Instant Love: Fiction

by Jami Attenberg

  But still, his was a compelling strangeness, and the sex was always so good. And she cared for him. And he for her. It was a twitchy kind of feeling she had when she saw him, like how her fingers felt after sewing for hours.

  “Maybe you could stay longer, after I get back,” he whispered in her ear. They were on his couch, naked, clothes everywhere, Sasha and Marcus sitting nearby with their tongues drooling from their mouths. “We could be a happy family.”

  She could not allow herself to take his offer seriously. She didn’t want to be disappointed, and Carter had done it before. Yet she promised, “I’ll think about it.”

  Her first week was spectacular: She took the dogs for long walks through the dirty but quiet streets of Long Island City, down past 5 Pointz, a massive compound of graffiti-strewn buildings that would send Sarah Lee into a creative frenzy for most of the afternoon. Plus she got an illustration gig with a weekly in town after getting drunk with an editor in an East Village dive. The editor loved her work, said she was just what New York needed, said she knew a creative director at an ad agency who would simply die over her stuff.

  “Die, do you hear me?” The editor shook her shoulders. Such overzealousness always left Sarah Lee limp and distrustful, but it was affection, it was attention, and she needed it, so she let herself believe her a little bit.

  But during week two, random women started showing up at odd times of the day and night, which is to say, at all times. One after the other: the stunning Asian woman in high-heeled leather boots who said she had left her book in Carter’s apartment three weeks before, it was in the living room, it would just take a second, and yes, there it was, the collection of spanking stories that had made Sarah Lee blush when she flipped through it, but she was nice, so Sarah Lee had made her coffee and they had had a nice chat—her name was Mary, she hadn’t known Carter was leaving town, no, no, it was nothing serious—until Marcus’s growls drove her away; his studio assistant, Nina Sprout, in pigtails and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, who stopped by to get her paycheck and was surprised to learn Carter had left town, who started to cry and freak out because how was she going to pay her goddamn rent, he hadn’t said word one to her about this, it was just like a male artist, they think they own the fucking world because they have testicles, and then she suddenly stopped ranting when she opened her envelope and looked at her check, three months covered, “Have a nice vacation” written on the memo line, and Nina jumped up in the air and yelled, “I love testicles!”; and the blond German woman who hadn’t needed to knock because she had keys and had crawled into bed next to Sarah Lee, and said, “Guess who’s in town, darling?” and had wrapped her arm around her. Sarah Lee let her hold her for a second because it felt nice, and then she turned on the light and the woman screamed, just like they do in the movies, only it was real, it really fucking happened like that, it really did. The woman cursed her and Sarah yelled, “Wait, I’m just house-sitting,” but it was too late, the woman was gone. And there were more bits and blips; Carter was constantly interrupting her life with his women even though he was thousands of miles away. Just think how it would be if he were here in town.

  So Sarah knew she wouldn’t be able to stay. But she wasn’t ready to go back west, either. This editor seemed promising. And so when Carter returned from Australia, it was on to the next sublet.

  5.

  TODAY SHE’S taking the bus into the city to get some money together, money she desperately needs. She’s been on rice and beans for weeks, and had barely scraped enough together to pay her phone bill and rent, just two bills and she couldn’t even cover that. She shakes her head: thirty-two years old. Am I going to live this way forever?

  But she was holding on, thinking that maybe this was the year she’d break through. Maybe today would be the day. You never know. At least she’ll put a little money in her pocket—she’ll pick up a few checks here and there, drop off some work, maybe get a coffee over near Tompkins Square Park, sit outside, not smoke any cigarettes, but just be around them for a little bit. Pretend like she’s still there with the smokers, still part of the scene.

  She stops first at Morris Juno’s studio, a silk-scarf designer she sometimes assists with office work. He had called her a few days before and asked her to visit when she had time. She was hoping he was going to give her some sort of bonus check, that his holiday spirit spread straight through to January.

