endgame

“Don’t fall in love with me,” he said.

She couldn’t tell if he was joking. There are men who can’t bear to joke, and then there are men for whom sardonic quips about sex and the sexes constitute the only category of joke they are capable of making.

Either way, the warning came too late. She tried to busy herself with other tasks, to point her affections elsewhere, and when that mission failed, she tried to analyze her feelings away: it’s close friendship. It’s a crush. It’s limerence. It’s obsession. True. It might be or have been one or all of those things. But things can be true without being the truth. Here’s the truth. Unfortunately, it’s love.

She called her former college roommate to ask for advice. The roommate had always been a very good friend and now she was also a very good lawyer, working at the US Attorney’s Office and logging 120 hours per week. She had lost her libido from exhaustion and from being surrounded by regressive arrogant dicks. And even worse than the 120 hours was the fact she had to wear a blazer for each and every one of those hours. But she loved it. She told her former roommate so over the phone: Oh, I love it. Nobody loves it, nobody wants it more than me. And I want the big prize. Attorney General.

In response, the former roommate told the lawyer about the guy she was seeing.

The lawyer listened without comment. Then she said, “You know that you can’t get him to love you simply by trying hard to get him to love you. The way I’ve gotten myself to accept this is by pretending like I'm already loved, which is not always true, and by relishing the experience of loving, which is probably the only thing I can do. I would be wary of going down the “he'll love me eventually” route. I would stick to “i love him and wow how nice does that feel” street.

And above all, don’t sleep with him.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t come up with even one reason not to .. that in itself is a reason not to.”

The lawyer paused for a moment to spread cheese onto a round cracker.

“He takes you to a jazz club and you think it means something. It does mean something, but not what you think. The jazz club, the bookstore, the little Chinese place across town — none of these are places he ever goes with his friends, his colleagues. He’s hiding you. But you don’t notice, cause you’re too busy being doe-eyed about Miles Davis and the fact that he paid for your, what, $13 cocktail?”

The former roommate could hear the lawyer chewing.

The lawyer didn’t mean to be sharp. She had just been passed up for another promotion. What if it never happens, she thought. What if I just keep getting and then barely getting over a cycle of panic attacks from being over-worked, stretched incredibly thin, writing long briefs that someone else will put their name on. Because I know I can do it and I keep betting on myself, thinking maybe this time. Maybe the next. But I’m tired. So very tired. A Swiss Army knife splayed out, taken advantage of.

And despite the cutting tone she took, the lawyer loved her former roommate, her doe-eyed best friend who thought so differently than she did, and made her think differently, too. The only person in the world who had helped her prepare for interviews, cross-legged on the bed at midnight with a stack of index cards: Why do you want to be a lawyer? Tell me about a time you showcased leadership. Why are manhole covers round?

The lawyer, not yet a lawyer, just an exhausted anxious-depressive with armfuls of ambition, had snapped: “What kind of question is that? Why don’t you try telling me why manhole covers are round?"

Then the roommate began, in the dreamy tones of exactly the type of perfect idiot who would in 6 months drop out of college to become a failed artist, and after that, an only-okay waitress .. “Manhole covers are round because once upon a time the world was protected by round-bellied gnomes. Instead of policemen there were gnomes, and instead of prison, if you were bad, the gnomes would send you to the underworld. The gnomes made all entrances to the underworld round, like their bellies, so they could simply roll in and out without any trouble, whereas dogs and horses were stuck. Unfortunately, the gnomes, like mammoths and unicorns, were hunted out of extinction, but their tunnels remain. And that’s why manhole covers are round.”

A decade later, people were less likely to label this personality innocent than ignorant, less dreamy than deluded. But by this point she had already lost her innocence. I’m not referring to her sex life, or lack thereof. I mean simply that she no longer thought of poverty as a memory that wealth would allow her to forget.

He got in the habit of coming over after work to her little studio. She’d make them dinner; he’d watch from the kitchen table: a simply-dressed woman stirring pasta or salad, illuminated only by the light over the stove. The years spent waiting tables and working in kitchens had given her a certain economy of motion — a mildly focused face, an open neck. Clean-smelling hair. A suggestion of sweat.

After dinner, he would stay seated for as long as possible, trying to find a reason not to leave. And then he would stand, awkwardly, trying to get her to bring him to bed.

He made a soft, wet sound, the kind that is made when you’re just about to speak and your tongue unglues from the roof of the mouth.

“You want a cup of … ?” Coffee? Tea? Wine? Body?

She laughed. “Oh, I shouldn’t. It’s far too late.”

The “I shouldn’t” story of sexual attraction is part of a larger turn towards self-betrayal as the preferred mode of romance in the 21st century. The popular porn categories — stepbrother, adultery, allegedly-accidental anal, workplace, age gap, interracial, and “rough” — are all about “I shouldn’t”.

Mild self betrayal can be a form of flirtation, a codependent promise of bigger, harder, longer thicker veinier (etc) betrayals to come. Today’s self buying pleasure with tomorrow self’s identity.

Sometimes this is actually a good and reasonable move. Like using a credit card. You take on two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars of debt to go to law school. You bank on tomorrow night’s sleep to make up for staying up tonight. People say you can’t get someone to love you back, but the thing is, sometimes you can. People say don’t lie. But the distance between self-delusion and self-creation is so dangerously short. What about a lie which you believe is true? Isn’t that what they call faith?

You don’t need me to tell you how they end up, the lawyer and the waiter. You’ll tell me in 20 years. And by then, the only person left to judge you will be the woman you were today, with a target on your back.