Room for Love

by Andrea Meyer

  “Fucking shit!” he says, grabbing my shoulder and shoving me away from the fireman, to whom I make an “it’s okay, I know him” motion with my hand. “You went on fucking TV?” he shouts at me, when we’re out of earshot of the fireman. I guess I’m on TV in the pub. I guess I’m missing myself. “You went on fucking Between the Sheets? Fuck! Everyone I know in the world is probably watching and everyone is gonna know that you did this to me. Goddamm it!” He actually stomps his foot and gnashes his teeth. “What the hell were you thinking? What am I going to tell my friends? Jesus, I can’t believe you’d be so deceitful and duplicitous and inconsiderate of me. You were, like, living a double life or something. Me and you were like a joke for you.”

  “No, Anthony, never—”

  He shuts me up fast. “Can’t you think for a minute about how your actions might affect someone else? Someone you supposedly love? Fuck! ‘Hot and heavy,’ you said. You got ‘hot and heavy’ with some other guy you met writing this thing? What? Was I just some other guy, the happy ending for your article? You waltz into my life, pretending to be my fucking soul mate or something, all pretty and nice, and you become this, like, perfect girlfriend, and then—this? You know, something always happens, every single time. I really thought we were great together, but the whole time you’ve been lying to me, scheming. You know how much honesty means to me. God, Jacquie, you know.”

  “I do know, Anthony, that’s why it’s been so hard. I was so afraid to tell you. God, Anthony, I know I lied, or kept the truth from you, but God, it was because I fell for you. You have no idea. I’ve been so broke and then my mortgage and my shitty salary and this editor of a major magazine offered me this story, it just seemed like a good story idea and, yeah, an opportunity, a good paycheck—and God, what if I actually met someone I liked? I wanted to fall in love and it seemed possible, to meet a nice guy, to meet you. Jesus, is that so wrong? I only lied so I could be with you. You have no idea how hard it’s been. I had to find a subletter, then they burned down my apartment. Shit, my apartment! And it was all because I wanted it to work out with you.” I hold my breath, thinking for a minute that maybe for once I said the right thing.

  “No way, Jacquie, don’t even try to make me feel sorry for you now. You fucking manipulative— Your apartment? Like I give a shit about your apartment that I didn’t even know you had? I could give two shits about your apartment.”

  “Couldn’t give two shits,” I say, correcting his grammar under my breath, and wish I could take it back.

  “What!” he yells.

  “Nothing.”

  “I have to get the hell out of here,” he says, and this time turns and runs, fast. Within seconds he’s hit Avenue A, turned the corner, and vanished.

  When someone lays a hand on my shoulder, I pounce. “What?”

  It’s the cute hardware-store boy, I mean Zach. “Hey, sorry,” I say. I notice that his shaggy dog, Buster, is at his feet. I squat down to pet him—he smiles, shakes his butt, licks my hand.

  “Hi, precious,” I say, standing up again to face Zach.

  “So, Jacquie, you know I was staying at your apartment.”

  “I do now.”

  Before he can explain, Serena appears and jumps into his arms crying fairly hysterically. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, honey. I’m fine.” He squeezes her and pulls away and holds her face in his hands so that she has to look at him. “Look at me. Look at me, baby, I’m fine, I got out. I’m fine.” She keeps crying into his chest like a little girl, taking in quick sucks of air.

  “You were in there when this happened?” I ask, my heart quickening.

  “Yeah.” He looks down at his feet. “I guess it was my fault.”

  “What do you mean?” I demand, suddenly pissed.

  “I’m not sure what happened,” he says, his lower lip quivering a bit, “but I painted your bathroom yesterday, so maybe there was stuff around, I don’t know. I don’t know what could have caused it. I was at the shop today and came back here after work, luckily it was early, and the bathroom was burning. I don’t know how the hell—I thought I cleaned up well, but maybe I didn’t throw everything away. I’m lucky I got back—”

  “What the hell?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I’m usually so careful,” he says. His eyes are pleading with me. “The light was on, maybe something was plugged in, I don’t know. I feel awful. I called the fire department and tried to smother it, but it was too big already. I yelled and banged on doors so everyone would get out of the building and then went back in to get out whatever I could before the whole place burned down.”

