by Leslie Cohen
As soon as I felt his tongue on me, I touched his head and then pushed him, held him away with one hand. I saw his face. He breathed in and out, heavily. I didn’t expect to start crying. God knows it wasn’t the time to start crying, but I was feeling so much inside my body, so many conflicting emotions, that something had to break. Also, I must have known. I must have realized, somewhere inside of me, that I had royally fucked up.
“What’s wrong?” Jesse said.
“Nothing.” Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
“Are you okay?” He must have seen the tears, even in the dark, even though I fought hard to keep them silent. He stood.
“Yes.” Yes. Yes. Yes. “I can’t,” I said, and then started to move away from him, bent over, retrieved the bra from the floor, zipped the dress.
“Yeah, we’ve already established that.” For the next few minutes, we were silent. He kept looking at me. I felt like throwing up. I willed myself not to throw up.
“I love somebody else,” I said.
“I do too, Eve,” he said, sighing, and then he started to walk toward the door. “But I love her because I love her. Not because I’m desperate to feel that way.”
EVE
* * *
WHY DID THE PIGEON CROSS THE ROAD?
I was praying for the sound of his voice. I had my phone in hand, pacing up and down the red steps in my black shoes, ten steps up, ten steps down, waiting to hear the sound of his voice. I felt like if I left this place, I could no longer be sure of what reality was, of what actually happened. I would lose the chance to take it all back, or to at least alter something. Across the street, there was a school and a fenced-in concrete area with lines drawn, a basketball court. There were three trees. Above me, two stained glass windows. At the bottom of the steps, I decided to turn right and go to the corner and back. I passed the yellow speed bump sign, yellow school-crossing sign, fire escapes, red door, fire escapes, red door, green building, gray bricks, corner of East Houston Street, then quickly turned back around. Green building, red door, fire escapes, red door, fire escapes, crossing sign, speed bump, red steps. I was anchored to the steps by an invisible thread. I kept walking the same way: around the corner but I never left the block; always returned to where I’d started, at the top of the steps. I tried calling Ben again, and listened to the phone ring and ring with no answer. I kept praying for that steady voice of his to interrupt the endless vacant ringing. Pick up pick up pick up.
I stopped moving when a stranger passed me by. He was rolling a suitcase by his side, and for some reason, I pictured him going home to his wife and two children, kissing their sleepy heads good night, reheating his dinner in the kitchen. He stared straight at me in the dark, with curiosity. It must have looked strange from the outside, the scene: a narrow street, so quiet at night, no lights, a girl in a green bridesmaid’s dress, visibly shaken; the clicking of her shoes up and down the steps. When he was out of sight, I went back to my phone. I called again.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said. “Call me back. I need to talk to you.” It wasn’t my usual course of action to leave a voice mail, but it was the closest I could get to him, and it wasn’t very close. I was desperate and starting to tremble in the cold, but I found comfort in the suffering. Inside of me, it was much worse. I had an energy that I couldn’t get rid of or put toward anything. There was no place to turn, nobody who would feel sorry for me, not a chance.
In need of a distraction from my own thoughts, I started to watch a pigeon along the sidewalk, pecking away near a gutter, a stream of water at the edge of the street. We were both moving back and forth down the road, in the same aimless way. I kept my eye on it as I paced, as it inched farther and farther away from the sidewalk and toward the center of the road. I refused to leave those steps. I would wait there until Ben called back. If I left this place, I would be even more alone in the city, disconnected from everything. I needed an anchor more than ever, and with Ben gone, I had only this wedding and my friends inside. Without this place, I was tied to nothing.
I had a passing memory of Ben holding on to me as I slept; he’d always done this, even before it was required, even after the first drunken night on Saint Marks; yet somehow I’d managed to throw it all away. I felt like something permanent had changed, like there was something spoiled inside of me, capable of ruining whatever lay in its path.
I clicked my phone to check it again, and in that second, a truck whizzed by and crushed the pigeon to death. All at once I heard the snap of countless small bones. I gasped. I moved forward, slowly, peeking at its flattened body, the black, gray, and white feathers against the street. I recoiled backward. I kept thinking about how all it took was one wrong move, just one false step, and it could all be over. You could gain or lose everything. Wasn’t that why Ben felt so guilty about his father? Even he knew how easy it was to alter the course of events.
Maya came outside and I looked at her, not masking my alarm.
“I just saw a pigeon die,” I said. “It died right in front of me. A truck ran over it, and it was like, whoosh. Death.”
She seemed confused but hugged me. She didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t tell her about Jesse’s brother, or Jesse’s roaming hands in the dark, the kiss, what I’d done to Ben. I just held on tight and she did the same. After a few minutes, she loosened her hold on me.
“So was this like . . . a pigeon pigeon?”
I smiled at her. She put her hand on my shoulder and went back inside and brought me my coat and a pile of tissues.
“Apparently, we’ve reached the Kleenex portion of the evening.”
I put on the coat, closed it with both hands, and held it that way, too concerned with staring at my phone to deal with zipping it up properly.
