BEN
218 EAST FIFTH STREET, BETWEEN SECOND AVENUE AND BOWERY, APARTMENT 2W, EAST VILLAGE
A woman grabbed hold of my arm.
“I know you,” she said. “I know you, exactly!” She took my hand.
I was on Christopher Street. I had just left a store that sold tea and coffee, a place that had been around since the 1920s, so read the sign. You could smell the store from the sidewalk, the sweet and bitter aroma of spices. Inside, the shop was crammed with burlap sacks of coffee beans labeled TURKISH, CHINA, BRAZIL, and bins of tea leaves marked ORANGE and JASMINE. Behind the counter there were jars of spices, coffee grinders, and brass scales.
I was hanging around the Village for research. The plans for the Freedom Tower had come to a halt, yet again, because of the advisory committee, which was embroiled in a heated debate over whether to include retail space in the plans. This time it was the Take Back the Memorial advocates causing problems, this one woman whose brother was the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She was against any retail development in the area, wanted to rid the memorial of those tenants and to expand the plans for a memorial museum. She said that to even think about retail establishments was to turn yet another part of Manhattan into a shopping mall. Another board member, whose husband worked in the South Tower, said that it was outrageous to plan for shops without first sitting down with the families, for the Port Authority to sign leases with any retail entity without first having asked for public input. We kept going over the parts of Manhattan that had retail establishments but weren’t ruined by them. We kept referencing the East Village. And so that was where I was spending my Saturday, on Christopher Street, trying to figure out what was different about these shops versus the ones in any other neighborhood. It wasn’t like the establishments in the East Village weren’t selling things. They were. They were just old, and some of them were one-of-a-kind, but not all.
I also chose the East Village to walk around because it had the advantage of being Eve’s neighborhood. She had become important to me. After I left the coffee place, I went to a bakery on Commerce Street and picked up a few things for her. I didn’t know for sure whether I would see her at the end of the day. I didn’t even know if she was home or busy or what, but I was suddenly counting on it.
Over on Tenth Street, between First and Avenue A, I had come across a shop covered in plants. The sign read, EXOTIC PLANTS • GEMS & CRYSTALS • BONSAI • ORCHIDS • FLOWERS FOR ALL OCCASIONS. There were flowers out in front, positioned in rows along the sidewalk, cactuses, and potted herbs of all kinds. Hanging plants and dream catchers covered the store windows. The smell coming from inside this place . . . It was incense and burning wood, but to the extreme. I couldn’t imagine how anyone stayed inside there for longer than five minutes without going crazy.
Which might explain the woman who currently had my arm in a death vise.
I paused. “I don’t think so,” I said slowly.
“Yes, I know you!” she insisted. “You have been so busy with friends, relationships, your job, your family, that you haven’t had time for magic!” Her blue-polished nails dug into my skin. “Am I right?”
“You got me!” I said, trying to move away from her.
She nodded knowingly. “You need a witch in your life, don’t you?”
“Umm.” I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” I tried to walk away. If by witch she meant a woman with mysterious powers over me, then yeah, I already had one of those.
“No. No. I can tell. You need one. Come inside for a few minutes, won’t you?” I squinted as I looked in. It was white inside. A cloud of smoke occupied the whole store.
“You’re busy? What are you doing? Where are you going?” she asked.
I didn’t think to say the truth, which was “Wandering around but eventually going to see a girl I can’t stop thinking about and I’d rather not show up smelling like a poisonous garden.”
“Crystals have healing powers. Did you know that? Let me show you some of them. Aren’t you interested in healing? Well-being? Neutralizing negativity? Becoming an integrated, whole being?”
She turned over my hand and looked at my palm. A grave expression appeared on her face.
“Oh, you definitely need to come in here,” she said.
I looked down at my hand and started to laugh. “What? See something you don’t like?”
“Oh yes. Are you a scientist?”
“No, I’m an engineer.”
“I knew it! I knew you were a scientist!”
“I’m not a . . . Are your crystals this accurate? Anyway, I really gotta run.”
“Don’t you want to establish your life’s purpose?”
“Those are some powerful rocks.”
She looked taken aback. “Oh, they’re not rocks.”
“Really?” I said, staring in between the plants, through the window. “Because they look a whole lot like rocks.”
She frowned.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You give me one scientific fact, and I’ll come inside and take a look.”
She held her hands together in front of her chest. “Crystal healing is ancient, dating back at least six thousand years to ancient Mesopotamia. It is centuries . . .” She seemed to lose her train of thought.
“So these crystals are from Mesopotamia?”
“No, they’re from Arkansas.”
I laughed.
