"The Young and the Jobless" — Afterward

I had a dream last night that I was in art school again.

We were drawing fish on the chalkboards and then overlaying Jesus faces on them.

At some point, I stopped drawing fish and started drawing people, which I found much more interesting. The teacher came to me and told me to draw fish again. I didn’t want to, and she looked disappointed. “That’s OK; you always quit anyway,” she said and walked away.

It caught me off guard. I dropped the chalk and darted after her. “What did you mean by that?” I asked, stopping short in front of her. “Just that. I’ve known you through other teachers for a while now, and it’s always the same with you: You work hard until you get to a point, then you stop and change direction.”

Within a few minutes, we were alone, outside. She was giving me life advice and I was feeling moved, inspired, grateful. I ran to the fish market nearby. And I began to look for the best fish to copy. The seller, a wily Greek man, came by to help. I pointed to a tub of butter fish and asked for the names. “They don’t have names,” he chuckled. “They have proteins.”

Embarrassed at first that I had asked a dumb question, I walked further down the display. But then I got angry at his rudeness. I walked back.

“How can they not have names?” I pressed him.

He rolled his eyes. “They just don’t…you want the names of the proteins?”

“No. What would I do with the names of proteins? How much for the small one?” Two fish were $7 each.

“Thanks,” I said. The man’s demeanor changed as he handed me the package. He asked me what I was. I explained about art school. But before he had time to comment, I already eyed the succulent fried potatoes.

“Will you get me half a pound of those too?” I said. There’s always time for lunch.

—

I woke up to a quiet house. In the bright, sunny, kitchen, I felt the fall chill enter through the windows. Beyond the sheer white curtains, I could see the plain blue sky — a crystal blue, with few clouds breaking up the color. The leaves rustled, and my neighbor for once wasn’t screaming at her sons. Her clothes hung outside her window, on her lopsided clothesline that extended  from her brick wall toward mine.

I opened the cupboards in search of breakfast. I wished I had bran flakes and oats to make granola. Or jelly for a PB&J. I reached for the peanut butter anyway — Brad’s Organic. And then the honey and the whole-wheat bread.

I washed down my sandwich with half a glass of milk, then I hesitated for a few seconds before reaching for the last chocolate cookie that had been sitting on the table all week. Finally I grabbed it and threw the wrappers away. “Who do I have to impress anyway?” I asked myself and ate.

I thought about Boy yesterday. It was fine, the date that I had planned. We had fun at the boathouse in the park, at the museum, then on my bed, eating takeout, talking, falling asleep.

But things bothered me. Why was I the one to decide everything? Why coudln’t he have called in advance, to plan, to chat, whatever? I felt annoyed already yesterday, even before meeting up. And when we met up, the boathouse had closed, and we couldn’t go boating, something I’d been looking forward to all week.

We walked around the wooded path instead, over the bridge and by the water, and we sat on a little hidden outpost, where he kissed me. When he kisses me, there is no better place. It was amazing later too, after food on my bed. But that’s not all I want. I don’t want to feel like he’s taking me for granted otherwise. Why hadn’t he called the few days before meeting up? He told me what he did on Friday night, and I asked if he was alone. “Should I have called you?” he surprised me before giving me an answer. “No,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

Later at the museum, he got bored halfway through the Robert Frank exhibit I had wanted to see. He wanted to see the wooden panels in the European section. “It’s OK, we can stay,” he said warmly after I realized that he didn’t want to be there. I urged him to go if he wanted, saying I wouldn’t mind. (Not everyone likes the same things, and I wanted both of us to have fun.)

Later, I asked him where he wanted to eat, and he made a suggestion. “I mean, I don’t want to go there if you don’t want to,” he quickly added. Again, I didn’t mind doing what he’d said. “You sure?” Yes, I was certain. Then he brought something up, something along the lines that he didn’t want me to say it was OK if deep down I was feeling that it wasn’t. A noble thought, but I guesstimated it had nothing to do with me but with a previous girlfriend.

