This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  I shrugged. “I thought I’d get a story out of it.”

  She looked confused. “Why?”

  “I thought I’d find out more about C-squat, that abandoned building on Avenue C that squatters live in.”

  She stared at me blankly.

  “Ben told me about it. I had no idea it even existed, but then I started reading. Basically, in the nineties, all these squatters got evicted from this building on Avenue C but some managed to stay. There are apartments, and in the basement they put on punk shows. And, like, good shows sometimes. Some of the members of this really influential turn-of-the-century punk band still live there. Oh! I met this girl at the party who is in mortuary school.” I raised my eyebrows. “She actually climbed to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. She also broke into a building in Times Square and showed me a picture of her looking down on this big crowd from up above. She told me an insane story about her boyfriend and how she accused him of killing her dog and they had to get an autopsy because she didn’t believe that he didn’t kill the dog. . . . Who has a situation like that? Anyway, the whole C-squat thing fascinated me, because so many musicians lived there and some still do. There’s also a lot of drug use and people stealing from one another but I just wanted to find out more about this weird housing situation.”

  “Why? So that you could go there and look for dates?”

  “No!” I yelled, and then glared at her. “Because I thought it might make for a good story for Voice.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you,” she spat. “Is that where Ben lives?”

  I tilted my head to the side. “Ben is a structural engineer who lives in Hoboken.”

  “So why don’t you like him?” she said. “Is he actually nice?”

  “Yeah . . .” I thought about it for a second. “He is pretty nice. And what’s sort of cool about him is that you think he’s this normal engineer guy but then he knows everything about all these random things. But I can tell that he doesn’t have any real issues. And that’s kind of what I don’t like about him, you know?”

  She tried to absorb this. “You are fucking psycho,” she said, looking at me with not the slightest smile and tugging at the frayed edges of her sweater.

  “I know,” I told her. “I sound crazy.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You don’t sound crazy, you actually are crazy.”

  Since I was the older sibling and a very mature adult, I would refrain from reminding her that she too had her own issues. Emma was famous for having nine hundred male friends, and zero boyfriends. When we were growing up, they would come over to our house, act like they virtually worshipped the ground she walked on, and she would carry on framing photographs they had taken for her and setting up the television with some show to watch together. Many of them even confided in me, looking to me for some insight. I merely sympathized and explained that Emma was different. I think the whole idea of a relationship terrified her. It was too illogical.

  But I wouldn’t say any of this to Emma. We weren’t sisters who were best friends. We were sisters who were sisters. We had the same natural tendencies. Our voices were impossible to distinguish. Certain small gestures were identical. But in other ways, we were complete opposites. The way that we reacted to what happened with our parents was different. We both felt the losses, but we managed them separately. I tried to shield myself from future pain by studying everyone around me. Emma watched horror movies before she went to sleep at night. When she got older, she went out. A lot. One morning when she was seventeen, I found her passed out in the kitchen of Arthur’s apartment. She claimed that she had inhaled too many helium balloons at a party, which seemed totally plausible to Arthur but not to me. I found out later that she’d slept with someone’s boyfriend and got herself banned from a graduation party.

  Then there was one time that she got high with her friends in our shared bathroom in Arthur’s apartment and left a candle burning overnight and caused a small fire. Even months later, the incident didn’t leave her so easily. She’d feel anxious over something and then say: “I think it’s also the fire.” She asked questions about it. How fast can fire spread? Do you think I could have burned down the whole apartment? Is it because this apartment is old? What happens to a fire in a new apartment? Is it true that doorknobs get hot the fastest? She passed her hand over the candles at restaurants and tried to put them out with her fingertips. She had nightmares about explosions and the apartment burning down. Arthur took her to see a psychiatrist, who told her that it wasn’t about the fire but what she associated with the fire. The doctor said that the shock of the fire was causing Emma to reexperience the trauma of our father leaving. She explained that shock could remain in people’s systems for a long time, and it could manifest itself in a variety of ways.

  When our mother died, I thought it would all go to hell, but Emma went away to school in North Carolina and actually came back more grounded. It was as if she’d gone through a tunnel and come out the other side. She decided that she wanted to be a CEO. “Of what kind of company?” I asked. Apparently, it didn’t matter. “I don’t care. I just want to be the boss,” she said. She came up with ideas. I was a bad judge of them. I couldn’t imagine anyone taking her seriously. In my mind, she was frozen at age twelve. Who would listen to her? Even sitting in my room now, when she said, “I have to jump on a conference call quickly,” my first thought was: That’s hysterical.

  She went back to the computer but remained astonished, even as her eyes focused on the screen. She got up.

  “Eve.” She sighed. “You want to be disturbed, be disturbed. I can’t stop you.”

  “I’m not being disturbed. I like Ben. He’s nice, but he’s also kind of boring to me for some reason.”

  “Because he’s not addicted to heroin?”

  “No . . . we just aren’t . . . the same person.”

  “So?”

  “So . . . he isn’t my type.”

  “Because he’s not addicted to heroin.”

  “Stop.”

