by Leslie Cohen
“Is that guy from your writing class coming tonight?” Maya asked. “What’s the deal with you guys anyway?”
“No deal,” I said. I pushed away my shot glass, until it was removed from sight. Maya handed me a wedge of lime and I sunk my teeth into it. “We walk together after class.”
“You walk together?”
Sadly, that was the most accurate description I could muster. We walked from class to the pizza place, from class to Duane Reade. I’ll admit that I invented scenarios to throw us together, but so did he. We basically took each other on errands. At one point, I accompanied him to the computer lab so that I could watch him send an e-mail. Our conversations drew all my attention. I only wanted the walks to be longer. The campus was designed so that anything you needed was within a few blocks, which was doing me a great disservice. I stood at the counter of Duane Reade and talked to him about Reese’s Pieces versus M&M’s, but could only do it for so long. I was fixated on making him like me, but it was also clear that I was succeeding, and without much effort. Each time, just before we were supposed to part ways, one of us would come up with a reason to continue walking. He’d touch my wrist as we stood on the partition between the two parts of Broadway. “I think I need a coffee,” he’d say, after he’d slowed to a stop and smiled. “Oh, of course,” I’d say, relieved. “I could use one too.” And then we’d start walking again, each of us pretending not to understand what the other was doing.
“So you walk together? That’s it?” she questioned, still at a loss.
I was about to respond, but Kate waved Maya’s incredulity off. “Don’t listen to her,” she said. “They’re in love.”
I laughed. “How is it that we’re in love?”
“Okay, so,” she said, preparing for a recitation of the facts. “They make goofy expressions at each other in class. The guy comes up to her when class is over and makes up some ridiculous excuse to hang out like, ‘Uhhh, uhhh, my roommate and I ran out of Skittles yesterday so do you want to, uhhh, go to CVS with me and then um help me carry the bag back to my room?’ ”
“Well, this is exciting!” Maya said.
“It’s nothing,” I told her. “And there are a few potential problems.”
“Yes.” Kate stood up straighter and took on a serious, professor-like tone. “From his poems, we have discerned that he may be mentally unstable, but he’s a musician, so that’s probably standard.”
I had told Kate about the song lyrics he recited in class, about a poem that he wrote entitled “O Captain! My Captain!” “The title alone,” I’d said to her admiringly. The fact that it had been used before didn’t ruin it for me in the slightest. From what I could decipher, it was about someone laboring under pressure to move his life in a certain direction. Graduation was looming, two months away. The real world was no place for an aspiring musician. I read between the lines, as our writing class wore collective looks of concern. At first, he seemed to be explaining what it would feel like to catch yourself on fire while wearing a perfectly tailored suit. Then, there was something about going home for Thanksgiving and getting buried alive by his parents and a psychotic dog. So there were some red flags. But, of course, instead of getting scared off like a normal person, I found him insightful. Okay, intriguing, at the very least. I sat there, mesmerized, interested in his words, and what it all meant.
“A mentally unstable musician? That is so your type!” Maya said optimistically. “He fits in perfectly with your history.”
It seemed to amuse my friends that I had this whole other circle that they were not allowed to be a part of, and it was true, I suppose, that when I hung out with people from my writing classes, I didn’t want them to come along. They would refer to them as “artsy,” and maybe they were, but they were also just glamorous to me, pursuing things that were almost impossible to carry on after college, in the real world. These people stayed up late to work on projects with no specific purpose other than that they loved to do it, and how could they possibly not? It was foreign to me. I grew up in the Bronx with a father who installed windows for a living and a mother who forbade me from watching the Muppets as a child because they were, in her opinion, a bunch of troublemakers.
In college, I was this walking, talking well of feelings. All you had to do was press gently, and there was a tenderness inside of me, a prickly feeling. Just press slightly, and everything would come spilling out uncontrollably. There were no parameters, no telling what I might write or say, or how long I might be feeling it. Writing classes were both this wonderful and dangerous opportunity for me to tap into that place, to be a ball of emotions without judgment. Okay, with some judgment. But it wasn’t like the people around me were saying, “Don’t have feelings.” God knows, they had feelings. They were mostly saying things like “Could you have feelings but in a less confusing, more narrative-driven, punchier-dialogue type of way?”
“He does fit in perfectly!” Kate agreed with Maya. “Let’s see . . . there was the playwright with the high school sweetheart down in Florida.”
“I just thought that he should see other things!” I yelled. “Plus, I didn’t know his girlfriend in Florida was a cheerleader. I would have given up more easily. I can’t fight that.”
“And then there was the photographer who was addicted to cocaine,” Maya added.
“Only on the weekends!”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Then there was that reclusive drummer guy who lived on our floor freshman year and never left his room and wore exclusively white T-shirts with holes in them. He was very sexy though. I’ll give you that. Ugh, those T-shirts. Remember when he got drunk and ripped his door out of its socket and replaced it with caution tape?”
“At least he was being honest!”
“What we’re saying is that this particular guy fits right in. You’ve never dated someone normal.”
I glared at them. “What is normal?”
“Ugh, you sound just like them,” Kate said.
