EVE
A JAPANESE CIRCUS ON SAINT MARKS
I walked through the door and was faced with a poster of a woman being either tortured or pleasured by red octopuses. The ceiling was low. The room was narrow but stretched far back. As I continued on through the restaurant, this dark tunnel of oddities, I scanned the crowd for a familiar face. There was a Japanese flag with graffiti covering it, naked mannequins wearing gas masks, a sculpture of Godzilla destroying the Tokyo Tower. Did it have to be so creepy? I guess I’d been out of town for too long.
I hate to admit this but, in those first few months back in the city, I was kind of a menace to society. I was wearing ripped jeans and a bad attitude. I was stomping around the East Village thinking, You just try to mess with me again, New York! I dare you! I wanted everyone to know that even though I was “back,” I wasn’t going to run the whole New York race. There was more out there than just this city, and I knew about it now. I’d hiked mountains. I’d gone camping. I’d made myself into a music reporter. I’d gone to hundreds of concerts and interviewed famous musicians on the phone while they ate lunch in their tour buses. I’d dated guys who jumped out of helicopters without a second thought. Basically: I had lived. I had seen things. I had an edge.
But when I wasn’t paying attention, New York was seeping back into me. How else can I explain it? The damn city fit like a glove. Why else would I feel so at home, so finally back at home, even on Saint Marks Place, which was the intersection of punk and Japan and drug paraphernalia? I looked up at the building that matched the address in my hands. The minute I’d heard 25 Saint Marks Place, it sounded familiar. I’d researched it for one of my music columns on electronic music. 19-25 Saint Marks Place used to be the home of the Electric Circus, a nightclub that embodied the bohemianism and club culture of the sixties. Experimental bands like the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground played there, with jugglers, mimes, flamethrowers and trapeze artists performing during breaks in the music. It was the epitome of that drug-fueled psychedelic time, with black lights and strobe lights and the pervasive smell of smoke everywhere. Over the years, 19-25 Saint Marks Place went from nightclub to German music society to community hall to Polish organization to a “dry disco” for Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, the building was split up into apartment buildings. And now, on the ground floor of 25 Saint Marks Place, there was a very strange Japanese restaurant where I was meeting my friends for the first time in a long while.
When I first got to Colorado, the new backdrop, new people, new food, new everything felt like some version of therapy. All my old rhythms were gone. It was like I had fallen into a maze with different intricacies and I was moving within it, a bit lost, but like a person who had been lit up from the inside. There was a fair degree of stumbling. I often felt like an outsider. There were nights when I would have killed to hear the sound of my phone ring. But all that felt like part of the experience, and it went away eventually, once I’d made a few friends at the newspaper.
But nearly three years later, I must admit, it was equally exquisite to return to New York. The city—yes, even the old, crummy, loud, chaotic city—had become new, especially the parts of it that I hadn’t experienced much before. Saint Marks was like being transported to another world, to a smattering of weirdness that looked like it belonged in Tokyo. It was a strip of neon lights, the awnings cluttered next to one another, the colorful signs selling psychic readings, comics, socks, records, piercings, wigs, foot massages. And yet, I was walking through it with such euphoria. Escaping the city is easy, but there is no known cure for how good it feels to come back.
Outside the restaurant, there were a number of people standing around, waiting to get in. There was a slightly demonic statue in the entranceway, and an electronic cat’s arm was moving up and down. It was the type of place where you felt like you had to be in the know to go inside, and I certainly wasn’t. As I stood in front of the sliding door, I felt a strange rush of excitement. I was going to see my friends again! Yes: the friends who I’d snubbed, who I’d so desperately needed a break from, moved across the country from, the friends who I’d decided were no good, too difficult, too “New York.” I was now thrilled with the knowledge that they were inside.
“My friends are here already,” I was prepared to say to anyone who asked, but nobody did. There didn’t appear to be a single person in charge. There were only hurried waiters and platters of steaming food and bedlam.
Then I saw Kate and Maya, sitting at a long, rectangular table against the back wall. Behind them, there was a picture of two feet crushing a line of delicately drawn plants and flowers. Some of the people at the table I recognized, some were strangers. Kate was leaning against Maya. They were cracking up at something on her phone. Kate gripped Maya’s arm and fell into her, laughing. The girl next to Kate, who I didn’t recognize, was looking at them, probably wondering what all the fuss was about, but I knew. They could throw themselves into laughter as much as they could despair or paranoia. It was just the way they were—open and honest and volatile.
