It’s at the after party of a silent auction in Newark that I see the man from the sushi restaurant again, the one whose friend had just died and for whom I hadn’t been able to muster any empathy. He looks the same now as he did then: red spring jacket, tired eyes, neat black hair parted over to one side. Very young.
I’ve come to the party with my downstairs neighbors, two Danish artists named Per and Thora. Per had a painting on auction that sold for peanuts. Thora is seven months pregnant with twins, and in the evenings, before Per gets home from his art handling job at a warehouse in Newark’s South Ward, where one of the big museums in Manhattan stores some of its collections, Thora and I have a glass of wine (I usually finish Thora’s for her). She’s asked politely what happened between me and Ralph, and I’ve demurred. I’ve said the expected things: it wasn’t meant to be, it just didn’t work out, we were tired of living the way we’d been living. None of these things is untrue, but none of them gives any details, either, and they sound as though I’ve reflected at least a little bit on the dissolution of my ten-year relationship. So, they do the trick. Per comes home, and sometimes he asks me if I’ve been writing, and I admit I haven’t been writing, and he smiles and says, “Artists need to rest.”
“You can say that,” I tell him, “because you’re prolific.”
The party is on Market Street, behind what used to be a storefront that’s now an empty event space. The scene could be a disbanded AA meeting: metal folding chairs scattered around, Styrofoam cups (filled with wine instead of coffee), and a general feeling that some people have embraced the party and others would rather be anywhere else. We’re the oldest people here. At least Per and Thora look cool. Per’s wearing a tailored white button-down, and Thora’s draped in loose, flowing linen. I look like what I am: a paralegal for an entertainment lawyer in Manhattan. A cardigan and flats.
Thora and I perch on the circumference of a small number of dancers who move beneath red spotlights strung up in every corner. Thora sips a little wine, and I sip a little more liberally and press the cup to my lips. When Thora puts her hand on her belly I pull it away and smile at her—she asked me to stop her if she ever assumes the “pregnant pose.” She doesn’t want to look like a Madonna. We sway back and forth to the music, a remix of something I don’t know, but our eyes are on Per on the dance floor.
Per is the center of attention, commanding the room with his strange way of dancing. He squats low to the ground and glides around the circle we made for him. He spins on bent ankles, a little like a figure skater, his arms over his head. He stretches his legs in new directions, the rest of his body following. He rises and twirls and shoots out a leg that nearly kicks Thora in the stomach. Thora drops her cup and jumps back. My wine splashes over the top of my cup.
The music falls in a thick layer over the room. Per’s dance morphs into a plea as he goes to Thora with his hands outstretched. No one seemed to notice except the three of us.
“I’m sorry,” Per says.
“It’s okay,” Thora whispers, but she looks grave.
Per’s fingers touch Thora’s elbows, and without saying anything to me they rush to the corner where we piled our coats. I swallow what’s left of my wine, most of it spilled on my hands, and follow them, not sure if they want me to walk home with them. When we’re outside Thora grasps my hands and says, “I’m sorry, love, we have to go.”
The gallery and the party next door are the only places open amid the gated storefronts on Market Street. Down the street, the courthouse blazes, its white facade lit from below with clean white light. It’s spring now and strong winds have passed through lately, leaving petals from Newark’s blossoming trees, the first trees of spring, scattered on the sidewalk like drops of paint. My hands are sticky, and I dig in my purse where I know there’s hand sanitizer.
“Looking for a light?”
I look up. I see him. He has a lighter in his hand and his thumb on the spark wheel. His irises are so dark they look black, and his jacket is zipped up to his neck.
“No,” I say. “No, I’m looking for my hand sanitizer.”
The difference between what he thought I needed and what I was actually looking for strikes him as funny.
“Hand sanitizer!” he exclaims.
His lips curl into a smile around his cigarette. Dimples appear, half-moon creases around his lips. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile and, of course, the smile changes his face. He doesn’t look like the sad sack shooting Jack Daniel’s with his elbows on the bar. I laugh, too, but then guilt nudges my heart because I couldn’t be bothered with his pain at the restaurant, or I’d turned his pain into my own pain—which I often do.
I offer an open palm to show I recognize him, and he nods, and at the same time we say our own versions of “Right, yes, we’ve met.”
We exchange facts about our meeting. The month, the weather, the bar. We shake hands and give our names. Patrick is his. We pass through a few moments of silence. Somewhere in the distance a siren wails. I rub my hands together even after the sanitizer has dried.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” I say finally. “How are you feeling?”
