The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (19 page)

A decade later, I calmly reflect on this exchange—on the romance as a whole—as one of youthful misadventure. I rejoice in the gentleman’s current status as a waiter/unpaid blogger on the indie-music scene.

At the time, though, my brash American temper got the
best of me. I reached for the bedside pot of tea and tried scalding bits of his anatomy. Then I hopped the next flight to New York. Which isn’t a cheap fuck-you, by the way. I used up most of the rest of my graduation gift to do so. I had no money left over, and since my parents had the ridiculous idea that college graduates ought to pay their rent themselves, I went ahead and chose the least-expensive option: I moved into the walk-in closet of this guy I knew named Wayne.

Wayne and I had met three years prior in a college elective called Valuing Self: Solo Performance Through the Ages. Within days of my New York return, he and I ran into each other in Tompkins Square Park. I’d gone there to consider whether the homeless lifestyle might be negotiable by any stretch, and Wayne had come to power-walk.

“Sara? Barron?” he’d asked.

He’d seen me crying while lying prostrate on a bench.

“Why are you crying on a bench?”

Wayne’s question was the perfect inroad to a conversation on the injustices of postcollegiate life. I told him, “I just got dumped by that English guy you said looked like Marty Feldman! I have no money! I slept at a youth hostel last night, and when I showered there this morning I stepped in a pile of someone else’s hair! I swear to you, it looked
alive
!”

“I hear you,” said Wayne. “My dad cut
me
off after graduation. It’s totally unfair.”

Wayne’s dad was a wealthy businessman who’d built his fortune on savvy participation in the Indian hair trade.

“He still pays for this class I’m in called Script Yourself,
and
for my rent
and
for a gym membership so I can work on my pear shape.
And
he pays for groceries and a weekly cleaning service. Nothing else though, and I’m like, ‘Well, I can’t
create
art, if I can’t afford to
see
art.’ ”

I nodded sympathetically. I said, “Struggling
is
the destiny of the artist, though. Just like they taught us in Valuing Self.”

Wayne and I tossed around solutions to our respective problems, like that I could sell my eggs or that Wayne could get a job. But these were not realistic options. I lacked the necessary generosity of spirit, and Wayne lacked a willingness to interrupt his PACT.

PACT was an acronym from Valuing Self.

It stood for Personal Art Creation Time.

Eventually, though, and after enough rigorous debate, we arrived at a potentially brilliant and mutually beneficial solution: I could move into Wayne’s apartment, but then in lieu of paying rent, I’d do the cleaning. I’d shirk homelessness this way, and Wayne would free up a portion of his budget.

“But what if your dad finds out?” I asked.

“He won’t,” Wayne answered. “I get a lump sum every month. And all he says is, ‘Just
please
go to the gym. Just
please
work on your pear shape.’ ”

The plan felt perfect to the both of us. The only downside was that Wayne was homosexual, and that this, in turn, meant no hope of trading sex for further amenities. It was a shame, really. I would’ve loved the occasional romp if it meant un-begrudged access to Wayne’s high-end foodstuffs. But as Wayne himself would say, “Why shove a lemon up your asshole if you’re drinking lemonade?”

Why, indeed? I would opt to keep my asshole lemonfree.

Wayne lived in the East Village, which, as a neighborhood, can shift on a dime. Or rather:
in
a block. From idyllic to disgusting. From brownstones and boutiques to bongs and belly-button rings. The apartments do the same. Some are tiny as a shoebox. They are weirdly arranged
with showers in kitchens and toilets in communal hallways. Others, however, are dream-worthy brownstones. They look like how New York looks in the movies. By which I mean like a rom-com kind of movie. Not a gritty drama.

By which I mean
When Harry Met Sally
. Not
Kids
.

Wayne, as I said, was still supported by his parents. Not a little by his parents. Completely by his parents. The situation surprised and confused me: How had Wayne coerced them? How and why had they agreed? I could only imagine that they had done so begrudgingly, and that if Wayne lived in the East Village, he did so on a grimy street, in one of the shoebox apartments.

Please, then, try to imagine the surprise I felt the first time I saw Wayne’s
actual
apartment. His
actually
perfect East Village apartment. For it was not a grimy shoebox. No. It was a gorgeous, light-filled unit in the newest building on the street.

