by Leslie Cohen
He laughed. “What’s to be scared of?”
“Um. Hello? Sharks? Ever heard of them?”
* * *
We left the restaurant and walked across Washington Square Park. There was an ice-cream truck pulled up next to the entrance to the park. The lights weren’t on. No music. The guy inside was leaning out the window, looking for customers, wearing a red Santa hat.
“It’s a hard day to be selling ice cream,” I said to Ben. “We should get something.”
“It’s freezing!”
“Yeah but maybe the ice cream will be so cold that it’ll make us warmer.”
“That’s not how temperature works.”
“Tell you what. You buy me an ice cream, and I’ll let you spend the rest of the walk telling me how temperature works.”
Ben perked up. “Deal.”
We walked up to the truck. I asked for a small vanilla cone with colored sprinkles.
“Colored sprinkles?” Ben’s eyes widened. “How old are you?”
“What toppings do you get? Butterscotch?”
“I don’t get toppings.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m an adult,” he said proudly.
“That’s a mistake,” I said. “Adulthood is highly overrated.”
As we walked, I felt my teeth chattering. I took a few last licks and then tossed the remains of the cone into a nearby garbage can and tried to wipe my hands with a crumpled napkin. Then, I put my gloves back on as fast as possible.
“Told you,” Ben said, shaking his head and interrupting his own lecture on thermodynamics. He put his arm around me.
“Look at that magnificent fountain,” I said, pointing to the facade of NYU’s library, as if referring to something majestic and not just a small stream of running water down the side of the building. “It was built in the eighteenth century, which you can tell from the pattern of the bricks and the . . .” I tried to feign as much structural engineering knowledge as I could, doing my best Ben impression. “You see . . . the Pilgrims came here in 1734, and they wanted to build something that would reflect their old way of life so . . .”
“That’s not a fountain,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “That’s a leak.”
“Oh.” I stopped walking. “Should we call someone?”
* * *
Ben reached for my hand to hold as we walked. It was a clear night, the sky had been dark for hours, and we seemed to be the only ones on the street. We got to my building and stood there.
“You know, I don’t sleep with guys after the first date.”
He laughed. “Ohhh, only before the first date, huh?”
“That’s right. That is my policy.”
“You know I’ve been up there several times before.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“What’s the matter? Don’t think I know how to take off a turtleneck?”
I pretended to be frustrated and kept my eyes on the sidewalk, and maybe I was a little frustrated because I couldn’t think of what to say or how to stop him from coming upstairs and couldn’t stop smiling and was almost embarrassed by how happy I felt. And then he came closer and kissed me and sort of knocked all the thoughts out of my head. After the kiss was over, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, definitely was not going to tell him not to come upstairs.
Everything quieted down after that, like the city after a big snowstorm. I don’t remember deciding to go upstairs, but we did. All that I can remember clearly is that kissing him suddenly felt like the only thing I’d ever done of any importance. I remember reality slipping away. I remember letting go of everything. I remember that it somehow became seven o’clock in the morning, that we were still up talking, yes—even Ben was talking, a little bit, that the sun was coming up, threatening to end it all, to usher us on to the next activity, but we didn’t care. We just kept doing whatever it was that we were doing, and laughed at the daylight.
EVE
* * *
BROOKLYN
The first birthday card I got from my father after he left us was postmarked from February, but I didn’t get it until May because that was when I decided to finally check my student mailbox, which nobody checked, since they were usually filled with junk. I wasn’t wrong, but this particular piece of junk was loaded. When my mother died, I’d half expected him to reappear. But where had he been? He must have known. He was capable of finding out, from someone, somewhere, what had happened. But apparently, all he’d done was send this card to a mailbox that I never checked. I remembered squinting when I looked at the return address, not wanting to know exactly, or to look too closely. Just to think of him living somewhere stirred up something within me, to know that he was so close and yet didn’t see the need to find us. The fact that he dared to call someplace home, the little hollow gestures that he must have made to have it seem that way, while leaving my sister and me so unattended.
From then on, a birthday card arrived every year from the same address in Brooklyn. The cards barely touched my fingers. Each year I opened it, glanced at the words there on the white page, written with a thick marker, and then shoved it down into the trash, as far as it could go, getting my hands dirty. At first, when he left, I imagined that he must have gone somewhere far away—a remote fishing village in Alaska, an island off the coast of Indonesia. Boston. Once I saw that address, I decided, so that I could live in New York without fear, that the chances of running into him in Manhattan were slim to none. I decided that I would never go to Brooklyn and that he wasn’t likely to leave it. Therefore, our universes were kept separate. If, for some reason, I had to go for work, I went and left as quickly as possible. I kept my head down the whole time, limiting my peripheral vision, but it didn’t really work. My heart raced each time I saw a man with similar eyes or hair, of a similar height, with his head shape.
I didn’t respond to the cards. A response wasn’t required or requested. But this year, when the card arrived, Ben was there.
“You should call him,” Ben had said, watching me that night, sitting on the floor, all teary-eyed and looking at old photos. “I’ll stay here with you while you call. Don’t you want to find out more about what happened?”
