I imagined the towns were filled with people like me— lonely people who wanted to fly away, who wanted more from life than a dreary existence of one-stop shopping, but either didn't know what that meant, or didn't have the guts to go out and find it.
Doug Blackman had blamed my malaise, in part, on the homogenization of America.
“It's destroying our culture, it's destroying our individuality, and it makes us feel dead inside,” he told me that night in Cleveland. “But we just keep letting it happen. And we don't think about it because thinking hurts too much.”
I asked Doug if we could talk about music and he got even more wound up.
“I am talking about music,” he said. “Popular music is a microcosm of the culture, Eliza. It reflects the mentality of the population. Tell me, when was the last time you heard a truly extraordinary new artist on the radio?”
Doug's impassioned sermon meant one of two things to me—either the mentality of the population was soulless, or its level of consciousness was on par with your average thirteen-year-old Wal-Mart rat.
I never did relax on the bus, and when it pulled in to Port Authority in Manhattan, an intimidating thought occurred to me: in a city of roughly eight million people, I really only knew two—Michael and Vera, who had moved to Manhattan two and a half years earlier, after Michael decided to give up his nascent career as a graphic artist to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a rock star.
It had taken a lot of urging to get Michael to go. He'd been hesitant to leave me. But even Susan Cohen, the therapist I'd been seeing since my paltry suicide attempt at sixteen, thought it was a good idea for Michael to loosen the reigns. And I was okay when Michael left. I was okay until Adam ran off to Oregon with the girl who made us caramel macchiatos, and my head began to unravel like a ball of yarn tumbling down a staircase.
Despite struggling financially, Michael seemed happy in New York. He was playing guitar for a fledgling band called Bananafish and working part time as a waiter in a famous SoHo restaurant called Balthazar. He and Vera had been living on the Lower East Side, in a small two-bedroom apartment with a guy named Paul Hudson, Bananafish's lead singer and songwriter, but they had just relocated to a place of their own in a more affordable Brooklyn neighborhood, which allowed me to become the new tenant in their old room.
I exited the bus, lugging my overstuffed backpack across my shoulder, and the muggy July heat felt like a plastic bag wrapped around my head. I followed the signs to the subway, where everything was covered in a thin layer of grime and the pungent odor of pee and garbage permeated the air.
New York was not altogether foreign to me. Michael, Vera, and I had visited the city dozens of times as teenagers, when Michael would tell our Aunt Karen we were going on field trips with our school and we'd drive to Manhattan instead. At night we'd sleep in the car; during the day Michael would browse guitar shops and record stores while Vera—my friend before she became Michael's girlfriend— and I trudged around downtown looking for rock stars to stalk.
It was on those trips that I learned to respect and love the shortcomings of the city as one might respect and love a scar on the body of a loved one, especially the dingy East Village and Lower East Side neighborhoods where Vera and I used to loiter outside CBGB, well past the club's heyday, affecting British accents and claiming we were related to Joe Strummer so that all the punk rock boys would think we were cool.
“This is what I want to do with my life,” I had decided back then.
“What?” Vera asked. “Sit on a dirty sidewalk and make out with juvenile delinquents?”
“No. Be a part of this. This city. This life. This music.”
“Aim high,” Vera said.
I'd squandered countless hours of my youth daydreaming about how happy I'd be if only I lived in Manhattan, but the realization that the dream of someday had just become now felt like crossing a bridge and then watching the bridge burn behind me. I could never go back. This was change and change was supposed to be good. But in my past, change and heartbreak were analogous, and as I made my way to the train I wasn't sure which one I was feeling.
One thing I never got a grip on during any prior visit to New York was how to navigate the subway. Michael is two years older than me. This made him the self-proclaimed leader. And I have what he calls an “inadequate sense of direction,” which is why he'd given me explicit directions from the bus to the subway to the apartment on Ludlow, making me repeat them three times over the phone the day before.
