by Lauren Oyler
The only place I could get fancy-enough ingredients for the pancakes I envisioned was a grocery store fifteen minutes away, and although a fifteen-minute walk did not seem the best way to optimize my shrinking window of Sunday morning, nothing mattered anyway, least of all time passing, and I had been trying to make decisions and stick with them, lying around worrying being if nothing else a terrible default. I looked up a recipe, got out of bed, and went downstairs. Turning the corner from Bedford onto Lafayette I passed the homemade flier that read “The Star Of David / LOOK AT IT” and thought, as I did every time I passed it, about how having attainable goals leads to more success. About a block later I was texting a friend who’d slept with her ex-boyfriend the night before and nearly ran into a pubescent Hasidic boy. He looked startled, though it was unclear whether that was because of the pubescence or the near-collision or the fact that he was lost. “Miss,” he asked, standing too close, “do you know where Bedford Avenue is?”
He didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, but he nodded several times and then set off in the direction I pointed him in. Felix was always marveling reproachfully at how distrustful I am of strangers—the odd angle at which my body attempts to avoid people who just need directions and straphangers who, like me, are traveling at busy hours. Did I think this ultra-orthodox teen was going to rob me? I always replied to the teasing by either 1) saying, “You mean strangers like pub crawl tour guides?” or 2) tracing the tendency back to my first trip to New York, in preparation for which I had studied a guidebook that warned, several times, in the Before You Go, Transportation, Shopping, and Entertainment & Nightlife chapters, of the city’s stealthy and ubiquitous pickpockets, and since then any urban environment took on a sense of lurking danger. Felix always replied that the latter thing was racist and ignored the former.
At the grocery store I bought ricotta, blackberries, eight-dollar grapefruit juice, maple syrup at a price I will not disclose, and two lemons, thinking that in addition to putting lemon in the pancakes I could start drinking hot water with lemon in the mornings, a wellness tactic dumb celebrities recommended that also made some kind of sense. While looking at the cost of lemons, written on a little chalkboard above the lemon bin, I realized that going to this grocery store had not really been necessary and considered that my new snap-decision policy was going to be a financial liability, prioritizing as it did my first choices, which always tended ignobly toward luxury. I also had to buy the things for pancakes one should already have—flour, baking powder, eggs—because I did not have them, and these too cost much more than they needed to. I have a friend who refuses to cook for men, even though she can cook pretty well and enjoys it, because she believes the gesture will never overcome its sexist connotations. I always feigned indifference when she went on about this because although I hate chopping onions and don’t usually cook for myself, I like to cosplay hospitality. The fact that Felix was my boyfriend made me want to give him things, like pancakes he didn’t want.
Outside my apartment building I saw the Hasidic boy again; he had not made it far in the half hour or so since we’d last met, and in fact I didn’t live on Bedford Avenue, so he’d really made negative progress. I nodded at him, and as I was walking up the steps he lisped, “Excuse me, miss?” and came up to the top of the stairs to meet me. Again I became awkward and avoidant. He was sorry to bother me again, but he needed to know where Myrtle Avenue was now. After I pointed him north, a look of relief lightened his features. He tipped his hat and said thank you; I smiled and said he was welcome. I went into the first door of my building and, standing in the vestibule, began groping around in my bag for the key to the second door. With my back turned I heard the front door open; I turned; it was the boy, still looking terrified. He reached for my hand, which I allowed him, stunned; said, “Thank you, miss”; and kissed it. Then he banged out the front door and skittered away in the wrong direction.
