“She makes the furniture herself,” I explained to Mark. “She refurbishes the furniture herself, I mean. She has her own business. She’s an artist.”
“An artisan,” Mark corrected me. “Did you sleep with her already? Has she seen your apartment—excuse me—your room?”
“Well, no.”
“I don’t see why you can’t date Becky or Elaine or Lacey Freeman,” Mark said.
“Gross,” I said. “Lacey Freeman?”
“Okay, not Lacey. But Jane? Jane Germeroth is perfect for you. Jane Germeroth is smart and she has good boobs. Listen to me, Nick. Cut your hair. You look like a drummer in some shitty band. You look like a fucking bartender. Also, your scarf is gay.”
My scarf was gay indeed. It had cost several hundred dollars, but it was beautiful—red and white checkered silk with long tassels.
“And it’s offensive,” Mark went on. “It’s supposed to look like what Yasir Arafat wears on his head. Now teenagers are wearing polyester versions like it’s some hip-hop thing.”
“This is silk,” I protested. “From Barneys.”
“You know you can buy that shit on the street in Chinatown for ten dollars?”
“Well, you look like a gynecologist,” I said. Mark was wearing a monogrammed cable-knit sweater and khakis.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means you look old,” I told him. “And, you know, perverted.”
“What do you want me to do? Wear tight jeans and roll my own cigarettes? I’m a grown man.”
“Rolling your own is better for you,” I said quietly, collecting the last crumbs of my cinnamon scone. “Less tar.”
Mark groaned and finished his coffee. “You’re not in love,” he said. Then he paused to watch a girl in a short skirt bend over to tie her shoe. A few days earlier I would have clung to the image for weeks—the lines of her panties under the opaque black tights, the soft dimpling down the backs of her thighs. When she stood back up, her thick brown hair seemed to undulate around her shoulders in slow motion. Her face was irreverent, almost pug-nosed, mean and adorable. But I was unaffected. I had Britt Wendt now. Other girls meant nothing to me. “So are you going to buy the couch?” Mark asked finally. “Where would you even put it?”
• • •
For the past year I’d been renting a room month to month for $350 cash in a flophouse owned by a Hasidic slumlord. I had to myself an eight-by-eight, windowless corner of the building, which had once housed a plant that manufactured little tongue-colored erasers. The place still smelled vaguely of burning rubber. My room was on the top level. The other tenants up there were all hip young people. I didn’t know anyone’s name. Downstairs, Middle Eastern gypsy cab drivers slept in shifts on bunk beds, their black sedans parked outside like a presidential cavalcade. Streetside, there was a soaped-up storefront full of car parts and broken computers. The building should have been, and probably was, condemned.
The only furniture I had was a twin mattress and a low glass coffee table, on top of which I piled my shoes, each pair in a Ziploc freezer bag to keep the vermin and roaches out. The walls between the rooms were single sheets of gypsum board. Hand-drawn signs in the crumbling hallways read: NO BEDBUGS! NO STREET MATTRESS! NO HOMELESS! The place had two communal bathrooms full of silverfish and a shared kitchen full of mice. I was constantly looking for a sublet or a room in an apartment or a cheap studio, but nothing seemed good enough. I couldn’t commit. Plus, I was always broke. I kept spending all my money on clothes.
Christmas morning, I was woken up by my neighbors having sex. Usually I’d pound on the gypsum, but that morning, in the spirit of the holiday and in honor of true love, I let the grunting slide. I stayed under my comforter with my laptop on my crotch, listening to the sex sounds and Googling Britt Wendt for the thousandth time. The Britt Wendt I found on Myspace was twelve years old, lived in Deering, New Hampshire, and posted inspirational photos of nature scenes with captions about how to be your best self, jokes about periods, links to articles about Olympic skating and beauty pageants. The only other Web pages that came up for “Britt+Wendt” were Swedish genealogies. My Britt Wendt was a mystery. I looked at her business card again. It was minimal, just her name and e-mail address and the words “redesigned antiques.” The font was generic, Arial bold. The card stock, flimsy. It was like she just didn’t give a shit. After my neighbors finished, I heard them walking down the hall to the showers. I considered visiting my go-to site for porn but chose not to. With Britt Wendt to pine for, watching videos of strangers having sex felt sacrilegious, like squirting a mayonnaise packet into your mouth while riding the elevator up to Per Se.
