The Falconer

by Dana Czapnik

  Percy shifts away from me so that his back is completely flush against the cushion and he pulls his arm out from under my head and places it awkwardly at his side, squeezing it in between us. I’m at the edge of the couch, doing everything in my power not to fall off.

  I gingerly put my arm around his waist and look up at him.

  “You okay?” he asks me flatly.

  “Yeah.” Lie. I want to cry, actually, but I know not to do that. Other girls have cried. He’s told me how annoying it is. “Girls are too emotional about sex,” he’ll always say with a shake of his head. “It’s really not that big a deal.”

  The girls who cry don’t last very long. I used to think that the girls cried because they were so madly in love with him and the sex was so amazing they cried out of sheer euphoria. But now I know the reason. Not because of the pain. Not because he refused to make eye contact with me. It was because of . . . what’s the right word for this? I guess . . . the banality of it. My grandfather always used to sing this song when I was a little girl. He had a thick Polish accent and he’d scoop me up into his arms and twirl me around and sing, “Is zat all zere is? Is zat all zere is? If zat’s all zere is, my friends, zen let’s keep dencink.” Is that all there is? That’s the reason I want to cry. Because movies lie and songs lie and grown-ups lie when they tell you to wait until you’re in love. Percy’s right. It’s not a big deal. It’s nothing fucking special. And I’m angry I was taught to expect it to be anything different.

  I lift my hand to my face and feel my nose. The swelling has gone down a bit, but it’s still tender to the touch. I sit up and start putting on my underwear. Percy remains supine, naked beside me on the futon. He puts his hands behind his head and closes his eyes. His nose whistles a bit as he breathes, and I think he may have started to drift off.

  Nuh-uh. No fucking way.

  “What now?” I say, loudly enough that he’ll wake up but not loud enough to fully reveal my anger.

  “Hmm?”

  “What now?” I ask, softer this time. My back to him, I’m staring at the stupid goddamned Rangers who just scored another goal, and the red light is flashing all over the Garden and it reminds me of how Forty-Second Street is known as New York’s “red light district,” which is such an odd name because I think of red lights as being synonymous with “stop” but all red light districts everywhere seem to be all about “go,” and a brief thought flutters through my head about what this now means for me, this no longer being a virgin bit, and that seventeen isn’t young but it’s not that old either, and whether people will think of me differently if they find out.

  “What now? How about a smoke?” he says. I wince. That’s not what I meant.

  The impulse to tell him that I love him feels urgent and dangerous. Like a wave of nausea.

  His voice changes. “Please don’t get weird on me, Lucy.”

  I know the way the world works. No one ever really gets to say what they want to say. I swallow that ball of riotous vomit down.

  I feel around the floor by the futon, my arm instinctively reaching across my chest, covering my tiny, ridiculous breasts. I finally find my T-shirt and put it on without getting up, so he can’t see me. I sit for a while on the futon, facing the TV, and listen to him breathe. I put my head in my hands and rub my fingers along my brow, trying to physically push whatever this awful sensation is out of my head.

  “Whoever coined the term ‘making love’ is a very stupid person,” I say. “It’s always made me cringe.”

  He exhales. “Loose.”

  “What? Don’t you agree?”

  “I mean . . .” He hesitates. “That’s not what I would call it.”

  I’m being honest. I’ve always hated that term. It’s not just because of my present circumstance. “Me neither.”

  “I think it was Shakespeare.”

  “Shakespeare.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s in Hamlet.” I wish he didn’t know things like that. “It’s not his best addition to the lexicon.”

  “Nope.”

  I feel his body move behind me, and the futon mattress shifts a bit underneath us and then resettles. I don’t move. I try to will his body to connect with mine. To show me some affection. But as each second without contact passes, my own body gets stiffer. If he waits much longer, it’s possible that millions of microscopic thorns will begin to emerge from my skin, ready to prick him if he dares come close. Will I ever allow myself the freedom to love someone so wholly again? No. No, I will not.

