AT THE THEATER, DOOR WAS a special pleasure. You were given a microphone and a copy of the schedule. Before you, a zigzag of velvet ropes like at a bank—and the moment you flipped the switch to make your announcement, all the people chatting cross-legged in the massive carpeted window casements, leaning with a smoothie at the café’s marble bar, would suddenly jump to attention and jostle their way between those ropes. It was amazing, the power you wielded with that microphone and that schedule. Now seating, the six forty-five showing of Buena Vista Social Club, please have your tickets ready. Standing at the far back corner of the lobby, you observed the effects of your booming call from a puppet master’s distance. For these few hours you were the man behind the curtain, giddily yanking each hipster yuppie to attention by his string. The microphone transformed you. Through it, you became an auctioneer, an anchorman, a cabaret act bantering with his audience between sets. You began embellishing, adjusting your timing, discovering funny accents. You could be afraid of public speaking or open spaces or crowds; it didn’t matter. Hearing your own voice over a loudspeaker and seeing its effects were enough to make the shrinkingest violet pick up that mic and be transformed. It was a sound that was related to you and that you were responsible for, but it was not you. It was like a rumor, or a child. You enjoyed seeing the way it could charm people or make them laugh. I made the most of my time at the door.
After I sent through the nine-fifteen showing of The Minus Man, pondering whether to risk stealing a ham-and-cheese wrap from the café or gorge myself on the unlimited popcorn I was allowed to have, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a girl, my own height, with long platinum hair and alien amber eyes. I had encountered her earlier that evening, during my stint in the ticket booth. She had ordered a ticket but was short a few dollars. As she was rummaging through her purse, embarrassed, I slid the ticket out to her. I said she could pay me later, not really thinking she would, yet here she was. She had a folded bill that she now pressed into my hand. When I unfolded it, there was a slip of paper with her name and number tucked inside—Call me, it read. I looked up just as she was disappearing into the crowd. She glanced back and gave me a little toodle-oo with her fingers. I was too stunned to respond.
No girl, unbidden, had ever given me her number before. A complete stranger!
Looking more closely on the bill itself, I could see she had written the same thing in the margin—Call me, with her number—but then crossed it out, presumably thinking better of it. I pictured her reasoning through this hasty gesture: What if I didn’t notice and just put the bill back in the register with the rest of the fives? That endeared her to me even more. As if her shocking beauty weren’t enough.
Our first date was at her apartment. She had a golden retriever puppy that she kept gated in her kitchen who barked incessantly and gave the place a peculiar smell. I brought flowers and the makings of pasta and tomato sauce. She said she didn’t usually eat, that she was a picky eater, but was “superimpressed” by my cooking. It was basic stuff, but it seemed to baffle her, the food, cooking in general. She watched me sauté onions as if I were demonstrating some rare skill. It seemed I was the first person to use her new pots. The dog scrabbled at the gate and yelped the whole time, and she would periodically scream at it. It was a disconcerting scream, a note of unrestrained hysteria in it. She was a recent high school graduate—she had gone to UNIS. Absentee parents. They had paid for the place, obviously.
She explained that she didn’t drink or do drugs. She was a member of NA. She had to spell it out for me: Narcotics Anonymous. That’s how much I knew of the world, for all my “experience” as a born-and-bred New Yorker. She wasn’t yet eighteen, I don’t think. She had been institutionalized, she explained—not without a certain amount of pride—after attempting suicide. BPD. Again, she spelled it out: borderline personality disorder. I got the impression she was telling me things about herself she’d only learned weeks before from the people in the institution.
She told me she needed to take things slowly, that she was starting over, from scratch. She described herself as a “reformed party girl.” She liked going to clubs and doing coke and drinking and staying out until dawn. She told me all of this on our first date, sitting in her new chairs at her new table, eating spaghetti off of her new plates, the puppy barking the entire time. There were awkward lapses in conversation. We had nothing in common. I was more than a decade older than her. Her only CDs were dance-club compilations. But she was by far the prettiest girl I had ever dated. Her teeth were crooked in a way that made her seem especially beautiful. I got the impression that she thought her diagnosis was glamorous, or maybe she was clinging to it because it was all she had. Her parents were in Germany. She was on her own. She was due to enroll at NYU in the fall, but she talked about it tentatively, and I got the impression she wouldn’t go through with it or that she would drop out midsemester.
