She gets pepperoni and garlic. Two slices. She doesn’t even make a thing of getting two. My high school girlfriend was so weird about food, it drove me crazy, but I was always too afraid of ticking her off to say anything about it. I like that this girl eats garlic. And I like that she doesn’t seem to care if I like that she eats garlic.
I get the same, and we pick two seats at the counter facing the street. The window is open, but the air is dead.
“So what were you guys doing up there? Are you making, like, a movie or something?” the girl asks through a mouthful of pizza.
Outside the window Tyler spots me and throws his hands up in a what-the-hell-man? gesture that I’ve come to know pretty well over the past month.
“Kind of. I guess,” I say while chewing. “It’s for school. Like a project?”
“Oh yeah? Where do you go?”
“NYU,” Tyler says, appearing at the counter between us. “I’m doing an experimental film. It’s a non-narrative, multimedia, post-visual exploration of transcendent states. He’s just helping me out.”
Tyler reaches across us and helps himself to my second slice with a superior grin of acquisition. I glower at him.
“Um.” The girl with 1950s bangs suppresses a smile. “You don’t say.”
She eyes Tyler, and I watch her take in his skinny black jeans and faded Ramones T-shirt that he probably got at Urban Outfitters. I look down at my own utterly nondescript polo and cargo shorts from the Target in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, and frown.
“NYU, huh? That’s great,” she says in a way that suggests she doesn’t necessarily think it’s great.
“I . . . ,” I stammer. “I don’t really go to NYU. I mean, I want to. But it’s just summer school.”
“He thinks if he makes a good enough film, they’ll let him transfer.” Tyler smirks. “Then he can go for real.”
My ears flush purple. Dick. It’s true, though. It’s the one thing I want most in the world.
“Oh yeah? You any good?” she asks me.
I start to answer when Tyler interrupts through a mouthful of my pizza. “We should get going, dude. We’ve got the lab starting in twenty minutes.”
“Right,” I say. But I don’t make a move to leave. I want to tell her that yeah, actually, I am pretty good. But I’m afraid if I say that out loud the universe will hear me, and then I’ll be jinxing myself.
“Well,” the girl says, toying with a crust. “Thanks for the pizza, anyway.”
“Sure,” I say. “No problem.”
Tyler sighs loudly. “I’m Tyler,” he says to the girl. “And this is Wes. And Wes has got to be going now. Come on, man.”
I glare at Tyler in a way that I hope will set the gel in his hair on fire, but nothing happens.
“Well, Tyler and Wes,” she says. One pale eyebrow arches at me. “It’s been real.”
“I . . . ,” I start to say. There’s got to be a right thing for me to say, right now. Nothing good comes to mind, though, and Tyler is already outside with half the bags, flagging down a cab.
The girl pulls out a phone and snaps my picture. I’m embarrassed. I always look weird in pictures. My hair sticks up in this wavy way that I hate, and pictures make my nose look huge. Plus I’m too tall, so in group pictures the top of my head is always cut off.
She smiles mysteriously at me and whispers, “I see you, Wes.”
A strange shiver travels around behind my ears when she says this.
“I’ve got to go. Sorry,” I mumble.
“Sure.” She smiles that one-sided smile again, looking at her phone instead of me.
“But, listen,” I say in a rush of unaccustomed courage. “Can I know your name?” I’m not about to make the same mistake twice in one night, and not ask. Not even I am that stupid.
Her smile spreads, lighting up her eyes, and she leans in close to my ear.
“I see you, Wes,” she whispers again. Her lips hover so near to my ear that I can feel her breath on my skin. It makes my ear tingle.
“What?” I whisper back, confused.
“Dude!” Tyler hollers from the corner. “Come on, let’s go!”
Her smile goes sphinxlike.
Baffled, I gather my stuff, keeping one eye on her as I sling bags over my shoulder and toss a crumpled dollar bill onto the counter. With a last glance at her, which she meets with a slow, silent wave, I turn and lope out of the pizzeria. Tyler’s loading equipment into the trunk of a cab when I arrive puffing next to him.