  “Love is just a human construct, anyway,” he says sleepily, talking through an exaggerated yawn. “Like God. A way to trick our minds into thinking sex is something more than a means to propagate the species.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s a nice little evolutionary maneuver nature pulled on us to make us think we’re not animals. But we are.”

  “Yeah, you’ve told me all this. I know all your theories.”

  I get up and flick on the light and walk over to his bookcase. I stand on my tiptoes to reach a conch shell sitting on a high shelf. I feel him watch me as I move, sizing up my legs, my calf muscles bulging as my body tightens to reach it. I tip the shell off the shelf and catch it. Hold it up to my ear. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that he is still naked, despite the fact that I put on my clothes. I’m nervous to look at him. In the dark I hadn’t needed to take in his body in totality, but with the light on, his full, tall figure stretched out like that on the futon, with the dark mass of hair right there in the center, blurry on the edge of my vision, I feel profound intimidation and even a slight bit of shame for him, though I don’t know why. Maybe his ease with his body is a function of his experience. What’s another girl seeing him? But still, shouldn’t he cover up for me? Shouldn’t he be more demure? His nakedness feels like a statement. I am more comfortable in my skin than you are and I want you to know it.

  I listen to the sound in the shell. In bio, freshman year, our teacher explained that the sound we’re hearing is actually the sounds of the environment we’re in bouncing around the shell and creating a muddled ambient noise. If you held up a plastic cup to your ear, you’d hear the exact same thing. And even though I know this, it still sounds like the ocean inside there to me.

  “Did you know there are rivers in the ocean?” I face him.

  He does not move from his place, and I see him, finally, in full. The leg hair that creeps up all the way to his hips and then stops almost abruptly. How thin he actually is, his pelvic bone visible through his skin. And then, of course, the part that just minutes ago ripped through me, now lying there limp and small, dangling off to one side, mostly hidden by unruly clumps of hair.

  He scrunches his face, says, “You mean, like, currents?” tentatively.

  “No. Actual rivers, cut into the floor of the ocean, with shores and waterfalls and rapids. And there are lakes too. Under the ocean. With sandy beaches and their own waves completely separate from the waves of the ocean, which are only there anyway because of the gravitational pull of the moon.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, I don’t believe that some kind of god imagined that, okay? There are rivers in the ocean and they exist because of entirely explainable scientific phenomena. But still. There are rivers in the ocean.”

  He looks at me blankly. “So, you’re saying that love exists because there are rivers in the ocean.”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess I don’t see the connection.”

  Violet says that some people will look at a piece of granite or some bark on a tree or some linoleum in a sad, poorly lit hallway and they will see a piece of granite and tree bark and linoleum tiles. And other people will almost immediately see faces in the grain of stone, in the etching of the bark, in the speckles in the tile. Varied faces, expressing joy and exasperation and emptiness and humiliation and surprise. Those are the two kinds of people: the people who see faces in everything and the people wh
o see objects just as they are.

  “Fair enough,” I say to him, the conch shell still in my hand hanging against my thigh, heavy as a skull. I put it back on the shelf. Rage and disappointment begin to boil inside me and overflow. All this time, all this time. I’ve loved a fool. Worse than a fool, actually, because he’s convinced of his own brilliance. And yet, there is still a very large part of my heart that wants Percy to love me. That wants him in a very real, very tangible way. And despite everything that’s happened from the moment I stepped into Manhattan Academy’s gym until now, this is my truest moment of defeat of the day.

  I have to get out of here.

  “I should head home. I stormed out of the game and no one knows where I am. My mom’s probably freaking out right now.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let me walk you.” He pulls on his boxers and stands up.

  “No, it’s okay. I can make it on my own.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, it’s just a few blocks. I’ll be fine.”

  I put on my warm-ups and stick my sports bra in my pocket. Percy gives me an awkward hug before I leave the room, and it feels less like an embrace and more like an ending. Downstairs in the foyer, I lace up my sneakers and grab my basketball bag. I linger for a moment to look at myself in the mirror next to the door. Turns out, I’ve been crying. I hadn’t even noticed. But once I see my own face, it’s hard to get a grip.

