It’s the longest drive of my life. I wish there was a way you could zap yourself so you didn’t have to be in the moment that leads up to the moment. Your life. It feels like Connecticut lasts forever and everyone is trying to get through it and I’m never going to get there and then it happens. I can’t pinpoint a specific moment. I just become aware that there were more woods than concrete until suddenly there weren’t. I am here, almost, I am in New York, the beginning of it, the flat-top buildings are standing there staring at me, waiting. Chloe.
I grab my phone. I’ve never called her from the state of New York, so I dial the number. I wait for her to answer. She sounds short of breath, nervous, Hello, hello? I don’t tell her it’s me and she doesn’t say my name this time. I hang up. Her voice made it real, what’s coming next, the big hug, the big kiss. Kiss.
I’m a kid again. I look at people in the cars around me and none of them are perking up. Mostly they look tired. I roll down the window and start beeping my horn in the happy way and people are looking at me like I’m nuts but I smile at them. I pump my fist. I’m alive. They smile back. I am still contagious, but now it’s in the good way.
* * *
—
What kills me the most is the sheer volume of people. They’re everywhere. You see them in the windows of the skyscrapers, they’re coming up from the subway below, they’re in cars, beeping, they’re on the street, not looking at you, not saying excuse me, they’re homeless or they’re in suits, they’re dressed up like Chloe said they would be and then they’re sloppy in Yankees jerseys, they are all so different and I want them to slow down. I want to slow down. But then it’s too late to slow down, I’m here, almost, just one street away from the gallery and my heart is beating so fast I have to stop. I have to breathe. I stop cold in front of a bakery that’s a deli and a newsstand and a coffee shop and I’ve never seen any place that was so many places at once. Someone at a table is eating sushi. I understand why Chloe always said New York is special. I’ve never seen so much variety, it’s like the city encourages you to make your dreams come true, to order the pizza and the tuna roll and then buy a scratch ticket and a roll of toilet paper, take it all upstairs to this salad bar—more food!—and be so awestruck that you almost walk right into a woman storming around with a basket of fresh groceries, a whole eggplant and a newspaper, a quart of milk. She detours so swiftly, people are so good at walking here, at moving. Maybe when you’re around this many people, you just don’t feel as much, or maybe you just know what feelings matter. I haven’t even seen Chloe yet, but it’s as if she’s already opening my eyes to the world, the way she always did, making it seem new again, day after day. It’s like I never saw people before, never realized just how big it is, the human race.
I watch a guy in all white make an egg sandwich and he ties it up so fast, it’s like a magic trick. I go into the deli and order breakfast for dinner as if I’m a normal New Yorker. I watch the people, the sad faces, the tired faces. I inhale the sandwich. It’s the best thing I ever ate. I go up and tell the guy who made it that it’s the best thing I ever ate and he nods. I don’t think he speaks English. Or maybe he doesn’t care.
I walk down rickety black-and-white stairs and go into a tiny bathroom where I splash water on my face. I floss. I pull shards of eggs out of my beard. New Yorkers look so different, yet somehow you can tell that I’m not one of them. Maybe that will change when we kiss.
* * *
—
Flare Gallery is halfway down the street, marked by a sandwich board on the sidewalk. This is when my heart starts ticking like a clock on a bomb, when I feel something, when there’s a spark, and the alarms sound, ringing through me, alert, alert. Chloe. But this must be what it’s like to be normal because right now all I feel is good. Not grabby, I’m in charge of my heart, not Roger. I stand here by the sandwich board and soak it up. The quiet in me. It’s like my heart is back to being the heart I was born with. It isn’t a weapon anymore. I feel like I did before, like nothing ever happened. It’s a circle of life in a good way, a great way.
I start walking. My palms are soaking wet and I can’t get there fast enough but I also can’t walk slow enough and then I get there. I am standing in front of the gallery.
And it’s empty. Empty.
The door is propped open and a girl sits on the stoop smoking. “The show is in the fucking annex,” she says. She blows a smoke ring up to the sky. “And the annex is on fucking Thirty-fourth and Lex. Such bullshit, right?”
* * *
—
It’s like When Harry Met Sally. Or any movie, really. The man always has to run through New York to get the girl. So that’s me now, flying down the street the way all superheroes do at some point if you want to get the girl. I’m running and smiling and a couple of girls connect their eyes to mine, I can almost feel them thinking There goes a good one. Now I live here, somehow. Running from Chelsea to Thirty-fourth and Lex in just eighteen minutes makes me a New Yorker. I am not afraid when I arrive, when I see the annex, a tiny little box of a space, almost like a cartoon, one giant garage door, open all the way, people spilling in and out, people drinking wine, music playing, music I don’t know. I go in. I see her name on the wall. I see her eyes on all the walls and then it happens. I see her, in a white dress, glittering flowery shoes on her feet. She exists. She is here.
Chloe.
She scratches her right ankle with her left foot, shifting the way she did in school. I can’t believe I am here, can’t believe we made it this far into the future, into the same room. I want to go to her but I want to wait, I want to hold on to this, this sensation of her being within my reach after being so far away from me for so long, in the computer, tiny and still.
