Paul knew his new girlfriend Lydia was better than his ex-girlfriend Lydia. She was kinder. She was more considerate. She was also prettier once she got all done up. She liked what Paul liked—at least more so than Lydia had—trendy restaurants, open mic nights, watching people ride the mechanical bull at Barley’s. She had a vibe, which his ex-girlfriend Lydia never had. Instead, the new Lydia painted the faces of miniature dolls made out of clay and paper clips, which she put on the internet. She was so obviously herself with the one exception of her name.
He hadn’t expected to break up with his ex-girlfriend, but when she told him that after two years together she was moving to Oregon, he stayed in the city instead. For his first six single months no one was better than his ex. The women he found online and then met in person were all jumbled together. Paul continued conversations from first dates to which his new dates had not been invited.
Paul arranged a picnic in Alphabet City for his first date with the new Lydia. Without planning it, they both wore down jackets and fingerless gloves. He laughed, and they hugged as if they were old friends, and then he kissed her on the neck to set the tone. For Paul, being so close to the large pores on Lydia’s nose finally made her real. He’d brought two ancestry-testing kits because another match was interested in learning where she came from. He wiped the inside of Lydia’s cheek with a cotton swab and placed the Q-tip into the provided envelope.
“I wonder how surprised we’re gonna be about who we are,” he said. “You know, about where we’re from.”
“Yeah, haha,” she said, but she didn’t exactly laugh.
At their second date, they read their expedited results to each other at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen near where Lydia went to school. The gastropub was stock market-themed, with a ticker that snaked around the ovaloid counter with marqueed approximations of publicly traded companies in the form of the bar’s most popular drinks: MGRT. DQRI. COSM. MRTN. Paul pursed his lips in confusion. These were not the acronyms he logged each day at work. These were just letters—both stocks and drinks, and neither.
Paul impersonated the voices of his favorite streamers for her. He tried to forget the other conversations he was having with women online by studying the way Lydia’s faint freckles darkened in the light. Her family was from all over, while Paul was almost entirely Greek. She sipped her White Russian. He’d ordered an Irish Coffee.
Lydia tucked her hair behind her ear as if this were not a date but a job interview. “I’m studying nursing. I can work in eight months, as long as I pass my tests.” She said she had wanted to be a nurse from age six. “I mean everyone else wanted to be actors or presidents or dentists,” she said, “but I wanted to be a nurse. And here I am.”
“Here you are,” Paul said. He felt relieved. Then he asked, “And how’d you get this?” He flopped his torso against the ledge to touch a mark on Lydia’s forehead with his thumb.
“Oh my God,” she laughed. “I, um, passed out from nerves at the regional spelling bee in middle school. My head hit the podium on the way down.”
The drunker they got, the less important the subway tile on the walls became, or the warm Edison lighting, or, eventually, their words. He couldn’t remember what she was talking about. Something about her doll hobby. Something about her website. He felt how warm her knees were just below her leather skirt. He was in loose blue jeans. When he kissed her, he thought of a slot machine, her lips presented on the finally settled reels.
She invited him to her place in SoHo, but calling himself a gentleman, he hailed a cab back alone to DUMBO instead. He liked her. She was fun, but more importantly, she was so much better than his ex Lydia. So much that he would continue to see her, on a third date at a make-your-own ramen bar, on a fourth date at a volcano museum, on a fifth date in line for artisanal cupcakes, at decreasingly adventurous destinations based on the algorithms of ads displayed in his web browser. This was what love was, Paul realized, as he looked at the signs for FDR Drive passing by the window. Love wasn’t a confession, or maybe not even a state of mind. It was the ability to move from a girlfriend whom he thought he’d marry to this new woman he found on the internet. Love was this alone.
*
Paul and Lydia fell into something easy over the next three months. When she finished class, she came over to his place. He asked about her day, and she asked about his, and they ordered dinner, and it was delivered, and every other day they watched a show, and every third day they had sex, and every other week they went out to bars with friends, and every third week they fought—well, really, bickered—and one would leave—Paul to the gym, or Lydia to yoga—and when they reunited in his one-bedroom, they shared a silent sorry, a cold kiss.
On a Friday, Paul took Lydia to Barley’s for the first time. It was a below-ground bar that fused speakeasy and Texas roadhouse. Paul and the old Lydia had first gone there together years ago. Paul liked its flashiness. Lydia had liked its cocktails. Now, Paul still liked its flashiness. The new Lydia liked its straws.
“Look!” she said. “Red ones with stripes.”
The bar pretended to be a front—the name on the receipts was “Lopez’s Pawn Shop”; the name on the coasters was “Bottom’s Up”; the name on the sign was “No, No, No.” “It must be part of its gestalt,” his ex Lydia had said the first time they’d gone.
Now, the new Lydia said, “So what if Barley’s isn’t actually its name?”
They sat in his usual spot—a high-top that overlooked the mechanical bull named Duke. Paul suggested they drink there so they could best watch people ride. He sippped quickly. Lydia swirled her straw through the melted ice of her Long Island iced tea. Paul finished his Manhattan.
