BEN
500 SIXTH AVENUE, BETWEEN TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH STREETS, WEST VILLAGE
I woke up at her apartment and my first thought was: Oh shit. Because that was my general reaction whenever I woke up in bed with someone familiar. In my experience, it is far less scary to wake up with a borderline stranger. As I lay next to her, staring at an amalgam of her arm and pillow and hair, I gave myself the third degree.
Did I just do something wrong?
Did I just get into something I . . . didn’t want to get into?
But then I told myself that I had no reason to worry. I went from oh shit to oh, wait a minute, that was fine. My arm was sore. I moved it from under her. I regained feeling in my forearm first, but my shoulder had been shifted so badly all night that it took longer.
One of Eve’s legs was visible at the other end of the bed. Her hair was strewn across her back, below her shoulders. It was an even shade of brown, although a few strands were catching the sun peeking through her window shades and looked lighter. Last night, she’d kept it half tied in this clip at the back of her head. The clip was now lying on the night table, flat and small and with three red stones in a line. I looked over at the table, which also had a pair of blue earrings in the shape of triangles lying next to a tissue box and a black alarm clock.
I examined the sliver of her face that was showing. She was pretty, the kind of pretty where you could stare at her face for a while. I’m not one for making a big deal out of eye contact or anything like that, but last night across the table we’d definitely had something. Jesus, what was that? I made fun of her and all of a sudden she was smiling. It was definitely a moment. How to describe it I’m not sure. But it was interesting. It caught my attention. Even though I’d been around her before, that was the first time we’d actually smiled at each other. It was enough to spark something. Enough that it led to this. I made the decision that when she woke up, I would ask her to go for breakfast. If it had been a one-night, zero-strings, sort-of-anonymous thing, I would have gotten the hell out of there, no questions asked. But Eve and I had gone to college together. We had an overlapping friend circle. We could share a meal. I was tired of those one-night things anyway. I wanted to give this a shot.
I looked around at her place. The paint on the walls, which looked to have been recently rehabilitated, revealed a few irregularities near the ceiling. To the right of the bed, there was a dresser with a rectangular mirror over it. There was no clutter, no superfluous objects of any kind. From the bed, I could see the outline of a colored carpet, the top of a pile of scarves, all folded in a basket. Its nicest feature was that from the window next to the bed, you could see Fifth Street and the bare branches of a tree. It was quiet out there. It was unlike lying in my own bed in Hoboken, where I heard every truck barreling by all night long. But that apartment had its advantages—my roommate and I got to keep some of the furniture and porcelain egg collection from the two ninety-year-old women who lived and died in the apartment before us. Stuff that screamed bachelor’s paradise.
As I waited for Eve to wake up, I thought back on whether I did anything embarrassing during the night, if I was snoring, the sexual experience. I pieced together the sequence of events that led to me falling asleep there. We were hooking up at the bar, and next thing I knew I was walking her home and when we got to her door, instead of saying good-bye, she just kept talking and walking into the building, up to her apartment. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to follow her, but she wasn’t telling me not to follow her and I didn’t need a whole lot more than that to boost my confidence. She showed me around her apartment. The only part I remembered was how she stopped in front of a bookshelf and drunkenly explained her whole organizational system. She had four of the books isolated, alone on a shelf, and told me that those were her favorites, that they’d earned their position above the masses. “Don’t worry. They don’t get lonely. They have each other,” she had said reassuringly. After that statement, I remember grabbing her for no reason I could understand, other than instinct. Why? Because she was a voracious reader? Never did it for me before. But okay, in this scenario, somehow it was working for me, and we ended up in her bed and neither she nor I were making too much of the whole deal. We were acting like this was just something that we did.
When she started to rustle under the covers, I turned my eyes toward her, though not my whole body, and I tried not to smile. I didn’t want her to think I was making fun of her, but it was a funny situation. Two people who have known each other peripherally for years waking up in bed together is pretty odd, if you think about it. She turned to me and said hi in that way that girls say hi, like there’s so much more that they are saying, and you’d better get it, buddy. And then she pulled the thick comforter up over her head, tucking herself into a ball, and groaned.
“It’s too much pressure,” I could hear her say.
“What is?”
“What if I don’t look adorably sleepy right now? I feel like I’m supposed to look adorably sleepy.”
I smiled. “Well, there’s no way to tell, with you under there.”
She reemerged, so that only the top of her head and eyes were visible.
“You look just okay,” I said, and then shrugged.
