by Leslie Cohen
“Ali’s not feeling well tonight,” he said to her, not looking at her directly, and Kate did a slow, satisfied nod and then twirled herself away, toward the bar. She’d gotten all the information she wanted. For now.
All of us watched Kate as she walked away. She found her friend, a girl named Eve Something-or-other, who we knew from college. Eve didn’t turn to see us. And frankly, if she didn’t come over, it was no big loss. I wasn’t interested in our usual round of chitchat. “Remember me? I’m Julian’s roommate.” We’d had the same conversation at least ten times. I felt like I knew her though, because we saw each other all the time—mutual friends, parties, the whole thing. There was one summer where I went with Julian to meet her and her friends in Central Park for some concert and I remember seeing her on the lawn with a blanket spread out underneath her and two bottles of wine, a small package of crackers. She’d come prepared, and there was something sort of cute about it, how she was all set up like that. She made a big stink when Glick took out a forty of Pabst and started passing it around.
That group of girls was always funny in general. We didn’t really know them too well, but we went to their parties. We were around them a lot. Everything they did was so incredibly girly. They threw Valentine’s Day parties, talked about their outfits, and went to the bathroom in groups. All their conversations were conducted in a secret tongue, and, although I understood each of the words individually, when strung together at that voracious speed, the whole thing passed me by like a speeding train. I saw it happen, but if you asked me to describe it a layer deeper than that, I’d be at a loss.
“That is one quality FWB,” Glick said, with a smirk.
“Not anymore,” Julian said. “That ship has sailed.”
The thing about Julian was this: he had the kavorka when it came to getting girls. Nobody knew exactly why. Whether he was extraordinarily good-looking, I couldn’t say. But basically, he knew how to talk to them, a skill that the rest of us had yet to master. He knew what to say, how much to say. He had an easy way of asking them questions. He turned on the charm, but not so much that it seemed like he was actually turning on the charm. Whereas Glick had his own foolproof method. He would stare a girl down, eyes scanning her from head to toe, as she passed us by, and then he’d raise his chin slightly in her direction, at what he believed to be just the right moment. To say that it never worked was an understatement.
“No, man. She doesn’t want to be FWB anymore,” Glick said. “Now she wants to be MWC.”
“MWC?”
“Married with Children.”
As soon as we got our drinks, Glick turned to Julian and started on him about Ali. “So how’s the girlfriend treating you? Why isn’t she here again?”
“Ah, she wasn’t feeling well. I told you. She didn’t want to come out tonight,” he said.
“Is she ever feeling well? What’s the deal?” Glick was being an ass, but he had a point.
“She’s never around,” Danza chimed in, and Danza hardly ever talked shit about anyone. He played it cool. He didn’t keep tabs, usually.
“It’s been over a month since we’ve seen her.” I decided to throw my hat in the ring, as long as everyone else was.
“Is she so disgusted by us that she can’t even fake it?” Glick continued. “Or are we talking about more serious issues below the surface? Slow burn? Attention ground control, Julian is fizzling out . . . we’re going to have a crash landing here. Clear the runway, make room, we have a goner!”
“So?” Julian said, getting fed up already. “What about you guys? Ben, you were lucky enough to hook up with that girl from Kansas? Or Kentucky? One of those. But then you went back to her place and she made you watch Titanic and you fell asleep and she threw you out. And, Danza, didn’t the girl you hooked up with last weekend tell you that she never wanted to hook up with you again, but if she saw you, she’d say hi?”
Danza’s face turned serious. “Cut it out, man. You’re making us sound terrible,” he said, looking around and over his shoulder.
“Or amazing,” said Glick.
“And, Glick, seriously the last time you got any action was at least a year ago, and the only reason she agreed to go home with you was because you told her that you had pot, which you didn’t.” Julian was right about Glick, at least. His hookups were few and far between. Each time it happened, I half expected him to take out an ad in the newspaper.
Then, as was inevitable, the old stories started flowing. Oh, the enthusiasm that we could muster for stories we’d told and retold hundreds of times, but it was fun to remember. College, what a crazy time that was . . . all two and a half years ago.
“I dodged the ambulance service multiple times,” Glick mused. “They thought I was too drunk. Girls, man. Trying to help. Not realizing that a passed-out guy in the corner is not a reason to call an ambulance. Amateurs . . . I showed them.”
“You did,” Danza agreed. “Except that one time that they actually got you and you had to escape.”
“I did. I had to fucking escape! I walked across campus in a hospital gown.” He took a sip of his drink. “And let me tell you something. Those gowns are breezy. They provide very little protection.”
“They’re not meant to be worn outside,” I reasoned.
“Let’s be real,” Julian said. “It’s a step up from your usual clothes.”
“What’s wrong with my usual clothes?”
“It’s sixty degrees outside and you’re wearing corduroys,” Julian said. “Those are winter pants, man. I don’t consider myself an expert on fashion by any stretch of the imagination, but that much I know. Aren’t you hot in them? Do you not just have a river of sweat running down your backside?”
Glick ignored us and ordered another drink. He did an impression of an exotic bird for the waitress. Glick was the butt of every joke, but he took it well because he knew. What would we all talk about, if not for him?
