by Lauren Oyler
When I finally did mention the ticket to Berlin, my friends, their minds narrowed by therapy, urged me not to go. They said I was repressing, no not repressing, mishandling, denying my feelings about Felix’s death. They didn’t understand why I would travel open-endedly to a city where I didn’t know anyone or speak the language; it only made sense if I needed, like, in order to fill some absence, to do some kind of subconscious investigation? They believed the subconscious investigation was being mapped onto the city of Berlin, and they believed this would not work because if I had no one to talk to I would kill myself. I told them that actually the choice to go there had little to do with Felix and more to do with what Felix had made me realize. The people in New York were petty and hypocritical in a way that made me feel isolated no matter how many I spoke to, I said, citing the journalist and the roommate. Everyone I knew suffered from vicious bruxism because of stress and all the dentists exploited this by failing to mention, when recommending mouth guards, that you could purchase one for $30 to $40 at the drugstore rather than pay $350 to $700 for a custom dentist-produced version. I don’t want to go into more detail about the healthcare system because it’s far beyond the scope of this discussion. “Also, the subway is terrible,” I said. “It’s an insult. And you can’t even flirt with people on it anymore because everyone is looking at their phones.” I could have gone on and on. I’d never really cared about New York the way other people did, never romanticized fire escapes or exposed brick or the days when you couldn’t get a cab to take you to Brooklyn. I had only seen three Woody Allen movies, and I couldn’t even tell you what happened in them. I got lost almost every time I went to SoHo or the Lower East Side; I could never remember the order or direction of nonnumbered streets and avenues. Felix would tell me to meet him at bars or restaurants and I would always underestimate how fast the subway could get me there, because I believed on principle that it should not take forty-five minutes to go two miles, and he would get annoyed that I was late.
No one cared about any of this; it was all acknowledged unanimously as true and therefore considered irrelevant to even bring up. My friends demanded more reasoning, something concrete or legitimate; to have pragmatic or ideological gripes against New York was not unique. Who was I, they wanted to know, Joan Didion? I lied that I had been thinking about going to Berlin for a while and at this point felt that stopping those thoughts was a good enough reason as any to go. What is the point of being middle-class in the twenty-first century if you can’t do things whimsically? I asked, and they shook their heads. Millennials aren’t middle-class, they replied, ordering another thirteen-dollar cocktail. Having been informed of neither the deceased’s duplicitous Instagram habits nor my (admittedly shaky) intention to dump him, my friends also didn’t understand that perhaps what they saw as my need to get over him through active purging of emotion was healthier than it appeared. Exasperated, I asked if they wanted me to wear a veil or something? Did they wish I’d married Felix so I might adopt a clearer public framework for my grief? They didn’t laugh. All jokes to them were transparent attempts to mask my pain. I said something I’d been saving up for a while, that, you know, it’s kind of like he ghosted me, and they made maternal tsk-ing sounds of nonamusement and cocked their heads like sweetly confused dogs. One (me) wonders if they would have been so aggressively naysaying if I’d said I was, oh, I don’t know, pregnant and keeping it.
The ex-boyfriends say they are on my side, and my problem is that I’m giving the friends too many opportunities to object. People like a single explanation. Concise. Simple. Direct. I’m always proposing too many possibilities, which makes it seem like I’m lying. I should have said I wanted to learn German.
But it was too late for that. The friends’ attempts to thwart my plans intensified as my departure approached. They began to appeal to vanity. Wasn’t it kind of tired to withdraw to Berlin? Hadn’t moving to Berlin become a toolish popular fantasy among New Yorkers in recent years? If it weren’t for L.A. would it not be even more so? Was the influx of upwardly mobile English-speaking foreigners not a serious problem for German society, not to mention rents, and did I not see that I was going to appear stereotypical by participating? I told them I wasn’t necessarily moving there, I was just going there, and at least for now L.A. does exist so I don’t have to worry about beach people bothering me; they will have been weeded out. The friends asked me if I didn’t feel a little guilty abandoning this country at such a monumental political moment; I said no, that was ridiculous, and shouldn’t they feel a little guilty acting like the United States is the center of the world?
