EVE
FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE
He wasn’t picking up his phone, so I decided to risk it. Taking the subway to his place had become a ritual, and Jesse, of all people, would understand that some habits are hard to break. I had an addiction, I’d say, if he ever questioned it. It was just too damn easy to go to his place, to get on the roller coaster, to throw my hands up and close my eyes and whoosh, let it take me.
There were no cars, few people. I allowed the glow of the street lamps to guide me. From the Second Avenue subway stop, I walked down Houston Street, with the faint, salty smell of pastrami in the air. I made a right on Ludlow, a narrow passage of fire escapes scaling the buildings on both sides. If I lifted my head, I would see a store selling wholesale hardware, another selling electrical supplies, an awning with Chinese writing on it. But I wasn’t looking up. Nope. I was going straight ahead, deliberately. There were a few people hanging out on their fire escapes. One leaned down to ask me if I knew what day it was. I felt a hand graze my shoulder. I flinched and kept walking and spoke to myself in a reassuring voice. You are so close. You are almost there Jesse is just a few blocks away. Nothing bad can happen to you.
I kept having the sense that someone was behind me, kept hearing footsteps, stopping, turning. It was getting to be that time when the area turned over, morphed into something else. And I knew what this place was capable of doing to me. To deal with the postmidnight scene around here, I had to be in that particular state of Zen, where I was so composed that I could look at someone and say, Oh, you have a black eye and a pet parrot that you carry around with you? That’s cool! Whatever floats your boat! If I felt a little weird in any way, this neighborhood only brought that feeling to the surface.
I took out my cell phone and called my sister, Emma, which I often did on my late-night walks to Jesse’s apartment from the subway. I was half interested in chatting and half afraid of walking to his apartment without some form of armor.
“Just so you know, your so-called protection is lying on the couch, wearing Cookie Monster pajamas, and at least seventy blocks away,” she told me.
“That’s fine,” I said. “It makes me feel safer to be on the phone. It sends a message to potential murderers.”
“And what message is that? ‘Don’t kill me because I have friends’?” Emma laughed. She talked to me about her night for five minutes. And then, she promptly ditched me for another call.
Shit. On my own again.
I took Orchard Street. It was less abandoned. I’d decided, at some point, that Orchard Street was safe. A red sign for a tattoo parlor was the only thing lighting up the block. I peeked as far down the street as I could, to make sure there was nothing lurking behind a pile of garbage bags. I walked, almost running, in a diagonal dash toward his building, a white brick walk-up. I punched the button on the intercom next to 4A, and then stood there. The sound of the buzzer scared me right out of my skin. “It’s me,” I said, as soon as I heard the static.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Jesse said. I exhaled, imagined all the ghosts in the neighborhood that would now leave me alone. A few minutes later, he was flying down the stairs and opening the door.
The entranceway was dreary, with damaged walls and a buzzing coming from the broken lamp half hanging from the ceiling. I dropped my stuff on the floor in front of him—a laptop case, a small duffel bag. I gave him a fatigued look. He was wide-awake, in a T-shirt and jeans.
“Long night?” he asked, picking up the bags from the floor.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Were you at Nobu this whole time?”
After flitting between a few odd jobs, I was now working as a hostess at a restaurant in midtown, where my job was to stand for six hours (surprisingly strenuous), walk around the restaurant while crying out Irasshaimase! (“Welcome” in Japanese), and lead people to their tables with a stack of menus in my hands. My function at Nobu, as far as I could tell, was to manage the dining room, to keep people from killing one another, and last, to keep them from killing me. I’d never worked in a restaurant before, and that first month, man, I was happy. I became friends with everyone, the bartenders and waitresses. I ignored the busboys hitting on me as we dried off glasses with a towel. That night, one of them had offered to take me out to the Red Lobster in Times Square.
One year in, and the job was starting to wear on me, but it had a greater purpose. I was attempting to make it as a music writer, which, in New York, is such a preposterous notion that I said it to a friend on Houston Street and a stranger who was walking by us actually started to laugh—this disturbing, high-pitched cackle of a laugh. When I recounted the story for Jesse, he acted unfazed, like of course that happened. “Don’t say that shit out loud,” he told me.
