by Andrea Bartz
“You know, Tessa, the unauthorized access of an email account is a felony,” he said, nudging a wheel of her chair with his toe. “Additional civil liabilities, too.”
“I’m authorized!” she replied. “Besides, with the dirt I find in here, she’ll know better than to come after me.”
“To mutually assured destruction,” I laughed, and we clinked our water glasses.
Will wandered off to change out of his suit, and Marlon trotted after him, tail wagging. Just as the guitar music hit a dramatic crescendo, Tessa murmured, “There, that should…” and struck the space bar. Words swarmed the screen.
“It’s not pretty,” she warned, “but it’s all here, everything in your inbox and sent folder from 2009.”
“There’s no way they taught you that at library nerd school,” Damien said.
Tessa stretched, smiled. “I used to hack into corporate servers in high school. I had issues with authority.”
“Damn, girl,” Damien said. “Quit making me question my orientation.”
She turned back to the screen. “It’s not directly from the server, but the archive was backed up in the cloud, probably because at some point you pulled it into a program.”
I frowned and then said, “Outlook?”
“That must be it. It’s kinda unwieldy, but I can index it for you.” More typing, more clicking. “Want me to drop all the emails into our shared folder?”
Something fluttered, apprehension at the idea of Tessa and Damien having access to my potentially embarrassing emails—the dumb stuff I cared about at twenty-three, the sexual quirks of whomever I was seeing, the cringe-y tales of how wasted we all had been. Really, it was a miracle that I’d made it through my twenties in one piece, protected only by the hubris of youth. I remembered making out with someone in the back of a camper as it barreled down the FDR Drive; his long-haired bandmate had volunteered to drive us back to Brooklyn, gesturing with his beer: “I shouldn’t be okay to drive, but I am.” How, how had we made it there safely?
Drunken disasters. There’d been the Warsaw Incident, but I hadn’t emailed about it, had I? Either way, I hadn’t met Tessa or Damien until years after that nonsense, so the names would be meaningless. But. Still.
I said sure. When she lifted her fingers from the keyboard and leaned back, I wanted to jump right in, push her out of the way, and start reading, but instead she crossed her legs and smiled.
“I used to write long emails back then, too,” she announced. “We spent so much time composing these novel-length messages, you know?”
“I know. Texting really killed the long-form personal confession.” I shrugged.
Damien finished his beer with a little ahh. “Didn’t you used to write essays? Like Modern Love–type stuff?” he asked.
“Oh, god.” I let out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s the exact kind of thing I was writing when I wasn’t treating emails to my friends like diary entries. I was always frustrated because I never had any good material. I didn’t really like that many guys and the ones I did like didn’t seem to like me, so I never had much to write about.”
The real answer was a longer one: I’d wanted to be a writer since I was little and had stumbled only by accident into the realm of fact-checking—a decent specialty in a shaky field, but just literal steps from the job I’d actually wanted. I’d had a few minor successes in my early twenties—a feature in the pretentious literary magazine n+1, a few clips in the fitness magazine that employed me—but I’d stopped pitching in my midtwenties, when all the staff writer jobs disappeared and journalists with résumés as long as the Iliad competed for the same editors’ attention. And I’d made peace with it long ago. I was a damn good research chief, and Sir was one of the nation’s oldest and most solid men’s magazines in the industry.
“You should think about submitting again,” Tessa nudged. She scratched at her button nose.
“Oh, maybe someday.” I cleared my throat and added, “Anyway.”
* * *
At home I dashed into the bathroom as soon as I got inside, and I stared at the inside of the door as I peed: a cheap door painted white, snowy when I moved in but now covered in black scuff marks. The area around the doorknob was a dirty beige; a crack bisected the door partway up. The kind of things a landlord deals with between tenants, a quick slap of paint to blot out the last renter’s marks. Five years on, the mess was all mine. Five years. It had seemed like such a nice, adult apartment when I’d first moved in.
