by Jancee Dunn
In the kitchen, the sink was piled with wineglasses, some, I noted fretfully, with lipstick marks. He sat down at the kitchen table. “You want some wine? I’ll have to wash some of these glasses.” I got up to do it myself. I had never once gone to bed with dirty dishes in the sink.
As I scrubbed the glasses with an ancient sponge, I noticed a Post-it on the cabinet reminding him to winterize the windows. “Did you winterize the windows yet?” I said, trying to joke. “That sort of thing drives parents crazy.”
He shook his head. “I wish they’d get the hell off my back.”
“Are you looking for an apartment in the city? Adam could definitely get you a deal. We’re still on good terms.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m keeping my options open.”
I flashed back to our senior year in high school. Early on a Friday night I had waited anxiously for Christian to call me. Six o’clock had passed, and then seven o’clock. Finally in desperation I phoned him to find out if his plans included me. I’m keeping my options open, he had said.
I sat down on the couch. “You’re not really the type that makes plans, are you? I remember that wasn’t your thing in school, either.”
“No,” he said, sitting next to me. When he sat that close I had trouble concentrating, but I pressed on, emboldened by the two Navy Grogs I had drunk during dinner at Captain Bob’s.
“I guess I just want to know what motivates you. You’ve always seemed a little restless to me, and I don’t quite know what’s behind it.”
He sat back on the couch, amused. “Why do women always ask these kinds of questions? Um. I don’t know. I don’t know what motivates me.” He thought for a moment. “Okay. I guess one motivator is that I like each week to be different. I would kill myself if I lived in the same town forever, like Geordie does. I’m always kind of churning. I’m never really content. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.”
I waited for him to say more, and after a few long seconds he went on. “At work there’s always a new campaign, and sometimes when I was in London they used to send me to different cities to spy on the college kids. Report back the trends. That was cool. Berlin, Paris, Kraków—I went all over, and I’d bring my little notebook, sit in a square. Or when we did a campaign for this snowboarding gear, I went to Chile, to the Valle Nevado. You have to take a helicopter to get there.” He looked at me and sighed.
“But I can see by your face that I haven’t answered your question in the way that you want. I don’t know. I guess I seek stimulation. Or so I’ve been accused by certain women.” He laughed. “I think people are way too concerned with how they’re perceived. I never think about externals. I just take it all in.”
I couldn’t resist a few more questions, which he answered with tolerant humor. Did he ever feel insecure? Of course, especially at the beginning of a new job. Has he ever had his heart broken? Yes. Saskia. She dumped me, pretty much. Did he ever think about me after high school? A slow smile. Sometimes.
Then his arms were around me. “Question time is over,” he said.
On Saturday we arose early and took a day trip to Philadelphia so Christian could document its underground art scene for EDJ. Christian’s boss had read that it was becoming a haven for displaced artists who had been priced out of New York.
We walked for miles through the city as Christian photographed street paintings and posters and galleries. Then we met up with a friend of a friend of Christian’s, a twenty-two-year-old artist named Coyote who “painted” with different shades of human hair, who led us to a guy who wouldn’t give Christian his name who ran illegal underground clubs in various houses. I smiled indulgently at Christian as he and the guy chattered excitedly about new scenes, new neighborhoods, emerging trends.
The nameless guy gave us the address of a barbershop downtown that had been around for decades and was the neighborhood community center. Christian wanted to discreetly snap pictures of it from across the street. EDJ was harvesting ideas for a campaign to revive a once hip sneaker company.
“I have to find places that look especially authentic,” Christian said as he snapped away. “I know, it’s ridiculous. But this is what they pay me for.”
While he went to a skateboarding store to talk to the pierced kids who worked there, I walked to the Museum of Art and wandered its peaceful halls.
On the train ride home, I was exhausted, while Christian was completely energized. “Isn’t chasing trends sort of a never-ending job?” I asked him.
“Yes, but the hunt is part of the fun,” he said, looking through the photos in his digital camera. “Some of this stuff is pretty hidden, so it’s like you’re a detective.”
