In most places I only saw dogs. It felt strange to be left alone in such lavish homes, to use bathrooms larger than my bedroom. I was told by Sandra about the Warhol in one place, the sofa in another that originally belonged to a French monarch. So when I walked into the town house on Morton Street on my fourth day and found a slim, older man wincing at me, I held up my hands and said, “Dog walker.”
“Do you think I’m going to rob you?” the man asked. He raised his hands, too.
“Letting you know I come in peace.”
“You must be Gordon,” the man said.
He had white hair, but his eyebrows were thick and dark gray, lifting to assertive arcs as he came forward to shake my hand. The dogs jangled at our feet.
“I’ve been able to tell that they like you,” he said, wincing again. “An ease they didn’t have with Sandra. She had terrible energy.”
I didn’t know which of the owners this was—Philip or Nicola—though with his Puritan paleness, the puckered droop of his face, he looked more like the former. On the wall behind him hung a large, monochromatic painting.
“I don’t want to keep you,” I said, leashed the dogs, and left.
The dogs and I walked to the West Side Highway, crossed to its path tracing the river. A few once-forgotten piers were being turned into parks. Others were rotting and ignored. The dogs liked the old piers best, as did I. Something in their creaky abandonment gave me an end-of-the-world calm.
One of the dogs took a shit. They were both King Charles spaniels, their coats white and burnt sienna. The dog looked at the stinking pile (that day, also burnt sienna), then at me.
“Everything matches,” I said as I scooped it up.
Wind wound down the Hudson, the sky dulled by clouds. The dogs lunged at a seagull.
A man jogged past in a tiny pair of shorts, his back’s architecture showing through his shirt. I tried to catch his eye, wanted closeness rather than distance, a sense I could see things and have them, but he didn’t look back. The dogs and I crossed the street.
“Philip was right,” a different man said, when the spaniels and I returned. He put a hand on my cheek. This should have felt strange, but I liked the attention, along with the smell of his cologne.
“Philip and I don’t usually agree,” he went on. “On the menfolk.”
I started to blush. He seemed to grow amused. Nicola. He was tanned, with a long, stately nose, his dark hair punctuated by silver streaks. Like many of the rich people I’d started working for that week, I understood that he was older than me, but—with his well-preserved shine—I couldn’t sense how much.
“Sandra told us you grew up on a farm,” Nicola said.
“Minneapolis,” I answered.
“Isn’t that where they grow all the corn?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t?” Nicola said, voice high and fey. He spoke with a hint of an accent, looked younger than Philip by a considerable margin. “A lovely piece of corn,” he added, touching my cheek again.
The dogs retreated to their beds. I hung up their leashes and wrote in the notebook they kept which one had done what business while we’d been out and about.
“I’ve never met a Gordon,” Nicola said.
“I’ve never met a Nicola,” I answered.
Nicola’s expression turned pouty.
“Never met a Nicola,” he said loudly to Philip, who sat at the kitchen’s pristine island, eating a grapefruit. Nicola poured himself some coffee.
“You’ve met a Philip before, I imagine,” Nicola said.
“I think so,” I said. “Definitely a Phil.”
“Well, this is definitely not a Phil.”
I wanted them to keep talking, the way they spoke a music whose time signature I couldn’t quite catch.
“Sandra also mentioned that you just got here,” Philip said. “To the city, as it were.”
“A few months ago.”
He didn’t say anything more, so I added that it was nice to meet them.
“You don’t want coffee?” Philip asked. “Nicola, get him coffee. Where are your manners?”
“I’d love one,” I said. “But I’ll be late for my next dog.”
Philip winced again. I began to understand that that was how he smiled.
“You’ll have to stay for coffee next time,” he said.
“Such a lovely piece of corn,” Nicola added.
“You already said that, dear heart,” Philip said, then went back to dismembering the grapefruit in front of him.
I finished my last walk, eager for a post-work cigarette. But checking my pockets and bag, I discovered I was out. I passed a man smoking on the street. He had thick arms and an assertive, muscular chin. Smoke rose from his mouth in a ghostly plume. Channeling Janice, I smiled and slowed and tried to catch his eye. When I did, when the shift in his expression signaled interest, it was a new kind of hunger I felt, also a new way of being fed.
“You don’t have an extra one of those?” I asked.
He pulled one from his pack, placed it between my lips. The lighter sparked against his thumb a few times before it let out a lick of flame.
“You’re a cute little thing,” he said.
“I’m not little,” I answered.
I am average height, was skinny then in the unforced way of people in their early twenties, but often referred to as small (a friend once told me I had a short personality). Looking at the man’s inflated chest and arms, I considered walking away, though knew I wouldn’t.
“Let’s go,” he said.
