Sad Desk Salad (13 page)

Adding to that feeling of grossness is the disgusting but true fact that Peter and I have been playing an elaborate game of bathroom chicken for a few months. Nothing—not the shower, not the mirror, not the toilet—has been thoroughly scrubbed since St. Patrick’s Day. For all his togetherness, Peter has an astoundingly high tolerance for dirt, and I’m just as sloppy as he is. Most of the time we live in barely postcollegiate squalor.

Jane has this grand theory of relationships that certainly holds true for Peter and me. In every union there is one better half. When fights occur, it’s usually because the worse half has done something cheeky and/or selfish (like going out to Coney Island on a Monday night without calling her boyfriend to check in). The better half gets to be sanctimonious and disapproving, but is also held to a higher standard of behavior. In turn, the worse half gets to be resentful of the better half’s prissiness, but he or she also gets to be the fuckup.

However, these dynamics are relationship specific, which is to say, just because you’re the better half in one relationship doesn’t mean you can’t be the worse half in another. When I was with Caleb, I was definitely the better half.

Caleb and I met during our last week of college, at a huge lawn party after all the art majors showed their thesis projects. I skipped the thesis showing (I really didn’t need to see another sculpture made from somebody’s earwax) but made it in time for the first sarcastic keg stand.

I was a regular at the art department parties because I had a thing for guys who thought of themselves as artists. I read a lot of biographies of Sylvia Plath at a tender age, and in college I was overly moved by her relationship with her poet-husband, Ted Hughes: On their first meeting they were so animally attracted to each other that he pulled off her headband and she bit him on the face. After that their bond was not only physical but also creative. They informed and inspired each other’s work.

I wanted that for myself (sans the whole putting-your-head-in-the-oven part at the end, which I always conveniently ignored) and so I gravitated to fine artists. Jane suggested a few times I try dating a writer, but I’m so competitive I thought I would fight with a fellow scribe. Also the art boys tended to be much, much better looking.

So when I got to that fateful art department party, Jane was talking to a circle of guys. I noticed Caleb straightaway because, well, he fit my stereotype: He was hot. He had shaggy blond hair and the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. He was also muscular without being bulky and had a perfectly proportioned tall frame. I was a little drunk already by the time I got there—pre-graduation week was basically a seven-day bacchanal—and so instead of hanging back and waiting for him to talk to me, like I normally would have, I marched right up to him.

“I’m Alex,” I said, sticking my hand out firmly toward him.

“Caleb,” he replied in that slow Southern drawl of his.

After that, things get a little fuzzy. I have a fractured memory of bantering about
Twin Peaks,
of which I had only seen one episode but fronted as if I had seen the entire series. I have a fairly distinct memory of going back to his dorm room that night—which was strewn with a deconstructed bed and filled with packing boxes—and boffing his brains out.

This was atypical behavior for me. Sure, I had hooked up with guys before without a commitment, but at that point I had never had
actual
sex with a virtual stranger. I could barely sleep that night, though I shut my eyes and feigned slumber while he breathed deeply next to me. I figured that it was going to be a onetime thing. It was the last week of college, and anyway, he was much too good-looking and cool to want to be with me. My guess was that when we woke up, he’d make some excuse about the grad party he had to dash off to.

But the next morning he stirred, slung his arm around my waist, pulled me to him, and said, “Mornin’.”

“Hi.” I scooched slightly away from him, afraid he could smell my morning breath.

“What say you and me find some grub around here?”

“Okay,” I said, attempting to tamp down my delight.

That morning he drove me to breakfast at Friendly’s in his vintage Mercedes, and we split a Fribble and talked about our post-graduation plans. He was moving to New York straightaway to pursue his art. He might take a part-time job at a gallery but he didn’t want anything to take away from his work. I read between the lines that work was optional for him, but I didn’t learn about the extent of his family’s wealth until much later.

