This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  But I was scared. To calm down, I told myself, You can always walk away. But then, what would happen if he got caught? I imagined going to class on Monday without him there and had an intense reaction to that notion, like I’d be alone, without a friend in the world.

  I walked up to the house, examined the plaque next to the door: SIGMA DELTA TAU. I peered in the window, but there was nothing to see but an empty gray garbage can. On the street behind me, a guy walked by, on the phone. His voice was loud, but then disappeared as he continued on down the street. All I heard was “She was so fucking wasted that she . . .”

  As I stood there, I watched the wind rearrange a stack of empty pizza boxes and shuffle along a copy of Herodotus with the cover ripped off. I didn’t know what was going on up there. I could have said, in a jokey manner, “So what are we delivering? Pot? Coke? LSD?” But I didn’t. I guess I still wanted the whole thing to exist in vague, amorphous terms. I was already mentally cutting this part of my evening from the picture, stitching together the party scene with whatever would happen between us after he came down those stairs.

  Twenty minutes went by. I kept waiting, getting increasingly agitated. A car passed and someone popped their head out of the window and yelled something at me, and I was so startled that it might be the police that I almost threw up. I started to tie up my hair and almost went to lean over the garbage can on the corner. Suddenly, I stood up straight. A bad feeling crept over me. All the fear and alcohol in my system was affecting me, catching up to me now that he was no longer there to distract me from it. I looked up at the windows on the third floor, reassuring myself with the idea that Jesse was watching me. But the longer I stood there, the more I started to panic. I felt like I was falling. I took as much breath into my lungs as I could and exhaled. The square of sidewalk that I stood on no longer felt secure. The world was starting to spin and slip away. I looked around, scanning for something, anything, to ground me. I looked up at the windows, but I could see nothing.

  It happens the same way every time. You obsess and fixate over it, but then you realize that you have to let go eventually, so why not now? It’s time to let it go. Invite him to the party, be cool about it, what’s the worst that can happen? You get hurt. That’s the worst. What’s the big deal? Plus, there are a lot of worse things out there. Think about all those things. Feel better about yourself. Be a little bit tougher than you really are. Confidence breeds confidence. Believe in yourself. Release it!

  You let it go. Of course you let it go. It takes guts, but you have guts. You tell him you’ll be his girlfriend; you say “I love you too”; you invite him to the party. You breathe. You walk away. You’re tempted to analyze his response, but no, that will only make things worse. Keep walking. Make a clean break. It’s too late now anyway. You commence waiting for the results, waiting to make some progress. You’ve done the hard part, and now he determines whether you get to move forward. It’s entirely out of your control. Relax, people say. There’s nothing more you can do.

  This is wrong. There is something more that you can do. There is something more that you will do. You will worry. It’s something you’re familiar with, from life. It’s not like, Oh, worrying? What is that? Is that what I’m doing right now? I’m not familiar. No, you’ve done this before. It’s something of a side profession for you.

  At first, there is this feeling of vulnerability. You want to take it back, to crawl into a hiding spot, to hug yourself into a tight enough ball that it disappears. But then you settle into it, you adjust, you decide, I’m the type of person who can do this. I’ve moved on. I’m not some damaged girl. My father left and my mother died, so I’ll always be fucked-up about relationships? No thank you. I’m the type of person who moves on. I’m the type of person who is out there. And once you settle into it, it’s kind of like a drug. You think, What else can I do? What else might he want to know? I bet he’d be interested in this or that story. You tell the stories to yourself first, correct the grammar, improve the dialogue, save it all for use at a later date. The high has kind of a manic quality to it. It’s as if your mind might spin away from you. Your imagination is running faster than you can keep up with. So you start to get cautious. You realize you’re paving the way for disappointment. You think that if things go too well, you will cross the street and get hit by a truck. To keep your head down, you change gears; you start anticipating the worst, which puts you in a somewhat gloomy state. But it’s a relief, really. What were you doing before? You have to protect yourself! But then after a while, you realize that you’re too down. You can only keep up this doomsday approach for so long. You meander back into cautious optimism because you have no control anyway, so what’s the point of feeling bad all the time?

