Does it really matter how we met? Why is that always the first question people ask? I was at a crosswalk on Lower Broadway when Nico flew by on his bike and his handlebar caught my purse strap, pulling me down into a puddle. He stopped to check if I was injured, but I received him with a blazing “Are you trying to kill me?” He balanced on his bike while some strangers helped me up, apologizing while I yelled that he was a hazard to society. Somehow we ended up kissing on the same street corner an hour later, after he’d bought me some deli roses and chocolates from Dean & Deluca.
My girlfriends considered Nico a big deal because he had gigs all over town, which might be one reason I stuck with him so long. Spaghetti-limbed, wet-lipped, and moody, broke but with the good looks and arrogance of a young hustler, as if his pockets were packed with bills. Nico, all bravado, even had my parents in the thrall of his rising star.
He didn’t smoke, but I did, and when I’d put a stem to my lips, he’d rip it from my mouth and toss it to the curb as if we were performing theater—two people playing the part of a lovelorn couple. For my birthday Nico had my name tattooed on his neck, which was a beautiful gesture that became tiresome because he’d throw it in my face whenever we fought, pointing to his jugular, screaming, “This is how much I love you!”
I couldn’t tell any of this stuff to my family and friends or they’d think Nico and I were a pair of maniacs. But Lou listened to my stories without judging while he taught me how to fingerpick “Europa” and the song slowly came to life. When I was through he’d say, “You really love that son of a gun, don’tcha, Bean.”
I thought I was lucky to live such a palpable love. A love you could spread out on a table or, in our case, take out with the garbage. Lou says Nico reminds him of himself when he was young and stupid and that he just needs a near-death experience to teach him what’s what.
After hearing so much about us, Lou told me about him and Olive. How when he met her, he couldn’t handle her because she was everything he ever wanted in a lady: smart, fucked-up, and beautiful. They slept together and then he ditched her and went on the road with some band. She got pregnant by another guy and married him. That was Sierra’s daddy. Years later, Lou and Olive ran into each other at a wedding in Montauk. He convinced her to leave her man, but the guy died in a wreck before the divorce was final anyway. That’s how she got the apartment. “Some love stories are just meant to be,” said Lou. “You just have to let time do its thing.”
He also told me the darker stuff. The antidepressants she often refused to take; pills meant to regulate her chemistry, keep her from hurting herself and her children. Sometimes she’d lock herself in her room for days and not even let Lou in. After an all-nighter at the studio, he sometimes found the boys in dirty clothes the next day—unbathed, unfed, crying, while Sierra did her best to keep them calm. Once or twice, she filled the house with gas from the stove, and the family survived by sheer luck and timing, which is why Lou says he’s become so religious at this juncture in his life. The suicide attempts have mostly stopped. Now the tendency is toward epic silences and occasional flashes of homicidal rage during which she might chuck a butcher knife at Lou, leaving a hole in the wall that he’ll eventually have to spackle.
Lou says Olive used to want to be an actress and people sometimes get loopy when their dreams don’t pan out. Her first husband was on some old TV show that I’ve never heard of and did several pilots, but he was mostly unemployed at the end. Sometimes Lou suspects that Olive still loves him. “It’s not her fault,” he tells me. “The guy is dead. And death is a huge aphrodisiac.”
A few hours in someone’s home and you can smell the beast within. Lou, pulling his body around under the low roof, cleaning what the wife didn’t clean, cooking what the wife didn’t cook, while she watches, smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table.
“How long are we going to go on like this?” she says low enough to believe I can’t hear from the next room.
He says he doesn’t know what she means. They’re a family. Families go through hard times. That’s what they’re designed for.
Then, just plates being washed. The rearranging of objects on the kitchen counter. I picture her rubbing out a cigarette in the clay ashtray one of the kids made her, ready to light another. His footsteps move closer to her. I feel them beside each other—see him put his hand on her shoulder. Hear him tell her, “She’ll leave tomorrow.”
Lou set me up on the sofa. Sheets, a pillow, a quilt with loose threads like dancing spiders. I won’t sleep tonight even though his building is a monastery compared to my place down in the valley of nightclubs and fire stations. I haven’t slept well in months. Ever since Nico started pulling unexplained absences. I’d ask, Where you been? And he’d say his family didn’t flee Cuba so he could be oppressed by another regime, meaning me. I’m no beggar for love, despite what you might think, so I’d kick him out and he’d howl through the door how cruel I am, that I never loved him, that I don’t know how to love because I’m a loveless, heartless panther who’d eat her own cubs, and I’d wonder who was this girl that he was talking about, because I knew she wasn’t me.
These fights would go on till a neighbor called the police, till one of us quit, dropped to our knees in apology, till one of us began negotiating or proposed some semiplausible reconciliation plan, till we fell into each other again and admitted ownership as if there were no other choice but to keep this calamitous opera in production.