The sight of Kate and Maya made me hopeful. There’d been some time apart, but we’d grown up together, in a way. Or at least, we’d spent some important years together. Scarlett had drifted from the group, ever since heading to Los Angeles for medical school. We hardly heard from her, except for an occasional update about the weather, for instance, “Heard it’s snowing there. It’s seventy-five in LA!” or “Hey, guys! I think I’m officially a Californian. It’s fifty degrees outside and I’m freezing! I’m wearing boots!” Maya would forward the e-mail to Kate and me and write, “I’d like to tell her where she can put her boots. Has she always been this self-righteous?” Maya was upset because while she was spending her days at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens cleaning vomit off the floor in a packed waiting room, Scarlett appeared to be studying on the beach.
As I walked toward them, some changes to Maya and Kate were immediately noticeable. Maya wasn’t wearing those big glasses anymore. She’d opted for a more conventional, less cartoonish pair. She was also wearing a black sweater she’d worn occasionally in college, but back then it was for job interviews and other proper occasions only. Now, the sweater appeared to be part of her everyday rotation. Kate’s clothes were more formal too. Instead of her usual T-shirt or tank top, worn in college as an homage to her California roots, she was wearing an off-white silk shirt, and a black blazer was slung over the chair behind her.
“EVE!” Kate yelled, above the noise. I leaned across the table to hug them and they pulled my arm and tried to drag me over the table completely. I felt my shirt coming up, a fork graze against my stomach. A few, more sensible people got up to allow me to shuffle inside. I scanned the table, waving hello to the few guys I recognized from college who had all been buddies on the hockey team—Glick, Ben, another guy they called Danza.
They’re still hanging out with these guys? I thought to myself. On purpose?
“Oooooo, she’s so Colorado now,” I could hear Glick say to the others. I had no clue why he was saying that. All right. I had some clue. It was the jeans.
“These guys? Still?” I said, turning to Kate and Maya, cocking my head to the right and eyeing them.
“We’ve become drinking buddies!” Maya said proudly. “They’re very easy to deal with, as it turns out.”
“They’re always available on a random Thursday,” Kate said, listing off the benefits on her fingers. “They’re punctual. They often pay for drinks. They didn’t abandon us for Colorado.”
I smiled. “Ohhhh, I see.”
“Why are you back?” Glick shouted. “Please explain in three sentences or less.” He pointed at my mouth with his chopsticks, as if offering me a microphone.
“I got a better job here,” I said into the chopsticks. I didn’t think he’d be interested in the details of how I’d managed to translate three years of music reporting in Colorado into a job as an assistant at Voice, a music-sharing program that published original content on its website. Career talk wasn’t really his specialty.
“I can’t believe we got you out of your apartment!” Kate said.
“Yeah, what have you been doing?” Maya wanted to know.
“Working,” I said.
Kate nodded. Maya rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right,” she said. “You’ve been on your couch eating frozen yogurt and you know it.”
“Like I can’t be doing both?” I replied.
Maya laughed. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said, hugging me. I felt the warmth of her. Finally, somebody who actually knew me, who I actually knew. The smell of her sweater brought me right back to college. When I first met Maya, it was two weeks into freshman year, and she was standing in front of her closet and telling me about this club downtown in the Meatpacking District that had space-themed dance parties every Monday night. “Deep Space Mondays!” she had explained, while throwing clothes across the room. I went with her downtown to the club that night, wearing one of her short, sparkly skirts, and we danced for hours to electronic, deep space–y, futuristic music and then went where all broke girls in college go at the end of the night for sustenance—Duane Reade. We sat on the staircase of someone’s town house, bleary-eyed and eating Entenmann’s cookies, unable to stop laughing, laughing so hard that it hurt. We discovered that we were different but the same, and in one glorious moment, I saw my future, and it was friendship with a girl named Maya. I just couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t get to tell my mother, the woman who had sat across from me at that little round kitchen table throughout middle school and high school, analyzing the state of my friendships. I remember from the second that I became friends with Maya, I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t get to tell my mother all about her. How could I not tell her? How could I never get to tell her that I’d made my first friend in college?
