BEN
49 ESSEX STREET, BETWEEN HESTER AND GRAND, LOWER EAST SIDE
That one night wasn’t a big deal, or anything like that. There was a girl, Eve, who was familiar because we showed up at the same places, over the years, but it wasn’t that I really knew her. I wasn’t thinking about her at all. But this particular night ended in me feeling sorry for her. And that ended up being important for what happened later. So that’s why I’m starting here.
The night began, as so many others did, with my friends at a bar. None of us had an apartment where it was convenient to drink, so this was a fairly regular occurrence. I lived in Hoboken, but didn’t invite people over because I had this thing about not pissing off my roommate, even though he wasn’t winning any prizes. He was a Korean kid studying to get a PhD in chemical engineering, and he did nothing but study and play video games and cook soup in the middle of the night that smelled like it could stop a clock. But most of the time, he stayed in his room with the door closed and kept to himself, and if I got bored, I would knock and talk to him about biocatalytic fuel cells.
Danza still lived at home with his parents in Connecticut. Glick was paying two hundred dollars a month to sleep on a couch in the basement of an apartment in Crown Heights. And Julian lived with his girlfriend, but she didn’t like us. At all. She didn’t take to us from the beginning. But then there was one time when she came home to find Glick taking a shower in her bathroom and that was the final nail in the coffin. Julian was still paying for that one.
So we went to this bar on Thirty-Fourth Street, which was centrally located and had cheap pitchers. As usual, I was late and coming straight from my office in the financial district. By the time I got there, they’d all been drinking for hours.
“This night is going to be huge,” Glick declared, as I took my seat at the table, took off my coat, loosened my tie. “HUGE.”
If there was one thing I appreciated about Glick, it was his deluded optimism. Call it delusion, naivety, or just a bloated sense of self-importance in the world. It was his way, before any night out, to set the stakes, and make them sky-high, didn’t matter the details. And it was a good way to be, to have some enthusiasm. Why not?
“What’s the plan, anyway?” I said, pouring myself a beer. “Are we actually doing Lower East Side?”
“Absolutely, we are,” replied Glick.
“I’m down,” Julian said. “Do we have an exact location?”
We were two years out of college, and now that we had jobs and a little bit of money to spend, the city felt brand-new. Every weekend, we found new places to go, discovered new neighborhoods. We wanted to make the most of it and do every fun thing we could. Yeah, we wanted to meet girls and get laid, but that wasn’t our primary objective. Our number-one priority was to have a good time, to get drunk and do stupid shit.
“Let’s go to Hair of the Dog,” said Glick. “I hear it’s good.”
“Can we get in?” I asked.
“Benjamin, have faith,” Glick answered.
“I don’t want to go if we can’t get in,” I said. “We spent all last Saturday night waiting on line.”
“We can get in,” he said, with confidence.
“Then sold.”
We wanted to take it to the city, but really, we were lucky if we got into a cool spot. We didn’t have much money. We were always waiting on line. The problem was that we weren’t going to anonymous, half-empty places, but we also weren’t buying bottles or tables. We were always going to that elusive cool bar that was overflowing with people, but not too expensive or exclusive to let us in. To get into a “cool bar” was a special achievement.
“Kate texted me that she’s going to some tiki bar on Essex. PKNY,” Julian said. Danza started to laugh, making a clicking sound with his cheek. Julian ignored him.
“Kate, huh?” Glick said. “What else did she say?”
Julian replied, “She’s a friend.”
“I need to find myself a friend,” said Danza, getting up to go to the bathroom. He was wearing a buttoned-down shirt that was too small. From the back, you could see his spine through the fabric. You could see his arm muscles too, but that was probably the point. “I’m down. Let’s go.”
