And Another and Another and Another Glass of Rosé

We’re each of us on our third glass of rosé when the Bachelorette sends home the Last Man of Color. There’s a closeup on his face, all the tears, the snotty crying because he had fallen in love with her, because this was the real deal, and the camera flashes back to the Bachelorette, also a sobbing mess, the wind pulling at her hair, her sparkly dress, like mother nature doesn’t agree with the decision and must express this concern so violently, like the whole thing is about to come crashing down, and then, when the music crescendos, the show cuts to a commercial for Prozac.

It should have been you up there, Michelle yells from the kitchen. She’s cracking open another bottle of rosé, the fourth of the evening.

You say that every week, I say, because she does, sometimes twice an episode, whenever things are going south for the Bachelorette.

And when has it stopped being true? She sets the half-empty bottle down on the coffee table. The glass is sweaty; the pink inside glows neon. Not saying you would have won, but I could see you being fan-favorite.

Oh my god, imagine you in paradise? Chills. This comes from Lacey, who only ever manages to catch two or three episodes each season. She reaches for the bottle and drinks straight from its mouth.

It’s a high-stress life, cheering for love to prevail in a hopeless reality-TV fantasy land. We’re not rooting for the Bachelorette or any of the men, although I do feel a connection to the Last Man of Color, and I wanted him to, well, not win—maybe score, which sounds gross to admit. I was rooting for him. Let’s leave it at that.

But, no, we’re not rooting for love or justice, or for Chris Harrison to win at playing God. We’re rooting for great television. We watch in awe every week, our stomachs pickled with wine, our tongues dry. At the start of the season, a 750ml bottle could last a whole two-hour episode. Good vibes, good times. A few sips to settle us into the night, to loosen us up for the train wreck ahead. At the start of the season, a bottle could endure.

*

I auditioned for the Bachelorette because I’m in my mid-twenties, I have six-pack abs, my hair takes well to product, and I’m Puerto Rican—so I offer surface-level diversity. It felt like the right move. And, honestly, it was an attempt to get out of my own head a little, to jumpstart some life back into me after all the energy I’d exhausted on dating and short-term relationships. A chance not at love or finding love, but for excitement. Some variety.

The show was holding auditions in Columbus, OH, where my parents live, and it wasn’t a stretch to say I still lived there. I was thinking about my parents’ house, how it would look on camera during Hometowns week. When the Bachelorette met the Last Man of Color’s family in Denver, they had a nice house, big, with a pristine kitchen, and I thought, there’s no way they live there. Absolutely not. It might be a rich aunt’s house, or even his grandparents’ house, someone with money, someone who no longer works, who can afford to sit around waiting for their youngest kin to bring home a potential fiancée they met on TV (whom they share with three other people), but that’s not the world of the show at all, is it?

The reality is I live in a studio apartment with my roommate, Damaris, in Brooklyn. We sleep on opposite ends; a set of flowy curtains splits the space down the middle. They make the room airy and not stifling. But imagine bringing the Bachelorette back home to that! Imagine a camera crew, a producer, assistants; imagine the hot bright lights flooding the apartment! The roaches that would scurry! The smell of the furnace, sour and potent; the traffic outside, the car horns and crying ambulances, the men at the corner bodega blasting eighties freestyle jams late into the summer nights. Imagine now it’s not the Bachelorette but a normal person, an everyday person like myself, someone who also works at a job where they have “manager” in their title but manage no one. Imagine this was actually the night before my audition, and I was breaking up with my boyfriend of five months, telling him that, OK, I think we are both destined for different life paths, and that I enjoyed when my partners actually cared about me or at least pretended to, that sometimes it felt like even I was pretending, and that maybe we could stay friends, actually, please let’s stay friends. Imagine you don’t have to imagine this. And imagine that Damaris was on the other side of the curtain, her vibrator crooning, roaring. Imagine the sparks flying out of her crotch! And imagine trying to live a life with another person—intimately, romantically, sexually—in this apartment, on a futon sandwiched between two bookcases, neither holding anything of worth. Imagine that!

*

When Michelle first invited me to join the viewing parties, it was a year before I met my ex. I wasn’t dating anyone then, and I hadn’t been for more than a year before that. It’s fine, it’s what it was. It didn’t hit me until I arrived that I was the only single guy in the bunch: April and her girlfriend, Lacey, next to me on the couch; Michelle and her husband, Robert, buddied up on the armchair. Love was around and alive.

Whenever I have to be not just me, but me plus a fantasy, what I have to offer seems so little.