At home, he told me a story about the girl he dated last semester. She was never nice to him, never positive, told him he wouldn’t make it in New York and took him for granted. “What did you like about her then?” I asked, taking a bite of my gyro. “I guess our personalities clicked, and I just liked being with her, but we really had nothing in common.” When he realized, he broke up with her.

He was unhappy in college. He’s glad Randy and I are positive people. He’s optimistic about New York.

I don’t know where this is going, dear reader. I felt unhappy this morning, despite the sweetness of the honey and peanut butter combo. I feel melancholy, uncertain, afraid that happiness and hurt are equally fragile, and I wanted an ear this morning. I made a list of what I didn’t like about him. Then I thought of how hard the week ahead will be, with a busy workload and the hours of neurosis that I’ll spend wondering when he’ll call again and why he hasn’t, like I did last week. Finally, I was mad again, feeling like it really shouldn’t be like this with anyone. Maybe I’m too nice. I should be sure he cares or forget about it. And then I wondered how you can make sure. And then I thought there is no way. So I checked my horoscope instead:

Pisces February 19 – March 20

For Sunday, October 11 -Today, you’ll have much more fun just running along and living your life than you will analyzing every little word out of every person’s mouth. It’s not the right time to get all serious about your life. There are good things going on right now, and bad things going on right now. Why don’t you just focus on the good things for the next 24 hours and give your worry muscle a rest? There’s not much you can do about what isn’t working anyway. The ball is in someone else’s court.

Amazing advice. It’s like it knows what’s happening every time.

If recent grads are lucky enough to have a job by the time Valentine’s Day rolls around, whether or not they have a significant other to share it with doesn’t really matter.

Because they know that their employer loves them, and that their landlord does, too, always receiving their rent payments on time.

It’s when recent grads have no job that Valentine’s really hurts. It makes them feel empty. Lonely, perhaps, too.

As a day of evaluation of love and happiness, the approaching Valentine’s Day makes me shudder. Last night I had a dream: I was in a theatrical production—the beautiful, dark-haired girl with a secondary role, who really turns out to be the protagonist at the end. Throughout the play, she wears pink satin dresses for the few minutes she appears onstage, she walks barefoot in the sun, she gathers daisies and eats tangerines. The tangerine girl, they call her. She watches the main girl’s melodramatic heartbreak story from afar, until in the end the male protagonist recognizes her as the tangerine girl, the one love of his life, and rescues her.

Rescues her from what, I do not know, because as the tangerine girl, she knows her beauty and calmness the whole time through. So it’s not really rescuing. He thinks it is, because his brain is befuddled with chivalrous stories of a nostalgic past full of bittersweet idealism and inequity. But she is too independent, too complacent to give any thought to titles and stories. To her, it is just love—a beautiful touch added to her already colorful life.

When I woke up this morning, I didn’t remember the ending. There was no ending really—doesn’t every play, every Hollywood love story end right at the point where the lovers get together and idolize the whole life they have ahead of them to celebrate the beauty of their union?

Well, I didn’t need an ending. I saw it in real life yesterday, when I ended my own real-life love story as I pulled the curtains down, giving him no time to follow me into the production area behind.

The man in the dream was actually my Middle Eastern man with his kind and chivalrous heart. My Mr. Darcy as they call him in real life. The tangerine girl was me. Innocent, complacent, satisfied with daisies, and tangerines, and the man that came into my life three months ago to “rescue me”.

Though he wasn’t really rescuing me. It became clear that maybe he thought he was. He treated me way too nice. He was too intense. He lost his identity when he was with me and gave me his all. Which for me was too much. No, I did not want his coat at the mere mention that it’s cold outside. No, I did not want him to always put his arm around my shoulders, crushing my independence, every time we walked. No, I did not want him to try to fix every little problem in my life when I talked about it.

He didn’t understand that. In fact, he thought me spoiled when I complained about all his niceness. And yesterday, he told me to write down in that “little blog of mine” that he was too intense for me, and go back and revisit in ten years and see what I think then. I know what I will think then, I told him. That you were way too nice and that I wasn’t ready for something like that.

What is it with men and their pride anyway? Maybe the Leo and the Pisces just don’t work. The Leo is way too prideful, way too caring. The Pisces is way too independent and non-traditional. The stars warned me from the start, but I didn’t listen. How non-traditional of me.

