A HOUSE IN OUR ARMS
We made it to New York.
That’s how we put it when we talk about it with each other, even though it means something different to each of us, and even though we’re both pretty used to it by now. I came straight from school, worked some crap jobs, then landed a decent one. It’s at a hedge fund and I hate it, at least theoretically. In practice I find the more time I spend doing it the less I feel one way or the other. It’s just what I’m doing, what I do. I work with nice enough people. They started me out as an assistant but I’m already almost a junior manager. Who knows where I might wind up if I stick around?
Leah stayed on in our college town, waitressing and getting fired from waitressing. When she got tired of that she moved home for a while, then traveled. Europe of course, and the Far East. Now she’s studying sculpture. She talks about getting “my MFA,” as if dropping by the school to pick up something she left there, maybe a coat.
We never dated, of course, but what we had—there’s no exact name for it—was well understood and envied within our circle. I mean the other guys sometimes would ask me what it was like to go to bed with her. She was the recently turned lesbian they all wanted to be the one to turn back. And how smug was I? How quick—but also truly pleased—to explain that I was the exception that proved her rule. Ah, college.
I suppose we are still enviable, since what we have is the same as it ever was, though probably most of the people I know now wouldn’t envy us.
Leah is in a new version of our old world, but I don’t worry too much about losing her. We have the fullness of our history to draw on. We see each other as often as our schedules allow.
I’m supposed to be going with her to an opening tonight, and I’ve been looking forward to it, but I get held up at the office and have to send an apologetic text message canceling on cocktails but promising to meet her at the gallery.
Because of this, Leah greets me curtly and then rejoins the little semicircle she was in when I tapped her shoulder. A group of people all about our age are standing around a rotund, gray-haired man who I believe has an essay in the current New Yorker, which I subscribe to, though if he is who I think he is then I fell asleep while reading his article. To show her that I am other than a perfect philistine, I spend several minutes studying what is clearly the star piece in the show. It has this monumental physical presence and a sort of explosive personality, like Rauschenberg covering Nevelson, or vice versa. See? I say to the Leah in my head. I know a thing or two about this stuff. The Leah in my head is very impressed.
I glance across the room. She’s still doing her thing over there. I go for the refreshments: a long metal table with jugs of wine and lightly sweating pyramids of cubed cheese. I am pouring myself a burgundy when an older man holds out his clear plastic cup.
“Fill me up?” He smiles suggestively, but with more than a touch of self-awareness, maybe even self-parody. I laugh and accidentally shake the jug a little as I pour, spilling a few drops onto the man’s hand, but thankfully I don’t stain his cuff. “Oh,” the man says. “Now you’ll have to lick it off.”
Am I going to laugh at this? He’s laughing.
Okay I’m laughing.
We laugh.
Richard has a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, and is thickset in a way that suggests how he’ll go to seed, but also that he hasn’t yet. He prides himself on the fact that he can be scandalous, “but hardly after two cups of bottom-shelf merlot,” he says, and I remind him it’s burgundy we’re drinking and Richard laughs in a way that is almost shrieking.
After a quick turn up and down the gallery, chatting, we come back to the table for refills. The burgundy is gone. Now we really are drinking merlot.
Leah comes up to us, rosy, buzzed, ready for my attention. Richard drifts off. Leah wants to point out Alison, the conceptual portraitist she’s been seeing but is currently on the outs with. I can’t remember what happened this time. There’s always some particular incident—the ostensible reason—but at bottom the fact seems to be that there is a natural ebb and flow in the women’s ability to tolerate each other. But there is real love there, Leah is certain.
Alison is heavier than I expected, with curly dark hair and sad eyes. She looks Jewish, and is deep in conversation with a much older woman who I think is the reason we’re all here.
You know what I mean when I say that.
Leah is saying good-bye to the famous critic and I am throwing out our cups, thinking about how long it will take to get home and what time I have to be up for work tomorrow. Is it early enough for a nightcap somewhere? If we hurry. I run into Richard at the garbage can.