Felix did not look like a painter, but he sometimes acted like one, erratic and moved by inspiration. I will admit that he has drawn me several times, in various states of dress, and that I was blushingly flattered every time the request was made, even if the ultimate representation was not something I would, say, post on Instagram. When I walked in the door he was at my kitchen table, which was in the living room, wooden paintbrush in hand and sketchbook open, his workspace surrounded by little stacks of thin white takeout napkins that remained untidied-up from the week’s dinners. Months before, without asking, he’d cleared out a corner in my closet and assembled a little altar of his art supplies and underwear, calling it “practical sculpture,” and every time he wanted a pair of boxers he had to remove several colored pencils from their positions blocking the shelf where his boxers were and then put them back. I didn’t have a lot of clothes or, crucially, shoes, so I didn’t mind from that perspective, but I thought it was rude he had never asked if he could build a practical sculpture in my closet, just as I thought it was rude when he got up during a lull in conversation and went to the bathroom without acknowledging that he was getting up to go to the bathroom. I always took it as a slight. (Because you’re too sensitive.) It was as if he was both invading my life and abandoning me.
“I’m sketching the man we saw last night,” he said without looking up, understanding that artistic melodrama was usually tiresome but believing himself to be an exception. On our way home from the bar we’d passed on the sidewalk a tall man dressed in stylish and very white tennis shoes carrying a newborn baby wrapped in an equally white blanket. The man was very calm and unselfconscious, bouncing, and Felix was perplexed by the image, unencumbered as he was by background knowledge of the type of scene we were likely watching: the new father was trying to get the baby, who had been crying, to go to sleep without waking the mother, who was indoors and probably very tired. I lived next to a tall silver building with private parking and locked gates; one side was a column of living rooms whose floor-to-ceiling windows revealed which residents read books and which watched TV, and at the top there was a duplex that occasionally flashed purple and blue lights. The man and his baby had probably come from there, like the poodle crossbreeds that had proliferated in the neighborhood in the last year or so. I didn’t explain any of this to Felix because I didn’t want to seem maternal.
“I bought stuff to make pancakes,” I said. He didn’t respond, so as I removed the ingredients from my bag I added, “Guess what happened to me.”
“What?” he said, rinsing off some purple in a Harper’s promotional mug that had FUCK THE INTERNET printed on it.
“A boy kissed me in the street.”
He looked up. He had padding around his edges, like a former athlete, and the teeth of a prom queen. The food in the U.S. made you fatter, he said. He could have snapped the paintbrush in two if he’d wanted.
I told him the story, adding the detail that the Hasidic boy had had red hair, making him seem even more ingenuous. Felix laughed and said I had probably changed his life.
“I change all men’s lives,” I replied, and I asked if he’d seen what Trump had tweeted about a senator. I kissed him on the forehead so that he wouldn’t suspect anything was about to change but ended up enjoying the ripple of good feeling giving affection produced. We ate the pancakes as we read The New York Times on our phones, pausing frequently to wipe our fingers on the takeout napkins so the screens would not get sticky.
· · ·
I DECIDED TO PUT OFF DUMPING FELIX UNTIL AFTER THE LARGE women’s protest taking place on the day after Trump’s inauguration. There were iterations of the event scheduled everywhere, but the big one was in D.C. I hadn’t planned to go—not because I was ideologically opposed to the idea necessarily but because it seemed there would be a lot of pink, which in a feminist context signaled to me a lack of rigor. I also thought the traffic would be horrible. Besides those two considerations, I had avoided considering it, even as conversations at parties increasingly focused on how people were getting there, where they were stayin
g, the unbelievability of the whole situation in general, and if we really cared shouldn’t we have been at the protests against police brutality. Then, a week before the march, I went to a yoga class, and immediately following the nice but antsy conclusive period of lying on your back with your eyes closed, during which you’re supposed to clear your mind of all thoughts and take a reflective break, the instructor—too peppy, I felt, for this job—announced that the following week’s class was canceled because she would be traveling to D.C. for the protest. One by one the women rolling up their mats and putting their bodies back in order whooped, or raised a celebratory fist, or shouted, “Me too!”
