I loved being with Professor Harrison. I never felt like a misfit when I was with him. I guess I still was one, but he was, too, and misfits aren’t misfits when they’re in each other’s company. Anything he said that I knew would be considered out of place in society, that a normal person wouldn’t say, only made me like him more. He seemed to think the same of me. When he talked about not feeling at ease growing up, I wanted to hug him. We had a comfortable similarity whose milky depths I never wanted to leave.
People might believe that such a relationship, young woman and older male authority figure, always would be ultimately harmful. Maybe it was. Then again, if I hadn’t met David, I probably would have spent all winter in my room, studying and reading and not talking to anyone. I would not have been out meeting other students. I would have been with myself.
But if I do end up with myself sometimes, it’s not so horrible.
I’m not the be-all and end-all, but I like myself.
I sit up. A wind blows. It’s cold. The roar of the crowd is getting louder.
I had fun tonight; I would not have admitted that before. I didn’t do anything too horrible, and I stayed true to myself.
But I am still alone.
Who would think that a person could sit above a crowd of five hundred thousand people, in a city of eight million, and still feel alone?
I walk back to the stairwell, take the elevator down and make my way through the crowds toward the subway station. It’s packed.
Waiting on the platform, I hear a conversation among the din. “Yeah, he never drank in college because his father was an alcoholic, but he didn’t tell anyone in the house why he didn’t, and they treated him like shit the whole time.”
I’m reminded that it doesn’t matter if a thousand people around me aren’t anything like me. I’d understand that guy, whoever he is, who didn’t want to drink and stood by it. I would have accepted him. But the problem is, I don’t know that I’ll ever meet him.
When the subway car slides over to us, the crowd squeezes in. It’s so stuffed it’s hard to breathe. Finally I get out at my stop and walk back through the cold air.
I still don’t feel ready to sleep. The world is going crazy, and I want to be a part of it. If I don’t, I’ll still hear it outside my window.
At my building, I see that Bobby’s shades are down. He’s either asleep or out. I quietly trot upstairs and put my key in the lock. My apartment feels warm.
It’s about eleven-thirty. Now what?
I check my answering machine, but there are no messages. I should get caller ID so I can see if anyone called just to hear my voice. Half the people who have it have it for psychological reasons anyway.
I get an idea. I dial 1-855-NYC-COPE.
A man answers. “COPE hotline.”
“What are you doing inside on New Year’s Eve?” I ask.
He pauses. “Volunteering for the COPE hotline.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“Someone has to.”
“What’s your name?”
“Bob.”
“Bob…?” I say. “I think I love you.”
He laughs. “Is there something you’d like to talk about?”
“A lot of things, but I’m dealing with them,” I say. “I do want to wish you a happy new year. It’s very nice of you to be doing something good tonight.”
“Ah, we got a few of us here. We’re happy to be here.”
“Well, I’m happy you’re happy,” I say. More people who aren’t out depending on drugs and alcohol. And they’re actually giving up their party time to do something nice!
“Happy new year, mystery caller,” he says.
“Happy new year, Bob.”
I hang up.
Now what?
I take my journal and flashlight and climb out onto the fire escape. I don’t worry that it hasn’t been inspected. I sit on one of the rusty metal stairs. It makes my buttocks cold. There’s enough light outside that I don’t need the flashlight.
“New year’s resolution,” I write, “figure out which rules I should stick by. Philosophize.”
I need to come up with a better resolution than that.
Suddenly I hear the squeal of a little gear. Someone’s screen door is opening. Three fire escapes to my right, the person steps out.
It’s Cy, only he’s not wearing his hat. He does have suspenders on, and his hair is slick as ever. Man, is he gorgeous. I half expect a high-heeled woman to step out next, and for the two of them to start slow-dancing in the moonlight. But it’s just him and one of his music books.
“Hey!” I call.
“Hey!” he yells, noticing me. “I was going to practice here. I figured no one would notice tonight.”
