Ben was at the bar already, talking with the woman behind the counter, who looked to be about twenty-one. She had the whole waifish heroin chic thing going for her that caused my hackles to rise. I didn’t want to do what I knew I was about to do, but I didn’t know how to stop myself. “Beeeeennnn!” I cried out a little too loudly, and I made an elaborate show of hugging him and touching his arm, so as to communicate to the bartender: the boy is mine.
This wasn’t necessary, of course. She had already disappeared to get someone else’s drink, and for a second I thought about how much energy I’d wasted over the past few years trying to keep and hold a man’s attention. No wonder women got breast lifts and plastic surgery and Botox—women I knew, not just Hollywood types—before and after they hit thirty. A woman’s window to power is very small and always shrinking. Some women, knowing this, shrink right along with it.
Ben fit perfectly into this Brooklyn milieu. He had started growing a beard, which suited him, and had on a plain white button-down and jeans. I felt ridiculous because he was looking at me quizzically, having apparently asked me a question I hadn’t heard. A barback was setting two drinks in front of us and Manu Chao was playing loudly over the speakers and Ben’s face was so open and expectant that I took a big breath, shoved my chronic female malaise aside, and heaved my best foot forward. “What’d you say?” I said, and helped myself to a drink.
“I said it’s good to see you!” he said a little louder. This sort of bar prided itself on din. Being heard was less important than being seen.
“Oh!” I said, probably too loudly. “Yes! And you too! I had such a great time last time!” I kept jabbering in this vein because that’s just what happens when I get excited, also what happens when I’ve spent a long time thinking about someone without actually talking to them in person. Most of the time this tendency toward rhapsodic fantasy ended in disaster: I’d wind up disappointed that the remarkable man I’d concocted out of bits of remembered detail and dreams had little or nothing to do with the dull pedant in front of me.
But with Ben it was different. Just sitting next to him for a second had my whole body vibrating. A physical charge, a tectonic disruption, no less measurable than electricity. As soon as I sat down next to him, words began to form way down below my solar plexus and, slowly, began traveling up through my back brain and into my frontal lobe: I could totally fall in love with this guy.
But that was ridiculous. I didn’t know Ben. There was no such thing as love, anyhow; love was a delusion shared by two lonely people. I told myself that I must be suffering from delusion and thus must, severely, keep a tight rein on my actions. Anything I was feeling or wished to do was just a trick of the old hormones.
And we did work together, after all. It was unprofessional, I said to myself, bad for business, what would Celeste say? So before I could think better of it, I ended my monologue about how great it was to see him again and what I’d been up to in the interim with what I thought was a sassy and independent, “Oh, and just to be clear, I am not going to fuck you.”
I’m not sure what was more embarrassing. Knocking over the highball glass in front of me and watching it roll to the floor and shatter, feeling strangers’ eyes burning the back of my skull accusingly (I was that girl), or the look on Ben’s face in reaction to my pronouncement: half surprise, half total amusement. It was a very dumb thing to say, because the thought of fucking him was A-okay fine; I just didn’t want to love him. “Oh for crying out loud!” I said, jumping off my stool and crawling on the floor, trying to pick up the broken glass. “My bad. If you’re wet, sorry about that—”
As I kneeled with one palm filled with glass fragments, I realized I’d put myself right at eye level with Ben’s crotch.
“Oh dear,” I said, and scrambled to my feet. Ben was really laughing at this point, slapping his palm on his leg. I apologized to the barback, who’d returned with a broom and a mop, and sat back down, desperate for a drink, but I’d just spilled my drink, and had nothing to take the edge off the stabbing humiliation. As if on cue, Ben passed me his, and I took a couple big gulps. This turned out to be a big mistake. It burned, it burned! Locally distilled whiskey, it burned! I coughed and gasped.
“Anyway,” I said, once I’d handed him back the glass. I crossed my legs and interlaced my hands primly over my knees, determined to proceed as if without incident. I cleared my throat. “Where were we.”
Ben started to say something, but just then I heard my phone chirp. I put a hand up primly. “Hold that thought.” Simone had texted, that sneaky devil. Where the fuck are u??? Wolf says he’s been lookin and you’re nowhere to be found????????