“Michael, I'm twenty-six. Stop treating me like a child.”
I made it from Port Authority to the A train without complication, which took me downtown to the West Fourth station. I was then supposed to transfer to the F and get off at Second Avenue. Michael had to work until midnight, and Vera was going to try to meet me at West Fourth, but to support herself and her husband's musical aspirations, she worked for a nonprofit cancer research organization that was having a fund-raising event at the Waldorf-Astoria and wasn't sure she'd get out in time.
“If you don't see me in the subway,” she said, “I'll meet you at the apartment.”
In the West Fourth Street station, Vera was nowhere in sight, and I had an anxious, fizzy feeling in my stomach while I waited for the train. But I could feel the energy of the city in the vibrations coming off the tracks, and the diversity of the faces I saw around me made me feel so alive, so much a part of something kinetic, I swore I could taste it like metallic electricity on my tongue.
The two most interesting people I noticed were waiting on the opposite side of the platform—an old man with a shaker of salt and a tomato he was eating like an apple, and another guy I guessed to be in his late twenties, fidgeting near the steps.
I watched the guy's head bob up and down while his leg bounced along with it, keeping the beat to a song only he could hear. His dark, stringy hair hung limp in his face, he had a strong Roman nose, and he was overdressed in an ill-fitted secondhand suit the color of split-pea soup.
I instantly thought the guy was cute, in that gaunt, never-sees-the-light-of-day, New York street urchin kind of way. And he never stood still for a second. From across the tracks I read his expression as I have everything on my side except destiny, only his expression clearly hadn't informed his head or heart yet.
The guy looked over and caught me staring, and once his eyes met mine they never deviated. He took several cautious steps forward, stopping abruptly at the thick yellow line you weren't supposed to cross. His arms dangled like a puppet and he seemed to skim the ground when he walked, as if suspended over the edge of the world by a hundred invisible strings.
I heard the train approaching, and the air that blew through the passageway was a fleeting reprieve from the heat. The guy in the green suit looked down into the tunnel, and then back at me with his head tipped to the left.
He eyed my backpack suspiciously and, in a low shout, said, “What's your name?”
His voice caught me by surprise. It was a confident voice pretending to be shy.
“What's your name?” he said again.
I remained mute, figuring it was dangerous to give personal information to a stranger in the subway. But even if he was a mugger, he was too far away to attack me. And let's not forget, he was cute. This was a new life. A new me. The chance to at least pretend to be the person I wanted to be. And I was never going to get over Adam if I didn't start paying attention to cute strangers.
“Come on,” the guy said. “Hurry.”
“Eliza,” I finally replied.
The guy smiled, and his face lit up radiantly, as if someone had poured gasoline on a pilot light inside his mind. Then he looked me up and down in a way that made me feel naked.
The train was seconds away from untying the curious knot that joined the two of us. “Eliza,” the guy said, pointing at the approaching headlights, raising his voice. “Do not get on that train.”
Then the train pulled in and I couldn't see him anymore. The new me was b
egging my legs not to move, but apparently the old me was still in charge of my motor functions because I stepped through the doors of the subway car, and the electricity that had been on my tongue surged down into my chest like a shot of adrenaline to the heart as the train began to pull me away.
Crossing the car, I looked out the window, hoping to catch one last glimpse of the guy in the green suit. He was still looking at me, smiling, and shaking his head.
I ended up on the wrong train. Turns out I'd been standing on the wrong side of the station and had been on my way uptown until I deciphered the word Harlem coming through the train's distorted loudspeaker.
It was after eight when I finally found my way to Second Avenue, walked the last few blocks down Houston Street, and then spotted the landmark telling me I had almost arrived at my destination—the Wheel of Fortune-like letterbox sign of Katz's deli on the corner of Houston and Ludlow.
