This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  We shared so much that I often felt like if I didn’t tell her something, it didn’t really happen. Running an idea by her was like logging it into some imaginary but very official journal of my life. Unfortunately for me, if she was any kind of bookkeeper, she was the most unneutral one that ever existed. She didn’t just want to know the basics. She wanted to shape things, to inject her not-so-subtle opinion into everything. And most of the time, to be honest, I was grateful for the guidance. But every now and then, when a conflict arose, it was what Arthur called World War Three in his apartment. My mother would look at him when he said this, exasperated. Arthur was perpetually three steps behind. It was irrelevant that nobody ever bothered to catch him up. We firmly believed that he should have found a way to keep up with everything on his own. My mother and I screamed at each other, I slammed my door (an act that she loathed, which would only escalate the situation), but after about thirty minutes, one of us would come crawling back to the other. Usually me, for fear of losing my most trusted adviser. We would then discuss things more quietly. She would come around to see my side.

  And then, September Eleventh happened. I expected a call from my father, but one never came. I remember the phone ringing at Arthur’s just as we were leaving for the funeral. The three of us stood in the doorframe, holding our coats, motionless, letting it ring. Just as Arthur was about to go to it, I said, “Nobody answer it, please,” because I wanted so badly to believe that it might be my father. I didn’t want to ruin my own illusion that he’d call, that he cared about what was going on. But he wasn’t at the funeral. Emma and I were sunk right back down, even further than we’d ever been before. And, in a way, I spent the next ten years waiting for that phone to ring.

  BEN

  * * *

  49 ESSEX STREET, BETWEEN HESTER AND GRAND, LOWER EAST SIDE

  That one night wasn’t a big deal, or anything like that. There was a girl, Eve, who was familiar because we showed up at the same places, over the years, but it wasn’t that I really knew her. I wasn’t thinking about her at all. But this particular night ended in me feeling sorry for her. And that ended up being important for what happened later. So that’s why I’m starting here.

  The night began, as so many others did, with my friends at a bar. None of us had an apartment where it was convenient to drink, so this was a fairly regular occurrence. I lived in Hoboken, but didn’t invite people over because I had this thing about not pissing off my roommate, even though he wasn’t winning any prizes. He was a Korean kid studying to get a PhD in chemical engineering, and he did nothing but study and play video games and cook soup in the middle of the night that smelled like it could stop a clock. But most of the time, he stayed in his room with the door closed and kept to himself, and if I got bored, I would knock and talk to him about biocatalytic fuel cells.

  Danza still lived at home with his parents in Connecticut. Glick was paying two hundred dollars a month to sleep on a couch in the basement of an apartment in Crown Heights. And Julian lived with his girlfriend, but she didn’t like us. At all. She didn’t take to us from the beginning. But then there was one time when she came home to find Glick taking a shower in her bathroom and that was the final nail in the coffin. Julian was still paying for that one.

  So we went to this bar on Thirty-Fourth Street, which was centrally located and had cheap pitchers. As usual, I was late and coming straight from my office in the financial district. By the time I got there, they’d all been drinking for hours.

  “This night is going to be huge,” Glick declared, as I took my seat at the table, took off my coat, loosened my tie. “HUGE.”

  If there was one thing I appreciated about Glick, it was his deluded optimism. Call it delusion, naivety, or just a bloated sense of self-importance in the world. It was his way, before any night out, to set the stakes, and make them sky-high, didn’t matter the details. And it was a good way to be, to have some enthusiasm. Why not?

  “What’s the plan, anyway?” I said, pouring myself a beer. “Are we actually doing Lower East Side?”

  “Absolutely, we are,” replied Glick.

  “I’m down,” Julian said. “Do we have an exact location?”

  We were two years out of college, and now that we had jobs and a little bit of money to spend, the city felt brand-new. Every weekend, we found new places to go, discovered new neighborhoods. We wanted to make the most of it and do every fun thing we could. Yeah, we wanted to meet girls and get laid, but that wasn’t our primary objective. Our number-one priority was to have a good time, to get drunk and do stupid shit.

  “Let’s go to Hair of the Dog,” said Glick. “I hear it’s good.”

  “Can we get in?” I asked.

  “Benjamin, have faith,” Glick answered.

  “I don’t want to go if we can’t get in,” I said. “We spent all last Saturday night waiting on line.”

  “We can get in,” he said, with confidence.

  “Then sold.”

  We wanted to take it to the city, but really, we were lucky if we got into a cool spot. We didn’t have much money. We were always waiting on line. The problem was that we weren’t going to anonymous, half-empty places, but we also weren’t buying bottles or tables. We were always going to that elusive cool bar that was overflowing with people, but not too expensive or exclusive to let us in. To get into a “cool bar” was a special achievement.

  “Kate texted me that she’s going to some tiki bar on Essex. PKNY,” Julian said. Danza started to laugh, making a clicking sound with his cheek. Julian ignored him.

  “Kate, huh?” Glick said. “What else did she say?”

  Julian replied, “She’s a friend.”