As Maya pulled away from me, she grabbed hold of my earlobe and inspected it, her eyes about an inch away from my face.
“Is this an extra piercing? Are you in the midst of a Goth phase?” She gave Kate an urgent look, pulled my ear toward her. “What is going on?” she demanded.
“Um, no,” I answered, with a smile. “I’m not sixteen.”
“Have you heard anything from Jesse?” Maya asked.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and looking down at my plate. “Thank God.”
The truth was I spent most of my time wandering music stores, after work and on the weekends, and I had to deliberately avoid anything related to Jesse’s band. It seemed like everywhere I looked, there he was. Lately, the band was receiving some backlash. They were repeatedly called a group of upper-class Ivy League graduates staking improper claim to foreign music. But the bad press only enhanced their popularity. I tried not to look, but late at night I read articles where Jesse was quoted defending the band, saying that they all had part-time jobs in college, that to this day they were paying off student loans.
I didn’t tell anyone at Voice that I knew him, even though it would have helped me there. Voice was a place where I felt entirely out of my league. I went to parties at the office in SoHo—this beautiful loft with signed album covers on the walls, “listening” rooms filled with silk pillows—seriously, each room contained no fewer than twenty brightly colored pillows scattered on the floor. The owner was a billionaire who made his money doing something else before this that nobody really understood, so there was no shortage of funds.
I went to the shows that I was assigned to, and didn’t think twice about going alone. I didn’t feel scared, didn’t feel so very alone in the city. As I walked the streets of the East Village, I looked down at myself and realized that something in Colorado made this person happen. It must have been the journey, the being taken out of my element, the new friends who disregarded me every time I said, “But I’m a little bit afraid of heights!” I’d gotten so full on my independence.
“Have you guys ordered yet?” I asked, staring down at the menu of “food challenges”— turkey testicles and maggot-fried noodles and a giant plate of rice that was free but only if you could eat it in less than twenty minutes. There was a “Russian roulette” appetizer, which involved a ball of dough, filled with wasabi, hidden among other identical-looking dumplings that contained octopus. The menu was enormous and an organizational disaster. There was nothing recognizable on it. I flipped through pages and pages of Japanese words next to English words that were just as foreign.
“Who picked this place anyway?” I said.
“Who do you think?” Kate looked at Maya. I should have known. Maya loved restaurants with a theme, or anything kitschy. In college, she used to drag me to Ninja New York because she liked the waiters dressed as ninjas, the magic tricks that they performed between courses. I tried to be a good sport about it, to take the “secret passageway” into the restaurant instead of the standard elevator. But then, one time, a ninja jumped out from behind our table and startled me to the point where the piece of sushi that had been in my chopsticks went flying into the air. “Never again,” I vowed after, and she agreed that it had been a bit too much that time.
“People,” said Glick. “Let’s make some decisions. What are we drinking tonight?”
I looked around at the table. There were pitchers of beer everywhere. Apparently, that wasn’t enough. Maya insisted that we order a round of sake bombs. She gave directions to the waiter. “We need eight shots of hot sake.” The guys ordered chicken wings, platters of them, so many that the waiter asked if they wanted the platinum level of chicken wing situations. They turned him down in favor of the bronze, which showed a lot of restraint on their part.
“So,” I said, turning to Maya. “How’s residency treating you?”
“Ohhhh, fine,” Maya said. “If you don’t count the fact that every time I have to take a test, I lose feeling in my hands.”
“What?”
“Eve. I want to be a surgeon. My hands are very important to me.”
“Well, my hands are very important to me too, but . . .”
She acted like there was no further explanation necessary, and then, when I gave her a blank stare, said slowly as though she were explaining something obvious to a child, “And sooooo that would be the worst thing, for something to happen to my hands. Stress can do some crazy shit to you. Do you remember when I took acid a week before my MCATs because I thought it would get rid of my anxiety?”
“Yeah, and it actually just made things much worse,” Kate said. “Obviously.”
“I went to Grant’s Tomb! I felt the need to visit some sort of memorial, but I thought that everyone I saw was a ghost.”
