We waited in the growing chill for the red beacon of the night bus, then sat huddled on the lower level, watching the inky streets spool by—parks, the odd monument, fluorescent storefronts. “I live in Camden Town—it’s like Melrose,” Josh said, “This boho street in Los Angeles. It’s funky. Incense shops and stuff. Lots of people our age. You’ll like it, tomorrow,” he finished carelessly.
I was intensely nervous. He had no idea how inexperienced I was. He must have some image of me as a carefree artist type—like my perpetually paint-stained jeans were some sign of liberation. How much could I reinvent myself; pretend I was that person?
“It’s our stop!” Josh yanked me to the front of the bus, and we stumbled down to the pavement. He pulled me off the main street, down a couple side streets, until we arrived at a dingy row house on Bonny Street. “For 185 pounds a month, a whole room in here is mine!” Josh said. “It’s kind of a rooming house. My roommates are an interesting bunch. But all asleep by now, I’m sure.” He winked elaborately and fiddled with the lock, bending backwards to kiss me, his face upside down. I smiled weakly; his good humor would keep me afloat.
A dark hall, sticky vinegar-smelling carpet, and Josh led me upstairs, to a perfectly square room with an ornate faux fireplace, a huge rubber plant, and a small window looking out on an overgrown backyard. I smoothed my hair, eying myself in the mirror above the fireplace. My lips were bruised red, my chin scraped raw by his beard stubble, rubbing against it all day as we’d kissed in parks and cemeteries. I looked well loved.
Walking to the window, I noticed stretched-out men’s underwear and flannel pajama bottoms flapping on a clothesline outside. A table, lit by an outdoor security light, featured a lone ashtray atop it, overflowing with cigarette butts. Josh’s bedroom itself was a mess. Beer bottles in the corner, socks on the floor. Josh was doing a hasty cleanup. “Sorry, I’m a total bachelor! Just stay turned around and I’ll do my Cinderella thing in no time, I swear!”
Obediently, I focused on the couple wooden bookshelves screwed at a haphazard angle into the wall. What I saw was heartbreaking. The shelves were like a self-study course in literature: The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse. The Riverside Shakespeare. Thomas Hardy, Dante Alighieri, Dostoevsky. “You bought all these just to read?” I asked, surprised. “Yeah,” Josh said a bit forlornly, coming up to put his arms around me from behind. “No econ books anymore, I . . .” He kissed my neck, “tossed,” warm lips glancing over my shoulder as he slid my t-shirt to the side, “them all.” Hands underneath my shirt, pulling it up, so he could kiss his way, unseen, down my shoulder blades, kneeling now, his mouth warm and wet against the small of my back. “What’s your favorite?” I asked, my heart thudding. “John Donne. So much power and passion . . . let’s see, oh, never mind . . .”
He pulled off my shirt, one easy swoop. “Fuck poetry. I want to make love to you.”
Afterwards, we held each other tight. “Don’t let go,” I whispered into his hair. “I won’t,” he promised. And he didn’t.
After a long time, I confessed, “I have something to tell you. I think I’m falling in love with you.”
He pulled himself up and looked into my eyes. “Me too. I’m falling for you, so bad. I’ve never felt like this before, about anyone.”
There was such naked honesty in his eyes that my heart ached. “I’m scared,” I whispered. “I’ve never had these feelings before . . . they’re amazing, but really frightening, you know? Like I could just . . . let go. Just disappear, into you.”
“I love you,” he said gently. “I’ll keep you safe.”
I wanted so much to believe him.
Chapter 4
It was late morning when we woke up. Made love again, discarded condoms littering the floor like crumpled little snakeskins—too difficult to bother to get up, and walk them to the wastebasket, when there was so much to learn.
Utter starvation pushed us out of the room at last, down the creaky stairs and into the shared kitchen. A discontented-looking man with a moon-shaped face sat at the kitchen table, lugubriously slurping a bowl of soup.
“Boris, my man!” exclaimed Josh heartily. “How’s it hangin’?”
Boris grunted and didn’t look up. Josh poked around in the refrigerator. “Pizza for breakfast?” he called.