From Katz's, I could see Vera standing halfway down the block. Vera had a cell phone to her ear, her lips were moving like mad, there was a tote bag over her shoulder, and she was wearing a plaid, below-the-knee wool skirt with socks and sneakers. Vera was the voice of reason in my life, but she dressed like a crazy Russian librarian, even when it was ninety degrees outside.
“Yay. You're here,” she said when she saw me coming down the sidewalk.
Vera was a cute, brainy girl with dark hair and bright green eyes speckled with amethyst, though when she had her glasses on, which was almost always, it was hard to notice this feature.
She threw her arms around me. I hadn't seen her in months and her presence was a relief.
“Sorry I'm late,” I said. “Have you been waiting long?”
She pulled a set of keys from her tote and shook her head. “I just got out of work. I left a message for your new roommate to meet you in the West Fourth Street station, but he has a bizarre subway phobia and rarely ventures underground. He never called me back.”
Vera hugged me again and I could tell something was off. She'd squeezed too hard, and when she pulled back her chest looked inflated, as if she'd taken a deep breath and forgot to let it out.
“What's wrong?” I said.
“Long day.”
It was a typical Vera answer. She was a whiz whenever I was in trouble—she'd wasted a week of her vacation time to come home and stay with me after Adam left—but she didn't like to burden anyone with her own problems.
“I don't believe you.”
“You just got here, Eliza. Let's enjoy the moment.”
She nodded up at the building, which was narrow, made of dirty beige bricks, had a four-tiered fire escape running down its face, and housed a tattoo parlor called Daredevil on its ground floor. “What do you think?”
“It looks like a tenement,” I said.
Unlocking the door, Vera led me up an endless number of stairs. I could hear a television blaring in one of the second-floor apartments, and the whole place reeked of fried fish.
The hallways were dark and narrow, and all the doors were gray, except for the door of the corner apartment on the fourth floor, which was a deep scarlet color. “Paul painted ours,” Vera said. “He wanted it to stand out. He also lost our security deposit.”
It was an unusual paint job, as if someone had taken a bucket of color and, instead of brushing it on, had poured it and let it drip in thick lines from the top down. The door looked like it was bleeding.
Vera walked in first, turned on the light, and I followed. I was sure that if I spit from the entryway I could hit the back wall. The kitchen was the size of the trunk of a small car, and the bathroom had grimy tile that only went halfway up the wall and looked like it had been stolen from the subway.
“Nice, huh?” Vera said.
It was a dump. Possibly the worst apartment I'd ever seen. But it was all I could afford, and it was New York. I wasn't going to complain. Except to note that for two hundred dollars a month less, Adam and I had lived in a place with a dishwasher and a walk-in closet.
There was a cubicle to the left of the bathroom. I peeked my head in and Vera said, “That's Paul's disaster zone.” A mattress rested on the floor, along with piles of books, tapes, and CDs stacked neatly in rows. But clothes were strewn all over, covering every inch of ground like a thick carpet of cotton and denim. An acoustic and an electric guitar sat on stands in the corner next to two milk crates. One crate had a small four-track recorder on top of it; the other held a plant that had seen better days.
The room's solitary window was small, and the only view it afforded was a brick wall that prohibited daylight from ever dawning on the space. There was an electric fan, a prehistoric laptop computer, and a dirty ashtray next to the bed.
“Paul won't bother you,” Vera said. “He works during the day and he's at the rehearsal space most nights. Sometimes he sleeps there. You'll hardly ever see him.”
All I knew about Paul was what Vera had already told me: “He's talented as hell. But he can be pretty…um…erratic.”
“Is he cute?” I asked her.
“Cute? If you like the dysfunctional lunatic, male-slut vibe, sure.”
I'd missed Vera. She had a way of delivering lines with a perfect ratio of sarcasm, syllable-stressing, and pausing that made everything she said sound either important or funny. And under different circumstances I'm sure I would have found Vera's description of Paul Hudson intriguing. Instead I took it as a warning sign. I didn't need to have my heart ripped out of my chest, pulverized, and then stepped on twice in one year.