Talk of firing our editor ended. I was still working at the theater, still living with my mother, and spent most of my awake time daydreaming on the plush leather couch. Sri Lanka was still strapped for cash; it had been weeks since I’d been paid. Our editor was having trouble financially, too. Something to do with the indie market drying up, stiffer competition. It had been almost three months since he’d worked a paying freelance gig. His reserves were depleted. But in spite of this, and in spite of Sri Lanka’s inability to afford to pay him any longer, the editor continued working on our film. He’d grown attached to it, he said, to us. When I talked to my mother about my day, I found myself calling each of them by name: Suriyaarachchi and Dave. We went to Dave’s daily and stayed all day. Suriyaarachchi had his film-related correspondence forwarded to Dave’s address. I was given a copy of the mailbox key; it was my job to get the stuffed wad from the box in the morning, along with crullers and coffee from the diner.
I don’t want to give the impression that the two of them had stopped fighting; they hadn’t. In fact, these fights became a defining characteristic of their friendship. But now they were like an old Hollywood pair, filling the air with their lively, sharp-witted banter. Occasionally, it would get heated, but just when I thought I needed to step in to break it up, one of them would say something that would cause them both to burst out laughing—and that would be that. I loved it. As an only child, I wanted a brother, someone to show me the ropes or someone to whom I might show the ropes. I yearned after the fraternal pack; and sometimes, after a meal, sitting in silence and listening to the two of them squabble, I felt like I finally got my wish.
I came to admire them. Suriyaarachchi’s determination was infectious. Like Arthur’s son and his imaginary dog, Suriyaarachchi was willing this movie into existence by the sheer force of his determination. It made me ashamed of my own doubts about the project. His confidence made him seem much taller than the five seven he was, and the rough cut, when we’d watch it together, seem better. Each sentence he uttered was filled with optimism. Here’s an idea. Or: You know what would be cool? In Dave, too, I saw traits I wanted and was ashamed I lacked. Dave was a consummate craftsman—always turning the cut over in the back of his head. We would be at his PlayStation, deep in the bowels of a dungeon, slashing our way through a thicket of skeletal ghouls, the movie right then the furthest thing from my mind—and out of the blue Dave would say, You know what might work? Then go on to describe some technical issue about pacing or continuity. Whereas Suriyaarachchi and I were always striving for something more than what we had, our daily grind a means to some grander, more glamorous end, Dave was different. He was content. He wanted to continue doing exactly what he was doing right now, what he had been doing for the past ten years—his only goal in life to make enough money to keep doing it until the day he died. He had found his true calling.
And Arthur? What kept me returning to his end of the hall?
Years later, long after it was all over, people—those who remembered Arthur’s brief moment of fame—would ask me that same question, how it was I could stand to be around that guy. What did I see in a man who could do what he did? In my defense, his second book had not yet come out, so all I knew of the depths of Arthur’s—let’s call it creative stuntsmanship—was still the comparatively minor stuff of that cadenza. Still, it’s true I remained friends with him even after the second book and kept steadfast through it all, following him down into the abyss—so I suppose this deserves a preemptory explanation.
Back in those days, I was searching for the answer, capital A. I didn’t have it and looked to everybody else for clues. My mother didn’t seem to have the answer: as a poet, she dwelled in the humdrum; her insights were the insights of a different generation—using the shock of fresh language to wake people up to the daily beauty of a dog’s bark, a sinkful of dirty dishes. This wasn’t what I was after. These weren’t my concerns. Almost a generation older than flower power, my mother watched that short era of hope bloom and die its cynical death from a relatively safe soul-preserving remove and was able to adopt the discoveries worth adopting—namely a sense of liberal self-expression, the only good thing to come of those times besides Abbey Road, she thought: a quality she hoped to instill in me, all too eager to encourage my slightest creative inclinations.