But seriously, what is it with their pride? I felt like I was in a chivalrous fairy tale the whole time in this relationship. I loved it, he treated me great, but I also felt like I was weak, just like those women who were treated too nice for their own good in those tales.

I didn’t want a guy to smother me with love. I wanted a cough syrup kind of love—one that would be tucked away in a little, brown glass bottle, preciously guarded on the top shelf of the cabinet, only to be taken out now and then and fed to me a dollop at a time with a little silver spoon. Then I could taste its sweet and soothing bitterness, let it trickle down my throat, slowly healing my every nerve.

And for the rest of the time, to know that my love stayes guarded in that little brown cabinet, away from the mouths of the world, away, quietly, strongly enough, that only the image of the bottle radiates inside me with warmth and gives me strength to go on with my life.

He didn’t get that. I told him I wanted a man with whom I could be comfortable enough to sit there, and read the paper, and watch TV, and eat a croissant in peace. I wanted a man who would be comfortable enough to go about his business and not shower me with attention every minute of our existence together, as if I might fall off my own two feet was I not watched for a single minute.

He didn’t get it. He thought I was spoiled. He thought I subscribed under the westernized view of “disposable relationships.” That basically I wanted a relationship in which I could be with someone, but not really.

And that’s when I realized that these are the cultural differences that my parents warn me against. Why did he have to think in extremes? Why did it have to be either a fairy-tale kind of love or a disposable relationship? Why couldn’t it be slow and natural, budding like an unripe flower?

A few weeks ago, I told him I loved him. Though by the end, he doubted my love. He told me he loved me, too. In fact, he told me I was the love of his life. He had never loved anyone as strongly before. I know he means it. But the kind of love he could give was the brawny kind that put gold fetters around my ankles, binding me to him. The kind of love I expressed was the kind that made me think of him at the sight of the nuances of a lavender flower. The kind that made me thank God for his overbearing presence in my life at nights. The kind of liquid love that tastes sweet, that slides down the throat as smooth as the transparent juice of the tangerines.

But it’s over. The dream, the reality, the end. The actors have bowed, the audience has clapped, the music has stopped. Here, the theater doors close, the actors part, some returning to their small studios to sleep within the frigid space of their four walls, others getting together to celebrate the success of their production tonight.

No matter what, life goes on. And Valentine’s Day approaches. And this recent grad will surely be celebrating it sitting on her bed, finding comfort in her stack of meaningless job applications.

Let’s face it, today’s world isn’t as idealistic as we remember it in years we weren’t born, and today’s men aren’t the gentlemen we read and sigh over in eighteenth-century romance novels.

Even if you weren’t an English major lusting after imaginary Mr. Darcy in college, surely you saw him around campus. You know the kind: the serious type who was “going places”, the seemingly unattainable yet promising to love you and protect you from the outside world kind of guy. That’s the one. The one who is aloof, yet screams of a secret, charming sensitivity.

Oh, the ideal Mr. Darcy.

The rare Mr. Darcy—rarer in the real world and in New York City, truly unattainable.

I’m not sure which of the two is the culprit, but, after living in New York City for four months now, I realize that either college or the South kept us very sheltered for a long time.

Back in the student days, it was easy to stay optimistic in all areas of life. When it came to career, we were working towards our degrees so we never felt unproductive. And when it came to guys, no matter what new, profound drama was washing over our lives, we always maintained hope, spotting a Mr. Darcy working at the school newspaper, running for class president, or even sitting serious, upright, and engaging yet cool, amongst us in classes.

And it was easy to know then that the problem wasn’t that the world lacked good guys but that we just hadn’t found the right one yet.

Moving to New York with that mindset is probably the second thing you can do to setting yourself up for huge disappointment. The first is imagining your English major can lead you to any title other than The Future Unemployed. But that’s a whole other story.

The point is, in a city that never sleeps because it’s too busy getting laid, my idealism is slowly shaking and I wonder: Where are the Mr. Darcys of New York?

