Around the time I met Alex, MySpace was exotic and alluring: I spent a lot of time that Christmas weekend arranging my “Top 8” friends for my brand- new Comedy Profile, and I put my friend’s band in the first row, because I thought that showed off how cool I was. But that only took thirty seconds, even with my parents’ crappy internet connection, and in that time, no exciting stranger had found my profile and noticed how cool I was. So, I set out to click around the site’s expanse and soon found myself sifting through the pages of my friend’s band’s “friends.” Maybe there was somebody else who liked this band who would think I was cool. After all, we liked the same band, r ight?
Go ahead and reread that paragraph and hit yourself in your own face with a frying pan every time you read the word “band” or “cool.” That’s an approximation of how embarrassing it is now to look back and see the criteria that fueled my search for a life partner. Because, in truth, I only
sort of
liked that band. I wanted a new boyfriend, I wanted him in the time it took a page to load on Safari, and I was excited at the possibility of this sparkly new website being the missing link between me and the person I always wanted to find.
Alex was friends with my friend’s band. I found a thumbnail photo of a handsome, sharp-featured guy wearing glasses when I perused that page, and I clicked on him. He was even better-looking when the photo got bigger. I saw more photos of Alex. He kept getting hotter. Everything about his profile looked great, but that’s because I was skimming it for references. He seemed funny. He liked the same TV shows as me. But according to the location underneath his age, it said that he lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What? Why? That was weird. But maybe Tulsa wasn’t
that
far away.Was it? I had no idea. I’d never been there, or looked for it on a map. I decided not to worry about it, and clicked “Add as Friend” under his handsome face, thinking it was like throwing a seed out the window of a speeding car, with limited investment in the possibility that it sprout into a tree one day. I got a message back from Alex within the day: “Hey, funny girl.”
And then the seed became a tree.
WE E-MAILED
back and forth for a while, and that lead to IMs, then texts and calls. He found my website and he liked my work, going as far as to pay me what was the ultimate compliment coming from him: “I keep getting indicators that you might be the female version of me.” And on the surface, we did seem to have a lot in common, but only in the way I scanned his profile for proper nouns, like bands and movies. Alex was a music critic and a pop culture savant, which I loved about him, but I was also at a stage where I didn’t realize the relative importance of things like musical taste and opinions about TV shows in the grand scheme of two-person compatibility.
After our first phone conversation, I wound up at a party at the apartment of one of Alex’s New York friends—another fan of that same band, which seemed to attract a lot of people of a similar ilk. Bands are social; they’re not like comedians. Band members hang out with one another after shows, and there are parties and hookups and fun and other things that make me nervous and sort of jealous of people less neurotic than me. I guess it’s why I glommed on to those guys, groupie-style, after my breakup. It all symbolized some kind of social opportunity. And nobody will go to as many parties or be more open-minded to hanging out with random jerks as the recently single. People who’ve just gotten out of relationships are constantly trying to prove to themselves how much they were missing out on before.
I was psyched to be at that party, even though I was flanked by a bunch of hipsters with whom I’d never be able to sustain a conversation longer than “Cute shorts,” “Thanks.” But at least I wasn’t home alone, online. I called Alex the next day to tell him how funny, what a coincidence, and pretended that I hadn’t gotten a wretched impression of that whole scene. I felt like now I was
in
, even though those people—his friends, I assumed—were alien and awful.
Soon, Alex and I were talking on the phone every day. I got to know his routine; he would take me with him when he went to buy his menthol cigarettes at the Circle K, and I would talk to him on my walks home from shows.We would text each other constantly while we watched the same thing on TV. We got to know one another, sort of, and I became comfortable chatting on the phone beyond figuring out a time and place to meet up, which is what I usually use the phone for, when I’m not texting. With Alex, I’d created the perfect boyfriend whose only flaw I could think of was that he couldn’t touch me, and I would voraciously debate people who wondered if I chose him because intimacy freaked me out.
