by Andrea Meyer
“Well, it doesn’t have to be. He’s perfectly happy to just sit here. We don’t have to pay any attention to him.”
“But you seem to love him very much, and as I said, it is now like an evening out with a dog for me. I wanted to be with you, to look at you and speak to you and start to know you more as a person.”
“Well, I had to take him out. He had to pee, and I thought it might actually be fun. I guess it could have been if you weren’t clinging to some notion of what a date is supposed to look like. Hell, seeing me interact with Larry probably tells you more about me than hours of conversation, let alone seeing my apartment, my local bar. Some people might consider that pretty intimate for a second date. Guess it depends how you choose to look at it.”
“Perhaps,” he mutters.
“Anyway, sorry I put you through such hell. Didn’t mean to.”
When I get home, I add, “Dog People Only” to the Post-it on my fridge, and, needless to say, never speak to Javier again. Larry wouldn’t allow it. And so grumpy Javier remains my first and only attempt at proper dating.
I check my messages:
“Hi, Jacquie. My name’s Samuel. I’m returning your call about my two-bedroom in Gramercy. It is very spacious and nice. I have a key to the park, which, I’m sure you realize, is quite an honor. Call me if you’d like to take a look.…”
I jot down his number, while a husky male voice says, “Hey, my name’s Anthony. Got a call from someone named Jacquie about the room I’m renting in my apartment. Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. I’m on this shoot in Pittsburgh that keeps getting longer. If you’re still looking, let me know and we can set something up for when I get back.”
“Hey, beautiful woman, it’s Court. Call me, I feel like we haven’t talked in days. Have we? Kind of spacey at the moment. Anyway, call me.”
I pick up the phone to call her back as the last message explodes into my darkened apartment: “Hey, gorgeous!” Jeremy. “How are you? Why isn’t your frickin’ cell phone on, pray tell? All I do these days is sit in a candlelit room, looking through old photos of you and me, thinking about the old days. Here’s one of us trying on goofy hats together, and remember that crazy pillow fight we had? Oh, and I love this one of us torturing a stray cat with a fork. Anyways, bellissima, I hope you are good. Met your charming prince yet? Remember you promised I get to be a bridesmaid! Call me. I was such a bad boy last night! Brunch this weekend?” He makes kissy noises.
I dial Jeremy’s cell and he answers, “What’s up, lezzy?”
“Just making out with my girlfriend.”
“Yum, giving up the man hunt?”
“No, just taking tastes from everybody’s plate.”
“Ah, my little omnivore, guess all this sex hasn’t left much time for anything else. Certainly not your, ahem, friends.”
“Not exactly sex; I’ve just been meeting guys for the story and working like crazy. Not much time for friends or yoga or girl day at the baths, but it feels good to work this hard. It’s going really well. Steve has been all gushy about how great the magazine looks and how it’s all because of me blah blah and the Luscious story is coming along. Life is good.”
“It’s because you broke up with that bad boytoy of yours.”
“You’re probably right. I feel unbelievably sane. I haven’t freaked out once since we broke up.”
“Speaking of freaking out…” Jeremy’s voice goes suddenly somber.
“Oh, baby, what?”
And he proceeds to tell me about his latest obsession with the latest jerk he met at a club and bedded, and the guy vanished in the middle of the night without even asking for his phone number. “I’m devastated. I really like him. We had a really good conversation.”
“About what?”
“I have no idea. I was hammered,” he says. “What’s your point?”
Saturday I take a break from my editing frenzy—we’re shipping the June issue to the printer this week—to check out the two-bedroom overlooking Gramercy Park that belongs to Samuel, a would-be comedian who earns a living doing freelance accounting. Samuel’s is the rare neighborhood below Midtown that feels like it belongs uptown—manicured, civilized, calm, quiet, and all grown-up. Well-kept high-rises with uniformed doormen tower over tree-lined streets and lush, gated parks, the jewel being the one for which the neighborhood was named, an exclusive, shady green city block, which requires a key for entry. Only residents of the buildings immediately facing the park are eligible for a much-coveted key, which they have to rent at $350 a year (and pay a steep thousand to replace if they dare lose it).
