This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  - prologue -

  EVE

  * * *

  Part of me wanted to drive him a little crazy, to see how far I could push before sending him screaming for the hills. Only this was New York City, so by “hills” I mean that minuscule square of green shrubbery outside your apartment building that passes for a front yard. Was I innocent? Not entirely. But let us not judge hastily the actions of the young for fear of neglecting the importance of the journey, said forty thousand fortune cookies, and forty thousand fortune cookies cannot be wrong.

  I still pass them by sometimes: the streets, apartment buildings, bars, and restaurants, all a part of this story. And, while they are unremarkable to most, they possess the unique ability to stop me dead in my tracks. I think to myself, somewhat irrationally, What is going on here? I get philosophical, and yes, a tad self-centered. Does an apartment still exist once you no longer live there? Why does a restaurant continue to operate once you’ve paid the bill and walked away, the door swishing closed in your wake? I can’t fully acknowledge that the place has moved on. Without me.

  A part of this story will always remain in those places, as if stranded in time. I like to revisit some of them and enjoy the nostalgia. The memories are still so vivid. Others are best left alone, to fade over time. Looking back, I can see how those places were leading us somewhere. We were drawing lines from a series of scattered dots, hoping to see a picture emerge. It took time to put it together. The dots existed all over the city—and not in a way that made any sense or always felt good. But we should have known. And whenever I find myself passing one of these places, I can’t help but think, What took us so long?

  BEN

  * * *

  “What took us so long?” Did she really just say that? I’ll tell you what took us so long. The ratio of irrational to rational thoughts inside her head was about twenty to one. That was her first mistake (there were others). To get from point A to point B, most people take a straight line. Not Eve. She zigzags; takes several steps backward; loops around; launches into deep contemplation at every turn, twist, and fork in the road; circles; hovers; eventually lands. And I could have walked away from the whole mess. I could have said, Good luck to you, Eve. See you in ten years, when you finally decide what you want. But I didn’t. Because the thing about Eve is, when she does land, she sticks that landing something hard, and suddenly, walking away is the very last thought on your mind.

  part one

  * * *

  SPRING 2005

  EVE

  * * *

  AN ASYLUM IN MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

  It was senior year. We were having a party. The theme was trash.

  In preparation, we decorated our suite with black garbage bags and blinking Christmas lights. The letters T-R-A-S-H hung from the ceiling.

  We were all looking to make something happen that night. Each of us felt like something big was right there. And it didn’t matter how many times we’d been disappointed in the past, how many times we’d dressed up and then fallen into bed hours later, with zero to show for the night but a faint dizziness, an imminent headache, a morning of recovery. We were resilient enough to bounce back. We didn’t even have to think about it. As the sun went down, a greater power took hold of us. It pushed us to close books, to shake off the haze from our afternoon naps, to get dressed, plan, send messages out into the ether, and hope, with a little luck, to get a few back.

  It was the power of possibility, that feeling of boundless potential that occurs late in the afternoon in New York, when the sun goes down and all the windows in all the buildings look asleep; before darkness rolls over the city like one long sheet and the lights come on. It could terrify me, all that vastness just waiting to be filled. But not that night. That night, I was ready for it. Lights on, Manhattan! I thought, clapping my hands together, standing at the window of our suite, as if I alone had the power to bring light to all those tiny square boxes out there. The illusion of control was tempting. I am not afraid of you, you had to say to yourself, when you looked out at the city. I am not fucking scared of you, you had to say. And you had to really believe it, or you were toast.

  I lived with three other girls in a four-bedroom suite in East Campus, a dorm between 117th and 118th Streets that housed most of Columbia’s upperclassmen. From the window of our suite, I could see the whole campus, the Hudson River in the distance, the chemical pink clouds descending into the granite dome of Low Library. In our world, Low was the Pantheon, and beyond Low, there were only buildings—mysterious, anonymous buildings. We had a panoramic view of the city that stretched from nearly one wall to the other and yet went largely disregarded. Everything that mattered seemed to happen within the walls of Suite 1603. Every now and then, we did peer out at the rest of the universe. We liked to pretend, sometimes, from our high-up fortress in Morningside Heights, that we were running this town.

  I’d invited Jesse Prescott to the party, a guy from my Poetry and Place in the Modern Landscape class with whom I’d been flirting for months. “Happily Ever After.” That was the title of the poem that I’d read out loud to him—well, to my entire class, actually. Yes, that’s right. I read it out loud. To people. With ears. It was still haunting me. Luckily, it wasn’t my first time. I’d done this to myself hundreds of times before, over the past few years of writing classes at this establishment. I’d learned to persevere. There are survival mechanisms that kick in, in a situation like that. I am not afraid of you, you had to say to yourself, before you started reading. I am not fucking scared of you.

