The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  The way he reacted to her revelation made Emily think of him in an even better light: he was there for her, she saw that now. He made her feel really good about herself. (Sadie: “They’re enthralled by him. They really do love him.”) She knew she didn’t have to but she climbed into the race car. She cried a little. The first few laps were for Joseph Riddick IV and the last lap was for herself.

  During the commercial break, Sadie poured us each a glass of wine. “Who is this guy anyway?” she asked as she handed me mine.

  I told her what I knew, that he was from Austin, that this was his second appearance on The Bachelor, that his father hadn’t been there for him when he was a kid and that that’s what made it hard for the Bachelor to open up.

  “And this show is supposed to make that easier?”

  “This show is all about opening up.”

  “Has he considered therapy? SSRIs?”

  “I don’t know about the drugs but he’s seeing a therapist. Thomas Parker. He appears on the show once in a while.”

  “How modern,” Sadie said.

  The commercial break ended and the pool party began. The Bachelor and Emily continued their conversation, sitting on chaises longues at the edge of the pool. The Bachelor looked newly troubled; he was quiet. He didn’t know what to say, he said. “What are you feeling?” Emily asked. His hard eyes bored a hole through the silence. His brow had assumed its characteristic furrow. (Sadie: “He looks like a leader of a cult.”) “Em,” he finally said, “I’m feeling like I like you a lot. It’s really tough for me to sit here and have feelings beginning to develop if, ah—ooh, I need to be careful of what I say.” “No you don’t. I’m not.” (Sadie laughed.) Okay then, he needed to say something about Ricky: “That’s a hard, hard, hard space for any man to fill.” Emily looked down, nodded, bit her lip. “In that moment,” she’d say later, “I just felt like: Great. Another one runnin’ for the hills.” She’d seen it unfold a million times before. Guys pulling away after they learn about her past. Feeling like it’s just too much to handle. (Sadie: “God, that’s really sad.”) She told the Bachelor she was ready for her past to stop mattering, for it not to be an issue in her life anymore.

  “That’s really sad,” Sadie repeated during the next commercial break. “It’s like—I don’t know, it feels almost tragic. Like Sophocles-level tragic.”

  “I know!”

  “It’s really a dark show.”

  “It really is.”

  “I think there’s something dark at the heart of that man. He’s got this almost monomaniacal look.”

  “He takes his role very seriously,” I said.

  Then Sadie asked a question that had never occurred to me: “What’s his job?”

  “I mean—he’s the Bachelor.” She took it as a joke.

  After the two-on-one date had concluded—Other Ashley beat out Ashley, who wept and regretted not opening up sooner—Sadie turned to me and said, “That was the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.” Her mascara was smudged; I hadn’t noticed it before, but I also hadn’t looked her in the eye till now. She asked a few more questions about the show and I answered them to the best of my knowledge. Then she said in a serious voice: “They should make a Bachelor with people like us.” What kind of people were we?

  Next morning I drove her to Des Moines International. When we got to the terminal she thanked me for taking care of her house—nothing there really needed taking care of—and told me not to worry about the rent anymore. “You’re an artist,” she said, to which I strenuously objected. “Fine,” she said, “then you’re a friend,” which I was surprised to find felt true. As we hugged goodbye she said, “See you in a couple weeks.” I hadn’t realized she’d be returning so soon. She headed with her suitcase toward the revolving door. “We’ll watch The Bachelor again!” she called over her shoulder.

  6

  As the weeks progress and their competition thins, the bachelorettes start to feel enormous pressure to say, “I’m falling in love with you.” It signals to the Bachelor that they’re here for the right reasons, plus it’s one of the easiest ways available to them of ratcheting up the intensity of their connection. It’s never “I love you,” always “I’m falling in love with you,” a little less definitive. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there. Falling. It’s a journey.

