by Emily Gould
Callie’s desire to basically pimp Laura out had always been a little bit tiresome. Laura tried to distract her. “I wrote a song about egg sandwiches this morning. Want to hear it?”
Without waiting for Callie to respond, Laura put down her drink and grabbed her guitar from the other room. “ ‘Bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Or sometimes just egg and cheese. In a greasy paper sleeve, I eat you on the street.’ ” She played a few more lines and then noodled around a little bit. “I’m still trying to figure out the chorus,” she admitted.
Callie scrunched up her nose. “I don’t think that one is going to be climbing the charts.” She motioned for Laura to come sit by her near the makeup mirror. Laura put down her guitar and complied.
A few minutes later Callie finished doing Laura’s hair and stepped away from her quickly, as though preventing herself from continuing to fiddle with and potentially ruin a perfect creation. They both looked at Laura’s reflection in the mirror for a moment with satisfaction.
Something about Laura’s looks hadn’t made sense in the context of their hometown. To be pretty there, you had to be symmetrical, straight-haired, and small-nosed, ideally white, ideally blond. Within those parameters, you could be pretty or just blandly palatable, like a pat of butter on a squishy dinner roll. Laura’s big eyes and off-kilter nose made her look different from different angles, which made figuring out whether she was attractive too confusing for the consumers of the buttered rolls. But with the city as her backdrop, she was starting to make more sense. She didn’t have the perfumed, deliberate, and commanding hotness of a Callie. But in their dim apartment, backlit by the lamp Callie kept next to her futon mattress on the floor, she had the look of an ingénue about to step onstage, lit with an anticipatory glow.
* * *
The band was playing at one of the terrible bars on Bleecker Street unofficially reserved for NYU students and tourists. There were booths and tables, and a waitress in tall black boots who smelled like patchouli came around and sloshed red wine into their glasses from a giant bottle with no label. It tasted like the smell of the industrial-strength cleaner that whoever mopped the hallways of their building used in order to push the ancient dirt around. After a few sips, though, it grew on them. Though the lighting left the musicians in a pool of dimness, Laura stared at them. Specifically, the guitar player. She hoped that he wasn’t the one who Callie had etcetera’d. He reminded her of a boy from her hometown who’d played Jesus in a high school production of Godspell, skinny and tall with long, pale stringy hair, and he never ever looked up from his guitar. His arm muscles were ropy and hard, and there were holes in his stained white T-shirt. He looked incredibly sad. Suddenly Laura was embarrassed to realize that she was imagining what it would be like to have sex with him. Embarrassed because it was so cliché, and because her imaginings were immediately so vivid and compelling.
The music he was playing, which she almost had to remind herself to notice, was objectively good but not in a way that Laura actually liked. She forced herself to admire his technical skills so that, if she met the guitarist, she could tell him about what she liked in a detailed way and impress him with her musician bona fides. The waitress refilled their wineglasses. Then the band took a break and everyone went outside for cigarettes. Callie put her head close to Laura’s as she lit her cigarette, leaning in so far that her hair brushed Laura’s face.
“So?” she asked. “You seemed into it.”
“I’m not really a fan of this kind of … purposely distorted, less-catchy Television-song thing. It’s just really heterosexual and derivative,” she was saying as the short black-haired drummer came up behind Callie and lifted her into the air by her tiny waist.
“You don’t like our music!” he said to Laura with a kind of prideful leer. Clearly, he didn’t care at all what she thought of his music.
“Owww, you’re hurting me,” Callie whined, batting ineffectively at her pseudo attacker.
He turned his leer toward Callie. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“This is Laura, she’s my new roommate. She’s a musician, too.”
“Are you coming to our party afterward? I promise it’ll be fun, even if you’re not into our heterosexual, derivative songs.”
She nodded mutely, unable to think of any interesting or clever way of saying yes. Letting Callie be her ticket into social situations made her feel like she was back in high school, both cozily familiar and disappointingly regressive.