So far, I’d only found one magazine that was willing to pay me to write for them, and it had nothing to do with music. It was called Outdoor World and was mainly about hunting and fishing. I’d been freelancing for them for a few months, and it was going well; the only slight hitch was that I knew nothing about hunting or fishing, but I needed the clips, to show someone, someday, that I was remotely in the realm of journalism. Nobody I knew had heard of Outdoor World. I didn’t care. I wrote about a fishing competition in Vermont, different brands of beef jerky, how to keep camouflage clothing from fading. I wasn’t writing about music, but I was writing about something. I had a few hundred words to write every week. I was ecstatic.
Working at Nobu was about ten times less exciting than writing but paid me ten times more. When my stepfather, Arthur, inquired, in his typical good-natured, jokey fashion, why the Columbia degree that he’d paid for had landed me nothing more than a restaurant job and an exposé on safe bugs and how to eat them, I had to explain that the two positions went hand in hand. Almost everyone who worked at the restaurant was an aspiring artist of some kind—actors, mostly, but a few more grungy-looking photographers and cheek-boned models also roamed the premises. I pretended that it was a social experiment, not so much a way for me to pay for things, something that writing might never allow me to do. I dressed like a bohemian—with long, flowing skirts and turquoise bracelets. I got into it—serving the high-class, business crowd of midtown by day, walking among the wackadoodles of the Lower East Side by night.
“They had a big party in the private room that just would not leave,” I explained.
“So tired and yet she made it all the way downtown,” Jesse said, smiling behind me, as we walked up the stairs. “Yet again.”
At the end of the night, when faced with the choice of Arthur’s apartment on the Upper East Side or here, I always chose here. It was a pretty easy decision, a way to feign the adulthood I hadn’t earned. Jesse and I were in a real relationship. He called most nights. We didn’t “go out for dinner,” but we got burritos at three o’clock in the morning. We ate scrambled eggs standing over his sink in our underwear. He read all my articles, and I knew every one of his songs, that the one about the extra toothbrush in his bathroom was really about me. Take that, ladies.
As I walked, he grabbed at the fabric of my skirt, tugged at it.
“I just wanted to see what you were up to,” I whispered, looking back at him with a wry smile. He reached for me again, and I hopped up a few steps farther, out of his reach.
“Okay. Okay,” he said. “I’ll be more civilized.”
I looked at the closed doors to other apartments as we ascended the stairs. We actually knew some of his neighbors—not their names, but their routines, their occupations. There was a film professor who lived on the second floor, with two sons who smoked pot every Sunday (the scent came in through Jesse’s windows about twenty seconds after they started). There was a masseuse who lived on the third floor, who got late-night visits from men who looked like they’d just been at the gym. There was the twentysomething woman whose friends arrived every Saturday night, carrying pillows and candles, brown paper bags filled with candy and beer. All evidence suggested that they were having some kind of séance. The building’s superintendent always seemed to be pacing the street outside the building. He was friendly, very social, as he watered the sidewalk. Most days, I found myself torn between talking to him about the weather and telling him my innermost thoughts.
Each time I climbed the steps to the fourth floor, I learned a lot about what people were up to. None of it was a secret. None of it was “what people do when nobody is watching.” There was no shame around here. The only shame was in not having late-night visitors, in having nothing to hide.
In his building, all Jesse had to do was sneeze and people were fascinated. He’d tell them about his band, about his stint playing the Coke bottle as a trumpet at an art installation on Rivington. He was instantly accepted, invited over for dinner, even, in the case of the elderly Italian lady who lived on his floor. When I encountered these same people, they couldn’t even look at me, for how naive I was. They looked off to the side right away, as if blinded by my inexperience. I had yet to harness my edge. But Jesse was covered, with his music and his stories of drug dealing in the Ivy League.
“I didn’t know if it was too late,” I said. “And you weren’t picking up your phone. As per usual.”
“It’s never too late,” he said. “I’m always up. You know that.” Each stair creaked when I stepped on it, but to an unsettling extent, like it was a risk, like I might continue to fall down, down, down, all the way through it.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Always.”
“You should really eat at the restaurant,” he said.
“I did eat. But that was at four o’clock.”
The staff dinners at Nobu, which took place at the beginning of each night, were, to me, what I imagined it would be like to live like royalty. The food was mediocre, but I didn’t care. I piled chicken and stir-fried vegetables onto my plate. I took five cookies and stuffed them into my apron and ate them outside in the alleyway, before one of the waitresses informed me that I didn’t have to be so sneaky. “They don’t serve those. They’re for the staff. You can eat as many as you want,” she said, with some combination of kindness and condescension. I looked down at the cookies, flat cylinders with specks of brown, and felt a sense of shame, that I’d actually thought they were a precious commodity.
