This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

by Leslie Cohen

  “So, are you bored yet of looking at pictures of the baby?” I heard Arthur say on the phone, a faint voice now, before I turned the knob on the guest-room door. A few seconds later, he said, “I tell ya! It’s hard work to be such a loving grandparent!” And then his signature laugh.

  He never answered the phone with a simple hello. And he never said good-bye either. Instead, he got off the phone with, “All right, well, enjoy the crossword puzzle! Is it easy or hard today?” or “Call your mother!”

  He was just being a nice guy. Three months of living with him and I was finally starting to master that certain live-and-let-live serenity. His apartment was Grand Central Terminal, but I secretly relished the distractions that it provided—the calls with his clients; his housekeeper, Camilla, a quick-tempered Colombian woman who tended to get into fights with everyone she encountered. She had a particularly contentious relationship with one of the doormen, Santiago, because she felt that he didn’t arrive to take her down in the elevator fast enough, when she called for it (I assumed they were also in love and carrying on a secret affair, but again, there was no actual evidence of this). One time, their yelling got so bad that Arthur had to get off the phone with a client. I heard him say, “I have to go. My housekeeper and my doorman are fighting. A house divided . . .” And then the laugh. I enjoyed this. I decided that it was a very Park Avenue problem to have.

  With my hands full of breakfast, I closed the door with my hip and went to the window, where I had a bird’s-eye view of Park Avenue, women walking up and down the street in heels and men in suits, walking dogs or yanking children by the arm. A swarm of joyless workers crossed the street, with hard hats in their hands. Double-parked outside the building, there was a black car, its driver reading the newspaper and leaning against it. I looked out at the figures below, the glances at the sky, the briefcases and cups of coffee moving up and down the street. It was one of the many charms of being in that apartment, on the seventh floor, the view of Park Avenue and with it, a sense of luxury. Being this high up meant I was free from the prying eyes that I was used to in New York. To be seven floors above the traffic, to have nobody see me but the birds in the sky, it was a pleasure that explained so much. It was wonderful to be rich, but especially in this town.

  I got back into bed, sat with my knees to my chest, and ate my hard-earned cereal. Across from me, there was a flat-screen TV. The other walls in the room had a few new, framed pictures—a print of Fred Flintstone, an abstract painting of Michael Jackson, a photo of a roll of Life Savers—all meant to convey the art-appreciating and yet fun-loving nature of Arthur. There was a photo of Arthur and my mother in a heart-shaped frame next to the bed. They were dressed up, at a wedding. Arthur was wearing a three-piece suit, with a gold chain dangling from his pocket. Oh, the pocket watch. My mom had begged him not to wear it that night, told him how old-fashioned it was. But he didn’t listen. He said it reminded him of James Dean. She said it reminded her of the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Those were the kinds of fights they used to have. I was always grateful that there was nothing larger at stake.

  I sank down into the four-poster bed, stared at the CD player above the dresser, which had a catalog lying on it, open to a page of silk handkerchiefs. There was a stack of CDs—Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits, The Eagles’ Complete Greatest Hits, The Beatles’ 1—Arthur didn’t waste time with the lesser titles. When I asked him about it, he said: “The hits are hits for a reason!”

  There was a sharp knock on the door. “Eve?” I heard his voice. When he came in, he looked around the room, at the untidy ball of clothes on the floor in the corner, books at the foot of the unmade bed.

  “You’re eating cereal . . . here?” He half smiled.

  “Yup! Breakfast in bed!” I answered. I had that one locked and loaded, for whenever he caught me.

  “Why not in the kitchen?”

  “You were on a call. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  He nodded, seemed pacified.

  “Eve,” he said, his face screwed up like he was about to tell me something that was difficult for him to say.

  “Yes?”

  He lowered his voice and closed the door behind him. “Don’t you think it’s time to find your own apartment?”

  “But I like it here!” I replied.

