by Teddy Wayne
I charged the sweater to my debit card, wore it out of the store, hopped on the uptown 6 train, and walked over to Park Avenue, where I found the elegant prewar residence of good ol’ Larry and Margaret.
My plan was to sit in a restaurant or coffee shop with a view of your building. At some point you’d pop out for a cigarette, and that’s when our coincidental run-in would transpire. I’d dart out and we’d laughingly exchange What are you doing here?s. Oh, I just saw a friend, but I have a few hours to kill before my train; sure, I could join you for a walk through Central Park. Away from school, away from Tom and Liam and Suzanne and Jen and Christopher and Andy and everyone else, you could be your unguarded self. Don’t take the train back, you would plead as dusk descended. Stay here, my parents are dying to meet you. You’d bring me back to your apartment, feverish with excitement. So this is the David we’ve been hearing so much about! Margaret would swoon.
But during my many jaunts down your block through Google Street View, I’d failed to notice the critical oversight in my strategy: Park was strictly residential. There wasn’t a single commercial establishment that could serve as an inconspicuous hideout; it was as if the avenue were designed to discourage the casual lurker.
A landscaped meridian bisected north- and southbound lanes of traffic, with concrete embankments serving as islands for pedestrians who didn’t catch the green light in time to make it all the way across the boulevard. Raised flower beds bordered interior strips of each median that had held grass in warmer months.
I stood in the middle of the crosswalk opposite your building, surveying my options. If I waited on the sidewalk right outside your home, I would blow my cover; if you saw me sitting on the edge of the island’s empty flower bed, you’d know I was on a stakeout. Failing to come up with a better solution, I decided to stay put. Under the pretense of waiting to cross the street, I remained adrift on my concrete no-man’s-land, eyes fixed on the green awning that canopied a set of double doors from which you might at any point emerge.
As the afternoon sun sank, suffusing the street with a tangerine glow, the indigenous species of the Upper East Side meandered by, women with pinched faces and coiffed hair, their toy dogs snug in cashmere sweaters, nonagenarians escorted by uniformed help, teens in sweatpants with the names of their prep schools scrolled in oversized fonts down the legs, towheaded toddlers slumbering in strollers.
Your building’s doorman, dressed in a brass-buttoned suit and a porter’s hat, maintained equal vigilance from his post inside your lobby so as not to be caught unawares by an approaching resident. And he never was, always anticipating the precise moment to turn the handle and swing the door open, stepping aside and acknowledging the occupant’s return with a deferential nod.
Every so often the door would open and he’d march out on his own to the curb, blow a whistle, and wave a white-gloved hand at the oncoming traffic. A yellow cab would screech to a stop in front of the awning and a resident would materialize from the lobby and climb in.
After one of these excursions, rather than going back inside the building, he headed over to my island. I typed pointlessly into my phone.
“You waiting for someone?” he asked in a gruff outer-borough accent.
“I’m doing a study on pedestrian traffic for Harvard University,” I told him. “I’m measuring the ebb and flow of population density and calculating carrying capacity.”
I held up my phone, ostensible proof of my scientific method.
“Harvard?” He grimaced, looked around as if uncertain what to do with this information, and nodded. “All right.”
Evening set in. The temperature dropped and it began drizzling. I thought about running over to another avenue to buy an umbrella, but if you chose that interval for your appearance, all my work would have been for naught.
The sky cleaved and the drizzle turned into a downpour. The only awning nearby was your own, and I couldn’t make that my haven. All I could do was stay in place, getting soaked as walkers scattered and I remained the one person outside sans umbrella.
On top of being wet, I was hungry, cold, and tired from standing. I didn’t know if you were home; if so, when you’d be leaving; or, if you were out, when you’d be returning. Yet the adverse conditions only fortified my determination. I was scaling Everest. It’d be another heroic story to tell you someday.
As it turned out, you were home.
You carried an open umbrella out of the lobby around ten o’clock, walked to the corner opposite where I stood, and stepped off the curb. My fatigued quadriceps contracted with anticipation. I stayed where I was, assuming you were going to cross the street in my direction, but instead you held up your hand to hail a taxi, forgoing your doorman’s services.
“Hey!” I yelled, but my voice was lost in the thrum of raindrops and whistling traffic. Two cabs spotted you simultaneously and jockeyed for your fare at the corner. While you folded your umbrella and climbed into the nearest one, I made a cavalier dash across the street. Your car took off as I jumped into the second cab, my wet jeans squeaking against the pleather seat.
“Follow that cab directly in front of us,” I told the driver. “Please.”
A chase sequence in traffic-jammed Manhattan wasn’t as exhilarating as it might sound. We stopped at frequent red lights; our cars never exceeded fifteen miles per hour; my driver yammered on the phone the whole time in a foreign language.
