EVE
THIS IS PARK AVENUE
As soon as I heard the water stop trickling through the pipes in the wall, that gentle swooshing noise that came and went in the mornings, I knew that I had to make my move, and fast. I had about ten minutes to get some coffee, eat breakfast or at least assemble it, and then hustle back into the guest room. I forced myself awake, up out of bed, and put on thick socks so that I could cross the living room without the creaking of the wood floor.
The kitchen was dark. I flicked on the lights and went for the coffee first, then got a bowl from the cabinet, careful not to clank the bowls against one another. I grabbed the cereal and opened the box, gently, gently. Over the past few months, I had learned to open and close a cereal box like I was defusing a bomb. I reached into the fridge for milk, and then froze. Were those footsteps? I listened. I couldn’t hear anything. I waited for another sound. I heard shuffling. Shit! I started to panic. How could he have gotten out of the shower and put clothes on so quickly? He always takes ten minutes! Always!
The footsteps got louder—low, heavy steps. Shit! Shit! Shit! I was screwed. There was no place to run. The best I could do was stand with my back to him, take an extra few seconds to plan my next move. This morning routine was becoming a ritual, but it seemed reasonable. The whole absurd dance wasn’t so absurd, under the circumstances. I was trying to get along better with Arthur, but before 9:00 a.m., it was tough.
“Morning!” I heard Arthur’s voice from behind me—always loud, always sociable. I poured milk over the cereal and then placed the carton back inside the fridge.
“Morning!” I uttered, as boisterously as I could, which wasn’t very boisterous. Arthur’s disposition was easier for him. It was as dependable as his wardrobe—a series of short-sleeved collared shirts in turquoise and orange with two pockets in the front and tucked into khaki pants. I watched him take a mug from the cabinet—he was wearing his orange number that day—and head to the coffeepot.
“How’s the writing going?” he asked. Arthur always had questions, and asking them was not something he reserved for when I was wide-awake. Once he asked me about the state of the music industry before seven o’clock in the morning and I almost burst into tears. I decided this time to answer quickly and then take my cereal into my room, as if that were where I typically ate it. The good thing about Arthur was that he wouldn’t take it personally. He was not the type who assumed that it was his company that drove people away. His nature was too sunny for that line of reasoning.
“It’s going all right,” I said, attempting to follow that with something resembling a laugh but which came out much more like a cross between a hiccup and a guffaw.
Arthur then laughed a much more legitimate laugh, and sat down with a bowl and his box of chocolate Cheerios. He filled the bowl to the brim with the dark brown loops. No judgment. Really, no judgment. But I wished that he would just tell me that he knew that it was a weird breakfast, that it was almost like having dessert, and not quite normal for a sixty-five-year-old. With Arthur, I was genuinely concerned that he didn’t know, that he thought the word CHEERIOS on the box implied health and whole-grain goodness. I was generally indifferent to the breakfast choices of others, but this, for some reason, really got to me. Oh, the agony—of watching him shovel the Cheerios into his mouth every morning with those large hands and the milk running down his chin. I silently wished that my mother were there to witness it. She would have made it less awkward, this cereal standoff.
His cell phone rang, and I heard his ringtone, the first few notes of ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ which were all too familiar now. I took the opportunity to skip away, back to the guest room, pretending that I didn’t want to disturb him. So polite and considerate! It was the first of Arthur’s client calls. His phone rang constantly, allowing him to deploy with regularity his unique brand of chitchat. I wondered if there wasn’t some electronic, or more up-to-date way for these people to find out about their stocks. But I had the feeling that all his clients were over seventy, and that they were just like Arthur, always wanting an excuse to chat. I imagined that his was the only call these people received all day, though I had no evidence.
“So, are you bored yet of looking at pictures of the baby?” I heard Arthur say on the phone, a faint voice now, before I turned the knob on the guest-room door. A few seconds later, he said, “I tell ya! It’s hard work to be such a loving grandparent!” And then his signature laugh.
He never answered the phone with a simple hello. And he never said good-bye either. Instead, he got off the phone with, “All right, well, enjoy the crossword puzzle! Is it easy or hard today?” or “Call your mother!”
