The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Both,” I say. “Extra honey.” That’s a street tradition so far ingrained I couldn’t say whether the preference for extra sweetness belongs to me at all.

  Owen is kind but he doesn’t know how to make tea and he doesn’t ever ask my friends how they’re doing. Delilah loving Jack makes sense. She is bubbly and flippant. She is bighearted and loud. He is calm and observant. She is fearless and fun. He has an almost-famous last name that he never talks about and he spends most of the time leaning against a wall or counter or the gate of the garden, dispensing small, perfect kindnesses. Delilah whirls and Jack leans and there’s a perfect symmetry to that.

  We watch him make tea and I tackle-hug my best friend.

  “I’m happy for you,” I say.

  “I’m happy for me, too. Now put this mess in a ponytail. It’s out of control.” Then she does it for me. Combs my hair with her long fingers and slips an elastic from her wrist into my hair like she’s done a billion times. It comes out bumpy and crooked. I keep it that way. “Lorna Ryder,” Delilah says like she often does. “You are more wonderful than rain.”

  It’s a thing she says, a saying that doesn’t exist but Delilah says it as if generations of Brooklynites had said exactly that. She has a treasure trove of expressions that sound universal but are actually only hers. I hope Jack loves it the way I do. I think he might.

  Jack brings me the tea and sits on the corduroy armchair, letting Delilah and me share the couch. I think he knows I need her more right now.

  “Where’d you learn how to make tea?” I ask Jack, smirking. “Don’t your maids do that for you at home?”

  Jack takes my teasing like a champ, like I imagine a big brother might.

  “You know how it is.” I like that he doesn’t tease me back.

  “Let’s turn off the news,” he says, and again he is right and gentle.

  “Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “Should I call the maid to do it for us?” he asks, grinning, and I kick his shin and it’s a bad day out there, but it’s a pretty okay day in here.

  As soon as the news is off, I feel better. The great thing about something happening not to me is that I can shut it off. It’s also the exact thing I hated about everyone who cried over the Times Square Bombing when they didn’t know anyone who died in it. They were choosing to dip into the grief. I was being held underwater by it. I was drowning and they were wading and it made me hate the rest of the world.

  Now I’m one of those people who feels a little sad and a little connected to the tragedy but isn’t submerged.

  Huh, I think, because it is both a good and terrible thing.

  Delilah tells a long, convoluted story about why Mr. Manning, our bald English teacher, maybe has a crush on her, and Jack laughs only at the parts that are truly funny. I can’t stop watching the way they seem to be touching even though they’re not.

  That’s love, I think.

  • • •

  We call everyone else over when afternoon turns into evening. We’ve been on the world’s most comfortable couch so long that we’re a little surprised when we turn to the right and see the sun going down through our oversize windows, coloring the apartment pink and orange.

  Owen comes first and he gives me a huge hug but he doesn’t ask how I’m doing like Jack did. He tells me I look beautiful, though, and that’s almost as good because I don’t.

  He and Jack guy-hug and Delilah giggles. We’re still learning how to have boyfriends at the same time.

  Cruz and Charlotte are next.

  “You’re lucky we made it over,” Charlotte says. She gestures to the window, and we all look to see Angelika on her stoop. “She asked where we were going. When I told her, she said I had to bring this.”

  Charlotte has a folded-up piece of notebook paper in her hands, and I know what it is but Owen and Jack don’t.

  “The names?” Delilah asks.

  “Of course it’s the names,” Charlotte says.

  Owen takes the paper from Charlotte. “Chester Koza,” he reads, “Adrian Sponak. Nestor Noon. Oliver Mundy. Jorge Ortiz—”

  “That’s enough,” Charlotte says.

  Owen snort-laughs and Cruz declares that he will be getting drunk. I can’t stop looking at Angelika looking back at us. Delilah rips The List to shreds and I accidentally let Angelika’s voice into my head. Hubris, she says, at the way we laugh it off.

  The List is the one Devonairre Street ritual I hate.

  “She’s in rare form lately,” I say.

