Either/Or

Selin attends a party that Lakshmi hosts at the literary magazine, and Selin is happy to see a student from the Turkish Club there. She stands with him and his friends and notices that, as Ivan had once tried to tell her, it is easier to converse with people after a drink or two. She has worn an expensive velvet outfit her aunt purchased for her, and Lakshmi compliments her on how well it shows off her body. One of the guys she has been talking to kisses her as she is making her way out of the bathroom, and when he suggests that they leave, it is not immediately clear to her that he is asking her to go home with him. She agrees because she always wants to leave parties and no one ever asks her to. When they get back to his house, they kiss some more, and Selin grows nervous. She tells him that she is not very experienced, and he tells her that there is “something” she can do with her hand. She finds the encounter unpleasant and is happy when it is over.

The next morning, Selin has a hangover. Thinking about the “aesthetic life,” she reflects on how, in the story of the seducer, the aesthetic life turns out to be about seducing young girls. How, she wonders, is one to live the aesthetic life if they are a young girl? She had thought that the aesthetic life would be more adventure based than it is turning out to be, and she reflects that it is actually a very conventional kind of progression from youth to “maturity.” She wonders about the relationship between the aesthetic life, sex, and love. She wonders if the guy whom she hooked up with, whose name she cannot remember, would have wanted to go further than they did. Should she have had sex with him? Could she find him again to see if he still wants to?

Selin goes to several more parties and experiments further with alcohol. She becomes violently ill at one party after drinking two rum and cokes, and the resulting hangover is terrible. She emails the guy she hooked up with at the literary magazine party to ask him out for coffee, and he responds that he “doesn’t really” drink coffee. It turns out that his name is complicated and Polish, so she decides to call him “the Count” (privately, not to his face) after a character in an Iris Murdoch novel whose name is so Polish and so complicated that people refer to him by his title alone. She goes home with another guy, a former classmate, but although they fool around, they do not have sex. She emails the Count again. This time, she overtly tells him that she would like to have sex with him. He immediately calls her. She goes to his house, and they do have sex. She finds it first uncomfortable, then unpleasant, and finally painful. Her lack of desire is not lost on him, and after it is over, he tells her that sex will be better in the future. She thinks about how bizarre “Trojan” is as a name for a condom brand; the metaphor of the Trojan horse, she notes, is “about permeability.”

In her writing class, they read Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Little Dog.” In it, the narrator, a Muscovite, seduces a woman from the provinces who is half his age. The woman is immediately regretful, and the man is immediately bored with her. Later, however, he realizes that she is “the one” for him, and he goes to her small, provincial town to find her. Selin’s reaction to sex had been markedly different from this woman’s, and that contrast is one of her focal points in analyzing the story. Her classmates seem to feel that the story, because it lacks a proper climax and conclusion, is formally innovative. Her professor thinks that it is a profound meditation on unrequited love. Selin is more interested in the interplay between the characters.

Selin emails Ivan, sharing that she has tried to follow his directions and “move on” and telling him about the Count. She notes that progress is often non-linear and likens it to the Russian formalist critique of the “knight’s move” because knights move in an L-shaped pattern across the chessboard.

In her writing class, one of Selin’s classmates writes a short story about losing his virginity that leaves Selin unimpressed. She finds a book about rules for dating and, reading it, realizes that she has failed to follow each and every rule in some way or other in past experiences with men. She runs into the Count at another party, but he avoids her and hits on one of her friends. Apparently, he has a “fetish” for south Asian women. She receives an exasperated email response from Ivan in which he tells her that she is “graceful in writing and clumsy in life” (264).

Selin’s friend Juho finds a girlfriend, a foreign girl from Mexico City who is painfully shy, obsessed with theater, and a student at Wellesley. Juho learns Spanish, and Lara pledges to learn Finnish. Lara plans to spend six months alone in Finland to determine whether or not she would enjoy living there. If she does, she will accompany Juho back to Helsinki after he completes his fellowship. Selin finds this plan strikingly bizarre.

Selin has applied to be a travel writer for a series of guides called Let’s Go. She also applied for a grant to study abroad in Russia. Although she wanted to write a travel guide about Russia, the guidebook editors would like to send her to Turkey: She speaks Turkish much better than she speaks Russian. The study-abroad grant that Selin receives is, she thinks, too little to actually pay for food and lodging in Moscow. Peter, who had directed the English teaching program she volunteered for the previous summer in Russia, finds her the telephone numbers of several individuals who can procure her the necessary visa invitation letter, rent her a room, and teach her Russian.

She agrees to travel to Turkey for Let’s Go. Although her mother is upset because the itinerary includes the disputed territory of North Cyprus and a stop on the Syrian border, Selin is set on going. She meets with the other writers-in-training, who learn how to write in the wry and “irreverent” voice employed in the Let’s Go guides. They are also taught basic self-defense, and there is much chatter among the writers about the negative experiences (and lawsuits) of students who worked for the company in previous summers.