by Amy Sohn
On my third Jameson I suggested we move to a booth in the back. When we got to the booth I sat down and he lay with his head on my lap and closed his eyes. I wanted to scream but instead I acted casual. I picked up a Village Voice sitting on the table, thumbed through the pages, and deliberately let them brush against his hands.
After a while he reached for my hand and put it on his, keeping his eyes closed. We stayed like that for about ten minutes, and then I decided to make a bolder move. I put my other hand against his face and stroked his rubbery skin and scar and lips. He opened his eyes and pulled my face toward his.
Wow. His lips were malleable and since his beer was nonalcoholic, he tasted good. I helped him sit up so I could lie on top of him and then we kissed and dry-humped for a while on the seat. I didn’t care if anyone saw. He was exactly what I’d been looking for: scarred, teetotalling, Jewish, and under me. I asked if he wanted to come over.
•
It was a humid August night and our subway wasn’t air-conditioned, so when we got out at Carroll Street we bought two juices at the deli across from the station and drank them on the walk to my apartment. When we got upstairs I put the leftover juices in the refrigerator, turned out the light, and switched on the patio lanterns strung along the ceiling.
I hoped Josh wouldn’t think my decor was immature. My bed, a futon, had a cheap green-and-magenta plaid blanket on it. To the right of the bed was a card table with my computer on top, and a gray metal folding chair I got at Staples. Between the windows was a particleboard bookcase, and by the right window was my makeshift entertainment center—CD towers, two milk crates with my TV and CD player on top of them, and wooden speakers my parents had bought in the seventies. Facing the TV was another futon, in couch position, but for some reason the mattress never seemed to stay on the frame, so you could only sit on it for about five minutes before you slid onto the floor.
If the furniture wasn’t collegiate enough, the posters were. But luckily I’d relegated the most offending to the kitchen: the Matisse of the dancing girls, The Kiss, and Bob Marley. Above my bed was Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back, and on the other wall were Johnny Depp in Dead Man; album covers of Joan Armatrading, Track Record, Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle, and Johnny Cash, Ragged Old Flag; a framed copy of the Bukowski photo; a publicity shot from Say Anything... of John Cusack embracing lone Skye; and a lithograph my grandmother had given me of an old Yiddish saying: “Beser tsu shtarbn shteyendig vi tsu lebn oyf di kni’es.”
“What does that mean?” said Josh, staring up at it.
“ ‘Better to die standing than to live on your knees,’ ” I said. “Not that I’m opposed to living on my knees every once in a while, though. For a really good cause.”
He turned red and headed for the CD towers. That made me nervous. I always want guys to compliment me on my collection because most guys think girls have no taste in music, and I want to be one of the few who do. Some guys get off on my Rufus and Chaka Khan, others my Sebadoh or Coltrane, but what impresses nearly all of them is my Dylan collection: I have fourteen of his albums.
My fandom began senior year of Brown, when I saw him in Don’t Look Back on a date with this ISO guy named Jason Levin. As soon as Bob appeared on the screen, fey, thick lipped, and young, I had a clit-bursting fantasy: I’d knock out Jason, race into the film, and leap into my sweetheart’s arms. He’d drop his “Subterranean Homesick Blues” cue cards so he could catch me, carry me back to his hotel room, pick up his guitar, and croon “One Too Many Mornings,” “Visions of Johanna,” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” in that order. At the end of the medley I’d set his guitar in his stand, remove his sunglasses and boots, unzip his tight dark jeans, and pull him on top of me. He’d rip off my clothes, shake his head from side to side, and say, “Mama, you been on my mind.”
“Don’t I know it,” I’d coo back, and then I’d pull his sizable Semitic sex straight into me and he’d fuck his music into my hole, up to my heart and mouth. I’d feel his brilliance and pathos swirling around inside me and it would be so intense I’d explode in a fabulous o. As soon as I started throbbing, he’d start shooting, and together we’d tremble joyously, him weak for my love, me weak for his genius. As our dual eruptions finally began to fade into the wild blazing night, he’d moan nasally, “Joan Baez don’t hold a candle to you, babe,” before withdrawing, reaching for the harmonica holder on the nightstand, and lighting a fag. I’d cough, and he’d put his hand on my cheek and stare at me lovingly, marveling at our spiritual and carnal connection.
