This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  “EVE!” Kate yelled, above the noise. I leaned across the table to hug them and they pulled my arm and tried to drag me over the table completely. I felt my shirt coming up, a fork graze against my stomach. A few, more sensible people got up to allow me to shuffle inside. I scanned the table, waving hello to the few guys I recognized from college who had all been buddies on the hockey team—Glick, Ben, another guy they called Danza.

  They’re still hanging out with these guys? I thought to myself. On purpose?

  “Oooooo, she’s so Colorado now,” I could hear Glick say to the others. I had no clue why he was saying that. All right. I had some clue. It was the jeans.

  “These guys? Still?” I said, turning to Kate and Maya, cocking my head to the right and eyeing them.

  “We’ve become drinking buddies!” Maya said proudly. “They’re very easy to deal with, as it turns out.”

  “They’re always available on a random Thursday,” Kate said, listing off the benefits on her fingers. “They’re punctual. They often pay for drinks. They didn’t abandon us for Colorado.”

  I smiled. “Ohhhh, I see.”

  “Why are you back?” Glick shouted. “Please explain in three sentences or less.” He pointed at my mouth with his chopsticks, as if offering me a microphone.

  “I got a better job here,” I said into the chopsticks. I didn’t think he’d be interested in the details of how I’d managed to translate three years of music reporting in Colorado into a job as an assistant at Voice, a music-sharing program that published original content on its website. Career talk wasn’t really his specialty.

  “I can’t believe we got you out of your apartment!” Kate said.

  “Yeah, what have you been doing?” Maya wanted to know.

  “Working,” I said.

  Kate nodded. Maya rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right,” she said. “You’ve been on your couch eating frozen yogurt and you know it.”

  “Like I can’t be doing both?” I replied.

  Maya laughed. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said, hugging me. I felt the warmth of her. Finally, somebody who actually knew me, who I actually knew. The smell of her sweater brought me right back to college. When I first met Maya, it was two weeks into freshman year, and she was standing in front of her closet and telling me about this club downtown in the Meatpacking District that had space-themed dance parties every Monday night. “Deep Space Mondays!” she had explained, while throwing clothes across the room. I went with her downtown to the club that night, wearing one of her short, sparkly skirts, and we danced for hours to electronic, deep space–y, futuristic music and then went where all broke girls in college go at the end of the night for sustenance—Duane Reade. We sat on the staircase of someone’s town house, bleary-eyed and eating Entenmann’s cookies, unable to stop laughing, laughing so hard that it hurt. We discovered that we were different but the same, and in one glorious moment, I saw my future, and it was friendship with a girl named Maya. I just couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t get to tell my mother, the woman who had sat across from me at that little round kitchen table throughout middle school and high school, analyzing the state of my friendships. I remember from the second that I became friends with Maya, I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t get to tell my mother all about her. How could I not tell her? How could I never get to tell her that I’d made my first friend in college?

  As Maya pulled away from me, she grabbed hold of my earlobe and inspected it, her eyes about an inch away from my face.

  “Is this an extra piercing? Are you in the midst of a Goth phase?” She gave Kate an urgent look, pulled my ear toward her. “What is going on?” she demanded.

  “Um, no,” I answered, with a smile. “I’m not sixteen.”

  “Have you heard anything from Jesse?” Maya asked.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head and looking down at my plate. “Thank God.”

  The truth was I spent most of my time wandering music stores, after work and on the weekends, and I had to deliberately avoid anything related to Jesse’s band. It seemed like everywhere I looked, there he was. Lately, the band was receiving some backlash. They were repeatedly called a group of upper-class Ivy League graduates staking improper claim to foreign music. But the bad press only enhanced their popularity. I tried not to look, but late at night I read articles where Jesse was quoted defending the band, saying that they all had part-time jobs in college, that to this day they were paying off student loans.