“Sure,” I agreed, uncomfortable around this incommunicative man. Our presence in the kitchen seemed to be ruining his day; he glared at me from under lowered eyelids. He was so pale—perhaps he never went outside.
The microwave dinged. “Brekkie!” shouted Josh, as if his bright mood could dispel the misery that lurked behind Boris’s empty eyes. “We’ll eat au dehors, mademoiselle,” he instructed, nearly shoving me out the back door. A light drizzle was falling, but I was relieved to be out of that kitchen. The scarred wooden table outside had a lingering smell of damp, stale beer and old cigarettes. I munched my pizza—an all-meat special, apparently. My empty stomach somersaulted. I hugged Josh’s sweatshirt tight around me. “What’s his story?” I whispered, jerking my head toward the kitchen door.
“I should’ve warned you. He’s one of two perpetually unemployed guys that lives here. I think he’s from Russia or somewhere. I have no idea how he got into this country or how he supports himself. As far as I can tell he only leaves the flat to buy groceries. Always things in cans and sometimes this really smelly smoked mackerel.”
I shuddered. “He seems so sad.”
“Yeah, sad, because he’ll probably get kicked out of the country eventually. He’s hiding out, I bet. Our own Russian spy!”
In the kitchen, I heard a huge clatter—Boris washing up and stomping off, a self-contained tempest of inward-centered rage and misery.
“Fun place,” I whispered.
“Yeah. You’ll like my other two flatmates though. There’s Trevor, he’s from Nigeria. He’s been looking for a job for ages, real nice guy. He’s pretty much the opposite of Boris, personality-wise. And then there’s Dov. He’s Israeli. Kind of a lightweight. Works at a travel agency.”
Josh reached into his shirt pocket and casually removed a pack of cigarettes. I raised my eyebrows. “You smoke?”
“Bad habit,” he affirmed, tapping the pack against the table and pulling out a cigarette. “You want one?”
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
Josh reached into his pants pocket and extracted a lighter. After five attempts, a small flame blazed. “Want to try?”
Squeaky-clean former me would have said a definitive no. But my world was upside down these days. “Sure, why not?” I agreed, thankful that Josh hadn’t produced crack cocaine, which I would probably have felt obliged to try as well.
He chose a cigarette, lit it against his, and passed it over. “Pull the smoke into your lungs,” he advised. “Don’t just puff on it and breathe out, you know?”
I experimentally inhaled, taking deep breaths as he had instructed. The smoke tasted awful—like breathing in odors from a trash can. After about five puffs, I practically fainted, nearly falling off the chair. I had to rest my head on my arms for a while, feeling ill. Josh ruffled my hair with concern. “I guess you breathed in too deep. You’re just a beginner. Don’t worry, you’ll be an addict in no time!”
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered. But I thought I’d try smoking, again. I seemed to have forgotten to press some invisible “stop” button that had always prevented me from doing stupid or dangerous things. Now I wanted to say yes to everything, to try everything.
“So, what’re we going to do today?” I asked, shyly. It felt weird, being part of a “we,” now.
Josh started whistling. It was the theme from Tweety Bird—“I’m a thweet little bird,” I sang along, as we tossed pizza bits in the trash, “in a gilded cage . . .” up the stairs, “Tweety’s my name,” back into bed—“and I don’t know my age . . .”
A while later, we picked it up again, as Josh introduced me to Camden Town. In daylight
, it was a whole crazy world; streets packed with tourists and grungy-looking students. We explored a dizzying array of cheap stalls inside the garishly green-colored entrance to Camden Market. Galoshes, incense, naughty postcards, woven backpacks from India. “I’ve got a trapeze, and a nice little dish,” we sang, watching a blonde dreadlocked girl create enormous bubbles from an almost human-sized bubble wand. Arms draped around each other, we hollered, “. . . there’s nothing I need, I live like a king . . . It’s lucky for me I learned how to sing!”
No one paid the least bit of attention. It was like the whole city was built just for us to wander around in—in our own small bubble of happiness.