But suddenly, with a swift V-8-style smack to the forehead, he’d remember he had to get back to the movie. We’d race back to the street scene and kiss good-bye, as Allen Ginsberg eyed us with interest. The audience in the movie theater would suddenly wonder (a) where Bob had been for the last forty-five minutes and (b) what this chick was doing in the flick. As they rubbed their eyes to make sure they weren’t imagining it, I’d leap off the screen back into my seat. Jason would regain consciousness and Bob would start the song again, periodically lifting his sunglasses to wink right at me, so I knew he’d never forget.
“I like your collection,” said Josh.
“Thanks,” I said. “What do you want to listen to?”
When he said, “How ‘bout Nashville Skyline?” my heart soared up to the water-stained ceiling, because that album has always been one of my all-time favorites. Jason and I used to lie on his bed and listen over and over to the part on “Girl from the North Country” where Dylan screws up the lyrics, and laugh about it together. Ever since then, I’d been convinced my Perfect Guy would notice that part, too.
I pulled out the disk and stuck it in the player. Then I got under the covers and Josh got under them next to me. I took off some of my clothes. He took off all of his. He looked even skinnier naked, which made me a little nervous. I’d done the small guy thing before and it was kind of scary. I’ve got enough to think about in bed that I don’t need to add accidentally suffocating my partner to the list.
But his body was soft, and so was his mouth, and after a while my asphyxiation fears flew away. When it got to the fuckup in the song, he said, “I love this part.” I was ready to walk down the aisle then and there.
We rolled around under the covers and suddenly he popped the question. “Do you have any . . . ?”
I didn’t, but I knew one of us could just go to the market on Court Street and get some. At the same time, I was afraid that if I gave it up that easily, he might lose interest. So I said, “No, I don’t. I’m sorry. But even if I did, I’m not sure I’d want to anyway. I like you too much. I want us to wait. It’s not that I’m not hot for you. I am. I definitely want to sleep with you in the future. Just . . . not yet.”
“Me too,” he said. We leaned toward each other and kissed more. The breeze wafted in. We fell asleep on top of the blanket because it was so warm.
•
When I woke up he was putting on his clothes. I looked at the clock. It was eight-thirty. “Where are you going?”
“I have a lot of shit to do today.”
“But it’s Sunday. I was hoping we could go get breakfast together.”
“I have to build some shelves.”
“Oh.”
“But give me your phone number.”
I wrote it down for him and he wrote his for me. I put on my robe and followed him downstairs to the door. He put his hand on the doorknob, then turned around abruptly, like he was having a change of heart, and said, “Ariel?”
All my worries slid away. He wasn’t walking out on me after all. He would lift my chin with the crook of his finger like in a 1940s movie, tilt my face up, kiss me passionately, and say, “I changed my mind. I do want to stay, and not just for the day—for my life!”
“Yes?” I said, gazing at him with bedroom eyes.
“Can I get my juice from your refrigerator?”
•
As I stood in the shower scrubbing my armpits, I replayed
the night in my head. Josh seemed to like me, not just want me, so I didn’t get what I could possibly have done wrong. Maybe he was a closet asshole. Maybe underneath the nice-guy exterior all he really wanted was the nookie, and when he didn’t get it, he flew.
Or maybe it had nothing to do with what I had said. Maybe I smelled. I’d recently switched to this all-natural deodorant, Tom’s, because Sara had told me regular deodorant gives you breast cancer, and the new deodorant always seemed to wear off by the end of the day. What if he’d secretly been repelled by my odor? Or my underwear? I’d been wearing the high-waisted granny kind when we got into bed because I only owned three pairs of sexy underwear and they were all dirty, but the granny underwear had come off so quickly I didn’t think he’d gotten a chance to see it. Then again, maybe I was overreacting. There was always a possibility that he really did have to go build shelves. He had given me his phone number, after all.