Whenever I am the only one—the only person of color, the only queer, the only single friend, or any combination of the three—I feel like a wind-up doll at the ready, alcohol the key to my talents. I must prove myself entertaining, and without a partner at my side I can at least offer commentary. So every time we gather, I bring a bottle of rosé and allow myself to unhinge. I’ve said of the contestants, He looks weathered and that suit is trash and she is far too desperate, too broken to ever find happiness and he really should be paying child support and I might let him punch me in the face but I’d still hate myself after and She’s far too good for him but, then again, she’s on this show trying to find a fiancé in eight weeks, so she can’t be that good, I mean, doesn’t that reveal some fundamental flaw in her DNA?

Then, one day, the show advertised auditions for an upcoming season of The Bachelorette. Robert passed me a plate of crackers, asked, Hey, you ever think about it? He didn’t say it cruelly, but it felt like a bullet.

Something to consider, I said, though I had already purchased a flight home for my audition.

*

I’m mid-pour on my fifth glass when the show returns from commercial break. We’re now live, and Chris Harrison is seated across from the Last Man of Color. A few words are said, but the rosé is doing its magic and Michelle is hollering at the screen. They did him so dirty, so fucking dirty, she says.

The show moves into a super-cut of the Last Man of Color and the Bachelorette—while it is very much her tumultuous, wonderful, dramatic, incredible, amazing, life-changing journey to find love, it is also his. The chosen clips suggest he had a phenomenal run: He said the magic words I’m falling for you in a submarine off the coast of Cape Town, ate chicken sashimi in Tokyo and threw up off-screen, he told the Bachelorette about his mother’s battle with breast cancer, how he quit college in his final year to go back home and take care of her, which made for an emotional encounter between his mother and the Bachelorette during Hometowns week, the two of them on a soft-navy couch across a fireplace, in a McMansion somewhere in a suburb of Denver, glasses of white wine shimmering in the low amber lighting. As they cried about how happy she was to see her son find someone so kind and beautiful and smart and other generic compliments, we all heard the cha-ching in Chris Harrison’s bank account. It all made perfect television. But then their journey ended, the relationship broke. Or maybe it was that the producers tapped the Last Man of Color for Bachelor (imagine!), and now he is all tears and strained face on a couch, in front of millions.

I’m stressed and sense a deep pain rumbling inside him. I’ve finished my fifth glass of rosé; I’m tilting it to Robert, because he’s opening a new bottle and I’m greedy for a sixth.

*

The Last Man of Color wasn’t always the Only Man of Color this season. The show has learned to add in more and more non-white contestants over the years. Seven or eight Black men, the occasional Asian man. When they’re Latinx, they’re often white, and speak in punctuated Spanish, or take any chance they can get to shake their hips and fill those large candlelit mansions with music. I’m not that guy, though I often feel this pressure to slip on a stereotype like a new shirt. To be a Latin lover with women or some white gay man’s fetishized object. I get caught up on all the things people want me to be that I often forget about the cravings of my own heart. And I’m not even blaming those men for bumping up the caricature for television. A hustle is a hustle. But in dating, in relationships, whenever I have to be not just me, but me plus a fantasy, what I have to offer seems so little.

*

Let me be clear: I didn’t break up with my ex-boyfriend for a chance to be on The Bachelorette. It’s a common misconception. I’m not that level of trash. I prefer trash-lite. The timing was the catalyst. I want love, I do, and I think about it constantly, about all the ways it appears before me every day I’m alive: When Michelle kisses April on the cheek in between commercials, and when Robert sweeps a strand of hair out of Lacey’s eyes, the simplicity of the gesture, how he’s also brushing away the larger world. Or, yes, when the Last Man of Color broke down for the first time in a one-on-one with the Bachelorette. Not when she stroked his cheek and told him it was OK, although that was sweet, but when he kissed the palm of her hand, held his lips there, and the two of them sat in silence.

I didn’t have any of these little moments with my ex. And my parents don’t own a navy-colored couch, nor is there a fireplace at home, but they have a bowl of fake fruit at the center of their dining room table, so when I brought my ex home to meet the family, we sat at that table making forced conversation. Mindless chatter, a bowl of plastic oranges and bananas our audience. So, no. I never found myself wanting to stand on a mountaintop to propose or choke on chicken sashimi or go zip-lining through some humid forest to prove how much I loved him. Or prove, even, that I could be worthy of his love.

*

It’s happening. The Bachelorette comes out to talk with the Last Man of Color for the first time in two months. There is a pause, but then she springs forward, throws her arms around his neck, and he welcomes her—all of her.