  And what’s crazy is that saying the words seems to make it happen, you can see it on the bachelorettes’ faces, in the moment, the words seem attached to the feelings they name, pulling them up and into existence, changing everything: the words make the feelings real. Chantal, Shawntel, Emily, Other Ashley—I watched each start to fall in turn. And what does the Bachelor think about all these women professing their burgeoning love? Does he believe them? Yes. His gaze goes deep; it touches the souls of bachelorettes. He doesn’t doubt the truth of their words for a second. But he also knows something they don’t. By this point he’s spent a significant portion of the middle of his adult life on The Bachelor. And he’s seen what it does to people. He’s felt it in himself. He knows how the show can make you feel what in the world outside you never would. He knows that cameras make things more real. He knows The Bachelor is a laboratory for synthesizing love from its two most basic elements, bodies and words. He believes the bachelorettes are falling in love, but he wonders if their love will survive the conditions—unreplicable, unrepeatable—of its birth. And it makes him sad to have to wonder this. It would make anyone sad.

  So when Sadie said she saw a darkness at the heart of the Bachelor, I had no trouble understanding what she meant. I saw it next episode in the Bachelor’s eyes, as he stood solemnly gazing this time not at a SoCal vista but at or through a waterfall somewhere deep in the rain forest (the action had shifted to Costa Rica), his purple-blue polo all the way unbuttoned, veins faintly visible on his forearms and neck, and I saw it especially as his gaze shifted downward, first to the waterfall’s churning basin, then to the reddish, muddy ground, finally down to his shoes, his chest, the beating heart within. I heard the darkness, too, in his strangely flat voice, when, for example, later in the episode, he said to Chantal on a treetop platform at the end of the longest zip line in the world, “Can I tell you something? I have so much fun with you” (clearly he was having no fun at all). And it was there in his mute nod, on the dismal group date, in response to Emily’s inexplicable confession that she tended to “sabotage” her relationships. Well then.

  But where Sadie saw “monomania,” I saw sadness and fatigue and frustration, signs of a struggle to hold himself together, as if beneath his otherworldly physique throbbed an inchoate violence. The Bachelor had come on the show with pure intentions—to fall in love, to find somebody. No one who had watched the entire season could doubt that he was here for the rightest reasons. But his conviction that he would fall in love, I sensed, had always been tied to the felt imperative that he must, that he couldn’t afford not to fall in love. He couldn’t allow a repeat of his first season’s failure: it would spoil this season’s redemption story line, not to mention leaving him just as alone as when the show began. And that was the Bachelor’s greatest fear: ending up alone.

  Six weeks in, there were eight women left. That he preferred some over others was obvious. But—because this was how the show worked, because ABC needed twelve two-hour episodes—he had to go through the motions of weighing the virtues of all these women he didn’t care about. He had to fake it. And faking it was exactly what he’d come on the show determined more than anything not to do, hyperaware as he must have been of the general suspicion that the entire show was fake, maybe even occasionally suspecting it himself. It would blacken anyone’s mood to be forced to spend a day exploring a cave with someone you’ve mentally dumped, then listen to her gush about you over a moonlit chicken dinner before you were allowed to dismiss her from your life. You might start to experience the show you were starring in less as an oppor
tunity than as a trap. You might remember similar feelings from your previous season on the show. You might start to wonder, in the predawn light, why you signed up for it all again.

  * * *

  —

  I sat, I read, I looked out windows, I ran through the streets of the city of my youth, I watched my Bulls, I watched my Bachelor, I wrote Maria and she wrote me. I started eating balanced meals. I shoveled my neighbors’ driveways and sidewalks. Now that I was reading the Register every day, I felt a renewed connection with my hometown. I slept well. When I dreamt it was often dreams of flight. (In the only dream from that winter I remember in any detail, because I wrote it down right after I woke up, I was walking through what seemed to be Lawnwood Park—though it was much larger than Lawnwood Park, it expanded beyond the horizon in all directions—when a big bird flew over me and dropped something and I caught it. When I awoke, I didn’t remember what it was—maybe I hadn’t known in my dream—only that catching it was the most important thing that had ever happened or would ever happen to me.) A fissure had opened up in my life, but now I felt myself starting to regain a feeling of—not quite continuity, but unseveredness. I was returning to myself, or leaving myself behind. I think I was starting to feel at home.