“Jesus
Christ
,” was all I could say when I saw it.

Wayne shrugged. He pointed to a nearby gym. I could see it through a floor-to-ceiling window.

“My dad liked the look of that gym,” he said, “since he likes when I work on my pear shape.”

Wayne then pointed to the balcony. Because there was a balcony.

“I, however, like the balcony,” he said. “I like to use it when I’m PACT-ing.”

I nodded. I said, “I can see why you would.”

The apartment was beyond my wildest dreams. Nevertheless, it was still a one-bedroom. It offered everything in the way of, well, everything, but not much in the way of space. Wayne thought the best way to solve the problem would be to put me in the closet.

You would think I would not want to be put in the
closet. But I
did
want to be put in the closet. Because Wayne’s closet was not just any closet.

Wayne’s closet was … a
walk-in
closet.

We’re talking
in
Manhattan. We’re talking
very
big.

“We’ll make it your own little room,” Wayne said.

“Sounds perfect,” I said. Because it genuinely did. The closet was big enough for me to stand upright or lie lengthwise on my air mattress. I plugged a “desk”-lamp into the outlet and nicknamed the space “A Room of My Own.” That is, until Wayne told me my nickname was ill chosen.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because,” Wayne answered, “Woolf’s point was that a woman should have a space that she has paid for, for herself. And you don’t pay for this yourself.”

“Who’s Woolf?” I asked. “I’m quoting the Indigo Girls.”

This, here, was a nice thing about Wayne: He might not have exchanged intercourse for foodstuffs, but at the same time, he knew enough about ’90s chick rock to help me unravel the threads of my own ignorance.

Wayne explained, “The Indigo Girls were quoting Virginia Woolf. Which is why they called the song ‘Virginia Woolf.’ She believed that for a woman to be an artist, she had to have a space that she, herself, has paid for. A space she’d use for work.”

“Oh. I’m
using
it to work,” I said, and this was essentially true. Lacking a TV for my walk-in closet, I set to work on a solo show that detailed this first year of my postcollegiate life. Its working title was
Mole Woman
, and the process of writing it did the job of a TV insofar as it could alternately entertain me and lull me into sleep.

In my experience, art that puts you to sleep does so because it’s either especially stupid or especially complex.
Mole Woman
was especially complex. If you doubt me, here’s a sample:

WAYNE AND I
lived happily together for a full six months. During those six months, I scored a job as a greeter and shirt-folder at the Banana Republic store in SoHo. Since I wasn’t paying rent, I managed to squirrel away a portion of my income while simultaneously treating myself to my own high-end foodstuffs. I’d do the occasional after-work jaunt through the Dean and Deluca at Broadway and Prince. I’d buy artisanal chocolate bars or loaves of Asiago cheese bread. I would share these treats with Wayne, who in turn would share his treats with me: a mint-scented Kiehl’s exfoliant. A body butter from Laura Mercier.

I was grateful to Wayne for this exciting first go at nonstudent housing. My gratitude was manifest in the zeal I brought to my cleaning. Wayne, in turn, was grateful for my zeal. We had such a good balance. Such a perfect give-and-take. Our relationship was like my initial roommate fantasy from several years before, and it convinced me, for a moment, that living with a roommate could be better than living alone. It
could
be better, but only if Wayne was that roommate. Only Wayne. Perfect Wayne. Always and forever:
Wayne
.

And by “always” and “forever,” I meant until we both had boyfriends.

And by “until we both had boyfriends,” I meant until
I
had a boyfriend.

SO YOU CAN
see, then, why I perceived it as a problem when Wayne got a boyfriend first.

Wayne’s boyfriend was a young man named Tomas. (Pronounced, not “TAH-miss,” but rather the immeasurably more annoying “Toe-MOSS.”) Tomas was, in personality, the Antichrist. He was a hellish man for a wide variety of reasons, but perhaps the most telling one of all was that he called himself an actor/dancer.

If you said, “What is it that you do, Tomas?” Tomas would say, “I am an actor/dancer.”

