by Lucas Mann
Josh reenters his monologue, undeterred. “If there’s any time you shouldn’t be eating junk, it’s the fucking morning. It sets a bad precedent. Your day is ruined. Right now, you are actively ruining your day.”
She nods. He continues.
“Your hair’s all dirty, you could fit five people in that shirt, you’re drinking a Coke at eight in the morning. And then the Twinkie. Like a fucking hobo.”
Does he realize that she baits these moments for him?
“Seriously, tell me what you’d think of yourself if you saw you on the street.”
He speaks loud enough for any stranger around to hear, and fellow commuters grin at the back-and-forth as they shuffle to the tram. Young people caring, what a thing to look at. She feels the rain angling in, wetting the bottom of her jeans. She sees him notice this, mid-rant, and pull closer, wrapping them tighter under his trench coat, dry.
—
At the bus stop, she paints his face. She moves slowly, as tender as she can, trying to get his every detail right. It smells like piss in the bus stop, but Lena breathes through her mouth and concentrates. They’re never closer than this. He has relinquished control. His eyes are closed for her. She watches their involuntary flutters as she rakes mascara along his lashes, and thinks of how thin a layer it is that keeps our eyeballs from anything that might hurt them. His lashes are long and cresting. You could be a pretty girl, she thinks, though she would never tell him.
He is ashamed of his acne, which really isn’t that bad. He is ashamed, too, Lena thinks, of his need to cover it up, his inability to tolerate flaws that are so common. It would be impossible for him to allow the general public to see a pimple. But he’s no good at the makeup and so he trusts Lena, only Lena, to do this. She feels her hands tremble still, always, as she decorates him, hiding the ritual as best she can with her narrow body.
With practiced, careful hands, she runs concealer in generous swaths across his face. She paints his eyelids, tries to contrast that blackness with a nice, subtle rouge on his cheeks.
“Almost done,” she says.
He opens his eyes, and right away they’re moving in darts, finding strangers that might be looking at him in judgment.
“Nobody’s looking,” she tells him. “Hold still.”
She finishes and he turns away from her.
He doesn’t say thank you. He never does. He reaches for his hair, sculpting it with the rainwater, making it match his clothes, his body, his face. When he turns back, Lena gives him a thumbs-up and he snorts, and she wonders if there is any lamer gesture in the pantheon of human gestures than a thumbs-up.
On the bus, dancer girls look at Josh, and middle-aged women, and businessmen, too, feigning casual scorn when Lena knows that they feel envy, maybe lust. He is happy, undeniably, for these moments. She likes thinking that she has helped make him happy. He relaxes a little into his seat. He takes his headphones off and surprises her by placing them gently over her ears. He leans in and says, “I love this song more than anything. Listen.”
She thinks it’s the most haunting song she’s ever heard. It’s Roxy Music’s “More Than This.” It’s slow and mournful, and they’re both high school art students who believe that all mournful things are genius, have consequence. More than this, the singer tells her, you know there’s nothing more than this. And it doesn’t feel overblown to think, Hey, yeah, he’s right.
“I love it,” she tells Josh.
He grins and takes his headphones back.
When they get to school, he messes her already messed hair with his fingers and walks through the front door ahead of her, doesn’t turn around. She finds her people, underclass wind instrumentalists—shy trombonists, overcompensating piccolo masters. She stands with them, clumped against a remote section of lockers. Josh, armored in her makeup job, strides through the hallways, greeting, getting greeted. He stops at no group, offers nothing more to anyone than a quick grin, a few words or maybe a two-fingered salute. Lena watches him greet Youngblood Haskell, the prettiest and broodingest of the school’s pretty, brooding skinhead painters. The hallway seems to part for them as Josh leans into Youngblood, says something funny enough to make this boy with so much invested in his own seriousness laugh.
Lena wants very badly to someday speak to Youngblood Haskell and is very certain that she never will. Josh won’t introduce them. She won’t exist, not in any visible way. But she’s included by association, and she’s proud as she watches Josh, swaggering and fragile, earning laughter. How terrifying it must feel for him in the second before he gets a response, how blissful when the laughter comes.
Lena will never tell anybody about those mornings when his teeth are unbrushed, his eyes red and darting. She won’t tell about the flecks of Cheerios stuck on his gums, the smell coming off him when he’s been thrashing in a panicked lather all night and hasn’t bothered to wash. She won’t tell how she breathes through her mouth to tolerate closeness, refusing to slide farther away in her seat because of how awful it would feel to shame him like that when he is already so shamed. How they can be silent together on the walk, then the tram, then the bus, and she won’t push him to talk because to open his mouth might reveal something grotesquely weak, something that he can’t take back. Those moments are hers.
Homeroom bell rings. He is gone. She will see him tomorrow.
—
It’s over too quickly. The last journeys of Josh’s high school tenure are tied to that feeling, an internal countdown for Lena. How many times have they done the same thing, developing toward nothing but an end?
“At least three hundred times,” she tells him on the bus. “We’ve gone to school together exactly the same way at least three hundred times. And now it’s just going to stop.”