My father was an early mentor, a man who held sacred his own childhood and through me was able to recapture some of its magic. He taught me a love of collecting—stamps, baseball cards, little-known facts—and fed my interest in science fiction. At the age of nine and ten I was thrilled to spend those rare school-free weekdays at his office on Fifth Avenue, only a dozen blocks south from where I now spent my days with Suriyaarachchi and Dave. He was a draftsman by trade, my father—one of those trades that simply vanished with the advancement of computers. He toiled away at a steeply angled table, tracing intricate ductwork and wiring onto sheets of vellum with a special metal pencil whose soft graphite set down marks as dark as ink. The windows—the office was on the top floor of an eighteen-story building—looked out onto a scale model of a busy street scene: toy cars and buses inching along the replica avenue, complete with tiny streetlamps and blinking crosswalk signs. I can still feel the simple pleasure of sitting near him as he worked, taking up the adjacent table. The person who sat at this desk was invariably in a meeting in the conference room whenever I was around. It only occurs to me now that this man was probably not in a meeting but rather vacating his normal post to allow me to sit beside my father, bringing his work to the big conference table for the day as a favor to us. In my room, next to my piano, is a large cardboard tube, the kind used for architectural drawings. It is filled with poster-sized vellum plans for intergalactic cruisers, light-duty zero-gravity suits, and lethal dense-particle plasma rifles. If you look closely at my 2s, you can see how I tried to undo the loop in them so that they would be more like my father’s 2s, a practical and efficient arrowhead V pointing down at the base of a curve. Next to his, mine looked dopey, the 2s of a student puzzling at the sum of a pair of them. And in the bottom right corner of each of my plans, copying his sturdy caps, I put the name of the project, the name of the draftsman (myself), and the project’s lead architect (my father).
But while I might have been entertained here of the occasional weekday afternoon, on the weekends—every weekend—I was making my pilgrimage on the Uptown local, plus the six uphill blocks farther by foot, to lock myself away in a practice room in the service of great art. By the time I was able to thunder through a Brahms rhapsody on the keyboard, I had left my father behind. Through my teens, my mentor was my piano teacher, an enormous man, six six easily, as round as he was tall. He had an enormous bald head and enormous hands. To see those fingers move across the keyboard was to understand why people use athletic terms to describe some classical musicians. His fingers were galloping horses, running wild and yet nailing every single note. Mr. Masi. His tastes became my tastes. Fred Astaire, Arthur Rubenstein. These were the greats. I diligently collected all the classic recordings and every old musical he praised with the same feverishness of my days collecting stamps and cards with my father. At the same time, Mr. Masi taught me a sensitivity to grace and beauty—and that such a sensitivity could be a masculine trait. To speak with confidence about how gorgeous a particular passage was and to, upon hearing it, close one’s eyes in submission to it. Artur Schnabel playing Kreisleriana, Maurizio Pollini rolling through a Chopin étude. Some lessons would begin this way, him putting on a recording and letting it fill the room. I would watch him go limp at these climactic moments and then, snapping out of it, turn to me and shout, “See? Good God! Do you see what this is all about?” And I did. He taught me to seek out these moments, to feel the shiver down the spine.
But then I went off to college and left Mr. Masi behind as well.
In my twenties, I was adrift, in search of a new mentor—someone who could help me make sense of this new territory I found myself in, disillusioned with university-level music making but still desperate to do something with my life, make something of myself. But how? For a while, it seemed that Suriyaarachchi had the answer: even though he was young, younger than me, his sheer enthusiasm made him a candidate. To him, creativity was an entrepreneurial endeavor, imbued with the possibilities of great profit and renown. I was drawn to his confidence but saw also that much of that confidence was based on wishful thinking. Which is when Arthur showed up, with his astonishing feat of language, his uptown professorship, his sexy wife and precocious son, and I saw that maybe, just maybe, I had been too hasty in my dismissal of art. Here was a man who seemed to have it all: prestigious job, family—and an audience. What more could one want?
