This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  “So are you going to wear a plaid shirt? Or a plaid shirt?” I said, smiling.

  He gave me a death stare.

  “You know what, I hardly ever go out in a T-shirt,” he said, with great interest, as if someone were interviewing him on the topic.

  He put on a shirt, plaid, just as I’d predicted, and looked in the mirror. He closed his eyes slightly and fiddled with his hair. I flinched and looked away from the mirror. He was good-looking, but he knew it, which made him a little bit less so.

  Once out of the apartment, he seemed to be in an extreme hurry to get there. I walked behind him, looking down and trying to figure out what clothing I’d put on, I’d been in such a rush. When he stopped walking, I looked up. There was no awning, no name. It was a tiny place and looked like it used to be a one-car garage. I could see the silver grates, up top, waiting to be pulled down at the end of the night. On the wall next to the bar, someone had painted a green palm tree against a sky-blue background.

  “This is it,” he said. He opened the door and allowed me to walk in first.

  Inside, there was a bamboo-paneled bar, naturally. Colorful drinks were everywhere, with umbrellas and cherries stacked on a straw next to a wedge of pineapple. A few people had ordered flaming shots, which came in a half shell of coconut. Bowls of watermelon with neon straws sticking out of them were passing us by. I turned my attention to the crowd, barely listening as Jesse talked to the bartender, who he knew, of course. He knew every bartender within a five-block radius.

  I spotted Kate across the bar, and I couldn’t believe the luck of it. “Kate’s here!” I yelled, tapping Jesse on the shoulder repeatedly. She was wearing a gray tank top tucked into black pants, a long necklace with a crystal dangling at the end of it. I pointed, standing on my toes to see over the crowd. Jesse looked at her and then looked back at me, rolling his eyes.

  “Hey, don’t do that,” I protested. “Kate’s my friend!”

  “I’m the only friend you need.”

  “That is not true,” I said.

  He grinned. “I’m gonna go downstairs,” he said.

  “What’s downstairs?”

  He shrugged. “Some of my friends.”

  “But I have to say hi to Kate!”

  “Feel free.”

  “Okay . . . so, I’ll, um, I’ll meet you down there in a few minutes?” He nodded, and part of me was relieved to be able to catch up with Kate without him there. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks. When we met up then, we hadn’t had the best dinner. Usually, our dinners were perfect conversational harmony. From the second we sat down, the drinks started flowing, the bread was torn into, we talked so much and so quickly that we didn’t even notice what we were eating. But the last time, we were being too formal with each other for some reason, or she’d been in a lousy mood because of work, or something was off. I hadn’t felt the same connection with her. But now, as I made my way toward her, I was ready to rectify the situation, to get back to our usual way. I realized how much that one mediocre dinner had caused me to miss her.

  I went up to her with a huge smile on my face. There is something about accidentally running into a close friend that is as thrilling as anything.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “I’m with some random people,” she said, less thrilled. “You do not even want to know the night I’ve had.”

  I looked behind her at a booth where four guys we knew from college were seated, Glick, Ben, Danza, and Julian. Ah-ha. “I see Juuuuuulian is here,” I said, drawing out his name in a singsong voice. “Why are you torturing that poor boy?”

  “That poor boy has a girlfriend,” she replied. “But I think I might try to seduce him anyway.” She half smiled, half winced. “Is that bad?”

  “For his girlfriend? Yes. Definitely.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Tell me what’s going on with you and Jesse,” she said, taking a sip of what appeared to be a strawberry daiquiri.

  I stared at her for a few seconds. The truth was I didn’t like to talk about my relationship with Jesse with my friends. I never knew what to say.

  “It’s going really well. . . . ,” I said. “Except for when it’s going really badly.”

  She nodded. “Standard Eve.”

  “I know.”

  “How bad is bad?”

  “There’s a fair amount of alcohol and drug use.”

  She didn’t blink. “But when it’s good?”

  I took a long inhale. “Fireworks.”

  “Standard Eve.”