“Hi Britt” is how I decided to begin my e-mail.
It took thirty minutes of Google image searching to find a photo of an ottoman that conveyed what I wanted to convey: I lived in an expensive converted loft, had a very high-quality camera, and was an organized and broad-minded music aficionado and reader of literature. The photo was perfect—sunlight streaming in through a wall of opaque factory windows, neat shelves of books and records, the corner of an electric guitar leaning against the exposed brick wall in the background. The source of the photo was the for-sale section of craigslist in Providence, Rhode Island. The ottoman itself was just a lame, gray, fabric-covered cube. The legs were short, angular, blond wood stubs. I could tell it was a factory piece from the 1950s and worth more than the fifteen dollars the seller was asking, but not much more. I understood that I’d be deceiving Britt Wendt by claiming ownership of this ottoman, but I reasoned that as soon as she fell in love with me—perhaps she already had—the existence of furniture or lofts, any trite reality, would become laughably irrelevant. So I downloaded the photo, adjusted the levels in Photoshop, attached it to my e-mail, and wrote, “It’s the dude about the stoned hunters and the chaise longue from the other day. Would love your ideas and a rough quote on reupholstering this ottoman (attached) in vintage leather from your Texas roadkill or other source. Merry Xmas?” I signed my name “Nicholas (Nick) Walden Darby-Stern” and added my phone number. “P.S. Did the chaise longue sell? Still pondering . . .” How could she not love me now? I wondered.
I spent the rest of the morning in bed, eating steel-cut oats with maple syrup out of my mini slow cooker and watching DVDs on my computer. I checked my e-mail every two minutes. Each time I saw that Britt Wendt hadn’t written back yet, there was disappointment, but also great relief. In the infinite realm of possibilities, I felt I still had a chance. That was the last dreg of youth, I suppose, that hopefulness. I watched Face/Off and Con Air and a few episodes of Fawlty Towers. I took a shower and put a sheet down on my floor and did sit-ups and push-ups in front of my space heater. Then I watched the first ten minutes of Marathon Man and the first five minutes of Hoffa, clicking back to my e-mail all the while. My neighbors through the gypsum had gone out. Everyone was out, it seemed. The flophouse was strangely quiet.
At such times, it was my habit to buy things online. But I had resolved to try to cut down on my spending. All I had to show for my earnings as a graphic designer were my computer and a rack of expensive clothes, each item safely sealed in a clear plastic garment bag. Despite my refined taste, I blended easily into the rank and file; my clothes were just high-end versions of the crap everyone else was wearing. My workday uniform usually consisted of black jeans from MDR; a plain, handpicked-pima-cotton T-shirt from Het Last; a washed-linen button-down and a heather-gray hoodie, both from Deplore; and white leather high-top limited-edition Chucks, or my perforated wingtip leather miner boots from Amberline, if there was snow on the ground. At home, I wore satin pajamas—burgundy and blue striped top and bottom from Machaut—and a heavy Peruvian parka I’d won on eBay. I had recently splurged on rabbit fur–lined deerskin gloves at Modo and a custom-ordered cashmere hat from an atelier in Tokyo that I’d read about in Mireille. I’d had to measure the circumference of my head for it. I
rationalized these expenditures easily: luxury accessories were better investments than, say, the seventy-five-dollar goat-milk soap from the Swiss Alps, which had taken a month to get through customs and lasted me exactly twelve showers. For the previous six months, I’d been working part time without benefits at Indent, a lifestyle magazine for rich intellectuals. It did not pay well. My bank account was empty. My credit-card debt by this time was in the five figures. I’d even cut up my cards in an effort to curb my spending. Until Christmas money from my father arrived, I would have a hundred dollars cash in my wallet, plus a fifteen-dollar gift card to Burger King that Mark had given me for Hanukkah as a joke. He had gone off to Vermont with his wife to be with her family. Everyone else was home with their parents, or on glamping trips in Joshua Tree or sunning themselves in Maui or Cabo or Puerto Rico with their girlfriends. My father was skiing in Tahoe with his new wife. He hadn’t invited me along. Without the funds to buy anything, I could only drift through online stores and put things into virtual shopping carts. It was all so futile. It was all just trash. What I really wanted was to run the tip of my tongue across Britt Wendt’s pale, trembling throat, then suck each of her ears until she begged me to fuck her. “Tell me you love me, or I’m pulling out,” I’d demand. “Oh God,” she’d say as I entered her. “I love you, I love you,” she’d pant at every thrust.
