by Jancee Dunn
chapter seventeen
Only a few days remained before the reunion. After a fruitless search for a dress at the mall, I decided to take a morning train into the city to fetch my reliable black Prada dress out of my storage unit. I phoned my friend Drew and asked him if he wanted to meet for lunch, knowing that he could always be counted on for last-minute get-togethers.
Drew was a friend from college whom I dated for exactly one weekend before we decided that friendship was our best course. He was the manager at Film Forum, the downtown movie house that showed independent films from all over the world and hosted events like “An Evening with Farley Granger.” His passion was silent films, and he was constantly petitioning the board of directors to feature more of them. Drew, due to his surplus of time and love of conversation, was one of those friends who would willingly accompany you to get keys made or your driver’s license renewed. He was waiting for me at the New Jersey Transit counter, a slight figure in a plaid thrift-store shirt and threadbare jeans. His lank longish hair hung over his thick nerd spectacles.
“Hey, babe,” he said, wrapping his thin arms around me. He nervously smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, so getting close to him was like sitting directly behind the exhaust panel of a city bus. “Let’s go get your stuff, and then we can eat.”
We walked to the storage place off the West Side Highway as he told me about his latest paramour, a photographer whom he met in the lobby of the Film Forum. Her specialty was photographing insects in the midst of devouring each other, a sufficiently mordant occupation for Drew. She put competing species in a box and waited for one of them to get hungry. “Now the ASPCA is on her,” said Drew. “After they did a write-up in the paper, she’s been harassed a lot.”
“Could this be serious, this thing with her?” I asked, already knowing the answer. He never said yes outright.
“I think so.”
“That means it’s not serious.”
“Not true. Not true. That means I’m a reasonable adult. Look, she’s smart, funny, motivated, and she loves old films. But she’s busy, so I only see her once a week.”
“If you were both really into it, you would want to see each other all the time.”
He lit a cigarette. “Not necessarily. You’ve been out of the game for a while, Lillian. When you get older, your job really can take over your life. I mean, I’m still working on my film, too, so a lot of times, nights are out.” For the past three years, Drew had been filming a documentary called End of the Line, a series of profiles on the sole remaining holdout in various New York professions—the last pinball-machine repairman, the last Checker Cab driver. “I just got a lead on the last squeegee man,” said Drew. “He laid low during the Giuliani administration’s crackdown. Now he’s somewhere in Hunts Point. Next week I’m tracking him down.”
I was unnerved by the city’s jostling hordes as we walked along. Had I been in the suburbs too long? We walked past a heaving mass of pigeons, bunched together on the sidewalk. “There’s probably a child under there,” Drew remarked dryly, sparking up another cigarette. A half pack later we arrived at the storage place and I got my key from the attendant, whose eyes never left the Knicks game on his tiny TV. “I can see why some people live in these units,” Drew said as we walked down a long corridor. “Look at this. It’s ten feet by twenty. That’s…okay, I can’t do the math on square feet, but that’s pretty big. I know a guy who keeps his collection of marionettes in here. It’s ironic, really. You define yourself by your possessions, and then you can’t even display them to let people know what you’re about. Now he probably has people over and they think his apartment is boring, not knowing that he’s this crazy puppet collector.”
I delved through my dresses as he kept talking. “Maybe I could do a documentary on storage,” he mused. Drew was always in mid-scheme. “I know there’s a band called Mini Storage that rehearses in one of these things in another facility downtown. That would be kind of funny, right? And I read that one place in Chelsea is a center for African art, it’s this big scene, and all these guys in dashikis gather together on the loading dock, trading and buying and making music and cooking food and stuff.”
I pulled out a pair of shoes from a box and stuffed them into a bag. “Shouldn’t you finish the film you’re working on first?” I despaired of him ever finishing. One former cigarette girl he had interviewed had already died. “Come on, let’s get out of here and go eat.”
Drew announced that he wanted a grilled cheese, which might have been less a craving than a tacit admission that both of us were broke. “How about this place?” I said, pointing at a restaurant called Mulalley’s Grille.
