Room for Love

by Andrea Meyer

  “I’ll show you,” I say.

  Court perches herself on the windowsill behind us and plays with Brad’s ringlets with her free hand, while I click on the people I highlighted at work, telling them about the story assignment as I go.

  “Let’s call someone,” Courtney says and grabs the cordless phone. I give her the number for thirty-four-year-old Steven, the doctor with the duplex in the West Village.

  “Hello, is Steven there?” she asks, sitting on the floor. “Hi, I’m calling about the room you’re renting. Can you tell me a little about it? Uh-huh. Oh, I see, that’s not really something I’m interested in. Thanks anyway.” She hangs up. “He’s gay.”

  “How could you tell from a two-second conversation?” Brad asks.

  “You just can.”

  “Oh, right, her infallible intuition strikes again.”

  “Shut up, you guys,” I say, clicking on the next one. “Thomas, pricey two-bedroom in Tribeca.”

  Courtney calls him and babbles for a couple of minutes. I keep clicking on apartments that Brad yays or nays. We glance at Courtney, who’s rubbing Chaz’s tummy and still listening to this guy ramble on.

  “So, tomorrow’s the big day, huh?” I say, still scrunched up next to him on the chair, my right thigh hanging over his left.

  “Uh-huh,” he says.

  “Where you going first?”

  “Northampton.”

  “That should be fun. College girls can’t get enough of you. You be careful, though. They’ll be all over you.” I laugh, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Nervous?” I ask.

  “Nervous as hell.”

  “You’re going to be great, Brad. Your record’s amazing.”

  “It’ll be hard to be away from you guys, to be away from Court.”

  “I know, but you’ll talk every day, and I’m sure she’ll come see you whenever she can.”

  “I know.” He pauses, still looking at the screen and not at me. “You know, the only time we’ve been apart was when you guys went backpacking after college. It’s been like ten years since we’ve spent a single night apart.”

  “Brad, that’s pathetic. It’s about time.”

  He elbows me in the side.

  “Shithead!” I elbow him back. We’re giggling and bruising each other’s ribs, when Courtney kicks each of us hard from her spot on the floor and Chaz flees. We look guiltily at each other like scolded children and Brad sneaks out of the room to go gawk at his luggage. I do wonder how Court puts up with our juvenile behavior sometimes. We bring it out in each other, and it must kill her to have to play mommy with her husband and best friend all the time.

  “Are you baked?” I shout after him. He doesn’t answer. Courtney kicks me again. Brad puts his head in the door, makes a pig nose at me with his thumb, and runs out of the room again. I click on John the East Village rock star.

  I look at Courtney as she says, “Well, I’m not really sure if I’m giving up my current apartment yet. I’ll be in touch as soon as I know anything, all right? Remember that life offers us many lessons if we allow ourselves to be open to them, especially in times of grief and uncertainty. You’re so welcome.” She hangs up. “Poor guy. He was telling me about this breakup he went through, his girlfriend sued him for everything they ever bought together and he can’t afford a lawyer and he’s had the flu for three weeks, but I’m certain it’s his body giving in to his emotional distress. It was totally depressing.”

  “Jesus Christ. Okay, how about this guy? John, a musician, he calls himself a ‘cool cat,’ who lives in ‘the grooviest digs on Avenue B.’ He sounds cool.”

  “No way,” Brad shouts from the other room. “No more starving artists. You want to meet men who are worth going out with, not guys like Jake.”

  “You’re a musician, Brad,” Courtney says.

  “I’m a professor,” he replies, appearing in the doorway. “With a hobby that has suddenly become more lucrative than I’d imagined. There is little chance that your friend there will have the same luck. Odds are against him. And he probably doesn’t have much of a backup plan.”

  “You’re right, you’re right.”

  “Hey, Brad, don’t forget to stick a copy of your itinerary on the fridge, okay?” Court says. Brad wanders off to find one. “And leave me contact info for that guitar guy. I’m gonna have to pay him while you’re gone.”

  “Shit, I forgot,” he says.