“Why didn’t you eat . . . at the end of the night?”
I sighed. “I can’t bring myself to eat what people leave on their plates,” I said. “We’ve talked about this.”
“Amateur.”
“Troglodyte.”
“All right, Porter,” he said. “No prehistoric insults after midnight.”
“How was your night?” I asked.
“Eh. Fine. I met up with Ian and Chris for a bit.”
Ian and Chris were Jesse’s bandmates. They got together to practice a few times a week, at a studio they rented. They had performed together in college, at small venues in Brooklyn and on Thursday nights at “partios,” a.k.a. parties on the Columbia Business School patio. They were now self-producing their debut album, and once it was finished, they planned to circulate it online.
I was winded by the time we got to the fourth-floor landing. I wasn’t sure how much of it was attributable to the steps and how much was because of his hand, going for my skirt, over and over again. He pushed the door, and I looked around at the familiar scene—the leatherlike sofa, a kitchen with a mini fridge, a two-burner stove, and a mattress on the floor. He had left one lamp on. A window that looked out onto the street was slightly open—that damn window, which caused nothing but trouble. One morning, I woke up to find an ant line marching from the window, across the apartment, and to a spilled scattering of Cheerios on the kitchen counter. The ceiling was low and cracking, on the verge of collapse. The floors were uneven. The only thing that provided any brightness was the bookshelf, which was spilling with colorful books, the books of the scholarly male—Hemingway, Pynchon, Carver, McCarthy.
Jesse closed the door and put his arms around my waist. I closed my eyes. “I have to pee,” I said, as he kissed the side of my head.
I went to the bathroom and then stood there, in front of the mirror, looking at the mildewed walls. I needed a second to collect myself, to get ready for the Jesse portion of my night. Without thinking, I started scrubbing away at the walls with a wet square of toilet paper, but I couldn’t make much progress. I started on a large stain on the shower curtain.
I washed my face in the sink. The cold water felt good, and I tried to ignore the fact that the water was a little bit brown against my hands. Okay. Okay. It was all starting to fade—the chaos of the restaurant, the subway ride downtown, the brief walk through the Lower East Side. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the running water, the quiet hum of the fan that Jesse kept in the corner of his apartment.
I hovered over the sink, splashed my face one final time. Through a small hole below the faucet, I saw a pair of antennae move back and forth. I froze. I shut off the water. A large cockroach came crawling out of the hole. I gasped and ran out of the bathroom. I opened the closet and flung a broom at Jesse.
“We have company!” I said dramatically. “The bathroom. GIANT cockroach. Kill it. Kill it please!”
He took the broom and stood there for a second. Then, he rested it gently against the wall. He went into the kitchen and came back with a paper towel. He walked toward the bathroom and, a few seconds later, I heard the sound of the toilet flushing. He came back into the living room and shook his head.
“This is what you give me?” he said, laughing, lifting the broom. “What, was an AK-47 not available?”
He imitated my voice: “We have company! Jesus fucking Christ.”
“But I—”
“I’m going to use this on you instead.” He pointed the broom at me, smiling. “Let’s see how you like it.” He chased me around the apartment. I ran for my life, until I was backed up into a corner and out of breath. He came toward me with a heavy stare, closer and closer to his surrounded prey. I pushed him away with a shove in the chest. He kept sweeping at my feet, running me around until we both fell onto the bed, exhausted.
“What happened to Outdoor World?” he said. “I thought that you were pro-bug these days.”
I laughed. “Well, then you were mistaken.”
After we’d lay there for a few seconds, Jesse said, “Speaking of your job . . .” and then he told me he had a “sort of” present for me. He unzipped something at the foot of the bed. I sat up. He handed me a long and slender black box. I opened it carefully, as if there might be something living inside of it. I still had cockroaches on the brain.
“A pen?” I said, staring at the shiny, silver object.
“Yeah, but it lights up.” He pressed a small button on the side of it, and the tip gave off a yellow light.
“It’s for writing your articles,” he elaborated. “I found it at that weird vintage store on Houston. I figured you could use it when you go night fishing and you have to write stuff down but you can’t because it’s too dark.”
“I’m not going night fishing!” I said, grinning widely. “Oh my god. Is that a thing? Do people go night fishing?”
“It exists, and you might,” he said. “You are an outdoorsman now.”
“I’m not an outdoorsman. I’m just faking it for the byline.”