He shook his head. “You know my rule: I don’t eat at places that have an e on the end of grill.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. Why is that again?”
“If they’re changing the spelling for no good reason, it means that they’re trying to compensate for lackluster food.”
Drew had a boundless trove of life rules, simple stratagems that he deemed necessary for happiness and that he was not shy in announcing. No “inspirational coach” movies, except on airplane flights longer than four hours. Never wait in line for breakfast; no exceptions. Baseball caps are for males under six years of age or over sixty-five. Do not date a woman who uses journal or dialogue as a verb. And no sandwiches at dinner (“There’s a pathos to sandwiches at dinner. Lunch only”).
After a few blocks we found a diner on Eighth Avenue and slid into a booth. As we studied the menus, he said, “I don’t think I want a grilled cheese anymore. Maybe I’ll get a hamburger. Burgers and steaks are the most popular last meals of death row prisoners, did you know that? Well, what if I get hit by a truck later on today? I should have a meal that most people would consider the ultimate.”
“Jesus, Drew.”
“And a milk shake, too, just in case.”
“Just in case of what?”
“Just in case I get hit by a truck.” A waitress took our order, and then Drew said casually, “So you probably heard about Adam.”
My stomach plummeted to the floor and beyond, past the diner’s foundations, past the city’s network of sewer pipes and subway tunnels, past the soil and rocks and down, down to the bits of pottery and clay pipe fragments thrown out by Dutch settlers in the 1600s.
“No, I haven’t,” I said evenly. Drew was just as close to Adam as he was to me, and, unlike some others, had remained friends with each of us.
“He’s moving in with Elyse, the woman he’s been dating.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Elyse Brooks. Does that sound familiar? She’s the daughter of Marvin Brooks. The petrillionaire? No?”
I shook my head again, stupidly. “She’s some sort of designer,” Drew continued. “Purses or something. I met her a few times. She’s very nice.”
Meanwhile, I was still mindlessly checking the “married” box whenever I had to fill out forms. “The divorce was just final a few weeks ago.”
He nodded. “I know. It’s fast. I’m sorry. I guess he had been spending a lot of time at her place, and they figured that—”
I cut him off. “I don’t need to know.” I tried to regain my footing. “I haven’t talked to him in a while. Maybe I’ll give him a call. I’ve been trying to make the transition into friendship.”
“I’m not friends with any of my exes. I don’t think you can be real friends with someone you dated.”
“You absolutely can. Often the basis of a relationship is friendship. The romance may dissolve but the base is there.”
He shook his head. “I disagree.” I disagree was Drew’s favorite expression and arguing his most beloved hobby. “There are too many tensions that are hidden, just waiting to flare up.” He dispensed of his burger in four bites. “I tried being friends with my last girlfriend,” he said. “We did the lunch thing, exchanged dating horror stories, but then when I met someone promising and I told her about it, she burst i
nto tears.” He groped his shirt pocket for cigarettes before realizing he couldn’t smoke in the diner. “There’s too much history. If you’ve gone out for a long time, you’ve seen them puke, you’ve seen them cry with their nose running. You’ve seen parts of them at close range that only their doctors have looked at. It’s too close. It’s too much.”
“But it seems odd to just erase your past,” I said. “I don’t mean keeping a stalker in your life, but what about that compatible person who has clearly moved on? The reason you were with them in the first place is that you liked being around them and shared at least some common ground. Just cutting someone off strikes me as a little cruel.”
Drew folded his arms. “There are six and a half billion people in the world, which if you ask me is a pretty big pool of potential friends. I think some people are right for you at the time, and then you move on. Ideally, you’re continually growing and changing, and not everybody is doing it alongside of you.”
I shook my head. “I disagree.”
We continued our argument as we walked all over Manhattan for the rest of the afternoon. It was extremely satisfying. Eventually he dropped me off at a subway downtown. “Can you make it to Penn Station on your own?” he said. “I know you’re a suburban girl now.”
