- epilogue -
EVE
112 MACDOUGAL STREET, APARTMENT 5C, WEST VILLAGE
“I can’t do this anymore!” I yelled, and threw the shriveled tube of toothpaste down onto the floor.
Ben looked at me, as usual, a little mystified.
“Can’t do what anymore?”
“This.” I pointed at the ground.
“Just squeeze from the bottom.”
“I’ve been squeezing from the bottom! I’ve been squeezing from the bottom for weeks! There’s nothing left. Can I please have one of the new toothpastes that we bought?”
“Not until the old one is finished. There’s plenty left in there.”
“Plenty?” I stomped past him. “Clearly, you’ve gone insane.” I tore open a box on the floor in the kitchen and started rifling through, putting aside rolls of paper towels and toilet paper.
“What are you doing? That box is organized and ready to go!”
“I need new toothpaste and I’m not going to live under this puritanical regime any longer!”
Bottles of hand soap dropped onto the floor, one after another, thud, thud, thud.
“Get out of there!” He grabbed hold of my waist, attempted to lift me out, but I held on to the box so that he couldn’t pull me away. “You are . . . nothing . . . but . . . trouble,” he said. As I rifled through, Ben held me by my feet, but my hands were still inside, so the box went sliding along with me, around the floor of the apartment.
“Get . . . OUT!” he said, part struggling, part laughing.
“Where is it?” I shouted. “Where is the new toothpaste?”
“I will give it to you. . . .” He grunted. “Jesus, Eve. Once we get to our new place. New apartment, new toothpaste.”
He wrestled me away from the box and to the floor. I squirmed out from under him, stood up. I walked back to the bathroom and pointed to the toothpaste that had been banished to the floor. “That one is done.” I started to laugh. “You can have that toothpaste or you can have me but you can’t have both.” I put my hands on my hips. “MAKE A DECISION.”
“Then I choose the toothpaste,” he said, going to pick it up. He pinched the flat tube, from the bottom to the top, rolling up the tube as he went. Blue liquid appeared at the opening.
“See,” he said, and then handed it to me. “Plenty.”
I took it into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, but with added gusto, a slight resentment. I almost didn’t brush them at all, out of spite. But then I got over myself. I wanted to brush, after all. Regardless of who won the argument, true victory was about choice. Or something like that.
I went into the bedroom to ready myself for the monumental dinner ahead, our last dinner in our neighborhood, as residents of Macdougal Street.
“You know, I’m going to miss this place.” I came back out and looked around the apartment we had rented for the past year. All our possessions were now in thirteen boxes, labeled one through thirteen in thick black marker, because Ben insisted that numbering the boxes would make it easier to keep track of them. I wanted to label the boxes based on room in which they were most frequently used. That’s when the marker got taken away from me.
“I’ll miss it too,” he said.
“You’re taking that?” I asked. Ben was holding up a ten-year-old can of Campbell’s clam chowder. He’d kept it over the years, because of some sentimental attachment that I didn’t understand involving his friends from the hockey team. “Are you sure?” I said. “What if it leaks? I think it’s too difficult to transport.”
“We’re taking you,” he said, shoving the can into the corner of a filled box. “And you’re difficult to transport.”
The apartment didn’t look the same anymore. We’d covered every bit of wall space, and now the walls were bare. We didn’t have much furniture, just an old armchair and an Indian-print carpet and a bookshelf that Ben built himself on one of those days when he took out his toolbox and listened to songs like “Takin’ Care of Business” and “Working for the Weekend” and felt the need to fix things around the apartment. All our books were in boxes now, haphazardly, as if they’d never been given a careful order. The apartment was small but compensated for any deficiencies by being on a quiet, tree-lined street. It was a couple of blocks from Washington Square Park.