“I don’t know. . . . I think you’re going to get hooked. I can see you now, asking me to go camping on the weekends.”
I shook my head. “I’m from New York. We sleep indoors.”
“I’m just messing with you,” he said, looking down at the pen. “It’s for shows . . . music shows, you know? Because it’s also dark, at shows, in my experience.”
“Oh!” I gave him a hug on the bed, my knees digging into the mattress. “At shows!” I said. “Of course! Thank you. Yes. A girl can dream.”
He pulled off his T-shirt. “Fuck, it’s hot in here.” He moved back to lean against the wall, grabbing me along the way. He had a rubber band around his wrist and his feet were tan and kind of dirty. We kissed to the sound of people yelling on the street, and then the sound of horns being blown. Neither one of us flinched. He twisted his legs tighter around mine. His skin was warm and smelled like cigarettes.
“You’re not seeing anyone at the restaurant, right?” he said breathlessly.
“Are you kidding?” I said, clearing the hair from my mouth and face. “I’m here almost every night!”
“I know, but I don’t want you to fall for some guy there, someone who thinks your jokes are funny and who walks you home because he’s pretending to be worried about your safety.” He said the word safety with unqualified derision.
“I actually do have a boyfriend at the restaurant,” I said, leaning my head against his chest. “His name is Joseph. He’s from Poland. He wants to take me out for seafood.”
I knew that I had to milk this for all it was worth. I had to really enjoy myself. Jesse almost never spoke about our relationship. But those few moments when he did—they were glorious.
“Does he?” he said, taunting me.
“He doesn’t seem as antagonistic toward me as you are though, so our relationship is really missing that special something.”
He put his arms around me and put his face against my neck. “Yeah, is that what makes ours special? That antagonism?”
I tilted my head toward him. We started kissing again, which quickly turned urgent. He slid down on the bed and pulled me with him, so that we were lying next to each other. He took my wrists and put them together, pulled them over my head. He kept them there with one hand, as we kissed, his other hand removing my clothes. I helped him. Then, he stopped, as if a sudden idea had come to him. He lifted me up off the bed and carried me toward the window.
“Put me down!” I shrieked. He opened the window with one hand.
“I will,” he said, and he placed me on the sill with a mix of care and disregard. I was naked, sitting on the edge, my legs wrapped around him. I hugged myself, arms covering my chest.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“This is the best thing to do at this hour.”
We entangled ourselves on the sill, and in truth, I really didn’t care where, at this point. I was glad he didn’t ask me. I was glad when he told me what to do, how to lean back, let my head and chest go out the window, how to hold myself up. I didn’t want any of our time together to be any less than it could be. I wanted to embrace it all, to experience it to the fullest. His choices were never predictable, never awkward. It made sense. The windowsill was hip height. After a few seconds of adjustments, one thing became clear: he’d done this before. I wasn’t his first. I didn’t dare ask. I never asked.
“I’m going to fall,” I said, as he put his hands against my lower back.
“You won’t.”
In the beginning, there was something funny about it, to be having sex above all these people in their apartments, not looking up. It was a rush, knowing everyone underneath us was none the wiser. I couldn’t see any passersby. I looked around, thinking, Someone has to look up. Does this happen all the time? How many times have I walked underneath people having sex on a windowsill? Everyone is at the mercy of me, and I am at the mercy of everyone else. I noticed the city differently, in that moment. I always felt like I was the one spying on everyone, but I realized it then: they were spying on me too.
“Say something,” Jesse whispered. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d gone silent. “It’s no fun if you don’t say anything, sweetheart.”
I shook my head, but then let out a small moan. My voice didn’t sound right, as I released it into the landscape. Everyone must do this, right? People must do this. Why don’t I see it? Everyone is having sex. Everyone’s got windows. This is the easiest way to fuck somebody. There is no out. And you offer them a nice view. It was hard to concentrate on the sex, because it was so extroverted, but I did the best I could. I felt a new vulnerability in the city. I was a part of it now. I was a new fixture, an ornament on a building. Where is everyone? Why aren’t they looking out their windows?
Jesse’s foot was on the radiator. I heard his knee crack the window. I shuddered, held on to the fire escape. There was broken glass everywhere. I glanced down and saw the building super, looking up at us. “I’m not replacing that!” he shouted.