  It seemed like she mostly got paid to be there and not talk; he was always telling her how much he liked her because she knew how to keep her mouth shut. Sarah Lee is used to being silent, a state she had cultivated initially because of her stutter, but had maintained even as she had progressed in life because she had so many things in her head to deal with first before she could speak. She has learned the lesson too many times that when she speaks too quickly it gets her into trouble.

  “I don’t know how you turned out this way, but god bless you,” he had told her.

  Morris lives on Rivington Street in a tenement with a depressing exterior—cigarette butts gathered on the front stoop like rain in a gutter and a paint job that had surrendered to the New York weather years ago—but the guts of the building were vibrant and alive, each floor housing a different artist who had knocked down walls and built in showers and archways and new doors, painted and nurtured and constructed, took the space and, like pioneers conquering new territories, carved out comfortable, rent-stabilized homes for themselves. (Sarah Lee was most impressed by the sense of permanence there, that people could do it, they could really stay put somewhere.) The tenants, all skilled carpenters and artists, were perfectly capable of transforming the front of the building, but they wanted to keep the place a secret, maintain the illusion of pregentrification for as long as possible.

  “The minute they know you’ve got something good, they want it for themselves,” said Morris. A short, hairy fireball of mysterious ethnic descent (some said Israeli, others Italian), he was obsessively protective of his personal space. He only took visitors from 10:00 to 11:00 AM daily, after his morning coffee, in his kitchen, unless you worked for him, in which case you were only allowed in his workspace—a spare bedroom off the living room he’d converted into a design studio—from 3:00 to 5:00 PM. If you came late to visit, you were not allowed in, and you were asked to leave promptly at 5:00, even if you were in the middle of something. But during his sample sales, he was a glorious host, and he had a reputation as a charming dinner companion and had a beautiful singing voice. He scoffed at the karaoke bars his friends tried to drag him to, but one or two bottles of wine into the evening, on the streets of Manhattan, if you linked arms with him and asked nicely, he would sing you love songs that would bring tears to your eyes. At least this is what Carter had reported to her before he left town. Morris had made Carter cry miserably, thinking of all the loves he had and lost in his thirty-four years, but then he felt free suddenly, and then full of something, love he supposed, and he had kissed Morris on the street.

  “Not like that,” said Carter.

  “Sure,” said Sarah.

  “I’m not that way.”

  “Whatever you say, Carter.”

  “Sarah, I’ve made love to you a hundred times. You know that I’m a deeply feeling heterosexual man.” He reached out toward her breasts. “Come here, let me feel you.”

  She let him feel her.

  AT 10:30 AM Sarah buzzes Morris. Even though he kept hours from 10:00 to 11:00 AM, he really didn’t want to see people until 10:30, and even then not till 10:45 AM. Fifteen minutes was just about all he could tolerate in the morning, but if he must, he must. You must, thinks Sarah. I need some money.

  On the stairs, past orange walls and up to a skylight that welcomed sun up and down the interior, she finally lands in front of Morris’s door. She knocks, and he opens the door slightly, just a wedge, peeks through, then, grudgingly, allows her in.

  She tries not to take it personally. She understands the need for control. She tries to keep her m
ind at room temperature at all times.

  He waves her in, a kiss on the cheek, and then a pinch on the other.

  “I saw Carter the other day. He was asking about you. You should return his calls, I think. Don’t be a silly girl.”

  Sarah hasn’t been talking to him for weeks. She thinks she’s mad at him, but she’s not sure why. She thinks she might even hate him.

  “Anyway, dear, enough of that. I asked you to stop by because I realized”—he says that last word as if he had made some great scientific discovery, a cure for cancer perhaps—“that I hadn’t given you any sort of bonus for the work you did for me this holiday season. So I wanted you to have one of my scarves.” He walks into his studio and returns with three scarves still in their plastic wrapping. “I think you need one of the fringed serapes. These colors—” He splays them on the table in front of her: the first red with orange stripes, the next orange with brown stripes, and the third plum with pink stripes. “These colors will suit you.”