He was just being a nice guy. Three months of living with him and I was finally starting to master that certain live-and-let-live serenity. His apartment was Grand Central Terminal, but I secretly relished the distractions that it provided—the calls with his clients; his housekeeper, Camilla, a quick-tempered Colombian woman who tended to get into fights with everyone she encountered. She had a particularly contentious relationship with one of the doormen, Santiago, because she felt that he didn’t arrive to take her down in the elevator fast enough, when she called for it (I assumed they were also in love and carrying on a secret affair, but again, there was no actual evidence of this). One time, their yelling got so bad that Arthur had to get off the phone with a client. I heard him say, “I have to go. My housekeeper and my doorman are fighting. A house divided . . .” And then the laugh. I enjoyed this. I decided that it was a very Park Avenue problem to have.
With my hands full of breakfast, I closed the door with my hip and went to the window, where I had a bird’s-eye view of Park Avenue, women walking up and down the street in heels and men in suits, walking dogs or yanking children by the arm. A swarm of joyless workers crossed the street, with hard hats in their hands. Double-parked outside the building, there was a black car, its driver reading the newspaper and leaning against it. I looked out at the figures below, the glances at the sky, the briefcases and cups of coffee moving up and down the street. It was one of the many charms of being in that apartment, on the seventh floor, the view of Park Avenue and with it, a sense of luxury. Being this high up meant I was free from the prying eyes that I was used to in New York. To be seven floors above the traffic, to have nobody see me but the birds in the sky, it was a pleasure that explained so much. It was wonderful to be rich, but especially in this town.
I got back into bed, sat with my knees to my chest, and ate my hard-earned cereal. Across from me, there was a flat-screen TV. The other walls in the room had a few new, framed pictures—a print of Fred Flintstone, an abstract painting of Michael Jackson, a photo of a roll of Life Savers—all meant to convey the art-appreciating and yet fun-loving nature of Arthur. There was a photo of Arthur and my mother in a heart-shaped frame next to the bed. They were dressed up, at a wedding. Arthur was wearing a three-piece suit, with a gold chain dangling from his pocket. Oh, the pocket watch. My mom had begged him not to wear it that night, told him how old-fashioned it was. But he didn’t listen. He said it reminded him of James Dean. She said it reminded her of the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Those were the kinds of fights they used to have. I was always grateful that there was nothing larger at stake.
I sank down into the four-poster bed, stared at the CD player above the dresser, which had a catalog lying on it, open to a page of silk handkerchiefs. There was a stack of CDs—Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits, The Eagles’ Complete Greatest Hits, The Beatles’ 1—Arthur didn’t waste time with the lesser titles. When I asked him about it, he said: “The hits are hits for a reason!”
There was a sharp knock on the door. “Eve?” I heard his voice. When he came in, he looked around the room, at the untidy ball of clothes on the floor in the corner, books at the foot of the unmade bed.
“You’re eating cereal . . . here?” He half smiled.
“Yup! Breakfast in bed!” I answered. I had that one locked and loaded, for whenever he caught me.
“Why not in the kitchen?”
“You were on a call. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
He nodded, seemed pacified.
“Eve,” he said, his face screwed up like he was about to tell me something that was difficult for him to say.
“Yes?”
He lowered his voice and closed the door behind him. “Don’t you think it’s time to find your own apartment?”
“But I like it here!” I replied.
It could have been a depressing state, living at Arthur’s place, but lately, I’d been trying to bond with him. We went to the movies together sometimes. Plus I had a job that I loved. Unfortunately, the job didn’t pay enough to allow me to keep my apartment once the rent went up. And so, until I found a new place, I didn’t see what was so wrong with seeking refuge with the fourth member of the Bee Gees.
“I’m trying to find a place,” I ventured instead. I started looking down at my phone, scrolling through e-mails, but I could feel his eyes on me. The truth was, I was milking this and Arthur knew it. It was far from my childhood bed, but it was someplace to rest comfortably. The apartment was nice and spacious. There was a constant stream of distractions. I had company at night when I was feeling lonesome and missing Ben. My salary didn’t get a huge chunk taken out of it for rent each month. The only downside was that every now and then, I had to shake off the underlying feeling that I was a pathetic loser.