“No. Not really,” I said, in a soft voice, not looking up at him. I reached for my headphones and plugged them into my ears. “I just want to listen to music and forget about it,” I said.
“Okay, fourteen-year-old version of my girlfriend.” Ben removed the earbuds with one gentle yank of the cord.
“Hey!” I snapped.
“Eve. You have to be an adult sometimes. Eat a vegetable. Both literally and figuratively.” He sat down on the floor next to me. I glared at him.
“Let’s just say, years from now, you change your mind,” he said calmly. “You might not be able to anymore. He’s not going to be around forever. Maybe it’s time you talk to him.”
I had followed his logic and somehow ended up calling an old family friend and asking for my father’s number. A few weeks later, after downing half a glass of wine, and under Ben’s watchful eye, I called.
“Eve. Hi. Thanks for calling,” he said.
He invited me to lunch in Brooklyn, as if it were nothing. I didn’t add anything to the conversation. I listened to his familiar voice on the phone and said I’d go to lunch and then hung up, relieved, like I had gotten off a bad ride just in time. Apparently, Ben’s naiveté and kindness were trickling into me. He had a sensible and even-tempered opinion about everything. It was infuriating.
I told Emma about the call, the possibility of a lunch, but then assured her that she wouldn’t have to go, that only one of us should have to be subjected to this nonsense and, since I was the older sibling, I would take the hit. She didn’t protest. As usual, she wasn’t too bothered by the whole situation.
All of which had brought me here, to a café on Seventh Street, waiting to go see my dad, feeling very bothered indeed. I sat in a daze, at a table by the window, next to a bouquet of flowers inside a w
atering can, tracing the lines of the wooden table with my finger. I couldn’t stop holding on to things. My body felt like it was on high alert. A waitress asked if I wanted anything and scared the shit out of me. I kept looking at the elderly couple sitting two tables over.
“So you see? Raisins,” the woman said to the man, affectionately, pointing to her pound cake.
“Today, they have raisins,” he replied. “Yesterday was a different story. What do you think? I’m going to get you the wrong cake on purpose?”
She smiled at him and then looked over at me, perhaps noticing that I’d been staring, speculating, Do they still like each other? Are they happy? I gave her a quick smile and then looked away. A woman came over and put down two cups of coffee on their table. “Ah-ha,” the man said, eyeballing the backside of the waitress. There it is. The flaws are never visible right away.
“Here, fuel up.” Ben stood over me and handed me a doughnut wrapped in cellophane and a small glass of apple juice. “The only thing worse than you in the throes of an emotional episode is you in the throes of an emotional episode on an empty stomach.”
“I thought I was supposed to be an adult today?” I said, turning away from the lecherous old guy and looking up at the doughnut and apple juice.
“Best not to shock your system.”
He’d thought of everything. So I nodded, sipped, chewed, couldn’t really taste. The main thing is to control my anger. That was the biggest obstacle, to keep it in a ball and crumple it up inside of me and not release it, not even slightly. I kept imagining what would happen, if for just one second, I let it go. That would be so much worse than acting as if nothing had ever happened. So that’s what I would do. I would act. I decided that in order to see him again, I couldn’t go down the wrong road, even a little bit, of how could you or what were you. . . . No way. But would it be written all over my face? My face usually betrayed me in situations like this. But then again, he didn’t know me very well. I decided that I would stay silent and concealing, but every now and then, when I thought of the whole situation, my mind went to a dark, truthful place and I had to chase it down quickly, to bring it back.
Ben and I sat in the Eighth Street subway station. I caught his attention and mouthed, I’m nervous. He ignored me, and I sat there with my hands in my lap. A few months of officially dating me had taught him not to indulge me too much. When the Stillwell Avenue–Coney Island R train arrived, we stood up. He embraced me and kissed my cheek and said, “Don’t even think about it,” with the breeze from the train whipping by us.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said back, and he laughed. The past two months with Ben had been a lot of sex and talking, sex and talking. It was like we were trying to catch each other up on everything that had happened in our lives up until this point. Most of that “catching up” happened in bed, as a matter of convenience. This trip to Brooklyn was one of our rare public appearances.
We were on the train for about thirty minutes—Prince, Canal, City Hall, South Ferry, Court Street, Jay Street—long enough to get into the rhythm of the darkness and then the blink of white lights, the slowing down and speeding up, the incoming and outgoing passengers, getting closer and closer to a place where I had no desire to go. I kept reminding myself that I could turn back at any point. I said to myself, Yeah, you’re going this way, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep going. You are just going to see how far you can go, to test yourself, and then, once you get there, you will simply turn back around and that’s all.
But I kept going. And when we got out of the subway, we walked on Flatbush Avenue for a few minutes, until we got to Nevins. We made a left. “Three-block warning,” said Ben, because I had no idea where we were. My stomach lurched.
It was a modern building on a block filled with commercial establishments—dental and law offices, an African braiding salon, an urgent-care medical facility, a wash center, a liquor store. It looked out of place, the only gray facade among a series of redbrick numbers. The building had four stories, with three rows of windows painted black. Next to it, there was a Salvation Army store, where the lights were on, the door open, and I could see a long row of T-shirts organized by color. A sign above the store read, HELP US HELP OTHERS.
