“Okay, okay, let me out,” you say.
There’s no response.
You push once more against the coffin roof, hard as you can, but this time it doesn’t move at all.
There’s a heavy, rumbling thud on top, inches from your face. Something heavy is on top of the cover.
“All right,” the Lawyer’s voice comes, muffled. “See you Monday.” You hear footsteps.
Of course he’s teasing you. He wants you to be afraid. You’re faking it when you say, “Come on, let me out, please!” which makes it more infuriating when he doesn’t.
You try a few more moments of silence, but nothing happens. Either the Lawyer is far more patient than you are, or he’s checking his phone, or he’s actually walked away.
“Let me out.”
No reply.
“Please.”
No reply.
“Come on, please, really let me out.”
“Oh, all right, all right,” the Lawyer says, and pulls the cover of the coffin away and leaves you looking up at a crack of fluorescent light, the roof of the warehouse, and his face. He extends a hand and helps to pull you out. You wonder if you played the part correctly because it doesn’t seem like either of you had fun.
Where to next on this date as you slowly realize this isn’t going to be one of those dates where he takes you to, you know, a movie or dinner or something?
A. Showroom
Turn here.
B. The Lawyer’s private workshop
Turn here.
It’s all chintz and floral wallpaper, like you’ve wandered into the home of Wes Anderson’s tacky grandmother, with plush, oatmeal-colored carpeting and bunting in pastel pink and mint green lining the walls of the showroom filled with half a dozen glossy, lacquered coffins, posed with their lids invitingly open and revealing puffed, silky pink interiors.
“Cool,” you say, running your eyes down the shape of each coffin and its accompanying price, one by one. You tell yourself you are only imagining the smell of dust and formaldehyde. You are used to death and the macabre. Both are part of a sexy BDSM aesthetic—a world of corsets and men in black eyeliner and Neil Gaiman stories—but not this sanitized, pastel iteration of death that lands on your tongue like wax and hard candies from the bottom of a drawer. You and the Lawyer aren’t holding hands while you pace in a small circle in the tight room, politely examining his family’s wares, feet sinking deeper into the carpet with every step.
He seems completely unfazed by the morbid pastel surroundings. “Hey, you’re writing books and things, right?” he asks suddenly.
“Yeah,” you say. “I mean, I’m trying to.”
“I’ve told you about the book I’ve been meaning to write, right?”
Plenty of people have told you the book ideas they’ve been meaning to write since “writer” became more or less your official title, but none of them have been your boyfriend.
“No,” you say, as cautious as a stray dog approaching a stranger’s handful of food. “I don’t think you have.”
He begins immediately. “So, it’s like Eat Pray Love, right? But it’s about how I got my shit together. I used to be heavy. But I started running, got into the BDSM scene—and so it’s called Work, Run, Fuck.”
He beams.
“So,” you offer, “it’s like a memoir.”
“Yeah, a memoir and a self-help guide thing.”
You swallow once. “I think something like that already exists, a parody of Eat Pray Love. I’ve seen it: Drink, Play, Fuck, maybe?”
The Lawyer is unfazed. “Yeah, but it wouldn’t be the same as mine,” he says, as if speaking to a child.
You sense a tiny knot of resentment coiling up inside him and sift through your mental rolodex, searching for R, for Right Thing to Say. “Yeah, no, you’re totally right. Yours sounds really, really funny. I can’t wait to read it.”
“Come on,” he says, not entirely convinced. “I’ll take you upstairs to the apartment.”
You follow him through the showroom, into a side annex with a narrow set of stairs that lead above the warehouse, opening into a small kitchen with an attached living room. The structure of it—an apartment hidden above the storage area, behind the front offices—reminds you of the tour you took of Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam.
