Seeing her waiting in line for coffee the morning after she’d decided to leave him, all I could see was the end of everything.
I looked at my phone.
DONT TEXT BEA
Today 3:57 AM
I’m up
Today 10:52 AM
i guess we missed each other
Today 11:32 AM
how’s your hangover?
“Eve.”
I looked up, Noz had me in her sights.
“Hi,” I said. “How’s the bright, sober light of day treating your emotional wounds?”
“So I guess you heard,” she said.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Ezra and I met up last night, we talked about it for a while.”
Noz winced, Noz sighed. “I wish I’d gotten a chance to talk to you before, but at least—can we talk now?”
I pretended to check my watch. “As long as you don’t make me late for my one o’clock.”
Noz was startled by a gentle throat clearing from the barista behind her, a bearded, pretty man who was, in terms of his exterior, Noz’s type. I watched her closely to see if she extended small flirts to the guy while she ordered an iced coffee for here. The barista filled a mason jar with cold brew. Drink delivered, she lingered, sipping her coffee, while I ordered my espresso. She followed me to the pick-up counter while we waited for the other barista with a beard to prepare my espresso. This one was less pretty.
At the same time, we felt a shiver. There was a presence in the coffee shop, something mild and likely benign, not the kind of spirit either one of us would spend time trying to exorcise or communicate with; not the kind of spirit that would take a form, much less a human form; not the kind of spirit that would be visible. As invisible as a smell, something that only the two of us could sense. Flimsy, Colleen would’ve called the spirit.
“Flimsy,” Noz said.
I didn’t even nod, as much as I wanted to. Again, like a teenager, Noz sighed. The barista delivered my espresso, which I normally drank quickly, standing, but instead I got us a table near the front, where the light came in through the glass.
“So what’d he say?” she asked.
“Everything he told me, he told me in confidence. I don’t want to get in between you guys.”
“I’m not trying to get the gossip, I just don’t want to waste your time repeating.”
Actually, she wanted to know how to spin it. I love Nozlee, but one of her great talents is making her own perspective as real as the truth. I sipped espresso.
“We mostly talked about, you know, feelings,” I said. “Rather than practical matters. He’s really upset. He hasn’t even texted me this morning.”
Noz had the decency to look ashamed, and as the warm morning light struck her I could see her normally pristine hair was snarled in places and she hadn’t bothered to apply her usual makeup, so the bags under her eyes showed—but so did the scattered row of freckles across her cheekbones and nose. She usually kept them hidden so it felt like a misplaced intimacy in this public place. But I loved those freckles and how beautiful they made her face look.
“It’s not easy for me, Eve,” Noz said. “It wasn’t a relief to let him go.”
“I would hope not!”
“When I was thinking about breaking up with him—”
“Thinking about it, and not telling me you were thinking about it, you meant to say,” I said.
“Come on babe, you absolutely would’ve told him,” Noz snapped back.
“You’re my friend too, I can keep a secret.”
“You would’ve felt obligated to tell him.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I said.
“Can you just hear me out and try not to argue with me?”
“Yes, sorry, yes.” I finished my espresso, already cold and too bitter, and put my hand on top of hers. She squeezed my hand and lingered with it a little and then let me go.
“I’m having a hard time right now, trying to figure out what I want from life. Did you know that when I was a kid, I knew my stuffed animals were inanimate and didn’t have thoughts but I still rotated which one I slept with every night because I didn’t want them to know I had a favorite? But I did have a favorite and it was my penguin. I wished I could sleep with the penguin every night. And somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I could do whatever I wanted but in the front of my mind, an anxiety would overtake me, and it wouldn’t allow me to sleep with the penguin every night. And on top of that, when my brother asked me to give him the penguin, I did it! I pretended that the penguin wasn’t my favorite and I just gave it to him.”
It was cute to think of little Nozlee and her stuffed penguin and her babyhood anxiety, but I wasn’t sure what the metaphor was supposed to mean.
“Is Ezra the penguin?” I asked.
“My point is that I act against my interests. That I refuse to acknowledge what I want. My therapist makes me talk about the penguin a lot but it’s not actually important, it didn’t even have a name. It’s just a good framework.”
“What is important then?” I asked. I wanted to be generous to her, but I was also deeply desperate for her to get to the point and tell me what I needed to hear, that things weren’t going to change, that uncertainty would never reach me. Miguel had decided to die and Bea had decided to leave and maybe it was unfair but I couldn’t abide Nozlee choosing to disintegrate my last safe, comfortable unit.
“Sometimes I feel so anxious and sometimes I feel so empty, and I can’t tell if either of those feelings are real. I started to take out my uncertainty on him, and it didn’t feel good.”
“Like how?” I asked.
