Miss Misery

by Andy Greenwald

  This time, however, I was older than everyone else: I had all the answers. I could see the game; I could see the strings. I knew which comments would provoke laughter and which would provoke nods. I knew which girls thought I was cute and which weren’t listening. I was in control of it, so when Keith brought me another beer I accepted it gladly and made a joke, and Sunny laughed and they all laughed and I laughed too. This was all so easy. It was all so clear.

  I was drunk and happy and the city air felt warm and clean on my face. I was funny. I was on. I was, in fact, so enraptured by the moment that when I felt my phone buzz in my pocket, I actually picked it up and answered it.

  “Hello?”

  “Holy shit, the enigma lives!”

  It was Bryce. I should have guessed.

  “Hey, man,” I said.

  “Don’t ‘hey, man’ me, you great big crazy person. Where the hell have you been? I haven’t heard from you in weeks!”

  I heard his voice in my ear, but my eyes followed Cath Kennedy as she strode across the roof, empty beer bottles gathered in her hands, and made her way back down the stairs to the apartment, Ben There following somberly behind, his arm perched lazily and worryingly on her shoulder.

  “I’ve been…well, all over the place, really.”

  “Yeah, no shit! Country mouse is suddenly city mouse!”

  My head felt thick. “What?”

  “Nothing. Where are you? I hear other human people. That doesn’t seem like you.”

  “I’m at a party.”

  “One of the ones you ‘promoted’? You bad boy rock writer, you?”

  “Ha. No. A friend’s.”

  “OK, OK. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Good.”

  “So you have friends now.”

  “What the hell do you think you are, dude?”

  Bryce chuckled. “I don’t know! You tell me!”

  “Bryce, you’re my best friend.”

  “I know that. Just wanted to hear you say it. So where the hell have you been?”

  I took a deep breath and walked away from the crowd of people who stood chatting around the cooler of beer. I walked to the opposite side of the roof and looked out over Eighth Street. One of the families had provided its children with bottle rockets and noisemakers, and they were making liberal use of them in between the parked cars below.

  “Bryce, have you ever felt split—like there are two of you and you don’t know which one is right?”

  “All the time, dude.”

  “Really?”

  “Except that with me there are like four or five people, and one wants to go for a drive and one wants to eat and another wants to call that girl who winked at me in the bar on La Cienega the other night and one just wants to go play tennis. Oh—and the fifth one is happily getting shitfaced with you in New York right now, glad he never left to move to this crazy place.”

  “So what do you do?”

  Bryce laughed again. Behind his voice I could hear traffic noises: cars accelerating and decelerating, honking and steering, braking and swerving on the other side of the country. “Depends on the day, dude. Depends on the day.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What the hell happened with Amy?”

  The name was like a knife in my heart. “She left.”

  “I know that, nimrod. And you stayed.”

  “Yep.”

  “And that’s all there is to it? You aren’t speaking to her anymore now too?”

  Then the words tumbled out. “What am I going to say to her, Bryce? What do I have left to say? All I did was talk for years and I never once backed up any of the bullshit I said. So I could call her and pretend to be in fantasyland and still hopelessly in love, but the simple truth of it is that I’m here and she’s there and that’s it.”

  “Hit a nerve, did I?”

  “I guess so.” I was out of breath.

  “But David…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You do love her.”

  I sighed. “I know I do.”

  I heard a car door slam; Bryce must have gotten to where he was going. “Listen,” he said. “Do you remember the Fourth of July four—no, Jesus, five years ago?”

  “What?” I said. “In Philly?”

  “Yep.”

  “When we went to the baseball game and sat out on the field to watch the fireworks afterward? That was great.”

  “Do you remember who my date was?”

  “Sure—Stacy Ackerman.”

  “What a cow!”

  “She wasn’t that bad—but you only liked her because of her dad’s car collection.”

  Bryce snorted. “And the marble floors in her parents’ house.”

  “Of course. How silly of me. Marble floors can be very important to the life and general well-being of a recent college graduate.”

  There was a pause. All of America rotated and buzzed between us. “I miss you, buddy,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling a catch in the back of my throat. “I miss you too. I could really have used you out here this summer.”

  “It sounds to me like you’ve got it figured out.”

  “It does?”

  “At least you’re doing something, man. Listen—I love Amy to death and I think you should never walk away from something like that. But if you’re going to do something, you should do it all the way.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Why do you think I moved across the country?”

  “Because the women out there are hotter and your sister offered you a job?”

  “Yeah—but no, dude. No. I did it because I could sit around with you in New York all year, broke, with my thumb up my ass and daydreaming about going, or I could pack the car and go. You fucking think too much. That’s why you’re smart but that’s why you’re stupid.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “You know it, chum.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I gotta get back to the party.”

  “OK, sure. Don’t be a stranger, huh?”

  “To me or to you?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Take care. Send me a postcard.”

  “I will.” Bryce coughed again. “And listen, when you get a chance, I really might need to borrow a couple…”

  “Good-bye, Bryce.” I laughed. He’d owed me $425 for the last nine and a half years.

