by Jana Casale
“I’d settle for a bedroom that has a closet at this point,” he said.
Their thirteenth viewing in, just as they’d really begun to lose hope, Leda came upon an ad for a townhouse “with views” in Noe Valley. That night they rushed to the open house, and as they walked through the door and saw the big glass windows and the everlasting view of the city running into the bay, they looked at each other and said almost simultaneously, “This is it.” Two days later they moved in. John held her as they looked out onto the city, and said, “A writer needs a good view.” And then she felt restoration in her high ceilings and all things as beautiful.
The first few days in the apartment she felt a sense of total possibility. The only furniture they had was a blow-up mattress and a folding chair. It was a bit strange to be in such an empty space, but the lack of clutter was invigorating. The rooms echoed and sometimes she’d call out the whistle from The Hunger Games. She spent her time writing a short story about a chef who made exceptional flan and eating leftover pizza while she read Joan Didion. They didn’t have cable or Internet yet, so she put washcloths under her feet and skated around the bedroom. Anne texted her: “What are you up to?”
“I’ve put washcloths under my feet and am skating around the bedroom,” she texted back.
“What?? You’re losing your mind!”
“No, it’s fun! What are you up to?”
“Watching Jason play Mortal Kombat.”
It was a moment of respite from her former life of singleness. Knowing that John was coming home and they would get takeout and curl up on the blow-up mattress and watch movies was all she needed to navigate the isolation of those first few days. It didn’t seem like what it really was: her alone in an apartment waiting for John.
Midweek the Comcast guy came. He was in his late thirties and thin and walked with an uppity, sexual kind of step. Leda had this sort of odd impulse to impress him.
“So you’re new here, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, just moved in.” She felt leaving out the pronoun made her seem more relaxed.
“What do you think about the city so far?”
“Seems really great.”
“Yeah.” He took a piece of cable and cut the end of it. His hands moved in a fast, knowing way. “Have you hit any of the clubs?”
“No, not yet. Any recommendations?” Leda had been to one real club in her entire life and spent most of her time throwing up in the bathroom from bad Chinese takeout.
“Let’s see…Well, honestly, you really need to go to Oakland to go to anything decent.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Have you been yet?”
“No, not yet, but I’ve heard great things.”
“Yeah, it’s great there…Do you smoke at all?”
“Yes.” She didn’t smoke.
“Well, I know a lot of good places in the area if you want some names.”
“I’d love that!” She smiled and nodded to seem like she was really interested.
“Great, I’ll write them down for you on the way out.”
Leda felt uncomfortable for the rest of the time he was in her house. As a result the Internet password she created when he set up the Wi-Fi was 3U988, a conglomeration of her not thinking and just typing something random into the keyboard as quickly as possible. He handed her his card on the way out with a list of places to buy weed and the names of a few clubs he liked in Oakland.
“Maybe I’ll be seeing you in Oaktown,” he said as he handed it to her.
When John got home she told him about the Comcast guy.
“Why was he asking you if you smoked weed?” John said.
“He was just being friendly more than anything, I think.”
“Leda, that’s seriously inappropriate. I mean, he was supposed to just come and put the cable in and instead he’s like weirdly hitting on you and seeing if you want to smoke with him?”
“I don’t think he was hitting on me really. I can’t really explain it.” She thought back on the guy and his knowing hands quickly cutting cable wires.
“I’m surprised you said that you smoked.”
“What was I going to say?”
“How about, ‘No, I don’t.’ ”
“Yeah, but why do that? He would have thought I was judging him or something, and I just felt like I was never going to see this person again, so why am I making some kind of thing out of it?”
“You don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not.”
“I don’t ever pretend anything.”
The week wore on, and that weekend they went to Ikea and bought furniture and plates. For the most part it was everything she could have ever wanted in her life then: looking at furniture with a man, planning their little home together, the air of domesticity ripe with Swedish meatballs and fiberboard. But she would remember the time in Ikea less than the cable man in her apartment. Less about the moment they bought their green desk and more about how nervous she was writing 3U988. John would ask her: “Do you like this lamp?” And she’d say: “Yes, I do.” And then that night, as she lay in her new bed looking off at her new view, she wondered why she lied to that man, how could she be so wanting from someone who had no real bearing, and why her life could be so misrepresented by no one but herself.
