by Rachel Cohn
There’s no way for me to know she’ll find me here. I didn’t call. I didn’t text. I left it up to that old connection, that old friendship sense.
It’s like Naomi always used to say: Life tells you to take the elevator, but love tells you to take the stairs.
I’m counting on that. And I’ve been counting on it for almost an hour now.
I’m about to give up, but I stop. I always try to last at least three minutes longer than giving up.
I’m here, Naomi. I’m here.
The door opens, and I hear the clomp of her Docs. Even harder than resisting the impulse to give up is resisting the impulse to run.
The fact that you think of yourself as a runner is what makes you run. Stop that.
Now: moment of truth. She sounds like she’s reached about floor eight, coming down . . . DOWN . . . and . . .
The Docs stop. She notices me.
And I notice her. I notice something’s happened. I notice she’s as beautiful as ever, but that she hasn’t put any thought into it. I notice she needs sleep and conversation and a kiss from someone who isn’t me. I notice she’s still angry at me but that there are other emotions there as well. I notice her the way you notice the differences in someone who’s been away a long time. And it hasn’t been a long time. It’s only been long for us.
It’s not easy, I remind myself. It’s not easy for any of us.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she says.
This, especially, isn’t easy.
I look at the Naomi + Ely equation on the wall. I want to think we still add up.
I will not be intimidated by the differences between now and then. I know the blue comfort sweater she’s wearing, and I know who she broke up with the day she bought those jeans, and I was the one who convinced her to buy those Docs, which look even better now that they’re scratched and worn. Now all I need to do is take all of this history, all these associations, and turn them from a tense present into a present tense.
This is our corner. We’re inside the force field. Nothing can hurt us.
“I think we should get married here,” I say. It’s so obvious.
Naomi sits down on the top stair, the edge of our corner, and rests her head against the wall. “Ely,” she says, “we’re never getting married. Never.”
She says it as if it’s some kind of revelation. Some kind of decision. But I’ve known this ever since I knew I wanted to be with guys. The only thing that’s a surprise to me is that it could have been a surprise to her.
“Oh, Naomi . . . ,” I say, sitting down next to her, leaning close.
She doesn’t lean back into me, but she doesn’t stiffen up, either.
“I’m so tired, Ely,” she tells me. “I don’t have the energy to be fighting you.”
“I never wanted to fight,” I say. “I never wanted any of this.”
I know what she’s thinking. If you never wanted any of this, why did you kiss Bruce the Second? I’ll plead guilty if I need to, but I won’t feel guilty. Even though it was the wrong start, I know it’s the right thing. For all of us.
And I guess I’m not the only mind reader in this dynamic duo, because now Naomi says, “Wouldn’t it just figure that the one time you’re monogamous and in love, it would be with my boyfriend?”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I probably screwed that up, too.” It hurts now that she hasn’t even been around to see it. To let me share it with her.
“Holy shit,” she says.
“What?”
“I said ‘monogamous and in love’ and you didn’t argue with me. You didn’t tell me to fuck off.”
“So?”
“So . . . that means it’s true. Wow.”
“Is that okay?” I ask cautiously. “Am I allowed to be in love?”
This would be the time for Naomi to lean into me. To pat me on the knee. To flirt.
She doesn’t. She just thinks about it. Then she says, “I’m fine.”
And it’s so clear she’s not.
“You lie,” I tell her.
“Fine,” she says again.
“Not fine.”
“Fine.”
I shake my head.
“Why do you lie?” I ask her.
“To cock-block truth.”
Fair enough.
Naomi goes on. “Where did we get it in our heads that we need truth all the time? Sometimes lies are nice, you know? You don’t have to know the truth all the time. It’s too exhausting.”
“These are all truths, Naomi.”
She smiles. “I know.”
“The No Kiss List,” I say.
“The No Kiss List is dead.” Naomi doesn’t seem sorry to see it go.