  “Just thought I’d try it. Stay frosty.”

  “You too.”

  Click.

  And just like that I was back on the roof of a strange party in a dark, festive city. I turned away from the edge of the roof and walked halfway back to the conversation I had left. It was still going, of course, ice-skating from quasi-ironic nostalgia (“Who was the genius who greenlit The Golden Girls? What production chief in L.A. was sitting around going, ‘Get me a quartet of menopausal hags and let the comedy ensue’?”) to fully nostalgic irony (“Remember when the coolest thing you could say about something was that it was ‘decent’? What was that about?”). I shook my head. The same conversation, the same party, a thousand times all over the city. I felt old.

  After a few minutes, Keith must have noticed me feeling sorry for myself, as he waved me back over.

  “Hey, professor, where are the fireworks gonna be? I don’t want to be facing the wrong way.”

  “Over the river,” I said, helping myself to another beer.

  There was a pause. “Which way is that?”

  “East,” I said, taking a sip.

  Blank stares greeted me.

  “That way.” I pointed. Everyone cheered.

  I wasn’t just the oldest person there, I was apparently also the only person with a sense of direction.

  Beer after beer, I bullshitted with the kids. The more empties I piled up on the edge of the roof, the less drunk I felt. It was more like turning up the volume on a radio without an antenna: The staticky hum just grew louder in my ears, helping to mask the thought of anything other than this rooftop, this party
, this conversation. Except one thing, of course: Cath. The thought of her itched in my mind, causing my eyes to dart to the door anytime someone new came upstairs. Where had she gone? And why had she been gone for so long?

  I was busy explaining to Keith why nineties R.E.M. was not, in fact, better than eighties R.E.M. when Stevie Lau burst through the doorway screaming bloody murder.

  “Ew!” he shouted. People turned. Stevie was wearing a burgundy Puma tracksuit and his hair was a thousand points of spikes. “In my bed! Ew!”

  The various groupings on the roof dissipated and circled around him. He was steaming; he was loving the attention. Surveying the crowd, he began his story. “Someone up here—I won’t name names, Andre—accidentally pitches my favorite lighter—the one with the hula dancer—off of the roof, so I go downstairs to get some matches. And while I’m down there, I have the temerity”—all around me people who had no idea what that word meant murmured to themselves—“to go into my own bedroom. And what do I see there but people.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Straight people. Having sex on my bed!” He caught his breath. His tiny face was the same color as his tracksuit. “Naked!” There was some hubbub, but the story was clearly winding down. Stevie waved his arms like propellers. “Rutting! Like animals!” Andre, head bowed with the gravity of the situation, came over to his boyfriend to provide comfort. Stevie let out one final peep: “And they didn’t even ask permission!”

  No one thought to ask the most important question: Who was it? My heart raced. I was making a move to rush down the stairs when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned.

  “Hi!” It was Debra Silverstein. She was grinning, carrying a paper plate filled with food, and wearing a ripped B-52s T-shirt advertising a concert I had actually and quite unironically attended in 1989.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi, Debra.” I paused. She kept grinning.

  “Hi!” she said again.

  “I thought you were going to be in New Jersey. Isn’t your sister getting bat mitzvahed?”

  Debra rolled her eyes. “Ohmigod, what drama! The whole thing is canceled.”

  “You can cancel a bat mitzvah?”

  “Well, not canceled, but, like, postponed?”

  “Ah,” I said, hoping that that would be enough for me to break away. But it wasn’t.

  “Yeah,” she said, still smiling. “It’s a huge shitstorm. Basically, my sister? Nikki? She didn’t like her Torah portion.”

  “You mean the story from the Torah that she’s supposed to recite.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Debra bit down on a tofu pup with such ferocity I thought she would leave teeth marks in her hand.

  “But you don’t choose those—you just read whatever comes up the week you get bat mitzvahed.”

  “Exactly,” Debra agreed. “But Nikki’s portion? Was, like, really lame? It was about goat herding or something. Totally dull. So she refused to do it.”

  “She refused to do it.”

  “Well, between you and me she totally didn’t like her shoes either.”

  “Her shoes.”

  “They didn’t match her dress.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying my best to look considerate. “That sounds really…unfortunate.”

  Debra nodded enthusiastically, thrilled to have found an ally. “I mean, goat herding! Yuck! She’s gonna wait until it’s time to talk about something more awesome, like, I dunno…when that dude turns into salt?”

  I shook my head with deep compassion, then said, “Listen, Debra, have you seen Cath?”

  Debra looked puzzled. “You’re always asking me that!” She laughed, so I laughed too.

  “I guess I am,” I said. “So you haven’t seen her?”

  “No,” she said. “Sorry.”

  A loud wail of a police siren started up, almost causing me to leap out of my shoes. “Jesus,” I said. “Did Stevie call the police?”

  “Ha, ha,” said Debra. “No!” She pulled her Sidekick out of her pocket. “That’s my new ring tone! I got sick of the wolves.” She silenced the police with a press of her thumb. “Sorry if I scared you!”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “Listen, Debra, I’m going to—”

  “What’s your Hebrew name?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your Hebrew name? You, like, have one, don’t you?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Um, it’s Yosef. After an uncle who died before I was born.”

