Finally, a shadow fell across my cubicle, along with a faint whiff of Earl Grey. I scarcely had time to wonder if a person’s ears could actually explode from the sound of the blood rushing in them before Dylan Gellner solemnly placed a neatly folded response onto the corner of the table. His face was inscrutable, and he walked away before I could start to read.
Here was the deal. Dylan Gellner vowed to cease all flirtation with Lisa, having been only briefly led astray by such shallow qualities as beauty, charm, niceness, humor, and general human appeal. However, he also declared it “much too soon” to embark upon any sort of nonplatonic relationship with another girl, whom he pointedly didn’t mention by name, who was sensitive and intelligent, but who needed “time without a boyfriend—not without friends.” I read that noble dismissal as a full-throated endorsement of our obvious destiny. To this day I don’t know how Dylan Gellner actually felt about me—but I do know that despite his highly cultivated sense of self-discipline (he woke up every morning two hours before school to read and do math for his own enrichment), he was also an eighteen-year-old boy. The spirit might resist, but the flesh would relent. I just had to time it right.
“Yes,” I agreed after I tracked him down in the cafeteria. “You’re right. Too soon. I’m sorry. Friends?”
“Friends.”
But look, friends can hang out after school—especially in a group, where one friend is decidedly colder to another friend he had only recently been flirting with and decidedly warmer to a third friend, for no reason at all. And friends can drive each other home from hanging out. I mean, friends do that all the time.
At six fifteen in the evening, two and a half days after I stomped into mock-trial practice awash in crocodile tears for the demise of my union with Travis, Dylan Gellner pulled up in front of my parents’ house and killed the engine of his gray 1985 Saab, in which I sat in the passenger seat. He removed the glasses he wore only to drive and placed them, folded, onto the dashboard. I was thinking: Life is astoundingly short, motherfuckers! I was also thinking that you don’t take your glasses off not to kiss someone.
“So,” I said. “Rebecca is duly confused about what to do.” We’d developed an inside joke over the last thirty-six hours. And yes, it was the most obnoxious affectation possible: a semi-ironic use of the third person when talking about ourselves.
Dylan Gellner put his hands on his knees and pressed them. “Dylan would like to kiss Rebecca, but it’s too soon.”
“Much too soon,” I said.
“I know.”
And then somehow Dylan Gellner’s face was in my face, or perhaps my face was in his. He tasted, unsurprisingly, like Earl Grey tea.
By the next day, a full seventy-two hours after the inauspicious conclusion of my relationship with Travis, Dylan Gellner and I were officially together. Lisa wasn’t talking to me (I had, after all, broken the unspoken pact between all teenage girls that once a boy is “claimed,” no true friend shall interfere), and Travis was, to my surprise, also not talking to me. He was over being with me, but not ready for me to be over being with him, a trait totally uncommon to mankind.
“Is there a fucking statute of limitations for mourning a relationship when the person you break up with refers to you as an impossible clinger he’s continued to date out of pity?” I spat at Samantha over the phone.
“I don’t know, Rebecca. How would you feel if Travis started dating, like, Lisa, yesterday?”
“That would never happen because Travis is best friends with Horacio.”
“Ugh, you know that’s not the point. What if he started dating me?”
“Ooh, do you like him? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You are being impossible right now.”
“Maybe, but do you know who doesn’t think I’m impossible? My new boyfriend Dylan Gellner, who said I was beautiful today. Or, you know, he passed me a note with a quote from an INXS song about a beautiful girl.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
Samantha’s disapproval didn’t register through my thick haze of don’t-give-a-fuck, because Dylan Gellner and I had just spent what I confidently deemed the most intellectually and emotionally significant afternoon of my life (possibly anyone’s life), sitting on top of his navy-blue plaid bedspread. It was our first time alone in his room since we had made out in his car, and to celebrate, he brought down his well-thumbed Schocken edition of Kafka’s The Complete Stories. He opened it wordlessly to the parable “Resolutions” and indicated that I should read it in its entirety, which I did:
To lift yourself out of a miserable mood should be easy, even if you have to do it by sheer strength of will. I rise from my armchair, run around the table, make my head and throat move, bring fire into my eyes, flex the muscles around them. Work against every feeling—greet A. heartily when he comes by, tolerate B. amiably in my room, force down everything said at C.’s in long draughts, despite the pain and effort it causes me.
But even then, with every mistake—and you can’t avoid them—the whole thing, easy and difficult alike, comes to a stop, and I must shrink back into my own circle again.
Thus the best advice is to take it all, to make yourself an inert mass, to feel as if you’ve been carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to look at others with the gaze of an animal, to feel no peace—in short, to take whatever ghostly life remains in you and choke it back down with your own hand—that is, to enlarge the final peace of the grave and let nothing outside that remain.
