Charmed Thirds (33 page)

RIGHT
OUR
LOVE
WAS
I
WISH

when Kieran knocked on my door. I had gotten into the habit of propping the suite door open, to encourage visits from my fellow refugees. The only one who’d taken me up on it was Kieran, so I knew it was him even before I heard his familiar flip-flopping shuffle. I stashed the postcards under my pillow and grabbed a
National Enquirer
from the stack on my desk.

“Hey,” he said, sulking and slinking into the room. “It’s darker than Plato’s cave in here.”

Wallach’s rooms are all inadequately lit with weak, humming bulbs that give everyone a sickly complexion. But I don’t think that’s why he said it.

“I hope you name-checked Plato as a joke,” I said.

“I do have a sense of humor. Though it’s hard to come by these days because I’m so sad about my girlfriend. My
ex-
girlfriend. Yeah. My ex . . .” His voice trailed off and his eyes took on that wandering look. “Are you still sad about your boyfriend?”

“Oh no,” I answered, ignoring the postcards under the pillowcase that said otherwise. “Being here has been very cathartic. It’s kind of like a monastic retreat, complete with solitude, poverty, and chastity.”

“And knowledge,” he said, holding up the
National Enquirer.
He glanced at the cover, graced by Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds. “This is from 1988.” He rifled through the stack. “These are all from the eighties.”

“I buy them from a homeless guy on 103rd Street for a quarter. It’s my one indulgence.”

“Why would you read about gossip that’s almost older than we are?” he asked, skimming through an issue that devoted four pages to Delta Burke’s weight troubles. “About has-beens and never-weres who have no relevance in today’s society? Isn’t it depressing?”

“Actually, it’s not,” I said. “I take great comfort in these old pages. The skyrocketing fame, the scandalous falls from grace. None of it matters anymore.”

“But doesn’t that just remind you of the futility of life?”

“Are you for real? Wait, don’t answer that. That’s only the worst question one can possibly ask a Philosophy major.”

“I won’t refute that,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied. “Anyway, these magazines remind me that everything is fleeting, the good stuff
and
the bad stuff. And no one is immune. Not Roseanne then, not Lindsay Lohan now, and not me. And that helps me take things less seriously. At least that’s my goal. I can’t say it’s totally kicked in yet.”

“It makes you think of the temporality of human existence,” he said. “But in a good way.”

“Right.”

He was standing in a shifty way that indicated that he wasn’t sure whether he should have a seat or show himself to the door. I gestured toward my desk chair and he promptly sat himself down in it.

“You should teach a course about this,” he said. “Get it added to the Core Curriculum.”

“Everyone should hope to be as enlightened as I am.”

And then it got quiet and Robert Smith’s plaintive wail filled the room.

“Go on, go on just walk away . . .”

“I can’t believe you listen to The Cure,” he said. “Where’s your ankh?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I mocked. “Where’s your Emily the Strange T-shirt?” I thrust my finger toward his birdcagey chest. “Oh
there
it is, you emo boy, you.”

His eyes narrowed. “I am not emo.”

“Oh give it up,” I said. “No one
admits
to being emo, but emo is still out there.
Someone
has to be emo. And that person is you.”

“I am not emo.”

I was clearly getting to him and it brought me much pleasure. I leapt up, got him in a choke hold, ripped off his wool cap, and knuckled a noogie right into his skull. We’re practically the same size, and his reflexes have been delayed by so many blunts, so it really wasn’t all that difficult.

“Say it! Say ‘I’m sensitive emo boy’!
SAY
IT!!!”

“Never! I’ll never say it!” He broke free, fled to the corner of my room, and cowered in the corner behind a pile of dirty laundry.

He whimpered. “I . . . feel . . . so . . .”

“Emo?” I suggested.

“Violated . . .”

And there was a moment . . .

(“Without you . . . Without you . . .”)

. . . before we both started laughing our asses off. It was all so dumb.

“Anyway, talk to me in twenty years and we’ll see if anyone is still listening to Death Cab for Cutie, okay?”

“Twenty years?” he asked. He took out his combination cell/ camera/Palm and tapped away. “It’s a date.”

And then we both settled into the pillows and thumbed through
National Enquirer
s and spoke when we had something to say and were quiet when we didn’t and he hardly annoyed me at all. And it was so nice that I forgot about the postcards. For a while, anyway.

