by Leslie Cohen
“I throw them both out. Once one is worn out, they both go in the garbage.”
“Really?”
I stopped myself right there and thought, Wait, why do I care about this so much? What am I even saying? Socks? A singles’ mixer? Leftovers? What have I become?
“I have to go,” I said to her finally, knowing what I had to do.
“Why?” She looked genuinely surprised. She was quite capable of ignoring this random non sequitur. She was a better actor than I was, or would ever be.
“I have to disprove a theory,” I said.
“Work?”
Yes, she certainly was.
I looked Natalie in the eye and she looked away because she knew but didn’t want to face it, not with me around anyway. She’d sort it out after I left, on the phone with her friends or her mother. I’d receive a very well-crafted e-mail in two to five business days.
* * *
I waited for the elevator to come with such impatience that I almost started banging on the doors. I felt like everything around me was moving in slow motion. Once I was outside, I got on my phone.
“Where does she live?” I said to Glick.
“Who?”
“You know who. Where does she live now?”
“Are you about to make some magic happen?”
“Fuck off.”
He told me the address. Park Avenue. Not exactly where I expected to find her, but it was convenient. I crossed Amsterdam Avenue and headed back to Central Park West. I went into the park, taking long strides. Surrounding me was the pond, lying still in the sun. I went over a small bridge built of cedar timber. On the right, I could see the skyscrapers of Fifty-Seventh Street in the distance, the sun low in the sky and falling lower. On my left were small rocks and larger stones, the water splashing faintly in the breeze. During the warmer months, there were often ducks, people rowing boats, their figures leaning toward each other. But today, the only people out there were crossing their arms and standing on the embankments surrounding the pond.
I started to feel a tiny vibration near my heart, like it was about to spring out. I walked faster, straight through the Ramble, making sure to avoid all the meandering trails that would have taken me out of my way. I stayed straight on my course, through a maze of dense woodlands, a web of jagged paths and planted woods. There was a sense of mystery to the Ramble. It was tall trees everywhere and wild shrubs along the ground. The terrain wasn’t smooth, and the crops crowded one another in disorder, vines and ferns and then, suddenly, I was out, and passing by a lawn with a single magnificent tree, its autumn leaves scattered across the grass beneath it. Once I hit this point, I actually started to run, just like they do in the movies, dress shoes and all. It was a good thing that girls made you watch all those romantic comedies, otherwise I would have no idea that this was normal, that this was what I was supposed to be doing.
Throngs of people on Fifth Avenue overwhelmed the sidewalk. There were artists displaying canvases and paintings and vendors peeking out of their carts, an ice-cream cone attached to an outstretched hand. I crossed the street to the less-crowded side. Traffic wasn’t moving. I weaved through cars to cross, past a policeman blowing a whistle. An army of children crossed next to me, a few adults, exhausted and shuffling them along. I pushed past them, was almost to Park Avenue. The feeling that I would see her again was suddenly palpable. I could hear my pulse.
In front of the building, there was a man in uniform with red cheeks standing by the door. His eyes fell on me. What the hell was her stepfather’s name? It wasn’t coming to me. Arnold? Maybe?
“Hello, I’m here to visit my friend Arnold.” It sounded wrong the second I said it out loud.
“Excuse me? Arnold who?”
“You don’t know Arnold? Yeah, gosh, Arnold, can’t believe he’s been living here for fifty years! You must know him! I’m here to meet him for our annual . . . golf outing.”
His face was empty of any recognition. He looked at his watch, signaling his impatience. I was tracking her down. Out of the blue? Hello? This was romance! He took a long pause. He didn’t look like the type of guy who would let me into the building based on romance.
“Arnold!” I said. I was desperate and on the verge of shouting rich-person things. Cigars! Cuff links! Monocles! Whiskey! Boats!
“You know what, I’ll just call him,” I said, making a big show of digging my phone out of my pocket. They let me into the lobby and I sat in one of the two chairs facing a mirror. I considered it a small victory. If I waited there, maybe she’d come down. I pretended to be on my phone as I listened to the doormen talk to each other. Nobody seemed to find it strange, or suspected any bad intentions about the fact that I was sitting around for so long. Eventually, they seemed to forget that I was there. I interrupted their conversation to say that I’d spoken to Arnold and that he was delayed upstairs due to some fluctuations in the stock market but that he’d be down momentarily.
And then, like a miracle, when I was out of ideas and my wait had lasted an hour and was verging on dubious, Eve walked into the lobby. I stood up, walked toward her in such a dreamy condition, reeling inside. She didn’t look surprised to see me. She wasn’t blinking. It was like there was something alive in her eyes, something very alive. She seemed to be seeing through me. And then she stopped looking at my eyes and looked down at my shoes.
“Why aren’t you wearing pants?”
I felt like reaching for her face. This happened once in a lifetime, I was sure of it, if you were lucky. It wasn’t like another one just came along. I held up the letter for her and then put it back into my pocket.
“I’m just here to tell you that there’s no way you could have choked on that potato chip,” I said. “It would have disintegrated long before killing you. Your esophagus would break the chip in half. It might hurt, but you’d still be able to breathe.”