“So now you’re imagining that you’re losing feeling in your hands?” I asked.
“Of course. It makes perfect sense.”
“Well, I’m a writer, so . . .” I put my hands out in front of me, looked down at them. They were feeling tingly, all of a sudden.
“Stop it!” Kate yelled, pushing my hands against the table. “Don’t listen to her. She’s insane.” She gave Maya a look of warning. “Don’t encourage her.”
“On the plus side, I get to wear black scrubs now! Black!” she said, thrilled by the notion. “So much better than blue, in terms of the potential for accessorizing. Do you know how hard it is to accessorize with light blue?”
I shook my head.
“It’s very limiting,” she insisted. “Especially with my skin tone. Black will be so much better.”
“Sounds like a very positive development,” I said. I looked across the table at Kate, who was giving Maya an annoyed look. “And how’s the world of finance?” I asked her.
She sighed. “It’s good, but intense. I’m trying to deal.” She closed her eyes slightly, took a deep breath, and touched her index finger to her thumb. “Charlie keeps trying to get me to see a life coach, but I don’t like the idea of being told what to do by someone who willingly became a life coach.”
I laughed. Charlie was Kate’s fiancé, who I’d seen pictures of on Facebook but had never actually met. He was from Arkansas and worked as a photographer’s assistant at a studio in Chelsea. Strange how much had happened since I left, that Kate had a fiancé who I didn’t even know.
“Where is Charlie tonight?” I asked.
“On a shoot in Istanbul. He’s so annoyingly good at his job.” She sighed. “All these famous photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Mark Seliger are constantly requesting his presence. I’m just hoping he doesn’t sleep with one of the models.” She said this breezily, but there was a slight discomfort in her eyes, something too close to real fear. I knew Kate well enough to know not to press further, to just laugh and ask more about it when it was just the two of us, in a quieter setting.
“And how’s it going with . . . Erol?” I asked Maya. She was dating a lawyer whose family was originally from Turkey. He grew up on Long Island. That was all I knew.
“Ugh I am done with him. Last night . . . we were watching a movie on the couch and I fell asleep and woke up at four a.m. on the couch and he was in my bed! Not okay. I hate him now. Aaaaaaannd I’m single again.”
Kate winced.
“He was in your bed?” I said.
“He says that he tried to wake me. He said that he tried to carry me but he, and I quote, ‘couldn’t get a good grip.’ I told him that the way out of this fight was not to call me obese.”
Kate and I burst out in laughter.
“Oh come on,” I said, once I’d recovered. “It sounds like it was pretty harmless.”
“I don’t know,” she said, with a smile peeking through. “I may stop being mad. I’m considering it. He’s a sweet guy and makes me laugh and he has a perfect face. But he’s on probation.”
“Fair enough.”
“Also do you think I can really marry someone whose name is so close to egg roll? I don’t want to confuse my Chinese delivery man.”
I smiled. “Is that really an issue?”
“Eve. I order Chinese all the time. It’s important that my delivery guy understand me.” She sighed. “It’s Turkish. Erol. I guess it could be worse,” she said. “His name could be Ishebog.”
We laughed. She took a sip of her drink. “Ooo! Whatever happened to that . . . reporter? That you were dating? Tell us about the men in Colorado.”
“So cute,” I said. My instinct was to tell them every detail, but I decided not to get so absorbed in their world again, to just give brief answers and move on. Maturity!
“What kind of answer is that? Is this a test?” Maya demanded. I shrugged, and kept my mouth shut.
“How’s your new apartment?” Kate asked.
“It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived,” I said truthfully.
I’d found a studio in the East Village that was smaller than my bedroom in Arthur’s apartment but had immeasurable value, in terms of my self-esteem. I had to dip into my savings from Colorado to pay the first month’s rent. I didn’t care. The girl living there told me that there were a hundred other girls just like me waiting for a place like this, and that was all she had to say. I bit the line.
“Although I did have a bit of a mice problem,” I added, wincing. Maya backed her chair away from me and then stood up on it.
“MICE?” she yelled, from way up there.
“I didn’t bring them here with me!” I said, looking up at her. She sat back down. “That’s right. What I meant is that I had a mouse problem, but it’s not an issue anymore because we became friends and casually socialize.”