  I was stunned that he wanted to talk to me afterward, that he still wanted to talk to me, even after hearing that overly emotional drivel:

  And then, she sees everything with a stunningly harsh clarity,

  the kind of clarity that makes reality seem hopeless,

  which makes you wish for an entirely new reality,

  something with reliably brighter thoughts.

  She wonders if everything in the world is fleeting.

  Love fades.

  The seduction of expectation crashes.

  Reality throws her into a strange, unpossessed place of which she has no bearing.

  Everything seems as far beyond her grasp as the yellow lights,

  spinning and dashing behind the man . . .

  “I liked it,” he said, when called upon by Professor Rosario to offer his thoughts, and those words were enough to earn him one invitation to our trash party. As a self-protective measure, I told myself countless times that he might not come. Yet somehow, his presence had become critical. In the days before the party, when I thought of it, everything inside me jumped. I looked down at myself, thinking, How did you get to this place?

  But before anything could happen, he would have to actually show up that night, to the sixteenth floor of East Campus, a dorm that used to be an insane asylum, and in many ways still was.

  * * *

  “It’s party time! It’s party time! Tell everyone it’s party time!” my suitemate Scarlett sang. “I want to meet someone tonight who will crush me. And then I want to break his heart. And then I want to fight to win him back. And then I want him to break my heart. And then I want to burn all his p
ossessions to the ground!”

  I laughed. “That’s quite an agenda,” I said to her as she balanced herself against the wall in our living room with one hand, sliding on black, shiny, five-inch heels with the other. They looked much nobler on her feet than they did in their usual position—cradled in her hands at the end of the night as she stumbled home barefoot.

  Farther down the hall, I could hear the sound of a phone beeping. The noise reverberated, echoing deeply throughout the entire suite. Within a few seconds, there was the faint sound of my suitemates discussing it.

  “It’s from a 917 number.”

  “Ugh, but the voice mail is only thirty seconds long. It can’t be important. He’s obviously bailing.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s only thirty seconds long! What can he say in thirty seconds that isn’t him bailing? And why else would he call this late? If he were coming, he would have called earlier. And he wouldn’t have left a message.”

  “Just check it! Just call the number back! Why are you being so negative?”

  “I’m going to! I just want to wait a few minutes! I need to think about it. I can’t just call.”

  Suite 1603 was a frenzy of emotions. Basically, it was a place for emotions to go on spring break. Like, when they wanted to run wild and really enjoy themselves and not be contained by things like logic and good judgment. Those downers.

  And this was especially true before a party. Clothes went flying. Anxieties ran rampant. By the time the first guests arrived, I was somewhat surprised to be still standing.

  I heard the sound of my name being called. “Eve!” I walked toward it, down the stairs from our living room to a hallway leading to several bedrooms. I went to my suitemate Maya’s room, slowly, warily. One never knew, with Maya.

  I stood at the doorframe.

  “I have a question for you, Evelyn J. Porter, MD, PhD,” she said.

  I smiled. “Just Eve. No J. And barely going to graduate with my bachelor’s.”

  “I was trying to make you sound more official. I broke up with Todd,” she said, and then, before I had the chance to respond, “Do you think I’m a selfish person?”

  I paused before I answered. Maya was the most volatile of my friends. A beautiful Indian girl who wore Converse sneakers and oversize black-rimmed glasses, she was known to ask for advice, all sweetness and soft-spoken, and then explode at you if she didn’t like what you said.

  “What?” she said. “I really want to know what you think. Give me your most honest opinion.” Her big brown eyes appeared to be quivering. She was intimidating, this one-hundred-pound girl sitting in front of me on a purple comforter, next to a framed picture of an ice-cream cone.

  “I don’t think you’re selfish,” I said. “Not any more so than anyone else.”

  “So do you think he’ll call?”

  “Well, if you broke up with him . . .”

  “You don’t think he’ll call?” she snapped, her eyes zeroing in on me. I stared at her blankly.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” She was turning on me. Abandon all honesty and placate! PLACATE!

  “I’m sure he’ll call in a few days,” I amended quickly.

  She sighed. “I wish I had a test to study for.” She stood up and walked over to her closet. Tests were Maya’s version of therapy. She was one of the few people for whom being in the library all night studying provided a profound sense of well-being.

  “There will be another test,” I said, trying for comforting.

  “Maybe I need to just sleep with someone else. . . . The theme for the night is trash.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “That would be very trashy of you!” Her face lit up. We started to laugh.

  “Thank God we didn’t pick a theme like the age of innocence,” she said. “Can you imagine how hard that would be for us to pull off?”

  “We’d still be able to have the party,” I said. “We just wouldn’t be able to attend.”

