Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

for all of us: they barely put up a fight when I say I must leave, must go home. That I can’t do this, can’t be here any longer.

I get another subway back, take a handful of blue sleeping pills and sleep until Sunday night. And just like that, two days and almost three nights have been lost. When I wake again, turn on my phone, I see pictures of everyone celebrating the holidays: on rooftops, on beaches, cocktails and sparklers in hand. While I lay unconscious, alone, they were living lives of joy, of love. A life I say I don’t want.

CHAPTER 18

‘Do you know,’ says a woman in my office with a raised eyebrow, ‘that the ratio of women to men in New York is two to one?’ It’s the statistic I hear most often and though it’s not true, it feels like it is.

The other women are toned and tight, with bodies they get up at five a.m. to perfect and punish. They’re perfectly made-up, with hair that they pay to have blowdried most mornings. There are facials and brow-taming and leg waxing and vagina plucking. They are perfectly smooth and hair-free and their shiny faces glow. This is what it is to be a woman in New York. This is what men want.

It’s not even that I feel out of my depth – I can’t even begin to paddle in their pool. My hair is too bright and too broken and snaps between my fingers. I don’t rip my pubic hair out with hot wax. My white belly folds over like sandwich crusts when I sit; my arms are corned beef. I’ve got black tattoos on my hands, my arms, my back.

Even though I’m slashing and cutting and drinking myself into ugliness, I join dating sites, scroll past the men who all look the same, say things like, ‘Looking for a partner in crime for workout dates’ and ‘No to drinking, drugs. Must be fit and no drama. No psychos.’

It’s not unusual to see women of extraordinary beauty holding hands with men who are ordinary, sweating. Every man in New York believes he deserves the most beautiful of women. That he’s entitled to her. And that we’re duty bound to beautify and preen and primp ourselves for them. Anything less than that is a failure on our part.

Saturday night. I’m meeting my friend in the White Horse Tavern in the West Village. I arrive early, order a beer and take a seat at the bar. A man wearing a gold band on his left hand tries to make small talk. I limit my answers to nodding and smiling, with one-word accompaniments. My lack of conversation bothers him, the fact that I’m not responding to his attention needles him. He shakes his head and looks at me, from my toes to my head.

‘It’s such a shame,’ he says. ‘Those tattoos.’

I put my hand over my arm.

‘What?’ I say.

‘They’re just … fucking disgusting. It’s like putting a bumper sticker on a Ferrari. Do you ever look in the mirror? You’ve ruined yourself.’

I swallow hard.

‘Can you leave me alone, please?’ And as he turns his back to me, I burst into tears, which splash off the bar.

A mean streak courses through the men of Manhattan. It fuels them and fires them. They dress it up as honesty and demand you’re grateful. There’s the forty-one-year-old who I go on two dates with after coming to in a Brooklyn bar to discover his mouth on my face and his hand all the way up my dress. I didn’t know who he was or how we’d ended up in that dark corner. When I stand up to leave and he stands too, I realise he towers over me by a foot. To cover up my shame, I agree to a date with him as I leave. We meet for dinner, and midway through my bratwurst he says, out of nowhere, with no prompting: ‘The thing is, I have no interest in a relationship right now. And God, definitely not a serious one.’ After dinner, we go for a walk in a nearby graveyard.

There’s the twenty-five-year-old who lives near me in the Village (‘Well, I technically live with my parents. My dad’s a filmmaker and my mom’s an author’); is a writer (‘Well, I suppose I’m a bartender really, but I have a blog’); straight(ish) (‘Well, there are just too many cute boys in the world to say no!’); and was open to a relationship (‘Well, I suppose I would be if the right person comes along but I don’t do relationships’).

There is the now-sober heroin and crack cocaine addict who texts me hourly after our date, not apparently needing a response. There’s the Anglophile I meet on a dancefloor at a Britpop night in Brooklyn. Beard, hair cut just above his eyebrows, plaid shirt, black skinny jeans, Converse. The Williamsburg Uniform of Mediocrity.

‘Ugh,’ says one of the women I’m with. ‘That’s Justin.’ She leans heavily on that last syllable, balancing it like a razor blade on the tip of her tongue. ‘He’s so fucking boring.’ The only thing receiving more emphasis than the last two letters of his name was the next sentence, whispered conspiratorially. ‘He has cats.’

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘No, you don’t get it. Like, loads of cats. Seven, or something. And there’s something wrong with most of them.’

‘What is it you do?’ I shout across the dancefloor – or was it by the bar? – as he strokes the torn, wet label of the beer he is cupping, watching me swallow a shot that gets stuck in my throat as it follows its path to my stomach, where it will sit for a few hours before retracing its original steps. I can tell by the arch of his left eyebrow that the man with seven sick cats is not much of a drinker and probably doesn’t much care for those who are. I take great pride