  If I didn’t care what anyone thought of me, which is a brand of freedom, I would howl at the greasy yellow moon overhead and rage and moan on an empty West End Avenue. I would rid myself of the remainder of my dignity until I’m hollowed out.

  But I put my right foot in front of my left on the frigid pavement and continue that way as I walk east along Eighty-Seventh Street. A fire truck howls. A couple has a fight outside a bodega. A red stoplight flickers and then goes dark. Bachata music pours out of the souped-up speakers of a rusted Pontiac Grand Am as it races through the intersection. The city moves on. Oblivious.

  I pull my warm-ups over most of my face and slouch into my chest as I cry into the smelly polyester mix the whole way home. I wanted to be his secret discovery. But I am nothing. Just another stupid girl.

  The world is indifferent and uncaring and New York is its agent of apathy. New York doesn’t give a damn. New York sounds like a choir conducted by the devil. And that’s on a good day. New York will take all your money and all your kindness and all your love and will keep it for itself. There is no return on your investment. You can count that shit as gone. Gone. When you look up the word “unrequited” in the dictionary, you will find a picture of New York. New York is the worst kind of addiction. The poverty-stricken kind. The kind where you can’t afford enough of whatever it is you need and so you stay needle sick forever, constantly searching for just one little hit to keep you going without ever feeling the crest of a real high. In New York the air smells like cancer. New York is an orchestra in a constant state of warming up. It never, ever finds its tune or any semblance of a melody. And not in an avant-garde jazz way. It’s just musicians in the bowels of an orchestra pit continuously tuning and tuning and tuning until they all go insane. New York is never fucking finished. The nonstop thrum-thrum-thrumming of jackhammers and the clanking of a new scaffolding being put up or taken down and the cranes that dangle in the sky like the sword of Damocles. It’s always being demolished and rebuilt and demolished and rebuilt, forever and ever and ever. New York can never just be happy the way it is. New York is where bad people come to do bad things. Look at all the wonderful weirdos! Those weirdos aren’t so wonderful when they molest you openly in the subway and no one says a goddamned thing. New York is a pussing flesh wound on the neck. It’s ravenous and insatiable. New York will leave you for dead.

  * * *

  The man on my right is large enough to bench press an M6 bus, and a Jack Daniels bottle has just been thrown at his feet. The glass shatters everywhere, and whiskey soaks the ankles of everyone nearby, including me. The man who could lift an M6 grabs some guy with frosted tips by the collar. Frosted Tips protests, “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, man.” But M6 doesn’t care. He just wants an excuse to punch someone. He pulls his right arm back and pounds the guy. Blood spurts everywhere. Frosted Tips’s nose is in the wrong place on his face. Alexis’s arm tightens in mine. We scan the crowd real quick. Not only is the police presence on the side streets next to nil, we’re the only two girls within a ten-foot radius—the only radius we can see. We’re surrounded by men. Drunk men. Men out of control. Men looking for a fight or to prove their masculinity or for danger. Though it’s freezing outside, the air around us is steaming with anger. It’s pouring out of their puffy black winter jackets and Carhartt coats. We look at each other. Words don’t need to be said. We both know.

  We bust it out of there. All the way back to Broadway, back to the Cats marquee at the Winter Garden Theatre, the yellow eyes with the black dancing human figures for pupils hang over us, watching us. Telling us to seek shelter—somewhere the social contract hasn’t entirely broken down. Someplace without anarchy and male aggression.

  “PJ was right. This is some bullshit.” Alexis sucks down a gulp from the Olde English she’s got tucked away in a brown paper bag and passes it to me. I take a sip too. The thing, though—the real truth of the matter—is that we both hate malt liquor.

  “This is your thing, Lex. I don’t need to see the ball drop. We can do whatever.”

  Alexis puts on the green, glowing 1994 glasses we bought off some guy in a trench coat doing the moonwalk on Broadway. She frowns and motions downtown.