“Yeah. But we should’ve put ourselves on it.”
“I liked that lie.”
“So did I.”
“But not now.”
“No, not now.”
We are in such uncharted territory here. We had it all planned out, and in the past few weeks we’ve just taken an eraser to all of it. Our two different versions, which we hadn’t realized were different. The maps are gone. The fantasies are gone. A little bit of the trust is gone. But even if we’ve erased all the lines and trajectories . . . even if we’ve blotted out all the hints and intimations . . . the writing on the map is gone, but the paper’s still there. We are still here. You can’t just erase hope and love and history. At the very least, you’d have to burn it. And if we’re still here, we haven’t burned.
“Shit, Naomi,” I say.
“You’re such a fuckhead,” Naomi says.
And that’s when she leans into me. When the top of her hair tilts into my cheek. When her head rests against my shoulder. When her hand finds my hand, and we hold.
“Bruce, huh?” she says after a moment’s silence.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Bruce.”
“You screwed it up?”
“Maybe?”
“Well, unscrew it. It would really suck if we went through all this over nothing.”
I nod.
Naomi goes on. “I think I might have screwed it up with Gabriel, too. He kinda likes me. At least, I think he does. And I might want to try to like him back, only it’s weird, and the timing is bad, and I really don’t know what to do about it. Gabriel made this mix for me. I think I was supposed to take all this hidden meaning from it, but I have no fucking clue. Then I made him a mix back. It sucked.”
“Gabriel the doorman?” I ask.
“Jesus,” Naomi says, hitting me with the hand I’m not holding, “where have you been?”
I suppose this isn’t the time to tell her I’ve always thought Gabriel had big ears. Not freakishly big, but noticeable. Nice abs, though.
“So how can I help?” I ask.
“Do I even have to say it?”
“What?”
“God, we’ve got to get our wavelengths back in check. I need you to make a mix for me. I mean, a mix for him. Take his. Listen to it. Decipher. Then respond in kind. I’m too messed up right now to do it.”
“You want me to Cyrano hot Gabriel for you?” I ask her.
“Yup. You can make penance that way. Meanwhile, I can continue on my crash course with academic oblivion.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m failing Freshman Seminar and Comp Lit, thanks to stupendous lack of interest and effort. I fail those, I fail out of NYU.”
Zoinks. Naomi has a big fucking problem here—much bigger than I realized.
“I’ll help you. Let me write your papers.”
She lets go of my hand and places hers on my leg. Then she turns to look at me—just looks at me. “No, Ely. Maybe that worked in high school, but no more. Truth is, failing out of NYU will be the last incentive Mom needs. She won’t have to keep a job she hates so I can go to school there. That dream can die, too. Me going to college, and us clinging to the idea of Dad—those were the last lies we’ve had to live out. Maybe now we can move on. And move out.”<
br />
“You can’t move,” I say. I mean, she can’t.
“We’ll see,” she replies. But I can hear it in her voice: It’s going to happen.
“Don’t move too far,” I manage to say.
I’m petrified by the idea of her moving away. Even when we were fighting, even when things were bad, I took some grounding from the fact that she was here. The idea of her leaving completely makes me feel like the ground’s no longer there.
I guess she hears the desperation in my voice. The need.
“Oh, Ely,” she says, leaning closer.
“Oh, Naomi,” I say.
Is that all we need? Can the way we say each other’s names encompass all our history, all our love, all our fear, all our fights, all our reunions, all of what we know about each other, all of what we don’t know? Can that all be heard in the way she says “Ely” and the way I say “Naomi”?
I’m really not sure. But it’s what we have.
We start talking. About her mom. About Bruce. About Gabriel. About the Robins and Bruce the First. About the possible benefits of transferring to Hunter College.
“Are we okay?” I finally ask.
She looks at me, and for a second I’m afraid she’s going to say no. But instead she says, “Yeah, we’re okay. Everything’s changed, and you have to be ready to deal with that. But we’re okay.”