You think you’ve seen someone if you’ve seen them in pictures, but this is a reminder of what more there is, the way she shrugs her shoulders and covers her mouth with her elbow when she coughs, and I see her phone, the phone she’s answered when I called. Jon?
A douche art guy bumps into me and he’s rude and unapologetic but he doesn’t drop to the floor like Krish. It’s more proof things are different now. More evidence that I’m safe. Kissed. Fixed.
I get a plastic cup of white wine and watch Chloe work the room. I like her this way, older. Life makes you better after it makes you worse. I’m calm just being here. She brings out the best in me, even now, when she doesn’t know that she’s doing anything.
I take a step toward her, another.
I’m closer to her, close enough to see individual strands of her hair swaying as she turns her head, as if she’s expecting me, as if she was waiting for me, and maybe she was. Of course she was. She feels me. She feels the pull of my heart. No. Yes. No. I get one tiny moment with the freckles on her face, some of them new, some old, those strands of her hair that won’t cooperate, like the weapon in my heart.
And then I hear all the gasping that’s familiar in the worst way. I don’t need to look back to know her nose is bleeding, to hear the sound of her body hitting the hard floor. Thunk.
And I can’t be the one to go over there and give her a Kleenex, kiss her and make it better. I was wrong to come here and my body lied to me and I’m not kissed, fixed.
I’m still me. I’m still in hell.
Outside on the street I run all the way to the edge of New York City, where it ends in the Hudson River. I pant and I scream at the water. It doesn’t scream back.
CHLOE
I saw him. Felt him. That high school sensation. When I could always sense him nearby, in my heart, that tug of the empty box on my computer when those bubbles would appear.
That’s why I started to turn around. And then I fainted. Blackout.
And now I’m awake and hiding out in the back room of the gallery and my mother is on the phone—You need to eat more and you better not be taking Adderall or coke, there’s nothing cute about it, C
hloe. It demeans your work too, to joke about drugs like that, is that what this is, drugs? Well, regardless, you need to drink more milk, do you eat those almonds I send you?—and I’m not an anemic or a cokehead. I saw him. I did.
I’m drinking water and wiping blood off my knee. The only real thing is the blood, the bruises, the substances inside of us, like paint on the canvas, proof. I have no proof that I saw Jon. Your gut is not proof. But your memory is something.
Alexandra is back, hovering, offering Kleenex and cocaine—my mother is not stupid.
“Thanks, Alexandra,” I say, steadying, stepping back into my skin, my life.
There’s an unspoken thing and we both know it. I’m off. I’ve been sliding a bit all year. At first I would “forget” about interviews and then Alexandra would reschedule them and then I took it to the next level, Actually could you tell them I’m in work mode right now? No publicity for a few months. And it’s all because of him, because of Jon. That day he ran out on me changed me, that train ride, I’m not the same. I can’t go talking about him to strangers anymore, he saw me, he left me, and it’s an important part of being a person, you have to know how to be left.
Alexandra knows me. She pats my leg. “You got the Jons bad right now, don’t you, babe?”
“No,” I say, smiling through the lie. “I swear I saw him, though.”
She tucks the Kleenex and coke into her pocket and checks her phone. “Huh,” she says. “Apparently there’s some guy sniffing around, says he knows you.”
My heart. “Are you serious?”
She looks at me. “Holy fuck,” she says. “You think it’s him? Jon?”
We don’t know. She is not so cool now, nervous, excited, says I have to be chill and wait and she goes to get him and I sit and wait. And then I stand. Nothing is right but nothing was ever easy with us and I remember that now, now that I think he’s here. I’m gonna get to hug him, thank him. For my art. I’m gonna get to talk about him, talk with him, and I miss that. I haven’t been able to talk about Jon with Marlene in years. She burnt out on the subject in college, my fantasy she called it. My mom practically hangs up on me if I ask about his parents. I feel whole again, like all the parts of me are condensing into one, the girl who missed him and the artist who hunts for him and the woman I could be if I could just get on with it, if he would just get here already.
Alexandra texts: Sorry, mad crowded, hang on.
I hang on. I wait. And my whole life starts to make sense to me, it becomes a movie with a beginning, a middle, an end.
Alexandra’s head appears in the crowd, the shock of her white blond hair. Here it comes. Here he comes.
He smiles. He, as in Carrig Birkus. Not Jon Bronson. I glance at Alexandra and she’s making hand gestures, smoking hot, right? Right. Carrig is still smoking hot, same as ever, embracing me. But Carrig is not Jon. But then Carrig is here.
He tells me I look great and I tell him he looks great and he is a little drunk, a little rattled, says he’s never been to an art thing and I laugh and tell him it’s gonna be okay and he can’t believe I fainted and I say I never do except when high school boyfriends show up unexpected.
“You invited me,” he says. His cheeks turn red. “I mean I got a Facebook invite. I didn’t mean it like…you know…”
I smile at him. This is the side of him that Jon couldn’t see, the sweetness.
I ask him if anyone else from school is here and it was a weird thing to say. There is a bump. An awkwardness. I can’t mention Jon. If I do that, Carrig will leave. It’s amazing, what you can know about a person all these years later, the rules.