  “And pack your blue coat. It will still be cold up north. And tea-tree oil in case your skin thing acts up,” she adds, getting up to check on the state of his suitcase. “I guess I can always send you anything you forget,” she says, before smoochy noises set in. I click on John the musician again. The doorbell rings, giving me just enough time to jot down his number and run for the door. Their buzzer is broken, so I have to run down two flights of stairs to the front door of the building to let the delivery guy in. “I’ll get it!” I shout on my way out.

  We sit at the dining room table, happy family that we are, quieted by anxiety about what the next few months will bring us, and shove noodles into our faces together for what we know will be the last time for several months. No one mentions that fact.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go then,” I say once I’m stuffed. “You guys should have a little bit of time alone together on your last night.”

  “Oh, you know we have no fun when you’re not around,” Brad says.

  Courtney looks at him with sad eyes. “I’m kidding!” he says. She doesn’t smile. “Baby, you’re the light of my life,” he says, grabbing her around the waist and kissing her neck, softening her a bit. I feel like she’s going to cry any second, not because his teasing bothers her but because he’s going to be gone for such a long time.

  “I’m out of here,” I say, putting on my coat. Court starts clearing the table. “Be careful, Brad. It’s a wild world out there.”

  “Hard to get by just upon a smile,” he says.

  “Winter, spring, summer, or fall, all you’ve got to do is call and I’ll be there.”

  “Thanks,” he says and hugs me. We’re not really phone friends, so I know I’m unlikely to talk to him for months and I will miss him. “While I’m gone, no hooking up with any of those hunky musician types, right?” he says, still squeezing me.

  “Jesus Christ!” I say and pull away from him. “You know, it’s easy for you perfect happy loving couples to give people like me advice. How do you know that this hunky musician isn’t the love of my life? How will I know if I don’t meet him? I mean, not all of us have the luxury of meeting our soul mate when we’re fucking nineteen.” Court comes back into the room and stands at the kitchen door, watching me.

  “Jacquie, it’s cool,” Brad says. “Do whatever you want. I just want you to find someone who’s worthy of you, that’s all, and your odds will only improve when you start diving into a certain kind of pond.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just still a little raw about Jake. And I’m sad that you’re going.” Saying it makes my eyes well up. He hugs me again.

  “Okay, now I’m out of here. Court, I’ll call you tomorrow. Brad, check in sometime. Break a leg. All that crap.” And with that, I’m out the door.

  Once I hit the street, I’m on a rampage. Courtney and Brad just love giving me romantic advice. Oh poor single Jacquie who’s always messing things up for herself, let’s offer her all the wisdom that we’ve gathered through our vast amounts of experience. Ha! Neither of them has ever gone on a date in their lives, or not since they were seventeen or something—and making out at keg parties doesn’t count. Brad and Courtney have never really been single. They have never experienced trolling bars full of losers or hooking up with losers at New York film-industry parties or being set up with losers by well-meaning friends. Who the hell are they to give me advice? Feeling deliciously rebellious, I pull out my cell with such vigor that I slip on a frozen puddle on Court’s corner and almost eat it. Where the hell is springtim
e anyway? One minute it’s warm, the next minute the streets are frozen. All those pretty little green buds are going to freeze to death, I think as I dial the number for John. The musician who didn’t have the good sense to get a Ph.D.

  Turns out John is a twenty-four-year-old bass player who bartends for cash. (Living in New York, I’ve found this to be a common professional combination.) He cracks me up. After twenty minutes on the phone—I talk to him all the way to the subway and then hang around the entrance talking some more—I know his life story. I know he grew up in Portland, went to college in Santa Cruz, majored in environmental studies, and played with a successful local band that landed—and lost—a record deal his senior year. He moved to New York to start a new group and is currently auditioning musicians and playing with random bands at the Mercury Lounge and the Knitting Factory. He smokes pot daily (can’t get through a conversation with his mother without it), worships Pink Floyd, is suffering from post–California-surf withdrawal, and broke up with his college girlfriend only a couple of months back, when she decided she couldn’t handle the schizophrenic energy of New York and moved back to Santa Cruz. He doesn’t seem to care which coast she’s on. “My music is my number-one priority right now. Know what I mean?”