“Like, I used to beg him to come pick me up at the airport, but now I would just prefer to get home by myself, but instead of being able to tell him calmly I snap at him like, ‘Oh suddenly you are so happy to pick me up at the airport? Where was this when I actually wanted it?’ But then when he actually did it, I felt so much love for him I thought maybe it would break me in half. And then two hours later, I’d be so annoyed with him and looking for that love and I would just feel empty.
“When I was thinking about breaking up with him, I was also thinking about how I could stay with him forever and get married, all of it.”
“Well then why didn’t you propose instead?” I asked.
Noz laughed, and it was sort of a joke, but it sort of wasn’t, and she realized that a second too late. She was so pretty when she was upset.
It wasn’t like I’d never thought about it, with Nozlee—that’s how she always showed up in my brain, a tangle of double negatives, the vagueness of “it.” A few hot nights in Brooklyn, pressed close together at Union Pool or some other straight-people shithole, I reveled in the scent of her slightly sweaty body and the gleam of her big eyes made a little glassy by whiskey and admired the ladder of her spine revealed by a backless top. I reveled in any expression of physical or emotional intimacy. But I didn’t like the idea of longing, pining for someone who wouldn’t reciprocate, who might make a gesture of sexual experimentation and openness but ultimately “settle down” with a guy. I don’t like gay pain stories, and it’s not like I never chased after a straight girl, I just never got so deep into it to actually give myself to them. In that regard, Nozlee presented a danger.
And so it was a relief to me when she and Ezra got all twitterpated when they first met, and they wrapped around each other like the pair of rattlesnakes I once saw fucking on a hike in Elysian Park. It gave me an opportunity to braid myself in with them without opening myself up to the possibility of my heart getting curb-stomped. When they got serious, I thought that braid had turned to steel. I actually had allowed myself to imagine officiating their wedding, getting seminude FaceTime calls from them during their honeymoon. I’d given them, in my mind, a straight person’s dream life with space for myself inside it.
/> Nozlee breaking up with Ezra reminded me the braid wasn’t made of steel, it was made of hair, and if you took the hair-band off, the braid would come apart. Nozlee saying she just as easily could’ve married him was like saying she’d undone the braid for no reason at all.
“That’s kind of sick, actually,” I said.
Noz scrunched her face up, confused.
“It’s twisted and a little gross to be thinking, ‘I could either marry this guy or break up with him. What should I do? I guess I’ll break his heart!’ ”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I’ve been complacent—I haven’t been allowing myself to live my fullest life, and part of that was him.”
“So you’re blaming him for holding you back? No wonder he felt so shitty after talking to you.”
“Eve, that’s not what I’m saying. I am trying to take responsibility for the fact that I want something else and that maybe it was a bad idea from the beginning, him and I,” she said. “Maybe it never should’ve started.”
“That’s a nice thought, but now he’s fucking in love with you and you’ve gotta take some responsibility for that.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“By giving him half of a real shot, then deciding to fuck off?”
“That’s not what happened. I’m trying to tell you, the relationship was always a placeholder.”
So maybe she was fucking someone else, maybe even Andrew again. I’d have to scour his social media for any evidence of her. He wouldn’t do something as obvious as post a pic, but maybe he’d tweeted something that contained a particularly Nozlee-esque turn of phrase, evidence of proximity.
“That’s a pretty rude and ruthless thing to say about your boyfriend of two years,” I said.
“God you piss me off so much sometimes,” Noz said, frustrating and whispering harshly like if she didn’t keep her voice down she’d just scream at me. “I’m one of your best friends, my feelings are important, I’m trying to communicate them to you. Please just try to understand me, I need you to understand me.”
I felt the edge of the chair dig into the back of my thighs. The flimsy presence took notice of two witches, both heated, sitting in a corner. It turned into mist, it started to congeal into the shape of its body. I saw its teeth, I saw its hungry throat, I saw its dripping tongue. The door opened as some new patron walked in and I felt it beckoning me out, out of there.
“Fuck this,” I said, as Noz tried to start talking again.
“If we stop feeding it, it will go away,” Noz said, glancing over her shoulder at the ghost.
I hopped off my chair.
“Eve, wait,” Noz said, trying to quickly stand up as well, but the barstool-style chair was too high for her to descend from elegantly, and she half tripped, stabilizing herself on the table, which shook like a little earthquake. “I have more to say to you,” she said amidst her own bodily chaos.
“Save it,” I said. “I have work, I can’t sit around all day listening to you justify.”
I left as fast as I could, squinting, fumbling to exchange my glasses for my sunglasses.
No texts yet from Ezra.
DONT TEXT BEA
Today 11:32 AM
how’s your hangover?
Today 11:59 AM
I’m not hungover. I know how to hydrate.
I had nothing at all on my phone that justified a response.