We were in bed for two minutes before Jesse stood up and crossed the room, went for his guitar. He came back and asked if he could play a song for me that he wrote that day. He played it, in boxer shorts, cross-legged on the bed, and then waited for my reaction. It wasn’t his best, but I didn’t know how to tell him that, so I sat there, in silence. The moment after he finished playing always felt loaded. I had learned to tread lightly. I could sense him holding his breath. I didn’t want to ruin the night. I said: “Is it about springtime or . . . California? In the spring? Sorry, you know how bad I am with . . .” When I spoke, my voice was low and sweet. But he got agitated anyway, and stood up and put his guitar in the corner of the apartment, then snapped it back into its case.
“Just explain it to me,” I said, pleading with him, but he was already gone.
“Forget it.”
“I’m just trying to understand. . . .”
“Let’s forget it, okay? Let’s talk about your night some more.”
I sighed and dug my fists down into the mattress. He watched me closely, his neck red. For the past few weeks, Jesse had become increasingly touchy about his music. I got the sense that he wasn’t being too productive and was looking for someone, anyone, to blame. At first it was his bandmates—they were lazy, he said, procrastinating, never showed up to practice on time—but lately I felt the blame had shifted squarely onto my shoulders. Half the time, I had no idea what we were even fighting about.
He’d say something like: “You don’t really get me though, do you? And it’s not your fault. I don’t think you have the emotional capacity to get me.”
I’d respond to this maturely. By yelling. “Say what you want about me. But do not insult my emotional capacity!”
“Maybe our relationship is the problem,” he’d said once, pacing around his apartment, talking to himself more so than me. “Maybe being around someone who is so stable is messing up my ability to write anything remotely interesting.”
Then, the shit really hit the fan.
“You think I’m stable?”
“You just want me to be dark for a few minutes! And then you want me to get over it and get myself together!”
“That’s not true! I want to be your source of comfort in the world!”
He’d start shuffling things around in his apartment, slamming drawers with too much force, kicking the mattress with all his might and watching it move a whopping two inches farther away from him. He never hit me, but he came after me a few times, like he was about to do something. I always felt like he would have, if I’d only stuck around a little longer. But I ran away fast, every time, at all hours of the morning, my fear of what remained inside for once outweighing what lurked outside, out of his apartment and down the stairs, down the street, always shutting the door to his building behind me with a sense of panic and relief, like I’d made it out just in time. Sometimes he followed me outside, and we screamed at each other on the street, loud enough to wake the neighbors.
Sometimes, after a fight, he’d leave in the middle of the night to go out, when I was too tired to protest or to really process the whole thing in the first place. He’d come home at around five with glassy, bloodshot eyes, in a semiconscious trance. We’d talk about how much he’d had to drink, his songs, the gloom that would come over him sometimes and cause him not to sleep. I was his girlfriend/full-time therapist. Every time he came home, I would sit up in bed, wide-awake, as I listened to Jesse in the bathroom throwing up. “Are you okay?” I said, in my hazy state. His response to this was to run the water so that I wouldn’t hear anything. When he got into bed, he passed out, but I got up every half hour to make sure he was still breathing.
One morning, I woke up to find that he wasn’t beside me. I found him asleep on the couch. I tried to ask him why he wasn’t in bed, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I leaned over him and listened for his heartbeat. He started rocking his body back and forth. On the carpet next to him was one thumb-size clear plastic bag. I said his name. His legs started shaking, like he was warding off bad energy that was inside him. I remember how worried I was, how I couldn’t feel myself move around the apartment. “Jesse,” I said, and then my voice grew louder, tougher, more insistent. His eyes opened. When he looked at me, the person I knew seemed to be far away. Hours later, he told me he did some drugs that night, and that he’d slept on the couch because he didn’t want to be close to me. He was too ashamed.
That morning, at a park on Essex and Canal, he finally explained himself. He told me how he’d done a few drugs in college but nothing crazy, just to experiment, then he sold them to make money, and maybe he had a few dalliances now and then, postcollege. He told me that it started when his ten-year-old brother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His family was devastated. He said that it was genetic, and that he worried about himself sometimes. He said that drugs were a classic thing that manic and bipolar people did. Their personality gave them this high of happiness and mania, but there were also lows, and when you got into the lows, you wanted to get out of them. He told me that in college, one time, he went up to the roof of Mudd, the engineering building. I told him that he didn’t have to take any engineering classes if he didn’t want to, which made him laugh. He said it wasn’t his style, truly, the drugs, the self-destruction. At his core, he said he liked it best when we were listening to music in bed together, and he was making fun of me for having bad taste. He called it recovery, to be with me, after a long night out. Recovery meant me being there, with him, holed up in his apartment. It meant us together in the dark, watching movies, getting takeout from the Chinese restaurant where Jesse was greeted by the entire staff. I swear, they threw as many complimentary fortune cookies as could fit in the bag. Each night that he slept soundly, I lay next to him in silence, feeling satisfied. It was a refuge, for me as well as him. It stopped me from worrying about other things. All that drifted into the background. Nothing was as pressing as keeping Jesse alive.