“Whatever you say,” Glick agreed, and then added, “boss,” which made him smile. Every time. He’d given Josh his “Danza” nickname because he was the team captain, so he was the boss, which led to Tony Danza from Who’s the Boss? When Glick came up with it, he was thrilled. You’d think he’d discovered plutonium. Every time he met someone new, he threw out the reference, hoping they’d bite and ask what it was about. And oh boy, when they did, that made Glick’s night. His eyes would widen, so excited to tell them the essence of the nickname. In his mind, the entire party was gathered around him, like he was some old storyteller getting ready to spin a tale for the ages. That was Glick’s way, and we loved him for it.
“Are you crashing at my place tonight?” I said to Danza.
“No. I’m taking the five a.m. train back to Connecticut,” he replied.
I laughed. “That must be quite a sight.”
“Yup. Only winners on that train.”
“All right, guys. Get your game faces on,” Glick said, and then made a hand signal toward the waitress, indicating the check.
The four of us were on the hockey team together at Columbia, which wasn’t what it sounded like. It wasn’t playing against Yale or Brown on Saturdays with a filled stadium, with parents drinking hot chocolate and girls in knit hats pulled down over their ears cheering us on, making us feel better after, if we lost. Columbia didn’t have an actual hockey team, so this was more like a club team where we played against SUNY New Paltz with nobody in the stands and spent hours in the damn van driving in the middle of the night because somebody left the equipment behind and we had to go back for it. I’d never admit it to the guys, but I think it meant more to me than it did to all of them combined—I’d played all through high school, and I was grateful to play in college, even if it was for a shitty pseudo team whose season got suspended junior year because we got caught drinking in the locker room and for recruiting new members with T-shirts that read DON’T BE A PUSSY. JOIN COLUMBIA HOCKEY. Like most bad ideas, it started with Glick.
“Let’s get out of here,” Danza said a few minutes later, downing the last of his beer. Julian started nodding. I poured a second glass for myself and then chugged it.
On the train down to Grand Street, Glick started badgering me about my job. He did this all the time, wherever we were. He could be pretty annoying about it.
“How was work today? Did they give you the full hour for lunch?” he asked.
“Yup,” I said. “Got the full hour. Standard union rules.”
“What kind of hard hats do they give you guys? Can you keep them at the end of the job? Or do they keep track of everything, and it all goes to the next job site? Swipe one for me next time. I’d love a hard hat.”
I was a glorified construction worker to him. He made jokes about the union, as if he knew anything about it. In reality, I worked in the structural and civil engineering department of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architectural firm that had won the bid to build the Freedom Tower. I was the lowest-level person there, but it was pretty exciting. To give you a clear picture of my place on the totem pole: I ran the numbers. I did the wind-speed calculations. I worked on the modeling, made sure the structure was capable of resisting things—the people in it, garage vehicles, snow, wind, and ice. These all stressed the materials of the building throughout its duration. It had to have the capacity to resist.
The fact that I was in the engineering school in college and my friends were studying liberal arts seemed to always be an issue. I didn’t get it, but it was a big deal to them. They treated me like I was a different sort of person, like because I hadn’t read Infinite Jest fourteen times, I wasn’t being properly socialized. They asked me once if I knew how to build a boat out of firewood, as if being an engineer meant learning archaic survival skills and when you were done, you got shipped off to a Survivor-type island to see how you’d do. Once, I asked them if they’d ever thought about something for class that wasn’t purely theoretical. I got a look of abject confusion, and I never asked anything like that again. That was not the way to make friends at Columbia. You had to be pro Infinite Jest at all times.
Everyone asked why I didn’t become an architect. After all, I worked at a well-known architecture firm. I explained that architecture was the visual aspect of the building. Architects provided a new design, but they worked with civil engineers like me (read: my bosses), because we were the ones who knew the materials, the high beams, the glass, the walls, where everything went or didn’t go. The architects came up with a general idea of what they wanted the building to look like. Let’s have it resemble a bird that’s flapping its wings! A serpent rising up from the sand! In this case, they wanted the Freedom Tower to combine the sense of a memorial with the city rebuilding itself and pushing toward the future. So we were always dealing with a lot of artistic mumbo jumbo and people having grand ideas and then we as engineers were tasked with making it all work. It had to be structurally stable without taking away from artistic purposes, and it had to be buildable. We designed the structure of the building to make sure that it didn’t, you know, fall down. And while everyone agreed that our job was important, it was significantly less cool.
