It’s different up here, I admit. It smells sweet. We stop in front of a house that is in need of a paint job. The three-story is ready to give—scratched up, mauled over by decades or centuries of wind burns and rain. Two brick tire tracks head up the driveway to an equally beaten garage. We stand side by side. A house and a garage. I want him to hold my hand, but he doesn’t. I want him to kiss me, but he doesn’t know. Trees hover, spilling giant, brassy, fairytale leaves. The house is leaning into the garage. A light goes on upstairs, and we look away from the house and into each others’ eyes. The rock wall has stone bulbs, pressed together like our knuckles.

“Remember Graham’s party?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, and sips his beer.

“Was that the one after prom?”

“No. It wasn’t after prom because my parents wouldn’t let me sleep over.”

“Oh,” I say.

“It must have been that spring. I think you had on a tank top.”

I laugh.

“And you kept asking if I was gay.”

“I don’t remember that,” I say, “but it sounds like something I would have done when I was that age.” I’m not proud, but I’m honest.

“It worked.”

“We were on the stairs.”

“Yes,” I remember. “Graham’s stairs.”

He wipes some of the condensation off the pint glass.

I look at his hands on his beer. “Was it nice? Do you remember?”

“I think so,” he says. “It was ten years ago.”

How much cancer should we postpone today, I ask myself, lying back on the paper that makes obscene crinkle-crinkles when I shift. How many days should we wait, I wonder. I don’t ask them. I don’t speak. I close my eyes and make fists. I stare at the ceiling and hear an occasional snip-snip as bits of my body are cut and laid out like malevolent paper dolls, like malignant origami.

The new one takes me for wine and oysters, and a few hours later, single malts and charcuterie. We talk about the oysters and other important details of the evening, like the herbed gravity bong, the truffled popcorn and the handful of characters behind the bar. When our lips meet our chins do, too. His hands hold my shoulders. My fingers touch is cheeks. We smell like fine grained booze and thinly sliced meats. We taste like smoke and the aftermath of an expensive date with an effusive appetite.

There is only so much you can push someone before they snap back, or in this case, snap away from you. Away from me.

I bet more than half of the women in this room feel fat. The other half is probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I hear British accents and a deep, handsome bass, and the chirp of women in stark black stockings and big-buttoned blazers. Women with frizzy curls in silky skirts leaning stoic against walls, wineglass in hands, jealous and judging. The men are the type who look then look away, always seeking out something newer and better, prettier and thinner with an improbable hint of challenge. These are the men that will never be happy and never know it.

I don’t want to wait to love you, I want to love you now. Maybe this is why I date older men. Maybe this is why I don’t want to date at all.

My last really serious relationship ended in February, 2007.

Since then, I’ve dated upwards of 100 men.

(Okay, that’s a guess, but I bet it’s not far off.)

Since then, I have had unsubstantial relationships with three, maybe four men. Some of them meant something to me and some of them haven’t. I rarely think about The Architect or Mr. Orange. Jon—who was important enough to have a real name—and I still talk. We occasionally go back over what went wrong, which is stupid, considering I’ve moved on and he has been in a serious relationship since we called it quits.

But mostly I’ve dated. There was the Deviled Egg, my best friend’s boss, the Vice Guy, the Owner, the kosher friend-of-a-friend, the coworker, another coworker,  plenty of coworkers, the Asshole, the college friend, the Not Fat Cat guy, the Craigslist Killer, the Williamsburg Waiter, and now, for now, there’s the Writer.

I’ve been, give or take, single since February 2007. I’m coming up on three years of mostly meaningless sex.

And since then, since February 2007, he just jumps from deep love to deep love, a serial monogamist—by comparison—in need of a serious serial killing.

I came home drunk last night and cooked something—a toasted bagel. I put the plate in the dishwasher, threw in some soap, turned it on and went to bed. The hours were all wrong. I was confused and passed out with the bagel on my pillow.

At nine I woke up and walked to the kitchen for water. And I got water—and foam. The entire floor was soaked in foam six inches tall. I stepped in the foam, got a glass of water, and sopped back to bed.

When I woke up at three—yes, three—I went back to the kitchen. The foam was gone and the floor was squeaky clean.

Was it all a dream? I decided to investigate.

The box of dishwasher detergent was empty. The antibacterial handsoap was, it would seem, my drunken way of cleaning the dishes. I must have used half the bottle, which lay in the sink looking guilty.

I turned the dishwasher on once more to rinse the dishes and foam poured out from the machine. “Shit!” I yelled, and unrolled long squares of papertowels on the floor, dancing on them and slipping around. Five minutes of internet investigation later, I returned to the crime scene with a bottle of vegetable oil and a prayer. I emptied a cup of Wesson into the machine and turned it on once more.

The foam stopped. The floor is squeaky clean.

The only downside, I think, is that I’m all out of oil. That and my dishes feel slightly greasy.

I finished Infinite Jest tonight. It’s Halloween—how apropos. It only took my five months and two copies. I would be the P.G.O.A.T. for Halloween, but I don’t have a veil or a crackpipe. Plus, I’m trying to fold a toga out of a sheet. It won’t stay on. Boo!

You need to love me patiently, like you’re whisking in eggs, or else it will all coddle.

There is nothing—nothing—I hate more than this.

I’m his plus one, and he’s deep in conversation with another writer from another publication.

In heels, I’m taller than him, and yet, he walks into the room and because of his stupid job, that (okay, I admit it) I am completely jealous of, people approach him and l0ck him into the type of indulgent, self-satisfying conversation that I can so easily identify because I am, ironically, a publicist, and can spot the body language, the compliments and the fawning.

So I sit here, totally abandoned beside him, watching quietly.

I hate this.

The xx – Heart Skipped a Beat

Can a writer date a writer?

It’s worked before. Take Mary and Percy Shelley. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Joan Didion and John Dunne. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Just kidding.

But this one might be doomed. We’re all drawn-out-drama, all thunderstorms and lightening bolts. You know, we’re a conversational shipwreck—in a good way. But sooner or later, my head might end up in the oven.

You want to lose ten pounds in two days? Day one: raw chicken. Day two: bleach.

Facebook is no place to air your dirty laundry. It should be washed thoroughly and air-dried on Twitter.

You may be wondering why I don’t shut down my career and just freelance write.

I, like every other New Yorker with a hysterical Jewish mother, will offer the same explanation:

Health insurance.

The air is the kind of cold that hurts your lungs to breathe it. It’s the kind of air that reminds me of college bong rips like one big blade cutting down my diaphragm, one big fist to my ribcage.

He asks me what I’m writing. It’s fair. “Just read that,” he says, and points to something I underlined.

“Okay. Apartment hunting in Manhattan is a vain, disgusting affair in which classic Jane Jacobs New York battles unsuccessfully with the gilded spill over of the post 9-11 real estate boom.”

“Not bad.”

“Really? I just threw up a little in my mouth.”

There are other things that turn purple—lamb chops and bruises and watercolor monsters. These are all the shiny ways, not the atrophied purple, like swollen shellfish.