“You know what’s funny about Eve?” Maya turned to Kate and spoke as if I weren’t in the room. “If you saw her walking down the street, you’d think, Totally normal person—wouldn’t you?”
“Totally.” Kate nodded profusely.
“Maybe you’d be like, Oh, she’s pretty! But that’s about it. She’s got her straight brown hair, she’s average height, those little turquoise earrings. . . . But then she puts on the slightest bit of eyeliner and starts talking about her feelings. . . . And it’s like, oh, she’s a freak.”
“A freak?” I exclaimed.
“And that’s why you like them.”
“Like who?”
“The other freaks,” Kate clarified. I put my hands on my hips and made a drawn-out huffing noise. They laughed. Yes, come one, come all, to see the girl with the sad parental situation and the stepfather who bought us a lava lamp and an Animal House poster to increase the “cool” factor in our suite.
“But! You also look normal and wear normal clothes and like to eat frozen yogurt and watch Project Runway, which is why you’re friends with us.”
“Used to be friends with you,” I added.
Maya’s eyes widened. “So is it going to be one of those situations where you go to see his band and he stares at you as he’s playing and then you have this moment where you realize that Oh my god, this song is about me? And then you go to see him after the show and there are all these bitches everywhere vying for his attention but you’re like, Move over, ladies, that shit was about me.”
I started to laugh. “You are about one romantic comedy away from losing your fucking mind.”
“Answer the question!” she said, like a judge on daytime television.
“We haven’t been on a single date yet, so I can’t foresee that situation at the moment . . . but the night is young.” I smiled.
Once we stopped staring at the door, people began showing up, funneling in by twos and threes, like very strangely dressed moths to a flame. One of us made sure to always be behind
the bar, doling out drinks with a minimum level of concentration. Everyone who entered appeared to be in a daze—as they took in the plants, the blinking lights, the trash bags. They entered into a suite that looked like a cross between a really fun jungle and a dark alleyway filled with garbage.
After the first round of cocktails and conversation permeated the crowd, people started to sway to the music, obligingly at first, then with more dedication. My job was to arrange the playlist for the night. I had decided on all jungle-related songs, because of the potted plants we’d purchased, but once I got through “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Jungle Love,” my options became more limited than anticipated. So I purchased a few songs from an album called Sounds of the Jungle. Birds chirping. Rain trickling. Crickets. It was either going to go over very well at this party or very badly. Time would tell.
My suitemates and I got together for another shot, excluding all others. This was the party within the party, and it was just for us.
“To bad decisions!” Maya cried, and then the clinking of glasses.
I pretended not to look for Jesse, but I did. My spirits began to drop as I met people I’d met a thousand times before. I started to get nervous that this would be like every other night—no new arrivals, the same faces and voices we’d been socializing with for years, but in weird clothes. I pictured myself hours earlier—putting on the black lace dress, a furtive glance in the mirror, my insides bubbling away. Right then, I was asking for trouble. It happens the same way every time. Why do you do this to yourself?
As the party went on, I noticed myself sinking into a sadness that wasn’t comfortable. Some guy wearing a T-shirt with a piece of masking tape attached to it knocked into me and spilled my drink. Worse than the vodka pooling around my ankles was that I would have to talk to him.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” I said, irrationally annoyed. “Nice to meet you.”
“Actually, we’ve met,” he said. “I’m Ben. Julian’s roommate.”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded, pretending to have just come to the realization. I stared at the words on his chest, TACOMA NARROWS BRIDGE, written on masking tape with a Sharpie. He was tall with light features, fair skin, almost but not quite blond hair.
He looked down at them, following my eyes. “It’s a bridge that collapsed . . . so it’s trash,” he said, looking for my approval. “I’m in the engineering school,” he said, by way of explanation. “I don’t know. I tried.” He shrugged. “I’ve actually been to all your parties.”
“Really? Cool.” It wasn’t cool. It was the least cool thing I’d heard all night. And was I supposed to laugh at that bridge joke?
“They’re always fun. What was the one . . . with all the red martinis?”
I looked at him like I wasn’t sure, even though I was.
“Valentine’s Day!” he said.
“Yup.”
“And you guys served only red drinks, right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded slowly. “We did.”
It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with this guy. It was just that he was yet another acquaintance I’d been bumping into for years—outside the library, by the elevators, in Hamilton Deli—hello, good-bye, should I keep walking or do I have to stop this time? I wanted something more that night. My hostility was zeroing in on this awkward social obligation obstacle. Where was Jesse?
“Okay, well, I’m going to go get another drink,” I said. Another drink. That was always a decent exit strategy. Not good per se, because everyone knew what you were doing, but decent. I turned away and went to the kitchen, where my friends were drunk and talking in low voices. I pretended to listen. I would deny this vehemently to anyone who asked, but I was agonizingly aware of every person who was in my vicinity. I was staring at the door, lingering in conversations without looking directly at the person I was talking to.
There was no question that I would know it, the second he walked in. And when he finally did, I spotted him before I even knew what I was looking at. We made eye contact across the room, exchanged smiles. He dodged bodies left and right. Relief was coursing through me as he got closer.
“You came,” I said, trying not to sound surprised.
