The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Four To Tango
Let me tell you about one of the most humiliating moments of my life. I had a handful of steady girlfriends in college but the one I was with the longest extended past my own graduation and through hers (she was a year behind me). Our coupling had rather inauspicious beginnings, as she was the suitemate of another girl I had been pursuing (I imagine that made her living situation mildly untenable, though I at least had the decency to never spend the night at her place). Things were pretty good for a while: She got me hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I introduced her to a bunch of cool bands, we talked a lot about movies and politics and the type of personal narrative grandiosity that tends to infect people in their early 20s.
It eventually got tumultuous, and though there were opportunities to break it off, we were both caught in the inertia of the relationship and neither one of us was confrontational enough to pull the plug. It turned into something of a bad marriage: We saw each other every day but mostly stopped having real conversations, and we also stopped having sex. It was bad, but as two recent college graduates living in New York, I think we thought a shitty support system was better than no support system at all.
It wasn’t non-stop misery, but we were in a rut for a good long while. When she was still in school, we spent the bulk of our time at the apartment I shared with a friend of mine. It was a relatively tiny two-bedroom with zero closet space to speak of that was also on the top floor of a six floor walk-up, but it was also in a great location (at the corner of Mulberry and Spring, right on the 6 train) and the rent was relatively reasonable. After she graduated, she found a studio in Chelsea with a shared bathroom and a loft bed. It wasn’t much, but again, it bested the alternative of “nothing at all.”
That little room on 24th Street was the stage for a deeply low point. We were going through what I thought was a pretty good stretch, communicating a little better and seemingly thinking about the future. She was going out of town a lot (she was from far away and had a brother with special needs she liked to visit frequently), so when she was on the road it fell to me to stop by her place once a day and feed her fish. She had a single betta she named after her favorite author, and often she would just bring the bowl to my apartment and he’d get to see the world for a few days. But this time around the fish stayed home, and I made the trek to her place to feed him.
It is here I must admit something deeply stupid: One of the reasons I was fine with going to her place to feed the fish was because she had a different cable system than I had access to in my apartment, and on that cable system I could watch the channel that carried Velocity, a second-tier bit of WWE programming that focused largely on smaller wrestlers and under-utilized mid-card guys, many of whom were my favorite performers. So I had a whole afternoon envisioned for myself: I’d grab some takeout from the sushi place by my apartment, jump on the train to her place, feed the fish and watch some wrestling while I gnawed on rainbow rolls. (Also she had an insanely comfortable leather couch, which took up most of the square footage of the entire apartment.)
Everything played out according to plan: the fish was happy, the sushi was delicious, and Jamie Noble had a really good match against Paul London. I was feeling pretty good, but then I immediately stopped feeling good when I went to throw my trash away and saw the only thing in her garbage was a used condom.
I almost certainly don’t need to point this out, but this was not my condom. To this point I had never been cheated on before, and I spent what felt like a full hour having an out of body experience trying to run through all the possibilities that could have led us all to this point in time. Of course I always came back to the central fact that she had sex with somebody else, but was this a one time thing? Or had this been going on for a while? And if so for how long? I felt hurt, but I also felt a strange lightness: I knew in my heart of hearts that this person was no good for me, and this incident would be the catalyst to finally get me to walk away.
I immediately called her to confront her with this revelation. She feigned shock and then spun a story about how she had been hanging out with some other friends of hers and a bunch of them decamped to a diner two blocks away while two of them stayed behind to have sex in her apartment. This was an obvious and ridiculous lie, and I was incredulous. “Who lets someone else have sex in their bed?” I asked.
“They kind of snuck back as we were leaving,” she lied. “It was like that one episode of Dawson’s Creek where Jen and Pacey almost have sex in Dawson’s room.”
In that moment, I let her off the hook. She was talking to me on my level, and because it had appeared in a show we both loved it somehow made all the logical sense in the world that this clearly fake scenario could have unfolded in the way she described. I apologized for getting upset. I kept feeding her fish. We stayed together six more months until she finally broke it off to run off with the guy she had been fucking behind my back. I still feel raw about it, and I hope she’s unhappy wherever she is.
Anyway, that incident happens in this episode, along with a lot of other dumb shit. The curse of the third season continues.
Also:
-This episode, which is pretty bad and involves a lot of ballroom dancing, aired on December 1 1999, the same night Jay Z stabbed a record executive at a club in New York. Remember when Jay Z stabbed a dude?
-The only notable new music release that week was Sisqo’s solo album Unleash The Dragon, which is the one that had “Thong Song” on it.
-If you went to the movies that week, you probably saw the still dominant holiday titles Toy Story 2 or The World Is Not Enough. You probably did not see End of Days, an ill-advised apocalypse action movie that was one of Schwarzenegger’s last tentpoles before he turned to politics.
-Jack’s plot this week involves communicating with a guy who read about him in the newspaper, and it was a surprising thrill to see the old version of AOL in use. What an aesthetic nightmare! It cannot be overstated how deeply ugly the early Internet was.
-Jack does use one of those turn-of-the-century candy-colored Macs. Those should definitely make a comeback.
-This episode ends on Wood’s “Stay You,” a sorta-Springsteen track that was on the Songs From Dawson’s Creek album that came out earlier in ’99. (The frontman of the band Wood, a Brit named James Maddock, still makes music.)