Peter was a lawyer. A corporate lawyer. Rose was not, she said, deeply in love with him, but she was attracted to him. How could you not be? He was handsome, the kind of textbook tall-and-handsome that Rose had previously never bothered with—black curls that had just started to go appealingly, discreetly gray; dark, intense eyes that came with a set of surprisingly noticeable lashes; and an expensive taste in menswear that elevated his camel coats and gabardine pants a cut above those worn by all of his other brothers in what we called white-collar crime. Peter looked definitively, exotically, like a cartoon of an adult male, professional class edition, and Rose said that this departure from what she called her usual muesli mix of art-damaged ruffians was proving a powerful aphrodisiac. Also fueling the aphrodisiac: Peter had conjured his wealth out of thin air. He’d come from what he called a shitty family from a shitty part of Connecticut and had made all his money because he’d vowed as a boy that he would never be that poor again.
They’d met at a Mets game. He’d asked her for her number because he was particularly impressed by her trash-talking, and Rose had said sure, what the hell, why not? We were thirty-one and it was still possible to treat dates as pure data.
Do you like him? she asked, with an uncharacteristic amount of anxiety.
I did like Peter, quite a bit, and Peter liked me. If you left the two of us alone at a table or in a movie theater lobby we’d find something to laugh about. Bring Charlotte, he’d say, if he’d gotten a reservation at some crazily overbooked new restaurant or tickets to a Knicks game or had rented a car to drive out to Montauk. It was Karl and Rose and Charlotte all over again, in some ways, save for the fact that neither of us were pining for Peter. But I could certainly see why Rose wanted him around. He sounded like Jimmy, sometimes—a Jimmy who had a habit of sending the wine back if he didn’t like it. A Jimmy who had better things to do—like make piles of money—than drink too much and crash cars into 7-Elevens. A Jimmy who cleaned up nice and stayed cleaned up. Peter also had a habit of calling me Charlie. It was what my mother’s father used to call me, and I liked it, a lot. I worried, however, and tried not to worry, that in marrying Peter Rose might have been turning back toward home rather than lighting out for new territory.
After six months Peter proposed and she said yes. She said yes, she told me, because she was sick of all those almost-famous assholes who’d screwed with her head, and being able to go to Mexico in February just because you wanted to was pretty nice, and she’d had all the sex, she said, that would give her memories on her deathbed. Also, Peter had said that as long as he was around her mother would never have to worry about money. It sounded supremely logical, and I could not decide whether that meant it was a terrible idea or a very good one. But I had not been the girl eating scrambled eggs for dinner and brushing my teeth with baking soda, and as the days went on I felt a small surge of relief materializing as I realized that Rose’s problem with money would no longer be a problem for me. So I could only imagine how relieved Rose might feel. Even if what she was feeling wasn’t pure, blinding, once-in-a-lifetime love.
Still, I’d always imagined Rose marrying—well, sometimes I couldn’t imagine Rose marrying but when I did I always thought it would be to someone she found while traveling. Someone from another country, perhaps, or an expat, or—and that was as far as my imagining went. Someone a little more—glamorous. A little more obvious a conductor of human electricity. Rose herself was that kind of conductor, and I was, too, in my own way, and it’s what made us dangerous to ourselves and others—that ability to instantly connect with and be delighted by people. The attributes that made us want to write—curiosity, focus, and lability in both the negative and slightly less negative senses of the word—made us forget where we were and who we were, if we wanted to get to the bottom of you, whether you were a book or a movie or a painting or a person. We disappeared as we stared at and queried the other, whether that other took the form of a book or an ocean or a face floating across from ours on the subway—while also sensing that we were most ourselves, or the best version of ourselves, while utterly disembodied in this way.
That kind of person might have brought Rose more misery than she wanted. I look back at my own marriage and think I must have felt the same. Rose and I might have always wanted to be the star of the show, and we might have felt a longing, left over from childhood, for an unflaggingly indulgent, and eternal, audience—a longing that we thought we could quiet with writing but did not. Maybe Rose sensed all these things, too, but could not say them out loud, or even formulate them as words, because to do so would be to admit that the face she showed to the world—defiant, fiery, wisecracking, stonehearted—was nothing but a mask.