I got dressed, bought a newspaper at the grocery store down the block, and walked to this café on Smith Street I liked to go to called The Fall that had kitschy-antique furniture and bookshelves with free books. All these twenty-something couples with nice shoes and funky glasses were drinking coffee, reading the Sunday Times, and playing footsie under the tables. I walked past them toward the counter, ordered a bagel-with-scrambled and a coffee, then sat down on a couch. I opened my paper to the Weddings pages, and started to read the boxed wedding of the week. The bride and bridegroom had met at a dinner party, fallen instantly in love, and later discovered that his mother and her father had once gone on a date. It was so disgustingly romantic I had to close the paper.
I wanted someone to talk to, kiss, read the Sunday Times with, order coffee for. Where was my funky-glasses guy? My footsie player? My young, slender, brilliant-artist type? If I wasn’t grossly deformed or retarded, if there was nothing officially wrong with me, why had it been so long since I’d had a boyfriend?
My post-Will liaisons had included a blond water-polo player with a perfect body who took me on one date, then, the following week, fell in love with an emaciated compulsive exerciser; a white freshman with dreads who had gorgeous cheekbones but a major THC problem; Jason, the socialist, who went out with me for two months, then decided he was categorically opposed to monogamy; and Tell, an occasionally cross-dressing punk rock grad student who thanked me for helping him realize that all women are evil.
I knew logically that it might take some time to meet my Perfect Guy, but I was terrified it would never happen. What if I was still living alone in my Carroll Gardens studio at age forty-five? Sara would have a house out in Greenwich, a stockbroker husband, and a litter of kids and cats, and I’d still be frequenting the same East Village bars we used to go to together. And then my chances of getting married would be smaller than my chances of getting killed in a terrorist attack.
I felt like I’d been born at the wrong time. Deep down, I was really a shtetl girl. I didn’t want the pogroms, I just wanted the certainty. I wished I could hire a yenta to set me up with my own personal Motel the Tailor—a sensitive, doting, slightly more attractive version of Austin Pendleton—so we could spend our lives together and I’d never be lonely again.
On the walk home from the café I looked at the Halloween decorations in front of all the houses. It was only September, but they do holidays early in Carroll Gardens. Every front yard was decorated with gravestones, skeletons, spiderwebs, plastic pumpkins, ghosts, and goblins. Some even had microchips that played ghoulish laughter all day long. I felt like the ghosts were mocking me for not having a boyfriend, for being alone when everyone else in the world was attached.
As soon as I got upstairs, I called Josh. He was home. “I was just calling to say I had a really good time last night,” I said haltingly.
“Me too.”
“But you left so early this morning. Did I say something, or—”
“Ariel . . .” When a guy begins a sentence with your name, you know the next words out of his mouth are going to be pretty damn ugly. “I’ve been through a lot of difficult things over the past few years, which I can’t really go into in detail. I had a really good time with you, but I don’t know if I’m ready to get into anything serious. I don’t want to lose you as a friend, though.” And then he slid me the Whopper: “But no matter what winds up happening, you can bet on one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We’ll always be great somethings.”
Everything became glaringly clear. The “great somethings” line is the oldest in the book. Just as I was thinking it couldn’t possibly get any worse, he served me the Arch Deluxe: “I think it’s a case of being in the right place at the wrong time.”
“I guess it is,” I said. “Well, nice knowing you.” As I started to hang up, I thought I heard him say, “You’re the best,” but when I said, “What?” he said, “Get some rest.”
•
That night Sara took me to BarF. She said I wouldn’t feel so bad about Josh once I saw how many other fish were in the sea. BarF was on Fifth, between A and B. It had a good indie-rock jukebox, a pool table, and three-dollar pints. I used to go there in high school, and the place would be filled with fifteen-year-old boys. Since Giuliani, though, they’d started carding, and now it was mostly twenty-something hipsters, Irish immigrants, and aging bikers.
We sat down at the bar, sipped our Jamesons, and moaned about the cruel, vicious nature of love. Just as the liquor was going to my head, this sideburned hipster sat down next to us and asked Sara her name. Her eyes widened and she sat up straighter in her seat, dropped her voice an octave, and said, “Sara.”
“I’m Jonah,” he said.
She gestured toward me. “This is Ariel.”