As a last resort, they made an appeal to practicality: How would I afford to gallivant in Europe for an undetermined amount of time without a job? Though I’d saved enough money to last several months after I quit my job, it’s true that I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with anxiety resonating in my chest, about money, and that to go back to sleep I would eventually succumb to fantasizing, mainly involving Felix being there next to me, spooning largely and firmly. I didn’t like this and I don’t like to mention it now. To my friends I replied that I had an amount of money in savings because I lived with a roommate in a rent-stabilized apartment in Bed-Stuy and wore shitty clothes even though I’d earned enough to buy oddly proportioned fancy ones. I never took cabs or paid for my own drugs. I’d had a couple of small student loans and paid them off doing freelance work I never told anyone about because it was embarrassing. (Copywriting, not sex, which I at least might have written about later.) I also pointed out that Felix usually paid for me at restaurants or bars or movies, and that I had always let him because I felt he deserved it for complaining to me about how much money he made, so in fact for the last year or so my overhead had been extremely modest. They said I was overcompensating for my despair with snark; I didn’t have to be so clever all the time. One of the rich ones asked why I didn’t get a new job I liked and then invest some of that savings instead, and I said, “Probably because I’ve been quietly preparing to flee the country and write a novel [NOT this one].” He rolled his eyes. I said he was obviously trying to sabotage me; it was a bad time to invest; the market was up. He said he knew I knew I didn’t know what I was talking about. I said it was unfair that he knew I knew I didn’t know what I was talking about, because I was still right, but the fact that we both knew I lacked the background knowledge to prove it meant my rightness could be easily denied. He said why couldn’t I just write my novel in New York? I said, My boyfriend just died, and I narrowed my eyes forlornly. There, I had hit on something useful: while grief meant to them that I could only have one justification for my actions, that justification could be applied to anything, so long as it emphasized my prerogative to feel my feelings. It was not that I was running away from my sadness, or from myself; it was that I was running away from all the pressure my friends were putting on me to deal with that sadness in a way that was recognizable to them! Aha. My friend said nothing and paid for my drink. They all knew I’d hated my job, so if I did a kind of reverse analysis I could make myself feel insulted that they weren’t supporting my decision, which was clearly the right thing for me, as a person who had recently experienced loss under disorienting conditions.
Nevertheless when I left my rich friend I felt adrift, bereft. I wrote a text to my spiritual friend, Mila, asking what is my problem??? She replied that the recent solar eclipse in Pisces had made everyone sensitive as hell and having endured a lunar eclipse in my sign just two weeks before I needed to give myself space to feel and heal. “your bf just died,” she added, helpfully. “get a manicure.” I said I didn’t like manicures because when they chipped after two days I felt I had wasted money. She said that was the wrong attitude but regardless the manicure was not meant to be taken literally. “the manicure could be a haircut or an expensive salad or trip to an art gallery. it just means something nice that you don’t have to think about!”
The ex-boyfriends are shaking their heads—they are o
n my side, truly, but the outreach to Mila made them suspicious. Mila is for light problems and trivial grievances only, they reminded me. Now they too think I’m protesting too much.
As I was forced to defend my half-baked decision it began to firm up and set. I was certainly not stunted, but I was still at an age when doing things like changing a light bulb planted in me a seed of pride; moving to a country where I did not speak the language, even one where speaking the language wasn’t really important, would force maturating behaviors. Abrupt relocation abroad existed on the spectrum of normal behaviors, but it was on the courageous end of that spectrum. Though I’d been to Berlin twice, the time I met Felix and then a second time to visit him for about a week before he moved back to the U.S., I had only seen three landmarks, no museums, several terrible basement galleries, and a damp movie theater on the sixth floor of an apartment building. I’d mainly hung out with Felix’s American friends at an Australian bar that charged fifty cents more for beer than equivalently hip German places. I didn’t want to go to relive my fond memories of first-stage love but to be better at being in Berlin than Felix, who had almost certainly squandered his time there. As I was studying a German-language book, I realized that for the entire time I knew him he had pronounced the name of his neighborhood incorrectly.