But when she told me that Peter had offered to pay back the money she received for the book she’d sold but refused to finish, I found myself a little less willing to let all this pass without comment. I wasn’t sure that she should be rescued so completely from her unwillingness to honor that contract, and it made me think, from time to time, about what that musician had said back when Rose and I first met—Rose, I’m having trouble deciding whether you’re actually smart, or just ballsy and hot. And sometimes I fantasized about quoting Rose to Rose—A woman can be stupid, and a woman can be broke, but she can’t be both at the same time—and asking her whether marrying Peter meant she wanted to be stupid for the rest of her life. Instead I said:
Do you really love him?
Even if she answered with a lie, I could sleep at night knowing that I’d given her an opportunity to tell the truth.
He loves me, she said. Which was not the same as I love him. It was not an outright lie, so I could go on respecting her enough to lie to myself and say her compromise didn’t matter, wouldn’t matter. If she were anyone else—but she wasn’t. She was the person with whom I’d changed my life into something like myth. Someone who I thought needed to remain in my life until death. So I swallowed words and banished thoughts because we still had miles to go.
Rose must have been the only person I’ve ever truly loved, because she was the only person I’ve ever made excuses for when she failed to live up to the image I had or wanted to have of her.
I made the veil for her dress, which she decided to buy new, right off some rack. She and I went on a hunt to the garment district, where I bought some Balanchine-worthy tulle, and then fashioned a trim from a tablecloth that had belonged to Rose’s great-grandmother, a tablecloth that Rose always thought was too lacy but couldn’t bear to discard because of all the Seven Fishes it had seen, and I stood by Rose’s side in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, on a gray day in mid-September, the clouds moving sluggishly above us, in a pale blue brocade party dress from the sixties that had been my mother’s, because Rose had decided that I would be her something blue. I stood by Rose’s side praying that I would never marry for money.
At the reception—I’d be lying if I said that the reception, which was held in a rented-out restaurant prodigiously full of period detail, replete with twinkling lights twined through branches popping with cherry blossoms, tables and bar tops cascading with unusual flora in shades of pink and green, white tablecloths floating like clouds under tin ceilings like icing, with rivers of hors d’oeuvres winding through the forest of guests, didn’t make me consider selling my soul because of the endless supply of safety, cleanliness, and comfort it promised. Hours after I prayed that I would never have to marry for money, standing and drinking wine in the middle of this reception, knowing that the beautiful reception was only the beginning of many beautiful rooms to come, clean, white, spacious, tranquil rooms bedecked with charm and flowers, I revoked that prayer, and wished that someone would come along and sweep me with a huge pile of cash into a house, I didn’t care who they were, as long as they left me alone to write whatever I thought I had in me to write.
I gave a speech that I’d worked on for three weeks. When I finished speaking, I looked up and out at the tables. Faces beamed, hands clapped, and two people asked for a copy. One woman, a friend of Ann Marie’s, said, That was an aria, honey, not a speech. Rose ran over to where I was standing and gave me a big, fierce hug, I gave her a big, fierce hug back, and hoped its ferocity said the things my speech had failed to articulate.
At around nine o’clock that evening, I walked into the ladies’ room and found Rose sitting on the tile floor, picking the pearls off the hem of her gown and tossing them on the floor.
What are you doing? I said. I was aware that in my shock I did not sound sympathetic.
Look at this, she said, picking off another pearl and pitching it to the ground. Why would you charge people thousands of dollars for a dress that’ll fall apart ten hours after you put it on?
I turned around to get her mother. Do not get my mother, I heard her say as the door shut behind me.
Ann Marie was sitting at someone else’s table, talking away. I placed a hand on her shoulder, apologized for interrupting, and told her I needed to talk with her. She excused herself with a worried look, and hustled us both off to the bar.
I told her that Rose was having—I searched for the words—something of a breakdown.
You mean nerves? she said.
No, it seems like more than that.
Well, it’s a big day—
No, I said, firmly, hoping that if I repeated myself with enough emphasis she would hear what I was trying to say to her. Like a panic attack. Because I could not say: Like she shouldn’t have done this in the first place.
Said Ann Marie, becoming impatient: Take her a drink, tell her it’ll be fine.
We’ve been drinking all night! I was angry—at Ann Marie, at Rose, and at myself.
