“You can ask me about book things. I feel like I know what I’m talking about re: agents and books. I’m meeting someone at 6:30 or so but I want to hang out with you. I’ll be done with the library at 4:30. I’m at 79 Washington Sq. South or I can meet you wherever. I’ll have email or text until then. I can give you some Xanax if you want.”
*
I took the R train to 8th street and we met outside of the station. Jeremy Lin examined my copy of “Monthly Review,” and then he led me to a vegan restaurant because I said that I wanted a drink before the reading.
When we arrived, I sat down and ordered a 32-ounce Sierra Nevada.
“How was meeting with the agent?” he asked.
“I think he liked me a lot.”
“Why? Why would anyone like you?” he asked in a jocular tone.
“I don’t know,” I said, laughing.
He must like me, you would only joke like that with someone you really like, I thought.
We started to discuss the reading. He read the last line of the piece he was going to be reading that night (“when I read my mom’s e-mail I cried also”) and asked me if I thought that he should add other reasons that he had started to cry then, like how he had no friends at the time.
“I think that’s kind of a cop-out,” I said.
“It’s more honest.”
In the end he decided to read it as it was originally written.
*
We started to walk to Housing Works Books, where the reading was being held.
“Who do you think is the biggest fan of your writing?” Jeremy Lin asked.
I smiled. “I don’t know. Probably no one.”
“It’s me.”
*
When we arrived at the reading, Jeremy Lin separated from me to be with his friend, who was thin and pretty and blonde. I sat in the seats reserved for readers, and spent most of my time watching Jeremy Lin chatting, huddled up with the blonde woman, looking at his iPhone together. The first reader read, and then it was my turn to read. I got on the stage and read like an automaton again. When I was finished, the audience applauded me, and then I returned to my seat. I didn’t pay attention to any of the readers. I only looked at Jeremy Lin talking with the blonde woman.
*
After the reading was finished I went over to Jeremy Lin and stood next to him. As we were talking, he was approached by a large group of fans. I stood there awkwardly as Jeremy Lin turned towards the group and began to talk with different people.
As I stood there looking at Jeremy Lin and his crowd I thought about how I desired to be close to him, for him to like me above all, and yet also how I felt overshadowed and stifled by him. Here, literally, as audience members flocked to him and everyone ignored me, and also as a writer, as my most honest thoughts and experiences were summed up by many as a Jeremy Lin imitation; a gushing groupie’s love letter to an older writer she desperately wanted to be fucked by. I thought back to a comment about me that I had read: “a story by a young, immature writer who’s trying to impress her writing idol [Jeremy Lin]” and how I would probably always feel stifled and overshadowed unless I were to somehow totally disavowal Jeremy Lin from my life and career, and accept all of the difficulty and pain that would bring. I wondered if I would ever be able to reconcile my ambition to be a serious writer with my desire to be loved.
*
At the end of the reading, Jeremy Lin, the blonde woman, my friend who had come to the reading, and I decided to go to Jeremy Lin’s apartment. There wasn’t enough room in the cab for all of us, so Jeremy Lin told my friend and I to take another cab and meet them. When we arrived on Jeremy Lin’s street, he hadn’t been waiting for us. I thought of a documentary I had once watched featuring an interview with Cynthia Lennon where she talked about being left behind by John Lennon on a train and how she knew then that their relationship was over. Then I felt ridiculous. I texted Jeremy Lin for his exact address.
*
My friend and I arrived at Jeremy Lin’s apartment. He and four other people were there. While walking in, I was struck by the starkness of it. It was dimly lit, and was totally bare except for a bed and other necessities.
I went to Jeremy Lin’s desk and took two tablets of MDMA, and an Adderall.
I went over to Jeremy Lin.
“Can I smoke in your room?” I asked.
“No, no no no…”
I smoked outside of the window, along with the four other people there. The blonde woman who Jeremy Lin had been conversing with at the reading tried to talk to me. She said kind things to me while I thought mean things about her.
I went onto Jeremy Lin’s bed, where his MacBook was lying, with his Gmail open. I typed “Marie” into the search bar. I clicked on an email conversation that he had with another writer who had read at the Muumuu House reading.
“I like Marie in person, but I’m not attracted to her,” Jeremy Lin had written.
“I expected to be more attracted to Marie in person. Also, I felt Marie read ‘poorly’, but she has a good reading voice,” the writer had replied.
I stopped reading.
“What did he mean by that?” I asked to Jeremy Lin who had come to sit next to me on the bed.
“It’s in quotes. You know what it means.”
“Like it was conventionally a poor reading?”
“Yes, that’s what it means.”
I felt like I was acting like what men refer to as “difficult and needy,” but on drugs I couldn’t restrain myself.
“Why aren’t you attracted to me?” I asked.
“I’m only attracted to girls who weigh like 100 pounds.”