But we push through. He brings me wine and he buys a painting and he’s talking a lot, nervous. He is bashful and cocky, it’s hard to keep up.
“So I bought a place in Tribeca,” he says. When someone starts a sentence with so he’s trying to make it sound casual. But this isn’t casual, Carrig being here. It feels so intentional. He cares so much he said so. “You should see my place. I can see the whole city, it’s insane.”
He tells me about how happy he is to be out of Hoboken, but how he does miss the bars. It’s all so easy, so familiar. I know how to talk to him. I know how to get the best of him. The night is slowing down and the crowd is thinning. Jon was a hallucination. I fainted because I didn’t eat and I thought I saw him because the only other time I’ve fainted was when he came back in Nashua. Something about being back with Carrig, leaving the gallery with him, the way he hails a cab as if he lives here, which he does, which is what Jon said he would do, which he didn’t, this feels like life to me, and everything about Jon, it feels like it was holding me back from life, trapping me, down to the fucking art I make, all the eyes, only the eyes, always trying to figure out what Jon was thinking, what was going on behind those eyes.
And now I’m free. I’m in a cab with Carrig, Carrig who showed up, Carrig who says he was living in Hoboken all these years, where they play Billy Joel in all the bars. “You probably don’t ever go there,” he says.
“No,” I respond. “But that doesn’t mean I have anything against Billy Joel.”
He’s E.T. with the heart light on and I’m embarrassed for him, how clear it is that he still wants me. But then it’s nice to be wanted so openly, craved like pizza. I could do this. I can picture us at Billy Joel. I can picture this whole other life where I’m wearing all my Lilly dresses and I have this guy who worships me. He nudges me. “Why are you smiling?”
“I’m just trying to remember, you didn’t want to live in the city when we were younger, did you?”
“No,” he says. “But I knew you did.”
He opens the door of the cab for me—thank you—and the door of his building—thank you—and he holds the elevator—thank you—and then he opens the door of his bedroom—thank you—and then he opens sliding doors, wide doors, miracle glass doors that lead out to his terrace—thank you. He stands there looking out at the city.
“What do you think?” he asks, not meeting my gaze, because he doesn’t have to look at me. I know it all. I know he did this for me, moved here, worked, earned. This is all because he doesn’t think he’s good enough.
When I move toward him for a kiss, for his hands, he doesn’t push me away or run. He pulls me closer, his arms wrap around me, two doors closing.
JON
Seventy-three hours have passed since I ran out of the gallery. She is eerily quiet, not wishing anyone a happy birthday, not posting a selfie. It was a mistake to go see her and I want to know that she’s okay, that she’s alive.
It’s 10:27 P.M. when I refresh her Facebook page and see it. A brand-new album of photos. My heart snaps like a twig. There are forty-three pictures and the album has a name. Coney Island in the Rain. Aaaah. The first picture is just the rain, a thundering downpour, the kind where your mom makes you wear a rain slicker. I feel young for thinking that, inexperienced. I click through the pictures and she wasn’t there alone. There was someone else with her, another person taking photos of her being silly, jumping in puddles. She’s wearing a poncho you buy near the subway and she stomps and smiles and flips the bird at the raindrops, at the camera. She sticks her tongue out too, impish. My heart aches with envy.
It’s a guy. It has to be. If she had been there with a friend, she would have insisted they take turns. She would have shared pictures of the friend stomping in the puddles. Only a boyfriend would be so invisible. A boyfriend who came into the picture the night she fainted. I can feel it.
She was fired up by the storm, the romance of it all. There are so many pictures because everything in the world looked new to her that day. This is how I felt in New York, except I was there alone. I was imagining being there with her and here she is, actually being somewhere with someone. She’s dazzled by every little magic thing, the raindrops landing on the candy carnival games, a custodian standing under the overh
ang, doing his job, waiting. The pictures are uneven with the colors. Overexposed. It means you showed too much and you shared too much and you can’t take it back.
The rain stops and there’s a time-lapse video of the clouds morphing into a sky that says, Sure walk around, I won’t give you any trouble, no more rain, I promise. The next pictures are at a restaurant in the city that overlooks the river. There are lights everywhere, little candles flickering. I backtrack to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but then it hits me. They didn’t take pictures during their trip back to the city because they were kissing.
Kissed. Fixed.
In the restaurant, Chloe raises her eyebrows as she eats the spaghetti. She rests her chin in the palm of her hand. Her eyes look bigger than they are in real life and she is watching a performance, a song. Her lips are puffy.
Kissed. Fixed.
She is sitting still but really she’s falling, away from me, into someone else. It feels like I did this, like I never should have gone to see her, as if I made this happen. The last picture of her is black-and-white. Underneath it says #TriBeChloe.
* * *
—
Then she’s gone.
She changes the settings on all her accounts to private. The window is closed. You can’t see where she’s going or what she’s doing unless you’re friends with her, which means she isn’t like the person stranded on the desert island anymore, making words out of branches on the beach, hoping I’ll see from above. She is behind closed doors, somewhere in Tribeca. With him. Him.
Providence Page 16