“I forget how crooked everything gets down here,” Maya says.
He settles a hand against her back.
“So that was …” She stops herself. “How do you all know each other?”
She doesn’t want to talk about Caitlin. She wants even less to talk about herself.
“Caitlin, I guess,” he says. “Though technically I met her through you.” Maya stiffens, and Charles pulls his hand back as he pulls out a stool for her. They loosen limbs from coats and sidle onto their stools. Charles places his elbows on the bar. “Alana and Caitlin were in some writing group together when Caitlin first moved here. The three of us were inseparable for a while.”
Maya thinks again about that day Caitlin cried to her. Alana: the other girl. “And then Bryant,” she says.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.” The bartender—thin, full beard, crooked posture, a blue T-shirt, and perfectly cut jeans—pours and delivers Charles’s beer, then slides Maya her wine. “We were that sort of close that’s not sustainable,” he says, nodding thanks to the bartender. “And the strangeness of being three of any group of people; it was bound to get weird or messy if Bryant hadn’t come along.”
“Weird or messy how?” Maya says. She’s asking too much.
“Oh, you know. Jealousy, maybe, or discomfort.”
“But none of you dated?” She sees Alana again, those eyes, her height. Maya feels the heat rising to her cheeks.
“That’s not the only kind of jealousy.”
“Right,” she says. “Of course.”
“But Bryant.”
Maya sips her wine, watches the bartender mix and pour a purple drink.
“He sort of swept Lana away.”
“And you all didn’t mind it.”
“It wasn’t our place to mind.” Maya thinks she hears remorse.
“You and Caitlin are still close, then?”
He shrugs. “All relationships come in and out, right?”
“She loves you.” She didn’t mean to say this. She almost clamps her hand over her mouth.
He holds his beer glass at a diagonal and rubs the label with his thumb. “I’m not sure she knows what that means.”
“She’s pretty brilliant.”
“She’s not spent much of her life in the real world.”
Maya shrugs. She didn’t mean to stay on this as long as she has.
“She’s not …” He stops himself.
She wants him to say something that proves Maya’s not doing Caitlin wrong.
“Bryant’s a douche,” he says.
Maya almost laughs out loud. It’s such an adolescent word. “A douche, huh?”
The bartender tops off her wine without her asking. She can’t imagine how she’ll make it home.
“Oh, you know what I mean. He’s one of those guys who only feels comfortable with women. And only women who appreciate his genius.” He says the last part in a lower voice, his glasses falling lower on his nose, and gulps his beer. “He always kind of hated Cait.” He pushes up his glasses. “I worry about Lana now.”
“He seems to really love her.”
Charles gulps his beer. “Of course he loves her,” he says. “She’s twenty-eight and gorgeous and she worships him.”
“And now she’s had his kid.”
He raises his hand, nods toward his beer as the bartender approaches. “Now that,” he says.
“Do you think he’d leave her?”
“He wrote a story about her. Caitlin found it in some literary journal, right after they met. It wasn’t about her, because they hadn’t met yet when he wrote it, I guess he could have seen her before that, but it was about a girl that looked just like her. They’re both from out West and the main character and the girl shared that too. It’s this incredibly depressing twenty pages about him buying her lipstick at Barneys and popping Ativan in her mouth all day. I’m not sure he has any clue who she actually is.”
“But we’re all only just the people other people think we are.”
“Maybe,” he says. He shakes his head, hands the bartender his empty glass, and sips his new one. “Fuck,” Charles says. “I hope not.”
They both go quiet.
“What do you think I am?” he says.
Briefly, she hears Caitlin’s words.
Maya drains her wine glass. She’s quiet, just drunk enough, her eyes still angled toward the floor “Exactly what I need.”
