Authors: Judith Arnold
“Fine,” she managed to say, then pressed her lips tight again to keep any extraneous words from leaking out. Damn it, she wanted to tell him about the weekend, about how self-righteous Adam’s girlfriend was and how goofy he’d looked in his mortarboard. Susie was used to sharing things with Casey. He was so much fun to talk to.
The hell with it. Cowards might remain silent to prevent the wrong words from emerging, but she wasn’t a coward. “Adam’s girlfriend was like a relic from 1969—except I don’t think they had vegans then, did they? She was so not like what I would have expected Adam to fall for. To call her a tree hugger would be
euphemistic. This girl is a tree tonguer. A tree
schtup-per
. You remember what
schtup
means, don’t you?”
“I remember.” His eyebrows twitched just enough to put Susie in mind of
schtupping
. Specifically,
schtupping
him. Her thighs tensed and the back of her neck grew so hot she expected steam to seep through her hair.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand and leading her through the store, past the coffee corner, past the pastries, past the bagel counter, where Morty Sugarman, the department’s senior manager, was counting bagels into a bag for a skinny orange-haired woman with a large nose and a voice like chalk scraping across a blackboard who felt it her duty to critique each bagel he lifted from the bin. Casey held up his hand, five-fingers splayed, and Morty nodded.
Good. Wherever he was taking her, they’d be there only five minutes. Not too much could happen in five minutes.
Well, yes, a lot could happen. She could burst into tears. He could call her a bitch. He could ask her to move in with him and she could say yes. The planet could get hit by a meteor and wind up knocked out of its orbit. Five minutes was an eternity.
He ushered her into the building stairwell and let the door shut behind them. The stairwell was brightly lit, echoing and private; few people ever used the stairs. The first time Casey had kissed Susie, shortly after they’d met, they’d been standing in this stairwell.
And now, a little more than a year later, he kissed her again. Damn his soul to a hell populated with skinny, screechy, orange-haired ladies who were excessively particular about their bagels. That was the
only punishment suitable for someone who could kiss like Casey Gordon.
The first time he’d kissed her, she’d fallen in love with him. And every time he kissed her since then, she fell deeper. She plunged like Alice down the rabbit hole, only unlike Alice, she didn’t glimpse books and other household objects on the wall’s shelves. She glimpsed pieces of her life—the fun, single, carefree pieces—and splinters of her resolve. How was she supposed to resist a man who smelled like fresh dough and was fluent in lingua lust and knew how to slide his hands over a woman’s tush so it felt as if he were holding her entire sexuality in his gently cupped palms?
Oh, God, she’d missed him. A long weekend in Ithaca and she’d missed him the way a chocoholic on a hunger strike missed fudge. Maybe there was a twelve-step program for people like her. Caseyholics Anonymous.
Hello, my name is Susie, and I’ve just tumbled off the wagon in a very big way.
The kiss seemed to last forever, but when he finally slid his mouth from hers she realized it couldn’t have taken as long as five minutes. Casey was a man of his word. He wouldn’t strand Morty Sugarman at the bagel counter longer than he’d promised.
“So, other than Adam’s girlfriend, how was Cornell?” he asked.
How could he talk about Adam and Cornell? Susie’s mouth felt as if he’d shot it full of Novocaine—completely detached from her and beyond her control. The only word she seemed able to utter was, “No.”
“No?”
Sensation returned in stinging twinges. “No, I don’t want to talk about Cornell.”
“You want to talk about the other thing?”
“Don’t ask me to move in with you, Casey. Please.”
If you ask, I might say yes, and I’m not ready for that.
He shrugged. “You want to get married?”
“What?”
“All right, look.” He slouched against the wall and raked a hand through his hair. His fingers got trapped at the rubber band that held it into a health code–mandated ponytail, and he let his arm fall. “I wasn’t going to ask you that. I wasn’t going to make this harder than it has to be.”
“How hard does it have to be?”
“Either we move forward or we sink. I don’t like treading water. It’s tiring.”
“We’re not treading water. We’re not even wet,” Susie protested, although after his kiss that wasn’t quite true.
“What do you want, Susie? What exactly do you want?”