This is a sad thing. She wants him to confirm it. He won’t. He starts poking her cushionless ribs. Look, look, look. She slaps his hand away. C’mon, he says. He puts his arm in her face and flexes.
He wants her to touch his biceps. He’s been doing something different with his weight routine. More reps or more weight, one or the other. It doesn’t make complete sense to her, but it means that he’s no longer defining muscle and is instead adding bulk. For college women. Because older women like bulk. He flexes harder, reddening from all the flexing. Touch it. People are watching. Touch it. She relents. She pokes his biceps. It doesn’t move. It’s like overcooked steak, she thinks.
“Feel that?”
“What am I supposed to be feeling?”
“Come on.”
She sighs and says—God, she can’t even believe it as she says it—“It’s big,” and he gives a full trapezoid smile, head swiveling around the bus looking for eye contact, confirming for all commuters that, yes, she touched it and, yes, it’s big. He throws his fists up over his head, simulates a crowd roar in the back of his throat.
They won’t see each other again once there isn’t a scheduled reason to. She knows that, and she is even a little proud of her lack of delusion. There won’t be a place for this anymore. Oddly, Lena feels less like she’s being abandoned and more like she is abandoning him. Who will armor him for a day of other people’s eyes when he’s in a freshman lecture or a crowded dorm room and she isn’t there to help? How can she let him do his own costuming?
Lena, touch it again. Come on, Lena. Lena, do it, come on.
This time she tries two fingers, jabs her middle and index hard into his biceps, determined to make skin dent. She feels her face scrunching up with the effort. She is not this girl by nature. She will never be this girl again. She wants to ask him what they’ll do when he’s on college break. She has vague ideas of taking the tram over the river on Christmas Eve, lights on the water below them, Empire State Building in front of them, red and green. But that’s not the kind of thing they do.
She wants to ask if he’ll be okay, but she wouldn’t be able to get more specific.
“We’ll still see each other,” she says instead, stuck between an asse
rtion and a question. He says nothing in response. He cares. She knows he does, even if he doesn’t want her to. Care is in every movement he makes, in the way his eyes glance at her, then away, then back again. Still, she’d have loved it if he said something.
—
She hears his voice once more after high school, through a phone. It’s six, maybe seven years since the bus and the makeup and the muscles. Lena is out of college, working her first real job, occupying one half of a cubicle, an assistant at a publishing company on Madison Avenue. She’s just a mile or so from the auditorium where they both had their graduations, Josh first, Lena watching in the back with her flutist friends. That was the last time she saw him. She has thought of him, yes. She tried to explain him once to her college roommate, stoned—We never even kissed.
Her desk phone rings and she jumps. It’s still a surprise when a stranger in another office somewhere is directed intentionally to her. She lets it ring three times and then picks up.
“Hi, this is Josh from Pinnacle Paper,” says the person on the other end of the line.
His voice is the same. She doesn’t need a last name to be sure. She can’t speak, and she hears her breath, loud, crackling through the line.
“Hello?” A sigh.
There is no indication that he’s called for her specifically, no excitement in his voice. This is a price-per-volume call, a pitch. His job is worse than hers, lower, more mundane. She realizes that. It stings. She imagines him at a desk in a warehouse, cold-calling from a fat binder, trying to convince bored publishing underlings to tell their bosses to turn his blank reams into units of someone else’s art.
She feels her palm sticking to plastic.
“Oh, oh hi, it’s me,” she says, finally. “It’s Lena.”
“Oh,” he says.
She’d heard from Roosevelt Island friends that he had a band, that they’d gotten a few gigs. This made sense and she was happy for him. Then she heard it was over. She’d heard he was starting to write songs, had his own production company. It was vague, but she liked the idea of him bellowing orders, imagined him with a movie director’s megaphone. She hadn’t heard anything else.
She forces herself to speak before he hangs up, her voice too big and eager, trying to fill awkward emptiness with overwhelming cheer.
“How are you? Oh my God, small world! Paper, huh?”
His embarrassment leaks through the phone. She can picture something shivering in his eyes, his face fifteen again in her mind, and nobody next to him at his desk to help him by staying close. She wants to stop and start the conversation over, remove the crazed squeal from her voice. There has to be an unpatronizing way to say, I care for you. You are better than where you are now. I believe that.
He starts talking about paper prices. He says that he can offer her boss a better deal than anything he’s currently got. He promises that.
Lena looks down at herself—the khakis, the white blouse with a cluster of unnecessary buttons up around her neck. Payless work shoes, sensible chic. Yes, she feels ridiculous, and no, she’s not exactly happy. But still, fine, it’s to be expected. This is a quiet beginning to a settled life that is, and has always been, appropriate for her. It doesn’t bother her that much to think about it. He’s the one who isn’t meant to be in this conversation, but he keeps going, flat and almost mean with his persistence.
Lena stays silent through Josh’s pitch, and when he’s done she offers no counter. It would have been good, hardball negotiating if it were intentional.
“Well then, look, if there’s no wiggle room, I’ve got to go,” he says.
She wants time to think of something to say.
“If you’re happy with your supplier, that’s fine,” he says. “Keep us in mind.”
