“If you’d put up with all of that,” he asked, “why leave now?”
He had thick, sensitive lips and dark eyebrows marked on the right side by an unexpected shock of premature white. He was in fact a good guy.
“I don’t know exactly,” I said at first. And then I realized the problem. “I guess I just don’t want things to be normal.”
It was natural that I’d take my experiences into my poetry class. I wrote almost exclusively about sex, because sex was the most interesting thing that was happening to me.
My poetry teacher’s name was Kevin Kealey.
“I like the sex poems,” said Kevin.
Emma, an almost-model, almost-artist in the class, sighed extravagantly and rolled her eyes.
“But?” I asked.
“Listen, the idea isn’t entirely new. You’ve got Anaïs Nin, Erica Jong . . .” Kevin looked confused.
“Sylvia Plath,” I reminded him. “Sharon Olds, Eileen Myles.”
Kevin was nodding. “Yes, yes, of course. And . . . others. And your work is appealing. I mean, it’s fresh. It’s very honest.”
Again Emma sighed, louder this time, and was joined by a distinct groan from the back row. I ignored them. My class was composed of fourteen antagonistic strangers with day jobs and the kinds of literary ambitions that grew from personal torment and a scattershot idea of what might make it all feel better. Their critiques were not kind. (Soulless. Demeaning. Empty.) They all seemed to hate me, or maybe they just hated my work. Only Kevin thought I was onto something.
I submitted my sex poems to and was summarily rejected by ninety-nine literary journals and poetry magazines, and I told Kevin that was it. The number one hundred was simply too demoralizing, too symbolic. How would I ever recover from a hundred straight rejections?
One night I stayed late with Kevin after the others had trickled out. The class was held in an NYU building in what appeared to be an abandoned classroom designated too drafty and dangerous for tuition-paying NYU undergrads. There was some halfhearted graffiti on one section of the blackboard and what looked very much like asbestos pushing up the floor tiles beneath the room’s only window, which was cracked. We all kept our coats on during class.
“Kevin,” I said, pulling up a chair beside his desk, “why do I even care about getting published?”
“I don’t know. Why do you?” He was peeling an orange, and the fresh smell of citrus filled the room.
“Because people tell me I should care. You tell me that!”
Kevin looked wounded. “Fiona, I am all about the purity of the process. Don’t listen to those bozos at the Paris Review. Just write what you want to write.” He paused. “Maybe you should start a blog.”
“What did you just say?”
“A blog!” Kevin’s mouth was full of orange.
“Bog?”
He chewed and swallowed. “Have you been living under a rock? A blog. It’s like if you put your diary online and invited people to comment on it. Not for the faint of heart, Fiona.”
I considered his words. “I’ve never fainted in my life. Really.”
“I mean, I love these lines.” Kevin picked up the poem I had submitted for that night’s class. “You could turn this bloggy. Easy as pie.”
Kevin wrote down some website addresses, and I took the subway home. The year was 2003. I spent the weekend taking notes on Gawker, Dooce.com, Belle de Jour, and The Daily Dish. By Sunday afternoon I figured I had read enough. I downloaded Movable Type version 2.6 onto my iMac and, after an all-nighter of mouse manipulation and profanity, became a blogger.
Because I was a little bit chicken and because I didn’t quite trust that Kevin totally knew what he was talking about, I did not use my name. I called myself the Last Romantic.
On the blog I described the project like this: “The Last Romantic aims to record in Full Truth the Sex Life of a Young Woman in a Great City, the woman being myself, the city being New York. Or, in other words, the process of providing myself with a sentimental education, unsentimentally.”
My first post, an earnest and semi-erotic poem about kissing a man with a mustache, drew 7 hits. My next post, a wryly detailed account of oral sex with the same mustachioed man, titled “Ticklingus,” drew 288 hits. I was hooked. I could say anything in a few short paragraphs, and anyone with a computer could read it. I told only Kevin when I posted something new, and yet week by week, month by month, my audience grew.
Before The Last Romantic, dating had always seemed like a purpose-driven exercise—date men, sleep with men, to find one man—but now it became process-driven. There was no one man, I realized, waiting at the end of this rainbow. The project itself served as both pot of gold and rainbow. I applied all the five-cent homilies I’d ever heard about the journey and the destination and not investing in the outcome into this, my sex life. And it was so interesting! What was more interesting than personal foibles and predilections related to sex? Because related to sex meant related to self and self-esteem and esteem of others. How a person behaved on a one-night stand spoke volumes. After I warmed up to the basic project mechanics (flirtation, initiation, fulfillment), I liked to shake it up. I would play a woman searching for commitment, or one heartsick from a bad breakup, or (once) a prostitute, or (twice) a virgin. Dabbling in the emotional specifics varied my partners’ responses and, most interestingly, changed my own physical outcome in ways that always surprised me.
Of course, the sheer number of encounters required that I look beyond the men themselves, their personalities specifically. They became for me a sequence of responses, physical, emotional, behavioral. Perhaps I should have taken anthropology in college as well as women’s studies, because the project seemed a melding of the two. Gendered in its consciousness and goals. But those who read the blog didn’t really care about the theoretical underpinnings, what I believed about gender expectations and sexual politics, the traps of marriage and motherhood, the need for women to claim their own personal freedom and expression, sexual and otherwise. Young women read my blog about sex because my experiences matched their own and my words provided confirmation that they—the furiously typing, horny, sexy female they—were not alone.
On the night of Joe’s engagement party, I had been writing the blog for ten months. I had 5,188 followers, averaged fifty to seventy-five comments per post, and was on the way to becoming the unlikely sexual guru to a certain group of single, primarily heterosexual young women with Internet access and complicated love lives.
Since the blog began, I had slept with seventy-six men.
* * *
“Hello? Hello out there?” said Kyle Morgan. He rapped a microphone. A small platform stage had been installed against the wall facing the windows, and Kyle now stood upon it, looking down at his party guests with the amused expression of a calm and indulgent host. Kyle had a louche authority about him. As vice president of Morgan Capital under his aging father, he was the de facto man in charge, the one who enforced the rules, but also the one who most frequently broke them.
“Children. Children, please,” Kyle said over the din. “It’s circle time now, so let’s listen up.”
All heads turned toward the stage. An expectant silence fell.
“Good, now you’ll all get a nice treat after class,” Kyle said, and grinned. “I first wanted to thank you all for being here tonight to celebrate Joe and Sandrine.” A few whoops, a smattering of applause. “I think I speak for many of Joe’s friends when I say thank you especially to Sandrine for taking Joe Skinner off the market so the rest of us have a chance.” Laughter, more hoots. “And I’m sure Sandrine’s friends would say the same. You’re a vision tonight, darling, really.” In the crowd Sandrine tipped her blond head.