Summer 2011
The boards are old. A milky, sand-speckled gray across their fronts, they have chunks of wax solidified to them. They’re heavy, big, and long—like standing on tables, Cooper tells them—instead of the slippery short boards being used by the kids already out offshore. He’s a busboy at Annie’s restaurant, a treat, Annie said, surf lessons for both Ellie and Jack
It’s getting better, slowly. Jack talks to her sporadically. She’s careful, listening. He does his searches, “research,” that mostly involve Google and Wikipedia, and she listens carefully as he reads her the information he finds, about storms, more about sailing (though she’s promised herself that she will never go again), tides and seasons, currents and storm patterns. He looks up bugs and New York, because Ellie told him that’s where she’s from and now he wants to go there. He asks her about Bloomberg and Cuomo, MoMA, Broadway, Central Park. His dream, he says, is to go to the Museum of Natural History. Not for the dinosaurs, that’s the thing everyone wants to see, he says. He wants to see the space exhibit. He’s interested in what still exists that has yet to be understood. Ellie has promised they’ll go together someday soon.
The weather’s been cooperating, at least until three or four in the afternoon each day, when the the sky seems so filled up with all the moisture that it crashes open in loud violent storms that Ellie loves, even if they trap them in the house for hours.
They spend an hour with Cooper in the sand before going into the water. Ellie and Jack giggle at first, failing to pop from belly to feet as seamlessly as Cooper’s shown them. Instead, they each manage it in three steps, planted palms, then knees, then feet, and far too slowly. Cooper keeps pushing them to get it right.
“One. Two. Three!” he says over and over. He’s tall, the color of an almond, with white-blond hair that’s long and pulled back at the base of his neck. He’s filled with confidence, demonstrating, more at ease on the board than he seems on land. He stands behind Ellie a moment. He holds her waist and lifts her. One. Two. Three. And finally she does it, one seamless motion, up onto her feet. And Jack claps, grinning, as Ellie stands.
Ellie reddens right up to her ears, Cooper’s hands still on her, Jack happy, proud. Cooper lets go of Ellie and does the same with Jack, standing behind him, and he’s up. Ellie claps and cheers.
“All right,” says Cooper. He carries both their boards out to the water. He instructs them in paddling, positions Ellie far enough back that her board won’t nose-dive, but close enough to the front that she has control. He sets Jack up closer to the front of his board, then Cooper pulls himself behind him. Jack holds on tight with both hands as Cooper paddles them out.
Ellie likes the weight of the floating board right from the start, the sound of the slap of water, the force with which she must push down to get beneath the waves. It’s a struggle getting past the break, and she wonders at how easily Cooper gets Jack out. He places his hands on either side and tips the nose of the board beneath the waves before they break over him, Jack grinning, laughing the whole way. They come up farther out and hardly scathed, shaking their heads free of water as they do, Jack emulating Cooper, water pooling at their backs, hair slick against their heads. But each time Ellie tries this, she doesn’t have the weight or strength to get the board under the whole wave. Each time it pushes her back and she falls off, twirling, fighting, forced to swim again after her twisting, flipping board. It takes her twice as long to get out to where the others sit, the noses of their boards flipped up over the water, their legs circling beneath them, ready to launch.
She was eight and Ben was six. It was almost time to go, their last day in Florida, and Ellie had begged her mom for one more swim before they left. Her mom had already pulled on her pants and sweater, and Ellie told her she didn’t need her to come in. She was old enough, a strong enough swimmer; she knew her mom was always cold. She’d swum out, on her own and happy. She’d looked back once and waved. She didn’t plan it; she’d simply wanted to feel the wave crash on her. Her legs scissored, kicked, and she’d felt safe and strong. The wave wasn’t huge and she thought it would be fun to fight against it. She watched, still, as it grew and curved. She breathed in once, kicked faster, and she kept her eyes open as the wave came down. She pushed the air hard from her nose and then the force of it took hold of her, like someone pushing, like Ben tackling her but softer, fuller, somehow both more completely and less real. The side of her thigh brushed quick against the sand floor and she felt each grain as it ran over her. She tried to grab hold of the current, to push up and over, like she did when the water was calm. But it had and held her. And she flailed a moment longer, then went limp. She let her body fall into the curves of water, let it shape her, turn her, twist her. She opened her eyes and saw her arms before her—blurry, pale, and crooked—and she felt safe and strong and warm. It must only have been seconds before her mom’s hands were around her. Her mom’s hands, which she knew just like her own hands. Her mom’s sweater was all soaking wet and sandy and her mom was crying as she carried Ellie back to shore. She wrapped Ellie up, peeled off her sweater, and Ellie felt her mom’s chest thump hard against her back. She covered them in all the extra towels, tiny grains of sand stuck to their arms and legs. Salt and sand bits rolled around in Ellie’s mouth. And her mom kept holding tight to her and rubbing her hands up-down, up-down Ellie’s arms. And Ellie started to get very hot, too hot, but she stayed still and let her mom hold her, because she thought if she was hot, maybe her mom was finally not cold.