“Okay, my dear,” she said, ready to level with me. “Let’s say you don’t believe in the healing powers, don’t you want to see something of beauty? We have some truly beautiful items. Just trust me, okay? Trust me. It is worth seeing. You go to museums, don’t you? Why miss a thing of beauty?”
“All right, all right,” I said, to get her to stop harassing me. I walked through the hall of plants and pulled open the door. I felt bad for that poor woman. She had a tough job. Or so I thought. Once I went inside, I realized that within the cloud of smoke, the store was packed with people. As it turned out, there was a decent market in this city for objects that alleviated tension and unblocked emotional distress. Because she was following me around the store, I bought a stone for four dollars that was meant to “enhance clarity and levelheaded decisions.” Really, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. The smell was giving me a headache.
I had the stone in my pocket, and I was headed toward Eve’s, grateful for the non-incense-scented air. You never really appreciate your standard, smog-filled, city-polluted oxygen until it’s taken away from you. From my apartment in Hoboken, I could see the Manhattan skyline, the skyscrapers in midtown and how the city dipped down in the Village and then, in the financial district, went back up. Skyscrapers were clustered downtown and in midtown for a reason. Geology controlled the skyline. The gray rock below the streets of Manhattan dictated that the higher buildings be found where the rock was closer to the surface, so that it could support that weight. Underneath the Village, the rock was not as strong, which is why the Village used to be all marshes. The rock was lower, and it took a lot more work to dig down.
I texted Eve, when I got close to her place. The text needed to be something casual, something that didn’t scream relationship. Small animal in the woods.
I typed: Going out tonight?
Her response came right away.
Nope! Sorry. Sick. Have the flu I think.
I felt the sting of disappointment, texted back.
Can I bring you something?
I stood on the street waiting, a block away from her apartment.
No, it’s okay. But if you’re going out downtown, I wouldn’t mind if you stopped by and kept me company for a bit. I lost my job yesterday. Voice was shut down by a federal court. Did you know that it’s against the law to steal music?
I typed quickly into my phone. Seriously?
Eve was pretty keen on daily life at Voice. She made fun of herself, said that it was assumed at the office that anything she had to say about music was lame, but I knew that underneath it all, she had a good idea of what she was doing. She loved her job like I loved mine, which was a great thing about her. So many people complained about work. My phone vibrated in my hand.
Yeah . . . I wouldn’t mind it if you stopped by.
I circled the block a few times, to give her the impression that I wasn’t a lunatic standing outside her door. When I showed up there, she didn’t question it. She answered with a blanket wrapped around her like a burrito.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Have you seen Eve?”
She looked at me and then sneezed, pulling the blanket across her face to cover her nose. “Very funny,” she said, her voice nasal and different.
I dug into my pockets, handed her the stone from the crystal shop.
“I brought you a healing crystal,” I said. She gazed down at it quizzically, a tiny blue dot in the palm of her hand. The expression on her face was just enough amusement for me.
“I’m kidding,” I said, and then took it back, presented her with a white paper bag. “I brought you cookies.” She perked up. “I thought you’d kick me out if I brought soup. You’d say it was too cliché or something irritating like that.”
She took the bag and peeked inside it.
“Fiiiiiine, you can stay,” she said, and brought the bag into the kitchen.
“Oh, thank you very much. Because it’s so pleasant in here.” I looked around her apartment, which had piles of tissues everywhere, cough drops spilled over the bed; nose spray, a bottle of NyQuil, and a thermometer were on the night table.
She looked up at the ceiling, like she was about to sneeze again, and then she sneezed. Four times. “How did you get so sick?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, frustrated, like she’d been contemplating this very question for weeks. “I think just lack of sleep and everything caught up to me. I’ve been going to five concerts a week.”
“Five?”
“I was actually proud of myself.” She pursed her lips together and smiled. “Until yesterday.”
“What happened with your job?”
She shrugged. “It sucks. But I’ll find something else. It’ll probably involve fewer pillows though.”
“Yeah . . . but that was weird anyway.”
“Yeah.”
I tried to think of a consoling thing to say but came up with nothing. I could tell her some version of “I’m sorry” or “Everything’s going to be okay,” except she’d hate that. She’d start all over again, with the cocoon that she was always building around herself. Or she’d bludgeon me to death with the nearest sharp object. Hard to tell with Eve.
She got into bed and pulled the comforter up until it reached her chin. There was a mountain of crumpled tissues next to her. She was alternating between grabbing for a mug with a tea bag dangling in it from her night table, and picking at a few crackers on a napkin.