  “Go to C-squat. Shoot heroin. Live there among your people.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. Her anger arrived without notice. “We had some bad things happen to us. And I’m sure some psychologist somewhere could have a field day with the connection between our dad leaving and our future relationships with men, or the loss of our mother and how that somehow echoed the loss of our father years earlier. But you’re choosing to hang on to this.”

  “I don’t think that—”

  “It was like that time when we were younger and we went to the grocery store and you picked out a loaf of bread and then you decided later that you didn’t actually want the loaf of bread so you put it back with the olives, and you felt so bad that it wasn’t with the other breads that you made me go back to the store with you ‘to put it back with its bread friends,’ so that it would have a greater chance of being purchased. And then, even after we put it back, that night, you were all ‘What do you think happened with the bread? Do you think someone bought it? Do you think some nice couple took it home with them?’ You named it and gave it a whole personality and kept talking about it like we abandoned it. And it was kind of funny, of course. But it was also kind of like you projected all your own psychological issues onto this loaf of bread, instead of realizing, like a normal person, that bread doesn’t have feelings. It was like you wanted to have this big abandonment issue. Well, fine. It’s there for you if you need it, that’s for sure. And nobody is going to take it away from you. Except for you.”

  I was watching her like she was sharpening a knife in front of me. She kept going. She controlled the conversation with authority, an “I’m an adult now” voice that only came out on certain occasions, when our mother used to tell her what size sweater to buy or what to eat for breakfast.

  “You feel an obligation to be this way,” she went on. “And honestly, I understand why you were like this. But now?
Still? I think you’re just scared of what would happen if you didn’t have this to fall back on. It’s been in your system for so long and you’ve become awfully good at accommodating it. It’s like, a long time ago, you decided you’d never be happy.”

  “Listen,” I interrupted her, not sure how she’d gotten me so riled up. “I’m not going to sit here and have you psychoanalyze me. Everyone has issues. You have yours.”

  Why couldn’t Emma just tell me that she felt the same way? That would actually help. I would think, See? We are all just humans trying to get by! Life! We are all just a little bit overwhelmed. I wanted to explain about Ben, in a way that would make sense to her. I almost told her about his lame attempt at fate or “meant to be” as a reason why I could never date him. She would have found this to be utterly preposterous. I wanted to scream: I might disappoint him. Yes, I could envision a time when I would disappoint him. It was like an invisible wall that I couldn’t break through. Or wouldn’t break through. I didn’t know which anymore. That was the most frightening part, that Emma was right. I was the one who was keeping this problem around.

  When she finished changing her clothes into “going out” attire, a black sweater with holes and red lipstick, she stepped back from the mirror and surveyed me.

  “It doesn’t necessarily have to be like that,” she said. “If you don’t like this guy, then fine. But don’t be one of those damaged people, because that’s what happened to us, but it isn’t who you are. Do you have any candy?”

  For a split second, her face looked just like the little girl she used to be, who wouldn’t leave me alone, who doted on me and followed me around until I let her in on my games. It was a time before—before she had her own friends, before red lipstick and thrift-store jeans and road trips to San Francisco with some guy with angular features who I worried would kick her out of the car by Vegas.

  “You always wanted to understand everything,” she said, banging around in my kitchen. She came back with a fistful of jelly beans. “Like, take Dad for example. You wanted to understand what he did, but I always felt like he was like a turtle.” She crossed my bedroom and shoved all her clothes into a bag.

  “What?”

  “He was an unknowable mystery. Who knows why a turtle does what it does? I have no idea. Would you even try to understand? Do you ever watch a turtle roaming around and think, Hmmm, I wonder why it went that way? I wonder why it ate that plant? I wonder why it likes that rock?”

  “No,” I said, with a smile.

  “Exactly. You have to think of Dad as a turtle. And we as a civilization just don’t understand the psychological motivations of turtles that well.”

  “You can’t yell at me for personifying bread and then compare Dad to a turtle.”

  “We are sisters after all!” she replied, and then came over to me. I opened my hand instinctually. She dropped a few jelly beans into my open palm, the flavors that she didn’t like but that I did.

