SOMEWHERE BETWEEN pasta and dessert, Ally decided she was done with dating.
The first half of the evening hadn’t been so bad. He had the kind of slick blankness that allowed Ally to project an entire inner life onto him, like she was writing backstory for a minor character in her favorite TV series. When he stuttered when asking her about what she did for a living, it was because he was nervous, not bored. When he stared at the couple behind them, he was imagining their future --- definitely not checking out the girl in the mini-dress made of that sheer black fabric popularized by yoga pants. And when he swatted her arm with the menu for no particular reason, it was because he found her very presence almost painfully adorable.
Everything started to get a little clearer when, three bites into her mushroom ragu, Ally’s date poked at it with his fork and asked, “You into this?”
“Yeah, I like it” she replied, adjusting her too-tight baby-pink blouse over her tummy.
“K, cuz you’re kinda scrunching your face up like it tastes shitty.”
That wasn’t the worst offense. Neither was his third story about a “totally psychotic” ex-girlfriend. “You’re not psychotic, are you?”
“I don’t know,” she responded. “I haven’t been properly tested and observed.”
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t nod. He simply continued to describe Becca, the apparently dangerous and destructive massage therapist who had, he assured her, stolen his beloved dog Pizza. “I gave my life to that dog. She was my angel. And the one time I tie her to my porch overnight, Becca steals her.” The confession of dog neglect was also not the worst moment of their date.
That award went to the moment, after they split a Mango Tiramisu, when he asked her, point blank and without provocation, “You good at sex?” That was when Ally started to suspect that she was on some new hidden camera show being laughed at by hipsters on their laptops nationwide.
When the bill came, Ally practically wrestled him to split it—she didn’t want to owe this dude anything—and in the process managed to knock over her second glass of lager, drenching her silver knit shorts (vintage, one of a kind, now seeming to disintegrate on her body). The waitress was lovely and brought over a glass of plain seltzer. She was a kind-seeming, college-aged girl who would have likely made a better date. At least they could have bonded over this douchebag who had, early in the meal, commanded that their server recite the menu from memory. “No thanks,” she’d protested before taking his order for two shrimp appetizers. (Both for him.)
As Ally dabbed at herself, he managed to pay for the meal and as he signed the receipt, he flashed it at her. “You own me eighty seven dollars of hang time, girl.”
Outside on Melrose, she waited for her Lyft. “It’s chilly out, don’t worry about waiting for me,” she told him.
“You live in L.A. and you don’t know how to drive?”
“Uh, no. I moved to Paris the minute I turned eighteen, and now it’s too late. My brain has stopped growing.”
“Let me teach you,” he said, leaning close and brushing her cheek with his sweaty lips. (Could lips sweat? His sure felt like they could.)
Guys always wanted to teach Ally how to drive. It was the constant refrain the minute they discovered she didn’t have a license. There was Neal, the IT guy who told her he was “a defensive driving aficionado.” (What they actually meant was that he was very defensive about his ability to drive, and after he rear-ended a senior citizen on their way to a Bon Iver concert, he stopped speaking to Ally, as if she were a triggering part of a traumatic memory.) There was Anders, who lived “off the grid” in Mount Washington and owned a truck outfitted with an engine that drove on used cooking oil. (After the driving lesson devolved into sex, she smelled French fries for a full week, a scent that no amount of showering or Oribe dry shampoo could erase.)
And then there was Matthew, who tried, really tried -- both to teach Ally to drive and to love her. The three years that they co-habitated, her first in Los Angeles, had taught her what it really meant to feel like she was part of something. Part of a family. Part of a friend group. Part of an intellectual movement (albeit a movement of two.). Their breakup was the first time she wondered if she was worth loving. If she couldn’t hold onto that home- with its cascading plants and joyful yellow kitchen and full fridge and nightly reading-aloud sessions, with its kisses on the eyes goodnight and makeup sex in the afternoon and furious arguments about Dr Seuss’s intentions as an artist and makeup sex about that too -- then could she hold onto anything?
She snapped back to the present, where her date was lingering close to her face. “I don’t want you to teach me to drive. It seems impossible for you, or any other man for that matter, to believe that not driving is a choice. But I’m an intelligent thirty two year old woman and if I wanted to drive then I’d know how. I’d pay someone to teach me who didn’t expect eighty seven dollars of good sex. So thank you for dinner but please, please, please don’t contact me again.”
He stared at her a moment, dead-eyed. Then he flashed her a peace sign, hopped into his Dodge Charger and drove off and away into the cruel night that had produced him in the first place. She wished her goodbye monologue had summoned a bit more shock and awe, but she would make do with him being gone.
