Miss Misery

by Andy Greenwald

  Cath looked troubled. “It is? But I took the skins off the peppers. That’s where the heat is.”

  I was sweating, and my mouth was like Chicago in 1871. I tried swallowing some more. It didn’t help. “No, no,” I said sloppily. “Thheaithinthetheeds!”

  Cath cocked her head. “What?”

  “Theat’s in the theeds!”

  “I can’t understand you, David. Do you want something to drink?”

  I choked and swallowed the last of it. “The seeds! The heat is in the seeds, not the skin!”

  Cath pulled one of my Stellas out of the fridge, popped the top, and handed it to me. “Really?”

  I laughed and tears were in my eyes. I drained half the beer and felt my insides cool off and return to normal. “Really! I promise you!”

  Cath crossed her arms and regarded the dip. “Huh,” she said. “I had no idea!”

  I took another sip of beer. It was cold, good. “Cath, your dip is lethal.”

  “That’s just what the dance instructor told me.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  She twisted her mouth in thought. “Well, I guess I’m going to serve it and then wait for the fireworks.”

  “In your guests or in the sky?”

  She smacked me again, but I knew it was coming this time.

  “Am I early?” I asked. “There don’t seem to be many people here.”

  “Everyone’s on the roof,” she said. “We have a great view.”

  “Cool,” I said. And we looked at each other for a half beat too long.

  Cath blinked first and opened the fridge. “Come on,” she said, opening a beer for herself. “Let me get you your iPod.”

  The dip-making apparently now concluded, Cath grabbed my hand in hers and led me out of the kitchen and through the common room. Jesus’ homeboy was there, sitting cross-legged on the purple and white throw rug. There was a futon as well, with a boy and a girl on it. Ben There was sitting moodily on top of a dining-room chair that had no table to keep it company. There was an enormous black and white poster of Ian Curtis on the wall and a dead spider plant on the windowsill. The room wasn’t air-conditioned, so the street noise wafted up from behind the plant. Cigarette smoke was heavy in the air.

  I nodded at Ben There, but Cath didn’t stop for any of them. She led me up to and through a white door with a whiteboard on it that said, in giant blue block lettering, “HAPPY.”

  “Is that a question or a statement?” I asked.

  “Is what what?” she said, and dropped my hand. We were in her bedroom now, and she closed the door behind her. The lighting was muted here: soft, gauzy. The blinds were down and a small air conditioner hummed and shook in the boxy window. The room was smaller than the kitchen. Just a mattress spread out on the floor with a tousled red duvet on top of it and a cracked wooden desk groaning under the weight of a laptop, a typewriter, and a dozen coffee mugs filled with varying levels of room-temperature coffee and cigarette butts. The floor was littered with clothing—T-shirts, skirts, brassieres—which made sense, seeing as there wasn’t a closet. My eyes lingered on a stack of well-worn paperbacks: Greene, Murakami, Didion, Pelecanos, and assorted manga. On the floor next to the mattress was an old Sony stereo system with loose CDs stacked high on top of it and a small shoebox filled with jewel boxes to its right. The walls were bare except for a framed print above the bed, a delicate painted image of a woman draped in black, and a photo taped above her desk.

  “The word on your door,” I said, getting my bearings. “‘Happy.’ Is that a question or a statement?”

  “Oh.” Cath laughed. “It’s neither. I just think it’s the strangest word—don’t you? Have you ever actually looked at it?”

  “Well, all words look dumb when you repeat them enough.”

  Cath plunged into the hysteria that was her desk. “Not that dumb.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I guess not.”

  “Here it is.” Cath extracted my iPod from the mess and handed it to me. It was none the worse for wear. “Even I couldn’t have lost something in less than twenty-four hours.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sliding it into my bag and noticing what else was in there. “I have something for you, too.”

  Cath fluttered her eyes. “For little old me? You shouldn’t have!” She kicked at a skirt on the floor and sat down on the edge of the mattress. “It’s not like a mixtape or something corny like that, is it?”

