Without thinking, I reached out and took hold of her arm, and was immediately struck by how fragile it seemed. Then I ran my finger across the scar—it felt exactly like the hem on a pair of the boot-cut jeans I inventoried last Tuesday.
I knew all about the scar—Michael told me the whole story, how he'd found her bleeding on their bathroom floor when she was like, sixteen or something.
Eliza pulled her hand away and tucked it under her pillow. “I'm tired,” she said. “Would you mind going to your room?”
Okay, so this is what I did next: I reached over and lifted a lock of her hair, one that had fallen across her eye. I moved it back off of her face, barely touching her skin, and my finger grazed the tiny pearl in her ear. I think we were having a moment but I'm not sure. By then I'd sort of lost myself in her face. No kidding, if you put me in a room with Eliza and a hundred beautiful girls, Eliza would be the one I'd walk over to. There's something magnetic about her. And sad. And she does this thing when she talks—she dips her chin and raises her eyes and looks right into you. It's a gift, really. I think she could make whoever she's talking to feel like the only person in the room— the only person in the universe, even. But then it switches— when she's not looking at you it's like her mind is in another world, miles away, and her dark, falcon eyes point upward, like she's in some kind of mesmerized state of flirtation with the sky.
Did I mention how much I wanted to kiss her? I wanted to kiss her lips and her eyelids and the curve in what I'm going to call “the transition area” where her hip flows into her waist. And my desire wasn't just confined to my dick. She made my whole goddamn body taut, like some invisible energy force was pulling me up by the skin.
I inched closer to her and she goes: “Don't even think about it.”
I was starting to get the feeling she was trying not to like me, so I told her this story about how, when I was a kid, my mom made clam chowder for dinner one night. I think it was my birthday or something, and Mom thought it was a big deal to serve clam chowder but I refused to eat it. I told her I didn't like clams and she said, “You've never tasted a clam. How do you know you don't like them?” She said I had to taste it. If I didn't like it, she promised she'd make me a peanut butter sandwich, but I had to take at least one spoonful of the clam chowder first.
I paused to make sure Eliza was still listening. Then I said, “Needless to say, I didn't have peanut butter for dinner that night.”
“That's a touching anecdote,” Eliza said. “But I'm allergic to shellfish.”
I told her she was missing the point and she started jabbering on about how she knew I had a girlfriend named Avril but was sleeping with this Beth chick, not to mention I was her brother's friend, not to mention the last thing she needed was to get involved with a guy like me, yada, yada, yada, I swear I thought she was going to start crying, and normally that would have sent me hauling ass in the other direction, but you know what? I had a bizarre urge to put my arms around her and hold her until she fell asleep.
Remember this moment, my friend the tape recorder. Lying next to Eliza, I had the feeling I'd just found something I didn't even know I'd lost. We hovered above the moment like two rain clouds, until I said: “Don't swear off all fruit just because you ate one bad apple.”
She said, “Please go to your room.”
I said, “If I go, I'm taking the fan with me.”
She said, “Take the stupid fan.”
I halted in front of the fan on my way out the door. I think I even touched the cord. But I left the room without it.
Over.
Prior to moving to New York, I had a lot of silly fantasies about what it was going to be like. Vera and I would hang out at quaint cafes by day, discussing life and how to live it; at night there would be cool lounges where she and Michael and I would see live music. But Michael and Vera were busy, and so was I. We hardly saw each other that first week.
And I couldn't get Paul out of my head. I kept thinking about what he'd told me the night he'd wandered into my room—about how he'd walked away from what might have been his only shot at a record deal because he didn't want to let my brother and the rest of the band down. There was a lot more to him, I guessed, than the flippant pretext and cocky-bastard smile he presented to the world.
But it was as though Paul didn't even live on Ludlow Street. More often than not, I had the place to myself and I didn't like it. I didn't like waking up and seeing the door to his room screaming-wide open, his bed in complete disarray but untouched from the day before. It made me feel like I was missing something.
