twisted tuesday
JUST CALL IT LOVE!
I couldn’t stop thinking. I would wake practically gasping with the need to know things like: Does weather move north? How and when did Prince die? What exactly were the details of Saddam Hussein’s capture and execution? Does Romania have beaches? If there were enough sounds happening at once, would they become harmonious? No, I read, it wouldn’t. It only makes a loud humming—like the sound of a million bees.
I’m listening to Yugoslavian jazz. My skin looks great since moving out, since being able to openly play music in the kitchen, since I return to an apartment that looks anything like mine and not a Hungarian tenement. I’m not dating in the sense that I’m not online dating but I am always wearing a sheer top.
I’m telling people: things are good. They are. I’m not walking around feeling hurt all the time. Instead I’m theorizing about my impact, which you only start to do with intention when your hierarchy of needs is met. It is—my hierarchy of needs is a living family, employment, having a boy to think about, an espresso machine.
I skip a work event and feel guilty about it. There is literally always something to do. I sit with wet hair and a martini and a book outside a bar and do what I always do in public: try and determine if people around me are happy, and try not to feel looked at. Try and determine if I want to feel looked at and by whom and to what end. Marriage, probably, the same flavor of mouth for eternity. Someone broad-shouldered, giggly, someone I couldn’t be mean to.
It had been three whole weeks where I hadn’t been swayed by men one way or the other, which was an entire era for someone like me. No dates, no kissing, nothing exciting in my texts or DMs, no flutter of any kind. I had forgotten, actually, how much I needed it.
I notice, however, and perhaps in its place, the familiar disturbing creep of depressive thought, one that feels random under the circumstances of being so busy there’s not really any time to be depressed, nor, do I think, there is much to be depressed about. But I find myself aggravated and exhausted at the thought of having to feed myself three times a day, having to put on a new pair of underwear every day, which seems too often. The trash is full, the bathroom’s dirty, I have no groceries. I relish sleep so much that when I wake from it I feel sad and inconvenienced. I always wish I was still sleeping.
In my book I read “Maybe happiness is the wrong measurement.”
It felt strange to think I couldn’t be found somewhere, that my life was mostly absent of repetitive themes. That was for later, maybe, when children and married life and Simple Living made a person beg for variation—even act, sometimes, in foolish pursuit of it. When life was mostly remembering, grown people would say; but now everything was doing—constant, various, unsettled.
What I wanted was to zone out inside the lull of people but go unseen, unnoticed, unaddressed. All existing was a performance here, I’d always felt. To be outside—and especially to sit still—was an invitation for critique, or engagement. Though was it? Or was this such a place of self-importance that a person assumed being watched when actually no one was watching. But all around me, I heard tables whispering about each other in hushed observation.
Hannah meets me. I order a gin martini because of how unfashionable vodka is, how besmirched. That’s stupid, Hannah says, when she sits down, just order vodka. She orders a gin martini. I order a burger and she eats my fries. Our server spits, accidentally, in my drink—he’s shy, and nervous. It doesn’t bother me—not the way a lump of toilet paper in a public bathroom would, or hair grilled into chicken, or an eyelash in rice.
She asks if I’d come meet the boy she’s seeing. He’s at Lucky 13 Saloon. We walk about a mile to Park Slope to meet him. He’s 27 but feels much younger. We sit outside. He buys us each a Corona, and I shake him down about his work on a fishing boat in Alaska, and his imminent trip to Antarctica. He avoids my questions. Hannah says Why are you so weird about going? And he says you never know about these things for sure until you’re on the plane. He doesn’t ask either of us anything. Intermittently, the dancers come outside and have a cigarette with the bouncer. Because the bar has one door open to the street, I can see a woman put her cheek down against the bar and lift her ass into the air while men shove wads of ones into her garter. I laugh thinking I dragged Henry in here once, who turned right around and went home. Jackson stood ten feet from the bar with his arms crossed. We watched the end of a death metal’s Battle of the Bands.
I get home and fall asleep in my makeup.