  “The whole place burned down?”

  “Pretty much,” Zach says in a voice no louder than a whisper. “I mean, I assume. It looked bad.”

  Serena looks like she’s going to cry again. “God, Jacquie, I am so sorry about all this. I feel like it’s all my fault.” Next thing she’s sobbing, and I feel like I should comfort her, even though her fucking boyfriend, who wasn’t even supposed to be living here, burned down my apartment.

  Zach leads her over to the curb and sits her down. He lets her rest her head on his shoulder, kisses her cheek, wipes a tear off her chin, and she looks up at him so lovingly, I suddenly remember being in an earthquake when my sister was a baby. My parents told me later they’d experienced tremors in L.A. before, but nothing this dramatic. It was the middle of the night and suddenly the whole house was rocking as if some giant creature were trying to rip it out of the ground like a turnip. My mother came into my room hysterical—screaming and swearing and running around erratically, unsure what she was supposed to do. When I saw her freaking out, I started crying. My dad picked me up out of bed and said, “Shhhh,” and kissed me on the nose. I remember gasping, trying to stop crying, trying to settle my breath as it struggled for space in my little chest. Together we approached my mom. He put his arm around her, and suddenly she was fine. She stopped shouting and her eyes became wide. Then we all walked over to my sister’s crib and stood around it silently until the rumbling stopped. The whole time I gazed up at my dad as if he were a god.

  Zach lets go of Serena’s tiny, shaky hand and walks back to me and says, “Jacquie, I am so sorry.”

  “Goddamm it! All anyone’s doing is apologizing tonight. I can’t handle it anymore. Will you just leave me alone? Please.”

  “But I want to help. Whatever I can do, really.”

  Suddenly I see red. I want to beat the shit out of this big blond guy who works at the hardware store and looks totally exhausted and pathetic and like he’d do anything to stop me from hating him.

  “I think you’ve done enough, Zach. Jesus, I can’t believe you were like living in my apartment and doing all this stuff—who the hell do you think you are doing all this stuff to my apartment? I mean, bookshelves and curtains, you put up a backsplash! What the hell?”

  I glance down at my bag and see the light flashing on my cell phone. I wave Zach away and pull out my phone. Seeing my sister’s name on my Caller ID causes my throat to constrict again. She says she’s at the bar and no one knew where I was, she’s called me fifteen times, the show just ended. I put my hand over the phone and tell Zach, who’s still standing there, to please go away.

  “But I need to—” he says as I shake my head and turn my back on him.

  “Alicia,” I say, gasping for breath. “My apartment burned down!”

  “Oh my God, where are you? Are you over there?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I say. “Zach did it, you know Zach, Serena’s—”

  “Who?” she asks. “Not Z! Did Z burn your house down?” I start bawling. “Shit, I’m coming over there.”

  While I’m waiting, I call my parents to let them know. After initial hysterics on the part of my mother, I hear my dad telling her to calm down, and she gets back on the extension to tell me she’ll set up a meeting first thing tomorrow at my apartment with the fire marshal and my insurance agent and another with the
lawyer who helped me buy the apartment.

  “Thank you so much for dealing with all this, Mom,” I say. “I’m pretty frazzled.” She assures me it will all be all right. Meanwhile, Zach has gone off, I guess to check on Serena, and he comes back with this enormous garbage bag full of stuff and places it on the curb next to me. I put my hand over the phone.

  “This is the stuff I got out of your place,” he says and hands me a piece of paper with his phone number on it. “If you need to reach me,” he says quietly.

  I nod at him. He stands there for a second and then lowers his head, all hangdog-like, and turns and slinks off. He looks back over his shoulder at me and blushes lightly when he sees me catching him, which almost makes me laugh, in spite of the circumstances. My sister turns up, wearing a flame-red dress and flip-flops.

  “God, this sucks,” she says, absorbing the chaos. “We were all wondering where you were and you didn’t pick up your phone.”

  “I’ve been right here the whole time,” I say. She grabs my hand and pulls me up off the ground. I lift the garbage bag, which is really heavy, and she helps me haul it as we walk the three blocks to the bar. We don’t talk much.