  When I hang up, I feel with some certainty that if I take twenty-four-year-old bass-player-slash-bartender John up on his offer to check out his apartment tonight—the fact that it’s almost midnight doesn’t faze him—he will be the kind of scruffy blond boy who makes me go wobbly in the knees. That he’ll offer me a beer or a joint or both. That the conversation will pop. That the apartment will be a hole. That the sex will be spectacular. But I also know I shouldn’t. He’s young and he’s clearly commitment phobic. I need serious guys for this piece, not to mention serious guys in my life—or one anyway.

  Plus, John is an Aries. I’m an Aries, and I’m not supposed to go out with them, mainly because my dad is an Aries and it’s common knowledge that we spend our whole lives trying to make our dad (or someone just like him) fall in love with us, which is enough to make anyone insane. Jake’s an Aries. He makes me insane. Stefan’s an Aries. He made me insane. My college boyfriend who left me for a girl who once posed for a Gap underwear ad, but still showed up in my room late at night just to make sure I remained insane—Aries. The guy I lost my virginity to when I was sixteen was an Aries. I have distinct memories of him: He wanted to wallpaper his room with my picture. He would go weeks without calling, forcing me to spend my days willing the phone to ring and my nights calling and hanging up on him (subliminally remind-him-of-my-existence kind of thing). He once told me he was “like, in love” with me and I treasured those words for, like, ever. The morning after we had sex for the first time—My First Time—he left at four A.M. to go surfing. We stopped seeing each other when I punched him in the stomach one night because he was dancing with another girl. (This behavior might qualify as insane.) The list of Aries men who have contributed to the decline of my mental health goes on and on.

  Aries guys are driven, confident, full of childlike wonder. That’s why I want to devour them on sight. But they’re also stubborn, infantile, and don’t know how to let go. You’d think that fire and fire would make a great match. Try two deranged rams, swirling horns locked, loving every minute of frantic, sweaty combat, until one of the two lies bleeding. I wish I had a T-shirt that said, CUTE ARIES BOYS GO HOME. Nobody told me they would turn me into a possessed, love-sick lunatic when they were teaching me other important facts of life. As the eloquent expression goes, I had to learn it the hard way.

  When I get off the F train at First Avenue at 12:38 I’m pretty sure I’m going to John’s place, in defiance of all my good reasons not to. Once I get something stuck in my head, no matter how absurd or unhealthy, I know I’m going through with it. What’s the harm, really? It’s only a block out of my way. I soak up my eclectic neighborhood, passing by a bouncing Caribbean restaurant, a rinky-dink radio station with two twenty-something guys in headsets inside nodding furiously to the tunes they so cleverly programmed, a yoga-studio-slash-Buddhist-sanctuary-slash-vegan-eatery, a fluorescent-lit joint specializing in pizza and pasta and gyros and shish kabob and barbecue and chicken. Outside a crowded bar, people hover, smoking cigarettes. The bouncer hushes them. “Yo, think of the neighbors! Please!” he says. I pass a Vietnamese take-out joint, a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, an appliance emporium, an all-night café where attractive people lining the windows check their e-mail and cruise MySpace. A girl walks by with a bouncy schnauzer who grins up at me, tongue hanging out of his mouth. “Hey, monkey,” I tell him before crossing the street and walking over to Avenue A, which is buzzing, like it does every night of the week.

  The East Village, my home, is heaven for NYU students, recent college grads, and twenty-four-year-old musicians bent on making it. There must be an average of three bars per block, probably a third of which feature live music. Among the bars you can find the dingiest dive next to the swankiest lounge next to the friendliest neighborhood joint. My mother doesn’t understand my affection for this dirty, ugly, noisy former slum that’s virtually teeming with teenage degenerates covered in piercings and tattoos. She can’t fathom what a woman in her thirties would still be doing in such a place. I figure as long as I’m single, this is where I belong. I can go out alone and always find a sympathetic soul with a booming personality and juicy past to chat with over a pint, and I rarely have to leave my twelve-block radius. Living in the hoppingest part of town, everyone comes to me. While I might someday outgrow the all-night buzz of the East Village, I tell my mom that I am devoted to these grimy streets and the tenement buildings growing out of them and swear I’ll have my kids here and grow old here, even struggling up flights of battered, rickety stairs with a cane if I have to. But I’m probably full of shit.