9:30am - I begin work from my bed, making final edits on vacuum sales. Chandon delivers me a magnum, and the messenger also brings up my paper. I read the paper while Peter tells me about the denouement of his last Hinge date. I make us lattes.
12:00pm - I have lunch at Cafe Mado, and do the crossword. I get “FAT” and “USA” and almost nothing else.
4:00pm - Hilary interviews me about my take on honey deuces.
4:30pm - Ochuko and I have a saloon crossover brainstorm on Google Meet. I’m outside a cafe on bad WiFi. What happened with that boy? She asks.
6:00pm - I build a coffee table in my apartment alone, and assemble a record player. I try not to have the deep-seated feeling that these sorts of things were meant to be done with someone else as you build your life together.
8:00pm - I have dinner with two influencers I’ve met at press events. They’re so online I have mostly no idea what they’re talking about. She had no idea who Chloe Fineman was, one says, affectionately, to describe her roommate. I don’t say I have no idea who Chloe Fineman is because it will seem ostentatious. Actually, I feel embarrassed. Finally, they bring up a name I know only to say they don’t like her on account of an article she wrote. I thought the article was extremely well done. I don’t ever know what to call stuff like this, the same girl says about our dinner—like we’re not “friends,” exactly, we’re almost like, co-workers.
God, I say. Such hell, I think, to feel this way around women, when there isn’t even the obvious utility of sex involved that creates a distance between yourself and men. Here, the utility is clout, social climbing, visibility, invites, events: a Cold War. But I know exactly what she means, and say so.
On the train, an ancient woman’s shirt says JUST CALL IT LOVE! in nearly illegible script. Is this advice? We make eye contact over it. I don’t think she knows or has thought about what her shirt says, but I’m deciding that based upon the rest of her outfit—floral leggings and neon orange sneakers of no discernible brand.
While in Maine, Amos and I had texted about how it’s grievous, creeping towards 30 without a partner, because your context is being lost to the person you end up with. You’re losing your youthful trips to Costa Rica, your ambling days of traveling, your spontaneous vacations to Mexico, your celebratory and for-no-reason steak dinners in Manhattan. All your solo vacations—if you let them, though you learn not to—have a sort of sourness to them when you consider they could’ve been done with your future partner. Another move conducted alone, furniture assembled solo with more than one back injury and brutally bruised big toes, and poor Jackson having to carry my 80-pound coffee table up the stairs when it’s finally delivered. There was something sad, we agreed, about a person meeting us when we were so fully formed, so unlikely to take too many shrooms and spiral out on the curb. We’d be gainfully employed, tempered, tired. It would already be time for kids when we met, the exploratory nature would be so much tighter, and economic—more timelined.
When I get drinks with Adam, he seems offput by this. His wife was 34 when she had her kids, he tells me. We were better parents because we were older. He even texts me the next day—still thinking about it, he says—with seven pointers on life, the last of them being: 7. I have total belief in you.
I spend a free night in a hotel with comped dinner, Ubers to and fro, a rooftop pool and champagne in the room, and I bring Molly. Aren’t you glad I don’t have a boyfriend? I text her, and she says I feel so spoiled, I’m kicking my feet. The dinner is atrocious. Our oysters are off and presented on two soaked diner napkins, and when I get my steak and give her a bite she says: “I’ve never had a steak like that before—are those…special spices, do we think?” I think they’ve marinated it in dish soap. I spend the night in the hotel working, putting together saloon. The brand has left a note on my bed, thanking me for doing this, as if it’s an imposition to me, and write, finally: Remember—you get to keep your bedding! Molly and I are dying at the idea of me walking out into the lobby and into a car with all my bedding bundled and spilling out from my arms—a robbery so conspicuous it will surely baffle the hotel staff.
“You won’t marry a deadbeat,” Molly says.
Really? I say.
“A deadbeat wouldn’t propose.”