I got up and started getting dressed, readied myself for a battle. “I liked the song,” I said. “But it’s not my fault if you don’t.” After a few minutes, he appeared to calm down, came over to me, just as I was putting on my shoes, pressed his cheek to mine. He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me up so that my shoes fell off, and then carried me back over to the bed. “Don’t go. Don’t go,” he whispered. I grabbed hold of the back of his neck.
The musician and the music writer.
“You know what?” he said, once he’d released me down onto the mattress. “Let’s go out. We gotta get out of here.” What he meant was that we needed to step out of ourselves, whatever happened to us when we fought. He had a mischievous look on his face. He stood, went to his closet, looked back at me.
“Okay,” I said. I was far from sleep anyway. I could never drop right off to sleep after work, not before 3:00 a.m. Something inside of me refused, would not give way. But I was more comfortable at his place than anywhere else. When he wasn’t in bed with me, I had this phantom image of him. I imagined pulling him toward me, curling up beside him and feeling that I’d come to a safe place. When everything in your life is so uncertain, you cling to clarity where you can find it. You cling to anything you can find that feels good or familiar. Did he know that I dreamed about him five nights a week? That every song was about him?
I couldn’t let him go out without me, then come home, barely conscious. It broke me to see him like that—unable to walk, speak, hold up his head.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“Where should we go?” He came over to the bed, kissed the top of my head. “How about PKNY?” Jesse said. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“What’s PKNY?”
“Seriously? Painkiller New York? You’ve never been? I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s that tiki bar a few blocks away? Apparently, they have a new drink with rum and banana colada in it that will not only kill your pain but make you forget how to speak.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said, half sarcastically. I got up, made the bed. I smoothed the comforter evenly over the mattress, fluffed the pillows, as always, for my mother. As soon as I was done, Jesse took one hand and pushed me lightly so that I fell back onto it, ruining everything. I sighed.
“I hear that piña coladas are making a comeback,” he said.
“You know what,” I replied thoughtfully, staring at the ceiling. “Good for them.”
“I’m feeling the need for some Polynesian and Manhattan fusion.”
“That’s not a need.”
“Get excited! This is why we live in Manhattan! This is why we pay a ridiculous amount of money in rent. Well, this is why I pay a ridiculous amount of money. You are just a freeloader. But this is why we live here, man! To go to a tiki bar in Chinatown at one o’clock in the morning.”
“Agreed,” I said, sitting up.
“All right!” Jesse said, and then gave me a high five. He stood in front of his closet, scanning his options.
“So are you going to wear a plaid shirt? Or a plaid shirt?” I said, smiling.
He gave me a death stare.
“You know what, I hardly ever go out in a T-shirt,” he said, with great interest, as if someone were interviewing him on the topic.
He put on a shirt, plaid, just as I’d predicted, and looked in the mirror. He closed his eyes slightly and fiddled with his hair. I flinched and looked away from the mirror. He was good-looking, but he knew it, which made him a little bit less so.
Once out of the apartment, he seemed to be in an extreme hurry to get there. I walked behind him, looking down and trying to figure out what clothing I’d put on, I’d been in such a rush. When he stopped walking, I looked up. There was no awning, no name. It was a tiny place and looked like it used to be a one-car garage. I could see the silver grates, up top, waiting to be pulled down at the end of the night. On the wall next to the bar, someone had painted a green palm tree against a sky-blue background.
“This is it,” he said. He opened the door and allowed me to walk in first.
Inside, there was a bamboo-paneled bar, naturally. Colorful drinks were everywhere, with umbrellas and cherries stacked on a straw next to a wedge of pineapple. A few people had ordered flaming shots, which came in a half shell of coconut. Bowls of watermelon with neon straws sticking out of them were passing us by. I turned my attention to the crowd, barely listening as Jesse talked to the bartender, who he knew, of course. He knew every bartender within a five-block radius.