“Like Cinderella?” Maya replied.
I nodded. “It’s exactly like that.”
About a week in, I discovered that the apartment that a hundred girls dreamed of living in had mice. I bought some poison that the guy at the store claimed was more humane than the traps. But when that seemed to be exacerbating the problem, I broke down and paid for an exterminator, who told me that the poison that I spread throughout the perimeter of my apartment was basically the equivalent of feeding the mice cereal. More humane, indeed! I couldn’t vacuum it up quickly enough. But, inevitably, when the influx of mice slowed down, it all turned into a funny story. I began to talk fondly of it, my cute little East Village apartment with its adorable mouse infestation. Only in New York!
When the shots of sake arrived, Maya explained to everyone exactly what to do. She showed us how to set the chopsticks on top of the glass, place the shot between the chopsticks, slam the table, wait for the shot to fall into the beer, and then gulp it all down.
“Wait. Why can’t we just drop the shot into the glass?” Glick’s friend Ben, who was sitting next to him, asked. It was a wonder I didn’t know two things about Ben, after all these years of running into him. The main reason was probably that he didn’t talk much. Almost never, actually, whereas Glick was loud and had a way of picking at people’s vulnerabilities.
“It’s more fun this way!” she insisted.
“Aren’t we going to cause a scene?” I looked around the restaurant.
“No! It’s fine,” she said confidently, like a pro.
On the count of three, everyone slammed the table and then downed their glasses of fizzy beer containing just a hint of something sharper. I stopped halfway through mine. I couldn’t do it. I’d had enough. The whole thing in one gulp? Impossible. I tried to hide the evidence. Maya and Kate would kill me if they knew.
“Another round,” Glick said to a waitress, running his hand across his mouth. “That was delicious. And extra shots.” Kate squealed in protest. As the two of them fought about whether to order more, I sat there looking at my half-empty glass, pushing it to the far corner of the table, attempting to mix it in with the other glasses.
When I looked up, Ben was staring directly at me.
“Hey,” he protested quietly. He’d seen the whole thing. I gave him a look as if to say, Please don’t rat me out, and then our eyes locked into this bizarre moment of familiarity, something bordering on affection.
What the fuck? Because of my subpar drinking skills?
After a few seconds, I looked away. I started lining up the silverware on the table. What was that? I guess it was obvious. It was a connection of some kind. I recognized it. I just didn’t see it coming, with some guy I’d run into a thousand times before and thought, Ugh, do I have to say hi to him or can I keep walking? Plus, we were in this brightly lit, completely unromantic place, and by unromantic, I mean: there were at least thirty chicken wing bones lying on the table between us.
After that, there was the second round of sake bombs, this one I downed completely to avoid another moment with Ben. I tried to talk Maya out of her latest theory that if a guy she was dating didn’t know how she took her burger, he didn’t have the right to continue living. I ate a few dumplings, and cubes of something that looked like chicken but tasted like shrimp. When the waitress started pouring free wine into our glasses, I got pretty drunk, along with everyone else at the table. I sighed and cracked open a fortune cookie.
“You know what, you guys,” I said, exhaling. “I know that I said Colorado was great and everything but . . . it wasn’t that great, not always.”
What I didn’t tell my friends was that despite my outward attempts to become so very Colorado, on the inside I remained myself. When I listened to my friends in Colorado describe the adrenaline rush of hiking to the top of a mountain whenever a full moon occurred, the awesome feeling of being one with nature, there was a tiny piece of me that tallied up a list of safety concerns. I had to force myself not to feign an illness whenever I was asked to participate. Mountain biking the “nastiest” trail in Utah? Too hungover. A three-day hiking trip? Recovering from a bad cold. Rock climbing Independence Pass? Would love to but . . . cough cough . . . I’m feeling a resurgence of a latent bronchial disease. In the end, I went most of the time, but only because I was faced with a decision between going with them and spending the entire weekend as a social outcast.
“We figured,” Maya said, not even pretending to be surprised. “Otherwise, why would you come back?”
“I really missed you guys!” Wow, so the wine had done a number on me. I felt like I was about to cry. “Well, I mean, the writing part was good, to get to write about music and everything. Plus, to get away from New York for a little bit.”