And then there was the business of that cadenza. In the middle of my formative stages as a young artist, to witness that act on that stage. It was so shocking, so out of the realm of what I knew art to be—even compared with those sixties experiments involving pianos rolled off stages. Thinking back on it, I can see that it was both the catalyst that propelled me onward, down the path toward a bachelor’s degree, as well as the poison pill that had slowly, over the course of my four years at conservatory, forced me back off that path, dissatisfied with the smaller and smaller territories academic composers were mapping out for themselves. Nothing I had experienced in those four years lived up to the sheer enormity of that act. But what did it mean? The memory of that incident had troubled me—for years afterward—remaining a knotted question in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there until bumping into him again after more than a decade. And here he was; it was an opportunity to work out that knot. I was happy to have been given a second chance with him.
So then: A mentor. And answers.
I arrived at Dave’s exhausted. Strange dreams involving Arthur and a shotgun. The gun would go off, and I’d wake up. This happened several times. Finally, I gave up and turned on the light. It was three in the morning.
Suriyaarachchi was on the phone with his father, a one-sided conversation in which he stared down at his feet and plucked at his eyebrows, grunting occasionally. After he got off, he was in a foul temper. Dave, too, was in a mood, which had to do with losing a big contract he’d been counting on. We sat around the suite barely speaking. Interestingly, neither of them seemed upset at each other.
At this point, we had a rough cut that was too long—two hours and twenty minutes—and were looking for places to trim. Dave suggested we watch it from the beginning and, after a few clicks of the mouse, shut off the desk lamp and sat down between us.
Halfway through, Suriyaarachchi said, “What else do you have to watch around here. This movie sucks!” He leaned forward and used the remote on the coffee table to mute the sound and turn up the lights. He put his head in his hands and groaned. “God! What am I going to do?”
Dave got up. “I think I have just the thing for today. I’ll be right back.”
After he left I said, “So what did your father say?”
“That it would have been better if I’d spent four years in an insane asylum, rather than film school. At least, he said, they teach you practical skills like basket weaving. He’d be half a million dollars richer by now and have some place to put his dirty laundry.”
Dave came back with a VHS and popped it into one of the decks. He said, “How do you feel about baseball?” As it happened, Suriyaarachchi loved baseball. “World Series, game three,” Dave said. He had set it to record before going to sleep and made a concerted effort to avoid learning the outcome this morning. Suriyaarachchi had learned the final score but hadn’t seen the game; he promised not to tell.
I left the two of them to their mutual interest while I went downstairs for another coffee and a copy of the Village Voice. When I returned, I spread the rental listings out on the kitchen counter. It was time for a change. I needed a place of my own—spending time at Dave’s and Arthur’s helped me realize that it was more than just a thousand-dollar-a-month hole in your pocket. It was where you could, if you so desired on a Saturday afternoon, pop the cap off a cold beer to be savored with a smoke in the wide-open comfort of your own living room. Where you could entertain a certain lovely tall girl with alien amber eyes and appealingly crooked teeth.
I made some calls with the wall-mounted phone, sipping my scalding coffee through the sharp snapped-off hole in the cup’s lid. On the face of it, hundreds of landlords around the city were vying to rent their cozy studios to me; however, all calls led to the same three brokerages, none of whom would get specific until I had filled out an application. Today was one of my two days off at the theater. I had been hoping to explore a lead or two during the late afternoon, but it wasn’t looking good. I popped my head into the editing suite and caught the roar of the crowd.
“You don’t have a fax machine, do you?”
The editor came out in his bare feet to microwave some popcorn and revealed it hiding in plain sight under a stack of books. I sat cross-legged on the floor, using the receiver to communicate with the realtors. The application was a joke. It asked for my occupation and income but for no other information that might tie me to these answers. I could have put down anything, and did, and by three thirty I was lined up to see half-a-dozen places. The broker asked me how soon I could get downtown. I told him to give me an hour.
I pulled out my wallet and removed the slip of paper that Viktoria had given me that day, the words call me in her loopy schoolgirl hand. I dialed the number. When she answered, I said, “How would you like to go apartment hunting with me?”