I spotted Kate across the bar, and I couldn’t believe the luck of it. “Kate’s here!” I yelled, tapping Jesse on the shoulder repeatedly. She was wearing a gray tank top tucked into black pants, a long necklace with a crystal dangling at the end of it. I pointed, standing on my toes to see over the crowd. Jesse looked at her and then looked back at me, rolling his eyes.
“Hey, don’t do that,” I protested. “Kate’s my friend!”
“I’m the only friend you need.”
“That is not true,” I said.
He grinned. “I’m gonna go downstairs,” he said.
“What’s downstairs?”
He shrugged. “Some of my friends.”
“But I have to say hi to Kate!”
“Feel free.”
“Okay . . . so, I’ll, um, I’ll meet you down there in a few minutes?” He nodded, and part of me was relieved to be able to catch up with Kate without him there. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks. When we met up then, we hadn’t had the best dinner. Usually, our dinners were perfect conversational harmony. From the second we sat down, the drinks started flowing, the bread was torn into, we talked so much and so quickly that we didn’t even notice what we were eating. But the last time, we were being too formal with each other for some reason, or she’d been in a lousy mood because of work, or something was off. I hadn’t felt the same connection with her. But now, as I made my way toward her, I was ready to rectify the situation, to get back to our usual way. I realized how much that one mediocre dinner had caused me to miss her.
I went up to her with a huge smile on my face. There is something about accidentally running into a close friend that is as thrilling as anything.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“I’m with some random people,” she said, less thrilled. “You do not even want to know the night I’ve had.”
I looked behind her at a booth where four guys we knew from college were seated, Glick, Ben, Danza, and Julian. Ah-ha. “I see Juuuuuulian is here,” I said, drawing out his name in a singsong voice. “Why are you torturing that poor boy?”
“That poor boy has a girlfriend,” she replied. “But I think I might try to seduce him anyway.” She half smiled, half winced. “Is that bad?”
“For his girlfriend? Yes. Definitely.”
She rolled her eyes. “Tell me what’s going on with you and Jesse,” she said, taking a sip of what appeared to be a strawberry daiquiri.
I stared at her for a few seconds. The truth was I didn’t like to talk about my relationship with Jesse with my friends. I never knew what to say.
“It’s going really well. . . . ,” I said. “Except for when it’s going really badly.”
She nodded. “Standard Eve.”
“I know.”
“How bad is bad?”
“There’s a fair amount of alcohol and drug use.”
She didn’t blink. “But when it’s good?”
I took a long inhale. “Fireworks.”
“Standard Eve.”
“But it changes constantly. I can’t trust it.”
“Do you even want to?”
I stared at her.
“Eve. I think if you dated someone and everything went smoothly, it would blow your mind.”
“That’s . . . not true. It’s not about highs and lows. It’s just about the person. Jesse and I . . .”
She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Ohhhh yes. You and Jesse. I know. I know. You’re about to tell me about this unspeakable bond that I couldn’t possibly understand. You guys get each other. Go ahead. Carry on. Have an experience. Do it. Vaya con Dios. By all means. Hey, I’m seducing Julian for no apparent reason. I’m not exactly in a position to judge.”
“Here’s the thing though . . . I think I might be in love with him.” I winced.
“Seriously?”
“And isn’t it bad to love someone who will ultimately hurt me?”
She started shaking her head. “I love pink drinks. That doesn’t make them good for me, and yet.” She stuck out her tongue. It was bright red.
“So you think I’m setting myself up?”
“Of course you are setting yourself up. Look, just be careful. I’m not going to judge you or tell you to stop, but be careful. That’s all I ask.”
“I’m going to go get him.”
I went to find Jesse, down the staircase in the back, to the basement. There was a long, mahogany hallway with small rooms every couple of feet and two larger rooms at both ends. The larger rooms were dark, with only a table visible in one and a black piano in the other. I walked to one of the smaller rooms that had its door shut but a light glowing from underneath it.
I knocked. “Come in!” Inside, there were six or seven people huddled around a mirrored coffee table streaked with white powder. Jesse looked up and smiled at me.
“Sit down,” he said. I watched him clear room for me. I sat next to him, quietly observing. A girl in a red dress, with a flower in her hair, offered me a line. “No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head. Jesse smiled at me and played with my hair, pushing away the strands near my face. He moved the pieces into a ponytail that he held in his hand behind my neck. “I think I’ll pass,” I said.