I always got the same puzzled response from people, something like, “Hmmm, that’s interesting. I don’t think I know any civil engineers.” Conversation over. But Glick was more aggressive about it. He was probably just pissed that he didn’t have his own thing. After getting rejected by every consulting firm in the metropolitan area, he ended up with a job doing marketing for his father’s swimming-pool company. He said it was only temporary, but it’s hard to get a better job when you don’t apply for one. I watched him now, on the subway, cleaning his fingernails. He had a small piece of turkey on his cheek, from a sandwich, hours earlier. I was waiting for the right moment to tell him about it.
When we got out of the subway, we walked a few blocks. We passed stores selling restaurant supplies and food wholesale, awnings displaying vague names like INTERNATIONAL MEN’S CLOTHIERS and NEW ERA FACTORY OUTLET. Some had clothes hanging in the window, others looked to be filled with cardboard boxes and dry cleaning. We passed a T-shirt shop and Glick pointed to a yellow T-shirt in the window that read TALKING IS HARD, and said, “Hey, Ben, we should get that one for you.” Julian and Danza laughed. Glick liked to call me boring. That was his big joke with me. I ignored him. Always. Maybe I didn’t express myself well. But Glick had a ton of personality, and nobody was particularly impressed. I’d rather be quiet than full of shit.
It was grittier in this neighborhood. There was a sense of history. It was old New York, except that there were also a few pizza places, upscale cocktail lounges, and packs of young people standing outside bars. There was a disconnect between people and backdrop, as if we were all presupposed into this universe. It was modern-day life in an old setting, a taste of how New York used to be at the turn of the century. It gave us a chance to see what it was like, to feel like the city might actually be dangerous, even though, in reality, it wasn’t. It was just enough danger to be fun.
We passed a bar called Stanton Social, a more upscale establishment. We tried to get in. But they turned us down, and I can’t say I blamed them. We were a bunch of drunk dudes. “Oh, I’m sorry I forgot to wear my blazer tonight!” Glick yelled, as we were leaving. On the way out, he spotted a young couple eating with their teenaged children. “I’m sorry that I’m not here trying to have a nice family dinner!”
There was a coffee cup on the street. He kicked it, thinking it was empty, but it was full and splashed all over Julian. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Julian yelled, going after him. It was hilarious. As if everything had lined up perfectly for that one moment. Julian’s entire back and pants were covered in coffee. And the rest of us didn’t get a single drop. Danza bought a set of dice from some guy on the street.
Once we got to Essex, we spotted the tiki bar, wedged between 47 Essex Street, a sporting-goods store that sold team uniforms, and 51 Essex Street, a place called the Pickle Guys, which had two barrels in front of it and a banner that read, WE SHIP NATIONWIDE! There was no sign for PKNY, but we knew it from the sight of a palm tree painted onto a brick wall.
“X marks the spot,” Julian said.
“Nice!” Glick said, snapping his fingers and pointing. “Now you know we’re in paradise.”
Whenever Glick snapped and pointed, he was giving his approval. It was his way of showing that something scratched him right where he itched. We walked in and did our standard surveillance of the situation, each focused on our own set of priorities. Glick wanted to figure out the quickest and most efficient way to get a drink. Danza wanted to evaluate the male-to-female ratio and where to stand for maximum exposure. Julian was focused more on the music and tended to judge bars based purely on their selections. He claimed to have a sophisticated musical palate, but as far as I could tell, he just wanted to hear Billy Joel.
The four of us sprang at an empty table across from the bamboo bar. The table had just opened up when we walked in, and it felt like the greatest luck. Finding an empty table at a hopping bar was gold. We set about deciphering the menu, smug with our seats, like we could order anything now, like we owned the place.
