rejection of institutions implied by the dropping out, the living in Berlin, the working of a terrible job in order to (I assumed) pursue art-making. I didn’t think to question his account, which was just interesting, not unbelievable. I might have been insulted by the flippancy with which he’d discarded a life that a younger me had wished she’d lived, but by that point the majority of people I knew were totally oblivious upper-middle-class types, “I mean we weren’t rich,” so I no longer cared. Besides, he expressed mild shame about it, and not through some falsely penitent acknowledgment of his privilege or “luck” but by seeming genuinely unsure how to present the concomitant summers in the family’s villa, shaking his head at his younger self when he got to the part about dropping out, saying audibly and to himself, “Stupid.” All this was good to know, or would have been if it were true.
There was still a lilac tie-dye look to the sky when we reached the second bar, which was indoors and literally underground, with exposed pipes running along the ceiling and some cavernous aspects; its most obtrusive decor was a silver, possibly papier-mâché sculpture of a human head with a comet’s tail hanging from the ceiling that I assumed was meant to evoke the bug of the bar’s name, Silberfisch, but I couldn’t be sure. The people inside didn’t seem to mind the sudden presence of an international crowd; upon closer inspection they were resoundingly Australian, in soccer jerseys. On the way I’d asked Felix where we were going, and he said, in English, Silverfish, and I said, “Oh, I think I’ve heard of that—isn’t it supposed to be really cool?” and he produced mild noises in response. I was thinking of Silverfuture, a queer bar across town that had appeared on one of the Brazilians’ underground lists, and when I realized my mistake while googling the next day I felt a vibration of embarrassment, thinking he might think I read the kind of publication or spoke to the kind of person who would recommend the kind of place Silverfish turned out to be. The Brazilians handed me a shot and an idiotic dawn rose in my mind: Jägermeister is German.
Eager not to seem eager I tried to talk to other people, keeping an eye on my target as I prowled around the room. I asked the Slovakians what they had seen in Berlin so far, I asked the study-abroad students about preparations of octopus they’d eaten, I asked the Brazilians if they were going to see one of the more famous underground attractions, an abandoned Cold War listening station in the forest. (They said no, because it used to be that you had to sneak in through a hole in the fence and now all the holes in the fence were patched and a tour group charged a fee for entry, so it was no longer special. How they knew this I didn’t ask; they seemed to know everything.) I made no new friends; I was barely paying attention. Kasia was squeezing behind Felix, her arms held wide like goalposts above the crowd, a bottle in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, as he looked over
his shoulder and made nodding eye contact with her. A friendly see-you-later? Just checking in before we move to the next place? Acknowledgment of untold passions awaiting them after work, when they could finally hang up the just-coworkers routine? During this analysis the Brazilians had somehow disappeared from my side and were now literally if casually samba-ing toward me from the other direction, their heads impossibly level as they cycled their hips and laughed, saying, Watch out! Your boyfriend is flirting! You have to go get him!
But there was no path; he was deep in an impenetrable throng of Antipodeans, apparently regaling. He made a swinging motion like he was telling a baseball story. I decided I could embark on a fact-finding mission until the final inning and hit my head on the overhang above the steps on my way out the door. I emerged embarrassed—Why is hitting your head on unaccommodating structures always embarrassing? Surely an architect somewhere is the one who should be embarrassed—and annoyed. Hi, I said. Can’t you smoke inside here? Kasia said yes “but not quietly.” I laughed and then realized I’d gotten myself into a textbook-awkward situation by not coming out with a conversational game plan. She had smoking to focus on; I was just standing there. I could have asked her for a cigarette but since she rolled her own the request was more burdensome than whether could I merely deplete her supply; there was no hope of me rolling one myself. I regretted leaving the Brazilians behind. I dug through my purse for something to do. Lip gloss, technically “butter,” which one has to apply with one’s fingers and so must subsequently wipe off on available (ideally dark-colored) fabric. I took out my phone and tapped around, pretending it worked, reading old promotional emails as if they were important updates from everyone I knew. Kasia was looking diagonally away from me and exhaling as if coming to terms with a huge problem in her life. Suddenly, or maybe it just seemed sudden because I was in a fabricated trance about my cell phone, she was looking at me and asking where I was from.
We chatted for a few minutes, about Greenpoint, where she seemed to know more people than I knew in all of New York City, and as I was beginning to fixate on not having a cigarette Felix came out of the doorway, ducking. My two favorite people, he said, can I roll you a cigarette? A knight in shining armor, looking at me. He would go on to prove himself almost scarily anticipatory of others’ wants, constantly hosting a party, but here it didn’t seem extraordinary—he was just offering a cigarette to a woman outside a bar. Nevertheless because I had pressurized the situation I experienced total relief. To be put in a category with Kasia was additionally flattering and galvanizing; I no longer felt I had to compete with her, I had already won. (She herself had surely taken months to rise to joke-favorite-person status, which I had managed so quickly.) We agreed that the best course was to smoke the cigarettes and move on.
OK, get to the point, my ex-boyfriends are saying from the audience, not unkindly but not kindly either. They will listen to me talk about other men, but you can tell they don’t really like it; they use any excuse to cheapen the experience. You take so long to tell stories. It’s hard to say what it is they saw in me if they didn’t appreciate this crucial aspect of my charm.