“Funny,” I said. “That’s some A material.”
When I got on the subway and sat down, a disheveled man at the other side of the car immediately perked up. His hard brown eyes eagerly sought mine, and as the train started moving he darted over and sat down next to me. “Hey, how are you, good,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”
I didn’t respond.
“I asked you a question,” he said loudly, and I rose to get off the train and change cars. Had I forgotten how to fade into the background? Did he flap over to me because I looked vulnerable? Six weeks out of the city and I had neglected to bring reading material and, worse, was making eye contact with strangers.
As I boarded a New Jersey Transit train, I found that I was eager to get back to the suburbs. “You again,” said the burly, mustachioed conductor who had taken my ticket in the morning. “Did you have a nice day in the city?”
“I did,” I said shyly, biting back the impulse to tell him that I actually lived in the city.
“Well, I’m glad that you had fun, young lady,” he said. I loved that the train conductors still wore hats.
I couldn’t believe how relieved I was to be on the train homeward. How could that be, when the best day of my entire life took place in New York? It was a fall day three years ago that commenced with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum with my friend Jina to see relics from the lost city of Petra excavated from the Jordanian desert. Where else could you take a subway to see an actual lost city? Then we went for lunch at Saks, with a quick stop afterward in the shoe department, where we noticed a group of large men in ill-fitting Big and Tall suits who had crammed their bulky frames into the delicate faux Louis XV chairs grouped around the shoe displays.
“See the earpieces?” Jina said quietly. “Bodyguards. For whom, I wonder? Look sharp.” We were looking discreetly around, elaborately casual, when we nearly bumped into a woman who was studying her sandaled foot in front of a mirror. It was Aretha Franklin—in town, I remembered from my morning paper, to perform at Radio City. Without taking her eyes off the mirror, she said, “What do you think, girls?”
She was wearing baggy knee-high stockings underneath the sandals, which were a vivid peacock blue and glittering with rhinestones.
“Don’t look too closely at my hose,” she said in her rich, rumbling voice.
“They’re great!” we squeaked, trying unsuccessfully to keep it together.
That night, after meeting friends at a bar in Murray Hill, I had decided to walk home to my apartment when I noticed a crowd massing near the Queens Midtown Tunnel. My mouth fell open as a pair of enormous elephants plodded magnificently by, followed by a group of nonplussed zebras. Before the circus opened at Madison Square Garden, the animal handlers walked their charges through the tunnel and across Third Avenue, where I stood. I was so exhilarated that I couldn’t sleep afterward.
How could the suburbs compare to a lost city, a Motown legend in the shoe department, a parade of circus animals on the street? Yet I couldn’t wait to have some of my dad’s pork chops in a cooking bag. And now that I had my black dress, and had reinvigorated my mojo by being in the city, I was ready for the reunion.
chapter eighteen
I sat in my parents’ car at the arrivals area of Newark airport, my stomach percolating with nervous tension. I was waiting for Kimmy, Lynn, and Sandy, who had coordinated their flights so that I could pick them all up at once. We’d booked two rooms at the Hamilton Park Hotel and Conference Center—Kimmy and Lynn in one, Sandy and me in the other—but hadn’t decided whether or not we were going to Friday’s “informal event” at Playmaker’s bar on Route 22. Most people were only attending Saturday night’s shindig.
Did the car smell like the sesame bagel with butter I had just eaten? I hastily rolled down the windows. I checked my hair again in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten my sunglasses, crucial for my insouciant, devil-may-care look. I squinted through the glass windows of Arrivals. Was that a shopping atrium? Maybe I could race into Sunglass Hut. Wasn’t there a Sunglass Hut on every corner of Newark International? I put the car in park. I could probably run in quickly. There was time.
Shoot. There were Lynn and Sandy, laughing as they ran through the double doors, each lugging huge suitcases. Kimmy was walking coolly behind them with a small wheeled cart and a pricey but discreet leather tote in a perfect buttery shade of camel. We all squealed as we hugged. I hadn’t squealed properly in years. “Hi, girls!” I cried, popping the trunk and instinctively taking Kimmy’s bags first.
