BEN
450 WEST END AVENUE, APARTMENT 4E, UPPER WEST SIDE
I had one last drink, standing at the bar, then got out of there, and kept walking until I got to the west side. I had to just get away from Eve. That was my main objective. To physically get away from her. The rest would follow. Sanity would follow. She was like a stimulant. Seeing her was like a shot of espresso to my system. And I didn’t want that, the way I used to. I wanted to go back to my natural state of calm.
Natalie and I had been together for only a couple of months, not exactly “show up at the door drunk” territory, but I felt the need to be in her vicinity. Eve was not going to suck me back into her dysfunctional world, where nothing meant just one thing or whatever the hell you thought it meant. I texted Natalie as soon as I got outside the bar. She texted back that she was in bed but that she’d leave the door unlocked for me.
Great. Perfect. All I really needed was the ability to get in the door.
The block where she lived, Eighty-Second and West End, was deserted. Natalie’s neighborhood, in the evenings, was like a refugee camp for recovering from the city and the madness that was life in the East Village with Eve. It was quiet, no traffic, few noises, no matter the time of day. It was like looking out at a lake with water that wasn’t moving, not even a ripple. A little strange for the city, but I’d take it.
The lobby of her building was lit with half-hidden bulbs that released an amber glow. I took the elevator up to the fourth floor. Once on the landing, I examined myself in the hallway mirror. I was dressed for work, pulled together from the outside. The only thing that gave me away was that my eyes were red, the way they got when I drank.
There were five apartments on her floor. Her door was the only one propped open by a sneaker. I pushed the door in and felt my way through the dark entranceway. I was hit immediately by the smell of oranges. Natalie’s apartment always smelled like that, like some perfume she’d just sprayed, citrus-scented. All I could comprehend was the light from the living room window. The walls of her apartment were cream-colored but they looked darker now. My eyes were adjusting to see the fireplace with a long mantel, and framed pictures lining it. She had sheer, gold curtains, which made the living room a place of dignity, with a brown velvet couch and an old piano that had been left by the previous tenants of the apartment but that Natalie said she couldn’t bear to give away. I took off my shoes and locked the door quietly behind me. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water, quickly.
I went into her bathroom. Everything in Natalie’s bathroom had her name written on it in tiny script—the towels, the toothbrush holder, the soap dish. A tissue box was inside a tissue box cover with her initials on it. Who knew that tissue boxes weren’t meant to be exposed to the outside world? Natalie Williams. That was who. It was ironic that I had said Eve’s name, hovering above Natalie that night, because Natalie’s name was everywhere. Natalie. Natalie. Natalie. As I looked down at the tile floor, it shifted in and out of focus. I rubbed my eyes a few times, and then washed my hands with a bar of dark green soap that smelled like olive oil.
I was more careful once I went into the bedroom, took off my clothes noiselessly and slinked in next to her. I lifted up the cream-colored blanket and put it over me. The slight movement against the mattress made her shift positions on the other side of the bed. I looked over there, at the outline of her face. Natalie was good. Natalie worked for the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, and she didn’t even know anyone with Alzheimer’s. Natalie made dinner, cooked it herself from ingredients. Natalie always smelled like vanilla and kept flowers on her windowsill because she believed that flowers gave people a sense of well-being. She used logic when discussing anything. Her household management skills were unparalleled. It seemed as if she’d been preparing for adulthood since she was a little kid, like back then, all she’d wanted was to hurry up already and be an adult with e-mails to answer and bills to pay and vegetables to chop. I slept turned away from her, so that we were facing opposite walls, so that I could, despite everything, despite every fucking thing that made sense, imagine Eve in the dark.
It happened most nights, especially when I slept in Natalie’s bed. I had no control over it. My mind just went there. That night, it was this time with Eve when it was snowing outside and we spent the entire day in her bed watching a Star Wars marathon, not because either one of us particularly liked Star Wars but because it was on TV. We were so snug in her bedroom that day, as the snow piled up on the frame of the window. We literally could not get out of bed. The outside world held no interest. The sun came and went and we were still in the same position. I fell asleep smiling, thinking about how much Eve hated the action scenes and her absolute favorite moment was when R2-D2 swiped a muffin from a table. That, for whatever odd reason, thrilled the hell out of her. Leave it to Eve to watch Star Wars and focus all her attention on that little robot and the one random scene with a breakfast buffet.