Josh didn’t have to work until that evening again, so we wandered through the city, through patches of rain; caught the first bus we saw, and just sat on it for a while, watching the streets rush by, till it spit us out unexpectedly in the City of London. Dark, twisting medieval avenues with gloomy names like Moorgate, lined with boxy gray banks and investment firms. They looked like glass prisons, encased in steel. I shivered. “I never want to grow up—imagine having to work in one of those places every day.”
“And with your sooooo-useful history degree, you won’t have to!” Josh concluded. I kicked him.
“Listen . . .you’re probably wondering why I’ve got all this time on my hands,” Josh interjected. “You’re probably like, where are this guy’s friends?”
Honestly, I hadn’t thought about that. “What, you don’t exist just for me?” I kidded.
“I had this group of pals at LSE—but they were all American or Canadian JYA guys, like me. I never could figure out the British mind-set, much as I love it here. It’s like, no one would let me in.”
We stopped at a sandwich shop and sat on drab stone benches in a concrete outdoor plaza. Even our brie-and-mushroom sandwiches were gray . . . except for the corn. I had noticed, over the past few meals, that the British persisted in putting sweet corn in everything. “So then the school year ended, and everyone went home, except for me. So I’ve been bumming around on my own this summer, mostly. Going for drinks sometimes with some girls I work with at Chicago Pizza, and hangin’ with my roommates, but, you know . . .” he shrugged. “It was lonely. Until you came along.” He kissed me, slowly. “Like I was just waiting for you.”
~ ~ ~
August 5, I fetched my duffel from the hostel, lugging it on the Tube with Josh, he holding one handle, I the other. I never bothered to ask for my money back from the new girl at the desk. I’d worked so hard for that money, but now it hardly mattered. And moving in with Josh, three days after I’d met him, seemed completely natural. The hostel seemed so small and insignificant now—what had I been so worried about, days ago? Everyone rushing around like ants, trying to see everything, “do” London so they could round out their itineraries. Their priorities seemed so pitiful. Poor things. No one could ever be as deeply in love as I was.
I called home the next morning from the squat black pay phone installed in Josh’s front hall. I had a pocketful of pound coins, and each one would last exactly a minute, which ticked down frighteningly fast on the LCD display on the front of the phone.
I’d long ago given up wondering why my parents never called me at college, but I suspected it was a combination of forgetfulness and reluctance to pay for long-distance charges. Nevertheless, I tried to call home every week, even while in London. Doing so felt faintly rebellious.
I could hear the phone lines crackling nervously as they reached their poorly wired destination—that house out of another time, whose residents warily tiptoed around its perimeters. I couldn’t talk quickly enough, it seemed, before the numbers would be down almost to zero and I’d be depositing another coin. I spoke loudly, as if the louder I talked, the less truth I’d have to tell.
Marty picked up on the first ring. I could tell it was him because of the rude noise he made into the phone.
“Hi, Marty! What’s up?”
“Your butt!”
“What are you doing answering the phone?”
“Poo-pee! Poo-pee!”
“Marty! Can you pass the phone to Mom, please?”
I heard a huge crash and a shriek, then Mom’s voice: “Hello, Vivian, sorry about that. How are you? How’s London?”
I heard a lot of crying and yelling in the background—my dad, yelling; Marty crying.
“Mom! I’m having a great time.”
“And are you all settled in at that hostel?”
“Uh huh. It’s okay. Some weird people, but whatever. Listen! London is amazing. Just like I’d hoped.”
“That’s great. Are you calling from one of those red British phone booths?”
“Uh, I’m at a friend’s house. This girl I met, uh, Jill.”
“How nice of her to let you use her phone! I’d like to say hello to her.”
“It’s a pay phone, Mom, just in her house. Some weird British setup. And she’s in the bathroom right now. So I’ll tell her . . . oh, I’m really sorry, I’m running out of pound coins, I can’t talk anymore. Say hi to Dad for me, okay?”
“Wait a minute; I had such a funny thing happen this week with the dishwasher repairman, I just have to tell you. So the dishwasher just stopped working on Tuesday—one day it was working just fine, and then the next, it made this horrible grinding noise . . .”
“Mom, that’s sounds really interesting, but I have to go.”
