by Emily Gould
The basement underneath the venue was a dark cave, too, full of scuffed leather couches and surfaces littered with bottles and half-full ashtrays, bottle caps and empty thin black plastic liquor-store bags. Dylan looked up when Laura entered the room with an expression of pure happiness, almost like he hadn’t expected her. When she got closer, though, she saw that the look she’d thought was shocked joy was actually a more abstract kind of euphoria. His pupils were huge, and he had trouble focusing on her face. He smelled sweaty, and she wanted him to close the distance between their bodies immediately, murmur in her ear, and get her out of there. Instead, he just stood there, smiling a goofy smile. She opened her mouth and realized she had no idea what she wanted to say. The two weeks since they’d seen each other seemed like a huge gulf of experience.
Laura had settled further into her new life, carving out patterns of her days, writing lyrics in the non-internet café on Avenue A, riding the subway, eating egg sandwiches in the morning and pizza at night, drinking dozens of cups of sweet light bodega coffee, getting incrementally better at being a cocktail waitress at night, making friends with Alexis on their smoke breaks, teaching Callie the new songs she was writing to prepare for their little shows. They had played twice more, once at Sidewalk again and once at a terrible NYU bar on Bleeker, which had gone less well. Part of her still felt Ohioan and alien. No matter what clothes she borrowed from Callie or how much makeup she wore, she didn’t quite look right. She still smiled too much at people on the street and at patrons at the bar. She didn’t know how to act in this loud smoky basement full of strangers. She wished that she and Dylan were alone and naked. She looked over at Callie, who was drinking from a tallboy can of malt liquor and letting Davey drape his arm around her.
Laura moved closer to Dylan so that he would put his arm around her, too. She relaxed into him. He handed her the beer he was drinking, and she took a long sip and thanked him.
“You were great,” she said, trying to look into his eyes so that he could tell she really meant it, wasn’t just saying it by default because it was the thing to say. For a second, his face lost its vague look and he really seemed to appreciate the compliment. He even seemed hungry for it, like he wasn’t already sure of himself. He led Laura to a low velvet couch with a coffee table in front of it and introduced her to the band’s manager, who was already sitting there, wearing a green army jacket with deep pockets. As she watched, he pulled handfuls of drugs out of them: cubes of perfectly intact marijuana buds with shimmering crystals on each folded leaf catching the light, bottles of pills, a small pile of plastic bags full of powder.
“It’s the world tour of drugs,” said Davey, diving toward the table and scooping up a handful of bags. Laura laughed; it was ridiculous, a caricature of rock-star behavior. Dylan didn’t laugh. He started dissecting a cigar, removing the tobacco to refill it with weed. He licked the paper, and she felt a shiver of desire at the sight of his tongue. He reached for pills from the pile and ate a couple of them like Tic Tacs.
“It’s just Adderall; we’re exhausted,” he explained, but he also shook some of the powder out of one of the bags on top of the weed before rolling up the blunt.
“So are you back here for a while?” she asked.
“No, they’re sending us back out again soon. We just have a couple of weeks, but we can hang out the whole time I’m here.”
Laura fought back the urge, again, to tell him that she loved him, to claim him officially somehow. The thought of him with random girls in different cities made her want to peel off her skin. She wished that they were married. She wanted everyone he met to know they were together. There was no possible way to express any of this to him.
He lit the blunt and took a deep, desperate drag on it, then passed it to her and lit a cigarette. She wanted to ask what the powder was but was worried about seeming naive. She tried to take a small hit, but the flavor of the smoke was delicious, and she could feel it relaxing her into the couch, making the situation seem normal much faster than the beer could. She smiled at him through half-lidded eyes.
“Are you good?” he asked. “I’m sorry we’re not alone. I have to stay here, but you should go home and get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll hang out, just us.”
