Instant Love: Fiction

by Jami Attenberg

  So she brought the cards that she hadn’t had a chance to show him the night before, and he spread them out before him on his desk and smiled at each one as he read them. Then she talked to him about a line of her own greeting cards; it wasn’t high art, she knew, but people seemed to like her cards a lot when she sent them. She had done invitations for parties, too, baby showers and bachelorette parties, and everyone had always said, “You should have your own line,” and that stuck with her, that she could have something of her own, because right now she didn’t have very much of anything at all. But she had to be careful about where she put her work, she was protective of it at times, and she couldn’t see her cards sitting in any old Hallmark store. They’d gather dust in the back if she wasn’t careful.

  A week later Doc sat for her for a sketch in his store, at a wide wooden table, animal claws for feet, and nicks on the top of it from a wild party where ladies danced on top of it in spiked heels—“You should have seen those girls dance.” Doc took phone calls and rang up forty-five dollars’ worth of sales and had something to say to practically everyone who walked in the door, knew them by first name, what they did, where they lived.

  It was that first brisk fall day, and the wind had stung Sarah Lee’s cheeks, surprising her, and people would just walk into the store to warm up for a while.

  When the sketch was done, Doc loved it. She had drawn him with his mouth slightly open, an evil yet seductive grin, and he had three sets of hands, all in motion. She drew him younger than he actually was, but she thought he needed to be captured that way. Doc framed it and put it up on the wall behind the cash register, a proud demon shopkeeper.

  He tells her all the time now that people try to buy his picture right off the wall, but he never sells it. “You could sell more,” he tells her. “You could sit here on Saturdays and sell sketches for thirty bucks. People love shit like that.”

  She still contemplates it from time to time, but she wasn’t sure if it would make her feel like one of those desperate failed artists trapped at Disney World, drawing caricatures of little girls with their favorite hobbies haunting the background. A tennis racket. A horse. A pretty blond doll with detachable parts.

  AT LIBERATION, she finds Doc standing outside, smoking a cigarette. She asks him for a drag. He offers her a fresh one instead, and she accepts, feeling the cold brush off his arm onto hers where they meet for a moment. Then he lights another for himself, and the two of them stand outside in the cold for a while longer. The store is empty.

  “Yeah, business has been bad since New Year’s,” says Doc. “Everyone’s broke, even the people who shouldn’t be broke, the rich kids in the condos. Or maybe they’re just all shopped out.” He motioned to a shiny new building down the street, where a doorman agonized behind a front desk. “No holiday spirit left. It’s all in the toilet. With my business.”

  Sarah Lee looks at his stomach and waist to see if he has been eating, then looks into his eyes to see if he’s sane. He needs to trim his nose hairs, she thinks, but besides that he seems all right.

  “You all right?” she says.

  He blusters like a teen boy, “Oh, I’m always all right, sugar, but thanks for caring,” and for a moment Sarah Lee sees his younger self, a fresh young art-school student straight from the South, traveling the art world in the ’80s in New York, death-defying feats of drugs and art and sex, twirling around like a ballet dancer, dazzling everyone around him.

  “I’ll take you at your word,” she says.

  “I owe you some money,” he says. “And it’s cold! Oh, sweet Jesus, it’s cold. Let’s get you inside.”

  He dashes into the backroom while she checks out his latest merchandise. She sees a new batch of screen-printed T-shirts; a new designer, she thinks, and she covets them. The design is intricate and original, no rip-off artist here, shiny silver paint shattered like a snowflake, each dot of paint like a small voice, on a sweet pink T-shirt cut and shredded and then resewn, so it hangs like gauze off the shoulders. It would look lovely on her, she thinks. She has good shoulders, the skin is soft and there are a few freckles. When she’s alone sometimes she rubs her cheek against them and wonders if everyone’s shoulders are this soft or if it is just hers. She checks the price tag—forty dollars.