  I didn’t tell anyone at Voice that I knew him, even though it would have helped me there. Voice was a place where I felt entirely out of my league. I went to parties at the office in SoHo—this beautiful loft with signed album covers on the walls, “listening” rooms filled with silk pillows—seriously, each room contained no fewer than twenty brightly colored pillows scattered on the floor. The owner was a billionaire who made his money doing something else before this that nobody really understood, so there was no shortage of funds.

  I went to the shows that I was assigned to, and didn’t think twice about going alone. I didn’t feel scared, didn’t feel so very alone in the city. As I walked the streets of the East Village, I looked down at myself and realized that something in Colorado made this person happen. It must have been the journey, the being taken out of my element, the new friends who disregarded me every time I said, “But I’m a little bit afraid of heights!” I’d gotten so full on my independence.

  “Have you guys ordered yet?” I asked, staring down at the menu of “food challenges”— turkey testicles and maggot-fried noodles and a giant plate of rice that was free but only if you could eat it in less than twenty minutes. There was a “Russian roulette” appetizer, which involved a ball of dough, filled with wasabi, hidden among other identical-looking dumplings that contained octopus. The menu was enormous and an organizational disaster. There was nothing recognizable on it. I flipped through pages and pages of Japanese words next to English words that were just as foreign.

  “Who picked this place anyway?” I said.

  “Who do you think?” Kate looked at Maya. I should have known. Maya loved restaurants with a theme, or anything kitschy. In college, she used to drag me to Ninja New York because she liked the waiters dressed as ninjas, the magic tricks that they performed between courses. I tried to be a good sport about it, to take the “secret passageway” into the restaurant instead of the standard elevator. But then, one time, a ninja jumped out from behind our table and startled me to the point where the piece of sushi that had been in my chopsticks went flying into the air. “Never again,” I vowed after, and she agreed that it had been a bit too much that time.

  “People,” said Glick. “Let’s make some decisions. What are we drinking tonight?”

  I looked around at the table. There were pitchers of beer everywhere. Apparently, that wasn’t enough. Maya insisted that we order a round of sake bombs. She gave directions to the waiter. “We need eight shots of hot sake.” The guys ordered chicken wings, platters of them, so many that the waiter asked if they wanted the platinum level of chicken wing situations. They turned him down in favor of the bronze, which showed a lot of restraint on their part.

  “So,” I said, turning to Maya. “How’s residency treating you?”

  “Ohhhh, fine,” Maya said. “If you don’t count the fact that every time I have to take a test, I lose feeling in my hands.”

  “What?”

  “Eve. I want to be a surgeon. My hands are very important to me.”

  “Well, my hands are very important to me too, but . . .”

  She acted like there was no further explanation necessary, and then, when I gave her a blank stare, said slowly as though she were explaining something obvious to a child, “And sooooo that would be the worst thing, for something to happen to my hands. Stress can do some crazy shit to you. Do you remember when I took acid a week before my MCATs because I thought it would get rid of my anxiety?”

  “Yeah, and it actually just made things much worse,�
�� Kate said. “Obviously.”

  “I went to Grant’s Tomb! I felt the need to visit some sort of memorial, but I thought that everyone I saw was a ghost.”

  “So now you’re imagining that you’re losing feeling in your hands?” I asked.

  “Of course. It makes perfect sense.”

  “Well, I’m a writer, so . . .” I put my hands out in front of me, looked down at them. They were feeling tingly, all of a sudden.

  “Stop it!” Kate yelled, pushing my hands against the table. “Don’t listen to her. She’s insane.” She gave Maya a look of warning. “Don’t encourage her.”

  “On the plus side, I get to wear black scrubs now! Black!” she said, thrilled by the notion. “So much better than blue, in terms of the potential for accessorizing. Do you know how hard it is to accessorize with light blue?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s very limiting,” she insisted. “Especially with my skin tone. Black will be so much better.”

  “Sounds like a very positive development,” I said. I looked across the table at Kate, who was giving Maya an annoyed look. “And how’s the world of finance?” I asked her.