He was swaying and slightly slurring as he said this. Laura understood, without wanting to, that Dylan was much more interested in getting fucked up than he was in having sex with her. She still couldn’t make herself give up and leave. After he finished smoking the blunt, he started walking around the room playing air guitar, dancing unsteadily. Laura got up and followed behind him, unsure what she should do next. Callie extracted herself from underneath Davey’s armpit and reached over and pulled Laura toward her.
“We’re getting out of here,” she hissed in Laura’s ear.
“I’m just going to stay another twenty minutes, I’ll see you at home,” Laura whispered back.
“No, you’re coming home with me. It isn’t happening tonight, and you look stupid. Let’s just go; you’ll see him again when he’s more sober.”
She waved at Dylan as Callie forcefully grabbed her arm and moved in the direction of the door. He waved, smiling in her direction, then turned his attention back to the world tour of drugs.
* * *
When Laura came over to his apartment the next afternoon, as he’d asked her to, Dylan still wasn’t alone. The whole band was there, and there were some girls who looked vaguely familiar from the night before, and everyone seemed to be wearing the same clothes and not to have slept. It was the hottest, sunniest part of the afternoon, and the apartment had one window air-conditioning unit that wasn’t doing anything to cut the fug of smoke and bodies and sickly sweet spilled booze. Cigarette butts marinated in the dregs at the bottom of beer bottles. Laura almost turned around and walked back down the stairs and out onto the relatively less gross street. She didn’t even see Dylan at first. But he was there, on the couch, slumped over and holding his head. She rushed over to him.
“Are you okay? Can I bring you anything?” she asked, realizing as she said it that she was acting like she was at work.
He looked up at her, pale and grateful, annoyingly still beautiful. He stood up, and she thought he was going to greet her with a kiss or a hug, but instead he grimaced and went into the bathroom, and a minute later she heard him vomiting.
She was repulsed, of course, but then quickly remembered that he’d watched her puke on the night they met, and also there was nothing he could do, by that point, that would have truly turned her off. “I’m going to the deli, back in a minute,” she shouted through the door.
At Sunny & Annie’s she bought a liter of ginger ale, a handful of Advil in little foil packets, and three bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches. The store had a friendly smell of bacon, burnt coffee, disinfectant, and cut-up fruit sitting on ice. She felt cheerful and competent, like a nurse in a starched white uniform taking brisk care of a bunch of invalids.
Dylan and Davey looked at her with pathetic gratitude when they saw her come in the door with the supplies. They consumed them sitting on the couch in front of the TV, passing another joint, watching a movie. The girls sat on the floor for a while and then got bored and left. For a moment Laura thought she might go with them. There wouldn’t be an infinite amount of summer sunshine, and she had to work later in the dank velvet gloom of Bar Lafitte for hours. She wanted to walk around in the daylight as much as possible, to let it sink into her skin and bleach away the residue of the time she’d spent in this smoky, filthy apartment. But she also wanted Dylan, even if all he was up for was some light cuddling and aimless conversation. She wondered if he would think it was dorky or weird if she cooked him a meal. The movie was something only stoners would watch, an experimental Italian horror film that had lots of tomato-saucy blood, and Laura realized that she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten any of the egg sandwiches herself. She got up to look at the kitchen and determine whether cooking in it was even possible.
The counter
was stacked with empty bottles of malt liquor, and there was a crusty George Foreman grill, but the fridge wasn’t disgusting because it seemed never to have been used to store food, only beer, and there were no dishes in the sink. She found a saucepan and a frying pan, a spatula and some forks. She could work with this. She made another trip to the deli and came back with the ingredients for a soup she’d perfected in college, consisting of one can of cream-of-potato soup and one can of creamed corn, plus milk, salt and pepper, and red pepper flakes.
“Dylan, your wife is the best,” said Davey as he ate, stoned and ravenous. Laura felt offended, a little ashamed of herself, and also thrilled. She looked down at her bowl so she wouldn’t see Dylan’s reaction.