Is a one night stand enough to fill the void of lonely New Yorkers? As I listen to the melodic raucus in my roommate’s room—floating over the ever romantic voice of Phat Joe or Lil Jack or whatever these guys are called these days—I didn’t question for one second that he was having fun. I mean, the girl obviously had a crappy taste in shoes, judging from the ugly brown leather boots by the door, but aside from that, perhaps it was her rockin’ body, or some sexy party cocktails that had brought them together back into his room.

A common theme seems to be that boobs and cosmopolitans are enough to make a New Yorker man’s night special. If she’s good in bed, suddenly her likes and dislikes, her personality, and tastes cease to matter. If she can give his busy world a few hours’ break instead of adding stress on top of it—stress that a full-time girlfriend would—who cares if she was wearing shabby shoes or the most elegant pair of Manolo’s?

That’s the problem: nobody, except for his girlfriend across town. Or, in my roommate’s case, his girlfriend across the country. That girl, just as hard-working as he is, who lives in a dead, no night-life city in Arkansas. Maybe she goes to work, drinks tea in the afternoon, chats on the phone with her friends, reads a book, watches a movie, relaxes, and goes to bed early to greet a new day with energy. And in those few moments before sleep when she is safely sunk into cool sheets with her eyes closed and a few last thoughts seal off another day, she thinks of him, misses her man, her Mr. Darcy.

The Mr. Darcy who’s actually busy screwing some chick he met at a party in Manhattan tonight.

Of course, it’s not like this thing doesn’t happen all over the United States. Cheaters are everywhere, and you can easily find them whether you look in New York City or the quietest town of Arizona. But when I’ve only seen and heard a few of these incidents happen in the past few years of college in the South, why, in just four months of New York City, has it become a daily thing? And why do people here treat it so lightly, turn apathetic eyes to a culture of love and romance that has gone extinct?

What happened to love going hand-in-hand with sex? Has the expression become as obsolete as those New Yorkers who still believe in it?

The conundrum of New York is the overflow of choices. There’s so much to do here, so much to see, so much to eat, so much to drink, so much of this, that, so many guys, so many girls, so many people looking for the excitement that the big city offers. And when you get everything you want all the time, you forget to appreciate each little thing. So, like spoiled children, those living in New York are often overworked, overexcited, and oversexed.

And that plays tricks on the mind of a true Mr. Darcy. It’s the Great Depression effect that we saw in The Grapes of Wrath, except, in this case, women are being played as fools: If one won’t take a half-assed relationship, there is always another just around the corner available to take her spot. If one refuses to deal with a guy’s issues, it makes more sense for him to leave her than to improve himself. So in the end, it makes more sense for her, too, to put up with it or lose faith in love altogether. In the city acclaimed for its speed efficiency, values that don’t play a part in the complex scemes of convenience are simply discarded.

And that leaves me to question the premise of the grand scheme of love in New York City: Sure there are ways to save time and money, but are they right? And in the end, what are we fighting for anyway? A cheaper way of getting fit (although I will admit that a $500 gym membership may overwhelm you after having a huge school gym available for free for four years) or a human connection? Are we looking for a quick, efficient way to get a pleasurable fix or a long-lasting companion who will offer love, compassion, and support?

For many, it seems to be the first answer. Because love comes with strings these days. And not the colorful kind that can be snapped off quickly from a woman’s hips. When a man is busy with work and barely has time for the exciting social life of the bustling city, where can he find time to fit in romance, love, and courting? Only sex can be fit in, because it’s quick and yields good results. And so, women are tentatively penciled in and quickly erased.

I’ve had my share of being penciled in to be erased soon after, in my short time in New York already, and by now I realize that the Mr. Darcys of New York, if any left, are disappearing fast.

Lucky for me, I seem to have found one specimen of the rare species. My Middle Eastern man with his sharp mind, beautiful heart, and caring disposition. My hopeless romantic. The one who demands respect in public and gets it. The one I watch socializing across the room when we find ourselves at the same events, the serious, sensible man withholding his smiles around others yet offering all the pleasant talk and winning affection madly. The one who opens the door for me as we leave the bar at the end of the event, who holds my hand and once around the corner will crack me the biggest smiles, give me his amorous compliments and passionate kisses of a madman.