I sat down at the table and bathed myself in the computer’s bluish glow. I opened up the text files Tessa had made and realized that it was going to be more of a nightmare than I’d anticipated; each email was in its own file, some of them with the earlier exchange clinging to the bottom of the message but never organized into conversations. I could sort them by date, which split conversations up over weeks, or by subject, which glommed convos together but strung them into a senseless timeline. Shit.
Instead I searched for “Modern Love” and found three sad little emails, each ending with a polite rejection, two form letters and one that seemed at least a tiny bit more personal (“Sorry to say I don’t think this is quite a fit, but thanks for trying me with it”). Even all these years later, rereading these replies sparked a mix of disappointment and self-consciousness. I opened up the piece that got the longest answer.
I Don’t Want to Be Sedated
A very determined cricket has chosen the tree outside my window as his podium. I love him and pity him and feel for him as he chirps his question mark over and over into a dark street. There don’t seem to be many other crickets in Bushwick, and with the odds against him, I worry that his trills will slow, that his optimism will flag.
My own odds ought to be much more favorable: The city holds millions of single men, and the company I keep—beautiful, creative young Brooklynites—pretty much comprises the graduates of gifted and talented programs from high schools all over the world. The options are excellent. The problem is me.
I don’t mean to be difficult to impress. I didn’t pick this particular pickiness. It’s the butterflies in my stomach, I tell you. It’s like they’re sedated or possibly bound up in cocoons.
It’s so very easy to get dates in New York City. Anyone with an internet connection and mild self-portraiture skills can line them up in a few quippy sentences. It’s so hard to get good ones. When I came to the city six months ago, I felt nervous before each first date, sipping a cocktail and listening to Beyoncé and swirling on bronzer as I fought down the urge to vomit. All those nerves, not the good kind of eddying in my torso, but motion nonetheless.
Now I don’t get nervous at all, a change that strikes me as a little sad. He’ll be fine, I predict, and I won’t really want to see him again. I’m almost always right. At night, I lie awake and wonder why the butterflies refuse to stir. I fear they know something I don’t, something dark and jagged about me. The skeletons in my skeleton. The reason I don’t quite deserve it.
The last time they showed any movement was when I met Jonah, a cute bearded fellow, at a concert in the fall. I liked his wide grin, his unbounded enthusiasm. He’d moved from the Midwest to Manhattan only three weeks before, and I was into the idea of an unspoiled specimen, too fresh and transparent to be over everything already. He and I sat knees to knees at a bar, and the little moths showed movement, an unfamiliar, almost-forgotten rustle.
He ghosted after the third date.
It’s nice to know the butterflies haven’t calcified, but I’m not entirely sure I’m glad I met Jonah. It’s made hollow first dates even hollower since then, two strangers in a mahogany booth deciding to become estranged. But I keep going to shows and parties, keep setting up dates, keep entering bars with a smile and a question mark on my face. Like the cricket, like the bird in the children’s book who keeps on asking and asking and asking. Are you my lover?
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br /> I must have written it before I fell for Lloyd. Aw, little awkward Lindsay. A girl I’d like to reach back and hug. Except that I wouldn’t have too many soothing words for her, I suppose. If only she knew the trend wasn’t temporary, that in a decade she’d be as old as Jesus with a list of sex partners exceeding her age but no identifiable capital-B boyfriend in the ensuing years.
And Jonah—him I just barely remembered, a dull “Ohhhh, right.” That idiot.
Time to start reading emails then. I attempted to sort them by date but accidentally brought them up by size, so the one at the top had huge files hanging off of it as attachments. Edie’s subject line: “HOT BUSHWICK JAMZ.” I opened it and found twelve .mp3s tacked onto a quick hello—oh god, it was a playlist, from back before songs streamed through the air, when we bought music piecemeal (or ripped it off LimeWire) and uploaded it into devices that didn’t yet intuit what we’d want to hear based on our constantly fine-tuned preferences. I popped in earbuds and dragged the files into my toolbar’s long-dormant iTunes player: first, a lush synth-heavy number with braided, building chords. I hit next: a dramatic eighties-style hit, something appropriate for the climax of a John Hughes movie.