But the apartment is—there is no other word for it—gentile. You have never been in a less Jewish series of rooms in your entire life. A dimpled white fridge, hidden beneath old school photos and postcards with Bible verses, occupies most of the kitchen. The wallpaper is pink and floral. There’s a square television set sitting on the floor of the living room, and beside it a small glass cabinet, its thin legs pressing divots into the carpeting. You go closer and see the cabinet is a museum of religious curios: a cross, a Bible, dozens of tiny porcelain angels, and a tiny plastic jug of holy water, helpfully labeled.
“This is the most gentile place I have ever been inside in my entire life,” you say.
“I don’t know what you mean,” the Lawyer replies, and the conversation ends, but you, the fun girlfriend, the teasing girlfriend, don’t realize.
“Like this,” you say as you enter his old bedroom. “No Jewish person has these little figurines on their dresser. Or that type of skirt on the bed.”
“Those were my grandmother’s. She’s super religious. This used to be her room—I just stayed in it after I graduated from college before I moved to the Brooklyn place.”
“I guess I can’t really explain it,” you say.
You stand in the pastel rooms, an island in an endless sea of draped fabric, for a few more minutes, trying to imagine ever coming back here and meeting members of his religious Italian family and not being able to.
“Come on,” the Lawyer says finally. “We should head downstairs.”
Continue reading.
Aside from the wood-shop class’s basement lair in middle school, you have never been in a place like this before: wide, low tables; scattered wood boards; opened cans of bubbling varnish. The walls are rough and unfinished, the door a sliding, dead-bolted thing.
The Lawyer doesn’t tell you where to put your things before he strides in to examine the coloring on a bookshelf in progress and so you shrug your coat and backpack off and leave them in a corner near a wooden, horizontal X, like a multiplication sign, flat and on wheels, about six inches off the ground. You think it could be the base of something to come. This is a place of things in progress.
You head over to the worktable and watch as the Lawyer methodically dips his brush in varnish, flattens the bristles along the side of the can, and sweeps it across the top of the bookshelf.
“I’m going to put it in the entranceway, right by the door,” he says. “This is just the start. I’m thinking I’ll do bookshelves all the way down the hall.”
He didn’t ask you, but you agree with him. It would look good. “I need a bookshelf,” you say. “In my new place.” You just signed a lease with a friend from college on a first-floor apartment on the Upper West Side, an adult-step away from the current place you’re living: that East Williamsburg place, a month-by-month rental of a room in a boardinghouse of people vaguely related to the comedy industry. You’ve spent the last week browsing decorating blogs, fantasizing about the room you’ll have that will manage to be both driftwood-and-candles-boho and luxe-makeup-counter-chic, done exclusively with items from IKEA. As of now, you have a mattress on the metal frame it came with, two boxes of clothes, a box of books, a roll of toilet paper the previous tenants left in the bathroom, and nothing else.
“I’ll make you one,” he says. “As soon as I finish these.”
And like that, your imaginary room gets exponentially better, because now every time someone walks in, you get to say, “Do you see the bookshelf? My boyfriend made it for me.” You rehearse the tone in your head, a way that makes it sound totally casual, as if a boyfriend in New York who makes you furniture is commonplace, but also a little beleaguered, as if you a
sked him not to, but he just loves you so much he just had to make you something for your new room.
“Really?” you ask. “You…You’ll really make me a bookshelf?”
“Yeah,” the Lawyer says, focused on grinding at a particularly difficult patch with a scrap of sandpaper. “Why not?”
He is your Aiden from Sex and the City, the lovable furniture designer with a dog who proposes to Carrie and wraps her, tiny as a baby bird, in his big arms. Except he’s also your Mr. Big, because he lives on the thirty-eighth floor of a building with a doorman and he always pays. And he calls you hot and talks in a cute Brooklyn accent and does strange things to you in bed in a tacit promise that the two of you will never become one of those boring suburban couples who have vanilla sex once a month and slowly grow to resent each other, him resenting her because she doesn’t want it enough and her resenting him because he wants it too often, neither realizing the problem is that it’s just not good enough in the first place to be able to account for a reasonable quantity. And, most important, he likes you. He carries you to bed and responds to your texts and offers you bookshelves and trips to Disney World. You have been in New York for only four months, but you’ve already done it: found a boyfriend. You can check it off your list and let your single friends moan about their mediocre Tinder dates on your couch while you pour them glasses of white wine and admire your bookshelf that your boyfriend built, drove over from his Brooklyn workshop to your place in Manhattan because he has a truck, and installed himself.