That night after work she told Callie about the day and what she’d done, cringing preemptively in preparation for her judgment.
“So you were supposed to go on a date, and instead you sat around with him and his friends, and then you cooked for them?”
Laura couldn’t see Callie’s face—she was at the kitchen counter, mixing bran cereal into nonfat yogurt for dinner—but she could imagine her look of lightly amused pity and contempt.
Laura nodded.
“What was the date supposed to be, even?”
“I don’t know, he just said we’d be alone.”
“So it was a booty call, and then you didn’t even have sex.” Callie sat down at the table to eat her gross meal directly across from Laura, so that Laura couldn’t evade her eye contact.
“It wasn’t to have sex—well, not just to have sex. I had thought we would … go to a museum or something.” As she said it out loud, Laura realized how laughably improbable the idea of going to a museum with Dylan actually was. She tried to picture them holding hands and walking through a gallery, Laura maybe explaining or criticizing some aspect of the artwork on display. It was so patently a fantasy that she might as well have been imagining them riding bareback on unicorns through an alpine field of wildflowers.
Callie nodded like she could read the realization on Laura’s face. “Yeah, I see where you’re at with him. You’re thinking, Maybe someday. I’ll teach him. I’ll train him. When we’ve been together longer.”
Laura was embarrassed, but she had to laugh. Those had been her exact thoughts.
Callie didn’t laugh. Her brow creased, and despite her perfect makeup, she looked older. “There’s no evolution for guys like him. You can be with them, but the version of him you’re seeing right now is who you’re going to be with. If you’re okay with that, by all means.”
“But I …”
“But I luuuuhv him,” Callie mimicked. It was what Laura had been about to say. Callie was right. But what was Laura supposed to do, stop?
* * *
Laura was checking her email at alt.coffee again when she got an unexpected message: her sophomore-year roommate, Amanda, had found out she was living in New York from one of their mutual acquaintances and she wanted to hang out. They’d had very little in common then, but maybe they had more now? And they had lived together for a year, so there was an automatic semi-intimacy; Laura could remember how Amanda had smelled and what noises she’d made in her sleep, though she was hard-pressed to remember what her major had been. Via email, Laura made a plan to go over to “check out” Amanda’s apartment that night.
Amanda lived in one of the strange brand-new apartment buildings on Houston below Avenue C. Laura walked down beautiful First Street and then cut over onto the charmless blank concrete stretch and past a gas station to arrive in the lobby of the gray square building. To get upstairs, she had to tell the doorman where she was headed, and then he actually called Amanda to let her know Laura had arrived. She had never been in a doorman building before.
Amanda greeted her at the door and ushered her in with a hug. She still smelled the same, like Secret antiperspirant and gum and onions. She looked basically the same as she had in college, except that she’d traded her ironed-straight brown hair for a studiously stylish angled bob. Her makeup was perfect and even and thick, like a layer of fondant icing on a fancy cake. The apartment was big, and Laura knew she was supposed to be impressed, but it was deeply charmless and seemed not to belong in New York. One of the things that Laura liked about the apartment she shared with Callie was that it was a dark little warren of tiny rooms, basically a tunnel with space to turn around every so often. You could imagine the people who’d lived there a hundred years earlier; starving garment workers squinting over their piecework by lamplight. That appealed to Laura.
This place was carpeted. You walked in and you were immediately in the entire kitchen/living room. It was of a piece with the large prefab houses outside of Columbus where she’d hung out when her richer high school classmates’ parents were out of town. Amanda pulled her toward a coffee table and poured her a glass of red wine in a real wineglass, then one for herself in a wineglass that matched. She set the glass down on a coaster. Laura remembered suddenly that Amanda’s major had been communications.
“So how long have you been here? What are you doing? Isn’t it great? Tell me everything!”
Laura smiled and sipped the wine, which tasted salty and sweet, almost like food, not like sugared gasoline, as the jug wine she drank with Callie did. “This place is great,” she said because she knew she was supposed to. “Do you live here alone?”