“Hey, you see that girl come out?” he says to me.
“What?”
“That girl. The one who was blocking my shot. Did you see her come out?”
I glance back at the pizzeria and observe the tattooed girl with 1950s bangs collecting my pizza crusts and dollar tip and loading them into her backpack. Weird.
“No.” I pause.
The girl continues to sit at the counter facing the street, fiddling with her phone. She smiles to herself, unaware that anyone is watching. I glance up at the windows above the pizzeria, but the velvet curtains have been drawn closed again. Thinking about the first girl makes the pizza weigh heavy in my stomach. The pizza of dismay.
“No, I guess I didn’t,” I say.
“You’ve got to make her sign one of Krauss’s releases, you know, to cover my ass. This is so going on my Vimeo channel when it’s done.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
Then we’re in the back of the cab and Tyler is giving the driver the address of the film lab. I turn and look one last time through the rear windshield. It glitters with droplets of hot summer rain.
The chair where the tattooed girl was sitting is empty, and there’s nothing but some greasy napkins and plates to show she was ever there.
Upstairs, behind the neon of the psychic medium sign, the velvet curtain twitches. I press my cheek to the taxi window, squinting up at the façade of the building.
A vertiginous rush knocks me sideways. I’m almost certain I glimpse the pale outline of the girl’s face with hipster hair curled over her ears. The face is looking down at our taxi in the street, and she’s smiling. That perfect mouth with its perfect mole. The eerie feeling spreads across the back of my neck again, and I close my eyes against it. It’s almost sickening. The taxi jolts as it pulls away from the curb, jostling me against Tyler and shaking loose the weird sensation.
But when I open my eyes again, the girl is gone.
CHAPTER 3
I’m so tired I haven’t even bothered to take my sneakers off. I root my face in my pillow, feeling myself just beginning to float off the surface of my bunk when there’s a soft click, and a triangle of light cuts into the room.
“Jesus. What happened to you?” a male voice says. It’s deep and gravelly, unmatched to the young, slender guy it actually belongs to.
I moan, draping my arm over my eyes to block out the light.
“What time is it?” I ask, my voice thick with sleep. I belch, and the stale taste of pepperoni and garlic pizza fills my mouth.
“Beats me.”
Springs creak as Eastlin flops onto his bed. Soft sounds of sneakers being unlaced. A click as he turns on the desk light. The lamplight hammers into my brain. Tyler took me out after we hit the editing room, to say thank you, I guess. God. It’s not like we don’t know how to drink in Wisconsin. But I can’t drink like Tyler. And he magically seems to know all the places downtown that don’t card.
“Man, come on,” I whine.
“What? It’s only two.” Eastlin is laughing at me.
I peek under my arm at my roommate and see him leaning over a mirror on his NYU-issue desk, wiping his face with a moist ball of cotton.
“Two? God.”
“Yeah. It’s early!” Eastlin grins and chucks the dirty cotton ball at me. It hits my forehead with a wet splap. ??
?I wouldn’t even be home, except for the DJ sucked, and this guy wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“What guy?” I ask.
“Some twink. He was thirsty.” Eastlin shakes his head with pity.
“Yeah?” I say.
“Old, too.”
One of Eastlin’s dirty socks comes sailing toward my face after the cotton ball, but I bat it away in time.
“Sounds rough.” I try to commiserate. My gay friends back home don’t go clubbing. Or if they do, they don’t tell me about it. Which makes me pretty sure they don’t. My high school friends are more the beer and batting cages type.
He laughs, leaning an elbow into his pillow while pulling out his phone. “And was your night as good as it looks?” he asks without looking up. He stretches a bare foot out, spreading the toes until they crack.
I groan, staring up at the ceiling. Acoustical tiles. There have been moments, this summer, when my solitude has been so deep that I’ve caught myself counting the divots in them.
“Tonight was the palm reader, right?” he prods me.
“It was. Tonight was the palm reader.” I add ironic emphasis to the words, though the truth is, I kind of had my hopes up about it. Tyler was so enthusiastic, when he described it to me. I wanted it to be cool.