Charlotte, Ann Marie said. Snapped. As if I were a ten-year-old neighbor kid who’d forgotten her manners in someone else’s house. Finish the performance, she was saying, because if you persist in thinking you are exempt from this or any other performance, it will lead to even greater unhappiness.
I grabbed us two whiskeys at the bar. Back in the ladies’ room I sat down next to her, handed her a glass, and we downed the whiskeys in silence. She continued to pick the pearls from her hem and toss them onto the floor.
What were acceptable feelings of deep apprehension, and what was conscience, rising up to remind us that we had put ourselves in the wrong place? How could you tell? Who was there to ask?
I remembered: one of my aunts telling my mother that every minute of her wedding day she thought about bolting, and that every night for the first year of her marriage she slept with a bag packed and waiting for her in the back of her closet. I mentioned this to Rose.
I don’t know, I said. Pack a bag, put it in your closet, and see what happens after a year?
She said nothing. I tried again.
He’s an honest-to-God adult man, I said. The rest of them are feckless children.
A few minutes went by. Make me go back out there, she said.
I stood up, took her glass, then took her hand. I dropped the tumblers in the sink—they cracked like ice cubes hitting cold water—and we went back out to the reception.
What do we know, anyway? she said, as she followed me out the door.
We were thirty-two.
What did we know, anyway? This was the question Rose and I had been asking ourselves all our lives. What did we know, anyway, not having lived through an economic depression or a world war like our grandparents, and not, like our own parents and uncles and aunts, having grown up in houses besieged by unexpressed sorrow and rage?
After exiting the ladies’ room, and handing Rose off to Peter, I went to the bar to get another whiskey because I could not think of anything else to do, and I did not want to think about what might be happening a year from now or three years from now. Jimmy happened to be there, too.
Hello, beautiful, he said.
I’m not in the mood, I said without looking at him, as the bartender handed me my glass.
You’re too young to talk like that, he said.
I turned to him. Jimmy, slowly, took the drink out of my hand.
Come talk to me, he said. I got your drink as hostage. What’re you gonna do, wrestle it off me?
In the velvet dark of the dregs of this party, Jimmy suddenly appeared as a rakishly suave apparition in a well-cut suit and luminous gray silk tie. What the Hawaiian shirt had forbidden, the suit and tie made possible.
Ten minutes, I said.
And then what? he said.
I go home. But I knew I wasn’t going home.
You’re not going home. My second heart swooned. He handed me my glass, gave me a single nod, a curt Salud, and we drank.
You know the mob used to dump bodies in the river here in this neighborhood? he said, speaking nervously the way I could sometimes speak nervously, and this change in register made me start, because I did not think that people who had been in prison would ever be made nervous by anything outside prison. I don’t know that firsthand, or even second- or thirdhand, I gotta stress, I learned that from a book. Honest to God. And then before that, long before that, in the, uh, I think it was eighteenth century, two brothers, two Revolutionary War vets, bought the land from the Dutch and they were going to turn it into some kind of summer vacation place, and they wanted to call it Olympia.
I stared at him and tried not to look too surprised.
Give me a two-minute lull in conversation and all kinds of stuff starts coming out of my mouth.
I continued staring at him. I couldn’t help it.
What, you think I’m too much of a mook to like history?
No, I said. Which was a lie. Maybe I’m surprised we might have something to talk about other than Rose.
Maybe you’re a little bit of a snob.
First, I said, even if that is true, there are much, much worse things to be. Like a child molester. Or Karl Rove.
That made him laugh.
Second, if you don’t watch it you’re going to ruin this before it even has a chance to start. His eyebrows reared back. I took a drink with what I admit was a bit of studied, performative coolness.
So where am I going if I’m not going home? I said.
Jesus, he said. Gimme a second.
Every night that Rose and Peter were away on their two-week honeymoon, Jimmy came over to my apartment after he got off from work and we would drink from the bottle of whiskey he’d brought until my hesitation had evaporated. His patience made me feel safe enough to become insatiable, and I needed to feel safe in order to become insatiable. He was the first person to fuck me in a way that made me realize all the force that word could imply, and the first person to show me that something like love could reside in that force. Which made it very easy to forget that I was doing exactly what I had promised Rose I wouldn’t do. I thought we would stop when she came back but we didn’t. By that time I had become addicted to having him inside me. That’s what I told myself but I also just liked him. Liked being around him.
