by Choire Sicha
Chad had been paying 650 dollars before, and Diego maybe slightly less. They were looking for one-bedrooms for 1,400 dollars or so, and found one for 1,350. So it worked out, they thought. Though it would take a while to get in. They had to stay at Chad’s parents for two weeks while it all worked out. Chad’s mom had just gotten a promotion at work. She was the only person that Chad knew who’d had any kind of career advancement that year. They were even renovating their bathrooms.
And Chad was getting 500 dollars a month in piecework from John’s company. Chad had made enough money in the spring that he didn’t really have to make much money this summer. Also he’d been drinking less!
The tutoring business was better than ever. When Chad didn’t have other income, he just picked up more clients. The agency was always contacting Chad with more students than he could manage. For spring he’d maybe had five students a week, at 100 dollars per student per week. But this work also kept Chad from reaching out to do better things. It kept him comfortable and fed, and he didn’t spend a lot of money, and he wore the same sweater all the time. Plus Chad had no debt because his school had no student loans. And Diego made like 40,000 dollars a year and had just a little debt, but they also lived really cheaply. Chad had about 15,000 dollars in savings. He spent only 1,500 to 2,000 a month. He was on a “family plan” for his cell phone, but his family never paid for anything else. Back when he’d had a real office job, and made 25,000 dollars a year, well, he thought that in that case, one should be paying 600 dollars a month in rent, not 1,100 dollars.
Chad was becoming Joni Mitchell–friends with Edward. That meant he’d IM with Edward and they’d talk about Joni Mitchell. Also, Edward wanted to talk about John a lot.
Chad’s mom loved John. Chad was talking to her about John shortly after he moved in for his temporary stay. John had come and stayed for a few days too, and then gone back home. They thought John had issues with money that kept him from improving his life. They thought there could be little sacrifices he could make. But it was so much all tied in with his family and feeling very bad about money. He actually hated money, they thought. He wanted it to leave him as soon as it possibly could. Chad thought John saw the very idea of money as being all wrapped up in the death of his father. But Chad’s mom said that she thought that John just believed that he didn’t deserve any security.
It was unthinkable to Chad that John had never been in therapy, which was a process of recalibration during which you talked with someone to discover things about yourself. And Chad thought John still blamed himself for his father’s death. And he thought John was happy in some ways but not in others, and that father surrogates would always be disappointing to him. Father surrogates actually couldn’t be there for you, not in a meaningful way. If they were your boss, for instance, they would leave at the end of the day.
While John was there with Chad’s parents, John had finally told Chad the whole story straight out. John believed that if something happened, you just had to move on. Not dealing with finances was a way of putting off dealing with all of these things. It was a way of putting off adulthood. Being an adult might be stressful, but so was being a child, and being childlike. That anxiety, and its constant presence, was what kept John on the run. Thomas quitting meant more than he could say. It confirmed his sense that people would always abandon you.
They talked about having sex without condoms—and Chad had done this too, in the past—but Chad would plead with John: Please don’t do that again. He couldn’t bear the idea of something so bad, and so unnecessary, happening to John. Chad worried about John all the time but also he tried not to.
THE STRETCH OF living with Chad’s parents dragged on all through hot August. The apartment wasn’t ready. His parents lived way, way out, and he would take the train to the end of the line, out past the airport, and then they’d come and pick him up. One night it was about ten and there were about six people in the train car. He was sitting on a bank of four chairs, and his calf was up touching another chair, his whole leg extended. And the train stopped at an aboveground station and he heard some voice. It said, “Get off the train.” And this big guy in street clothes came over and held up a badge. “Get off the train,” he said, holding the doors open. This was in the first car, so he looked at the conductor, and the conductor said, yeah, it’s okay.
“How many seats did you pay for?” the man asked.
Chad thought about it. Trick question, he thought. I paid for a ride, not a seat.
“You had your foot on a seat,” the man said.
There were many rules for the use of “public” transit, which was not really public; it was a corporation controlled by people proposed by the state and by the Mayor. It was, however, more “public” than it once was; three competing subway systems were consolidated, some sixty years previous, when the two of the systems that were “for-profit” corporations filed for bankruptcy. The City then owned all the subways, and the transit corporation paid the City for their use.
The rules included that no person could engage in any “commercial activity”; no person could take part in any “nontransit uses” of the transit system, including “artistic performances”; there would be no consumption of liquids at all in any “open container”; one might not light a match; one should not gamble; one could not use the trains when one was “impaired” by alcohol or drugs, though what one was supposed to do in that case was unclear; one was forbidden from causing “annoyance, alarm or inconvenience”; one could not place one’s foot on any seat; one was not allowed to recline; one could not block escalators or stairways or platforms; and one must not “occupy more than one seat . . . when to do so would interfere or tend to interfere with the operation of the Authority’s transit system or the comfort of other passengers.”
