by Adi Alsaid
“Like who? I don’t know anyone else in this situation.”
“Look within yourself.”
“I don’t know the answer. Just tell me.”
“I was talking about you and Leo.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I can’t wait to read the part in your biography where you got murdered in The Strand by your best friend.”
Pete thumbed through the book he was reading. I nudged him to lift the cover so I could see it, but also to make sure he wouldn’t get too engrossed. He eyed me over the brim. “Have you met Diane and Rachel? They’re Colleen’s friends, dating and just graduated. I could put you in touch.”
I reshelved the Van Buren biography and ran my fingers along the book spines in front of me. It’s such a cliché thing to do, but I can never resist it. “But I want to write about Cal and Iris.”
“They said no. You can either complain about not having a subject, or you can complain about having one. You can’t do both.”
“Watch me!” I yelled, maybe a little too loudly. A few customers gave me a mean look. They had a definitive tourist vibe to them and I felt like I was giving them the authentic New York experience of rudeness or whatever, so I didn’t apologize.
“For the record,” Pete said, putting his book down, “I think it’d be really good for you to interview Leo. That is, if I believed he’d take the time to show up for an interview. Which he wouldn’t. Because he’s a selfish prick.”
“There is no record, so your comment has disappeared into the ether,” I mumbled. We wandered around the aisles a while longer, the way we usually did, absentmindedly looking at covers and reading back cover copy, occasionally diving into the first few pages of a novel. The store wasn’t too busy, so we hung out with Starla at the registers and played one of our people-watching games: How Hard Would It Be to Get That Person to Murder You? Starla was really good at that game, always able to come up with a scenario in which even the most mild-mannered customers might murder her. Maybe it was because an extra decade or so on the planet had the tendency to lessen your faith in people, or maybe because she’d read more spy novels than all suburban middle-aged dads combined.
I also tried eavesdropping on people every chance I got, but didn’t get anything too interesting. That’s usually the case with eavesdropping. You get the minutiae of everyday life without the context, the lulls without any highlights. I could have eavesdropped for years without coming across another couple like Cal and Iris.
In the lulls, my thoughts went to Leo. Pete had called him a selfish prick, but that was just Pete taking my side, being protective. Leo had never once been selfish in our relationship. It was a new side to him that the breakup had dug up, and even in my stewing, I felt that it wasn’t the real Leo.
Pete had always liked Leo while we were dating. He’d even come with me to Leo’s plays at school and joined me when the cast and crew went out for burgers, so that I wouldn’t be the only quiet nontheater person. I think they’d gone to watch a movie once without me, maybe?
After about an hour or so at the bookstore, my mom called me and told me dinner was almost ready so I should get my ass over to help her grate three pounds of parmesan cheese or something like that. I wasn’t really listening. Before I left, I looked at Pete. “Alright, fine.”
“Fine, what?”
“Fine, give me the info for Colleen’s friends.”
“Wise decision,” he said, unable to contain a smirk.
“Your mom’s a wise decision,” I said, gathering my bag and heading out the door. “I have to write a draft by Monday, so can you put them in touch with me tonight?”
He and Starla both chuckled. “See you tomorrow,” Pete called out.
* * *
I spent the next day mired in abject boredom on my couch, still unable to write. The one exciting thing of note was that Pete got me in touch with his sister Colleen’s friends, and they’d agreed to meet up with me after Pete’s shift was over. I thought a lot about Iris and Cal, but I was itchy to get to writing, and Pete was right. It was better to move on and actually write something than get bogged down with one couple.
I was still going to get to dive into the topic, pry into someone’s life, pick this thing apart and try to discover if it was knowable, if I could understand where Leo and I failed and how. Sure, I was still thinking about Leo nonstop, and I couldn’t exactly shake off my interest in Cal and Iris, but at least there were other things going on in my mind. At least I’d be writing.