I was overcome with the sense that I needed to go, and it did not feel good. The people at my yoga studio, which was on the more bourgeois side of my neighborhood, were primarily white women living in Brooklyn, and although I too was a white woman living in Brooklyn, I of course did not identify as such, since the description usually signified someone selfish, lazy, and in possession of superficial understandings of complex topics such as racism and literature. Besides working in the media (also a bad thing), the weekly seventy-five-minute session of possibly culturally appropriative contortion was the most white-woman-in-Brooklyn thing I did. It is OK to do yoga, I told myself, but I never really believed it, and each time I joined the perky line of spandexed women heel-toeing down the sidewalk on the way to the studio before class, stressed about getting there before all the good spots were taken, wondering if it was an anti-yoga impulse to indulge my impatient and competitive nature by passing the slow walkers, I hated my yoga mat, the purple of a pediatric dentist’s office, and was ashamed.
I had assumed most of my cohort would, like me, not care to spend time and money traveling to lifeless Washington, D.C., in order to protest an administration that would not affect them particularly sweepingly, but after the election, being a white woman living in Brooklyn began to feel, very briefly, less repugnant; the white women living in Brooklyn, in the end, were ultimately just annoying, point-missing, and distracting, not the biggest problem. For a few months the political catastrophe seemed so dire that one’s music and movie preferences were no longer considered the ultimate markers of one’s moral fitness to fight fascism, which became, incredibly, a buzzword; though we could always do more or do better, there was a sense that our embarrassment of privileges could be set aside to focus on the task at hand, though what that task was I wasn’t really sure. The emphasis was on resistance, a helpfully broad term the force of which was derived from social media, where you could not look away from the spectacle of previously apolitical coworkers and high school classmates and one-night stands rallying around paragraphs of drastic recommendations, often copied and pasted from users of n degrees of separation who would later emerge demanding credit for having started whatever action was scrambling into being. Watching debates about logistics coagulate in real time was tedious. Yet if you were out there protesting you were only a single person protesting; if you were out there posting photos of yourself protesting you could become, theoretically, multiplied, into the number of people you encouraged through genuine inspiration or quiet guilt to follow your example. Whether the righteous overuse of social media platforms fed directly into the fountain of power on which Donald Trump was a lewdly spouting statue was not worth thinking about. You worked with what you had, and you had to admit it was useful to be able to reach an audience like that, an audience that might as well have been everyone in the world for all your brain could comprehend. At the march itself I realized after seeing several signs featuring Princess Leia that despite the term’s historical usage in political theory and activism the resistance arose because it was a feature of Star Wars, and Carrie Fisher had just died. You could argue that its usage in Star Wars comes from political theory and activism, but even so the real significance is muted. If you don’t know something is a reference you don’t fully understand it; this is the great humiliation of allusion. Anyway, the message I got in the yoga class was that everyone was going to the protest, so I, someone who actually cared, someone who had, after all, served as president of her (red-state) high school’s Young Democrats of America for not one but two years, should go, too.
Whenever the march had come up in group small talk or whatever, Felix responded ambivalently, with a nodding hm or a despondent yeah, and then excused himself to go to the bathroom; I couldn’t figure out what he thought of it, if he thought of it at all. I respected this; it made me want to look at him meaningfully in the eye and share an understanding, maybe one that would include a justification of the Instagram conspiracy theories. When confronted with the subject of feminism in public in general he always deferred to me or the other women around, understanding that expressing an opinion on the matter could discredit him even if he were right—he considered the territory mine and didn’t feel the need to conquer it the way some men did. To avoid accusations of antagonism, envy, or mediocrity, a man discussing feminism had few options but to become a toothless sycophant, and even then he’d be ruthlessly mocked or treated with skepticism, and Felix was neither a masochist nor a person who could easily dismiss what people thought of him, including those he disliked. This wasn’t the result of low self-esteem or paranoia but, I think, a desire for control. When I told him, months after the fact, that his pub crawl colleague Kasia had said he was “interesting,” he swiveled from the idle reminiscing we’d been doing to something very solemn, and he proceeded to ask so many questions, about her tone, about her facial expression, about whether she had seemed mad about something, about whether the comment had been made before or after he and I had spent the entire session at the third bar talking in a corner where he had touched my arm—his memory surprising and flattering—that I had to lie and say I’d interpreted it as her having a crush on him, but because I hadn’t come up with that lie soon enough, hadn’t introduced the comment with the teasing insecurity it would have called for, he didn’t believe me.