She went into hiding. I laughed, started to sit up and then decided against it, and put my head back down against the pillow. After a minute or so, she came out, presumably for air, and I turned to face her. I couldn’t even look at her for too long because if I did, it was that moment at the restaurant all over again. Good, but too much, too soon.
“Did you have fun last night?” I asked.
“I did.” Her voice was flat but agreeable.
“What was your favorite part?”
“The cotton candy,” she said.
“Jerk.”
She started to laugh pretty hard, and I could see the inside of her mouth.
I don’t know why but watching this girl laugh in bed was the most instinctually appealing thing I’d seen in a long time. “Do you want to get breakfast or something?” I said.
She appeared to think it over. Usually, I did the walk of shame as soon as possible. The great thing about New York was that there was usually a whole parade of people also doing the walk of shame. Every time I passed a girl who was still in her all-black and heels, I smiled. I was sure there were a few guys too, but their nightwear was harder to spot. Then I usually showered, got food and coffee, and decided whether to text her. My A game was to make conversation, to find out what she had planned for the rest of the weekend, then later in the day (much later), send a text like You better not have missed your toothpick convention! Or whatever it was.
After she thought about breakfast for a while, she didn’t say anything. She just got out of bed, grabbed a T-shirt from a drawer and slipped it on, like her apartment was on fire, and left me there. She skipped out of sight and then next thing I heard was the water running in the bathroom.
When she came back from the bathroom, with a toothbrush hanging out of her mouth, she said some words that were all mangled because of the brush, but I think it was: “Okay, we can get breakfast.” I started to get dressed.
It was completely still outside, on our walk. The cold stung my ears, and I pulled my hood up to cover them. The streets were empty and the sky was white. Everything appeared to be frozen. There were a few snowflakes coming down, dotting the sidewalk. My theory was that neighborhoods with an active nightlife were always vacant in the mornings. It was as if the neighborhood itself had to recover from all the activity the night before and it hadn’t woken up yet. Unfortunately, this peaceful setting only emphasized the sudden weighted, nearing-uncomfortable silence between us. I could think of something to say, but I didn’t want to be overly chatty first thing in the morning, especially with a girl who didn’t seem to like that sort of thing.
Eve was looking down at her feet as she walked. She mumbled something about a bagel place on Sixth Avenue, but we had to walk from the East Village to the West Village in order to get there.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m in no rush.”
We passed Cooper Union and Astor Place, and then walked on Macdougal Street, past all the NYU bars and comedy clubs. We started to talk, to make simple conversation about how this or that compared to Columbia. She pointed out the places that she frequented on a daily basis. She seemed to wake up, a little more, as blocks went by.
“This place serves exclusively peanut butter sandwiches. Can you believe that? Who goes out and buys a peanut butter sandwich? Make it at home! It’s so easy!” she said.
“I know,” I said. “How lazy can you be?”
“Maybe there’s something special about them.” She shrugged, getting oddly contemplative about it. “I don’t know. I’ve never had them. I shouldn’t talk.”
We walked under the arch of Washington Square, passed a man wearing at least eight jackets, one on top of the other, and mumbling to himself about loyalty. We continued up Fifth Avenue, through the residential area with elegant apartment buildings and doormen in gray uniforms. From the street, you could glimpse into the marble lobbies. When we got to Sixth Avenue, she pointed out the bagel place, a navy awning and two benches outside it. When we got closer, I noticed that the windows were foggy. We opened the door to about twenty people lined up, almost to the door. Apparently, this was where everyone was. It smelled like freshly baked bread and coffee and everything I wanted at that moment to get myself feeling right again. We stood at the end of the line.
“What are you gonna get?” I said, to break the silence that had set in, again.
“Umm . . .” She looked up at the menu, written on a chalkboard, and then at the bins of bagels. Each one had a small sign on it, POPPY, SESAME, WHOLE WHEAT, EVERYTHING. Eve looked at each sign like she was studying the metaphysical differences between them.
As we stood there inching along, taking small steps that felt like progress, we got closer and closer to the bins of bagels, but it wasn’t easy between us. We talked a lot about Glick, his cagey trips to Atlantic City, whether he had a gambling problem. The atmosphere in the bagel place didn’t help, with the chaos of people ordering and paying, everyone trying to get their bagels and then get out as quickly as possible. People were shouting at the employees behind the counter, who listened and then ducked between and behind one another. The whole situation required some strategic maneuvering or you’d get bulldozed by the person behind you. It wasn’t the ideal atmosphere for holding down a conversation, but we did our best.