It seemed to register with her that I had only just read it. She had a slightly hurt look on her face, involuntarily, but she pushed past it. “Maybe so,” she said, looking down solemnly.
“And you are the only one in the world who would refer to that as a potato chip incident.”
“It was scary!”
“For you? I bet.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Am I okay now? Well, it’s been a few months . . . but the recovery time is always longer than people tell you it’s going to be. Plus, let’s not forget to factor in post-traumatic stress. . . .”
“Oh yeah. Let’s not. We’d be remiss.”
Her face fell into a smile and my mind raced as I tried to settle on what to say next. Our conversation felt delicate, like we were both maneuvering on glass that might crack. She asked if I wanted to take a walk, so we went outside and walked a few blocks. Eventually, we settled on a bench on the park side of Fifth Avenue, next to a car with its windows open and seats reclined, a man in the front seat playing salsa music. As we sat there, a group of children in brightly colored running clothes passed us by. A small crowd began to accumulate near the bus stop. An ambulance wailed. A woman smoking a cigarette stopped to fix her shoe in front of us, her hand leaning against a big tree. We watched the activity on the street for a while, the people walking by in twos and threes, with backpacks and with red shopping bags from the gift shop at the Met. Everyone was returning home from Saturday activities, hands in their pockets and faces directed toward the pavement ahead. Most people were headed downtown. An ice-cream truck started playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Eve’s head remained bowed, with a dangerous smile that I could see, even though she was trying to stifle it. She appeared to be holding her breath. I knew that there were things I should have done differently too, that I wouldn’t mind a fresh start. I wanted to see her again, and again and again, and that was that.
My mind was chaos. It was breaking over me, this feeling that my heart was bursting and beating fast. This girl broke down some wall inside of me—she must have broken it down a long time ago—and being without her now was
unthinkable. A thrill ran through me as I reached out and touched her arm, like I was smashed into fragments. I wanted her face next to my face, to clasp her hand in mine. I touched a few of her fingers just then and it was pure bliss. But also torture. Incomplete. Nothing else mattered now besides the fulfillment of this sensation.
“I don’t know what happened to me,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”
“You became a big sucker,” she said, closing her hand around mine, more firmly now. Those eyes, staring right into mine. She leaned forward. “Just like the rest of us.”
- epilogue -
EVE
* * *
112 MACDOUGAL STREET, APARTMENT 5C, WEST VILLAGE
“I can’t do this anymore!” I yelled, and threw the shriveled tube of toothpaste down onto the floor.
Ben looked at me, as usual, a little mystified.
“Can’t do what anymore?”
“This.” I pointed at the ground.
“Just squeeze from the bottom.”
“I’ve been squeezing from the bottom! I’ve been squeezing from the bottom for weeks! There’s nothing left. Can I please have one of the new toothpastes that we bought?”
“Not until the old one is finished. There’s plenty left in there.”
“Plenty?” I stomped past him. “Clearly, you’ve gone insane.” I tore open a box on the floor in the kitchen and started rifling through, putting aside rolls of paper towels and toilet paper.
“What are you doing? That box is organized and ready to go!”
“I need new toothpaste and I’m not going to live under this puritanical regime any longer!”
Bottles of hand soap dropped onto the floor, one after another, thud, thud, thud.
“Get out of there!” He grabbed hold of my waist, attempted to lift me out, but I held on to the box so that he couldn’t pull me away. “You are . . . nothing . . . but . . . trouble,” he said. As I rifled through, Ben held me by my feet, but my hands were still inside, so the box went sliding along with me, around the floor of the apartment.
“Get . . . OUT!” he said, part struggling, part laughing.
“Where is it?” I shouted. “Where is the new toothpaste?”
“I will give it to you. . . .” He grunted. “Jesus, Eve. Once we get to our new place. New apartment, new toothpaste.”
He wrestled me away from the box and to the floor. I squirmed out from under him, stood up. I walked back to the bathroom and pointed to the toothpaste that had been banished to the floor. “That one is done.” I started to laugh. “You can have that toothpaste or you can have me but you can’t have both.” I put my hands on my hips. “MAKE A DECISION.”
“Then I choose the toothpaste,” he said, going to pick it up. He pinched the flat tube, from the bottom to the top, rolling up the tube as he went. Blue liquid appeared at the opening.
“See,” he said, and then handed it to me. “Plenty.”
I took it into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, but with added gusto, a slight resentment. I almost didn’t brush them at all, out of spite. But then I got over myself. I wanted to brush, after all. Regardless of who won the argument, true victory was about choice. Or something like that.
I went into the bedroom to ready myself for the monumental dinner ahead, our last dinner in our neighborhood, as residents of Macdougal Street.
“You know, I’m going to miss this place.” I came back out and looked around the apartment we had rented for the past year. All our possessions were now in thirteen boxes, labeled one through thirteen in thick black marker, because Ben insisted that numbering the boxes would make it easier to keep track of them. I wanted to label the boxes based on room in which they were most frequently used. That’s when the marker got taken away from me.
“I’ll miss it too,” he said.
