by Andrea Bartz
I stood up and got a beer out of the fridge. I sat down and messed around on Facebook, on blogs. Finally, I returned to the Craigslist email and wrote something that would, I hoped, be complimentary without freaking her out.
Subject: that guy at the other end of the counter…
Body: …had nearly finished his yogurt so that he could nonchalantly peek at you while you ate your salad. (okay, maybe it was a stare. sorry.) before you left, i wanted to tell you with neither presumption nor agenda that you’re beautiful. maybe you’ll give me another shot, or maybe we’ll bump into each other again. anyway, thank you for giving me the unlikely opening to do a deed left undone…you definitely made my day.
greg
I read it through a couple of times and deleted the second-to-last sentence—there, now I’d done everything I could to distance myself from the drooling ogre bro vibes I didn’t want to emit. The response came two days later, days mercifully packed at the firm—I was developing a set of construction drawings for what eventually became a facade in Park Slope. So the mystery woman wasn’t even humming in my subconscious when a reply showed up in my inbox.
Greg—
I’ve never posted on Craigslist before, not even to sell a couch or anything. And I did it on a whim the other day, not expecting a response, let alone one so kind. So thank you. I keep rereading it and smiling. Hmm, so many things I could say next, but I’ll start with a question: What were you reading?
Edie
I wrote back that night, answering and returning the question. She wrote the evening after that. We asked the typical questions. Senior at NYU. (So much younger than I’d thought.) Living in Bushwick in one of those insufferable dormlike self-contained hipster havens. Born and raised in New York, which explained that phlegmatic expression earned from a lifetime of discovering things before everyone else. I learned her verbal tics, the lilt of her sentences and the subtlety of her wit. I found her on Facebook and stared and stared and stared at the tiny blurry profile photo I could access, too stubborn to send her a friend request. I couldn’t mentally call up an image of her, just a sharp sense of attraction. Which almost never happens to me. What good is a photographic memory if the cap’s on right when you need it most?
I told my friend Lexy the story, leaving out the bit about the woman being an undergrad. I knew she’d react with the appropriate amount of awe and delight and excited clapping. I’ve known Lexy since college, one of those truly platonic friendships that way too many women insist can’t exist. Sitting at a picnic table on the back porch of a barbecue joint, wearing a coat and pretending it was a warmer spring day than the thermometer indicated, she actually flung a rib down at one point to throw her hands over her mouth. I knew she’d just love it.
“You guys are gonna get maaaried,” she sang when I’d finished.
“Dude, she hasn’t made any mention of actually meeting up in person, and it’s been over a month. I’m beginning to think she’s in a full body cast or something.”
“Or that you’re writing back and forth with someone who just happened to be in the deli and observed the whole thing and is doing this to fill a certain emptiness in his or her life.”
Jesus, that hadn’t even occurred to me. That’s the thing about Lexy. She’s getting her Ph.D. in American history and will just extrapolate the shit out of something you thought you had figured out.
“You think I should ask her out?”
“Uh, yeah. She’s probably wondering why you haven’t tried to see her yet. Actually, if she was smart, she’d think you were the fat, lonely impersonator.”
One end of Lexy’s chartreuse scarf kept sliding off her neck and down across her boobs. I was waiting for it to land in her pile of sauce.
Lexy was right—it was weird. The intimacy was fading from the email exchange, and now I had no choice but to ask her out, which of course would sound creepy or awkward no matter how I phrased it because I’d already waited so damn long. I asked Edie to call me. She wrote back with her number instead. I dialed it right after work one day, settling into a bench in Central Park among a row of peacoat-swaddled locals.
It rang once. Twice. Someone with a clipboard was making his way down the line, asking for money for some kind of project.
She picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?”
It was nice to hear a real hello, the way we used to answer the phone before we always knew who was calling. Her voice was huskier than I’d imagined.
“Hi! It’s Greg.”
She said “Oh, hi!” just as I continued to speak, and then I stopped, and then we both listened to silence for a second.
“How are you?” I lumbered on.
“I’m good! Just got off the subway. Sorry if I sound out of breath. How are you?”
“I’m fine! Thanks. I’m…sitting in the park, actually.”
“Oh, nice. Central Park?”
“That’s the one!”
“Ahh, jealous! Do the trees have buds on them yet? I love buds and those little puff things at the end of pine trees. I always promise myself I’m going to make it into the park before they open up and then I forget and remember in, like, June.”
“The trees are still looking pretty dead from here. But actually…” My god. A freebie. “Actually, I was calling to see if you’d like to get together this weekend. Like for a walk. In the park.”
“Oh! Umm…” It was either deliberation or thinking hard, trying to work out her schedule.
“The buds are gonna be here and gone before you know it. Honest to god, I can see, like, six big leaves just from here.”
She laughed. I loved it—a kind of throaty ha ha.