In the afternoon, Lacey Freeman texted to invite me to Christmas dinner at her apartment. This kind of last-minute invitation was typical of Lacey. “Herding all the strays over for my annual Xmas feast, so stop by if you’re lonely 6–11 p.m.” Every time I saw Lacey, she’d gained five more pounds. She was turning into the kind of obese girl who does her hair like a forties pinup and wears bright red lipstick, a blue polka-dot dress with a white doily collar, colorful tattoos across her huge, smushed cleavage, as if these considerations would distract us from how fat and miserable she had become. In a few years she’d get her eggs frozen, I predicted correctly, and the rockabilly thing would disintegrate into Eileen Fisher tunics and lazy, kundalini yoga. Any man interested in Lacey would have had to be seriously self-loathing. I knew this because I’d made out with her when we first met at Mark’s birthday party five years earlier. I got drunk and went back to her place, came to with my face buried in her back fat, about to consummate my desperation. I left quickly and rudely. I never told Mark about it. The next time I saw Lacey she acted unfazed, like we were chums who had merely shared a funny moment. “That Scotch!” But having held my dick in her hand, she seemed to feel she’d earned the right to belittle me as much as possible. “Are you getting by okay?” she liked to ask me. She was a sad person, sheltered and confused and ineffectual, et cetera. She’d recently become obsessed with canning and baking and making her own bitters. The last thing I wanted for Christmas was her homemade eggnog and gin-pickled okra. “Merry Xmas! I’ll try to make it!” I texted back. But I had no intention of giving her the satisfaction. Mark texted me a photo of his father-in-law’s model replica of a World War II battlefield. I did not reply.
For the rest of the afternoon I watched more DVDs, checked my e-mail, and pined for Britt Wendt. I fantasized about our life together. We’d get a one-bedroom in Flushing, fill it with her furniture, cook roasts, and drink expensive wine bought with the money we saved by living in Queens. Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing. I could imagine Britt Wendt lying beside me in bed, her frothy blond hair flattened into a fuzzy halo. We’d be like dope fiends for each other, reaching out our swollen hands for one more hit, her body pale and freckled, nipples pink as sunsets. “The worse your morning breath, the more I love kissing you,” I’d say, slipping my tongue into her hot, bitter, velvety mouth.
I think by then I’d been single longer than is healthy for a young man. I’d had just one serious girlfriend since graduating from college. Postbreakup, there was a consequent jag of failed sexual reprisals (including the one with Lacey), a two-year dry spell, then a single and only semi-interesting encounter with a completely hairless Taiwanese girl I met at Bloomingdale’s. Next came a few standard Brooklyn bar hookups with insecure twenty-five-year-olds, then three more years of nothingness, not a drop, not a cloud on the horizon. By my Jesus year I was practically a virgin again. My father told me to focus on my career. “Women are attracted to money,” he had said over the phone before leaving for Tahoe.
“I’ll die alone,” I told my father. “I don’t care.” This was all before I’d met Britt Wendt, of course.
“There are plenty of girls who would be interested in you,” my father said. “You’re a long-term investment, they’ll think. Women are good about the future. They can see further down the line. I’ll mail you a check when I get back from Tahoe.”
When the sun went down, I checked my e-mail one more time, found nothing, got dressed, pinned my hair back, jogged through the snow, bought a can of soup and beef jerky from a bodega, and walked back in the dark feeling heroic and despondent. Mine was not the usual self-pity, but the kind of fearful admiration one feels watching footage of young tribal boys performing dangerous rites of passage.