It was easy to compartmentalize—like a man! I crowed to myself—because Jimmy and what he gave me had no place in life as I had lived it. There was no taking Jimmy to book parties or readings or to the bars and restaurants Rose and I hung out in—not just because we would be seen, but because Jimmy would be severely out of place. Jimmy could take me to what he called his old man bars in Bay Ridge, and I could talk to the regulars and the bartenders, because the Jersey Shore was Bay Ridge’s close cousin, but I did not know where I could take Jimmy without having to explain myself or make excuses for him. He was something to have privately and in snatches. I’d been developing, or might have always had, an appetite for detached engagement—a taste for swimming about in a state of no more, no less—and Jimmy seemed to perfectly answer that need. I was a woman getting my needs met. No more, no less.
Of course, I also could have been trying to hoard something for myself while Rose decorated a brownstone in a neighborhood that in the early twentieth century had belonged to Italian immigrants, a brownstone replete with more-intricate-than-usual moldings and tin ceilings, replete with a quiet, shaded yard and a pine tree standing humbly, shyly, in the middle of it, replete with tall windows that let in so much sun the light almost obliterated the walls, buffed original hardwood with a perimeter patterned like the top of a Japanese puzzle box, a breakfast nook with a bay window, closets in the bathroom that allowed you to buy more than four bath towels and more than one roll of toilet paper at a time, laundry in the basement that allowed you to indulge in actual, and multiple, washcloths for the first time in your life, and to stop buying underwear because you’d run out and were too busy to go to the laundromat, replete with so much space you were practically forced to buy decorative items in order to create a sense of warmth and history.
Rose and I did as much research as we could on the people who’d lived in that house before she arrived, but we would never discover who painted the two Tuscan landscapes that sat on opposite sides of the vestibule and greeted you when you opened the heavy oak door. Whoever had painted it had seen an artistic opportunity created by two rectangles made out of molding and had used a very glossy oil paint, applied with lush but careful strokes, to fill those spaces with cypress trees, terra-cotta rooftops, and a wash of pale and peaceful blue sky shining down on a grayer lagoon below.
Those brushstrokes don’t look homesick, I said to Rose, the day she showed me the house and those paintings, which she was particularly excited about.
No, they don’t, she said. They seem—more proud than homesick.
Those cypress trees did look very proud.
But what do we know? she said.
Enough not to ever paint over these, that’s what we know, I said.
Another thing we could not discover through public records: Rose and I were sitting outside on her stoop drinking coffee when the son of the eighty-eight-year-old woman who had apparently won the house across the street in a poker game stopped by to welcome her to the neighborhood.
I used to smoke pot in that upstairs bathroom, he said at one point during the conversation.
You want to see it? said Rose. I rolled my eyes at her nonchalant yet still overeager attempt to ingratiate herself with the lifers.
Nah, he said, smiling. I live in the now.
It sounded like something Jimmy would say—although Jimmy might mean it less than this guy actually seemed to. I felt some pain at not being able to share this thought with her, but the fear of what she might do if she knew was stronger.
Is it me or does this feel like playing with a gargantuan Barbie Dream House? I said one Sunday afternoon near Union Square, while we waited for a woman to ring up some drapes at a store I still can’t afford to buy anything in.
I could tell by the way Rose concentrated very hard on reviewing and signing the credit card receipt that she did not think this a very good joke.
I don’t know, she said. I never had one.
Neither did I, I said sharply. Then, softer: I’m sorry. What I meant to say was that I’m having fun.
She nodded. An uncomfortable rest of the afternoon followed.
I neglected to tell Rose that I was sleeping with her uncle, and Rose neglected to tell me how much her couches really cost.
