by JD Hawkins
I let out a laugh and turn to look at Nate, only to find his eyes already fixed upon me like they’re stuck. “What do you think, Nate?”
“I think you look incredible.”
I laugh and turn to Paul, who rolls his eyes melodramatically.
“But which one?” I prod. “The red or the blue?”
“How about both?” Nate says with a smile. “Red for the wedding, blue for when I take you to dinner tonight.”
I smile back at him as Paul quickly starts speaking in his machine-gun rhythm.
“Okay. That’s that, but now the problems are only beginning,” he says, turning to Fabiana. “We need a bag and we need shoes that can work with something this special, and I don’t even know if they make them yet, but let’s start with…”
At some point the clothes-trying and talking wraps up, though it seems like it does so only because I’ve tried on half the things in the entire store. As we’re saying our goodbyes, I make a quick run to the bathroom, and Nate has the payment finished by the time I come back—I suspect so that I wouldn’t even get to hear the price.
When I meet him outside, he’s carrying an entire wardrobe’s worth of clothes, making me feel like a lot of my difficult decision-making wasn’t really necessary.
“How long were we?” I ask, emerging into the daylight like I’ve spent a week in a cave.
“About two and half hours?”
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry.”
“It was as fun for me as it was for you,” he says, eyes glinting, sneaking a glance across my body. As if realizing how forward he sounds, he quickly clears his throat and adds, “I’ll drive you home. Would you like me to take you to dinner first?”
I laugh at his tone, formal and gentlemanly. “Why yes,” I say, doing my best Audrey Hepburn, “I would like that very much.”
Despite the fact that I love being around other people, living with roommates is not really something I ever want to do again.
Working crazy shifts as a nurse meant that one selfish roommate making noise could wreck my sleep pattern—and with a kind one who stayed quiet, I just ended up feeling guilty for the burden. If I learned anything about myself from living with roommates, it’s that trying to be helpful often means you’ll get mistaken for a doormat. In one situation, I spent so long listening to the problems of my housemates, and mediating between their constant squabbles, it felt like a second job.
Living on a nurse’s wage in a major city, needing to be close to the hospital, and not wanting to have roommates left me with very few options, though—and none of them were all that great. So in the end, I went for the “living in a shoebox” option over the “risk your life looking out the window” one.
Leading Nate through the graffiti-stained staircase (there’s no elevator) up to my apartment makes me aware for the second time since I came back from my vacation about how I live. The multiple gigantic, luxury-branded bags he’s holding are an almost comical contrast.
“Sorry about the place,” I say over my shoulder. “It’s nothing fancy.”
“I’ve seen worse,” he says through a smile, and I almost believe him.
My apartment’s a studio. A kitchen you can see from the bed, but it’s a better view than the brick wall you can look at from the window. I justify it by reminding myself I spend most of my time at work, and most of my time at home sleeping, and that not having enough room for a TV is probably a good thing. Anything to make it feel less like a prison cell, which is about all it’s good for.
I stop at the door, my key waiting in the lock, to look back at Nate. A sudden memory of how he kept even his hotel room in a precise, tidy state.
“I have to warn you,” I say with a smile, “the place is a mess. But in my defense, it’s too small to be anything else.”
Nate’s eyes soften, and he stands intimately close to me. “Do you think I grew up in a skyscraper or something?”
“Well…maybe not,” I say, remembering what he told me about his childhood struggles, his dad being blue-collar. “You just seem like the type who’s used to more luxurious surroundings.”
“We really don’t know each other, do we?”
I laugh and reply, “And that’s your fault, to be honest.”
Nate smiles and relaxes a moment, looking almost bashful. “Maybe we can fix that a little over dinner,” he says.
“Are you sure? You don’t think it’ll make it ‘harder to pretend’?” I reply playfully, mimicking his words at the hotel.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t think we need much help pretending at this point.”
I meet his gaze and search it for what I think he’s hinting at. We’ve been circling the big question so long now that I never realized how much closer we had come to it. And now he’s here, at my apartment, carrying a bunch of clothes that he bought for me, with nothing to stop us from doing…anything.
Except we’re so familiar with each other, so easily informal with one another, that the question’s only gonna get bigger and harder to answer when we finally need to address it.
What if we could be more?
I decide to kick the question down the road once again. After all, we’ve got a wedding to pretend to be a couple at, and Nate’s still got to meet my friends, and he’s still got to get that job…
“Well then,” I say, playfully turning my shoulder towards him coquettishly, “welcome to my world, Mr. Big Shot.”
14
Nate
The jasmine hits me first, so that even though I’m stepping behind her into the apartment, half of my mind is flung back into that hotel room, and that moment when the friction between us made that smell most intense.
I could fit the place four times over into my Chicago office—but size doesn’t matter when there’s this much to it.
An explosion of color everywhere, furniture painted prime blues and yellows with charming crudeness, a mandala-patterned rug in kaleidoscopic purples hanging on one of the walls, teals and turquoises and reds across the strewn clothes, the scattered books, the rumpled sheets. It’s as if the colors matter more than the objects, making them irrelevant, and the psychedelic effect is most important.