  I flushed. “Ha, ha. Of course not. Why would you say that?”

  Cath took out a cigarette and pushed the shoebox of CDs over to me with her foot. “Take a look.”

  I picked up the box and examined the contents. They were all mix CDs, each adorned with different masculine handwriting. They had names like Everywhere and The Wish for Thunderstorms and even The New Sound of Missing You. Some had elaborately designed covers. Others just had text.

  Cath lit her cigarette and exhaled a little laughter with her smoke. “It’s what boys do. They always do it. It’s like they’re genetically incapable of giving a girl something other than their own taste in music.” She pretended to gag. “I knew you wouldn’t be that cliché!”

  I was frozen, still thumbing through the CDs. God, how corny! How predictable! “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Well, for starters, you already made me one.”

  I looked up. “Excuse me?”

  Cath reached under a pile of socks and winged a jewel box my way. “You know,” she said. “You—the other you.”

  I caught the jewel box in my right hand and put the shoebox back down on the floor. In my hand was a mix CD made by me—but I hadn’t made it. The cover was a photo of the Chrysler Building at night, unevenly sliced out of a men’s fashion magazine, and on the CD itself a shakier version of my own handwriting had scrawled, “Nicotine Stains.” Classy title. My eyes scanned the track list: Cabaret Voltaire? LCD Soundsystem? Jandek? Who was he trying to impress, anyhow? The Boredoms? Royal Trux? Superpitcher? Freaking Bauhaus? This was terrible! Worst of all, it showed no flair for sequencing, for dramatics. I was embarrassed for my own good name. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. “He made you this?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  Cath was making a brave effort to straighten out her sheets. “Yup.”

  “How? He doesn’t even have a place to live, does he?”

  “He made it here, actually. Just downloaded the songs when I was at work.”

  I sputtered. “He made you a mix on your own computer?”

  “Yup.” Cath stopped and turned to me. “What, does that break the boy code or something?”

  “No, no. It’s just…”

  Cath laughed. “Look at you! You’re actually offended! It’s—”

  I cut her off. “What offends me is the…I don’t know, the lack of style.”

  “Really? I thought the transition from Siouxsie and the Banshees into the Wiley/Dizzee Rascal remix was pretty good.”

  Under my breath I muttered, “Dizzee Rascal remix!”

  Cath was staring at me as one would at a mildly autistic puppy. “This makes you so mad, doesn’t it? It’s actually kind of cute.”

  I dropped the CD onto the bed. “Whatever.”

  Cath beckoned for me to sit next to her. “So what do you have for me? Frankincense? Myrrh?”

  “Oh,” I said. “You know what? I think I’ll give it to you later. It’ll, uh, make more sense then.”

  Cath frowned. “OK, but don’t make me wait too long.”

  I sat, gauging the distance between us carefully.

  “So,” I said. “Now that I have my iPod, should I leave? I mean, you are supposed to be staying the hell away from any and all David Goulds. Or so you said last night.”

  “Yeah,” she said, suddenly fiddling with the loose discs atop her stereo. “I meant it too.”

  “OK,” I said. “What changed?”

  Cath seemed flustered. “I don’t know.” She hit EJECT and winged whatever had been in the stereo across the ro
om, replacing it with something new. “Do you know this band? Dubstar? Totally cheesy and totally underappreciated. English.” Shimmery synthpop filled the small room.

  “I don’t know them,” I said.

  “No one does.” Cath smiled. “I love them.” And she hummed along.

  “Cath,” I said, remembering that I was the older of the two of us. “What changed?”

  “Nothing changed, creepo,” she said without looking at me. “I just…wanted to invite someone to Stevie’s party. I don’t know many people in this city, remember.”

  “Why me, though?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “Because you’re nice, I guess. And I liked dancing with you. And…you seemed lonely.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Whereas the other you just seems desperate.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “Probably a few drinks.” Cath raised her beer in mock salute. We clinked bottles.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Probably. Still, I’m glad you invited me.”

