Meets Girl: A Novel

by Entrekin, Will

  “Jo?” I said, unable to keep my voice from sounding surprised bordering on jubilant.

  She squinted as if trying to place me. I wondered, then, how I might have changed since last she’d seen me; time-lapse personal evolution is a side effect of Manhattan living. When working in the great big City, walking its streets every day, it often starts to—I was going to say rub off on you, but that’s not quite the meaning I want. In some ways it’s like a perfect spice that complements already extant flavors rather than contributing its own, but in more ways it’s like . . . modern society has corrupted the word “glamour,” which has come to mean the title of a magazine every bit as much as it’s become synonymous with either cosmetics or old-time movie stars like Mae West or Marilyn Monroe, but glamour originally meant a sort of magic with which one could disguise oneself, and when living in Manhattan, one can’t help get a dusting of glamour as conspicuous as, and perfectly opposite of, dandruff on the collar. If comic book characters and science fiction heroes often have evil-villain twins distinguished solely by their goatees, there should in addition exist the Manhattan twin, street-smart and City-hip, MacGuyver without his mullet, Patrick Bateman without his psychosis, Sam Beckett without the time machine.

  When Jo recognized-slash-remembered me, she told whomever she was speaking to to hold, please, pulled her headset off, retreated to the office door so that she could step around, and gave me a gigantic hug giddy on both sides.

  “Jesus, you look great,” I told her. “How are you?”

  “I’m great! How are you?”

  “I’m doing decidedly all right. What’s there to complain about after spending the holidays with family, right?”

  “Somebody else might argue with you, but I won’t. You had a good Christmas, then?”

  “Totally. And an even better New Year’s.”

  “Some lucky girl get a midnight kiss?”

  “Went to see some friends play a gig down near Philadelphia. Great times. You?”

  “Trip back home, lots of food, breaking resolutions quick as I could make them, breaking up with boyfriends—.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. Better off, anyway. Now I can concentrate on acting.”

  Jo is a terrific actress; I’d once seen her in a production of the Vagina Monologues, and she’d been fantastic. “How’s that going?”

  “More time for auditions,” she said, which didn’t totally answer the question I’d asked, but she delivered it with enough enthusiasm that it seemed she was happy, and sometimes that’s all you can appreciate. Sometimes, when dealing with pursuits like acting and writing and painting, you have to set aside success in the result—getting on stage, publishing a book, getting a gallery show—in favor of the process, the technique, the practice of whatever spooky magic you’re engaged in. Sometimes, when the going gets tough, it’s less a matter of the tough needing to get going but rather realizing why you’re going in the first place.

  “Which can only be good in the long run.”

  “Exactly,” she said, paused a moment, then, “So what brings you to our neck of the woods today? Didn’t come just to see me, did you?”

  “Well, not that I need more reason than that, but I actually did come hoping you guys might hook me up with another assignment—.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she retreated around her corner, back into her office, while I leaned on the ledge in front of her computer. “You were at—was it an ad agency?”

  “The New Yorker.”

  “Ooh, look at you, Mister Magazine. Eat your heart out, Messers Condé and Nast. You were there for a while, too.”

  “More than a year.”

  “Which might as well be permanent in this—dammit. I—let me finish up this call really quick,” she said, pulled her headset back on and began talking into it to set up an appointment with whoever was on the other end after she apologized for having put them on hold for so long. After she hung up, she tucked her mic down. “Okay, so. New Yorker. Mostly administrative, yeah?”

  I nodded. “Advertising sales.”

  “How’d ya like that?”

  I hesitated.

  “Which I’m going to take as a not-much-at-all. Between you and me, I don’t blame you. Sales is so hard. High-intensity. Let’s see . . .” she scanned her computer. She went quiet a moment, frowned, then gestured me forward, lowering her voice to say: “Listen, I’m going to level with you, we don’t have much right now. I think pretty much everything we have is going to be a paycut for you. Can you hold out a couple of days?”

  “I think so, but not for much longer than that.”

  “We’ll bump you to the top of the list. All the stuff available right now is for banks and consulting firms, but if you wait a few days—,” she lowered her voice further—“I heard John say we might be getting an order from the Weinstein Company later in the week, and he’s been talking to a couple of ad agencies, too—.”

  “More sales?”

  “No, the actual agencies. That make the ads.”

  “Oh! Well, that’d be neat.”

  “I know, right? So, yeah, give us a few days. Still at the same number?”

  “Always,” I told her. “Awesome. Thanks so much, Jo.”

  “Hey, no probs. Now get on out of here and stop wasting valuable writing time.”

  I laughed and told her I hoped the rest of her day was as bright as she had just made mine, and she might have blushed, just a little, as I walked out that door.

  ***

  Outside, January was cold, but I wasn’t yet ready for home, so I headed west to the subway, which I took down to Union Square. I thought I’d kill a couple hours in Barnes & Noble, but instead headed south another couple blocks to the Strand—eight miles of used books!—and shopped the racks for a while. Couldn’t spend much, but I found a few books priced at a quarter each and went to the counter to pay. When the clerk rang me up, I pulled out my case, withdrew from it a couple of bucks, then took the books as I stowed the case and started to leave.