“Of course!” he replied.
I explained my outfit, that “trash” was the theme, as if he couldn’t see that on his own, and then told him that this would not be my personal choice, under other circumstances. All intelligent thoughts had spilled out of my brain at this point.
“You look good,” he said. “You should wear that to class.” He smiled and pushed his dark, almost black hair out of his green eyes. His hair was messy, stood up in places, and flopped down across his forehead. He wasn’t wearing the glasses that he wore in class.
“Um . . .” I laughed.
We talked a bit about the other kids in our class. He kept remembering lines from their poems, and every few minutes he would bring up something else, in amused disbelief. I stopped craning my neck toward the door and looked up at him, stood closer, laughed at everything he said, my eyes bright. I asked him questions, touched his arm whenever he said something funny. I was being fun!
At some point, Maya came over and required my attention. Jesse and I lost each other in the crowd. I went to the kitchen with Maya and attempted to defuse whatever was bothering her. She showed me an empty bottle of freezer-burned vodka, a hysterical look on her face. We searched the kitchen until we found espresso vodka that somebody must have brought. It was in a pyramid-shaped bottle and lit up neon green when we picked it up from the counter. We lifted it and put it back down several times, thrilled by our finding. “The enchanted vodka bottle!” we decided to call it, for marketing purposes. We started pouring it directly into people’s mouths. It was too exquisite for a glass, we told them, too prized to spare a drop. As soon as I had some myself, I became hyper immediately, laughing and smiling so widely that I felt it in my eyes. I had an insatiable need to socialize, and started babbling to strangers about their outfits, the party decor, a weird thing that happened to me in a dream once.
I kept checking on Jesse, spotting him in various positions across the room. At one point, I saw him standing a few feet away from a blond girl who had her hair tied back in a loose ponytail. He looked over at her a few times, briefly, discreetly. She noticed him as well, appeared all smiles, nodding at him and laughing with her friends. She was wearing a black halter top that she’d fashioned out of a garbage bag. Pretty and resourceful! Damn it, the cards were stacked against me. It was cropped and tied together with a string at the neck. I examined her face, as if trying to make sense of it. She was looking at her friends, but also somehow at Jesse. Then, she turned. They knew each other. I watched him lightly grab the back of her neck and cup his hand right around the spot beneath her ponytail. He mouthed something at her that I couldn’t decipher. She whispered in his ear. There was some kind of understanding exchanged, though I had no way of knowing. Oh, so there were others. Of course there were others. This party was rife with options. Girls were there for him, for whatever reason.
I kept shuffling things around in the kitchen, pretending to be very busy—more booze, back and forth to the freezer, moving a stack of cups, tossing a bag of chips. I talked to Maya. Minutes later, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted him with another girl—this one not trying to hide it. Her face lit up as he touched her hoop earring, ran his finger along the large gold circle. She was emitting a glow that conventional wisdom would lead anyone to believe she was the happiest person in history. She flicked her wrist against his stomach, sipped from her plastic cup, and looked at the ground with a kind of intensity. My eyes darted back to him again. I like this man very much. He was even better than before, as he put his hand on her arm and smiled. No danger with this one, of him wanting to form—to begin forming—some future “how we met” story. Just specifically for this night, he is perfect, all things considered.
Eventually, I could sense Jesse staring
at me from across the room. What is happening? Is it my turn? He whispered into the ear of the guy next to him, and something about the way his eyes stayed locked on me as he talked gave me the distinct feeling that he was talking about me. I had a sudden idea. The guy next to him was a friend of Kate’s. I made my way through the crowd until I located her.
“Can you go find out what Jesse just said?” I said to her, my voice unusually loud.
“Right now?” she replied, carelessly.
“Yes! Right now.”
The second that Jesse and his friend separated, I hustled Kate along. I stood away, allowed her to do the talking. After they were done whispering, she looked at me and then grabbed my arm. We walked to the other side of the room.
“He said, and I quote, ‘See that chick? I want to suck her brains out.’ ” She wrinkled her nose, as if grossed out by the words as she said them.
“What?” I said, stunned.
“He wants to suck your brains out.”
“You mean ‘fuck’?”
“Huh?”
“ ‘Fuck’ would make more sense. Less zombielike.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Fuck. Probably.”
The whole party seemed to come to a pause. At that moment, all my ideas, all the games that I had played with myself about how this night might go, promptly went to shit. I turned serious, all of a sudden. “He said that?”
She nodded, disinterested. I had the wrong audience. While Kate was good for a down-to-earth assessment, my other friends were better for blindingly supporting something for no sensible reason.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, irritated. “I thought you said he was a poetry major.”
I smiled. “That is poetry.”
I was in that state of intoxication where you become very direct, very to the point. You tell people how you feel. You grab things that you want. There was more dancing now, a crowd in the middle of the room, circles of girls leaning into one another closely, bursts of male laugher. As I made my way across the room, I could feel something rising higher in my throat, making me tremble a little. I met Jesse’s gaze as I walked toward him. It was one of those rare moments of understanding. Eventually, I’d feel tightness inside of me, an abrupt rigidity, an inability to move further. But for now, I could enjoy myself.