“But you’re chasing something that you’ll never find,” I persisted. “Because there’s always that itch for the new, you never get to the end. You can never sit back and relax and just enjoy what you like.”
“Well, yes,” he said, kissing me. “Exactly.”
On Sunday we saw a matinée at the tiny movie house in town, where I was unable to follow the film’s plot—something about World War II espionage—because I kept thinking, He’s here, right next to me, in the dark. My eyes stayed purposefully forward, on the screen, but I was acutely aware of every sip of soda, every infinitesimal shift in his seat. Halfway through the movie he cleared his throat and I marveled at his deep voice, the polite concision of his cough, its laudatory lack of phlegm.
I prayed he wouldn’t want to discuss the movie afterward, but thankfully all he said when the lights came up was, “Ready to go?”
Back at his parents’ house, we made linguini with clam sauce, and as the pasta was boiling in the pot and I was setting the table, the phone rang. I could hear a man’s faint voice. “Hey, what’s going on,” Christian said in the hearty voice that guys use for other guys. He leaned against the wall. “Hold on a second.” He put his hand over the receiver and looked at me.
“You’re leaving tomorrow morning, right?” he said. I nodded. Why did that sting? Three days was plenty. He turned back. “Yeah, I could do that. I’ll pick you up. Is she working? Okay. Later.” Who was she? Was he picking her up, too? I didn’t ask. My stomach thrummed.
The next day I was up at dawn and decided to leave early to regain some of my waning power. I invented an early phone meeting that I had to conduct with Vi, which Christian accepted without protest. Then I brooded as I drove home on the turnpike.
He had folded me into his life, but when I had mentioned the Film Forum again, he laughed and said, “Oh, you’re having me meet the friends already?” The remark was half in jest, but his point had been made. But then at Captain Bob’s, he had said that his friend was running in a race the following weekend on Long Beach Island. “You’ll love the scene afterward, everyone’s drunk by ten in the morning,” he said. So clearly it was a given that I would be there. Well, not clearly. It seemed he just didn’t like to make plans in advance.
I steered the wheel with my left hand so I could freely gnaw on the cuticle of my right thumb. The turnpike exit signs whizzed past my unseeing eyes. Why couldn’t I just enjoy the moment? It’s not like I wanted him to sob out a declaration of love or whisper that he missed me after we had been apart for a few days. What did I want? Why was I upset?
Maybe it was that he was in control of our budding relationship. He was never nervous that I wasn’t going to see him. He assumed—correctly—that when he wanted to see me, he could. He controlled the plans, he arranged the setting. When he mentioned his friend’s race, why could I not say to him, “‘So I guess that means that I’ll be seeing you next weekend?’” Yet I held back.
This situation was no different than it had been in high school, when Christian irrefutably drove the bus. But because no being is more indecisive and flighty than a teenage girl, it was a relief to conform to what he wanted. Christian never made a misstep, whereas I had made so many. And at seventeen, I was used to being ruled anyway, by my parents, my teachers, the tyrannical
girls at school, my boss at Donna’s Dog Wash II.
And part of the magic of being with Christian in high school was the deliciousness of filling in the blanks—thinking of him while I was doing my homework or before I went to sleep at night. It was a game, a way to constantly be with him. He didn’t like to talk on the phone beyond making plans. I didn’t see him on weeknights, or after school when he had practice, or on Sundays when he played street hockey with his friends. And so I invented a heightened persona for him, in which my fevered daydreams colored in his inadequacies.
But now that I was an adult, conjuring up those daydreams was almost impossible. When you’re younger, concealment is alluring—is he hiding a secret pain? Silence can be translated into depth. My older eyes saw his stonewalling as something else. At our age, Christian should have been eager to fill in the blanks for me. He, not my daydreams, should be moving the story forward.