“And the same old people,” Kate said, her eyes rolling toward Glick, who was putting chopsticks in his nose.
“But the guys out there were dangerous,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Kate asked. I held up my glass and eyed it suspiciously. “It means I almost died in an avalanche, several times, trying to be a fun girl.”
“They were that cute?” Maya reached for her drink.
“Yes. I told you. I almost died. No, but reeeeeeaaaalllllyyyy, even with Jesse, it was the same way . . . between the charm and the bad moods . . . I’m always trying to keep up, always changing myself to be what I think I’m supposed to be. I’m always the sad victim going after the same dysfunctional guy. I’ll tell you one thing: I am not sitting around in my pink pajamas anymore waiting for some guy to call. It’s too cliché and unfair, you know?”
“You do that?” Kate said.
“Metaphorically speaking, yes.”
“I’ve missed you, Eve,” she said. “You’re the only one I know who wears metaphorical pajamas.”
“It’s unfair compared to who? Men?” Maya exclaimed. “If you compare yourself to men, you’re going to feel like an insane lunatic.”
“I’m telling you, guys! It is hard work to be a wide-eyed romantic,” I insisted.
“Is that what you think you are?” Kate started to laugh. “You take pretty much a doomsday approach to every relationship that you ever get involved in.”
“So don’t be such a romantic. Come visit me at the hospital one day,” Maya said. “People are dying everywhere.”
“I’m serious! I think I’m ready for a grown-up relationship with someone normal.”
Kate gasped. Maya stared at me. “Someone normal?”
I nodded.
“But that really flies in the face of your whole policy,” Maya said, horrified.
“Congratulations!” Kate shook my hand, her grip strong and sure, much like I imagined it was in her business meetings. “Welcome to adulthood. Let’s find your first victim.”
Before I could stop myself, I glanced guiltily at Ben, who was watching Glick shove chopsticks up his nose and unsuccessfully try to keep them there, and then looked down at my plate quickly.
But not quickly enough.
“BEN?” Kate shrieked.
“Shhh! No! Shut up! Shut up!” I paused. “But what do you think of him? Do you think he’s too quiet and maybe too nice?”
“Eve. He was on the hockey team. How nice can he be?” Maya said.
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s thrown a few punches, if that makes you feel better,” Kate added. I thought about the slight dent at the bridge of Ben’s nose, which made it look a little broken, and was the only flaw on his face.
“It does!” I said.
“You can take the girl out of the insane asylum. . . .” Maya looked at me and shook her head slowly.
The restaurant emptied out until we were the only table left, along with a few teenaged girls in the corner, the sushi chefs plying them with drinks. Glick got up and then came back to tell us that there was a bar upstairs and that he was in love with the bartender. He told us this as if he was dead serious. “I asked her what time she was getting off,” he said in a daze. “And then I asked her to fix me a gin and tonic. And then I gave her all the money in my wallet.” He took out his wallet, as if to verify the story, and opened it up for us and shook it over the table. It was, in fact, empty.
When the check arrived, it came with plastic cups of colored sugar, which we were meant to take over to a vintage cotton candy maker. I fought for a pink cup. Ben stood up, and the first thing I noticed was that his hooded sweatshirt went down to his knees. He was a good-looking guy, but it was hard to tell, with the baggy clothes, the orange T-shirt with a series of holes at the neck.
I pranced over to the corner and dumped the sugar inside the machine, then watched the colored cotton whirl onto my chopstick. I took a few bites and then gave it to Maya, who took one look at it and threw it into the garbage. “I feel sick enough already,” she said, as if I’d insulted her. We all trooped upstairs to the bar on the second story. It was crowded, with deafening electronic music and a balcony overlooking Saint Marks, where people were smoking cigarettes. The walls were red, with gold Japanese letters painted on them. There was a small chandelier in the center of the room. We were standing at the bar, shouting at the top of our lungs. Maya was talking to us about her birthday, which was a week away.
“Maybe we should just go to Dave and Buster’s!” She started laughing. “It’s a pretty trashy crowd and the food is disgusting but they have some salads. . . . Should we do that? Do you think you could stomach it?” She looked at me. “It’s so fun! They have skeeball!”