CHAPTER 25
An Average Day in the First Month of Living in San Francisco
8:42 a.m.: Leda woke up and still felt tired even though she’d had enough sleep. Is it possible to wake up from things being too quiet? she wondered. She leaned over to her nightstand and grabbed her phone. One text from Anne. One text from Elle. She didn’t bother reading Anne’s. It was long and about Jason. It was too early in the morning to hear her complain about Jason not texting, or Jason forgetting her birthday, or Jason wanting to try anal. These kinds of texts used to palpitate the day, but now it just seemed like she and Anne were living such painfully dissimilar lives. She felt older than Anne and maybe more exhausted. Anne was exhausted too, but her exhaustion was so childish, so rooted in the trivial anxieties of youth. It seemed pointless to go on and on about yet another bad relationship where the greatest concerns were things that would never matter in any relationship that was worth anything. On more than one occasion she wanted to tell Anne what she really thought. She wanted to say, “Anne, the guy is a total piece of shit. Find someone nice,” but of course you couldn’t say those kinds of things to a friend. Friendship was about tolerating someone else’s constructed realities, letting them settle their own neuroses and not intervening. Who was she to tell Anne that Jason was shit? Who was she to tell her that if she found someone decent, she wouldn’t be fighting about anal, she’d be having it?
Elle’s text said: “Sorry! I meant to text back like forever ago. It’s blue. How are you, girly??”
Leda had to reread her last text to Elle, which was from a month before. She’d asked her what color coat she got from this store they both liked. Elle taking a long time to respond was pretty customary in their friendship. Leda tolerated it for the most part without any type of pettiness or passive-aggressive retaliation, but again, now her life seemed so different. She was living in San Francisco with John. He was taking a good job so that they could have a future together. Dealing with paper Elle and her lame texts seemed foolishly juvenile. Why should she desperately write back when she hardly wanted to talk to her in the first place? Fuck off, Elle, she thought.
She grabbed her computer from under her nightstand and checked her e-mail and then Facebook. She read an article Mel posted about toxoplasmosis and how this scientist from Prague believes that toxoplasmosis is so prevalent that it explains why so many people are doing all these extreme sports and all this crazy stuff and aren’t scared, just like how the mice aren’t scared of cats when they become infected. Maybe I have toxoplasmosis, she thought.
—
10:14 a.m.
: She got up to pee after no longer being able to hold it. After peeing she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She lifted her shirt and sucked in her stomach. She pushed down on the pocket of fat above her belly button. If only I could lose this. Her face looked tired and she thought maybe a little bit drawn. She smiled at herself. “It’s not like that,” she said to her reflection, a phrase that she’d remembered from a book and would say to solace herself on occasion.
She ate half a banana with peanut butter for breakfast. Then she turned on the TV and watched a marathon of Say Yes to the Dress for nearly three hours.
—
1:23 p.m.: She shut off Say Yes to the Dress just as the episode came on with the woman who was dying of some kind of rare kidney disorder. She’d seen it before, and it bothered her. It was sad and hard to watch, but more than anything it was just so atrociously voyeuristic. It was like emotional pornography. You too could be touched by this sick woman in her tenderest moment. In the end the girl did get a nice dress and she looked happy despite dying. Even if you’re dying you’re happy to be marrying. No man is worse than death, Leda thought, and shut off the TV.
The apartment was getting hot. She opened the sliding door to the porch to let the breeze in. Outside a man was cutting weeds in his garden. She watched the way he moved back and forth in the tall grass of the overgrown embankment. She didn’t want him to notice her standing there in her pajamas with her messy hair, but she still stood there and watched for a while longer. How rhythmically he cut those weeds. How neatly he placed them in a pile. After that she made a grilled cheese for lunch and ate it as she flipped though the Oriental Trading Company catalog.
—
2:39 p.m.: Leda felt resolve in wanting to get started on her novel. She’d had this idea for the longest time about this woman who ends up getting cheated on and ruined by her friends who expose her at her job and her whole life sort of unravels and she loses any real sense of who she is. She’d told the idea to John and he thought it was fantastic. He said: “That sounds fantastic! What are you going to call it?” And she said: “I’m going to call it Eleanor.”
Leda sat down at her green desk. She’d never been successful at writing at a desk, but now in the new place with this new adult lifestyle, and all this new Ikea furniture, she felt motivated to become a desk user.
Her original plan with the novel was to make a complicated outline the way one of her professors had taught her.
“All writers use outlines,” he said. “If they say that they don’t, they’re lying.”
Leda worked on the outline for twenty-two minutes before coming to the conclusion that this advice was misguided at best. She ended up with a Word document that looked as follows:
Chapter 1: Introduce Main Character Eleanor
• Brunette (Possibly a redhead—make this point shown without describing her, looking at her own reflection—friends’ reaction? Or maybe something her mother says—mother’s name: Sheila)
• Smart (Goes to a prestigious school—has fantastic vocabulary)
• Complicated family (Get back to this later but something to do with Sheila)
Chapter 2: Conflict
• Relationship (Things falling apart, cheating)
• Work conflict (Her friends ruining things for her at work)
Chapter 3: Resolve
• Things resolve??
