BEN
93 SECOND AVENUE, BETWEEN FIFTH AND SIXTH STREETS, EAST VILLAGE
Three weeks later, I was on Second Avenue and Fourth Street at around eleven at night, trying to decide where to get pizza. I was pretty drunk and hungry and had the wherewithal to know that I should probably sober up a little before getting on the train. I was debating between East Village Pizza on Ninth and First and Stromboli Pizza on Saint Marks and First. I was about to turn right on Fifth Street to go to Stromboli when I changed my mind. Stromboli, though commonly thought of as the best pizza in the East Village, was a tourist trap. East Village Pizza was better. More of a locals’ spot. So I kept going straight on Second Avenue instead of turning right, and that was when I ran into Eve. She was standing between two restaurants, underneath a black, unmarked door.
“Hi,” I said cautiously, as if approaching a small animal in the woods that could get freaked out by sudden movements.
“Oh! Hi!” She seemed happy to see me. I guess because she was alone.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m about to go to some concert. What are you doing here?” She was different from how she was at the bagel place. More like the girl she was the night before that, on Saint Marks. Fun. In the mood to play.
“I’m about to go get some pizza.”
She smiled. “Interesting . . . do you want to come with me instead?”
I looked at her for an extra second, because my brain hadn’t quite caught up. It felt like a trick. And then I said all right, despite our less-than-stellar breakfast, because all right, I’d play. Game on. Also, she was wearing this short-sleeved dress, striped, blue and white, that hugged her closely on top and scooped down in the front, not so low that you could see anything but just almost; and hanging out with her, compared to whatever other options I had for the end of the night, still sounded better. As I said, I was drunk and hungry.
I stood inside Lit Lounge with her, and everything that I’d been thinking before just kind of flew out of my head. Whatever happened in the past was so far away. There was something exciting about her. And I had short-term memory. Should I ask her about the card? Her mother? Maybe later. Things were going well, and I had a feeling that the revelation I needed to make had the potential to blow it all up, especially with someone like Eve.
I decided to talk around it, first.
“So what was the deal?” I said, while we waited at the bar for the show to start. “Why did you leave like that?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, turning toward me. “It was stupid of me. I just freaked out!”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!” she said, covering her face with her hands. Every now and then, a dark bra strap appeared at one shoulder, and she’d adjust and tuck it away. It was an innocent-looking dress, girlish, which contrasted sharply with her black nail polish, the faint impression of rebellion.
“You don’t know why you freaked out?”
Her dark hair was parted on the side and tied back. Her lips were pink, but she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
“Yeah, but I do that a lot. So don’t flatter yourself!”
Flatter myself?
“I don’t know . . . I guess it wasn’t just ‘breakfast,’ it was just the whole idea of breakfast. Nobody has ever asked me to get breakfast before, after, you know, sleeping over. It seemed so serious.”
“Breakfast?”
“Yes! After a first hookup? I almost called the police.”
“Oh yeah? What would you have said?”
She smiled. “Oh, they would have understood. I would have asked for a female cop.”
I had no idea she would interpret it that way. I shrugged. “Okay.”
“Let me make it up to you?” Her smile got bigger. “We’ll have fun now.”
She looked at me excitedly and then took my hand.
“C’mon! C’mon!” She dragged me across the room by the arm. “The music is downstairs, in the basement. They call it the Lit Dungeon.” She raised her eyebrows. I followed her down a spiraling staircase. “Between noise complaints, underage drinking, and drugs, this place has gotten into trouble, like, a thousand times, but they’ve somehow managed to stay open, and you have to respect that, you know? At one point, the owner even had this crazy policy where the staff would steal your belongings when you weren’t looking, wait for you to report it stolen, then give it back to you, and that’s how they would warn you about leaving your things unattended.”
“That is exceedingly stupid.”
“Oh, I agree.”
“Are you going to write about this show?” I asked her, as we made our way down into the darkness.
