The Significance of Others

by Vic­to­ria Bolf

You know you should not tell your room­mate you want to be set up on a blind date. You know mak­ing it into a joke won’t work, and you will sound whiny and pathetic.

You tell her any­way. You are filled with self-loathing.

One of your room­mates just got a boyfriend. You are now the only one left who does not have one. You think about the way this reflects on you. Per­haps you should shave your legs more often. Per­haps you should stop giv­ing your opin­ion on the Bush admin­is­tra­tion so much. You can change, you tell your­self. You must prove that you are not pitiful.

You feel your­self slip­ping more and more into des­per­a­tion. It has been a year of “I’m the last one left”s. Your remain­ing sin­gle sis­ter just got mar­ried, mak­ing you the last unmar­ried woman in the fam­ily. You are the last room­mate left with­out a man or prospects. You are the last friend left who has not had a date in three months or more. You are the last one left.

Your sister—the newlywed—asks you, at every hol­i­day and birth­day party, if you have a boyfriend. She tries to sound casual, but you can hear the hope in the ques­tion, and the dis­ap­point­ment in her auto­matic response: “Don’t worry. The Lord’s got a great guy in store for you!” As though the Lord were con­ceal­ing Christ­mas presents around the house, and your sis­ter peeked onto the shelf where yours was hidden.

Your father was busy for most of your child­hood build­ing a new fam­ily with his new wife, new house, and even­tu­ally, new daugh­ters. You couldn’t say you missed him, exactly. He bought you ice cream every other week­end until his other daugh­ters were born. Your brother was around, too, and you felt much closer to him. He smoked, like your father. Unlike your father, he let you stand out­side with him as he smoked each evening, chat­ting with you as you looked at the stars. You always loved the smell of cig­a­rettes because of this. You never thought about not hav­ing a father around as a detri­ment to your per­sonal love-life until you saw an episode of Ger­aldo Rivera on the sub­ject. You won­dered if you would end up on Geraldo—or worse, The Ricki Lake Show—shouting “Daddy, you ain’t never been there for me an’ that’s why I cain’t find my baby’s daddy!”

Nonethe­less, in high school, you devel­oped a rel­a­tively nor­mal crush on a tall, skinny boy with no pig­ment. He played the bas­soon and you thought you were in love. You spent all the time you could with him, call­ing him every day until his mother knew your voice, and also knew to tell you, “He’s not home right now. May I take a mes­sage?” You asked him to the home­com­ing dance, and he said yes. Two days later, he told you he’d changed his mind. Hav­ing already bought the dress, you decided to go to the dance any­way. It was the last one you would go to in high school. There are pho­tos of you stand­ing by the man­tel­piece alone, wear­ing the cor­sage your best friend had bought for you, smil­ing as though you really were excited to be there.

“You’ll never find a man if you’re look­ing for one,” you hear one fresh­man girl say to another as you walk past them on the quad of your col­lege cam­pus. You have heard this before, and it still makes lit­tle sense, though it res­onates with other clichés that seem true, like “a watched pot never boils.” You have also heard things like “the early bird catches the worm” and “a penny saved is a penny earned,” which seem con­tra­dic­tory but equally com­mon­sen­si­cal. Your head begins to hurt.

At a party that night, you feel gen­uinely socia­ble, which is unusual. You think your socia­bil­ity might have some­thing to do with the small bul­bous ceramic pipe from which you have already taken three hits of some­thing you have heard described as “chronic.” Why, any boy would be lucky to receive your atten­tions tonight. Lucky! you think as you toss back another Tecate to get rid of the burn­ing in your throat.

At any rate, you feel good, if slightly unsteady in your ridicu­lous shoes. You sit down on the floor, wait­ing for a lucky boy. One named Justin walks past you towards the door. You’ve always thought of him as a sort-of self-absorbed, Ginsberg-idolizing boor, but des­per­ate times call for des­per­ate mea­sures, you think, and this pot is tak­ing one hell of a long time to boil. You know Justin will not say no to a quick make-out, which is all you really want. Afraid that he is leav­ing the party, you grab him by his pre­ten­tious tie and ask, “Are you going home now?” You think it sounds like a more or less inno­cent query, but this is not how Justin takes it. In fact, his com­ing home with you does not occur to you until later when you are both out­side in an alley behind Jessica’s apart­ment, and he is kiss­ing you (you will find out later he has kissed three other girls in that same alley that same night), and he says, “Wanna go back to your place now?”

Your addled brain can muster no com­pelling rea­son why he shouldn’t come back with you. Isn’t this what you want, after all? “Okay,” you say to him. You man­age to drive the both of you home with­out inci­dent, and you even par­al­lel park successfully.