Days went by before Paul ended our incommunicado, using a scrap of paper he stuck to my door while I was out running one morning, affixing it to the wood with a piece of gum.
Why didn't you come to the show on Thursday?
I get off work at 6 tonight. Meet me here. I've been thinking about you.
Potentially yours, WP Hudson.
I spent the entire morning obsessing over every word of that note. I wanted to know what “I've been thinking about you” literally meant. Thinking about me how? Did it mean thinking: “I wonder how she is” or “I wonder if she likes Pink Floyd” or “I wonder if she's good in bed” or what? There were too many interpretations. And then the “potentially yours” sign off. How was I supposed to decode that?
At any rate, I'd missed Bananafish at Rings of Saturn the week before because I was busy trying to put the finishing touches on my panning of the 66 show in the hopes of winning the respect of Lucy Enfield, only to have Lucy turn around and assign me the job of fact-checking a feature on a Brazilian fashion model, while Corbin, the guy in the cubicle beside me, got to interview Wayne Coyne.
I did my best to maintain the delusion that it wasn't excruciating to be employed by the nation's paramount music publication and have to research an article about a girl who was quoted as saying: “It's like, such a drag when singers whine about the world. I just want to say to them, you know, like, shut up and dance.”
“I hate my boss,” I vented to Vera over lunch in Bryant Park the day Paul left me the note. “Because of her, all my coworkers think I'm a groupie.”
We were sitting on a bench, and Vera scooted a few inches away so she could turn and face me. She split the cookie she was eating in half and gave me a piece. “Why do your coworkers think you're a groupie?”
“My boss told them I slept with Doug to get the job.”
The tragedy of the situation escaped Vera. All she said was, “I love how you're on a first-name basis with Doug Blackman.”
I let it go. The November deadline was of supreme importance and I only had thirty minutes before I had to go back to work. “Don't make Michael quit the band.”
Vera's breath blew a piece of hair off her face. “That's not fair, Eliza. I'm twenty-seven. If I don't start school soon, I'll be forty by the time I graduate.”
“Marriage is about compromise,” I said stupidly.
“Right. Except notice I'm the only one compromising,” she sighed. “Do you know that almost every cent Michael makes at the restaurant goes into the band? We're living paycheck to paycheck. My paycheck. I can't do it anymore.”
I couldn't argue with her. The situation was unfortunate for all involved. But someone had to feign hope and I decided that someone would be me. “I have a feeling things are going to start happening for Bananafish.”
I crushed up my piece of cookie, tossed the crumbs onto the ground, and half a dozen pigeons swarmed the bench.
“Eliza,” Vera said. “If a rat scurried up to you right now, would you feed it?”
“No.”
“Pigeons are rats with wings.”
I wished she wouldn't have said that. I had enough to worry about and didn't need to add flying rats to the list.
Vera gazed over her shoulder at the New York Public Library. “I applied to Columbia,” she said. “If I get in, I'll start in January. If the band isn't signed by then, Michael understands he has to quit.” She look
ed directly at me. “This is what I want.”
I had to laugh. The phrase what I want struck me. It contains so much entitlement, so many complications, but encompasses only what a person doesn't have.
It made me ponder what I wanted. I fingered the note in my pocket and felt emptiness in the pit of my stomach—like I hadn't eaten for three years. Then I thought about Adam. I thought about all the things I'd wanted from him, things I knew he never could've given me, and I whittled all of them down to one juvenile, esoteric wish.
“A song,” I said aloud.
“What?”
“The whole time Adam and I were together, he never wrote one song for me.”
Vera looked like she was trying to think of an appropriate response to such a stupid desire. “He was a drummer. You hate it when drummers sing.”
This is true. I say, down with the Romantics, Don Henley, Phil Collins! Down with songs like “Yellow Submarine” and “Love Stinks.” Drummers have enough to do behind their equipment. Half the time nobody can see them. And fans should be able to make eye contact with singers. It's sexier that way. But Vera was missing the point.