Coming!!!!!!!!!! I texted back. Sorry!!!!!!!!!! Then I added a grimacing emoji.
To Ben I said, “Well, well, well, as revelatory as this has been, I have to go.” Then I added, with some back-brain impulsivity: “Unless you want to come.”
“Already?” Ben looked disappointed, or was I just imagining it. He shook his head. “I would, but I can’t stand that guy.”
“Well,” I said, standing up uncertainly. “Maybe we could meet up later? I’m only in town till tomorrow, but I thought we could maybe”—Ben smiled then, a cat-eating-the-canary sort of look—“as friends,” I added, “colleagues”—why in God’s name were these words coming out of my mouth?—“go to a museum, or something—”
My phone chirped again. It was probably Simone. “Shit, I really have to go,” I said. “I’m going now, byeeee—”
I leaned in to give him a hug. Before I could, he kissed me. On the mouth. Nothing big or anything, no slip of the tongue, but there was the shock and pleasure of feeling his lips on mine.
“Catch you later, Pendergast,” he said. We were on a last-name basis now.
“Oh for crying out loud,” I said again. Then I smiled real big. Huge, really. You can try and try to deny love, but, like pain, it insists on acknowledgment eventually. Often it insists on even more, insists that one restructure one’s entire way of being, but luckily this process is slow and incremental so we don’t balk and skitter off. Point is, I wasn’t thinking about love when I was kissing Ben. I wasn’t thinking at all, only being. Of course, you could also say that being without thinking with someone, I mean genuinely, is the definition of love itself.
* * *
—
Listen, the party was unbearable, and there’s a lot I’m willing to bear for the sake of a party. But parties are never fun when everyone’s afraid to be themselves. That’s the first thing I noticed as soon as I got to this converted warehouse/gallery space. A person could not ask for better circumstances—dim lights, not-bad DJ, luscious alcohol, wide dance floor—and yet all the darkly dressed and disaffected youths just stood around in tight huddles, death-gripping their plastic cups, looking about furtively like small forest animals sniffing for predators.
It sounds strange, but I felt instinctively tender toward these people. Writers, I’d figured out over the years, were solitary creatures. To join a crowd, to participate, would mean to stop observing, and I think this was pathologically impossible for them. Which is sad, if you think about it, because as much as joining and participating can lead to awful things—Nazism, for example—it also leads to wonderful things. Like karaoke, and barbecues, and intergenerational dancing at wedding receptions. Poor writers! No one, at this party, was willing or able to join anything beyond their own ruminations, and therefore it was a real dud.
In lieu of fun, a couple of bespectacled gentlemen were selling magazines behind a table for twenty bucks a pop. They were dressed like dandies, or the Wright brothers. People milled around, idly flipping through the issue. I picked one up. There was an emaciated woman on the cover, dressed in white. The Minimalism Issue, the cover line said. It was the era of rich people throwing out all their things. I set it down. I knew deep down that I was a maximalist at heart.
It didn’t take me long to find Wolf; I just had to spot the clump of fanboys and -girls that followed him everywhere he went like peewee soccer players. I disliked him at first sight. Wolf even walked with smugness. From the looks of him—average height, mushy build, shifty eyes and bad posture—he’d been something of an outcast growing up. And, like many former outcasts, had seized upon his newfound popularity with a tyrannical zeal.
“Glad to finally meet you,” he said, smiling with his mouth only after I’d introduced myself and broken up his coterie. He led me by the elbow to a corner of the room so we could speak privately. All his mannerisms felt so stagy I had to resist the urge to guffaw. It was impossible to take this guy seriously, maybe in direct proportion to how seriously he took himself. He gestured for me to take a seat at a wrought-iron high top table. “How are you?”
“I’m good!” I said in a voice an octave higher than the one I normally use. And then, made efficient by the desire to have sex with someone who was not the person in front of me, I proceeded to launch into a mile-a-minute pitch about why he should start being sponsored by and producing content for the Italian athletic wear company. While I talked Wolf kept smiling. It was a smarmy smile; I knew it well: I’d been getting it ever since I was sixteen. He was not really listening to what I was saying, just humoring me because he found me sexually attractive enough to do so.
