by Blair Hurley
The friends, as Nicole had expected, were familiar to her. She sat lightly at the edge of a booth, ready to flee, as they introduced themselves: youngish, dressed in nervous black or army surplus, explaining to her a variety of ordinary jobs (receptionist, Web designer, something in advertising) while qualifying them with a “but” and an explanation of what they really were, which was poets, artists, filmmakers. The fledgling novels or drying canvases hovered in the wings of their every conversation. They were proud and detached, funny and bored with themselves, with each other. Their political beliefs were declared in pin form on their bags. When one of them arrived straight from work, still in tie and shirtsleeves, he was razzed heavily. The women were easy with their body language, tugging on his tie, ruffling his too-gelled hair, draping their arms around each other to make space on the hard pewlike benches at their long table.
They pounced on her as a new source of life. “If you’re a Buddhist, doesn’t that mean you’re a nihilist?” one of them asked.
“I’m kind of a Buddhist, too,” said the poet. “I went on a meditation retreat once. It was insane. By the end I started hallucinating and having all these crazy sex dreams.” He nodded, widening his eyes. “Crazy, tantric shit.”
“Going on a retreat doesn’t mean you’re a Buddhist,” said Jocelyn. “This girl’s legit. She converted and everything.” She pushed a beer at her, smiling encouragingly.
“I bet Mommy and Daddy weren’t happy about that,” said the artist.
“Crazy Kama sutra stuff.” The poet forged determinedly ahead. “Doing it with cows. Somebody there was an expert at tantric sex. He said you haven’t screwed until you’ve screwed in a state of higher awareness. Do you do that Tantra stuff?”
“Is that a pickup line?” asked Nicole, which got a laugh around the table. She flushed but held her gaze steady. The questions continued.
“Do you convert to Buddhism? What’s the ceremony like?”
Nicole aimed for the question that was easiest to answer. “It’s very simple. You take refuge in the Three Jewels.”
“The Three Jewels?”
“The Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha.” She did not translate the words. She let them all stare at her.
“So you must have seen the Dalai Lama talk. He was in New York a few years ago.”
“I heard he was sold out from day one, as soon as the tickets went on sale.”
“Actually, I’m a Zen Buddhist. He’s a Tibetan Buddhist,” she tried to say, but the conversation moved away from her, which was a relief. Jocelyn heard her, though. She had an amused, thoughtful light to her eyes. “You must get this a lot,” she said.
The party kept changing shape, gaining and losing heads, always shifting. More people joined them at the bar and others left, then all of them headed to another bar, louder and brighter, with black lights and shot glasses lined up on every table. From there they all ended up in someone’s apartment in the Village, a tiny one-bedroom dense with Turkish rugs on the walls and floor. Jocelyn, laughing and asking questions, looking deeply into all of their eyes, was easy to become attached to. The others followed her from room to room, or tugged her arm insistently like children until she moved to a different group to talk. They wanted to know what she thought of everything, and she obliged them, warmly, lazily.
She and Jocelyn took the train to Brooklyn over the river, looking back to the skyline, which was not as bright as Nicole had expected. It was dark and enormous. At the top of one building she saw a plane signal light blinking blue, and its pair in the water, blue-black-blue. “This is the bad bridge,” said Jocelyn, when they had been quiet for a while. “Bad memories. I once almost jumped off this bridge.”
She thought the woman must be drunk, speaking so freely. But Jocelyn’s eyes were bright and steady; she spoke easily, unafraid of the consequences. Nicole wondered if this was the sort of thing New York people shared; or if saying it casually diminished its power; or if there was something particular about herself, some whiff of empathy about her that made her safe.
She turned her face away, worked her bag nervously with her hands. The scales were too heavily weighted in one direction. She groped for some matching intimacy to even them, but there was nothing she had the courage to say.
