Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Lakshmi’s father sometimes joked about women who married for love: how much they must value themselves, to think they were more attractive than the sum total of all other women—to think they were enough, without the institution of marriage, to keep a man faithful to them. He teased Lakshmi, asking if she thought of herself that way. I felt a wave of gratitude toward my parents, who would never have thought or said anything like that about me. On the other hand … that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

It was a strange thing how people acted as if having a kid was the best thing that could happen to anyone, even though actual parents seemed to experience most of their children’s actual childhoods as an annoyance, which they compensated for by bossing them around. People with kids had to go to work every day, at boring, reliable jobs. On the plus side, work was an acceptable way to escape your children, without seeming to want to. The children, having no such escape, lived through long stretches of boredom and powerlessness, punctuated by occasional treats that they overvalued and freaked out over because the rest of their lives were so empty.

Furthermore, whenever parents talked about “love,” some part of my brain switched off. They had their story, and they were sticking to it. The story was that they loved us with a love that we were incapable of understanding, and the reason things were the way they were was because they loved us so much.

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I’d been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about. It was a great disappointment to find that, even at Harvard, most people’s plan was to have children and amass money for them.

You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world as a place of free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge hurry to get ever...

I felt irritated, understanding that it was girls’ responsibility to disinterestedly award ourselves to nice guys—to guys whom other guys agreed were nice, because our opinion couldn’t be trusted.

Leonard said that being a writer meant that you lived your life on the outside looking in.

In a lot of ways, being a writer was about endurance more than talent.

Writers, Leonard said, were not normal people. As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words. You were constantly putting yourself on the line, and constantly being rejected. You betrayed the only people who really loved you. For this reason, the most honest advice anyone gave about becoming a writer was that, if you were capable of doing absolutely anything else, you should do that thing instead.

“He doesn’t really care about me, just about his own idea of himself,” Lakshmi said, opening a new and painful line of thought. Did Joey care more about his idea of himself than he did about the actual Lakshmi? Who was the actual Lakshmi—other than someone who didn’t care much for Joey? What would Joey act like if he really cared about her? Did Joey’s pursuit of Lakshmi betray some fundamental misunderstanding of who she was? Had I missed the point of Ivan? Did I care more about my idea of myself than I did about him?

Was it the wine that helped a person appreciate things uncritically? Was that why Ivan had always been trying to get me to drink?

Svetlana had pointed out that, if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I would notice that everyone was saying all kinds of antisocial, ignorant, or irrelevant things, which were often just a posture they were trying out, as opposed to a reflection of their essential personality, which was probably a thing that didn’t even exist. I hadn’t believed her, but she was right: nobody was actually answering anything anyone else had said, and people were constantly betraying antisocial ideas.

Later we were at another party in a dorm. Why did all parties sound and smell the same, even though the component people were different? It was as if all the different individuals came together and formed the eternal entity Party Person.

When he leaned in to kiss me, it was like sliding back into the water on one of those long days at the beach, where you just get out so you can go back in again.

How strange that this was like that—that the most adult thing was in some way like being a child.

How were his arms and chest so strong? I reached a clearer understanding of why a man’s body was exciting: not just in itself, but because of how it made you feel, how slender and pliant.

How radical to feel so much of a person’s skin—not with one’s hand but with one’s body.

Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn’t come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower.

Wasn’t that how people in other countries viewed all American people—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the “reality” that happened elsewhere?

What was the relationship between leaving the country, ruining people, falling in love, and having sex? There clearly was one.

I had thought that an aesthetic life would be more like a string of adventures than like a coming-of-age novel, or the life-cycle of a frog, where there was a grand progression ending with “maturity” and the ability to procreate. But it was impossible to imagine an aesthetic life, or any life, without falling in love.

Without love, knowledge itself became a hassle; became bullying and imposition. “My country.” “Learn about my country.” Being in love was the only thing that made you want to learn about a person’s country, or about anything else outside your experience. Falling in love was the essential feature of a novel. The Russian word for “novel,” roman, could also mean “love affair.” A “love affair” implied sex, at least the question of sex.

If falling in love was the only way to learn anything, and if falling in love was in some way about sex, could the fact that I hadn’t “had” sex explain why I seemed to myself not to have really learned anything—why I seemed not to have really learned anything about, for example, Hungary—why everything I did learn felt somehow incomplete and beside the point? Was it sex—“having” sex—that would restore to me the sense of my life as a story?

On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that literally nothing was fair. The people who had said that throughout one’s childhood hadn’t just been joking around, or trying to whitewash their own personal lack of integrity.

And yet … it felt like you were dying. Of course, you weren’t really dying. Was that the source of the humor: the disjuncture between how serious it felt and how trivial it really was?

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that?

And then it was like slipping back into the water again after lying on hot sand, and knowing you were going to go back and forth like that, between the beach and the sea, until the sun burned up and sank into the water.

A series of expressions moved across his face. I knew that his feelings couldn’t be the same as mine, but they seemed, at least in that moment, to be equally numerous. How close I felt to him, and I felt him feel it, too, and I thought: Would it have killed him to have coffee first?

The preferred state was for me not to be fascinated. It was for me not to be thinking about the condom factory, wondering why they called it Trojan when the Trojan horse was a story about permeability, about how the Greeks swarmed out and foiled the Trojans, who had believed themselves to be protected—and in the moment that he pushed me onto my back I realized, with elation, that I could prefer that state, too, that I didn’t need to be thinking about those things.

