by Dessa
Alex is leaner than anything native to the water—the striated muscles of his forearms more resemble tree roots than the sleekness of a fish. He is from Barcelona but has lived in Mexico for many years with his German girlfriend. In his accent I try to detect this history, like a geologist labeling layers of sediment. “Give her the mask,” he tells Ricky.
I dip my face into the water to see the other woman. She is naked, with her legs pulled tight against her chest, arms around her knees. “You know what to do?” I do, we’ve talked through this shot already.
Alex goes under, camera in hand. Ricky stays above to make sure I don’t drift with the current. My right foot catches a bit of coral, a pink puff of blood. I close my eyes. I take several deep breaths, exhale hard. Begin to sink.
When my feet touch the bottom, my knees bend beneath me. I kneel in the sand, facing in what I think is the direction of the statue, hoping I’ve not turned or drifted away from her. I lean forward and open my eyes to the blur and the burn of salt water. Neither of us can see the other, because one of us is cast in marine-grade cement and the other one doesn’t come equipped with the necessary nictitating membrane. But we hold, regarding each other until one of us breaks for air.
At the bar that night, the team drinks mescal, which tastes like tequila that’s just finished a cigar. DC, me, Alex and Ricky, and both of their slender women sit at a small bar. Ricky’s girlfriend speaks almost no English, but is so beautiful that it’s hard not to stare. It takes a compelling man to keep a woman like that.
I let on about some of my recent professional ambivalence. Alex is indignant to hear it—art is a domain for passion, not pragmatism—and in this way he is every bit a Spaniard, with no trace of the mellowing Mexican influence or the reserved Germanic. His long-limbed blonde girlfriend is more sympathetic. She herself chose to dive less, she says, because it took too much out of her. “Like what?” I ask.
“Oh, the wrinkles. The joints start to hurt.” Alex leans in to take over the thread of the story as she finishes her third mescal.
“Every diver you see is like this.” Alex holds up his pinky.
“Thin,” says his girlfriend.
Alex says that the nitrogen a diver breathes underwater stays in his bones at the joints. His girlfriend says it hollows a person, they age early, wrinkle. Since she stopped diving so frequently she has filled out a little. I cannot imagine her having been less substantial than she is now, without pulling teeth.
She says that when Alex stays on land for a couple of weeks, like when they visit her family in Germany, she can see a youthfulness returning to him.
“Ah, but then I miss the water,” he says.
Later I’ll look up the hazards of deep diving. It’s nitrogen that’s responsible for the bends, the condition suffered by divers who surface too quickly to properly decompress. The dissolved gases in their blood form bubbles, which can be lethal; the human body is not designed for effervescence. But over the course of a career, even well-controlled dives can lead to osteonecrosis—bone death—and potential damage to the retinas, the ears, brain. I think of ballerinas and their broken toes, pop musicians playing themselves deaf, and the pitchers on the mound who muster enough power to throw their arms apart. There is a price to pay for excellence.
Alex is a good drinker. The rest of us sip and listen. His favorite dive was in the arctic, he says. There, he’d been able to walk upside down in the water, hiking on the frozen ice above him.
Then we drink and listen to Ricky. He was recently hired by a female champion free diver from Chile. He shows us pictures of her in repose in a bikini, lying on the seafloor as if she were a sunbather. He shows us pictures of the human skulls that lie at the bottom of the freshwater caves. He’s training to become a better free diver himself, he says, by lowering himself down a guide rope. At sixty feet, it gets easier, he says, because the remaining air in your lungs compresses and “the ocean starts to suck.” If you took a breath from another diver’s scuba rig while you’re down there, you’d die on resurfacing—the air would expand as you ascended, until it burst your lungs.
As the night blurs, DC takes out his cell phone, sets it on the table, and leans back. On it he has queued up a ten-second clip of the shot with me and the statue woman.
