by Lauren Oyler
Felix’s penis felt inert and unalive, like a small squash. I tried to get all of it in my mouth and gagged; I had never and would never be able to, but I always had to try. My eyes watered and I pressed on, varying my rhythm when I remembered to do so, licking his balls when I remembered they existed, keeping my fingers and thumb in a firm but banana-safe hold. Although I have no way to understand the passing of time during sex it felt like it would never end, like he was withholding his orgasm to demonstrate not only that he had won this battle but that I had been immature to conceive of a casual evening together as a competition in the first place—that if I continued to, I would lose. The music was nice and I wanted to know the artist. When it was over I swallowed, as I always do, and went to the bathroom to wipe away the smudged mascara from under my eyes, and then I spent the night.
*
FUCK! I MESSED UP THE STRUCTURE. THAT ONE WAS TOO LONG.
*
TAURUS: MY FATHER ABANDONED MY MOTHER WHEN I WAS FIVE years old, taking much of her collection of Royal Family memorabilia with him. The British DJ expressed his apologies. My father had wanted to sell it for drug money, she’d said, and I had to believe her, because I never saw him again, though I also couldn’t remember the Royal Family memorabilia, which, I later learned, were basically worthless. I only remember that he smelled like cigarette smoke and spent his days in the basement. Once, when I was nineteen, he contacted me on Facebook, and I deleted the message immediately. I never regretted it, no. It was stubborn, yes, but I was a stubborn person when it was justified, when I could pair my bullheadedness with a seething rage unrecognizable to me during the rest of the placid and contented life I had built entirely for myself by working my way up the ladder at a successful company until they did exactly what I wanted them to do, which was transfer me to Europe. The memorabilia he’d left behind featured the lesser royals. What are their names? Beatrice and Eugenie, right. A Beatrice mug. Excuse me, but fuck him. Now all I really wanted to do was settle down with someone sturdy and reliable. I was self-sufficient, of course, with my years of accumulating savings distributed in a variety of funds, but one wants a partner, you know? To talk to. To make dinner with. The question had been if my parents were divorced. The DJ’s were, too, but it was amicable, nothing like that. Just recently, yeah. A year ago or so.
*
ALREADY THE PROJECT WAS REQUIRING MORE RESEARCH THAN I’D anticipated. I’d thought I knew a fair amount about astrology, particularly for someone who didn’t believe in it, but the only signature traits I could really recite if pressed corresponded to my own sign. It turned out to be incredibly boring to learn about the made-up characteristics of other people.
*
I’VE BEEN WONDERING IF SEX CAN BE IRONIC. I THINK AT THE end of the day probably not, as much as we would like it to be.
*
ALL MY EX-BOYFRIENDS WERE GEMINIS, I TOLD AN INDIAN POST-DOC, wasn’t that strange? He had no idea. What was I? Also a Gemini, I replied. Isn’t that strange? He, playing along but clearly apprehensive, couldn’t determine how strange it was unless he knew the typical Gemini traits, but he assumed the coincidence was to do with some kind of feeling of alliance I cultivated among those with similar birthdays. Why would I cultivate a feeling of alliance among those with similar birthdays? I wanted to know. Why does anyone do anything? he wanted to know. Actually, he wanted to know, what did I do? Like, for a job. I told him I was a Jill of all trades, unable to commit myself to any one field, because I found everything so interesting. There was nothing more thrilling to me than an internet rabbit hole, I beamed. I sometimes felt Wikipedia had been invented just for me.
*
ACCORDING TO THE BLOGS, THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE visa application was proving you had a health insurance plan that complied with German health insurance requirements. It could NOT be traveler’s insurance. Traveler’s insurance was much cheaper and easier to apply for.
*
CANCER: I WOKE UP ON THE DAY OF MY DATE WITH AN ESTONIAN marathon runner and went swimming at a historic pool near my apartment. The pool was in a grand hall, built in the early twentieth century to look ancient and Roman, decorated with mosaics and enclosed by thick columns, and it was a women-only swim day. There were no lap lanes, just a divider between the shallow end, where women in burkinis waded back and forth, talking, and the rest of the pool, where chaos reigned. I tried to swim laps normally but no one else was, so I felt disruptive. I emerged an hour later feeling like I’d had a cultural experience but not an athletic one, and when I arrived at the appointed bar that night I still felt sensitive to minor annoyances. The marathon runner’s lateness did not help. I asked him if he’d ever had any psychic experiences, saying that he seemed like he had, and he said, “Wow, yes, how did you know that?” I said I was very intuitive. All his visible ligaments suggested clairvoyant energy. I asked him what the biggest problem in his life was and he said his finances. I asked him why and he said he didn’t have a job. I said that must be hard and he said no, it was actually quite easy, except for not being able to pay for anything. His main activity in life was running and that was free, except for the shoes, which companies would send him for free. I nodded a lot and said that seemed like it would be difficult, even though it did not, and that I was worried for his joint and foot health.
*
THE EX-BOYFRIENDS ARE FINDING IT ODD THAT I WOULD SAY they’re all Geminis. What’s the point of lying about that?