They would have made a cute couple, April says, and we all nod our heads. Look at them! And we do, we are. I can’t look away. April and Lacey are a cute couple, the cutest some might say, so I trust her opinion and feel validated in mine.

Sometimes I wonder if my friends think it’s strange that I haven’t yet found someone to be serious about. I haven’t fallen in love. Maybe once, when I was younger. In college. But not since then, which leads me to wonder when it will happen. Lacey, April, Robert, nor Michelle met my ex. Which is to say, I didn’t introduce him to them, and he never asked to be part of the world outside of the two of us. And I thought if I let him in, then it would become something real, something I’d have to devote myself to. The Last Man of Color took a while longer than the other guys to open up. The Bachelorette commented on it every time they were alone together. I want more from you, she said, I want to know what you’re really feeling. It’s hard to open yourself up to people. I think we all know this is true; I think we all know how difficult it is to rip open a stitch and let all your emotions leak. This isn’t a rationalization or even an admittance of regret of what went wrong with my ex. When I said to him I hoped we could stay friends, I meant it more than I thought I would. The words came out and then they were true, perhaps the truest thing I ever said in our short-lived, drawn-out relationship. But why is it so often one option or the other? Why is it so often that I give up romance for friendship or friendship for romance, and why is it that I can see my friends have it both ways?

*

The suit I wore for my Bachelorette audition was my ex-boyfriend’s favorite color: a deep forest green. I thought of him in the dressing room, and I thought of him again walking into the audition room, but there was no sadness attached to the image of him. I felt neutral: His face floated through my mind, like a burst of radiating pink when you stare up into the sky on a sunny day and close your eyes and the color flickers until it doesn’t anymore. That was his face. And by the time the audition ended, after the producers had sized me up, asked if I had any quirks, any talents other than IT Management, asked if I was really here for the Bachelorette, and asked again after I paused, after I cracked my knuckles and started to cry, after they said, Not this time, after all that I wasn’t thinking about his face, or the Bachelorette’s. I sat down in the waiting area and saw nothing. No face, no hair, no smile or eyes. I saw no one.

The next morning, I flew back to New York. Got home with just enough time to drop off my bags, rinse my mouth out, reapply some deodorant, and change into a clean shirt for work. I was expecting Damaris to still be asleep, so I would have to tiptoe through the apartment.

But imagine she wasn’t sleeping at all! Imagine opening the door and hearing moaning, her vibrator working overtime. Imagine the fan is going, too, the curtains flailing about! And through the opening, imagine Damaris is topless, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, and imagine she’s on her knees, arched forward, holding the vibrator against someone, a man, hairy and sweaty, a man. And imagine that man is your ex-boyfriend! Imagine he’s on his back, his legs held high in the air, his toes curling. And his moan, the dull ache of pleasure—imagine it falling from his mouth without any finesse, so clumsily, hitting the walls with a thud, reverberating in your chest. Imagine coming home to that, stumbling back into the hall, slamming the door. Imagine rushing down the stairs, losing your breath. Imagine reaching the outside again and shutting your eyes to all the sunlight. Imagine the hot burn of pink whirling inside of you.

*

The conversation between the Bachelorette and the Last Man of Color is awkward, of course, we expected that much, and there are a lot of silences. The entire show is built on quiet moments juxtaposed against loud, dramatic displays of affection, of lip-smacking and crying, of heavy breathing and the wild rush of wind. But it’s sincere, and they maintain eye contact while speaking, and maybe there’s no bad blood, no ill wishes. One day they might be something like friends. Like if the cameras were off, they’d continue chatting; like if they weren’t being paid to be here—well, he’s not being paid to be here—she would keep the conversation out of genuine, platonic desire.

Just tell me one thing, the Last Man of Color says. The lights in the studio are dim. His mother is in the audience, weeping, mourning. His voice waivers a bit, a few false starts, then, Are you happy?

I let the Bachelorette’s nervous laughter wash over me. Love is a lie packed in a jeweled box. Love isn’t dead; it was never alive. I swirl the wine around in the glass, stare down into the mouth of my drink. Pink rosé is the color of summer, of holding hands and running through an open field, of uninterrupted passion, love-making. Lacey, Michelle, April, and Robert—I’m not sure if they’re happy. I hope they are. If they’re not, what does that mean for me? It’s a selfish question hidden in genuine concern, I know, but really where would that leave me?

The Bachelorette inhales, the studio light sparkling in her eyes. Even her lip gloss is glittery. I am, she says. Yes, I am so happy. The happiest I’ve ever been.

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