Instant Love: Fiction

by Jami Attenberg

  Why was I assuring him of anything? Why did I need to stroke his ego? I had every right to say, “You fuck just as I thought an accountant would.” Not that I had ever thought about fucking an accountant before.

  “It was just what I needed,” I said. “But now you have to go.”

  He pulled himself off me. I pulled on a robe, tied the sash at the waist. He pulled on his pants, jumped up in the air to get the tight denim over his hips. I handed him his shirt, the flimsy cheap cotton scratched against my fingertips. He sat back down on the couch and slipped his feet into those goddamn hiking boots, and then, slowly, began to lace each shoe up. I stood there, hands folded across my chest, hands cupping my elbows, upper arms squeezing my breasts, a shelf of cleavage pushing against my robe. He double-knotted the laces. Come on, faster. Move it on out. Move it. Fuck.

  Finally, shirt, shoes, coat, done. I walked him to the door and gently pushed him through it. He stood outside—why is he still here?—and then extended his long, bony hand for a shake. I had to shake it, this hand that had been briefly inside of me just minutes before. As I reached out my hand, nails bitten, I heard a pound across the hall. There was my neighbor, hair hanging over his face, trying to get in his front door.

  “Good night,” said the accountant.

  My neighbor heard his voice, turned and spotted me in my robe, and then, gracefully, turned his head back. Respect, I thought. Or disgust.

  “Yeah, OK. That’s fine. Just go.” I blurted it out, louder than I would have liked. “God, go already,” I said, softer. And then he was gone, I was safe behind my door, and I thought: I’m really going to need to be pickier in the future or this is never going to work.

  MY LOVE LIFE since I moved to New York from Chicago has been like a desert. I’ve had tiny little interactions of love, like finding shallow pools of water to drink from, and then I’ve moved on, hoping that I’ve stored enough love and affection and excitement to get me to the next place.

  I’ve been stuck with a string of unsuccessful two-month relationships, the deaths of which have burned out almost all my romantic instinct and desire. I was in love with Alan, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. I’m probably still not ready. But being who I am—not that I particularly know who I am, I just know who I’m not—I felt that I should keep trying for love. I mixed up the real dates with the one-night stands just enough to keep myself satiated. On the dates you did not fuck, in the bars you did. Those late nights at the bars, I recognize now, were just as much work as the dates: the talking, the drinking, the questioning, the laughing so hard at jokes that weren’t that funny. They just never were funny. It’s not funny, none of it, I know.

  But back to the dates, the relationships, my flaccid attempts at legitimacy. Online dating has been the only way I’ve met men the last few years: nice, neurotic financial analysts, law students, and advertising account executives who made it perfectly clear they were ready to settle down every step of the way—in their ads, in their initial e-mails, over those first drinks in Chelsea, they were ready to go, if they could find the right woman. Are you the right woman?

  I am not young anymore. I need to say that. Or I don’t feel young.

  Two months became the end point (if I could make it that far, but often I made it only a few weeks) because that’s when the first (and last) big fight occurred. This led to a gentle fadeout of phone calls and e-mails, no holiday cards were necessary. Rarely have I had a big breakup, because at two months it’s hardly necessary for any sort of scene. No one is invested. I can’t get attached to anything in two months except for cigarettes, and I gave those up years ago. Those things will kill you.

  But I am attached to sex. I get this from my father, who left my mother and younger sister and me twenty-odd years ago because we were seriously impacting his social life with his graduate students. Children can be such a drag, don’t you think?

  My sister, Maggie, and I would stay with him every summer in some rented house near the university hosting whatever writing program he was running that year, and try not to think too much about who he was or what he was doing while he was out with some nineteen-year-old, screwing up her head for the rest of her life. He would neatly stack a few twenties for us on the counter before he left for the night, enough to keep us occupied. Sometimes we would go to the movies; sometimes we would buy and eat so much ice cream—all kinds, Creamsicles and King Cones and Popsicles with gum balls at the center—our bellies would ache; and then sometimes we would keep the twenties and hang out and play backgammon. We never made any new friends (our father never bothered to encourage it; he didn’t really have any friends either), it was just Maggie and me, entertaining ourselves and each other.

