by Lauren Oyler
To accomplish something like this, you have to be rude, aggressive; I used my leading arm like a wedge and slipped myself between teenagers and their friends, mothers and their mothers, mothers and their children. I saw newborns wearing noise-canceling headphones the size of their heads and countless kids being exposed to nonsexual references to genitalia—images of uteruses and vulvas were everywhere, their anatomical correctness part of the political message. Eventually I followed a group that had formed a successful line back toward Constitution, though it took about half an hour to get there. On the way a woman standing on a platform encouraged people passing on their way out to come up and see how far the crowd went. At the edge of the crowd was an impressive group of self-identified undocumented women chanting in Spanish, and as I sat down on the grass in front of the National Gallery of Art Library a jogger in a McCain/Palin ’08 T-shirt passed by. It was at this point that I saw the former secretary of state and his dog.
I tried to call Jeremy but couldn’t get through; we’d decided we would meet for lunch at two, but I wanted to be far away from the march now, at eleven forty-five. I went to the National Portrait Gallery and used the bathroom—security guards were happy to show everyone who had come there for this purpose where it was—and considered going inside to look at paintings but didn’t. Tiredness weighted my hands and feet and I thought I could feel circles purpling under my eyes. As I came out of the museum my phone received a few messages at once—the friend who was stuck in traffic saying they had finally parked, Jeremy telling me he would come early to the Belgian restaurant if I would text him when I was done—but still none from Felix, with whom I now felt furious. I couldn’t wait to break up with him; I would cry a little, but I would be better off. I noticed, again, that there were no police anywhere. As I went down into the Metro and watched the up escalator bring person after person to the protest that would continue for hours, I again had a restoratively heartening experience. At the bottom of the escalator a steady and buoyant line waited to ascend, and looking at the girls in tutus and college students in homemade T-shirts I forgot about the stupid problem that I’d prolonged for melodrama and could only feel I was glad I came, to have seen it.
· · ·
THE RESTAURANT WAS EMPTY EXCEPT FOR A COUPLE I TREATED with suspicion—they weren’t wearing the red hats that identified unapologetic Trump supporters, but there was something frowning and conservative about them. The woman was much younger than the man and wore heels; they were both eating steaks. The night before, it had been disturbing to see the hats on gangs of boys in waxed jackets walking up and down Fourteenth Street; they had come to D.C. to see the inauguration and brought with them a sense of confused infiltration, middle-school bullies who had only just realized they were physically intimidating, and publications ran photos of men and women in black tie going to inaugural balls looking like actors who had stumbled onto the wrong set.
I sat at the bar, ordered a beer, and read the news on my phone: There were photos from marches all over the world, in Nairobi and Kolkata and Belgrade and Melbourne and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. About thirty people aboard a boat in Antarctica each held up a different-colored sign—“Seals for Science,” “Save the Planet”—in a photo gallery on the New York Times website. All the pictures were dominated by women looking defiant but happy. The word solidarity seemed to belong in that category of formerly incisive political vocabulary on the fast track to overuse, but there was nothing else I could sense from those people protesting, from the overwhelmingly cheerful attitude of the turnout. The march organizers had insisted that the event was not intended to be an “anti-Trump” protest but rather a “pro-woman” rally, and although I doubted any event beyond the election of Donald Trump to president of the United States could have inspired such numbers and fervency, I nevertheless saw traces of that optimism and positivity in those photos, and in the crowd that had so recently almost given me a panic attack. I wondered if I was in any of them, in the background, captured from a bad angle and contributing to some nebulous statement I didn’t necessarily agree with. I don’t think positivity works, not least because it’s alienating, but then again so is being a bitch.
I’d finished the beer and the bartender was asking me where I was from when Jeremy walked into the place complaining. “Definitely Trump supporters,” he said in a loud whisper as he walked past the silent couple finishing their beef. All the restaurants in D.C. were clean and obvious; they looked like they were designed by someone who had forgotten until the very last minute that restaurants usually had tables and chairs. The menu had many items needlessly listed in both Dutch and English, and the waiter spent a long time telling us that the mussels were really good until Jeremy said, “We don’t want mussels. We want Brusselse spruitjes and Belgische frietjes and macaroni en kaas.” The waiter nodded and left.
“I used to sleep with a Belgian dancer,” he said. “I always used to ask her to pick her favorite language and she really didn’t like it.”
Jeremy had thin lips that were always chapped and an olive tan that had inspired his elementary-school classmates to tease him about being adopted. He wasn’t adopted, just tan, and it made him cry every day. After that I believe he became hardened. I told him he shouldn’t be rude to service staff and he replied, “It’s OK if they’re white.” He had a working-class upbringing that he never talked about except to refer to it vaguely and awkwardly as such, his “working-class upbringing,” and again I think it gave him a chip on his shoulder.