“Are you really looking? What have you seen lately?” he asked.
I looked up at him. His hair was still wet from the shower.
“Everything is too expensive. You said that you wanted me to live here for a little while!”
“It’s been . . . a while now.”
“Well, you didn’t specify a time limit. I’ve been very productive!”
“It’s not about that, Eve. I know that you have a great job. And don’t get me wrong, I like having you around, but it’s time. Nobody likes to be alone. After my first marriage ended, I slept with the lights on in the whole apartment every night for a month. But you have to force yourself to be a little bit brave. You’re just scared, that’s all.”
“Of course I’m scared. I ruined the only good relationship I’ve ever had. But the good news is, I do my best work when I’m scared shitless!”
A part of me was still recovering from the night of Kate’s wedding. Ben had moved out of our East Village apartment. My first night there alone, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. in a massive state of panic. Sitting up in bed, I tried to focus on breathing. I counted to ten with every inhale and exhale and concentrated on each number as if my life depended on it. To get my brain to slow down and to break the endless loop of terrible thoughts, I listened to a few songs on my computer, the ones that always soothed me right before going to sleep. But that night, it wasn’t doing the trick. It simply wasn’t enough. So I took a pile of blank paper into bed with me and wrote an article for Interview.
When I was done, it was five o’clock in the morning, and I still couldn’t sleep. So I packed up some of my belongings and left. I bolted out of the apartment with my heart beating rapidly and my shoes barely on. I was in such a rush, with no idea why, no idea where I was going. It was raining very hard, but I couldn’t stay where I was. I was too afraid of how I felt inside, of what might happen if I remained alone there. So I stood outside, getting soaked as I hailed a cab. In my head, I heard my mother judging me. She hated cabs and often condemned people who took them as a form of transportation. “How much time do you lose sitting in traffic?” she would say. I was soaking wet by the time a cab pulled over, but I didn’t care. The worst danger was that my problems might get washed away. I threw out Arthur’s address to the cabdriver, automatically. I didn’t want to call Kate or Maya or my sister. They would all indulge me too much in examining the details of the situation. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted sleep.
The rain hammered the top of the cab as it made its way uptown, so much so that I couldn’t see where it was going. Water sputtered inside. I closed the window, which had been left slightly open, and saw my reflection, my face dizzy with emotion, my eyes glassy and mad-looking. I must have looked strange to Arthur, at the door of his Park Avenue apartment, soaked through and shaking with cold but also fear. I felt an overpowering need for company. But he wanted to know first if I was in some kind of trouble, and then once he figured out what had happened, he considered it to be nothing that we couldn’t sort out in the morning. He brought me into my old room, which had been converted back to a guest room, and opened the drawers full of clean and dry towels, while the rain came down outside. He produced a toothbrush. He offered me hot water for tea and then retrieved it. I was surprised to hear the voice of a woman in the hallway, even though I knew that Arthur had started dating again. We both pretended not to hear it.
I slept for only a few hours that night, and the nights after were no better. I awoke each morning with no idea where I was and what had happened to lead up to this place. Then, before my eyes were open, before I was fully awake, I had the sad job of explaining to myself what had occurred. It was a little recap that I did: “On last week’s episode of . . .” Ben’s gone and it was mostly your fault. Funny how you wanted to be broken and now you are.
I had a hard time going back to my East Village apartment. Somehow, it was the apartment itself that became impossible for me to handle. I couldn’t settle myself down there anymore. Whenever I went back, I felt a sense of insecurity boiling up inside of me. I returned to the same place, but I was frightened now, of every bit of it, frightened that it would prompt that panicky reaction all over again. All the good moments that came before had been replaced by this one monumentally bad feeling. I could feel it when I walked around the space, opened the door, looked at the bed, the kitchen. I told myself that it wasn’t the place that caused the panic, but it didn’t matter. They had become too closely linked in my mind. I had to give it up. The only good that came from that night was that I sent my insanity-induced article to my editor at Interview and he loved it. Apparently, it was my best yet.