“Who’s this?”
“The guy who hasn’t called you back in a week.”
“Hey! I was wondering about you. I almost didn’t pick up because I didn’t recognize the number. It’s been a very upside-down world I’ve been living in. Usually, I’m the one who doesn’t call you back. Interesting feeling, being blown off. And by interesting, I mean it sucks. Apartment hunting, why not? Where should we meet?”
I put my head into the editing suite again to announce I would be leaving early. Suriyaarachchi, engrossed in the game—it was apparently a nineteen-inning nail-biter—said, “Why don’t you just take the rest of the day off?” I was about to tell him that he was paraphrasing what I had just told him, then thought better of it.
I thanked him and left.
I met Viktoria on the corner of Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. I was struck anew by her beauty. She was stunning. Tall and thin, with long blond hair that today she had divided into twin pigtails. She wore a skirt, high-heeled Mary Janes, and a cardigan over a button-down oxford. I felt both sheepish and overjoyed to be walking down the street with this sexy jailbait. Every man we passed without exception was dumbstruck, even the two holding hands. She was, to say the least, out of my league. She seemed at ease with the attention, absorbing it and deflecting it in equal measure, returning a smile or lowering her gaze or staring straight ahead. There was something electrifying about being the guy she was with, like riding a motorcycle for the first time—power, danger, lack of control.
We met the broker outside a tenement on Fifth Street and Avenue A. He had to correct himself when telling us his own name. “Hector, I mean. Viktor is my brother. Hector Villanova.” He handed us his business card with trembling fingers.
“Villanova,” Viktoria said. “That can’t be your real last name?”
“What do you mean?”
“Villanova means ‘new house.’ ”
“Yes, it does,” Hector said, not catching her drift.
Viktoria looked at me poker faced.
Hector fumbled with the keys before letting us into the lobby. It was a five-floor walk-up, past dimly lit hallways and the smells of cat pee and frying onions. Hector described the apartment as “newly restored,” but all that seemed to mean was the stove had been cleaned. A sponge and a can of Ajax stood on the counter. One of the walls had been given a recent touch-up; the smell was intense.
One couldn’t really be given “the tour” because there wasn’t anything, properly speaking, to tour. The place was a kitchen. Nevertheless, Hector tried his best. “These are the original linoleum floors,” he said, and tapped a buckling tile by the refrigerator with his tassled dress shoe. I went to the windows and looked down at the street corner. Hector came over to narrate the view for me, as if to revise what I was seeing. “What we have here are two exposures, unusual for the building, but this is a corner apartment. North facing and east facing. You will get very nice light here in the morning, and it should maintain an even brightness throughout the day. You can see the features of the neighborhood from here. Restaurants, nightlife, shopping. It’s very safe at night. There are people around all hours. Eyes on the street, we call it in the business. Keeps the criminal elements at bay.”
Viktoria said, looking out, “Oh my God, that place!” She pointed to the bar directly across the street. “We used to cab it down there once the clubs closed. Nice thing about it—only thing about it, really—is that there’s no last call. They’d just let us hang out until we had to go to school in the morning. I don’t know how many times I barfed in that garbage can on the corner.” She took me by the hand. “Come look,” she said, and brought me to the bathroom.
She sat down on the toilet. “Try closing the door.” I tried, but her knees protruded past the threshold and the door bumped into them.
I turned to Hector. “Small bathroom.”
Hector came over, and we both considered Viktoria as she sat on the toilet. “But you have very long legs,” he said.
“Taking a shit in this apartment would be a public act,” Viktoria said. “It’s okay, I don’t mind.” She got up, keeping her bare knees together.
“I will ask the landlord what he can do about that,” Hector said, making a note.
Apartment hunting in New York City, I came to learn after Hector had shown us the others, is a special kind of hell. Each was more depressing than the next. If Viktoria hadn’t been with me, I would have quit after the first two. She was sweet and game and helped me see that, yes, I could build shelves over here or have a loft made over there and put a desk right under it. She showed me the cool thing about this place: a safe, built right into the wall! Or that one: roof access! Or: Couldn’t I just picture a cross-legged, candle-lit cocktail party in here?