A characteristic gesture in such a mood is the running of the little finger over the eyebrows.
What the fuck was this supposed to mean?
Interpretation A: Dylan Gellner was so brilliant and so pained, so trapped inside his own head, that he could not relate to a single other human being—how could he, when he scarcely felt human himself? Until, that is, yours fucking truly.
Interpretation B: Dylan Gellner was going to have some issues as a boyfriend.
But, as someone very wise (or at any rate very terrifying) once said, correctly understanding something and misunderstanding the same thing aren’t mutually exclusive. And anyway, who had time for minutiae when Dylan Gellner’s skin smelled like tea and sugar, and he had actual real hair on his chest, like a grown-up man?
“You remember Dylan Gellner, Mom.” I’d poked my head into her study later that night to interrupt her as she prepped a lecture.
“I do?”
“You know, the guy who got a 1450 on his SAT and admired your Hermann Hesse collection.”
“Oh, him.”
“Anyway, he’s my boyfriend now.”
“Great,” she said, not looking up from the copy of Frankenstein she was mauling with her bright green pen.
“I’m glad you’re happy for me, you know? Travis is so pissed. But, like, he didn’t care when we broke up! What does he want me to do, become a nun and make him a shrine?”
“Wait, what?” she asked. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Things moved so fast that there wasn’t time to explain the particulars to my mom—not that I would have anyway. My parents and I kept our discussions of my burgeoning sexuality on a need-to-know basis, meaning they probably knew everything, but I needed them to pretend they didn’t. David Schuman, Ph.D., J.D., has a special gesture he makes, where he places both hands above his head in the shape of a sloped roof; the “hand house” is deployed during any discussions of tampons, cesarean sections, BDSM safe-word rules, and especially teen sexuality, which, as a teen, I would have rather impaled myself on one of my mom’s infernal green pens than discuss anyway. Sharon Schuman, Ph.D., meanwhile, was so palpably uncomfortable during any talk about My Changing Body during puberty that, simply so that I would not die of awkwardness, I shut her out around age thirteen and relied on the Eugene 4J School District’s comprehensive sex education curriculum to fill in the missing pieces. (This is probably why, at sixteen years old, I was still under the impression that the man finishes immediately upon entering the woman and then they wake up ten hours later wondering what happened, like in Top Gun.) Anyway, my parents had neither concern nor occasion to know how fast things were moving with Dylan Gellner. (I’d been taught about affirmative consent in sex ed, so I asked: “Do you want to have sex?” and although the answer was as curt as it had been to my request about the I Ching, it was in the affirmative.)
For a fleeting two months that I’m sure he quickly forgot thereafter, Dylan Gellner’s previous ambivalence about taking on a relationship with someone openly obsessed with him was eclipsed by the oxytocin high of intercourse. Thanks to the hormones that conquered his intellect and common sense, he was, for the better part of the spring of 1994, obsessed with me back. Poems were composed, full of heavy-handed symbolism: Dylan Gellner was an island; I was a bridge that led either to it or from it, I wasn’t sure (understanding and misunderstanding the same thing, etc.). Mix-tapes were mixed, bequeathed, and played until they warped: Nine Inch Nails’ “Something I Can Never Have”; Alice in Chains’ “Man in a Box,” Duran Duran’s “Come Undone,” Pearl Jam’s “Black.” Characteristically succinct sessions of coitus were followed by reverent viewings of Animaniacs.
When I wasn’t rolling around on Dylan Gellner’s polyester-covered bed, or politely turning down his mom’s invitation to dinner as I scurried out through her kitchen with my shirt inside-out, I was getting serious with his literary doppelgänger. The Trial I was still lukewarm about, but through it, and “Before the Law” especially, I’d learned about Kafka’s scores of haunting, unforgettable parables—just the right length for someone like me, equal parts very serious intellectual and person with the attention span of the first two verses of “Gin and Juice.” I rushed through my AP Lit assignments so that I could savor as many of those parables as possible. I held my breath through “Bachelor’s Unhappiness,” which is about exactly what it sounds like, and ends with the allegedly comforting reminder from the nameless narrator that at least he still has a forehead to smack with his hand. I spent days in an existential funk about “The Bridge,” the story of a man who stretches himself across a ravine and then tries to turn around to see who has walked halfway across him and then jumped up and down on his back. (“A bridge to turn around!” the narrator chides himself, before falling down onto the jagged rocks below.) The aching loneliness, the questions with no answers—these little stories climbed into my deepest speechless heart (as Rilke would say) and gave it voice.
