by Andrea Meyer
I pick one up—it’s dry, not like a normal sponge—and start wiping off the refrigerator. “You think you can save those?” I ask.
“Definitely,” he says. “Sand ’em down and stain ’em and they’ll be as good as new.”
I look around, trying to get used to my burnt-out home. “Hey, where’s my couch?” I ask.
“I put it up on the roof,” Zach says. “Had to carry it up on my head. It was soaked. I think if we leave it in the sun, it might be okay. The cushions are crunchy and I don’t know if you’ll be able to get the smell of smoke out, but they can be reupholstered. I put that red chair up there, too, and the rug that was bunched up in the corner.”
“Thanks,” I say, peeking into the refrigerator, which Zach has emptied. “Hey, you haven’t found any of my stuff buried in here anywhere, have you? I’m wondering about jewelry.”
“You got that one box?”
“Yeah. God, I never did thank you for that. That was so nice. I don’t know how you did it, but you managed to get almost everything I have of my grandmother’s.”
“Were you close?”
“Yeah, she was around a lot when I was a kid,” I say, dropping my bag to the floor and leaning against the exposed washing machine. An image of my grandmother comes to mind, rubbing lotion on my legs after a bath. “Soft as velvet,” she would say, tears gathering in her brown eyes. “Please God, let me live to see you married. I so want to see you a bride.”
“She died a few years ago and my grandfather later that year,” I say. “I was inconsolable. I think I wondered if anyone would ever love me that much again. Sorry, that must sound pretty stupid.”
“Not at all,” Zach says.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. “How do you recommend finding my valuables?”
“I’ve bagged up a lot of debris,” he says. “But I left most of the bedroom for you. Maybe you’ll be able to find something. I did some Internet research, though, and I guess it’s hard to find objects in the parts that get hit the worst. They get pulverized.”
“My bedroom did suffer,” I say.
“Some of the books that were closer to the floor are all right,” Zach says. “Soggy but legible.”
I approach the stack he’s made on the floor: a motley assortment of plays, a Yeats anthology, movie guides, Toni Morrison, the Proust I never read, Tim Robbins, a stack of romance novels. I run my fingers along the damp pages of a doozy called One Steamy Summer before making my way past the countertop, which Zach has leaned against the kitchen wall, past the pile of garbage bags and the flame-broiled wooden stakes that used to be my bedroom walls, and sit down on the floor to start digging though the rubble to search for anything that might belong to me.
“I laughed when I saw all those romantic books,” Zach says. “I got into your books when I was staying here. It was a workout, all those writers you like who make you work for it—Woolf, Faulkner, Nabokov. I read a lot, kept discovering new stuff, like Italo Calvino, awesome, and then I found that hidden stash.” He chuckles.
“I was trying to write one,” I say, refusing to give in to his mockery. “I heard there was a formula to romance novels, so I got the guidelines from one of the major publishers, thought maybe I’d take a stab at it.”
“Oh, tell me you didn’t like reading them. You didn’t have to get thirty-eight of them.”
“I bought about twenty for a buck at a stoop sale, but fine, I admit I did like them a little.” I laugh. “I even started writing this essay about my guilty addiction, you know, the English-major geek who gets hooked on Harlequin. Never finished it.”
“You could still,” he says. “You’re a great writer.”
“Oh really.”
“I’ve been reading you for years,” he says. “Your film stuff.”
“You read Flicks?” I’m incredulous. Only directors, movie fanatics, and the indie community read my rag.
“I have a subscription,” he says.
“That’s hilarious,” I say, refocusing on the rubble, but I’m sure his face is crimson.