About a week before I left, I met my friend Jane for dinner, and her dazzling example of a truly successful New Yorker, someone who belonged in New York, who flitted around and went to meetings and had to take taxis because otherwise her shoes would get fucked up and she would look bad at the meetings, seemed to confirm that it was time for me to go. I didn’t resent her—she was always laughing at her luck when she showed up to lunch or coffee wearing the kinds of things rich people own and appreciate, shapely leather bags and blouses in delicate fabrics, which she would beckon me wide-eyed herself to JUST LOOK at. I know I keep making oblique reference to a lower-class childhood but being completely honest with you it was for most of my formative years more like lower-middle, and for one brief period in the late nineties even approaching hard middle. I’d never experienced anything like Jane had, never been locked in a basement, the basement where my parents before they were arrested for grand theft auto had cooked meth; I had never had to endure and overcome anything actually bad. But it just didn’t seem like it was going to happen for me in New York, it being it, resounding, highly publicized success, or rather I didn’t care to do what was necessary to make it happen for me—work very hard, for example. At dinner I told her I’d been on the verge of dumping Felix when he died—I didn’t mention the conspiracy theories, but I said I’d looked through his phone because he’d been “acting really weird” and I hadn’t found anything—and I now felt an amalgamation of guilt, sadness, relief, and projection.
She told me about a new novel with a plot that resembled my situation: A woman who has been secretly separated from her unfaithful husband for about six months receives a call from his mother asking her where he is. When the woman has to admit she doesn’t know, her mother-in-law informs her that he is in a Greek village and that she (the mother-in-law) is going to pay for the woman’s flight and hotel so that the woman may go to the Greek village and find him. The woman doesn’t want to reveal to her mother-in-law that she is separated from her son, so she goes. She does not find her estranged husband until he’s murdered and left in a ditch. His parents come to the island to deal with it and she has to pretend throughout this strange and agonizing period that she is a grieving widow and not a grieving ex, though she is certainly grieving perplexedly. She also receives a large sum of money.
I told Jane that it sounded like an interesting book but it made my pain feel less significant. What’s more, I “only got a thousand dollars!”
This was where the evening began to turn bad. Jane leapt into earnest apologies—oh, no, she said, it actually wasn’t less significant, because the situation in the book was fictional and mine was real. So then I had to say no no no, it was just a joke, and besides things indeed could be a lot worse; mainly I was excited to go to Berlin. I’d thought using the stilted phrase “my pain” would be enough to signal that I was just teasing, but her continued look of concern concerned me. I could see her straining for niceness and sensitivity, but niceness and sensitivity were not what I wanted. This was a person I had known for several years, since college, whom I had seen vomit, whose life-changing cover letter I had basically rewritten. Once, a couple of years before, she had come to my apartment and made me shower because I had not gotten out of bed in a week. She had returned for the next three mornings to make sure I had food and coffee, and on her way out one day had yelled at my roommate for her pathetic inability to notice what was going on around her because she didn’t give a shit about absolutely fucking anything except the shape of her own fucking eyebrows, which by the way only looked good on fucking Instagram. This was a person who got it. Yet now she was looking at me as if she did not know me at all, as if I had not given a single indication of what was actually going on in my head, as if I had not earned interpretation. I got the sense that she, like everyone else, expected me to offer some burst of tearful confession, one that was apparently spontaneous but still clearly outlined all the conflicts and qualifications of my emotional position, which she could then graciously accept and reassure me over. When I offered nothing of the sort, she bought my dinner, and we hugged awkwardly goodbye.