She texted Katrina about it, as the two had taken the class together.
“I just wrote the stupidest outline in the history of outlines. Prof. Brimbley doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Katrina never responded.
Leda tried to write out a bit of the first chapter but gave up. She laid her head down next to the computer and closed and opened each eye one at a time in succession, so that the keyboard looked first here, then there, then here again. Closer but really still farther, she thought.
—
3:17 p.m.: After abandoning her attempt at writing for the day, she had a sort of vague ambition to organize the bookshelves. Just a few days before, she and John had haphazardly stacked their books onto the new shelves.
“Let’s just get them out of the boxes, and then we can worry about them looking nice,” he said. Leda had agreed at the time, but now seeing her Tolstoy squished between his book on film theory and his book on postmodernist theory she felt a compulsion to fix it. She sat beside the first shelf, a small white bookcase made from fiberboard and epoxy, and started ripping the books off. The fast motion of it and the sound they made hitting the floor gave her a certain satisfaction. She moved faster and faster and allowed the books to fall and hit each other harder and harder as they landed in a pile on the floor. Once the shelf was empty she looked down at the pile of books. The Noam Chomsky was on top, and without thinking much, she picked it up and gave it the honor of being the first book on her shelf. The other bookshelf, which was metal and tall and modern-looking, she’d leave for John’s theory books, but all her lovely books would be together, and when she’d look over at them, she’d know that the Tolstoy stood alone, and there was so much comfort in the thought.
—
4:42 p.m.: The fog rolled in. The room darkened and out the window she could only see the tops of trees through the rolling gray of haze. She slid her back against the bookshelf that she’d just filled and watched the air looking so opaque and closed in. No longer could she see the city; no longer could she see the bay. The limitation of it was a consolation, as if there wasn’t anything else. As if her day couldn’t have been anything more than it was.
—
6:35 p.m.: She spent the last few hours before John got home unapologetically watching TV. There wasn’t anything on, but it didn’t matter. When she heard John’s key in the lock, a feeling of anxiety and anger waved over her. John came in smiling. He tossed his keys on the table.
“Hi, beautiful,” he said, and at that moment she wanted to kill him. You’re happy ’cause you aren’t here watching Storage Wars. Well, fuck you for that. She didn’t say hi back.
—
8:47 p.m.: They went out for dinner, and she felt a little bit better about the day after that. John told her about this guy at work who had sent this desperate Facebook message to this girl he went on a terrible date with.
“He said he loved her in it and that he thought they’d end up together one day.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, we were all telling him not to send it. What can you really say, though? You can’t tell him he’s crazy and that she’s going to think he’s crazy and will probably never speak to him again.”
“I think he’s just a virgin,” Leda said.
“I’m not sure if he is.”
“I am. I’m sure he’s a virgin and just feels completely alone and wishes things were different so he’s ready to do anything.”
“Or maybe he just wants to love somebody,” John said.
“That’s probably what he thinks, but really he just wants to feel like someone wants him.” She took a bite of her falafel. “I feel sorry for him.”
—
10:46 p.m.: She and John had sex that night. They role-played that she was a cheerleader and he was the coach and that she’d have to blow every guy on the football team in order to get on the squad unless she just had sex with him. It was great. She came really quickly, and they cuddled for a long while afterward.
“Why did you separate all our books on the bookshelves?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
John fell asleep soon after. The fog had rolled back out and she could see the view of the city again. She thought about toxoplasmosis. Maybe I have toxoplasmosis. Maybe that’s why I’m not scared, even though I should be.
—
11:59 p.m.: She fell asleep.
CHAPTER 26
Rochelle
“Do you think I should do this?” she asked John.
“Why not? You want to meet new people in the city. It could be fun,” John said.
“I worry it will just be a bunch of weirdos.”
“You’ll be there, and you’re not weird.”
“That’s true,” she said, and she sent an e-mail.
It wasn’t easy picking out an outfit for the Meetup. It was like dating in that there was some sense of anticipation that you should look nice and try to impress, but it was not dating because you weren’t trying to sleep with anyone. How attractive am I trying to be for these strangers that I don’t want to fuck? she thought. In the end she wore a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting sweater. When she got to the bowling alley, she was happy she hadn’t dressed up any more than she had, as all of the people there to meet “new friends” were men. She wanted nothing more than to turn and walk away, but the woman she spoke to on the phone spotted her almost immediately.
“Hi there, are you looking for the Meetup?” she asked. She was a tan girl with really muscular arms and white eyeliner.
“Umm, yeah.”