I’d already told my mom that I had a dinner meeting for the magazine, so at around seven I left home and walked to the theater to meet up with Pete since he’d met Diane and Rachel before and could make things marginally less awkward. We were going to Mamoun’s, which had this incredible hot sauce I just had to slather on everything. Unfortunately, this turned me into a sweating, sniffling mess that would surely cancel out any of Pete’s efforts to make me seem normal.
They were already waiting for us when we got there, having claimed a table on the tiny patio overlooking St. Marks. They were both black and wore glasses, though Rachel’s were thick-framed and square while Diane’s were the little circular John Lennon kind. I liked them right away, if only for their choice of table. It wasn’t super muggy out, and when the weather is nice in New York, choosing to sit inside is a crime of unparalleled moral depravity. Kind of.
Pete made the introductions, and then he and Diane went to put our order in at the counter. Rachel and I stayed outside, where there was plenty of noise coming from the street—groups of college students deciding where they should eat, a promoter at the nearby comedy club chatting loudly with the bouncer, faint thumping music from one of the bars.
“Have you ever been here before?” Rachel asked.
“Yeah, all the time,” I said. “I work nearby, so sometimes I come here for lunch. Also, I’ve been trying to sneak into the kitchen for about three years in order to steal their hot sauce recipe, but I always get cartoonishly thwarted.”
“‘Cartoonishly’ the way Wile E. Coyote would get thwarted, or like the villain in an episode of Scooby-Doo? There’s an important distinction.”
“Oh, definitely on the Wile E. Coyote side. Kind of Wile E. meets Tom from Tom and Jerry. There’s always a stick of dynamite involved.”
Rachel laughed, playing with her braided hair. “What would you do with the recipe if you got it? Make millions?”
I pretended to think about it for a while. “Make a swimming pool full of it. I’m not in it for the money, just the love of the sauce. I want to be surrounded by it at all times.”
“Oof, I’m not about that. Hot sauce is meant for mouths, absolutely nowhere else.”
“Good point,” I said, relaxing. You find someone you can joke with right away, it’s funny how quickly other anxieties just seem to disappear. Pete and Diane came out then, holding a stack of napkins and a bottle each of hot sauce and tahini.
We ate first, Pete doing most of the talking to catch up with Diane and Rachel. When we finished eating, the table was overrun with crumpled, sweat-and-hot-sauce-stained napkins. “Oh my God, it hurts so good,” I said. I tilted my water glass to get an ice cube to ease the heat.
“You weren’t kidding about your love for that sauce,” Rachel said.
“It’s not a healthy relationship, but I can’t seem to leave it.”
Diane pushed herself away from the table, hand on her stomach. “So, what’d you want to talk to us about? Pete said it’s some kind of writing thing, but he didn’t really give us details.”
I crunched through the ice cube, swirling the bits around my mouth to calm my tingling taste buds. It would have been wise to go easy on the sauce, maybe, but when I’m at Mamoun’s wisdom is not my forte. I filled Rachel and Diane in on the magazine and what kind of stuff I liked to write, and then I told them my idea for the new series. I didn’t want to bring
up Cal and Iris or my breakup, but Pete, as usual, had zero tact.
“Lu here is heartbroken and looking for answers,” he said, giving me a condescending arm tap.
“That’s not why I’m doing this.”
He rolled his eyes. “Sure, the parallels are totally unrelated.”
I threw a napkin at him, which he calmly caught and placed back on the table. “Well, what do you wanna know from us?” Diane asked. “Shoot.”
I took in a deep breath and opened up my notebook. “How long have you guys been dating?”
Our interview went on for about an hour. Pete ended up leaving us alone, and we felt bad hogging a table at Mamoun’s so we just started walking and ended up at Washington Square Park.
Diane and Rachel were really cool and obviously in love. They’d struggled with what to do in the fall when they went to separate schools upstate, whether or not it was silly to believe they could stay together beyond high school. All the same things Leo and I had talked about. But after weeks of it, they decided there were many reasons to stay together.