He insists I take his number, which he’s already written down on a napkin. “Just think about it,” he says, placing one hand firmly on my shoulder. “You look like you could use someone to make you a real dinner. A growing boy like you. Really, anytime.”
So sometimes I have dinner over at Richard’s.
It’s a different night. We’re leaving a bar, up by Leah’s place again. It rained while we were drinking and the city looks delicate, refreshed. All the streetlamps have birthday-candle haloes.
Leah is hanging on my arm. It’s no big thing. She’s not stumbling, just making sure I feel her presence, her there- ness. We reach her building.
“Gentleman you are,” she says. “Walking me home.”
I smile.
“So you want to come upstairs?”
She slips a hand into my pocket, squeezes.
“Well,” she says, “what’s it gonna be?”
“If you really need me to say it,” I say. “I mean of course.”
“Awesome,” she says, and pecks me on the cheek. Hand still in my pocket. “But you’re not staying over.”
But then she lets me.
I live in Murray Hill. Leah lives up by her school. This means that in order to see her I need to take the 6 to Grand Central, ride the shuttle to Times Square, then finish my trip on the 1. Or spring for a cab. Not that I’m so broke, but still.
Richard has a rent-controlled place in Alphabet City. The neighborhood, seedy when he moved in, has gentrified smartly over the decades. Richard has stories about the prostitutes who used the corner Laundromat (which has since become a coffee shop) as their home base, about the bums who would sleep in his building’s stairwell, ready to fight you if you roused them, about how all the real character has been driven from the city, though it is nice to be able to walk around at night.
A cab home from Richard’s is eight bucks, tops, and often Richard insists that I take some money to pay for it. “Refuse me twice and you’ll make me cry,” he’ll say, half-serious. (It’s sometimes hard to tell with Richard what is genuine and what is theater.) I act exasperated—you’re making me feel like a kid, I say—but accept the cash, grinning, and only then can we complete our good-night ritual: a hearty, protracted embrace during which he pecks me on the cheek, or maybe tries to plant one right on the mouth.
I’ve begun to crave the undivided affection Richard gives me on our nights together. Sometimes when I’m at work I find myself drifting off, thinking of the low light by which we dine, how he’s taken to keeping a bottle of my preferred bourbon in the house. “I don’t know about another round before dinner, Richard,” I might say, and Richard might say “Oh come on—you young people are supposed to be able to take it.”
It’s hard to say who’s more surprised the night I respond to Richard’s latest hysterical come-on by stretching myself out on the couch and then laconically unzipping my fly.
I no longer think of Leah as the love of my life, but I do still sometimes think we might make each other the happiest. It would be more like teaming up than being married. We could do all kinds of things together: whatever she wanted to. I could work, she could sculpt; she could have girls too if she wanted. She could bring them home to us sometimes.
I know it’s silly, but I think about it.
Also I think maybe it isn’t so sill
y.
I’m imagining the two of us at a party together, her wearing a black dress with a plunging V neck, me not in anything particular, and she’s talking to some old friend of ours. She’s telling a funny story about something I said on account of having misunderstood something she said, and how we argued until we realized what the original miscommunication had been, and how afterward everything was okay.
Richard fucks with a ruthlessness utterly disconnected from his demeanor, that carefully crafted mélange of snark and fey. He tops, for one thing, and sometimes when he gets frisky he gets rough. The situation ought to allow for nothing in either partner but animal instinct. Instead, I’m feeling oddly trapped inside what is shaping up to be a muddled, but essentially analytical, drunk.
How have I wound up in this apartment, on my belly, on this bed, greased?
Obviously I don’t mean this literally, but in the grander sense.
Richard’s trying to get me into position for a reach around, but I’m not helping because at this particular moment my being fucked feels like it is happening in an adjoining room. In that room, I think, Richard has given up on parity and is now calling me filthy things.