  It could have been a depressing state, living at Arthur’s place, but lately, I’d been trying to bond with him. We went to the movies together sometimes. Plus I had a job that I loved. Unfortunately, the job didn’t pay enough to allow me to keep my apartment once the rent went up. And so, until I found a new place, I didn’t see what was so wrong with seeking refuge with the fourth member of the Bee Gees.

  “I’m trying to find a place,” I ventured instead. I started looking down at my phone, scrolling through e-mails, but I could feel his eyes on me. The truth was, I was milking this and Arthur knew it. It was far from my childhood bed, but it was someplace to rest comfortably. The apartment was nice and spacious. There was a constant stream of distractions. I had company at night when I was feeling lonesome and missing Ben. My salary didn’t get a huge chunk taken out of it for rent each month. The only downside was that every now and then, I had to shake off the underlying feeling that I was a pathetic loser.

  “Are you really looking? What have you seen lately?” he asked.

  I looked up at him. His hair was still wet from the shower.

  “Everything is too expensive. You said that you wanted me to live here for a little while!”

  “It’s been . . . a while now.”

  “Well, you didn’t specify a time limit. I’ve been very productive!”

  “It’s not about that, Eve. I know that you have a great job. And don’t get me wrong, I like having you around, but it’s time. Nobody likes to be alone. After my first marriage ended, I slept with the lights on in the whole apartment every night for a month. But you have to force yourself to be a little bit brave. You’re just scared, that’s all.”

  “Of course I’m scared. I ruined the only good relationship I’ve ever had. But the good news is, I do my best work when I’m scared shitless!”

  A part of me was still recovering from the night of Kate’s wedding. Ben had moved out of our East Village apartment. My first night there alone, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. in a massive state of panic. Sitting up in bed, I tried to focus on breathing. I counted to ten with every inhale and exhale and concentrated on each number as if my life depended on it. To get my brain to slow down and to break the endless loop of terrible thoughts, I listened to a few songs on my computer, the ones that always soothed me right before going to sleep. But that night, it wasn’t doing the trick. It simply wasn’t enough. So I took a pile of blank paper into bed with me and wrote an article for Interview.

  When I was done, it was five o’clock in the morning, and I still couldn’t sleep. So I packed up some of my belongings and left. I bolted out of the apartment with my heart beating rapidly and my shoes barely on. I was in such a rush, with no idea why, no idea where I was going. It was raining very hard, but I couldn’t stay where I was. I was too afraid of how I felt inside, of what might happen if I remained alone there. So I stood outside, getting soaked as I hailed a cab. In my head, I heard my mother judging me. She hated cabs and often condemned people who took them as a form of transportation. “How much time do you lose sitting in traffic?” she would say. I was soaking wet by the time a cab pulled over, but I didn’t care. The worst danger was that my problems might get washed away. I threw out Arthur’s address to the cabdriver, automatically. I didn’t want to call Kate or Maya or my sister. They would all indulge me too much in examining the details of the situation. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted sleep.

  The rain hammered the top of the cab as it made its way uptown, so much so that I couldn’t see where it was going. Water sputtered inside. I closed the window, which had been left slightly open, and saw my reflection, my face dizzy with emotion, my eyes glassy and mad-looking. I must have look
ed strange to Arthur, at the door of his Park Avenue apartment, soaked through and shaking with cold but also fear. I felt an overpowering need for company. But he wanted to know first if I was in some kind of trouble, and then once he figured out what had happened, he considered it to be nothing that we couldn’t sort out in the morning. He brought me into my old room, which had been converted back to a guest room, and opened the drawers full of clean and dry towels, while the rain came down outside. He produced a toothbrush. He offered me hot water for tea and then retrieved it. I was surprised to hear the voice of a woman in the hallway, even though I knew that Arthur had started dating again. We both pretended not to hear it.