  Sarah Lee mentally calculates how much she might be able to get for the serape on eBay. A couple hundred at least.

  “I like the plum for you, but you could do orange, too. Orange is such a happy color, and the plum, it might pull you down. It’s up to you.”

  Well, it would be the plum, of course. Plum, somber but pretty plum. She moves her hand to the package, pulls it closer to her. But she’s going to sell it anyway. She doesn’t need a new scarf. It was frivolous. No one needs a silk scarf when you can buy a perfectly nice fleece one on St. Mark’s for seven bucks, which is what Sarah had done. There was a time she might have coveted the scarves, but these days she just wanted to eat something beyond those rice and beans. She wanted steak, even if she wasn’t dressed for it.

  “Try it on, let me see it on you.”

  I bet I could get more for it if it’s still in the packaging, thinks Sarah, but how could she insult him? It was a generous gift, more than she probably deserved for answering a few phones and ringing up credit-card charges. She rips open the plastic with her fingers and slips the scarf around her shoulders. And it was heaven. Of course. Her shoulders felt a warm pressure from the weight of the scarf, and when she rubbed her cheek against it, it was soft and comforting like the sound of someone’s voice, a crooner singing a love song. She rises, walks to the mirror near the front door—the colors suit her perfectly, particularly the mood she’s in today. There’s the wine tint to her cheeks, as if someone had just pinched them, the gray in her green eyes, the auburn highlights in her hair, all swirling around next to this beautiful plum scarf. Her whole body is so warm now, everything about her feels more beautiful and spectacular.

  She hears Morris in the background saying, “You should do nice things for yourself. You should take care of yourself. Little things. Like this.”

  No way in hell is this scarf going on eBay. She has to keep it. She is in love with this scarf.

  6.

  AFTER SHE leaves Morris, she walks up to Houston and hangs a right, then a left onto Avenue C, which will always feel like no man’s land, no matter how many new condos they install. Years ago, when she still lived in Boston, people would tell her to stay away from Avenue C whenever she visited New York. She would visit with her high-school boyfriend, the one who got her pregnant, then weeks later ended up in jail for dealing drugs (Last she’d heard, he’d high-tailed it to Maine to avoid two separate sets of child support payments. A heartbreaker from start to finish). At the time, though, he was just a normal, totally fun stoner dude, and they would drive down on the weekends and stay with an aunt of his. She lived on the top floor of a town house in Chelsea with two gay men (“We’re the sitcom of the future, you wait and see,” one of the roommates said), and welcomed the youth of today with wide open arms and a glorious décolletage in full bloom. Sarah Lee loved to press up against her, what a joy it was. It made her boyfriend a little uncomfortable when he hugged his aunt, Sarah Lee could tell by the seriousness of his lips, straight and narrow and tight, but she was free to enjoy the embrace. She had read somewhere that people should get ten hugs a day, so she would take them when she could get them.

  “That’s your first problem right there,” her boyfriend had said. “Reading articles. And your second problem is believing them.” But he had hugged her all the time anyway, and secretly liked that Sarah Lee tried to understand the world around her in a different way than he did, which was usually through a cloud of pot smoke.

  His aunt took club drugs in great quantities but never shared. However, she did tell them what part of the park to go to for dime bags if they had shown up empty-handed, and which bars were unlikely to card (all of them), and what parts of the city were safe. Avenue C wasn’t on the list, neither was Avenue B for that matter, and Avenue A, barely.

  “You two stay away from that park after dark,” his aunt had said.

  Today Avenue C had French restaurants, shops and galleries, and, near the north end of it, one narrow storefront shop, Liberation, a legendary space (Carter used to see bands play there, swear to god, he told her. “How did they fit?” “They just did”) that sold Sarah Lee’s handmade Christmas cards, along with work from a handful of designers, the kind of stuff Sarah Lee sometimes thought of as art, and sometimes as useless crap: T-shirts screen-printed with outlines of birds or the faces of dictators, zines of poems or snapshots or personal tales of hard times on the road all hand-stapled or sometimes bound by a single extra-thick rubber band, and self-produced CDs made by noise bands from places like Portland and Chapel Hill and Chicago. (Sarah had picked up one of these once and discovered she had slept with the drummer from one of the bands and, blushing and horrified, had immediately shoved it to the bottom of the stack, as if that would prevent anyone from knowing the deep dark secret in her head.)

