Punch in the Nose
<<2004-08-26 - 12:23 p.m.>>

What next?

Two nights ago Chloë and I crawled the face of downtown, and she told me about myself (I am lucky, I am very lucky to have a friend who can do this and do it well). After dinner on Sixth Street she suddenly came out with a cold and quiet anger that I hadn't ever told her much about my relationship with John—not the end of it, but the bulk of it—and so I tried to explain how it was, how it was one long windup with no payoff, a hundred implied promises that no one ever kept, how I don't know now if there was ever anything there at all. And I tried to explain to her why I hadn't told her: because the things to me that were amazing, heartbreaking, new, were things that to her would have been nothing. People, I said, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice, are always wanting to know her, wanting to really know her, wanting to unravel the mystery that is beautiful Chloë with her perfect posture and coffee-colored skin and big dreamy eyes. It does not come so easy for me, I tried to explain. She made a good point: it would have been special to her because it was special to me. But I was afraid that in the telling, in the shoving what was special to me under the comparative light of her knowing, something would vanish and never come back. It didn't help, certainly, that Chloë was always, always, eternally The Standard that I was living up to in my relationship with John, that I knew always that we were in direct comparison. No matter who was winning that day, we were stacked against each other, like in tenth grade when we both wanted to climb inside the same imaginary human being.

And remembering how stupid I was brought a lump to my throat as we walked across town on Eighth Street: I thought I was special. I don't think anyone is special to John. When he wants to know people, he wants it because he wants to prove his terribly deep empathic abilities, and who you are doesn't particularly matter.

I saw him Sunday, at Chloë's birthday party. "There she is, in all her glory," he said, and he kissed me—the images of his kisses fall together—and it was just sort of nothing. He was just sort of nothing. He doesn't engage. He can either give you a generic and vaguely grotesque parody of intense interest ("that's so interesting," he says, over and over) or he can give you monologues about himself. (But I remember more—) Wonderfully, it just didn't fly. People thought the over-the-top interest was odd and the monologues were boring. After each speech about his business (club promoting) or his ex (Jordanian, 35), someone, to my subtle but intense satisfaction, would change the subject. Then he left early, saying he would meet us at Pier 25 for the dancing, and didn't (rather, he might have, but Chloë didn't pick up the phone when he called).

It was good to be over him.

But so I tried to tell Chloë, and it mostly didn't work, especially as we quickly got sidetracked onto a discussion of how I (apparently) block people who might want to know me. By being unfriendly. By making too little small talk and being bombastically opinionated and smarter than most people and just not giving people an avenue through which to approach me. And some of that made me go, "Oh." But some of it now rings false, because I know that you find me pathetic sometimes, find me pathetically obliviousness to my own pathos, find me ridiculous and sad for failing to realize my own (words fail) badness. Bad is not the word. The word is pathetic but I've lost a sense of what that means.

Point is, I know you think of me that way sometimes, and I can't blame you, because I do not know how to negotiate the rifts between what I think of as myself and what I think of myself.

I guess if I think about people more than they think about me, you could argue that this is not patheticness but rather a manifestation of one of my principal interests as a human being, which is thinking about other people.

All of which reminds me a little bit of the feeling that I am looking for someone who can take it. Last night my mother said I am like a punch in the nose, and what I wanted to know was, why don't people like being punched in the nose?

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