The last room on the right was mine. It contained an old wooden bed, a lamp, a small bookcase, the three large boxes I'd mailed there earlier in the week representing all I had in life, a roach motel in the corner that, to sustain my composure I chose not to question, and, in what appeared to be a strange interior decorating choice, a large crucifix hanging on the wall across from the bed, complete with a bloody crown of thorns and bas-relief nails protruding from Christ's palms.
“That was here when we moved in,” Vera said. “We thought it was weird and left it up. Feel free to toss it if you want.”
I took a closer look. Jesus had piercing blue eyes, dark hair that hung in a flawless mess, his body was emaciated and taut, his hands and feet dripped with blood, and nothing but a gauzy loincloth hid what looked like a nice package underneath.
“Sexy,” I said. “He looks like a rock star.”
“Mother-of-Pearl,” Vera sighed.
The room's saving grace was its window, and the tiny bench in front of the window, which was covered with an afghan I recognized as one of my Aunt Karen's creations.
After our parents died, Michael and I had moved in with our Aunt Karen—a history teacher with orange hair, skin that smelled like baby powder, and a penchant for knitting. She was a good-but-detached woman, more school marm than loved one. We stayed with her for two years—until Michael turned eighteen, and he and I relocated to an apartment with a dozen afghans in tow.
Aunt Karen stored her yarn in a cedar closet, and no matter how many times we cleaned the afghans they always smelled like mothballs. The smell of mothballs reminds me of death.
Outside the window I could see the iron bars of the fire escape. Across the street there was a crowded lounge, a small French restaurant, an organic market, and a thrift store called Las Venus.
“This room gets the best light,” Vera said. She was showing me how to open the window when we heard what sounded like hammering on the stairs.
“Here comes Paul,” she said. “You'll always know when he's on his way up because he never walks the steps, he leaps them.”
Paul came in yelling, “Anyone home?”
“In here,” Vera said.
My back was to the door when I heard a voice say, “I told you not to get on that goddamn train.”
I turned around. The guy in the green suit was standing in front of me.
“Have a nice trip to Harlem?” he said.
I had to summon all my determinat
ion to hold his gaze. At the station, I'd been too far away to get a good look at his eyes. They were two crescent moons, small and lucent, the color of soft, perfectly faded denim.
Vera said, “Eliza, this is Paul Hudson. Paul, Eliza.”
” We sort of met already,” Paul said. “After forcing myself underground, I tried to tell her she was going the wrong way —but she didn't listen.”
Paul Hudson was grinning at me. The same combustible grin he'd flashed in the station. He wasn't what I would call handsome, at least not conventionally. His face, when he wasn't smiling, had a pensive, ominous cast to it, but as soon as he grinned the severity melted into an airy radiance that made me want to touch his chest and feel his heartbeat.
“You guys eat yet?” he said. “I brought home one of those frozen pizza dough things.”
He took off his jacket and added it to his bedroom floor. He had the most amazing tattoo I'd ever seen on the inside of his left forearm. It was a butterfly colored the deepest shades of autumn leaves, as if it were on fire. The insect's legs were disproportionately long, and holding fast to one of them was the figure of a scantily clothed creature that bore a striking, if not somewhat cherubic resemblance to Paul himself.
“I have to go,” Vera said as Paul wandered into the kitchen. Then she turned to me. “Are you going to be all right?”
I nodded, but I felt dizzy when I thought about being alone with the strange stranger whistling “Kashmir” in the other room.
“What about you?” I asked Vera. “Everything okay?”
She gave me a scarcely discernible nod. “I'm really glad you're here.”
Before Vera left the apartment, I heard her stop in front of Paul and say, “Remember what Michael said: Keep your hands to yourself.”
I was arranging my clothes in garment-specific piles on the bookshelves when, through the corner of my eye, I saw Paul peek his head into my room and watch me for a good thirty seconds before he asked me if I was hungry.
“No. Thanks, though.”