“Are these all drinks?” Danza said, flipping through the six-page menu of frozen cocktails, mai tais, highballs, Scorpion Bowls, Sipping Spirits.
“I don’t even care,” Julian said. “I just want something with rum. Nothing frozen.”
“No, I’m not going frozen either,” I said. “I think I’m going to get the Lei Lani Volcano.”
“I’m getting the Kon-Tiki Tropical Itch . . . or the Sleeping Giant . . .” Danza squinted at the menu.
“Strong choices. I’m going to go with the Dying Bastard or the Dead Bastard. One of the Bastards,” Glick said, delighted. He always chose his drink based on the name, and this place really catered to his sensibilities. Every time he picked a drink, he enunciated every syllable and got all excited. He said, “It’s not just about the drink. It’s about what the drink represents!” Few people loved to drink as much as Glick.
As we waited, Kate came over to talk to us, or rather, to Julian.
“Hello, boys,” she said. “Michael.” She gave Glick a proper nod and stuck out her hand for him to shake. She was the only one who addressed him by his first name. She must have been tipsy. The three of us usually got the freeze from her. Kate was very beautiful. And I mean, she was universally considered a knockout. She was half Asian and had this exotic look about her. And confidence. She had a lot of confidence. She was one of those women who could easily put out that “It’s nice to meet you / hang out with you / talk to you, but I don’t need you” vibe.
“Where’s Ali tonight?” she said to Julian, with almost a smile. Julian used to hook up with Kate in college, despite the fact that she was way out of his league. They were never dating, but she used to keep him around so that she could call him at the end of the night. He’d literally go running to wherever she was. One time, we were sitting in the McDonald’s in Times Square and she told him that she was at a bar near Columbia. He said he was too, and then made a mad dash for the subway. She instructed him that they were “FWB,” or Friends with Benefits. And now that Julian was with somebody else, she seemed to be even more hell-bent on keeping him around.
“Ali’s not feeling well tonight,” he said to her, not looking at her directly, and Kate did a slow, satisfied nod and then twirled herself away, toward the bar. She’d gotten all the information she wanted. For now.
All of us watched Kate as she walked away. She found her friend, a girl named Eve Something-or-other, who we knew from college. Eve didn’t turn to see us. And frankly, if she didn’t come over, it was no big loss. I wasn’t interested in our usual round of chitchat. “Remember me? I’m Julian’s roommate.” We’d had the same conversation at least ten times. I felt like I knew her though, because we saw each other all the time—mutual friends, parties, the whole thing. There was one summer where I went with Julian to meet her and her friends in Central Park for some concert and I remember seeing her on the lawn with a blanket spread out underneath her and two bottles of wine, a small package of crackers. She’d come prepared, and there was something sort of cute about it, how she was all set up like that. She made a big stink when Glick took out a forty of Pabst and started passing it around.
That group of girls was always funny in general. We didn’t really know them too well, but we went to their parties. We were around them a lot. Everything they did was so incredibly girly. They threw Valentine’s Day parties, talked about their outfits, and went to the bathroom in groups. All their conversations were conducted in a secret tongue, and, although I understood each of the words individually, when strung together at that voracious speed, the whole thing passed me by like a speeding train. I saw it happen, but if you asked me to describe it a layer deeper than that, I’d be at a loss.
“That is one quality FWB,” Glick said, with a smirk.
“Not anymore,” Julian said. “That ship has sailed.”
The thing about Julian was this: he had the kavorka when it came to getting girls. Nobody knew exactly why. Whether he was extraordinarily good-looking, I couldn’t say. But basically, he knew how to talk to them, a skill that the rest of us had yet to master. He knew what to say, how much to say. He had an easy way of asking them questions. He turned on the charm, but not so much that it seemed like he was actually turning on the charm. Whereas Glick had his own foolproof method. He would stare a girl down, eyes scanning her from head to toe, as she passed us by, and then he’d raise his chin slightly in her direction, at what he believed to be just the right moment. To say that it never worked was an understatement.
“No, man. She doesn’t want to be FWB anymore,” Glick said. “Now she wants to be MWC.”