The first thing I locate is a huge chunk of blue ceramic with dirt still clinging to it. It’s a piece of the flowerpot I planted Zach’s mini-roses in. The flowers themselves were collateral damage. I look up at him and remember how sweet I thought it was when he brought that plant to Serena, back when he was a mystery to me. How funny that I knew the guy fixing up my apartment all along. It’s comforting to know it was Zach, someone who’s always been so kind and generous. Digging my fingers farther into the muck, I touch something hard and bore a little tunnel around a smooth object, which turns out to be a Day of the Dead skeleton my sister brought me from Mexico. Its bones are charbroiled. I wonder how it got all the way over here from its shelf.
“Look at this,” I say to Zach, holding it up.
He walks over and peers at the tiny, black and white doll. “Only a dead guy could survive the flames,” he says. “Check out his expression.”
I look down into my palm at the spooky grin on its face. The particles around the doll have dried out a lot. They feel soft and dusty on my hands. I fill my left hand and with my right push away gray and black dust, liberating solid chunks with my fingers to see if they might be anything valuable.
“Hey, you know the books that you saved during the fire, why those?”
“I don’t know, really. I didn’t have time to think, I just grabbed, but I guess they seemed worn, like you paid attention to them,” he says. “I guess they were the ones I would have rescued if it was my fire.”
We spend the next hour there, Zach sanding while I dig and chuck hunks of gloop. I don’t find much except a couple of shattered nail polish bottles amid the unidentifiable slabs. I’m acknowledging the surreal humor in my situation and feeling calm, my mind quiet for the first time in a while.
“You know, Zach, I have good news for you,” I say. “Once the place is fixed up, you can go on staying here if you want.”
He spins around, wiping his hands on his jeans. I don’t know why it’s hard for me to tell him.
“My boyfriend and I were breaking up, but now it looks like we’re staying together,” I say. “I’m going to keep living at his place.”
“Oh,” he says, turning toward the shelves for a second and then facing me again. “I never understood why you would live somewhere else when you have this great apartment.”
“Well, I just told you, I’m staying at my boyfriend’s. His apartment is bigger, so it makes sense. I guess we’ll see what happens in the future.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“I love Anthony and I’m gonna try to make it work and if that means not living at my apartment, so be it,” I say, feeling as if I have to defend myself. “He gave me a ring.”
“You’re engaged?”
“Well, not engaged engaged,” I say. “It’s more like a promise, you know, to get married eventually.”
“Right,” he says and turns around to keep sanding the bookshelves.
I keep picking through shards, pissed off and irritated that Anthony didn’t ask me to marry him. What the hell is a promise ring anyway? Did he even say it was a promise ring?
“You know,” I say, staring into the mountain of dust at my feet, “things are going really great for me right now, you know? My job, the column, did you know I got a column at that magazine Luscious?” I look up at him and he nods. I wonder how he knows. “I guess I’m not busier than anyone else in New York, but lately I feel like I’m on some kind of spinning ride at an amusement park that’s going faster and faster and I’m glued to the walls and the floor’s dropping and I’m waiting to tumble when it comes to a halt, and it’s starting to make me dizzy and a little nauseous, even though it’s exhilarating and fast, and I don’t know how to get off. And now there’s all this.” I thrust my hands out, indicating the pitiful remains of my life. “I don’t even know where to start with it and I have nowhere to go. Then this guy that I rea
lly do care about tells me he wants to make this relationship work and maybe it’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Zach walks slowly toward me. I lift my chin up toward him from where I’m sitting Indian-style on the damp, blackened floor. “I always wanted to live a simpler life,” I say, “to find a small, quiet space where I could have some peace, maybe even get a dog. This apartment felt like a start, and I don’t know what to do now.” My shoulders slump as I start to cry into my hands.
“Shhhh,” Zach says, crouching down and putting his arm around me.
He’s so big, I feel safe and warm and don’t want him to go away. When I stop crying he pulls away from me and lightly places his hand on the back of my neck. My whole body tingles.
“This place can be rebuilt, Jacquie,” he says, scooting around to sit on the floor in front of me, the bottoms of his knees hitting the tops of mine. “I know it seems bad right now, but when you get the insurance money, all you’ll need is time, energy, a little vision. It should take six months. With focus and determination, I give it three.”