When we reached your destination, the rain had stopped. Our cabs pulled up in tandem at a curb that, according to the on-screen map, was on the Lower East Side. I paid with my debit card but had trouble swiping it cleanly, and by the time I was done you’d disappeared into a bar on the corner. A squat man with an imperious stomach guarded the door. I could wait until you departed, but at that point you might be headed home. And I was tired of waiting.
I sauntered up to the bar’s entrance, scratching the back of my neck and checking my phone with blasé distraction. Slouched on a stool, hands in the pockets of a puffy jacket, the bouncer barely lifted his eyes from his own phone. “ID,” he mumbled.
“I left my wallet here last night,” I said. “They’re expecting me.”
He yawned and blinked wearily. “Can’t let you in without ID.”
“My friend got his stomach pumped because he was here last night,” I said. “We had to leave right away, and I’ve been in the hospital with him all night and day. I’ve got a flight tomorrow, and if I don’t get it—”
He released a bored sigh. “Make it quick,” he said.
My first time in a bar—and a New York City bar, at that. But it wasn’t what I had expected from a Manhattan establishment, nor was it the kind of place I would’ve guessed you’d haunt. Bad eighties music shrieked on a jukebox; retro arcade games blinked and blipped against one wall; the floor was sticky with beer. A number of ironic moustaches and earnest beards among the male clientele; the women seemed intent on marring their looks with conscientiously frumpy clothes and eccentric glasses.
I pretzeled into an opening at the bar, but the bartender kept fielding orders from whoever was next to me. After the third such slight, I managed to interpose a request. She cupped her hand behind her ear.
I held up two fingers. “Vod-ka so-das!” I hollered, and scanned the crowd for you while I waited. There was another room in the back. You had to be there.
The bartender served me my drinks and asked if I wanted to start a tab. Low on cash, I said yes and gave her my debit card. I chugged one of the drinks and took the other to the back room, shaky from the booze on an empty stomach and a day of standing guard in the rain.
And there you were. Yes—that was your head; I could pick out that compound of colors in the stands of a stadium. You sat on a stool at the corner of a high-top table with two girls, your back to me. I bushwhacked through a thicket of twenty-somethings, the last leg of a grueling obstacle course. The day had worn me
down, but I suddenly felt helium-filled, it had all been worth it, who cared if I woke up with a cold tomorrow. I stifled a keyed-up laugh as I reached out to tap your shoulder. You twisted around and the scar on your forehead shot up in surprise.
“I thought that was you!” I said. “Funny bumping into you like this.”
You glanced at your two companions before looking back at me.
“So, how was your Thanksgiving with good ol’ Larry and Margaret?” I asked.
“It was fine.” You fingered the straw in your drink. “How’d you know their names?”
“It came up the last time we hung out, after the Harvard-Yale Game,” I said. “You were pretty inebriated,” I added chucklingly, to explain your forgetfulness to the two other girls.
You squinted at me before responding. “What are you doing here?”
“Meeting up with some old friends,” I said. “I’m early.”
You took a long sip.
“Did you get a chance to”—sotto voce, though the other girls were now talking among themselves—“talk to the Ad Board?”
The straw still in your mouth, eyes on mine, you nodded once.
“Good,” I said. “You’ve done the right thing.”
“Where d’you get that sweater?” you asked. (Where’d Jew get that sweater, it sounded like.)
I looked down as if to remind myself of what sweater I’d worn that day. “Christmas,” I said. “I got it for Christmas last year.”
“Veronica, who’s your friend?” one of the girls you were with cut in.
“This is David,” you said. “He goes to school with me.”
The friend translated for the third girl, who couldn’t hear. “From Harvard!” she shouted.
“We’re in the same dorm,” you said.
“I used to date her roommate,” I clarified, bellying up to the table.
You stood up and offered me your seat. “We were actually just about to leave, if you want to claim this table for when your friends get here.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But they won’t be here for a bit. You guys should stay another round.”
“Unfortunately, we really have to go.” You buttoned your coat. “It was great running into you.”
“Stay for one more,” I said. “It’s on me. I insist.” I leaned over the table and made eye contact with your friends. “What are you guys drinking?”
“Scotch and soda,” one answered.
“Gin martini, extra dirty,” requested the other.
I looked at you. “I’m good.” You sat back down.
“I’ll get you a vodka soda, just in case,” I said, tapping the table as I left.
Back in the other room, it again took a while to get the bartender’s attention. “Close out your tab or keep it open?” she asked.
“Keep it open,” I told her. “The night’s just beginning.”
Four drinks was too many to carry in one trip, so I guzzled my own and cradled the other three against my chest as I began the perilous journey back, bracing for impact from rogue elbows, from men stepping back for full-bodied laughter, from women’s swinging bags.
When I arrived at the table your stools were empty. You must have gone to the bathroom together, as girls are wont to do. Better to stay there, I reasoned, than wander around the bar and lose you.
Ten minutes later I took out my phone and wrote you a message on Facebook:
Got the drinks. Where are you?