  She sighed. “It’s good, but intense. I’m trying to deal.” She closed her eyes slightly, took a deep breath, and touched her index finger to her thumb. “Charlie keeps trying to get me to see a life coach, but I don’t like the idea of being told what to do by someone who willingly became a life coach.”

  I laughed. Charlie was Kate’s fiancé, who I’d seen pictures of on Facebook but had never actually met. He was from Arkansas and worked as a photographer’s assistant at a studio in Chelsea. Strange how much had happened since I left, that Kate had a fiancé who I didn’t even know.

  “Where is Charlie tonight?” I asked.

  “On a shoot in Istanbul. He’s so annoyingly good at his job.” She sighed. “All these famous photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Mark Seliger are constantly requesting his presence. I’m just hoping he doesn’t sleep with one of the models.” She said this breezily, but there was a slight discomfort in her eyes, something too close to real fear. I knew Kate well enough to know not to press further, to just laugh and ask more about it when it was just the two of us, in a quieter setting.

  “And how’s it going with . . . Erol?” I asked Maya. She was dating a lawyer whose family was originally from Turkey. He grew up on Long Island. That was all I knew.

  “Ugh I am done with him. Last night . . . we were watching a movie on the couch and I fell asleep and woke up at four a.m. on the couch and he was in my bed! Not okay. I hate him now. Aaaaaaannd I’m single again.”

  Kate winced.

  “He was in your bed?” I said.

  “He says that he tried to wake me. He said that he tried to carry me but he, and I quote, ‘couldn’t get a good grip.’ I told him that the way out of this fight was not to call me obese.”

  Kate and I burst out in laughter.

  “Oh come on,” I said, once I’d recovered. “It sounds like it was pretty harmless.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a smile peeking through. “I may stop being mad. I’m considering it. He’s a sweet guy and makes me laugh and he has a perfect face. But he’s on probation.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Also do you think I can really marry someone whose name is so close to egg roll? I don’t want to confuse my Chinese delivery man.”

  I smiled. “Is that really an issue?”

  “Eve. I order Chinese all the time. It’s important that my delivery guy understand me.” She sighed. “It’s Turkish. Erol. I guess it could be worse,” she said. “His name could be Ishebog.”

  We laughed. She took a sip of her drink. “Ooo! Whatever happened to that . . . reporter? That you were dating? Tell us about the men in Colorado.”

  “So cute,” I said. My instinct was to tell them every detail, but I decided not to get so absorbed in their world again, to just give brief answers and move on. Maturity!

  “What kind of answer is that? Is this a test?” Maya demanded. I shrugged, and kept my mouth shut.

  “How’s your new apartment?” Kate asked.

  “It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived,” I said truthfully.

  I’d found a studio in the East Village that was smaller than my bedroom in Arthur’s apartment but had immeasurable value, in terms of my self-esteem. I had to dip into my savings from Colorado to pay the first month’s rent. I didn’t care. The girl living there told me that there were a hundred other girls just like me waiting for a place like this, and that was all she had to say. I bit the line.

  “Although I did have a bit of a mice problem,” I added, wincing. Maya backed her chair away from me and then stood up on it.

  “MICE?” she yelled, from way up there.

  “I didn’t bring them here with me!” I said, looking up at her. She sat back down. “That’s right. What I meant is that I had a mouse problem, but it’s not an issue anymore because we became friends and casually socialize.”

  “Like Cinderella?” Maya replied.

  I nodded. “It’s exactly like that.”

  About a week in, I discovered that the apartment that a hundred girls dreamed of living in had mice. I bought some poison that the guy at the store claimed was more humane than the traps. But when that seemed to be exacerbating the problem, I broke down and paid for an exterminator, who told me that the poison that I spread throughout the perimeter of my apartment was basically the equivalent of feeding the mice cereal. More humane, indeed! I couldn’t vacuum it up quickly enough. But, inevitably, when the influx of mice slowed down, it all turned into a funny story. I began to talk fondly of it, my cute little East Village apartment with its adorable mouse infestation. Only in New York!