  “I think Anthony and I broke up. He found out about the article.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah.” I continue to follow her through the shadowy streets.

  When we step through the front door of the bar, everybody applauds. I wipe sweat and ash off my forehead and put on a happy face.

  Johnny hands me a shot of Jack Daniels, which I swallow in one gulp. “Can I have the next one with ginger ale?” I say, thinking, It will be okay, it will be okay, it will be okay. Drink whiskey with ginger ale and it will all be okay.

  “Anything for you, beauty queen. You are a star!” He leans over the bar and plants a big wet one on my mouth.

  “I wasn’t too horrible?” I squeak, actually starting to cheer up a bit.

  “You were fantastic,” he says, “gorgeous.”

  “You didn’t tape it, did you?” I say, embarrassed by how badly I want to see the show, in spite of everything.

  He holds up a videotape. “I was going to take it home and let you lull me to sleep with your sordid tales, but I guess I can let you borrow it.”

  “Pervert,” I tell him and push through the crowd until I find Jeremy and Courtney, who jumps up and throws her arms around me. She pulls away and looks directly into my eyes. “Oh, honey, sweetie, are you all right?”

  “I’m okay, okay as you can be when your house has just burned down,” I tell her. “I’ll find out more tomorrow. Can I stay with you tonight? Anthony and I had a huge fight when he found out about the article, and I think we broke up.”

  “Oh, honey, of course you can.”

  “Come sit with us,” Jeremy says, patting the seat next to him, which Napoleon reluctantly relinquishes and jumps on his daddy’s lap. I keep standing. “You can cry on my shoulder. It might seem like small consolation, but I must tell you that you looked fabulous on TV. A real bombshell.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “It does actually make me feel better.”

  “I like this look. Terrific new accessory, bag-lady inspired, I presume?” I look down at the garbage bag I’ve been lugging around. “Which would be appropriate for your new living situation. Sorry. Really bad joke.”

  “I have no idea what’s in it. The guy who’s been staying at my place rescued some stuff.”

  I scoot into their booth and open the bag. When I reach inside it, the first thing I find is a thick photo album containing pictures of the trip Courtney and I took to Europe after college graduation. She ended up coming home after three months, purportedly because she ran out of money, but really because she missed Brad too much to stay away. But I wound up getting a job teaching English in Paris, the city I’d loved since I first visited it with my family at thirteen, meeting Philippe, and staying for two years until I moved to New York to go to grad school.

  “Check this out,” I say, pushing the album toward Courtney. Jeremy scoots up next to her to look at the pictures, holding Napoleon in his arms so he can see, too. I cut out all sorts of magazine pictures and words and pasted in postcards to create a book-long collage of our trip and my subsequent life in France. “I’m so glad he saved it.”

  “So fortunate,” Court says and holds it up to show me a spread of us, young and tan and grinning and topless on the beach in Mykonos. “We were so happy and carefree. Sometimes I do miss those days,” she says, and I notice that her face is drawn. I’ve never seen her so skinny.

  “Hot stuff,” Jeremy says. As they continue ogling our bare boobs, I dig around in the treasure chest, which seems to contain another album, one of my jewelry boxes that happens to have my most valuable pieces, including the few I got when my grandmother died, my Sex and the City DVDs, five of my favorite books—Eloise, The Passion, Franny and Zooey, Writing Down the Bones, The Unbearable Lightness of Being—and all of my thirty-seven journals of various shapes and sizes, which I wrote in religiously from the time I was ten until the last few years, when I became a busy, flaky grown-up with less time to devote to pouring out the contents of my soul. I hold up my first one ever, a little Hallmark diary with a picture of two angels in an apple tree and a lock on it, and start to cry.

  “What up with the blubbering,” says my sister, arriving on the scene.

  “He saved all my journals. That was so nice,” I say. “God, I’ve been leaking from the eyeballs ever since I got here tonight. It’s pathetic. I’m an emotional wreck.”

  “You’ve just lost all your possessions,” Courtney says, reaching across the table to hold my hand. “Honey, it’s completely normal.”