You can’t say something that direct and honest and totally true to people in a long-distance situation. They will get defensive, and tell you all they want
is
intimacy, only they’ve been painted into a corner of having to cope with the God-given circumstances of not being physically near the person they want more than anything. But those people are full of beans, and so was I. Distance was what I wanted and needed at the time: the perfect conversation
was
the perfect boyfriend, and that’s what Alex gave me, often.
I loved talking to him. I snapped to attention when I saw his name lighting up my phone screen, and we spoke every day, and before we went to bed—sometimes until my phone got hot against my cheek.
Alex had an amazing speaking voice, and he’d call me “babe,” in this flippant way that was so sexy I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t have experience taking to guys who didn’t hem or whine. Maybe it was the Southerner thing. Alex was irresistibly gruff and deliberate, and even when he made jokes you could hear in his tone the makings of that wrinkle he had in all his photos: the little vertical line in between his eyebrows, a result of knitting them in terse thought.
I spent my days in reverie, thinking about how one day, Alex would be in New York, and how we’d fall in love, and we’d be able to call it that, because we’d be off the phone and in person, like real couples who live in the same town and know what it’s like to look at each other’s actual faces, and not at their photos, when they’re talking. Oh, and there would be bonkers sex. Because this guy was—by
far
—the best-looking guy I’d ever had any kind of interaction with in my life. At least that’s what it seemed like from his photos.
Obviously, there were huge gulfs of difference between us that extended beyond physical distance. But unlike Patrick, whose Santa-channeling mom gave me the “I Don’t Belong Here!” jitters, Alex’s Southernerness drove me bats in my pants. He told me that he was a bad kid in high school who got into trouble a lot, hoping that it wouldn’t “freak me out,” which it didn’t, unless “freak me out” was slang for “ruin my panties” in his part of the country. He talked about himself—his goings-on, his worldview, his opinions—and I took it all in the way geeky kids read comic books. He had stories about going to this party, or seeing this band, or bartending this wedding for his catering job, and even the mundane stuff about his life seemed like field reporting from Where the Cool Kids Are.
For everything he had to say, I was at attention; rapt and flattered that somebody as hot as Alex was paying attention to me. I mean, he was just so fucking hot. I was used to “quirkylooking,” or “funny, so it makes him cute to me.” This guy was just out of my league.
I tried so hard to show Alex that I knew about stuff too—I could reference old movies and albums he thought were hilarious. I made jokes and laughed at his, even though they were more referencey than funny, as in, “Look at how I remember this terrible band from 1978!” or, “Check it out! I’ve seen
Cannonball Run
!” He wasn’t funny the way people who can really make me laugh are funny—people with a surprising insight, a unique point of view, or access to footage of a cat falling into a toilet. I knew I was funnier and smarter than Alex, but he was cooler and way better-looking, so I tried as hard as I could to use the resources I had to make him like me.
After three months of whatever long-distance intimacy we’d established, I gently initiated more provocative conversation. I didn’t start a phone-sex session or nothin’, but I made sure he knew, in my inimitable way, that I was growing impatient for him to fuck my mouth before it got warm outside. I told him before going to bed one night that I had a doubleD-cup bra, and I remember hearing his voice waver, and then get quiet in a way I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t want to keep pressuring him about when he was going to come and visit me, because he dropped the subject whenever I did, until I finally said that if it was about money, I could pay for his flight. I don’t know why I said that, because I couldn’t. I was in grad school for illustration (which is a genius idea if you want to make money and also it is Opposite Day) and juggling two part-time jobs. But I had some savings, and I was dying to meet him. I was also eager to classify his reluctance to set a date and time as something that had nothing to do with his being too nervous to go through with meeting me in real life. It was more attractive to me that he was broke than scared, though it turns out he was both.
Alex called me back the morning after I described my breasts and asked if I was serious about buying him a ticket, and that’s when I realized he was shit-poor. But that revelation receded into the background so “The hot guy is coming to New York!” could take center stage. I went ahead and bought him a plane ticket.