“Yeah,” she replied. “I think I might. Another one of my famous articles!” She looked down and laughed a little self-deprecatingly. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just that, you know, people don’t go to Voice for the articles. They go there to steal music.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “They’re putting the articles there for a reason.”
The basement was lit up by a red light. The space was small, dark, and grimy, with a low ceiling. The stage had red Christmas lights above it, strewn across the ceiling in a line that wasn’t straight. A guitarist and a drummer came out onstage and started to set up. A few in the crowd whistled. The drummer wiped his face with a towel and straightened his baseball cap. The guitarist took a sip from the drink that he’d brought out with him. He was dressed in black and had his back toward us. We were standing in front of the drummer, who kept fidgeting in his seat.
“Is there anything I should know about this band?” I said.
She shook her head.
“I don’t know much about music,” I admitted.
“Neither do I,” she said.
I looked at her curiously. “You work at Voice!”
“Yeah, but I don’t really know about music, not the way that some people do. Some people have this encyclopedic knowledge of music history and albums and bands.” She scanned the crowd. “I just know when I like something and I feel really strongly about it. And when I like it, I let it take over. I let it trigger feelings, memories, whatever emotions come up. That’s the key. Just see if you like it,” she said. “See if it affects you. And then let yourself be affected.”
I looked at her bra strap. She twirled around at the sound of the drummer cracking his drumsticks together, his elbows waving in the air, and then he started, his whole body propelling forward. Eve was in front of me and started to move to the beat. We kept getting pressed up against each other, because of the crowd, which was good because we were in that weird in-between period when you’ve hooked up once or twice but you don’t want to hold hands or even make bodily contact in real life because everything is very unclear. But being at the concert made it easier, because we were forced to touch each other and it broke the ice without either of us really realizing it.
At first, I touched her hips accidentally, and then it wasn’t long before I did it on purpose because it seemed like I could get away with it. Her body looked great and it took a lot out of me to be restrained, but I knew I had to be. She rested back into me every now and then. I was buzzing and she was smiling, really trying to be nice to me. I could tell. It was just like the night we hooked up, the night she’d cast her weird Eve spell on me and made me follow her home like a puppy. She was the same way tonight, like something had cracked open inside of her. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I didn’t want to ruin it, to send her back into her other mode of being—the Eve I knew in college who said hello and kept walking, the Eve who sat at a bagel place without talking. She had this shell around her sometimes, but not now. I let her dance, the skirt of her dress sweeping back and forth in front of me. Every so often, I put my hands on her sides, in borderline innocent places, always borderline.
After a few songs, she leaned into me and whispered, “Do you like them?”
“What?” My eyes drifted down from her eyes slightly, and then I thought, Shit, and yanked them back up.
“The band?”
I shrugged. “Oh. Yeah. It’s good.”
She waited, moving a bracelet up and down on her wrist. “That’s it?”
I was at a loss. “I like it. It’s good.”
“Yeah, but how does it make you feel?”
I really was at a loss. Was there music playing? I had no idea. I couldn’t think of anything at all except touching her.
“I feel like I want to kiss you, and the fact that there’s a drumbeat in the background doesn’t really matter to me.”
“But you want to kiss me more here than you would if we were outside on the street,” she said.
“I don’t think so.” I stared at her mouth. “I think it’s about even.”
She squinted the way she did when she was suspicious of something. “You’ve been slammed too many times against the boards,” she said. “You’ve sustained emotional brain damage. It’s a good thing I’m here. Oh! You know what we should do after this?”
“What?” I said, still thinking through what she’d said, piecing it together. I was stuck on emotional brain damage.
“We should try to sneak backstage with my credentials!” She grabbed hold of my elbows until she was fully against me.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay? That’s it?” She smiled. “Not big on words, huh?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but when I say okay, I mean it in the grandest sense of the word.” She laughed, moved away, and widened her eyes at the sound of the first few notes of a song that she liked. She turned back around.