“I need a cigarette,” he said, right when I was getting to the part about the importance of subtle endorsement strategies. “Come outside with me.”
I know I didn’t have to go outside, but look, I was trying to get the whole thing over with. The party was in full swing, and when I’d come through the front doors I’d seen plenty of people outside smoking. But Wolf didn’t go to the front, he led me out back, past the bathrooms and out to the alley, which smelled of garbage. Once outside he lit a cigarette, sighed, and exhaled a plume of smoke. He offered one to me, but I refused.
“That’s better,” he said. “Too loud in there.”
I nodded. I began again. “Anyway, as I was saying—”
“You like dick?” he said out of the blue.
“What?” I thought I’d misheard him. “Sorry—I think I—”
“You heard me,” he said. He was leaning against the brick wall, one foot up, like a wannabe James Dean. I didn’t know whether to laugh or run. Fear and absurdity get mixed up a surprising amount of the time. When a bad thing starts to happen, the wise guy in me looks around and pipes up, thumbing toward the situation. Can you believe this shit? Wolf took another self-conscious drag.
I started to laugh, an involuntary nervous-system response, no different from a possum’s flopping over and playing dead. “That’s—” I said, between giggles. “That’s—what are you talking about?”
Wherever the laughter was from, Wolf didn’t like it at all. Or maybe he liked it a lot. In any case he stubbed his cigarette out against the brick and sidled toward me and started slobbering on my face. He might have described it as kissing, but I can assure you this was not the case.
“You do, don’t you,” he said into my ear between his slobbers. His breath was hot and rank. “I can tell.” He felt around, grabbed the space between my legs roughly. “You love it.”
“Ummmm,” I said.
I was flipping lightning-fast through possible responses in an impossible situation, unable to figure out how not to hurt his feelings or cause him to act any more aggressively than he already was. He was grunting a little, insistent, like a dog trying to get peanut butter from the inside of a chew toy. And I was kissing him back, I guess, or I wasn’t not kissing him back, I’d say the fault proportion between him and me was around 90/10, same as a head-on collision. When Wolf finally paused, leaning back to get a better look at me, I instinctively touched my face, just to make sure it was there. This was not how I was expecting the evening to go.
“Should we go back to my place?” he said. His curly hair, styled like a fifties greaser, was falling across his sweaty forehead. He was one of those guys whose face wasn’t bad-looking from far away, but up close his yellowing teeth and pockmarked complexion stood out. The flaws seemed to worsen when he opened his mouth.
I had to be delicate about this. In order to talk to a guy like Wolf you had to remain permanently deferential, tacitly assure them at all times they were in the dominant position. “I mean,” I said, “I would love to, but—” I scraped around the edges of my brain, looking for a reason. Illness: no, too obvious. Death in the family: same. Feeling fundamentally unsafe: he wouldn’t care. All the smarts in my brain disappeared into a poof of smoke. Until—“Wait!” I said, pushing him gleefully back. “We can’t! You’re hosting! This is your party!”
* * *
—
After that, Wolf made me wait around for hours, the very end of the party, till he would talk to me again. Maybe he was sore that his advances had been rebuffed, maybe it was just another power trip. He was going to sign with us, of course he was going to sign. He just wanted to fuck with me. Show me who’s boss. Sometimes men seemed so dumb and naked and obvious in their actions it baffled me that we lived in a world where they ruled it. Then I remembered the advantage they had—they could hit women really hard. Rape us too.
I occupied myself for the remainder of the evening by thumbing through my phone, scrolling through family and vacation pictures taken by people I barely knew, filled with rage at this dumbass Internet poet wasting my time. Finally at three A.M., Wolf sidled up. “I’m wrecked,” he said. “Mind if we put off work stuff till tomorrow? We can get coffee or something.”
