By Madeline Berberian-Hutchinson

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This piece was selected as an Honorable Mention in the First Chapters Contest, hosted in partnership with Penguin Random House and Electric Lit.

This piece is intended to be the first chapter of a larger, semi autobiographical body of work that essentially criticizes the archetypes of men that have frustrated me throughout my life.

The first one wrote me a song about my brown eyes. They’re blue. The second, in scratchy red pen, traced out a rhymed poem for me. The final lines were  “you are so fucking witty / and Jesus Christ you are incredibly pretty.” Some poet he was. The third sent me his manuscript about the difficulties of male intimacy (something, he told me, nobody seems to understand but him) alongside his first whittled wooden sculpture. It gave me splinters. A few weeks later, he gifted me a palm-sized watercolor of a sparrow and a rainbow. I told him that I was proud of his eight year old sister; what a distinguished child artist she had become. We walked two blocks in silence until he told me that he had painted it himself. I did not see him again after that. 

I accepted each of these gifts with a stifled smile, even if the gifts bore no resemblance to anything I had ever wanted or mentioned. Each gift was a reflection of the person they wanted me to be. I found that humility was attractive to them, but what they really sought after was cold-pressed shame. Appeasement had quickly become a permanent fixture of my lexicon. 

I met the fourth at a laid-back art school in the East Village. His double kneed pants-–trousers, he later corrected me—were streaked with faded strokes of gesso and blue pen. A newly issued copy of Camus’s The Fall (with the boring black and white cover) was tucked underneath the armpit of his dark brown trench coat. But he looked more like a Murakami—no, Bukowski—reader to me. Suddenly the Keats in my messenger bag felt childish. We were standing at the corner of Astor and Broadway when I turned to him on the crosswalk. I was lost, and late. 

“Do you know where the Foundation building is?” 

“Across the street,” he said, pointing to the brownstone facade sprawling in front of us. He craned his neck downwards to look at me, which I didn’t think was possible given that our shoulders were level. “Saturday Program?” 

“Saturday program.” The Cooper Union Saturday Program is a (free) art intensive, meant to simulate college level art courses with its strenuous 10am-5pm schedule and jarring student critiques. We painted on gessoed cardboard (free) with our fingers (free) and dried out carpenters’ paintbrushes (once expensive, now free) and were taught by current Cooper Union students (free). Yet everyone there used “weekend” as a verb and “work” exclusively as a noun: “let’s weekend at my family’s upstate chateau,” “this work serves as an allegory for the unraveling of the obese female form.” Art school jargon. 

 But he was different somehow; he was Park-Slope-single-family-brownstone rich, which meant he occupied space in a way that, at the time, felt meaningful and established. And he was soggy-cardboard-boxes-of-free-porcelain-on-the-sidewalk merciful. And he was cool like I-don’t-eat-icecream-I-only-eat-organic-gelato-cool. Communist-in-theory-but-not-in-practice cool (I would later learn that his only experience with labor were his shifts at his natural deodorant Mecca, the Park Slope Co-op, to which I was incessantly fascinated by, given that my mother barred our family’s participation in the “hippie cesspool.”)

So I followed him through Cooper Square, up the uneven brownstone steps, into the industrial elevator. I followed him, ceaselessly. 

*** 

We were in the same painting class. I thought it was a coincidence. If you had asked him, he would have said it was fate. We sat next to each other in the dark corner, the only two seats left when we walked in, red-faced with our giant plastic portfolios. 

***

He bisected my canvas with his linseed-soaked brush. His motion diluted the strokes I had just placed, and some of the oil dripped down my arm. I wanted to lick it up. 

“Strong composition,” he uttered, sounding surprised. He squinted his eyes. “What is it?”

“A subversion of a childhood picture of me and my sister. The figures are meant to symbolize-” 

“My sister and I,” he automatically corrected me, tapping the metal leg of my stool with his boot. 

“Oh.” I paused for a moment, reconfiguring the words in my head. I blindly replied with a “thank you,” even though I knew that he was wrong. He was two years older than me, but the bleached blonde hair on my upper lip was thicker than his brown mustache. 

“But I like it,” he resumed, attempting to subdue the tension. 

“Thank you.”

“You are a talented artist.” This was the first time I had heard this from a boy. Suddenly, everything presumptuous about him was placated by a deceptive desire.

“Thank you,” I responded, feeling lighter than before. 

“But your strokes could be more refined.”

“Thank you,”  I responded, feeling heavier than before. 

***

Later, as the early October sun melted through our studio’s window panes, our identical dirty blonde professors prompted a group meditation. 

“Everyone, enter our energy circle,” they instructed, remnants of their Californian accents drawing out their vowels. 

As we sat, they downed their mason jars of homemade kombucha. The color was similar to our plastic cups of dirty paint water. I imagined drinking the dirty water, my teeth turning black. I imagined vomiting everywhere, and I imagined dying from the inside out. I closed my eyes and attempted to bask in the warm silence, but I could not separate myself from the sound of their glasses clinking against the linoleum. My eyelids echoed irrational obsessions: images of my family being consumed by fire as I slept, car crash shrapnel, hot flashes of erupting bombs, and the thought of an impending aneurysm. I had learned the day before that aneurysms can strike at any time, launching a yearlong, perpetual fear of headaches and instant death. 