I told him my plans were up in the air and then we went back to his room and went at it again. After a few more hours of that I returned to my room and checked my e-mail.
Rev
had offered me an assistant gig at their new website, starting as soon as I could move to New York.

Caleb and I were completely inseparable the last week of school, and when we moved to New York I stayed with him at the Williamsburg loft his parents were funding until I could afford a place of my own. My assistant gig paid so little, and I needed to save up so that I could afford the first month’s rent and a security deposit on my own hovel.

The first months of our relationship were probably the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. We had sex incessantly. My job at
Rev
required me to go to indie rock shows almost every night of the week, so I brought Caleb along for companionship and, if I’m honest, booze money. The VIP section of the Bowery Ballroom doesn’t come with free drinks, and I always hated being the only sober person at shows. I never quite felt polished enough to be there—not only at the shows but with Caleb—and drinking and the occasional recreational coke sniff helped me feel like I belonged.

I didn’t have to get into
Rev
’s offices until eleven
A.M
. anyway (rock ’n’ roll hours!) so having a perpetual hangover didn’t really matter.
Rev
was perfectly happy to have a twenty-two-year-old with no real experience write their entire website. I was closer to their target audience than the senior staffers, who had seen Pavement play in their original incarnation—not on their reunion tour. I had no deadlines and no quotas. An assistant editor would briefly glance at my posts before they went live, but that’s about the only guidance I got. The DJing gigs I was doing around town padded out my meager income, at least a little—and they were fun.

But twenty-two turned into twenty-three, and my relationship with Caleb and my job at
Rev
both started to seem juvenile and unhealthy. I felt like I needed to progress in my career, and fast: My mother could only hide the health insurance cash and the winter coats she shipped me for so long. And I really wanted to show her that I could make a go of being a professional writer.

Plus, after that raucous first year together, Caleb and I started fighting. At first I secretly thought it was sort of fun. Our love was so strong that it was violent! We couldn’t help but clash! But then it just became tedious. Our fights were almost always about his behavior; he would disappear for days and I wouldn’t know where he was. I was pretty sure he was cheating on me, specifically with this woman Stacia who ran a hot local gallery and whom Caleb always described as “really centered.” He began sharing with me, constantly, health tips that she had passed along. “Stacia says that I should really be using agave, not sugar,” he told me one morning as I poured him coffee. “That way I can avoid the jagged highs and lows of a sugar crash. It’s really going to be better for my creative process.” I pulled a face and said, “Great.”

When he would emerge from his days-long disappearances, he would just say that he had been working on his art, and if I were a
real
artist, and not some blogger monkey banging out meaningless words, I would understand that.

“Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with your writing,” he told me on one of those occasions. “I don’t really believe in the Internet.”

“What do you mean, you ‘don’t believe in the Internet’?” I snapped. “I remember you spending a whole lotta time posting to your blog and watching YouTube videos of dancing babies just last month.”

“That was then. Now I’ve evolved beyond it. I’m at the point in my work where I really need to focus on my process, and the little things that go on in real time just don’t affect me anymore. No offense.”

I rolled my eyes and fired back something about how
some
of us didn’t have the luxury of disappearing for days to make “art” and that
some
of us liked being blogger monkeys, so fuck off.

The last straw was when my dad died and Caleb refused to attend the funeral with me. That’s not quite accurate: I didn’t know where he was that week, so I couldn’t tell him the sad news in the first place. When he resurfaced a week later, I wouldn’t answer the phone. I made Jane tell him what had happened, and though he tried sending flowers and writing soppy love notes, I stopped speaking to him entirely.

So, Caleb: definitively the worse half. In her relationship with Ali, Jane says they trade off being the better half. Maybe this is why Peter isn’t telling me about the Omnitown deal: He wants to remain the better half forever.