  At which point I felt a light grip on my elbow: guy behind me, holding out a business card. “You dropped this.”

  Angus’ card must have fallen out of my case when I took the money from it. I thanked the man and continued out of the store, where I paused to replace the card in my wallet, but stopped. The silver embossed text had caught the January afternoon sunlight so it shimmered like it had weight.

  Angus had mentioned a business proposition. While I wasn’t sure how he might help me, nor even with what, we had discussed writing and publishing . . . I wondered if he was involved, somehow, in the entertainment industry. I couldn’t figure out “Futures Trading,” but figured if he was involved in the entertainment industry, he might have connections that could help me out from my current situations. I could always perhaps find freelance work, contract positions that didn’t involve sitting in cubicles so much as banging out articles for corporate marketing—

  Under most circumstances, I would have been suspicious. After the introduction of cell phones, Craigslist, and inexpensive office space in the business equivalent of broom closets, just about anyone—reputable or otherwise—could set up business in Manhattan, and many did. Many were shady but often shared something in common because of those cell phones; newer Manhattan area codes related in addition to other boroughs, and most were either 917 or 718.

  Angus’ 212 wasn’t the area code you’d find for a new business; 212 is Manhattan. It’s New York when being New York meant something: when it was the City that never slept, when making it there meant you could make it anywhere, when all its rats wore tuxes and swilled martinis and doffed fedoras while running in packs. It’s New York like a sepia photograph of the Empire State Building, an old-fashioned picture of tomorrow.

  I pulled out my cell—area code 917 on that, even though I’d signed up for it back during my freshman year of college, 2001—and dialed the number on the business card. Two rings before someone answered, and the
n another moment before someone spoke: “Futures Trading, this is Brigid. How can I help you today?”—

  a sudden image in my head: copper-colored hair and pale skin. Green, green eyes behind tortoise-shell glasses, and a business suit the charcoal of etchings with a blouse the white of paper, all behind a glass-topped desk. Long fingers poised above a keyboard. On her desk, a nameplate—otherwise I would have thought: Bridget, or Bridgid. But no: Brigid.

  More than that, too: sunlight like fine gauze, clear and bright but cold as January, and the intimation of the world around her, just fuzzy enough to be unclear, all washed out enough to be more a vivid impression than an explicit picture—

  “Hello?” Brigid said, making me realize that impression had caught me suddenly enough it had surprised me with its intensity.

  “Um. Hi. I’m looking for Angus Silver? He gave me his card a few days ago—.”

  “Ah, yes, we’ve been expecting your call and hoping for your visit. May we expect one?”

  The way she said it, the cheerful hope in her voice . . . I didn’t want to let her down. “Sure,” I told her.

  “Wonderful,” she told me, and then she relayed to me an address not far from where I was even then standing, and again that sudden mental flash—

  a brownstone in sepia, sun-drenched black-and-white. Fire escapes and a turret—

  “See you soon, then,” she told me, and with that I flip-closed my cell as I started a few blocks south and then cut east, into the heart of the Village, along St. Mark’s Place—8th street between 3rd Avenue and Avenue A for those keeping score by way of Google Maps—punk-rock antiquity and rock-and-roll royalty, where artists dreamed less of the gallery than of the gutter, where it was better to burn out than to fade, where artistic integrity had more value than fame though neither ever really had any meaning, anyway.

  Who lived here? Lenny Bruce—

  Let me tell you the truth. The truth is, what is. And what should be is a fantasy, a terrible terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago.—

  and W.H. Auden—

  All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: “I refuse to be what I am.”—

  to name but two of its most notable alumnae.

  It’s where the cover for Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti was photographed as an impossible album cover, and it’s where there used to exist a small café called Sin-E, where many bands, including but not limited to P.J. Harvey, Ben Folds, David Gray, and Jeff Buckley—

  The only way to really make it—anywhere—is to put every bit of your being into the thing that only you can provide. The only angle is the art that you choose, that only you can provide. And to do that, you have to be quiet for a long time and find out what you bring forth. You have to know what’s in yourself—all your eccentricities, all your banalities, the full flavor of your woe and your joy. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What makes it different from everybody else’s? It’s totally subjective. You're just given the task of bringing it up.—

  played long before they were ever really discovered, much less famous.

  All that aside, what matters for the moment is that it was then the neighborhood I traversed to discover, not far from Tompkins Square Park, precisely the turreted brownstone whose image had popped unbidden into my head, a building at once both conspicuous and unremarkable, a dichotomy that can exist only in Manhattan. Anywhere else, that building would have stood out to passersby as a place where one could expect great things to occur, great business to transact, great art to be committed, but right there it looked—even if it didn’t look at all like any other building in the world—completely routine. That’s the paradox of Manhattan, with everything so vibrant and spectacular vying simultaneously for attention, so that even a place so extraordinary as the Cloisters never actually stands out. How can you stand out, among the Metropolitan Museum or Opera House, take your pick; among cathedrals dedicated to Saint Patrick and Saint Peter; in a place whose Christmas tree seems a hundred feet tall?