At the time I wouldn’t have said I was jealous of Rose’s money, and I don’t think I was. I was still hopeful that I would have a large enough portion of what I had desired while a girl, which had never involved money to begin with, and I was still physically revolted by the thought of a man footing my bills. But that didn’t mean I wanted to judge Rose for accepting an offer that had dropped in her lap. I couldn’t. It didn’t matter. We still spent more hours and more cash than we intended at the WFMU record fair. Still stood too close to the paintings at the Whitney or the Met or MoMA, so close that the security guards were forced to ask us to move away. Still loved to sit next to each other in a middle row at Film Forum, grinning in the dark at the irascibility of the wild-haired lifers, at their black T-shirts and black jeans, their army jackets and wool berets. Long may it wave, Rose would say, whenever one of them turned on an unsuspecting audience member with a cry of Your perfume is burning my eyes! before the start of Killer of Sheep or smacked the snoring face in front of them with a rolled-up Voice in the middle of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.
New York was still New York, essentially, even though the people around us had started to marry and have children; to buy houses and cars and make Costco runs. They were quietly but ruthlessly and probably unconsciously seeking ways to import the suburban into the urban. But wasn’t it disrespectful to this city, I thought—actually, blasphemous—to wish for it to be as comfortable and steady as the towns we’d spent our lives dreaming, whether idly or feverishly, of leaving? I did not judge these people, either—it was too early in the game for that—but I wondered at what I saw unfolding around me. I kept on wanting what I’d always wanted—to be seen as a writer worth reading and to love someone whose body and mind I could not get enough of—but watching these people, friends, and friends of friends, start shaping their lives to look like the ones I thought we moved here to avoid had started to make me question my own plan. Not theirs. Mine. It could make me a little confused about the validity—the solidity—of my own desires. The teenage girl who congratulated herself loudly for living against peer pressure had become an adult woman who second-guessed departure from the herd—and should she even call it the herd, and risk sounding like a fourteen-year-old boy who’s just discovered Nietzsche? It was much easier to stand in defiance of peer pressure when I was sixteen, seventeen, and twenty-one—the pressure back then was to give in to bad sex, bad music, and wine coolers, and the people making the rules were insecure, power-mad children. It was harder to take a principled stand against marriage, because I understood that it had brought many people joy and comfort, and harder to see who the enemy was, because these were fundamentally decent people who still missed their subway stops because of a book.
Rose loved to trash-talk all the people going on Costco runs, and goaded me when I trash-talked all the people panicking about getting their one-year-old into P.S. 321.
You should write about that, she’d say whenever I trash-talked.
What, and sound like a sore loser? I’d say. No thanks.
No, just the voice of a generation, she’d say.
I’d sit in Rose’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, the two of us talking about books we were reading and books we might write, of people we liked and people we didn’t, of musicians we liked and musicians we didn’t, of movies we might want to see, of snatches of conversation we overheard during the week on the subway or in lines for coffee, tossing jokes old and new back and forth, tossing ideas for things we might find to eat in her kitchen back and forth, for things we might cook for another dinner party in my apartment, talking and feeling buoyed up, and up, and up by our talking, feeling shored up, up, and up, by our talking, and then I’d find myself lying awake on a Sunday night thinking that I was a fool to want more out of heterosexual companionship than a kitchen that gleamed like a fortress made out of stainless steel and vintage ceramics.
And then Jimmy would leave a message on my answering machine, rescuing me from having to spend some sleepless nights sorting true desires from acquired notions.
Jimmy and I didn’t talk about books, but we talked about family, which was what nearly all of my favorite novels were about anyway, so it was really just like talking about books.
You love your father a little too much, princess, he said one night.
So what? I said. How is that making a problem for you?
I’m not worried about me, he said.
We talked about New York, and what it was like in the late eighties, when I used to cut school on occasional Fridays and take three trains to the city for the privilege of walking in and around and up and down Tower Records on Broadway and Lafayette. Sometimes the trains were just as much the point as the records. In the late eighties, when Jimmy had a job at the Fulton Fish Market. Sometimes Jimmy was in the mood to wax poetic about the concrete floors and the sunrises and the fish guts and the gunshots, and sometimes he wasn’t. When he talked of that time and place I thought of Melville and Whitman and Dickens, so: really just like talking about books.
We laughed a lot together. He could tell a story, and so could I. Jimmy loved to hear me talk about the dumb shit, his words, the private school students I taught said and did and thought and fought over.
I like your smart mouth, he said one night. I’ve always liked a smart mouth.