“What we have right now,” she answered honestly. Kisses hot enough to ignite the sky. Sex so explosive the Homeland Security Department might want to adjust its ratings whenever Casey and Susie were alone together. Long, meandering conversations about everything and nothing. The realization that she couldn’t glimpse Casey without smiling, a reflex that had been fully operational until last Thursday night.
That was what she wanted.
“I want more,” he told her, then turned, edged open the door and left the stairwell without a backward glance, leaving her alone, surrounded by cinder-block walls and stainless-steel railings sloping up and down alongside the stairs.
“You asshole!” she shouted after him, although the
door was swinging shut and he couldn’t possibly hear her. “I hate you!”
Her voice resounded throughout the stairwell, a pathetic lament. There she was, dressed as if in mourning, howling over the prospect of losing a guy who was obviously wrong for her. He was greedy. He was selfish. He was demanding, manipulative and pushy. Why the hell should she grieve over him?
She really needed to start wearing bright colors. She needed to accept that Casey’s prowess in bed—or in the stairwell, or wherever they happened to be when the kissing started—was not a good enough reason to forget about everything that mattered to her, every dream she’d ever had, every concept of herself she’d ever entertained. She was a visionary, an explorer, an adventurer. She wrote poems and drove a rental van nearly big enough to qualify as a truck. She counted among her friends unemployed musicians, unemployed actors, unemployed gallery owners and unemployed filmmakers and even unemployed food-preparation professionals. She needed to remind herself that Casey Gordon wasn’t the only tall, gorgeous, charismatic bagel maker in the world.
Sleeping till noon got old pretty fast.
Adam rolled out of bed, blinked his eyes until his surroundings came into focus, and groaned. Ten past twelve was a decadent time to be getting up, especially since Tash wasn’t in bed beside him, so he couldn’t blame sleeping all morning on having not slept all night. He felt as if his skull were crammed with damp cotton, and his back felt weird. Uncricked. Pain free. After four years of sleeping on spongy, sagging dorm
beds, he wasn’t used to sleeping on a solid Posturepedic.
Noon light filtered through the shades. He stared at the piles of cartons lined up against the wall across from the bed and flashed on a memory from many years ago, when he was a toddler. That wall, where the detritus of four long, busy years of Ivy League living currently stood in stacked cardboard boxes, used to hold a colorful fabric hanging covered with zippers, buttons, pockets, flaps and, at the bottom, two yellow strips of cloth with a blue shoelace crisscrossing them together. He recalled having nightmares about the shoelace. Maybe he’d thought it was a snake. Or else his dread had come from a legitimate fear of flunking childhood because he’d taken so long to learn how to tie a bow.
The wall hanging was long gone. So were any other objects that marked the room as Adam’s. His shelves were cleared of books—he’d transported his favorites up to college, and his mother must have disposed of the rest. His magnetic dartboard was gone. His collection of soccer trophies, meaningless because every kid on every team received one at the end of every season, regardless of his skill level or his team’s win-loss record, no longer stood like a chrome-and-fake-marble army along the back edge of his dresser. His stereo was still packed up; he ought to unpack it so he could add a Phish/Weezer/Sonic Youth sound track to this dismal summer.
He didn’t feel like unpacking. He didn’t feel much like doing anything, other than getting out of bed before the rest of the day disappeared on him.
He tossed on a pair of shorts and one of his many Cornell T-shirts, then staggered out of his room and
into the bathroom. From there, he headed to the kitchen. His mother was always on a diet, which meant he’d have to look in unexpected places to find the good food: frozen waffles hidden behind a package of frozen spinach, a box of Frosted Flakes tucked discreetly at the back of a cabinet filled with virtuous Special K and fat-free crackers. No whole milk, only skim, which had an unappetizing blue cast to it. He added a splash of it to a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes, figuring the sugar would disguise the faintly sour taste of the diluted milk.
He needed to find something to do. In school, when his days had been crammed with studying, research and exams and his nights with concerts, parties and midnight pizzas, he used to spend his rare free moments fantasizing about having infinite free moments, endless stretches of time uncluttered by obligations. But he’d been home a day now, long enough to be bored. He wanted—well, not obligations but
stuff
. Concerts, parties and midnight pizzas would fit the bill.