“Eve,” Arthur said now, smiling at me.
“What? You’re kicking me out?” He was the one who’d wanted me to stay there after I opted out of renewing the lease on my apartment. He thought it’d be best for me not to be alone.
“Sort of.” He put his hands on his waist. “Consider this your two weeks’ notice.” His eyes lit up, like he was offering me the chance to play a fun new game.
“Well, I’ve been kicked out of finer places.” I got out of bed, shoving the sheets out of my way dramatically.
“Oh, have you?” He laughed.
“Of course not,” I said, in a huff. “This is Park Avenue.”
Would you look at that, I thought to myself, as I got dressed for work. Arthur and I were finally developing a rapport.
The dark-wood-paneled elevator opened into the lobby and four doormen came to attention. The two who were sitting down on a leather bench stood up immediately. All four always greeted me, but I felt like they were forcing it, like they knew that I didn’t really live there and there was no reason to be friendly to me, some temporary visitor. I nodded and said good morning back. My mother had always talked to them about the weather, especially with Dennis, who had an Irish accent. “They say rain, but I don’t know, Dennis—what do you think?” she’d say. Or he’d tell her, “They say sixty-five degrees by Sunday,” and she’d say, “Oh my. I’m going to hold you to it!” As if conversation with doormen about the weather was something she’d done all her life.
As I walked out onto the street, I noticed that the traffic was already building, going down Park. I preferred the atmosphere downtown, the vaguely bohemian nature of the Village. The Upper East Side was more uniform. Whatever didn’t belong stood out. It was moms in exercise clothing with big leather bags, talking about their renovations. “There is nothing more difficult than doorknobs.”
“I redid my bathrooms and people said, You’re crazy.”
Young girls were on their way to school and dressed in matching skirts. They carried backpacks with tiny stuffed animals hanging off them, bobbing up and down as they walked.
“I’ll text you and it’s possible we’ll be able to squeeze in a playdate!”
Everyone was finely dressed, no matter age nor gender nor ethnicity. Even old men who walked their dogs in the morning in sweatpants appeared semihomeless, but upon closer inspection, like their sweatpants might actually be really expensive. I watched the couples on the street—the women wearing long coats with fur accents, the men in suits and shiny loafers and pocket squares, often speaking French or Italian to one another. I didn’t feel like I had something to offer them or them to me, but I was enjoying the look of their nice shops, the apartment buildings with matching awnings, the trimmed rows of bushes and potted flowers. My work was downtown and it wasn’t high-powered and it wasn’t something that people on the Upper East Side would find impressive, so once I got on the subway, the Upper East Side and I parted ways.
But first, I went to Madison Avenue for a pit stop. I sidestepped the puddles created by doormen watering the streets, and weaved through messengers carrying shiny shopping bags. I went to the same overpriced restaurant for overpriced coffee every morning, but I’d be lying if I said that the coffee wasn’t delicious and that the pink cup it came in didn’t make me feel like I was on a luxurious, Parisian vacation. Standing outside the place, I saw a guy who looked a lot like Ben’s friend Glick. He was standing with his back to the wall. As I got closer, I realized that it was Glick, and my heart started racing, just at the thought that Ben might be nearby, that Glick might have seen or spoken to Ben recently. Glick was wearing a pale gray buttoned-down shirt that was buttoned up one notch too few, a triangle of his chest hair showing.
“Hey!” I said, sounding excited, perhaps overly so.
“Oh, hey,” he said, with a more appropriately muted level of enthusiasm.
“What are you doing at this fancy-pants place on a Friday morning?” I said, looking at his pink coffee cup, which suited him even less than mine suited me.
“Just met with a client,” he said, his voice groggy, ducking down to take a sip from his cup.
“A client?” I said, impressed.
“Yes,” he said. “Is that so hard to believe?” He gave me an amused look.