I followed him down a street, its middle a rash of cobblestones. He took a final drag, threw his cigarette into the air, a somersault of sparks before it landed. I flicked mine into a gutter. We walked into an office building, his hand on my back as he nodded to the security guard and guided us to the elevator, which we took to the eleventh floor. My pulse fluttered against my neck.
We walked past empty cubicles and into a large office, shining plaques crowding one wall. He closed the door, held my shoulders, and turned me so I faced the window.
In seconds, our pants were at our shins. The sex I’d had since moving to the city had been so unremarkable that I turned hard right away. My hands pressed against the window. Downtown’s skyline glittered, the lights at the top of the Towers blinked. I heard the condom’s damp unraveling, felt an unnerving burn as he moved into me roughly and without warning, though I breathed deeply, working to feel what was good underneath that pain until good won out. His fingers clawed my hips. He grunted out obvious filth about what he was giving me, how much I wanted it. “Shh,” I answered, and the man pushed himself all the way into me. I let out a barnyard noise. He wrapped one arm around my waist, another tight on my throat, kissing the back of my neck with the force of a bite. Good feeling grew larger, pain hovering just underneath. I pressed my forehead against the window.
Afterward, the two of us pulling up our pants, I asked if he often brought people to his office for sex. In the dim room I could only see his outline. His belt buckle chimed as it clasped closed.
“This isn’t my office,” the man answered.
I waited for him to explain, then thought of the confident nod he’d offered to the security guard, the way he’d hit the elevator’s buttons as if he’d done it thousands of times. His deceit seemed wondrous then.
“So you wouldn’t know where the bathroom is either,” I said.
He kissed me and left. I wandered until I found a bathroom. I walked around the office after, stopping at a cubicle. Tacked-up pictures showed friends at a bar, a dog in a sweater. I slid a few pens into my bag. On a notepad I wrote, I just had sex here.
“Can I help you?” a voice asked.
A man moved toward me, holding a vacuum at his hip. I wondered if he’d watched us a few minutes before and called the police. Arrest had been a fear of mine since childhood. I’d assumed that each street I’d jaywalked across, the seconds of soda I’d snagged at self-serve places would lead to unwanted contact with the law. That fear went hand in hand with an indignation I felt all the time but rarely showed. Still, the excitement of what had just happened, the man I’d been able to seduce with a look and a question left me too giddy to care about the police or the office this man had to clean or the rain that had begun tapping against the windows.
“Just leaving a note,” I answered.
Back downstairs, I wished the security guard a good night.
“You too,” he said, with warm familiarity. He was good looking enough that I would have flirted with him had he seemed game. I thought of my old job and apartment, of Alan’s breakup monologue where he insisted that the most reliable part of me was the certainty I’d let him down. I didn’t care about any of it now.
Outside, debating whether to run to the subway to stave off the rain, I felt something against my legs: the spaniels from Morton Street, Nicola attached to them.
“You!” he said.
“Just finishing work,” I answered.
“You don’t work in that building.”
Nicola stood under a large umbrella. At certain angles, he was handsome. At others, he had the overlong countenance of a cartoon villain. The dogs—Alice and Lola—tugged on their leashes.
“Busy bee,” Nicola said. “Do you drink wine?”
“I drink a lot of things.”
Nicola and I shared his umbrella. We passed warmly lit brownstone windows, chandeliers and elaborate cornices centered on ceilings. Rain landed on the pavement in juicy pops.
We found Philip sitting in the living room, a painting behind him that Sandra had commented on when I’d shadowed her. “You probably know them,” she’d said, and named an art gallery Philip and Nicola owned and ran. But I knew little about art, nothing about the couple apart from the fact that they were wealthy, the gallery part of that wealth, or at least what made it interesting.
“Look what the dogs dragged in,” Nicola said.
“Nicola fancies himself a comedian,” Philip told me.
He spoke with baritone benevolence. I wanted him to keep talking.
“We’re here for wine,” Nicola said.
We walked into their kitchen filled with stainless steel appliances and open shelves. Bowls sat in sculptural stacks. A wall of windows showed off a terrace and garden. Philip uncorked the wine with elegant efficiency.
“Tell us about corn,” Nicola said. His smile was blinding.
“What’s this corn nonsense?” Philip asked.
“He’s from the corn state. Minneapolis.”
“Dear heart, that’s not a state,” Philip said. “And even if you’d said Minnesota, I’m not sure corn is on the menu there, as it were.”
Philip seemed older than I’d first suspected. Wrinkles framed his mouth, his knuckles patterned in bunched skin. Perhaps noticing my noticing, he dropped his hands under the counter.
“Corn is so American,” Nicola said.