“You …” says Annie, when Ellie comes into the living room before Cooper gets there. She’s ecstatic, Annie, about Ellie going out with Cooper, like it’s affirming something about Ellie’s normalcy.
Ellie wears a sundress, no bra. It’s the first time she’s worn a dress since coming here.
“You look nice,” Jeffrey finishes for his wife. His eyes are on her then, as he gets up from the couch, one leg folding to the floor and then the other, marking his place in a large hardcover book.
Cooper comes in shortly after. They all watch his headlights through Annie’s vegetation, then hear the slap of his sandals as he comes to the door. Ellie’s never been on a date that she can think of. She’s been out with Dylan a thousand times. She’s gotten stoned and accidentally slept with other boys. But Cooper’s hair’s still wet from his shower and he looks sweet and young as he hugs Annie, then stands awkwardly, shaking Jeffrey’s hand.
“Where you guys going?” Jeffrey asks him. Annie glares at him. He’s almost always the quieter of the two of them.
“I don’t know,” Cooper says. “I was going to leave that to her.” He nods toward Ellie.
“Bad move, man,” says Jeff.
Annie hits her husband on the shoulder.
“What?” he says. He laughs. “The guy should take the reins.”
Ellie watches Cooper’s face get red and wishes she could pity him. Instead, she’s slightly grossed out by how young and small he looks.
She grabs his arm. “We’ll figure it out,” she says, not looking at Jeffrey, wishing they were closer to the water now, to make Cooper seem more sure again.
“You’re close with Annie, huh?” says Ellie. They’re at some chain restaurant in a strip mall. The lighting’s an awkward too-dark orange and they sit across from one another in a booth against the wall.
“She likes to collect strays,” Cooper says.
Ellie nods.
“The kid’s been really hard for her, though. All his problems. She has less time for us.”
“It was nice of you to take us out, though.”
“She knows I need the money.” Their food has come, and he drops his fork briefly after saying this. “I mean, I’m glad I did.”
Ellie laughs. She wishes they could go outside again, go back to the ocean. She could swim out as far as she wanted and she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone, to think of anyone, ever again.
“I went to New York once,” says Cooper. The silence has gone on too long and Ellie’s stopped making an effort. “It was awful,” he says. “I don’t know how anyone could live in that place.”
“You’re serious?” says Ellie. She can’t imagine this, has never even heard it. She doesn’t know it’s true until she says it: “It’s the only place I feel like it might one day be okay to be whatever I might be.”
There were a few months, when she was twelve, when she went to an art teacher in DUMBO. She stopped showing up after always just going and began to wander around. She’d fallen deeply in love with the city then. It was winter when she started, cold, with mounds of dirty snow piled on the sidewalks. She’d burrow her hands into her pockets and dig her face into her scarf, a wool cap pulled down over her ears: she’d walk and walk. She’d discovered parts of New York she’d never known then. It was one of the great thrills of the city, how impossible it was to know. How there would always be another street or block she hadn’t yet encountered. How there would always be large stretches of space where no one knew her.