He gave Chad a fifty-dollar ticket for having his foot on a seat.
Oh, you should absolutely fight it, his friends told him.
EDWARD BROKE UP with his boyfriend, just like that. Perhaps this was something his boyfriend could have seen coming, what with Edward living in the Capital with his parents so much of the time.
Perhaps not. People are surprising, and easily surprised, and also people have always been willfully blind.
Except now Edward was spending more time in town. He would send an email to John that would say, hi, I’m coming up, can I see you? And John would have this ambivalent rush of feelings and in the end? Well. He would.
So Edward and John were talking, at a party, and John had also invited this guy he used to have a crush on too, in a fit of craziness. Originally he was going to invite Tyler Flowers as well. He wanted them all there; he wanted something to happen, to break. Why did he do this, his friends asked, why did he always pile all these people together? “I don’t know why!” he said. He did it in part to take Edward at his word. Weren’t they not together?
Inevitably John got drunk and mixed up their names.
But then Edward and Jason and John went to take the train home. Edward was going to stay at Jason’s, they were pretending. Of course he wasn’t. John fell asleep in the subway station with his head in Edward’s lap. Some guys walked by and said, “Oh, that looks nice, I wish I could do that,” but in a totally hostile, sneering way.
John slept right through it. Then he woke up in time to go home with Edward.
FINALLY IT WAS time for Fred to leave the City. So he had a going-away party.
Edward came in and found John at the bar. This was down in a little neighborhood, not far from the patiently waiting waterfront, clustered under some bridges. Inside it was huge and brown and an absorbing kind of loud, and it was unclear where the party stopped and started; the party itself was a meandering throng of pressed people.
“What do you think is the cheapest beer here? Will you order it for me?” Edward asked.
“I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that,” John said, quite seriously.
Jason was behind them. He’d just taken a vacation with his ex-lover. That was probably a bad idea. “It was okaaaayyy,” he told people, when they asked. He was talking to a glittery-eyed guy, who was very tall and had very intense hair and a big, impressive nose. This guy knew Fred because they’d slept together once, not happily.
“Did you use a C?” this guy asked Jason, aggressive but teasing.
“A connie?” Jason said. He meant a condom.
“Did you come inside him?” the guy asked.
John and Edward went out to smoke and talked about the writer Iris Murdoch. When the glittery guy came out too, John tap-punched him in the stomach. “Those are my abs,” the guy said, absently.
It was sticky, and up and to the right was the black looming metal mass of a bridge, so dark and heavy it made all the streets look gray-yellow instead of dark. Cabs and partiers passed on by. It was like being in a secret tiny village hidden inside a big stage set.
“Where does Eleanor Clift live?” Jason asked.
“I’m sure she lives in Chevy,” Edward said.
“I never knew she was the sister-in-law of Montgomery Clift!” John said. “I wrote it on my Twitter. This Truman Capote essay I was reading on the train? It was a profile of Elizabeth Taylor, written for Ladies’ Home Journal in 1967.” These were the names of rich people who were all dead.
“Oh my God, link?” Jason said.
“But!” John said. “There’s this incredible scene, of course it’s like just typical Truman Capote, name-dropping left and right. He’s like, so one time we’re talking about our mutual friend Montgomery Clift, and he’s like, we went to the Gucci store together because Montgomery was depressed, he was like, I’ll buy you lunch and I can get you a sweater. So then we went to the Gucci store and he picked out twenty sweaters, and he went outside and threw them in the street and started dancing around them. I kid you not. And the people at Gucci were really good about it. They were like, ‘So who are we charging those sweaters to?’ and Truman’s like, ‘Well, I can’t afford this!’ And he’s like, ‘Montgomery, we need a credit card.’ And he’s like, ‘This! Face! Is the credit card!’ ”
“Do you think that might work for me?” Edward said.
“Maaaaybe,” Jason said.
“I have no credit cards though. I have my dad’s,” Edward said.
“It would have been better if he’d charged it to Liz. She’s good for it,” Jason said.
“That was bananas,” John said. “Bye, are you leaving?” A guy had left the bar.
“A friend of ours is flying in from Paris,” the guy said, “only for the night. May I please bum a light as well?”
They talked about a party the guy was planning, and how chaotic the City could get.
“This is why I’m moving way out here,” the guy said. “I live on Thompson Street.”