Instant photos hang from string against the walls, and a two-foot-square table in the corner is stacked with papers and brushes and overspilled paints. Everywhere I look, even in the tiny spaces, there are funny little curiosities: A cactus with a shopping list pinned to its needles, a wooden sketching figure with eyes painted onto it in a dancing pose, red flowers in a couple of green wine bottles.
I feel like I’ve never been in a place like this. Somewhere so exciting and yet so warm. If I saw it in a movie I wouldn’t believe it. It’s almost alien to me—the polar opposite of the austere offices and “luxury” apartments I’ve spent the past few years trying to get comfortable in.
And yet…it also feels strangely familiar. Not in terms of place, but what it evokes. Fun and easy, alive and vibrant… It feels like her. As if she’s got so much of this energy in her, she can’t help spreading it outward, and this is all just the result of it.
She’s talking, and I’m still holding on to the bags even though she closed the door behind me seconds ago, but coming around to listening to her feels like waking up from a shock.
“…but my shifts have been crazy ever since I got back— Are you listening to me?”
“Huh? Yeah.”
She stops her hurried tidying, grabbing clothes from the chair by the window and folding them as she moves to the small dresser, then looks at me strangely.
“You know,” she says, “it’s gonna be a little hard for me to get dressed with you clutching the bags that tight. Do you expect me to fight you for them?”
In my fading daze I miss the flirtatious insinuation completely, and just chuckle at myself before putting the bags down. She laughs as she approaches and sifts through the bags delicately, as if the bags themselves are precious, searching for the blue dress and the shoes.
“Do yo
u want me to wait outside?” I ask.
“No no,” she says, lifting the bags and heading off to the door by the kitchen. “I’ll get changed in the bathroom. I won’t be long.”
“Okay,” I say, turning back to the room, letting it fascinate me all over again.
I move through the place like it’s a museum, taking it all in, and careful not to touch anything, as if the scattered paints and books were placed there carefully, or my own heavy presence might ruin their vibrancy. Even the sound of the shower running—loud through the barely-insulated door—evoking images of water running down her naked body doesn’t distract me, it only adds to the sensuality of this place.
I settle on the paintings, a few framed, but most pinned to the gigantic corkboard among notes and quotes and more photos where Hazel’s smile is almost as permanent as it is in real life. The paintings are incredible. Fluid curves and shapes that don’t seem to have a beginning or end, the lines so light they seem to float on the paper, figures always dancing and dynamic, abstract and still honest. I lose myself in them, and yet somehow find something, some new strand to Hazel I never knew existed, just as thrilling as every other aspect about her.
“Oh gosh,” she says from the kitchen, punctuating it with a laugh. “I just pinned that up to dry and forgot to throw it out.”
“This yellow one?” I say, tilting my head behind me in her direction but unable to peel my eyes from it.
“Yeah.”
“No. It’s…incredible…”
“Do you draw or anything?”
The question pulls something from deep inside. A glimpse of a feeling, and the handful of memories where I felt it before. A pack of colored pencils, the best birthday present I ever got as a kid. A whole summer spent badly sketching anything that came to mind, the local stray, the latest apartment, the train that bombed past my window.
My dad looking at a picture I left out like I’d just made a mess. Being a teenager and sketching on an old legal pad for the first time in years, but feeling guilty because it wasn’t going to help pay the bills, wasn’t the kind of thing that mattered in the world I lived in, wasn’t something anyone I knew would like, wouldn’t get me the hell out of there, and besides, I was terrible at it…
“No,” I say, then turn around to face her.
If the memories and sensations in me were a poisonous sludge, the sight of her washes it all away without a trace. I’d seen her in the blue dress barely an hour ago, but seeing her in it again now, wearing it just for me, knowing that it’s hers, here, sets a white-hot flame in my chest. If I weren’t so stunned I’d step right over to her and grab her right now.
“You got ready fast,” I say, putting all my mental effort into suppressing my lust.
She tenderly takes the shoebox from the kitchen counter and moves over to the bed where she sits to put her new heels on.
“It’s been forty minutes,” she says.
Forty minutes… I glance back at the paintings as if wondering how the hell they made the time go so quickly.
“I knew a nurse once who always wore these huge wedges to work—I have no idea how she did it, but she said she didn’t feel dressed unless she was two inches taller,” she says casually as she carefully straps her feet into the shoes. “I don’t know what I’m dreading more tomorrow—seeing Theo, or wearing heels for an entire day. At least I’ll have some practice.”
She stands up and glances at me before twirling over to the kitchen counter to pick up her purse.
“What do you think?”
I take another look, a purposeful look at her, as if studying for the question, waiting for the words to come to me, wishing I’d read more fiction as a kid so I could maybe find them. I say the only thing that even comes within a mile of what I think.
“I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
It slips out almost involuntarily, like a catharsis, like a drug-induced truth, like the hypnotic effect of her apartment has dissolved any barrier in me. But before I have to account for it, to reckon with what I actually feel, she laughs and steps toward me.
