by Andrea Meyer
Once they’re gone, Jeremy, Alicia, and I start chuckling again, but it’s sad laughter this time.
“Let’s go find your coat,” Jeremy says. I make my way into my bedroom closet. The door, well, half of it, which now has the consistency of burnt firewood, is still dangling from its hinges, but the mirror that was affixed to it is nowhere to be found. I shine light inside the somber cave and notice that most of its contents are bundled in a big colorless ball on the floor jammed up against the back wall, which I approach. I pry off a layer and examine it: a crispy, hard, shapeless board that on further inspection becomes the red polka-dotted dress I wore to my birthday party. I try to flatten it in my hands and it rips in half. Alicia giggles.
“It’s not funny. I love that dress,” I say.
“Well, maybe you can use that emergency debit card to go shopping. Two hundred bucks can get you six items from H&M,” Jeremy says.
“I don’t think that’s what the Red Cross has in mind,” I tell him.
“Why not? You lost clothes in the fire,” he says.
“Shut up,” Alicia says. “You’ll get bucks from insurance and we’ll buy you a whole new wardrobe. I always thought that dress was a little 2002 myself.” I hit her on the head with the left half of my crispified former favorite dress. It breaks. “That stinks,” she says. I flick some ashes out of her hair.
“Let’s get out of here. I can’t deal with it,” I announce, and we all go get coffee at my corner café. I tell the cute waiter what happened and he says my latte and croissant are on him. I can’t remember the last time I actually paid for anything there.
“So, guess what?” Alicia says. “With all the drama, I haven’t had a chance to tell you, but I got a cool gig.” She tells me that she’s going to be doing pro bono commercials for the animal shelter where she’s been walking dogs. “No money, obviously, but it’s finally something I’m excited about. I called a copywriter and art director I know and they’re in for free. I’m producing, and we’re doing three spots.
“Oh shit,” she says. “I’ve got to go. I’m supposed to walk Sporty and Jeannette today, my two chubby Labradoodles.”
“Excuse me?” Jeremy asks.
“Designer urban hybrids, half Lab, half poodle, Labs that don’t shed, poodles with no issues. Tell me you don’t have any in the dog run.” Jeremy shakes his head. “They’re all the rage in Brooklyn, along with Puggles, half pug, half beagle, friendly, loyal hounds with squished faces.”
“We have at least six of those in the dog run,” Jeremy says.
“The breeders can’t mate their dogs fast enough to keep up with the demand. But I think you should get Nappie a little baby Chi-poo brother, half poodle, half Chihuahua. And my sister should get a schnoodle, half poodle, half schnauzer. They are painfully cute.”
“I need a home first,” I say.
They both take off and I decide to stay and write. I take out my computer and start putting down thoughts about the fire and losing my possessions. Next thing I know I’m just writing. And writing and writing, about life and priorities and how badly I want a home that feels like a home. I have not written just to write, just for me, for so long that I almost forget what it feels like to put words down that are not about a movie or what twenty-something girls should do to hold on to their boyfriends, but just my thoughts—about life, about what is going on in my head, about Anthony and why it didn’t work out between us. It feels so good, it’s almost like sex, which is convenient, since I’ll probably never have any again. I’m perched in my seat, back arched, sort of swaying back and forth. An observant bystander might think I’m masturbating.
Gradually my narcissistic ramblings begin to take shape. It’s not just, “Woe is me, my apartment burned down and my boyfriend left me, where did Anthony and I go wrong?” It’s more about the destruction of my home and my relationship in a larger context, against a backdrop of men and women loving each other enough to construct a life together, to stop playing house long enough to build a home. To cut the bullshit and be honest and real, the way we are with our friends and families. The way Courtney and Brad have always been with each other, even when the truth is so painful that it risks ripping them apart. What makes a relationship real, I realize, is caring enough to eliminate the masks and the defenses and really talk to each other—and agree to help do the dishes and pick up a quart of milk on the way home, if that’s what it takes to make one’s lover happy. Have I ever felt that way? Certainly not since Philippe, and I left him, maybe because I was too young to handle that kind of openness, or maybe because I knew in my gut that my future didn’t lie with him. I needed to build my own home here in New York.