“MWC?”
“Married with Children.”
As soon as we got our drinks, Glick turned to Julian and started on him about Ali. “So how’s the girlfriend treating you? Why isn’t she here again?”
“Ah, she wasn’t feeling well. I told you. She didn’t want to come out tonight,” he said.
“Is she ever feeling well? What’s the deal?” Glick was being an ass, but he had a point.
“She’s never around,” Danza chimed in, and Danza hardly ever talked shit about anyone. He played it cool. He didn’t keep tabs, usually.
“It’s been over a month since we’ve seen her.” I decided to throw my hat in the ring, as long as everyone else was.
“Is she so disgusted by us that she can’t even fake it?” Glick continued. “Or are we talking about more serious issues below the surface? Slow burn? Attention ground control, Julian is fizzling out . . . we’re going to have a crash landing here. Clear the runway, make room, we have a goner!”
“So?” Julian said, getting fed up already. “What about you guys? Ben, you were lucky enough to hook up with that girl from Kansas? Or Kentucky? One of those. But then you went back to her place and she made you watch Titanic and you fell asleep and she threw you out. And, Danza, didn’t the girl you hooked up with last weekend tell you that she never wanted to hook up with you again, but if she saw you, she’d say hi?”
Danza’s face turned serious. “Cut it out, man. You’re making us sound terrible,” he said, looking around and over his shoulder.
“Or amazing,” said Glick.
“And, Glick, seriously the last time you got any action was at least a year ago, and the only reason she agreed to go home with you was because you told her that you had pot, which you didn’t.” Julian was right about Glick, at least. His hookups were few and far between. Each time it happened, I half expected him to take out an ad in the newspaper.
Then, as was inevitable, the old stories started flowing. Oh, the enthusiasm that we could muster for stories we’d told and retold hundreds of times, but it was fun to remember. College, what a crazy time that was . . . all two and a half years ago.
“I dodged the ambulance service multiple times,” Glick mused. “They thought I was too drunk. Girls, man. Trying to help. Not realizing that a passed-out guy in the corner is not a reason to call an ambulance. Amateurs . . . I showed them.”
“You did,” Danza agreed. “Except that one time that they actually got you and you had to escape.”
“I did. I had to fucking escape! I walked across campus in a hospital gown.” He took a sip of his drink. “And let me tell you something. Those gowns are breezy. They provide very little protection.”
“They’re not meant to be worn outside,” I reasoned.
“Let’s be real,” Julian said. “It’s a step up from your usual clothes.”
“What’s wrong with my usual clothes?”
“It’s sixty degrees outside and you’re wearing corduroys,” Julian said. “Those are winter pants, man. I don’t consider myself an expert on fashion by any stretch of the imagination, but that much I know. Aren’t you hot in them? Do you not just have a river of sweat running down your backside?”
Glick ignored us and ordered another drink. He did an impression of an exotic bird for the waitress. Glick was the butt of every joke, but he took it well because he knew. What would we all talk about, if not for him?
“You know what, let’s get Danza drunk for once,” Glick said, half to the unimpressed waitress, half to us. “I’ve never seen him drunk. Let’s get him good and drunk and then you can all spare me your usual judgments. A round for the table, m’lady!” he cried with a wave of his arm. The waitress looked confused and vaguely pissed-off, but nodded and returned several minutes later with a tray full of alcohol.
So we drank. A lot. Julian spent a solid half hour talking in the corner of the bar with Kate, during which time we made fun of him mercilessly, for the way he was standing there with such a stressed-out look on his face, as if torn apart by some moral dilemma, and yet shamelessly watching her fiddle with the necklace hanging near her chest. “Your girlfriend is outside,” Glick said to him, a lie that worked like a charm. He was back sitting with us in no time.