They found another apartment with a party going on; Nicole drank another beer. She was not in Boston, not pushing and squabbling among the young girls of the Zendo. She was not her old self, not anyone else yet. These were the people her teenage friends might have become, or hoped to. For the first time in years she wondered what Holly and Colin were up to now, if they had vaulted easily into their next lives. And Eddie? Had he finally gotten where he wanted to go? And herself? If things had gone differently, would she have become this person of effortless cool, leaning on the balcony of an apartment in Park Slope, free to dream herself into whatever shape she chose? She watched Jocelyn do her slow-shuffling white-girl dance to a song on the radio, hands over her head, laughing beautifully.
Well, ten-year detour notwithstanding, she was here now. She gripped her bottle, tipping it back into her throat.
Presently she found herself talking to a friend of Jocelyn’s named Elliot, a man with high, thin eyebrows and an artful, appraising stare. He pressed himself close to her in the crowded apartment, touching the icy neck of his beer to her wrist to get her attention. “I’ve dabbled in that a little too, you know,” said Elliot. “Bikram yoga. That sort of thing.”
That sort of comment always pissed her off. “What else have you dabbled in? Judaism, say? Did you try out getting circumcised for a while and then decide it wasn’t for you?”
“Whoa, whoa.” He held up his hands in the ‘don’t shoot me’ pose, one finger and thumb still clutching the neck of his beer. “I getcha, I getcha. Fuck the tourists, right?”
“That’s right.” She turned away; she was ready for the conversation to be over. Here was her new, angry self. It was exhilarating to slip away without another word, not an apology, not an ingratiating smile.
He liked that, though. He followed her out to the narrow balcony, came up behind her and clinked her beer with his own. “Hey, you didn’t give me a chance to apologize.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Look at you,” he said, mugging at her. “She be badass.”
She tried to focus on the skyline, a crowded network of lights, jumbled buildings—internal, unknown Brooklyn. “Maybe.” Somehow the exchange had gone from galling to fun. This was how confident men won you over, softened you up. He leaned on the railing beside her and told her a long story about the cereal café in Fort Greene that also sold designer sneakers, displayed under museum glass beside the Froot Loops. Millennial nostalgia and New York fashion all within one storefront. He said, Now you can have whatever you had as a kid twenty years ago. So Lite-Brites and fanny packs and those bracelets you slapped onto your wrists were back in. He displayed the shoes he’d gotten there: electric-green Air Jordans. He’d picked them out with Jocelyn and her husband.
“Wait, Jocelyn is married?” Nicole interrupted.
“Well, yeah,” said Elliot. “Totally, a hundred percent. And he’s this straitlaced, nine-to-five guy. A doctor.” He made a face. “If I had to go to school as long as doctors do, I’d kill myself.” It was the third such threat she’d heard that night.
The anecdote he was telling had lots of ins and outs, names she didn’t know, places in the city she’d never heard of. But all of them were accompanied with the confident assertion that soon she would know them, soon she would have her own stories to tell about that laundromat, that overpass, that pizza place with its grizzled, toothless third-generation cook sliding peels into a brick oven. The story implied that it would have no end, that it would continue. Familiar buildings and parties and stories. And if she couldn’t grab hold, couldn’t add her own laugh line, she’d fail to belong. She listened hard, trying to catch the thread.
They moved to the crowded kitchen, and Elliot opened the fri
dge. “Another?” He came up, handed her a beer. “So what about you? Conversion. What was that like?” Before she could answer, he went on: “It must be—something really intense. You don’t hear people talk about the moment, the actual moment. Except for the assholes who want to tell you all about accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. You can’t get them to shut up.”
“It’s a private experience,” she said finally.
“Like coming out or something.”
“Maybe.”
“You say, ‘Dad, I’m a Buddhist,’ and he says, ‘I didn’t raise no Buddhist kid’ and gets out his belt.”
Her father had handled it as he handled all things: with a heartbreaking, Olympic attempt to pretend nothing had changed. “God, no.”
“I guess you’re not going to tell me.”
“No.” She wasn’t going to tell this smug stranger. There was too much at stake. And there was the Communion on the Common, and priests and dead cats. All of Boston was wrapped up in her conversion. If she tried to tell, he might laugh.
“It’s as secret as the moment you fall in love,” said Elliot.
“Yes.”