“How’s it going in there? Do you think Kate’s noticed that I’ve been gone?” I asked her.
“No way.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded emphatically. “Kate doesn’t even notice who she married,” she said. “Why don’t you go home?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t.”
“I have to find Erol,” Maya said, and turned to go back inside. I nodded, kept pacing. I didn’t know how much time had gone by, but eventually, I heard the sound of a few wedding guests, too drunk and done for the night, saying their good-byes. Is it over? The first group of departures flung themselves into taxis, the yellow lights on and waiting. After the cab doors closed, somehow, miraculously, my phone rang.
Once I heard his voice, everything else went black. The city was gone. I heard no car horns or bits of conversation from the people walking by or music from inside. I heard nothing but the sound of his words.
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
“How was the wedding?”
“Fine.”
“See.”
“Oh, Ben, I just don’t understand. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me something like that. Something so important like . . .” My voice cracked and tears came spilling under my eyelids. “Something so important like that.”
“This again? I’m sorry. I should have. Right away. You’re right.”
“You can’t just go silent on me. You’re so silent sometimes. And there’s nothing that scares me more than unexplained silence.”
“I know.”
“And it’s all fucked up now. It’s all so fucked up.” I was sobbing into the phone, uncontrollably.
“Why?” he said. I’d never heard Ben sound so alarmed. It broke my heart even more.
“I . . . I did something bad.”
“Okay. . . .”
“I did something really bad.”
“What is it?”
“I saw Jesse at the wedding.”
“Okay.”
“We kissed.”
“What?”
“I know. It was the stupidest thing.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s something wr
ong with me.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t believe I did this, because I love you. I love you so much, Ben. But you really threw me . . . when you told me that. I was just so surprised. I never ever thought you would hide something from me. You were supposed to be the one who fixed . . . who fixed . . . this hole inside of me. You weren’t supposed to create one.”
“Okay.”
“But even so, it was such a mistake. Do you believe me? It was a big mistake.”
“Okay.”
“Say something other than okay, please.”
“What do you want me to say? Look. I say everything I need to say. There’s nothing bubbling under the surface. What you see is what you get. What is the point of all your words? They don’t get us anywhere. For example, I was a lot better off before we had this conversation.”
“I don’t know, but please say more than just one word. I just want to talk to you. I feel like sometimes you aren’t very expressive, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on in your head when I can’t see you. So, if you could just say what you’re feeling. . . .”
“EVE. Take a wild guess. Take a wild conjecture as to how I might feel. What’s going on in my head? How do I feel? I feel exactly how you’d imagine I would feel.”
And then the line went dead.
BEN
* * *
UNDERGROUND, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN WEST 4TH AND 207TH
New York City is a phenomenal place to be pissed off. You fly into JFK from wherever the hell you were, doesn’t matter now, because once you get to New York, as it turns out, your whole life has changed shape. Once the plane descends lower and lower toward that dizzying display of yellow and white lights, twinkling amid the blackness, the Empire State Building in the foreground, the bridges linking all the landmasses that look as if they might otherwise float away from one another, you’re back to reality. Except this time, what you’re back to is not the reality that you left behind. Because reality would have been sitting on the A train, calm but also pretty stirred up inside, in a good way, because you were going to see her soon, and that was always a little bit exciting. Reality would have been passing by Fulton and Chambers and Canal and getting off at the West Fourth Street stop, and then walking a few blocks to her place, or what had certainly become our place.
But instead of getting off at West Fourth, you watch everyone shuffle past you, West Fourth Street, this is the West Fourth Street stop, and you sit. You sit, and you wait, and you move your suitcase closer so that nobody kicks it square into your shins on their way out. The doors close. Somewhere below Times Square, you make the decision to keep riding. Because you are having trouble moving the way you used to, and you feel like maybe being a lump of useless mass on a subway seat suits you pretty well at the moment. Also you don’t know where to go. You don’t want to be alone, but you don’t want to talk to anyone either. The subway is great for this purpose. That, and if you want to see a bunch of people whose lives are worse than yours. People go through some shit. Just sit on the subway for a while and you’ll practically see them going through it.
The A train is known for the long express ride from 59th to 125th, with no stops in between, so maybe that’s perfect, for now. For an express train, it is slow in downtown and midtown, relative to other express trains like the 2/3 or 4/5, but what’s your rush? For riding it all the way uptown with no destination in mind, it is the way to go. After 125th, there is 145th, and then 168th, which is Columbia Medical Center. You smile to yourself about the idea of getting off there, because isn’t there some sort of psych ward, the New York Psychiatric Institute or something like that? And isn’t that where it makes sense that you’d end up, after all this? Yup. At a mental institution.
No. No. Come on. Seriously? Look at all the people getting on and off the train. Do they look happy? Do they look like they are having the greatest fucking time of their lives? No. They look somewhere on the scale of fine to miserable, for the most part. And I’m sure they have their reasons. Reasons better than mine.
