This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  Jesse closed the door and put his arms around my waist. I closed my eyes. “I have to pee,” I said, as he kissed the side of my head.

  I went to the bathroom and then stood there, in front of the mirror, looking at the mildewed walls. I needed a second to collect myself, to get ready for the Jesse portion of my night. Without thinking, I started scrubbing away at the walls with a wet square of toilet paper, but I couldn’t make much progress. I started on a large stain on the shower curtain.

  I washed my face in the sink. The cold water felt good, and I tried to ignore the fact that the water was a little bit brown against my hands. Okay. Okay. It was all starting to fade—the chaos of the restaurant, the subway ride downtown, the brief walk through the Lower East Side. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the running water, the quiet hum of the fan that Jesse kept in the corner of his apartment.

  I hovered over the sink, splashed my face one final time. Through a small hole below the faucet, I saw a pair of antennae move back and forth. I froze. I shut off the water. A large cockroach came crawling out of the hole. I gasped and ran out of the bathroom. I opened the closet and flung a broom at Jesse.

  “We have company!” I said dramatically. “The bathroom. GIANT cockroach. Kill it. Kill it please!”

  He took the broom and stood there for a second. Then, he rested it gently against the wall. He went into the kitchen and came back with a paper towel. He walked toward the bathroom and, a few seconds later, I heard the sound of the toilet flushing. He came back into the living room and shook his head.

  “This is what you give me?” he said, laughing, lifting the broom. “What, was an AK-47 not available?”

  He imitated my voice: “We have company! Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “But I—”

  “I’m going to use this on you instead.” He pointed the broom at me, smiling. “Let’s see how you like it.” He chased me around the apartment. I ran for my life, until I was backed up into a corner and out of breath. He came toward me with a heavy stare, closer and closer to his surrounded prey. I pushed him away with a shove in the chest. He kept sweeping at my feet, running me around until we both fell onto the bed, exhausted.

  “What happened to Outdoor World?” he said. “I thought that you were pro-bug these days.”

  I laughed. “Well, then you were mistaken.”

  After we’d lay there for a few seconds, Jesse said, “Speaking of your job . . .” and then he told me he had a “sort of” present for me. He unzipped something at the foot of the bed. I sat up. He handed me a long and slender black box. I opened it carefully, as if there might be something living inside of it. I still had cockroaches on the brain.

  “A pen?” I said, staring at the shiny, silver object.

  “Yeah, but it lights up.” He pressed a small button on the side of it, and the tip gave off a yellow light.

  “It’s for writing your articles,” he elaborated. “I found it at that weird vintage store on Houston. I figured you could use it when you go night fishing and you have to write stuff down but you can’t because it’s too dark.”

  “I’m not going night fishing!” I said, grinning widely. “Oh my god. Is that a thing? Do people go night fishing?”

  “It exists, and you might,” he said. “You are an outdoorsman now.”

  “I’m not an outdoorsman. I’m just faking it for the byline.”

  “I don’t know. . . . I think you’re going to get hooked. I can see you now, asking me to go camping on the weekends.”

  I shook my head. “I’m from New York. We sleep indoors.”

  “I’m just messing with you,” he said, looking down at the pen. “It’s for shows . . . music shows, you know? Because it’s also dark, at shows, in my experience.”

  “Oh!” I gave him a hug on the bed, my knees digging into the mattress. “At shows!” I said. “Of course! Thank you. Yes. A girl can dream.”

  He pulled off his T-shirt. “Fuck, it’s hot in here.” He moved back to lean against the wall, grabbing me along the way. He had a rubber band around his wrist and his feet were tan and kind of dirty. We kissed to the sound of people yelling on the street, and then the sound of horns being blown. Neither one of us flinched. He twisted his legs tighter around mine. His skin was warm and smelled like cigarettes.

  “You’re not seeing anyone at the restaurant, right?” he said breathlessly.

  “Are you kidding?” I said, clearing the hair from my mouth and face. “I’m here almost every night!”

  “I know, but I don’t want you to fall for some guy there, someone who thinks your jokes are funny and who walks you home because he’s pretending to be worried about your safety.” He said the word safety with unqualified derision.

  “I actually do have a boyfriend at the restaurant,” I said, leaning my head against his chest. “His name is Joseph. He’s from Poland. He wants to take me out for seafood.”

  I knew that I had to milk this for all it was worth. I had to really enjoy myself. Jesse almost never spoke about our relationship. But those few moments when he did—they were glorious.

  “Does he?” he said, taunting me.

  “He doesn’t seem as antagonistic toward me as you are though, so our relationship is really missing that special something.”

  He put his arms around me and put his face against my neck. “Yeah, is that what makes ours special? That antagonism?”

  I tilted my head toward him. We started kissing again, which quickly turned urgent. He slid down on the bed and pulled me with him, so that we were lying next to each other. He took my wrists and put them together, pulled them over my head. He kept them there with one hand, as we kissed, his other hand removing my clothes. I helped him. Then, he stopped, as if a sudden idea had come to him. He lifted me up off the bed and carried me toward the window.