Patrick shakes his head as he lights another cigarette. “I shouldn’t have bothered you with that,” he says.
“No, it’s okay,” I say.
A few people spill from the party. I look over my shoulder, but Per and Thora have disappeared from sight.
“I’ll take that cigarette,” I say.
He pulls the box from his pocket and holds the lighter near my mouth, cupping it.
“I’m glad I ran into you.” I flick ash to the ground. “I felt bad for leaving you at the bar that night.”
“God, don’t bring it up,” he says. “I was a mess.”
I shrug. “We all have nights like that.”
He nods, but he’s looking down the street. Maybe he’s tired of talking. “Well,” I say.
He looks at me. “Your friends left.”
“They had to go.”
“Where do you live?” he asks.
“I’m near campus. What about you?”
“The Ironbound.” He checks his watch. “I’ll walk in your direction.”
“That’s out of your way.”
“It’s actually right by the nearest light-rail station.”
That’s not true, but I start walking without agreeing or disagreeing. I have a feeling I don’t often get: that there’s something left to excavate in the night, something with more of a payoff than just going to bed.
There’s another spill of people from the party on the sidewalk outside the gallery, but when we cross the street to a new block the sidewalk empties. We’re downtown, hardly anyone lives downtown, and outside of business hours everything is quiet. The smell of smoke from our cigarettes makes me feel peaceful, it lifts my lungs and leaves me floating on a cloud. My father was a lifelong smoker, and for me the smell of smoke belongs to him alone.
We cut through Military Park, and we don’t say anything as we walk past a light-rail station. Soon the park will be full of summer activities: yoga and tai chi; movies on Tuesday nights; plays; and the carousel, which is boarded up right now, undergoing remodeling, but will soon alight and spin. We pass the magnolia tree in the yard of the church on Central Avenue. Its leaves are waxy and its mangled branches make it look fossilized.
“What happened to your dad?” Patrick asks.
“We don’t have to talk about that,” I say. “Tell me about your friend.”
Patrick throws his head back and blows a stream of smoke into the air. “He was just one of those guys you loved even though he was a fuckup.”
“You could call my dad a fuckup,” I say. My cigarette is down to its filter and I toss it in a puddle.
Even though I said I wasn’t going to talk about him, grief is always looking for a mate. I immediately feel badly for calling my dad a fuckup. It’s a different thing to call a twenty-year-old a fuckup than it is to say that about someone who was almost sixty when he died. At that age it’s not about mistakes anymore. It becomes about who you are rather than the things you did—and that doesn’t seem fair, because now my father doesn’t have the chance to redeem himself. Patrick’s friend, meanwhile, is redeemed merely by the fact of his youth. He didn’t have enough time to know better. But I don’t feel like explaining this to Patrick. All I manage to say is, “I mean, he was, whatever.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, as though I’d actually said something descriptive. I laugh, and when he asks me what’s funny, I shake my head. He extends his cigarette toward me, and I take it and take a drag.
We pass through campus, the long brick corridor with Rutgers buildings on either side—the law library, the nursing school. On the next street over there’s a row of 150-year-old brick town houses that have been turned into campus buildings. The creative writing program and the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. We’re almost at my apartment. We pass the Catholic hospital, which I’ve read is near to filing for bankruptcy but for now still blurs with activity. The carriage house of the Ballantine mansion opens up to University Avenue, covered in vines and flowers.
I ask Patrick if he wants a nightcap when we reach the foot of my stoop, and immediately I feel embarrassed. It’s not as though we were having a conversation that needed more time to reach its end.
But Patrick agrees, and we go inside and up the stairs. A ribbon of light seeps under the door of Per and Thora’s apartment, and I wonder if they take note of the extra pair of footsteps, or if it’s only me who thinks the whole world can hear them. It’s been a long time since I brought someone home that I didn’t know, and it was a lifetime ago that I lived in an apartment I hadn’t shared with someone else. With Ralph.
The door to my apartment fits loosely in the jamb, and I unlock the lock that’s only a formality. I left the window open earlier, and the glass rattles in the wind, and my tabby sits on the windowsill. He hisses when he sees Patrick. The white lace curtain blows dramatically, getting sucked against the screen and billowing back out into the room as the wind changes. I busy myself pouring wine into glasses, and my heart is an iceberg in my chest. I wonder how long before I can kick him out. We sit across from each other at my table and drink. “Nice apartment,” Patrick says, and I can’t help but smile. I look lovingly at my high ceilings and big square windowpanes, the cracked wood floors and marble fireplace. I tell Patrick this row of brownstones was built in the 1880s as company housing for the Ballantines, the Newark beer family whose nineteenth-century home is now an annex of the Newark Museum, into whose yard you can see from my fire escape.