Friday, 12:15 p.m.
The new walk I was working on was in the tony hills of the Silver Lake neighborhood; in Los Angeles, the higher and more precarious, the twistier and more narrow the roads, the greater the threat of mudslide and earthquake damage, the less available street parking, the higher the average income. The new walk was part of a series about residences and public buildings across Los Angeles that used glass bricks in their construction.
Every email from James Danielson consisted entirely of a series of commands that read like the barebones instructions in a treasure-hunting game. I parked on Silver Lake Boulevard and went to the corner of Effie, like James Danielson had instructed me to do. I pulled my phone out of the black leather fanny pack I liked to wear while I walked, to read through Danielson’s message. Strangely, still nothing from Ezra.
James Danielson: “Start at the intersection of Effie Street and Silver Lake Boulevard. Don’t continue on Effie Street, take W Silver Lake Dr. north. Explore the streets to the north/west of Silver Lake Boulevard. Note any houses with glass bricks easily visible from the street. Keep a list of their addresses. Take clear, well-lit photographs. Framing and artistry is not necessary in these photographs, as they will just be used for my reference and for further architectural/historical research.”
I also ran the Instagram account for LA by Foot, as well as all the other apps and properties owned by the parent company, so framing and artistry, were, in fact, necessary. James Danielson didn’t think the Instagram was a worthwhile endeavor, but I knew 67 percent of new downloads of the LA by Foot app came from our targeted Instagram sponsorship campaign. The guys that owned the app liked to tell James Danielson he was in charge, and it felt insane sometimes, to know my job was more important but that none of the men I worked for would acknowledge it to my face. I took the scouting pictures so they’d look like the posts my friends made during their hikes in Griffith Park: expansive views of Eastside neighborhoods from above, houses nestled between patches of green; bent palm trees against bright blue skies; spindly cactus gardens, artfully manicured; ombré sunsets over Dodger Stadium.
This email was exactly the kind I liked to find in my inbox on any given morning. I liked to walk on hilly streets with good views, where I could be alone, with and inside the city. I was always so in love with Los Angeles. I turned on to W. Silver Lake Drive, and headed north, north, up into the hills.
I’ve spent hours climbing the residential hills of the Eastside of Los Angeles by foot, but still my quads burn when I ascend, and my breath gets hard and fast. My work walks usually give me the opportunity to get out of my head, to focus on the burn in my calves and thighs as I trudge up steep streets, or to go into the blank space in my mind in between what I see and how I’m feeling about it—there is a gap there I can inhabit, where nothing bad can reach me. I worked on dismissing invasive thoughts of Noz’s quivery face and the way she rushed after me when I left the coffee shop. She was reaching out for me, I was reaching away from her, and I didn’t want to think about it, and I didn’t have to. I sucked in a hot breath hard through my mouth and tried hard to forget about her. The sun was bright and my steps were heavy and I almost, almost succeeded.
I wound up a few of the lower streets, houses still small, or poorly maintained, or cracked at the foundation, or divided into apartment units, their sidewalk gates adorned with misshapen metal mailboxes.
When I hit a flat expanse of street, I stopped to catch my breath and stepped into a shadowed patch of the street. Under a fresh-flowered lavender jacaranda tree, I looked at my phone, to see if anything had happened on there.
12:27 PM DONT TEXT BEA
how’s your hangover?
Today 11:59 AM
I’m not hungover. I know how to hydrate.
Today 12:16 PM
You aren’t making this breakup easy.
Bea and I had split a few weeks ago, an inevitable parting; we’d begun dating right after Miggy’s funeral, in a heady rush, a very lesbionic nesting. The hot early times lasted really super long, almost the full year, before devolving quickly and dramatically into a series of huge fights, during which she dissociated from what was happening and I stormed out dramatically, pulling my car precariously out of the narrow driveway and halfway into downtown Echo Park before I had any idea where I was going. That is to say, when things got tough we ran away from each other. We were still running away from each other,
further and further away with each late-night u up?, with each ill-advised post-breakup after-midnight hookup. Bea was probably the hottest person I’d ever dated and it was hard for me to reconcile the ugliness I wanted to pile onto her with the beauty of her body, so round and strong. And so, I fought with her and I fucked her and didn’t stay away from her even when it hurt.
I sent Bea a screenshot of a few texts she sent last week that claimed, even with my pettiness and quick temper with her, she’d rise above and be compassionate and generous.
DONT TEXT BEA
Today 12:29 PM
It’s like you’re not even trying.
what do you want me to do?
Be less mean
Stop hitting me up in the middle of the night.
you hit me up in the middle of the day all the time
you ask me my opinions on, fucking, like, movies! casual shit! like we’re still friends!! and, what, ur surprised that i think its okay to hit you up??
U UP? Page 5