“I'd be a sucker for a guy who wrote me a song,” I said. “Like Beth or Rosanna or Sara. Or Sharona. Is that too much to ask? To be somebody's Sharona?”
“Aim high,” Vera said.
I hadn't left the office before eight all week, but my conversation with Vera had left me feeling heavy, and I didn't want to spend all evening alone in the apartment, stuck under the burden that was my thousand-pound heart.
I snuck out of work early, went home, and had just gotten dressed when I heard Paul bounding up the stairs. A second later he was in my doorway.
“You're here.” He grinned. “Finally.”
“I'm here? That's funny considering your bed hasn't been slept in for days.”
Paul let out a laugh. “Oh, Eliza. Sweet Eliza. You do like me, don't you?”
Maybe I'm weak for music men. Maybe I'm weak, period. But I couldn't deny I was charmed by his arrogant, foolish guise. And since I hadn't been charmed by anyone in a long time, I couldn't just write that off.
Paul looked weird, collegiate. It took me a few seconds to figure out why. He was dressed, head to toe, in Gap clothes.
“I know,” he said. “Let me change and then we'll go.”
He reappeared in the hall a minute later, bright as a sunbeam, wearing the pants to his green suit and a yellow T-shirt that said: My Jive Limo ~ A ride you'll never forget.
” We match,” he said, pointing first at his shirt and then at my chest.
“Excuse me?”
“Your bra,” he said, which he could see through my dress. “Yellow. Nice.”
I called him a bastard and he laughed with a sense of accomplishment, as if he'd been trying to get me to insult him. “Do you like to gamble?” he asked, furiously opening and closing drawers in the kitchen, a guitar pick sticking out the side of his mouth.
“Why?”
“Don't be so suspicious. Just answer the goddamn question.”
“I've never really—”
“Score!” he said, discovering a five-dollar bill under a mess of pens, rubber bands, and plastic cutlery.
As soon as we were on the street, Paul prodded me to walk faster. “Kick it in the ass or we'll miss the first game.”
“Why don't we take the subway?”
He came to a smashing halt in the middle of the sidewalk. “Subway?” he said, as if I'd invited him to walk through the gates of hell. “I don't ride anything that goes underground. I'll be subterranean enough when I'm dead.”
Witnessing Paul exhibit vulnerability, even superciliously, also made me want to touch his chest. I'd never had the urge to touch anybody's chest, but Paul was so animated and energetic, I imagined a metrical, pumping drum pounding in place of a heartbeat, and I wanted to feel the rhythm. I wanted to merge with it. I wanted to be it.
“That's the gayest thing I've ever heard,” I said.
He laughed. “Warning: if you insult my heterosexual eminence one more time, I'm going to have to throw you down in the middle of the street and prove myself.”
I almost said it again, just to test him.
Six months is a long time.
It was a thousand degrees outside.
“A-ha,” Paul said. “Now I know how to shut you up.”
In silence, we continued west halfway across town, eventually arriving at the door of a nondescript building with a green awning that said St. Vrain Senior Center.
“You said we were gambling.”
” We are.”
“This looks like a home for old people.”
“What, old people can't gamble?”
“They better have air-conditioning.”
Paul took me by the elbow and dragged me through the door, down a long hallway, and into a sad, spacious rec room with a low ceiling, a drab linoleum floor, and—thank the Lord—air-conditioning. The sour smell of urine and powdered mashed potatoes hung in the air.
A fleshy, middle-aged woman named Mary Lou waved at Paul. She called him Willie and told him to sit at table five. “Patty asked if you were coming,” Mary Lou said. “She claims she never wins when you're not here.”
“Patty is the most competitive player in this place,” Mary Lou told me, her nose scrunching into a snout. “And she has a little crush on Willie.”
Must be an infectious disease, I mused, following Paul to a desk where another overweight woman sat with a box of Hello, My Name Is tags.