We’d discussed the move at length. It was the best possible decision for the future. We needed more space. We were never meant to live in this apartment forever. We had taken it as a short-term solution. Once Ben and I decided to live together, it seemed that we needed to live together right away. Logistics like where to put our possessions once our one closet was overflowing and the oven was full of plates and lesser-used pans . . . well, that could be worked out later. And later had come, though it was impressive watching Ben put his engineering skills to use, to see him staring into the closet with extreme focus and rearranging it until we had a legitimate spot for that bottle of Advil that used to fall to the floor whenever we opened the door.
We hadn’t lived there for very long, and yet there was something about it. We were very much there. It was the happiest time of my life so far. It was where we’d gotten back together, and where we knew we’d never be apart. It was where we took a break from the world, which was, in the city, never very far away. We only had to peek out our window to see into other peoples’ apartments, each square with its own points of interest. Through one window, there was an old lady who lived alone, who liked to come outside to her patio on Saturday mornings and sweep the leaves into a dustpan. In another, there was a young guy who was always sitting near the window behind his computer. He had a rotating cast of roommates. In the apartment above us, old music and movies were always playing. The couple who lived below us liked to watch sports together and then get into screaming fights about whether they should have children.
The next day, the movers would come. I got to work on my last task, which was folding and packing up our bed linens. They were all white and immeasurably soft, purchased for us by Arthur at a store on Madison Avenue. I nearly fell over when I saw the price tag, but Arthur insisted. “Your mother would have wanted you to have them. She loved this store. You know she believed that the key to happiness was soft sheets.” I nodded and accepted the gift. As I folded them carefully, corner to corner, end to end, I thought, She would have loved these sheets, but mostly, to see me so comfortable beneath them.
Ben was working up until the point when we left for dinner. He promised that he would start getting nostalgic with me then, at dinner, but not a moment before.
“Hey,” I said, looking around for my phone. “Do you remember when I said I was going to make a video about our time in this apartment and you said, ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning, go back to sleep’?”
He continued staring at his computer screen. “Like it was fifteen hours ago.”
I removed my phone from the windowsill. “Okay, well! Now is the time!”
Ben was sitting on the floor with his computer on his lap and paid no attention to me as I started the video, walking throughout the apartment, talking to my phone about all the different parts of it. I wanted to give it one last good lookover before we left. Its appearance was much worse without all our stuff in place, but I didn’t care. I still loved it, every corner of it. I explained our brief history there to the phone, holding it in front of my mouth and basically walking around in circles (there really wasn’t very far to go).
For dinner, Ben requested that we go to Pluck U, a “restaurant” that specialized, unsurprisingly, in chicken.
“Really? We can go?” he said, energized and a little alarmed, when I agreed. “I always want to go there, but you never do.”
“That’s because the online reviews are terrible. More than one post mentioning food poisoning is the rule,” I explained. “One is an outlier. Two is a pattern. But I’ll do it this time, because relationships are all about compromise. And I want it to be noted on the record that I am a great compromiser.”
“You’re a great compromiser. I asked to go to Pluck U twenty thousand times, and we went once.”
“Exactly.”
“Whatever,” he said, yanking long strips of brown tape from its dispenser and wrapping it around a box. “If I left you to your own devices, you’d eat potato chips and Junior Mints for dinner.”
Outside, it was clear that winter had come to New York. The snow had buried everything. We walked on West Third Street, past Sullivan, until we hit Thompson, our boots clomping along the sidewalk. We walked past all the bars, packed with a mix of college students and older couples.
Pluck U was the brightest establishment on the block—a port in the storm, with its yellow awning, and painted yellow walls—it radiated its golden hue all the way down Thompson Street. Once inside, the smell of french fries hit me in the face. There were only two tables, and one was open. I hung my coat on the chair, to save it for us. I wasn’t going to eat our farewell chicken dinner standing up. Ben gave the menu above the cashier a serious look.
As we sat at the table a few minutes later with our respective chickens, I was expecting some kind of shift, for this dinner to be different from every dinner we’d ever had before, but it wasn’t.