“You know what, let’s get Danza drunk for once,” Glick said, half to the unimpressed waitress, half to us. “I’ve never seen him drunk. Let’s get him good and drunk and then you can all spare me your usual judgments. A round for the table, m’lady!” he cried with a wave of his arm. The waitress looked confused and vaguely pissed-off, but nodded and returned several minutes later with a tray full of alcohol.
So we drank. A lot. Julian spent a solid half hour talking in the corner of the bar with Kate, during which time we made fun of him mercilessly, for the way he was standing there with such a stressed-out look on his face, as if torn apart by some moral dilemma, and yet shamelessly watching her fiddle with the necklace hanging near her chest. “Your girlfriend is outside,” Glick said to him, a lie that worked like a charm. He was back sitting with us in no time.
Danza took out the dice and we started playing c-lo. It was a game we played sometimes in the locker room with three six-sided dice where you kept rolling until two out of three dice matched and your score was the amount on the remaining dice. The person with the highest score won the pot. We were rolling the dice at our table, gambling, taking bets, involving the bouncer and making a huge scene, cash on the ground, cash on the table. We ended up losing about a hundred dollars to a group of girls, a bachelorette party. Then, Danza made out with the bride-to-be after using some stupid line like, “Aren’t you supposed to kiss a stranger tonight?”
By one o’clock in the morning, we were stinking drunk. And hungry. We talked about going to a pancake place on Clinton Street.
“Isn’t it closed?”
“Whatever, we’ll start pounding on the door. I’m sure they get deliveries. We’ll say, The yeast is coming and so are we!” Glick yelled.
“I’m not breaking into a pancake place,” I said. “There’s a diner on every corner.”
“Yeah, dude, that is not the only restaurant in Manhattan to get food right now,” Julian said.
“We are doing this,” Glick insisted. “It’s not about the fucking pancakes, it’s about the fucking princi
ple.”
“What principle?” I shouted, eyes wide. The argument went on for much, much longer than it should have. It somehow became a question of loyalty. Always. Everything was for the team.
“Guys. We set a goal and we have to achieve it,” Glick said. “We shouldn’t settle for anything less than that fluffy pancake in the sky!” He got all red-faced and fired-up. “We need to end the night this way. Don’t you guys realize? This entire night has been leading up to these pancakes. Without these pancakes, the whole night didn’t exist.” He started shaking his head. “I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing this for all of us. I’m doing this so that tomorrow, you’ll wake up and your stomach will be full and you’ll say, Wow, what an amazing fucking night.”
Glick was an idiot, and there was no way to reason with him once he had something stuck in his head. Julian was a free bird that night, with his girlfriend busy doing something else, “not feeling well” or “working” or whatever it was, and even though he was yawning like crazy, he wasn’t going home a minute sooner than he had to. Danza could barely keep his eyes open, but he insisted that he was a “team player” and “taking one for the team,” which meant never backing out of anything, ever. And you know what, good for him. I said good-bye and started to walk away from them. I guess I didn’t possess the leadership qualities of a Danza, that diehard devotion. I left them all there, to the sound of groans and protests.
“Glick,” I yelled, from across the bar. “You have turkey on your face.”
Not everyone can be the team captain.
* * *
The walk to the subway would be good with nobody around. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to wait too long for the train. The streets looked different, now that the night was over. The Lower East Side had a coolness to it, but when you looked more carefully, there was a crustiness to everything too. A romanticizing went on, but in the end, it was a neighborhood of old tenements. There was a reason why everyone left before we got here. It was not one of the nicer parts of town. It was housing for the poorest class of people. Twenty years ago, a room probably cost fifty dollars a month. They say these houses have improved, but it was hard to believe that, from the looks of them. It was the least possible amount of light and air for tenants and the greatest number of people crowded into the space. I learned a lot about areas like this in an urban infrastructure class that I took in college, about tenements, the damage of congestion, the lack of park space and open areas.
The Lower East Side had an allure, but the more time you spent there, the more carefully you looked, you realized it. The cracks were visible. The allure dissipated. It was the complete absence of engineering. No engineer had ever looked at any of it. If you were to walk into any Lower East Side tenement and put a marble on the floor, it would roll down to one side of the room. The floors weren’t level, and that drove me crazy. Not to mention the walls were not vertical, all out of plumb. Calculations were never done.
As I rounded the corner of Houston and Ludlow, I heard a guy talking. The voice got louder as I walked, but I couldn’t see anything. I turned, like he might be talking to me. But then I looked across the narrow street and I saw Eve. She was standing next to this guy in a plaid shirt who looked familiar to me from college. He was in a band. Or something. I don’t know why but this guy had this look about him, a look that screamed unemployment. But then, in college Eve was always with guys like that. Nobody really knew what she was doing. Anyway. Plaid Shirt was standing across from her. She was a few feet from him, arms across her chest. Something about him always irked me. He was the type of guy who wouldn’t talk to you unless you had something for him.
“Jesus, what is up with you tonight?”