“I’ll show you,” I say, and I lead him into the bathroom and hoist open the window that leads to the fire escape. He holds my wine as I climb out, and then I hold his. There’s a wedding tonight in the yard of the museum, inside a white tent, and music billows into the night. The small schoolhouse that’s part of the museum yard is dark and empty, the bell still in its belfry. I point to the back of the mansion, tucked between the museum and an office building. Beneath us, Per and Thora’s bedroom light glows. They’re still awake.
The fire escape is small, and our shoulders touch. Our jackets are inside still, and soon my fingers will lose their color—Reynaud’s.
“Were you with friends at the party?” I say. “You left without telling anyone.”
“They’ll figure it out,” he says. “I don’t see them much anymore. They don’t really understand.”
A pang of recognition hits me. It’s what I said to him the night we met.
“It’s us, too,” I say. “Not letting them understand.”
He ignores me. I shift on the metal grate, and my arm touches his. It seems to be this soft brush of skin against skin that launches him into an explanation of what happened to his friend. The way one whiff of a certain scent brings back a memory in all of its details.
“We grew up together. Did undergrad together. The first time we did Oxy, I gave it to him. I was supposed to go with him to a meeting the day before he died. But I bailed. I didn’t even have a reason. I just didn’t feel like it. I was his ride, too.”
He looks into his wine. His voice is thick, and he’s probably had a lot to drink tonight. I’ve known addicts like him, ones who think they can keep drinking once they give up drugs. Maybe they can, but for my dad it was always either all or nothing. Patrick tells me how he got clean, how he takes master’s classes at the Business School and has a part-time job at the halfway house near Lincoln Park.
I listen. What is it that I want here? Someone to talk to—to understand? Do I just feel bad that he was alone on the night of his friend’s funeral, and I brushed him off? And then I see, looking out at my slice of the city and the slow-dancing bride in the wedding tent, that it’s already done. I’ve already brought him here.
“My dad sent me an email a month before he died,” I say. “He told me he was lonely and asked that I keep in touch more often. I didn’t reply. I didn’t call him.”
“Why not?” Patrick asks.
“We would go through phases. Talking and not talking. I always thought it was after I didn’t write back that he started using again—that he felt betrayed.”
“You know that’s not the truth,” Patrick says. “Or not all of it.”
“And you know your friend could’ve taken an Uber to the meeting. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Okay. You believe that for me, and I’ll believe this for you, and one day we’ll be ready to swap.”
I smile, close my eyes, tap my head lightly against the bricks behind me. I’ve had enough to drink to tell him about Ralph. I explain that we split up because I couldn’t get over my grief. At times I bottled it up and other times I talked about it in a way that accused Ralph of trying to get me to forget about my father when all he wanted was for the two of us to be happy again. I say it with my eyes closed so I don’t see Patrick’s face. He takes my hand and runs his fingers through mine just as I’m thinking that between the two of us, I’m the bigger fuckup.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, either,” Patrick says.
“No,” I say. “I did.”
I open my eyes and look at our clasped hands, suspended between us. The music from the wedding has stopped, and although guests are still lingering in the yard the caterers and museum staff are bustling around, cleaning things up, shooing people away.
He kisses me. Our hands are clasped between our chests.
“Can we go inside?” he asks.
In my bedroom, we get out of our clothes without turning on the light or closing the curtains. Our closeness is a form of silence; it smothers everything we said on the fire escape.
Per and Thora are sleeping beneath us. I saw their light snap off before Patrick and I crawled inside. If I’d left alone earlier, or left with them, Patrick wouldn’t be here. Instead I made the guy from the sushi restaurant the keeper of my biggest secret, that I’d ignored my father when he needed me most. I grab the skin on Patrick’s back, pull it taut with my fingers, take his earlobe gently between my teeth.
Patrick keeps his lips close to mine but doesn’t kiss me. I try to close the distance but he pulls back. My head falls on the pillow. I wonder if this is a mistake. There’s so much I haven’t told him. Later on, if we’re being kind to ourselves, we can remember: we didn’t plan this.