Something about this neighborhood—maybe all the shade, maybe the preponderance of strollers—slows me down. After a leisurely stroll, I arrive at Samuel’s door, immediately disappointed by him physically. He’s short and stocky with, incongruously, a diamond stud in his left nostril, and one of his eyes never looks straight at me, but I’m too exhausted by this whole process to come up with an excuse to leave. He shows me around, pointing out prosaic details like the brand-new gas stove, the pull-down ironing board, and the hundreds of immaculate National Geographics he’s been collecting since 1987. While he’s in his closet searching for an ashtray he made in his pottery class that I’ve “just got to see,” I peek in the drawer of his nightstand and find a stuffed kitten, handcuffs, a matchbook from the Vavavoom Room, which I assume is a strip joint based on the busty babe on its cover, and a signed headshot of Britney Spears.
“Hey,” he says while we’re examining an enormous fern his mother gave him for his first apartment that he’s kept alive with a diet of Miracle-Gro, affection, and Aretha Franklin songs. “I bet you’re a very nurturing person, too, with those big, womanly thighs of yours.” I’m aghast.
“What does your eye thing say about you?” I ask.
“Jean-Paul Sartre had eyes like mine,” he says. “They say it’s a sign of genius.”
“The word genius is so overused,” I say, about to bolt when the front door swings open and in jaunts a grungy angel in baggy jeans and a backward baseball cap.
“Jacquie, Hunter, my roommate who’s moving out.”
“Yo. You’d sure be an improvement over me. Sammy, my man, you go. You guys want a beer?” I say yes and from that point on don’t say another word to Samuel, who eventually skulks off to his room to do his taxes or something, leaving Hunter and me alone.
“So, where are you moving?”
“I found this space way the hell out in Red Hook. It’s out of this world. It’s far and there’s no subway out there, but I ride my bike everywhere anyway. The place is raw. It’s huge. I can play my music as loud as I want and paint and build walls. I can’t tell you how psyched I am to get creative with my living space. Oh, wow, let me show you this picture.”
He pulls out a book about lofts with shreds of Post-its stuck to selected pages. Every time he reaches one of the shots he’s marked, he jumps a little and says, “Check that out! Man, love it.” When he smiles, a dimple appears in his left cheek. He has all sorts of plans: painting the ceiling orange, building walls with Plexiglas windows so the light can pass from one room to the next, organizing weekly artist salons so his friends can come by to read or display their work, play music, talk about what’s going on in the world. He keeps grabbing the top of his scruffy, chocolate-brown hair with his fist for emphasis. His enthusiasm is infectious.
“How did you wind up with this grump?” I ask.
“Oh, him? Harmless. Just answered an ad, you know how it goes. I knew it was temporary. You gonna live here?”
“I don’t think so,” I say, feeling deceitful. “He and I don’t really get along. I’d like to find a space like yours.”
“Well, you’ll have to come to the salon! Hey, what are you doing right now? Want to grab some food?”
We eat at a cheap Mexican joint I like about a block from my place. The proximity makes me feel guilty about lying to Hunter. I take a deep breath. “You know, Hunter, I have to tell
you something.” He looks at me, big eyes suddenly concerned. “I’m not really looking for an apartment.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m writing an article for a magazine about meeting guys by pretending to look for a roommate,” I laugh. “You know, a dating scheme.”
He lets that sink in. “That’s fucked up. You’ve, like, been going to all these places, telling people you want to live there, wasting their time, and you’re not even looking for an apartment?”
“Well,” I stutter, ready to defend myself. Then I realize that he’s right. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Wow. You and I met, like you’ve been meeting all these other guys, and a bunch of them ask you out, including me. I guess that’s the point.”
“No, it’s not really like that. I haven’t met that many, I mean, I haven’t gone out with very many, only the ones I liked.”
“Jesus Christ, isn’t there enough duplicity in the world? You’re playing right into it. You know, I spend my whole life trying to create something honest. I try to surround myself with people who have those values. And I thought you were cool.”