Just when I’ve beaten the night, I feel his arm on me. Lou shaking me from my half sleep, his muscular fingers tugging my skin. The darkness breaks with the glow of the street, spots of car lights on the walls, shining right through Lou so he looks as if he has a halo. He turns on a lamp. He’s got a guitar hanging from a strap on his back and another, which he hands to me. I sit up, let the quilt become a pond around my waist. Take the guitar from him and run my fingertips over the fat metal strings.
I think maybe he wants to talk, but when I ask him what’s wrong he puts his finger to his lips and shakes his head. We run through chord progressions. Play a few songs. In a couple of months, Lou has given me a small repertoire. If you didn’t know better, you might think I have talent. A real miracle worker, that Lou, teaching the unteachable.
We stay like this for a while. Lou, shirtless and shiny like porcelain, in black drawstring pajama pants, holding the guitar in his lap like a child. And me, in my university sweats, letting him lead me. Then I see Olive on the edge of the room like it’s her curtain call and she’s the sleeping princess who’s come out for applause in her gauzy nightgown, sleepy-faced, pillow-bruised cheeks.
I stop my strumming and Lou looks behind him to see why.
I apologize for waking her, though I know that’s not what she came for.
She doesn’t say anything. Just stands there, and Lou gets up, tells me good night. He follows her down the hall and I hear the door click shut behind them.
Once we went to Coney Island and Nico got his teeth knocked out by some locals who didn’t like his swagger. They were following us for a while, cooing that I had a hot ass and asking how much. When we were leaning on a railing sipping slushies, the guys came up close. Nico told them to fuck off and next thing you know they had him on the ground, his fly busted open, blood on his face, eyes shut like a smashed-up newborn. We were only together a few months by then, but that was the clincher. We’d laugh about it later, especially when his replacement teeth came loose or fell out while he was eating, say that that day was like a scene out of The Warriors and I was the girl in the leotard dress whose nipples are popping throughout the whole movie.
“The punches I took for you,” Nico would say, like it was a debt to be paid.
I used to say: Why can’t we be like normal people? Go to the bookstore, the movies, eat meals in restaurants and have conversations about things other than our latest love war, communicate in a language beyond screaming and screwing. We could be friends with other couples, have brunch, and hold hands at
parties instead of eyeing each other like cannibals.
We could talk to each other, listen to each other.
We could teach each other things, make each other better people.
I used to say: I wish we met ten years from now. Maybe we could be something. Something other than what we are.
In the morning, I pretend to be asleep until the whole family is awake. Lou leaves to get the newspaper and Olive flounders around the kitchen making eggs for the boys with such little finesse I wonder if she has ever prepared a meal in her life. The twins are still in their pajamas; mussed blond tuffs of hair, sleep crust around their eyes. They’re telling Sierra a story about Martians and marshmallows, wizards, and blizzards, and I try to follow, but there’s no chance.
I ask Olive if I can help her out.
“Sure. Beat some more eggs for me. These kids eat a lot.”
I go to work on the scrambling, and she leans against the stove, so close the back of her jeans might catch fire. Again, she has that blurry gaze, like she’s both here and living in another city at the same time, with another family.
I decide to go the extra-polite route.
“Thanks again for letting me stay here. I really appreciate it. It’s nice to be around a family in a time like this and you have such a lovely home.”
She lifts her top lip. I guess it’s supposed to be a smile.
“You don’t have family?”
“They’re in Jersey.”
“You don’t have friends?”
I rotate the fork so quickly in the bowl that the eggs pull into a perfect open blanket. I move past her to tuck them into the frying pan.
“I just came out of a relationship.”
“You’re a grown-up when you realize no one’s going to take care of you.”
“Right.”
“Lou is not the cheating type, you know.”
I wonder if we’re having the same conversation. As far as I can tell, she has no reason to be wary of me, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in my life, it’s that I am usually wrong about everything.
“I can tell. He adores you. He talks about you all the time.”
“That’s right. He does.”
And then, “You want some advice, Bean? That’s what he calls you, right?”
I nod.
“Guard what’s yours.”
I don’t say anything. Just finish off the eggs while she watches like I’m her employee, the lines of her home clearly drawn.
I eat with the kids. I don’t even like eggs but I chew them, slowly, feel them glide down my throat. Lou returns with the paper but puts it away so the kids won’t see the pictures or headlines. After I help clean up the breakfast mess, I slip into the living room and pull my bag out from behind the sofa.
I tell them I’m leaving. Thank them too much for their hospitality. Act like they saved my life but, really, I just want to run.
Lou insists on walking me to the corner. It’s all I permit even though he offered to take me all the way back downtown, make sure everything is okay at home. I don’t want to look him in the face and I feel bad for that fact. He’s been good to me.
“Once it calms down, we can start your lessons again.”
I smile, yeah sure. Though I’m obviously out of a job. My workplace doesn’t exist anymore. Won’t be able to afford those late-night sessions.
He goes for a kiss on my cheek but instead hits the curve between my nose and lip, and I drape an arm around him quick, give him the hug he wants, then pull off and cross the street before the light changes.
On the way home, fellow pedestrians are mute, shock-eyed, and I long for noise. At Union Square, the park is transformed into a shrine lined with candles and posters of the disappeared. I feel inappropriate. We’re supposed to be mourning and all I want is to scream.