I decided that I wasn’t born to be still, nor would I ever be pacified. Nothing about me was ever gentle: not the pressure of my heavy handwriting, not my thick brushstrokes, not my mind, or the crooked way I walk. 

Meanwhile, I turned to him, his smooth hands perched neatly on his kneecaps. I observed the ease in which his straight shoulders cut through the studio’s chalky atmosphere. His breaths were unburdened. What a privilege it must be to be so ample, his skin being able to contain his mind so perfectly. 

***

He snuck me into the darkroom, because he had to develop a set of photographed portraits for his next “work.” The room reeked of ammonium and acetic acid. He tasted like metal. 

“What are you thinking about?” It was his turn, he decided, to ask something of me. As if putting his hand in mine was not invasive enough. I think he only asked to make himself appear charismatic. 

“How excited I am to pick up my Prozac from Walgreens later,” I replied, beginning to laugh. I think my psychiatrist was done with me, so she double doped me up on a potion of 120 milligrams of antidepressants to shut me up. It was clearly not working. I paused, beginning to regret the quick cadence with which I dispelled this possibly shameful information. Medication was normalized to me, I had been taking prescription drugs since I was twelve years old, and homeopathic anti-anxiety pellets (like I was some rabbit) since I was eight. “That’s all I can think about. Isn’t that funny?” He did not find it funny. 

Under the glow of the red safety light, I saw his face shift. This was clearly not the answer he was looking for. He had tried to supplant his ego into my every breath, but had failed. 

***

Every Saturday, I had the joy of attending his pompous philosophy sermons in Studio 2B. I would pour the solvent into a red solo cup, wiping any of the excess on my shirt as he sat, waiting for me to prepare our shared palette. 

“I want to triple major in Studio Art, Philosophy, and Political Science,” he announced as I taped down our palette paper. He repeated a scooping motion, indicating that I had placed the paper with the waxy side against the table, which was incorrect. I flipped it over, smoothing over the crinkled edges. 

“Oh really?” I replied, feigning interest. I swear to god, we do not need another one of those in this economy. I miss it when boys aspired to be firefighters. Hell, I’d even take a wannabe Stock trader.  “What job do you want?” 

“I don’t know,” he said, stretching out his legs. “I just want to be an intellectual.”

“How will you make any money? How will you support your family?” I began scratching my brow, worried for his younger sister, who was the same age as mine. 

“I’m an anti-natalist. And besides, it’s not about the money,” he scoffed as he fiddled with his bronzed cufflinks. Of course it’s not about the money; why would it be? “It’s the most virtuous path I can take.” Virtuosity was not a viable option for me.

***

His cool-toned oil paintings featured, fittingly, phallic compositions. His portfolio featured the same bald man in varying mediums, surrounded by greek columns, exploring different schools of philosophical thought. I wouldn’t buy his paintings, but our instructors would huddle around him, praising him endlessly. 

“God, this is so deep,” our classmates would caw. “So raw.” Like I said, fittingly phallic. 

***

We were walking to the train station. Our exhaustion was palpable, backbones buckling from our easels. I watched his profile fade into the shadows of 13th Street. 

“What are you thinking about?” I prompted, attempting to match his intellectual inclinations. I wanted to be the one to challenge him. Mistake. 

“I’m not thinking, I’m self actualizing.” What the fuck does that even mean. I softened my initial response, translating it into a language he could be receptive to. 

“What do you mean?” Mistake. I don’t know why I continued to engage this perverse philosophy major. Every teenaged male philosopher I had met since then had been equally insufferable- their “epiphanies” equal to that of lunchtime curiosities explored by my elementary school friends, now repackaged as “novel” through fancy words. In other words, it was bullshit. I was tired of his ideas, his self actualization. And I was tired of making art that was viewed as surface level because it featured pictures of braided hair and thick eyebrows. And I was tired of fucking Aristotle. 

He ignored me. “Have you read Aristotle yet?” This was somehow the worst thing he could have said. Yet implied that I was going to read him later, but hadn’t had the capacity to understand yet. But this was not true– I had never read Aristotle and I had no desire to. 

Instead, in the comfort of my bedroom, I explored De Beauvoir and photo essays of girls shaving their legs, both captioned with neatly written script testimonials of their experiences with misogyny.  Equally as stimulating and twice as relevant. 

***

I would tell him on the F train home that this wasn’t working out. I had blamed it on something I had promptly falsified: I was a lesbian (which, evidently turned out to be true), I had no time for him, I wasn’t allowed to date, I forgot which excuse I had chosen. I don’t understand why I felt responsible for his lack of self awareness, intensified by his carefully supplanted, egotistical introspection. The following days hung me in a deep stupor. I held an intense, confounding guilt for telling him off. Maybe I hadn’t been smart enough to keep up with him, or maybe he was just a ridiculous kind of person. I still can’t decide which was worse: being miserable or being undesired. I will always be mutilated in some form or another. 

 ***

My medication tastes like metal too. 

Process

I initially wrote this as an assignment for my English class, about “eudaimonia.” I found the prompt really stupid, and I hate Aristotle, so I chose to instead write a personal essay dismantling these kinds of super philosophical men like my English teacher.