“Yes, yes it is.” He stuck out his leg, presumably to kick me in the shins, but he was too far away and didn’t make contact. “What are you up to these days?” I asked.
“I’m selling real estate.”
“What a coincidence!” I clasped my hands together. “I’m looking for real estate! To rent . . . an apartment.” I cringed, for no apparent reason other than I was suddenly reminded of why I was looking for an apartment and that Ben’s friend might find it a bit distasteful to help out Ben’s cheating ex-girlfriend.
“What can you pay?”
Or not.
“In terms of money?”
“No, in terms of experiences,” he said bitterly.
I looked around and whispered, “I figure I can pay about twelve hundred dollars a month.”
He blinked hard and shook his head. “And I figure you’ve gone mentally ill.”
“I won’t find anything?”
“Were you figuring on New York?”
I laughed and rolled my eyes. “No. Any city will do!”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. “You know what, I have a place on Sixty-Ninth and Third that’s for rent. You might like it.”
“Third as in Third Avenue? In Manhattan? I’m sure that’s out of my league.”
“Wait and see the apartment first. It has some . . . liabilities. But what doesn’t in this town? So when you flush the toilet, water comes out of the ceiling? Is that really so important to you?”
I laughed. “Um . . .”
“I’m kidding.”
“Oh.” I looked down at the ground. “So what’s the rent?”
“I can show it to you now, actually.” He raised his eyebrows.
“Now? I have to get to work.”
“What time do you have to be there?”
“Ten.”
“Ten! Jesus.” He looked at his phone.
“Yes, I write for a magazine, which means I can get there at ten but I can’t afford an apartment on the Upper East Side. You haven’t even told me the rent yet. I probably can’t afford it.”
“What are you doing in this fancy-pants neighborhood, then?”
“Oh, my stepfather lives at 750 Park.” I didn’t explain the particulars of the situation.
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh. Then you’ll be fine,” he told me, and then said that the rent was something like twenty-one hundred a month. I knew right away that I couldn’t afford it. But I had the sneaking suspicion that if I spent a half hour with Glick, I might be able to find something out about Ben. So I lied and said it was a doable number, that maybe I had undershot the runway and it wouldn’t hurt to see the place.
Together, we walked down to Sixty-Ninth and then the three long avenues east. There was a crisp, fall breeze in the air. Colored leaves from the trees were scattered across the sidewalk. We passed by a blond woman pushing a baby in a stroller, a bag attached to the stroller with the word FORD written on it, in blue script.
“Ford,” Glick grunted. “Perfect name for when you’re having a baby . . . or a president.”
I laughed.
“I’m sorry, but that baby was wearing loafers! I don’t think I had a pair of loafers until I was twenty-five.”
“Yeah, but you’re special,” I said.
I started asking him about his friends, pretending to be curious, innocently curious. I asked about Danza and Julian, their jobs, their apartments, waiting for the right moment to mention Ben.
“Let’s see, there’s Danza, Julian . . . who is my third friend? Who else am I friends with who you might ask me about?” he teased me. “God. You know what, I can’t think of it. This is a real head-scratcher.”
“All right. All right.”
He paused for a few, long minutes. I did my best to be patient, to wait for him to say something, and then he did. “He has a new girlfriend, you know.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, feeling my heart sink.
“Yep. She works for a nonprofit and runs marathons.”
“Wow.”
“So she’s definitely a good person.” He snickered.
I didn’t know what to say. “Well, good for him.”
“They’ll probably end up engaged within the year.” He sighed. “Any day now, I’ll be buying them a pizza-making kit or a mango pitter or a picnic basket.”
“Ah, the picnic basket,” I said, with a slow nod. “Why do people register for those? Do you think they really use them? I’ve never heard any of my friends express the slightest interest in going on a picnic, and yet, evidence suggests that picnics are a big part of marriage.”
“Also, how often are you eating mangoes that you need a specific instrument for them?”
“I agree. I feel like mangoes are a very once-in-a-while type of fruit.”
“I don’t know, man,” he said, sounding tired. “Seriously, being almost thirty is just finding out which of your friends who you used to throw up with in the street is now registered for a picnic basket.”