He enjoyed spending time with me, but so far, he seemed uninterested in my life. This, also, was nothing new. When I was a teen, I wasn’t insulted when he held himself apart from me. I tacitly agreed that my life was mundane. My family was pedestrian, my house was shabby, we never went anywhere for vacations except to Florida and once to Hershey Park. But now his incuriousness, his contention that he already knew me, seemed like an emotional shortcut.
Then again, I didn’t necessarily want to answer questions about myself. I was glad not to have to talk about the divorce, or the current shambles that was my life. He probably picked up on my reticence and was being tactful. Well, I was going to meet him halfway. We were adults and I was going to take a chance and invite him into my life—meet a friend or two, swing by and say hello to my folks. Nothing too taxing. I vowed to bring it up the minute he called me.
chapter twenty-seven
In the meantime I took the train into the city to meet Andy so that he could show me around Red Hook, the Brooklyn waterfront area where he lived. Like a tourist, I took a cab to meet him because there was no direct subway service to it. He was standing out in front of his apartment complex, wearing an old navy peacoat that he said was once his grandfather’s and a worn pair of brown cords.
As we walked up the stairs to his apartment, he showed me the courtyard and explained that the building had housed dockworkers in the twenties. His place was small but clean, and every available surface was covered with his artwork. “Let me give you the house tour,” he said. He spread his arms. “Well, we’re done.”
In the kitchen area he had set out cheese and crackers. “I have wine, too,” he said. “And go ahead and make jokes about my port-wine stain, by the way. I do. It’s nature’s tattoo. I was ahead of the curve, really. I’m an early adopter. It’s in the shape of Bangladesh, if you’ll notice.”
Then we took a walk to the edge of the harbor, past a row of warehouses and a few artists’ studios. A raw wind whipped off of the water, and I snuggled deeper into my coat. “I like to walk along here in the early evening,” he said, “because the trucks have gone from the warehouses and the streets are empty. All the big flat buildings are like empty canvases. There’s not a lot of visual clutter and it’s just quiet.”
He turned into the entrance of a park that sat on the edge of the harbor. In the distance the majestic green figure of the Statue of Liberty rose out of the bay. We were the only people at the water’s edge.
“I can’t believe you found a pocket of New York that’s so utterly still,” I said.
He nodded. “It’s easy to forget that New York is a port town,” he said. He looked down at the dark green waves. “I love the sea smell and all these weird objects that wash up, buoys and life jackets and even an actual creature sometimes. See, isn’t that a jellyfish?” He pointed. “Never mind. It’s a plastic bag. I did see a crab, once. He kept snapping his claws at a floating beer can. Maybe he was trying to obey New York’s recycling laws. I always think I’m going to see a body, which makes me feel a combination of excitement and dread. I guess it’s probably better in theory than reality.”
We watched a few tugboats chug by and then a red and black cargo ship. “There are a lot of ships that go by with strange flags of origin,” he said. “A lot of them have Liberian registry, which is kind of a scam. They call it a ‘flag of convenience’ it’s like offshore banking. They register it in Liberia to save on income tax and wages. Plus there’s less regulation.”
He took me to another part of the harbor and pointed at a sunken ship whose rotting masts jutted out of the swirling water. “Doesn’t that give you a spooky feeling?” he said.
“It does,” I agreed. Then we wandered down some side streets. The neighborhood was a mix of worn houses done up in a nautical theme, public housing, and nineteenth-century warehouses, some of them converted into apartments. “There’s kind of a weird community here,” Andy said, nodding at a large guy who walked a pit bull. “Fewer people live out here, so you kind of have to make a commitment. There’s no subway around. I mean, it’s changing a lot. There’s strange little workshops and businesses, like there’s one I’ll take you by, a few streets over, that provides antique cars to movies—little marginal places that you didn’t even know were businesses.”
We stopped at a bakery to warm ourselves, and he bought me a cupcake and a hot chocolate. Then he continued the tour, which wound through art galleries, an antiques shop, and a former sailor’s bar called Sunny’s. We followed some old trolley tracks that curved through the cobblestone streets and wound up at another waterside park.