All of my girlfriends told me not to do it, that it was doomed. But Nate understood—he’d seen Alex’s photos too. And I knew deep down that it made sense to fly him out here because I wanted that badly to see what he was about. But Project Alex had only made me crazy, not stupid. I was still wary of a thirty-two-year-old man who couldn’t afford a domestic plane ticket with five weeks’ notice.
Those five weeks went by like the last two hours of a temp’s workday. We texted each other more than we usually constantly texted each other, about how much we couldn’t wait, how we wanted “this” to be “something,” and other things you say to strangers you’re convinced you will love soon but do not want to scare with soothsaying.
THE DAY
finally came, and Alex texted me from LaGuardia Airport after he landed. We were to meet at a bar on Avenue A, with no presumptions that he’d spend the night at my place, as per my friend Angie’s advice, and, to her credit, “You met him on the Internet! He could be psycho!” is never a bad thing to be reminded of. The plan was that Alex would drop off his stuff at his friend’s apartment, then meet me at the bar and “see how things went.” He told me what he’d be wearing so I’d recognize him, and I wore a top over a bra, instead of something strapless, because he’d told me how much he loved unhooking lingerie. I probably shaved my legs four times that day, and got my hair and makeup camera-ready. I walked over in my cute wool coat, even though it was puffy-jacket weather, and when I realized I was there early, I walked a lap around the avenue, warming up for the big event.
I cornered the block to find Alex through the window, inside the bar. I saw him tiny at first, then big when I walked in, like when I clicked from his thumbnail on Christmas to see the big picture. I met eyes with a stunning, oddly familiar face. And I was so relieved. Because, in the Mannerist tradition of the whole affair, I took one look at Alex, and I knew I’d done the right thing. I’d been vindicated. Even though he was short—and I mean, like,
Dudley Moore
-short—Alex was, true to the Internet’s assurances, indeed, so. Good. Looking. I was literally agog: meeting eyes with Alex was like seeing a work of art look back at you. I marveled at his features like I was ogling some kind of tiny, expensive bird.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
There was nervous laughter, and he looked down at his hands like he warned me he might do, in one of our phone calls from the week before about how we thought it was going to go. After some chat about the movie they showed on his flight, Alex broke down and told me I was “really pretty,” and hearing that made me feel like I was drunk, it was such a sweet relief. That whole evening was fast, fizzy, and happy, and I jubilantly experienced whatever the opposite of “regret” is about spending money on his ticket. He wasn’t a rapist, I decided, so we walked down Avenue A back to my place, and he kissed me really gently when we got upstairs. I was ecstatic, and then he spent the night.
“Spent the night,” so you know, is not a euphemism in this case. There was no making out, and certainly no sex, but the evening’s main event—finding out Alex was attractive in real life and that he thought I was too—was enough of a high for me to spill the news to my friends about how explosively my Tulsa boyfriend lived up to my shallow expectations; he wasn’t ugly, and he didn’t butcher me into a torso and leave my limbs in a trash compactor, so I figured it was time to show him off, like an imaginary friend whom suddenly everybody else could see. Handsome-face’s deb ball awaited!
I found out about a going-away party that was happening the next night and decided to go, even though I couldn’t have cared less about the girl who was moving away. I think I was relieved she was getting out of town, frankly. But I knew there would be people I knew at that bar, and I wanted them to see me with a gorgeous date. And sure enough, I got a lot of compliments that night about how cute Alex was, and then, later into the evening, I found myself asking my friends at the party whether they thought, based on his body language, he liked me. I guess he was a lot less forthcoming in person; the stuff he would text me about wanting to cook for me and how beautiful my eyes were seemed like something I’d dreamt now that he was here. He wasn’t touching me or kissing me even casually, and I wasn’t sure when or if that would change. He also had that cool-kid affect; the kind of “mean” you see in teenagers able to make emotive dorks and weirdos feel they don’t belong with an eye roll or a raised brow. Alex wasn’t mean—not to me—he was just a little icy and withholding. And I was starting to feel insecure—like I needed more next to me than just a pretty face that I ordered online.