I smiled sweetly. “Sure. That sounds great.” If he was going to make me ingratiate myself with him, oh, he’d see. I’d ingratiate him into the ground. He was going to make me miss going to a museum with Ben so that I could stare with hatred at him through the steam of an Americano? Fine, just fine. I was going to get what I wanted from him, and no matter what he did, he was not going to get what he wanted from me. I don’t just mean sex—I mean my respect.
“Cool.” He stood there, weaving a little. He was drunk, probably also high. “Thanks for coming.”
“Absolutely,” I said, in as soothing a voice as I imagined a mother used with her screaming, idiot baby. “Thank you for having me.”
The next morning, Simone emailed me at some ungodly hour, letting me know there’d been a change to my itinerary. Surprise! Mary London, resident queen of the American short story, was expecting me for tea at the women’s college where she taught, just north of the city.
It took a few readings of the email for me to understand. Celeste actually knew Mary; they’d gone to college together back in the day. Huh. Celeste knew Mary London? Mary was Susan’s favorite writer, my second favorite, right behind Julian North. Susan discovered London in a college fiction workshop and had in turn gotten me into her by laughing so hard at her collected stories that I’d eventually made her start reading them aloud. London’s cutting humor was as finely orchestrated as any comedian’s stand-up act, but unlike most comedians, she also wasn’t afraid to crack your heart into smithereens.
Apparently Celeste and Mary were the same age, but I’d always pictured Mary London to be ancient, maybe because I believed only old people could be wise. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that there were elements of Celeste’s life I’d only get glimpses of through the chain mail that wrapped around most of her affairs. Most people are unknowable to us and, what’s more, they prefer it that way. Anyway, I was going to take a train upstate, which Simone had already booked. It left in a few hours.
This all seemed very exciting, like I was on a big mission for a top-secret government agency. I felt like I was playing make-believe in my childhood bedroom all over again, this time with piles of money at my disposal. Affirmative, I wrote back to Simone. Copy that. Then, from the comfort of my California King, I called and called and called Wolf until he drow
sily picked up with a “ ’sup.”
I commanded that he meet me straightaway at the café downstairs. “I don’t have a lot of time today,” I said haughtily. “I have another meeting this afternoon.” Listen to me! How busy and important I sounded! I was a professional businesswoman with an iron fist! I rummaged around my memory for bits of dialogue from no-nonsense prime-time workplace dramas. Then I added, “And don’t be late.”
Wolf showed up at the Ace not an hour later, a surprising show of punctuality, given his Brooklyn address, and more proof that the best way for me to get a leg up in the world was to watch more TV. I’d saved us two stools by the windows that faced out onto Twenty-ninth. I found comfort in the hustle and bustle of the Ace, of the trust-fund babies, creative professionals, and wealthy tourists that filled the Parisian-style, light-filled coffee bar. Being around fancy people and fancy things had always put me at ease. It’s not even that I was born with that big of a silver spoon in my mouth—it was more that I’d always felt I’d deserved a big silver spoon in my mouth. For a brief period in fifth grade I’d even convinced myself that I’d been switched at birth and was the secret daughter of Princess Anastasia Romanov.
Point is, the question I was always trying to answer in my daily affairs was: how can I make this banal shit more glamorous? Today I’d already answered that question by dressing like a French woman—high heels, ripped jeans, red-and-white striped shirt, fitted trench coat—and ordering, instead of my usual Americano, an espresso in a tiny cup that arrived with a mini-macaron on its tiny saucer. Eating and drinking out of tiny things made me feel, as the French would say, très chic.
Wolf, on the other hand, looked terrible, probably because he’d just gotten out of bed. Seeing him there, far from his natural habitat, I was struck by the precariousness of the roles we assign ourselves, how tenuous this idea of identity really is; how much of ourselves relies on context. Here in the Flatiron District, in the bright glare of morning, Wolf’s ultra-niche demagoguery had no place. He appeared meek and chastened by the peacockish displays of wealth and health and good grooming around him. He was not the king of the Internet poetry scene; here there was no such thing as an Internet poetry scene. Here, he was not allowed to assume the alpha position, the bullying self, he got to be in other places. Because here, barely a few miles from Brooklyn, they gave zero fucks about him.
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