Jimmy could have been a writer, Rose used to say. If only, if only, if only, she used to say. Rose and I had the luck of being born to women and men who did not want to repeat the mistakes of their parents. They repeated some of them anyway, but this vigilant awareness of not wanting to perpetuate the worst of it at least prevented them from inflicting physical and emotional abuse. Jimmy was not that lucky. His father used to beat him, and once, Rose said, broke a few ribs.
And another night: You look like all those girls who come into the bakery, but there’s a big fucking difference: they never fucking smile. Never! Is this what books do to people? Cheer up, I always wanna say when they come in there with their little librarian glasses and their little fabric bags. Did your one and only cat die? Did your father forget to foot the bill this month? What the fuck?
Oooh, I said, laughing. You’re not supposed to tell women to cheer up.
Why the hell not?
Yes, why not? I paused. Well, I began, it supposes that women exist only to prop up society’s psychic economy with their self-effacement.
What the Jesus fuck, he said.
Just don’t ever say it out loud. I don’t want to have to visit you in prison.
The look on his face told me that I had been very stupid, and very spoiled by my innocence, if I felt free enough to make that remark. My face burned, and he must have noticed.
It’s okay, he said coolly. Which made my face burn even more.
I frequently begged him not to smoke on my stoop, because I didn’t want it to bother Mrs. Rivera. He refused. It’s either this or cocaine again, kid, he’d say. And I would sweep up the cigarette butts in the morning after he left.
We hardly ever spoke of Rose, and we never spoke of prison. I asked once and he said, I don’t want to talk about that with you. Neither did we talk about politics. If I finally knew what I thought there was to know—such as, for instance, he was as racist as all the old and young Italian guys in my neighborhood now or my neighborhood back home, or that he held intricate, poorly informed conspiracy theories about liberals and their agenda, I’d be forced to spend some time weighing the value of personal satisfaction against the value of defending these abstracts by refusing to consort with someone who denigrated them. I made lists of the worst offenses he could possibly commit and examined my heart to see what it could stand if it knew how closed-minded and ignorant he could be. But these mental preparedness exercises were all very abstract, too, and often it seemed to me that getting into a fight with Jimmy about politics, and trying to tell him why he was wrong, could end only with him thinking that I was patronizingly trying to reeducate him like the pinko commie that I was. No battle would be won for the things I believed in, and I would lose Jimmy to boot. The personal: zero. The political: zero. So, I thought, let’s go with privileging the personal.
And Jimmy might have been on his best behavior, maybe, because he knew what a college girl talked like and looked like, knew what a Rose talked like and looked like, and perhaps had thought it best to keep his more pungent thoughts to himself if he wanted to keep being let into my apartment.
I was very tempted, several times, to ask him why me of all people, until the night he said, I like how much you like it. I was also essentially naked of associations: I didn’t know him when. Or we were both bored and looking for shocks, or you could say that we both had serious problems with the world as presented to us—only my way of dealing with that feeling of being shut out of what everyone called real life was to write, and Jimmy’s had been to drink and take drugs and erupt into violence. And I hope I am not fooling myself when I say that I think the both of us knew this.
Once he drove me out to Dyker Heights to look at the Christmas lights and then to get pizza in Mill Basin. Because Rose would not be anywhere near there, and because no one I knew would be in either Dyker Heights or Mill Basin, unless they, too, had grown up in the southern end of the Jersey Shore and sometimes craved a very easy night of it around people who reminded her of the people she grew up with.
Is this your latest? said the waiter, when he came to take our order.
I laughed out loud. The waiter looked at me like I was crazy.
On the contrary, said Jimmy, seemingly unfussed. She’s my last. A bottle of your most expensive white wine, please, Sir Asshole.
That was a joke, he said, when the waiter left, and said it so smoothly I believed him. You don’t deserve to be spoken to that way.
Should I be your last? I said, batting my eyelashes, so he knew that really, I could care less.
Princess, he said, so that I would know that really, he had it all under control here, every last bit of it, you and I both know that would be one of the stupidest things we could ever do.
I picked up the skyscraper-tall menu and hid behind it because there were no fans here in the twenty-first century to screen our flirtations. And, I began, but he finished the sentence for me.
And I’ve done some stupid things, he said, from behind his menu. I could hear him smiling. His foot found mine and pressed it, once, a kiss, under the table, and then disappeared.