  Eventually, the ball drops. He wasn’t what you thought he was. And the fact that the ball drops is kind of hilarious to you. Well, not the fact itself. What’s hilarious is that you thought that it wouldn’t. You actually threw that thing up into the air and expected it to stay there, or maybe come down a little, but certainly it would not thud on the floor. No. Never. For the ball to drop would so fly in the face of the fundamentals of physics. HA.

  And then, it is as if someone took all those exciting moments and flipped them around. The same ache that had you soaring now has you in despair. There’s a fair amount of tears, body hunched over and shaking, head in hands, palms pressed hard against your forehead tears. It’s all coming back to you in short, gasping breaths, the kind that pushes your insides further in, that turns your inhales into short puffs. Every single time you have felt good about this in recent memory is coming back to you, and you feel the reverse side of it. The exact amount of pleasure is now pain. But it’s worse now because the pleasure was spread out over time, thinly distributed, whereas the pain is happening all at once, crashing down on you like a heavy rainstorm. You’re choking on the words that you told yourself, those ridiculous words that you told yourself, how you said, Keep going, you’re doing so well! You’re finally over it! It’s all turned to poison. It’s rotting before your eyes, and there is absolutely no way to reverse it. That’s how final and penetrating the damage is going to be. Attempting to reverse it doesn’t even occur to you.

  I looked up at the town house. The lights on the third floor clicked off. I waited for several minutes but heard nothing.

  Where is he? Will he be okay?

  Will I?

  Anything was possible.

  part two

  * * *

  FALL 2007

  EVE

  * * *

  FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE

  He wasn’t picking up his phone, so I decided to risk it. Taking the subway to his place had become a ritual, and Jesse, of all people, would understand that some habits are hard to break. I had an addiction, I’d say, if he ever questioned it. It was just too damn easy to go to his place, to get on the roller coaster, to throw my hands up and close my eyes and whoosh, let it take me.

  There were no cars, few people. I allowed the glow of the street lamps to guide me. From the Second Avenue subway stop, I walked down Houston Street, with the faint, salty smell of pastrami in the air. I made a right on Ludlow, a narrow passage of fire escapes scaling the buildings on both sides. If I lifted my head, I would see a store selling wholesale hardware, another selling electrical supplies, an awning with Chinese writing on it. But I wasn’t looking up. Nope. I was going straight ahead, deliberately. There were a few people hanging out on their fire escapes. One leaned down to ask me if I knew what day it was. I felt a hand graze my shoulder. I flinched and kept walking and spoke to myself in a reassuring voice. You are so close. You are almost there Jesse is just a few blocks away. Nothing bad can happen to you.

  I kept having the sense that someone was behind me, kept hearing footsteps, stopping, turning. It was getting to be that time when the area turned over, morphed into something else. And I knew what this place was capable of doing to me. To deal with the postmidnight scene around
here, I had to be in that particular state of Zen, where I was so composed that I could look at someone and say, Oh, you have a black eye and a pet parrot that you carry around with you? That’s cool! Whatever floats your boat! If I felt a little weird in any way, this neighborhood only brought that feeling to the surface.

  I took out my cell phone and called my sister, Emma, which I often did on my late-night walks to Jesse’s apartment from the subway. I was half interested in chatting and half afraid of walking to his apartment without some form of armor.

  “Just so you know, your so-called protection is lying on the couch, wearing Cookie Monster pajamas, and at least seventy blocks away,” she told me.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “It makes me feel safer to be on the phone. It sends a message to potential murderers.”

  “And what message is that? ‘Don’t kill me because I have friends’?” Emma laughed. She talked to me about her night for five minutes. And then, she promptly ditched me for another call.

  Shit. On my own again.