How do I know he’s the real Mr. Darcy in a city of fakes, crooks, and addicts?

It’s not because I’ve had more thoughtful dates with him in the past month than I’ve had in my entire lifetime. Not the big bouquet of white roses he surprises me with after a morning walk to his favorite bakery.

Not the fact that our community of friends call him “Mr. Darcy” to begin with.

Nor that after hours and hours of nightly conversations, our emotional connection is alive.

Neither his reassurances that I don’t need to feel pressured for anything. That he has all the time in the world.

But mostly because when my own demons catch up with me and I throw unfair, insecure fits, asking him things that any emotionally abused New Yorker woman would, like, “What does she have that I don’t?” he looks at me as if I’ve just asked him the simplest question in the world, smiles calmly, and pulls me close and answers, “Me.”

Aside from a competitive job market and through-the-roof rent which can be very stressful to an unemployed recent grad, New York City offers another big set of problems: the melting pot of older men.

It’s only after you graduate and enter the real world that it suddenly hits you: The rest of the world is not your age. Just because you were crazy enough to take off and come to the big city at 21 doesn’t mean that the rest of the 21-year-olds out there did the same, no matter how great their idealism. Because everybody dreams about escaping to the city—the city of lights, people, life—but most are either too afraid or too wise to do it. I was neither.

The way I see it, most young professionals of New York City are in their mid-to-late twenties and early thirties. They come here after entry-level, to further their careers. Once they’ve stayed here for a while and are nearing forty or fifty, they move upstate or to a more spacious state, to start a family or simply to rest in a more low-key lifestyle.

That leaves the few 21-year-olds like me to constantly make friends–and dates–with vastly older people.

My ideal age range for a dateable guy used to be 22-25. Of course, I didn’t always follow that rule even before I moved here, but nonetheless, I used to keep it in mind. Now, that, too, has been adjusted to fit all my other changing ideals.

It was during a night at Cibar that the age ideal really went out the window. I had just broken up with a 27-year-old production assistant, who had also come here from the South a year ago and was too cocky for his own good. I felt empowered after the break up, inspired to go out and do good. So, I found myself at this upscale party in Gramercy, where I figured the open bar wouldn’t hurt my new, single sensibility and neither would all the cuties sprawling in the place.

But the first cutie I talked to really first approached me. Modest, understated, and kind—that’s how I would describe him. He was curiously attractive to me from the start—curiously, because I usually don’t fall for 35-year-old, Muslim men.

I was raised in an all white, Greek family, with a mother who is not the most open person when it comes to mixing with other races. My father is as idealistic as I am, and his advice always consists of, “Follow your dreams, follow your heart.” My mom’s, on the other hand, lies more along the lines of, “You date an Indian guy, I kill you.”

I used to agree with her, too. Why date someone so vastly different from me when I have enough trouble dealing with those who aren’t? Besides, I had never been attracted to anyone of another race before.

But this man is different. Maybe it’s the fact that he lived in Pakistan half of his life and in America the other that makes him so unique. He has a pure Middle Eastern heart and an American sensibility. He is a gentleman. Not like the frat boys you so often find in New York City, who are here not for lights, not for careers, but mainly for the “slammin’ hotties,” and while one slammin’ hottie is drinking a beer he just bought her, another at a small apartment halfway across town is crying herself to sleep because of him.

But this man is a true gentleman. Refined, cultured, and honest, he has the memory of an elephant, which is scary knowing that nothing escapes him, and the heart of gold.

His Middle Eastern name translates to “kind man,” too. Kind of fitting, I like it.

But still, as if the problem of culture and religion wasn’t there, the problem of age is. When my parents met, they had a twelve-year gap: She was eighteen, fresh out of high school and ready to take the next step, and he thirty, in college, about to finish his degree. They fell in love, and despite the six-hour driving distance between their cities, they kept the feeling alive: They wrote letters every day and called each other whenever possible; that is, whenever my mother could sneak past the strict rule of my grandfather.