I have four pickle back shots at Whiskey Tavern and dance in the sort of way that’s embarrassing but doesn’t feel it, because I’m not feeling perceived, even in a halter top, even among men. We eat noodles at a place in Chinatown at 3:30am. I lose my wallet. In the morning, I call and ask if they’ve seen it—What time were you here? The man asks on the phone. Three…thirty…four? I say, in my robe, with mascara all over my face, my friends tittering around me. Eleanor brought me a latte. I’ve already burst into tears once this morning.
I wake up to West Elm delivering a mirror into my apartment. I go to the farmer’s market, buy $16 worth of tomatoes, walk a pair of shoes to Srishti’s house in Park Slope, and another to Emma’s in Clinton Hill. Srishti tells me since our last dinner she’s started reading my writing. I remember in that moment something she said at our dinner I forgot to write down. She said she felt “infinity for her” when describing someone she loved. I couldn’t believe how natural it sounded.
I call my dad on my walk home, but a few minutes in my phone buzzes with a notification from a lawyer at work, the meeting titled “Substack.” “Oh, hell,” he says, “better deal with that.”
I bottom out thinking about it, the dissolution of saloon and my writing being at odds with work. At long last, I’d found a job to justify living in New York—there was a commute every day to the World Trade Center, a coffee on 35 at 3pm, dinners with exuberant, personable PR girls and interviews with designers, events every night in SoHo and West Village or press previews on Madison Ave, venues I never even knew existed. I was learning about 7,000 things every day: new designers, people, movements in artistry and interiors. I felt I was learning the thread through everything. I could see how one thing was inspired by another was made into something else. I was using Wikipedia more than I ever had. In a day I was consuming everything from Jean Lurçat tapestries to Ruhlmann daybeds, happening upon the y2k brand Cyberdog, Trapunto quilting, fazzoletto. I felt challenged, in pursuit of something. I’m so smart now, I’d tell people. It was like the feeling I assume people who love school felt while being in school. Like you were improving yourself, meeting your environment—finally, learning the secret of everything.
I hire a Taskrabbit to switch out my flush mount boob lights for hanging pendants. Michael C. doesn’t speak much English, but tells me my home reminds him of his old apartment in Kyoto and that I play music for a “sad woman.” It’s Santo & Johnny.
A man tries to jump the turnstile while holding a slice of pizza. The plate is so greasy it can’t hold the weight of the slice. I take it from him while he jumps over. I wonder what the ticket fee is for being an accomplice to this sort of thing. $0, likely, for a white woman in a cardigan. A gentle tease from the police officer, and a Where you headed?
I go to a book talk at the Twenty-Two, another members club sort of thing—gilded wallpaper, an elevator made of desilvered mirrors, a man in cummerbund manning the thermal carafes—for a talk on the Empire of the Elite, a “dishy history of the Condé Nast magazine empire.” When they make a joke about anyone from Condé in the room revealing themselves, I do not raise my hand. The author says the media's best operators are assimilationists. He works at the New York Times. Who were the new cultural critics? The room asks. What was the new hierarchy? It remains to be seen, he says.
I read two weeks later in a newsletter: Taste isn’t democracy, nor should it be populist.
There was always such a show in politics, in conversation, in lectures and panels and books, on fourth dates, of disseminating hierarchy, and yet there was—so clearly—the dark instinct of people to want it. We had a desperation for a life that was upwardly mobile, a desire to be better-than, more important, more essential. While that was more on display in New York than, I believe, anywhere else in the world—here it had coordinates, reservations, it hung from Goyards and stunk from between the split toe of Tabis—it was intrinsic to people at large. I hadn’t ever seen that be untrue, I’d just read that it could be from the same people that donated to private universities. My sister texts me: Our sense of personal justice is constantly inflamed.
In my other book, “almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
A brand sends me a pitch: We’re offering a giveaway where five lucky pet parents can receive $15,000 worth of premium pet products. Imagine, I think, trying to store $15,000 worth of premium pet products in your New York apartment.
If life is a journey, the trick is to just take it. Jump the turnstile.
Loved it, Julia. It's interesting how some of these themes reemerge at later points in your life, unexpectedly. (I'm a lot older than you!)