We watch around the tiny screen. “Again.” Everyone gets to hold the phone and play it once. Ricky is last. He cocks his head to give me a look, holds my eyes to make sure I understand him. The four of us have made a beautiful thing. I do not know if the whole video will be beautiful or if it’s only these few frames—and in any case it feels like such a small thing to be so proud of in the presence of ice-walking genuine adventurers—but calculating on six ounces of mescal, five thousand dollars seems like such a small sum to pay for these ten seconds. It is art and it is good art, and no, I do not think it will be a sound investment or win an award—though a corner of my heart hopes it might. Living as an artist is fundamentally speculative; there’s a permanent uncertainty about where you’ll be hired next and how long that work might last. But really that’s true of most parts of our lives; the pension, the marriage, the mortgage are all friable, all fallible. We don’t own much, and what we do own we certainly can’t keep indefinitely. Every breath is borrowed by the lungful; you can’t save them for later or hold a single one for long. And even a chestful of air is too much cargo for some trips. Some places you have to go empty.
Life on Land
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Before dating my ex-boyfriend, I hadn’t considered myself particularly special below the knee. But he liked my feet and that made me like them too. I have unusually long toes, which my X called “tingers.” (That’s not a Pulitzer-worthy portmanteau of toes and fingers, but Pulitzers aren’t awarded in the bedroom and at the time it seemed very sweet.)
Our love wasn’t good for either of us, but we had a hell of a lot of it. Like a trick candle that couldn’t be snuffed out, it kept flaring back to life after the party had dispersed. We caused each other a lot of pain, mostly on accident and sometimes on purpose. The sex, however—probably because of the constant turmoil—was great. Like, outrageously great. If prestigious global prizes were awarded in the bedroom, we’d have had a hutch full of statuettes.
Even when he wasn’t around, I thought of my toes as tingers. I thought that word when I stepped out of the tub or put on my shoes in the morning. I’m thinking it now, wiggling them in my combat boots.
Loving him made me unhappy, but I couldn’t figure out how to stop doing it. We tried for a long time to make it work, to find some way to keep the affection but ditch the jealousies, the fears, and the resentments. The first time we went to a couples’ counselor, she set a throw pillow on the floor and told me to put all of my anger into it (which, of course, put all my anger into her). We wrote lists and letters. We phoned late at night to say, “I—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called.” We tried for years to isolate the love alone, but it proved impossible. It was like trying to wring the flight out of a bird.
After many long years of failing with X, I met someone else. He was funny and kind, curious and outlandishly handsome. We dated for several years and together we built something seaworthy, sweet, and affectionate. We began to discover, however, incompatibilities that couldn’t be reconciled. He wanted to cook dinners together, make a down payment on a house with a lawn, raise a couple of cool kids. I wanted to tour Asia.
When he and I ended, X’s candle flared again, blazed through its box in the closet and threatened to burn down my apartment. I tried one last time to sort it out with X; we went on chaste coffee dates, talked and talked, kissed and watched movies and tried to ease into something adult and viable—and imploded again. I felt mangled and beaten and sorry for myself and stupid to have expected any other outcome. On the advice of friends and books, I made all sorts of rules: Schedule time to cry if you need to, but don’t allow yourself to be sad all day. I took his numbe
r out of my phone. I resolved to never, ever think about him while masturbating.
But now I find myself in the dumb and embarrassing position in which my own feet make me sad. Even my body reminds me of him. Since our final split, something like a year ago, I’ve been trying to hide them from myself. I wear socks more often inside, keep my head up in the shower.
In Minneapolis, the city in which we both lived, our lives were threaded together. His friends were my friends. Entering a coffee shop, I’d scan the room to see if he might already be there, small mocha in hand. Idling in traffic, I’d watch for his grey sedan. And then one of his songs would come on the radio and I’d change the station or maybe just let it play and let it hurt. Sometimes one of my own songs would come on: We’ve been living too long, too close / and I’m ready to let you go / I’m ready; call off your ghost. There was no place far enough away from him to properly get over him in Minneapolis. After several months of private deliberation, I decided to rent an apartment in New York. I’d always wanted to live in the city, and if there were any time to go, it was now. I’d figured I’d stay there part-time at first, then decide whether or not to make it permanent.
