just leave it here.” I had to say that, or the night would be one of him sulking, of long silences and, finally, me mustering up an apology. And whatever way it went at that point, it would conclude with sex. I might as well make it pleasant.
“What, now you want it?” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m not confident yet. I might change my mind. Are you angry? Do you really want me to have it?”
“I want a talker,” he said. “That’s what you were when we met.”
Weeks later, I stood at a pay phone in Penn Station with two garbage bags filled with my belongings. I was moving out. Oryn had lost his job the week before when the whole company shut down. They were commissioned to make the cap for Calvin Klein’s CK One bottle, and the materials they used caused a chemical reaction with the fragrance, made it smell like dog sweat, and they had to recall a shitload of units. They’d screwed up once before with a small shampoo manufacturer in France. It was a kids’ shampoo with a ladybug cap, and the spout, which was also a spot on the ladybug, would pop off and present a choking hazard. That problem was nothing but a hundred-thousand-dollar loss—big deal—but fuck up with the big boys, and there goes your reputation. No one wants your business.
When I left Oryn’s place that evening, I’d meant to go to the college and surprise James, but at Jamaica I got on a train going in the wrong direction and slept until I arrived at Penn Station.
I called James to tell him I was coming. “Come out. I want to play the game.”
“Umm, can’t tonight,” he said.
“Fuck you can’t. Come out.” I checked my warped reflection in the metal plate on the phone and was reminded that I needed to bleach my roots. “Come out, come out, come out.”
“Uh, well, there’s this thing. There’s this stuff.”
“Come out.”
“Who is it?” said a female voice on James’s end.
“Just a friend, sweetie,” he said, his voice distant. Then it came back: “Jared, I really can’t.”
I bought coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and sat by the escalator. A woman in heels walked quickly down, digging through her transparent purse with fingernails like tweezers, finally pulling out a Metrocard as she stepped off the last sinking step. She trotted down the corridor and around the bend, toward the subway entrance. And you can always tell the group of kids from Long Island going to a rock concert. They sat on the floor by the ticket window before heading off to the venue, laughing at their stupid jokes and posing as though everyone had their eyes on them, as though everyone wanted to be them. And then there was this couple walking in step like they fit each other, the man in his weekend denim and leather, everything scuffed in the right places; the woman’s stride, draped in shining club clothes, threw back the brightness of the station. Their arms crossed each other’s back, and it looked like they’d been walking that way forever. I wondered how anyone ever stayed that way—two people together unchanged—and while I watched them ride the escalator toward the exit at Madison Square Garden, waiting to see them falter, I spilled my coffee down the front of my shirt.
In the bathroom of the Long Island Rail Road waiting lounge, I changed my wet silk shirt for the college sweater I dug out from the bottom of one of the garbage bags. Paint supplies were scattered all throughout the bag. I’d thought that maybe I could sell them to some art fag once I got to the school.
When I left the bathroom, it hit me: about a hundred and twenty pounds on my back, skinny arms around my neck, and long, thin legs in big pants constricting my waist. I dropped my bags and the force of the weight pushed me forward a few steps.
“Jared!” she said. It was Shelly. She got off me and I turned to face her. I didn’t know what to say. It had been the better part of a year since I’d seen her, but only a day since I’d thought about her, and when I’d thought about her she was wearing a black dress and a peacoat with pearls around her neck, her hair cascading past her shoulders. Now she wore these extra-baggy blue jeans and a white shirt with long orange sleeves and matching crewneck collar, the sleeves ending right after the elbows. Her hair was lopped off to about four inches long and purposely messy, but she was beautiful. She had an eyebrow ring. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“It’s you,” I said.
Shelly smiled and squealed. “Ohmigod! Jared!” She threw her arms around me. She was too loud for Shelly. “Jared! I’ve missed you!” She stepped back, holding on to my hands. “I saw you and your dyed hair, and I wanted to say, are you going to the concert?”
“No, I’m just passing through, actually.”
“Jared!” She put her arms around me again and put her forehead against my chest. “Rub the back of my neck.”
Without wondering why, I did what she asked. “Like this?”
“God, goodness yes, like that.” She rested her cheek against me.
I thought of Oryn. He was probably wondering why I hadn’t returned from taking out the trash.
“What are you on?” I asked Shelly.
“Oh, it’s so good, Jared.” She backed up and looked me up and down, still smiling. “Come. I want you to meet my friends.” She pointed. “They’re sitting over there.” Her smile vanished. “Wait. Fuck, Rich might get bitchy if I bring you over.”
Without looking toward the ticket window, I knew that Rich was in earshot. We weren’t that far. Shelly was talking as though I were all the way down by the subway entrance. I turned around and sure enough there was a guy wearing pants in the same vein as Shelly’s, leaning up against the newspaper recycling bin and pretending not to look at us.
“Yeah, I should probably let you go, then,” I said. I wanted to sneak back into her parents’ house on Long Island and spend the next day with her in her room.
“Listen,” she said, her smile magically reappearing, “come by sometime.”
“You still in the same dorm?”
“Yeah, so come by, like, whenever.” She threw her arms around me again and kissed my cheek, then walked backward over to the booth, the whole time facing me and smiling, her Rich an insecure blur in the background.
Smoking in front of Madison Square Garden where the warm night air smelled like car exhaust and fried food, I remembered the first time I went to the city, and the air had had that same smell in pockets of heat along the sidewalk. On the way home from that trip, Sinatra’s “New York, New York” came on the radio while I looked at the collage of city lights through the back window of my parents’ car as we passed over a bridge, probably the Williamsburg. I remember thinking that since it was the city, “New York, New York” probably always played on the radio when you were leaving, as though the city were saying, “Farewell, and come again.”
When Shelly had hugged me, I could smell her deodorant, which was the same brand she wore for as long as I’d known her. The first thing she would do when she came out of the shower was put her deodorant on, so when she hugged me at the station I had an image of her naked and wet in her bedroom, which made me think again of the bath I drew for her on that cold day in November years ago.
“No, really, I’m an artist.