“You’re going to think I’m so much less cool once I get us sent to Lit Lounge jail!” She pulled away and then came toward me again. “They probably have a jail for assistants and interns who try to pass themselves off as legitimate people, right?”
I studied the crowd—it was a mix of young people standing up and older people sitting at the bar. The people in front of us kept yelling for some song, worried they weren’t going to play it.
I just kept watching Eve.
Once the concert was over, we walked to the far end of the space and Eve opened the door to some back room, like it was something she did all the time. “I just want to try to ask the band a few questions! One or two quotes for my article would be a game changer!”
I followed her and we waited for a bouncer to consult a list that Eve and I weren’t on.
“Could you check with Kim?” she said, when he failed to let us in. “She said that it would be okay for me ask the band a few questions after the show.”
The bouncer looked confused but then left to consult with someone.
“Who is Kim?” I asked, once he’d left.
“I have no idea!” She leaned into me to say. “It sounds like it could be someone though, right? Kim?”
I gave her a puzzled look.
“I just thought that if I dropped a name, it would add an air of authenticity to our story.”
“Ah.”
It was freezing in this room. It had a window open. As we waited, Eve started snapping her fingers, tapping her shoes against the ground, which echoed throughout the stairwell.
“Oh, by the way, you left this behind,” I said, taking the business card out of my wallet and handing it to her, testing the waters.
She closed her eyes and took the card and held it against her chest. “Thank you,” she said, and then put it in her wallet. “I was so afraid I’d lost it.”
“Is that . . . was that . . . your mother?” I stuttered out. Feigning ignorance felt like the safest approach. But I also knew that by handing her that card, by asking her that question, I was officially hiding something from her.
“Yep,” she said, and there it was. Simple as that. Thud. She was confirming what I already knew, but it didn’t seem real until this moment. The woman on the card was my father’s secretary, and she had two daughters and one of those daughters was Eve. She continued talking, but I could only half hear what she was saying. It was all fuzzy, like someone had lowered the volume without my permission.
“I was afraid I’d lost it, and I don’t like to lose things,” she said. “I lost a glove once and I was devastated.”
“Over a glove?” I managed to say, though I still hadn’t come back to reality. And then I remembered something else, once she said the word glove. It was a story that my father told me when I was younger. Every now and then, his secretary, Eve’s mother, would come up in conversation. It was a snow day and my brother and I were fighting over who got to use the car, and he wanted us to realize just how stupid our fight was. He told us this story of how his secretary came into work on a cold winter morning and her hands were all red and she was blowing on them. He asked her why she didn’t wear her gloves and she said, “I gave them to my daughter this morning.” Well, he shut us up right then and there. There were families out there that didn’t have enough gloves to go around. It stopped us dead in our tracks.
Eve laughed. “I wrote a song about my gloves. Not these,” she said, looking down at her hands. “A glove that I lost once. Do you want to hear it?”
“The song?” I didn’t know what she or I were really saying. I was too busy feeling half exhilarated that I’d gotten away with giving her back the card without explaining my connection to it, and half guilty as fuck.
“I’m not going to sing it, but I’ll tell you the words.” She semisang it to me in a more high-pitched voice than was natural, holding a glove with each of her hands and moving them in unison, as if they were doing a coordinated dance number, which, apparently, they were.
“Why?” I asked, when she was finished.
“It’s how they feel about each other!” she said. “It was the saddest day. They’ve been together for so long! They’ve gone everywhere together! Imagine the life that it’s living now, one without the other. . . .”
I thought about the gloves and her mother and how it all made Eve seem “good” but not in a moral sense. I could tell that she was caring and kind but not necessarily in a maternal way. What was it? Okay, she was cute. I couldn’t help the fact that she was cute. I had nothing in common with her, in terms of interests or profession or ways of interpreting the world, but she was just so graceful; even the way her eyes wandered a room had a certain grace or charm or something. I felt like I could have watched this girl make ramen soup and she would have done it with this kind of naturally caring disposition.