At a tense Doomtree meeting, I came clean to the whole collective. It was just too hard. I loved them all, but I had to take a break—from everything—or I’d never be able to heal up right. I didn’t tell them that I was still struggling to extinguish the hope that X and I might someday reconcile. Hope is incredibly hard to get rid of. And unless you manage to eradicate it completely, it comes right back.
I’d been afraid they’d be angry; I had prepared all sorts of arguments to justify myself. But with patience, grace, and affection, my rap group granted me a sabbatical. The guys told me to take whatever time I needed, to participate how and when I felt comfortable. I told them I couldn’t start on any new songs together and didn’t want to set off on any big tours, but figured I could manage the occasional one-off.
I flew to New York with an air mattress as my carry-on luggage. I sublet a spot from a drummer slash chef who was a friend of a friend slash stand-up comic. He was going on tour in Australia, so I’d get his Lower East Side apartment to myself. I had just returned from an Australian tour, so I gave him a baggie full of dollar coins on the way out. His apartment had lots of expensive chef stuff and a little Casio keyboard and good water pressure and a few tiny brown roaches that he was in the process of exterminating. I could stay for two weeks, time enough to find my own place.
One-bedroom apartments in New York average something like $2,830 a month. I’d saved up some money, but that figure seemed insane—more than any lovesick musician could reasonably spend on her escape. Every morning I logged on to PadMapper, Zillow, RentHop, and half a dozen other sites. I cycled through the windows all day long, clicking Refresh like one of those research mice who die of thirst because they do nothing but press the lever for cocaine.
Every time a new listing met my parameters, I got an alert on my phone. I’d freeze mid-stride on the sidewalk, a sudden impediment to those behind me, or I’d stop chewing my breakfast sandwich, breathing through my nose while speed-reading the listing, searching for a phone number to set up a viewing. To an onlooker, I might have been a trauma surgeon being paged back to the ER. Every time my phone chimed, I knew a thousand other phones did too. Like a dance troupe whose members would never meet, all the other hopefuls were asphyxiating on their bagels in unison, afraid that if we didn’t find something soon, we’d all just have to go back home to Omaha or Tucson or Decatur and submit to the life we’d been hoping to escape.
Racing to one open house, I rushed headlong into traffic, crossing against the light. A car swept past at full speed—the miss was near enough to send a slug of adrenaline through me that left me shaking. Jesus, I thought to myself, pay attention! I don’t want to get hit by a car and miss seeing this place. As if getting hit by a car needed a predicate.
A listing for a rent-stabilized unit on the Lower East Side said there would be an open house on Sunday at 2:55 P.M. that would last for five minutes. At the showing, a pale-haired woman corralled in the kitchen yelled to us that the landlords were LIARS. Like a diorama at the Natural History Museum, she was the Current Tenant, on display in her natural habitat. The broker told us to ignore her, she was high; she’d been late on rent. The entire scene was unsettling. Within four minutes a fellow renter submitted an application.
In the afternoons, I hit my target neighborhoods on foot, street by street, hoping to find some elderly landlord without a DSL connection who might simply post notice of a vacant room in the window, the way people trapped in burning buildings signal with their bedsheets. On a coffee break, I overheard a handsome black man at a café consider proposing to the cat lady a floor below him because her rent had been frozen at some pre-war rate. I had seven days left to find something.
I caught wind of a fifth-story walk-up sublet for $1,550 a month and arrived twenty minutes early for the showing. A crowd was already milling; people in cars shouted, “What’s going on?” A warehouse party? A pop-up restaurant with a Michelin star? Beyoncé? I texted a picture of the scene to my crewmate Lazerbeak back home—he would appreciate the fact that more people had come to see this one-bedroom apartment than had ever come to any concert I’d performed in Florida. On the way up the stairs, I glanced over the railing to see an unbroken line of people, a foot on every stair. It was like the Hajj.