  This was fine for a few years, and then suddenly it was not fine at all, at least not for me. (Maggie always loved those twenty-dollar bills. They were an adequate love substitute, like how some people feel about Equal in their coffee, ignoring any sort of long-term damage, like to brain cells or psyches. She even went so far as to marry a very rich, very chatty, very boring man, but she’s since come to her senses and left him last year. Now she’s shacked up in Oregon with a quiet man who makes beer for a living.) The last summer I stayed with my dad I screamed at him one night, blocked him from leaving, blocked all entries and exits with the sound of my voice: Why do you do this? Why? And he said, “When you’re older, you’ll understand.”

  I understand now. Because even when it feels bad, it still feels good.

  It started slowly, this late-night sex life. It was after a bad date, one of many, they all blend together after a while. I went home, logged on to the dating site (I was using just one then; I’ve since cast a larger net), hovered my mouse around my profile, and then clicked “Play” in the list of romantic interests. I’d always just had “Dating” and “Serious Relationship” (never “Friends”—who needs any more friends?), and it had never occurred to me before to select anything else. But this seemed right, too, perhaps more right. Sure, I had slept with plenty of guys on the first date, but to connect with someone for just an hour, late at night, it was beyond slutty. By clicking on “Play,” I was admitting that I was a complete deviant, that I just wanted to fuck. It wasn’t about pleasure. It was about feeding very base and gritty needs. It was about being starved, being ravenous, and taking whatever I could get to eat. About wanting to consume. But there was no pleasure. I was required to do it, by what or whom I don’t know. It was an uncontrollable urge. I had been bitten.

  THERE IS A BLAST of noise through the walls, a thump of overturned furniture, perhaps a table, followed by the high tinkle of glass shattering. Then a body slams against the wall that faces my front door. Grunted cursing, and then loud squabbling, like chickens fighting over feed. Someone yells, “Enough!”

  Yes, indeed. Enough.

  Onto the couch, legs up, glass of chardonnay on the floor next to me. My living room is small (I’ve been meaning to find a new apartment since the day I moved in), and my couch is large. This is where I have the sex. All my life I wanted a couch like this, a buttery soft black leather couch, big enough to lie almost side by side with someone, wrap your legs around them. Sink into it. This couch makes me happy. It reminds me of making out with my first boyfriend in high school. He had a black leather couch in the basement of his father’s house. There was a tear in it. Sometimes I would finger the tear while he was in the bathroom or changing the music on the stereo. (The Smiths, always the Smiths. He would have traded me in for Morrissey in a second.) I would slip my finger inside of the couch. It felt soft in there. I swore someday I would have a couch like that, and now I do, but I rarely sit on it, just fuck on it.

  Instead I usually sit in the chair by the window, feet up on the sill. I stare out at the building next to mine, the half dozen trees on the street below, spurting forth from the concrete, the fire hydrant, the double-parked cars, the deli on the corner, the one where the counter guy thinks I’m cute, but not fuckable. He told me this one night: “You look too
wholesome,” he said, “those chubby cheeks,” and I thought, Brother, are you wrong. You don’t know anything about me and my leather couch.

  There are framed something or others on my wall. Pictures of pictures. Flowers, sunsets. A step above a dentist’s office, a step below a therapist’s office. I know I’m weak. I bought them because I thought I was supposed to. My true love is my book collection, that’s why I rented this place. Built-in bookshelves, floor to ceiling, head to toe, stacked with everything I ever bought and never sold: biology textbooks from college and graduate school that I can’t seem to sell or give away, so I hold on to them as a reminder that I am smart; collections of entire science-fiction series; books with faraway gnomes and fairies—it’s weird, I know, but my sophomore-year roommate got me hooked on the stuff fifteen years ago, and I haven’t been able to stop. I like going to those faraway lands; I like it when there are new words to learn, new cultures to understand, all vaguely like my own, at least metaphorically, but somehow different, more freakish, outlandish, whimsical yet dark. I reread some of these books at least once a year, take myself to that place again.