  For me, the opposite, Maria wrote. She didn’t know how much longer she could stay in her house. Sam and Jo were getting worse. This morning they’d woken her up at five-fifteen, yelling at each other about root vegetables. Maria put in earplugs—she had finally bought earplugs—but she couldn’t sleep with them in, so she read. She’d recently started a memoir about a man’s obsession with a pair of peregrine falcons. At the time the book was written—the 1960s—it seemed likely that peregrines would go extinct, largely due to massive-scale DDT poisoning and other effects of the agrochemical revolution; and the book, Maria wrote, had something of the feel of a fierce and ecstatic elegy. The author was a mysterious figure. He apparently lived his entire life in the same small town. He married, but had no children. Did he have friends? He worked either as a librarian or as a manager for the Automobile Association—or possibly for a fruit juice manufacturer, no one was sure—and spent his spare time cycling through the countryside and translating it into crystalline prose. No one knew when he died, or how, Maria wrote.

  She read for several hours, took a shower, and walked to the Institute of Arts, something she often did late mornings, to look at, along with a few other works, Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals. She’d always been strangely comforted by the murals—their clean lines and symmetry and their mysterious integration of human and cosmic scales—but now their depiction of autoworkers on an assembly line, which had always struck her as joyful and ennobling, a celebration of human ingenuity and accomplishment, took on a disturbing, sinister aspect, becoming a prophecy of the city’s imminent decline, which stood in for civilization’s. What she found especially haunting, she wrote, was the downturned gazes of the autoworkers, each intent on his own assigned task, unaware of the gleaming machines that towered menacingly on all sides—that and the giant fetus encased in the bulb of a sprouting plant, which instead of symbolizing fertility and life seemed to be cowering from it.

  As she made her way to another room, she heard someone calling her name, and turned around, and standing there was her first boyfriend, Roger. She’d dated him for two years in high school and hadn’t seen him in a decade. He looked exactly the same, she wrote. He was almost thirty but looked eighteen. They hugged, and she asked him how long he’d lived in Detroit, and he said he didn’t live in Detroit, he lived with his “beautiful wife” in New York City, if she could believe it, he was only visiting for a few days, to attend a conference on aquafarming. He was looking to get into aquafarming, he said, did she know what aquafarming was? So we talked for a while about aquafarming, Maria wrote, and made plans to meet up for dinner that evening, which ended up being at the same sushi restaurant I took you to when you were in town.

  Well, she continued, I felt very, very weird. I was sleep-deprived and still unsettled by the murals and sitting there with this person who for two years of my life had been closer to me than anyone else in the world and now was a total stranger. And at first it was interesting, it was sort of exciting, to talk with this apparition. We gave versions of the stories of our adult lives, but I could tell he wasn’t really listening to mine, he was way more interested in telling his. So I listened as he told me how after college—he’d majored in political science at Princeton—he enrolled in the Peace Corps in Tanzania, which is where he met his wife, an Australian, one of those perennial Australian tourists. He’d always enjoyed telling me, when we were dating, that he wanted to dedicate his life to helping “the less fortunate,” but his wife convinced him the best way he could do that was to go to business school, where he discovered he had a talent for algorithms or bullshitting or whatever, and before he knew it he was working for Lehman Brothers and living on Park Avenue. And from this point forward, Maria wrote, it was like he was reading from a script: the job, at first exciting, became soul crushing; likewise the money; the marriage became a functional arrangement at best; and the past two years he’d spent in secret torment, daydreaming of ways to start over. The undercurrent running beneath it all was that he wasn’t to blame for his unhappiness: his wife was. He was a casualty, a victim. His wife didn’t even know he was in Detroit, she thought he was at a meeting in Amsterdam, because he knew if he told her about his plans they would immediately seem ridiculous. And so they are, Maria thought as she nodded in fake empathy and polished off her second California roll.