I was about to start crying walking home across the Williamsburg Bridge when a cyclist in expensive mechanical gear passed too close on the incline and because I was depleted of force my screaming response to his vanishing form was uncreative, not Shakespearean at all: fuck you. I didn’t even get to call him rich. I walked the rest of the way home angry and did not look at the skyline. Rudeness was a New York trademark, once charming for the way it implied a collective acknowledgment of the struggle of everyday life, a gently reciprocal buzz-off, yet it had taken on in recent years a ruthless antisocial edge. A broad awareness of how things used to be had severed these things from history, so that they were now only pleasingly abstract ideas, repeated and exploited for all purposes: the rudeness now was unearned, just convenient. What was the fucking point of making fucking jokes, I wondered, frustrated and teary. No, it didn’t make sense, but what was the point in making sense? Felix had been right. I had known since I found the account that his manipulative insincerity was a fair response to the way the world was. But since I had no one to admit that to, I was going to keep it to myself. The temperature, too warm not to worry about, dropped sharply as I stomped down Lee Avenue, deserted except for the occasional wool-suited man. When I woke up late the next morning it was snowing. Donald Trump had declared at a conference that he had been proven right about Sweden and no one knew what he was talking about.
· · ·
THE FORTHCOMING CENTRAL BERLIN AIRPORT HAVING BEEN IN the works for decades and Germany’s second-largest airline having reduced operations en route to bankruptcy (to be filed a few months after this narrative concludes), the options for getting to my blank slate were uncomfortable and long. Dazzled by the low low price and also a little drunk, I’d bought my ticket noticing but not really understanding the layover and its implications, only realizing when I got off the first flight and walked through the terminal’s assemblage of multicultural food trucks that I was about to spend seven hours in a place where a single beer costs upward of fifteen dollars and a meatless hard-breaded pre-packaged sandwich about ten. To achieve the low low price, the airline didn’t serve you a meal, though after a raft of complaints a few years before they did provide free water. I’d abandoned my snacks when the woman at the check-in counter, Juana, weighed my carry-on + personal item and with pity in her eyes offered me a deal: fit it all in the one already-just-slightly-too-wide carry-on suitcase and I could take it without paying the $125 same-day checked bag fee, determined by consultation with a chart involving length of flight and whether there was a layover. (Checking a bag online, before your flight
, cost merely fifty dollars, which I had already paid; that bag was half a kilogram too heavy but was given a pass.) I will be telling this story until I die, so indicative is it of the kindness of strangers, so useful is it for contradicting my relentless negativity.
In Oslo, all the airport employees were friendly; they had nothing to worry about. As every minute moved me closer to the purchase of egregiously priced bad food, I gazed out the windows onto a solemn ice-scape fringed with evergreens, dissociated from my past frustrations, and aided by the empty stomach achieved a pleasantly empty mind. I found the layover a helpful temporal/geographic/spiritual buffer zone, by which I mean all of these things—time, geography, spirit—stopped carrying meaning as I sat and sipped an IPA the price of two IPAs at elevenish in the morning that was in my mind fiveish in the morning. On the flight, the woman seated in front of me seized the opportunity when both flight attendants had to attend elsewhere to pilfer a bag of chips from the food cart. Life was so full of possibilities, modeled by the seemingly regular people all around us. Stealing chips never would have occurred to me.
My sense of generous porousness did not last long. I had no real problems. Nothing pressing logistical or financial or governmental or even really at that point emotional (she insisted) held me back. Usually when you have these sort of searching bourgeois-white-person narratives you have to offer a disclaimer, I know my problems do not rank in comparison to the manifold sufferings of most of the world’s people . . . but, but this preamble isn’t meant to be perfunctory, a tick on a checklist; I really mean it as a point to be made in itself. Nothing was wrong. I had no problems. And yet I had problems.