It was loud in the kitchen, and they couldn’t hear well. “Come on,” he said. He led her down a tiny hallway into the bedroom and they sat on the bed, drinking thirstily. In the bathroom, girls’ voices rose high in laughter. “Doing a line, probably,” said Elliot. “It’s hot, actually, what you do. I couldn’t do it. It takes dedication. It takes belief. I am unable to believe in anything.” In the next room over, the wall began to thump rhythmically. It had become that kind of party.
“Want to have some fun?” Elliot asked. He put his arm around her, moving in slow. She thought fleetingly of Sean—but they were taking a break now, weren’t they? Wasn’t this the blank slate?—then kissed Elliot firmly. He reached a hand into her blouse, icy from the beer.
The door opened. “There you are,” said Jocelyn. “Elliot, enough snogging. You can see her later.” She held out her hand. Nicole rose quickly to it, surprised by her own relief.
“Hold on there, Joss,” said Elliot. “Cock-block much?”
Jocelyn smiled; Nicole wondered if it was possible to offend her. “Maybe next time, Romeo. I’m going home, and I’m not leaving Nicole among such ill-intentioned strangers.”
“I get it, I get it. Girl solidarity.”
They walked back to Jocelyn’s building, laughing and slow. On the threshold of her apartment, Jocelyn turned and put a finger to her lips; they tiptoed into a dark living room, and Jocelyn threw on the lights. “My husband’s probably asleep.”
“You didn’t seem like you were married.” Nicole swayed into Jocelyn’s shoulder, just drunk enough to think her honesty was what everyone wanted. The cluttered mismatch of hipster relics she had expected was not here; the apartment was clean and modern, with wall-to-wall bookshelves and a rocking chair with a seahorse blanket draped on it.
Jocelyn just laughed. “People will surprise you.” A sound came from another room, and Jocelyn left, then padded back with a baby on her hip, bumping it gently up and down. Nicole picked up a silver rattle—Tiffany?—and put it back down. “You are surprising.”
Jocelyn raised a finger to her lips. “Ssh. Don’t wake my husband—he flies to Stockholm tomorrow.” She rocked slowly, patting the baby. She said quietly, “You’re surprising, too. Sorry they all swarmed on you. Being a real Buddhist has some cachet.”
“That’s all right. Even Buddhists think they’re pretty cool.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Buddhists are cool. To be a Buddhist, all you have to do is look at the people you love and say, Bye. You have to say, Whatever you thought was permanent or lasting will fade. The universe will die. The lights will go out. So don’t get too attached to things, because they’re not going to last. You have to have an existential crisis to be any good at it.”
“So does that make you cool? Did you convert to be cool?”
“Me? No. Never was cool, never will be cool.” She could hear the teenage girls in her class, the pretty ones: fucking weirdo.
“How did you end up here? How do you live this life?” Nicole waved her hand, took in the tasteful apartment, the view of Manhattan, the baby nestled so naturally, already asleep. Landscape paintings on the walls, coffee cups lined like soldiers on the shelf.
Jocelyn studied her thoughtfully. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah. I do.”
Jocelyn stared at the baby in her arms. “I shouldn’t be here. I grew up in Wisconsin, and my dad left us when I was a kid. As soon as I was old enough to drive, I came to New York. You name it, I did it. I had a lot of fun, too. Most of it was fun. Wake up on the floor of some underground club, don’t know what you did the night before, but it doesn’t matter. How can anything hurt you if you’re open to everything, if your only answer to every question is yes? I was perfect. Free and unattached.
“Of course, that only lasts so long. And you start to see the people you know crashing. The people you met tonight, they’re the survivors, the ones who pulled their shit together and made it out. There were plenty of people from my twenties that I can’t find now. Went homeless or went home. Some OD’d. I was usually the one who’d be sitting in the waiting room after bringing in some friend because I could look pretty sober and not get in too much trouble myself. There was this night-shift ER doctor at Deaconess that I’d see. He’d come out and ask if I was a relative and I’d say no, just a friend. And his eyes were always very sad, and together we’d figure out next of kin. We’d go through my friend’s pants pockets looking for phone numbers. And I’d realize I barely even knew these people. I didn’t even know their last names or where they came from. After a couple of times, it got to be this weird joke. Like I was a regular at some bar and he was the bartender come to top me up, and we’d both laugh.”