  I realized as I approached that brownstone that I didn’t need to check the address, as well as that there was something more at work there. Not just that I’d been pulled toward that place since the moment I’d dialed the number on the card and heard Brigid’s voice, but even that something unconscious had tugged me downtown from Force One’s uptown offices—otherwise, there really was no reason for me to be in the Village, and Lord knows that even a quarter for new books was money I might have been better off not spending. I think realizing that broke the spell to some degree as I climbed the stoop stairs to the front door, but then I stumbled on the top step and tripped through the front door, which seemed heavier than it should have and crashed shut behind me—

  I might have been first introduced to the idea of a tesseract, or the next dimension on top of an already three-dimensional cube, by Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time; her idea for interspatial travel related to interstitial travel—that the titular wrinkle in time was quite literally an extra dimensional fold that placed more closely together two spatial points that had previously been separated by some great distance. Which I always thought was rather ingenious, as it could bypass the problem of crossing lightyears simply by moving destination closer to origination even if only on a plane beyond the dimensions we’re used to.

  Such ideas have always cropped up all over science fiction. Consider Doctor Who’s TARDIS, a phone-booth time machine bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside, where people see it as a police box.

  I bring those up because—

  Tripping across that threshold . . . in some ways, it was similar to passing through that beaded curtain into that red-haired woman’s inner sanctum of cosmology and interpretation, but extended far beyond that scale. My first thought after that brief memory of that grand Jersey hall, was that whoever owned Futures Trading had bought the brownstone whose steps I had ascended as well as several neighboring, and knocking out the walls had been merely the first step in renovating, which had subsequently included replacing carpets and hardwood floors with smooth, gorgeous grey-green marble. The room seemed cavernous and impossibly tall; if that brownstone had had three stories, they had knocked out two floors in favor of going straight from the ground to the roof thirty feet up, where sunlight streamed through a skylight and dazzled that marble dizzy. To say it looked enchanted would be to take the easy way out; the sunshine blazed through its golden veins to make it shimmer like fabled old money and the promise of new wealth.

  Behind me, the door through which I had just entered was the only actually visible part of something I can’t call a wall for all the water cascading down it; the anterior interior wall was a waterfall I assume was synthetic because how else would one get one inside, besides by building it there? A lip kept the water from falling over the doorway, but besides that, I could see nothing else of that wall. Where windows might or might not have been there existed only large rectangles, shiny silver against the clear shimmer of the water.

  To the left, a large stone fountain the color of bones, water proud and loud enough that, though I might like to use a word like susurrus for the poetry of it alone, it cannot apply; this wasn’t whisper so much as a loud plobbling—hey, onomatopoeia!—that matched in both tone and intensity the freely flowing cascades of the wall behind me. It came in jets from the mouths of mermaids, as if the tinkle of water on water were the call of the siren, beyond the appreciation of mortal men save in its irresistibility.

  Directly in front of me: Brigid. Her desk before me matched to the detail the vivid image that had jumped into my head, though there was some difference in person, if only in vibrance and intensity. Her hair wasn’t just copper-colored but the tawny orange of a disappearing tabby cat, while her eyes were a green you’d think every field in Ireland would be if it didn’t rain there so often.

  Beyond her left shoulder: two enormous, mahogany French doors, ornately carved and with visible hinges as big as two of
my hands together.

  “You must be the pleasant young man to whom I spoke only a few moments ago,” she told me. Her voice was bright and airy as the room around us, sparkled here and there with inflection and cheer like the veins in the marble I crossed to approach her desk. It would have made me want to have been that pleasant young man even had I not been.

  “This place is fantastic,” I told her, my voice more an amazed whisper than an attempt at communication.

  “I suppose that depends on your fantasies,” she said, but so matter-of-factly I couldn’t decide if she meant innuendo.

  Either way . . . well. I’d like to say I found myself still too positively gobsmacked to respond either in kind or in flirt, but that would imply I spend any time in my life not gobsmacked, which I rarely do. Regardless, I was still taking in the room, because seriously, I couldn’t believe what they’d done with the place.

  The doors behind her opened before I had to worry too much about responding, and if the flapping wings of a Central Park butterfly can so completely change the world by causing stampedes several continents away, I hesitate to consider the impact of those large, heavy doors. Even just the sound they made—first the massive, solid chunk of a hard metal latch, and then the quiet but substantive movement of that cavernous room’s air displaced by those enormous slabs of wood—if the world would only make a sound when it knows your life is about to change, it would be that one, and it would come as well with that open and empty feeling you get in your gut when you know you’re about to make a decision that might not change the whole world but is certainly going to change yours.