she could barely make out in the shadows. He waited all night for some sign, some acknowledgment of his presence, but all that happened was the lights went down and he was alone in the dark with two matches and a quarter-pack of cigarettes.
In two years, he’d have been out of the army if he’d gone. Empty beer cans lined the edge of the coffee table. He reached for his cigarettes. The pack was empty. The stores were closed. The phone was ringing. Will was supposed to be at work. He walked next door to use the cigarette machine at Schultzie’s. The bouncer wouldn’t let him.
“Come on,” Will said. “Greta’s my landlady. I live right there.”
“Listen, buddy,” the bouncer said, “I can smell the alcohol on you. You’re underage. I’ll throw you out on your ass, you try to come in here.”
Will walked away, quietly cursing the bouncer. He stopped in front of Salty’s. The washed-up tropical beach hut covered in crusty snow sat back on the sidewalk in the center of the village business district. Will tried looking through the blue display window with his hands cupped to the glass. The paint was too thick. The doorknob wouldn’t turn. He went back to the apartment and the ringing phone. It was time to quit.
“Hello?”
“I need you to bail me out,” Dorian said.
“What are you talking about? The mattresses?”
“What?” Dorian said, incredulous. Then he whispered, “Don’t talk like that on the phone, dick. You have to bail me out.”
“You’re in jail?”
“Fucking Christ, man, are you listening to me?”
The phone went dead. Will sat on the kitchen chair with the receiver in his hand. He straightened a cigarette butt from the ashtray and lit it. Then he dialed her number.
“Who’s this?” Rebecca said.
“How’s the baby?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, Will.”
“Will? What do you want?”
“Nothing. I don’t want anything.”
Rebecca hung up.
Will closed his eyes. Music hummed from the bar on the other side of his wall.
It had been early spring, a Sunday. Rebecca’s parents and little sisters had taken the hatchback on a daylong shopping trip. Will’s and Rebecca’s clothes were on the kitchen floor. A feel-good movie played on the television in the master bedroom. Sunlight poured through the open sliding door to the back deck. Rebecca, naked and sleepy under her parents’ bedspread, had fit herself against Will, her breath on his neck, her hand on his chest. “This is the way it’s going to be,” she said.
Was she talking about the movie, or the moment they were in? It was all the same. He kissed her forehead, held her tighter, and disappeared with her under the covers.
One summer I dyed my brown hair blond and combed it in a Caesar style, and I roasted in a tanning bed twice a week, twenty minutes at a time, cooking perfectly around like a rotisserie chicken. I owned three identical white silk shirts and blue jeans that hugged my ass, the legs gradually widening so that only my toes sticking out of leather sandals showed at the selvage. I clasped the two buttons at the top of the shirt and left the rest open.
Oryn thought it was sexy that way. He gelled his hair back and wore only black except for his socks and undershirts, which were matching pastels that splintered from the bottom of his pant legs and over his collar. He’d dropped out of FIT when he landed a job with this company that designed and manufactured caps for toiletries, from shampoo bottles to aftershave, including big-ticket fragrances from the same designers of his wardrobe. He had an office on Fifth Avenue, leased a lofty apartment in Astoria, and on a whim dropped a few thousand dollars on a new sofa that became my favorite place to sleep. I loved it while it lasted.
Before Oryn, I’d knock on James’s door in the dorms and say, “Come out, shit-head, let’s play the game.” We’d hit the bars along the Long Island Rail Road in search of an easy target, a fatty or a butter face. (“She has a nice body, but her . . .”) I had James on looks, but he could get her to trust him. He’d look her in the eyes. He took her by the arm with a hand on her back, told her to watch her step as he guided her around the pile of broken glass that had been a drunk sophomore’s bottle of beer, tell the sophomore to give up his stool for the lady. He borrowed the broom and dustpan from the barman to sweep up the shards and resumed talking to Kim, standing by her, gesticulating and looking her in the eyes.
Then I walked over from across the bar.
“Jared,” James said, “you have to meet Kim. Kimberly, this is Jared.”
I leaned in close to her. “What’s your name, Kim?”
Kim had been considering James. Maybe she’d imagined waking to him in sunlight under crisp, bleached sheets, but then I came along, so she felt guilty for getting his hopes up. Now she had to let him down. (Girls like that know how it feels—happens to them all the time.) In the same stroke, she didn’t want to lose the prize, which was me.
I wanted to buy her a drink and I was holding my and James’s money, or I thought I was. Someone had lifted my wallet. This sucked for everyone because we had only had one drink apiece so far. Kim felt sorry and offered to buy me one. She offered James a drink, too, because she didn’t want to make him a third wheel—she knew how that felt. The girlfriend she had come with had left with her boyfriend an hour earlier.
We ran out of cigarettes. Kim bought us a pack. She bought rounds and we toasted her every time, me slipping my arm around her waist and sliding her quarters into the slot on the pool table, James caressing her hand, both of us talking her into taking us to breakfast when the sun came up, fretting about the train fare going home, and digging into her backseat for change while she got out to pump gas into her hatchback.
I had Kim in her car while James smoked in the train station parking lot. Another time, James hooked up with the girl.
Once, we shared a girl in her dorm room.
Everybody won. James and I got a night out. The girl got to feel like a princess. Sure, she probably felt duped when she called the number I gave her and got a Pizza Hut, but for one night in her sorry young life she felt like gold.
Once, I was in love. It lasted four years. I thought I was in love three times, but the last time told me the other times were a joke. Her name was Shelly. She had freckles, and black hair like those women in shampoo commercials. It was the kind of hair a girl could wrap up in a sloppy bun or tie into a loose ponytail, and it was always perfect. The holes in the knees of her favorite jeans were perfect, too. She made me feel like I could do anything I wanted if I set my mind to it, that I could do so much better than working in restaurants out east. That was what I did before Shelly. I started as a dishwasher in the Hamptons and had worked my way through salad boy and line cook, teetering on the edge of sous chef. Shelly was the reason I went