“You think that I’m using you, like a sociopath,” I said.
“No.”
Jeremy Lin moved away to talk to the other people in the room.
I got onto his MacBook and Google searched “Marie Calloway” and intentionally sought out negative things that had been written about me. (“It was just a girl mimicking [Jeremy Lin.]”)
Jeremy Lin saw what I was looking at and scoffed. He ordered me to stop looking at those things because “it’s just going to make you sad.”
“Don’t you think there’s more things in life than just being happy? But, no, actually I feel silly that I cared so much about criticisms of me. It seems so immaterial in the face of doing readings and meeting with an agent and being surrounded by encouraging people…”
“Good.”
I got off of the computer and talked to my friend, who was standing near the window. We talked about men and body image and writing.
“I remember that you said that one day you want to write a story that’s completely incomprehensible to men,” my friend said.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, smiling.
“That’s sexist. You’re the most sexist person I’ve ever met,” Jeremy Lin interjected.
I flopped down on his bed, sighing, “Men are so oppressed.”
“Me and my friend were talking about how it seems ridiculous to call you a ‘feminist,’ but you support a lot of female writers through Muumuu House and you wrote that article about how female writers are taken less seriously than male ones.”
“I did write that… I think everyone is sexist and racist.”
I lit a cigarette and started to smoke it in Jeremy Lin’s bed.
I said something to Jeremy Lin about inconsiderateness.
“How am I inconsiderate?”
“In your books,” I said, thinking in my mind how a review in the New York Times had referred to the Jeremy Lin character in one of his books, Richard Yates, as a “psychologically damaging bully.” I thought about how calling him a “bully” was too harsh, but that he had seemed really controlling and intent on molding the female character in that book, and that this was interesting to me because I thought that he had been trying to mold me as well.
He was going to respond, but then I sat up, revealing cigarette ash all over his white sheets.
“This was incre
dibly inconsiderate!” This was the first time I had ever heard, even heard of, Jeremy Lin raising his voice.
“Well, now you’ll always have a part of me in your bed,” I said, smiling and laughing.
He looked me and I averted his gaze. I could tell he was disgusted.
“I need to write,” I said.
“What do you need to write?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t have anything in mind, I just felt that I had to, in that moment. Jeremy Lin slid his MacBook to me and looked over my shoulder. I typed about how I felt that Jeremy Lin owed me something, that he had a responsibility to me.
“I feel like I have given you a lot of publicity,” he typed back.
I felt annoyed that he seemed to not understand what I had meant.
I typed bad things that had happened to me in my life, and that how I thought that usually male writers wrote female characters poorly, but that his portrayal of a teenage girl in Richard Yates was exceptional.
Jeremy Lin got up off of the bed and walked away to talk with his other friends.
My friend and I lay on Jeremy Lin’s bed and talked intimately. Then Jeremy Lin addressed me, standing up, holding a copy of his book, Bed.
“I didn’t like that one. I liked Richard Yates, though,” I said.
“You don’t like pretentious prose?” he asked, smiling.
I asked him if he would give me a copy of Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee because I had enjoyed the author’s reading.
“Won’t that book just make you jealous?”
“Why would it make me jealous?”
“You know, she is my wife.”
“I know.”
He threw four or five Muumuu House books at my head.
*
The other guests at the party decided that it was time to leave, and left. Jeremy Lin and my friend urged me to leave as well, but I said that I didn’t want to yet, and that I would catch up with my friend in a few minutes.
Jeremy Lin was lying stretched out on the other side of his bed, as far away from where I was sitting on it as possible. I said things, and he didn’t respond.
Finally he said, “Your friend is waiting for you,” with a high degree of irritation in his voice.
I thought about how normally being some place and interacting with someone when they don’t want me to, as Jeremy obviously didn’t then, is one of my worst fears. However, while I was on drugs I didn’t care about any of that. I thought that it was interesting how I was for the first time in my life pushing past the desire to never interact with someone in a way that they didn’t want me to.
“Oh, yeah.” I had genuinely forgotten about her. I realized that I should leave for her sake.
“I just don’t want you to lose interest in me and stop talking to me, Jeremy,” I said quietly.
He said no, and that he only publishes people on Muumuu House that he thinks he will be interested in for a long time.
I got out of his bed and walked out of his apartment.
*
When I got back home from New York, the first thing that I did was email Jeremy Lin.
“Hi. I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable at the party thing. It’s just drugs make me spill my guts. I feel like you would be interested in that in my fiction but not from the high, crazy girl at a party. I’m not sad you aren’t attracted to me, really, by the way.”