“Sorry, these seats are occupied,” I told a party of women who attempted to take your stools.
After a few minutes, when you still hadn’t shown, I surrendered the table to the glaring women and relocated your drinks to a ledge on a nearby wall, in unfortunate proximity to a speaker. “Sweet Caroline” came on, to cheers from the patrons. I wrote you again:
I had to give up the stools and moved to a wall.
I started sipping the scotch and soda.
The wall with an exit sign.
The densely packed room and the alcohol and the long day and my waterlogged clothes coalesced in a queasy, moist heat. “So good! So good! So good!” a man bellowed in my ear.
You probably didn’t receive Facebook notifications on your phone; that would account for why you hadn’t responded to the one I sent from Applebee’s. I wrote you at your Harvard e-mail:
In case you didn’t get my Facebook messages am with our drinks against the wall with the exit sign.
I polished off the martini. Your vodka soda I refused to besmirch with my lips and carried with me as I made my way to the front room, digging a thumb inside my jeans pocket and rubbing the piece of your belt. The stitched initials gave the weightless silk a feeling of tangibility, of something that could be held and corralled.
You’d ditched me.
My attempt to blunt my anger by drinking your vodka soda was a mistake. Vision juddering, a medley of liquors roiling inside me, I lumbered to the men’s room. I made it just in time, barging into the graffiti-tagged stall and kneeling in front of the scummy toilet seconds before my body rejected the poison. I cleaned myself up, hailed a cab back to Penn Station, remembered I’d left my card at the bar, apologized profusely as I handed the driver my remaining cash, and missed the last train by three minutes.
A cab to New Jersey would be exorbitant, and I’d have to wake my parents up and ask them to come downstairs and pay for it, with me drunk and disheveled. My return ticket granted me the privilege of staying overnight in the station. I sat against a wall, not letting myself nod off for fear of the indigent drifters who were also taking refuge there, waves of rage and nausea cresting in alternation, the swelling of one temporarily abating the other. As I scrutinized your Facebook page for any hints of where you’d gone, my phone died, leaving me with nothing but my acid thoughts for five hours.
I took the first train in the morning and walked an hour home from the station. “Taking a nap before my bus,” I called to my parents in the kitchen.
“Sounds like someone had a big night out in the city,” my mother said.
I got in bed, plugging in my phone and checking my e-mail. One new message, sent a few hours after my phone had died.
Just got email. Friend had emergency. Had to leave.
I responded:
No problem! I gave your drinks to my friends. We had a fun night. Hope your friend’s okay.
I nestled into my pillow but, despite my exhaustion, couldn’t fall asleep, buzzed on the welcome relief of knowing you hadn’t intentionally abandoned me, even feeling a little foolish for my premature, unwarranted fury. Of course there’d been a reason.
Chapter 15
Following Thanksgiving vacation, we had a truncated week of classes, then reading period, then exams. I showed up early to the final lecture of Prufrock. Tom was at his usual post near the back. Had you not gone to the Ad Board as you’d claimed? No; he was either still unaware of the imminent charges or in denial, assuming it would blow over.
Further confirming this, you were already there for once, in the front row, to keep your distance from him. I dropped my bag in the seat next to yours and strode up to the podium, where Samuelson was reviewing his notes. I hadn’t heard back when I e-mailed him “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?: The Self as Staffage in Emily Dickinson,” so I’d printed out a hard copy. “In case this got lost in your in-box,” I said, handing it to him.
He held the pages at a distance and lifted his head to read the type through his bifocals. “Your paper?” He tried to give it back to me. “You’re supposed to send this to your section leader.”
“I know,” I said. “I e-mailed it to Harriet, of course. I just thought you might also want to read it, because of last time. It’s not on Hawthorne, but I figured that can wait till next semester.”
Samuelson looked bewildered and a little peeved. “What happened last time?”
“If nothing else,” Samuelson said in his concluding remarks, “I hope I’ve done you all the wonderful service of making you aware of your own tragic flaws.” There was polite laughter and a round of applause.
“So your friend’s okay?” I asked you as the clapping petered out.
You nodded as you packed up but didn’t volunteer any details.
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “My friends showed up right after you left, so I didn’t know if I should give them your drinks, or what. I guess I should’ve explained that in my messages.”
“No worries.” You shouldered your bag and turned toward the aisle.
“I was planning on knocking my final paper out of the way this week,” I said as we waited for the aisle bottleneck to clear. “Want to meet up?”
“I’m pretty busy with other work this week.”
“Next week’s good, too. I’m flexible.”
You took your phone and earbuds out of your bag. “Don’t wait on my account.”
“No, you’re right, I’ve got other finals I should take care of first.”
You untangled the cord.
“So just let me know when you’re ready to meet,” I said.
“Will do.”
“Cool. I’ll wait for you to get in touch.” As we stepped into the hall you put the earbuds in. “One more thing,” I said in a hushed tone, and subtly nodded my head back to the classroom.