6
THE cab driver was reluctant at first. I guess I would be too. We look crazy from the near death of it all. You’re a fucking mess. I’m so clean that it’s almost disturbing, pimp-clean to your whore-dirty. We’re a true pair.
“But the thing is,” you say, going over the recent events for the umpteenth time, your legs folded under, your arms flailing as you speak. “The thing is, at the end of the day, I couldn’t live if that guy wasn’t gonna stop singing. I mean I know I must have seemed crazy.”
“Nuts.”
“But I had a bad night, and at some point you have to set rules, you know? You have to say, I will not put up with this. I will die before I continue to live in a world where this guy will not stop singing and polluting a shared environment.”
You sigh and I love you for trying to spin this into some sort of strike against complacency and what fun it is to play with you. “Still, you were pretty drunk.”
“Well, I think I would have done the same thing sober.”
“What if he’d been singing the Roger Miller version?”
You laugh and you don’t know who Roger Miller is but most of the people in our generation don’t know and your eyes narrow and you stroke your chin and here you go again, for the fourth time. Yes, I’m counting.
“Okay, did you ever spend a summer working on a ferry?”
“Nope,” I say. You are convinced you know me somehow. You have said you know me from college, from grad school, from a bar in Williamsburg, and now, from the ferry.
“But, I swear I know you. I know I know you from somewhere.”
I shrug and you examine me and it feels so good, your eyes hunting me.
“You just feel close to me because you fell and I was there.”
“You were there, weren’t you? I’m lucky.”
I shouldn’t look away but I do and I can’t think of anything to say and I wish the cab driver were the kind to babble intermittently.
“So what were you up to tonight?” you ask me.
“Working.”
“Are you a bartender?”
“Yeah.”
“That must be so much fun. Getting people’s stories.”
“It is,” I say, careful not to reveal that I know you write stories. “It’s fun.”
“Tell me the best story you heard this week.”
“The best?”
You nod and I want to kiss you. I want to take you onto the tracks before engine engine number nine grinds to a halt and swallows you whole and fuck the drunk out of you until the New York transit line swallows us both. It’s too hot in here and it’s too cold out there and it smells like burritos and blow jobs, middle-of-the-night New York. I love you is all I want to say so I scratch my head. “Hard to pick one, ya know?”
“Okay, look,” you say and you swallow, bite your lip, redden. “I didn’t want to freak you out and be, like, this psycho who remembers every tiny little social situation she gets herself into or whatever, but I was lying. I do know how I know you.”
“You do?”
“The bookstore.” And you smile that Portman smile and I pretend not to recognize you and you wave those hands. Such small hands. “We talked about Dan Brown.”
“That’s most days.”
“Paula Fox,” you say and you nod, proud, and graze my arm with your hand.
“Aah,” I say. “Paula Fox and Spalding Gray.”
You clap and you almost kiss me but you don’t and you recover and sit back and cross your legs. “You must think I’m a fucking lunatic, right? You must talk to like fifty girls a day.”
“God, no.”
“Thanks,” you say.
“I talk to at least seventy girls a day.”
“Ha.” And you roll your eyes. “So you don’t think I’m, like, stalker-crazy.”
“No, not at all.”
My middle school health teacher told us that you can hold eye contact for ten seconds before scaring or seducing someone. I am counting and I think you can tell.
“So true. Which bar do you work at down there? Maybe I’ll come by for a drink.”
I won’t judge you for trying to reduce me to someone who services you, who rings up your books and delivers your picklebacks.
“I just fill in there. Mostly I’m at the bookstore.”
“A bar and a bookstore. Cool.”
The cab rolls to a stop on West Fourth Street.
“Is this you?” I ask and you like me for being deferential.
“Actually,” you say and you lean forward. “I’m just around the corner.”
You sit back and look at me and I smile. “Bank Street. Not too shabby.”
You play. “I’m an heiress.”
“What kind?”
“Bacon,” you sass and a lot of girls would have gone blank.
We are here, at your place. You are looking in your purse for your phone that is on the seat between us, closer to me than you, and the driver shifts. We’re in park.
“Here we go again with me and the always disappearing phone.”
Someone raps on the car door. I jolt. The motherfucker actually knocks on the window. Benji. You reach across me and roll down the window. I smell you. Pickles and tits.
“Benji, omigod, this is the saint who saved my life.”
“Good job, dude. Fucking Greenpoint, right? Nothing good happens there.”
He raises his hand for a high five and I meet his hand and you are sliding away from me and everything is wrong.
“I can’t believe this but I think I lost my phone.”
“Again?” he says and he walks away and he lights a cigarette and you sigh.
“He seems like a jerk but, you have to understand, I lose my phone all the time.”
“What’s your number?” I blurt and you look out the window at Benji and then look back at me. He’s not your boyfriend but you’re acting like he’s your boyfriend.
I’m good, calm. “Beck,” I say. “I need your number or your e-mail or something in case I find your phone.”
“Sorry,” you say. “I just spaced. I think I’m still kind of freaked out. Do you have a pen?”
“No,” I say and thank God that when I pull a phone out of my pocket it’s mine and not yours. You give me your e-mail address. You’re mine now and Benji calls, “You coming or what?”
You sigh.
“Thank you so much.”
“Every time.”
“I like that. Every time. Instead of ‘anytime.’ It’s pointed.”
“Well, I mean it.”
Our first date ends and you’re going upstairs and fucking the shit out of Benji but it doesn’t matter, Beck. Our phones are together and you know that I know where you live and I know that you know where to find me.