  “Put me down!” I shrieked. He opened the window with one hand.

  “I will,” he said, and he placed me on the sill with a mix of care and disregard. I was naked, sitting on the edge, my legs wrapped around him. I hugged myself, arms covering my chest.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “This is the best thing to do at this hour.”

  We entangled ourselves on the sill, and in truth, I really didn’t care where, at this point. I was glad he didn’t ask me. I was glad when he told me what to do, how to lean back, let my head and chest go out the window, how to hold myself up. I didn’t want any of our time together to be any less than it could be. I wanted to embrace it all, to experience it to the fullest. His choices were never predictable, never awkward. It made sense. The windowsill was hip height. After a few seconds of adjustments, one thing became clear: he’d done this before. I wasn’t his first. I didn’t dare ask. I never asked.

  “I’m going to fall,” I said, as he put his hands against my lower back.

  “You won’t.”

  In the beginning, there was something funny about it, to be having sex above all these people in their apartments, not looking up. It was a rush, knowing everyone underneath us was none the wiser. I couldn’t see any passersby. I looked around, thinking, Someone has to look up. Does this happen all the time? How many times have I walked underneath people having sex on a windowsill? Everyone is at the mercy of me, and I am at the mercy of everyone else. I noticed the city differently, in that moment. I always felt like I was the one spying on everyone, but I realized it then: they were spying on me too.

  “Say something,” Jesse whispered. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d gone silent. “It’s no fun if you don’t say anything, sweetheart.”

  I shook my head, but then let out a small moan. My voice didn’t sound right, as I released it into the landscape. Everyone must do this, right? People must do this. Why don’t I see it? Everyone is having sex. Everyone’s got windows. This is the easiest way to fuck somebody. There is no out. And you offer them a nice view. It was hard to concentrate on the sex, because it was so extroverted, but I did the best I could. I felt a
new vulnerability in the city. I was a part of it now. I was a new fixture, an ornament on a building. Where is everyone? Why aren’t they looking out their windows?

  Jesse’s foot was on the radiator. I heard his knee crack the window. I shuddered, held on to the fire escape. There was broken glass everywhere. I glanced down and saw the building super, looking up at us. “I’m not replacing that!” he shouted.

  * * *

  We were in bed for two minutes before Jesse stood up and crossed the room, went for his guitar. He came back and asked if he could play a song for me that he wrote that day. He played it, in boxer shorts, cross-legged on the bed, and then waited for my reaction. It wasn’t his best, but I didn’t know how to tell him that, so I sat there, in silence. The moment after he finished playing always felt loaded. I had learned to tread lightly. I could sense him holding his breath. I didn’t want to ruin the night. I said: “Is it about springtime or . . . California? In the spring? Sorry, you know how bad I am with . . .” When I spoke, my voice was low and sweet. But he got agitated anyway, and stood up and put his guitar in the corner of the apartment, then snapped it back into its case.

  “Just explain it to me,” I said, pleading with him, but he was already gone.

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m just trying to understand. . . .”

  “Let’s forget it, okay? Let’s talk about your night some more.”

  I sighed and dug my fists down into the mattress. He watched me closely, his neck red. For the past few weeks, Jesse had become increasingly touchy about his music. I got the sense that he wasn’t being too productive and was looking for someone, anyone, to blame. At first it was his bandmates—they were lazy, he said, procrastinating, never showed up to practice on time—but lately I felt the blame had shifted squarely onto my shoulders. Half the time, I had no idea what we were even fighting about.

  He’d say something like: “You don’t really get me though, do you? And it’s not your fault. I don’t think you have the emotional capacity to get me.”

  I’d respond to this maturely. By yelling. “Say what you want about me. But do not insult my emotional capacity!”

  “Maybe our relationship is the problem,” he’d said once, pacing around his apartment, talking to himself more so than me. “Maybe being around someone who is so stable is messing up my ability to write anything remotely interesting.”

  Then, the shit really hit the fan.

  “You think I’m stable?”

  “You just want me to be dark for a few minutes! And then you want me to get over it and get myself together!”

  “That’s not true! I want to be your source of comfort in the world!”

  He’d start shuffling things around in his apartment, slamming drawers with too much force, kicking the mattress with all his might and watching it move a whopping two inches farther away from him. He never hit me, but he came after me a few times, like he was about to do something. I always felt like he would have, if I’d only stuck around a little longer. But I ran away fast, every time, at all hours of the morning, my fear of what remained inside for once outweighing what lurked outside, out of his apartment and down the stairs, down the street, always shutting the door to his building behind me with a sense of panic and relief, like I’d made it out just in time. Sometimes he followed me outside, and we screamed at each other on the street, loud enough to wake the neighbors.