Paul picked up a black marker, wrote WILLIE in big, robotic letters, and stuck it on his shirt.
“What's with the name?”
“My alias,” he whispered. “Don't blow my cover. I have a reputation to uphold. These people think I'm a goddamn kindergarten teacher.”
I laughed. “Right. Because you look so much like a kindergarten teacher.”
He filled out another tag and placed it above my heart, ostensibly trying to avoid making contact with anywhere I might construe as out-of-bounds. I kept my eyes locked on his as he pressed the paper into my chest, at which point I experienced a rush of blood to the inguinal region of my body.
“What?” he said, smirking.
“Nothing.”
There were at least a dozen people at all ten tables. Paul and I approached number five and a frail woman with white hair, a ghoulish smile, and lines that ran down her face like the Manhattan bus map said, “Roger, move over. Willie likes to sit by me.”
Roger, a toothless man who looked as old as a dinosaur, offered up his chair. “There's my girl,” Paul said, giving Patty a big smooch on the cheek.
I looked around the room and noticed a number of people under the age of thirty. Some, I guessed, were family members. Others were obviously volunteers.
“Do you come here a lot?” I asked Paul.
“Once a month or so. I started coming after I moved to the city because someone told me volunteers got free meals.”
Patty had four cards going at one time and never missed a beat. During the first game she was a B-17 away from BINGO and cursed out loud when an African American woman at table eight beat her.
“Betty has Alzheimer's. And she cheats,” Patty said. “Willie, check her card.”
A few minutes into the third game, Patty tugged on Paul's arm and yelled, “Tell Luka to pay attention.”
Paul cleared his throat, prompting me to look at my name tag. “Very funny,” I said. Then I inspected my card, stood up and shouted “BINGO!” as if I'd just hit the million-dollar jackpot at Caesar's.
Initially, I interpreted my win as a fortuitous event, but when I tried to claim my prize, Paul informed me that volunteers were not allowed to profit from the game. Not economically, anyway. Mary Lou did give me a keychain, and a calendar filled with photos of Weimaraner dogs all dressed up in silly outfits.
We left Bingo a little before dusk. Paul hustled me back to the Lower East Side where, if we hurried, he promised a spectacu
lar urban sunset on the roof of the Pack-It-Away Mini Storage building that housed Bananafish's rehearsal space.
By the time we got there it was nearly dark, but the night was warm and clear, and we could see the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Manhattan Bridge. Paul quizzed me on what I was looking at and I scored a dismal one out of three. I got the Statue of Liberty right, but thought Brooklyn was Queens, and mistook Staten Island for New Jersey.
“I'm not very good with directions,” I said.
“Not good?” Paul laughed hysterically. “You're geographically retarded.”
I walked to the edge of the building and Paul followed. Although he could have stepped left to avoid touching me, he let our shoulders meet.
“I've been meaning to thank you,” I said, shivering even though it was still so warm out.
“For what?”
“For not signing that deal. For not leaving Michael in the dust.”
Paul shrugged, but his face softened and I could tell my words meant something to him. A while passed before he nodded toward my wrist.
“Why did you do it?” he said.
It wasn't a topic I was particularly keen on discussing, especially with someone I hardly knew. But the way Paul was watching me, with the utmost level of attention, and no trace of judgment, made me willing to offer him a response.
“I was depressed,” I said, shrugging. “I was a stupid kid. I didn't mean it.”
Paul stared at me like he wanted more.
“I couldn't feel anything,” I finally told him. “I couldn't feel the truth. Does that make sense? Do you know what the truth feels like?”
“I know what it sounds like.”
We both smiled, and a moment of complete understanding passed between us before I had to turn away.
Looking out over the city, I was certain there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be than right there, with the blue-black sky above me, the aromas of Chinatown and Little Italy mingling below me, and the man beside me who, when standing on a dirty rooftop with a million twinkling lights behind him, looked a lot more like a lonely orphan than a cocky bastard.