We stopped at the corner of Sixty-Ninth and Lexington and waited for the light to change. “So, not into the whole marriage thing?” I turned to him. His hands were in his pockets.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Haven’t found the right girl yet is more like it. Not everyone can handle me, Eve.”
“Yeah, well, join the club.” We crossed the street, dodging a dog walker with six or seven small white puppies jumping at his ankles.
“Eve. You didn’t do anything that bad,” he said. “You just wanted to blow up your life.”
“What?”
“You wanted to blow up your life,” he repeated.
“I didn’t want to.”
“Oh yes, you most certainly did. People do what they want to do, and you wanted to blow up your life.”
“Did Ben say that?”
“No. Have you met Ben?”
I smiled in spite of myself.
“It happens to everyone. Well, it happens to some people. For whatever reason, sometimes you just want to fuck shit up. I’m sure you had your reasons.”
“Yes, well, I’ve thought about it and I’ve thought about it and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was just all going along so smoothly, and, I don’t know. Every relationship I’ve ever been involved in has been so tumultuous and . . . I guess, rather than wait for it to get messed up in some unexpected, out-of-the-blue way, I took matters into my own hands because I think on some subconscious level . . . I’m an idiot.”
“No, I know what you mean though. It’s like that feeling on a roller coaster when you’re slowly going up higher and higher and nothing bad is happening yet but the fact that something is coming totally fucks with you. And sometimes, you don’t want to wait for it. Sometimes, you just want to get it over with.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.” I decided that Glick had an okay side to him, when he wasn’t drunk and destroying a fax machine that he found on the street.
“Ben’s a good friend though,” he said. “Ben’s like an anchor and . . . I’m like a buoy.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of a buoy too. Wait, aren’t buoys also tied to something?”
“I don’t know, man! This is my first maritime analogy. I thought they just floated around aimlessly, no?”
“Oh, maybe you’re right.”
“You know who would know the answer to this question?”
We both said it at the same time. “Ben.”
I looked up at the white brick building that took up half the block. “Is this it?” I asked. He nodded. When we got upstairs to the apartment on the seventh floor, I pretended to check everything out, the way I would in a realistic situation. The place had big windows overlooking Third Avenue. The bathroom and kitchen looked recently redone. That was why I couldn’t afford it. I’d never lived anyplace in New York with a bathroom or kitchen from this century and I had the feeling that I never would. But it was okay. I’d come to appreciate the black-and-white-tiled floor, the quirky fixtures, knobs and cut-off pipes sticking out of the wall for no reason.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he said, standing in the middle of what would be the living room. “But only because I feel like we’ve bonded now.”
“What is it?”
I could tell that he was fighting off a smile. “Ben may not be headed to the altar as soon as I implied earlier,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I went over to the kitchen, opened and closed the fridge, then the oven, launching a fake investigation of all appliances.
“He had a fight with his girl. We were making fun of him about it.”
“Oh? What about?” I crouched down to look into a drawer below the oven. This is where the wrapping paper could go, I thought to myself, to make sure I had the right facial expression.
When I lifted myself back up, Glick was tapping his fingers together, under his chin. He was enjoying this.
“What?” I demanded. “The suspense is killing me.”
He looked me up and down. “He said your name.”
“Huh?”
“He said your name.” He winced. “During . . . sex.”
“Shut up.” I put my hands on my head.
“You’re welcome.” He laughed and walked over to the window. I could see his reflection, squinting into the sun.
“I can’t believe he did that,” I said. It was like a door that had been slammed shut now had a tiny sliver of light showing from underneath.
“I know. And she flipped, obviously. It was pretty unwise. But classic Ben, right? I swear. Outside that iron-clad smart brain of his, there is a fluffy layer of marshmallow stupidity.”
I nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. The kick under the table at my father’s apartment. The yellow roses, gently used.
“I just can’t believe he was talking, let alone during sex,” Glick said.
“I wouldn’t call that talking.”
“True. Anyway, she threw him out of her apartment. But I think they’ve recovered.”
“Wait, but this is great news!”
