None of this was good for the dread. What made me such a terrible representative? Maybe I wasn’t funny enough. Maybe I wasn’t professional enough. Maybe I wasn’t informed enough. I tried wearing heels and dress pants. I read more. I took on more work. I stayed later and came in earlier. When he told me that my stories were bad, boring, tepid, I’d fight for them to get on air anyway. Time after time, they were huge audience hits—dozens of people would tweet that they cried at my stories, that my episodes were their favorites, the best they’d heard all year. I produced a short that won us an Emmy. I taught classes at Columbia. This changed absolutely nothing.
So I tried to be more personally appealing. I tried cracking more jokes and changed the tone of my voice to be flatter and deeper. I changed my tastes in entertainment, music, stories; I listened to the things he liked and started conversations about them. I brought him cake on stressful days and mixed cayenne shots for him when he came in sick. Nothing worked. One day, I walked into his office while his back was turned and said, “Hi.”
“Hello! Good, I wanted to ask you something,” he responded, and then he turned. “Oh. It’s you,” he sneered. “What?”
But even though the dread grew until it was constant and hysterical in the back of my head, there was a positive side effect. I did become more meticulous. My work got better, I became a better editor, and I was damn proud of most everything I created. After another major show tried to poach me, TAL gave me a raise that allowed me to drown the dread in expensive cocktails at parties where celebrities I never had the courage to speak to twirled braver and prettier young women on the dance floor. I leaned my cheek against the cold taxi window on the way home, turning up my headphones to keep me awake: Started from the bottom, now we’re here.
* * *
—
And the dread gave me one more gift: It kept me on Tinder and OkCupid. It whispered that my looks were fading, the circles under my eyes were getting darker, and I’d better settle down quickly before I lost the cachet of youth. So I went on bad date after bad date—fifty in a year and a half. I came up with techniques to maximize the dating experience. Changed up my profile a hundred times. Used a photo of my face, then switched to a photo of just the back of my head. I vetted men on Skype dates before in-person ones so I could quickly weed out the creeps while saving money on beer.
One day, I matched on Tinder with a cute man carrying a Christmas tree. Joey was genuine from the beginning. After our first date at a local bar, he texted me Every. Single. Day. No games, no withholding. He invited me to everything. He told me without reservation, surprisingly early on, that he loved my nose, my fingers, my brain. He loved that I was always researching something new—the ethics of immortality, Afrofuturism, Chinese traffic jams—and we debated these topics for hours over dosas. He had fascinating and nuanced perspectives on everything because of his history as a former soldier and his current work as a speech and debate teacher.
I loved that Joey was capable of wide swaths of empathy for seemingly everyone. I loved his exotic-to-me Queens accent, the way he said “How ya dough-in?” and “Hey, boss!” at the bacon-egg-and-cheese guy at the deli. I loved that years ago he’d run a radio station in Afghanistan. I loved that now he spent his days reading Ayad Akhtar and Warsan Shire, searching for passages for his Black and brown students to recite during tournaments. I loved that he opened doors for old ladies and picked up litter and ate dinner with his parents at least once a week. So of course I buried my crazy deep down inside and pretended I was the marvelously sane girl of his dreams.
Three months into our relationship, he looked at me funny and said, “I feel like I still can’t put my finger on you.”
“What? What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t know,” he frowned. “But I’m sure something is. I still don’t really know what’s wrong with you. What are your insecurities? What makes you anxious? I want to know you, the good and the bad.” He sat across the couch from me, boring holes into my head with his intense stare.
“But what if you learn that you can’t deal with it? What if you hate the bad?”
“Then it’s helpful, isn’t it? If we decide we really hate each other’s flaws, we can move on without wasting our time. Tell me what’s up so I can actually answer that question.”
Logical. Sensible. Terrifying. But I couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. I asked for more whiskey, and he poured me a few fingers of the good stuff.
“Okay, fine. You wanna know? You really think you wanna know? Well, here it is. First of all, I have an abandonment complex. Obviously. My mom left. My dad. Then everyone else.”
“Yeah, I got some friends in similar situations. It’s really tough. I hope you understand that none of those losses were about you, though.”
“Sure, whatever. And I need constant reassurance. I’m really insecure. And I have a really hard time trusting anyone. And I sometimes get really involved in work.” I went on for what seemed like forever, laying out all of my greatest shames, the things that I hoped I could hide for another few months, at least. He remained terrifyingly poker-faced the whole time, and I guessed he’d tricked me into digging my own grave. At the end, he absorbed my failings in silence for a minute and then nodded.
“Okay. Is that it? Yeah, sure.”
“What do you mean, ‘Yeah, sure’?”
“I mean sure, that’s doable.”
“How do you know? Maybe it’s not.”
“I don’t know, there’s a lot of trauma and abandonment and anger around here. Your issues are solidly within my wheelhouse. Thanks for telling me. It’s good to know, and I think we can make it work.”
“But maybe you’ll get tired of it. I mean, I’ll still work on my shit. I promise.”
“Sure, and I’m glad for that, thank you,” he shrugged. “But, you know, it’s okay to have some things you never get over.”
It’s okay to have some things you never get over. In the span of half an hour, this man whom I had known for less than a season did what nobody in my life ever had: He took all of my sins and simply forgave them. He didn’t demand relentless improvement. There were no ultimatums. He asserted that I was enough, as is. The gravity of it stunned me into silence. Joey was the opposite of the dread.
* * *
—
He asked me to move in with him two months later. We went through with it on our one-year anniversary. He talked constantly about our future together, our children. Nobody I dated before him had ever considered marriage. They didn’t even want to make travel plans eight months ahead of time. Joey wanted to know what clubs we should join at the senior center in forty years. He thought shuffleboard might be the ticket.
And so, somehow, I found myself living a perfect life: my dream job, my dream man, a big rent-controlled apartment we finagled through a friend. We had a beat-up car, and we bought the good olive oil. Combined, we had a respectable library of graphic novels. We went to an animal shelter, and became a happy little family: me, him, a mischievous cat.
And, of course, the dread.
Yes, it stayed, darkening my whole chest every day. Still, I thought, we could coexist, me and the dread. In a way I owed everything to it, didn’t I? All of it—even, eventually, its counterbalance. Joey said it was okay to have things you never get over, right?
It might have gone this way forever.
If I hadn’t lost the thing that allowed me to believe that everything was fine.
If I hadn’t lost work.
CHAPTER 10