I was struck by the tidiness of the plan. After months of frantic decision making, it was such a relief to have it laid out for me.
I tried to kiss him on the walk to the cab, and he held me off. “Not yet,” he said. In the cab his credit card didn’t work, and I paid drunkenly and showily. I followed him up the stairs to his fourth-floor walk-up. When he opened the door, he called out: “Nina? Joanne? Emily?” His roommates, he explained. As he turned the lights on, it became apparent we were in a studio apartment. No girls lived here. We were alone. I laughed too hard.
Before he would kiss me, he had to pack his bag for a job the next day. I watched as he carefully filled a backpack with tools, checked to make sure his power drill was charged, and examined his call sheet for details. I liked the careful obsessive way he prepared to do his job. It reminded me of my father teaching me to wash dishes. His room was painted red and didn’t have a window. I sat on the bed and waited.
After what felt like months, he sat across from me, one foot still on the floor, and looked at me a long moment, like he was preparing to eat something he wasn’t sure he would like. I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t even sure I was real. When we kissed it was dizzying. I fell back, unsure of where I was or what was happening, knowing only that the part of me that had left had come back, and the reattachment was almost painful, Wendy attempting to sew Peter Pan’s shadow to his body. I was amazed by the fluidity of Devon’s movements, how slick it was when he reached for the condom, reached for me, reached for the light to make it dark.
When we had sex, he was silent, and that, along with the pitch black, created the impression that I was being penetrated by a succubus of some kind. He felt oddly far away, and when I asked for confirmation of his name, he would give none. The next morning I awoke with a horrible feeling he was called Dave.
We spent the rest of the week together. I’d finish work and go straight to his house. We would talk—about movies he hated, books he was okay with, and people he avoided. His misanthropic spirit was apparent in everything he said and did.
“I like you,” I told him on the third night, sitting between his knees, up past my bedtime.
“I know you do,” he said.
He was odd, certainly. He kept his shower cap on the ceiling on a pulley he had rigged so he could lower it whenever it was needed. He had only orange juice in his fridge, and Hershey’s chocolate “because that’s what girls like.” He kept matches by his toilet for when he shit, which seemed both polite and tragic due to the amount of time he’d been spending alone. He spoke of his high-school ex with the kind of lingering bitterness more often felt by husbands who have been abandoned and left to care for multiple children.
After that week, I had to go. To LA, to work. He wasn’t an excuse to stay, even though he felt like one. He walked me to the subway, and I headed to the airport, teary-eyed. I was myself again, and I didn’t like it.
The rest of our relationship (five months) went swiftly downhill. His critical nature proved suffocating—he hated my skirts, my friends, and my work. He hated rom-coms and just plain coms. He hated Thai food and air-conditioning and “whiny” memoirs. What had initially seemed like a deep well of pain caused by unattainable women was actually a Philip Rothian disdain for the fairer sex. It’s become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I’ll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology.
We spent torturous weekends attempting to share brunches and movie dates like people who knew each other. But he wasn’t impressed enough by how funny my dad is, and I didn’t understand what was so cool about his friend Leo the puppeteer. I attempted to break up with him on no fewer than seven occasions, and each time he would cry, beg, and show more emotion than he ever had during our silent sexual encounters or our mornings drinking tea in bed. “You care about me,” he’d tell me. “You’ve never felt like this before.” And who was I to object?
I hauled Devon a lot of places I shouldn’t have, in an attempt to make him a part of my life: dinner with girlfriends, the Christmas tree at the Met, even a family vacation to Germany. (My father asked me to reconsider. I was so afraid on the plane headed there that I took two Klonopin and bought all new luggage on my layover.)
“You can’t draw blood from a stone,” my mother told me—gently, considering she’d had to tend to him for almost five hours one afternoon while I sat in the hotel room contemplating my fate. If I ended this, would I be alone forever? Sure, he hated my skirts. Sure, he wrote fiction about what sluts the girls who work at J. Crew are. But what of love?