I sent him a message as I left the yoga class, blocking the door and then almost falling on the step outside because I was looking at my phone, saying that I thought I would go to D.C. the next weekend, and in addition to the adrenaline from almost tripping I think the announcement gave me a little thrill. I was excited to be distanced from Felix, to be able to concoct a last-minute plan that didn’t involve or concern him. I’m not saying he was possessive—he was the opposite, almost too laissez-faire, rarely expressing anger or frustration or any other negative emotion about me saying I was having drinks with an ex-boyfriend or spending time with someone he disliked—but rather that I interpret boyfriends’ silences and noncommittals as masculine efforts to conceal themselves and the fact that they are feeling more than they say. I try to assume everyone is working with an inventory of emotions identical to mine, and since I couldn’t help taking it as a tiny betrayal when I heard about a boyfriend’s plans made without me, particularly if he brought up said plans nonchalantly several days after making them, as if having plans were not important, as if our two lives were not an intricately woven tapestry but merely two lines sometimes intersecting, I imagined men suffered the same pinpricks of disappointment when I did the same. This was delusional, I knew, particularly because I obviously liked to maintain my own independence and should theoretically be able to rationalize another person’s desire to do so. Nevertheless I preferred to think of everyone I’d ever loved or gone out with as existing in a constant state of devotional pining for me, sexually and spiritually, ideally not even leaving the house except to pick up necessities, and I assumed they liked to think of me the same way.
Three minutes later he replied, “For the inauguration?” I said haha no, for the Women’s March, I was thinking I could probably stay with Jeremy, Jeremy being my friend from high school who worked for Booz Allen, doing work he only discussed by raising his eyebrows suggestively. In addition to being true, this was calculated to induce jealousy. Felix did not believe that Jeremy, who was gay, was “really gay,” and
he believed that even if he was “really gay,” it wasn’t as if being gay prevented you from having sex with women. In Felix’s view everyone’s sexuality was fluid, both a threat (to his relationship) and an opportunity (to sleep with interesting people regardless of gender). The idea of labeling yourself, even with the anti-label labels that were proliferating or said to be proliferating in progressive spaces, pansexual, demisexual, sapiosexual, asexual, poly, queer, etc., was to him just asking for confusion and angst; worse, any declarative statement about yourself would inevitably result in having to publicly revise whatever distinction you’d made, admitting you had not known yourself as well as you thought you did. I would say, So you think it makes people look bad to say they’ve changed their minds? And he would reply, I think it makes people look bad to make claims about themselves in the first place, because it seems as if they are not smart enough to consider the possibility that they are delusional or will change their minds. (The ex-boyfriends are rolling their eyes and shaking their heads; they never liked this guy.) If you’re wondering, Well, then, were you guys in a “monogamous” relationship? Is that not a label? I will tell you: we weren’t in a “monogamous” relationship until he moved back to the States, at which point we became “monogamous,” which he would say was not an identity structure but a relationship structure. (Critically, though, both structures.) (If we said we were polyamorous, that could be either or both, depending on the context.) OK, fine, you, the reader uncommonly aware of identity politics, say, but you’re using gendered pronouns? Did he not use them for himself? He did use them, you’re right. Don’t get mad at me. These aren’t my inconsistent views, remember, but Felix’s. I think they’re mostly related to his reading of philosophy and the traumatic combination of being the smartest person and worst painter at art school; that would create a lot of combativeness, a lot of animosity, plus a foundation in this kind of discourse. Sexuality-wise, he had never had a gay experience, but he said he was totally open to having a gay experience if the right guy came along, and he thought the fact that he had never had a gay experience said more about how terrible men were than it did anything about himself. It’s true, he had no male friends. Or many friends at all. Nevertheless, because of the demands of society, when pressed he said he was straight, which he was.