My outpouring becomes the beginning of a sort of essay, I think, about the importance of honesty in relationships and the small, unexciting, yet intimate moments that make those relationships solid. For a second I wonder if it is any good at all and then realize that I don’t care. I take a deep breath, thinking sut, and let it out slowly, thinking nam.
I consider going back to the apartment to start digging through muck, but I feel exhausted and would rather go back to Courtney’s and take a nap. I drop off the flashlight at the fire station on Thirteenth Street and say hi to all the cute firemen I recognize from the other night. I’m like a celebrity over there now. They take a break from lathering up the trucks to flash matinee-idol grins at me and ask how I’m holding up. I smile pretty, but don’t have the energy for proper flirting. I don’t even go by my favorite hardware store to buy a flashlight, but stop by the generic one around the corner from the fire station instead. I don’t have the energy to see Zach yet. That’s going to be one weird encounter. Maybe I’ll have the fortitude to face him when the dust settles.
15
* * *
Body needed ASAP: My roommate needs a roommate fast for our huge 2-bd in Hell’s Kitchen. Cable, hi-speed Int, etc. Big room’s a steal at $900. Moving in with my new boyfriend. (!) Unexpected event forcing me to abandon Pamela, rmte of 10 yrs. She’s the best. Call fast. Won’t last. Steve.
* * *
As I turn the corner onto Courtney’s street, I spot Anthony on her stoop, his long, bare legs punctuated by rust-colored Adidas stretched lazily out over the stairs. He doesn’t see me immediately, since he’s staring intently at an article in The New York Times, which is spread out in front of him. Spots of sunlight that have squeezed through the gently swaying branches overhead play on his handsome arms and shoulders. Little wings flutter around my heart.
“Hey,” I say, approaching the stairs. He looks up with a sad smile.
“Hey. How are things?”
“Good,” I say. “Courtney’s taking care of me.” I sit down next to him, with enough space between us that I don’t seem presumptuous.
“I want to talk to you,” he says, scooting around to face me and squinting against the sun. “I don’t want to break up. I know I’ve been a dick for the past couple of days, but I want to be with you.”
He reaches into his jacket pocket and looks into my eyes with an expression that says, “Never doubt me again. I’m your knight in shining armor.”
“I’ve been thinking and I realized how important you are to me,” he says, looking down at his hands, which appear to be holding something. “I got you, um, it’s not some kind of big engagement ring or anything like that. It’s this ring of my mom’s that I have, but I want you to wear it.” In the palm of his hand sits a gold band with a thin cluster of diamonds on one side. He picks it up and slips it onto my finger. It’s so perfect, I could burst.
“I saw the rest of the show, the Between the Sheets you were on,” he says. “Will taped it. It was nice how you were so concerned about me and how I’d react. I felt like a jerk.” He stands up and looks down at me, opening and closing one of his hands rhythmically. “Do you think we can try again, Jacquie?”
My heart is banging around like a tiny puppy’s as I jump up and throw my arms around his neck and he buries his face in my hair—it’s
so easy to fall back into him.
I imagine our wedding right here on Courtney’s stoop in Park Slope on a fall day with red and yellow leaves whipping around us and so many of our loved ones crowding the street, they have to close it off to traffic. I hear the taxis honking at the disturbance and see my sister’s grin on the stairs next to me, my mom brushing tears of relief off a sculpted cheekbone, my dad’s proud expression on the sidewalk at her side.
“Oh, baby, yes! Of course I want to be back together, of course I do,” I say, squeezing him and looking up into his beaming face. A nervousness nips at the back of my mind but I swat it away, along with the mental image of Courtney’s skeptical, frozen, faux smile as she stands on the stoop in a burgundy bridesmaid’s dress clutching my sister’s arm so hard she’ll leave fingerprints. I imagine pushing her over the railing of the stoop, her limbs flailing wildly as she lands in a bush. I want so badly to savor this happiness.