“Nicola’s not, in case you hadn’t figured that out,” Philip added.
Nicola rested a hand on my shoulder. “I found this one with some muscle monster.”
“How did you know about that?” I asked.
“I’m not dumb,” Nicola said, offering no further explanation.
I blushed. But Philip smiled, lifted his eyebrows, and unleashed a staccato laugh, and I sensed they didn’t care, that, if anything, what I’d just done with some man who smelled like horses raised me up in their esteem.
“Everyone used to do that,” Philip said. “Sleep with this or that person, often several at a time. It’s a wonder any of us survived. Did you even get his name?”
Before I could answer that I had not, a cell phone on the counter rang. They were an anomaly to me then, something Alan had ranted about, citing radio waves, brains blooming with tumors. Philip picked it up, covered the receiver, and turned to us to whisper, “It’s Deidre Holmes.”
“Of course,” Nicola said, then saw my confusion. “But why would you know who that is? A nice thing about having a farmer in our midst. Reminds us how our world here is itsy bitsy.”
Nicola finished his wine, looked down the hallway Philip had disappeared into, and thanked me for stopping by. I finished my drink in one gulping swallow. Nicola opened a closet, pulled out a rain jacket, and handed it to me.
“You need to dress for the weather,” he said.
“I’ll bring this back tomorrow,” I answered.
Nicola shrugged, said it looked nice on me. The jacket was a shimmery gray.
Philip reappeared, asked if I was leaving already.
“Nicola lent this to me,” I said as an answer.
“I’m sure he’s outgrown it anyway,” Philip replied.
“Philip likes to tell me I’m fat,” Nicola said.
Discord hung between them. Then Nicola laughed and Philip held out a hand, to shake mine ostensibly, though I saw a bill folded between his fingers. “Thank you for taking such good care of our girls.”
Once outside, I found that Philip had given me a hundred-dollar bill, enough for a bounty of groceries, though I’d use it instead to take Janice to a restaurant we otherwise couldn’t afford. Rain clapped against the sidewalk and streets, and people without umbrellas or rain jackets ran for safety. I pulled up the jacket’s hood and walked in my regular rhythm.
Getting home, I saw our apartment through Philip and Nicola’s eyes: the rust-hinged cabinets, the wall behind the stove infected with stains. The love seat crowding our living room where Janice sat reading a magazine. She asked if I had cigarettes.
“Of course,” I said.
The rain had stopped, so we climbed onto the fire escape. Light from a nearby F train flashed in and out of our peripheral vision.
“One of the richies gave me this,” I said, touching the jacket.
“Let you borrow it, or gave gave?” she asked.
In the weeks I’d known Janice, she’d become, among other things, my mentor. She stopped me each time a man checked me out and I didn’t notice, telling me I needed to always look at who was walking by. Now I shared the story with her about the cigarette I’d asked for, the sex it had led to, and she squeezed my shoulder as a coach might after some hard-won point had been scored. Water dripped down the fire escape’s banister.
Back inside, Janice scrambled eggs that we ate on a shared plate, covering them with hot sauce so that my eyes watered.
“Sugar,” she said. “Next time tell me you don’t like it so spicy.”
I wiped my eyes, spread more hot sauce across the eggs, and took another bite.
“Oh,” Janice said. “Some old man is on the machine for you.”
“What old man?”
“Not the guy who just fucked you, I hope.”
It was Philip. Janice went to her room to gather clothes for a night at Meredith’s. Her packing up left me sad, embarrassed, too, at how quickly I’d come to consider her a basic need.
The phone rang several times before Philip answered.
“Good evening. This is Gordon Wagner, your dog walker,” I said.
“So formal, young man,” Philip said.
“The dogs need more walking?”
“Tomorrow is fine for all that. But we’re wondering about your plans for Friday.”
Through her opened door, Janice threw a bra into her bag.
“No important plans,” I said.
“Good,” Philip answered. “We’re having a little dinner.”
I pictured myself at their table, conversation pinging back and forth about artists and foreign countries. It felt thrilling, terrifying, too, all the land mines I might unwittingly step on.
“We’re hoping you might help us out,” he said. “You’d be well compensated.”
“Oh. I’m not much of a cook.”
“This will be more arranging.”
I felt dumb mistaking his call for an invitation, wrote arranging on the notepad next to our machine. In her room, Janice tossed clothes around, trying to locate something.
“I’m fine at arranging,” I said.
“We knew you would be,” he replied, adding that he’d see me then before hanging up.
“Who was that?” Janice asked.
“One of the richies who gave me this coat.”
“Or let you borrow it,” she said. “He wants it back?”
I didn’t want to tell Janice about the party, felt surprised by choosing not to, so I answered, “Dog-walking things,” adding, “Tell my sister Meredith I said hello.”