“It’s okay. I usually like talking in that manner, just not at that moment. I had also felt irritated by your other actions, like how you got cigarette ash everywhere. So I didn’t feel like talking like that at that moment. But I liked talking to you at other times. Did I give you you are a little bit happier than I am? Almost all of it is about a girl I liked that I wanted to be closer to who didn’t want to be closer to me. I feel like I felt how you felt when you were lying in the bed not wanting to leave. It’s in one of the poems in there, where I don’t want to leave some girl’s place but she’s kicking me out.”
I wanted to ask why he had told me about that part in his book, but I was too afraid to.
*
“I don’t think Jeremy Lin likes me anymore. I’m afraid that he’s lost interest in me,” I wrote in an email to a mutual friend of Jeremy Lin and I.
A few minutes after I sent that email the friend responded, “I don’t think you understand him. You expect him to see you as a sex object, but he sees you as a person, and as a writer. You should stop thinking of sex as your best thing and realize, like Jeremy has, that writing is your best thing.”
insufferable
“can you just be mine and
mine only from now on?”
“I feel like I belong here.”
“it’s scary how much you look like anna karina. it’s scary how beautiful you are. you are going to destroy me.”
am i always going to feel like this? uncomfortable, tired, bored, irritable, depressed.
“i feel exhausted.”
“[being around you makes me feel depressed.]”
“how is marie?”
“insufferable.”
“it’s like she has never interacted with another human being, ever.”
“she’s so weird and boring. i don’t know how much longer i can take being around her.”
“Baby.”
“i feel like a monster. last night you kept telling me to ‘stop’, and i didn’t.”
“we were just playing.”
actually, trying to push him off of me was one of the most erotic and pleasurable experiences of my life.
“i told her i liked her.”
…
“i guess i just wanted to see how you’d react.”
he’s mean to me for fun.
[“I do actually like you a lot … I’m afraid of my feelings for you …. I’m like a little boy who teases a girl he likes.”]
he doesn’t feel that way at all. he’s just trying to manipulate me. over the internet i became interested in him because he talked about being manipulative. he seemed very intelligent.
i felt a connection to him, i wanted to be around him.
“I want to be close to you.”
“we are close. we’re laying on a twin mattress together.”
“You know what I mean. Why will you feel ‘relieved’ when I go home on Friday?”
“We’ve already had this conversation.”
am i not even worth talking to?
“i feel alone in the world right now.”
“i guess i always feel that way, but i don’t really think about it.”
he didn’t come home until 4 A.M. i stayed up until 2 A.M. waiting for him. eventually i fell asleep, using his jacket as a blanket. i woke up to him looking down at me, smiling, while he stroked my hair. i felt like i wanted to be very kind to him from then. i felt very happy and warm. i wanted to be with him. i want to be his. i wanted to always be with him so he could always show me affection like that. i wanted him to always be stroking my hair. i’m physically very beautiful, but my personality is terrible.
my life is stupid. it should be ended immediately.
“you don’t have it in you to make a work of art.”
later i would apologize for saying that to him.
“i have mixed-feelings about you.”
i like my life here.
“We’ve already had this conversation.”
There have always been many, many, many men who have fallen in love with the idea of Marie Calloway, and now that you’re a micro-celeb it’s only intensifying. When are you going to learn your lesson?
“i could change my ticket easily so i don’t leave on friday, but i guess you don’t want me to.”
“yeah, i guess i’d prefer it if you didn’t change it.”
“i don’t think you’re in love with me.”
i hate it when other people try to tell you how you feel.
i began to sob.
he laughed at me. “It’s okay.
You’re not in love w
ith anyone!”
“you’ve been very sweet and
cute the past day or two. i feel
like i’d be very attracted to you
if i hadn’t already seen a side of
you i didn’t like.”
how could someone be so cruel
he won’t even touch me.
just say you hate me already. please be honest. i’m not even worth that, to him.
“i’m not a doll.” i’m not either.
all of that effort for nothing.
i guess i admire his life
working at american apparel and art movie theatre with many cool attractive hipster friends and always going out and being v social and well liked
my life isn’t like that at all
and i liked cuddling/sex/etc with him
how could he dislike me so much
“[You’re too sexually forward. It’s very unarousing.”]
i know he only saw me as a concept; marie calloway the writer who is friends with tao lin and does readings in new york so nothing i could have done would have made him love me but it hurts very much not to be liked
What terrible things is he texting his friends
about me?
“i feel like you don’t want to be around me.”
“that’sallthat i want to do today.”
no, you want me to go home. please
stop pretending to like me to be polite. it’s humiliating.
“come out with me. don’t sulk in my bed all day, it’s depressing.”
“i’m sorry.”
you have to understand. there’s nothing
you can do that will make him comfort you,
not crying, not sleeping on the couch. you
mean nothing to him.
I’m sure he thinks I’m insane. But I’m not insane!!
i’m tired; i tried.
i wish i were normal.
i wish i were normal.
i wish i were normal.
i wish i were normal.
i wish i were normal.
what purpose did i serve in your life Page 13
