You

by Caroline Kepnes

  “No, Beck, this is an old building. Those marks are the history.”

  “When I was a kid, I wanted glass box walls. You know those frosted glass boxes? Like from the eighties?”

  “You like new things,” I say.

  You are quick to come back. “You like old things, Joe.”

  “I like it here,” I say and I look around the room. It’s smaller than I remember or maybe it’s just hot. I want you. “You think your new bed’s gonna fit in here?”

  “I had a queen before.”

  You’re wrong, because your old bed was a double and it barely fit but I can’t correct you. You lick your lips. “So, can I be your assistant?”

  “No,” I say. “But you can be my apprentice.”

  I always say the right thing to you and it was like that right off the bat. You like words and I know words and we toast for no reason and throw back our drinks and I stand first. I offer a hand to help you up and I’m holding one of your hands, and now both of your hands. This time you’re not letting go and I’m getting hard and you’ve got me with my back against your window and I can hear leaves rustle on trees. Cars swoosh up West Fourth, right through my gut. My senses, Beck, you turn me on, literally, and the wind nips at my back through the screen on the window. You take my hands and you slide them onto your hips, guiding. You maneuver my fingers one by one beneath the elastic waist of your threadbare sweatpants and anyone outside walking by could see us and you bring my hands lower and your butt is soft and yet hard and round and I’m cupping your ass and you let go of my hands and reach up and wrap them around my head and it’s on.

  You leap up and straddle me and I could walk from here to China with you wrapped around me and I walk across the tiny room and I have you against the wall and I’m kissing you and owning your ass and I like your heels in my back and your bed in a box and there’s a horrible sound at the door, metal on metal and a whistle and your legs drop to the floor and you straighten my hair and there is someone at the door.

  “Is your mom here?” I say and you lick your hand and tame my eyebrow.

  “Nope,” you say. “It’s Peach!”

  So it’s like that and you slide away. This is all wrong and this was our time and you run to the door and let Peach inside and I can’t hear you but I sure can hear her.

  “What is wrong with your hair?”

  You say something.

  She balks. “You’re not fucking the assemblyman from Craigslist?”

  You say something again.

  She groans. “Beck, dessert is supposed to come after dinner. What are you thinking when he hasn’t even built your bed?”

  Now you are loud and clear. “Joe!”

  I come when I am called and I nod hello to Peach and she fakes a smile.

  “Hi, Joseph,” she says. “Sorry to crash your party but our little friend here had originally hired someone to make her bed and, as her best friend, it was my duty to join just in case the worker was a luuuunatic.”

  “Well, surprise!” I exclaim and you laugh but Peach doesn’t and man, that vodka was strong.

  She looks at you. “Can I pee?”

  “Of course,” you say. “Are you having a flare?”

  “I am,” she says and she kicks off her sneakers and the smell of her self-indulgent, sweaty feet overwhelms the apartment and now she pulls her hot pink fleece over her birdy little head and throws it on the floor, not on the coatrack. She looks at me.

  “Joseph,” she says. “I know this is more than you want to know but I have a rare condition with my bladder called interstitial cystitis and when I have to pee, I have to pee.”

  “Be my guest,” I say and she stomps into the tiny bathroom and she doesn’t turn on the light. She knows your place. She knows that if she turns on the light, the fan will come on and she won’t be able to hear us. She doesn’t trust me. But she probably doesn’t trust anyone.

  I crack up a little but you shh me and motion for me to follow you into the bedroom and you are different now. “I am so sorry, Joseph,” you slip. “Joe.”

  “That’s okay. Is she all right?”

  “Have you ever heard of IC?”

  “I what?”

  “Interstitial cystitis,” you say and you are all best friend business now, tying your hair back with an elastic band and opening a scissor and tearing into the box. I take the scissor and finish the job and you pour more vodka for you, not me, and we’re not having sex and you’re not my apprentice anymore. Instead, I am hauling the bed frame and the bolts and the Allen wrench and all the little pieces out of the box and you are leaning against the window and smoking a cigarette the way you do sometimes. You’re telling me more than I ever wanted to know about interstitial cystitis and this is not how this was supposed to go down.