The drummer gave Callie a squeeze and put her down. The guitar player was standing under a streetlamp alone, smoking, and Laura let herself stare at him. There was something about how he’d looked playing guitar—his focus and his passion, which he’d seemed to be trying almost to conceal. It wasn’t cool to be passionate, but he was, and that made her feel tender toward the part of him that couldn’t protect itself from being seen. He glanced up, catching her in the act of staring at his fingers and lips, and he caught her gaze and held it, held it and let his lips curl into a lazy half smile around his cigarette. She felt the blood rise to her face as she dropped her gaze, trying to pretend that she’d been aimlessly staring into space. She’d never felt so powerfully attracted to anyone before. When she looked up again he was talking to the drummer. The whole thing lasted a fraction of a second, but it was still enough to get Laura through the rest of the show.
The party was in a big, weird loft on Ninth between C and D, built out with lots of plywood dividers to make bedrooms for all the roommates, detritus hanging from the ceiling as decor, low light concealing general filth, and a big stand ashtray next to a rotting velour couch whose springs poked Laura in her bony butt as she sat on it, smoking and drinking more than she wanted to because she was both bored and nervous. She tried not to glance at the guitar player too often. He stayed in another corner of the party having an intense one-on-one conversation with the bass player, but she still looked at him often enough that he had to have seen her and sensed her attention. Hadn’t he?
As the party wore on, getting louder and later and smokier, she became more and more sure that she had imagined the whole thing, or maybe he just did that to girls at random, testing his eye-contact powers the way you’d press the blade of a knife into whatever was around to see how sharp it was. She hovered on the edge of a conversation that was happening near her, pretending with her head movements to be part of it, but there was no one she wanted to talk to besides him.
A joint kept getting passed to her. She smoked without thinking, then was unpleasantly surprised when she stood up and her head swam. She hadn’t eaten since the Juicy Lucy smoothie she’d had for lunch. Of course this was the moment the guitar player chose to begin to make his way toward her, but now Laura’s breathing was speeding up and her mouth was watering in an ominous way and her number one priority was to leave the party without throwing up. She said goodbye to Callie, who gave her a puzzled look and quickly turned back to whoever she was talking to. Being full of incipient barf and the threat of humiliation made Laura feel artificially sober; she noticed every detail of the stairwell tile, the uneven texture of the sanded-down stairs under her feet. She ran out to the street, and the stinking breath of the hot summer night hit her straight in the face. She crouched on the curb between two cars, and wine vomit spewed out of her in a torrent, foamy and pink. She stood up shakily and felt immediately better, then gasped as she realized that the guitar player was standing right next to her.
“That was impressive.” His speaking voice was deep and smooth, unexpected in a skinny, boyish person.
She shook her head and fished around in her bag for a tissue, but she’d borrowed the purse from Callie, and there wasn’t anything inside it that felt familiar. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
He produced a packet of tissues from his pocket. They were clean and new-looking. She must have looked surprised.
“I have allergies,” he explained, waving them toward her. “My throat is so sore righ
t now I can barely talk.”
“It’s brave of you to party in that condition,” Laura said, taking a tissue and dabbing at her mouth in what she hoped was a casual yet effective way.
He shrugged. “Davey said we had to. There were supposed to be important industry people here. There’s always some reason you have to go to a party, you know? In Davey’s mind, anyway.” He paused, and she wobbled slightly on the uneven pavement. “Sorry, are you actually okay?”
“I think so. Just humiliated. I’m Laura, by the way.”
“Oh, the musician!”
She looked at him suspiciously; he had to be making fun of her. No one had ever referred to her as a musician before.
“Callie told us about you.” He was clearly trying to put her at ease.
“Us?”
“Davey, the rest of the band, my roommates. Callie’s a cool girl.”
“Oh! Yeah, she’s … she’s cool.” The post-puke reprieve from nausea was wearing off, and as much as she wanted to keep talking to this beautiful yet vulnerable (allergies!) guy who thought of her as a musician, she knew she should leave before she threw up again.