I passed by Schoolbells and Soda, a bar where all the young, hip gentrifiers of the neighborhood congregated and, as they tended to do, ignored one another every evening, taking advantage of the Tecate-and-tequila special and the plein air seating with fire pit out back. The interior was all old, weathered wood sourced from Navy Yard scrap, the lamps Edison bulbs hanging from thick ropes, the glasses jam and mason jars. At the time, this was considered innovative design. I’d been a regular there until mid-November, when I got caught refilling my beer glass from the tap myself. I’d actually been stealing beer for weeks and could refill my glass one-handed by then. All I had to do was rise slightly from my barstool, get my glass under the spout, hold the rim with my fingertips, and lower the tap with my thumb. It took two seconds. When the bartender, in his suspenders and bow-tie neck tattoo, caught me in the act, he turned red, shut his eyes, and began to inhale and exhale dramatically, his lips moving as he counted each breath. I recognized this practice as an effort to reduce violent rage. I couldn’t imagine him beating anybody up. He looked like one of those portly, nebbish types who if you shaved him and scrubbed him and dressed him in Van Heusen, you’d discover your cousin Ira, a tax attorney in Montclair. The whole bar hushed. Joanna Newsom yodeled and harped from the speakers. After ten breaths had gone by, I felt I had to do something. So I pulled three dollars out of my wallet and waved them in the air. “I’m happy to pay for the extra beer,” I said. The bartender simply shook his beard and pointed to the door.
Mark loved to convict me of being an alcoholic. The Schoolbells story in particular seemed to arouse him. I made the mistake of recounting it a few days later. He listened attentively, said, “I feel like an opportunity has presented itself,” then made a big fuss about silencing his phone. He went on to explain how embarrassed he’d been at his bachelor party two years ago when I’d made a joke of calling his cousin Daniel “Herr Schindler” in front of all the groomsmen.
“I’m Jewish, Nick. That means something to some of us. And why Schindler? How is that even funny? Do you even know what Schindler looked like? Or were you thinking of the actor in Schindler’s List? Ralph Fiennes?”
“It’s pronounced like ‘rape,’ but with an f,” I said.
“Fuck you,” said Mark.
I nodded. “It wasn’t a great joke, okay? But Dan had been making a big deal about paying for the stripper, blabbing every chance he got, being a Schindler,” I said. “It was a joke about self-interested generosity, the glove-on-the-invisible-hand thing.”
“What invisible-hand thing?”
“Like when people tell you they gave money to a homeless person. The invisible hand of selflessness, only it’s wearing a glove so everyone can see it.”
“You could have called hi
m Queequeg or Alyosha,” Mark said. “But did Schindler really brag? Was he blabbing? Is that the takeaway, that he was a blabber?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was insensitive. I get it. Who is Queequeg?”
“The cannibal from Moby-Dick, idiot.” Mark turned the ringer on his phone back on. “In all seriousness,” he said, “please get a grip on the drinking. Have some self-respect.”
For the six weeks since the incident at Schoolbells, I’d limited my drinking to Fridays and Saturdays, and only beer from bottles, and only alone in my room, safely cast away in my dark corner of the flophouse. As a result of this discipline, I was sleeping better. My morning jogs were faster. My small talk at work was funnier and more enjoyable. When I met Britt Wendt, I wasn’t bloated or burpy. My eyes were clear. I was in prime condition. Such self-improvement was worthy of reward, I thought. And it was Christmas, after all. I stopped in front of Iga, a Polish bar across the street from Schoolbells. I’d passed by it countless times, but I’d never been inside. A buzzer sounded. I pushed on the door.
The place was bigger than I thought it would be. There were a dozen tables with red checkered tablecloths and worn metal chairs with black vinyl seats. The floor was parquet, and my footsteps squeaked as I walked haltingly toward the bar. There was no music on, nothing. A small cat slunk by, then rubbed itself against a stack of old newspapers. A radiator hissed and sputtered. The only light came from neon signs on the walls, and an old light-up beer advertisement with a broken clock. The back wall of the room was covered by a dark curtain. In the corner by the door to the toilet sat a large potted plant and a statuette of Adonis or David or Hercules or somebody, a Santa hat on its head. A middle-aged woman stood behind the bar, smoking a cigarette. Otherwise the place was empty.
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