apartment that I shared with three other guys in Boston looked like an enlarged version of my room when I was a kid, except that there was a stove and sink and a refrigerator in one corner. The refrigerator was broken but none of us noticed until someone moving into our building bumped their head coming up the stairway and we offered them some ice for their head, and found that we had none, but Dina’s apartment was nice. It was like a real house. It was clean and it looked like an apartment on a TV show. There was a dish drainer by the sink and it had clean dishes drying in it. The sink was empty. There were real pictures on the walls, not posters but real pictures. There was a couch and a coffee table and there was a remote on the coffee table and some fanned out magazines and the remote was clean and it worked. There were draperies. No video games. No computer.
She hung up my coat and looked into the refrigerator. No bread. There was cottage cheese and coffee and there was a bottle of wine. Dina poured herself a third of a glass of wine from the previously opened bottle in the refrigerator, and asked as if wanted some. I said no. She was turned away from me for a moment and when she turned toward me I saw the side of her face that didn’t have the scar, and the light from the kitchen was behind her and she looked beautiful for a moment, with the light behind her hair. She looked like she did the first day of ninth grade when she walked into home room after the first summer that we hadn’t seen each other for the whole summer, because she went to stay with her aunt when her parents got divorced. She walked into class that day like she was in slow motion. She was tan. Her hair was long, with red streaks, like a soft brown sea at sunset. She sat right in front of me and I acted like I was tired and putting my head down on my desk, but I just wanted to bury myself in that hair. It smelled like a whole field of flowers.
She clicked on the TV and in five minutes she was asleep with her head on my shoulder. I stayed like that till my neck got stiff and I had to move and it woke her up. I pretended I had fallen asleep too. She kissed me, hugged me, said something like ‘you came just in time,’ and wove her way to the bedroom and shut the door. It was a little cool in the apartment so I put on my jacket and fell back down on the couch and stared at the ceiling. I guess I slept too much on the train 'cause I think I stayed up all night. I didn’t think I could have fallen asleep anyway because you could hear the noise of the street traffic like you were standing on the corner even though we were at least three floors up. I waited until I heard her turn on the shower the next morning, and went to the kitchen and tried to make coffee but I didn’t realize that the machine wasn’t plugged in and water was leaking from somewhere. When Dina came out of the bedroom she looked upset and a little mad and didn’t say much. She plugged in the coffee machine and stared at it until it hissed.
"You used too much water" she said, but matter-of-factly, not mad at me.
The coffee looked like tea. She stared into the sink for about half a minute and then smiled a little.
“So, you ready?"
I couldn’t remember what it was I was supposed to be ready for, but she seemed a little desperate so I just said ‘Sure.’
Dina wore jeans and a pink cardigan sweater and now, in the daylight, without her coat on, she looked thin but shapely. We went down the block to the subway. She reached her hand into her pocket and used her pass and pushed me through ahead of her like I was a little kid. The train was fast and the pillars rushing by made me dizzy. It smelled slightly of urine.
The lab was a small room in a dull grey building on the ninth floor and, even though it was a big building, there were only two doors to choose from when we got off the elevator. It smelled strange; Kind of sweet and mildewed at the same time, like moldy gelatin. Dina handed the technician a prescription and a small woman, wearing some kind of filter mask, assembled some glass tubes and sat Dina down in a chair with a little table attached, like a kid’s school desk. Without speaking she wrapped a thick rubber band around Dina’s arm and started to swab her arm with alcohol. At the smell of the alcohol and writhing of the blue veins on her white arm I turned to leave the room but she instantly jolted in her chair and almost knocked over the glass tubes.
“Hey, you promised," and she held her other hand towards me. I crawled back and took her hand with a sense of purpose and dread that shocked me a little (it was the sense of purpose that shocked me, not the dread), just as the technician sunk the needle into a big blue worm of a vein in the crook of Dina’s arm. I was okay until a drop of the blood trickled down from the puncture and I had to turn away and hold down the bile that was rising in my throat.