  “But it changes constantly. I can’t trust it.”

  “Do you even want to?”

  I stared at her.

  “Eve. I think if you dated someone and everything went smoothly, it would blow your mind.”

  “That’s . . . not true. It’s not about highs and lows. It’s just about the person. Jesse and I . . .”

  She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Ohhhh yes. You and Jesse. I know. I know. You’re about to tell me about this unspeakable bond that I couldn’t possibly understand. You guys get each other. Go ahead. Carry on. Have an experience. Do it. Vaya con Dios. By all means. Hey, I’m seducing Julian for no apparent reason. I’m not exactly in a position to judge.”

  “Here’s the thing though . . . I think I might be in love with him.” I winced.

  “Seriously?”

  “And isn’t it bad to love someone who will ultimately hurt me?”

  She started shaking her head. “I love pink drinks. That doesn’t make them good for me, and yet.” She stuck out her tongue. It was bright red.

  “So you think I’m setting myself up?”

  “Of course you are setting yourself up. Look, just be careful. I’m not going to judge you or tell you to stop, but be careful. That’s all I ask.”

  “I’m going to go get him.”

  I went to find Jesse, down the staircase in the back, to the basement. There was a long, mahogany hallway with small rooms every couple of feet and two larger rooms at both ends. The larger rooms were dark, with only a table visible in one and a black piano in the other. I walked to one of the smaller rooms that had its door shut but a light glowing from underneath it.

  I knocked. “Come in!” Inside, there were six or seven people huddled around a mirrored coffee table streaked with white powder. Jesse looked up and smiled at me.

  “Sit down,” he said. I watched him clear room for me. I sat next to him, quietly observing. A girl in a red dress, with a flower in her hair, offered me a line. “No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head. Jesse smiled at me and played with my hair, pushing away the strands near my face. He moved the pieces into a ponytail that he held in his hand behind my neck. “I think I’ll pass,” I said.

  She did a line. He did a line. I stared at the floor. Eventually, I was able to get him away, to lead him back upstairs. He was rubbing my elbow with his fingers as we walked. I tried to get him to talk to Kate, to change her mind about him, about us. I tried to sit at the table and make conversation, but Jesse’s hands were on my skirt, my thigh, under my skirt. He was gradually making it more and more impossible for me to talk. That seemed to be his goal, as he sat next to me, to get me to leave with him as soon as possible. Flashes of the windowsill were coming back to me. I was giving distracted answers to Kate. She could probably tell.

  “Remember what happened earlier?” he whispered into my ear, while I was talking.

  I took his hand in mine and tried to move it away, to put it back in his own lap, but it was a waste of time.

  “I’m not really capable of socializing right now,” he said into my neck. His fingers were fully up my skirt now. His fingertips were sliding beneath my underwear, moving it sideways. I started to laugh. I felt a little bit dizzy. I thought, for a second, about the streaks of white powder, but then I pushed that thought away.

  When Kate got up to use the bathroom, Jesse dragged me outside by the arm and kissed me against the blue wall next to the bar, under the palm tree. I felt li
ke I’d never done it before, like we were inventing something new, that nobody had ever thought about. He pressed me against the wall and when his lips left mine, I exhaled so hard that things started going blurry.

  “Can we go home and fuck now?” he said, smiling, his wet mouth next to mine.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”

  “What is it?”

  I stood there quietly for a few seconds. “What do I . . . mean to you?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. What am I? To you?”

  “Come again?”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Seriously? This is what you want to know right now? While I’m high and fuck-drunk on you?”

  “Is there a better time to ask?” I smiled.

  “Ahhhh, see. You told me that you weren’t one of those girls. But you are. You lured me in under false pretenses!”

  “One of what girls? I just want to understand what’s going on.”

  “Of course you do. You probably have a whole staff of people working on this issue as we speak.”

  “I don’t. Fine. Look. You don’t have to answer that. But, can I just ask you for one thing? When you’re ready to break up with me, can you just tell me as soon as you know? Like, don’t wait, don’t drag it out, don’t make me guess. Just do it.”

