my series of unfortunate events revisited
Has anyone got a light?
“‘Sometimes I think I’m an alien’ ‘How come?’ They’re sitting on the steps out the back door of the bar. Squashed together thigh to thigh in the space of the door frame, smoking cigarettes… Laur swallows. ‘Yeah’ she says, not like she’d never thought of it, that maybe she was dead and this was hell, though sometimes it felt like heaven. And how it felt like someone had left the iron pressed on her jeans at the place where Vic’s thigh pushed against hers.”1
Infatuation has been on the brain lately.
It’s showing up in all the media I’m consuming: plays (The Effect), movies (Love Lies Bleeding), music (eternal sunshine), and books. Especially the books.
The quote above is from Hannah Levene’s experimental novel,2 Greasepaint, which focuses on anarchist piano playing butch lesbians in 1950s New York. I picked it up at Book Club, a bookstore bar hybrid. A last-ditch purchase on my way out because I couldn’t resist that cover image.
I’ll admit to watching and reading romance. I even write it in spite of myself. Still, I’ve resented the genre for feeling like a fantasy. My love life or personal “Series of Unfortunate Events” as I’ve fondly called it, has been heavy on the slapstick, screwball, and dark comedy. Light on romance. At least that’s how I’ve always framed it.
Only recently have I wondered if I’m neglecting key parts of the story. Scenes, however brief, that’d fit on the pages behind a cover like that.
“Squashed together thigh to thigh in the space of the door frame, smoking cigarettes…”
If you ask me the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me, I’ll tell you about the time a man crossed the party to offer me a cigarette.
I was sitting on a beat-up outdoor wood table. The kind placed in the front yards of senior college student housing to play rage cage and beer pong on. The paint on this one had chipped away and it had been cast off to the side of the lawn where I sought it for quiet.
I was in a circular conversation on the phone with a friend who’d drunkenly found herself on the steps of my apartment complex. I was using everything in my arsenal to convince her NOT to call her sometimes-long-distance-low-commitment boyfriend. After talking her off the stoop, her slurred voice told me how much tell me she loved me, and I knew in spite of the alcohol she meant it. We exchanged declarations of adoration as drunk college girls are prone to do. Once she reached her apartment where her roommate was waiting, we said goodnight. I hung up and exhaled. She was safe. I’d just noticed the night was beautiful.
That’s when he came over. Black hair, two years older, and handsome in a solid, 50s leading man sort of way. He crossed the party toward me in soft focus. A Marlboro pack in one hand and a red solo cup in the other, leaving the noise and people behind. I’d been selected. Found. Seen in my hiding spot outside the rest of the world. Lights were softer. It was as if someone was pumping haze into my own personal film set. In a second, I’d swapped the role of the well-meaning friend for the romantic heroine.
It wasn’t a random gesture. I’d laid groundwork early in the night. Touching his arm every other sentence and laughing loudly in a way that felt mortifying in front of my friends. Fluffing my hair. I was a charming jumble of obvious cliches, never imagining my performance might amount to anything. We’d joked about smoking together later, and he’d promised to find me. I was stunned to see he meant it.
That moment took my breath away. Not the guy, but the fact that things were right and reciprocal. The aesthetic of the action was perfect. Raised on Old Hollywood movies, my brain is rotted with romanticism around smoking.
“‘Yeah’ she says, not like she’d never thought of it…”
Like all perfect moments, this one was over too soon. The bubble burst once we both lit up. I remember my mind going blank from being too stunned. I’d reached a place in romantic language I’d never been to before. It was too charged, too picturesque for mundane small talk. Hopes and fantasies had come true, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Then, I realized how little I knew about the man opposite me. How we were really just strangers and what did we actually have in common. An hour later, he was falling down drunk, and I was ordering a Lyft home.
“Isn’t that sad?” I’d ask people at parties and over dinners. One small bright spot in my series of unfortunate events is all I have to show. The most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me and there wasn’t a kiss or sex or a grand gesture or love. Just lung cancer.
In the years since, I’ve had other equally romantic and fruitless experiences. A long-awaited confession of feelings in the rain comes to mind. I called my friend on the walk home to yell, “IT HAPPENED IN THE POURING RAIN? CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? HE TOLD ME HE LIKED ME AND HE WANTED ME BUT THE TIMING WASN’T RIGHT WHILE WE STOOD ON THE CORNER GETTING SOAKED. NOT EVEN UNDER AN AWNING OR ANYTHING.” Again, it felt like a scene from a movie. Again, I was cast opposite the wrong person.
“…it felt like someone had left the iron pressed on her jeans at the place where Vic’s thigh pushed against hers.”
Then again, there’s something to be said for all that.
Instances that only feel perfect because nothing’s happened yet. The fleeting in between area. Not intense love or even lust, but validation. The moment what-if-they-like-me becomes a mutual attraction. Two people creating their own orbit with an intoxicating gaze or a hand on your lower back you can still feel a day later. Those moments that confirm romance exists off the page. Outside the silver screen. That it can still happen for us mere mortals. I recently lamented the agony of interpreting and reinterpreting a crush’s actions to my friend, only to be told, “Sophia, this is the best part.”
Romance isn’t the same as love as much as it pretends to be. If I’m talking about the love in my life, I’ll tell you about the friend who sat on a public bathroom floor with me while I cried that I was broken. Or all the people who showed up for my memoir reading. Whenever someone introduces me as a “great writer” without a trace of hesitation I feel adored and understood. Regarding grand gestures, I’ll tell you about the time someone helped me install my AC unit or about the person who took me to the NY Botanical Gardens light show for my birthday.
Platonic is what I lean on in a crisis and look to when I don’t know who I am anymore. Platonic is stable, devoted, and reciprocal without becoming a transaction. For now, romance hasn’t been able to match that, which isn’t to say it never will. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.
It’s moments that burn hot and fast before being stubbed out. The illusion that you are the star, the world is right, and everyone’s gorgeous. The feeling that nothing exists or matters except whatever immediately comes next.
God, does smoking feel good.
Recommendations for this Era:
Greasepaint by Hannah Levene3
Love Lies Bleeding (2023)
eternal sunshine by Ariana Grande
The Effect by Lucy Prebble
Sunday flea markets
Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker
Pink Lipstick
The New Look on Apple TV+
NOT obsessively checking the partiful and asking your friends why they haven’t RSVP’d
Cowboy Carter by Beyonce4
Levene, Hannah. Greasepaint. Nightboat Books, New York (2024). pg 20
Or so the back cover says.
I’m almost done with this book, and it is a lovely combination of poetry and prose. It delves into fascinating nuances of gender performance, and I highly recommend checking it out.
Obviously!!!