  “I need to find myself a friend,” said Danza, getting up to go to the bathroom. He was wearing a buttoned-down shirt that was too small. From the back, you could see his spine through the fabric. You could see his arm muscles too, but that was probably the point. “I’m down. Let’s go.”

  “Whatever you say,” Glick agreed, and then added, “boss,” which made him smile. Every time. He’d given Josh his “Danza” nickname because he was the team captain, so he was the boss, which led to Tony Danza from Who’s the Boss? When Glick came up with it, he was thrilled. You’d think he’d discovered plutonium. Every time he met someone new, he threw out the reference, hoping they’d bite and ask what it was about. And oh boy, when they did, that made Glick’s night. His eyes would widen, so excited to tell them the essence of the nickname. In his mind, the entire party was gathered around him, like he was some old storyteller getting ready to spin a tale for the ages. That was Glick’s way, and we loved him for it.

  “Are you crashing at my place tonight?” I said to Danza.

  “No. I’m taking the five a.m. train back to Connecticut,” he replied.

  I laughed. “That must be quite a sight.”

  “Yup. Only winners on that train.”

  “All right, guys. Get your game faces on,” Glick said, and then made a hand signal toward the waitress, indicating the check.

  The four of us were on the hockey team together at Columbia, which wasn’t what it sounded like. It wasn’t playing against Yale or Brown on Saturdays with a filled stadium, with parents drinking hot chocolate and girls in knit hats pulled down over their ears cheering us on, making us feel better after, if we lost. Columbia didn’t have an actual hockey team, so this was more like a club team where we played against SUNY New Paltz with nobody in the stands and spent hours in the damn van driving in the middle of the night because somebody left the equipment behind and we had to go back for it. I’d never admit it to the guys, but I think it meant more to me than it did to all of them combined—I’d played all through high school, and I was grateful to play in college, even if it was for a shitty pseudo team whose season got suspended junior year because we got caught drinking in the locker room and for recruiting new members with T-shirts that read DON’T BE A PUSSY. JOIN COLUMBIA HOCKEY. Like most bad ideas, it started with Glick.


  “Let’s get out of here,” Danza said a few minutes later, downing the last of his beer. Julian started nodding. I poured a second glass for myself and then chugged it.

  On the train down to Grand Street, Glick started badgering me about my job. He did this all the time, wherever we were. He could be pretty annoying about it.

  “How was work today? Did they give you the full hour for lunch?” he asked.

  “Yup,” I said. “Got the full hour. Standard union rules.”

  “What kind of hard hats do they give you guys? Can you keep them at the end of the job? Or do they keep track of everything, and it all goes to the next job site? Swipe one for me next time. I’d love a hard hat.”

  I was a glorified construction worker to him. He made jokes about the union, as if he knew anything about it. In reality, I worked in the structural and civil engineering department of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architectural firm that had won the bid to build the Freedom Tower. I was the lowest-level person there, but it was pretty exciting. To give you a clear picture of my place on the totem pole: I ran the numbers. I did the wind-speed calculations. I worked on the modeling, made sure the structure was capable of resisting things—the people in it, garage vehicles, snow, wind, and ice. These all stressed the materials of the building throughout its duration. It had to have the capacity to resist.

  The fact that I was in the engineering school in college and my friends were studying liberal arts seemed to always be an issue. I didn’t get it, but it was a big deal to them. They treated me like I was a different sort of person, like because I hadn’t read Infinite Jest fourteen times, I wasn’t being properly socialized. They asked me once if I knew how to build a boat out of firewood, as if being an engineer meant learning archaic survival skills and when you were done, you got shipped off to a Survivor-type island to see how you’d do. Once, I asked them if they’d ever thought about something for class that wasn’t purely theoretical. I got a look of abject confusion, and I never asked anything like that again. That was not the way to make friends at Columbia. You had to be pro Infinite Jest at all times.

  Everyone asked why I didn’t become an architect. After all, I worked at a well-known architecture firm. I explained that architecture was the visual aspect of the building. Architects provided a new design, but they worked with civil engineers like me (read: my bosses), because we were the ones who knew the materials, the high beams, the glass, the walls, where everything went or didn’t go. The architects came up with a general idea of what they wanted the building to look like. Let’s have it resemble a bird that’s flapping its wings! A serpent rising up from the sand! In this case, they wanted the Freedom Tower to combine the sense of a memorial with the city rebuilding itself and pushing toward the future. So we were always dealing with a lot of artistic mumbo jumbo and people having grand ideas and then we as engineers were tasked with making it all work. It had to be structurally stable without taking away from artistic purposes, and it had to be buildable. We designed the structure of the building to make sure that it didn’t, you know, fall down. And while everyone agreed that our job was important, it was significantly less cool.

  I always got the same puzzled response from people, something like, “Hmmm, that’s interesting. I don’t think I know any civil engineers.” Conversation over. But Glick was more aggressive about it. He was probably just pissed that he didn’t have his own thing. After getting rejected by every consulting firm in the metropolitan area, he ended up with a job doing marketing for his father’s swimming-pool company. He said it was only temporary, but it’s hard to get a better job when you don’t apply for one. I watched him now, on the subway, cleaning his fingernails. He had a small piece of turkey on his cheek, from a sandwich, hours earlier. I was waiting for the right moment to tell him about it.

