Dating Confessions by You "We only had one quasi-date, so it's baffling to me how I can feel so flattened by your disappearance. How could I have been so wrong about the chemistry?"
Dating Advice from . . . Animators by Chantal O'Keeffe Q: Is there a way to enjoy the primitive game of cat-and-mouse without crossing any lines? A: Well, if the mouse starts picking up ironing boards and frying pans...
The afternoon of the World Trade Center attack, I found myself huddled in a small West Village apartment, a cozy place full of campy toys. Across from me sat two new lovers, Canadian-English genus. They were two of my closest friends a boy with the face of an angel (one who had started drinking) and a smart girl ingenue. Just two days before, we had returned, with another friend, from a vacation that had lashed our small group together with all the bonds of intimacy, or to put it another way, falling in love: private jokes, physical touch, shared meals and drunkenness and dancing and singing and long conversations. That Sunday we flew back into New York and back to work. Monday, there was peace and prosperity and the shrug of private dramas falling back in place. Tuesday, the planes hit downtown.
The fourth friend was in Brooklyn, renting a van. He was terrified of biowarfare, and afraid of being a coward. But in that small apartment, between the couple I was with, a smoke of attraction filled the room and my eyes. It's idiotic to feel like a third wheel in the midst of an international crisis, but there it was. The ghost of the love they were about to make crouched on the dining room table, slumped like a gargoyle. Real smoke was everywhere, sweeping up Sixth Avenue. I was crying; we were all comforting each other; the radio was on.
It's the truth about terrible moments, that you think about who you want to be with. All day long, as we passed the laptop back and forth emails and immediate messages, are you all right?, we're gathering, we're gathering, where are you? and punched every number we knew into the now-on, now-off cell phones, invisible hierarchies of love were forming. "If a long lost friend hasn't emailed me by Friday, I guess they're really not my friend anymore," said my best friend. Because of circumstance neighborhood and profession, the fact that most of us were journalists or academics or new media folk, people who got up late and worked uptown the news we were getting was all "good." No one was dead, or rather, thousands of people were dead, but the grieving was mostly secondhand, taking place among our families and friends-of-friends. What we were feeling was something different: panicky fragility. A desire to do something, to be heroic. And a desire for comfort. To be rescued. To rescue someone. To be alone. And not to be alone . . .
The paragraphs above were written just two weeks ago, but it seems like a decade. It's odd how the emergency seems to have sped things up yesterday's insights flipping over, flashing their other side like fall leaves. And now, unsurprisingly, we're at war. In the interim, I've read plenty of articles about what happened to people's relationships in the aftermath of September 11: accounts of awkward/touching calls from old boyfriends; of torrid one-nighters; of bonds cemented by terror and those that shredded apart like a dried sponge. A few of these accounts were thoughtful, but many more were not. Several were well meaning but as empty as the emptiest American self-help book, full of earnest quotes from psychologists and buzzwords like "terror sex" and "apocalypse sex." (Hooksexup weighed in too, with a roundup in Lisa Carver's column and though I'm of course biased, I do think ours was more direct, and certainly way more straightforward about the sex itself.) I certainly don't fault anyone for trying to write about one of the central experiences of this crisis. It's what journalists do, and I think it's important. And hey, here I am, trying to write about it myself.
Still, reading these pieces often seemed like staring into a mirror coated in steam. So many of the pieces I read seemed to paint "single" life as unbearably isolated, a cartoonish matter of "coming home to the empty apartment." The unmarried women craved wedlock to the point of mental illness; the single men had been stung by cads' remorse; cats were the only comfort to either party. None of this bore very much connection to the complicated, heightened world I was living in, in which circles of friends and lovers locked in and took care of one another with the devotion of family members where emotions may not have been (as a friend of mine frequently points out) skilled workers, but they were rich and intimate, and, despite painful moments like the one in my friends' living room, satisfying, not empty at all.
Certainly, there was friction. The lines of our mutual dependency lit up like an X-ray, and the choices people made baffled even them: "I feel a little ill," said one friend. "I spent the day alternately fucking and crying. I don't know what to think about that." A man I knew talked to me about his "horrible, powerful" desires to comfort the vulnerable women around him. Some people felt vertiginously physical; for others, sex turned off like a yanked faucet. But that theoretical split between atomically unhappy singles and bonded-into-one couples wasn't what I was witnessing, or experienced myself. What I saw (and felt) was wilder, and deeper, and more confusing, the way intimacy often is.
On the Friday three days after the attack, I met with friends for what were supposed to be "quiet drinks." But the drunker we got, the less quiet it was. Maybe we were sick of asking each other how we were. Maybe we were angry or relieved, or just tired of analyzing everything. In any case, we were in midtown Manhattan, which felt strange dangerous and safer all at once and suddenly we were all dancing, embracing one another and showing off. It was a no-consequences sort of night, full of the kind of flirtations you can have without wrecking everything in sight. The angel was there; so was the ingenue, and the fourth party, handsome in his dapper suit; plus five or six others, taking over the place. The cabaret laws, so stringent in Giuliani's New York, were tacitly suspended. Our friend Terri, an extrovert to make us all seem shy, seemed to have melted her spine; she ground up against a group of dancers, grabbing my ass, her black eyes flashing. After days of anxious huddling in sweatpants and CNN, I was wearing high-heeled black mules I'd slipped on thinking, these are shoes I can't run away from danger in. There were little rivulets of guilt, and sweat, but then, not really. My brain turned off. I felt powerful, after a week of feeling powerless. And someone said, Well, this is the way we work it out.
Walking home, my feet burning from the night, I found myself thinking with love not only about my friends, but about my city, in all its largeness and strangeness: a sad place, but also a place where romantic comedies are conventionally set; where relationships reshape themselves like bonsai plants in the strange small spaces where they are planted; where beauty and style and a kind of high energy coexist, as they did on the vacation I'd just returned from, in a way that can only be called (with sex or without it) romance. In a time of real fear, I want to see that freedom, that range of romantic possibility, that life of both the body and the mind, as strengths, not weaknesses. On my best days, I feel like I live in the perfect home, a city in which, even during grief, two ideas can be held simultaneously, resonating like a tuning fork: solitude and community, autonomy and long-term love, self-denial and hedonistic abandon, danger and safety. On days like these, the sunny-cold days of fall, these possibilities seem to complement one another not in opposition at all, but side by side, like an equals sign turned sideways against the sky.
