Wreck and Order (8 page)

I spent my first few days in New York shaky, jumpy, and wide-eyed, like a drug addict going through detox. There were no doors in the fourth-floor walk-up I shared with a filthy kleptomaniac and her elderly, one-eyed Yorkie. Barnes and Noble was the only bookstore that responded to my application.

The day before I started clerking there, I decided it was time to wear clean socks again and set out to conquer the Laundromat. I watched my wardrobe drown in murky water for a while before I realized that I hadn't put in detergent. I couldn't bring myself to ask the elderly Chinese woman punishing strangers' garments at the back of the Laundromat if she sold detergent and if it was too late in the cycle to add it. I let the wash run its course and then transferred my dirty, sopping clothes to the giant cauldron of a dryer. I pretended to read a magazine in imitation of the people around me. “Dryer number seven!” the Chinese woman bellowed at increasingly hysterical volumes before I realized she was telling me to remove my clothes from the dryer so someone else could use it.

I dropped my warm, dirty clothes on the floor of my room, decided to go to the Met, took the wrong train, ended up in Queens, walked past a group of black guys wearing Afro picks and addressing each other as “My nigga.”

“Hey baby, you dropped something,” one of them called to me. As I looked at the empty sidewalk around my feet, he said, “My heart at first sight of that fine body of yours.”

“Why you wearin' all black, sweetie?” another boy called. “Someone die on you?”

I hadn't encountered many black people growing up in western Mass. I didn't know if the jeers were threatening or enjoyable, an innocuous thread from the land of human contact. I took the train back to the Lower East Side. It was pouring. I sprinted into the first café I passed, brightly lit and Polish and filled with tiny, empty square tables. I ordered borscht with rye bread. The waiter nodded and walked away. He met my eyes as he put down the steaming, maroon soup. “Okay?” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

I picked up the bowl with both hands and gulped the salty broth. Onion and mushroom dumplings were hidden at the bottom. I ate them lovingly. I spent the next two hours in the café, drinking cup after cup of Lipton tea and watching the world outside the rain-streaked glass. A gray-haired man in soaked mesh shorts jogged past, squinting and making fists. A drunk leaned against the storefront, smearing the glass with his oversize denim jacket. A well-dressed, overweight woman held an umbrella in one hand and a phone in the other, gripping each so tightly her knuckles were white. A group of teenage girls passed by in high, high heels, walking slowly, feeling themselves walk. A man with a cane and a fedora took the table next to mine. He sipped a beer and carefully sliced his kielbasa. A white woman and a black woman shared a plate of pierogies in the front of the café, laughing loudly and eating with their hands. I could just make out Luther Vandross's voice from the rear of the restaurant, telling the cooks and dishwashers that he just didn't want to stop loving them. I had changed my life.

The next day, I woke up depressed by the thought of returning to the Chinese laundry and afraid of my comfort in the café. What if being alone doing nothing was the only way I could feel okay? I'd grow old drinking bad tea, listening to '80s R&B, and overtipping immigrant waiters.

I met Brian a few weeks later, when we were forced to share a table at a crowded coffee shop. He had large green eyes that stared into his mug when he spoke, wire-rim glasses, carefully considered facial hair. He'd gone to UCLA for college—undergrad, he called it—and we chatted about the standard differences between the coasts. As he put on his leather jacket to head back to work, he said, “So, what's your romantic situation?”

Jared and I spoke on the phone every day, but he didn't know where I was. “I don't have a romantic situation,” I said. Brian smiled and typed my phone number into his device.

He took me to a movie the following weekend, and then we shared his umbrella on the walk back to his apartment. Brian said he liked how the heroine was beautiful but was never sexualized. The comment had its intended effect. I smiled at the glistening sidewalks; it was really going to mean something when this trustworthy man sexualized me.