  Sometimes, after a fight, he’d leave in the middle of the night to go out, when I was too tired to protest or to really process the whole thing in the first place. He’d come home at around five with glassy, bloodshot eyes, in a semiconscious trance. We’d talk about how much he’d had to drink, his songs, the gloom that would come over him sometimes and cause him not to sleep. I was his girlfriend/full-time therapist. Every time he came home, I would sit up in bed, wide-awake, as I listened to Jesse in the bathroom throwing up. “Are you okay?” I said, in my hazy state. His response to this was to run the water so that I wouldn’t hear anything. When he got into bed, he passed out, but I got up every half hour to make sure he was still breathing.

  One morning, I woke up to find that he wasn’t beside me. I found him asleep on the couch. I tried to ask him why he wasn’t in bed, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I leaned over him and listened for his heartbeat. He started rocking his body back and forth. On the carpet next to him was one thumb-size clear plastic bag. I said his name. His legs started shaking, like he was warding off bad energy that was inside him. I remember how worried I was, how I couldn’t feel myself move around the apartment. “Jesse,” I said, and then my voice grew louder, tougher, more insistent. His eyes opened. When he looked at me, the person I knew seemed to be far away. Hours later, he told me he did some drugs that night, and that he’d slept on the couch because he didn’t want to be close to me. He was too ashamed.

  That morning, at a park on Essex and Canal, he finally explained himself. He told me how he’d done a few drugs in college but nothing crazy, just to experiment, then he sold them to make money, and maybe he had a few dalliances now and then, postcollege. He told me that it started when his ten-year-old brother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His family was devastated. He said that it was genetic, and that he worried about himself sometimes. He said that drugs were a classic thing that manic and bipolar people did. Their personality gave them this high of happiness and mania, but there were also lows, and when you got into the lows, you wanted to get out of them. He told me that in college, one time, he went up to the roof of Mudd, the engineering building. I told him that he didn’t have to take any engineering classes if he didn’t want to, which made him laugh. He said it wasn’t his style, truly, the drugs, the self-destruction. At his core, he said he liked it best when we were listening to music in bed together, and he was making fun of me for having bad taste. He called it recovery, to be with me, after a long night out. Recovery meant me being there, with him, holed up in his apartment. It meant us together in the dark, watching movies, getting takeout from the Chinese restaurant where Jesse was greeted by the entire staff. I swear, they threw as many complimentary fortune cookies as could fit in the bag. Each night that he slept soundly, I lay next to him in silence, feeling satisfied. It was a refuge, for me as well as him. It stopped me from worrying about other things. All that drifted into the background. Nothing was as pressing as keeping Jesse alive.

  I got up and started getting dressed, readied myself for a battle. “I liked the song,” I said. “But it’s not my fault if you don’t.” After a few minutes, he appeared to calm down, came over to me, just as I was putting on my shoes, pressed his cheek to mine. He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me up so that my shoes fell off, and then carried me back over to the bed. “Don’t go. Don’t go,” he whispered. I grabbed hold of the back of his neck.

  The musician and the music writer.

  “You know what?” he said, once he’d released me down onto the mattress. “Let’s go out. We gotta get out of here.” What he meant was that we needed to step out of ourselves, whatever happened to us when we fought. He had a mischievous look on his face. He stood, went to his closet, looked back at me.

  “Okay,” I said. I was far from sleep anyway. I could never drop right off to sleep after work, not before 3:00 a.m. Something inside of me refused, would not give way. But I was more comfortable at his place than anywhere else. When he wasn’t in bed with me, I had this phantom image of him. I imagined pulling him toward me, curling up beside him and feeling that I’d come to a safe place. When everything in your life is so uncertain, you cling to clarity where you can find it. You cling to anything you can find that feels good or familiar. Did he know that I dreamed about him five nights a week? That every song was about him?

  I couldn’t let him go out without me, then come home, barely conscious. It broke me to see him like that—unable to walk, speak, hold up his head.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “Where should we go?” He came over to the bed,
kissed the top of my head. “How about PKNY?” Jesse said. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “What’s PKNY?”

  “Seriously? Painkiller New York? You’ve never been? I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s that tiki bar a few blocks away? Apparently, they have a new drink with rum and banana colada in it that will not only kill your pain but make you forget how to speak.”

  “Sounds perfect,” I said, half sarcastically. I got up, made the bed. I smoothed the comforter evenly over the mattress, fluffed the pillows, as always, for my mother. As soon as I was done, Jesse took one hand and pushed me lightly so that I fell back onto it, ruining everything. I sighed.

  “I hear that piña coladas are making a comeback,” he said.

  “You know what,” I replied thoughtfully, staring at the ceiling. “Good for them.”

  “I’m feeling the need for some Polynesian and Manhattan fusion.”

  “That’s not a need.”

  “Get excited! This is why we live in Manhattan! This is why we pay a ridiculous amount of money in rent. Well, this is why I pay a ridiculous amount of money. You are just a freeloader. But this is why we live here, man! To go to a tiki bar in Chinatown at one o’clock in the morning.”

  “Agreed,” I said, sitting up.

  “All right!” Jesse said, and then gave me a high five. He stood in front of his closet, scanning his options.