Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Yet they all thought that they were the only ones who weren’t motivated by jealousy. Surely that meant that there were people all over who weren’t motivated by jealousy. Why shouldn’t Zita be one of them? After all, Ivan had liked her.

Ivan said he didn’t know what his feelings were, or where they would lead. They agreed that this was the nature of feelings,

Ivan and Zita discussed the nature of love. Ivan asked Zita if she thought you could be in love with two people at the same time. Zita said she didn’t know—maybe you could. Later, Ivan asked Eunice the same question. Eunice said: “No.”

She realized now she had been trying on some level to win Ivan back: not directly anymore, but socially, almost politically, through persuasion, because that had always been her strength. She wanted to make everyone understand what was just, and to cause it to happen.

Of course, an ending was always sad, but to not end something that needed to end was even more sad.

Her story had had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Nothing between Ivan and me had happened that way. It hadn’t made sense, the way her story had.

Surely there was more to life than just trying to avoid bad luck?

When I woke up in the morning, there was a second or two when I felt light and free, unaware of any reason to feel upset. Then all my knowledge and memories rushed back and a weight descended on my sternum and the creaking started behind my eyes.

It turned out that Ukrainians, just like Turkish people, and Russians, and many people in Hungary, considered their culture to be uniquely “torn between East and West.” How many cultures didn’t think that? I had once heard a Japanese person say it about Japan.

On some level, it felt exciting to have a personal connection, however tenuous, to this material that was so far from my own experience. It seemed to be something I had achieved through writing. Listening to my Walkman and smoking a cigarette by the river, I felt a kind of elevation in my chest, my eyes opened wider, I felt more alive.

There was something about crying so much, the way it made my body so limp and hot and shuddering, that made me feel closer to sex. Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched—one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia.

Music was the thing that made it the most clear what sex would be like. The feeling of different places being touched and resonating at the same time. Like sitting on a parapet with your eyes closed, feeling sunlight on your left eyelid and a breeze on your right forearm. Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back—promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You’re going to die without it. You’re never going to get it. You’re going to die. Here it is.

For some reason, the most painful part was knowing that the whole situation was my own doing.

We had to learn how discourses were taking power, how to identify a text’s blindnesses and learn to take power and authority for ourselves. There was something depressing in this picture of everyone scrambling to grab power and authority over each other, before their own authority and power were grabbed.

The one that started “Days like this, I don’t know what to do with myself” made me feel certain that I had spent my whole life not knowing what to do with myself—all day, and all night. “I wander the halls …” That was exactly it: not the streets, like a flâneur, but the halls. Oh, I knew just which halls.

Lakshmi had assured me, when I pointed it out, that the insufferability of clubs was widely acknowledged. Why else did I think everyone was on drugs the whole time? My reluctance to talk to the guy you had to talk to to get the drugs was exceeded only by my mistrust of the drugs themselves. If I messed up my brain, what else did I have?

immediately recognized it as an old song—the kind you heard as a kid, and knew that the world it came from and referred to was not only closed to you, but was one that in some sense you yourself had brought to an end, so that whatever it was really about was something that no longer existed, and that you could never have—except that now you were having it, because it had been transformed, uprooted, dragged into now, and some seemingly foreclosed possibility had opened up again.

Up to that moment, I had thought that the reason it was embarrassing to be in a club was because of not feeling anything, and having to go through the motions. But it turned out that feeling things—feeling so much—was even more embarrassing.

The idea of being totally seen, but not pitied or stopped-at, of him relentlessly telling my whole life with his words. My life, with his words.

(So, it was possible to make someone else feel that way: the way someone had made you feel.)

It was like we didn’t have the language between us to talk about anything normal.

Ivan had asked me that once about New Jersey—whether it had been intense—making me realize that intensity was, indeed, what one valued in place. Childhood was somehow the opposite of intense.

With the passage of time, this expectation came to strike me as insane. Of course he wasn’t going to call. If he had hoped to see me, he would have told me he was coming. He was here to visit his girlfriend, to have sex with his girlfriend, to do any number of things and to see any number of people, but not me. I was literally the one person he would be least likely to want to see, out of everyone on the planet, including all the people he had never met.

All I wanted was to be unconscious—to be asleep—to experience that moment of freedom in the morning, right when you woke up. I always felt it was my fault for not managing to prolong it. But even in the moment when I was steeling myself to prolong it, I had already forgotten what it was that I was trying to ward off, and the effort of remembering would bring it all back.

At least one was vouchsafed that dignity: the passage from day to night, the illumination of the headlights that made human affairs resemble, to some slight extent, the cosmological formations that didn’t have feelings or experience disgrace.

But I had had the feelings that Tatiana had when she wrote to Onegin, that repeated when I wrote to Ivan: the feeling of having put myself in his power, entrusted myself to his honor, like I was falling, like I could die, but he would catch me … probably.