I leave a message for Courtney saying I won’t be sleeping over tonight, and Anthony and I hop a cab back to his place—our place. Anthony has bought flowers, two dozen pink roses, which he’s arranged in an orange juice bottle on the coffee table, and he runs around like a fussy housewife lighting candles, picking up a sweatshirt from the floor and tossing it into the bedroom. He’s straightened up since I left: The piles of newspapers are gone, photos are stacked neatly by the living room wall, and even the spare room looks a little less cluttered when I poke my head in.
“I started clearing out some of that junk,” he says with a shy smile. “Brought a load out to the Dumpster. I’m determined to turn that room into an office if it kills me.”
We order Chinese and eat it while staring at a movie about a fat talking cat. Anthony falls asleep immediately after swift, sleepy reunion sex, even though it’s only ten o’clock—I guess he worked through the night again—but I’m completely wired, my mind chattering endlessly. Our fight clearly got Anthony thinking about what he wants from our relationship and I annoyingly find myself obsessing about what I want. I wish I could just be happy, but my anxiety is too ominous to ignore. When I told my old therapist that I was never sure about Philippe, she said that maybe I was the kind of person who would never be sure about anything, whose nature it was to analyze, question, and doubt. At the time, I was grappling with what I wanted to do professionally. I had also agonized about whether I should move to New York or California from Paris and finally chose New York simply because I got into grad school here. Deciding between the fish, the steak, or the vegetarian couscous on a menu can be traumatic for me, let alone the chocolate-mousse-v.-crème-brûlée question. So, settling on a life partner? Maybe my therapist was right. Maybe I have to hold my nose and jump. I mean, I think I could be happy with Anthony. I suspect I could have been happy with Philippe, too, for that matter, had I just been willing to commit to him. He and I had dinner at a dimly lit Vietnamese restaurant on our block in Paris the night we decided to break up. At one point during the mostly silent meal, I asked him why he loved me. “What gives me the greatest pleasure in life is looking at you, talking to you, and making love with you,” he said, and I began to cry, for a moment sure that I was doing the wrong thing, letting this wonderful, devoted man slip away because I was scared shitless. Why should I do that again?
I’m about to cuddle up to that thought when another one hits me in the head: Maybe I am totally retarded when it comes to menus, but what if when something really matters, I do know what I want? Once I started writing, for example, even when I was just doing movie reviews at fifty bucks a pop and waiting tables to supplement my income, I never considered any other job ever again. Once my feet touched New York City pavement, I knew it was home. And what if there’s a man out there who would make me shout “Eureka!” from the rooftops? Someone who would stir a certainty deep in my gut that says, Go ahead and tattoo his name on your tummy, girlfriend, because this is The Guy.
Eventually I kick off, probably late, because I don’t wake up until eleven the next day, drenched in sweat. I wander dazed through the apartment, which again looks as if a bar brawl passed through. Anthony has disappeared, leaving a mass of destruction in his wake. The clues—scripts, contracts, open film-reference books, tapes, and CDs strewn on the coffee table, floor, and kitchen counter, couch cushions jutting at odd angles—suggest the loss of a necessary object. Something has even managed to collide with my roses and a spray of pink petals and disembodied buds are miserably scattered. I turn my back, pretending I didn’t just see the mayhem, and instead shower, leave swiftly, and head over to the East Village to start cleaning up my own mess.
It’s a scorcher out, the first really hot, muggy day, and it’s not even August yet. People hate steamy New York summers, but I love them. The city belongs to the few of us who choose to sweat it out rather than flee to the beach and dare leave our air-conditioned apartments to wander the deserted, still streets. I love that girls run around with no makeup, braless, in the flimsiest of garments. It’s as if we shed our inhibitions along with our clothes and suddenly find ourselves permitted to bare our skin, drink more booze, laugh harder, dance or play tag or grope our boyfriends with abandon right in the middle of the street. The balmy air is so heavy, I can feel it weighing me down, luring sweat out of every one of my pores, slowing down my usually brisk, New Yorker-paced steps to a crawl. It feels sultry, thick, as if the air itself has a personality. The East Village sidewalks are practically empty, with those doing the slo-mo crawl down them pushing tired limbs through air as thick as pudding. I make my way to Avenue A via Sixth Street—a detour, but my dripping body is hungry for something cold and sweet—and almost knock over a screeching little boy in his underwear hopping blissfully under the water spraying out of a fire hydrant. His big sister is watching from a stoop, hesitant, judgmental, envious, while their young mother in Daisy Duke shorts smiles and shakes her head at her happy boy. I step into the air-conditioned soda fountain on Avenue A and order a chocolate-vanilla-swirled frozen yogurt on a sugar cone from the modelesque Polish girl who works there, before again braving the steaming street.