Before I knew it, I was out cold.
I woke up to the sunlight heating up one side of my face and Natalie standing above me.
“Ben,” she said, patting my leg. I took a few seconds to orient myself. I saw Eve. I am in Natalie’s apartment. I came here last night after seeing Eve. Natalie is okay with it. Natalie doesn’t know about it.
“What?” I croaked. Then, realizing that I’d drunkenly showed up at her place without much warning, I tried to be nicer. “Hey, good morning,” I said, feeling for her arm.
“I’m going for a run. Do you want to come?”
I still wasn’t out of my dreamlike state. “A what?” I opened my eyes wide, not entirely sure whether I was imagining this, but there she was above me, all dressed in her stretchy workout gear, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, her skin pale and just washed.
“I’m going for a run,” she said. A smile appeared on her face. “Would you like to come with me?”
Natalie went running in the park every morning. She did not miss a single day. She kept a calendar and marked her times and checked off tiny boxes. She had a great deal of discipline when it came to keeping herself active. On weekends, she dragged me with her, but I craved an exception on this particular Saturday morning. It may have been too late to apply for one.
“Okay . . .” I said, wanting to be hospitable. “You sure you want company?”
“Yes, because I know that if I leave here without you, I’ll come home and you’ll still be sleeping.” Her face was passive, not angry, just matter-of-fact.
“That’s not true.”
“You’re right. Maybe you’ll have woken up and then migrated to the couch, where you’ll be about five minutes away from taking a nap.”
I closed my eyes and then opened them again. “You always think I’m taking a nap.”
“You almost always are,” she countered.
“That’s an unfair characterization,” I replied, smiling with my eyes closed.
I tried to drag her back into bed with me but she got away too quickly, and out of my reach. I grasped at the air, and then got up, mostly because I was afraid of pissing off two women in a twelve-hour time period. Maybe running would be good for me. Sure, it felt like the last thing on earth I wanted to do now, but once I got out there? The wind in my hair, my feet pounding against the pavement? Instant clarity. Maybe.
While she waited for me near the door, I put on the shorts and T-shirt that she’d left on the bed for me, something old and too big for her. Maybe belonging to an ex-boyfriend. I didn’t have sneakers, so she said that I should just put on my dress shoes I’d been wearing the night before.
“Dress shoes?” I’d gone to the bar straight from work.
“Better than nothing. And it’s actually a little bit cold this morning,” she said. Natalie’s running outfits were always coordinated and changed depending on a five-degree difference in the weather.
I looked at her blankly. “I don’t have anything to put over this.”
“Don’t you have some jacket here?”
She opened her closet and took out a fleece that I must have left at her place one time. I put it on and looked down. She laughed at me.
“What? No good?”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. Not the ensemble of the century, but it’s okay.” She said it was fine. I thought I looked like I was missing a pair of pants.
It was a sunny, windy day. Red, green, and yellow leaves were spread across the road and blowing over the grass. Central Park was looking pretty magnificent. We ran along the mesh fence at the side of the road. We got to the Great Lawn and ran around it three times. There were children on the grass playing soccer. I watched as a little girl knocked down a boy and then spat in his face. Eve.
We ran until I could feel my breath burning in the bottom of my chest, until I could feel last night’s alcohol rising in my throat. I looked over at Natalie, who appeared to be moving at a steady pace, with no need to stop. When I couldn’t go any farther, I made her take a break with me. I sat on a bench, pretending not to be sucking air into my lungs, as she stretched her legs.
“Weren’t you some kind of college athlete?” she said, grinning.
“Yeah, ten years ago,” I said, coughing and then blaming it on my lack of proper footwear.
“You don’t need sneakers to run,” she said.
“Yeah, but it sure as fuck helps,” I replied.