Sometimes she went into the bookstores she knew her mother liked, the tiny one with dark wood paneling on West Tenth Street, where their mom used to drag her and Ben when they were kids. She fingered the spines of books she knew her mom liked, like she had when she was little. She sat in the back, on a wooden bench close to the end of the alphabet in the fiction section, sometimes taking out books and reading tiny snips of sentences, before placing them carefully back.
Ellie had refused to read for pleasure at a certain age, probably around the same time she began skipping her art lessons and walking around. She’d liked it, she remembered, liked it now that she’d returned to it, but there was something dangerous about letting her mom see her too often with a book. The way she looked so hopeful, the way she seemed to want to make something of Ellie’s choices, to shape her, form her, show her, if only she could get hold of her long enough.
She’d thought, eventually, her mom would catch her in there wandering, skipping her hour sessions in DUMBO. Her art teacher, Catherine, would call and tell on her. But she was never caught and nothing ever came of it. She told her mom she wasn’t into art any longer, and she still found time sometimes to wander around.
When she was older, sometimes, after Dylan got her stoned, she’d do the same thing, but this time she tended to interact with other people more. She’d go into bars and let men hit on her. She’d gone home twice with men who must have been twice, if not more, her age, one with a big apartment in the Financial District with shiny silver fixtures in the kitchen and the bathroom. Ellie’d let that guy have her on his sink. He’d wiped it with a Clorox wipe right after, Ellie standing in the too-bright light, cold, with all her clothes off, the guy rubbing, eyes intent on the silver till it shone. The other guy had lived in a tiny studio in Fort Greene with a roof deck. She’d snuck out after he fucked her—he’d come too quickly, she’d been relieved by this, his quick apology and then his passing out; she’d almost laughed at his awkward limbs and crooked nose, which had all looked so powerful and ominous when he’d been standing across the bar from her. She’d sat out on the deck for hours, finally climbing down the fire escape to avoid having to go back inside and see him standing up again.
She craved a sort of violence in all this time that she spent wandering. She wanted the city, someone deep inside it, something further underneath, to come up and shock her into a
sort of certainty, to tear her open, break her, in order that she might have something she could work to fix.
“It’s just loud and dirty,” Cooper says. “And no real water.”
“It’s an island,” Ellie says.
Cooper looks down into his food again. “Well, sure, but you can’t surf a river.”
Ellie laughs. “I guess you can’t.”
It’s still light out when they pull back into Annie’s. Ellie’s relieved to get out of the car. She wants to be alone in her little room with her Deborah Eisenberg. She wants to get Jack out of bed early the next morning and spend the day in the water just the two of them.
She doesn’t see Jeff at first when she comes in through the side door. Later, she’ll tell herself he might not have been there at all. It could have been Annie, or a shadow from the trees, outside her door then, except she saw the same dark blue cover of the book he’d been reading when Cooper had come to pick her up.
She closes the door to her room but doesn’t lock it.
Cooper had offered, without her saying anything, her body somehow signaling, on the drive home to get her high if she were ever in need while she was here. She’d demurred, her eyes fixed out the window, the quiet empty streets still disturbing to her; she’d wanted to ask him to drive her back to the East River instead.
Winter 2013
“Fucking Brooklyn,” Laura says.
She’s come to take Maya to dinner, to distract her from what’s about to happen, to fortify her as only Laura can. Maya’s called the doctors, bought the tickets. She’ll be with her girl so soon.
“You’re changing,” Laura says, eyeing Maya’s pants and baggy sweater. Stephen’s convinced Ben to go with him to get the vegetables and meat for dinner. Maya lets Laura lead her back into her room. They stand before her full-length mirror. Maya unbuttons and takes off her jeans. “That thing too,” says Laura, nodding toward Maya’s big black sweater. She’s located wine glasses, pours each of them a drink.
“We pretend,” says Laura. Holding her glass toward Maya, then taking a big sip. “We women. We pretend we’re okay by dressing up.”
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