  When the shots of sake arrived, Maya explained to everyone exactly what to do. She showed us how to set the chopsticks on top of the glass, place the shot between the chopsticks, slam the table, wait for the shot to fall into the beer, and then gulp it all down.

  “Wait. Why can’t we just drop the shot into the glass?” Glick’s friend Ben, who was sitting next to him, asked. It was a wonder I didn’t know two things about Ben, after all these years of running into him. The main reason was probably that he didn’t talk much. Almost never, actually, whereas Glick was loud and had a way of picking at people’s vulnerabilities.

  “It’s more fun this way!” she insisted.

  “Aren’t we going to cause a scene?” I looked around the restaurant.

  “No! It’s fine,” she said confidently, like a pro.

  On the count of three, everyone slammed the table and then downed their glasses of fizzy beer containing just a hint of something sharper. I stopped halfway through mine. I couldn’t do it. I’d had enough. The whole thing in one gulp? Impossible. I tried to hide the evidence. Maya and Kate would kill me if they knew.

  “Another round,” Glick said to a waitress, running his hand across his mouth. “That was delicious. And extra shots.” Kate squealed in protest. As the two of them fought about whether to order more, I sat there looking at my half-empty glass, pushing it to the far corner of the table, attempting to mix it in with the other glasses.

  When I looked up, Ben was staring directly at me.

  * * *

  “Hey,” he protested quietly. He’d seen the whole thing. I gave him a look as if to say, Please don’t rat me out, and then our eyes locked into this bizarre moment of familiarity, something bordering on affection.

  What the fuck? Because of my subpar drinking skills?

  After a few seconds, I looked away. I started lining up the silverware on the table. What was that? I guess it was obvious. It was a connection of some kind. I recognized it. I just didn’t see it coming, with some guy I’d run into a thousand times before and thought, Ugh, do I have to say hi to him or can I keep walking? Plus, we were in this brightly lit, completely unromantic place, and by unromantic, I mean: there were at least thirty chicken wing bones lying
on the table between us.

  After that, there was the second round of sake bombs, this one I downed completely to avoid another moment with Ben. I tried to talk Maya out of her latest theory that if a guy she was dating didn’t know how she took her burger, he didn’t have the right to continue living. I ate a few dumplings, and cubes of something that looked like chicken but tasted like shrimp. When the waitress started pouring free wine into our glasses, I got pretty drunk, along with everyone else at the table. I sighed and cracked open a fortune cookie.

  “You know what, you guys,” I said, exhaling. “I know that I said Colorado was great and everything but . . . it wasn’t that great, not always.”

  What I didn’t tell my friends was that despite my outward attempts to become so very Colorado, on the inside I remained myself. When I listened to my friends in Colorado describe the adrenaline rush of hiking to the top of a mountain whenever a full moon occurred, the awesome feeling of being one with nature, there was a tiny piece of me that tallied up a list of safety concerns. I had to force myself not to feign an illness whenever I was asked to participate. Mountain biking the “nastiest” trail in Utah? Too hungover. A three-day hiking trip? Recovering from a bad cold. Rock climbing Independence Pass? Would love to but . . . cough cough . . . I’m feeling a resurgence of a latent bronchial disease. In the end, I went most of the time, but only because I was faced with a decision between going with them and spending the entire weekend as a social outcast.

  “We figured,” Maya said, not even pretending to be surprised. “Otherwise, why would you come back?”

  “I really missed you guys!” Wow, so the wine had done a number on me. I felt like I was about to cry. “Well, I mean, the writing part was good, to get to write about music and everything. Plus, to get away from New York for a little bit.”

  “And the same old people,” Kate said, her eyes rolling toward Glick, who was putting chopsticks in his nose.

  “But the guys out there were dangerous,” I said.