She was marveling at me just as I was at her. Natalie was the most well-functioning person I’d ever met, maybe a little shrill when she was busy with work, but she was numb to the harm of everyday occurrences. She threw parties at her apartment. She had a ton of friends. She was always setting up dinners with people visiting from out of town. I’d never seen someone get so many visitors from out of town. How did she know all these people? I couldn’t figure it out. Her calendar was filled with social engagements and she never broke them. Once it was in the calendar, it was set in stone. It didn’t matter how tired she was on any given Friday night, if Natalie Williams made plans, she stuck to them.
She wanted to run the reservoir, so I told her to do the loop without me and then come back. I’d still be there. Recovering.
She seemed more than fine with it. “Okay . . . but we’re not finished!”
“I know. I know.”
Once she was gone, I sat there on the bench and reached into the pockets of the jacket, protecting my hands from the cold. I could see the tops of the buildings on Central Park West, each with its own unique outline, set against a clear blue sky. Central Park was remarkable in that it couldn’t be defined by just one part of it. It was meant to be a moving experience, a passage of scenery, not repeated or uniform but unpredictable, like nature itself. It was the designers’ intention to make it seem limitless, a great expanse of green. The Great Lawn was a green oval in the center of it all. Back in the day, it was a precious work of art, and people fought against the placement of baseball fields on the grounds. The diamonds were introduced in the fifties, and they confined recreational activities to this area, meant to be “a place for play.”
The wind blew against my legs. My fingers felt a square folded-up piece of paper in one of the pockets. I took it out and examined it. Ben.
It was her handwriting, and I remembered right away.
Eve had left it at my door about a month after we’d broken up. When I saw it on my doorstep, a sad little folded square of paper, I knew what it was. I assumed that it was yet another apology or explanation. She hadn’t been thinking clearly, et cetera, et cetera. Back then, I was on my way out for the night, and put it in my jacket pocket without reading it. I went to meet my friends at a bar, all pissed, not throwing the thing away, but definitely not reading it. That was the night I met Natalie, and then deliberately forgot that the note existed. It got warm outside. I left the jacket at Natalie’s place. I didn’t look for it again all summer.
Sitting on that bench, I watched people pass by and played with the folds of the paper, unfolding and then refolding, still with no intention of reading it. I kept looking over my shoulder, for any trace of Natalie. Eventually, I unfolded it enough times to see the words potato chip incident, then refolded it, then put it back inside my pocket, then took it out again and thought, Potato chip incident? I opened it. It was two pages of writing, in Eve’s customary lettering, part script, part print, less neat as she went along, i’s never dotted, halfhearted e’s that never quite seemed to close their loops. I checked over my shoulder one last time.
I started reading.
The Potato Chip Incident
You know how you hate it when I eat chips in bed? It makes sense that you hate it. It’s a terrible idea. But I was doing it anyway. Because you were gone and I was nervous and I heard something somewhere about carbohydrates being relaxing and I could pretty much confirm that as a medical fact since I’ve had more than my share of soothing moments with a french fry. Anyway, I wasn’t paying attention while eating them because, as usual, I was writing at the same time, and half a chip got caught in my throat. I couldn’t breathe and I got really scared for a second or two. I ran over to the sink and cupped water in my hands. As soon as I started coughing and breathing again, I realized something. This near-death (I can actually hear you thinking NEAR DEATH? But yes) experience taught me that anything can happen in life. You can live to be a hundred or you can die of a freak potato chip mishap. So there is no point in hanging on to something, there is no way to really hang on to anything, at least not in the way that I was.
I used to have this fear of people leaving. I feared the discomfort, the sheer hurt of it, and none of that happens without the beginning part. None of that happens if you don’t have that crucial beginning, where you trust, you love, you hope, you rely. I have spent my whole life thinking that I have this limitation: my father left when I was young, my mother died, my sister and I were left all alone, so I have a fear of people leaving. But I always wondered whether it would be true forever. I wondered, once you and I got together, whether I would get over it, simply because I felt that there was nothing I could do that would make you leave. That was how I felt, finally, amazingly, like you were really there and would always be. Well, it turns out that wasn’t true. I tested it, and you left, and it hurt every bit as much as I had anticipated, maybe more.