He nodded curtly, turned back to her, and said, “Do you live around here?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to go out for coffee sometime?”
“Sure.” She scribbled down her number and he went to the back to play pool.
Almost every time Sara and I went out, it was the same story. We’d be in the midst of an intense conversation when a Camel-smoking coolio would saunter up to us and hit on her. I knew it wasn’t fair to blame her for being so attractive, but I did. There are pretty girls and there are messenger girls, and I’ve always been a messenger girl.
In high school I had this tall, gorgeous girlfriend, Rebecca, who would take me out to ska shows, and every time we went to one some hot guy would pull me aside and ask if she had a boyfriend. I would have him wait a second, and then I’d go back to her and point him out. If she liked him, I would tell him he could approach her. If she didn’t, I’d tell him she had a boyfriend.
The worst thing about being a messenger girl is that you can’t ever let on that you’re bitter about it. Because then you’re not just ugly, but an ugly bitch. So you have to play it cool, like you’re just not the girlie type, like there’s nothing you love more than relaying messages for your pretty friend. So after a while I stopped dressing up when Rebecca and I went out. Instead I just played up my sidekickability by wearing baggy jeans, making lewd jokes with the guys, and pretending I was there for the music.
It wasn’t like I never hooked up on my own. I did—but the guys always made me promise not to tell anyone what we’d done. They all gave the same explanation for their discretion (they didn’t want their friends to tease them), but I knew the real reason: they were ashamed. It was one thing for them to want me, it was another thing for them to let the world know they did. It never occurred to me that they might be total dicks who weren’t worth my time. I was so flattered that they were interested that I was content to let them define the terms.
With Sara, though, I couldn’t even console myself with the knowledge that I was getting secret action, because I wasn’t. I was nothing more than the pretty girl’s friend. I knew part of the reason was my face. I have two huge, deep dimples and round, squishy cheeks, and people always think I’m younger than I am. But I didn’t want to have
to vamp up in order to get noticed. I wanted a guy to think I was attractive despite the fact that I looked like Shirley Temple. I wanted a guy to see that my tits were way bigger than Sara’s—even if I always wore loose clothes. But guys in their twenties just aren’t that creative. If you don’t display, you go home alone. So as Sara distributed her digits to half the male population of the East Village, I bantered with the bartenders and pretended not to care.
By the end of the summer my life was nothing like the working girl’s dream I’d been convinced it would be. My acting career was turning out to be a bust (since Dem’s da Breaks, Faye had only gotten me one audition, for “Zelda, the ugly sister,” in a Jewish Rep production called The Two Gentlewomen of Vilna), my best friend was getting all the guys, and I was spending my nights jerking off to the rumble of trucks going over the BQE.
But one morning in mid-September, Sara invited me to see a movie Nick Fenster directed, and I became convinced my life was going to turn around. Nick Fenster’s hand had been imprinted on the Hollywood Boulevard of my pussy since I first saw him and Seismic Cunt in concert at Chaise Lounge, senior year of high school. The moment I caught sight of his bobbing Adam’s apple, huge schnoz, acne scars, and six-foot frame, I was slayed. Courtney Love said rock is dick, and although I have zero respect for that sutured sell-out, I totally agree with that statement. When a guy can impress you with what he does onstage, you can’t help but wonder what he’d look like coming inside you.
The next day I bought all four of the Seismic Cunt albums, and listened to them whenever I was depressed or lonely. That summer the band broke up, though, and I hadn’t heard any news about Nick or the band till now. Maybe it was an omen that Sara had asked me to the movie. Maybe Nick would show up at the screening and I would get a chance to meet him face-to-face.
When I got home from work, I changed into white tights, a white, orange, and blue flowery dress with bell sleeves and a bell bottom, and knee-high red go-go boots, and then I went to meet Sara. The movie was long and insipid and focused on a bunch of sheep hunters out in the woods. It didn’t have much of a plot, but it had an excellent rock sound track, composed by Nick. Despite the fact that it was pure fluff, the audience laughed extra hard at all the jokes and gave it a standing ovation at the end. It was obvious that everyone there wanted to fuck Nick or be Nick.