  “You know, I still wasn’t sure I believed you until I saw that little scene in the men’s room last night. About you not being the same person.”

  “No?”

  “Like Batman and Bruce Wayne, you know? No one’s ever seen them in the same room.”

  “We’re not the same, Cath. How could one person be so…extreme?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged and lit another cigarette. “It doesn’t seem that far-fetched to me.”

  “Well, it does to me,” I said. “And I need to do something about it. But I’m all out of ideas.”

  “Well,” Cath said, exhaling a stream of smoke. “I guess you could call the police.”

  “And tell them what, exactly?”

  “That you have a stalker? Identity fraud? Grand Theft Emo? I don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Exactly.” I took a sip of beer. “Besides, I think Bloomberg shut down the local X-Files chapter. Budget cuts, you understand.”

  Cath stuck her tongue out at me. “Funny.”

  “Look, the truth is…I don’t really care one way or another.”

  Cath looked surprised. I was rather surprised myself. She said, “You don’t?”

  “No. I really don’t. I’m doing too badly with my own life to worry about someone else’s.”

  “But he’s you, right? Isn’t that your life too?”

  “No,” I said. “Why should it have to be?”

  “It shouldn’t,” she said. “Sometimes it just seems like you want it to be.”

  We didn’t say anything for a while after that—just sat there, drinking beer and watching Cath’s cigarette smoke weave its way up to the ceiling. Eventually my eyes fell on the photograph Scotch-taped to the wall above the desk. I stood up and walked over to it.

  “What’s this?” I asked. “Is this you?”

  The picture was of a three- or four-year-old girl who looked suspiciously like Cath wearing a Burger King crown and mugging for the camera. She was in the arms of a beautiful woman with sapphires for eyes and shoulder-length black hair.

  “Yes,” Cath said in a strange, small voice. “That’s me and my mom.”

  The woman looked almost exactly like Cath, but somehow fuller: Her face was longer, and there was a strength to her gaze, her arms, her shoulders, that Cath lacked—a certainty of purpose, a gravity. I could see why Cath had chosen this picture to display.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  “She’s dead.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK.” Cath took a long drag of beer. “You didn’t do it.” She gave me a half smile. “You’re a freak, but I don’t think you’re cancerous.”

  “How old were you?” I asked.

  “Um,” said Cath. “I was eleven.”

  “That must have been horrible.”

  “It was. I mean, it is. But—and I think about this all time—what would be really strange is to have had her live. Like, sometimes I think about this shadow me that split off the minute she died. This totally happy girl that grew up with both parents and never went through a bad period or being such a bitch.”

  “There’s that word again.”

  “What? ‘Shadow’? ‘Bitch’?”

  “No,” I said. “‘Happy.’”

  She laughed. “Right.”

  “But you get along with your dad, don’t you? He seems like a good guy.”

  Cath’s face melted a little, like I had been holding it too close to a flame. “He’s the best guy. He’s wonderful. He put up with everything—the times I ran away, the times I came home high or drunk or with funny-looking cuts on my arms. I mean, in high school there would be weeks when I wouldn’t talk to him. Or if I did I would just totally curse him out. And he would just shake his head and smile to himself. He never stopped making me breakfast. He never got mad. Ever. And eventually I stopped trying to wind him up, because what’s the point?” She sucked in nicotine and sputtered. “God, he’s so good at being a dad—at being my dad. And look at me now—I still left him.”

  I sat down again. “Cath, that’s what kids do. They leave. They have to.”

  “I know.” She rubbed at her nose and then at her eyes. “It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “When we’re together we just have this…what do you call it? Banter. Like, that’s how we communicate. Like I’ll come home from making out with a boy and covering the entire downtown area with stickers that have random words printed on them like ‘roar’ or ‘lion’ or whatever, and he’ll be asleep on the couch listening to his batshit crazy modernist classical crap. And he’ll pretend he wasn’t asleep and then he’ll pretend that he wasn’t waiting up for me. And we’ll do this dance, and I don’t have to tell him what I was doing because he knows, and he doesn’t have to tell me he loves me because I know. But we never say anything, you know? We never say it.”