“So does Pluck U stand for Pluck University?” I asked Ben. “Because the chickens are in college now or something like that?”
“Yeah, but it’s just a play on words. They’re not, like, making a statement about the education of their chicken.”
The song “Rockin’ Robin” came through a speaker in the corner of the ceiling.
He rocks in the treetops all day long . . .
Hoppin’ and a-boppin’ and singing his song . . .
I looked up. “Wouldn’t it be funny if every time they played this song, a guy in a chicken suit came out and ate everyone’s food?”
Ben dunked a fry into a pool of ketchup.
“Why would a chicken eat other chickens?” Ben was often in the position of questioning the logic of my jokes. Before I presented an idea at work, I usually ran it by him, just to make sure I hadn’t gone too far off the deep end.
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s one of those self-loathing chickens?” I thought about it for a few seconds. “Or maybe he comes out and knocks the food off everyone’s tables?”
He nodded. “See, now that makes sense.”
I got a secret thrill from his approval, from coming up with an idea that would satisfy even an engineer.
“I guess it’s appropriate that we came here on our last night in the apartment, since we had that ‘moment’ on Saint Marks, over chicken wings. Chicken seems to be a common theme in our relationship.”
Ben didn’t respond. He took a sip from his soda.
“What? You don’t think so?” I asked.
“Does our relationship need a theme?”
“It does if we don’t want to confuse our future wedding planner!”
The expression on his face was like he sensed a trick. He stopped eating. What I said was that important.
“Oh!” I added. “They can play the ‘Chicken Dance’ at our wedding! ‘The Way You Look Tonight.’ Give me a break. Actually, do you think they could do the ‘Chicken Dance’ but like a Sinatra-esque version? Arthur would love that. He loves Sinatra. He always says, ‘That Sinatra has got star power,’ as if he’s the one who discovered him and Sinatra were still alive. Oh God. Would Arthur be the one to walk me down the aisle? I think I’d be okay with that, actually. As long as he doesn’t wear that hideous pocket watch. Oh! Emma could be the maid of honor. Ugh, she’ll probably sleep with one of the groomsmen. What do you think? Have any friends whose lives you’d like to ruin?”
His eyes went wide. “Are you finally saying yes to marrying me . . . in Pluck U?”
“You know what,” I said, cheerfully. “I am.”
Ben seemed to give it a second thought, and then looked satisfied. He went back to his fries, grinning. “And by the way, the ‘Chicken Dance’ is played at baseball games, not at weddings.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am.”
As we walked back to our apartment on Macdougal Street for the last time, I asked Ben whether he thought that our next place would feel as much like our real home as this one did. The correct answer was, yes, of course, that our real home was us together, that was all. There was no need for the structure itself. It was about that feeling of safety in the world, that was what people wanted most of all. Everything else in life revolved around getting to that point. I told him if that were the case, we should have gotten together a long time ago, saved ourselves some trouble. But Ben said that he believed in the process.
“The city exists in contrasts,” he said. He explained that it was true here more so than anywhere—people were always throwing themselves into the feverish streets and then seeking shelter from the madness. He said that was what made New York so great, that you couldn’t fully appreciate a sunny day unless you’d come in from a storm. If that were true, then I could only be glad I didn’t yield to him earlier. I didn’t realize the visionary I was when I involved myself with the very wrong people who came before him. That was really my most brilliant move—to find every bright love interest who wasn’t quite as bright as I imagined. I wouldn’t even recognize them now, with how falsely and powerfully they existed in my memory. But, I was thankful for them. They were each a promise of something greater. And if things really do exist only in contrasts, then how wonderful to feel disappointment, to be not quite right, to feel confused and not always adored. How important it was to be able to say I was quite the heartsick girl, once upon a time.