  The owner of Liberation was a man named Travis James Crenshaw, but everyone just called him Doc because he was good with his hands. That’s what he said anyway. It may have also had something to do with his stint as a prescription-drug dealer in the mid-’90s, but he went with the line that was more likely to make the ladies blush. He’d had the store for ten years, and had forty years left on his lease. Rent was five hundred dollars a month, and he slept in a cozy setup in the back of the store, about two hundred square feet, enough for a twin bed and small kitchen. So as long as he sold at least thirty dollars a day (minus what he paid to the artist, always fifty-fifty, that was his motto), and cooked all his own meals, Doc could keep up Liberation forever, or at least for the next forty years.

  Plus he drank for free (or on the cheap anyway) at every East Village dive bar, so oftentimes he drank his dinner. The female bartenders in particular liked him because he was still handsome, with his dark eyes that flashed as if warning that he could cause trouble at any moment, balanced by a slender and crafted nose that made him seem important, a decision-maker, a leader. And he was gallant and polite, with a nice, warm southern voice he earned from eighteen years in Savannah, Georgia, as a youth. He would drag himself from bar to bar, around Tompkins Square Park, south of it mainly, Doc making the women smile, working the room. Sometimes Carter would join him—he liked making the rounds of lady bartenders as much as the next guy.

  Sarah Lee went out with Doc once, right after the first time she met him. “It’s a business meeting,” he claimed. He was interested in selling some of her work in his store. But Sarah knew most business meetings don’t happen at 9:00 PM on a Thursday, even if this was New York.

  They went to a dive bar on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B—“What’s this place called?” “7B.” “Right, of course.”—and he proceeded to launch into a tirade about his ex-wife for the next hour. He used all kinds of awful words, obscenities flowed through his speech like champagne on New Year’s Eve, only there was nothing to celebrate, just things to mourn, things to kick and stomp on, things to beat into the ground. His wife had left him for the man who owned the other gallery on Avenue C, the one that made more money, the one that got co
vered in Art Forum and the New York Times, the one that the man closed quietly, opening a larger space in Chelsea, taking Doc’s wife with him. Chelsea is not that far away from the East Village, but Chelsea is a million miles away from Avenue C.

  Put it to rest already, thought Sarah.

  “I don’t know why I’m talking this way,” he said, and when he apologized later, it was clear he really didn’t. But she was just sitting there so quietly, and she was new, she hadn’t heard these stories before. It happened to her a lot. She was silent but seemed welcoming, warm, and she was attracted to the kind of people who needed to fill empty spaces with words; or perhaps, they were the kind of people who were attracted to her; or both, of course, both.

  But the cursing, it just went on for far too long, and it made her feel that he might have that much venom for the next woman. She could be the next woman. But she didn’t want to be next. She wanted to be last.

  Eventually she simply got up and left—it was when he said “cunt”; she had no patience for that talk—and he walked outside after her, stopping to pat the door guy on the shoulder, no trouble here, mate, and then called her name; she was halfway down the block, walking toward Houston, she was always walking toward Houston, it seemed, when she was in the city, and she stopped.

  He apologized again and again. “I’m just crazy,” he said. “Please. Come back inside.”

  She declined.

  “Then come by the store tomorrow. So I know that we’re going to be friends.”

  And she did, because she woke up the next morning, thought it through, his heartbreak and his anger, and she wished that she could articulate it the way he did, not with the cursing, but the way he told the story in a straight line, the way each emotion was so real and vibrant to him. Maybe there was something to be learned from him, she didn’t know what. She decided to be his friend.