  My books fill me. Just not enough.

  AT LAST, a flash of fresh hope on the screen, a new message for me from a man on the Lower East Side who looks just like all the boys before him, young and wiry, sideburns like strips of bacon, long and unshapely, an inch of buzzed hair around his head, pulling back on his forehead in echo of a grandfather or a great-uncle, and two earrings in the upper right-hand corner of his ear. Two entirely gay earrings. But I know they’re not supposed to be gay because, look right there, there on his profile, it says, “Straight,” right above “Play.” And I read his e-mail, which gently suggests that the red, red lips of my profile picture would look even better around the tip of his cock.

  It’s on. I am so troubled. And it is on.

  I LIKE FINDING a new boy each time, I admit this. Uncovering a new treasure. And in the minutes between my sending him my address and his hopping in a cab and heading to my apartment, I am anxious and excited, as if I am waiting to hear about important, potentially good news. Not that I get a lot of good news these days. I don’t get bad news, either. I am just treading water. Occasionally, on nights like tonight, I create my own news.

  While I wait, I bite my nails, so raw and ragged, and then I realize I’ve been sweating for the last hour, chardonnay seeping out of my pores, and I’ve been ignoring it out of laziness. But now it’s time to pretty myself for my latest suitor. In the bathroom I drop my robe to the floor, stumble into the shower, catching my foot on the curtain (I am drunker than I originally thought), and crank on the water.

  Even though I shaved yesterday, I start shaving my legs all over again and under my arms, and while we’re at it, why not hike up that bikini line? I soap myself all over, every pore, every crevice, scrub my face with a fancy grapefruit scrub my sister got me last year for Christmas, which I never use (She is always getting me things I don’t need, spending her husband’s money on products. God, so many products. She’ll try anything once, or make you try it anyway) except when I feel like I’m supposed to, like on nights like this. I want everything to be glowing and pink, create a remarkable image for the man between my legs that night, so that he’ll remember the experience fondly when he’s jerking off a week later before he has dinner with his ex-girlfriend from college. Look how far he’s come. He can get laid anytime he wants. With a pretty, pink, slightly older weird woman from the Upper West Side.

  I also do this in hopes of some sort of karmic retribution, that he, too, is standing in a shower, perhaps a dingy stall in a shitty studio apartment, making himself nice and clean for me.

  HIS LAST E-MAIL said, “Leaving now,” an hour ago. He was supposed to take a cab. Maybe he took a subway. Maybe that’s why he’s late. He should have been here in a half hour at the most in a cab. There’s no traffic this late. He would have come up Broadway. Maybe the West Side Highway.

  I pour another glass of wine, the last in the bottle. Maybe it is the chardonnay. Maybe it has nothing to do with my father or my failed relationships or the isolation of urban life. Maybe it is just the chardonnay.

  ONCE I LEFT a note for my neighbors. Their garbage was piled up two bags high, two across on either side of their front door, and the smell hit me every morning as I opened my front door. It was starting to seep under my door, too. I couldn’t smell it all the time, but I knew it was there, hovering like an invisible force field. I was afraid one day I would wake up and be trapped in my apartment forever, a captive of irresponsible youth, a victim of mismanaged testosterone.

  I tried knocking on their door, for a few days in a row, but they either weren’t home or were passed out from a late night or a long day making money for people richer than themselves. I didn’t want to be that neighbor who left nasty notes, so that when we saw each other in the elevator we could barely stand to share the same air while the floors ding slowly in front of our faces—counting off, when will this ride end? That seemed like something a cranky old lady would do.

  But the smell: like old coffee grounds stuck in the filter, raw meat left out and gone bad, and dirty sponges on the day you decide to throw them away. It was the bottom of the garbage can, the corner where things catch and mold, every day in front of my door.