*
A MAN WHO PLAYED THE BANJO CANCELED OUR PLANS SO, APPRECIATING the weather, I went to a bar with outdoor seating near the Reuterplatz. I had just ordered a beer when the perky voices of my countrywomen jerked my ear. I was two tables away from them, one blonde California type with a dog in her lap and one with short dark hair cut to swoop across her face and a larger dog lying at her feet. There was no noise from the street except for the occasional rumble of a car over the cobblestones, and I could hear everything they were saying as if it were being broadcast over speakers. Conventional wisdom about eavesdropping—that you should not do it—seems to ignore the important point that it is often unavoidable, especially when the targets of your eavesdropping are not engaging in the usual discretionary gossip tactics—lowering their voices, avoiding identifying proper nouns, looking behind them to make sure no one compromising is in the vicinity—because they believe no one within earshot can understand their language. I entered the conversation in the middle of a party scene: The dark-haired woman, a little drunk, had been introduced or been told to introduce herself to a man because she was really into this one kind of techno and didn’t really know anyone else who’s into this one kind of techno. She and the man had a really good conversation; he could recommend certain club nights that featured the kind of techno they liked; it was unclear whether they practiced the techno themselves or just enjoyed it. They smoked a huge joint and she thought he was cute, but at some point the girl had to abandon the conversation to use the bathroom, and when she came back the man was gone. Hours later she returned to the room where they’d met and saw that he was lying on the ground, half inside and half outside, with his legs on the floor of the balcony and his upper body on the floor of the bedroom. The woman asked him if he was OK and he said yes, would she like some speed, and she took a little and then went home. Besides that? Work was going well but she really wanted to focus more on her music. She was excited about getting a new tattoo tomorrow, with an artist who was expensive and had a long waiting list but was very good at flowers. The tattoo would be located on her bicep and about the size of a twelve-ounce can, though they don’t do ounces here. The blonde woman was planning a trip to Italy.
Suddenly the large dog was no longer at the dark-haired woman’s feet but out on the sidewalk next to the restaurant’s little outdoor patio, barking. Turning heads collided with a childish shriek; then a pause, followed by a sustained wail. Called by both the blonde and the brunette in anxious unison, the dog trotted back over and lay down in its original
spot. For a moment the boy, encircled by his skipping and apparently unbothered brother, stayed there in the middle of the patio with his arms over his face in anguish, crying and screaming. The heads of the restaurant swiveled back to their companions or looked nervously around the corner, wondering if the child had someone to console it or at least remove it from the premises. The girls were soon identified as those culpable, and they looked only at each other, their eyes locked in nervous giggles, the brunette’s hand on the dog’s collar. Finally a tall man, salt-and-pepper hair, Birkenstocks despite the chill, emerged from behind the building and approached the child, his pace slow and even, and when he reached the boy he did not crouch down to comfort him but merely looked down at him as he thrashed and flailed. Finally, the man put his hand on the boy’s head. The girls, still laughing, not maliciously but nevertheless, began to hiss at each other that the man was looking at them, and the tension of the situation stretched smiles across their faces in anticipation of confrontation. The blonde one held her thin hand against the side of her face, shielding herself from his gaze; the brunette had her back to him and seemed to understand her vulnerability. The man, his hand still on his son’s curly little head, looked at the women in silence for about thirty seconds, the blonde occasionally updating the brunette on his continued presence, until finally the brunette turned around, offered a meek wave and smile, and said, in English, “Sorry, I’m sorry,” gesturing toward the dog’s collar, which was still in her hand though she had twisted awkwardly around to face the father. The man, whose flair for drama was clearly honed, waited a beat before nodding silently and turning away. A short woman appeared, a lumpy swaying laundry bag hanging off the handle of her empty stroller; a brief recitation of events occurred, and the group walked away. I wished that I had seen what happened, to know if the child had somehow taunted the dog, if the dog had actually made contact with the child or just barked at and scared him, but I had not been paying attention. “Oh my God—what an asshole,” the brunette said. “I’m going to get kicked out of the country because some man can’t watch his own kid.”
*
WHAT’S AMAZING ABOUT THIS STRUCTURE IS THAT YOU CAN JUST dump any material you have in here and leave it up to the reader to connect it to the rest of the work. I was going to cut that dog story, but why should I? It evokes a mood. It relates to my themes. When I saw it happen it was somehow incredible; I was watching earned self-consciousness mutate into unearned self-preservation in real time, something I usually only saw online, where it was easier for the unbelievable to remain that way.
*
@HELENOFTROYWI ON ASTROLOGY: “PEOPLE LIKE TO SAY ECONOMICS is astrology for men, and I agree: economics is the more complicated, useful, interesting, and rational version of astrology”
*
I ONCE BROKE UP WITH SOMEONE WHO TOLD ME MY REASONS for doing so were “not believable.” I replied that I couldn’t believe he’d said that. When I told a mutual friend about it, she replied, “Well, you’re a human woman, not a book!” I said to her what I said to him, that the advantage of switching from fiction to non- was that you no longer had to worry about being believable.