She did a line. He did a line. I stared at the floor. Eventually, I was able to get him away, to lead him back upstairs. He was rubbing my elbow with his fingers as we walked. I tried to get him to talk to Kate, to change her mind about him, about us. I tried to sit at the table and make conversation, but Jesse’s hands were on my skirt, my thigh, under my skirt. He was gradually making it more and more impossible for me to talk. That seemed to be his goal, as he sat next to me, to get me to leave with him as soon as possible. Flashes of the windowsill were coming back to me. I was giving distracted answers to Kate. She could probably tell.
“Remember what happened earlier?” he whispered into my ear, while I was talking.
I took his hand in mine and tried to move it away, to put it back in his own lap, but it was a waste of time.
“I’m not really capable of socializing right now,” he said into my neck. His fingers were fully up my skirt now. His fingertips were sliding beneath my underwear, moving it sideways. I started to laugh. I felt a little bit dizzy. I thought, for a second, about the streaks of white powder, but then I pushed that thought away.
When Kate got up to use the bathroom, Jesse dragged me outside by the arm and kissed me against the blue wall next to the bar, under the palm tree. I felt like I’d never done it before, like we were inventing something new, that nobody had ever thought about. He pressed me against the wall and when his lips left mine, I exhaled so hard that things started going blurry.
“Can we go home and fuck now?” he said, smiling, his wet mouth next to mine.
“Wait a second,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
I stood there quietly for a few seconds. “What do I . . . mean to you?”
“What?”
“You heard me. What am I? To you?”
“Come again?”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Seriously? This is what you want to know right now? While I’m high and fuck-drunk on you?”
“Is there a better time to ask?” I smiled.
“Ahhhh, see. You told me that you weren’t one of those girls. But you are. You lured me in under false pretenses!”
“One of what girls? I just want to understand what’s going on.”
“Of course you do. You probably have a whole staff of people working on this issue as we speak.”
“I don’t. Fine. Look. You don’t have to answer that. But, can I just ask you for one thing? When you’re ready to break up with me, can you just tell me as soon as you know? Like, don’t wait, don’t drag it out, don’t make me guess. Just do it.”
“You’re borderline insane.”
“And you’re not answering my question!”
“I just want to have a good time, man.”
“What does that mean though?”
“It means—” He took a long, annoyed breath and ran his fingers through his hair. “Jesus, Porter. You kill me, you know that? You’re killing me, even just by saying that, in that way that you say things. You and I both know that I can’t even see straight right now. We fucked earlier, but it doesn’t matter. That doesn’t cool me off toward you. It only makes me hotter. It’s like a cycle and I’m never satisfied. I’m in a state of pining for you, right now, that is probably bad for my health. If you walked away right now, I think I would die. I think I would literally stop breathing. I would do anything to stop this conversation and take you home right now. Literally. Anything. I want you so badly that it hurts, it fucking kills me.”
“You know,” I said, looking up at him. “I don’t enjoy hearing you say these things.”
“You certainly enjoy hearing me say these things.”
I started to smile. “I’m just worried that . . .” He picked me up off the ground, his hands clasped around my legs. My little half yelps half laughter filled the air. He carried me down the street, with his arms still around me. It required an unnerving amount of energy. Once we were in front of his building, he placed me down, and stood in front of me. He moved closer and closer. He touched his nose to my nose. He kept his face there. We both closed our eyes.
“Jesse,” I whispered. I could feel myself resisting. When he hugged me, I couldn’t sink into him. I knew that I could go upstairs with him, we could sleep together, we could sleep next to each other, I could press myself against him all I wanted, but somehow, it wouldn’t stick. He could hold on to me, but I wouldn’t feel it. Instead, as I stood there on the street with him, I felt the frailty of my body, on my skin, a flash of Kate’s red tongue in my face. I’d left without saying good-bye.
“See,” he said, his arms around me, pulling me in. “This is how we are. This is good. Can’t you see that?”
I looked around, uneasily, at a neighborhood that wasn’t mine. I felt like there was something missing, like there was meant to be something underneath me, but instead I was holding myself up, and not well. Something more reliable was supposed to be there.
My chest tightened and I let out a sound that Jesse seemed to take for lust but was really much more me on the cusp of a full-blown panic attack. This wasn’t stable. I wasn’t stable. Nothing in my life was fucking stable.
I closed my eyes as Jesse buried his face in my neck and, as I had done for the past six years whenever I was on the verge of becoming completely unmoored, I wished for my mother.