“I have brunch plans on Saturday, but…after that? Like at three?”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been excited for a date. I got Lexy’s good-luck text as I climbed out of the subway at Eighty-sixth and headed west, motoring around tourists. Edie was standing outside the entrance, pecking at her phone. Prettier than I remembered, another little punch of damn. She smiled and waved and waited awkwardly for me to cross the street as the light lingered on DON’T WALK, and then she pulled me into a hug, all wool to wool and warmth to warmth.
We tromped around the reservoir for an hour, hands in our pockets, smiling at each other as we talked. That aura was there again, that weird magnetic pull. Finally she veered off the circular path and sat on a bench. I sat down next to her and allowed myself an unabashed stare—this time, I vowed, I’d remember those high cheekbones and that heart-shaped mouth.
“I have to tell you something,” she said finally, staring out at the water. A row of ducks was lined up on what must’ve been a beam just under the water. It looked like two dozen birds had arbitrarily formed a straight line.
“Go for it.” I slung my arm over the bench’s back.
“It’s…Okay, it’s weird now because I haven’t told you before. I’m actually—when you and I first met, or ran into each other or whatever, I was just kind of casually starting to see someone, but now we’re…exclusive.” She mumbled the last word, but it still came out sounding heavy. Ex-clooo-sive. No matter how you mean it, it forms pretension in the mouth.
It hit me like a force, like a big wave of energy shot off of her and struck me in the side, but I just nodded and stared out at the reservoir. “Got it,” I said.
“But I really do care about you,” she said urgently, turning to me. “I really hope we can still hang out and talk and everything.”
I nodded slowly and shot her a smile. “Of course.” I withdrew my arm from the back of the bench and fished my phone out of my pocket to check the time. “I should think about heading back, though.”
I really didn’t mean to sound sullen, I didn’t, but neither of us was any good for conversation as we trudged back to the subway. We should have ridden the same line, but I ma
de up some dinner plans so that I could drop her at the stop.
“At least she was honest with you,” Lexy texted back.
“I guess,” I responded.
* * *
The emails with Edie petered out; I can’t remember who finally didn’t write back, which probably means it was me. Spring slipped straight into a hot and muggy summer, and my work started to take on that nihilistic pall. I kept on thinking about Edie, the playful smirk, the warm hug through the coat. I still couldn’t conjure up her image and I kept her in the back of my mind whenever I turned a corner in the city, hoping she’d appear.
Then right at the most merciless blast of summer, when a third of my coworkers had been quietly let go, when my 401(k) had shriveled to a few curls of bills, when it was so hot I just sat and sweated and thought hazy hateful thoughts about nothing and no one in particular, she texted. She wanted to get drinks. And could I meet her at nine.
The week after that is foggy, no clear chronology, just a set of moments, a real-life movie montage. Her lowering her chin and looking up at me through those eyelashes, saying exactly the words I’d been longing for like autumn: “broke up,” “single,” “another round.” Kissing in the street while a parade of drunks and late-night revelers ambled by. Her sinewy back as I unclasped her bra. Eggs Benedict. Watching someone make enormous bubbles in McCarren Park. The pillows with the zigzag stripes on her little lofted bed.
We were a We. And we had to last, we just had to, because how many fucking stars had aligned to bring us together in the first place? She delighted in telling people the story of how we met, pausing for effect in the same places, raising both hands to recount how she’d never, never posted anything on Craigslist before, not even for furniture or anything. I took so many photos of her with my Mark II—at the beach, over dinner, at the park, on my love seat—and put a few of the best onto my phone, an iPhone back before everyone had them. Sometimes I’d pull up an image I’d shot of her and just stare, taking in the details like I was sizing up an especially impressive building.
I discovered I wasn’t the only one enchanted by her; her little roommates, thin and sparkly eyed, worshipped her as well, including the creepy brunette Edie counted as her closest confidante. Men of all ages went googly-eyed when she let out her laugh. She had her own gravitational pull, the calm black hole at the center of a swirling galaxy. I’m not sure if she knew it. She floated through life, the air bending toward her in her wake.
Four months became five, then six. I kept snapping photos of her, trying to capture what I’d lose when I couldn’t see her. I had dinner with her odd, unbalanced mother and her spooked, distant father in their Upper West Side apartment. We took our first big trip together, a week in Berlin coinciding with an architecture conference I was invited to attend, right in that last aching stretch of winter when you stare at the skeletons of trees and just long for them to be leafy already. The city delighted her, with its white asparagus and crisp museums and citizens who were just like us Brooklynites only they stayed out later and spoke multiple languages. On the flight home, she slept in my lap while I stared at the TV screen in front of me, a head cold gathering in my skull like storm clouds. By the time we landed, the congestion had commandeered my lungs. We collapsed into bed that afternoon, and I woke up the next morning with a ridiculous combination cold/flu.
I didn’t want her getting sick, too, so we spent the week in our own beds, her stopping by late at night to bring me Sudafed or soup. But something changed that week. It was the same dimming of intimacy that’d begun in our email exchange so many months before. She had less to say at dinner and interesting new reasons to crash alone in her own apartment. I observed it helplessly, like a passenger watching his boat recede into the distance.