Amanda cackled. “Oh my God, no; I have two roommates! It’s just like college, basically, we have to put a sock on the door when one of us is sexiled, but it’s worth it to be in a doorman building. I just feel safer. And I’m never here, anyway, I work all the time.”
“Where do you work?”
“I’m the assistant to the editor in chief of SPIN, it’s literally the hardest job ever. I have to be at my desk by eight, but I also have to go to all these shows. I never sleep. And my boss is such a slave driver.”
“Oh yeah, I know SPIN,” Laura said. It was a music magazine that covered mostly stupid arena-filling bands and was just starting to pay attention to bands that Laura knew and cared about. Maybe she and Amanda had something in common after all, apart from their hometown.
“Do you still do music at all?”
Laura summoned all the self-confidence she could. “Yeah, I’ve been playing a few shows. And I’m working on an album. I’m still writing the songs, but I’m hoping to have enough finished to start recording them soon.” This latter part was a lie, but like the one she’d emailed Dylan, it was the hopeful kind of lie. “I’m kind of in a band called the Groupies with my roommate, Callie. I’ll let you know when the next show is; you should totally come see me. And also …”
She paused. She both did and didn’t want to tell Amanda about Dylan. It was still thrilling to tell other people about him; talking about him conjured him and made it almost like he was there. In some ways it was better than actually being around him. For the past week he’d been so stressed out that when he wasn’t practicing or in the studio or gone, he only wanted to sit inside and smoke blunts and watch movies. Eventually they would crawl into his tiny bed, or she would have to leave for work. It seemed like whatever he was going through was a natural reaction to the sudden onslaught of attention and pressure, and therefore, she hoped, temporary. When she went to watch band practice—which made her feel gross, like she was a cheerleader watching her quarterback boyfriend—she still saw him radiating joy in his skill, magnetizing something in her that wanted to, simultaneously, fuck and be him.
All of this raced through her head as she tried to figure out how to describe him to Amanda. “The guy I’m seeing is in a band, too. But, like, a real band. A successful band.”
Amanda drank the remainder of her glass in a single gulp and made a wincing face as though she was about to do something difficult or brave.
“Okay, I have a confession. I heard you were dating him. That’s part of the reason I wanted to see you.” She gave a cute little shrug, then refilled both their glasses. “I wondered whether you might be able to
get me an interview with him. If I could do a profile timed to the release of the new album, it would be my first long article for the magazine. They’d have to promote me! Or at least get me off my boss’s desk. I’m so sick of answering his phone. If this is too awkward of a request, don’t worry about it. But I just thought, if it was easy, you could introduce us, and then I’d convince him it was a good idea.”
Laura tried to figure out what she was supposed to do. “I think stuff like that has to go through their label or their manager or whatever.” She wasn’t inclined to do favors for someone who had just admitted to using her.
Amanda shrugged. “I figured. I mean, I’ll try that, too, but they haven’t been doing much press, and … okay, well, just think about it.”
Laura had an impulse to make the ensuing silence less awkward but squashed it. Let Amanda feel awkward. She deserved to. Laura wished she’d stayed home, maybe finally picking up her guitar and working on new songs. It probably wasn’t too late, though she’d absently already drunk too much wine to get anything done well.
“I’d love to hear your songs sometime,” said Amanda as she walked Laura to the door.
Before she could stop herself, somehow, Laura found herself telling another hopeful lie. “Well, we’re opening for the Clips soon, so maybe you’ll hear them then.”
* * *
Laura decided to ask Dylan if she and Callie could open for the Clips the next time he was in the right mood, which was tricky. She rarely saw him during daytime, conscious, sober hours. Even in the noonish times they spent together after waking up late he was often preoccupied, smoking joints with his headphones on as he fussed with the piles of electronics that lined his cavelike bedroom.