“Oh boy,” John said. That street could be loud.
“So if anyone knows a place opening up . . . ,” the guy said.
“You’ll be the first to know, I promise,” John said with a little too much insincere heartiness.
Things were “booming real estate–wise before September and now—” the guy said.
“And now it’s September,” John said. “You know what the new theory is about Williamsburg?”
“The new theory?” the guy said.
“That it’s settling into middle age. Like people are now moving there—like Trixie and Finn moving there?”
Trixie was John’s immediate boss these days, now that Timothy was the overall boss. She was about six years older than him. She and her husband, Finn, were, for now, childless but they did own a cat.
“It’s Park Sloping,” said someone.
“Exactly,” John said. “People are moving from Fort Greene, the nice areas, to Williamsburg now.”
“I really like Boerum Hill,” the guy said.
“Well, they’re all leaving,” John said. “Boerum Hill is the new Williamsburg.”
“I’m always ahead of the curve,” Jason said.
“I’ll regentrify Boerum Hill,” the guy said. “I’ll open a little coffee shop. Well, thanks for the cigarette.”
“Alright, guy,” John said. “I’ll see you Saturday.”
“Barbecue. Saturday,” the guy said.
He left.
“Oh my God, we just had to talk to Crazy Eyes!” John said.
“He’s going to regentrify Brooklyn! Those eyes!” Jason said.
“Oh, he’s Crazy Eyes,” John said. “It’s unbelievable. He’s the one who was critical of my semi-western tennis grip. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m experimenting with this semi-western tennis grip.’ And he was like, ‘You don’t use that already?’ He was like, ‘I’ve been using that for years.’ ”
Then they talked about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding for a while.
“Why do I feel this way?” John said. “I can’t move.”
Later they ended up at Metropolitan, at the bar. Eventually John decided that he was really tired. I have to go home, he said. Jason went to go get his bag, and while he was gone, Edward asked, can I come over? We don’t have to, like, do anything, but I’d really like to spend the night with you.
ALL AROUND THE City were signs for the upcoming election. The press was on, and the Mayor was trying to solicit good feelings after making so many people so mad. And everyone expected him to win by a huge margin, so while there was much grumbling, no one minded too much, really, except a little, but also they weren’t sure they had any better alternatives. He had a chief competitor who seemed invisible, who seemed pale and unvivid in comparison to the Mayor. No one really felt like he was a character in the story of the City. The challenger just couldn’t make himself felt.
The Mayor’s third run was a keenly played attack on human nature. The Mayor knew full well that people, who almost always like what they are accustomed to, tended heavily to vote for the candidate already in office. The Mayor had found a way to do something that many people did not want and then, as an encore, to suggest that the people were welcome to reject him if they wished—even while he was spending millions of dollars, just an immense amount of money, in advertising. Advertising was supposed to eat away at any resistance that people felt, and the more times someone saw an ad, supposedly, the more people regarded the product advertised as something they couldn’t live without.
SOME OF JOHN’S family had been training for the annual end-of-summer get-together all year. They stayed at a hotel called the Beachcomber. It was super trashy, but also it was right across the highway from the ocean. This beach was as far east as you could go away from the City. The pinnacle of the weekend—for some, at least—was the tennis tournament. John had maybe played only three times all summer. Before he hit the court, he had a few cigarettes and a big glass of gin. He was literally swinging the racket as hard as he could, grunting like a hog.
At the reunio
n, it was John and his two brothers, his cousins—including his roommate—and his young nephews, Jesse and Julian. All of them had been born in mid-October. Also there was his sister-in-law, Shawn.
Jesse was six years old. John had brought him this book that had been sent to his office. It was called The Pop-up Book of Sports.
“Hey, Jesse,” John said.
“Hi,” Jesse said.
“Jesse, I have a present for you,” John said.
“Can I have it now?” Jesse asked.
“No, you have to wait for it later, but aren’t you excited?” John said.
“How can you afford it?” Jesse said. “You don’t have any money.”
“Where did you hear that?” John said.
“From Jake and Shawn,” Jesse said. He called his parents by their first names.
John went over to Jake and Shawn.
“Oh, he’s just been saying that about everyone these days!” Shawn said.
Shawn was a character. She was actually one of the three hundred thousand or so people who worked for the City. One day she was wearing a T-shirt that said “I [heart] the City” at work. And this was a time when there was a new shirt, one that said “I [heart] the City more than ever,” part of a campaign of improving civic pride. Why aren’t you wearing “that” shirt? someone at work asked her. Don’t you know? Well, as a matter of fact, Shawn said, I don’t heart the City more than ever now.