I could not hide my shock at how nice Brian's apartment was. The only other New York apartments I'd seen were those of my coworkers, who shared railroad three-bedrooms in Bushwick between four people. Brian had a duplex with hardwood floors and exposed brick walls that overlooked Prospect Park. I put my hand on the spiral staircase that connected the living room to the upper bedroom and let my jaw drop. “My dad owns the building,” Brian said, looking at the floor. “He's in real estate. But I pay rent.” I understood his embarrassment at parental help. But it made me feel even more confused by finances. Every once in a while my father sent a check, which made me feel rich because I never bought anything, since I also felt poor. I made ten dollars an hour at Barnes and Noble, working half-time as a way to signal to myself that translation was my real work. When my coworkers worried about student loans and maxed-out credit cards, I almost wished I too had the boundary of debt to help describe my place in the world. It was lonely to be both spoiled and blue collar, just one more way I was a stranger to what most people considered the real world.

We sat on the edge of Brian's bed for a long time, staring at the wall a few feet in front of our faces. I was thrilled to feel myself blushing. It had been so long since I was nervous for a first kiss. “So, I got you back to my room,” he said finally, rubbing his hands on his corduroys. I helped him tuck the hair behind my ears. And then the black bar on my roller-coaster seat snapped in place over my legs—complete freedom, nothing to do but surrender to the grip of a machine whose sole purpose was exhilaration. He didn't try to take off my underwear and eventually the ride slowed to a stop in a breezy, unmown field.

As soon as I opened my eyes the next morning, I willed myself to stay awake. My body yawned and rolled toward Brian. “Get up,” I commanded it. The clock on Brian's desk told me it was seven fifteen. It was a Saturday and I had nowhere to be. I dressed silently, kissed Brian on the cheek, and slipped out his bedroom door. As I clanked home in my high-heel boots and one earring, I grimaced against the thought of the long black hair in my right nipple, which I'd forgotten to tweeze before I met Brian the night before. Maybe that was why he hadn't tried to take off my underwear. I crawled into bed when I got home, hoping to sleep off the shame of a new attachment. He wouldn't call me and I would stop liking him. I put my left hand on my breast and my right hand between my legs and slept until noon.

But he did call, and kept calling. He courted me perfectly, waiting a dependable two or three days after each of our dates before inviting me to a concert or a movie the following weekend. All that was required of me was to say yes. If he waited longer than usual to call, I felt relieved to be alone in my own bed, instead of hyperconscious in Brian's, where I waited for my new need to crash over me in the dark.

Brian and I had been dating for weeks before I let myself stay in his bed until late morning. He yawned and rolled on his side toward me. “You're still here,” he said, and kissed me once just above each of my nipples. I bit my lip to keep from moaning. I wanted his sleepy lips on my breasts again and again and nothing else. I felt sad knowing I would have sex with Brian one day. Sex was the cracked, pink, mammalian tongue of a stranger who had promised me a line of coke in the bathroom of a dive bar; the pointy coarseness of the unknown cock between my legs when I woke up facedown in an unfamiliar room; the pair of hairy, pudgy thighs imprisoning my torso one cold, grainy morning on a secluded beach that had seemed exciting a few hours earlier; Jared's stern voice telling me not to move, he was almost done, he needed to be relaxed when we met his father for brunch. I wanted sex with Brian to salvage my body from memory. So the first time it happened while we were drunkenly making out, a voice in my head said, “Tell him to stop. Make this stop.”

The good voice in me is always male. Not because men are wiser but because men are calming, before you get to know them. You ask a man a question, he answers. He asks you one back or doesn't. End of story. I listened to the unknown male voice telling me to make this stop until Brian said, “I'm gonna come.”

“No!” I said—aloud this time, but it was too late.

“Sorry,” he said. I kissed him lightly. “Sorry.” I kissed him again. He sat up and reached for his tissue box. “Sorry.”

“Stop saying—”

“Sorry.”

I curled my chin toward the solid redness of his comforter. He asked me how I felt.

“Tired.”

I was supposed to say something about having unprotected sex. That was my job as the girl. But I didn't want to make the accidental sex real by speaking about it. Brian curled his long body around me. “I don't know how you work yet,” he whispered.