“Why?”
“Because it means I’m in his head! It means I still have a chance.”
“Maybe . . .”
“Well, Michael, this leaves me no choice.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I have to go to the airport.”
“What airport?”
“To find Ben, of course! I have to chase him down and tell him that I love him and try to get him back.”
“He’s not at the airport.” He gave me a puzzled look. “He’s at work, you dingbat.”
“I know.” I smiled. “I was just kidding. I watch a lot of television. Everyone is always making big declarations at airports. And it’s always raining.”
“Blue sky.” Glick pointed out the window.
I shook my fists in the air. “I can’t catch a break!”
“So what have you done so far? To get him back?”
“Just a lot of calls and e-mails and one borderline insane handwritten letter. But I stopped about a month ago. I was trying to give him space, but not so much space that he could find a new girlfriend.”
“Eve. We’re almost thirty. How hard do you think it was for Ben to find a girlfriend? Factor in that he has a job and a pulse.”
“But I knew him back in his hooded-sweatshirt days!”
“Oh, come off it.” He shook his head. “You didn’t like him back then either.”
“Whatever!”
“How about this.” He paused, paced around the apartment for a minute, deeply entrenched in thought. “I go out to a bar tonight with my boys. I know. I know. Very unusual occurrence for us on a Friday night. It’ll involve an elaborate scheme of deception I’m sure. Anyway, I get Ben to come, and you show up.”
I paused. Glick and I had never been close, to say the least. I’d always gotten the sense that he’d merely tolerated me, for Ben’s sake, but he often looked at me like he couldn’t quite place what I was doing there.
“Why are you doing this for me?”
He thought about it. “Because you made him happy, and then you made him miserable. But at least he wasn’t going on any picnics.”
We walked out of the apartment and toward the 6 train stop on Lexington and Sixty-Eighth. I was descending the stairs to the subway platform, thinking about how Glick had really come up in the world, when he called after me, “And about tonight . . . wear something sexy.”
Glick texted me later that afternoon with details and, that night, I showed up to the bar on Second Avenue and Seventy-Eighth Street, in a black slinky dress, ready to ambush Ben. It was clear that I had somewhat lost my mind. If Ben had wanted to reach me, he certainly knew how to do that. And you couldn’t force someone into something. I knew that. But I didn’t allow myself to think too much about the weirdness of what I was doing. I realized the depth to which I’d sunk, but it was no greater than the depth of my mistake. That had been way more embarrassing, way more wrong than this. I had to break it down into small pieces. I’m just going to a bar. I told myself that this was a coincidence, a coincidence that happened to be orchestrated. It wasn’t a lie if you really, really believed it.
Before searching for them, I went straight to the bar and got myself a drink. The bar had TV screens everywhere with sports playing. The place was filled with the abstract faces of men talking, streams of them moving toward the bar or sitting at tables. They were of all ages, and I passed through the crowd, with them whispering to one another. I had a strange feeling of being talked about, as they stood in small circles, wrangling one another. The voices made me ache for Ben, as I always did, among other men.
Once I had downed some of my drink, I looked for them—Ben, and the three others—Glick, Danza, and Julian. I spotted them at a table in the back corner. A waitress walked over to them, observing first and then getting more involved. They were a familiar unit to me, but there was some strange feeling sinking in, a sense of power that they now had over me. I got very nervous for a few seconds, and then, I thought, Act. Do not think. Act.
I went over to their table in a bit of a trance. Ben lifted his face when he saw me walking toward them. He looked innocent, slightly afraid. It reminded me of how he had looked to me in college, before I really knew him. Him watching me. I was received in silence. The others rose from the table. There was a confused pause. Glick tried to smooth it over.
“Well, if it isn’t the devil herself,” he said.
Ben then got up to greet me. He hugged me solidly. It wasn’t distant. It was friendly. It feels so good, but I thought to myself: Dismiss this thought. I was getting ahead of myself. I knew that, objectively, I had a long way to come back. But he said my name! And the hug! Quiet. Quiet. I thought of trying to call Ben while standing outside the synagogue that night, and it had a calming effect on me. It was a long way to come back.