“Somebody should really tell that guy that nobody watches art films anymore.” Eastlin pauses. “In fact, I’m pretty sure nobody makes art films anymore.”
“It’s going to suck,” I inform him. “It’s going to suck so hard I don’t think I’m going to let him put my name on it.”
“Tyler? He probably wasn’t going to, anyway.”
“Yeah,” I say, thinking.
“Now, see this guy?” Eastlin flashes his phone at me, showing a profile picture from some cruising app that he uses. I catch a glimpse of a clean-cut guy our age with a lopsided grin and a backward baseball cap. He looks like a lacrosse player. “Why couldn’t he have been there? He probably doesn’t go to clubs.”
“Actually—” I start to say.
“He probably doesn’t have to. Meets everyone he wants at the polo matches or whatever. He looks like you, if you, like, knew how to dress.”
Eastlin thinks I’m a slob. But then, Eastlin thinks that most guys who wear cargo shorts are slobs, even though cargo shorts are a completely normal thing to wear.
“Actually, you know. It wasn’t bad. It was okay,” I say. I don’t know why I want to defend my night to him. But I sort of do. I mean, it’s not like I was just sitting here by myself playing Minecraft. Which is what I would’ve been doing, if Tyler hadn’t made me go out.
“Bullshit it was. You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”
“Yeah. Except . . .” I hesitate. “There was this girl there.”
I regret it the moment I’ve said it.
“Oh, reeeeaaally?” My roommate’s phone has immediately disappeared and he’s zeroed his eyes on me. I’ve taken no end of crap from him about my failure to bring a single girl back to the room in five weeks. More than once he’s pointed out that I’m squandering ridiculous opportunities in the privacy offered by his active nightlife. It’s become a joke.
“Elaborate, please,” he says, resting his chin on his hand.
I close my eyes, my mind’s hand reaching forward to brush the elbow of the girl with the curled hipster hair and the bottomless black eyes. My scalp starts to tingle.
“She was—” I begin.
“Was she hot?” Eastlin likes to cut to the chase. Or rather, he likes to cut to the end of the chase.
I consider the girl’s face. That cool, opalescent skin. The mole above her upper lip.
“Hot isn’t the right word,” I say.
Eastlin’s eyebrows move slowly up his forehead, and he breaks into a smile. His front tooth is chipped, I don’t know from what, but it means that he doesn’t smile widely all that often. “You think she’s beautiful,” he tells me.
“Come on,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“You do. I can tell.”
How can I explain her to him? Not because he won’t understand, but because something about her fails me. She’s impossible to put into words. There’s only the feeling.
“I don’t know how to even tell you,” I say, helpless before the idea of her.
“What did she look like?” he presses me.
“I don’t know.”
“Light? Dark? Big tits? Little tits? Come on. Give me something to work with.”
“Light hair. In this kind of weird, complicated curl situation. Dark eyes.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Actually,” I say, looking at him with new interest. “She was in some crazy deconstructed dress thing. It looked like something you’d have at the store.”
Eastlin’s eyes light up. “She was wearing Abraham Mas? Which one?”
“What do you mean, which one? I don’t know. A dress. With a bow at the neck. Sleeves.”
“Which piece. They all have names. Each design is unique.”
My roommate is clearly trying to be patient with me, but it’s hard for him, living with such a rube. They apparently don’t have rubes in Connecticut, where he’s from.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say.
“Would I kid you? With this face? Come on.” Eastlin smiles.
“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t from there. Looked like it, though. That lace trim, kind of torn, but, like, on purpose? Heavy. Expensive. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Lace trim?” He brings a fingernail to his mouth and gives it a meditative chew. “We did lace two seasons ago. Stained in tea.”
“She was . . .” The right words won’t come. The right words usually don’t, for me. I mostly experience the world in images. I wish I could show Eastlin the film I took of this girl, in my mind. It unspools before my eyes, rolling forward like a silk ribbon falling out of someone’s hand, and I see the girl in the deconstructed dress smile.