I can accept that. Just like I’ve accepted the fact that we’re never going to be married, I’ll have to accept the fact that she doesn’t believe it anymore, either. We’re where we need to be. It might not be as fun as it was before. But it’s necessary.
She kisses me on the cheek.
“Go get Bruce. Bring ’im back alive.”
I tell her I will . . . and then I’ll return to make her a kick-ass mix for Gabriel.
“No,” she says. “I changed my mind. I think there’s another way.”
I know better than to ask her for details. I take comfort in the fact that I’ll know them soon enough.
She gets up and I get up. As she starts to head back upstairs, I say to her, “Wait . . . weren’t you heading downstairs for a reason?”
She looks at me like I’m completely stupid.
“No,” she says. “I knew you’d be here waiting.”
And with that, she turns her corner, and I turn mine.
NAOMI
CLOSETS
I’m not drunk or stoned.
I may be crazy.
I don’t care.
I find him in the supply closet.
Yes, doormen have supply closets. These closets, strangely, do not contain spare doors or spare doorknobs or even spare men (as far as I can tell). That’s okay. I don’t need a door or a doorknob. I only need one certain doorman.
Gabriel looks at me like I’m jailbait, like he already knows why I’ve decided to intrude on the doorman’s one sanctuary, where they go to sneak smokes or to escape the Building residents during their fifteen-minute breaks or simply to find a spare lightbulb.
He’s sitting at the workbench, wearing large headphones that still can’t obscure his big ears. When he sees me, he glances at the clock on the wall, then turns off the music player and removes the headphones. “It’s two in the morning, Naomi. What are you doing here?”
He knows the answer.
I take my stand under the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.
Finally Gabriel says, “I could get fired for this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “I’m bound by the co-op board’s hatred of my family to tell you they’ll blame me, not you.”
He stands up, takes a step closer to me. “I’m bound by my own personal will to tell you I can’t not be this building’s doorman soon enough.” Even under the harsh light that exposes all facial blemishes (his dark skin reveals none), he’s so gorgeous my knees almost buckle from his nearness. But he doesn’t reach for me, though he’s close enough—he could. Perhaps he’s noticing the blackheads on my nose?
So what about the imperfections.
I tug the string hanging from the lightbulb over his head. Lights out. I close my eyes, angle my head, ready to make this happen.
But the light is back on. I open one eye to see: Gabriel is not in about-to-kiss-Naomi pose. His head is tilted, yes, but his confused expression seems to ask, What the hell is Naomi doing?
WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET A KISS OUT OF A BOY I LIKE, ANYWAY?
“The doorman code of conduct?” I ask Gabriel. What did I do wrong this time? Or is Gabriel one of those Madonna/whore guys who can’t deal with a girl who makes the first move?
“No, the gentleman’s code of conduct,” he says. “And, I don’t know, maybe needing better ambience? Like, not in a closet. Maybe dinner and a movie first?”
I really don’t know how to do this. When the stakes count. I am an idiot.
I turn around to leave, embarrassed, but he presses his hand against the door to keep it from opening. (He really is a bad doorman.) Then he places the softest, sweetest kiss ever on the back of my neck. “We’ll get there,” he whispers in my ear.
I got my kiss, I got my k-i-s-s.
We leave the supply closet to head back into the lobby. His pinkie finger intertwines into mine.
Awesome, as girl-Robin might say.
“Ely left something for you at the front desk.” Gabriel hands me a postcard of Buenos Aires, addressed to both me and Ely.
What I really wanted was an uno, dos, tres–threesome with both of you. Love and happiness, Donnie Weisberg.
I snort.
Damn. I really wish I wouldn’t do that in front of the guy I like.
But Gabriel must truly like me, because he ignores my near-snarf. He says, “Ely came down here, dressed all spiffy like he was going somewhere important, asked me to give you this like he knew I’d be seeing you tonight, and walked out like he was on a mission. Then he came right back through the door fifteen minutes later and hasn’t been back down since.”