  When we got out of the subway, we walked a few blocks. We passed stores selling restaurant supplies and food wholesale, awnings displaying vague names like INTERNATIONAL MEN’S CLOTHIERS and NEW ERA FACTORY OUTLET. Some had clothes hanging in the window, others looked to be filled with cardboard boxes and dry cleaning. We passed a T-shirt shop and Glick pointed to a yellow T-shirt in the window that read TALKING IS HARD, and said, “Hey, Ben, we should get that one for you.” Julian and Danza laughed. Glick liked to call me boring. That was his big joke with me. I ignored him. Always. Maybe I didn’t express myself well. But Glick had a ton of personality, and nobody was particularly impressed. I’d rather be quiet than full of shit.

  It was grittier in this neighborhood. There was a sense of history. It was old New York, except that there were also a few pizza places, upscale cocktail lounges, and packs of young people standing outside bars. There was a disconnect between people and backdrop, as if we were all presupposed into this universe. It was modern-day life in an old setting, a taste of how New York used to be at the turn of the century. It gave us a chance to see what it was like, to feel like the city might actually be dangerous, even though, in reality, it wasn’t. It was just enough danger to be fun.

  We passed a bar called Stanton Social, a more upscale establishment. We tried to get in. But they turned us down, and I can’t say I blamed them. We were a bunch of drunk dudes. “Oh, I’m sorry I forgot to wear my blazer tonight!” Glick yelled, as we were leaving. On the way out, he spotted a young couple eating with their teenaged children. “I’m sorry that I’m not here trying to have a nice family dinner!”

  There was a coffee cup on the street. He kicked it, thinking it was empty, but it was full and splashed all over Julian. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Julian yelled, going after him. It was hilarious. As if everything had lined up perfectly for that one moment. Julian’s entire back and pants were covered in coffee. And the rest of us didn’t get a single drop. Danza bought a set of dice from some guy on the street.

  Once we got to Essex, we spotted the tiki bar, wedged between 47 Essex Street, a sporting-goods store that sold team uniforms, and 51 Essex Street, a place called the Pickle Guys, which had two barrels in front of it and a banner that read, WE SHIP NATIONWIDE! There was no sign for PKNY, but we knew it from the sight of a palm tree painted onto a brick wall.

  “X marks the spot,” Julian said.

  “Nice!” Glick said, snapping his fingers and pointing. “Now you know we’re in paradise.”

  Whenever Glick snapped and pointed, he was giving his approval. It was his way of showing that something scratched him right where he itched. We walked in and did our standard surveillance of the situation, each focused on our own set of priorities. Glick wanted to figure out the quickest and most efficient way to get a drink. Danza wanted to evaluate the male-to-female ratio and where to stand for maximum exposure. Julian was focused more on the music and tended to judge bars based purely on their selections. He claimed to have a sophisticated musical palate, but as far as I could tell, he just wanted to hear Billy Joel.

  The four of us sprang at an empty table across from the bamboo bar. The table had just opened up when we walked in, and it felt like the greatest luck. Finding an empty table at a hopping bar was gold. We set about deciphering the menu, smug with our seats, like we could order anything now, like we owned the place.

  “Are these all drinks?” Danza said, flipping through the six-page menu of frozen cocktails, mai tais, highballs, Scorpion Bowls, Sipping Spirits.

  “I don’t even care,” Julian said. “I just want something with rum. Nothing frozen.”

  “No, I’m not going frozen either,” I said. “I think I’m going to get the Lei Lani Volcano.”

  “I’m getting the Kon-Tiki Tropical Itch . . . or the Sleeping Giant . . .” Danza squinted at the menu.

  “Strong choices. I’m going to go with the Dying Bastard or the Dead Bastard. One of the Bastards,” Glick said, delighted. He always chose his drink based on the name, and this place really catered to his sensibilities. Every time he picked a drink, he enunciated every syllable and got all excited. He said, “It’s not just about the drink
. It’s about what the drink represents!” Few people loved to drink as much as Glick.

  As we waited, Kate came over to talk to us, or rather, to Julian.

  “Hello, boys,” she said. “Michael.” She gave Glick a proper nod and stuck out her hand for him to shake. She was the only one who addressed him by his first name. She must have been tipsy. The three of us usually got the freeze from her. Kate was very beautiful. And I mean, she was universally considered a knockout. She was half Asian and had this exotic look about her. And confidence. She had a lot of confidence. She was one of those women who could easily put out that “It’s nice to meet you / hang out with you / talk to you, but I don’t need you” vibe.

  “Where’s Ali tonight?” she said to Julian, with almost a smile. Julian used to hook up with Kate in college, despite the fact that she was way out of his league. They were never dating, but she used to keep him around so that she could call him at the end of the night. He’d literally go running to wherever she was. One time, we were sitting in the McDonald’s in Times Square and she told him that she was at a bar near Columbia. He said he was too, and then made a mad dash for the subway. She instructed him that they were “FWB,” or Friends with Benefits. And now that Julian was with somebody else, she seemed to be even more hell-bent on keeping him around.