1 Addressing my beloved by a single initial seemed romantic, like the desperate and secretive correspondence of two married intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Lest the meddling postmaster discover our identities and reveal our affair to our vindictive spouses, we will communicate using a code. That code shall be: the first letter of our names.
2 “Jot” is a pretty casual word for the dissertation on emotional dysfunction that follows. Throughout the course of this relationship, I wrote A. epics that he would answer with either a single word (“cool,” “sure”) or a screed on a totally unrelated matter that was currently nagging him, like the impossibility of finding fashionable winter boots or the lack of modern-day Hemingways. I would comb these emails, searching desperately for a hint that they were truly for and about me, and come away knowing only that they had, in fact, been sent to my address.
3 Me: So…
[Beat.]
Me: Are you still there? I’m feeling kind of … I just wonder if perhaps when I say something you could say something because that is called…
[Beat.]
Me: A conversation.
4 Ironic references to rom-coms are a great way to show that you are NOT the kind of girl/woman who cares about romantic conventions. A. and I often disagreed about what to watch. His interests lay mostly with masculine classics from the 1980s, while I tended (and still tend) to want to watch films with female protagonists. Rather than admit that he didn’t want to waste two hours watching a woman’s interior life unfold, he would tell me these films “lack structure.” Structure was a constant topic. He built shelves, wrote scripts, and dressed for the cold weather with a rigor and discipline that, while initially intriguing, came to feel like living under a Communist regime. Rules, rules, rules: no mixing navy and black, no stacking books horizontally, pour your beverage into a twenty-ounce Mason jar, and make sure something big happens on this page.
5 This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.
6 Although he worked a job that involved heavy lifting and hard labor, his true passion was writing fiction, and after much cajoling on my part he gave me one of his stories to read. It was the twenty-page account of a young man very much like himself trying, and failing, to seduce an Asian girl who worked at J. Crew in Soho. Although the prose was unusual and funny, the story sat with me like a bad meal. It took me about twenty-four hours to realize the issue: that I could feel, in nearly every sentence, an essential disdain for womankind that was neither examined nor explained. It was the same feeling I had experienced after my initial read of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in eighth grade: I love this book, but I don’t want to meet this man. But, in this case, it was: This story is okay and its author has already come in me.
7 The first week we met, I slept at his house every night. Time stopped in his bedroom, which was windowless and overly warm. Each day we took a new step together: flossed our teeth, shared a bagel, fell asleep without having sex. He admitted to having an upset stomach. By the time I emerged from his home on Friday morning, we had essentially performed the first year of a relationship in five days. I got on the plane to Los Angeles, unsure of when we’d see each other again. I was pretty sure I’d seen him cry a little bit when he dropped me at the subway.
8 Perhaps, yes, in that way.
9 As an experiment. It was similar to looking at an empty vase or staring out a window.
10 On this trip, my first as a working woman, I was renting a house in the hills above Hollywood. It had been pitched to me as “chic” and “within walking distance of chic things” but was small and damp, windowless on three sides, and had the boxy nondescript fa?ade of a meth lab. Sandwiched between the homes of a failed TV writer with a set of pit bulls and a queer-theory professor who wore a bolo tie and collected Murano glass, I decided that the amount of fear I felt alone in this house was directly proportional to all I would learn from living there. And so I stayed, for five months, calling it growth. One night I put on a nightgown, stepped onto the porch, looked up at the moon, and said, “Who am I?”
11 I remember being so impressed with this turn of phrase that I carefully clocked who I had already shared it with and who I could still try it out on.