As if that would ever happen. His mother would freak if he brought a pizza into the house. She’d see his having introduced such empty-calorie temptation into her home as a personal attack, a mean-spirited attempt to undermine what little willpower she had when it came to food.
He wolfed down the cereal without tasting it, then returned to his bedroom for his wallet and keys. A walk would clear his mind and give him some ideas about how to fill the abundance of free moments he was suddenly saddled with.
He donned his sunglasses, stopped back in the bathroom to brush his teeth and glanced at his reflection. His hair was a mess, but it was a punkish, rakish mess and he liked it. His chin was dark with stubble, but he
liked that, too. With the sunglasses, he looked kind of cool. Well, maybe cool was stretching it. At least he didn’t look like a math geek.
Fortunately, the apartment building had its own lobby and front door, so he didn’t have to go through Bloom’s to get outside. He didn’t want to set foot inside the store. A year ago, after school had let out for the summer, he’d wandered into the place to see how it was faring under Julia’s management, and the next thing he knew, she’d talked him into a summer job. It hadn’t been the worst summer job, either—stock clerk sounded menial, but the people he’d worked with had been pleasant and he could think of worse fates than to be surrounded by excellent food for eight hours a day. But he was a college graduate now, his sights set on a doctorate and a career in academia. That a university might eventually pay him to hang out on campus, listening to good tunes and schmoozing with colleagues and playing with numbers all day, astounded him. Working at Bloom’s couldn’t begin to compete with that.
The sun was bright overhead as he walked up the street. The store loomed to his left, occupying half a city block. Pedestrians flocked to its showcase windows, and its doors repeatedly opened as shoppers came and went. The place seemed to be bustling. People needed their bialys and blintzes.
He deliberately crossed the street and strolled downtown, away from the store. Broadway had changed a lot during his lifetime; twenty-two years was several evolutionary cycles in terms of the neighborhood. When he was a kid, even a teenager, the avenue hadn’t included so many outlets of national chains. Nowadays,
Upper Broadway could pass as an outdoor, noisy, Mu-zak-less version of a mall—fast-food joints, clothing boutiques, electronics stores lined block after block, beckoning shoppers. Thank God for places like Bloom’s, independent old stalwarts that would never rent space in a climate-controlled mall in Dubuque or Scottsdale or West Lafayette, Indiana.
He hastily erased that thought. One reason he wanted to go to graduate school in West Lafayette, Indiana, was that Bloom’s would never open a franchise there.
He wondered if West Lafayette had seedy vendors selling questionable merchandise from folding card tables along its sidewalks. Used and remaindered books, cheesy paintings in cheap frames, knock-off watches, sun visors, New Age knickknacks and brass paperweights shaped like the World Trade Center towers, with the words
God Bless America
etched across their red-white-and-blue bases—were all these folks licensed to sell such crap? Did anyone care?
Of course not. This was New York.
A few blocks south of Bloom’s, he purchased a hot pretzel from a guy with a pushcart. The dough was chewy, the salt crystals crunchy. He hadn’t bought a sidewalk pretzel in years, and he’d forgotten how good they tasted. Much better than Frosted Flakes with skim milk.
By the time he’d finished the pretzel, he’d reached Lincoln Center. He tried to recall the last time he’d seen a production at the performing arts mecca. When he and his sisters were younger, his mother used to take them to matinees there all the time. His dad rarely joined them; he was always working. But in the evening, over dinner, Adam and Julia and Susie would
describe to him what they’d seen: “This lady played a harp, Daddy, and she sounded just like heaven!” or “A bunch of fat people sang very loudly and their voices wobbled,” or “The dancers wore tutus, Daddy! That’s what those funny skirts that look like petticoats are called. Tutus. Isn’t that a silly name? Like a tutu train.”
His sisters had been enthralled by the ballets their mother had taken them to. Adam had found them excruciating, all those skinny ladies in their tutus, kicking and flicking their feet and doing swoopy things with their arms, and guys in tights jumping around a lot and fluttering their fingers. And his mother would have to whisper the story the dance was supposed to be telling them. “He’s an outlaw, Billy the Kid,” she’d murmur.