I walked through the unit trying to present as the ideal tenant—someone who listened to music only through headphones, who cooked food with inoffensive smells—a celibate teetotaler with family money and a 9 P.M. bedtime. A few feet away, a deaf couple signed to each other. Shit, I’m out, I thought. They’d be so quiet. We were asked to a write a short essay about why we deserved the unit. I called twice a day to check on the status of the apartment and eventually learned it went to a gentleman renter. I did not ask if it was his literary style that elevated him among us or if he was deaf.
With only a few days to secure a lease, I abandoned my budget and walked through a spot on the Upper East Side. The floor plan was inexplicable: mostly hallway, like several Tetris pieces melted together, or like maybe the apartment was trying to spell out a secret message. I said I’d take it.
The broker took my application, but said I’d need a guarantor with a yearly income of eighty times the monthly rent. My mom was retired. My dad flew gliders for a living. What if I paid the first few months up front? Nope, they’d want a guarantor. I applied anyway. Then I wrote myself a glowing letter of reference, emailed it to Lazerbeak, and asked him to put it on Doomtree letterhead. The broker wanted bank statements and a tax return. Then a second character reference. I asked my accountant to write a letter suggesting that, even though I was a musician, I was neither drug addled, itinerant, or insolvent.
I ended up sitting in tense silence with the broker and the broker’s boss, all of us waiting at a conference table for a final decision to be texted from on high. When the keys dropped into my hand, it felt like I’d been handed a relay baton. It was finally my turn to go—I just wasn’t sure who was on my team or which way we were running.
I inflated my air mattress every evening, and every night it deflated gradually beneath me, setting first my hip and then my shoulder on the floor, gently, like a bride. For the first few nights I slept in my clothes, wrapped in a red Delta blanket I’d swiped on the flight over. I was proud of myself and a little scared and perpetually chilled.
Since then I’ve been gigging hard, earning New York rent. I played a surprise birthday party in Carmel-by-the-Sea—a curtain whooshed open to reveal me and my entire live band, like a car on a game show. I did some voiceover work, recording into my iPhone and hoping the echo of the empty apartment wouldn’t muddy the audio. I performed with Doomtree at a handful of one-off festivals. I played a stop on Gloria Steinem’s book tour and froze up like a moron when she said I had a pretty voice.
I’ve been here for five months now. I bought a proper bed, but the Delta blanket’s still on it. I do not know how or if I can rejoin Doomtree, but the thought of being a musician without a crew is too frightening to think about too hard for too long, so I try not to.
There’s a delivery truck in my new neighborhood that has a huge, realistic painting of a striped bass on the side. Beneath it, there’s a phone number for Meat Without Feet. When I first saw it, I thought, Hey, that’s me. My own feet have been in storage all summer, stowed in black combat boots where they couldn’t remind me of X. I’m just the fish in the second-story walk-up on East Eighty-Second.
My lease is $1,850 a month. For someone calibrated to the Minneapolis market, that figure is total lunacy. Telling my father I pay that much in rent was like coming out—I stuttered; he tried to hide his confusion and surprise. But he still loves me, even if he doesn’t understand my choices.
Not inclusive of the broker’s fee, that figure breaks down to $2.57 an hour. That’s 4.3 cents a minute, which means I could either lease this apartment or phone Macao on a calling card and leave the handset off the hook for a year.
My first month on the Upper East Side, I mentally converted all of my income and expenses into rental currency. The price of a granola bar at the bodega was the equivalent of twenty-nine minutes in my apartment. Every CD I sold at a show earned enough money to watch a full-length movie on Netflix in my apartment. A plasma donation could earn nearly ten hours in my apartment. By extension, donating all of my plasma would net just over four days.
The place seemed way too expensive to leave empty when I was traveling for shows—too valuable to leave empty when I was walking around the block, really. The lease explicitly forbid short-term sublets, but the idea of wasting all that rent was nauseating. I’m the type of person who cuts open empty bottles of lotion. I’ve brought my own Tupperware to restaurants so as not to waste a box on my leftovers. Everything neurotic and Midwestern about me equates waste with moral failure.