“You want another?” he asked.
They talked about the rain and Paul’s firm and Lydia’s dolls. They talked about school. Lydia was nervous about taking her exams after graduating. “It’s like the bar, but for nursing.”
“What does it stand for again?”
“Oh, God,” she said. “I can’t remember. I’ve just been thinking about it as the ensee lex this whole time.”
On each table lay a plastic ox skull with a flickering candle. Rifles hung off the walls, flowers coming out the barrels. A stuffed capybara head was mounted above the door to the restrooms. Duke, the mechanical bull, was spotlighted in an inflated arena in the center of the bar.
Paul leaned in. “I read that the owners used to live in Cambridge.”
“Massachusetts?”
“No, England. Britain. The UK, or whatever. It’s why they named the bull Duke.”
Paul looked at his warped reflection in the lacquer of the bull’s haunches. He wondered why he was always so aware of himself. That if he were remarkable he might be able to forget.
He hadn’t seen any posts from the old Lydia over the past week. He never clicked on her stuff, but having it on the fringes of his day gave him a comfort; it made it feel like she could still be with him. Had she found out he was dating someone else named Lydia and blocked him, or was she swept up with someone new in Portland? What if his name was Paul?
He had been nervous to date, not so much due to fear of rejection, nor awkwardness, but for how he might erase his ex. He thought of his memory as a tape deck from childhood and Lydia an artifact on the ribbon to rewrite. Every date had involved losing someone by recording someone new.
The bar grew noisier as it grew later. Someone dropped a glass; someone else shouted, “Chuppah!” A woman talked too loudly about the word “literally.” A man approached the bull.
The man mounted Duke to laughter and applause. The bartender turned down the overheads and music. Only the spotlight remained, illuminating the wisps of threads of the man’s plaid shirt. He lassoed the air, tipped his hat, screamed, “Yeehaw!” as he dipped, twirled, and slid on the jerking machine. The game was to not let go, to never let go, but the bartender always jacked up the speed and modulated the movement and soon enough every single person fell off. Lydia’s face was slack with surprise. The old Lydia had seen it coming every time.
When the applause died down, a small line started to form. Paul was so distracted by the man’s proud exit from the arena that he didn’t notice Lydia was gone until he saw that she was next. She waved.
He watched his girlfriend hitch up her tight jeans and mount the beast. He liked where they sat on her now, how they bisected her stomach. Her chest looked nice in her draped top, and Paul let himself admire it, study how fearless she was compared to Lydia. She was better able to laugh at herself, more certain about what she wanted. The bartender gyrated the bull slowly, then quickly, bucking it to make Lydia’s silk blouse ride up in each dip. The crowd cheered, which is when the bull reared, jerking Lydia’s head as it sped along its track with a mechanized whir. She lost her grip, flew off, and slammed face down against the rubber padding on the edge of the arena. She didn’t move for a moment. Was she hurt? And to think he’d brought her here! Her body lay limp, her arms outstretched under the harsh lighting, her hair flared out over her neck. How would he break the news to her parents, whom he hadn’t yet met? He hadn’t even told her he loved her because he didn’t know if he did or could.
Finally, she stood up and shimmied out of the ring to chants from the audience. Paul did not applaud, and, to his surprise, did not feel impressed. He worried instead he might no longer be enough.
He touched Lydia’s neck. He felt a thin layer of sweat. Lydia was springy and athletic. She’d be a nurse, a healer. She was surprising and driven. She would drink with him, and she would sleep in his apartment, and she would make him happy by being happy, by being so genuinely Lydia.
“You’re a hoot,” he said.
*
When they got back home, Lydia assembled her newest dolls on his coffee table. She moved around them and took photos with a professional camera. She checked its display, then repositioned the floor lamp closer toward the scene. Then, further away.
When she caught Paul staring, she said, “It’s more fun drunk.”
She’d shown him the pivot tables she’d made, how she scheduled out her orders. He liked that she had a hobby, all the work in service of these small familiars comprised of painted clay on paper clip bodies, too frail to exist except online. But here they were, Paul reminded himself, right on his coffee table.
Lydia created long, limber men with varying degrees of musculature. They were anything but beautiful—sharp-featured, each sporting some sort of neckwear: pashminas, ascots, bolo ties, turtlenecks, braces, and scarves. “Why do you keep covering them like that?” he said.
She shrugged. “Otherwise they’re too simple. They’ll look like Ken dolls.”
To him, they just looked wrong.
Paul sat in the armchair outside her shot. “Who are these ones?”
She put the camera down and pulled her black hair back. “Boyfriends.” She turned the six dolls around so they stared at Paul in a semi-circle. “For my friends at school. I told them I’d make them boyfriends so they have something to look forward to after graduating.”
Paul laughed.
“I asked them about their types. How boring is it that they all just like tall, dark, and handsome?”
“Am I tall, dark, and handsome?”
“I bet they forget by the time graduation comes around.”
He pulled her toward him so that she straddled him in the armchair. Her chin came down to his eyes. He kissed it.