“If she shops at Abraham Mas, I probably know her,” he offers.
A funny fluttering thing happens inside my chest, and I have to clear my throat to get rid of it. “She was young,” I say helpfully.
“Young.” He tears off the offending nail, examines the bare fingertip, and spits the nail out on the floor. “Most Mas girls are Madison Avenue types. You know. Lunch. Their hair, my God. Three hundred dollars a week, for the color. At least.”
“I think you’d recognize her,” I say, surprised at the urgency in my voice. I want him to know her. I want him to tell me who she is. “Definitely.”
Just then the pocket of my cargo shorts vibrates twice. I fish inside and pull out my phone. It’s got a huge crack in the glass from where I dropped it in the subway last week, but it still basically works. A bird icon informs me that someone’s mentioned me on Twitter.
“Huh.” Eastlin starts in on the next nail. “Well, at the very least, she’d be in the store system. We can stalk her.”
“Come on,” I say, peering at my phone.
The tweet is from a profile I don’t follow.
It says, I see you, @wesauckerman.
And it links to a picture of me on Instagram. In the picture my mouth is half open, like I’m in the middle of saying something. My hair is sticking up, and there’s pizza grease on my mouth. The glare of the fluorescent lights has been softened with a filter. I’m smiling.
I laugh, tugging on the forelock of my hair. The profile belongs to someone named Maddie, with no identifying details other than “NYC.” The profile picture is a cartoon unicorn galloping on an ocean of stars. The girl with 1950s bangs is webstalking me. Maybe it wasn’t the pizza that helped push away my disappointment.
“Look at you,” my roommate says, getting to his feet and tossing a towel over his shoulder. “She text you just now?”
“What?” I say, weighing whether or not I should respond.
She must have found me from an image search. I guess I know people can do that, but it’s not like it ever occurred to me to try. What should I say back to her? I should say something funny. But I’m not sure what Maddie will think is funny. I hesitate.
Maddie. Maddie who has Bettie Page pinup bangs. And a neck tattoo. My high school girlfriend thought all girls with tattoos were sluts. She could be kind of a bitch, though. What do I think of girls with tattoos?
“Pathetic,” Eastlin remarks as the door closes behind him. A second passes before the door opens again, and his head sticks back inside our dorm room. “And you realize I mean that in the worst possible way.”
“Asshole,” I say, laughing, and chuck his own sock back at him. With a grin he shuts the door and the sock misses by six feet.
I stare at Maddie’s profile, ruminating. There’s not much to it. Lots of retweets of joke memes. Her Instagram is mostly pictures of diner food, glistening French fries or hamburgers in primary colors. There are a few arty shots of corners of New York City. A curl of pilaster. A puddle. A pigeon with a gnarled foot.
I stuff my phone back in my shorts pocket without responding. I need time to think of something good. My fingers interlace behind my head, and I stare up at the ceiling tiles.
“You’re going to have to put the effort in, Wes,” my dad’s voice plays on a tape in my brain. I hate that I can still hear him from a thousand miles away. “You can’t just hide behind your video camera all the time. Watching life happen to other people.”
I frown and roll onto my side, away from him.
My dad came to the Village when he was my age, determined to be the next Bob Dylan. He dropped out of UW, panhandled bus fare, and showed up in Port Authority with nothing but a change of boxer shorts, thirty-six bucks, a jean jacket, and a guitar. I think he was surprised there wasn’t a committee of folkies waiting to welcome him with open arms and a bunk in a commune squat. Nobody told him that by 1975, it was already too late. Not even Bob Dylan wanted to be Bob Dylan anymore.
Dad lasted a month sleeping on some girl’s floor before he ran out of money. She let him stay on another couple of weeks after he went broke, and his mouth always twists in a funny way when he gets to that part of the story. After a while the girl met somebody else, and Dad called home collect to beg Gran and Grandpa to wire him some money. Then he packed up his guitar and took a bus back to Madison. He hasn’t been back to New York since. It’s not the same now, he likes to point out. It’s nothing like what it used to be.