  Forty dollars. Two weeks of rice and beans with one vegetable a day; one happy hour with a friend, then a slice of pizza plus a cab ride home; her cell-phone bill; the haircut she gets once every three months from the cheapie Asian salon in the East Village that Carter introduced her to because he’s in love with all the stylists; five packs of cigarettes; a year’s supply of sketchbooks and ultrafine Sharpies. A steak dinner with one glass of cabernet. Forty dollars.

  Doc emerges from the backroom, waving the check in the air, eyebrows raised like a vaudevillian comic. “You did all right this year, little miss.” He hands it to her. It’s for $305.00. She blushes. She can’t even begin to extrapolate that number, she’ll save the fantasizing for later when she’s alone and wants to savor the day.

  “We sold out of the cards,” he says, then starts in on his next plan for her: Valentine’s Day. They’d up the price this time because they could be presents as well as cards, he’s sure he’d be able to get ten bucks a pop for something really special. He has plans for her and her little drawings, he says. Big plans.

  “What do I know of love?” she says dramatically, and then she laughs, and he laughs, and there is briefly a moment of hysteria in the store, and then he says, “Exactly,” and she knows she’ll do it, she has twenty ideas at once. About love.

  “I like this shirt,” she says. “A lot.”

  “Yeah? It’s mine. I mean I made it. I decided, why should you kids have all the fun?”

  “It’s beautiful, Doc.”

  “You should try it on.”

  “I couldn’t….”

  “Try it on.”

  And so she goes to the backroom, his little hole in the wall with a few boxes of shirts and books and CDs and bookshelves and a spartan twin bed and a hot plate and a sink and a mini-fridge and she stops looking, shuts down after that, because the fridge is too much, it’s so little, and she’s sure there’s nothing in there but a six-pack and a bottle of vodka anyway, maybe some mixers. Madly, she pulls off her sweater and pulls on the T-shirt, and then models it for Doc. He proclaims it perfect, it’s as if he had been thinking of her the entire time, and she must have it, just take it, consider it a Christmas present.

  “I have been waiting to do something nice for you since the day that I met you,” he says, and there is an argument, a friendly one, and then finally he agrees to take twenty dollars for it. She pulls a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet and hands it to him, and he takes it guiltily, but he is pleased, too—this is the first thing of his that he’s sold in a long time.

  “I think I’ll wear it all day,” she says. She shoves her sweater in her bag.

  “You make me happy,” he says, and he holds her hand for a second, and she lets him, because she still has a little holiday spirit left in her.

  “Oh, fuck, I forgot to tell you,” he says. “Carter’s looking for you.” And then, awkwardly, he drops her hand.

  7.

  SARAH LEE crosses the park and heads west, toward Gareth’s apartment. She is excited to see him more than anyone else today, because he is the nicest man she has ever met, and that includes every hippie in the Pacific Northwest and any man she has ever loved. Also he might be the one to change her life forever. They are trying to make a book together; he is writing it, and she is illustrating it. He is sort of famous and successful already—he is on NPR constantly, and has a children’s book series about a giraffe named Camilla that is widely loved—but he wants to break into the adult market because he feels more like an adult now than he has in years, that’s what he told her. He is married, he has a baby on the way, and he has bought an apartment. He is almost grown.

  “I have shed my twenties completely,” he has said. “A layer of
useless skin I’d like to forget.”

  At Gareth’s house the buzzer doesn’t work. She presses it for a minute straight, and there’s no response. A pile of errant snow, dirty from the streets, forgotten by plows and last weekend’s sunshine, lies near a garbage can, and Sarah Lee packs together a snowball, hurls it at his window, nails it. After a moment, Gareth comes to the window, flakes and water dripping down it, looks at the street and waves at Sarah, then mouths, “I’ll be right down,” and then, just to make sure she understands, points downward.

  “Yes, yes.” Sarah nods, and then laughs.

  Gareth hustles to the front door, out of breath. He reaches to his cowlick, neatens it, and it flops down again on his forehead. Sarah Lee has often wanted to press it in place herself, but she has resisted. He is not hers to touch.