"Call Thursday for results."
That’s all that the small woman said before she put a bandage over the cotton ball. We left.
Dina left early on Tuesday and it rained the whole day so I stayed in. I tried to go out for a little while but my sneakers were getting soaked and I didn’t have another pair so I went back. I forgot about the locked front door and I had to wait until someone else went in and I found a piece of cardboard to kick into the doorway for next time. I didn’t have a key to Dina’s yet so I. had to leave the door unlocked, but I forgot her exact floor, so I had to try the doors at her end of the hallway on three or four floors before I found it. Dina got home late and went right to her room.
She left early again Wednesday morning. It was a nice day on Wednesday and I went out and found an ATM and took the last $86 out of my account and pawned my watch. I’d never been in a pawnshop; it was a sad place, like a jail for unwanted stuff. They gave me a ticket to buy my watch back. I looked around at all the stuff hanging from the walls and I looked at the other watches and jewelry in the cases, there was a lot of jewelry, and lot of guitars, electric guitars. I tried to imagine who might have left them. In one dusty counter there were old-fashioned pocket watches that you had to open to see the watch face. They had inscriptions in them like "To Grandpa, with Love, Flora", and "My everlasting Love, Your Tutu!"
There was one that looked new that said ‘till death do us part."
I dropped the pawn ticket on the street as soon as I walked out the door. If they didn’t get their watches back, then it certainly wasn’t right for me to get mine, When I got home it was only about three o’clock, and Dina was already home. There were two bags of groceries on the kitchen table and Dina was busy doing something with a can opener.
"Hey, how was your day?" She said it like there was nothing unusual about her being home in the middle of the day, when the last two days she was out by six and wasn’t home till 10:30 or 11:00 at night. She smiled robotically but she looked like she was going to burst out in tears right through her smile, or maybe I was going to cry.
"They let us out early because it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow. You’ll get to meet Simon."
Thanksgiving. I’d forgotten about Thanksgiving. It was unusually warm on that rainy day and I’d lost track of the seasons. I thought about calling my parents. The apartment started to smell really good and I was starving 'cause all I ate in the past few days were hot dogs from the sidewalk vendors. Dina finished in the kitchen and beckoned me out to the couch and we watched some old black and white movie that was on because it was Thanksgiving tomorrow. Dina fell asleep on my shoulder again and the smell of the shampoo in her hair with food cooking in the apartment almost made me happy. It made me think a little about us when we were kids, and I was ashamed. She was wearing a Danskin top and I could see the cleft between her breasts and I imagined it was the chute on one of those rides at the water parks, and I was sliding down it like I did once when I was a kid.
Thanksgiving morning was sunny and it was even warmer than the day before. In the morning we walked uptown to Central Park and on the way Dina made me a key to the apartment. She asked me if I was going to get a job, and was I still a musician, and would I like her to get me a job where she worked. They always needed more people in the mailrooms. I didn’t have to answer much as she just kept on chattering and pointing things out and she seemed very happy. She took my arm in hers the way marri
ed people do when they get older, and she held it there almost the whole time we were walking. I saw a girl that looked exactly like Dori from far away and a lump jumped up in my throat. I remembered that I’d hid my violin in Dori’s closet so that I’d have a reason to call her. I’d learned that from TV. We passed a music store on the way home and Dina asked to pretend I was going to buy a violin so that I could play for her. My own violin, which was currently hiding under some loose clothes in one of Dori’s closets, was a good instrument. It cost about $4000 when I bought 4 years ago and was probably worth a lot more now. The one that was handed to me in the music store was about $400 and was a decent student violin. The bow was pathetic and had too much rosin on it, but Dina couldn’t tell.
I played a couple of minutes of a sad adagio, and then a couple of minutes of the following allegro, and the guy behind the counter suddenly perked up and was reaching for a better violin. I played a little more on the better one and with a better bow with silver fittings and I wasn’t really paying attention to Dina. I was polite and pretended I might be interested and took the shop owners card and Dina told him I might