When we finally got our bagels, coffee, and an orange juice, we got a table that was wedged in a row of six other tables, all too close together. The guy next to us was sitting by himself and had his nose in the newspaper, which seemed promising. At least we wouldn’t have to listen to him yammering away, which was more than we could say about the guy on the other side of us, who was pontificating to a girl who looked half his age about the best seafood he ever ate, which was “surprisingly!” in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But then, even the guy with the newspaper betrayed us. Every few minutes, we would hear a sucking sound coming from his direction. He was smacking his lips as he ate. Eve and I took turns looking over at him. At first, it was no big deal, but after his eighth or ninth smack, we paused, fed up.
She mouthed: Should we kill him?
I laughed, and it melted some of the tension between us. I decided that as soon as we got out of there, I was going to ask for her phone number.
Unfortunately, it was at this exact point when she started to leave. She said she had to go and apologized. She got up, riffled through her bag, got out her wallet, threw a few dollars down onto the table, even though I’d already paid. Hadn’t she seen me pay? Doesn’t she know I’m the type of guy who pays for bagels?
Then, she crumpled up her mostly uneaten bagel in its wrapper and tossed the ball into the garbage and, with a hand gesture that was a cross between a wave and a salute, left. I sat there for a few seconds, trying to register what had just happened.
I stood and caught up with her outside on the street, halfway down the block, as confused as I can say I’ve ever been, with one or two poppy seeds stuck between my teeth.
“What’s going on?” I said. She turned.
“You’re a nice guy and all!” she said. “But I can tell from your breakfast suggestion . . .” Her eyes wandered off.
“You can tell what from my breakfast suggestion?” I smiled. “That I wanted . . . breakfast?”
“I can just tell that you’re looking for someone . . . to date. Maybe even seriously. But you don’t want me.”
“Huh?”
“Trust me,” she said. And then, on Twelfth Street and Sixth Avenue, in front of a closed-down Village Wine & Spirit Shop, she gave me an awkward hug. It was so bad that I would forever think of this spot as the Site of the Awkward Hug. I remember thinking that it was the worst in the history of hugs, her body a safe distance from mine, her hands barely touching my shoulders. We went toward each other at different moments. I was going in as she was going out. Half of her was already running off.
“Don’t tell anyone what happened,” she said, rustling through her bag, looking for something.
“I couldn’t even tell you,” I answered.
When she left, I went back inside. I’d never seen someone pull something like that. I glanced at our table, the empty chairs pushed away from it. There was only a sad piece of my bagel left in its parchment paper. From the evidence, it looked like I’d been eating alone.
Underneath the chair that she’d been sitting in, I noticed a small, white rectangular card and what appeared to be a folded-up receipt. The two slips of paper stood out against the wood floor. I went to pick them up. They must have fallen out of her wallet. She’d gone through her bag so quickly, in such a rush to get away from me, but why? I took them from the floor. I unfolded the receipt. It was from a music store. Well, that made sense.
I flipped over the card. It was an old card. I could tell because the grain of the paper was worn and soft, the print was faded:
JOSEPHINE PORTER
Executive Assistant
Callahan & Gibbs, LLP
Two World Trade Center
The font was red and familiar. It was a business card from the law firm where my father was a partner. And it had a woman’s name on it, that, with a sinking feeling, I knew I recognized. It was coming to me, in an immense rush of clarity. I felt lightheaded, like the blood had run out of my face, like my feet were the only things connected to the floor.
The foundation beneath me had cracked wide-open and nothing mattered anymore.
My father went into work that day like it was any other day. He did his usual routine—the sound of his alarm clock once, twice, three times. He always did push-ups and sit-ups in the living room, in his boxers and a white T-shirt, his hair sticking straight up. He showered while my mother cut up some fruit for him in the kitchen. He emerged twenty minutes later and devoured it all. Then, he opened up a carton of yogurt that stunk up the entire kitchen. He went at it with a big spoon. I hated the smell, and told him that, often.
I imagined him in his car, sitting in traffic, listening to the Eagles or one of his “coffeehouse” or “light music” radio stations that he reserved for his morning commute. I pictured him getting to his building, always careful not to touch any doors or other people, opening the doors with his foot, touching the elevator button with his knuckles. He was afraid of germs and, as far as I knew, not much else.