  He rests on the door for a moment, this large man, a boisterous king of a man, whose flesh is simultaneously solid and unyielding like the wall of a castle, and soft and embraceable, something to sink into for comfort. Sarah Lee can’t picture him as a smaller man; she hopes that he stays big forever. It is nice to know in a city of wasted-away youth that a man like Gareth exists.

  He pushes the door open with his free hand, in the other there is a baby monitor. He hugs Sarah, and she allows herself the pleasure of it for a moment.

  “Sarah Lee, my dear sweet girl,” he says. “I’m so delighted. Company, at last!”

  They take the three flights slowly, the stairs ache with each step.

  “Laura’s home now,” he tells her. “In bed. The doctor made her. ‘Stay in bed,’ he said, and so there she is. In bed.”

  “Is she OK?”

  “Well, yes. And no. She’s having trouble breathing. She’s so petite, you know, and she’s carrying everything up front. All that weight on such a delicate woman, it’s remarkable. She’s never weighed that much before. But the baby is fine.”

  They stop outside his front door. The Christmas wreath is still hanging, two birds with holly in their mouths, entwined in straw and yarn.

  “They think the baby should be fine,” he says. “Everything is supposed to be fine.”

  “It’s going to be fine,” she says. She hugs him again, and this time lets him hold on to her.

  “Of course it is,” he says. “And then she was driving me mad with all the yelling back and forth from her room to the kitchen, so I got these.” He waves the baby monitor. “We needed them anyway.”

  They are still standing in the hallway and time is passing very slowly, like the time before someone kisses you for the first time, thinks Sarah, only this is not about a kiss. A forceful wave of emotion plunges into her, and she feels dizzy. It isn’t about her, it isn’t her moment, but she is still a servant to her surroundings. And then she remembers to focus, and she is back, she is present again.

  “I don’t want to go back in there,” says Gareth. He looks down sadly, embarrassed. His ears flush pink, and Sarah wants to grab them to see if they’re as warm as she thinks they are.

  “It’s OK to feel that way,” says Sarah.

  “Things have been…difficult,” he says.

  “You can handle it,” she says. And then, even though she didn’t know if it was true, even though she had only known him a few months, she chucks his shoulders with her hands and boldly tells him, “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your entire life.”

  “Well, I don’t know if it was this exact moment,” he says.

  “No, it was this one. I checked,” she says drily. She laughs at him, and then he starts laughing, too, and then the moment is over, and everything she felt drains from her body. Relief. At last.

  THE BOOK they are making is about rats beneath the city and lovers aboveground, all living off the same alley in New York. Some panels are split in half, others in quarters, so multiple story lines are visible at the same time. There are some characters who are identifiable only by their shoes, and others by their tails. There is a heroine, and her name is Mirabella. She looks like Gareth’s wife, Laura. To a T. Tiny bones, olive skin, dark black hair like a shroud. There is a young man, Ali, who rides a skateboard around town, and he’s in love with a woman named Amy who wears pink high heels and clips made of shiny pearls in her hair, and an older man, Horace, who has sturdy brown boots with laces and makes sure all of the animals in the city are fed, and is sometimes watched by a mysterious woman who lives behind purple curtains. And there are rats named after saints, like Luke and Agnes and Antonia, some with longer story lines, pairing off and traveling together, and some that make only brief appearances, spouting off one-liners, truisms of life. All of the characters have the same mission: They are all marching desperately through this alley, trying to fall in love.

  They haven’t decided on a title for it yet. Sarah likes Love Alley but Gareth thinks that sounds like a porn title. “Like ladies of the evening in the red-light district of Amsterdam.” It sounds romantic when he says it like that, thinks Sarah, but he makes everything sound romantic.

  They have spread out the new pages Sarah Lee brought on his kitchen table, salt and pepper shakers and electricity bills shoved aside, the baby monitor holding down an errant corner of a page. The sketches are in black and white, and the table is vintage 1950s style, with peach-and-blue swirls decorating the square top lined with silver. They are sitting on matching peach vinyl chairs that squeak slightly as they move. Gareth has made fresh coffee and brownies. The brownies have walnuts in them. They are still warm. Sarah Lee is trying not to get crumbs on her sketches, or on her new shirt, or on her new scarf. This is why I don’t bother dressing this way, she thinks. It’s too much work.