What good fortune, that the thing he wanted was something I was so eminently capable of wanting—that my desires overlapped, or could overlap, with the concrete social reality. I felt my body adjusting to the concrete social reality.

As a child, you learned that all the soft, colorful things were for girls, and at that time I had felt lucky. But this coarse gray towel … had I been duped?

“Well, you’re assuming that a lack of responsibilities makes a person happy, and vice versa. I think this is a very American assumption. You have relatively few responsibilities now. Are you happy? Maybe you would feel happier if you had more responsibilities.”

It went on like that all day: the previous night replaying over and over, seeming to confer a kind of weighted legitimacy onto all the routine, boring parts of the day, making me feel like I was in a movie. Why was it that, when you got to a routine or boring scene in a movie, you didn’t panic or despair? In a movie, the number, duration, and meaning of scenes were determined in advance. You just had to wait it out. Theoretically, I supposed, this was true of real life—certainly, the number and duration of scenes weren’t infinite—but there was always the chance it would just end without anything meaningful happening at all.

You always speak ironically, and yet you’re so sincere. You are the only one who can prevent me from my self-absorbed flights of bathos.”

But the curtain came down again almost immediately, everything went back to how it had been, and I understood that what had been revealed to me at this sadomasochism-themed party was the true face of all parties: how they were all, in one way or another, sadomasochism-themed.

How could a key even be a key if they were all the same? Wasn’t the point that each key was different? I tried to think it through, on the way to the bathroom. Was it related to whether your goal was to keep out many different people, or keep in one person?

It was, of course, an outcome I had anticipated; but insofar as I had given it any thought, I had seen it as an improvement on the status quo, reasoning that it would feel more bearable and legitimate if the guy was someone I’d actually had sex with. It had been a comfort to imagine a future in which I wasn’t constantly thinking about Ivan—even if it meant just subbing him out for a guy with a worse personality.

Instead, I talked about my favorite line in the story: the one where the guy realized that all parties were the same. You were always just stuck in a room while drunk people said the same things over and over, “as if you were sitting in a madhouse or a prison.” “That’s such a great description of what unrequited love feels like,” Leonard agreed. I had never heard anyone say the word “unrequited,” and hadn’t realized it was pronounced that way, or that it was something Leonard had experienced. “Or not necessarily unrequited, but just not going the way you want it to.” Gazing into the distance, Leonard talked about “a wrongness underlying the machinery,” and everything he said was true.

Did you ever read in Russian formalism about the “knight’s move”? The theory is that change or innovation never goes in a straight line. That’s why it’s always surprising, and sometimes feels almost backwards.

The Rules were basically to do the exact opposite of everything I did. You could never tell a man that you loved him, or show that you liked him, or initiate sex, or agree to have sex. The Rules closely corresponded to the list of things that Tatiana didn’t do, in Eugene Onegin.

That was the essence of the Rules: to treat the man you were interested in just like the man you weren’t interested in. You could never stop pretending you weren’t interested, not even after you were married. That was Rule 26. If at any turn, anything you did seemed like your idea, it was a huge turnoff. This was because of “biology.”

Nothing in The Rules was news, exactly: the eternal defeat of non-lame women, the worthlessness of their “honesty,” the way they so often ended up marrying lame guys whom they had initially rejected as tedious. It wasn’t that I hadn’t known these things, but that at some point, without realizing it, I had persuaded myself that I was different—that my honesty and non-lameness wouldn’t be punished like that, because I had some special skill, some self-sufficiency, an ability to be alone. I always had been alone, when every other person in my family had insisted on having someone around to have sex with.

It was shocking to see Ivan’s name in my in-box, even though, or maybe because, it was no longer the white-hot one, being somehow less activated than the longer Polish name pertaining to the Count. But I felt its latent power: how it could start again, how the wire was still live.

how could you be so graceful in writing and so clumsy in life?

I thought about the Rules, and how I had felt they didn’t apply to me. All that time, when I had been telling myself that I wasn’t dependent on other people, hadn’t I been holding on to the contradictory conviction that someday I would—in the very phrase, heavy with significance, used by my mother and aunts—“meet someone”: someone as different from the tedious guy who wanted to marry you, as from the tedious guy who didn’t want to marry you?

Struck by Peter’s way of viewing things, by the way he made the world sound so manageable and small and large at the same time, I wondered aloud whether I should try to work something out with the frozen food guy. Wouldn’t it be pleasing in a narrative way for everything to tie together like that?

Why was that the thing you had to do when you saw a girl: to prosecute whether and in what way she was beautiful—as Lara, I realized, was? With guys, some of them were physically repellent or appealing, but a lot of them initially presented as neutral, and there wasn’t that immediate, urgent-feeling cognitive puzzle to slot them in, as there was with literally every female person, including one’s own self, in windows and storefronts.

Sometimes it seemed to me that I looked interesting, mysterious, and sculptural. Other times I thought that I didn’t look like anything, that nothing matched together or corresponded to anything or had any kind of grace or proportion or meaning, that the posture was deformed and hateful, like a sign of laziness or obsequiousness or some other personality flaw.

I felt relieved to learn that there was some logic, after all, behind who ended up with whom, because this plan sounded crazy to me, and yet I could imagine a person different from me thinking it would be fun. Clearly, Lara was such a person, and that was why she and Juho were together.

How alone a person was normally, walking down a street, trying to choose between different businesses. It wasn’t the most glamorous part of life, or the one that was most often discussed, but it was so constant, like a heartbeat, like the waves: the question of where and how to spend the money that had been wrung from the world at such cost.