They ticked off all the boxes that I would have needed for a column. Profiling them would have been exactly what I needed, an exploration of how love can overcome obstacles. They were in no way less than Cal and Iris. They were inherently interesting, so in love that it made me scroll through pictures of myself with Leo on social media later that night, torturing myself just for the slight pleasure that reliving the love could provide.
But there was something that just wasn’t clicking for me. No matter how many details I wrote down, the little lines of dialogue that were better than eavesdropping because they weren’t stolen away but given with full permission, nothing sparked. When I said goodbye to Diane and Rachel and went back home, I looked at my notebook and felt completely underwhelmed. I even tried to push through and force myself to write an article. Two sentences is what I managed to type out, and one of those was: I don’t know what to write someone help me.
I spent the whole night in front of my computer, my notebook splayed open in front of me, begging the words to come, begging my heart to open itself up and transcribe itself, to capture life in the beautiful way only words can. Saturday turned to Sunday. Nothing came.
8
AS BASIC AS EATING
Pete and I were stationed at the box office the next day and I was trying to write in my notebook in between customers. “This is great. I work so much better under pressure.”
“Totally,” Pete said, tapping at the keyboard. “The Diane and Rachel column coming along?”
“No, couldn’t get a single word out. But I have a backup plan!”
“Oh yeah? Who’s that?”
“This supersweet couple from Montauk. Joel and Clementine. They tried to erase each other from their memories but their love is too strong and they’ve just found themselves back in each other’s arms.”
“That’s the plot for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
“Are you saying that I’m not allowed to interview fictional characters?” I scoffed. “Don’t be such a patriarchal tool, trying to control my behavior. I thought you were better than that.”
Pete leaned back in his slightly comfortable office chair, brushing the hair away from his eyes. The afternoon sun shone in the ticket booth, reflecting off a handful of shiny surfaces. We each had a large soda next to us, beads of condensation dripping down the sides. I don’t actually like soda, but it was free at work and the act of sipping on something sweet made work at least momentarily easier. “I’m waiting on you to tell me about a backup plan.”
“My neighbors, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy.”
“Pride and Prejudice.”
“Okay, fine, real couple now. They had a really amazing time in Paris together, but violent circumstances led them to split up despite their very strong feelings for each other. Years later, they ran into each other at Rick’s Café in Morocco and he helped save her from–”
Pete interrupted with a sigh, shifting in his chair so that it squeaked as he moved. “Are you done?”
I slammed my forehead down on my depressingly empty notebook. “Not even close.”
Behind us, the door to the rest of the theater opened. I couldn’t quite muster the energy to lift my head up, so I was hoping it wasn’t our manager Brad. “Lu, you can sit up straight, or I can put you on cleanup crew. Which do you want?”
“I want a muse, Brad.”
Brad looked over at Pete. “What’s she talking about?”
“Probably not worth explaining,” Pete said, then turned his attention to some customers.
“Have you ever been in love, Brad?” I said at the same time, turning to look at him. He was holding one of his beloved clipboards, wearing a short-sleeve mustard-yellow button-down with a brown tie. Brad looked like he’d be really at home working at an office in Kansas, but he was alright. He wasn’t a dick, and only occasionally made dad jokes that made me want to quit my job in a rage.
“Um.”
“What about in high school? Did you date anyone in high school? What happened when you graduated and you had to decide what to do? Did you ever step onto that particular romantic minefield, and if so, how did you survive it?”
Brad stared blankly at me for a moment and then sat down at the computer on my left. He started scribbling down something on his clipboard. Sure that he was going to ignore my tirade, I opened up my notebook, waited for my musings on love to come pouring out of me the way they had been for the last year at Misnomer. “I married my high school girlfriend,” Brad said.
Now I sat up straight. “You did? What happened when you went to college? Did you guys have, like, a tumultuous on-again, off-again thing throughout the four years, your love for each other tenuously surviving distance and the changes of early adulthood? Would you wake up in the middle of the night terrified that your love would pull so taut that it would snap, sending you each hurtling in opposite directions?”
