I sometimes pass through situations where I genuinely don’t know how to locate myself within them: are they funny, absurd? Sad? Colorless? Meaningless altogether?

A week ago, I agreed to meet a friend and go to a discussion of an important book recently published by Nancy Fraser. I was tremendously excited: the chance to finally see Nancy Fraser in person, that feminist thinker of I sometimes pass through situations where I genuinely don’t know how to locate myself within them: are they funny, absurd? Sad? Colorless? Meaningless altogether?

A week ago, I agreed to meet a friend and go to a discussion of an important book recently published by Nancy Fraser. I was tremendously excited: the chance to finally see Nancy Fraser in person, that feminist thinker of brave and exceptional ideas, was finally within reach. At the same time, and strangely, nearly the same feeling gripped me about seeing the friend who had suggested we attend the book signing and discussion. She was of Eastern European Jewish descent, yet she knew more about North Africa and the history of the Sephardic Jews than I did, by a humiliating margin,  in a way that left me embarrassed, ashamed, and thoroughly destabilized in my sense of myself.

Before the meeting, I went to a modest Irish pub a few blocks from Times Square. The idea was to get some fortification from alcohol – enough to manufacture a borrowed courage and a counterfeit presence with which to face my friend, a woman of formidable and exceptional character, a Cornell graduate. I went, and I genuinely liked the place, visiting it for the first time.

A simple bar, uncrowded, its regulars wearing open, easy expressions, which made it, at least for me, the perfect pub. I could sit there in full comfort without the ordeal of trying to flag down a bartender across a long queue or through a wall of noise. She came to me directly and asked for my order with easy warmth.

I was happy, until the thing I never want happened. The thing I wouldn’t wish on another living soul on this planet in a moment like this.

I needed the bathroom. Immediately. Urgently. Like that, out of nowhere.

The sudden, desperate need to relieve myself outside my own home had always been my greatest nightmare. I have a deep aversion to public restrooms, to the bathroom of a bar or restaurant or any place I don’t know well. I’ve come to believe that home is simply the place whose toilet you’re comfortable in. 

Forgive the humble standard, but it is precise, and it is final, and it is everything to me.

What could I possibly do? I had no choice but to take the risk. I summoned my nerve and walked toward the pub’s bathroom, and I was genuinely, enormously relieved to find it clean (actually clean) with some pleasant fragrance drifting through it, proof that the place tended to this corner of its existence with an intelligence I deeply appreciated.

On my way out, still flushed with the unexpected relief of having escaped this perennial, perfectly ordinary predicament of mine, I forgot entirely that I was wearing suspenders instead of my usual belt.

I’d taken to suspenders because they always struck me as something apart , especially leather ones,  though one of the metal clasps had apparently decided otherwise, springing loose without warning, snapping violently in the opposite direction from my trousers, launching itself skyward and producing a resonant, mortifying crack – in full view of the bar’s bewildered regulars – before I stumbled out into the room, searching the ceiling for the clasp that had ricocheted off it, miraculously finding it, and doing what I could to reassemble myself before my trousers fell entirely and completed what would have been a catastrophe of the highest order.

I tried to ignore the whole thing as I walked back through the bar, wishing the floor would open up and swallow me whole, permanently,  only to find the bartender looking at me with quiet suspicion:

— You came back? My God, I thought you’d left your bag and your wallet — and your coat — and just walked out.

— No, I’m sorry. I was in the bathroom.

She closed her eyes for a brief moment, then moved away, visibly relieved to be free of the weight of those abandoned belongings she’d assumed were orphaned.

I found, seated in the chair directly next to mine, placed there during the interval of my urgent errand, a young woman with long curly hair falling to the small of her back, full-figured, wearing a wide and easy smile. She leaned toward me without preamble:

— You know, she said, when you leave your seat at a bar, the custom is to put the saucer from under your glass on top of it – or your napkin over the rim. That’s the signal that you’re coming back.

— Oh. Thank you – honestly, I didn’t know that. I’ll do it from now on, I promise.

My embarrassment doubled. Here I was, thinking I’d become a bar regular of some distinction, only to discover I didn’t understand bar etiquette at all. I could feel, for a moment, that the warm young woman who’d offered me the advice had sensed my embarrassment and felt a flicker of it herself — enough that she tried to smooth things over:

— Never mind. Your next drink is on me.

Her offer stunned me. Because it’s a decisive thing — a loaded thing. Here (I guess) buying someone a drink means extending an invitation: to conversation, to acquaintance, to warmth, and to whatever might follow. It is extraordinarily rare for a woman to make that move first — despite all the years of liberation, this particular gesture has remained stubbornly, almost entirely, a man’s territory. (I may be totally wrong about this).

Faced with the embarrassment, the disorientation, the shock , my answer was, as usual, catastrophic:

— I’m leaving in about five minutes, I’m afraid. But thank you. Really.

Catastrophic in every sense of the word. I could see her expression change completely – she was probably thinking: this man is a failure at human connection and a failure at basic decency – he doesn’t know how to signal he’s coming back, and he doesn’t know how to accept an extraordinary invitation when one is handed to him.

I left, wishing for the third time in a row that the earth would open and take me.

I cut through Times Square, the lights seizing me from every direction with their terrifying glare –  as if they were exposing me, stripping me down, laying bare my weakness and my profound fragility before everything. I tried to move through the crowd, around them, between them. I tried to walk down the street as if I didn’t exist at all –  hoping no one would see me, that people would step on me, that the cars would roll over me, that I might dissolve into one of New York’s many rats, scurrying unseen beneath all of it.

I reached the venue for the book signing. It was an enormous room with an extraordinarily high ceiling, shelves upon shelves of books rising along the walls. I was struck with something close to awe, enough that I briefly forgot everything that had happened in the last hour.

I sat in a chair along the side and waited a long time for my friend, with whom I had arranged to meet here. She was late. I decided to call her.

Her phone was off.

Perhaps she would still come. Or perhaps she, too, was passing through some mortifying situation of her own, and had finally managed to make the earth swallow her.