“I love it here,” I announced. “I can’t believe I’ve lived in New York for so many years and I’ve never been to Red Hook.”
“I’m telling you, there are still decently priced apartments to be had,” Andy said. “There are art festivals out the wazoo; in fact there’s one in two weeks that I’m going to be showing in.”
“Well, then, why don’t I come back?”
He grinned. “Why don’t you? It’s on a Saturday and we could go watch the soccer teams play at this field near my apartment. It’s just a bunch of regular guys who play, but some of them are really good. The best part is the food carts that spring up around the games. A lot of the players are Colombian, and the trucks sell the best tacos and papusas you’ve ever eaten.”
“What’s a papusa?”
“They’re from El Salvador, and they’re sort of like empanadas. They serve them with pickled cabbage slaw. You know what? There’s a storefront place around here someplace that sells them. Want to try one?”
I nodded. This was my favorite kind of day, wandering from one discovery to the next. He stood for a second. “Just let me think of where it is.” He hit his forehead. “Think. Think!”
The phone in my purse buzzed, and I jumped. “You keep thinking,” I said hurriedly to Andy and answered with a carefree laugh in my voice.
It was Christian. “Hey,” he said. “I know this is last-minute, but a few of my friends are descending on me later tonight and I wanted you to meet everybody. I don’t suppose you want to drive down.”
I calculated. It was three-thirty. If I took the train home and then drove to Sea Girt, I could get there by seven.
“Sure,” I said. He didn’t ask where I was, and I didn’t tell him. “See you soon.”
I snapped the phone shut.
“Is everything okay?” asked Andy. “I remembered where the place is, and—”
“I think I may have to go to that place another day,” I said. “I should get back. I have plans tonight.”
His eyes hardened. “Right,” he said.
I rushed back to New Jersey, and two hours later, I was driving on the turnpike, bound for Christian’s party.
chapter twenty-eight
I had been a hit at Christian’s get-together—cracking jokes, keeping glasses refilled, winning his friends over with bright questions and commentary. But the party had taken place on Tuesday, and I returned home the next morning. By Friday he hadn’t called. I had nothing to do but fixate on the phone,
which seemed to ring every ten minutes for my parents. It was my last two weeks at home before I returned to the city after Christmas. I had asked Adam to try and find a place for me in Red Hook, but in the end he had secured a relatively cheap apartment in Washington Heights, which, he informed me, was now called “WaHi.” I found a hard-up moving company to move me in between Christmas and New Year’s, and I’d start work on the second of January. (“All right, my patience has run out,” Vi told me on the phone. “Your midlife crisis is over. I’m seventy-four and I’ve never had a crisis—early, mid, or late.”)
The weekend loomed. Dawn was avoiding me. My folks’ plans were dully parental—a library benefit dinner, a community house-tour organization meeting, a Sunday trip to the fabric store for some sort of holiday project. I didn’t feel like going into the city alone. Well, maybe I’d do a double feature at the gigantic spotless movie theater on Route 22. I’d make a bag of microwave popcorn and stow it in my purse the way my mother did. Or I could wander through the mall. Why wouldn’t Christian call me? Were two visits in one week too much? I had to talk to somebody.
I walked briskly over to my mother’s catalog basket and rooted out the J. Crew catalog. I needed a new cardigan, anyway. I dialed the customer-service number and asked for Trish, smoothly explaining that she had been my representative when I ordered last week. What if she had quit? A cold tremor ran through me as a supervisor put me on hold.
At length I heard her cheery voice. “Welcome-to-J.-Crew-this-is-Trish-how-may-I-help-you?”
Suddenly I wanted to hang up. What the hell was I doing? Why would she even remember me?
“Hello?”
I cleared my throat. “Oh, hi, Trish. This is Lillian Curtis. I placed an order with you before my high school reunion?”
“Oh, sure! How are you, hon? How did it go?”
“It was so much fun, better than I could have ever hoped. Listen, I have an order to place. I don’t want to talk your ear off. I know you must think I’m a weirdo.” I let the statement hang there.