  We knew from experience that when choosing a theme for a party, it was best not to be too specific. We didn’t want to get hemmed in by thematic restrictions. Those were for amateurs. We were sophisticated city girls. We knew what we were doing. We had bags full of lingerie from the ninety-nine-cent store, this magical place on Amsterdam Avenue where you could buy a year’s worth of toilet paper, an assortment of vaguely religious lamps, and clothes perfect for theme parties but likely meant for prostitutes. At the store, we dug into cardboard boxes full of clothing, but it wasn’t long before we got distracted by other items and decided that yes, four large potted plants, taller than we were, would be a smart purchase. They would provide ambiance for the party. “It’ll be like a jungle!” one of the girls insisted. After some searching, I ended up with a black lace dress that was see-through but not totally see-through. So, tasteful. And since it was the classiest of the prostitute costumes, my friends declared, “Park Avenue trash!” That’s what I would be.

  For the next few hours, my suitemates came to me with fistfuls of necklaces—long strands of fake pearls, fake diamond chokers.

  “Why?” I yelled.

  “Because you’ll under-accessorize otherwise, if we don’t help you.”

  “ ‘Park Avenue trash’ is about collecting as much material wealth as possible and putting it into one ensemble. It requires attention to quantifiable possessions.”

  “You can’t just wear a black dress and call it a day.”

  Our other suitemate, Kate, came into Maya’s room and sat down on her bed. “Do I look under-accessorized?” I asked her. I put a few of the necklaces on and held the rest in my hands.

  “It looks like a jewelry store threw up on you,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  Kate was half Czech, half Chinese, and somehow managed to possess the prettiest features from both ethnicities. She had skin that was perpetually tan, visible cheekbones, dimples. Her eyes and hair were the same shade of perfect chestnut. Kate never bothered to use these occasions to put on a crazy outfit that just so happened to flaunt how pretty she was. She didn’t need to. On Halloween, when everyone else wore slutty angel and fairy ensembles, Kate dressed up as the Unabomber.

  At eight o’clock, the delivery guy from Hamilton Deli arrived—we could throw a stone from our window and hit Hamilton Deli, but that didn’t stop us from ordering—with a crate full of orange juice, tonic water, ginger ale. We set up a “bar” in the corner, which was really just a desk covered in a black garbage bag, with red plastic cups stacked in a tall cylinder, bottles of tequila and gin, a half-gone bottle of vodka from our freezer, and the mixers from the deli. We placed the four plants we’d bought from the ninety-nine-cent store in the corners of the room and lit them up with the Christmas lights. When we were finished, we looked around.

  “It looks so cracked out!” Maya said, giddy. In our suite, that was about the best thing you could say—that something was cracked out. It was most commonly applied to moments that combined alcohol, drugs, and nonsensical actions. For example, when, after a big night out, someone went on an instant-soup shopping spree at Duane Reade, or painted the bathroom doors, or started spraying people with a fire hose. “He was so cracked out!” we’d say, relishing the moment. College! We embraced it.

  I made my first drink of the night and sat with Kate on my bed as our suitemates ran through the room in various outfits, occasionally stopping to ask things like: “Do you think Xanax and alcohol is a bad idea or a bad idea in a good way?” One of us would inevitably say no to something, but we didn’t try very hard. We knew that nothing we said made any difference.

  Suddenly, Maya burst in, looking like she had just received the best news of her life. Scarlett was standing behind her. I thought she was about to tell us she’d been accepted to med school, but instead, she said, “Scarlett found a plastic bag full of white powder in the back of a taxi!”

  We looked at her, confused.

  “What should we do about it?” she said, her arms stret
ched out to us, her palms turned up toward the ceiling.

  “Let’s snort it!” Scarlett shrieked.

  “Are you insane?” Kate replied. “It could be anything! It could be laundry detergent.”

  “It won’t kill us.”

  “Actually, it could kill us,” Kate said.

  It wasn’t what you’d expect from two girls who were premed. Maya wanted to be a surgeon, often citing her prowess at fixing a stuck zipper five minutes before a party as proof of her qualification. Scarlett wanted to be an emergency room doctor, because being a surgeon required choosing one area of the body to work on and she wanted to be able to fix any problem at any time, rather than be so specialized. Needless to say, it behooved everyone to talk to each one, separately, regarding her medical aspirations. Kate, the constant voice of reason, was applying to work in finance but only the type of finance that required traveling regularly to Buenos Aires, which made her sound like a floozy until she started firing off facts about the South American markets.

  By eleven, we were dressed to kill, amped up on either cocaine or laundry detergent, and looking around at an empty suite. Scarlett, wearing what appeared to be a one-piece bathing suit from the fifties and giant heels, went out to walk the halls.

  “Are you guys coming to our party?” she said to the guys on our floor, who received this question silently but then followed her back to our suite, as if possessed. With our new friends in tow, my suitemates insisted on shots. I finished the first easily and then started on the second, after which I immediately felt the rush of alcohol hitting my bloodstream. By the third, I felt sick. They were going by too fast. I already needed a break, but still I was lifting the glass from the kitchen table, watching the shots go by. It wasn’t so bad. People did this all the time!