That whole time, six years, I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion had been, for medieval people: it gave you the energy to face a life of injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery.

The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

There was a problem in it somewhere, because the point of getting out was to become a writer and write novels, and novels were all about that other kind of love—the kind where “something happened.” But when had I not had to dismiss some concern about the disjuncture between literature and the way I was living my life?

The extent to which Picasso idealized or disfigured the women in his paintings was a test: not just of their physical beauty, but in some way of their human worth.

Love affairs no longer felt only like a power my parents had to menace me from a distance. They were a venue through which, if only hypothetically, I could be the one who was special—who could finally have someone on my side, apart from myself.

Nothing went back to normal. Matt was now Svetlana’s boyfriend. I felt the same shameful emotions I had experienced in the past, when my aunts, mother, and father, in pursuit of various “relationships,” had brought more and more tedious people into our lives. Envy, jealousy, loneliness, despair—and also a kind of guilt, mixed with relief. Insofar as Svetlana and I had been in competition, to see whose worldview was better … that was over.

In a way, I had won, but it felt like defeat. How could she drop out of the race, when we had only just started? How had they gotten her so easily? Did they get everyone? Would they get me? Did I want them to?

Katie got sick and refused to eat anything but strawberries. Gavriil bought her strawberries, which she ended up puking, and which he cleaned up—because he loved her. He said in a fervent voice that he hoped that someday I would meet someone who would love me enough to clean up if I puked strawberries all over a bathtub.

The idea of opening up a new language seemed exciting. On the other hand, I never had been a huge fan of free play or chaos. Nor did I feel like my main problem with other people or the external world was an excess of logic.

“It could be Selin’s Finnish friend doing a thought experiment,” Riley said. That was what she always said now, whenever we weren’t sure if something was really happening.

Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness.

This thing with the boyfriends—it wasn’t a passing fad. Nothing would go back to how it had been. It would become more and more like the way it was. The stakes would get higher, the choices more limited. There were to be no exciting private discoveries of another person. Any option that occurred to you was bound to have occurred to others, embroiling you in a struggle—like the struggle between Zita and Eunice, which I had entered, without even realizing it.

But I didn’t have a plan, I wasn’t going to do it: partly because it would be the same thing as murdering my mother, and her sister, and then what would happen to my cousin; and partly out of fear that I would fail, and then people would say it had been a “cry for help.” Which is exactly what it would be if I told this guy about it now.

“Desire” seemed so metaphoric and wide-ranging, and an erection seemed so literal and specific.

There were too many things to think about, and you weren’t in control; you had to relinquish control.

After the psychiatrist, I always cried on the T. If you betrayed embarrassment or made a production of wiping your eyes, people stared, or asked if you were OK, or aggressively looked away in a way that made you feel guilty. But if you acted like nothing was happening, you floated on a magical cushion of invisibility. Maybe people didn’t notice, or they thought you just had an eye problem.

Was it wrong to value things—to want to keep them? If so, how did I get free from it? If this guy was telling me to not value something, wasn’t he obliged to offer me something better?

Later, I was back in that hospital basement, trying to describe my feeling of the world being a huge soul-crushing sex conspiracy that I didn’t know how to be a part of. The psychiatrist looked at me dispassionately and said: “Do you think you are attractive to men?” I gaped. Was he being cruel, or just dumb? I had told him that nobody had ever kissed me, or asked me out. And anyway, he himself could see me. Here I was. “No,” I said.

I found it in the library catalog—Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. “In America” was also annoying, as if everything that happened to you was somehow about America.

It wasn’t a positive review. “Ms. Wurtzel spares us no detail about her life,” Michiko Kakutani wrote. It was the same critique André Breton had leveled at Nadja: how she didn’t hesitate to tell him all the vicissitudes of her life, “not omitting a single detail.” (So: it was important to spare people details.)

Apparently, there was a link between the kind of self-indulgence that made people whine about their childhood, and the kind that made writers fail to “murder their darlings.” Both came from not having enough problems: from dragging around slights that had happened when you were two, and padding them with adjectives.

It was a familiar, incontrovertible line of reasoning: you couldn’t just dump everything on a page, because it wouldn’t be art. Yet there was something newly troubling to me, as it had not been when I was in high school, in this story of a girl who had gone to Harvard, and was depressed because her parents were divorced, and had written a book that was widely critiqued as self-indulgent.

“I missed this Selin,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she had missed me, too.

Lakshmi said that dating and romance were fun when you were young, but that freedom of choice in love was an illusion, and caused only pain. Sartre had explained this: to choose was to be never secure, to be always in flux—to be, for a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir had shown, in a kind of nonexistence. Maybe Sartre had been happy, but Simone de Beauvoir hadn’t.