That night at the restaurant I gave him a Christmas present—an encyclopedia of New York City history that must have weighed ten pounds. He was visibly moved, and I tried to not be visibly pleased with myself at intuiting so accurately what just might please him.
I don’t think anybody’s given me a book in my whole goddamned life, he said, as he slowly flipped through the pages. And then stopped abruptly to wipe his hands on his jeans. Oh shit. Fucking pizza grease. Shit. And then wiped his fingers on one napkin, then another, closed the book shut, and set it down carefully in his corner of the booth.
Who has it better than us? he said, when he looked up.
Sometimes I think I was the happiest I’ve ever been, eating pizza and drinking warm white wine in a booth in a packed Mill Basin restaurant of no discernible decorating scheme save marble-topped surfaces, while sitting across from Jimmy and laughing at his running commentary on the room, my heart rushing and lit up like the BQE while he stared straight at me and poured me a third glass. Unless I think about sitting in a booth with Karl and Rose at O’Connor’s, or sitting with just Rose in a booth at O’Connor’s, or WXOU, or the In-N-Out Burger off Hollywood Boulevard, everyone’s Saturday night beginning or ending or exploding all around us, white paper wrappers unfurling like fireworks on red tray after red tray, like white water lilies on red pond after red pond.
Unless I think about Jimmy driving us into parts of Brooklyn I knew existed only because of the subway map, just driving in the dark and listening to Stevie Wonder or the Bee Gees or Marvin Gaye or Donny Hathaway or the Clash. I would wonder, as the night deepened and grew in tenderness all around us, as the red and white lights of traffic waxed and waned around us like hundreds of morning stars, whether this was all a person had the right to ask from another person: silent affinity as you share an awe of some object, some art.
I feel safe around you, he said one night, to the windshield, as he drove me home.
I feel safe around you, too, I said, and wished I’d never said it. I was afraid to call this safety love.
One night I heard him arguing with someone over a parking space on my street. I went to the windows and there he was, standing outside his car, passenger door open, shouting at someone who had their car just about angled into the last open spot on the block.
You absolute motherfucker! he shouted. You swooped in right in front of me!
Jimmy had begun to pace back and forth in the small space between the two cars in some kind of agony, swiftly, his body coiled, his hands to his head in some kind of disbelief.
Calm down, calm down, my friend, said the other man.
Then Jimmy swerved away and out of his agony and planted himself directly in front of the man. I beat a guy almost to death in prison, man. I don’t think you want to tell me to calm down. I think you want to get your fucking car out of this fucking space.
Yeah, yeah, said the man, and Jimmy lunged at him and took him by the shoulders.
Hey man, hey man, hey man, the other said, each iteration of that phrase getting more and more frightened.
I ran out of the apartment, down into the street in my bare feet, and shouted, Knock it off!
The two of them looked up. Jimmy let go of the man’s shoulders.
You don’t need that parking space, I said. You’re not coming in tonight.
Well fuck you, too, said Jimmy. Fuck you, too, princess.
That particular Princess sounded like an envelope containing a letter that read Bitch within.
No, I’m sorry, fuck you. Don’t make me feel like I’m the problem here because I can’t take this kind of opera.
I went back inside. A half hour later I smelled cigarette smoke coming through my open windows. I looked outside. He was sitting on the stoop, facing the street, smoking.
Come up, I said.
He put his cigarette out, sat there for a second, and came up.
I wasn’t afraid of him. I was afraid of the work loving him would require—the constant monitoring of whatever he said or did and the constant monitoring of others’ reactions to him.
Tell Rose about me, he said. Lying in bed that night, facing each other, his hand between my thighs.
No, I said.
Why not? Yes, why not?
Your father would love me. Trying another window to see if it was open.
I know. My father might also, depending on whether or not Jimmy was wearing a hat, think he was a little bit ridiculous.
So what else do you need to know about me?
Don’t you think it—
You think if you take me to some reading I’m going to shit in the corner like nobody taught me where the shit needs to go?
I wanted to laugh so badly—the scene he’d tossed out was so vivid, and so vividly put—I had to bury my face in the pillow to stop it.
What’s wrong? Are you laughing? Why the fuck are you laughing?
No, that’s not it!
I think that is it.