Wow, someone at eleven-thirty on New Year’s Eve who can talk without hiccuping or slurring. “Have you been out?”
“Not till now,” Cy yells. Below us, a fat man in a beret is dancing with a stuffed pig. “This is a little much for me,” Cy yells. “I’m from a different decade. Reincarnated.” He smiles. His face is so clean shaven. “You know ‘Man of La Mancha’?”
“Yes,” I say.
He looks at his book, then extends his hand and croons “The Impossible Dream.”
I hear sirens go off in the distance.
“See what you did?” I say.
He laughs. “Usually I only break glasses.”
I hear something crash.
“You want to come over here?” he asks. “It is New Year’s. I mean, I guess normal people don’t like to spend it alone. Not that I’m normal.”
I have to smile at that. “I know you need to practice your music.”
“I practice too much. 4R.”
That’s an apartment number I won’t forget. I crawl back inside, then stare at myself in the mirror. Save for a piece of green-blue confetti in my hair, I look pretty good. A fast beat passes by, obviously from someone’s car, and I brush a tiny bit of corn chip from my sweater. I lock the door and run downstairs, outside, then three doors down.
Cy’s apartment shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, in its tastefulness. In his kitchen, he’s got framed Broadway show posters, a pile of records, a phonograph and a piano keyboard. “I can’t believe I’m finally in New York,” Cy says. “It feels great.”
“It took you a while?” I ask, really fishing for his age.
“Ronald told you, right? I was living down in South Jersey. I shouldn’t admit this, but I was in my parents’ garage. Which was ridiculous. But I wanted to come to New York on my own terms, as someone who was making a living in the theater, not owing money to my parents or having four roommates. You can’t always do that.”
“Some people never get to,” I say. “You should be proud.” His chin is about even with my nose. I want to nuzzle against his shaven face. I don’t even worry about whether it’s the alcohol. “Did you study theater in college?”
“Yes,” he says. “At Mason Gross.” He tells me what year, and I put him at twenty-nine or thirty. Eleven years older than me, but Petrov did say I was mature for my age.
He walks through the kitchen. It’s expansive, with a clean white floor. “This is the only room in the house with room. Check this out.” He drops a 78 on the phonograph. “Was my grandmother’s,” he says. “That was when I started learning to love this stuff. I was a weird kid.”
I can’t help but smile at someone so into something that’s not alcohol or drugs. He spins around, then stops and holds out his hands for me.
Cy is the most unusual person I’ve met since moving here, which is a good thing. We dance for a while, slow, and then he sits me on a couch and shows me half a million things. It’s as if he’s waited ten years to show them to someone. He’s got that stack of 78s, an electric piano keyboard, and he’s writing a musical. The guy can play any song on the piano you ask for.
I don’t detect anything scheming or self-conscious—I get a sense that rather than purposely trying to avoid bad behavior, bad behavio
r isn’t an attraction for him. He makes no excuse for listening to old records or wearing a hat. It’s just the way he is. I can’t help but be entranced by it.
I don’t ask what he got on his SATs. I don’t ask if he avoids moral indiscretions or whether he has read Rabelais. Maybe he isn’t even real.
“Look,” Cy says, and he finds his hat. “I’m wearing this in the revue.” He does a little dance. It’s haphazard and funny.
“I first saw you in that hat,” I say. “You were in the subway muttering to yourself. I thought you were crazy.”
“I am,” he says, and he steps onto a chair, then onto the coffee table, then onto the kitchen counter. “Did you ever do this when you were a kid, pretend the floor was the ocean, and if you touched it, you’d drown, so you had to see how far you could go without touching the floor?” No wonder he doesn’t drink. He doesn’t need to.
“I must have,” I say. “I know I played runaways-on-a-boat.”
“And the bed was the boat?” Cy says. “That worked until you had to walk across the floor to refill your bowl of Cheetos.” He jumps down and puts his face next to mine. “You know what it’s called when you do that?”