Janice gave me a kiss. Her leaving for the night felt like a larger exit, the easy gift of her presence taken away just as fast. I teared up. She rested a hand on the back of my neck, asked what was wrong. I thought to tell her about the note I left at a random woman’s desk, how that woman might find it and feel disgusted or that she was being made fun of. Of how, had I not found the bar on a night she was working, I’d still be in Bay Ridge with Thor/Vince and Marcy and the apartment whose fumes I was sure would lead to early cognitive decline. But, still in the raincoat I’d been lent or given, I said, “I just get sad sometimes.”
“Why I like you, hot ass.”
“My ass is just lukewarm,” I said.
Janice kissed my forehead, my eyelids.
“You want me to stay?” she asked.
I did, but said no, told her I’d go for a walk and make wild eye contact.
“Oh,” she said. “There’s another message for you on the machine, too.”
Janice left. I hit play. It was my father. I hadn’t talked to him in close to a year. He explained with annoyed surprise that he hadn’t known about my move. “I called where I thought you were living and your friend said you were in New York, that he didn’t know how to get in touch with you. I had to call your mother, which was, well. But she and I agree on this New York business. Call me back, please.”
I went into Janice’s room and lay on her bed, trying to remember the moment when I’d seen the handsome man smoking and, rather than stare at the ground, looked right at him. But thoughts of my father interrupted: early years when he was wildly silly, eyes gleaming during a week Mom “needed a break from us” and went to her sister’s. It snowed the night after she’d left that time, and Dad told me we needed to explore. I was eight or nine, easily wooed by his playful carelessness.
We’d piled into sweaters and coats, walked down the middle of streets usually clogged with traffic. Snow transformed parked cars into soft-shouldered hills, muzzled our neighborhood’s usual honking horns and loud music and growling arguments. We walked past a playground and into a park. I was thrilled at this adventure, the timidity I usually clung to falling away for a moment.
But then Dad insisted that we walk to the river. Even at my young age, I understood it was too far, our adventure losing out to the beige monotony of obligation. Snow fell harder. A few abandoned cars sat in the middle of the street. My face and fingers ached with cold, my jacket soaked by the snow’s weight.
“Dad,” I said.
“Almost there,” he answered.
It took him several seconds to realize that I’d stopped walking. When he turned around and saw snow past my knees, anything brave and certain in him deflated. I felt the sharp embarrassment of having a parent whose difficult feelings surfaced so easily and often, who cried when he lost a job or if he and Mom were stuck in some fight. Dad’s mouth hung dumbly open, and I fought the burying worry that I was just like him.
“Let me carry you home,” he said.
Dad had a bad back. He breathed with wet effort when he moved faster than a stroll. But he liked to pretend, thinking it lifted rather than deflated me.
“I’ll walk,” I said.
Back at the apartment, cold’s ache having spread to my feet, Dad told me to get undressed and went to fill the tub. I climbed in. The water’s warmth itched and squeezed. As an oily skin of soap spread across the water, my father promised me meals we couldn’t afford, movies Mom wouldn’t let me see. I lifted a wet hand, placed it on his knee. It left a mark on his jeans. Dad kept talking, about a camping trip we could take, the sleeping bags he’d buy, the propane stove we’d cook on. I filled a cupped hand with water and dropped it onto his lap. He went on about the constellations he’d show me, the new kind of dark I’d experience. I sliced my arm across the water. A wave lifted from the tub and onto his face and shirt. Dad didn’t move. Water dripped from his nose and chin, flattened his hair so I could see his red scalp, veins roping up his forehead and under his sideburns.
“You aren’t stopping me,” I said, livid and ashamed and scared that he’d let me keep going until our bathroom flooded and the water broke through to the apartment downstairs where a lady lived who banged on the ceiling whenever my parents fought or we walked with shoes on.
“I figured you were getting even,” Dad said, then went to get me a towel.
In my Gowanus apartment, I walked to our bathroom. Though cluttered with lotions and makeup, it was clean. I wondered if my father, now having found the Lord, had also stopped letting people douse him with water or say they needed a break from him. I dialed his number. He didn’t pick up for several rings. When he finally did, his startled hello reminded me that it was late, that I’d woken him up. He said hello again and again, his annoyance more potent each time. I hung up and hoped he didn’t have caller ID, though after so many years of near poverty, the idea of him with anything beyond the most basic need was funny to me in the way I see most things as funny and sad at the same time.
I went onto our fire escape to smoke. The woman across the way was awake for a change, her face so different than I’d imagined it. “Hey,” I said, but her window was closed. I tried to memorize what she looked like awake, so I could tell Janice the next time I saw her.