By the end, six turns deep into the realtor’s labyrinth, I began to see these apartments not for each one’s objective awfulness but for the way each stacked up against the others. It was a trick of the eye that fooled me into believing that maybe number 4 wasn’t so bad after all.
Only to be told that if I was interested, I would need to act fast.
“What does ‘act fast’ mean, in this situation? Me saying, ‘I’ll take it’?”
“And filling this out completely.” He handed me a form that required my divulging all of the relevant information that the initial application hadn’t, including bank account numbers, landlord references, and a signatory waiver for a credit check. “Get it back to me as soon as you can,” Hector said. “And confidentially,” here he handed me the faxed copy of the form I had filled out earlier, “I would suggest putting something steadier sounding on your final application than ‘filmmaker’ and”—he pointed to the number I had listed for income ($300,000/year)—“make sure you have a figure here that can be verified.”
After parting ways with Hector, we strolled back west, toward Viktoria’s apartment. Now that the sun had gone down, it was much cooler, and she hugged herself against my arm as we walked. We stopped at the front window of the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a storefront I’d passed dozens of times on my way to the movie theater, never once having the urge to slow down, to take in what was on display.
We went inside. I took pleasure in losing Viktoria for a short while as I wandered the store—to discover her again, at the far end of an aisle. She’s with me, I thought, just to make myself flush. I showed her Arthur’s book, which was on display. “I know him,” I said. This didn’t seem to impress her, though.
“Very good.”
“Reading isn’t really my thing. I’ve got nothing against people who read, there’s just so much else to do in life. Do you think they have any books on BPD? I need to figure this thing out better.”
She went to the counter and asked. Even the hipsters who worked here in their tight flannel shirts and horn-rimmed glasses were not immune to Viktoria. She shook them from the heights of their affected boredom to the very core of their once brace-faced, high school selves—stammering, tripping over their own feet to show her what she was looking for. It was a joy to watch.
She brought a book to the register. Girl, Interrupted. “I hope it doesn’t suck,” she said.
I offered to pay for it. In my head while she was picking something out, I practiced a line about how paying for her book would be my contribution to the fund for her enjoyment of reading, but all that came out was “No, seriously. I insist.”
The clerk had already rung through her credit card. “Do you want me to void this transaction?”
“Forget it,” I said.
We continued on our way, through a crowd outside a velvet-roped place on Ninth Street. Viktoria looked at her watch. “What are these losers doing out so early? It’s not even eight o’clock! Remind me to tell you about that place one day. Crazy story!” As we passed the crowd, I noted the slight shift in Viktoria’s gait, taking on a bitchy catwalk.
As we approached the corner where I would have to turn left and she would have to turn right—trying to work out in my head how to land the good night kiss, practicing it, visualizing it—Viktoria invited me over for dinner and a movie.
“It’s my turn to cook for you. And by cook I mean order pizza. My treat. It’s what normal people do, right? They order pizza. They don’t snort coke off a guy’s asshole on a dare. Not me, a friend of mine. Logistically, it’s hard to picture. But he swears it happened, and I believe him. He’s a crazy motherfucker.”
She dialed ahead for the pizza. We took our time at the video store. We chose a Hollywood drama about recovering alcoholics and watched it while we waited for the food to arrive, listening to her puppy yap in the kitchen. When the delivery man appeared, I paid and brought the box into the kitchen and put two slices on a pair of new plates. She played with hers but didn’t eat it. When I asked she said, “I don’t really like pizza.”
“But you suggested it!”
“I was thinking about what normal people eat.” This would become a common refrain for her, what normal people did or did not do.
Neither of us was really paying much attention to the movie. She kept turning the volume down, inexplicably, whenever she would scream at the dog. “Shut! The! Fuck! Up!” she would scream, and then pick up the remote and turn it down a few notches.