She came over one night with the sole intention of breaking things off; I knew it the second she walked through the door. I was washing out a bowl lined with vinaigrette and thinking that the little flecks of spices looked like undigested food. We’d made vague plans to rent a documentary, but when she walked in and closed the door and draped herself over a chair at the kitchen table, I thought, Well, fuck. I don’t remember anything she said, just the tunnel-like feeling of multiple gunshot wounds as she fired off lines about stagnancy and not growing and something being different and just not right. I actually teared up and she hugged me close, letting the drops gather on her sleeve. When it was all over, she picked up her purse and walked miserably out the door.
* * *
About three weeks later I figured out that she was dating Alex, a friend from her building whom I’d never liked. The fact was painfully easy to gather from a little Facebook stalking. I was shocked and then totally alarmed that I was so shocked. And then I just felt really stupid.
“God, so she’s one of those girls who’s always seeing someone,” Lexy said. “That makes so much sense. You didn’t pick that up from talking about exes at all?” We’d both ordered whiskey neat in a dim new bar in Lexy’s neighborhood. Sometimes I appreciated her refreshing lack of sympathy—from everyone else it was bordering on pity.
“I mean, I have a lot of ex-girlfriends, too.”
“But you’re a guy. There are about fourteen eligible men in this city, and it’s totally normal for any of them with their girlfriend light on to get snatched up like that.” She actually snapped her fingers, and I admired the theatrics. “For a woman, it’s a mind-set. Do or die. That’s why some women always have a boyfriend when others haven’t had one in, like, six years. You just think to yourself, ‘Okay, you’ll do’ and keep lining ’em up.”
She saw my eyes drop and knew she’d gone too far.
“Greg, you’re a catch. The point I’m trying to make here is that you could go on Nerve and have five hot girls clamoring to date you in all of thirty seconds.”
“It’s just—it’s weird that I was so wrong about her. Apparently I’m really fucking terrible at reading people.”
She put down her glass and asked the bartender for more water. I could see her assembling her thoughts. “There’s just no such thing as absolute reality. There’s no such thing as ever reading anything quote-unquote right.” She pressed a napkin on the small puddle around her glass. “You and I could be standing together and both see, I don’t know, a guy bump into an old lady on the subway, but our experience of it would be totally different. And that’s just a douchebag and an old lady, action, reaction. Dating’s probably the most subjective experience there is. You’re experiencing another person. A fucked-up, complicated, enigmatic human being.”
We sipped our drinks.
“So you’re saying…what? That I’m wrong and she’s not kind of a bitch?” I let out a half-laugh.
“I just mean that it’s not weird to look back on someone or something and realize that your read on it at the time was completely different from how you’d interpret it now.” Lexy nodded to herself. “I met a guy at this party, that one Mandy had while you were out of town? He’d just published a memoir, and I asked him how his friends felt about him exposing all their shit. He told me, ‘You’d be amazed at how bad people are at recognizing themselves in print.’ ”
“So basically I’m not delusional, we just had different versions of each other in our heads.”
“I’m saying we’re all delusional. And we’re all just trying to find someone whose delusions line up with our own.”
I couldn’t decide if that was encouraging or depressing.
“And people do?”
“People do what?”
“Find someone whose delusions line up with their own?”
“Apparently people do, Greg. Apparently they do.”
* * *
For a few months, I bumped into Edie here and there, the way denizens of this city always do. At first we made polite conversation, smiles forced, auras tense. Then one day that summer, we saw each other in a grocery store. I wa
s heading up the escalator and one of us would have had to make an effort and I was tired and in a bad mood and so we didn’t. I didn’t have histrionically bad feelings toward her, just tiredness, just a sense that we were no longer worth each other’s time. A few weeks later, while I was at a conference in DC, someone texted me something confusing, so I Googled her and up popped an obituary. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t mention a cause of death and there wasn’t really anyone I could ask; I was out of town during the funeral, too, so I sent her parents a bereavement card and that was that. It’s horrible, of course, sad that she died so young, but it also felt strange and thick and faraway. Someone I loved doesn’t exist anymore. You pretend after a breakup that that person disappears, but in this case she did.
I know that’s what should haunt me the most, but what actually snags my mind from time to time, even all these years later, is how we met, the improbable connection, the perfect How We Met. I don’t understand why the universe wasted the whole scheme on that ephemeral redheaded fairy and a relationship that wasn’t going to work. Maybe we weren’t supposed to speak to each other at all and Craigslist messed with the natural order of things, I think to myself, staring at a wall of gleaming white Greek yogurts. I pull out five because my wife likes to take them to work. Maybe we were a miss from the start.
Chapter 5
LINDSAY
The Flip cam video ended with a freeze-frame of blurriness. I sat stock-still for a few seconds, then felt a curious rise through my torso, neck, and face like a glass being filled with water. A sudden muted hum like dipping your ears underwater. Then another punch of thick nausea.
Because the realization had hit me full force: I was there. After screaming that I wanted her dead, I had visited Edie in her living room the very night of her death. Drunk, murmuring, over-Edie’s-bullshit me, in a rendezvous I had no recollection of whatsoever.