In the morning, the movers arrived. I thought it would be a long process but the boxes disappeared quickly. I took one last glance around, looking for something to take with me, but I couldn’t find it. I knew I would never see the apartment again. If we were to come back, in the years to come, it would be a distorted space. I wanted to remember it the way it was at that moment. That was how it would always be, in my mind. I had the video from last night. And I took some photos, before we’d torn it all apart. I tried to remember a few moments, because I just needed a few moments to come back to me.
The side of Macdougal Street that Ben refused to walk on with me because he walked on it alone during the week and it reminded him of going to work.
Sneaking over to our neighbor’s doorstep when we knew he was away so that I could look through his mail while Ben kept a lookout.
Walks through Washington Square Park when it snowed and watching kids go sledding down a hill that was only three feet high.
The Italian restaurant on Ninth Street where we went once but everyone was over seventy years old so we felt kind of uncool and decided we couldn’t go there again (because of our self-esteem), but we could definitely have it delivered (because it was pretty tasty).
The hallway outside our apartment where we practiced doing the lift from the last scene of Dirty Dancing because I’d just made Ben watch it and said it didn’t seem that difficult to me until we tried it and I kept laughing so hard and running toward him and then chickening out before he could lift me.
The NYU kids moving into their dorms in August and their parents unloading the cars with worried expressions on their faces and eyeing the older NYU kids with piercings and tattoos like What is to become of my child?
My hair clips and earrings on the night table.
His socks under the bed, hidden like snakes so that I couldn’t see them and nag him to put them away.
The kitchen where Ben made hash browns on Saturday mornings and reheated pizza on Sunday nights and invented “spice-cabinet chicken” a.k.a. chicken that he seasoned with every single spice we owned.
The hallway outside the kitchen where I said things like “Stop micromanaging my ice-cream situation!” And Ben said things like “Did you know that the Italians have only been cooking with tomatoes for the last one hundred years? Christopher Columbus brought them from the Americas.”
The couch where I sat while he cooked because I’d been banished from the kitchen for giving too many unnecessary directions.
The Korean restaurant on Carmine Street we went to so often that I said that when we have a child his or her first words will probably be not dada or mama but bulgogi taco.
The TV that stopped working one day and we didn’t do anything to repair it and then a week later it started working again and we looked at it, astonished, and Ben declared, “Fixed itself!”
The closet where Ben’s shirts hung and he wore them in a rotation and he was a slave to this rotation, so I changed the ordering of the shirts once, which caused him to have a short but acute psychological breakdown.
The living room where Ben came home with the final sketch of the Freedom Tower and I told him that it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and he was all excited and proud and said, “OF COURSE IT IS. BECAUSE YOU CANNOT FUCK WITH THIS CITY, EVE. YOU CANNOT!”
The Laundromat on Thompson Street where we took our clothes and I made fun of Ben for never emptying his pockets before washing his pants and the machine would start to clank because Ben was accidentally washing pennies and his credit cards.
Suddenly I had a genius idea. I went looking in the bedroom closet. Something was written there. I’d seen it months ago. I opened the closet door and looked down. It said 112 Macdougal Street, 5C in black, thick marker on one of the pieces of wood near the floor. I bent down, ran my finger along the words. There had been places I’d lived, but this one was different. We’d built something there that would last. It would last forever and nothing would destroy it. Underneath 112 Macdougal Street, I thought about writing Ben & Eve, but something stopped me. The reality of our names on the wall seemed trivial, and the result was nothing, without context. I thought about the strangers, the future residents, who would see it. I wanted the apartment to pass into its next episode unscathed, the way it was when we found it, like a continuous, vacant sphere, filled and then emptied, filled and then emptied. It wasn’t about that anyway—our names. It was about what had transpired there, and all over the Village. But I couldn’t recall so much of what had taken place. I hadn’t written anything down. I’d made a huge mistake.
“We’re not dying! We’ll go out and make new memories,” Ben said later, when I told him, to make me feel better. “We will always be here, in a sense,” he added reassuringly, as he closed the door. He knew that I needed a lie, a fairy tale, a happy ending.
But I believed him, and so it was.