“What?” I ask.
“Cheet-ing.”
“Ugh,” I say, but of course, I like it.
He kneels in front of me. “I would give you anything if you can tell me a worse joke than that.”
The first one that flashes into my head is the Pinocchio one that Douglas P. Winters told me at legal proofreading that night, but I can’t do that. I tell him a joke I heard once about an Amish drive-by shooting. He laughs. I had told it to Michael at Barnes & Noble, and he didn’t get it.
Cy puts the hat on me. “Looks good,” he says.
“It’s kind of big on me,” I say.
“It’s Victor/Victoria.” He sits on the couch. “A woman pretending to be a man…”
“Pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a man, pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a man, pretending to be a woman….”
He smiles. “You know it!”
“Well, it’s kind of famous.”
“You’d be surprised how many people know so little. Did you have musicals in your high school?”
“No. They would hold auditions and start practicing, but they kept falling apart. No one would show up for rehearsals. All the drama people went to the arts high school. They drained all the talent from my school.”
“Except for you,” he says.
“I’m not talented.”
“Yes you are. I can tell.”
“Nah.”
“Yes.” He presses my nose for a second, then lets it go. “What did you do in high school? What were you like?”
“Nerdy and geeky.”
“Come on,” he says. “You must have been in some after-school activities.”
“Math Team, Science Team, College Bowl, Decathlon of Knowledge, Mathletes, Olympics of the Mind, Excellent Exegetists, Harvard Model Congress, Quiz Kids, Varsity Physics, Westinghouse Science Project Semifinals…”
“Nerd nerd nerd,” he says.
“Theater geek,” I say.
“Nerd nerd.”
“Theater geek.”
We’re in each other’s faces.
“Nerd.”
“Theater geek.”
“That is not the proper term,” Cy says. “The proper term at my school was ‘stage whore’ or ‘drama queen.’ Also, I was in the band for a while, so I was considered a ‘band fag.’ Who comes up with these things?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “You band fag and stage whore.”
“I’m only guilty of some of those things,” he says, leaning close. He looks even better up close. “And you should be everything you are.” He puts his right hand in mine, then reaches for the other. “Got a request?” He looks over at the 78s.
“Polka,” I say.
“Polka what?” he asks.
“Polka you.”
He finds a record. The pile smells musty, but I like it, as it reminds me of my grandparents’ place. Cy gingerly drops it onto the record player. After the crackling stops and the music starts, some sonorous notes ring out, long and pretty. We dance from the kitchen through the hall to up on the couch.
He puts his left hand around my waist.
Then he looks at me intently.
A loud bang stops us in our tracks.
“Haaappy new year!” someone shrieks below, and there’s screaming, stomping, honking, laughing. I haven’t heard this much racket since the Yankees won Game 4.
Cy looks at me again. We’re both quiet.
“I was hoping you’d end up here sooner or later,” he says.
Then he moves toward my neck. I feel his nose and lips at the same time. He feels warm. “I’ll bet you were a great Mathlete.”
“Secant squared minus tangent squared equals one,” I say.
“Whisper it,” Cy says, kissing his way down my shirt.
“Secant squared minus tangent squared equals one.”
He rises and again kisses me on the lips. I feel a shiver run from my mouth through my body. “Come with me,” he says, and takes my hand.
“What’s your name?” I ask him. “What’s Cy short for?”
He smiles. “Cyclone. Does that put me ahead of you in the bad joke Olympics? Although you were probably in it in high school.”
“They had to get rid of it because all the comedians went to Arts High.”
He stops at the door to his room. “What’s Carrie short for?”
“Carrie.”
“What’s your middle name?”
Ooh, he wants to know my middle name. “My name is Carrie Constance Pilby.”
“Cute name,” he says.
“What’s your full name?”
“Cyril George Panatogolous.”
“I’ll call you Cy.”