Felix rounded up the crawl by yelling down the stairs into the bar that since everyone had already paid him he didn’t care if they stayed here but he was leaving in two minutes, that’s zwei minutes. One by one pink and exuberant faces emerged, hitting their heads on the overhang. The route led along a cobblestoned street behind the redbrick S-Bahn tracks, the TV tower hugely and brightly there in the background. I decided to walk with Kasia at the rear of the group, saying it looked like something from The Jetsons, do you know that show? It’s a cartoon? She did not. Another pause threatened but soon she seemed like she had something serious to discuss.
“You know, Felix . . . he is a really weird guy,” she said. My initial horror at being read too well was rendered irrelevant by more pressing concerns. “What do you mean?” I said, modulating my voice, trying both to seem cooler than I had apparently seemed before and, evilly, to make her feel as if I thought she was confiding in me her disappointment in Felix rather than warning me. “Like bad weird?” But she was much shorter than I was, so I had to lean forward, emphasizing my obvious curiosity about any bad weirdness I was hoping to make out with later. “No no, he is so charming,” she said, “but there is something about him.” “Yes . . .” I said, hoping to lead her to more, “he seems interesting . . .” Quickly she agreed that yes he was interesting. I was trying to mean “interesting” in a neutral way; she saw through the euphemistic veil of the word and could see that what I was really trying to say was that I wanted to sleep with him and, if that went well, that I would be open to the possibility of sleeping with him again. A standstill. Whether this was supposed to constitute a coded message I could not say; I didn’t want it to so I didn’t let it, though now I wonder what she knew, if she just had a feeling or if there was anything incontrovertible she had in mind.
Regardless, after about five drinks—the unlimited beer having been German and low in alcohol content—I finally became my true self. Felix and I talked, and talked, with the Brazilians occasionally giving me supportive glances across the subsequent crawl locations, which were as unimportant as the previous two described, though one was decorated entirely in a kitschy bright orange, the walls polka-dotted and the seating self-consciously lounge, and being also completely empty except for an apparitional ponytailed bartender it looked like the haunted set of an Austin Powers movie. There were stories from childhood and discussions of the news of the day. Finally, closing in on midnight, when we were en route to the S-Bahn to the crawl’s final destination, an all-ages club called Matrix that played shrieking house remixes of Top 40 songs, he asked me if I would like to ditch the crawl and go to a “real bar” after he dropped off the rest of the group. I said yes. Actually, I said I had been looking forward to the club and wanted to “check it out” and watched happily as the horror on his face transformed into understanding of my joke.
As our train approached our point of disembarkation, a seriousness overcame him, and he began to brief the group chatting and scattered throughout the car: They all had their wristbands, so if they got separated from him and Kasia on the platform, which would be VERY CROWDED, they should go up the stairs, turn left, walk past the U-Bahn station down the hill, and the line for the club would be located through an underpass on their left. Also, just a reminder that if you had a good night we do accept tips. Winning smile. A fretful question appeared: I didn’t need to tip him, right? I would buy him a drink. Or would this mark me as a callous enemy of the worker? He beckoned to me as the train came to a stop and put his hand up to my ear: In fact the pub crawl tour guides were not supposed to accept tips. I was getting excited and the adrenaline made jostling through the dense mass of people on the platform almost unbearably frustrating, just absolutely fucking infuriating. To look at one’s phone while walking up the stairs is a hazard and a menace. To have been plucked special from one group only to be reincorporated into another more debased one is an insult to pride. I maneuvered irritated past bright stands selling unfamiliar pastries and sodas, left, past the U-Bahn station down the hill, keeping Felix ahead of me but not too far ahead. Bass advertised throughout the underpass as eyelinered girls finished off bottles of beer. Felix filed the rest of the crawl behind them in line, shared a look of camaraderie with the bouncer, and motioned that we would go back up the way we came. Three single-minded cyclists sped past the wrong way down the bike path, dinging cute bells at an errant reveler who had strayed into their way; when the bells did not jolt the offending pedestrian apologetically to the side, the leader shouted and set off a chain of maneuvers. At the top of the hill outside the glass-windowed U-Bahn station, its interior glowing with bakery and convenience-store signage, a barefoot performer’s toothy smile dared passersby to ignore his ukulele.
Back at the bridge over the train tracks the crowd, speaking many languages, flowing out of the S-Bahn station and onto the nar
row sidewalk, became tighter, encouraging us off the sidewalk and into the bike lane, and for several yards (meters) we walked in single file and I was leading him, though I had no idea where we were going. Past an opening where a group of crust punks and their dogs harassed one another, the line outside a couple of retro photo booths blended with the line outside a sausage stand. A tram rambled to a stop on the left, its garish yellow expressing the city’s casual liveliness and nodding at its history (when the trams were also yellow). Felix returned to my side near the intersection, across which another barefoot hippie in billowing pants awaited the walk signal. This area sucks on the weekends, he explained as we turned right, into a group of leather jackets, and most of the bars around here, except the ones I’m taking you to, are terrible. I wouldn’t live here if I had much of a choice, but finding an apartment is a nightmare. A large complex of squat warehouse-looking buildings enclosed by a high brick wall plastered with concert and exhibition posters to our right comprised what I was told was an OK Sunday flea market and beyond that several not-worth-it concert/exhibition/club venues. I said, You can take the guy out of the tour but you can’t take the tour out of the guide. He said grammatically he didn’t know if that was fully right, but fair. As we crossed the street and turned left he pointed and said he lived two buildings down.