But, I’m still here. As it turns out, I’m stronger than I thought I was. I now realize that there is no such thing as an unblemished childhood or a perfect family. There’s always some form of pain or loss. And I feel like this impulse to avoid discomfort is not compelling to me anymore. I stopped believing in it. It’s illusory. It is like walking past an apartment that you have moved out of. The apartment still exists, but what’s the difference what has happened there, since you left? Basically, my fear no longer has structure. It no longer has substance. When I was on the Lower East Side and saw Jesse again, I didn’t just go back to that place, I really . . . really . . . went back to that place. I went back to being twenty-two. Back then, I had this feeling like I was protecting myself, like I might be able to prevent all the bad things in life that I couldn’t control, because I wouldn’t be able to handle them. I went back to feeling like I was a certain type of girl, who was very fragile and needed a certain type of boy. But I went back to a place that no longer existed. I went back to something that I could only see from a distance. I got so wrapped up in my pseudo-traumatic past and my most definitely present stupidity that I forgot to factor in something important: other people. Our relationship changed me. And not just because I felt that you wouldn’t leave, but also because when you did leave, I got through it. It was painful, of course, but it was something that I could withstand. It was something that, of course, I could withstand.
I can’t predict the future, but I can tell you that based on the evidence at my disposal, I feel fairly certain that it can still work between us. And, Ben, that’s all anyone can give you. That’s all you’ll ever get. It’s the best that you can ask for. I hope that you know how sorry I am. I hope that you can forgive me. Not because you’re perfect or I’m perfect or because of any promises made for the future but because we are in the unfortunate position of being in love. And I hope that we can eat chips together again sometime, because for certain people (who shall remain nameless), eating them alone is a dangerous, dangerous proposition.
GODDAMNIT, Eve. I read the letter again. It wasn’t like I was missing something with Natalie. You know what it was like? It was like I was sitting down to a full dinner, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the fucking ice-cream truck parked outside. I couldn’t stop thinking about shoving my fucking face with shitty ice cream.
Why couldn’t I get her out of my head? I’d sulked for weeks over her betrayal. I hated her. I got drunk, played out various scenarios in my head, what I would say or do if I saw her. But the bottom line was I never really let go of how I felt about her in the first place. Always on the verge of sleep, in the darkness, and replaying happy memories with Eve in my head. In dreams, in walking down the street, she was there unless I told myself not to think about her, which I didn’t. That was my problem. I didn’t stop myself.
And the name mistake, well, that was poetic justice at its best. I guess I always felt like I would see Eve again, even as my memory of being with her began to fade, made the wound less fresh. I couldn’t stop feeling like everyone else who I encountered was a substitute. Eventually, I wouldn’t see or hear from her. She’d give up trying. I would unwind myself, and then I would be free. Except, I didn’t want to be free. If I wanted to be free, it would be easy. I was never one of those people, never the person who thought I was supposed to be with someone who gave me vertigo. But this was what she wanted, right? To be the most frustrating and exasperating person I couldn’t live without?
GODDAMMIT. I was starting to yearn.
Natalie found me after her run and we walked together for a few more minutes. Thankfully, eventually, she started to get tired, and so we went back to her place. I sat on the couch in a daze as she handed me a plate of carrots with a lump of hummus on the side and a glass of orange juice. She turned on the football game. She left me there, went into the other room, to do her Natalie things—refold her clothes, keep up with her acquaintances. Everything in her apartment was so neat that I was almost tempted to knock over the glass of juice, just to see what would happen, just to see what kind of lawlessness might unfold.
I hadn’t said anything about wanting to watch the game. But it didn’t matter. It was fall. It was Saturday. Natalie liked to hear the sound of football on television. She said she’d grown up with it. Her father was always watching sports. She found the sound of the games comforting. And come to think of it—wasn’t that what she liked most about me? That I used to play hockey? That I was some semblance of a guy who was into sports. That I was some semblance of a guy who Natalie imagined herself with. But was I? Well. I don’t know. Not fully. Yeah, I liked sports, but so did a lot of people. It felt like she’d made an error in casting.
