I have never in my life worn a shirt tucked in, but if I were so-inclined, I sure as hell wouldn’t tuck it into red plaid Bermudas.
I stopped worrying about Helene when I saw that snapshot.
Sure enough, when Will returned from break to find his plants thriving, his plastic milk crates apparently undisturbed, and the plate of homemade cream-cheese brownies I’d left on his kitchen table, he informed me that he and Helene had broken up on New Year’s Eve. I, in my not-just-friends-but-not-quite-more role, wasn’t sure how to respond to that news. I remember ultimately acting sympathetic toward Will, and inwardly slapping myself a high five because I had won. I had beaten out Helene. The shadowy hometown girlfriend had been eliminated from the competition.
A shallow, short-lived victory, because I soon discovered that I had a long way to go. Even now, three years later, the finish line eludes me.
Kate asks, “Don’t you think you should tell Will you’re quitting your job and going with him?”
“I didn’t say I was definitely doing it. I just said that I wanted to.”
Dammit. Kate’s looking at me like I’ve just told her that I may or may not mow down everyone in this Starbucks with a sawed-off shotgun.
“I have to go now,” I decide abruptly, picking up my white paper cup and my giant black shoulder bag.
“Me, too,” Kate says, picking up her white paper cup and her giant black shoulder bag. “I’ll walk you over to the subway.”
Great.
One crosstown block and one uptown block of Kate’s attempts to sell me on the many glorious pros of summer in the city. Laughable, because I’ve already spent enough steamy, putrid-smelling urban August days to last me a lifetime.
I’ll have lived here a year Memorial Day, having spent the first few months sharing a Queens sublet with a total stranger courtesy of a Village Voice classified. Her name was Mercedes, and the few times I saw her in passing, she looked stoned. Turned out she slept all day while I was out temping, and was out all night doing God knows what—I tried to ask, but she was evasive. We both moved out on Labor Day when the actor who had sublet us the apartment returned from summer stock. I never saw her again, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up on an episode of COPS someday, vigorously denying something.
Thanks to my summer in a relatively affordable borough, I scraped together enough money to land a studio of my very own in Manhattan, in the East Village. Way east. Like, almost as far east as you can go and not be on the FDR Drive or in the river. The apartment has that kind of grimy and depressing thing going on. Like the Kramdens’ place in those Honeymooners reruns on Nick At Nite, it seems to exist only in grainy black-and-white, no matter how I try to jazz it up. Not that I’m trying so hard.
Kate—whom I met temping on my third day in New York and who lives in a brownstone floor-thru in the heart of the West Village, courtesy of her wealthy parents back in Mobile—thinks I should splurge on a bright-colored cover for my futon. I tell her that I’m broke, which is always true, yet in reality I don’t want to spend any money on my place.
Here’s why: because if I make it more like a home, then there will be a permanence about it—a sense that I’m there to stay. And I don’t want to stay alone in a drab East Village flat.
I want to live with Will.
Soon.
And forever.
“And just think,” Kate is saying. “Shakespeare in the Park.”
I shrug. “Maybe Will will do Shakespeare in summer stock.”
“You think?”
I shrug. Probably more like Little Shop of Horrors. Carousel, maybe.
“Italian ices from sidewalk vendors,” she pontificates. “Weekends in the Hamptons.”
I snort at that.
“I’ve got a half-share,” she points out. “You can visit me.”
She goes on about summer, which is hard to envision on this gray May Saturday morning, cool and drizzly.
This stretch of lower Broadway is teeming with multi-pierced NYU types, stroller-pushing families, packs of suburban teenagers and the ubiquitous sales-flyer-thrusters.
Kate and I dump our empty cups into an overflowing trash can on the corner of Eighth and Broadway. I leave her admiring a pair of hundred-dollar fluorescent coral-colored mules in the window of a boutique and descend into the depths of the subway.
On the uptown-bound side I wait for the N train, standing away from the track with my back almost against the wall, yet not touching it because you never know what kind of filth is just waiting to rub off on your Old Navy Performance Fleece pullover. My eye is peeled on a scruffy guy who’s pacing back and forth along the edge of the platform. First clue that he’s not all there: It’s forty degrees out and he’s shirtless, wearing shorts and ripped rubber flip-flops. He’s muttering to himself, something about lice—or maybe it’s lights—and I’m not the only one giving him a wide berth.
Every once in a while you hear about some innocent New Yorker getting shoved in front of an oncoming train. My friend Raphael was actually on the platform when it happened once, but the pushee rolled off the track in the nick of time. The pusher looked like a regular businessman, Raphael said. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Turned out when the police searched him that the briefcase was full of live rodents. The significance of this escapes me, other than proving that you just never know who you’re dealing with in a crowd of strangers in the city, and it’s best to keep your back to the wall.
Which I do.
Finally, the telltale rumble just before a light appears at the end of the tunnel. As the N train roars into the station, I move cautiously forward, positioning myself in advance exactly where the door will open, something that’s possible only after several months of riding the same train every day.
The car is packed and too warm and smells of sweat and Chinese take-out. Hip hop music blares from the headphones of the guy next to me as I stand holding on to a germy center pole. As we lurch forward and the lights flicker, I keep my balance, thinking about Will, wondering whether he’ll be awake when I get to the studio apartment he shares with Nerissa, whom he met on an audition last fall. He likes to sleep past noon on Saturdays.
Does it bother me that he lives with another woman?
I want to say of course not.
But the reality is that I wouldn’t mind if Nerissa got pushed in front of an oncoming N train tomorrow. She’s lithe and beautiful, an English dancer in an off-Broadway show that opened a few months ago. She sleeps on a futon behind a tall folding screen from Ikea, and Will on his full-size bed…and never the twain shall meet.
Yes, I truly believe this. I force myself to believe it, because Nerissa has a boyfriend, a Scottish pro golfer named Broderick, and Will has me. Yet I’ve seen the way he looks at her when she drifts around wearing drawstring cotton pants over her dancer’s leotard, with no hips to speak of and high, taut braless breasts.
I am all flesh, by comparison to Nerissa or not; all hips and thighs and buttocks. As I