Okay, yes, so I take you to some reading! You’d be bored, you’d hate it, and you’d start talking shit about everyone, loudly, before we even made it to the exit.
How do you know I’d be bored?
You’re right, I don’t know that. I removed his hand from between my legs and sat up.
So what is it?
There are—structural problems. Someone in college had used that line on me while trying to explain why he didn’t want to keep dating me over the summer. According to that guy, it was too far a drive from Exit 13 on the turnpike all the way down to Exit 20 on the Garden State Parkway. It sounded like a load of bullshit at the time, and here it was floating up to the tip of my tongue from some recess of hurt in my heart, here I was using it on someone I cared about because I did not want to hurt him, and was still young enough to think I could avoid it with strategically placed words.
Structural problems? What the hell does that mean?
I mean that we live in different worlds, and love isn’t enough! I did not know where those last four words had come from.
Love isn’t enough? He sat up, climbed over me, out of the bed, and disappeared into the living room. He came back and stood in the bedroom doorway with his pants in his hand. That’s all there is, lady! He pulled the pants on and zipped them up with a force and precision that made me miss him already. You know what? You’re so smart, you’re stupid!
When three weeks went by without a call, I knew it was over.
At Jimmy’s funeral later that year, I thought I might die. It was the first time I’d carried alcohol in my purse to get through an event. The first time I stood in a ladies’ room stall staring up at the particle board and the not-quite-obliterating-enough fluorescent light, taking long, careful sips until I thought I felt my heart rate slow and my breathing level. Not out of a flask—too much work, too much of an affectation. I’d stopped at a liquor store near Penn Station before getting on the LIRR and bought three in-flight-size bottles of vodka that I zipped into a cosmetics bag. I never drank vodka, but neither had I ever been to a funeral of a man who happened to be both the uncle of my best friend and my—well, in the nineteenth century they would have used the word lover, but again, too much of an affectation, too much like jewelry you want to show off, too grand and clean a word to lay on the grave of whatever it was we’d been doing. He was killed while driving home from work one night. He was not drunk, which I was relieved to hear.
Rose and I learned at the same time. Late August, a Saturday, very warm. The two of us sitting in her yard and talking, drinking iced coffee and staring into the branches of the pine tree, talking about how right we’d been to not get on a packed train to Long Beach that morning.
The phone rang, and she headed inside to answer it. A few seconds after she picked up I heard her shout No! I ran in and found her on her knees on the kitchen floor, hands on her face, crying.
That night, after leaving Rose’s house, I went out and bought a bottle of vodka, because that would be quicker and more potent than wine, and then drank myself to sleep using a quarter-cup measuring cup because I had no shot glasses, kept pouring the vodka to the eighth-cup line of the quarter cup, as if being very methodical would make this more medicinal, and repeated this action until I fell asleep.
At the funeral, I was just numb enough to be able to speak to people without slurring my words but just dead enough to panic to be able to sit in the church without bolting.
Rose approached the lectern, and set three double-spaced typed pages out in front of her. She stood very still and then picked the pages up again, staring at them before beginning.
No one will ever love me the way my uncle did, Rose said. Then she turned to look at Peter. My apologies to my husband. Everyone laughed.
My uncle, she said, loved me in the way my father should have, but never got the chance to. Her face crumpled into tears and she brought her fist to her nose to plug them up. Everyone waited. Rose took her fist away from her face.
I’m not going to be able to do this, she said, staring down at the pages, so I am going to ask a friend of mine to read these words for me.
When I reached the lectern, Rose grabbed my hand in the sloppy, territorial, and ferocious way she did whenever we stood in a dark club and a song we loved announced its imminent arrival. My panic subsided. I read out a eulogy to the man I also feared had loved me in a way I would never experience again.
At the back of the church, as we all filed out, Ann Marie pulled me aside and clasped me to her for a very long time. I did not want to be rewarded for perpetuating a deception, but I was almost deliriously relieved. The kind of relieved you might be if you’d gone away for a week and returned to find that you’d left the door to the house unlocked, but, as you crept, panicked, around the house, you discovered that nothing at all had been damaged or stolen. That no one had taken advantage of your monumental stupidity. That you had been protected from your monumental stupidity, and you’d better figure out how to prove to the gods that you deserved that reprieve.