  “All your CDs, books, furniture—oh, that amazing Persian rug,” Alicia says.

  I picture my apartment and all the things in it that I’ll never see again. I can’t quite grasp the enormity of my loss. “I found it at a flea market for nothing,” I say, missing the rug intensely. “And that amazing red velvet armchair I lugged up from the street.”

  “All your clothes,” says Jeremy. “You took that fabulous vintage coat over to Anthony’s, right?”

  “Oh, Jeremy, not my favorite coat.”

  “You left it?” he says, flabbergasted. “What were you thinking?”

  “It’s summer. I left all my winter stuff. Oh God, my pink parka, my agnès b. trench coat, all my cashmere.”

  I’m about to get really depressed, until my sister cuts in. “I wonder what vibrators do when they burn. You have the Bunny, don’t you? Poor barbecued Bunny Foofoo.”

  “Luckily I put that personal stuff in a box in the basement when Serena moved in. Wish I’d done the same with my clothes.”

  I look into the bag and pull out a couple of framed photographs that used to be on my bedroom wall, one of my mother as a little girl sandwiched between my grandparents. My sister squishes into the booth next to me, puts her arm around my shoulders, and squeezes. Then she takes the photo slowly out of my hand and kisses it. We turn our heads to face each other and when our eyes meet we look quickly away.

  I reach back into the almost-empty bag and find a black, squishy thing at the bottom. “Oh my God,” I say. “He saved Chubby.”

  “Another one of your sex toys?” Jeremy asks.

  “No,” I say, whimpering again as I pull out the squished, pitiful-looking teddy bear who’s helped me fall asleep since college. Napoleon growls at him.

  “That was a lovely thing to do,” Courtney says. “Really thoughtful. Who is this man who collected these things?”

  “Zach,” Alicia says. “Serena’s perfect boyfriend.”

  “Yeah, who burned down my apartment.”

  14

  * * *

  Seeking short-term sublet, 3–6 mos, month to month would be ideal. Below 14th St preferable. Cheap. Take pity, my apartment (my whole life, really) burned down, I need to rebuild it. Call Jacquie.

  * * *

  Courtney and I take a cab back to her plac
e in Park Slope. I’m so tired, I barely make it up her stairs without falling asleep on the banister. She graciously offers to carry the garbage bag containing my worldly possessions.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Courtney says while unlocking her front door. “It’s not all lost. Remember, you do have quite a lot of things at Anthony’s. We can arrange to pick them up later this week.”

  “Where would I put them?”

  “Here for now. We’ll figure it out.”

  “I don’t know, getting my stuff from his place makes it all seem so final.”

  “You’re right,” she says, turning on the light and dropping the bag in a corner of the living room. “Let’s not worry about any of that yet. You can borrow clothes from me, I have an extra toothbrush, use anything you need.”

  “Thanks, Court.”

  She goes into the kitchen to make a pot of chamomile tea, which she says will calm my nerves, and I plunk myself down on the couch next to Chaz, who purrs and rubs up against me. I pick him up and hold him against my chest and he gazes into my eyes soulfully.

  Courtney returns with two steaming cups of tea and sits down next to us. Chaz glances over at her as if to say, “Sorry, Mom, Jacquie’s needing some feline therapy tonight, I’ll catch you later,” and then shifts around and rests his chin on my belly.

  “Oh, sweetheart, are you going to be okay?” Courtney asks.

  “Of course I am,” I tell her, not so sure myself.

  “Jacquie, when I’m feeling down, it often helps me to remember all the things I do have. You weren’t harmed. You have your health and your family and friends who love you and work that you’re passionate about.” I nod my head. “Homes can be rebuilt and furniture and clothes are nothing but flimsy pieces of fabric and wood and metal. But the most valuable things remain.”

  I have the sensation of being in a Lifetime movie-of-the-week where the girl’s house burns down. I think I might have even seen that one. Or maybe I’m confusing it with an International House of Coffees commercial, the kind that actually sometimes makes Courtney dab at her eyes. “Apparently the Red Cross will give me a debit card for two hundred dollars for toilet paper and pajamas and prescriptions that burned,” I say.