I skipped ahead to a stripped-down head-bobber with reverb-y guitars and droning male voices. I could picture them, onstage just inches from Edie and me in a semilegal venue: a troupe of skinny guys in plaid shirts or big trench coats, nodding their heads with their hair shaken over their faces. I read over the band names and smiled—lots of woodland creatures, a few colors. None of them had gone on to greatness, which probably would’ve made Edie and me turn on them anyway.
We’d loved going to shows together. One night I had turned to Edie from the packed audience of a concert, what felt like the millionth, and the whole crowd was so excited and the band onstage was killing it and Edie and I had just locked eyes, happiness rushing up through me like froth. She’d reached out and squeezed my arm with both hands, and for one second, life was perfect.
Edie had that air of never seeming to care what anyone thought of her, which of course made everyone desperate for her approval. She spoke lazily, softly, and people leaned in to listen. She smiled and raised an eyebrow when you said something dumb, a look that hurt like a hot iron. And when she laughed, when you got it right and she tipped her head back to guffaw…
I hit forward again and got an intense drum intro, then a hyperpulsing bassline: same venue, different punk kids onstage sweating and flailing while the crowd slammed into itself. I pictured us playing the song on Edie’s computer speakers, shaking our hips as we applied eyeliner and got ready for a night out in Williamsburg. The music felt ageless now; it was angry but somehow defiantly joyful, a middle finger to the sky.
As the song pummeled into my headphones, I searched by date and found the last email Edie ever sent me. It was a group email from our mutual friend about her coworker’s show at Spike Hill that Friday (the Friday); Edie had replied-all to say that she was probably going to stay in. No other emails from her that week, which made sense given our big blowup the weekend before.
I decided to work the other way, beginning with the oldest emails, from January. We volleyed back and forth almost daily, mundane emails peppered with our own affected shorthand: “see you on fridaze” and “let’s get some burr” and “sofa king” as our go-to adverbial clause (“sound it out,” she’d prompted on first usage). She complained about her fashion-school classmates; I told her about a hot but “possibly aspy” boy who’d left his socks on during sex. A sense of privacy infused every email, our own little world. People have described romantic relationships to me that way; perhaps this was the closest I’d gotten.
I saw a long chain that had tracked in one email, indented further and further so that my first email to Edie was a skinny column along the right; the subject line was “UM.” I started at the bottom:
From: Lindsay Bach
To: Edith Iredale
Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 2:06 PM
LADY. WTF happened with BC after I left last night? There was so much heat between you guys that everyone else was, like, shielding their eyes. Did anything happen??
From: Edith Iredale
To: Lindsay Bach
Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 6:16 PM
Ugggghhh I am so hungover I want to DIE. Isn’t he insanely hot? I know you’ve seen him around here too but there’s something about his voice, and those eyes when he’s listening to you…I want to have sex with his voice, Lindsay. Someone should come up with a way for me to do that.
But to answer your question, NO, don’t be stupid, of course nothing happened! I wouldn’t do that to Greg. It was totally innocent, just…intense. I don’t know. He got my number and said something about hanging out in Calhoun this weekend but right now I can’t even wrap my head around it. I’m going to have to make him use a voice changer thing like they do on TV so that I can be around him without spontaneously orgasming…
From: Lindsay Bach
To: Edith Iredale
Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 12:10 PM
Okay, I am glad to hear you two didn’t jump each other’s bones because it TOTALLY FELT LIKE THAT WAS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. Just saying. Did you figure out where BC lives?