“I have to say, I’ve never imagined the life that my gloves would be living, if they didn’t have me.”
“Never?” She couldn’t believe it.
“Nope.”
She shrugged. “I think about what my possessions would do without me all the time.”
“That’s pretty odd.”
We were quiet for a minute. As we stood there waiting for the bouncer to return, I took a stab at a few different topics, none of which really worked. I felt something like panic coming over me. This is the bagel place all over again! It’s bagel-con 1! The highest level of emergency bagel preparedness! But then, I had a sudden idea. It was like a challenge, dealing with Eve. It was a game where we were down two goals in the third period. It was a building concept with an undetermined support system. I would tell her about my father, about this random connection between us. Maybe it would bring us closer. Or maybe it would ruin the entire night. I wasn’t ready to find out.
So instead, I reached into my coat pockets and took out my gloves. I put them next to hers.
“Do you think they like each other?” I said, looking down at my crummy brown gloves next to her green ones.
She smiled. Ah-ha. Got her.
“It is way too soon to tell,” she said.
After finally getting turned down, we made our way back upstairs. We took two seats at the end of the bar and ordered drinks. There was a guy sitting there with long hair and tattoos all over his arms, talking to the guy next to him, who had a scruffy beard and a leather vest, about the “Disneyfication” of the East Village.
“Like, look at him,” one said to the other, pointing to a young guy walking toward us wearing a polo shirt and khakis. “His outfit is classic. This place used to be Studio Fifty-Four and bathroom coke parties, and now it’s garbage Top Forty and NYU kids.”
The other man nodded. “I guess the word got out that Lit girls were easy! There are sharks in the water, man!”
“I’m telling you. The prices have gone up. There’s a freaking cover. This gentrification has gotten out of hand ever since the yuppie community board declared war on meaningful nightlife.”
Eve smiled at me. “I think we’re part of the problem,” she whispered conspiratorially. “We should remain inconspicuous.”
“All right, I’ll cancel the Shirley Temples,” I said, turning toward the bartender.
“Shhhhhh!” she said, covering my hand with her hand. “Don’t even joke! What’s the most hard-core thing we could order? Tequila? Order us tequila!”
I kept her hand there, running my fingertips along her fingertips. She took a breath. She didn’t lift her head. “What?” I asked, trying to hide how happy I was with where all this was going, but she didn’t reply, and that was okay. If she was feeling what I was feeling, it was okay. I could tell that she was close to leaving with me. My knees were tapping against her knees. I drained my beer and then paid the check, with either money or a dry-cleaning receipt. No idea.
Outside, there were people lined up on the street behind a rope, waiting to get into the next show, which started after midnight. They were all wearing big, shapeless coats and constantly moving to keep warm, bouncing up and down against the cracked pavement.
“All right, so come home with me,” I said. I could see my breath in the air. Her cheeks were chilled pink. I looked to reach for her hands, but they were covered in gloves already.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked away, settled her eyes on the ATM that was next to her and covered in black-and-white stickers and dark red graffiti, signs that read things like: GBGB WAS HERE, LOVE ME, and THE DARKNESS. We were standing in front of a Thai restaurant, our legs next to a sandwich board advertising today’s specials—crabmeat fried rice, kai kua noodle, drunken noodle. The specials were written in pink chalk, in haste. I looked down at them, not wanting to stare directly at Eve, as her face turned confused and then to considering.
I had her thinking about it. I had this girl’s attention. But who knew for how much longer?
I looked up. I went and kissed her, and it was a damn good kiss. It was actually perfect. When I moved away from her, I saw that she was about to change her mind. She squinted at me.
“I don’t want to go to New Jersey.” She smiled.
“Nobody does,” I said, and then lifted her up and carried her to the Ninth Street PATH station.