“I’m scared!” she said, and then caught herself yelling, lowered her voice. She sat down on a bench. “And I know people say that all the time, but I don’t have parents, so cut me some slack, please, because sometimes, I feel completely alone in the world. And I know that people say that too, but in my case, it’s actually true.”
I felt glued to my spot on the street. As soon as I heard her say that, I had this strange feeling, like I was invested in what was happening.
“You’re not alone,” he said, and then he walked over, sat down next to her. He sounded calmer than I expected him to. I watched the wisps of her hair moving in the wind.
“I feel like I’m desperately trying to hold on to something or someone. And you’re not . . . holding.”
“Oh, really? Like how I held your head every night while you were sleeping?”
Oh brother. This guy.
“Look. Eve. It’s not your fault. It’s like there’s this darkness inside of me. There’s not a single day when I wake up and wish that it weren’t there, but I don’t know how to get rid of it.”
“I know exactly what you mean though. Doesn’t that help? Shouldn’t that help?”
“No. Because your darkness isn’t like my darkness.”
It should be illegal for two English majors to date each other.
“I thought that it was,” she said, shaking her head and staring at the ground. “I thought that . . . we were.”
“I’m just tired, man, and I’m tired of talking to you about this and the reality is . . . I will never have this with anyone.” He motioned to the space between them and then stood up, started pacing around in a circle, moving around a lot. I was sure of it now. Something was amped up about him. Maybe he was high.
“Whatever I’ll have with other people will be something else, and it’s such a heartbreaking idea, isn’t it? But we might be wrong for each other! Okay? It’s true! We might be wrong for each other! And we could battle it out for months, years even, and you’ll get mad and I’ll be sorry and we’ll both ultimately come up short. There is no doubt in my mind that some intangible thing connects us, and that we have become tied together in a way that I might never find with someone else. This alone could sustain us for a long time. I could stay with you just to avoid that endogenous and visceral fear of never finding it again.”
Endogenous? Okay, now he was making up words.
She put her hand up to her mouth and looked like she was going to cry. Was she going to cry? I wasn’t too sharp about this kind of thing, but she looked like she might cry. I took a few steps to my left, officially lurking in the shadows, but I didn’t care if I got caught. She wouldn’t care. I was just some acquaintance, though I felt some instinctual need to help her, not sure why, but there was nothing I could do, as she sat there, concentrating on him.
“What?” he said. “You don’t like the drugs, right? The fact that I do drugs bothers you? Well, you are pretty and smart and there’s no reason that you need to put up with someone like me. No reason, and you shouldn’t. You just shouldn’t. I would recommend against it. Go.”
“But you’re . . .”
“I’m WHAT?” he yelled.
“Nothing . . . it’s just . . . I would never have had the guts to say all this to you. You may be right, but I would never have been able to talk about us like that, in the past tense. What you’re saying sounds nice, they’re nice words, but they sound a whole lot like good-bye.”
“You know that you basically pressed me into this place, right? You forced a conclusion. This is what you wanted.”
Then, she started to put her hand on her forehead, on her eyes, all over. He sat there, didn’t move. What was the matter with him? What was the big deal that you couldn’t just shut up and make someone feel better? No reason to torture each other. With an upset girl on my hands, my tendency was always to back down, to be quiet, overly agreeable. I was never overtly mean. Or maybe I was and I didn’t realize it. I guess there have been times of drunk fighting when things weren’t totally talked out but then we had sex and forgot about it. I was once seeing this girl who annoyed the hell out of me, but the sex was fun because I was sort of perpetually mad at her. Controlled doses of pain or anger could be good, I guess. But this was too much.
I started to wal
k again, leaving them to their conversation, in all its glory. I was feeling bad for her, but also, frankly, glad not to be involved in that kind of mess. I had no desire for a girlfriend, then, but at some point, I probably would. And when I did, I knew one thing for sure: I wanted a relationship that wasn’t a lot of drama.
It was time to get the hell out of there.
EVE
* * *
MIDTOWN MELTDOWN, SOME RANDOM ATM VESTIBULE
The sky was darkening, in the middle of the day, which brought on that looming feeling, those ominous clouds. And then suddenly it was pouring rain and I was caught on the street with my lunch, headed back to the asset management firm where I’d been working as an assistant for the past few months because Arthur had a friend who worked there and at the point when he asked me about it, the thought of a steady paycheck had become blindingly appealing. Plus Nobu reminded me too much of Jesse, of coming home to him smelling like a plate of chicken teriyaki. I decided that I needed a clean break from that entire part of my life. It didn’t fit anymore. That was the other Eve. The new, adult Eve was going places, like to and from the copy room. I could still write, I told myself. If I could pretend to know what asset management was, I could certainly pretend that I was still writing.
There were people all around. The streets near Bryant Park were more congested than any other part of the city. I couldn’t get any clearance for myself, within the stream of bodies. And so, of course, some guy in a suit knocked me out. He hit me so hard that I fell onto the street and so did my salad. Most of it burst out of its plastic container, so it looked like it was raining fucking lettuce for a while and I had to gather the rest of it up off the ground with my hands to throw it out. Fuck. It was a thirteen-dollar salad, supposed to last for two meals.