  Occasionally the baby monitor spurts and fits, Laura in the other room sighing, breathing, shifting. Twice Gareth has to leave the table, first to refill her water pitcher, and once for an unexplained reason; she just called—“Gareth, I hate to interrupt your meeting, but…”—and he rushed off to the bedroom, stayed for a few minutes, and then came back smiling, shaking his head.

  “What a sense of humor that woman has,” he says.

  “What does she do all day in there?”

  “Reads to the baby. Reads to herself. Watches television. Hates her life while trying not to hate the baby.” Gareth smoothes one edge of a sketch. “I play a lot of cards with her. She’s quite good. I’m inclined to send her to Vegas after the baby is born. The college fund needs a little padding.”

  “I can’t imagine sitting still all day long,” says Sarah.

  “She’s hanging in there,” says Gareth. “She’s simply remarkable. The love of my life, you know. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met her. I dated so many crazy women in New York, I was starting to turn crazy myself. The smart ones are always a little crazy,” he says, and winks. “And then, there she was, in the midst of all these sad and miserable and just—confused people, there was my Laura, sane and joyful with a voice and mind as clear as a bell.”

  The baby monitor emits a thick cough, and then a long wheeze.

  “And she was funny and beautiful and she liked the same books, the same music, and she wanted everything I did, was in the exact same place I was in life, and just like that, add water and mix, instant love.”

  These are the things we do sometimes, she thinks. We remind ourselves of why we’re in love, so that we can stay that way. It’s not a permanent state, remember that, she tells herself.

  “You’re lucky,” says Sarah. She is warmed by Gareth’s effusion, but sometimes another’s excess of love reminds her of her absence. She is all alone in the world, she thinks.

  “Oh, please, my dear. Everyone is in love with you!” He shoots it out of his mouth and starts to laugh, it’s a short noise, then gets her more coffee, makes her take another brownie, won’t take no for an answer, he made them especially for her, after all. The baby monitor whirrs, Sarah Lee makes a note on one of the sketches, and the room is suddenly full of air again. Gareth has two months left until his life is changed forever, for
the better, she knows it, and Sarah Lee wonders how long it will take until that moment arrives for her.

  “By the way,” says Gareth later, as Sarah Lee bundles herself up to leave. “I believe Mr. Carter Michaelson seeks an audience with you.”

  “So I hear,” she says.

  “It seems inappropriate for me to tell you what to do,” says Gareth. He sucks in his breath, the wall of his body rising high. A buttress. “I don’t like to get in other people’s business.”

  Sarah concentrates on the bejeweled buttons of her coat.

  He exhales, inch by inch, the wall collapses. “But you should call him,” he says. “Because he loves you.”

  Love.

  8.

  SHE STOPS ON the front stoop of Gareth’s apartment building, she sits, she takes out her cell phone, she puts the cell phone away, she gets up, dusts off the back of her coat, walks to Avenue A, turns right, walks to the café where she orders a cup of coffee to go, asking them to leave room for milk.

  In the cup of coffee she empties one packet of sugar, delicately shaking it so no granule is wasted. Then she pours milk into it, fills it up to the top of the cardboard cup, until the coffee is cooled. She takes a sip. She pours more milk. She repeats the process. Now it is perfect.

  The café is full, so she walks to the park, past the cops lingering near the front entrance and the nannies with their charges in the playground and the junkies haunting the benches and the indie kids taking pictures of the dead trees in the winter with their digital cameras. She sits in the center of the park on the wide half moon of benches that surround an island of trees that poke up through the concrete. A committed hippie rides by on his bicycle. A slender man with high cheekbones in a long swinging fur coat walks two West Highland terriers. The dogs are adorable. Sarah Lee makes a kissing sound at them, and one turns toward her, ears pert.