The smoke alarm goes off. The salmon. Richard pulls out. It is a rushed, painful exit that makes me gasp. Richard runs to the beige disk and snatches it off the wall, disabling it. He opens the oven and surveys the ruined food. The salmon is blackened and hard; it looks like scorched warped bricks.
“Goddamn, goddamn,” Richard says. I hear the quaver in his voice.
We stand at opposite ends of the kitchen, two naked men, first not looking at each other, then looking.
I am eating fried pork dumplings out of a white box balanced on my lap, a lot less drunk than I was before, which I think is good. Richard has spareribs and makes a show of sucking the meat off each bone. I start to tell him all about Leah, figuring there is an obvious segue from that into breaking up with him, but I can’t find it, so I just keep telling old sex stories.
“Ugh,” Richard says finally. “I ate a pussy once in college. That was plenty.”
“I think we should be just friends,” I say. Richard stares at me, gnawing on his last rib. “Okay, I know it sounds stupid,” I say, “I mean we’re sitting here and—” I make a sort of encompassing gesture with my chopsticks.
Still, Richard says nothing.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Really. But this is a mistake for me. I thought maybe it wasn’t, but it is. I hope you can understand. We can still see each other. I love it when you cook dinner.”
Richard clears his throat, starts to talk, stops, then says: “You know, I try and remind myself that you’re all the same, but apparently there are some things in life a person never gets used to.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re trying so hard to be understanding but the fact is you couldn’t possibly understand. You apparently think that you’re my boyfriend. You think this”—he mimics my gesture—“is my whole life.”
I let Jason from the office talk me into letting his fiancée, Danielle, who works in legal, set me up with her good friend Candace. In an e-mail CC’d to Jason, Danielle sends me Candace’s e-mail address, along with a short note explaining that Candace is recently out of a long relationship and probably won’t be looking for anything too serious right off. I write to Candace, who I’ve been told is expecting to hear from me, and reintroduce myself. (We met a couple months ago at somebody’s birthday party, but that was before she was single.) She writes me back a few minutes later, saying she remembers me, and in my next reply I ask if she’d like to get together some evening after work for a drink. She doesn’t write back for a few hours; in fact, I’m getting ready to leave the office when she does, though since she wrote to my work e-mail—the only contact info of mine that she has—it would have forwarded to my BlackBerry if I hadn’t still been at my desk. She says she’s looking at her schedule and next Wednesday works for her if it does for me.
We have a good time.
I’m in Leah’s kitchen, which is also her living room. We’re sitting in high-back wooden chairs, getting drunk on Maker’s Mark. I guess we’re about halfway there. Her apartment is an almost uncramped studio near the park. At least the tub is in the bathroom. Recipes are stuck to the fridge with fruit magnets, though Leah only ever eats out or orders in.
She’s been telling me about this studio class she’s taking called Across Mediums: Conversations Within and Between the Arts. It sounds interesting, or at any rate she seems to be enjoying it, and like evidence supporting an alibi, here’s a copy of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara on the table. It’s thick, paperback, black; the cover dominated by a yellowed headshot of the poet. He has close-cropped dark hair, a high forehead, full lips. He’s looking over his right shoulder, gaze brimming with a melancholy not entirely unsweet.
I open the book, flip to a random page, and read what I find out loud:
“the unrecapturable nostalgia for nostalgia for a life I might have hated, thus mourned
but do we really need anything more to be sorry about wouldn’t it be extra, as all pain is extra”
“Don’t be afraid to jump around,” she cuts in. “That’s the way to read him, my teacher says.”
So, on another page:
“if Kenneth were writing this he would point out how art has changed women and women have changed art and men, but men haven’t changed women much
but ideas are obscure and nothing should be obscure tonight
you will live half the year in a house by the sea and half the year in a house in our arms”
This time I interrupt myself. “Who’s Kenneth?” I ask.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “He’s always mentioning people. You get the feeling they’re all somebody. There might be notes in the back.” There aren’t. She gets up from the table. I put the book down and finish what’s in my glass.