“Where is Buster?” I ask.
“With Serena,” he says. “I didn’t think I should bring him here. Who knows what he’d get into? You know, Jacquie, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Here’s an idea: get excited instead. This is a clean slate, anything can happen. I mean—” He bites his lip. I feel like this is when he’s supposed to reach out and kiss me before the sexual tension suffocates both of us, but that’s not a possibility, is it?
“I should really go,” I say, jumping up and away from him. “I have this party thing.”
“Yeah, I have to go pretty soon, too,” he says. “Gotta meet Serena to taste wedding cake.”
Now it’s my turn to blush and move quickly to the door.
As I’m swinging it open, Zach says, “Jacquie, I have to apologize.” I turn around to face him. “I knew about the light in the bathroom. I’d seen it spark before, and in my line of work, I never should have let that slide. I kept meaning to fix it, but never got to it. You just never think this could happen.”
“I should have fixed it, too, Zach.”
“Yeah, probably.”
When I leave, I don’t feel like going back to Anthony’s, so I take the F train to Brooklyn and tumble into Courtney’s inviting, king-size bed, where I fall dead asleep in minutes.
16
* * *
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* * *
I wake up from my nap to Chaz complaining about how desperately and immediately he needs to be fed. When I pry my eyes reluctantly open, he is seated on top of Courtney’s pillow directly in front of my face, iridescent eyes unblinking, obviously irked.
“Fine,” I say, “fine,” and sleepwalk into the kitchen to fetch him a scrumptious health-food brand Turkey and Giblets Feast. It stinks up the whole room as I spoon it into his crusty dish. I open the refrigerator and pull out the Brita pitcher, pour myself a tumbler of water, and guzzle the whole thing. The clock over the stove says eight-twenty when I make my way back to the bedroom and crawl back under the covers. “Shit!” I jump up again, more awake now. The Flicks party started at eight way on the West Side, and I’m in Brooklyn. Can I never be on time? I drag myself into the bathroom to examine myself in the mirror and am alarmed to see puffy eyes and big, frizzy hair that resembles Carole King’s circa 1973. “Shit,” I say again, realizing that I can’t avoid taking a shower and at least wetting my hair. I turn on the hot water and run a brush through the bird’s nest on my head. “Your hair is like a broom,” I remember my grandma saying in her Yiddish accent. I miss my grandma. While the shower’s heating up, I grab an open bottle of white wine from the fridge, pour a glass, and place it on the edge of the tub to sip while I’m washing off my nap.
I end my shower with a blast of cold water in an attempt to de-puff my eyes and retrieve some of my usual bounciness. Even a girl mid-existential crisis whose apartment burned down can muster up enough pep to face a minor New York cultural event, right? I take a handful of hair product out of the medicine cabinet, glob it onto my wet mop, wrap it all up in a towel, finish off my glass of wine, refill it in the kitchen, and race into the bedroom. It’s a quarter to nine when I call a car service (ETA: in five minutes), throw open Courtney’s closet door, and, without having to think, pull out a totally un-Courtney emerald-green, silk, sexpot cocktail dress that she never wears and I’ve always coveted and the black strappy sandals that accompany her to weddings only. How lucky am I that both my best friend and my sister wear size 8 shoes and size 6 dresses just like me? I toss the towel from my head onto the edge of the bathtub, slather lotion all over (even though it will slide right off me in the heat of the night), and when my car honks, I scrunch my wet hair, down my wine, grab my purse, and jet out the door. I’ll put on makeup in the car, which will cost me twenty bucks—that’s what I get for sleeping for three and a half hours in the middle of the afternoon.
When I reach the party, at a monstrous warehouse in Chelsea, I see a throng of people crowding the front door, trying to persuade the pack of perky publicists to let them in. Luckily for me, big boss Steve happens to be out there chatting up one of the bouncers, and he grabs my hand and pulls me past the red rope.
