Odd Man Out
Photo by WeeGee
I was up late watching a show from the early-aughts about girls living in New York City. I didn’t watch it when it originally aired because I felt disdain towards the show’s protagonist and I didn’t have HBO. Earlier this year, I said “fuck it” and decided to give it a go, the show was having a cultural resurgence anyway and it’d been a while since my last bandwagon.
Reluctantly and despite myself, I enjoyed the show. Of course, I would. It brought me back to those post-adolescent days when everyone ran around and into each other. The fashion was great and the soundtrack couldn’t be better, all Camera Obscura, Feist, and Robyn. And it had jokes.
In one episode the protagonist’s mom is introduced to her somewhat unconventionally attractive boyfriend, who looms tall and eccentric over the show. He’s an artist, he’s tortured, he lives in a squalid, bombed-out apartment, he makes grand gestures like covering a huge wall in paste-up SORRYs in the middle of the night to apologize.
In this particular episode, the main character and her mom have this exchange:
Mom: You know, you're so special. You deserve everything and more. He's really nice, but you know stay open to possibilities.
MC: Mom, how dare you talk about something you literally nothing about.
Mom: No you're right. I don't know him very well. I see certain things. He's odd, he's angry. He's uncomfortable in his own skin. He bounces around from thing to thing.
MC: Again you have no idea--
Mom: Just-No no let me talk. I don't want you to spend your whole life socializing him, like he's a stray dog. Making the world a friendlier place for him. It's not easy being married to an odd man. It isn't.
The boyfriend on the show reminds me of a former flame. One who knew everything; about music and movies and art. He was rigid in his peccadilloes, everything had so much meaning. Even going out to eat a hamburger had to fit in with his aesthetic ethos. He wasn’t soft or kind but the whole world felt illuminated when his attention shined on me. He was hot and mysterious and terribly interesting. He wore boots without laces and he’d never deign to engage with pleasantries. In short, he was odd too. He careened through his life to get what he wanted and he’d never soften or slow down to accommodate me. Me or my friends or my family or the silly little things I liked. And there was something admirable and exciting and enviable about all of those qualities even as they enraged and saddened and confused me. Emotional turmoil masquerading as love. At the time, it felt like it meant something, changing and molding myself to fit his contours. The highs were high and the lows were low, that’s the way love goes. And for a long time, it went that way.
I felt the dialogue between the mom and the protagonist almost coursing through my veins and the timeline of my life zoomed out, the confluence of girlhood and womanhood coming into contrast. The pocked and arduous path of youth diverging from where I left my own odd man in favor of an easier road with someone a little more normal. I think that growing up means knowing what you know now, that it could have worked out, and knowing what you know now, being so thankful that it didn’t.