It’s kind of romantic if you think about it, especially if you see the packs of yellowing letters my mother still keeps stored away in a big bookcase drawer. It fulfills the romantic ideal that love is blind, love has no borders, love is beautiful. My parent’s story is like a Hollywood chick flick. Except, unlike Hollywood, real life also reveals the end of the lovey-dovey stage and beyond. And my parents’ story doesn’t end with the beautiful letters and sweet kisses of youth.

My mom never went to college, got married instead, and she blames my dad. My dad puts up with her rude, rash behavior and secretly wishes they had never married. Sure they still love each other somewhere in the very bottom of their hearts, but my mom is constantly upset, and I don’t think it’s because of college or because of my dad for that matter. I think it’s because of her own decision to marry an older man.

Truth is, it’s sexy when a man has his life together. But it’s also dangerous. Because an older man has untangled the complications that twenty-somethings face, it becomes easy to lean on him, take his advice, blindly look up to him. Too easy. And you do it, and the years pass, and no matter how much you love him, there comes a time when you look back on your own life and you see gaps. Where there should have been struggle, and victory, and loss in the process of figuring yourself out, there is instead a smooth road of pleasant nothingness. And so you get angry, feel that you wasted your energy, or rather, that you bottled it up, because you didn’t get to do all the things that girls in their twenties do. While your friends were out partying, clubbing, you were sitting inside, drinking expensive wine over a nice dinner, discussing ancient art or Nostradamus with your wise, old man. And when you finally reach your thirties and forties and are happily married to your wise, old man, perhaps you start to feel a restlessness and a need to release the energy that you were so stupidly holding onto, composing yourself in your twenties.

So many times my mother looked nostalgic when my sister and I threw house parties in college. So many times her mood changed during our preparations then, and she became giggly, almost like a little girl, and asked if she could join us, half jokingly, half seriously. But her time for those things was over and she knew it. And so many times, while we were out drinking, smoking cigarettes, and flirting she was at home, crying herself to sleep, and not because of what some guy did to her, but what she brought upon herself with her choices.

I can see me falling into the same pattern with my own 14-year gap here, and I don’t really want this for myself. And since this guy is Muslim also, who knows what kinds of different ideas he has about life and women and relationships. My heart tells me, “But he’s beautiful when he speaks so well about women, about their struggle,” and my little mind is already looking up to him as if he were God. It’s funny sometimes that you know what you should do, yet what you keep doing differs drastically.

Instead of ending this, I say yes to his dates. Instead of trying to find younger guys, even if they are half as cultured, I go out with him, to nice Indian dinners, exquisite walks around Greenwich Village, and independent movies about life and love. He waits for me to get on the subway and sees me off, waving goodbye, never staring too much, as the train starts to roll on its course. He kisses me on the cheek, never intruding too much, either.

And yet, last night when we found ourselves at another one of those upscale parties, in the Meatpacking District this time, I kissed him. Not a full-fledged, make out kind of kiss, but a peck on the lips. I will admit to having been a little tipsy at that moment, and to feeling a little embarrassed about the kiss today. I wish I hadn’t done that, to be honest. I like the way things were going, slow, beautiful. After a rocky relationship with a 27-year-old country boy who had amazing skills in bed, yet was as shallow as a rock, it’s a beautiful thing that is happening here. But alcohol makes you do stupid things, and there I was, touching his lips with mine in front of all of our friends. So now our secret is out also, and who even knows if he wants it to be? Who even knows if he likes smooching in public?

Perhaps that’s the other big part of the attraction: the mystery. I am constantly learning new things and trying new things with this guy, and it’s all refreshingly enriching and non-sexual. I don’t know his reactions to things yet, and I haven’t figured out his personality, his mindset.

I guess that unfamiliarity you feel towards others is also a part of New York City, a true melting pot full of different mindsets, different races, struggles, and love matches. And figuring it out, all in good time, is part of making it in this city of strange love and mystery. And figuring yourself out—whether it takes dating five 35-year-old, Muslim men or ten rough-and-tough frat boys—is also part of life.

You just have to explore with an open mind, keeping newly-found love and your ideals side by side at heart.