  “You’re borderline insane.”

  “And you’re not answering my question!”

  “I just want to have a good time, man.”

  “What does that mean though?”

  “It means—” He took a long, annoyed breath and ran his fingers through his hair. “Jesus, Porter. You kill me, you know that? You’re killing me, even just by saying that, in that way that you say things. You and I both know that I can’t even see straight right now. We fucked earlier, but it doesn’t matter. That doesn’t cool me off toward you. It only makes me hotter. It’s like a cycle and I’m never satisfied. I’m in a state of pining for you, right now, that is probably bad for my health. If you walked away right now, I think I would die. I think I would literally stop breathing. I would do anything to stop this conversation and take you home right now. Literally. Anything. I want you so badly that it hurts, it fucking kills me.”

  “You know,” I said, looking up at him. “I don’t enjoy hearing you say these things.”

  “You certainly enjoy hearing me say these things.”

  I started to smile. “I’m just worried that . . .” He picked me up off the ground, his hands clasped around my legs. My little half yelps half laughter filled the air. He carried me down the street, with his arms still around me. It required an unnerving amount of energy. Once we were in front of his building, he placed me down, and stood in front of me. He moved closer and closer. He touched his nose to my nose. He kept his face there. We both closed our eyes.

  “Jesse,” I whispered. I could feel myself resisting. When he hugged me, I couldn’t sink into him. I knew that I could go upstairs with him, we could sleep together, we could sleep next to each other, I could press myself against him all I wanted, but somehow, it wouldn’t stick. He could hold on to me, but I wouldn’t feel it. Instead, as I stood there on the street with him, I felt the frailty of my body, on my skin, a flash of Kate’s red tongue in my face. I’d left without saying good-bye.

  “See,” he said, his arms around me, pulling me in. “This is how we are. This is good. Can’t you see that?”

  I looked around, uneasily, at a neighborhood that wasn’t mine. I felt like there was something missing, like there was meant to be something underneath me, but instead I was holding myself up, and not well. Something more reliable was supposed to be there.

  My chest tightened and I let out a sound that Jesse seemed to take for lust but was really much more me on the cusp of a full-blown panic attack. This wasn’t stable. I wasn’t stable. Nothing in my life was fucking stable.

  I closed my eyes as Jesse buried his face in my neck and, as I had done for the past six years whenever I was on the verge of becoming completely unmoored, I wished for my mother.

  EVE

  * * *

  CHILDHOOD IN THE BRONX (OR: NEVER TRUST A MIDNIGHT SNACK)

  It was the summer of 1997. I was on a mission and pedaling fast, one thought circling on an endless loop in my head.

  I needed to talk to my mother.

  The buildings were blowing by me, the tall brick rectangles, each the same: a semicircle driveway, a few errant bushes, two or three trees along the road, not close enough to touch. From the Kingsbridge Academy, a public school in our neighborhood, I had to bike only a few blocks to get home, and I knew them well. I could afford to be reckless. I wasn’t looking out for cars, or any movement on the street, or watching for stop signs. It was all grayness anyway, nothing to see. The small knapsack kept bobbing against my back, as I pedaled my heart out. I only knew that I had to talk to her, before it was too late.

  I made the right onto Blackstone Avenue, went to the end of our road, which looped in a circle and then spit back out. Our house was tucked behind the Henry Hudson Parkway, not on the parkway, but not so far away from it that we didn’t hear the cars, at night, when everything else was quiet. We were the third attached house on the left, in a row of four, each with a red awning. The group was distinct among the surrounding buildings. It didn’t belong. It was shorter and stubbier, disconnected from the landscape. Of the four, we were the house with sheer curtains in every window. It wasn’t the best part of Riverdale, the part that was green and suburban and looked more like Westchester than the Bronx. It was the part of the North Bronx where people lived if they didn’t have money, but it was still a bastion of shelter compared to the South Bronx.