“May . . . be. Where is it?”
“It’s in Times Square,” she replied.
Kate groaned. “Of course it is.”
“Or we could go to O Ya?” Maya said. “But it’s omakase only, and it’s three hundred dollars.”
Kate stared her down. “So our choices are Dave and Buster’s or a three-hundred-dollar-per-person omakase?”
Suddenly, Ben tapped me on the shoulder.
“Do you want to go out to the balcony?” he asked.
The music had become a throbbing bass loop of the same four notes, on repeat, shaking the floors. I was dying to escape it.
“Sure,” I said.
Once we were out there, I leaned over the railing and looked down at the people on the street below. In my new apartment, my preferred spot was right next to the window, sitting on the ledge, watching everyone on the street walk by. Since it was on the second floor, I was close enough to see faces, to hear words, to feel like I had company. It was the city equivalent of hiking a mountain—a way to get lost in something outside of yourself. Except in New York, there was the added advantage of glimpsing into another person’s existence. When observing, I always started from the ground and scanned up. I watched their feet pound the pavement; catching the urgency of their stride, then examined how they had dressed for the day, their facial expressions. Then, I waited for some piece of conversation. The juicier bits usually came from someone on the phone. People on the phone tended to forget that they were not in their own private universe.
I got into the hypnotic rhythm of watching people, until I heard Ben clear his throat behind me.
“So, what was that downstairs?” he asked.
I smiled and said, “I think it was a moment.” He moved to stand next to me.
“What should we do now?”
I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of yellow. Inside the room, a Japanese man was blowing fire through a hoop.
“Okay, seriously where are we?” I said.
He looked inside. “Isn’t it obvious? We’re at a Japanese circus.”
I laughed.
“I feel like I should say something right now though . . . regarding the moment?” He looked at me for approval.
“You should.” I nodded.
“Should I say something about your eyes?”
“Blech. No.”
“Well, what’s your preference then?”
I slowly shook my head. “No way, man. I’m not going to help you out.”
“Oh come on. Give me some topics. Should we talk about college? Your job? Oh! Your cuteness?”
“My cuteness?” I gave him a threatening look.
The longer the silence lasted, the more nervous he looked, and the more confidence I gained. I’d never made someone nervous before. Everyone made me nervous. Didn’t he know?
I looked over at my friends back inside. More people started coming out onto the balcony. We were jammed into a corner. He put his hand on my back, and the contact gave me a little rush. Even once his hand left, I could still feel his thumb there. I felt myself falling for just a few seconds as we stood there quietly, that feeling like I had no base, like I wasn’t safe. Look down. Look down. The alcohol and the balcony were making it worse.
“I feel like this thing is about to collapse,” I said, staring at my feet.
He shook his head. “All the balconies in this neighborhood are over a hundred years old,” he said. “This is no less safe than the ground.”
“Why do you sound like an expert?”
He smiled. “I know a lot of random facts about the city. It’s part of my job.”
“Where do you work?” I said, trying to focus. There’s that anxious feeling in my stomach. It’s happening again.
“Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. It’s an architectural firm. I work in their structural engineering department. We’re building the Freedom Tower,” he said proudly.
“Really? That’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah, except it’s a mess.” He straightened his back and looked less like the hunched-over, hands-in-pockets, hooded-sweatshirt guy I’d vaguely registered in college. I had a flash of looking out the window of my dorm room, sophomore year, and seeing Ben with his baseball cap and hood on, walking to the bookstore.
“Why?”
“It’s a nonstop back-and-forth between the architects and the engineers in terms of what’s possible. But there’s been a lot of frustration on both sides. Plus, it’s an emotionally loaded project, politically charged. But,” he said, with a sigh, “there is a certain satisfaction in bringing order to the ideas, I guess.”
He started telling me about the history of Saint Marks and the buildings that surrounded us. “They were built in 1831,” he said. “Look at the divisions of the building, the contradictory shades of red and brown. It’s four buildings now, but it used to be one very large ballroom with a balcony.” He pointed to the ceiling inside. “They plastered the walls and got rid of the right angles so that people would feel like they were in a big cavern.”
“Saint Marks is such a weird mash of cultures,” I said.