“Hey,” you say. “They say the snow is going to come down all night.” You’ve already gotten a text alert from the Weather Channel and a dozen text alerts from your mother in Chicago, begging you to pick up bottled water and soup from the store before the blizzard hits full force. “How about you and I spend the entire day tomorrow in our pajamas marathoning Miyazaki movies? You haven’t seen Howl’s Moving Castle, right? It’s underrated. Maybe the best one. We have to start there.” You can already imagine yourself curled into the crook of his arm, under a blanket on his couch, confessing how attractive you find the long-haired, metrosexual, prickly Howl, while you watch the snow tumble from the gray skies outside his floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Ah, sorry, I have plans with a friend,” he says.
“But,” you say, “there’s like, a massive blizzard coming.”
“I know,” he replies. “I haven’t seen her in forever and we’ve had these plans for weeks. It’ll be fine. I have a truck.”
The couch and the blanket and the animated movies melt away like snow in summer.
“Your friend is a girl?”
The Lawyer measures the angle of a piece of wood and fiddles with it slightly. “Yeah.”
“Like, a girl you hook up with?” You keep your voice as measured as you can. Don’t sound jealous. Don’t sound jealous. Don’t sound jealous. You’re Kate Hudson. Don’t become the naggy, shrill brunette girl from the beginning of the movie that the audience hates and resents and will cheer when she ends up alone. He’s allowed to have female friends.
“No,” he spits. “I don’t ‘hook up with her.’” And he goes back to the bookshelf he’s working on in a way that makes it clear the conversation is supposed to be over.
But you are somehow both numb and on fire and you refuse to let the conversation end here even if you know, you know, even before you say anything, that anything you say is going to make things worse. Twist the knife, even if the knife is inside your own stomach.
“Is it a girl you used to hook up with?”
The Lawyer looks at you, and you don’t know if the look is anger or pity, but his voice is completely neutral when he says, “Yeah, I did.”
“Are you going to hook up with her tomorrow?”
He puts down the brush he’s just dipped in varnish. “Dana, you know what this is. You know I’m polyamorous and this was never going to be exclusive. But no,” he says with a sigh, as if he’s offering you the greatest concession in the world, lowering himself down to your level of crazy just this once. “I’m not going to hook up with her tomorrow. She’s just my friend. But it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s just—” You stop because you aren’t sure how you want to finish the sentence. You’re okay with him being polyamorous, you always were, as long as you felt like his primary partner, his girlfriend, the one he comes home to and tells about the other people, if not to ask your permission then just because the two of you are always on the same page and share everything with each other. You don’t care if he gets his dick sucked by every girl in Williamsburg as long as you know that he loves you the most, that you’re the one he holds when there’s a blizzard outside and there’s no way to leave the apartment and the two of you get to play cards by candlelight and watch movies on your laptop and fuck at two in the afternoon and then make mac and cheese on the stove because it’s the only thing you have in your cabinet and you forgot to grocery shop. His friend is getting that day tomorrow.
“I just wanted to spend the blizzard with you,” you say finally.
He looks at you with such tenderness and mercy that for a moment you feel ashamed of accusing him of abandonment, even in your mind. “We still have tonight,” he says, and envelops you in his big arms like they’re the covers on your bed and you are a child hiding from the monster that only exists if you forget to close your closet door all the way. A hand drifts down your back and lands with a spank on your ass. “Let’s go back to my place.”