Leah’s got her head in the freezer, checking to see if the new ice is ready. I get up from my chair and go to her. I grip her hips, momentarily, then slip my hands around her front, get underneath the fabric of her tee shirt, and clasp them over her belly. Holding her close against me as chilly air washes over us.
“Hey there, you,” she says, and presses back.
I circle her nipples with my index fingers, feeling myself tense as they tighten.
She turns her neck to the side, as if yielding to a vampire.
I kiss her on the neck, then pull her closer still—I want her to tip her head back so we can kiss.
“Couldn’t this be it?” I say, speaking the words into her hair. “Isn’t this good enough?”
She reaches behind herself, thrusts one arm between us and pushes. Her other arm drawn across her beautiful breasts like a shield.
Leah doesn’t throw me out, but she also doesn’t try to hide that I’ve upset her and how badly. We can’t talk about it, or I know she won’t so I don’t even try, but it’s what goes unsaid between people that builds up like masonry. You have to either knock the bricks out with other things, or let them keep stacking until eventually you are alone in a room. So the important thing is that we are sitting here, together, sharing a silence that is both charged and cozy, working on a fresh round of drinks.
When they’re finished, Leah doesn’t offer to refresh them again. She says she thinks she’ll get ready for bed. I wobble a bit when I stand. We say good night and I see myself out. We have always forgiven each other everything. It is easy to believe that we will survive love.
Leah’s building is on Amsterdam and 108th. There are subway stops on Broadway at 103rd and 110th. Does it make more sense to walk north to the closer stop or walk the extra five blocks south and have one less stop to ride?
I’m walking down 108th, toward Broadway, not knowing which direction I’ll turn when I get there. Then, instead of turning one way or the other, I decide where I really want to be is inside this bar on the corner. I’ve never been in here
before. I take a stool at the far end, order a Maker’s, shoot it, then order a beer to sit and sip on, though before I know it half of that’s gone, too. It’s pretty busy in here—a student hangout, apparently, though of course that can mean a lot of things. The Pixies are on the too-loud stereo. Straining to listen to the conversation nearest me, I am able to discern the word epistemology. English majors.
“Do you know what time it is?” Richard says. “Of course you don’t or you wouldn’t be calling.” I’m on the sidewalk in front of the bar. “So. How drunk are you, exactly?”
I say, “Nobody knows me like you do. I don’t understand it.” I’m not even slurring too badly, all things considered. “What did you mean when you said we were all the same? Who?”
“Christ,” Richard says.
“I’m not a fucking TYPE Richard I’m a fucking PERSON.”
“It’s not one or the other, Todd. You’re a type of person, and I’m sorry if that hurts to hear, but it’s true. Also, I’m not that sorry. You typed me right off as a needy used-up old fag, and now that you know I’m not you’re trying to recast me as magic negro to your plighted hero.”
“Fine, okay, you’re right. Everything, you’re right. So okay, fine, hit me with it—what am I? Type me.”
“You,” Richard says—dramatic pause—“are the type who hears the deadbolt turning but can’t tell whether the door is about to be opened or has just been locked shut.”
A taxi is sailing up the street. I stick my arm out. It sees me, pulls an outrageous U-turn in the empty intersection, sidles up to the curb. “I’m coming over,” I say to Richard. “I’m going to make it right between us.”
“No you’re not,” he says.
“I am,” I say. “I already gave your address to the driver.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and give his address to the driver.
“It’s already right between us,” Richard says, “in the sense that it’s never going to be anything other than this. You try to make things better, and that’s sweet, sort of, but the fact is they aren’t yours to change. I’m sure it’s the same with your other—situation, though please don’t take that as an invitation to start talking about what’shername.”
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