  “Is anyone else a little relieved it was in Chicago?” Charlotte says in her breathy voice, and no one answers, but Cruz and I look at each other and think the same thoughts.

  But then Isla is at the door. Wearing a corset. She’s wide hipped and starlet haired, and I wonder where she came from—in more ways than one. She looks right at me as she unveils two bottles of vodka and says, “We’re going to party.”

  We could say no, but we don’t.

  I steal a bottle of my mother’s wine because I have no interest in screwdrivers or the beer that Cruz unpacks from his backpack. I’m determined to be LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla, to be Devonairre Street Kids. We’ll do this together, the surviving, even if we don’t know what that looks like yet. We stay in the living room to watch the tail end of the sunset, which always looks the best from our apartment, where the sunset meets a squint-or-you’ll-miss-it view of the Statue of Liberty out the corner of the window. I like how the pink-orange-gold of the sunset dominates the sky, and how tiny the Statue of Liberty is in comparison, dwarfed by the colors and the mysterious way the clouds spread and shift. We’re listening to an old Patti Smith song Jack likes and waiting for the alcohol to slide our feelings one way or another. I try to keep my eyes on the disappearing sun, because when my gaze drifts to the mirror and I see us all reflected back, I feel strange. We look lost and none of us are quite sure what to do with our hands so we keep trying to put them on each other.

  What do you do in a tragedy where no one you know has died?

  It’s not a question we’ve had to ask ourselves before.

  I wonder whether strangers drank to forget about my sadness when my father was killed.

  Cruz takes a spot on the floor, offering Charlotte the chair. She pulls her knees to her chin and settles in—the chair might as well be hers, that’s how often she’s curled up in it. Jack’s on the floor, too, but Owen joins me on the couch with Delilah and Isla.

  I put my sunglasses on. They cover most of my face and turn my apartment sepia toned.

  Owen makes a noise like a laugh, shakes his head, and kisses the place where my glasses wrap around my ears.

  “She’s too cool for you, man,” Jack says, already refilling his glass with vodka and ice and no juice at all. Everyone else is drinking their screwdrivers slowly. Delilah and I share the bottle of wine, no glasses necessary.

  Owen wraps an arm around me and raises his glass to Jack. Jack raises his glass back, and they toast the air. I smile at Delilah.

  “See?” she says. “Things can be good here even when things in other places are bad.”

  I don’t say I agree because it feels selfish to be cozy and comfortable with the people I love most in the world, but I don’t disagree, either. It’s at least a little true with the television off and the world shut out. We don’t even crack a window, although the air is close and a little sweaty. It’s worth the heat and the smell of skin to not hear Angelika monologuing about What It All Means on her stoop with Betty and Dolly and their endless yeses. We draw the curtains finally, too, so I can stop sneaking glances at her disapproving looks. I want to feel the good parts of being a Devonairre Street Kid for the rest of the night—the comfortable closeness, the swish of my long hair tickling my shoulder blades, the looks Owen and Jack give me and Delilah—open faced, starstruck—like we’re something more t
han girls, which we are, because we are Devonairre Street Girls. I want to feel all that without the rest—without the List of dead men and the Curse and the always-there fact of Angelika reminding us how disappointing and dangerous we are.

  Jack turns up the music and Cruz smiles and sways. He looks handsome, a fact that surprises me a little. His black hair curls with more control than his sister’s and he has thick eyebrows and light brown skin from his Puerto Rican parents and shoulders that seem to have widened overnight. His nose is more delicate than the rest of his face, small and upturned, and that, too, looks good on him.

  I look away. My mind is thinking all the wrong things since yesterday afternoon. I take the wine bottle back from Delilah and head to the kitchen to grab us glasses so that we can properly toast.

  Cruz does the toasts. He always has.

  He’s so tall he could touch the ceiling.

  He usually says something poetic or potent. He’s good at toasts, the way he’s good at practically everything. Basketball. Singing. Smiling with dimples.