Ely chickened out.
I am not having this. I took my stand. He was supposed to take his. That’s how we work.
I’m about to offer up an explanation for my sudden departure, but Gabriel just smiles at me. “Go,” he says, looking toward the elevator and pointing .
My key to Ely’s apartment is back under the doormat. I find him lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling.
A shiver runs through me, being back in Ely’s bedroom. It’s the same room as always, we weren’t apart that long, but still—it feels different. The expectation of what could happen here is gone.
The time will come soon enough when I arrive home, expecting to see Ely, but he will not be there, because Mom and I will no longer be here. It’s hard enough to imagine that Mom and I will eventually call some other building in this city our home; it’s harder to imagine a home could exist for me in a place removed from Ely; the hardest part is recognizing that the distance should happen.
I take Ely’s leather coat from his closet and put it on. I’m cold. And so not dumpy.
“He was totally in here the night we had that fight, wasn’t he?”
“Who? Where?” Ely mumbles. He looks comatose. Fearful. This isn’t an Ely I know. He’s a warrior. Isn’t he?
“Bruce the Second. In the closet.”
At the same time, Ely and I both exclaim: “With a candlestick!”
I pull the covers off him. “You’re getting your best suit all crinkly, lying around like that.”
“I ironed it,” Ely says. “Can you believe that?”
“Well, it must be true love, then, Ely. And you look beautiful in that suit.”
The timetable on the hurt is this: It still hurts. But less so. I can live with it. One day it may be gone.
He doesn’t say anything.
I try again. “Are you scared of being hurt?”
He thinks about it. Then: “No. I’m scared of hurting him. Like I hurt you.”
Somehow it’s a relief to hear him say this, for him to
acknowledge the difference in our feelings for one another, even if we can’t seem to talk about that difference. I don’t know that I could if I wanted to, anyway. The space filling the hurt and disappointment is still too big.
The wall was always there; we just chose to ignore it. Mostly, I chose to ignore it.
“Get up, Ely,” I say. My new mantra. I might be a faith healer in my next life. For now, I’ll probably settle for taking a time-out on the school thing and just get a job at Starbucks until Mom and I have figured out our next move. I’m thinking I will look great in that green apron. Maybe sometime in the near future, after many dinners and movies (hopefully he’ll pay, because I’m a girl who can make the first move, but I am majorly broke), Gabriel will see me wearing . . . only that green apron?
Ely stands up. I want to smooth out the creases in his suit, but I don’t. Instead I tell Ely about the secret spot where he can touch Bruce the Second, the place on his back that’s so tender to him Bruce will profess his undying love whether he means it or not.
I’m sorry. I can make my peace with it. I don’t think that means I have to like it.
“You’re a bitch,” Ely says. “But it’s good advice.”
I have a feeling Bruce the Second will mean it with Ely.
“I love you,” I say. I mean it in the best possible way.
Usually I’d kiss him on the cheek at this point—perhaps with the expectation/hope of more. I don’t now. I’ll save that energy for the maybe of Gabriel. Or some guy who is at least straight “Now, go. Run to him.”
The moms took us to see Peter Pan on Broadway when we were in second grade. I hated it. I wouldn’t clap for Tinker Bell. That stupid fairy could die and I wouldn’t care. But other parts, I got. I used to wish that if Ely and I ran fast enough, hard enough, together, the force of our energy could transform us, like Wendy and Peter Pan. Our legs would intertwine as they lifted us from the ground. We’d away. Ely just had to want it as much as me.
“ U 2,” he signs to me.
I almost tell Ely that Gabriel qualifies for the No Kiss ListTM as much as Bruce the Second does at this point, but I don’t. I want to keep this one for myself, for now.
So I just say, “.”
ELY
CLOSE