She lit a cigarette and went over to the window. I joined her. She said, “I used to only smoke a couple cigarettes a day, but at rehab that’s all everyone ever does, is smoke. So now I’m up to two packs a day. It’s sick.” We finished our cigarettes, stubbed them out on the sill, and tossed them out the window. She said, “I need to take things very slow. Do you think you handle that?” It was something she had said on our first date as well. I said I could take it slow. “Good,” she said and squeezed my hand.
We went back to the sofa and watched as the film drew inaudibly toward its conclusion, which clearly was imminent because the main character had hit rock bottom and seemed to be in the middle of a teary reunion with an estranged son. Viktoria leaned against me, and as the credits rolled, we kissed. Her face smelled like peach candy. The television screen, once the credits ended, bathed us in blue. We went on kissing for a while like this. I reached into her shirt and unhooked her bra. I brushed my thumb against her nipple, back and forth, until it became firm. Her eyes were closed, her breath a string of sighs, one after the next. She did not stop me, and the dog, miraculously, was quiet except for some scrabbling now and then at the gate, a stray whimper. With my other hand I felt my way along the long path of her leg, up the inside of her thigh, and into her skirt. I reached into the humid warmth of her underwear, then reached up farther, with two fingers, and held her like this, my palm against her bristly mound as she rocked herself to climax.
We lay there for some time afterward, and from the way her head was turned, away from me, I could tell I had gone too far. I got up to pee, and when I came out, she was in a pair of boy’s pajamas. Without saying good night she went to her bedroom and closed the door.
I let myself out silently, so as not to disturb the dog.
It had been the summer of The Blair Witch Project, and after three solid months of sold-out shows and lines out the door, the moviegoing public seemed to have awoken from the hype of this little “gem” feeling swindled and took a pass on the fall season. I sat on the glass popcorn display case cross-legged, watching over the empty theaters while the other ushers engaged in closing duties ahead of schedule in anticipation of an early night. The person in the ticket booth, entirely against policy, turned off the marquee lights and lowered the gate partway so that we would appear closed to those who might be considering a late show. This rarely worked. Either a manager would catch us or someone with a Moviefone ticket purchased ahead of time would foil our plans, but tonight it worked, and I found myself back home by nine fifteen. My mother was up watching television, and I sat with her awhile. This activity had gotten to be tricky, as I had to fake a sense of continued enthusiasm for every bit of my day that I chose to relate.
My mother wasn’t fooled, of course. “I spoke with Ann today.”
“My ex-girlfriend?”
“Brody. Down the hall?”
“Right.”
“Her daughter’s looking to take up the piano. I told her that you might be interested.”
“In what? Giving lessons?”
“I didn’t say you would, I just said you might be interested. I thought it could be a nice opportunity for you.”
I was still momentarily stuck on my mistaken impression that my mother had been talking to my ex-girlfriend about me and what that conversation might have been like. There was a lot they agreed on, namely that I couldn’t be trusted to make career decisions and that I needed to shave more often.
Seeming to read my mind, my mother said with a sidelong glance, “I don’t know about this in-between look you’ve got going. Either grow a beard or don’t, but this just makes you look like you forgot to shave.”
“I did forget to shave.” I pointed the remote at the television and notched up the volume on an episode of Law & Order. I could sense her continuing to watch me as I pretended to watch the screen.
During the commercial she said, “Give it some thought. It would be some steady pocket money for you and a way for you to reconnect a little with your music, which might not be the worst thing in the world.”
“Mother dearest,” I said, turning to her and taking her hand. “I love you and have nothing but gratitude for the twenty-odd years you’ve sheltered me—”
“Uh-oh.”
“—but I think the time has finally come for me to move out.”
“Again.”
“For good this time.”
“Any place you find, you know, is going to want first and last. Even a sublet.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
I stood, gathered my mother’s dirty plates from the coffee table, and went into the kitchen. I rinsed the dishes and set each on the rubberized-wire drying rack. “Bring the box of cookies on your way back,” my mother called. “They’re on the windowsill!”