“I should go home,” she said, backing away so that he didn’t get the opportunity to do what it seemed like he wanted to do, which was reach toward her and touch her arm. The possibility that he would touch her was too exciting to deal with at her current level of shaky queasiness. It made her feel like she might explode, and not in a cute way. He shrugged and lit another cigarette as she slunk off down the block, hoping that her instinct was leading her in the right direction, away from the East River and toward her strange, filthy, exciting new home.
* * *
The next day Laura woke up with a disgusting hangover that made her head feel like a black banana. By 1:00 p.m. she’d managed to ingest a coffee and a chocolate croissant and was feeling much better. She was absolutely sure she would never smoke cigarettes again, until Callie woke up at 2:00 p.m. and started smoking her American Spirits in the kitchen, and without thinking about it Laura lit one, too. Callie was wearing her beautiful teal kimono, deep in the process of removing last night’s makeup with almond-oil-soaked cotton balls that she placed in a growing black-and-red pile on the table in front of her, studying her own face in the mirror with infinite fascination.
When Laura walked past the door of Callie’s room on her way to the bathroom she noticed that the drummer was lying asleep in Callie’s bed. Laura cocked her head toward the bedroom as she reentered the kitchen as if to say, “So?”
Callie looked away from her reflection for a second and smiled. “They’re a good band, right? They’re going to be famous soon. That’s definitely the last time they’ll play a venue that small; it’s almost for sure that they’re going on tour, opening for the Strokes. Did you end up talking to Dylan?”
“His name is Dylan?”
Callie smirked. “His parents picked his name, not him. Okay, so … let me guess. You either hooked up with him but were too drunk to remember his name—which, since I’ve met you, I know is unlikely. Or maybe you were too shy to even speak to him.”
Laura slumped in her chair and ashed into her empty cardboard coffee cup. “Worse. We did meet, but it was right after I threw up in the gutter.”
Callie’s naked face shone with oil. She was still beautiful without the makeup, but it was weird to see her without it. She looked pink and unfinished. “Well, he’ll remember you next time, for sure!”
“As the girl who barfed. Great.”
“So you’re into him! That’s good. We’re going to a party tonight that he’ll probably be at.”
“Except I have to work.”
“Come by after.”
“It’ll be late, though.”
“Well, still come, you’ll be sober and you’ll be able to swoop in for the coup de grâce with all your wits about you.”
Laura rolled her eyes. “That’s me, swooping in. Always very slick.”
* * *
Laura waded through the crowded darkness at Bar Lafitte, leading people to their tables, smiling and leaving them there, then strolling slowly back to the podium by the door. Whenever she was bored, Laura thought about the album she had been slowly assembling in her mind over the course of the past couple of years. She had a handful of tunes that needed words, and this was why she’d moved to New York—to live the kind of life that she could write songs about, instead of a life in an apartment above a music store that she rented at a discount rate from her mother. Aside from “I Want My Tapes Back,” she hadn’t mined great material from her utility boyfriends. Inspiration had to come from somewhere else—New York, she hoped. She wanted to be like the artists who’d enshrined her new neighborhood as a place for the dissolute and beautiful and doomed.
But the East Village wasn’t turning out to be like the mythic version of itself that existed in her mind. Rents were higher, people died far less often, and there were stores that specialized only in Japanese toys and hookah bars that catered to NYU undergraduates. There were also the internet cafés. There was something about an internet café that could never be glamorous, only grubby and desperate. On Avenue A, across from the park, there was a real café, where everyone languidly sipped their coffees, eyed each other, watched the street outside, chain-smoked at the sidewalk tables, and wrote in little notebooks or pretended to. In the internet café next door everyone just stared at the screens. They had bought their little bit of time, and now they had to use it wisely.
