Thankfully, I am very busy. Work assignments come just as quickly as they go, twelve and twenty inches filed here and there on end-of-the-year best-of lists, new hot spots to visit in the city for the holidays—all of which I treat with the importance of Watergate. That is, in between making light conversation with Katherine about the excruciating details of my divorce/parents’ remarriage/new city/new roommates/new job/hypochondria.
“I don’t look like I’m dying,” I ask by way of small talk. “Right?”
“Nope,” she says cheerily. “But if you do die, could you file that New Year’s Eve roundup beforehand?”
She makes me laugh hard, the one thing in life that has always made me feel sane and whole.
“Just tell me if I’m freaking you out,” I say. “I realize I can be a bit much. Like if you need me to tone down the ‘Do I look like I’m dying’ questions to once an hour.”
“Not at all,” she says. “I think everyone pretty much feels like they’re dying their first few weeks in New York. It’s kind of part of the city’s charm.”
The mental turmoil of all my coinciding life changes has caused my body to shut down and the effects are showing. Every day, some mysterious new skin problem emerges. I haven’t had my period in months, which has never happened to me before.
Honestly, when I got off the birth control pill a few months earlier—since I figured I’d be using condoms from here on out—I didn’t anticipate the havoc that the change would entail. Huge clumps of cystic acne started appearing on my chin, small white dots appeared on my stomach, discoloration marked my forehead. And month after month, no period in sight. I began praying for blood spotting.
I spent thousands on doctors and specialists, and I finally had to accept that maybe there might be something to the “extreme stress” diagnosis I kept receiving. One doctor practically shoved antidepressants down my throat, but I googled the side effects and flushed them down the toilet.
“The worst part is I’m all skinny and hot now,” I prattle on to Katherine. “But I have to put on like a pound of clown makeup to cover up my face.”
“Yeah, but that’s just a pain in the ass,” she says. “You look totally fine. I bet you’ll be dating some new guy in no time.”
“Are you seeing someone?” I ask.
“I was seeing this one guy,” she says, as she hands me some faxes to see if there is anything worth pursuing. “But he told me he wanted to ‘branch out.’ ”
“Oh God,” I say. “I hate that. I’ve just given up on men entirely.”
“That’s good,” she says. “Giving up on men will help you file this hot breaking story on Christmas Web Santas.”
“Oh definitely,” I say. “By the way, you know who loves Web Santas?”
I open my email and click on a picture of Scott with the Yacht, who is now talking about flying me out to Arizona to take in the Fiesta Bowl. “This guy.”
“Yeah, that guy is definitely all about Web Santas,” she agrees. “Is that your boyfriend?”
“Hardly,” I say. “But I might spend New Year’s with him.”
Before too long, Christmas is upon us at the office.
Katherine offers me a seat at the dinner table at her parents’ home in Connecticut in case I get lonely, but I spend the day collapsed on the yuppie lesbian couch in Park Slope instead. I call twenty gyms near me because I figure since I don’t have a boyfriend, I can at least work on a potentially tight body for the benefit of one— because I have awesome priorities. But all of them are closed.
“I think most people are with their families,” one man says.
Yeah. I got that.
I hang out with Jonathan Ames a few more times, but I notice something. I don’t enjoy it as much when I’m not tipsy. He’s fine, of course. But there’s no real connection. I hate that about daytime sobriety. It just makes you feel so present.
The only thing I have is my career—and I am determined not to screw that up, too. Which, by the way, a tip: If you suck at dating, you’ll be aces at writing about it.
At work, I pitch a story about some new dating site that specializes in catering to hipsters and nerds. I find out that the Dungeons & Dragons contingent populating the user base is anathema to the most popular girl on the site. She is a textbook normal—like a Pumpkin Spice Latte–drinking, Delta Gamma kegger–level normal.
I interview her, write it up, and then share with Steve the story so far by putting it in his “basket,” as we call the different file folders on our shared server.
He speed-reads, then comes over to my desk and stops me mid-typing.
“You see this?” he asks, pointing to one specific quote in the story where the girl is cringing about how the nerds on the site are attempting to romance her.
The quote is:
“This guy sent me a note that says, ‘You would so be the perfect copilot for my Death Star cubicle.’ I have no idea what that means. That’s bizarre.”
It is pretty funny—her utter disdain for the earnest gamer boys trying their best at romancing a Jennifer Aniston–loving mind. But the rest of my story is filled with tangents and quotes from her about the state of dating in general. It is all over the place.
Steve points again to that quote, in which she makes fun of the geeks wooing her.
“That is the story,” he says. “Right there. Call her back and reinterview her to get more of that.”
I do. With a sense of clarity from having a theme—a direction—I play the SAT “this is to this as that is to that” game with her to find out just how different she is from