A woman held the door open for us at my father’s building and I wanted to ask her if we could hang out in her apartment for a while instead. After we got out of the elevator, I stood in the middle of the hallway and took off my jacket, folded it over my arm. Suddenly, I was very warm and wondering why I hadn’t fought this more. Why am I here?
The click of a door opening disrupted my thoughts. When I saw him at the door, I was struck by how old he looked. Maybe that was obvious, but I really expected him to look the same. He was still thin. His face had the same angular features, cheeks slightly sunken in, a full head of straight gray hair. But I remembered him being taller, or bigger somehow. How harmless he seemed, in person, no longer a fading image in my head. He had a warm expression on his face, as he hugged me and shook Ben’s hand. And then he actually started to look a little uncomfortable. My heart was beating erratically, out of rhythm. I ran my hand over my chest in a soft circle, discreetly massaging the place where my heart was, trying to calm it down. It’s okay. It’s okay. Nothing’s happening. I studied Ben’s face, the outline of his body, latched on to his arm as if I could absorb all the quietness inside of him by osmosis. Look how calm he looks! He looks like he does on any other day!
My father turned to lead us into his apartment. He pointed out various things and then sat down in a chair, awkwardly. All the chairs and couches in the apartment looked like the type of brightly colored and modernistic furniture that would be purchased by a college student without a budget. Against one wall, there was a large cabinet that stood out. It had an array of objects inside it, behind a barrier of glass—a clock shaped like a lemon and small Russian dolls, a tray with Chinese lettering on it. They looked like the souvenirs of travel. I wondered, my insides rising, Is this what he’s been doing this whole time? Collecting these objects from around the world?
Along another wall, there were pictures of him with some woman, in front of various backdrops—wearing matching red sweaters on a mountain, sitting on lawn chairs on the beach, dressed up and kissing at somebody’s wedding. I didn’t know how long this woman had been in my father’s life, but all the photos appeared to have been taken during the same time period.
“Nicole!” he said, and the woman from the pictures appeared in person, with a drink in her hand. She greeted me with a hug but didn’t quite pull me toward her. I only felt her fingertips on my back.
Great, I thought, and plastered a smile on my face. I felt another wave of fear melting over me.
“This is my daughter Eve and her boyfriend, Ben.”
She smiled sincerely.
“Get the children some drinks, would you?” he said. The word children stuck with me. It made it sound like we belonged to him, but did she know?
Nicole sipped her drink and looked us over. “Of course! What can I get you?”
Who is this person? I know. I know. “Nicole.” But seriously, who is this person?
“Nothing,” I said, and then Ben raised his eyebrows at me. “Actually, wine works,” I said. “Thanks.”
“What do you have?” Ben said, and then appeared to think over his options as Nicole listed them. Only Ben would be in this kind of a situation and carefully consider his drink options, as if we were on a cruise in the Mediterranean.
“White is fine,” Ben said, looking at her glass. “Whatever is open.”
“You found the place okay?” my father said. “I know all these streets are confusing when you’re used to Manhattan.”
Nicole emerged with our drinks and a small plate of candy fruit slices. They were the kind that I used to love as a kid. I couldn’t tell whether this was done on purpose. Is he trying to remind me of my childhood? I took one, slowly, hesitantly, deciding that it was a coincidence.
&
nbsp; Nicole’s hair was long reddish waves that she kept playing with, twirling and twirling strands around her finger and then gathering it all up and releasing it. Her clothes were dark and loose-fitting. She wore a large black silk shirt with buttons down the side like a sofa cushion. The clothes masked a body that I couldn’t determine. I wondered if she had a family of her own, how much younger she was than he, how they met, where she grew up, what they fought about, if they kept anything from each other, whether she was behaving sweetly just for show. Is this her apartment or his? I looked for signs to see if she felt like she belonged.
We took seats on the couch. Nicole put the plate of fruit slices on the coffee table. There was silence. I looked at the view of Manhattan from their window. When the questions started, my father let Nicole ask them, which was fine, less weird than having my own father ask me basic facts about my life.
“I used to write about music for a newspaper in Colorado, and then I moved back to New York and wrote for a website in SoHo, and now I write for a magazine,” I said.
“Very cool!” she said, her eyes studying me. “What kind of magazine?”
“It’s a music magazine. . . .” I said, thinking it over, how much to tell. “It’s called Interview. I interview musicians—”
Ben interrupted me. “Yeah, and she gets to go to some pretty cool concerts for free.” It was unusual for Ben to speak without being spoken to directly, but it was the result of my having proffered some big threats on the way here. “You have to talk. You got me into this. Now you have to take the pressure off me,” I had said, with a pointed finger in his face.
“You’re making it sound way cooler than it is,” I interjected. “It’s mostly me moving around the words of famous people until it sounds like they said something interesting.”
“A true journalist!” Ben said. I gave him a strange look. A true journalist? Who is this person?