From: Edith Iredale
To: Lindsay Bach
Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 1:45 PM
He’s on the 4th floor, way east, which makes sense why I hardly ever see him. So wild, I can’t believe we bumped into him in Manhat. Ugggh. Do you want to watch a movie tonight? Greg’s friends are going to some bar that has bocce ball, but I really don’t think I can rally…
I skimmed further; the conversation veered off into plan making. But god, I remembered that night, Thursday, January 22, apparently—clear as if it were playing out documentary style before me.
The holidays were over and we were cold and bored. Weekend after weekend, we drank cheap whiskey and did lackluster, shuffling dances in the back room of Royal Oak, one of our go-to shitty bars. We racked up Friday after Friday at Calhoun, picking our way up and down littered staircases in search of another sweaty party or arbitrary open band practice or glimpse of the hot guy Edie had a Building Crush on. We sat in booths and sipped drinks instead of talking and finished too many nights with sad free pizza at The Charleston.
Until that night when, in a burst of motivation, Edie and I rode the train all the way to the Lower East Side to see some British band she knew about; the rest of our friends had been too SAD-addled to make the trip. After the show, we downed whiskey-gingers and held shouted, jerky conversation over loud music and were just about to call it a night when in walked Building Crush with a crew of cool-looking friends: model-y, thick-banged girls and a cute blond dude in an acid-washed denim jacket. Building Crush, of course, turned out to be Alex, but it was his friend I homed in on—ashen hair curved in a triumphant windblown wave, like he’d just stepped off a crotch rocket. High cheekbones and a square jaw around an impish grin. The goofy sidekick in a Molly Ringwald movie. Energy that bounded out spastically, bouncing off of things.
What followed was one of those New York City nights that we were too young to see as special: Alex wandered over with a confident “Hey, are we neighbors?,” setting in motion the whole movie montage. The blond dude, Lloyd, not of the building, said his friend had given him the code for her fancy condo in the East Village, and we walked there together, Lloyd running ahead to entertain us with stupid antics like climbing into and then reclining in the basket of an abandoned crane. Edie and Alex followed a half-block behind, talking and smiling shyly. It was an unexpectedly warm January night, and we all felt young and drunk and free, pretty hipsters in an ad for jeans.
Lloyd was a photographer with an insane ability to take a
good shot of anybody; he snapped away on his iPhone 3G, and every time he flicked it around to let us see, we squealed in delight, our faces just the way we liked to think they looked. Humoring me, he took my shitty Razr flip phone and lifted a lighter above me as I held a cigarette and looked pensive. It was perfect. Longest-running Facebook profile photo to date, until I grew old enough to realize the fake-smoker thing was gross.
I think he was in a band, too. God, all the men of that era were both photographers and in shitty bands.
We clambered onto the roof of a gorgeous condo on Fourteenth, one I wasn’t ever able to locate again, and one of the girls magically procured a stereo and we danced to stupid nineties tunes. Lloyd kept us moving, pulling me in and then whipping me out to spin. Alex and Edie found some lawn chairs and settled in a little ways away, talking sleepily, while Lloyd finished a bottle of whiskey and, with a holler, ripped off the cover of a drained pool I hadn’t even noticed and vaulted himself into the deep end, demanding that we grab the stereo and climb in with him.
I still remember those smooth white tiles, how we threw off our coats and danced in and out of the deep end, laughing hysterically as one by one we lost our footing on the center’s slanted floor. Lloyd did pull-ups under the diving board. We discovered the stars overhead and clutched each other in delight of them. We were dizzy and drunk. The night screeched to a halt when I threw up into a drain, and Lloyd helped me clomp down to the street and obtain a cab home. But that happy little aquarium made the rest of winter survivable: a ceramic vault where the music boomed and swelled.
I’d gone on to develop an enormous crush on Lloyd, the jelly-kneed, stomach-flipping kind that only strikes every five years if you’re lucky. (I squinted at the emails again: of course Edie’s hadn’t asked if anything had happened between him and me.) I felt a little heart flip, remembering my intense infatuation. Then my mind jolted ahead to how it ended, and a sinking feeling rushed in to replace it.