There’s already at least six inches of snow on the ground as the two of you trudge back up to his building. The streets are slushy and dotted with people, shuffling along with hoods up and heads down. He shakes the snow off your jacket as he takes it off you and hangs it up in his closet. “Movie night!” he chirps. “Unless I eat your skin first!”
You giggle while he fake-nibbles on your clothes, pulling your shirt up and your pants down and leaving a sizable bite on your butt cheek that elicits a yelp. “Get naked and into bed,” he growls, and bites again and you yelp again and comply.
When it’s over, he goes to the bathroom and you’re left waiting, until you realize that you should put your clothes back on and join him because he’s already sitting in the living room on his computer.
“Hey,” you say. “What was that flat X wood thing you were working on?”
“That,” he says, pulling you onto his lap so you’re facing away from him and wrapping his arms around you, “will be for tying girls up, on their backs, to be blindfolded and wheeled around and used. And maybe if you’re very good you’ll get to use it.”
“I better,” you say. You’ve never done anything like that before, but there’s no reason you can’t. You can close your eyes and hold still and know that nothing all that bad is going to happen to you. BDSM sex can be a lot like a roller coaster at an amusement park—strap in, do nothing, you’re not going to get hurt.
“I’m thinking I’ll paint it purple,” he says. “With black dots. Or stripes.”
And the fantasy is completely ruined. For whatever reason, having the X painted purple makes it all seem so cheap, and high school weirdo outcast who shops at Hot Topic. If it was just wood, or even black, it could be sex-party-in-the-Hamptons. But purple. When your homemade sex toy is painted purple, the connotation is bad wizard role-play.
“Okay,” you say.
“Hey, have you ever seen Freaked? It’s with the guy from Bill and Ted who’s not Keanu Reeves.”
“I have not.”
“Okay, we are watching that right now. You are going to love it.”
And because you love the idea of being with someone who knows what you’ll love, you nestle into him on the couch and pretend to like even the gross bits of the B-horror comedy. You fall asleep in his bed while he’s on the couch on his laptop, promising that he’ll be in soon.
The next morning, the snow day is as bad as everyone thought it would be. For once, forecasters and fear mongering haven’t left the city overprepared and unsati
sfied under a quick flurry of snow that barely sticks. The floor-to-ceiling windows in the Lawyer’s apartment are pure white and fizzling with the frantic energy of angry snow.
The Lawyer is asleep on the couch, with half a blanket over his legs. “Okay,” you say, plopping down next to him and kissing him awake. “There is no way you can go meet your friend. Look outside the window.” You had thought carefully of how to phrase it: playful, non-accusing, totally Cool Girl. You’re pretty sure you nailed it.
He groans and rolls over, checks his phone, and then looks outside.
“It’s not that bad. Besides, I still have an hour before I have to leave.”
The rings on the table from water glasses are visible in the diffuse morning light. You can see the dust on his bookshelves. “I guarantee she’s going to cancel. I mean, look at this,” you say. It was white-out conditions through his windows. The only hint that the ground was still below you at all was a streetlight on the corner, barely visible and bravely glowing red through the snow for the benefit of a completely empty street.
The Lawyer checks his phone again. “Nope, still on. And the subways are running. See the news alerts?”
He flashes the screen at you. It says SEVERE DELAYS DUE TO FLOODING ON ALL LINES.
You only moved into your new apartment two days ago. You still don’t know which subway line you take to get there from here and so while you get dressed you frantically plug the address into Google Maps. Luckily, a station for the 2/3 train is at the top of his block, less than five minutes away. It’ll bring you to 96th and Broadway, two blocks from your new home.
“You haven’t seen my new apartment yet,” you say.
“Well, you’re going to be there for a while, aren’t you?” he replies, buttoning his shirt.
“It’s off the 2/3 line,” you offer, hoping your disappointment comes across, that he’s actually leaving, that you’re actually leaving, without sounding needy. A girl is never supposed to be needy. Not even during blizzards.
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