  “Cheers,” he says, his voice cracking. That’s it but it’s somehow his best toast yet. He clinks only with me. We may all have dead fathers, but Cruz and I have something more. The weight of being symbols of a tragedy. The Affected title. The knowledge of what the people who lost family in Chicago are feeling. The pressure of the whole country mourning a person that only you really knew.

  Isla should share that with us, too, but she says she doesn’t remember their dad or the days after the Bombing or anything else from that time seven years ago. It’s not true, it can’t be true, but we pretend for her sake that it is. We are good, on Devonairre Street, at pretending to believe.

  “Cheers,” I say.

  “Cheers,” everyone else whispers.

  • • •

  We get blasted.

  Mom will be pissed when she gets home around ten, after all her patients are gone and her paperwork is paperworked. But for now I don’t care. The wine feels good going down and at some point Isla starts dancing and even the boys join in. The coffee table gets moved to the side of the room, by the windows, and Isla jumps on it, because the laws of physics say if there’s a party, Isla will eventually end up dancing on a table.

  If the curtains weren’t drawn, Angelika and Betty and Dolly would be able to see that, and they’d hate the way she looks carefree and proud. They’d lecture us about Our Terrible Generation and the Way Things Used to Be and What a Blessing It Is that no one we know died, and they’ll wonder if dancing, too, is a sign of our awful hubris.

  And if Another Bombing weren’t the inaudible but unmistakable bass line underneath this dance party, there would be strangers on the street looking up at us, peering in through the windows like I’ve seen them do before, snapping pictures of Isla’s hips and my hair and Charlotte’s thick glasses and Delilah’s smile and the way we drape ourselves over one another, the way we are carefree and wild on the saddest street in the world. They’d post pictures of us online, and I’d see what they see—irresponsible girls and the boys that love them anyway. They’d wring their hands over the bottles of wine and beer on the coffee table in the same breath that they’d discuss which of us is hottest.

  On a dare, they’d ring the doorbell with the name RYDER next to it, to see what it’s like to talk to someone who’s Affected and Cursed and beautiful.

  But no one can see us, for once.

  • • •

  The sun is long gone and so is the wine, but Charlotte’s still sober. That’s her way. She hands out water and snacks like a preschool teacher and we love her for it. When Isla’s dancing gets too aerobic, Charlotte holds out her hands and takes Isla’s wrists to steady her. Isla misunderstands and thinks Charlotte’s joining in the dance, so she dances even harder while Charlotte’s body stays still and her arms wave around, under Isla’s control.

  I point it out to Owen, but he doesn’t get what’s so funny about it.

  When Isla lets her go, Charlotte moves next to Cruz on the floor. They aren’t as cuddly as they sometimes are, but Jack and Delilah are so much more. Owen and I kiss every five minutes like there’s a timer, and I like the reliable rhythm of our affection.

  Delilah and Jack must have their own beat, and I wonder what it might feel like. My mind goes a little wild—wine tells me I’m allowed to think about anything at all—and I picture my best friend with her legs around Jack. I wonder whether she ever crosses her ankles over his spine. I like Owen’s hands most of all, but Delilah might like something else about Jack and the things he does with her.

  Delilah and Jack start making out by the ladder to my loft. I watch them a moment longer than I’d want anyone to see, hoping to catch sight of love in the way they kiss or the path that Jack’s hands make from Delilah’s neck to her butt. It’s not like I believe Angelika, but I can’t help looking for the thing she saw.

  Owen snakes a hand around my waist and a little ways down my pants.

  “Are we like that?” I ask, slurring and not totally sure what I’m asking.

  “We’re like us,” Owen whispers, and for the second time in as many days I think I could love him.

  “No one’s like Jack and Delilah,” Cruz butts in. Charlotte purses her lips. Isla screech-laughs and topples off the coffee table. We should all stop drinking.

  Instead we send Jack out for more booze. It’s easy for Jack to get alcohol. The guy at the closest bodega calls him the Prince of Brooklyn. I don’t know about that, but I’m getting used to the easy way an Abbound can navigate the city. We’ve seen Mets games from private boxes and cut in line to get pizza at Di Fara’s and walked around the Museum of Natural History after hours. Jack is so unassuming I almost forget it’s all because of where—or who—he’s from.