BY THE TIME Ally made her way through the door, her ruined shorts were sagging like a wet diaper on a toddler. She dropped her keys, dropped her purse, then dropped trou, wandering into the kitchen in just her blouse, granny panties and high heeled Mary Janes. The electric buzz of rage had subsided, making room for some low-grade devastation, the kind she had become so used to feeling every time a new romantic intrigue gave out and made space again for memories of him.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” asked Caz, who was sitting in the breakfast nook enjoying a midnight string cheese, her clean freckled face, jail-house striped pajamas and mess of gold chains making her look like a French fashion editorial.
Ally shrieked and backed into the fridge. “I thought you were at Meg’s tonight!”
“Is that what you’d do if an actual home- invader was here? Just kind of raise your shoulders and snuggle the fridge? We need to work on your self-preservation instincts.” Her roommate snapped the string cheese like a teen bad girl would snap her gum. Even at midnight, home in her pajamas, Caz’s pompadour was greased to perfection. No wonder her instagram handle was @lesbianelvis.
“Please don’t tease me right now, even in a sweet way,” Ally moaned. “I had a date that was so bad it made me wanna lie facedown in a bath mat.”
“So, your average Saturday.”
“Caz, it wasn’t even funny bad, or spectacular bad. Just quotidian, yet repulsive. And the worst part is now I’m going to be depressed for the whole weekend. I won’t even want to do anything fun, like Meg’s barbecue or dollhouse club.”
“Okay,” Caz cautioned. “We’ll return to dollhouse club, which you know I don’t support if you ever wanna have sex again. Where did you meet this guy?”
“Uh, I can’t remember. Tinder? Hinge? Some program for contacting white collar inmates who are about to be paroled?” Ally had managed to finish, during the course of the conversation thus far, half a bottle of kombucha, some leftover Pad Thai, two hazelnut mochi and three slices of apple dipped in peanut butter.
“Oh, wow” Caz eyed the damage to the fridge. “Not all heroes wear capes.”
“I am DONE, Caz,” Ally shrieked, sucking down a black olive from the jar.
"See, this is your issue, Al. You either date your best friend—”
“Matt wasn’t my *best friend."
“Excuse me, your closest friend since you were twelve. Then you swing the opposite way and date these randos who we have nobody to sign off on. There’s gotta be a middle ground. What you need is a verified stranger.”
The conversation was making Ally feel hot and itchy. She headed to the bathroom to wipe the Lager off her thighs. Caz followed, barking orders.
“Here’s the deal—- from now on you date people who are two degrees away. They’re not your friends. They’re also not friends of friends of friends. They’re friends of friends. Them’s the rules.”
“I don’t need any rules because I’m done. I’m not dating ANYONE!”
“Okay, well, if you change your mind, there’s a queer girl orgy in Koreatown next weekend and I’m not not going.”
“You know what?” Ally said, changing into her high school soccer tee. “Maybe I will.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You don’t know me,” she moaned. “Nobody knows me!”
And with that, Ally was off, storming down the hall and toward the front door. She didn’t remember making the decision, but she could feel her feet carrying her, as if some primal instinct was forcing her down the front steps, left on Lucille Avenue and toward Matthew’s house.
On the front porch, Caz called after her, powerless. “Don’t do this Ally! Ally, please, this never ends well! I beg of you Ally.” She paused, then yelled louder: “Ally, I CAN SEE YOUR THONG!”
That was a detail that had slipped Ally’s mind. But this was the danger of living a four-minute walk from the home you once shared with your ex. You were close. Now, you were closer. Now, you were almost there and now, you were standing outside without pants. It’s hard to avoid the place that still feels like yours.
Ally knew the place like the back of her hand. And she knew him even better. She knew that the doorbell was soft and never woke him up, but that he could always hear voices outside the window. “Matthew!” Ally shouted. “MATTHEEEW!”
She heard the latch on the window, then the rickety screen being yanked up. She felt calm wash over her: he was home. He was home. He was her home. And then a head popped out -- not Matt’s, with its mussed black hair and sleepy charcoal eyes. It was a woman. A very pretty woman.
“Uh…”
“Matty, some girl is out here yelling your name.”
Matty? Some girl? Suddenly, home felt like the farthest thing from it …
Lena Dunham, the award-winning creator of "Girls" and the writer/director of "Tiny Furniture," is currently living in London in preparation for her next movie. New chapters of Lena Dunham’s “Verified Strangers” appear daily, Monday through Friday, on Vogue.com. You can read subsequent chapters here.