Danza took out the dice and we started playing c-lo. It was a game we played sometimes in the locker room with three six-sided dice where you kept rolling until two out of three dice matched and your score was the amount on the remaining dice. The person with the highest score won the pot. We were rolling the dice at our table, gambling, taking bets, involving the bouncer and making a huge scene, cash on the ground, cash on the table. We ended up losing about a hundred dollars to a group of girls, a bachelorette party. Then, Danza made out with the bride-to-be after using some stupid line like, “Aren’t you supposed to kiss a stranger tonight?”
By one o’clock in the morning, we were stinking drunk. And hungry. We talked about going to a pancake place on Clinton Street.
“Isn’t it closed?”
“Whatever, we’ll start pounding on the door. I’m sure they get deliveries. We’ll say, The yeast is coming and so are we!” Glick yelled.
“I’m not breaking into a pancake place,” I said. “There’s a diner on every corner.”
“Yeah, dude, that is not the only restaurant in Manhattan to get food right now,” Julian said.
“We are doing this,” Glick insisted. “It’s not about the fucking pancakes, it’s about the fucking principle.”
“What principle?” I shouted, eyes wide. The argument went on for much, much longer than it should have. It somehow became a question of loyalty. Always. Everything was for the team.
“Guys. We set a goal and we have to achieve it,” Glick said. “We shouldn’t settle for anything less than that fluffy pancake in the sky!” He got all red-faced and fired-up. “We need to end the night this way. Don’t you guys realize? This entire night has been leading up to these pancakes. Without these pancakes, the whole night didn’t exist.” He started shaking his head. “I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing this for all of us. I’m doing this so that tomorrow, you’ll wake up and your stomach will be full and you’ll say, Wow, what an amazing fucking night.”
Glick was an idiot, and there was no way to reason with him once he had something stuck in his head. Julian was a free bird that night, with his girlfriend busy doing something else, “not feeling well” or “working” or whatever it was, and even though he was yawning like crazy, he wasn’t going home a minute sooner than he had to. Danza could barely keep his eyes open, but he insisted that he was a “team player” and “taking one for the team,” which meant never backing out of anything, ever. And you know what, good for him. I said good-bye and started to walk away from them. I guess I didn’t possess the leadership qualities of a Danza, that diehard devotion. I left them all there, to the sound of groans and protests.
“Glick,” I yelled, from across the bar. “You have turkey on your face.”
Not everyone can be the team captain.
The walk to the subway would be good with nobody around. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to wait too long for the train. The streets looked different, now that the night was over. The Lower East Side had a coolness to it, but when you looked more carefully, there was a crustiness to everything too. A romanticizing went on, but in the end, it was a neighborhood of old tenements. There was a reason why everyone left before we got here. It was not one of the nicer parts of town. It was housing for the poorest class of people. Twenty years ago, a room probably cost fifty dollars a month. They say these houses have improved, but it was hard to believe that, from the looks of them. It was the least possible amount of light and air for tenants and the greatest number of people crowded into the space. I learned a lot about areas like this in an urban infrastructure class that I took in college, about tenements, the damage of congestion, the lack of park space and open areas.
The Lower East Side had an allure, but the more time you spent there, the more carefully you looked, you realized it. The cracks were visible. The allure dissipated. It was the complete absence of engineering. No engineer had ever looked at any of it. If you were to walk into any Lower East Side tenement and put a marble on the floor, it would roll down to one side of the room. The floors weren’t level, and that drove me crazy. Not to mention the walls were not vertical, all out of plumb. Calculations were never done.
As I rounded the corner of Houston and Ludlow, I heard a guy talking. The voice got louder as I walked, but I couldn’t see anything. I turned, like he might be talking to me. But then I looked across the narrow street and I saw Eve. She was standing next to this guy in a plaid shirt who looked familiar to me from college. He was in a band. Or something. I don’t know why but this guy had this look about him, a look that screamed unemployment. But then, in college Eve was always with guys like that. Nobody really knew what she was doing. Anyway. Plaid Shirt was standing across from her. She was a few feet from him, arms across her chest. Something about him always irked me. He was the type of guy who wouldn’t talk to you unless you had something for him.