The Brusselse spruitjes were prepared the same way they are at most trendy restaurants, and when they arrived I received another call from the unfamiliar California number that had tried before. I picked it up as Jeremy was explaining a TV show he watched but didn’t like, and he immediately pulled his own phone out of his front pants pocket and slumped over it. The voice on the other end of the line said it was Darcy, Felix’s mother’s assistant at the production company where she worked. I had never met or spoken to Felix’s mother; Suzanne, which is what he called her when he spoke of her at all, lived in Los Angeles, and Felix had not invited me to join him the one time he’d visited her during our relationship. Darcy asked if I was available to take a call from Suzanne; I said I was. I must have sounded confused because Jeremy looked up from his phone. After a short pause Suzanne got on the line and said that Felix had died.
Her voice was strained but direct; it sounded as if she had prepared how she would tell me. I had googled his mother once in the early stage of our relationship, and I knew what Darcy looked like because Felix had once shown me her Facebook page, which he thought represented what a “normal person” cared about. When I surmised that she had eleven fairy tattoos and collected photos of each of them in an album called “FAERIES,” I said that wasn’t normal at all. He had died in “an accident”—she kept saying “an accident” until she finally added, “a bicycle accident.” I don’t know what I was doing with my body or face but when I hung up I had red lines on my left hand from sitting on it and pressing it into the ugly chair. The bicycle accident, she told me, happened somewhere upstate, where Felix had gone by himself in the early morning, a detail furnished by the Metro-North ticket stub in his wallet. This was consistent with other things he did. I should mention that although it was January it was very warm, like spring but darker, so a person going upstate to ride a bike wouldn’t have to be hardcore. After several long pauses backgrounded by the sounds of suffering Suzanne sniffed and said, “I’m sorry, honey,” and that they would be in touch about “the plans.” Jeremy probably couldn’t hear the entire thing but could make out bits of what she was saying, and of course there was my distraught face. He spent the phone call not knowing what to do with his hands: He put them flat on the table, touched my leg just for a second before sensing it wasn’t a natural thing for him to do, put them back on the table, ate a spruit but seemed halfway through to find it repulsive, unlocked his phone, locked his phone, ate another spruit. At one point I said something like
, Did they take him to the hospital? because I felt my thoughtlessness was not appropriate and it was the only question that occurred to me. I said, Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh. The word spruitjes is very pleasant; the j is delicate yet propulsive. Jeremy was not such a jerk that he would say the obvious inappropriate jerk thing—“At least now you don’t have to break up with him?”—but as he quickly paid our bill with most of the food uneaten I started thinking it, at least now I didn’t have to break up with him, so I imagined Jeremy had been thinking it the whole time. We had that in common, selfish black humor, always saying things our mothers kind of gasped at, first because we wanted to test them out and then because we became more comfortable with—and better at defending—the selfish black thoughts. What can you do when something is that shocking but react reflexively? It was a guilty thought but it was the obvious thought. I think anyone in my position, not that many people would ever find themselves there, would think it.
MIDDLE
(Nothing Happens)
WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER I TOOK A QUIZ IN A MAGAZINE THAT promised to help you determine “if you’re really in love or just crushing!” One of the questions was something like: If your guy hasn’t contacted you in a long time, do you assume a) he’s busy; b) he’s cheating on you; or c) something bad has happened to him? If you choose c) it means you’re in love, I learned, so whenever I had imagined Felix’s death, I had always taken it to be a sign of the purity, or at least intensity, of my feelings. Having not imagined Felix’s death for months at that point, I was more surprised than I might have been when it actually occurred.
I didn’t cry until we got back to Jeremy’s apartment, and I didn’t do it in front of Jeremy, who seemed to feel as if his impenitent gossiping had somehow contributed to the situation. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying in the Uber, not in the rote, box-ticking way, as if he regretted what had happened and wanted a shorthand for impossible condolence, but as if he had actually done something wrong. “For what?” I kept replying, again not to suggest the usual thing, that he had nothing to be sorry for, but as if I expected he would provide a satisfactory answer. Once I shut the door to his spare room, my tears arrived, and unlike our conversation they strained for no meaning, coming as if on schedule, reflexive, unfelt. I didn’t sob, heave, weep, thrash, moan, bawl, or experience the sort of humiliating physical wrenching of face and stomach that I associate with true devastation. I was crying, just crying, as much from shock as anything else, the tears receding and returning, for ten or fifteen minutes, the amount of time one might cry after a particularly painful career failure. After I finished, I sat up in bed with my swollen nose and the bottle of wine Jeremy had brought in while I, dignified, kept my head under the blankets, holding my breath so as not to betray a sniff, and thought: nothing.