So I just stared at the TV screen for a while, with my glass of juice, holding up a plate of carrots, wanting to leave, and feeling like an asshole.
Something was wrong here. That was all I knew. I put down the carrots. I walked into her bedroom, where she was organizing her sock drawer.
“Ah. So what’s your sock strategy over there? Standard matching or free-for-all?”
“Huh?”
“I assume you’re going to keep each sock matched up with their standard partners?”
“How else would you do it?”
“Well, there are multiple ways. . . . So what do you do with your leftover singles? Is there a singles’ mixer?”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded.
“What do you do with your leftover socks? You know, when one is worn out and you have to throw it out, what do you do with the second sock?”
“I throw them both out. Once one is worn out, they both go in the garbage.”
“Really?”
I stopped myself right there and thought, Wait, why do I care about this so much? What am I even saying? Socks? A singles’ mixer? Leftovers? What have I become?
“I have to go,” I said to her finally, knowing what I had to do.
“Why?” She looked genuinely surprised. She was quite capable of ignoring this random non sequitur. She was a better actor than I was, or would ever be.
“I have to disprove a theory,” I said.
“Work?”
Yes, she certainly was.
I looked Natalie in the eye and she looked away because she knew but didn’t want to face it, not with me around anyway. She’d sort it out after I left, on the phone with her friends or her mother. I’d receive a very well-crafted e-mail in two to five business days.
I waited for the elevator to come with such impatience that I almost started banging on the doors. I felt like everything around me was moving in slow motion. Once I was outside, I got on my phone.
“Where does she live?” I said to Glick.
“Who?”
“You know who. Where does she live now?”
“Are you about to make some magic happen?”
“Fuck off.”
He told me the address. Park Avenue. Not exactly where I expected to find her, but it was convenient. I crossed Amsterdam Avenue and headed back to Central Park West. I went into the park, taking long strides. Surrounding me was the pond, lying still in the sun. I went over a small bridge built of cedar timber. On the right, I could see the skyscrapers of Fifty-Seventh Street in the distance, the sun low in the sky and falling lower. On my left were small rocks and larger stones, the water splashing faintly in the breeze. During the warmer months, there were often ducks, people rowing boats, their figures leaning toward each other. But today, the only people out there were crossing their arms and standing on the embankments surrounding the pond.
I started to feel a tiny vibration near my heart, like it was about to spring out. I walked faster, straight through the Ramble, making sure to avoid all the meandering trails that would have taken me out of my way. I stayed straight on my course, through a maze of dense woodlands, a web of jagged paths and planted woods. There was a sense of mystery to the Ramble. It was tall trees everywhere and wild shrubs along the ground. The terrain wasn’t smooth, and the crops crowded one another in disorder, vines and ferns and then, suddenly, I was out, and passing by a lawn with a single magnificent tree, its autumn leaves scattered across the grass beneath it. Once I hit this point, I actually started to run, just like they do in the movies, dress shoes and all. It was a good thing that girls made you watch all those romantic comedies, otherwise I would have no idea that this was normal, that this was what I was supposed to be doing.
Throngs of people on Fifth Avenue overwhelmed the sidewalk. There were artists displaying canvases and paintings and vendors peeking out of their carts, an ice-cream cone attached to an outstretched hand. I crossed the street to the less-crowded side. Traffic wasn’t moving. I weaved through cars to cross, past a policeman blowing a whistle. An army of children crossed next to me, a few adults, exhausted and shuffling them along. I pushed past them, was almost to Park Avenue. The feeling that I would see her again was suddenly palpable. I could hear my pulse.
In front of the building, there was a man in uniform with red cheeks standing by the door. His eyes fell on me. What the hell was her stepfather’s name? It wasn’t coming to me. Arnold? Maybe?
“Hello, I’m here to visit my friend Arnold.” It sounded wrong the second I said it out loud.
“Excuse me? Arnold who?”