  He was obviously hoping I’d invite him to my house, but I ordered him a cab and practically pushed him inside (he was pretty drunk) and walked back home feeling as though I were moving through a nightmare, Maria continued. And the first thing I see when I get back is a note—a letter really—on the kitchen whiteboard, signed Jo, concerning waste separation. Our house adheres to a byzantine system of trash, recycling, and compost, Maria explained, and apparently (so Jo alleged in her note) someone had gotten lazy: plastic bags did not go where crunchy plastic went, and crunchy plastic did not go where carton plastic went, none of which, it went without saying, went where glass or cardboard went. Plastic caps were acceptable if attached to their containers. Metal caps went with the rest of the metal. Next to her note Jo had thumbtacked several incorrectly sorted specimens, labeled with sticky notes.

  It’s hard to explain what happened next, Maria wrote. I felt a sort of outrage that was also a performance of outrage, which was actually pretty enjoyable. And before I knew quite what was happening, what I was doing, I was carrying the compost and trash receptacles upstairs, then dumping their contents on the stairway that led to the bedroom shared by Sam and Jo. I’d never done anything like that in my life! Of course Sam and Jo were furious, but I felt sort of great. In fact fantastic. The only thing is that now it’s generally agreed that I need to leave this house. Any ideas for a place to live, even if only short-term?

  I went for a run to see if when I came back Maria’s email seemed less like an invitation for me to invite her to live with me in Des Moines. In spite of the intensification of our correspondence, the idea disturbed me a little: that she would want to live with me didn’t fit with my conception of her as defiantly independent. At least as strong as this concern, though, was excitement at the prospect of living with her, which by the time I got back from my run I was certain she had suggested. Then again, did I want to live with anyone? I was coming to enjoy my solitude, my space; I wasn’t sure this era of my life, the post–Ashwini Era, had run its course. (The couple of times Ashwini and I had talked, we’d managed to avoid discussing our status, but our relative silence for a month and a half said more than either of us could on the phone.) More than this, I didn’t trust my desire, was maybe a little afraid of it. No doubt a part of me didn’t want to risk the pain I would feel if things didn’t work out.

  I rewatched
episode six of The Bachelor, walked the route I had just run, showered, made and ate an enormous salad, wrote an email to my parents (“Things are good…”), read a few articles from the day’s Register—“SUV plows through house, kills woman,” “Tree-killing gypsy moth spreads at rapid pace,” “Iowa soldier loses portion of leg,” “Meatless days bedevil producers.” The commodity price spike appeared to be general. A tank full of anhydrous ammonia was leaking. Detroit was nine hours from Des Moines by car, an hour and a half by plane. I had two options. One, I could invite Maria to Des Moines. Two, I could not invite Maria to Des Moines. But within those options were innumerable sub-options. I could invite her with disarming boldness (“Why don’t you come live with me in Des Moines for a while?”), maybe even phrasing my invitation as a demand (“Come to Des Moines,” or even “Come here”); I could invite her in an ambiguously jokey way (“They say Des Moines is the next Detroit!”); I could hint at an invitation without actually inviting her; I could prod: “Are you inviting yourself to Des Moines?” No option felt right, or each did then didn’t.

  An unexpected text presented a solution. It was from Jess, inviting me to a concert the following evening in Ames. She had an extra ticket, she said, and it would be great to finally see me again. We’d texted a bit since our evening out, but I’d ignored her Facebook friend request and the few times she’d suggested we meet up again I’d always claimed I had prior commitments. If I was a little afraid of falling for Maria, I think I was also a little afraid of Jess coming between me and her. I’d never dated more than one woman at a time and doubted my emotional capacity for it. Plus, ever since I’d told Maria about Jess, whom I hadn’t told about Maria, Jess had come to seem less and less like a person than a minor character in our story. Now, though, I devised a plan that would require Jess’s presence, her reality: I would go with her to the concert; we would dance; afterward, if the night had gone well, we would kiss (up for anything), maybe more; and if after that I still felt an urge to invite Maria to Des Moines, I’d do it; if not, I wouldn’t mention the possibility and we’d continue pretending our correspondence wasn’t a courtship. It was not a well-thought-out plan, but it was a plan, and it felt good to have one.