The spindly loft bed shakes dan­ger­ously as he climbs in next to you, but you say noth­ing. You are begin­ning to think of a few good rea­sons why he shouldn’t be there, but you feel it is eas­ier at this point sim­ply to get it over with quickly rather than stop the presses, as it were. You hate to cause a bother. Justin slips off your panties eagerly, kick­ing them roughly to the foot of the bed before they are even off your ankles. Look­ing you up and down, he says, “Well, well, well, look at you.” He is look­ing at the tat­too on your lower left hip. It hap­pened in Ams­ter­dam. You had told your­self that if you made it that far in your soli­tary two-month back­pack across Europe, you would sub­ject your body to nee­dles and ink, though get­ting a tat­too was some­thing you had always found slightly silly. It was akin, in your mind, to the under­grads who take their earnest mediocre poetry a bit too seri­ously. But this would be a mark of your­self to your­self, this tat­too, and only some­one who knew you inti­mately and well would be able to appre­ci­ate it. That was why you’d put it in that exact place—private, hid­den. Cer­tainly the exhi­bi­tion­ism of a shoul­der or foot never crossed your mind. Now you wish Justin had not seen it. You wish you could kick him out of your bed, watch him fall the six feet to the floor. But that would be so rude. You are noth­ing if not polite.

Justin keeps look­ing at your tat­too, even trac­ing it with his fin­ger in a ges­ture that would be ten­der if you didn’t resent him so much. Doesn’t he remem­ber how you lam­pooned him in that review of his poem you did on the school’s lit­er­ary blog? He some­how got the posi­tion of poetry edi­tor, and used it to pub­lish all his own self-important stuff. Your arti­cle said some­thing like, “It seems like he just wants some­one to say, ‘Wow, this really sounds like Dean Mori­arty could have writ­ten it!’” You almost chuckle aloud, remem­ber­ing, but the last thing you need is for him to stop his energetic-but-ineffectual min­is­tra­tions below your waist and ask, “What’s so funny?”

The whole thing is over quickly. Justin is not quite the Don Juan you had assumed he would be, and the ceil­ing being less than a foot above him only makes things worse. “Shit!” he yells, as he slips out of you and hits his bare back over­head for the third time. “This fuck­ing ceil­ing!” Five min­utes later, he is passed out and drool­ing on your pil­low. You find it excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult to fall asleep, as Justin seems to have a ten­dency to sprawl over the entire bed, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to pre­tend he is not there.

The next morn­ing, he sleeps late. He is hung over, as are you, but you can never sleep past eight. The small bed, cinched up to the ceil­ing as it is, forces you to strad­dle him as you attempt to climb down, and it is at this pre­cise unfor­tu­nate moment that he half-wakes with a grunt and clasps you back down onto him. He smells of beer, sweat and semen, and you know you must smell that way, too. Dis­gusted, you dis­en­gage your­self and slip down the lad­der. By the time your feet hit the floor you can hear Justin snor­ing again, hav­ing slipped back into a drunken stu­por. He stays in your bed for an incon­sid­er­ately long time, until any hope of even a semi-civil good­bye is gone. He is just an annoy­ing obsta­cle in the purifi­ca­tion process you have started, pre­vent­ing you from strip­ping your bed of its sheets. You shower twice while wait­ing for him to leave, scrub­bing your­self with near-scalding water until your skin is red and almost raw. You even rub your feet and elbows with the block of gray pumice shaped like a foot.

Finally, around lunchtime, Justin leaves. He pulls on his pants and smiles at you, unem­bar­rassed, as you wait by the bed for him to vacate the room. “Thanks for let­ting me stay last night,” he says lightly, as though he’d merely slept on the couch.

You snort in reply.

As soon as he is gone, you strip the bed roughly, light a stick of Nag Champa and point the fan out the win­dow in an attempt to rid the room of its stale odor. Cart­ing your sheets to the laun­dry com­plex, you keep rehears­ing what you will do. Hot water. Extra soap. Dry on high-heat set­ting. You do not relax until you have fin­ished the laun­dry and inhaled its chemical-clean scent. You re-orient your bed so that the pil­low is at the other end of it. You briefly con­sider tak­ing another shower.

You are in a library, months later, look­ing for back-issues of The New Yorker when you stum­ble across The Com­plete Works of Pablo Picasso. Your tat­too is of a Picasso sketch, “Vis­age de La Paix,” the Face of Peace. It is a woman’s head with an olive-branch crown and a dove, the wings cradling her face. You leaf through the book, won­der­ing how women felt when he took them home and traced the lines of their bod­ies. You won­der about Marie-Thérese, the mother of his daugh­ter. You won­der if Picasso was a kind man, or merely a genius. You sus­pect that he was both, and that he never bruised the ankles of any of his lovers in his haste to remove their panties.