“You don’t know Arnold? Yeah, gosh, Arnold, can’t believe he’s been living here for fifty years! You must know him! I’m here to meet him for our annual . . . golf outing.”
His face was empty of any recognition. He looked at his watch, signaling his impatience. I was tracking her down. Out of the blue? Hello? This was romance! He took a long pause. He didn’t look like the type of guy who would let me into the building based on romance.
“Arnold!” I said. I was desperate and on the verge of shouting rich-person things. Cigars! Cuff links! Monocles! Whiskey! Boats!
“You know what, I’ll just call him,” I said, making a big show of digging my phone out of my pocket. They let me into the lobby and I sat in one of the two chairs facing a mirror. I considered it a small victory. If I waited there, maybe she’d come down. I pretended to be on my phone as I listened to the doormen talk to each other. Nobody seemed to find it strange, or suspected any bad intentions about the fact that I was sitting around for so long. Eventually, they seemed to forget that I was there. I interrupted their conversation to say that I’d spoken to Arnold and that he was delayed upstairs due to some fluctuations in the stock market but that he’d be down momentarily.
And then, like a miracle, when I was out of ideas and my wait had lasted an hour and was verging on dubious, Eve walked into the lobby. I stood up, walked toward her in such a dreamy condition, reeling inside. She didn’t look surprised to see me. She wasn’t blinking. It was like there was something alive in her eyes, something very alive. She seemed to be seeing through me. And then she stopped looking at my eyes and looked down at my shoes.
“Why aren’t you wearing pants?”
I felt like reaching for her face. This happened once in a lifetime, I was sure of it, if you were lucky. It wasn’t like another one just came along. I held up the letter for her and then put it back into my pocket.
“I’m just here to tell you that there’s no way you could have choked on that potato chip,” I said. “It would have disintegrated long before killing you. Your esophagus would break the chip in half. It might hurt, but you’d still be able to breathe.”
It seemed to register with her that I had only just read it. She had a slightly hurt look on her face, involuntarily, but she pushed past it. “Maybe so,” she said, looking down solemnly.
“And you are the only one in the world who would refer to that as a potato chip incident.”
“It was scary!”
“For you? I bet.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Am I okay now? Well, it’s been a few months . . . but the recovery time is always longer than people tell you it’s going to be. Plus, let’s not forget to factor in post-traumatic stress. . . .”
“Oh yeah. Let’s not. We’d be remiss.”
Her face fell into a smile and my mind raced as I tried to settle on what to say next. Our conversation felt delicate, like we were both maneuvering on glass that might crack. She asked if I wanted to take a walk, so we went outside and walked a few blocks. Eventually, we settled on a bench on the park side of Fifth Avenue, next to a car with its windows open and seats reclined, a man in the front seat playing salsa music. As we sat there, a group of children in brightly colored running clothes passed us by. A small crowd began to accumulate near the bus stop. An ambulance wailed. A woman smoking a cigarette stopped to fix her shoe in front of us, her hand leaning against a big tree. We watched the activity on the street for a while, the people walking by in twos and threes, with backpacks and with red shopping bags from the gift shop at the Met. Everyone was returning home from Saturday activities, hands in their pockets and faces directed toward the pavement ahead. Most people were headed downtown. An ice-cream truck started playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Eve’s head remained bowed, with a dangerous smile that I could see, even though she was trying to stifle it. She appeared to be holding her breath. I knew that there were things I should have done differently too, that I wouldn’t mind a fresh start. I wanted to see her again, and again and again, and that was that.
My mind was chaos. It was breaking over me, this feeling that my heart was bursting and beating fast. This girl broke down some wall inside of me—she must have broken it down a long time ago—and being without her now was unthinkable. A thrill ran through me as I reached out and touched her arm, like I was smashed into fragments. I wanted her face next to my face, to clasp her hand in mine. I touched a few of her fingers just then and it was pure bliss. But also torture. Incomplete. Nothing else mattered now besides the fulfillment of this sensation.
“I don’t know what happened to me,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”
“You became a big sucker,” she said, closing her hand around mine, more firmly now. Those eyes, staring right into mine. She leaned forward. “Just like the rest of us.”