I sat down and the five of us talked together about some mutual acquaintances from college. After the first twenty minutes, things started to feel more normal. When Ben laughed at something I said, it was the best sensation I’d felt in a while.
“Eve and I were just talking about your hooded-sweatshirt days,” Glick said.
“That was a great hoodie,” Ben responded.
“Yeah, except you wore it all the time,” Danza added.
“My other clothes weren’t as comfortable.”
“As what?” I said, laughing. “The pajamas you were always wearing?” The alcohol was kicking in. I was feeling unguarded, careless.
“Hey, Ben. Why don’t you tell Eve about the fight with your girlfriend,” Julian said. Apparently, he was feeling the same way.
Ben looked down, smiling slightly. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” he said. There was a moment of unbearable silence when the three of them got up. “Okay then, you two. Talk among yourselves,” Glick said to us.
We sat there, watching them go to the other side of the bar, drifting farther and farther into a pack of people. “How’s it going?” Ben asked me.
“I’m good! How are you?”
“Pretty good.” He shrugged.
“How’s work? Hey! I read something about glass panels being installed. . . . That’s a good sign, right?”
“Yup. They’ve been doing that for about two months.”
“That’s excellent!”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. What about you?”
“Me? Nothing new . . . except, I’m all grown up now.” I motioned to myself and then smiled.
“So you’re not writing songs about your socks anymore?”
“Listen! I just think . . .” I looked down at the table, blushing. “I just think that the Laundromat must be a stressful place for socks. They could get left behind. . . . They could lose their other half. . . . I’m just trying to make the whole process easier for them.”
He nodded, his mouth in a straight line.
“Sorry. I know. It was a lot of craziness.”
“Actually, I didn’t mind the craziness.”
“You could have done without it.”
“No,” he said, thinking it over. “That was just you. If I’d lost that . . . I would have been too afraid of what else I might lose.”
“That’s a nice thing to say,” I said, and then shifted my dress and sat up on my knees all excitedly. I put my hand on his arm and my head on his shoulder as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do. I could feel him shift a tiny bit toward me, bend his head in my direction. I looked at him and noticed that his eyes were slightly closed.
After a few seconds, I took my hand off him and sat back down, properly. “Anyway, I was reading this article about the Freedom Tower and I learned all this stuff about shoring and false work! Like what you do when something is unstable and might collapse, expanding the foundation to make it structurally sound. I learned what underpinning means!”
“What’s it mean?”
“When a building is collapsing, you put a new building next to the existing building so that when you create a basement level, the building next to it will fall over into the hole.”
He smiled. “Not even close.”
“What?”
He stood up suddenly and put his hand on my bare shoulder and I felt the movement of his fingers. It was nothing, and yet it made me miss him even more. My body went completely still. His fingertips felt warm. “Do you want another drink?” he asked, looking a bit exasperated. I was wearing him down. Maybe. But in a good way? Maybe.
“Sure,” I said, looking up at him. My name. The hug. Another drink. This is going to be okay.
He tapped my shoulder two times and then walked toward the bar. I sat there for a few minutes, looking at the table, both taking in what had happened so far and in a frenzy to plan my next move. I decided that I couldn’t waste any more time. When he came back, I was going to put all my cards on the table. I felt a sudden burst of bravery about what I might say. I was spinning inside, like my thoughts couldn’t fit inside of my skin for much longer. I couldn’t wait to be sitting next to him again, how good it would feel to be next to him. For the first time, it all made sense. I believed that I could get him back. It was only a matter of getting him alone again, just one more time, and that was all. Another drink. He’d asked about another drink and that was a good sign. I could work with that.
After a few minutes of waiting, and then a few minutes more, Glick came over to me looking guilty. I could hear my own heartbeat. I don’t know why I had such a bad feeling from the second I saw his face, but I did.
“I’m sorry, Eve,” he said. “Ben left. He told me to say good-bye to you for him.”
I was dissolving inside. All my hopes fell, in a single instant.
All I heard was Ben says good-bye.