I kept thinking, Why? Why bring someone else into a good situation? I guess it wasn’t good for her. What other conclusion could there be? But how was it possible that I’d misjudged it so much? I knew nothing. I didn’t understand her. That was the only answer. And what was it really to be with someone who you didn’t understand? She and I . . . we weren’t like apples and oranges. Because those belong in the same category, the same universe. Look at a fruit basket, for Christ’s sake. Fruits mingling. Eve and I . . . we were like apples and . . . a book? A backpack? A metal pole? I don’t know. These were just things that were surrounding me. She’d be better at this. She’d smile and say, Oh, have you not heard the tale of the apple and the metal pole? That’s right! You haven’t. Because they don’t hang out together! And then it would just absolutely kill her with joy that I’d thought to make this analogy in the first place.
A soaring pain will run through you when you think of something she’d say or that you’d like to tell her but it feels like the sound of the wheels cutting through the tracks beneath you. That screeching sound is just about right as you arrive at . . . where the hell are you? 175th Street? End of the line is 207th. They’ll repeat it a few times, so that you have no hope of going farther, no hope that you don’t have to make some sort of decision. You can’t just do this forever, buddy, says the MTA and everything else about this city that is unforgiving.
Next stop is 207th Street. 207th Street is the last stop.
part four
* * *
THREE MONTHS LATER
EVE
* * *
THIS IS PARK AVENUE
As soon as I heard the water stop trickling through the pipes in the wall, that gentle swooshing noise that came and went in the mornings, I knew that I had to make my move, and fast. I had about ten minutes to get some coffee, eat breakfast or at least assemble it, and then hustle back into the guest room. I forced myself awake, up out of bed, and put on thick socks so that I could cross the living room without the creaking of the wood floor.
The kitchen was dark. I flicked on the lights and went for the coffee first, then got a bowl from the cabinet, careful not to clank the bowls against one another. I grabbed the cereal and opened the box, gently, gently. Over the past few months, I had learned to open and close a cereal box like I was defusing a bomb. I reached into the fridge for milk, and then froze. Were those footsteps? I listened. I couldn’t hear anything. I waited for another sound. I heard shuffling. Shit! I started to panic. How could he have gotten out of the shower and put clothes on so quickly? He always takes ten minutes! Always!
The footsteps got louder—low, heavy steps. Shit! Shit! Shit! I was screwed. There was no place to run. The best I could do was stand with my back to him, take an extra few seconds to plan my next move. This morning routine was becoming a ritual, but it seemed reasonable. The whole absurd dance wasn’t so absurd, under the circumstances. I was trying to get along better with Arthur, but before 9:00 a.m., it was tough.
“Morning!” I heard Arthur’s voice from behind me—always loud, always sociable. I poured milk over the cereal and then placed the carton back inside the fridge.
“Morning!” I uttered, as boisterously as I could, which wasn’t very boisterous. Arthur’s disposition was easier for him. It was as dependable as his wardrobe—a series of short-sleeved collared shirts in turquoise and orange with two pockets in the front and tucked into khaki pants. I watched him take a mug from the cabinet—he was wearing his orange number that day—and head to the coffeepot.
“How’s the writing going?” he asked. Arthur always had questions, and asking them was not something he reserved for when I was wide-awake. Once he asked me about the state of the music industry before seven o’clock in the morning and I almost burst into tears. I decided this time to answer quickly and then take my cereal into my room, as if that were where I typically ate it. The good thing about Arthur was that he wouldn’t take it personally. He wa
s not the type who assumed that it was his company that drove people away. His nature was too sunny for that line of reasoning.
“It’s going all right,” I said, attempting to follow that with something resembling a laugh but which came out much more like a cross between a hiccup and a guffaw.
Arthur then laughed a much more legitimate laugh, and sat down with a bowl and his box of chocolate Cheerios. He filled the bowl to the brim with the dark brown loops. No judgment. Really, no judgment. But I wished that he would just tell me that he knew that it was a weird breakfast, that it was almost like having dessert, and not quite normal for a sixty-five-year-old. With Arthur, I was genuinely concerned that he didn’t know, that he thought the word CHEERIOS on the box implied health and whole-grain goodness. I was generally indifferent to the breakfast choices of others, but this, for some reason, really got to me. Oh, the agony—of watching him shovel the Cheerios into his mouth every morning with those large hands and the milk running down his chin. I silently wished that my mother were there to witness it. She would have made it less awkward, this cereal standoff.
His cell phone rang, and I heard his ringtone, the first few notes of ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ which were all too familiar now. I took the opportunity to skip away, back to the guest room, pretending that I didn’t want to disturb him. So polite and considerate! It was the first of Arthur’s client calls. His phone rang constantly, allowing him to deploy with regularity his unique brand of chitchat. I wondered if there wasn’t some electronic, or more up-to-date way for these people to find out about their stocks. But I had the feeling that all his clients were over seventy, and that they were just like Arthur, always wanting an excuse to chat. I imagined that his was the only call these people received all day, though I had no evidence.