  I find myself walking east on Sixth Street straight past Avenue A (which would lead me home) toward Avenue B. “I don’t care what Brad thinks,” I say aloud. “‘No hooking up with hunky musicians.’ Easy for you to say, Mr. Getting-laid-on-a-regular-basis-since-you-were-twelve. I’m having sex and you can’t stop me.” I march past a hip, dimly lit Asian bistro and a skanky eatery with hipsters and hoodlums hanging out the windows and wind up standing in front of the deli on the corner of Avenue B across the street from John’s building. I crane my neck to look up at the fourth floor, where he lives, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I see an attractive guy with messy blond hair holding a beer. If he looks my way, I’ll go up, I think before realizing that the skinny silhouette could belong to just about any guy on the block, any stoned, twenty-four-year-old, beer-swigging, bass-playing hottie in the goddamn East Village.

  Brad is right: I don’t need to meet that guy anymore, not at this point in my life. I am writing a story about how to meet the right kind of man, the kind who could potentially wind up my husband, not another hot young thing to drag into my bed. I march quickly up Avenue B and don’t look back. Then I start running, toward home, fast and furious. I work up a sweat flying up the four flights of stairs to my apartment and grab a pad of Post-its once inside the door. I peel one off and write:

  * * *

  No guys under 30.

  NO ARIES.

  * * *

  I stick it to my fridge door.

  Proud of myself, I throw on sweats and get to work sanding a bench I found on the sidewalk the other day. I’m painting it tangerine and pasting a photo collage on top, thinking it will make an unusual coffee table. It’s only when I’ve smoothed out the first leg that I realize that my apartment is a horror story. The fourteen outfits that Alicia tried on before settling on whatever she wore for her date with the actor are strewn all over the living room floor, my blanket lies in a heap in the doorway to my bedroom—guess Princess took a nap?—and the boxes of books stacked from floor to ceiling behind the couch fill me with renewed irritation. The temperature has dropped again, so I get up and try to shut the stupid broken window, but give up as always. I stomp into t
he bathroom, where it looks like bad guys have turned the place upside down searching for clues. In the kitchen, half a can of tomato soup sits congealing in a pot on the stove. Dirty dishes clog the sink. I make a mental note to strangle my sister as I toss the gelatinous red mess down the drain and put Beethoven on the stereo, hoping some sonata therapy will cool my anger.

  After lighting a candle, I return to my project, slowly sanding, and breathing in the unmistakable scent of Votivo red currant. My apartment has good energy, despite my sister’s Tasmanian devilish cleaning habits. Courtney’s sage-smudging worked. The memory of her puttering from corner to corner shaking smoke at my walls makes me chuckle. She’d shake shake shake while telling me to think about what I want to invite into my life (love, peace, a coat rack) and what I want to purge from it (loneliness, fear, the stench of sage). Sometimes her methods strike me as mad, but they actually seem to work. The apartment feels cleansed and peaceful. We did make space for abundance, self-discipline, and a healthy relationship to enter my life. Once the bench is prepped for a first coat of paint, I trash the dust I’ve created and make my way to bed, doing my best to ignore the disorder around me. But when Alicia stumbles in and crawls under the covers at three A.M., giggly and reeking of scotch, I kick her.

  5

  * * *

  Recently divorced 40-year-old man seeks a nice young woman to share roomy UES 2 bd. The room is large. I’m a nice guy, easy to live with. Give me a chance! What have you got to lose? My name’s Stanley.

  * * *

  Over the weekend, psyched about beginning my research in earnest, I send Alicia off to brunch and plant myself at my desk, which is tucked into a little nook of my living room with a window to my right. I live on a quiet block, but it is one of the first warm days of the year and I’m easily distracted by kids playing in the garden I can see below and pigeons’ springtime mating coos. I force myself to stay glued to my chair—except for one break when I allow myself to paint my new coffee table—and spend the day scouring Craig’s List.