  I slept for only a few hours that night, and the nights after were no better. I awoke each morning with no idea where I was and what had happened to lead up to this place. Then, before my eyes were open, before I was fully awake, I had the sad job of explaining to myself what had occurred. It was a little recap that I did: “On last week’s episode of . . .” Ben’s gone and it was mostly your fault. Funny how you wanted to be broken and now you are.

  I had a hard time going back to my East Village apartment. Somehow, it was the apartment itself that became impossible for me to handle. I couldn’t settle myself down there anymore. Whenever I went back, I felt a sense of insecurity boiling up inside of me. I returned to the same place, but I was frightened now, of every bit of it, frightened that it would prompt that panicky reaction all over again. All the good moments that came before had been replaced by this one monumentally bad feeling. I could feel it when I walked around the space, opened the door, looked at the bed, the kitchen. I told myself that it wasn’t the place that caused the panic, but it didn’t matter. They had become too closely linked in my mind. I had to give it up. The only good that came from that night was that I sent my insanity-induced article to my editor at Interview and he loved it. Apparently, it was my best yet.

  “Eve,” Arthur said now, smiling at me.

  “What? You’re kicking me out?” He was the one who’d wanted me to stay there after I opted out of renewing the lease on my apartment. He thought it’d be best for me not to be alone.

  “Sort of.” He put his hands on his waist. “Consider this your two weeks’ notice.” His eyes lit up, like he was offering me the chance to play a fun new game.

  “Well, I’ve been kicked out of finer places.” I got out of bed, shoving the sheets out of my way dramatically.

  “Oh, have you?” He laughed.

  “Of course not,” I said, in a huff. “This is Park Avenue.”

  Would you look at that, I thought to myself, as I got dressed for work. Arthur and I were finally developing a rapport.

  * * *

  The dark-wood-paneled elevator opened into the lobby and four doormen came to attention. The two who were sitting down on a leather bench stood up immediately. All four always greeted me, but I felt like they were forcing it, like they knew that I didn’t really live there and there was no reason to be friendly to me, some temporary visitor. I nodded and said good morning back. My mother had always talked to them about the weather, especially with Dennis, who had an Irish accent. “They say rain, but I don’t know, Dennis—what do you think?” she’d say. Or he’d tell her, “They say sixty-five degrees by Sunday,” and she’d say, “Oh my. I’m going to hold you to it!” As if conversation with doormen about the weather was something she’d done all her life.

  As I walked out onto the street, I noticed that the traffic was already building, going down Park. I preferred the atmosphere downtown, the vaguely bohemian nature of the Village. The Upper East Side was more uniform. Whatever didn’t belong stood out. It was moms in exercise clothing with big leather bags, talking about their renovations. “There is nothing more difficult than doorknobs.”

  “I redid my bathrooms and people said, You’re crazy.”

  Young girls were on their way to school and dressed in matching skirts. They carried backpacks with tiny stuffed animals hanging off them, bobbing up and down as they walked.

  “I’ll text you and it’s possible we’ll be able to squeeze in a playdate!”

  Everyone was finely dressed, no matter age nor gender nor ethnicity. Even old men who walked their dogs in the morning in sweatpants appeared semihomeless, but upon closer inspection, like their sweatpants might actually be really expensive. I watched the couples on the street—the women wearing long coats with fur accents, the men in suits and shiny loafers and pocket squares, often speaking French or Italian to one another. I didn’t feel like I had something to offer them or them to me, but I was enjoying the look of their nice shops, the apartment buildings with matching awnings, the trimmed rows of bushes and potted flowers. My work was downtown and it wasn’t high-powered and it wasn’t something that people on the Upper East Side would find impressive, so once I got on the subway, the Upper East Side and I parted ways.

