Your bag is empty.
A woman in your apartment for the first time is Nancy Drew (hopefully much older or you’ll be imprisoned). She’s in your bathroom reading your prescriptions, she’s opening the wrong kitchen cabinet on purpose, and then she finds the bookshelf and slows all the way down. The bookshelf is the only furniture in your place that can’t lie. The couch says you have money. The books say who you are when nobody’s fucking you.
One wrong book and it’s over. I’m serious. The Game on a shelf has ended more hookups than whiskey.
Here’s the thing, every man I’ve ever slept with was one of five guys, and all five of them were in detention together in 1985. You already know which one you are, but your bookshelf will give it away to her in mere minutes
THE BRAIN
You’ve said “well, actually” in bed. Infinite Jest is your birthright, holler to my engineers, but the bookmark cannot still be at page 60 where you quit in 2019. She will check. I have checked. Your self-help book is How to Win Friends and Influence People, because your whole problem is you think being right is the same as being liked, and it never once has been. Your research project is Gödel, Escher, Bach. Nobody alive has finished it, which is the point, it says you can commit to something impossible, which is what dating you will be. Your childhood book is Ender’s Game, and be ready to have complicated feelings about the author on command. Also you get one Stephen King. Everyone gets one Stephen King, we expect it. A shelf with no King is a shelf hiding a body.
THE ATHLETE
You peaked at 17 and honestly? You’re handling it beautifully. Your self-help is Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me, which tells her you cry at the gym (the acceptable place). Your big biography is Agassi’s Open, the one jock book about being sad, and a sad jock is catnip. I don’t make the rules, my body does. Your conspiracy book is about the 1919 White Sox or Lance Armstrong. Sports crime only. Stay in your lane. Your childhood book is It, because you read King under the covers between two-a-days, and that detail will get you further than your thighs. Those thighs though.
THE BASKET CASE
You feel things at parties. Your self-help is The Body Keeps the Score and you will not bring it up first. It just sits there on the shelf like a loaded gun. If she finds it herself, you’re in. If you hand it to her, you’re a project, and she’s at capacity. Your conspiracy book is Chariots of the Gods. Ancient aliens. Open to wonder, ultimately harmless. Your childhood book is Slaughterhouse-Five, dog-eared, water-damaged, possibly cried on. Hopefully cried on. Your King is Pet Sematary. Obviously.
THE PRINCESS
Yes, men can be the Princess, you have a skincare routine and a headboard. Your self-help is Essentialism, which you bought at an airport and which taught you nothing, but it looks clean and so do you. Your research book is Just Kids by Patti Smith, love as beautiful and doomed and she will want to test that theory before midnight. Your childhood book is Harry Potter and I need to be honest with you, that’s a coin flip. Half of us find it charming, half of us have follow-up questions you cannot survive. Your King is Misery, which is either self-aware or a cry for help, both work on me. And American Psycho stays spine-in. Face-out is a confession.
THE CRIMINAL
My people. You get Bukowski, Post Office. Women aren’t scared of the Bukowski. We’re scared of the man who owns only Bukowski. He needs neighbors. Your self-help is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, because a bad boy trying to be good is the entire romance industry and most of my twenties. Your research book is a JFK book. Thick, tabbed, serious. A man who doesn’t trust the official story about anything, including himself. Your childhood book is The Outsiders. You’ll say you never cried at it, she’ll know you’re lying, and the lie works for you. Your King is The Stand, uncut. You commit.
Last thing, and this is for all five of you. The books have to be read. Most of them, anyway. The shelf gets her to stay for a drink, but at some point she’s pulling one down, and “I’ve been meaning to get to that” survives exactly once. Twice and the whole shelf is a costume. A woman can forgive a man who doesn’t read. She cannot forgive a man who pretends to.