This might have disturbed me, but I remembered that I rejected sentimentality for sentimentality’s sake, and that I was in the unique situation of being in a unique situation, with no burdensome expectation for my grief or lack thereof. Was there something to be sad about? I had been with a person; I had come to see him as despicable; twinges of doubt about that assessment were chalked up to memories and hormones and ultimately redoubled my certainty of his contemptibility; now we were no longer together. I had already mentally separated from Felix, who had become, I guess you could say, despite it seeming a little on the nose, dead to me. From a certain perspective, the only difference between this and a messy breakup was that now I could be certain we would never see each other again. The elimination of this possibility could only be good. What’s more, my memories of Felix would be mine, to do with what I pleased, rather than subject to objection from the only person who knew them as well as I did.
Drinking wine from the bottle, which had been delivered with an opener but no glass, I felt better, and then I was hit with the force of knowledge never to be acquired. There had been an explanation for him somewhere, and now it was gone. My writing him off as inexplicable had been lazy; I had just not wanted to try. Suddenly, moronically, I understood why the cliché was “loss.” Phone, wallet, keys—I would not be able to unlock the door. I soon began thinking of his muscular forearms and the way he used to pronounce Slavoj Zizek radically differently every time he said it. (As a joke.)
A woman I worked with used a photo of a pink neon sign that read “FEELINGS” in all capital letters as the background image on one of her social media accounts. FEELINGS were popular at the time—expressing them was seen as a kind of feminist statement, the reclamation of an “inappropriate” femininity previously dismissed as frivolous or hysterical, and as a result people were constantly declaring (on social media) the intensity of their emotions: about celebrities, about television, about heavy-handedly alluded-to romantic turmoil, about pizza, about cute animals, about deadlines. The seriousness of the object of the feelings was usually inversely proportional to the strength with which they were announced; it was a joke, yes, but it also tapped into the way specific emotions can swell without warning: the gratitude for a relatable view expressed by a famous person, the deep desire to hold a cat, the fear of disappointing an employer or being rejected by a love interest. I had identified with the impulse to express profligately at times, though I tried not to act on it, because the people who declared their emotions in this way were annoying, and here was where Felix’s philosophy about not making public statements about yourself that you would later want to renounce made the most sense. Now that I had actual feelings, unlikely given the almost-laughable originality of the situation to have been anticipated, I could say for certain the whole trend was absurd. Feelings are nothing like a pink neon sign at all.
The ex-boyfriends are nodding. They don’t know what to say. It’s awful. They’re sorry.
· · ·
I STAYED AT JEREMY’S FOR A LITTLE OVER A WEEK, SLEEPING IN his guest bedroom and eating his food from the organic supermarket and listening to the same playlist of eight songs I’d made back when Felix was still in Berlin and I still liked him. Listening to these sad songs of the past in the spare Ikea Malm was comfortingly abject for me; I used them to reassure myself that I once had simple feelings about Felix, admiration and yearning directed across the Atlantic, which justified the peaks of sadness that were now rising out of the mist. I was nostalgic; maybe I had always been nostalgic; maybe that’s why I hadn’t broken up with him immediately, because our meeting had been so unlikely and I’d wanted to hold on to its rarity. Had our connection been particularly unique? At times I’d thought it was. I never had the sense of certainty married or otherwise in-love people talked about, the coherence that came with recognizing someone so suited to you that you were forced to recognize yourself; nevertheless, he would sometimes voice so confidently ideas I felt I might have gone on to form, too, if I had been quicker or sharper. These sentiments were always external—about culture, common behavioral tendencies, politics—and not about himself, never about himself, actually, but they created what I’d thought was a clear outline of him, a very detailed negative space.
Unfortunately I couldn’t let my nostalgia remain uncontaminated by awareness of my own foolishness for very long. A stupid thought: if I’d broken up with him sooner he might have been too sad to have gone upstate and would not have died, a win-win. Such a counterfactual was philosophically bankrupt, not to mention unfounded—I’d never known him to claim the kind of sadness that prevents you from doing something, and I suspected he wasn’t that dedicated to our relationship anymore, anyway. But regardless I wished I’d confronted him. I could have asked him why, and even if he’d refused to speak and just shaken his head, I could have looked at his body language and facial expressions and tried to detect some truth in them. I could have grabbed his face cinematically and made him look at me, and even if he pulled away it would have given me something more to analyze than what I had. I often thought about the call from his mother—how she must have begun trying to call me within an hour or two after she received a call herself, early in the morning
her time—and whether it suggested Felix had made me seem more important to him than I was. The oddness of it seemed consistent with Felix, who refused pathos but understood its importance to others. His gifts were always thoughtful, yet practical (and expensive) enough to transcend romanticism: a framed print of a painting we’d seen together, for Christmas; the complete set of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, for my birthday; a fancy hand lotion or new record or knowing brand of candle, for no reason. I’d thought his generosity was evidence of his solidity, but speaking to his mother made me wonder if it wasn’t just a quality he cultivated because he felt he had to.
