by Maren Foster
“Mmmm, maybe just the most important ones,” I teased.
“You wish,” he said. “Oh wait, we need to go down there.” He pulled me toward an elevator and a sign for 16th Street. We snuck in just as the doors were closing, to disapproving looks from those inside.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we emerged onto 16th Street.
“You’ll see,” he said, crossing the street ahead of me.
We walked into a stately brick building with an ornate, illuminated arch for an entrance. “Chelsea Market” was painted on the brick wall followed by a listing of epicurean experiences.
We stopped at a spice shop and I asked for a sample of turmeric. I enticed Adam to smell it. He leaned in and inhaled, then drew back, surprised by the pungent fragrance and let out a forceful sneezed.
I laughed and he laughed with me, poking his fingers into my ribs and then pulling me toward him playfully.
“Gotcha!”
“You did,” he agreed.
I smiled at the girl behind the counter and we moved on to the next attraction.
At a jewelry stand on the second floor he tried to guess which of the sparkly pieces was my favorite. When he finally got one right: a gold necklace with delicate iridescent beads strung haphazardly, he fastened the clasp behind my neck and admired the way it fell just above my neckline.
“I’m buying this for you,” he insisted.
“You can’t.”
“Think of it as a ‘welcome to New York City’ present,” he said. “Something to remember this day.”
Eventually I let him buy it and wore it as we walked back out into the bright summer sun.
We followed the rest of the High Line to Gansevoort Street and then took Washington to one of the piers that jutted out into the Hudson River. Brave New Yorkers were sunning themselves on the raised green space in the center of the pier. Adam pulled me to the end of the pier and we turned to admire the view of the New York skyline.
“Pretty great, isn’t it?” he said.
“It is.”
He put his arm over my shoulders.
“It’s good to have you in New York,” he said.
“I’m excited to be here.”
He leaned forward and kissed me. At first I couldn’t help myself. It had been a long time since we had let ourselves get swept up in the romance of a new place or the creation of a beautiful memory, and even longer since he’d tried to kiss me. It just felt right. I can’t do this, not right now. I can’t have any distractions right now, and getting romantically involved with Adam would be a major distraction. I have to stay focused on Nate.
I pulled away.
“What now?” he asked.
“I can’t.”
“Of course.” His disappointment was obvious.
I turned away. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you dating someone?” he asked.
“No, but there’s something I need to do first. I came to New York for something and I can’t be with anyone until it’s done.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you gave up on being a dancer a while ago.” He squinted in the bright summer sun.
“It’s not that. Four years ago something unforgiveable was done. A life was ruined and a life was taken, and it’s up to me to make sure that the person responsible pays.”
“Freddie, what are you talking about?” he said, using my nickname from childhood. Ugh, call me ‘Wyn’!
“I can’t tell you right now.”
“Are you ever going to be honest with me? If you’re not interested, just tell me.”
“It’s not about that. I am.”
“Then what? What are we waiting for?”
“This isn’t how I want it to be. I’ve tried everything else.” A tear ran down my cheek and Adam pulled me toward him. “It’s just, there’s no other way. I have no choice. There’s no justice in the right way. There’s only one thing to do and it’s up to me to make sure it’s settled.”
He looked confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Eventually you’ll understand.”
“Eventually. Always eventually.”
“I don’t want you to be complicit. It’s better if you don’t know.” I can’t tell him about Nate. I have to deal with this on my own.
“Should I be worried about you?”
“No, at least not yet.”
“Okay. Well, you know how I feel, but I’m here for you if you need me.”
I squeezed him tight. “Thank you.”
The Put-up
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Hell’s Kitchen
Sunday morning I woke up early, tossed and turned for a bit, but despite my best efforts, couldn’t fall back asleep. I wandered out for a walk. Turning down a side street, I watched an assortment of families and older couples flowing into a stately old church. Just what I need, perhaps. I watched from down the block until the last of the parishioners was inside. As I walked up to the front steps I saw a plaque that read, “United Church of Christ”. I’m a little underdressed but at least I’m not wearing jeans. I snuck in quietly and took a seat at the end of the very last pew. The cream-colored walls of the chapel were bathed in blue light. The mustard-colored marble columns that punctuated the pews glowed, and the cerulean blue ceiling was as bright as the cloudless summer sky outside.
My mind wandered through the early formalities but I listened intently as the pastor began her sermon; “We’ve all read the verse in Exodus, ‘But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’ And we have all surely read the passage in Matthew, ‘You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’, but what else does Jesus teach us about forgiveness?” she asked rhetorically. “You may also be familiar with the passage in Matthew, where Jesus instructs his disciples to forgive ‘seventy times seven times’. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a lot of forgiveness to me.”
The congregation let out a muffled approval.
I tried to distract myself but the memories flooded back: his strong hands around my wrists, the smell of his overpowering cologne, the abrasiveness of the cheap bedsheet against my face. How to forgive such a violation?