  “Look at the crowd. We’re not even gonna get close. They put up barricades on Seventh Avenue. If I had known we were gonna need to secure our spot at four in the afternoon, I never would’ve come. I’m not about to get my face slashed or get raped by those idiots from Jersey. Screw it. Let’s see if we can find a bar or something.”

  We walk west. But we’re in the Theater District, so all the bars are lousy and have covers, because tourists will pay an insane amount of money just to say they were close to some famous New York landmark. Just to be able to tell someone, “I was there.” Why is that statement so important? Don’t they know no one gives a damn about anyone else’s experience?

  The snow, which was beautiful for the first thirty seconds after it fell a few days ago, has now hardened into something black and otherworldly. It’s not ice. It’s not snow. It’s not any form of H2O. It’s some mutant strain of H2O. H3O. Months from now, after the northern hemisphere has emerged from winter, there will still be patches of frozen black H3O clinging to sidewalks all over the city. So caked in gunk that a barrier will form, rendering it incapable of melting. Slivers of reminders, even in the city’s most beautiful, hopeful days, that winter is long and dark here and it’s always right around the corner.

  “I’m freezing,” Alexis says. As always, she’s underdressed. She thinks hats mess up her hair and winter coats make her look fat. Both of those things are true, actually. But still. Alexis would rather look good and be cold. I’d rather be warm. But then again, she has a boyfriend who says “I love you” and gives her good advice, like, “Don’t go to see the ball drop. It’s bad news,” and I have a best friend who hasn’t called me since we slept together three weeks ago. “Can we go into that diner and warm up for a sec?” She motions across the street at some greasy spoon on the corner. It’s the only place with lights on for blocks and it has a neon sign that says “Open 4 Ho s.”

  Before we go in, I snap a picture of Alexis under the sign using the Olympus loaded with black-and-white film I signed out from the school photography club. Which I had to join in order to use their equipment, and I begrudgingly added that little factoid onto the “Clubs and Activities” section of my college applications. She sticks her finger in her nose and mugs hard-core at the camera, “1994” still splashed across her face. I’ll probably submit the picture to the yearbook for shits and giggles. Doubt it’ll make it in.
Not because it’s inappropriate but because Alexis and I aren’t friends with anyone on the yearbook committee.

  It must be Sad Sack Night at the diner, because everyone, even the line cooks, looks like they’ve been through some real existential horror. No one in the whole place is younger than fifty. None of the men are clean shaven, and all the women have on the kind of makeup that makes them look older and uglier because they’re trying so hard to make it not so. Our waitress has a gold metal name tag that says “Geraldine” on it. She’s got bottle-blond hair with about three inches of dark brown and gray roots growing in. She’s wearing a pale pink—no, more like mauve, the world’s saddest color—waitress uniform. She doesn’t have a ring on her finger, and there’s something about her that makes you think there must be a reason. The way you know not to go into the almost-empty car on a crowded subway train, even though there are a ton of seats. The diner is all Formica and linoleum and faux wood paneling. There’s one tiny TV on the wall over the counter. It’s tuned to Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve special on ABC. I bet David Lynch keeps an image of this diner in his spank bank.

  We’re seated in a small booth with cracked brown pleather, next to the window. Alexis, with her coat still on, breathing hot air into her clasped hands, asks for a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows. I order a coffee. Geraldine smiles at us in a way that feels genuine. There’s something wrong with her left eye. It veers to the side of her face. It might be glass. I want to know her story.

  I idly peruse the menu.

  “What are you smiling about?” Alexis goes.

  “Things are looking up, mi amiga.”

  “No way. No one but you, me, and God can know I spent New Year’s Eve at a diner. I wanted a real experience, you know?”

  “I think you’re getting one.”

  Our drinks come in small, thick, white diner coffee mugs. The marshmallows in Lex’s cup melting, creamy at the corners. I pour four packets of sugar into my coffee and chase it with two creamers.