Nowadays, this slash (“/”) in one’s job title is a common thing to see. The folks who like to use it, they like to seem, well, what exactly? Diverse in their talents? Successful in multiple fields? Ironically, the use of the slash undermines what they’re after, since it mostly confirms a lack of success. A lack of achievement in more than one field. An actor/dancer. A writer/painter. An actor/writer/director. A photographer/painter/designer. The sign of the slash does not mean you do it all, or more than one. It means that you wait tables for a living. Or temp. Or have a parent, wife, or husband who funds the things you say you are. It shows you have a hobby, a thing you’re hoping or trying to be.

In keeping with this idea, Tomas called himself an actor/dancer, yet to earn his money he taught fifteen spin classes per week. Well, combine the self-delusion inherent in slash (“/”) exploitation with the self-discipline involved in fifteen spin classes per week, and it’s like, of
course
Tomas was awful. The first time I met him, I’d recently arrived home from a shift at Banana Republic. I’d been back for, I don’t know, twenty minutes, let’s say, and already I had changed into my cleaning-woman outfit so that I might scour hardened ketchup off a counter.

Suddenly, there was Tomas.

I heard a door and a voice. And turned around. And he was there. And he was
gorgeous
. Tomas had that level of attractiveness that can really bowl a person over.
Wordlessly, it suggested that I should smooth back my hair and set down my scouring pad.

Tomas had a movie-star face and what are often referred to as “washboard” abdominals, and these, the latter feature, were on display care of the white-ribbed tank top he’d worn and tied in a knot at the base of his chest. For my part, I’d been outfitted in wide-legged sweatpants, kneepads, and a roomy sports brassiere. Such was my uniform for cleaning.

I set down my scouring pad and dried off my hands.

“Tomas, Sara,” said Wayne. “Sara, Tomas.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” said Tomas.

“Sara is my friend,” Wayne said. “The one living in the closet.”

“Weird,” said Tomas. “I mean, like, why?
Why
are you living in the closet? And, like,
why
are you even dressed like that?”

This first question from Tomas did not help me like Tomas. On the contrary, he questioned my living situation and my cleaning outfit, and I thought, I know for a fact that I’m going to hate you. But, of course, that is not the kind of thing one can say without looking psychotic. So instead of telling Tomas that I knew that I hated him, I just mumbled, “It’s comfortable. I clean a lot,” and then scurried away to my closet, to a safer place where his evil abdominals could not stare me in the face.

I sat there, alone, in my closet, and channeled my feelings into my work.

“Times were tough,” I wrote. “Tough times were fast becoming my best friends. But I could take it. I was resilient. In other words: I was just a common woman.”

I hadn’t yet decided on the ideal format for
Mole Woman
, and reconfigured the sentiment as a spoken-word poem.

I wrote, “There I was at the School of Hard Knocks / Droppin’ rocks / Of negativity / Rocks: That were holdin’ me down / Bring it, world / Bring the pain / It’s my gain / It makes me tough.”

A week went by, and by the end of that week, Wayne and Tomas were a Couple. They were in a Relationship. How this sort of thing happens at the drop of a hat for everyone other than me, I’ll never know. But the point, for the moment, is just that they were a Couple, and that by the end of
one
week, Tomas had ostensibly moved in.

Wayne, Tomas, and I managed the cramped quarters with a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Wayne bought them off eBay, and left them for me in my closet with a note attached that read, “Hi! I was hoping you’d wear these at night from now on. Just for privacy and stuff. Thanks!”

I told Wayne no problem, and wore the headphones when I slept. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but neither is sleeping ten feet from aggressive intercourse, anal or otherwise. Which is what I did, countless nights a week. Wayne and Tomas would do a lot of intercourse at night, and in the afternoons they’d watch TV. Tomas would leave whenever he had his spin classes, and Wayne would go with him. When they returned, Tomas would set up two yoga mats in the communal living space, and lead Wayne in a series of yoga poses. The schedule was such that Wayne and Tomas would do their daily yoga at the same time that I would do my daily cleaning. Often I would clean around them. Sometimes Wayne would invite me to join in on the yoga, but more often than not, I would’ve just finished a bag of beef jerky, and doing a child’s pose in that condition would’ve been like waving a red flag at the bull of my cataclysmic gas.