She continued, “Then in Luke, Jesus says that, ‘If there is repentance, you must forgive.’ As Christians, we know that we are called to turn the other cheek, but what should we do if we have been truly harmed. Now, I’m not talking about when someone cuts you off in traffic, or makes fun of your eclectic fashion sense.” She paused as the parishioners let out a self-conscious laugh.
“I’m talking about real harm. Intent to harm. We know that despite our devotion to God and to our savior, Jesus Christ, there are times in life when we may be vulnerable. Our Faith cannot protect us from all evil. How should we respond when we find ourselves in this situation? What should we do if the person who has harmed us does not repent? Will not repent? Are we called to forgive in the absence of repentance? Let us look to the Bible for our answer,” she proclaimed.
“During the crucifixion, Jesus does not forgive his unrepentant attackers. The man who embraced sinners and healed the sick with his bare hands prays to God to forgive his attackers. In this moment, when he is tested, he asks for forgiveness for those who hurt him, but he does not forgive them unconditionally. In fact, look again and you will see that Jesus never says that unconditional forgiveness is a virtue or a requirement of Christians. He does, however, in that very same Gospel of Luke, instruct his followers to ‘bless those who curse you [and] pray for those who abuse you’. So we can see through his example that we are called to pray for those who have sinned against us, but we are not expected to be tolerant of their abuse.”
She paused for effect.
“And so I say to you, good men
and women of God, if you know someone who is being harmed, or if you yourself have been harmed, remember this, in the absence of authentic repentance and reform, we are called to pray for our abusers and to support victims, nothing more. Let us pray.”
I bowed my head to pray. Dear God, please show him the error of his ways, open his heart to you, help him to repent and to become a better man so that he may not hurt another person the way he hurt me. But please, also grant me the strength and courage to seek justice and peace so that I too may someday live free from the weight of his sins. Bless both of our souls so that we may be healed, and so that we may know your love.
I waited and listened, hoping for some indication that I should keep going or turn back, but I was left with only silence and the insistent reverberations of my thoughts; an eye for an eye…wound for wound…he must pay for what he did.
I stepped outside and was invigorated by conviction. I will never find peace without justice.
Back at the apartment, I used my roommates hand steamer to prep my best suit for my first day of work, and set three alarms before finally falling asleep.
The first alarm woke me just after six-thirty, giving me plenty of time for the sixteen block walk to my new office. I checked in at the front desk and waited until a woman in her mid-thirties from Human Resources waved me back.
“Wynafreda, welcome.” She held out her hand.
“Call me Wyn please,” I said.
“This will be your desk.” She motioned to a small white cubicle barely separated from the desks on either side by a short white partition.
“Thanks.”
She handed me a piece of paper. “Here is your login information and the url for the training program that you’ll need to complete today. Ladies’ is down the hall, also coffee and tea. Let me know if you have any questions or need anything. Ethan will be by shortly to welcome you.”
“Great, thanks!” I said.
The woman sitting just a few feet in front of me looked up. “You won’t be so enthusiastic once you start the online training program,” she said.
She was slightly chubby with jet black hair and a few magenta streaks. She looked like she was in her late twenties or early thirties. She stood up to reveal black skinny jeans, high heels, and an oversized sweater.
“Noreen.” She held her hand out.
“Wyn.”
“Nice to meet you. Tell me to fuck off if I’m being too nosy. As you can see, it’s pretty hard to get any privacy around here.”
“Nice to meet you too,” I said.
She went back to typing for a minute and then looked up again.
“Have you met Ethan before?” she asked.
“At my interview, yes.”
“He has no budget and no real authority. He just assigns and checks our work for Alan.”
“Who?”
“Alan Donovan, head of marketing for the Northeast.”
“Oh.”
She lowered her voice, “Classic douchebag.”
I nodded. “Good to know.”
A woman in her late thirties or early forties and well-dressed walked toward us. She had that mom look which made it hard to tell exactly how old she was.
“Oh, you should meet Natalie.” Noreen’s tone was loud and exuberant again. “She’s great! She’s worked here forever and knows everything you’ll need to know to survive.”
“Jeez, you’d think I was a dinosaur,” Natalie said. “Nice to meet you.” She extended her hand. “And welcome.”
“Wyn,” I said. “Thank you.”
The rest of the day was uneventful. My boss, Ethan, introduced himself again and then disappeared. The online training was about process, procedure, and ethics, and by the end of the day I was jittery from all the coffee I’d consumed to stay awake.
Back at the apartment I opened Facebook on my phone and scrolled through my list of friends. Shit! Nate still hasn’t accepted my request. I need to find another way to get close to him. I need to get close enough to know what makes him tick and what weaknesses I can exploit.
I rescinded my friend request to Nate and invited myself over to Adam’s apartment in Brooklyn. Getting there was a hike, but Adam had a tiny studio to himself, so visiting him was also a nice escape from my roommates.
Just like old times, we turned on bad t.v. and lounged on his tiny couch.