  When she was ready to leave, I walked her down the stairs and out the door. As I watched her moving along Fifth Street and farther away, I felt an unexpected pang. She must have been feeling it too, because after she’d walked about halfway down the block, she turned to look back at me and I thought, We are sisters after all. This is what it’s like to have a sister. You’re not having a great time together. You sit across from each other and you talk about the issues of the day—whether some guy she’s texting with is really busy at work, how busy can a person be? Or is he blowing her off? You give her advice that she half takes. You say variations of what your mother used to tell you both. You say, Focus on work; make a date with someone else; stop worrying about things you can’t control; a watched pot never boils! It is almost always the case that one of you is single and the other is not. The one who is not gives the advice, careful not to seem too smug or condescending. The one who is single tries not to seem hostile, to just take the advice because, really, she can’t afford to create any enemies right now and she knows that you have the best intentions but she also can’t be bothered to mask her annoyance. If you were her friend and not her sister, she would pep up a little bit more, she would be more upbeat, more receptive, and more outwardly grateful. She would say things like “Thanks!” and “That’s really helpful!” But she’s your sister, so she sits there with a frown on her face, as if your advice is some kind of imposition. But she’s not not listening. She’s not not paying attention. So you can feel free to keep speaking, if that suits you, if that thrills you. And then you both sit there in semicomfortable silence, secretly wishing you were with a friend and wondering why it’s awkward and then consoling yourself with the fact that at least you’re not alone. You think: Why does she have to be in such a bad mood? Couldn’t she put on the slightest bit of an act for me? I’m a person too. Doesn’t she realize that? You glance at the clock and think it’ll be a relief to part ways, to have only one of you in the room to deal with. Sometimes it’s a little bit too much, having two people together with such similarities. So you part ways. And at first it is a relief. But then you realize it’s a little bit harder than you thought it would be. You hadn’t anticipated that the separation would make you feel anything. But it’s only apparent during the process of separating. It only hurts when she walks away. You smile widely, you wave at each other in an overly enthusiastic way that makes you both laugh, because, yeah right, like this is such a big deal? You give each other strange exaggerated looks of being frightened for no reason, because you’re not actually frightened. But you both know. It’s a “good luck out there!” kind of look. It’s not about anything specific. It’s about life. It’s an acknowledgment that you’re moving through it separately and hoping the best for each other. She keeps walking, and eventually you can’t see her anymore. It’s official. You’re apart. But she’s not abandoning you. She’s back to her life and you’re back to yours. And that’s fine. You still think, you still feel, on some visceral level, like you could almost cry, but then it passes. A few minutes pass and it’s okay. It’s really okay.

  After she left, I went back inside and called Ben. “All right,” I said, when he picked up. “Tell me about the sandwich.”

  BEN

  * * *

  218 EAST FIFTH STREET, BETWEEN SECOND AVENUE AND BOWERY, APARTMENT 2W, EAST VILLAGE

  A woman grabbed hold of my arm.

  “I know you,” she said. “I know you, exactly!” She took my hand.

  I was on Christopher Street. I had just left a store that sold tea and coffee, a place that had been around since the 1920s, so read the sign. You could smell the store from the sidewalk, the sweet and bitter aroma of spices. Inside, the shop was crammed with burlap sacks of coffee beans labeled TURKISH, CHINA, BRAZIL, and bins of tea leaves marked ORANGE and JASMINE. Behind the counter there were jars of spices, coffee grinders, and brass scales.

  I was hanging around the Village for research. The plans for the Freedom Tower had come to a halt, yet again, because of the advisory committee, which was embroiled in a heated debate over whether to include retail space in the plans. This time it was the Take Back the Memorial advocates causing problems, this one woman whose brother was the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She was against any retail development in the area, wanted to rid the memorial of those tenants and to expand the plans for a memorial museum. She said that to even think about retail establishments was to turn yet another part of Manhattan into a shopping mall. Another board member, whose husband worked in the South Tower, said that it was outrageous to plan for shops without first sitting down with the families, for the Port Authority to sign leases with any retail entity without first having asked for public input. We kept going over the parts of Manhattan that had retail establishments but weren’t ruined by them. We kept referencing the East Village. And so that was where I was spending my Saturday, on Christopher Street, trying to figure out what was different about these shops versus the ones in any other neighborhood. It wasn’t like the establis
hments in the East Village weren’t selling things. They were. They were just old, and some of them were one-of-a-kind, but not all.

  I also chose the East Village to walk around because it had the advantage of being Eve’s neighborhood. She had become important to me. After I left the coffee place, I went to a bakery on Commerce Street and picked up a few things for her. I didn’t know for sure whether I would see her at the end of the day. I didn’t even know if she was home or busy or what, but I was suddenly counting on it.

  Over on Tenth Street, between First and Avenue A, I had come across a shop covered in plants. The sign read, EXOTIC PLANTS • GEMS & CRYSTALS • BONSAI • ORCHIDS • FLOWERS FOR ALL OCCASIONS. There were flowers out in front, positioned in rows along the sidewalk, cactuses, and potted herbs of all kinds. Hanging plants and dream catchers covered the store windows. The smell coming from inside this place . . . It was incense and burning wood, but to the extreme. I couldn’t imagine how anyone stayed inside there for longer than five minutes without going crazy.

  Which might explain the woman who currently had my arm in a death vise.

  I paused. “I don’t think so,” I said slowly.

  “Yes, I know you!” she insisted. “You have been so busy with friends, relationships, your job, your family, that you haven’t had time for magic!” Her blue-polished nails dug into my skin. “Am I right?”

  “You got me!” I said, trying to move away from her.

  She nodded knowingly. “You need a witch in your life, don’t you?”

  “Umm.” I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” I tried to walk away. If by witch she meant a woman with mysterious powers over me, then yeah, I already had one of those.

  “No. No. I can tell. You need one. Come inside for a few minutes, won’t you?” I squinted as I looked in. It was white inside. A cloud of smoke occupied the whole store.

  “You’re busy? What are you doing? Where are you going?” she asked.