Lynn was slim as always, her blond hair a neat curtain, her posture correct. She had on expensive jeans, black boots, and a closefitting black blazer, and had put on more makeup than she was obviously used to wearing as a wind-blown riding instructor. Kimmy was tan—a resort tan rather than a salon tan—and had on a creamy white sweater and the sort of menswear-style trousers that looked chic on her and made me look like a security guard. Where were the wrinkles from the plane? Her only jewelry was a pair of simple but hefty diamond studs, just as she had worn in high school. Her parents had allowed her to upgrade them at every graduation: eighth grade, high school, college.
“Hi, honey,” she said casually, as if I lived next door and she had just seen me. I hugged her, enveloping myself in the familiar scent that clung lightly to the entire Marino family: the interior of a new BMW.
Sandy jumped in and grabbed the both of us. “Hiya, Chugs!” she shouted, using my hard-drinking nickname from high school. I had always chafed at that nickname, but begging her to stop only made her use it more.
“Hi, Jugs,” I replied, using a nickname made obsolete after Sandy’s breast reduction. Her reddish brown hair was frizzy from the plane ride, and her freckled face was split into a wide grin. She was wearing black leggings and an enormous red puffer coat to ward off the November chill. She carried a flowered pillow from her bed at home and a faded tote bag that looked vaguely familiar. “Do you recognize this fabric?” she asked, holding it up. “It’s my skirt with the taxicabs all over it! I had it made into a tote bag! I couldn’t give it up.”
I shoved their luggage into the trunk and they piled into the car, Kimmy taking the front seat as she always did.
“I’m starving to death,” Sandy announced from the back.
“Well, then, let’s go to the Nauseous,” I said. Everyone cheered.
“I’m getting the tuna melt,” Sandy announced. “I wonder how it will taste when I’m sober.”
Everyone began to talk at once, the pitch of our voices unconsciously rising the way it had when we were kids. “Lillian!” Lynn hollered over the din. “I brought something that’s going to make you laugh. Do you have a tape player in th
is car?”
“Of course,” I said. “Remember how cheap my father is? I drove this thing in college. It only has 160,000 miles on it. My dad claims that if you replace your oil every three thousand miles and check your transmission, your car will last forever.”
“Then play this,” she said, handing me a cassette. “It’s a tape you made me for my seventeenth birthday. Look at the two sides. One says ‘Before You Go Out,’ and the other says ‘When You Come Home.” See? One is to psych you up, the other is to calm you down after a big night. Now I pretty much just listen to the mellow side, because there is no going out.”
I put it in and a muffled version of the Cure’s “Love Cats” came on. I drove crazily to make the girls laugh. We roared into the parking lot of the Nautilus Diner, aka “the Nauseous,” and walked to the entrance in a tight unit, talking simultaneously. I was nearly overcome with a surge of pure love for the three of them. It was so exhilarating to be enclosed within a posse. In New York I traveled everywhere on my own. Being part of this little group restored in me a long-dormant sense of security. It wasn’t about me anymore; their personalities lifted the weight off of me. When I walked around New York by myself, all eyes relentlessly evaluated me, but when we moved together as a group, the only thing people saw was a group. It was so freeing. No wonder we traveled in a pack as teens.
We had a satisfyingly rowdy lunch. Everyone recklessly ordered fries—Sandy unapologetically adding cheese—and Lynn flirted with the pimply fourteen-year-old waiter. Kimmy insisted on picking up the tab. Then we headed to the hotel to unpack, singing to my mix tape as the years dropped away. I forgot that Sandy and Kimmy had kids, that Lynn was a teacher, that I was, as Vi termed it, a divorcée. We chattered about old boyfriends as if they were still young and single and paunch-free. I had an overwhelming urge to drive straight to the shore with them and guzzle a cheap warm beer from a sand-encrusted can.