“Jesus, aren’t you overreacting? I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t like you and feel bad about lying to you.”
“Whoa, I feel really special now.”
I feel like crying. It doesn’t help when he stands up, reaches deep into his pocket, pulls out some bills, throws them onto the table, and says, “I gotta get out of here.” I bite off a split end, flick myself with my rubber band, and start whimpering like a spoiled starlet whose Jimmy Choos got swiped from the edge of the dance floor.
Then I do what I usually do when I feel like shit: call Jake.
“Can I come over?”
“What, like right now?”
“I’m in a terrible mood.”
“Okay, see you in a few.” I jump in a cab. When I get there, the place is hopping. Jake moved to New York just under a year ago from Boulder, where he was snowboarding and running a successful bar. He came here to focus on his art and, I suspect, to create something as popular and thriving as his bar, but with an artsy, urban bent. He’s run up against a host of unforeseen challenges, namely a city full of equally talented, energetic young people who are equally eager to make art and friends and a big, loud, dazzling splash that forces everyone in New York to stand up, mouth agape, and listen.
I give Jake the kudos he deserves for trying. He moved into an enormous, unfinished warehouse space on the south side of Williamsburg, a largely Hispanic neighborhood that’s only recently begun to catch up to the more gentrified part of the ‘Burg, which is already booming with the swanky bars, shops, and eateries that have transformed “Billburg” into a bastion of youthful appeal to rival the East Village. Jake single-handedly knocked down and threw up walls, wired and decorated and demolished to create a trippy, multifunctional space that goes like this: You enter into an art gallery with fire-extinguisher-red walls covered with large-format paintings by Jake that do a sort of disturbingly annoyingly confusingly abstract Bacon-meets-Pollack thing. Tear your eyes away from the dizzying display to pass behind a black curtain thumbtacked over an opening in the back wall, and you enter the equally red living room, a cavelike space in which the only furniture is a thrashed black futon facing a big-screen TV, a turntable and accoutrements in the corner, and a chunky plywood bar dividing the entertainment area from the kitchen. Not a soft or pretty flourish in sight. It is painfully obvious that no women live here and the girlfriends don’t last long enough to make a mark. The kitchen, however, looks remarkably like any other kitchen. There’s a microwave, fully stocked fridge, cupboards, toaster oven, stove, coffeemaker. Besides the front of the gallery, there are no windows.
When you move through the next thumbtacked black curtain, you enter Jake’s studio and workshop, the lab where Maestro makes art. His tiny bedroom—loft bed, dresser, white shag carpet, that’s it—lies beyond, where those daring to enter remain high on the fumes emanating from Maestro’s laboratory. There’s a plunging cement staircase to the left of the bedroom that leads to a basement, in which there are two eight-by-eight cells that Jake rents out to like-minded souls, an office housing his impressive computer setup, and an honest-to-God functional recording studio that Jake also buffed out with his own pretty little two hands. It’s got a drum set, a range of guitars and keyboards, and all the gadgetry that pro studios offer, including two large bongs and a wet bar. It looks very professional to these untrained eyes, anyway. I try not to go downstairs very often. If the upstairs is a virtual dungeon, the subterranean recesses are the netherworld, from which I fear no one returns with their faculties intact.
When I arrive, Jake’s latest roommate—they come and go like the tides—a Jim Morrison look-alike with no personality, is spinning records. Two other guys I always confuse, wearing matching hairdos and short-sleeved T-shirts over long-sleeved ones, are doing coke on the kitchen counter, and Jake is standing over a pot of boiling pasta. I mix myself a vodka tonic, let the alcohol pull me out of my funk, and move my hips to Jake’s roommate’s groovy tunes, trying to regale the crowd with tales of real-estate-ad dating. Unfortunately, the snorters are almost as offended by my antics as Hunter was; they pronounce the process of judging men by their homesteads “harsh, dude” and keep snorting. Jake’s roommate, who takes himself very seriously as a DJ but serves Cosmos and Mojitos to swooning, fishnet-clad gamines on the Lower East Side for cash, loses his headphones just long enough to catch the Javier and Larry episode and return to his musical bubble. Jake, perched quietly on a bar stool hurriedly shoveling spaghetti into his face the whole time, finishes his meal, pushes his unruly bangs out of his face, and turns to me nonchalantly.