“Sit by me,” she said. I went over to the radiator and put my hand over it. Little heat was emanating out. It was warming nothing but the radiator itself.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Yeah, but if you sit by me, I’ll feel better,” she said, looking up at me, her eyes wide, her hair messy against a white pillow.
“What about the rules?” I said, mocking her. I was still fixated on the cold. How was she supposed to get better like this?
She sighed. “You’re here already. What’s it matter?”
I touched the wall behind her pillow. It was freezing. I touched her head. Her head and hair were cold too, which made sense. She was basically outside. The problem with radiators in old apartments was that you had no control over them. The building controlled the boiler. There was steam heat and water heat, gravity systems and pipe systems—what was this? I looked around. There was one square window in the wall and I went over to it. It wasn’t properly sealed. As a temporary solution, I wondered if there was a way to make a headboard, to create a barrier between her head and the outside world. I searched the room for a slab of wood.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Do you have any large chunks of wood lying around?”
She smiled. “Are you kidding?”
“Never mind.”
I went over to her and got into bed. I crawled over her to reach the side closest to the window. I sat up, felt my back against the cold wall, and put one arm around her. I looked down at the side of her face. The tip of her nose was red. Her eyes were closed.
“I always want to sit right next to you,” I said. “Even when there are other, more germ-free options.”
“I know.”
“Seriously, you look like one big germ right now,” I said. “Like one of those big green germs from the commercials for cold medicine.”
“Why am I big?”
“That’s your issue? Fine. You’re a cute little germ.”
“Better.”
“Eve. I’m telling you this in your weakened state because I think you’ll be more susceptible to reason when your body isn’t strong enough to be totally irrational.”
She looked up at me.
“What is it?”
“I want to take you out on a real date. On Tuesday.”
“Tuesday? Why Tuesday?”
“Because Monday sounded too eager in my head on the way over here.”
She groaned. “You don’t understand. I’ve had a few . . . blows, which I haven’t really told you about. It could have been worse, I guess. But it was pretty bad and I’m scared that it won’t work out between us because you and I are so . . . different . . . and I don’t know if I could ever explain it to you in a way that would really make sense . . . to someone who’s never experienced . . .”
This felt like the moment to tell her everything. About my father. The card. But I looked at her and I just instinctually did not want to do anything that would hurt her further. I wanted to make her feel better, not worse. I had this plan in my head to just get her to more solid ground, and then, once I had her there, I could tell her whatever I wanted. I just had to book that date, get us on track for a real relationship, and in order to do that, I had to defuse her fear, not send her running scared. Fortunately, that was something that I knew how to do.
“Can I tell you something about my job?” I said.
“What?”
“When you’re designing a building, you have to think about all the possible things that can happen to that building—hurricanes, snowstorms, insane traffic. . . . No one knows what’s going to happen exactly, but we need to be able to predict with a certain level of probability what is likely to occur. We boil things down to mathematics, even though it really doesn’t lend itself to such an exact science. There are so many unknowns, but you have to think to yourself, What’s most likely? You do the calculations that will give you a high level of certainty that it will work, and then you move forward. And it’s such a satisfying feeling, to be able to let go of the what-ifs and finally move forward.”
She didn’t say anything, but I could tell that she was listening. Her eyes were open and she looked peaceful. For once, she wasn’t furrowing her brow.
“Anyway, I can’t predict the future, but I can tell you that based on the evidence at my disposal, I feel fairly certain that this will work. And that’s all anyone can give you. That’s all you’ll ever get. It’s the best that you can ask for.”
Her eyes widened for one last protest. “But what about . . .”
I shook my head. “No. No amount of imaginary potential hypothetical factors is going to scare me away, because those are constants in everything. We’re going out on Tuesday. And if you say no, I’ll take away the cookies.”
She crossed her arms on top of the sheets and exhaled. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this while I have malaria.”
That was it. I’d won.
I lifted the comforter to put it over my jeans. “You don’t have malaria.”
“I think it could be a parasite. I have no appetite. I’m usually very hungry. How else do you explain it?”
“It’s not a parasite,” I said, with a sigh. “You have to feed them. You’d be extra hungry.”
She laughed and gave me a warm look. I smiled and then closed my eyes, nudged her foot against mine.
“Tuesday.”
“Maybe.”
“Tuesday.”
“You’ll regret it,” she mumbled.
“Let’s just see.”
I pulled her in closer to me. After a few minutes, she was quiet. With Eve that meant one thing: she was falling asleep.
“Don’t try to lull me into a false sense of security,” she said.
I laughed. “Why is it false?”
I reached over her head and turned off the light so that the only thing illuminating the room was a streetlamp on Fifth Street.