Lena Dunham’s Verified Strangers , Chapter 18: Mister at the Screen Door
Whenever she was faced with anything resembling conflict, Ally resorted to childlike magical thinking. She would snap her lids closed and hope that she could shake herself into a new reality, like those dreams where you recognize there may be a way out and so you start digging your way toward consciousness. She was aware it was a stalling technique, like an ostrich burying its head, and yet she always thought this time would be the one time when it worked. But it only took a few seconds of staring down the neck of her T-shirt for Ally to realize that inhaling deeply the smell between her own boobs wasn’t going to free her from her current reality.
“Ally?” Matthew asked. “Ally, I only need a few minutes.”
“Can I come in or what?” Caz prodded gently.
“Ally, what’re you thinking?” Timmy handed Ally a mug of water, a gesture so gentle it made her want to cry.
“Caz, of course. Uh, yeah. We should all talk.” Ally offered Caz a nervous half-smile that Caz ignored, nodding to Timmy instead like they were the one who had said it. Matthew watched as Caz decamped for the kitchen, a move that highlighted the stark reality of this moment: he was behind the screen door and no one had invited him in.
Ally stepped to the door, bowing her head and talking out the side of her mouth. “Hey, uh… It’s not a good time. I’m so sorry about your mother. I RSVP’d for Thursday. But I can’t do this right now.”
“But you don’t even know what ‘this’ is,” he pushed. It was so like him to keep iron-clad boundaries when she needed something, yet the moment it was about his inner life, he was ready to mow hers down.
Ally knew that, to many, the death of someone’s parent was an “all bets are off” scenario. After all, it only happens twice in a lifetime and is the kind of formative pain that can act as a before-and-after marker between two versions of someone’s inner (and outer) life. If you had asked Ally last week what she thought she would do if Matthew’s mother had died and he had showed up looking for her, she would have answered with one word: melt. After all, she’d spent the last two years looking for an excuse to dissolve the blockades between them and return to a fluid state where they lived inside each other’s brains. But more had happened in the last two weeks than had happened in the last two years, and she now found herself left with one primary emotion as she looked at his face, his shiny black beard—thinner than she remembered—and hair buzzed to type-A perfection, dressed in a full menswear “look” despite his mother having committed suicide three days before.
Since their breakup, Ally had spent more time thinking about her appearance than she had during the previous 30 years of her life. There’s nothing like someone slowly backing out of the room while pretending that they’re still right there with you to convince you that there’s an inherent problem with the curl of your bangs, the mole on your left eyebrow, or the spread of your upper thigh. But here she stood in front of Matthew, her hair forming a halo of frizz, her T-shirt stopping at the widest point on her whole leg, blemish cream dotted right above the plummy V that the top of her lips formed. Aside from the assorted meaningless tattoos on her forearms (hearts, arrows, thin bands of pink, yellow and blue) there was the word on her collarbone: Mister. It was her nickname for Matthew, but it had come to represent every one of them. How fitting that the love of her life’s nickname was simply the prefix title for men in general.
“I can’t do this right now,” she repeated.
“But Ally…” he choked, his voice catching like it hadn’t since their cat Wally died behind the refrigerator. He had never cried during the entire time they were cleaving apart, and it was an alien sound, like an old man clearing his throat on the bus. “Ally, I can’t get through this without you.”
“Did you and Siobhan break up?”
He shook his head, no. “It’s just different.”
And with that, she stiffened. From the corner of her eye, she could sense Timmy—a perfect host—pouring Caz a cup of tea, stirring honey in with a long wooden spoon. Ally stood tall so that she was looking ever so slightly down at Matthew, whose five-foot-four-inch status had never felt quite so clear. “You gave up the right to me when you shut me out. And when I was in pain, I didn’t have access to you.”
“Ally, that was a breakup. My mom is dead.”
“There is nothing I could have said to get to you. This isn’t revenge, Matthew. I just don’t have any room left. Please, it’s better this way. The other version was torture for me. Is that what you want?”
He opened and closed his mouth a few times like a fish on a hook.
“Matthew, if you’ve ever loved me, please let me keep the space I’ve created for myself.”
He stood there for a moment, searching her face for a trap door in, and when none presented itself, he turned down the front steps and headed back out into the dark. “Be well, Ally.”
For the first time, seeing him leave did nothing to her. There was no kick in her chest, no fear in her stomach, no sense that she was losing what belonged to her. She could no longer recognize the 14-year-old boy bombing down Collins Avenue in his printed board shorts. She could no longer recognize the 28-year-old man grilling burgers on their balcony. She could no longer recognize him at all, and she would have celebrated that freedom, but she had only just warmed up for the major emotional marathon of the evening. Ally turned back to Timmy and Caz, who were now gamely gossiping about their friend Zelda’s sudden move to Marin County. Goddamn, these well-adjusted queer people and their ability to contain multitudes and accept contradictions in the people they love, even in the people they don’t. Ally dropped her shoulders—dropped the shield, it wouldn’t serve her here—and asked: “So, you two wanna talk?”
New chapters of Lena Dunham’s “Verified Strangers” appear daily, Monday through Friday, on Vogue.com. If you missed the previous chapters, you can read them here.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