“Jesus, what is up with you tonight?”
“I’m scared!” she said, and then caught herself yelling, lowered her voice. She sat down on a bench. “And I know people say that all the time, but I don’t have parents, so cut me some slack, please, because sometimes, I feel completely alone in the world. And I know that people say that too, but in my case, it’s actually true.”
I felt glued to my spot on the street. As soon as I heard her say that, I had this strange feeling, like I was invested in what was happening.
“You’re not alone,” he said, and then he walked over, sat down next to her. He sounded calmer than I expected him to. I watched the wisps of her hair moving in the wind.
“I feel like I’m desperately trying to hold on to something or someone. And you’re not . . . holding.”
“Oh, really? Like how I held your head every night while you were sleeping?”
Oh brother. This guy.
“Look. Eve. It’s not your fault. It’s like there’s this darkness inside of me. There’s not a single day when I wake up and wish that it weren’t there, but I don’t know how to get rid of it.”
“I know exactly what you mean though. Doesn’t that help? Shouldn’t that help?”
“No. Because your darkness isn’t like my darkness.”
It should be illegal for two English majors to date each other.
“I thought that it was,” she said, shaking her head and staring at the ground. “I thought that . . . we were.”
“I’m just tired, man, and I’m tired of talking to you about this and the reality is . . . I will never have this with anyone.” He motioned to the space between them and then stood up, started pacing around in a circle, moving around a lot. I was sure of it now. Something was amped up about him. Maybe he was high.
“Whatever I’ll have with other people will be something else, and it’s such a heartbreaking idea, isn’t it? But we might be wrong for each other! Okay? It’s true! We might be wrong for each other! And we could battle it out for months, years even, and you’ll get mad and I’ll be sorry and we’ll both ultimately come up short. There is no doubt in my mind that some intangible thing connects us, and that we have become tied together in a way that I might never find with someone else. This alone could sustain us for a long time. I could stay with you just to avoid that endogenous and visceral fear of never finding it again.”
Endogenous? Okay, now he was making up words.
She put her hand up to her mouth and looked like she was going to cry. Was she going to cry? I wasn’t too sharp about this kind of thing, but she looked like she might cry. I took a few steps to my left, officially lurking in the shadows, but I didn’t care if I got caught. She wouldn’t care. I was just some acquaintance, though I felt some instinctual need to help her, not sure why, but there was nothing I could do, as she sat there, concentrating on him.
“What?” he said. “You don’t like the drugs, right? The fact that I do drugs bothers you? Well, you are pretty and smart and there’s no reason that you need to put up with someone like me. No reason, and you shouldn’t. You just shouldn’t. I would recommend against it. Go.”
“But you’re . . .”
“I’m WHAT?” he yelled.
“Nothing . . . it’s just . . . I would never have had the guts to say all this to you. You may be right, but I would never have been able to talk about us like that, in the past tense. What you’re saying sounds nice, they’re nice words, but they sound a whole lot like good-bye.”
“You know that you basically pressed me into this place, right? You forced a conclusion. This is what you wanted.”
Then, she started to put her hand on her forehead, on her eyes, all over. He sat there, didn’t move. What was the matter with him? What was the big deal that you couldn’t just shut up and make someone feel better? No reason to torture each other. With an upset girl on my hands, my tendency was always to back down, to be quiet, overly agreeable. I was never overtly mean. Or maybe I was and I didn’t realize it. I guess there have been times of drunk fighting when things weren’t totally talked out but then we had sex and forgot about it. I was once seeing this girl who annoyed the hell out of me, but the sex was fun because I was sort of perpetually mad at her. Controlled doses of pain or anger could be good, I guess. But this was too much.
I started to walk again, leaving them to their conversation, in all its glory. I was feeling bad for her, but also, frankly, glad not to be involved in that kind of mess. I had no desire for a girlfriend, then, but at some point, I probably would. And when I did, I knew one thing for sure: I wanted a relationship that wasn’t a lot of drama.
It was time to get the hell out of there.