  “Neat,” said Debra.

  And she stood in front of me, rocking back and forth, just waiting for me to ask. So I did. “OK, what’s yours?”

  “It’s Malkah Surah,” she said proudly. “It means ‘Queen Sarah.’” She beamed.

  I was just about to make an inappropriate remark when a giant seagull swooped down from nowhere and snagged an entire hot-dog bun from Queen Sarah’s plate. Debra screamed.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a bird,” I said.

  “Yeah, obviously, but what is it?”

  I paused. “It’s like a plane, but with blood.”

  Debra stared. I killed my beer and walked off in search of Cath.

  Cath’s room was empty and so was Stevie’s, so I locked myself in the bathroom to get some air. I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Why was I so jealous? I had no claim to this girl—I had no claim to anyone. Halfheartedly, I picked up a few of the dozens of bottles that lined the white shelves of the bathroom: Kiehl’s products for every possible cleansing need. I wondered which roommate they belonged to or if the two of them had a time-share agreement. The floor was littered with two-year-old issues of oversize fashion magazines like V and W, all promising the secret of the new looks in London. The sink was full of cat.

  Wait—what?

  I stood up. In the sink, playfully batting at a thin stream of water, was an undersized gray and black mottled cat. It noticed me, said, “Mrowr,” then began bashing its tiny forehead into the water.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “Cats hate water.”

  But the cat didn’t listen—in fact it twisted its body in liquid-inspired ecstasy, lolling around the entire sink and ignoring me entirely. Sufficiently confused, I unlocked and opened the bathroom door, and Cath Kennedy was standing on the other side.

  “There you are,” she said, taking my arm. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “You have a cat in your sink,” I said.

  “Oh! You met Sinky!” She dropped my arm and rushed into the bathroom to give the cat a damp pat on the head. “He loves it in here. We have to keep the faucet turned on for him.”

  “I thought cats hate water,” I said.

  “I thought people didn’t have evil twins!” she said, sticking her tongue out at me.

  “Point,” I said. I watched her pet Sinky for a moment, then said, “I was looking for you, too.”

  “You were?”

  “I was.”

  “I was dealing with Ben There and then helping him into a cab,” she said.

  “‘Dealing’…like in Stevie’s room dealing?”

  Cath laughed. “Ohmigod, gross! No—that was our neighbors. We didn’t even invite them to the party. They’re exhibitionists.” Sinky was licking happily at her wrist. “Anyway, he was in a bad mood. I don’t think he likes you very much. I think he might even have been jealous.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Jealous of me? Why?”

  Cath shrugged. “I suppose he gets jealous whenever a strange older man who isn’t him takes an interest in me.” Sinky was purring loudly now, his tiny eyes closed in private passion. “How come you didn’t pet Sinky?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess I’m out of the habit. I used to love cats, but Amy”—I watched Cath’s face for any reaction, but there was none—“Amy was allergic, so I had to keep away.”

  Cath grabbed my hand and pulled me into the bathroom. “Well she’s not here now. Come on—who could resist that face?”

  I looked down and felt myself resisting, then giving in. I gave Sinky a li
ght tap on the forehead—which was soaked and fuzzy—and then a full stroke from front to back. The cat arched its furry spine in appreciation. “Cute,” I said.

  “Well done,” said Cath, taking my arm again. “Now come on. I don’t want to miss the fireworks.”

  And so I let her lead me back up the stairs. Up on the roof, night had fallen completely and the chatter and laughter that emerged from our party seemed to blend and mingle with similar sounds from the top of every building in the city.

  We walked past the rest of the guests—arranged around the boom box and the food—and made our way to the opposite end of the roof. It was unspoken, our walk, but somehow exhilarating: We were together now and didn’t much care who knew it. We crouched down behind the air-conditioning unit, just hidden from plain sight, faced east, and waited for everything to begin. We didn’t have to wait long. A hush fell over the city, and the prerecorded string music started up from a radio perched on someone else’s rooftop. And then, before long, the whoosh of rockets was audible and the first fireworks of Independence Day lit up the night.

  “Wow,” said Cath. “That’s beautiful.”

  And it was. As the lights exploded all around us, I felt outside of myself for the first time in days. The city was beautiful, illuminated, shining. The only sounds were the staccato bursts of exploding fireworks and the multitracked oohs of appreciation echoing from every rooftop, from everywhere.

  “These are my favorites,” I whispered, as a cascade of slowly bursting green lit up the night.

  Behind us, I could hear Keith laughing about something and Debra squealing, Stevie’s high-pitched complaining and Andre’s muttered shushing. But none of it mattered. White flashed, then orange. The vague sound of strings and snippets of political speeches: Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy. I turned slightly and watched the glare illuminate Cath’s face. Her eyes were wide open and seemed never to blink. She looked innocent, awestruck.

  Eventually there was a pause. Somewhere someone whistled and someone else applauded.

  Cath leaned into me. “Is that it?”

  “No way,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without the grand finale.”