  I took Orchard Street. It was less abandoned. I’d decided, at some point, that Orchard Street was safe. A red sign for a tattoo parlor was the only thing lighting up the block. I peeked as far down the street as I could, to make sure there was nothing lurking behind a pile of garbage bags. I walked, almost running, in a diagonal dash toward his building, a white brick walk-up. I punched the button on the intercom next to 4A, and then stood there. The sound of the buzzer scared me right out of my skin. “It’s me,” I said, as soon as I heard the static.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” Jesse said. I exhaled, imagined all the ghosts in the neighborhood that would now leave me alone. A few minutes later, he was flying down the stairs and opening the door.

  The entranceway was dreary, with damaged walls and a buzzing coming from the broken lamp half hanging from the ceiling. I dropped my stuff on the floor in front of him—a laptop case, a small duffel bag. I gave him a fatigued look. He was wide-awake, in a T-shirt and jeans.

  “Long night?” he asked, picking up the bags from the floor.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Were you at Nobu this whole time?”

  After flitting between a few odd jobs, I was now working as a hostess at a restaurant in midtown, where my job was to stand for six hours (surprisingly strenuous), walk around the restaurant while crying out Irasshaimase! (“Welcome” in Japanese), and lead people to their tables with a stack of menus in my hands. My function at Nobu, as far as I could tell, was to manage the dining room, to keep people from killing one another, and last, to keep them from killing me. I’d never worked in a restaurant before, and that first month, man, I was happy. I became friends with everyone, the bartenders and waitresses. I ignored the busboys hitting on me as we dried off glasses with a towel. That night, one of them had offered to take me out to the Red Lobster in Times Square.

  One year in, and the job was starting to wear on me, but it had a greater purpose. I was attempting to make it as a music writer, which, in New York, is such a preposterous notion that I said it to a friend on Houston Street and a stranger who was walking by us actually started to laugh—this disturbing, high-pitched cackle of a laugh. When I recounted the story for Jesse, he acted unfazed, like of course that happened. “Don’t say that shit out loud,” he told me.

  So far, I’d only found one magazine that was willing to pay me to write for them, and it had nothing to do with music. It was called Outdoor World and was mainly about hunting and fishing. I’d been freelancing for them for a few months, and it was going well; the only slight hitch was that I knew nothing about hunting or fishing, but I needed the clips, to show someone, someday, that I was remotely in the realm of journalism. Nobody I knew had heard of Outdoor World. I didn’t care. I wrote about a fishing competition in Vermont, different brands of beef jerky, how to keep camouflage clothing from fading. I wasn’t writing about music, but I was writing about something. I had a few hundred words to write every week. I was ecstatic.

  Working at Nobu was about ten times less exciting than writing but paid me ten times more. When my stepfather, Arthur, inquired, in his typical good-natured, jokey fashion, why the Columbia degree that he’d paid for had landed me nothing more than a restaurant job and an exposé on safe bugs and how to eat them, I had to explain that the two positions went hand in hand. Almost everyone who worked at the restaurant was an aspiring artist of some kind—actors, mostly, but a few more grungy-looking photographers and cheek-boned models also roamed the premises. I pretended that it was a social experiment, not so much a way for me to pay for things, something that writing might never allow me to do. I dressed like a bohemian—with long, flowing skirts and turquoise bracelets. I got into it—serving the high-class, business crowd of midtown by day, walking among the wackadoodles of the Lower East Side by night.

  “They had a big party in the private room that just would not leave,” I explained.

  “So tired and yet she made it all the way downtown,” Jesse said, smiling behind me, as we walked up the stairs. “Yet again.”

  At the end of the night, when faced with the choice of Arthur’s apartment on the Upper East Side or here, I always chose here. It was a pretty easy decision, a way to feign the adulthood I hadn’t earned. Jesse and I were in a real relationship. He called most nights. We didn’t “go out for dinner,” but we got burritos at three o’clock in the morning. We ate scrambled eggs standing over his sink in our underwear. He read all my articles, and I knew every one of his songs, that the one about the extra toothbrush in his bathroom was really about me. Take that, ladies.

  As I walked, he grabbed at the fabric of my skirt, tugged at it.

  “I just wanted to see what you were up to,” I whispered, looking back at him with a wry smile. He reached for me again, and I hopped up a few steps farther, out of his reach.