  “So it’s awful for her,” you say. “She can’t drink regular water, only Evian water. Almost all foods irritate her bladder and it’s impossible to predict when or what or why or how. She can’t eat any fast food and if she drinks alcohol, it has to be high pH like Ketel One or Goose, and ideally pear, because pears are soothing to the bladder. Anyway, the poor girl suffers. People think she’s being uppity but if she eats cheap stuff, her bladder can literally, like, break.”

  “She was doing shots of Jäger at her party,” I say.

  “Joe, don’t be like that.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just confused.”

  “It’s a complicated disease,” you say and I apologize again and you forgive me and you come over and rub my head and kiss my head but then you go back to the windowsill and I didn’t sign up to assemble this bed alone. I miss you. My hands were down your pants and now you don’t even look at me when you talk.

  “Sometimes, if she takes this special pill and she pads her bladder with a lot of goat cheese or milk or pressed pear juice, she can, you know, she can eat other things like Jäger or wheat.”

  “Sucks to be her,” I say and the instructions for the bed are in pictures. The only word in the whole eight-page brochure is IKEA. I am not a visual learner and your cigarette is making me sick.

  “It really does,” you say. “And I love Lynn and Chana, but they can be so rude with her. I mean they always want to go to pizza or whiskey places and they know Peach can’t eat that stuff but they still make these plans. It’s not very nice.”

  “She can’t eat anything at a pizza place?” I say and I never would have had that vodka if I knew I was gonna be handling a wrench. I thought I’d put this bed together in the morning, after I woke up with you naked in my arms on the couch in your living room.

  “Beck!” Peach calls. And she’s crying and it’s bullshit and I’m sure of it but you stub out your cigarette (and you don’t put it out completely, I have to finish the job), and you run away without so much as saying good-bye.

  The rich are difficult. You are drawn to their idiosyncrasies and their dramatics. I assemble your bed slowly and sing along quietly to your Bowie and it takes a long time, a long, lonely time and you’re out there with her and I can’t hear the two of you talking and I have never felt more alone in my life than I do when I tighten the last bolt on your bed. It is way too big for this room and I was right. I take the mattress leaning against the wall and drop it onto the new bed frame instead of sliding it on. I want you to come out here and clap and admire my work. But instead, you text me from the bathroom:

  I am SO sorry Joe. Peach is super sick and I don’t want to leave her alone. Is there any way you could do us a favor?

  What can I do but write back:

  Anything.

  Now you call for me to come so I walk over to the bathroom door. I don’t open it. And neither do you. I knock on the door. “At your service, ladies.”

  You open the door the tiniest bit and you smile. “Would you mind running to the deli and getting a bottle of Evian and a pear and some more ice?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Should I grab your keys?”

  You start to say yes but she nudges you, I th
ink, and you tell me to buzz when I get back. I don’t kiss you good-bye.

  It’s clear to me as I walk past Graydon Carter’s house and breathe in the West Village air. Benji’s got to go. Peach is your best friend, so you’re allowed to be excessively tolerant of her bullshit, but you’ve got this thing in you, Beck. And it’s not your fault, because everybody has something. Dennis Lehane would call it a misguided Ivy League omertà and he would be right. You will always choose the Peaches and Benjis of the world over me because you’re loyal to the gentry. I pick up the smallest bottle of Evian and the worst pear in the bucket and a two-buck bag of ice and a pair of rubber gloves I’m gonna need.

  I haul my sweaty, sore ass back to your place and you don’t buzz me in. You come to the door and take the plastic bag.

  “She’s really not up for company,” you say.

  “I get it,” I say. “You okay?”

  “Oh I’m fine. And so is my bed.”

  You smile and peck me on the lips and Peach is calling so you run back to her and as I walk cross town to the shop, all the good of our day, all the boyfriend joy is obliterated by how much I hate this fucking city for being owned by people like Benji and Peach. It’s not until I reach the shop that I realize I left the rubber gloves in the bag. If you ask, I’ll tell you that I was going to clean your bathroom. You’ll believe me. I know how to do stuff like that, I do.