But he didn't ask me to show him, and I couldn't bring myself to volunteer unsexy lessons in my anatomy (“Just a little softer. Just a little higher. Here, let me show you”), complicating my easy attraction to Brian's long muscles and smooth skin and the adolescent jumpiness of his perfect penis. One wants to be free during sex, to let go completely, to feel and not think. But every time I did…

After Brian came, he would kiss me softly and wipe us off with tissues and fall asleep holding me. The bathroom was the only place to go. Sometimes I touched myself as I lay on his dirty bath mat, curling my toes against his cold tile wall and filling my mind with images of busty secretaries servicing CEOs or high school teachers taking advantage of their students—the kind of cliché sexual manipulation that Jared and I had enjoyed enacting. My self-inflicted release in Brian's bathroom left me small and shallow, a yellow bruise on a flat universe.

In bed afterward, empty enough to sleep, I would hate Brian's arms around me and feel an ugly satisfaction when he rolled away from me in his sleep. Finally one night, I returned from the bathroom and said his name. He was on top of me right away, smoothing my hair back from my face. “Talk to me,” he said. “Please.”

I didn't want to tell Brian, as I'd told many men, that I needed him to make me come if he came first. I didn't want sex to be that crass and simplistic. I did need to come, but I also needed something else. Even on the rare occasions when we came together, I'd ache for Brian as soon as sleep softened his grip on my shoulders. So I said nothing in response to his pleas, knowing any attempt to put my longing into words would depress and shame me. I let Brian kiss my eyelids, quiet my spine with his fingertips, murmur that everything was all right. My high school boyfriend told me he hoped I would never cry in front of him because people look ugly when they cry. But Brian was good enough to take on my ugliness in the middle of the night, even if he had to work for ten hours the next day.

He was a Web designer for philanthropists and human rights groups. I respected his work and liked listening to him talk about it. His good work made my aimlessness acceptable. I hadn't worked on
Fifi
since Brian and I started dating, as if I were now preparing myself for a different kind of success, one that was both easier and more successful: to marry well. It still seemed like enough, for a woman. Apparently Brian thought so, too, although I don't think either of us was conscious of the thought. He didn't seem the least bit troubled by my meager professional prospects. This probably should have concerned me, but all I felt was relief every time he laughed when I said that a mentally retarded and physically impaired monkey could do my job, which mostly involved alphabetizing and making change.

Given his family's obsession with money and success—his lawyer sister calling him at midnight to talk about a big client meeting she had the next day, his father asking Brian to look over his investment spreadsheets—it was odd that Brian found my excesses endearing. He bragged to his friends that I had lived alone in Europe instead of going to college, that I drank canned beer in bed before going to sleep, that I wanted to order pizza three nights a week. I suppose it was a relief for him to know he would never have to compete with me. He would always be the successful one, the provider, the solid man taking care of the pretty, damaged woman. It was a dynamic that appealed to me as well. I also wanted to be safe, at least in theory.

I tried to open myself to Brian. I stopped hiding in the bathroom after sex. He would hold me and tell me to take deep breaths. “What's going on?” he begged one night. I mumbled something about how everyone tries so hard in all the wrong ways. My voice was a little girl banging on a metal bed frame in the dark, refusing to go to sleep.

“What does that even mean?” He clenched his fists at his sides. “I can't stand it when you do this. I care about you so much and I have no idea what you're upset about.”

My breathing slowed, my tears stopped. Here was the hidden part of Brian that I needed—some urgency, some insecurity, some sense that he did not know how everything would turn out. I let my lips fall on his cheeks, his forehead, the sharp V between his eyes. I told him I was scared. We talked about our parents' failed marriages—just because his parents were still together didn't mean they had succeeded, he said. We promised each other we would not end up like that, two people unknown to each other, forced to share a house, a blanket, a toilet. When our bodies came together after these talks, my thoughts about my life unraveled inside me like a trapeze artist's rope after the tent has folded, hanging from the sky unobserved, pulsing with the breeze.

But one night, I started to say something after Brian turned out the light and he snapped, “No talking.”