“I’m going to bed. You can come if you want.”
“Gee, an invitation I can’t refuse,” I say to my public before making a dramatic exit on the heels of my little grinch. I know how pathetic I must seem trotting off after him, but I also know how shattered Jake would be if I didn’t. His tough-guy routine is only an act, and I can tell he wants nothing more than to cuddle up with me right now.
I take off my clothes and shiver my way into his freezing bed. He flips off the light and aims a space heater at me.
“That better?”
“It will be.”
He strips down and climbs over me, and I wrap myself around his icy body, warming us both.
“How’s it going, mister?”
“All right.”
“Anything ever happen with that gallery owner?”
“Nah.” He’s quiet for a minute. “Nothing ever happens with those guys, at least not for me. I’m not sure what I should do, maybe open another bar. It’s something I know I’m good at, which is cool, but the bureaucracy in New York might kill me. I looked into it and the permits alone can take months.”
“You’ll figure it out. I have complete faith in you.”
“You’re the only one. It sucks to turn thirty with nothing to show for it. Last year, everything was, like, great, and I move out here to, like, get my art thing going, and I feel like I have nothing all over again. People aren’t buying my work, I don’t know anyone, the money’s running out.”
In the shadow, I can see the outline of his pretty face, which he turns to me. His eyes look so sad. I squeeze him tighter.
“I was just thinking,” he says.
“That you have no one else in your life that you can talk to about this stuff?”
He laughs. “No, that’s not what I was thinking. But I guess it could have been.” He pulls me in closer. “You’re amazing, but I can’t do this.”
“I know, I know.”
“You’re gonna find it, Jacq.”
“Leave me alone.”
“You want it. That’s what matters. You’re gonna knock on some guy’s door who’s looking for a roommate and he’s gonna open it and not believe how lucky he got to have this beautiful girl standing there, and you’re gonna see his face and just know. I’ll probably be ki
cking myself, but I’m just too selfish to put anyone ahead of me right now. You know I’m right.”
“Yeah, I do.” He turns toward me and we kiss. I figure this will be the last time we have sex. As we hold on to each other, my tears drip down my face and onto his chest and neck. He licks them off my eyes and cheeks. I think, They’re all wrong about you. You’re not a bad guy. You’re just not ready to love me as much as you already do.
7
* * *
34-year-old documentary filmmaker seeks female roommate fast! My former partner in crime skipped town with two months’ rent in his grubby fist and I’m more than a bit desperate. What can I say? I’m tall, dark, handsome, not-too-dumb, not-too-self-involved or irresponsible. Oh, wait, I’m looking for a roommate, not the love of my life. Hell, if you think you might be the love of my life, you can call, too. The room’s $1300. It’s bright and big, and I think I have fairly decent taste and housekeeping habits—for a guy. Place is in Billburg. Give me a call. Name’s Anthony.
* * *
Sunday morning after my night with Jake, I drag myself to yoga. There was a time not so long ago when I went to class four, five times a week. Now I’m lucky if I make it three times a month. Between work, the man-hunt-slash-research for my story, and a general laziness that has somehow crept in, physical activity has dropped significantly among my priorities. This morning, though, my body is begging for nourishment.
I barely make it to a class taught by my favorite teacher, Gwin, a forty-something rocker with long, red hair and the hardest yoga body in town. Ten minutes in, and my body is screaming at me. The simplest downward-facing dog feels like medieval torture, and I have to suffer through an hour and forty-five minutes, pushing my body through a seemingly endless series of poses. I guzzle water. I rest a lot in child’s pose. I vow to go at least two times a week for the rest of my life. Clearing my mind has always been my biggest yoga challenge, and today my head is cluttered with Jake withdrawal, cheesy attempts to keep myself positive, various possible endings for my piece.