  “Whatever you guys need,” Jack says tonight, and because it’s Jack, I believe him. He runs a hand through his perfect one-wave hair and kisses Delilah so long and hard we all look away. When he’s done, she has stars in her eyes. I can see them through my sunglasses, which I keep putting on and taking off. She sinks a little, like her legs are giving out.

  “We love you, Jack,” I say, wondering if he will officially become One of Us when they get married. LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIslaJack. It’s not the same, but it’s pretty good. I don’t mind it at all.

  I didn’t know that when your best friend falls in love, you do a little bit, too.

  Delilah and I sit at my kitchen counter while Jack’s gone. Owen comes over every few minutes to kiss me, but he’s mostly playing quarters with Isla on the living room floor.

  “Cruz keeps looking at us,” Delilah says. “He’s weird today, right?”

  I look over at him and Charlotte on the couch. They’re watching themselves in the mirror and probably wishing it were the TV instead. Isla leans against Cruz’s shins and it’s so distinct—the way a sister and brother touch versus the way the rest of us do. I could never brush against Cruz so casually. We catch sight of each other through the glass—his reflection meeting my gaze. It’s a little easier to make eye contact this way—once removed.

  Delilah waits for me to agree with her, but I shrug and flutter my feet because I’m a little weird today, too. I’m not annoyed exactly, but I’m feeling the little space between the things I’ve experienced and the things Delilah has. Her dad died of cancer when she was a baby. Charlotte’s had a heart attack. Cruz’s and my dads’ deaths changed the world. Their dads’ deaths changed only them. I envy them as much as you can envy someone whose father is also dead.

  “You and Cruz,” Delilah says. We’re halfway through a second bottle of wine. She takes an extra-long sip of it. “You’re like onions and butter, aren’t you?”

  I don’t know what it means. It’s another one of her sayings. But damn if I don’t love the way onions smell, cooking in a pool of melting butter.

  • • •

 
I’m thinking of butter and onions when we hear a screech and a yell and a crash out on the street outside our windows. The panes are thin, so we hear every bit of the sound.

  There’s no mistaking Jack’s voice.

  6.

  Betty is the first one to bring a lemon for Delilah.

  “She’ll be back soon, no?” she says, approaching me, Isla, Cruz, and Charlotte on my stoop. The phrasing makes it hard to know whether to say yes or no so I don’t say anything at all. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she says, and I don’t have anything to say to that, either, because the loss isn’t quite mine.

  Jack is dead.

  I try the sentence out in my head over and over, which is what I’ve been doing since early this morning when Delilah called and whispered the words over the phone from the hospital. They sound like a joke, and the corners of my mouth turn up in response. I hide my smile behind my hands, but Isla catches it.

  “It’s fine. I laughed in the bathroom for twenty minutes,” she says.

  I cover my mouth anyway.

  Jack is dead.

  I smile again and lean over my knees to try to stop the laughter or turn it into something more appropriate.

  We all stare at Angelika’s house across the street because if we look anywhere else we’ll see police officers and caution tape and the place where Jack’s body was hit by a taxi. My mind pounds at the thought.

  “We’re not ready for this,” I say. Charlotte, Cruz, and Isla nod even though I’m not sure what I mean. I think we’re not ready to believe Jack is dead and we’re not ready to be strong for Delilah and mostly we’re not ready for tragedy to happen to someone our age. They’ve threatened us. They’ve said boys will die if we love them. But we didn’t actually believe them.

  I mean, we don’t believe them.

  Jack is dead.

  It’s an impossible sentence because he was so, so alive last night, kissing Delilah and pouring drinks and asking me what we could do to help the people in Chicago.

  Owen comes back from ZeeZee Bakery with coffees and bagels. Jack would have known that for a morning like today we need lavender tea and croissants. Cruz, Isla, and Charlotte thank him anyway, but I can’t get the words out.