She hears the phone click on his end, and she is returned to her high school self, the sound of a hang-up enough to make her limbs heavy. She holds the receiver to her ear until she hears a dial tone. She thinks of him on the bus. She thinks of the two of them, surrounded and alone. She tells herself that she will see him again. It’s just a matter of waiting until he wants to be seen. Seeing him on his terms. The two of them on the bus in the morning, older, happier, too, but him still flexing, her still poking his arm to make him smile.
—
“You look like him,” Lena tells me. “The way your hair falls on your face a little.”
We’re sitting across from each other at a scratched wooden table. Her irises move in small, concentrated circles as she takes in my face. I imagine that, in her mind, a vintage city bus sprouts around us, closing us in, a seamless set change to the New York of her high school memories. But we’re in Park Slope, and nothing moves backward in this sleepy paradise of cafés and real estate offices and swarms of children who can correctly identify cilantro at the market when their parents want to show off.
Lena’s twin daughters are probably out of their bath by now, their father wrapping them in yellow towels and drying their hair. She keeps apologizing that she will have to leave for home sooner than she wants to because she doesn’t like the girls falling asleep before she lies next to them for a few minutes, so that they can feel her. She likes to stay for that moment when their faces change as they begin to dream.
Our hands almost touch as Lena reaches out her wallet to show me photos of the girls, sitting with their heads cocked in opposite directions, wearing matching checkered dresses, little tablecloths with eyes. She snatches her fingers back, thin, elegant fingers, flutist fingers. I picture their narrow tips on Josh’s arm in the same spot that my own fingers would touch a few years later but with less grace. I imagine her teenage head like my child’s head, tilting up at him.
The bar we’re in is beginning to fill with thirtysomethings. Faded sleeve tattoos snake down bare arms, stop above sensible leather-band watches and wedding rings. Scarves are stuck into the armholes of peacoats before they’re hung on iron hooks. First dates begin with quick hellos and mangled cheek-kisses. “Tainted Love” begins to play, not the original, soulful version, but the cover that epitomizes every stereotype I have of a bouncy, metallic eighties adolescence. Faces lift. Lena smiles down at her hands. I watch her fingers tap on the table.
“Hey, that Roxy Music song I was talking about, do you know it?” she says.
“Yeah, of course,” I say.
She straightens up and smiles. “He must have played it for you. When you were a kid? Did he? He loved that song.”
“Oh. No. It was in that Bill Murray movie a few years ago. What’s it called? He sings it drunk at karaoke. The soundtrack was really popular when I graduated from high school.”
She sags and I wish that I’d lied. Josh is so deeply past tense that a song he loved new has reseeped into popular culture as something for a faded star to sing as he attempts to reignite. I watch her realize that. As a sort of penance, I tell her the story about me on Josh’s lap in the home movie, when he pieced together “Let It Be” on the piano.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she says. “What a nice thing to remember.”
“He taught himself to play the piano,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “Isn’t that amazing? To have an ear like that?”
She thought of him today, she tells me. She dropped her girls off at school and she waited for the bus home alone. It was cold rain all morning and she’d forgotten an umbrella. She felt her hair, stringy, nearly frozen, sticking to her face and her neck. And then he was next to her, telling her she’d never looked worse, like seriously never ever, until she laughed, and then he put his headphones over her ears and watched her listen to his song. When she thinks of him, there is always music and she is always laughing.
“I was thinking about him for a while,” she says, “and then something went off in my head like, hey, he overdosed. That’s so strange. Sad, too, but more just weird. He had so much willpower. He was so healthy. When I was a teenager, all anybody around me felt was apathy, and he had so much conviction. If anybody didn
’t need drugs to feel things, it was him. You know what I mean? He was so much on his own.”
She acts out much. She balls her flutist hands into narrow fists, presses them on the table. I nod my head at her, eager, agreeing with the feeling of the word as she uses it, a feeling that I know I remember. It’s not just sad that the gentle Adonis she knew became a junkie; it’s a surprise narrative. A fluke. It doesn’t make any fucking sense. And the senselessness is kind of absolving.
Those people who shit themselves when they nod off on the subway, they are not him. The scabby punks who live on benches in Tompkins Square Park with arms that have turned to leather, who told me dope stories in exchange for pizza, they are nothing like him. That is what we’re agreeing upon. I feel momentarily certain. But then. But then those scabby punks went to high school once. Even if they dropped out, there was at least a year when they sat on the bus and somebody probably sat next to them who found something much in them, indulged in fantasies of their lives that involved a different future. Everyone at this bar knew someone like that. And as the microbrews flow, if I went around and prodded each stranger, they’d find slurry details to remember, muscles and drumsticks, geometrical smiles with ominous unbrushed teeth.
It’s the commonness that’s most wrenching. Lena fights the commonness with care. Lena takes the common moments and breathes into them until they inflate.
“He deserved so much better,” she says, spreads her palms on the table, flat and certain. “If there was anyone who deserved…”
She coughs needlessly. There is toast slathered in locally sourced goat cheese between us, meant to be shared, which she hasn’t touched.