“Do you remember this guy from Penn?” I said, holding up a picture of Nate on my cell phone.
“Don’t think so. Why?”
“No reason, just curious. He was in some 40 under 40 list recently.”
“Oh.”
“It says you are Facebook friends with him. Do you mind?”
“You’re the nosiest woman ever,” he said as he handed his cell phone to me. I typed in the month and day of his birth to unlock his phone, and then looked for the app.
“You don’t have Facebook on your phone.”
“No, I don’t. That shit is a waste of time.”
“Yeah, yeah. You say that, but where do you go when you want to know if some girl is single,” I teased.
I downloaded the app and put in his email address and his usual password as a first guess. Bingo!
Sure enough, Nate appeared alphabetically in the list of Adam’s friends. I pulled up Nate’s profile, and clicked on “About”.
Works at Ellis Enterprises, Inc.
Studied at University of Pennsylvania
Lives in New York
From Westport, CT
Gender Male
Birthday July 29, 1990
Political Views Conservative
Interested In Women
Relationship Single
I scrolled through the photos of Nate: with his buddies at a golf outing, with his mom at his college graduation, with his sister in Europe. Then a few photos from a weekend in the Hamptons with friends. A photo of him at a black tie event, accompanied by a slender (to be honest, anorexic) young woman. Her arm wrapped around his.
The next woman was bustier than the first, followed by a series of women, each rivalling the next in beauty, bustiness, and thinness. There’s no question he has a type.
The majority of the photos and posts documented a wealthy partying lifestyle, but about six months earlier the nature of his posts had changed, dramatically. Instead of pictures of him partying with beautiful women, the more recent photos were of particularly gorgeous sunrises over the Upper Bay or artistic shots of the City. There was a photo of the Hudson Bay on a clear day with a line of cargo ships stretching into the distance, and another one of the Brooklyn Bridge lit up at night. Hobby photographer? There was a post a few months earlier from a conservative leaning magazine that I skimmed and found to be relatively intellectual, titled, “The spiritual dearth of modern life.” Maybe he’s changed? Yeah right!
I perused the various Facebook locations where Nate had checked-in over the past year. There were the expected local, regional, and international tourist attractions, like the Empire State Building, restaurants and bars in the Hamptons, and a beach on Nantucket Island. There was also a cluster of check-ins at bars and restaurants on the Upper West Side, and a fancy gym that was a few blocks from my apartment.
He’s clearly in good shape based on his photos. Maybe I should join that gym. If I’m lucky, I’ll run into him there and can make small talk. Then again, I don’t have money for a gym membership and what if he doesn’t actually belong there. The idea of working out was completely off-putting, but I needed to see him, meet him, get his attention, capture his interest.
A few days later I went to the swanky gym that he’d checked-in at and told the receptionist that my boyfriend had left his membership fob in the locker room earlier and asked if she could check to see if anyone had turned it in. She looked up Nathan Ellis in her system and said that she could see that he’d checked in earlier that morning but no fobs had been turned in for his account. He is a member! I thanked her for checking and headed to the membership office.
I si
gned a contract for a membership that amounted to essentially all of the money I had budgeted for clothes and other unnecessary items, but it would be worth it if it meant an opportunity to meet him, seemingly by chance.
The Put-up
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Upper West Side
The summer days were warm and bright. It had been a few weeks since I’d joined the gym and despite the occasional early morning workout, going back after work, and spending far more time at the gym on weekends than I’d have liked, I hadn’t seen Nate. I was about to give up and had thought about cancelling my membership when I caught a promising glimpse. It was a Saturday morning, not too early but not late either. He was dressed in mesh basketball shorts, a worn-out cotton t-shirt, and running shoes. He had earbuds in and walked past the elliptical on which I was struggling to find a rhythm. I couldn’t believe it at first and did a double-take. I hadn’t seen him in more than three years; what if I don’t recognize him. My heart began to beat faster. For a moment I wasn’t sure, but then he turned to fill up his water bottle and I saw the back of his t-shirt, which read:
Westport High School
Class of 2008
Yep, that’s him. He turned toward me and I instinctively looked away.
I struggled to catch my breath. I looked down and noticed that my hand was shaking. As he walked right past me again, it felt like something heavy fell on my chest. Oh God! A sense of intense weakness washed over me. My head suddenly felt as light as air, like it was floating, disconnected high above my shoulders. I don’t feel well. Is this how it feels before you faint? I managed to hold it together until he was out of the room. I grabbed my stuff and ran to the single stall bathroom behind the check-in desk, locking the door behind me. Calm down! I just need to relax. I sat on the toilet and leaned back, closing my eyes. Breathe! I clasped my hands together to keep from shaking.
Awhile passed before someone knocked on the door. “Anyone in there?” A woman’s voice called with concern.
“Yeah, one minute.” I splashed cold water on my face before opening the door.
“Are you okay?” A woman wearing the all-black staff uniform asked.