  I propped my bike against a row of garbage cans and let myself inside with the key under the mat. My mother’s car was in the driveway, which was a relief. It occurred to me, on the way home, that there was a small chance she’d be at the grocery store. Once inside, I figured I had about fifteen minutes before my sister, who was three years younger than I was, would come trudging home. A mere fifteen minutes to recount what she’d done that day. It was the worst thing imaginable. Up until then, I’d thought the worst that weasel would ever do occurred when I was nine and she borrowed one of my stuffed animals and left it in the back of the BxM2 bus. But no, this was worse.

  That summer, my sister and I went to Kingsbridge together every morning, where we spent an hour each day playing sports and the rest of it taking math classes because it was cheap and my mother somehow managed to convince us that this was camp. The silver lining was that they took us on field trips every few weeks, to the community center for swimming, to the bowling alley. A rumor was circulating that there would be a trip to a water park at the end of the summer.

  Normally, the prospect of a water park would have been enough for me. But that summer, there were more pressing matters to attend to. I was thirteen and I had a crush on a boy named Jeremy. That day, I’d found out that, joy of joys, he liked me too. I told my sister, in a fit of excitement. Normally, I pretended that she didn’t exist. I only paid attention to her in an emergency, like when she left the water running in the bathroom and nearly flooded the place, or when she jumped into the pool without her floaties on and had to be rescued by the sixteen-year-old lifeguard. Under those circumstances, with a teacher breathing down my neck (“Your sister almost drowned!”) I paid attention to her, the little inconvenience. Well, I should have stuck to that policy. She was to be dealt with only in an emergency. But I broke down. And leave it to her to take that single moment where I chose to let her in a little bit, and turn it into a public relations disaster. She went straight up to Jeremy Robbins, under the lunch tent, with all the other kids watching, and declared, “Welcome to the family!” She wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug.

  I nearly melted into my sneakers. She didn’t know. She had no idea that you couldn’t say stuff like that to thirteen-year-old boys without scaring them away. You just
couldn’t. Later that day, the crush of the moment told me that our deal was off, that he no longer wanted to sit with me on the bus to the movies, that he would not be holding my hand in the dark during the frightening parts. Well, he didn’t say that last bit, but it was an implied part of the movie-field-trip bus-ride-companion contract, as far as I was concerned.

  I didn’t discuss it with my sister. I didn’t go to her and say anything. I merely left for home without her that day. Let her wonder why I’m not waiting for her! Let her think about her actions! I had a better, more industrious plan. I needed an audience who would understand the scope of the damage. I was going to go home and scream at my mother. She was at least, in part, responsible for what had transpired that day. She’d created the little monster, after all.

  The tears were in my eyes as I ran upstairs, breathing heavily, the words ready, just waiting to pour out, as I replayed the events of the day over and over again in my head. It wasn’t just that my mom would hear me out and probably punish Emma—she would calm me down, make me see reason, give me some perspective. She always did when I was freaking out about something. “There will be other Jeremys,” she would say soothingly, her calm seeping into me like a drug and making me a little more numb to everything. “Now let’s go downstairs and eat Emma’s favorite flavor of ice cream and not give her any.”

  But when I got upstairs, the door to my parents’ bedroom was closed, which was almost never the case. At some point, they’d told us that if the bedroom door was ever closed, we shouldn’t bother them, that we should leave them alone and that they’d open it when they were available.

  I thought about this but knocked anyway. This was an emergency. My sister would be home any minute and I wouldn’t have time to have the very adult conversation that I needed to have with my mother without some ten-year-old hanging around. I knocked and held my breath. Nobody answered.

  Disgruntled, I went to the bedroom that I shared with my sister and locked the door. I would wait, but I wasn’t going to wait with her around. I almost caved when I heard her little footsteps outside. She didn’t knock, but she slipped a Fruit Roll-Up under the door, my usual afternoon snack that I’d skipped over in my enraged state. It didn’t really fit, but she pushed and pushed, wedging it into the small gap between the carpet and the door, until it lay there, freely.