“Where’d ja get that?” asks a grungy twenty-something guy with stringy dyed black hair and a dragon tattooed across his shirtless chest. As I point at the soda fountain behind me, liquid drips onto my forehead. I gasp and snap my head back to squint at an air conditioner looming above that has perspired onto me—it still surprises me every time. In front of a dingy corner bar, a preteen girl whose breasts are spilling out of the front of her minuscule green dress is flirting with a preteen boy in a baseball cap who’s playing it cool. As I pass, he says, “So, do you have any plans tonight?” She devours the poor pup with heavy-lidded eyes, taking her lower lip between her teeth for a moment. Her answer will clearly be his salvation. I’m remembering that age fondly when a leathered man with butt-length dreadlocks stops dead in his tracks in front of me and points at my feet.
“You have the most ravishing feet I’ve ever seen. I have to paint them.”
I look down at my weathered pink flip-flops in wonderment.
“No, really, man, they’re mind-blowing,” he says. “This isn’t a pickup, seriously, bring a friend with you, whatever, to my studio, but I must paint your feet. It’s my duty, man, never seen anything like them.”
“It’s not a good time right now,” I tell him, but take his phone number and promise to call when my schedule opens up. As I move past, his eyes never leave my skinny, pale ankles.
A big, bushy Irish wolfhound limps past me and I say, “Hi, baby face, I’m sorry about your leg.” It’s an illness really, my compulsion to talk to every dog I see. I think I’m afraid they’ll recognize a kindred spirit in me and feel hurt if I don’t acknowledge them. I tell myself I’ll dump the rest of my frozen yogurt on the next street corner, since it’s loaded with sugar and calories and dripping all over my hand, but when I get there, it’s too good to part with. I finish it all the way to my corner, where I nod at the family hanging out in their van while wipi
ng yogurt on my old cutoff khakis, and blow kisses at their yappy Yorkie, who barks as I pass.
The door to my apartment isn’t locked. It pushes right open, and I immediately sense that something is different. The windows are still boarded over and the space is still dark, but the toxic smell has grown less pungent and the muck in front of the door has been cleared away. A waist-high pile of full garbage bags sits in the middle of the dank cave that used to be my bedroom.
“Hello?” I say, entering cautiously.
“Oh, hey.” Zach the hardware-store boy’s head pops out from behind the washer/dryer. He’s wearing a dust mask that he pulls down around his neck when he sees me. Then he blushes, as usual, so deeply that I can see it in the dark. He walks out of the kitchen wiping his hands on the bottom of the Smokey the Bear T-shirt he’s wearing over a pair of filthy jeans.
“Hey,” he says. “I’ve been cleaning up the place.”
“You’ve made major headway,” I say, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. There’s another pile of garbage bags in the living room, which must contain all the ash and plaster that was covering the floor, because there’s very little of it left. A portable fan hums in the corner, its metal face turning slowly left then right, doing its best to dry up the dampness. The exposed floor is a sight: the damp floorboards curling cutely, yet disturbingly, upon themselves. A pile of cleaning supplies covers the kitchen floor: mop, broom, dustpan, various bottles, rags, sponges. There’s a shovel leaning up against the washing machine.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” I tell him.
“Well, yeah, I kind of did,” he says, walking over to the bookshelves he built. He turns away from me and starts to sand the wood down with a block and says over his shoulder, “Grab one of those sponges over by the fridge. They’re good for getting the soot off.”