  Cath’s face was red now and her eyes wouldn’t leave the floor. She placed her cigarette on the edge of a mug that had a picture of a bear on it, and I watched the fire eat away at the filter. The music was still playing—it was cheerful and bouncy and totally inappropriate.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry to make you talk about this. That wasn’t fair of me.”

  She didn’t listen. “I have dreams now, you know? I have dreams of him dying, and it’s the scariest thing in the world to me—it literally makes me unable to breathe to the point where I think I’m dying too. But I could never say anything about it to him. And I’m still living here doing stupid things like making dip.”

  I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were flushed and hot. “Sometimes it’s hard to say stuff to the people who mean the most to you,” I said. “Sometimes it’s easier to say it to total strangers. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  “I mean, why else would you be telling me, right? No one is stranger than me.”

  She laughed. “Great party, huh?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “I’ve barely seen it.”

  “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll show you the roof.” She started to stand. “Wait, are my eyes all red?”

  I looked up at her—at the sharp chin, the tendons in her neck, the tiny wrists. It was a marvel, really, that she’d made it this far in life without snapping in two. “A little bit, but no one will notice.”

  She rubbed at her face. “Great—now everyone will think you made me cry.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Just tell them it was the dip.”

  She smacked me, and I knew that everything would be OK.

  Up on the roof, the party was, indeed, in full swing. People I recognized from the VSC and dozens of others I didn’t were scattered everywhere, drinking beer and margaritas, and listening to the Chameleons play from a dinky boom box wedged on top of an exhaust grate. From this vantage, the East Village was a giant game of Q*Bert, all diagona
l boxes and squares that appeared—in the fading summer light and mild alcoholic haze that enveloped me—eminently jumpable. All across the neighborhood, young and old had taken to the roofs and were celebrating and waving to one another in a gregarious manner they would never repeat on the grimier streets below. Cath was beside me, taking in the scene, balancing her homicidal dip on her bare knee. I gestured at the humble balustrade that edged the roof, intended to keep us from plunging to our deaths but instead drafted into service as a buffet table. Jesus’ homeboy and other scraggly sophomores were manning a tailgating grill in the shape of a football.

  “Is there anything for me to eat over there?” I asked. “I’m a vegetarian.”

  Cath rolled her eyes. “It’s the twenty-first century, dude,” she said. “We don’t have anything here that wasn’t slaughtered out of soy.”

  “Well,” I said, “I hope the beans were killed humanely.”

  “Always,” she said. “Always.” And then she went off to add her dip to the food offerings spread out before us.

  I drank another beer and then a third and watched happily as the evening eased its way into night. I got into a conversation with a nineteen-year-old Korean girl named Sunny about collegiate topics I knew nothing about, like eighteenth-century French painting and the benefits of study abroad. I let Jesus’ homeboy—whose name was actually Keith—ruminate at length about the relative merits of nylon guitar strings versus steel. Andre ambled over, shook my hand with a firm grip, and called me Ryan Adams. We all laughed at that. I had another beer, ate some potato chips, and then downed still another can—Tecate this time, watery and sweet.

  Standing on a rooftop, talking to these kids made me feel caffeinated and nostalgic, as if I had stepped through a wormhole and were back at one of my own gawky freshman parties, clutching an illict can of Beck’s outside the only fraternity that didn’t check IDs, sneakers toeing a clumpy root underneath a maple tree. Feeling out which of all these strange new people would be friends for the next phase of life (those with Guided By Voices boxed sets in their rooms and Replacements posters on their walls) and which would merely be faces in the alumni magazine for decades to come. Flirting shyly with the curly haired girl from my American Literature course who had a My Little Pony pencil case and liked Adrienne Rich a little too much. Finding out if the high-school charm still worked in the new setting or if college required advanced placement in wooing.