“Hey, how are you feeling?” he asks, wearing a look of fatherly concern.
“I’m great,” I tell him, tipsy. “Stoked to be out.” Stoked? I must be drunk.
Steve pats my back and nudges me into the industrial elevator, which subsequently lurches up and ejects us on the second floor, which is so packed with people that I have to squeeze past sweaty limbs, chests, and backs to find the bar and order a two-dollar beer in a plastic cup. Techno music blasts and videos play on most of the walls towering twenty feet overhead. My eyes are drawn from one projection to the next, unable to focus on anything specific. I swerve toward the corner farthest from the bar, where the crowd thins a bit, and become hypnotized by images of women of different shapes and sizes on the wall in front of me. They’re all dressed in the uniform preferred by twenty-something inhabitants of Williamsburg: some variation of stretchy, blousy, vintage, eye catching, low slung, bleak. The cuts quicken until the women are slamming against the makeshift screen one upon another in rapid succession. They should blur into some vague generalization about womanhood, but they don’t; each maintains her individual beauty and distinctness. There’s something poignant, mesmerizing about the piece.
“Like it?” a familiar male voice asks over my shoulder.
I swing around to find Jake standing next to me in baggy jeans and a tight orange Frosted Flakes T-shirt, and grab his shoulder to steady myself.
“I do, so much,” I say. “Is it yours?”
“Yeah,” he says proudly, a wide grin on his pretty face. “I’m doing video and photography stuff these days, installations, you know.”
“Congratulations,” I tell him, taking a sip of his strong cocktail.
“There’s a gallery interested in me,” he brags. “Maybe two. One place bought two of my paintings.”
“That’s great, Jake,” I shout over the music. “Hey, you didn’t sleep with all those chicks, did you?”
He laughs a low, devilish laugh. “Not all of them,” he says. “None of them while we were together. I promise.” I realize I’m not jealous of those girls or annoyed that he’s been slutting around since we broke up. Jake is not someone who can get to me anymore and it feels great.
“Hey, I want to hang out, Jacquie,” he says, feeding me another swig of his drink. As I bite my lip, about to tell him why we shouldn’t hop back into bed, which is of course what he means, he says, “C
an we, like—? It’s weird, you know? It was crazy when we were hanging out, but I feel like you inspired me or something, like this work is a lot because of you or something.” He looks down and futzes with a hole in his shirt that reveals a circle of tanned, flat stomach. “That’s probably kinda lame, huh? But you believed in me, you know, maybe we should try to see if we could, I don’t know.”
He stares at me with hard eyes that soften as they land on mine and reaches out to run a single finger down my bare shoulder. His touch makes me want to pull him toward me, crash against the wall, wrap my legs hard around his small waist, grind myself up against the seam of his jeans as he grabs my ass, as he would, bites my lip, mauls me in a room full of my friends and acquaintances. But I stop myself.
“Jake, this wasn’t me. It was you,” I say, recovering from my raunchy reverie. “You just needed to find your medium, you know what I mean? It’s about confidence and getting into yourself and finding out what your strengths are, you know? It was bound to come once you let yourself go.” Damn, I sound like a barfly perched on a stool, pontificating for whoever will listen. “I don’t think you really want me back in your life, Jake. Remember how insane we made each other?”
“We fucked great,” he says, making me laugh way too loudly.
“Yeah, we did,” I say, savoring the ache he can still ignite between my thighs just by saying the f-word. “But that’s not everything.” I reach out for him and he leans into my arms.
“Jake.” I feel so much tenderness for him, I almost tell him I love him, but I know he’ll take it the wrong way. “I really care about you. I’ll always be your friend.”
He straightens up and runs his hand coolly through his shaggy hair.
“Yeah, me too,” he says, his eyes beginning to dart around the room, eventually landing on an older man in really expensive jeans, whom I take to be one of his professional suitors.