“Hold on, I’m almost done. So, I’d press the button and nothing would happen except for that noise, it sounded like a cat coughing up a hairball, honestly. So I called Appliance Experts, they’re always so nice--”
“I told you, I’m out of coins here. Tell me next time, okay?” She was still talking as I hung up the phone.
Mom talked a lot, but there was so much she didn’t say. Whitewashing the real issues with pointless stories. At home, I would often find her in the kitchen, reading the ingredients of cleaning supplies, mouthing “oxymethylbutyloxinate” just for something to do. If she was finished with the morning paper and still eating breakfast, she’d read the nutritional information on cereal boxes. She was never not busy.
Talking with my family always made me want to take a nap—I was slammed with mental exhaustion afterward.
There had been a mistake about five years ago, and here was Marty. My mom was almost fifty. She’d thought she was through with raising kids, and was into all these middle-aged-lady activities like going on local garden tours with friends who already did the hair-helmet thing—aging hair bouffanted into an old-lady cloud around their heads.
But it turned out she wasn’t post-menopausal after all, and now there was a maniac kid running around the house, this unwanted child who I barely got to know before escaping to my faraway college. Marty was hyperactive; he was always throwing things, breaking things, and falling down our rickety staircase and smashing his face up. And my mom and dad, never the most affectionate parents a person might hope for, grew ever more distant, acting around the house as if each inhabitant they encountered was an unwelcome surprise visitor.
At home for vacations, I’d sometimes overhear Mom on the phone, updating friends about us. At least five straight minutes of talk about my nineteen-year-old brother Alex. How successful he was, how proud she was, basking in the reflected glory of having a straight-A kid going to an Ivy League school. What she never said was: Alex was gone. He was spending the summer in Boston; he had left for Harvard last fall and hadn’t looked back. He’d finagled a summer job at State Street Bank, handling back-office money market transactions, and was living in an MIT fraternity house that rented its rooms for cheap in the summer. I knew that he wasn’t coming back. Not just for the summer. Never.
I understood why. And I almost didn’t mind that he emailed me less and less often, too. We’d been close all through our childhoods, but I knew why he was avoiding me now, when he’d finally been able to get away.
But I kept showing up, for winter break, for spring break, for summer
break. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And I hated myself for my weakness, for the fact that I kept coming back, kept phoning home, kept hoping for the love and apologies that never came.
On the phone with friends, when Mom was finished with her Alex spiel, and moved on to talking about me, it always went: “Oh yes, Vivian, she’s the artist in the family. A future investment banker and an artist—isn’t it funny how two kids can turn out so differently.” And there I was, dispensed with, in one sentence.
Mom never talked about Marty in those phone conversations. As if, by not mentioning him, he might disappear. Then she and Dad could go back to golfing and gardening, without continual Marty-made disasters forcing them to interact. They could return to colliding only every Friday night for their traditional Friday night dates. That one night, they’d dress up, go out, and display to the friends who always dined that same night, at that same restaurant, every week, how committed to each other they both were, after more than twenty years of marriage.
My dad had recently decided to go into politics. Starting from the ground up, he was a city councilman, and he was often at nighttime council meetings, planning meetings, or out with work friends. This was intentional. And it worked out great for Mom, because she could tell her friends, winding the phone cord obsessively around and around her finger, “Have you heard—this weekend the mayor himself invited Howard to golf with him. Well, Howard and the other council members too. But I mean, what an honor!”
And I could just see Dad driving there smugly in his Cadillac, golf clubs in the trunk. It was an impulse purchase from ten years ago that he’d driven home one day, straight from the dealership. He’d known Mom had her eye on a used Mercedes: as posh as a new Cadillac, but half the price. Whenever she saw his car, her fingers would nervously pluck at the sides of her always-matching outfit, and she’d talk about her shopping list, the store vacancies on Lincoln Avenue, the price of milk, faster and faster, hardly stopping to take a breath. I figured, if she spoke fast enough, she might forget how much she hated that car, the wrong car that my parents couldn’t afford, that they had only recently finished paying off. Dad avoided car confrontation most days by pulling straight into the garage.
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