Jocelyn turned her eyes down the hall, to the dark bedroom, where her husband slept.
“Each night you’d go out into this exciting darkness. It was warm and it smelled like candy and ash and Jack Daniel’s. And you’d have fun there, but you couldn’t stay or you would die. There was this one friend who didn’t make it back. That was when I spent the night on the bridge, daring myself to jump because I was so scared of—I don’t know. How empty I was. In the morning I walked home and I knew how lucky I was, that I was unscathed. But not really. Not at all. Then the ER doctor said, ‘When will you get tired?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and he said, ‘When you get tired, I’ll be waiting.’ And he was.”
She smiled at Nicole. “That’s my story. That’s why I’m here. Eventually you get tired. You try to run and run, but whatever you’re running from always catches you. And I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing. I just know I’m here, and I’m alive. Is that Zen?”
Nicole patted Jocelyn on the shoulder. “Yes. You are very Zen.”
“I tried Zen for a while,” she said. “It was very—compelling. But I had to get out; it was taking over my life.” Jocelyn smiled again and looked at Nicole, serious now. “So what’s your story?”
She opened her mouth. It was too dry to swallow. Just when she was going to have to make something up or tell the truth, her cell phone rang. It was an unknown number with a Boston area code.
“I’m sorry, I have to take this,” she said.
In the elevator, she watched her phone vibrate and chime: a new voice mail. Sean? She looked at it for a long time, and then she deleted it without listening.
That weekend, Jocelyn arrived at her apartment with a shopping bag in one hand, her head tilted in her friendly, appraising way. “Well? Coming?”
“Where?”
“I told you, I’m going to make sure you see the right things in this city. You need a tour guide who’s worth a damn.”
Several times that week, they drank thick Turkish coffee at a café around the corner or pushed baby Emmeline’s stroller through the narrow aisles of bodegas while Jocelyn pic
ked up lychee nuts and cans of coconut milk and anything that took her fancy. Then they walked for hours, sometimes huddled under a shared umbrella. There was so much to see. Jocelyn took her to the Earth Room: a fourth-floor walkup in Greenwich Village packed wall to wall with twenty-two inches of rich, dark topsoil. Then late-night bars hidden behind unmarked doors, where smoking cocktails named after famous authors or garden plants arrived in mason jars. And wet covered farmers’ markets, where Jocelyn picked wild artichokes, making plans for meals with her artist friends.
Nicole had not told Jocelyn the reason she’d left Boston. Nobody really knew. But she figured you could read her unease on her face, in the hunted way she looked over her shoulder in dark streets or startled warily at every ring of the phone.
On the subway, she and Jocelyn huddled close to make room for Emmeline’s stroller, their knees knocking together as if they were much younger girls, like best friends. She wondered if Jocelyn was the kind of person who fell into easy intimacies with her woman friends, who climbed into laps or played with hair, seeking a physical closeness and emotional attachment. There was that girlfriend she’d had at nine who’d insisted that Nicole go into the bathroom with her, who’d chatted away on the toilet and seemed disappointed when Nicole had turned her back, mortified. There was some kind of a test girls gave one another, and she had failed.
Meet people. Make friends.
What was she so afraid of, really?
They rode the subway to Jocelyn’s place over that troublesome bridge, and Nicole thought of what had almost happened there. She knew what Jocelyn had meant when she’d announced, the day they met, that she had almost jumped. Almost. Like an accident of fate, a lucky break: that tree almost fell on me; the storm passed over our town. It was out of her hands.
“You’re thinking about what I told you. About the bridge,” Jocelyn said abruptly.
“What?”
“I can tell.” Jocelyn shrugged. “It’s all right. I told you because I could tell you were a very private person. You weren’t going to blab it all over town.” Then she leaned into Nicole. “When are you going to tell me what brought you here?”