  And then there was a pizza box, too, tiny bubbles of grease spotting the bottom of it. I imagined dried, old cheese stuck to wax paper inside the box. When they balanced the box on top of the bags one evening, like that last bucket atop a sand castle, that’s when I cracked.

  “Please take out your garbage,” I wrote. “It smells. And it is unsanitary. This is New York! There are rats everywhere!” I underlined “rats” three times. I almost drew a picture of a rat, but I thought that would be too cute and I wanted to be taken seriously. “It is not fair to the rest of us.”

  I didn’t sign my name, but a few hours later I opened my front door and the garbage was gone. My note had been returned to my door, and on the other side someone had written, “What garbage?”

  I’M AT THE FRONT of my apartment, my knees clamped to my chest, head resting on the door, listening for hallway noise. It’s after 5:00 AM. I think I’ve been waiting for two hours. I’ve just checked my computer; there’s no one left online but a handful of men I’ve seen before, one of whom I dated briefly, and another whose profile name is MastaGangsta. I don’t need a master. I just need someone who will show up.

  And then I hear it: the elevator opens on the floor. He’s here. He must have gotten in the building, he’s sneaking up to surprise me. I knew he couldn’t resist my juicy red lips, even if the digital photo doesn’t do them the justice they deserve.

  I stand up, brush myself off (there is dust on my legs from the floor), tighten my robe around me. Fingers through the hair, tidy those curls. I hear the footsteps come closer. Time for business. I open the door, light up my face, bite the inside of my lower lip to keep that light steady. Hold the door frame. Steady now.

  I peer down the hallway. It’s the one who shuffles, paper bag in hand. The quiet one. He’ll do.

  SO MY NEIGHBORS stopped talking to me after the note, cold stares at the floor in the elevator. They never hold the front door for me anymore when my hands are full with groceries. I am forced to drop the bags, dig my keys out, open the door, jam it with my foot, shove the bags inside, stagger on the street like a drunk.

  Before that they had been pleasant young men during the day, even though they were crazy and loud late at night. All those parties they have. And they never invite me to even one of them. Not like I would come.

  But still, it would be nice to be invited.

  “I NEED YOUR HELP,” I say. Blurt, like it’s an emergency, which it is. Which it isn’t. I want to reach out and grab him and pull him into my apartment. Kidnap him.

  “What?” He looks up, pushes his hair out of his face. “Did we—did something happen?”

  “I saw a rat. In my kitchen.”

&n
bsp; He looks disgusted, not at me, at the rat.

  “A big one. Gray with a huge tail. I think he’s under the sink. I could hear his tail knocking over bottles. Dishwashing detergent.”

  He tightens his hands around the paper bag he is holding. Looks behind him. His white moon cheeks and watery blue eyes made him seem frail and gentle, like he wouldn’t know what to do with a rat if he caught one, that the rat would more likely know what to do with him. Just my luck. The late-night pussy.

  “It would just make me feel better,” I say. I suck on my lips. “I’m all alone in here.”

  He reaches in the bag, pulls out a can of beer, cracks open the top.

  “Yeah, OK, I’ll take a look,” he says.

  ONCE AFTER a big party where they made a dent in their front door, I left a note that said, “You are loud. You are the loudest people in the world. Why do you need to be so loud? Don’t you know that other people don’t like noise? Please shut up shut up shut up.” Everything was underlined. Every single word.

  IN THE KITCHEN I am teetering. The presence of someone else has suddenly amplified my drunkenness. I cling tightly to the counter, as if it is a life raft in the pit of a swirling ocean, only nothing is moving around me, not technically anyway. He looks at the cabinet under the sink, pulls everything out from inside, the dishwashing detergent (which stands, unfortunately, erect), an unopened pack of sponges, a bucket full of cleaning supplies, a container of old fabric softener I keep meaning to throw away but never do. He stacks these items behind him and then notices me and my grip on the counter. He asks me if I’m OK.