  “Okay. Okay,” he said. “I’ll be more civilized.”

  I looked at the closed doors to other apartments as we ascended the stairs. We actually knew some of his neighbors—not their names, but their routines, their occupations. There was a film professor who lived on the second floor, with two sons who smoked pot every Sunday (the scent came in through Jesse’s windows about twenty seconds after they started). There was a masseuse who lived on the third floor, who got late-night visits from men who looked like they’d just been at the gym. There was the twentysomething woman whose friends arrived every Saturday night, carrying pillows and candles, brown paper bags filled with candy and beer. All evidence suggested that they were having some kind of séance. The building’s superintendent always seemed to be pacing the street outside the building. He was friendly, very social, as he watered the sidewalk. Most days, I found myself torn between talking to him about the weather and telling him my innermost thoughts.

  Each time I climbed the steps to the fourth floor, I learned a lot about what people were up to. None of it was a secret. None of it was “what people do when nobody is watching.” There was no shame around here. The only shame was in not having late-night visitors, in having nothing to hide.

  In his building, all Jesse had to do was sneeze and people were fascinated. He’d tell them about his band, about his stint playing the Coke bottle as a trumpet at an art installation on Rivington. He was instantly accepted, invited over for dinner, even, in the case of the elderly Italian lady who lived on his floor. When I encountered these same people, they couldn’t even look at me, for how naive I was. They looked off to the side right away, as if blinded by my inexperience. I had yet to harness my edge. But Jesse was covered, with his music and his stories of drug dealing in the Ivy League.

  “I didn’t know if it was too late,” I said. “And you weren’t picking up your phone. As per usual.”

  “It’s never too late,” he said. “I’m always up. You know that.” Each stair creaked when I stepped on it, but to an unsettling extent, like it was a risk, like I might continue to fall down, down, down, all the way through it.

  “Hun
gry?” he asked.

  “Always.”

  “You should really eat at the restaurant,” he said.

  “I did eat. But that was at four o’clock.”

  The staff dinners at Nobu, which took place at the beginning of each night, were, to me, what I imagined it would be like to live like royalty. The food was mediocre, but I didn’t care. I piled chicken and stir-fried vegetables onto my plate. I took five cookies and stuffed them into my apron and ate them outside in the alleyway, before one of the waitresses informed me that I didn’t have to be so sneaky. “They don’t serve those. They’re for the staff. You can eat as many as you want,” she said, with some combination of kindness and condescension. I looked down at the cookies, flat cylinders with specks of brown, and felt a sense of shame, that I’d actually thought they were a precious commodity.

  “Why didn’t you eat . . . at the end of the night?”

  I sighed. “I can’t bring myself to eat what people leave on their plates,” I said. “We’ve talked about this.”

  “Amateur.”

  “Troglodyte.”

  “All right, Porter,” he said. “No prehistoric insults after midnight.”

  “How was your night?” I asked.

  “Eh. Fine. I met up with Ian and Chris for a bit.”

  Ian and Chris were Jesse’s bandmates. They got together to practice a few times a week, at a studio they rented. They had performed together in college, at small venues in Brooklyn and on Thursday nights at “partios,” a.k.a. parties on the Columbia Business School patio. They were now self-producing their debut album, and once it was finished, they planned to circulate it online.

  I was winded by the time we got to the fourth-floor landing. I wasn’t sure how much of it was attributable to the steps and how much was because of his hand, going for my skirt, over and over again. He pushed the door, and I looked around at the familiar scene—the leatherlike sofa, a kitchen with a mini fridge, a two-burner stove, and a mattress on the floor. He had left one lamp on. A window that looked out onto the street was slightly open—that damn window, which caused nothing but trouble. One morning, I woke up to find an ant line marching from the window, across the apartment, and to a spilled scattering of Cheerios on the kitchen counter. The ceiling was low and cracking, on the verge of collapse. The floors were uneven. The only thing that provided any brightness was the bookshelf, which was spilling with colorful books, the books of the scholarly male—Hemingway, Pynchon, Carver, McCarthy.