  I go to my corner store that’s not as nice as your corner store and pick up more rubber gloves and peanut oil and then I hit up Dean & DeLuca for a soy latte. I get back to the shop and I pour a healthy tablespoon of peanut oil into the soy latte. Benji lies about everything. He’s probably lying about his peanut allergy but who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky.

  16

  MOST people think that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage about war. But he didn’t. He based his battle descriptions on his experiences on the football field in school. Crane was somewhat of a pussy in his youth, perpetually sick and not a jock. He’d never been to war; he’d only been sacked by the early American equivalent of Clay Fucking Matthews. You should have seen Benji’s face when I told him this, Beck. He knew the book inside and out but he knew nothing about Crane, had no idea that Crane was full of self-loathing over the fact that veterans bought his bullshit. He pretty much spent the rest of his days killing himself slowly, enlisting in war after war and trying to make up for the fact that he’d been young, clever, and lucky.

  “That’s unreal,” Benji marveled, shaking his head.

  “What’s unreal is that you love the book so much but never learned about him.”

  THIS much is true: Benji wasn’t lying; he is, was, allergic to peanuts. He died educated. He died with new confidence and new pride and who says a life has to take eighty years to be lived? He learned, you know? How many people get to go out feeling like they’re just hitting their stride? Most people die old, full of pain and regret. Or young and full of drugs and self-indulgence—or sheer bad luck. But Benji had the ultimate privilege; he died with an opening heart, an improving mind. Benji wasn’t any good at being Benji, Beck. You know that, above all people. Look at the way he treated you and look at the way he treated his body. The trap I set for him was a relief from the trap he was born into. I created a world where he couldn’t steal, where his counterfeit words didn’t count. I took his drugs away.

  I look out over the water at IKEA on the horizon. It’s the craziest thing, Beck. The storage locker Benji told me about, the one with the key card? It’s right near IKEA. You gotta get a kick out of the little things and I wonder what Paul Thomas Anderson would make of this “coincidence.”

  It’s easier to make sense of things at sea, in a river that could kick your ass if it wanted to. You remember that we really are nothing compared to the elements, ashes to ashes, Beck, dust to dust. Benji’s ashes are in an IKEA box, one leftover from our trip. I tell a deckhand that there were parts missing, that the product looks nothing like the picture. In truth, this box contains Benji’s ashes. And you wouldn’t believe what I had to go through; a person doesn’t just disintegrate to dust.

  Two days ago, you started stressing about Halloween. You were going to be Princess Leia (you really are a flirt), and you were taking pictures of yourself and your friends and getting drunk a lot. You did not ask me to be Luke Skywalker, and going forward, we are gonna have some fun fights about how to celebrate Halloween.

  And two days ago I started stressing about what do with Benji’s body. I had to get Curtis to work crazy hours during Halloween and I had to learn to cremate a corpse. Curtis was amenable; potheads need to buy pot and respond well to overtime. And I figured out what to do with Benji thanks to the instructions on fiscally practical backyard cremation readily available online. It wasn’t something I could do in the city so I took Mr. Mooney’s car out by Jones Beach and found a good hiding spot. Cremation takes time. You have to keep that fire going for ages and it’s not a perfect job. Benji’s ashes are definitely bony so you wouldn’t want to go pouring them into a colander! A proper cremation requires time and chemicals, but I think I did well, given the circumstances. And I care enough to box him up and bring him home, and most people in my position would leave him out on the island. I crack a smile because when you think about it, you’re not really Princess Leia (your buns were much smaller), and I’m not really an undertaker. There’s a symmetry of some kind, and I like it.

  “How much was it?” says the friendly deckhand.

  “Eighty bucks, if you can believe that.”

  He shakes his head and hoists the box of Benji into the hold. “They rip people off. But the girls love it.”

  “That’s how I got into this mess,” I quip, and we laugh and I tip him ten bucks and he is genuinely happy to get that kind of a tip and you know nobody ever tips him.

  We’re easing into the slip and he’s got a cigarette tucked behind his ear and he’s holding the line and gathering it and preparing to toss it and he tells me he’ll help me lug the Benji box to IKEA but I tell him I got it.