As the tepid water sluices down the sides of my face, the high of Moira’s praise for the page views and my pioneering spirit wash off. I can’t shake the upset I feel over Peter’s sin of omission. From everything he’s shown me over the past year and a half, he’s a genuinely good person, which is one of the things I love best about him. When we moved in together, but before I started working at Chick Habit, we had fallen into what I remember as a blissful weekday routine. If it was really nice out we’d walk several miles home over the Brooklyn Bridge. I would stop by his office at lunch and bring him treats that I had snagged from
Rev:
a signed Spoon CD or a few tickets to a show his friends might like. Work was just work—someplace I spent eight hours a day so I could pay my rent.

I was still piecing my inner self back together after Dad died, but I knew I could always count on Peter. He wasn’t overbearing about his support; he just made himself available whenever I wanted to talk. If I went silent and wet-eyed, he’d reach out and hold my hand.

My schedule got more stressful almost immediately once I started working at Chick Habit—but at least it gave me something other than worrying about my mom to obsess about. It wasn’t just the punishing pace, Moira’s IM tantrums, or the early morning hours that got to me. I was totally unprepared for the sheer number of commenters—Chick Habit has four hundred thousand daily readers and about 10 percent of them are frequent commenters—and how vicious they’d be. Within the first thirty-six hours of being a Chickie, I’d been called “bitch,” “idiot,” “moron,” “retard,” and “bloody fool” (we have a lot of British commenters).

After my first week I spent the entire weekend curled up in a ball, wondering if I had made a huge mistake. Peter convinced me that I hadn’t. Despite the frequent emotional thunderstorms that I’ve been having since that first week, his support for me and my work is unflagging. At the end of a long day he always wraps me in his arms and says some version of the same thing: “You know how much I believe in you, and how talented and smart I think you are. This is a stepping-stone to someplace else, eventually. You will survive this.”

I decide I will call Peter the second I get out of the shower. I’ve been keeping my phone off on purpose so that I could avoid speaking to him, and just surfacing thoughts of my deception and his potential betrayal makes me so anxious that I start shifting my weight from foot to foot. We need to have a real conversation—rather than a series of near misses—so that we can clear everything up.

Even though the Rebecca West video is going viral right now, it’s unlikely that Peter will have seen it. Any site that’s remotely entertaining is blocked by Polydrafter’s notoriously tough IT guys. I’ve never met them, but I’ve heard enough about them that the picture in my head is of an army of movie-ready dorks with pocket protectors, wire-rimmed glasses, and ill-fitting pants. If they found him watching a video of some barely legal girl snorting drugs and going shirtless, he’d probably get fired. So there’s still time to unburden myself without seeming too squirrely.

I turn off the water and grope around for a towel, which I wrap around my hair. I pat myself dry with another towel and, in the interest of time, step back into the black muumuu of death. I scoot back into the bedroom and—in an attempt to maintain a shred of decorum—I put on a fresh pair of underwear. The dress has become something of a security blanket: Even though it’s salty and ripe smelling, it makes me more comfortable and puts me in work mode. Besides, I don’t have any other waistless pieces of clothing that are easily accessible.

The phone is next to my computer, so I head back to the couch to do the hard but correct thing.

Before I reach for the phone I notice a blinking instant message from Rel on my laptop screen and decide to attend to that first. I bet she’s writing to congratulate me about my big, juicy scoop. Despite my reservations about the video, I’m excited that Rel will see that I’ve finally done something truly audacious. I have spent a lot of time trying to sound like more of a badass than I actually am in order to impress her—telling her largely exaggerated tales about nights partying when I worked at
Rev,
about the super-hot guys, plural, I would go home with, when actually there was just one guy, singular (Adrian). I did not, of course, mention the part where my one-night wonder patted me awkwardly on the back while I sobbed in huge, gasping breaths—or the vomiting portion of the evening.

Wienerdog (1:55:23):
Dude.

Alex182 (1:56:17):
Afternoon!

Wienerdog (1:56:54):
What is the deal with that video you posted?