A silence took hold of the box office. I’m not quite sure why. The poignancy of my soliloquy, probably. Pete was looking over at me, biting his lip thoughtfully. Brad had stopped scribbling. There was even a customer at my window, frozen by how deep I’d delved into the fragile condition of teenage love.
“I didn’t go to college,” Brad said, shattering the silence. He calmly resumed his vaguely managerial duties. “My wife takes night classes, and sometimes we fight about money and how many kids we want to have, but other than that our love has not been ‘pulled so taut it could snap.’” He used air quotes for the last part, then pointed at my window. “You have a customer.”
As the day progressed, Pete and I tried to think of anyone we knew from our respective schools who I could write about, with healthy interludes of Pete suggesting I write about myself, and then me trying my hardest to shoot knives at him with my eyeballs. We scoured our phone contacts and social media friends, asked all of our coworkers. We got a lot of looks, but no stories. I found myself going back to Iris’s Facebook, doing a wee bit of stalking, maybe even hoping that she’d suddenly change her mind and message me. I thought about it some more and would love the attention, as well as the chance to be portrayed in your wonderful prose and unique insight!
It was almost six o’clock and I still had nothing. Hafsah would no doubt check her email first thing in the morning, and if she didn’t see anything from me I’m sure she’d be unapologetic and ruthless and fire my ass before I’d even woken up.
* * *
It’s hard to describe what having prolonged writer’s block feels like. Like missing a part of yourself, I guess. But not really. It’s like you’ve suddenly forgotten how to do something as basic as eating. Long after mom had said good-night and my apartment had fallen quiet, long after even the city itself seemed to have gone silent, I sat in the dark, sweating despite the open window, bathed in the glow of my computer screen, time tickin
g away. I had nothing.
I rested my fingers on the keys, as if I could fool myself into repeating the motions I’d successfully performed in the past. Then I clicked back to Tumblr, scrolled through my feed. Usually that helped stimulate my brain; reading through other people’s posts, the pictures they chose to share, those little glimpses of personality visible online. It was almost like eavesdropping. Part of me thought that maybe I could find someone posting about their relationship in a way that would spark my creative juices. For a while I searched through hashtags that I thought could lead me to pertinent posts: #relationshiptroubles, #precollegiatebreakups #inarelationshipwhichrecentlysurvivedorwasdestroyedbytheprospectofeachpersongoingtocollegeinadifferentplaceandwethoughtwecoulddoitbutturnsoutwearentevengonnatry.
But I was kidding myself. It was almost midnight, and even if I found someone interesting, the chances of them accepting an interview and responding to my questions in time were not great, and that wasn’t even accounting for the time it would take me to write a full column. Then I stumbled onto Leo’s blog. I still hadn’t found the courage to unfollow him, and I got stuck scrolling through his stupid thoughts and selfies. Sweat made my tank top cling to my lower back, and that simultaneously gross and annoying sensation was exactly what it felt like to read Leo’s blog.
He hadn’t posted much recently, just a few vague entries that I’d already pored over dozens of times, trying to suss out just how hurt he was post-breakup. Which meant that almost immediately I was seeing pictures of us still together. My face buried in the crook of his perfect neck, his eyes looking straight at the camera, a smile to them, like he knew the hair falling across his face was absurdly sexy. The caption read: The cover to our future R & B album.
Just to further torture myself, I found the post from late September where he’d reblogged my Misnomer column and written: Me. She’s writing about making out with me. I’m dating a talented beast of a writer.
For some reason, I thought of a moment that occurred a few months ago. It was after winter break, and my latest column had just gone up. We were sitting in homeroom, which was the place where Leo, with one seemingly innocuous shoulder-tap, had initially confessed to reading my column. Our friendship had blossomed because we talked about my column, talked about love all the time, the subject’s intimacy naturally bringing us closer together. After we started dating, I asked Leo if I could keep writing about us, and his eyes had lit up. “Lu, that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”