  “Enjoy your smoke, guy.” I say. “You only go around once.”

  “Or back and forth six times a day.” He laughs.

  THE key card works. Benji was right. The storage locker is where he said it would be and there was no trouble getting in because nobody wants to employ humans anymore. Back in the day, there would have been a security guard and a pit bull and there would have been questions.

  Who are you?

  What’s in the box?

  Who authorized your access to this locker?

  Where is your authorization?

  Can you get Mr. Crane on the phone?

  Can you get him to come down here?

  And my answers wouldn’t have been good enough and I wouldn’t have known what to do with the box of Benji. But he was generous toward the end of his time on earth. He knew I’d get in here no problem and I think he wanted to rest here. I think he wanted to be reunited with the stolen Rolexes and suits and silver, the stuff he was trained to respect and the stuff that he didn’t have the balls to break away from. He was always gonna be an unhappy materialist. I spared him years of pain.

  I pop open two bottles of Home Soda, one for me and one for Benji, and I set his bottle by the box. Tell you this, Beck, the shit tastes like heaven once in a while, if you catch the right batch. I glove up and clean up and listen to the carbonation fade. I notice a Mount Gay Rum Figawi Sailing hat from 2006 with the name Spencer Hewitt stitched under the lid. Rich kids have their names stitched into their clothes, because of rooming with klepto brats like Benji and nannies who need help remembering names. I try on the hat. It fits and I decide to keep it. I need it, Beck. It’s Nantucket red, faded to a dusty rose hue, sensitive to the elements, regal somehow in spite of being damaged, just like you.

  17

  YOU don’t know that you’re in mourning. You don’t know that Benji is dead. You couldn’t know. But you’re off, Beck. You’ve spent the whole week loafing around having
virtual movie screenings with Peach. You can’t even leave the apartment to get coffee without debating the merits of Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, and the “sweet workers” at your deli. I’ve tried to get in with you, but right now, you’re all mixed up in Peach.

  You can’t even keep your head straight about a fucking movie. When we went to the Corner Bistro, you told me you love Magnolia and you went off on your love/hate relationship with California and your dreams of meeting Paul Thomas Anderson and telling him how fucking smart he is. And I agreed. But Peach tells you his movies are bloated and judgy and you agree with her! And judgy isn’t even a fucking word and you’re supposed to be a writer. I try. I ask you what you’re up to and you tell me you’re watching Magnolia and what do you do? You tell me that you think it’s judgy. You don’t think that. Peach thinks that. And I try to get together with you but you tell me you’re sick.

  You’re not sick, Beck. You ask Peach to go shopping, to get lunch. She says no. She says she’s sick. But I tracked her down. I have to know why she has this hold on you so I’ve been watching her walk to her architecture firm and walk to lunch and kiss people hello and pick at Cobb salads all fucking week, Beck. She’s not sick. I ask you to go out for a walk, for coffee, soup, for anything. It’s always the same:

  I’m still sick.

  I sleep. Six days since Benji’s passing and still I haven’t seen you. I don’t dream, at least, not that I remember.

  THE world is a better place when I wake up because at long last, you got into a fight with Peach. She told you she thinks your shrink is no good and you stood up for your shrink and for yourself. I’m proud of you. And the best part is, now that you’ve got your head on straight again, you are the you I know and love. You wrote to me in the middle of the night:

  Okay, this is way too many words and it’s way too late but do you ever just feel like telling everyone in your life to fuck off? I don’t want to be that girl bitching about her friends but right now, may I just say . . . my friends are bitches! I try so hard to get them together, you see that, and they all bicker and make my life impossible and Chana won’t go somewhere if Peach is gonna be there and Peach won’t go somewhere if they have happy hour specials because she thinks drink specials bring out the riffraff. The point is . . . And now it’s five A.M. and I haven’t finished my piece and I have to be workshopped today and just plain ugh, you know? And there’s this Blythe girl, this monster, she hates me, and she’s gonna attack this cowboy story and okay. I am so babbling. But basically, the sun is coming up and I am thinking of you. See you soon, assuming you don’t decide I’m a crazy person after reading this e-mail? Night.