*
AROUND THIS TIME, I WOKE UP ONE MORNING DISTURBED BY A vivid dream. I won’t describe the dream, but I will summarize the lesson I believe it hammered home: I felt trapped, almost claustrophobic, by my inability to talk to Felix, and I wanted to ease the tension I felt between us with a jokey text message, like in the morning after a fight, or an admission of insecurity that I hoped would weaken his resistance to self-exposure.
*
THE GERMAN HEALTH INSURANCE I ULTIMATELY CHOSE WAS called TK, which had an English version of their website that advertised “above-average benefits and services.” I knew for many days that I would choose TK but I put off doing anything to make the choice. It wasn’t until I came home after having three drinks at a bar, where I was stood up by a thirty-seven-year-old experimental trumpet player, that I went to the TK website, downloaded the application form in English for “People In Work,” emailed it to myself, and departed for the Späti where you could print stuff. When I entered the Späti my drunken sense of purpose propelled me to attempt German, and the man behind the counter either did not understand or pretended not to. “Drogen?” he asked, laughing. “Drogen? You want Drogen?” Drogen means “drugs.” Drucken means “to print.” Sober I would have been floridly embarrassed. I sat down at computer 4 next to a muttering large-headphoned teenager who had chat windows splayed across his screen. The German keyboard inserted z’s into my password and I had to type it three times, funneling my fluid concentration into the task. Finally the familiar customized background (leopard print) and list of recent chat contacts appeared. I clicked on the email I’d sent myself. I downloaded the attachment. I wanted TK. I hit Drucken. I logged out of my email. I left the computer and then returned to make sure I had logged out of my email. Having nothing to do with me the teen jolted in surprise and pulled the headphones away from his ears, as if trying to distance himself from a loud sound. At the counter the smug employee examined my paperwork as if making an assessment and winked as he handed over the TK form. I paid him in coins and when I got back to my bedroom I put the form on my desk without looking over it and fell asleep in my clothes.
*
I WONDERED IF MY DESIRE TO TALK TO FELIX WAS NOT REALLY A desire to talk to Felix but a desire to talk to someone I knew well, seriously, in depth. I was avoiding any kind of go-there conversation, it was true, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had one with anyone, and despite his caginess about himself, Felix was very responsive to others, seemingly authentically so. His voice didn’t shift into a faker register when he gave a compliment. He looked you in the eye. He seemed like someone who had certain things he didn’t want to talk about, which might have been true for a number of reasons, and so he seemed to have all the facets of his life story under control. He was especially good at concealing the possibility that one of those reasons was insecurity. I suppose it was also comforting to be around someone who seemed to have no doubts, only frustrations.
*
AFTER I PRINTED OUT MY TK FORMS, I FELT I HAD MADE GREAT strides. I permitted myself to not think about them for a week.
*
LEO: I PREPARED FOR A DATE WITH A CHAIN-SMOKING AMERICAN who worked at a call center by listening to “I’m Too Sexy” and making my hair big, thinking, This is a sign that goes all out. After fifteen minutes he admitted he had recognized me on OkCupid because he followed me on Twitter and remembered my old profile picture, from before the one where I have my hair in front of my face, and in advance of the date had read all of my writing available online. I had not even considered trying to look up anyone I’d been on a date with. I said, “What do you mean, everything?” He said, “I mean everything.” I said, “OK. But not, like, my college-newspaper columns?” He said, “Yes, even those.” I was uncomfortable but also euphoric. I was addictive. He could have, if he’d wanted, come up with a theory about me. He knew more about me than I did. Unable to offer him an alternative personality, I homed in on what his compulsion to “possess me intellectually” (my words) and subsequent admission of that compulsion might have said about his feelings about his family, education, ex-girlfriends, and self-worth. I posed therapeutic questions and messed preeningly with my hair. I let him buy the rest of the drinks. Every time he asked me what I thought about an issue I said something like, “Well, as you know, I said it better in December 2014.” Though I felt he was owed at least a kiss at the end of the evening, having spent the majority of it intimately discussing the idea of me, I said that I never kissed on the first date because I was a real germophobe, and I used the pause that followed to bid him quickly goodbye.
*
AT SOME POINT YOU HAVE TO ADMIT THAT DOING THINGS IRONICALLY can have very straightforward consequences.
*
THAT EPISODE IS AN EXTREME VERSION OF WHAT HAPPENS WITH dating apps generally: The
getting-to-know-you process is fabricated by the exchanging of profiles, and each person gets to foreground what they want you to know, which is usually banal information about preferences that would not necessarily be frontloaded because in spontaneous interactions people respond to the environment and/or build on what has been said before. In meetings arranged on dating apps, both parties possess information from the get-go that would ordinarily trickle in as it was relevant, making the date more like a job interview. Each person feels uncomfortable starting a conversation with, “So: I know you like bad music. Explain why you like it?” because it’s weird to admit knowing that sort of thing about someone you’ve never met. But what else are you going to talk about? The weather? Not when the contraband info is front of mind.