His room is very dark. The shades are black. Maybe because he’s up late at night and sleeps during the day. Hey, he’s like me.
He shuts the door until it’s pitch-black, and for a second, I’m afraid, but he takes my hands and we start dancing again, slow. It feels like it goes on forever. Cy seems a lot stronger than a half hour ago.
Soon we stop. He kisses me in the dark.
In the end, it turns out that he’s much better at everything than Professor What’s-His-Name.
About four in the morning, a garbage truck rolls by. I wake up. I’m next to Cy, who’s curled like a fetus, asleep, and the sheets are all out of place. I sit up and find that I’m wearing a Godspell T-shirt. How did all of this happen? When will God save the people? Oh, God of mercy, when?
I don’t feel bad, but I do feel funny, as this is obviously not standard operating procedure for me.
I stand up. What have I done?
Then, I think of something else.
I’ve done everything on the list!
Except one thing.
I grope around for my clothes.
“Where you going?” Cy asks into his pillow, reaching around with his left hand.
“I’ll be back,” I say, and I head downstairs.
There are stragglers stumbling home, but mostly, the only noise is the trucks, churning away the evidence of the night’s debauchery. Practically embedded in the street are papers and pieces of foil and stepped-on noisemakers. They’re like those gun barrels and pennies and metal objects you see stuck in gravel sometimes. What’s the story with that? I head around the corner and see that the coffee shop is open. Even at four o’clock, Milquetoast is inside.
He brightens when he sees me. “Hey, Carrie,” he says. He really looks excited. I’m glad. There are four or five tables full of people in there, but no one is uttering a word. They’re playing with bits of straw wrappers or staring at each other, obviously hung over. “Hi, Ronald!” I yell.
A guy with spidery hair glares at me.
Ronald smiles.
“It’s too bad you have to work on New Year’s,” I say.
“I don’t mind,” he says slowly. “It’s too noisy out there.”
“You know, you’re my kind of person. I didn’t fully realize that.”
He grins and looks at the counter bashfully.
“Well, I was home, and I knew you were here, and I wanted to tell you something. I think you’re a great guy, and I really like you. You don’t lie about anything. You’re true. There aren’t many people like that anymore. And I think you should stay that way.”
Ronald grins broadly. “I like that, Carrie,” he says. “That makes me happy.”
“I care about you,” I say, and he leans forward, and we hug.
“I like you, too,” he says.
“Do you want to get that meal tomorrow?” I ask.
“Tomorrow tomorrow,” he says, “or tomorrow today?”
“I guess…tomorrow tomorrow,” I say.
He grins broadly. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s good. Yeah, that’d be good.”
“Here’s my number,” I say. I scribble it on a napkin. “Call me tomorrow. Tomorrow tomorrow.” I hand the number to him.
This time, I don’t have that hollow feeling inside. I think he really does like me. He’s not faking it.
He looks at me funny as I’m standing there. “You want coffee?”
“No, thanks,” I say. “I don’t really drink it.”
“Hey,” he says. “Happy new year.”
I smile. “Happy new year.” It might be a good year after all.
On the way past my building, I see Bobby peeking out his window in his undershirt, and I wave. Bobby smiles. Pleasantly, not lecherously.
A few buildings down, Cy is sitting on his stoop in a button-down shirt and wrinkled Dockers, circles under his eyes. When he sees me, he stands up and reaches for my hands. That’s dedication, to get out of bed at four in the morning to wait for me.
Chapter Twelve
I wake up again at 9:15 a.m., and Cy is sleeping.
Now that the alcohol has worn off, I feel embarrassed. The events of last night seem surreal.
The way the light comes through Cy’s drapes feels strange; the way his furniture reflects in his wall mirror feels strange; the way his pile of laundry smells is strange. I don’t know how people can routinely wake up in different places. Maybe they get used to it. I don’t think I could.
Carrie Pilby Page 29