Back in my room, I got into my pajamas, a gift from An way back when. I used to sleep naked, but she claimed the oil and sweat I secreted required her to launder the sheets too often. An liked things clean. I would find my pajamas washed and folded every few days on my pillow. They were falling apart now from so many washings, the waistband losing its elastic, threadbare, the cuffs coming unhemmed. I could sleep naked nowadays if I wanted to, but I’d come to see it her way.
My mother stopped in later to return the book I’d lent her.
“What’d you think?”
She turned it over in her hands. “This was that boy you knew from Morningside Conservatory? What a terrible thing, doing that onstage. So destructive. I don’t know. What did I think? It’s hard, knowing nothing else about him but this book and that performance, to avoid trying to link them somehow.”
“What do you mean?”
She took a seat on the piano bench, leaned her elbow on the closed lid. “It feels very personal.”
“It’s not a book of poems, Mom.”
“Still, there’s a rawness about the material. As though he were still working through it. That guidance counselor. You’ve got to deal with this thing or it will eat you alive. Dire pronouncements. It’s like the author’s giving himself this advice.”
I adjusted the pillows on my bed, leaned back. “I liked it. It’s creepy, in the way Beckett is creepy. And I think he’s kind of fascinating. Totally intense.”
“What do Suri and Dave make of him?”
“Oil and water.”
“Ha. I’d suspect so. Art and Commerce, at opposite ends of the hall.”
“They’re not as crass as all that, Mom. Maybe Dave is, but Suri wants more. You read the first draft of his script.”
“How about your script?”
“I gave it to him. He promised to read it. Once we’re done with this project.” I watched my mother run her hand along the closed lid of the piano. “It’s got to seem like a terrible waste,” I said, “me giving up on music after all those years. The money you spent on lessons. Not to mention the four years of college tuition.”
“If this is about Mrs. Brody’s daughter, forget I mentioned it. And forget money. You’re looking for something. I get it, honey. I do. It’s not music, and that’s fine. You’ll find it. Whatever it is. Whatever end of the hall it’s on.”
The realtors wanted nothing to do with me. My income did not meet most landlords’ minimum requirements, and my credit history revealed a long and contentious battle with my college lenders to collect monthly payments.
“What am I going to do now?” I was at Viktoria’s, in her kitchen preparing a dinner omelet while her dog snuffled at my crotch.
“You could stay here with me and Sammy. We’d love that, wouldn’t we? Oh, wouldn’t we? He could be our little slave, cooking and cleaning for us while we went about our business.” It actually didn’t sound bad at all.
I took the potatoes out of the oven, which I’d tossed with a little oil and rosemary and set up on a high rack to broil under some aluminum foil. I divided these on the plates with the eggs, which I set down on her rickety Ikea table. Viktoria opened the gate and let the puppy roam. “I think he can be trusted by now.”
I shook some ketchup into a small dish and set it between us for dipping our potatoes. I demonstrated.
She clapped. “Yay, like normal people!” She forked a potato and blew on it. “You really should be proud of yourself,” she said after a few bites. “I usually don’t eat, but this smells so good. My parents would be shocked.” Despite this claim, she only made it through a quarter of the omelet. Most of her potatoes remained untouched. It occurs to me now that on top of her other troubles, she might have been anorexic as well. I had no experience with this, as all the women in my life were good eaters. She was very thin, her hips narrow, her breasts the buds of a prepubescent girl. Her stunning beauty was not a voluptuous one but rather the angular, androgynous beauty of a runway model. Thin limbs that extended out to her very fingertips. Clumsy, but the clumsy of a swan on dry land, of Annie Hall. It wasn’t her breasts you noticed or her rear end. It was the graceful hollows, the scoop of her clavicle, the dimpled backs of her knees.
Viktoria lit a cigarette and dropped the match onto her plate, where it sizzled. I cleared and upon returning was struck by the distinct stench of dog shit. Viktoria smelled it, too. We followed it to its source.
On the little entryway rug, Sammy had left a wet-looking pile.
“Oh you stupid fuck!” Viktoria screamed at Sammy, who sat shivering on the bed.