“Look at you, Lydia,” he said. “You’re like the saint of nursing.”
She kissed his forehead. “That’s Saint Agatha, actually, for resilience. I mean, what’s harder than sticking it out?”
“Sticking it in?”
“Gross, Paul.”
She sat down on the carpet on her knees. It was strange to Paul how they’d met on the internet, and now they were a couple, together, in real life. It didn’t seem possible. Had he swiped the other way, it would have been someone else. It would have been different dolls.
“Were you ever scared to date online?” he asked.
“Hm?” Lydia was taking photos again. Her blog was part store and part archive. Several thousand fans loved her style and expected regular updates.
“Stranger danger,” Paul said. “Meeting guys you didn’t know.”
“Oh, so now you want to know about other guys?”
“Okay, okay.” He walked into the kitchen, the island obscuring her. “I’ll let you be.”
“I guess you never know who someone might be. But that’s why you meet first in public. And I didn’t have any bad experiences, really. And then I met you. I mean, yeah, dates are scary. Love’s scary. Online or otherwise.”
“‘Resilience in hardship,’ right?”
“Maybe. Or, purity. That’s in the Nightingale Pledge. It’s what nurses say instead of the Hippocratic Oath.”
“Say it.”
“What?”
“The pledge.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Pull it up on your phone. I want to hear it.”
There was a pause where Paul thought she’d gone back to arranging the dolls, when he gave up on her, and them, for her giving up on him, and right before he was about to go to bed, Lydia started reading.
“‘I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly, to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully.’” Her voice was strong with a sense of purpose Paul had never felt himself. “‘I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. As a missioner of health, I will dedicate myself to devoted service to human welfare.’”
He imagined Lydia accepting some prestigious nursing award in the indeterminable future, something his ex Lydia never would have accomplished. His eyes watered. Tomorrow, he would enter his office to study the probability of money with no way of being entirely certain.
“Congrats on your coronation,” he said. “You’re a nurse now.”
“It almost feels sacrilegious to say it before I take my exams.”
He wanted to be with that Lydia in the future, the one at the award ceremony.
“They changed it in the 1930s,” she said. “The original one was too subservient—too religious.”
“You still said, ‘God.’”
“That’s not religious, though.” Lydia popped her head up from the other side of the counter. “‘God’ is just another word for what’s right.”
*
After Lydia’s graduation, Paul took her to Barley’s to celebrate. While leaving, they ran into his ex holding the hand of a man about Paul’s height. The other couple stood in front of the basement entrance, the door to the stairs behind them. The velvet curtains to the bar were behind Paul and Lydia. Cowboy boots lined the brick walls.
“Oh fuck,” his ex-girlfriend Lydia said. “I thought we might—well, damn.” She stepped forward and gave Paul an awkward hug, standing on her tiptoes like Lydia always did. “I’m in town visiting some friends and—oh, Paul, this is my boyfriend, uh—”
While he hadn’t seen him on Lydia’s accounts, Paul figured her boyfriend’s name must be Paul.
He shook the man’s hand. “And this is my girlfriend. “Lydia,”
Lydia looked good, he thought, maybe more so than his current girlfriend, since she had been so stressed by her family being in town, by the speeches and the dressing up and the posing for photos with her six friends and their six dolls. She’d forgotten to make one for herself, and so Paul had pretended to be one, standing small and stick-like next to the clay boyfriends as the camera clicked.
His ex let out a laugh. “Phew, okay. This is less awkward now. We’re both shacked up again. Monogamous motherfuckers.”
Paul could tell from Paul’s stubble he had a better beard than he did, and his voice was lower. He was embarrassed to compare himself to the little he saw of Paul’s chest hair, or his biceps against the fabric of his blazer. Paul wondered if he’d ride the bull.
“Isn’t this place great?” Lydia asked.
“Barley’s?” Lydia said. “Yeah.”
“I thought it was called, ‘No, No, No,’” the other Paul said.
The new partners chatted as Paul and Lydia stared at one another. He was hurt she brought Paul here, but of course he had taken Lydia here, and now here they were together, though accidentally so.
“Firm’s good?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
Paul put a hand on his ex’s shoulder. It felt new to his touch, simply because it had been replaced with another shoulder most other times than this. “And you’re doing okay?”
His girlfriend gave him a squeeze that reminded him he was real.
“You like being out of the city?” Paul asked.
For a second he thought he saw himself in his ex and not her boyfriend. He wondered where he’d find her next—another random run-in or in fragments online—and who he might be at the time. Or was it worse to always be Paul? He felt scattered, still feeling love for Lydia the way a person feels ancestry. It had been, and so it was. So it would be, though never in the moment, not exactly.
“All I want is for you to be happy,” Paul said to her, but he was saying it to himself.
The other couple made a move to go.
David Lerner Schwartz has been published in Ecotone, Witness, New Ohio Review, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review, Literary Hub, New York magazine, The Rumpus, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. The recipient of the New Letters Robert Day Award for Fiction and a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, Schwartz has been awarded fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and St. Albans School, where he served as the writer in residence. He holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. www.