There he is.
Nico. Sitting on my bed, writing in a notebook. I forgot he still has a key.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says.
“How did you know I was coming back?”
“You weren’t on the list of the missing. I checked.”
He tells me he’s been in New York all along. The stint in Los Angeles was brief and pointless and he’s been living in Green Point ever since. He walked across the bridge right after the planes hit, made his way to me. Must have arrived right after I left with Lou.
We look at each other a long time. There is no big conversation. No more questions. No push for repentance. For once we’re calling it even. I’m here. You’re here. That’s all we need. In spite of everything, and because love stories never end when they should, I believe we still have a chance.
We tuck into each other like origami, fall asleep like captive hamsters, our lips touching, pretending we’re each other’s reasons for surviving the cataclysm. We’re good for a while, too. Build a pretty pattern of peace—me cooking us dinner, Nico playing with my hair and counting all the ways we’re perfect together, starting with the fact that we wear the same size jeans.
I think this is it: the near-death experience we needed to make us work.
For a moment, I’m happy.
It will be months, and most of the wreckage will have already been cleared, before we admit it’s not enough. It will be uneventful, the way most life-changing moments are. You don’t see them happening.
An April morning. Getting ready for my new job. I will be making my coffee the way I like it: dark, bitter, thick mire with no milk or sugar. He will come up behind me, press his naked chest to my back. He will slip his hand around my mug and take a sip, make a spitting sound and ask how I can drink this shit—say, “Leave it to a Colombiana to ruin the coffee,” push me out of the way, “Let me show you how it’s done, baby.” And I will decide without his knowing, without ever saying, with only an amended gaze that he will never notice, to let the story end.
GREEN
Your mom just called to tell you that Maureen, the girl who tortured you from kindergarten to high school, who single-handedly made it so that you were never welcome in Girl Scouts, soccer, or yearbook, is dead. Maureen, who said you weren’t invited to her ninth birthday party because you were too tall and your head would bust through the roof of her house. Maureen, who said that your skin was the color of diarrhea, that your Colombian dad dealt drugs, that boys didn’t like you because you looked like their maids, is finally, finally dead.
Officially it was some kind of organ failure, but Maureen is dead because she hasn’t eaten in years. You know Maureen went through years of food rehab till her family’s money ran out and then she went into the free experimental programs at Columbia Pres. You know Maureen’s dad died a few years ago of brain cancer, diagnosed and buried within three months. You know Maureen was a little bananas at the end, because, of all people in the world, she started writing letters to you—not sure how she got your address. You’ve moved a dozen times since high school, when you had your last blowout with her right after the graduation ceremony. She called you a shit-skinned whore in your white dress, miniature red roses in your French twist. She’d only just started losing weight and you shouted back that she was a fat albino midget no diet would ever save, something you will always regret.
You never knew why Maureen picked you to hate. Her brother was a nice person—made it to Yale and was the family pride. He always asked you how things were going when you ran into him in town. And Maureen’s parents were okay people. They even showed up at your grandfather’s funeral, said they knew him from the Rotary Club. But Maureen was a monster in a short, tight gymnastics body, thick ankles and black hair from her Portuguese mom, freckled like a dalmatian thanks to her Irish dad.
Your mom is sighing because it’s really tragic when a girl you’ve watched grow up dies.
“And her mother,” says your mom. “That poor, poor woman.”
She says she’ll go to the funeral and maybe you should send the family a card like you did when the interior decorator’s son drowned in their pool last summer
. You didn’t even know the guy but you liked his mom because once, when you were just passing through the living room, she looked up from the upholstery swatches she’d brought your mom to tell you that you had the eyes of a fairy tale.
So Maureen is dead and your mom reads you the obituary they printed in today’s paper. Maureen Reilly. Aged twenty-four. Beloved daughter, beloved friend. You remember the Maureen you saw at midnight mass a few years back. Even in heavy winter clothes you could see that her thighs were the size of your wrist. Her eyes bulged and her teeth jutted out of her face like those plastic ones you wind up and let chatter all over the floor for laughs. She’d lost a lot of her hair, got more wrinkles than her mom, the queen of YMCA aerobics. She was just twenty-two or so then, already looked like a corpse and had this stupid look on her face, like she was laughing to a comedy playing in her head.
She saw you and waved from her place on the pew next to her family. You tried not to look at her decaying body, tried to be matter-of-fact about it when your family talked about the sight of her during the car ride home, saying Maureen used to be so cute and look at her now. The only recent gossip you had on her was that her high-school boyfriend, a footballer named Kevin, impregnated and married her former best friend, another ruthless soccer girl named Shannon. You even felt pity for Maureen. You’d just been cheated on for the first time and felt the pain of wounded women everywhere.
A month later, Maureen wrote you a letter. She wanted to get together. She knew you lived in the city now but was hoping you could come out to Jersey. Said she was still living with her parents and was saving up to rent a place in Hoboken or Weehawken. You made the mistake of telling your mom about the letter and she guilted you into going.
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