“It feels like it’s on its last breath though, doesn’t it? I mean, all the music venues have closed down. Punks don’t hang out here anymore. There’s nothing dangerous. There are no muggings. The drug dealers have all moved to Avenue D. It doesn’t have an edge. It’s like the ghost of a bygone era.”
“Sure,” I said, with a laugh. “Once the drug dealers go . . .”
“The Seven-Eleven,” he said, shaking his head.
“What’s wrong with a Seven-Eleven?”
“It depends on the location, but once that gets built in a place like this, it is the end. The East Village has a deep distrust of any chain stores, doesn’t matter what kind, upscale or not. There’s a lot of pride here. The local residents are invested. The community board is active. Which is why this neighborhood has been slower to change than any other part of the city.”
I looked up at the awning on the store above us. SEARCH AND DESTROY was printed on it. There were various doll parts stacked in the window with menacing faces, a plastic pig, Mickey Mouse dressed in an Uncle Sam costume, a gas mask, a sign that read NOBODY INNOCENT.
“I came down here a lot when I was sixteen,” he continued. “I used to hang out on the street with my friends before and after shows.” His voice was low, steady, solid, matter-of-fact. I felt like I was meeting Ben for the first time. Our entire interaction before this, in college and throughout New York, at a party, standing around in a group of people, faded from memory.
“But you look so clean!”
“What do you mean?” he asked, confused.
“Oh, I just meant, um . . . nothing. Never mind. So you hung out here after the shows?” I was about to be all This guy just does not get me, but I stopped myself. Grown-up relationship. Grown-up!
“Yup, and I got pretty beat up right over”—he extended his arm and pointed down the street—“there.”
“What’s that mean?” I was beginning to see some rebellion in Ben, and that right there got me, a little bit. He had some edge, I thought, hidden under there, beneath the spotless exterior. Thank God.
He shook his head. “There were all these groups. Everyone was very specific about which bands they liked. And they took it seriously.”
“Why?”
“Why were there groups, or why did they take it seriously?”
“Umm . . . both?” The wheels in my head were turning with a possible headline, first sentence. But then I realized that even if this was an interesting topic to write about, I was about ten years too late.
“I don’t know. I went to a show at CBGB and I guess I bumped into the wrong guy. Then we came to Saint Marks and his friend punched me. Actually, he didn’t just punch me. He broke an orbital bone next to my eye.”
I cringed.
“I have to say, it’s funny to be here talking to a cute girl in the exact location where ten years ago I got smacked in the face,” he said, concentrating on me. “See. I managed to say something about your cuteness after all.”
“Phew!” I said. He laughed. I couldn’t help but notice how happy he seemed. What am I doing that is pleasing him so much?
Oh, I can see where all this is going. How can I resist? There isn’t the faintest chance I am going to miss this. I am cured now! Ben’s orbital bone had recovered and I am no longer worried about being left. This is my chance to break through. Ben is smart and sweet and haven’t I been through the wringer already with guys who I couldn’t trust? They leave too. Maybe this one will fix something inside of me.
“Do you ever feel like you experience the city differently? Because of your job?” I said, with searching eyes, playing with my hair, doing my best.
“Definitely,” he said. “Like when I’m in the subway and I’m staring at a column or a beam. I don’t even realize it, but I’m tracing the load path, trying to figure out how the loads are transferred.” I gave him a confused look. He started to get more enthusiastic. “So in the subway station, you have the street traffic above, which is supported by a series of beams running across the street, and the columns that you see support the beams. If you look at them closely though, you can see the connections in the beams and that’s interesting to me. Like, you can see whether they used rivets or bolts. Rivets were used until the sixties, and after that, technology advanced and bolts were developed and could be installed easily in the field. Whether you see rivets or bolts or some combination tells you when something was built. It suggests what has been refurbished and what is really old. So in the subway you might see riveted connections next to bolt connections, and then you know that someone in the eighties made a change, which tells you the history of the station.”
I nodded, unsure of how to respond. I didn’t know anything about rivets or bolts, but I did know about the larger situation at hand. A boy liked a girl.
The nice ones never come to you.
“Ben.” My eyes narrowed on him.
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to make out?”
He looked at me as if I’d asked him the dumbest question imaginable.
“Umm.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Yes.”