You will move to a new city after grad­u­a­tion. It is a large, bustling, diverse place and you will feel the dif­fer­ence keenly between this and your small uni­ver­sity town. Some­times you will revel in your anonymity, and some­times you will barely be able to con­trol your mount­ing hys­te­ria at the thought of being for­ever alone. This feel­ing will come to you mostly when you are sit­ting in your soli­tary apart­ment, lis­ten­ing to the sub­stan­dard plumbing.

You will flirt with the guy at the cor­ner bak­ery who serves you your almond crois­sant every Sat­ur­day. He will flirt back until one day you coyly slip him a piece of note­book paper with your num­ber on it when you pay. After this, he will avoid your eyes and find things to do in the back of the store when you are there. You will remem­ber how stu­pid his jokes always were, anyway.

Your sis­ter will call and you will chat with your niece, who informs you that she has her first boyfriend. You will be unequiv­o­cally happy for her. A man on the street, prosperous-looking, will stop to tell you that you are “absolutely gor­geous,” then keep walk­ing, wish­ing you a nice day. Another, grand­fa­therly and kind, will admire your “grace­ful swim­ming” at the gym pool. You will appre­ci­ate these sim­ple kind­nesses, this vul­ner­a­bil­ity from men who want noth­ing more from you than your
momen­tary exis­tence in their lives.

Your cat will watch as a pro­ces­sion of wildly var­ied men ring the door­bell to come pick you up on week­ends. These are the men you have met through the online dat­ing ser­vice you joined, or they are the men who hit on you dur­ing happy hour and look under thirty and semi-professional. They will be named Mitch, Car­los, Nikhil. They will wear grey suits, dandruff-dusted cot­ton shirts, or bat­tered Birken­stocks. They will take you to expen­sive, self-conscious restau­rants, pic­nics in the park, or cheap dives before the mati­nee. You will remem­ber read­ing in a dat­ing book that you should “have ques­tions ready, like ten­nis balls you can toss back and forth. If your date misses one, toss another.” You will get the feel­ing you are heav­ing bowl­ing balls at them. “Oh, I don’t con­sider myself that polit­i­cal,” they’ll say in response to your current-events quiz.

“Every­thing is polit­i­cal,” you will retort. “This salad is political.”

They will cough and look around the room or at their feet or at the bot­tle of wine, won­der­ing what to say next. Tak­ing pity on their des­per­ate polite­ness, you will change the sub­ject. At the end of the date, they will kiss you good­night, though any hope of romance, for you at least, will have died hours ear­lier. You will allow these kisses, even when their tongues start explor­ing your mouth, even when they’ve kept you on the porch so long that it seems the only way to get to your wait­ing bed is to take them with you. The weeks fol­low­ing such nights will be spent screen­ing your calls, duck­ing behind cereal dis­plays when you think you see them in the mar­ket, and toy­ing more and more with the pros and cons of celibacy.

You will go on a sec­ond date with grey-suited Mitch. He has a Master’s in Engi­neer­ing and smiles too much, you will dis­cover. He will be the best of the lot, but you will not be able to get over his rude­ness towards the waiter or the smarmy way he swishes the wine around in the glass. He will ask con­fi­dently if he can come upstairs at the end of this date, and you will hesitate.

“I sup­pose,” you will say, annoyed with his self-assurance. Mitch will fol­low you closely up the stairs, a hand on your lower back. He will put in a movie like he owns the place, then sit on your couch and pat the seat next to him, as though you are a dog. Not fif­teen min­utes into the film, he will lean across the couch and nuz­zle your ear for a moment, then start caress­ing your shoul­ders and torso. When his hand slides up your shirt and unclasps your bra, you will sud­denly push him off of you, off of your couch, in a burst of deci­sion that sur­prises the both of you.

He will sit, stunned, for a full minute on the floor while you blink at him. “I see,” he will say finally, as though you have explained some­thing to him. “I see.” And then he will get up and leave with­out another word. You will sit on the couch for a while longer and then go stretch out on your bed with­out chang­ing your clothes, savor­ing, for once, its empty expanse.

You will read the Sun­day paper in its entirety the next day, and put blue­ber­ries and extra honey in your oat­meal, feel­ing like you are try­ing to make some­thing up to your­self. You will catch your­self smil­ing, beset by some pri­vate satisfaction.

The next week­end, your sis­ter will visit, leav­ing the kids at home with her hus­band. This means you are to have “girl talk.” You will go out for cof­fee and sit on the patio, shar­ing a pas­try. “So how was that sec­ond date?” she’ll ask between bites.

You will watch her pick up crumbs with her fin­ger­tip for a moment before reply­ing. “Well,” you’ll begin, “I found out he has a Master’s in Engi­neer­ing.” You won’t be able to explain fur­ther, though, because you’ll start laugh­ing, chuck­les that evolve into deep belly laughs, until you are bent over the small table, gasp­ing for breath. Your sis­ter will smile at you, faintly con­fused, toy­ing patiently with her paper nap­kin as you wipe the tears from your eyes with the back of your small, strong hand.