  But first, I went to Madison Avenue for a pit stop. I sidestepped the puddles created by doormen watering the streets, and weaved through messengers carrying shiny shopping bags. I went to the same overpriced restaurant for overpriced coffee every morning, but I’d be lying if I said that the coffee wasn’t delicious and that the pink cup it came in didn’t make me feel like I was on a luxurious, Parisian vacation. Standing outside the place, I saw a guy who looked a lot like Ben’s friend Glick. He was standing with his back to the wall. As I got closer, I realized that it was Glick, and my heart started racing, just at the thought that Ben might be nearby, that Glick might have seen or spoken to Ben recently. Glick was wearing a pale gray buttoned-down shirt that was buttoned up one notch too few, a triangle of his chest hair showing.

  “Hey!” I said, sounding excited, perhaps overly so.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, with a more appropriately muted level of enthusiasm.

  “What are you doing at this fancy-pants place on a Friday morning?” I said, looking at his pink coffee cup, which suited him even less than mine suited me.

  “Just met with a client,” he said, his voice groggy, ducking down to take a sip from his cup.

  “A client?” I said, impressed.

  “Yes,” he said. “Is that so hard to believe?” He gave me an amused look.

  “Yes, yes it is.” He stuck out his leg, presumably to kick me in the shins, but he was too far away and didn’t make contact. “What are you up to these days?” I asked.

  “I’m selling real estate.”

  “What a coincidence!” I clasped my hands together. “I’m looking for real estate! To rent . . . an apartment.” I cringed, for no apparent reason other than I was suddenly reminded of why I was looking for an apartment and that Ben’s friend might find it a bit distasteful to help out Ben’s cheating ex-girlfriend.

  “What can you pay?”

  Or not.

  “In terms of money?”

  “No, in terms of experiences,” he said bitterly.

  I looked around and whispered, “I figure I can pay about twelve hundred dollars a month.”

  He blinked hard and shook his head. “And I figure you’ve gone mentally ill.”

  “I won’t find anything?”

  “Were you figuring on New York?”

  I laughed and rolled my eyes. “No. Any city will do!”

  He opened his mouth and then closed it. “You know what, I have a place on Sixty-Ninth and Third that’s for rent. You might like it.”

  “Third as in Third Avenue? In Manhattan? I’m sure that’s out of my league.”

  “Wait and see the apartment first. It has some . . . liabilities. But what doesn’t in this town? So when you flush the toilet, water comes out of the ceiling? Is that really so important to you?”

  I laughed. “Um . . .”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at the ground. “So what’s the rent?”

  “I can show it to you now, actually.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Now? I have to get to work.”

  “What time do
you have to be there?”

  “Ten.”

  “Ten! Jesus.” He looked at his phone.

  “Yes, I write for a magazine, which means I can get there at ten but I can’t afford an apartment on the Upper East Side. You haven’t even told me the rent yet. I probably can’t afford it.”

  “What are you doing in this fancy-pants neighborhood, then?”

  “Oh, my stepfather lives at 750 Park.” I didn’t explain the particulars of the situation.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh. Then you’ll be fine,” he told me, and then said that the rent was something like twenty-one hundred a month. I knew right away that I couldn’t afford it. But I had the sneaking suspicion that if I spent a half hour with Glick, I might be able to find something out about Ben. So I lied and said it was a doable number, that maybe I had undershot the runway and it wouldn’t hurt to see the place.

  Together, we walked down to Sixty-Ninth and then the three long avenues east. There was a crisp, fall breeze in the air. Colored leaves from the trees were scattered across the sidewalk. We passed by a blond woman pushing a baby in a stroller, a bag attached to the stroller with the word FORD written on it, in blue script.

  “Ford,” Glick grunted. “Perfect name for when you’re having a baby . . . or a president.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m sorry, but that baby was wearing loafers! I don’t think I had a pair of loafers until I was twenty-five.”

  “Yeah, but you’re special,” I said.

  I started asking him about his friends, pretending to be curious, innocently curious. I asked about Danza and Julian, their jobs, their apartments, waiting for the right moment to mention Ben.

  “Let’s see, there’s Danza, Julian . . . who is my third friend? Who else am I friends with who you might ask me about?” he teased me. “God. You know what, I can’t think of it. This is a real head-scratcher.”