“And you told me you’re not good at lying,” she says, still laughing as she takes my arm and ushers me to the door.
In the world of high finance, almost everything becomes a kind of ritual. Everyone standing when the chairman comes in last. Anything said in the back of a limo being off the record. Wishing your enemies well and always maintaining boundaries with your friends. The handshakes, the signings, the gifts for foreign clients, the clothes, the offices, and even the dining. It all becomes a kind of theatre, a kind of game where everyone knows the rules but not necessarily why we even have them anymore.
And though I know how to navigate it well, I’ve always been just enough removed to see what a crappy script it is—even if everyone else can’t.
But with Hazel, I can kind of feel like it’s worth it. The way she smiles as she thanks the valet who takes my keys, the minor pulling back of her shoulders proudly when the maître d’ greets us, the way her eyes widen and move slowly across the chandeliers and lavish décor as we enter—while everyone around her can only stare at her—it all seems a little more worth it. These things I always felt were stupid and done for nothing but ego, yet through Hazel’s eyes I feel like I can understand why they exist in the first place.
We take our seats and order a bottle of wine, Hazel somehow teasing a genuine laugh out of the bored waiter as he recommends something to her, and I know it’s genuine because he brings it fast. We talk a bit about the menu, order, and then relax into our wine-sipping. For a while we just look at each other, like we’re playing some blink-and-you-lose game. Hazel loses a few times, laughing randomly and looking away. Yet it’s never weird or uncomfortable.
Simply sitting and looking at each other feels like the most natural thing in the world.
Eventually I want to hear her voice again, and lean forward to speak.
“I want to know more about you.”
“Hmm,” Hazel hums, pursing her lips and looking up as if thinking. “Well, I’m a Pisces…I once went an entire week eating only bananas…and I’m great at Halloween costumes.”
I let out a laugh and shake my head. “Come on. You know what I mean,” I say. “Tell me something more… Tell me why you became a nurse.”
For the first time since I’ve known her, there’s a flash of something heavy in her eyes, a tiny opening through which I see something other than lightness and laughter. Not pain, but something…
“Now that’s a question,” she says, trying to play off her emotion but unable to force her typical laugh. I don’t say anything for a moment, just sip my drink and give her time to stare at the table and think. Then she says, “I guess…my dad was the reason.”
“He was a nurse?”
“He was disabled,” she says. “He died when I was fourteen, and…the last few years especially…he lived in a lot of pain.” I’m about to say something but she quickly stops me—stops herself, almost. “No. Actually, that’s not what I should start with. That’s not what’s most important about him.”
“What is?”
“He liked to laugh,” she says, her voice cracking just the tiniest amount, only noticeable for how easy it is every other time she speaks. “He liked to crack jokes. He was always smiling. Even though he was in pain…even though he was dying. And I always thought that was amazing. I always thought it was the most admirable thing a person could do—to find the humor. No matter what.”
I reach out to put my hand over hers, taking it from the wine glass she’s stroking to let her fingers rest in mine. It’s the kind of gesture I never make, but the instinct to do it is firm. She seems fine, but I know that even a slight hesitation in her tone, and a slightly smaller smile, means she’s pulling at something from the deep.
“Sorry,” she says, sighing. “That doesn’t really answer your question, does it?”
“It does,” I say earnestly.
“Well anyw
ay,” she continues, “my mom and I took care of him, and when he went he left me a bit of money. I wanted to be so many things…a vet, a hairdresser, an architect… I wanted to go to art school… But being a nurse was…” She looks up at me, eyes suddenly alive. “It’s stupid, but I felt like I knew some secret thing. That I had some special tool that I had to share with the world. The thing my dad always told me: ‘Laughter is the best medicine.’”
As if to prove it, she lets out a laugh I join in.
“I dunno. Being a nurse just felt so much more important. And going to nursing school with the money he left me… It was like I was carrying on his message, honoring him, maybe. And I never, ever regretted the decision at all.”
I savor the look on her face, even as the appetizers are placed in front of us. It’s a look of such warmth and affection that it feels like something rare, a moment of perfection that you have to appreciate before it slips away.
“Thanks,” Hazel tells the waiter, who smiles back at her before leaving. She picks up her fork but barely even acknowledges the food, turning to me instead. “Now you.”
“Me what?”
“Tell me about yourself. I still know hardly anything about you. What was your childhood like? Your parents? You said your dad was blue-collar?”
I gulp down a half glass of wine before starting, and make sure to fill it up again when I do.
“My childhood… My dad—once upon a time—had a thriving business. He was a mechanic with a couple of garages in Chicago. My earliest memory was growing up in this big house, vacations twice a year in the Caribbean and Europe. He developed this…modification for cars, gave you better gas mileage. Customers loved it, but certain other people didn’t. The car manufacturers sued the heck out of him and he lost everything. The house, the holidays…my mom.”
Hazel interrupts her chewing to put a hand on her mouth and flash me horrified eyes. She quickly swallows and says, “What happened?”