There were still fascinating and glamorous people around, though. The beautiful waitress at the BYOB cheap Italian restaurant on Ninth Street, the one with the giant eyes and acne-scarred cheeks. Yulia, whom Bar Lafitte had hired at the same time as they’d hired Laura, who only ever spoke to say, “Please, your table.” The guitarist Dylan. She wanted to write a song about Dylan. She wanted to do all kind of clichéd things, and she was just self-aware enough to know they were clichés but still young enough to think that things would be different for her.
She didn’t really like smoking, but there wasn’t anything else to do, so she took a cigarette break in the alley behind the bar, where a waitress was also smoking. It was almost sunset and there was a golden light on the stones of the building across the street, and they stood smoking in the fading light, silently finding some kind of comradeship in just standing next to each other. The waitress broke the silence by introducing herself, strategically waiting till both their cigarettes were almost to the filter. “Hey, I’m Alexis, I’m section five tonight.”
Laura turned to look at her more closely. The waitresses primarily distinguished themselves from the hostesses by their little black aprons, but there was also something else different about them. The hostesses were softer, newer—they all clearly had ended up there by accident—while the waitresses were professionals. Their eye makeup was dark and deliberate, calibrated to be visible in low light. Their cleavage pushed out of their tight black tank tops, not as if they were shoving their tits in your face but as if they couldn’t be bothered to conceal them. Alexis had a short brown ponytail and a dark even tan and perfectly globular breasts. She was intimidating, but there was also something about her that Laura trusted implicitly.
“Do you want to get promoted to server?” she asked as if it were an offhand question, but Laura could tell that she was being evaluated.
“Should I want to?”
Alexis laughed, and her globular boobs jiggled slightly, perfectly. “I’ll ask you again after you’ve had your first shift drink with Stefan.”
Stefan was the manager who’d hired Laura. “Oh, because he’s a perv?” She could hear herself trying to sound tough, as tough as hard-edged Alexis. “I can shut that down.”
“Well, then he’ll fire you. Just flirt, string him along a bit. You definitely don’t have to do anything, but keep his hopes alive.” Alexis pulled out a hot-pink Bic and lit another cigarette, and Laura felt a glow of approval; if she’d been a dud, Alexis would have gone right back
to her section, she felt sure.
“To answer your question, though, yes you should want to get promoted! You’re making shit money considering what you’ll have to put up with here, and the bartenders will never tip you out, because you don’t do anything for them. The only exception is Max, and he’ll just be trying to get you to talk to him, which you shouldn’t do if you can avoid it. And you make good money here as a server. Really good.”
Laura wished she was a real smoker; her cigarette was out, but she was still feeling slightly too hungover for another one and she wanted an excuse to continue talking to Alexis. “How good?”
Alexis paused, maybe assessing whether she wanted to be honest with Laura, whether Laura merited advice or help. “On a good night you can make three hundred dollars. There’s a lot more bullshit, but it’s worth it.”
* * *
Even though the party where she might have been able to talk to Dylan was likely already petering out by the time her shift ended at four, a completely deranged part of her wanted to go to the party just in case he was still there. Instead of sprinting out the door and through the streets, though, she made herself sit down at the bar. She needed to ingratiate herself there if she hoped to be promoted to server. She ordered something disgusting from the bartender, rum and Coke, in the hopes that she wouldn’t be tempted to drink it too quickly. Alexis sat down beside her and put the contents of her money apron on the counter and began counting the bills. Laura noticed that there was another stack of bills nestled into the lace that cradled her boobs, and she didn’t count that one. When Stefan walked over to them she pushed it down out of sight with a subtle movement that might have been involuntary, like smoothing your hair or adjusting the waistband of your jeans.
“Shots!” he said to the bartender as he sat down at the barstool they’d left between them. Wordlessly and expressionlessly the bartender lined up four shot glasses and filled them with top-shelf tequila. Alexis helped herself to a lime from the tray on the bar and sucked it as Stefan asked them how their night had gone.