“You’re taking that?” I asked. Ben was holding up a ten-year-old can of Campbell’s clam chowder. He’d kept it over the years, because of some sentimental attachment that I didn’t understand involving his friends from the hockey team. “Are you sure?” I said. “What if it leaks? I think it’s too difficult to transport.”
“We’re taking you,” he said, shoving the can into the corner of a filled box. “And you’re difficult to transport.”
The apartment didn’t look the same anymore. We’d covered every bit of wall space, and now the walls were bare. We didn’t have much furniture, just an old armchair and an Indian-print carpet and a bookshelf that Ben built himself on one of those days when he took out his toolbox and listened to songs like “Takin’ Care of Business” and “Working for the Weekend” and felt the need to fix things around the apartment. All our books were in boxes now, haphazardly, as if they’d never been given a careful order. The apartment was small but compensated for any deficiencies by being on a quiet, tree-lined street. It was a couple of blocks from Washington Square Park.
We’d discussed the move at length. It was the best possible decision for the future. We needed more space. We were never meant to live in this apartment forever. We had taken it as a short-term solution. Once Ben and I decided to live together, it seemed that we needed to live together right away. Logistics like where to put our possessions once our one closet was overflowing and the oven was full of plates and lesser-used pans . . . well, that could be worked out later. And later had come, though it was impressive watching Ben put his engineering skills to use, to see him staring into the closet with extreme focus and rearranging it until we had a legitimate spot for that bottle of Advil that used to fall to the floor whenever we opened the door.
We hadn’t lived there for very long, and yet there was something about it. We were very much there. It was the happiest time of my life so far. It was where we’d gotten back together, and where we knew we’d never be apart. It was where we took a break from the world, which was, in the city, never very far away. We only had to peek out our window to see into other peoples’ apartments, each square with its own points of interest. Through one window, there was an old lady who lived alone, who liked to come outside to her patio on Saturday mornings and sweep the leaves into a dustpan. In another, there was a young guy who was always sitting near the window behind his computer. He had a rotating cast of roommates. In the apartment above us, old music and movies were always playing. The couple who lived below us liked to watch sports together and then get into screaming fights about whether they should have children.
The next day, the movers would come. I got to work on my last task, which was folding and packing up our bed linens. They were all white and immeasurably soft, purchased for us by Arthur at a store on Madison Avenue. I nearly fell over when I saw the price tag, but Arthur insisted. “Your mother would have wanted you to have them. She loved this store. You know she believed that the key to happiness was soft sheets.” I nodded and accepted the gift. As I folded them carefully, corner to corner, end to end, I thought, She would have loved these sheets, but mostly, to see me so comfortable beneath them.
Ben was working up until the point when we left for dinner. He promised that he would start getting nostalgic with me then, at dinner, but not a moment before.
“Hey,” I said, looking around for my phone. “Do you remember when I said I was going to make a video about our time in this apartment and you said, ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning, go back to sleep’?”
He continued staring at his computer screen. “Like it was fifteen hours ago.”
I removed my phone from the windowsill. “Okay, well! Now is the time!”
Ben was sitting on the floor with his computer on his lap and paid no attention to me as I started the video, walking throughout the apartment, talking to my phone about all the different parts of it. I wanted to give it one last good lookover before we left. Its appearance was much worse without all our stuff in place, but I didn’t care. I still loved it, every corner of it. I explained our brief history there to the phone, holding it in front of my mouth and basically walking around in circles (th
ere really wasn’t very far to go).
For dinner, Ben requested that we go to Pluck U, a “restaurant” that specialized, unsurprisingly, in chicken.
“Really? We can go?” he said, energized and a little alarmed, when I agreed. “I always want to go there, but you never do.”
“That’s because the online reviews are terrible. More than one post mentioning food poisoning is the rule,” I explained. “One is an outlier. Two is a pattern. But I’ll do it this time, because relationships are all about compromise. And I want it to be noted on the record that I am a great compromiser.”
“You’re a great compromiser. I asked to go to Pluck U twenty thousand times, and we went once.”
“Exactly.”
“Whatever,” he said, yanking long strips of brown tape from its dispenser and wrapping it around a box. “If I left you to your own devices, you’d eat potato chips and Junior Mints for dinner.”
Outside, it was clear that winter had come to New York. The snow had buried everything. We walked on West Third Street, past Sullivan, until we hit Thompson, our boots clomping along the sidewalk. We walked past all the bars, packed with a mix of college students and older couples.
Pluck U was the brightest establishment on the block—a port in the storm, with its yellow awning, and painted yellow walls—it radiated its golden hue all the way down Thompson Street. Once inside, the smell of french fries hit me in the face. There were only two tables, and one was open. I hung my coat on the chair, to save it for us. I wasn’t going to eat our farewell chicken dinner standing up. Ben gave the menu above the cashier a serious look.
As we sat at the table a few minutes later with our respective chickens, I was expecting some kind of shift, for this dinner to be different from every dinner we’d ever had before, but it wasn’t.
“So does Pluck U stand for Pluck University?” I asked Ben. “Because the chickens are in college now or something like that?”