He was at his desk for ten minutes, he said, when he heard something hit the other tower. So I pictured him, sitting there with his coffee, his eyes lazy and scanning his in-box, getting disrupted by something from the outside world. The news came that it was a plane. Nobody said anything about terrorism. They thought it was just some accident, some terrible freak thing. But then it quickly turned more horrific, as they saw a gaping hole in the building, the violent flames inside of it, papers flying everywhere, and people jumping to their deaths. They could see only the silhouettes of human forms moving, earthbound and freeing themselves, dropping down against the setting of 22,000 eighteen-inch-wide windows. I learned about the construction of the towers in school. The windows were meant to be narrow, so that people who were afraid of heights would feel secure inside the building. They had to be built to bear the weight of the interior floors, but also to withstand the pressure of the wind.
My dad said that anyone who went toward the window to look out at the other tower quickly recoiled or shrieked at the dreadfulness. “It just got so, so hot,” he said. “I could feel the heat on my face, like I was standing next to an open oven.” At this point in the story, I usually interrupted him, because I knew what he was about to say, and I yelled, “How could you not leave right when you saw that? How could you not get the fuck out of there? Why would you even think about staying?” I told him that I would have been gone. Out of there. As fast as my legs could take me. He always said a variation on the same thing: Yes, you say that now, but we had no idea another plane was coming. No idea! Who could have imagined? We thought we were the lucky ones. Lightning didn’t strike twice. He decided to stay. He said most of the partners were staying. That also killed me, when he said that. As if any kind of law firm structure mattered, in a situation like that. They told their secretaries to stay.
But after a few minutes, his secretary started packing up to leave. She said, “If they’re going to stay, then that’s their choice to make. We have to get out of here. I have two daughters at home. They already don’t have a father. They’re not going to lose their mother too.” She convinced him to leave with her. He thought she was being kind of dramatic. She was a bit of a worrier, to begin with. But he went with her, if only to keep her company. She was very fragile, always. And at that moment she seemed particularly unhinged. When they got down to the lobby, he said, “I’m just going to get my car out of the garage. I’ll drive you home.” She lived on the Upper East Side. He figured he’d do her a favor.
“Get your car? Are you crazy?” She practically dragged him out of the building.
The world was ending, and my dad was going to get his car. But that was how he was. Calm under pressure. Growing up, my dad was the only relaxed presence in our house. My brother was always going at it with my mom. My mom fought with my dad. She didn’t believe in going to sleep angry, so she had a crackerjack strategy of just screaming like hell at him before they went to bed. She’d do strange things sometimes, like rearrange all the furniture in the middle of the night. But my dad knew how to calm her down. He knew how to grab her by the shoulders and speak in a solid voice and generally stop the madness. That was how their relationship worked.
That’s why I am 100 percent certain that, left to his own devices, he would not have left his office. Thus, it wasn’t his wisdom—it never would have been his wisdom—but hers, this woman who I’d never even met, who saved his life. And that was why he made it safely out of the building. That was why, when the elevator made its final trip down, from among the one hundred and ten floors to the lobby, my dad was on it.
But he was one of the lucky ones. On Vesey Street, they heard a loud noise, a blast, like those heard in thousands of movies, going off above them. A plane had hit the second tower. The ground trembled beneath their feet, and they could see the building sway. His secretary ran in one direction, and my father ran in the other. And that split-second decision that they both made on Vesey Street—or what was once Vesey Street but then a haze of smoke and fire—was the difference between life and death. He never saw her again. Falling debris, everyone said.
Her funeral was later, and I remember how in the weeks following September Eleventh, guilt literally enveloped him. He felt this crushing sense of regret that he’d told her to stay. I walked in on him once watching television with his head in his hands. I heard him say to my mother, who was sitting next to him with her hand on his back, “Why didn’t we leave right away? Why did I tell her to stay?” He felt so responsible. And in a way, in this one dreadful way, he was.
I remember feeling guilty about it too, like my own relaxed nature, inherited from him, was somehow at fault. I had some stupid reason I didn’t go to the funeral, some school-related thing that I was behind on, but really I just didn’t want to face it. This woman had a daughter who was my age. Fuck. I didn’t want to see that. I had just nearly lost my father. It was “okay” for me not to go. My parents accepted my excuse. And that was kind of it. But I knew the plain truth. I didn’t want to face it, and there was a word for people like that, for eighteen-year-old me. Gutless.
Now, as I turned the card over and over in my palm, I felt like that same eighteen-year-old kid. I put the card in my wallet and left the bagel place, my mind unwilling to comprehend what this would mean to Eve when—if—she found out. When—if—I ever told her.
Like I said, gutless.
I’d probably never see her again anyway.