Without you . . . Without you . . .

the eighth

I just woke up from a classic anxiety dream in which I’m supposed to be taking a very important math class over this winter break, the kind that covers whole chalkboards in formulas and sines and cosines and daunting stuff like that, a class I need to pass in order to graduate but that is only available during this two-week vacation period. In my dream, I sign up for this class, but never show up because I’m too busy hanging out with The Winter of Our Discontents. And when I suddenly realize that I’m supposed to be in the Mathematics Building with the rest of my classmates, huddled over our final exam in this subject I know nothing about, I start running around the Living and Learning Center screaming, “My life is over! My life is over!”

And then Kieran shrugs and asks, “How do you know your life exists at all?”

And then I stop running and screaming and say, “Shut up, assclown.”

And that’s when I woke up.

the ninth

Take note: This is how bad things happen.

Yesterday, I got a call from Bridget.

“We’re back!” she said.

I didn’t know they were gone.

“We spent the holidays with Percy’s extended family in Chicago,” she explained. “But we’re back in New York now, and we called your mom and she said you’re in the city, too, so we should hang out.”

And so that’s how Pepe and Bridget joined The Winter of Our Discontents. It’s only been nine days, but it seems like we haven’t left Wallach in years. And it’s the first time any “outsiders” have entered our little world, so they were treated like exotic explorers from distant shores.

“You’re a Metropolitan Studies major at NYU? What’s the program like?? Do you think I should transfer???”

“I love your coat! Where did you get it? You got it downtown, didn’t you? Oh, the shopping is so much better down there. Tell me about it, please? Please?”

“Take the last two shots of Ketel One. We’ll take the Brita-filtered Vladimir.”

And so on.

In honor of our special guests,
ALF
had dragged a TV and a PlayStation into the usually low-tech lounge. He and Pepe got along famously over Grand Theft Auto, as guys often do. And Tanu and Kazuko had a slightly delayed, but enthusiastic recognition of Bridget from her short career as the model-actress Bridge Milhouse.

“You’re the Hum-V girl!” they screamed. “The one from
Bitch (
YUB
Trippin’?)
!”

Bridget instinctively grabbed for her ponytail to start chewing—as she always does whenever anyone mentions her one and only professional acting credit as one of the video hos for the already-forgotten
baaaaaad
boy band Hum-V—but the phantom hair wasn’t there anymore. Recently, she was stopped on the street by a rep from a new striving-to-be upscale salon who offered her a free cut in exchange for her work as a hair model. Her choppy mess of a new ‘do is not altogether different from The Mitch of yesteryear, and yet she looks more stunning than ever. If she were anyone else, I’d hate her.

“Can you believe we were both Hummers in high school?” Tanu cackled.

“How embarrassing!” Kazuko cried.

Bridget’s perfect complexion turned red and itchy. “Not as embarrassing as, like, actually going out with one . . .”

Only after Tanu and Kazuko had exhausted all their questions about what the Hum-V demi-himbos were really,
really
like did they agree to run out to Rite Aid to get a $10 case of whatever Lite beer was on special. Bridget and I finally had a moment to ourselves.

“So, let me guess,” Bridget said, gesturing toward Kieran. He hadn’t said much all night and was, at that moment, sitting at the piano, gently hitting the same somber, low note, over and over again. “He’s the one you’re going to sleep with.”

“Oh, stop,” I said.

“You totally are!” she said.

“And why is that? We haven’t even talked since you arrived.”

“I know,” she said, eyeing him again. He had now drifted away from the piano and was watching Percy and
ALF
score coke, pick up hookers, and run over innocent bystanders in their alternate lawless universe. He looked bored. “It’s, like, a very obvious not talking.”

As is often the case with Bridget, I hated to admit that she was right. But she was. Kieran and I had barely said more than “hey” since our
National Enquirer
afternoon. Our relationship was very bipolar. (And I don’t think Dexy would be offended if I described it as such, which I probably will when I share this story with her on the phone.)

“He’s exactly like Marcus,” she continued. “Only shorter.”

I nearly fell over. “He’s nothing like Marcus!”

“Yuh-huh,” she insisted, exaggerating the affirmation. “He’s
exactly
like Marcus.”

“No one is
exactly
like anyone else,” I said. “Not even the Olsen twins.”

“Well—duh!—they’re fraternal.”

“I was only trying to make a point how no one is exactly like anyone else,” I said, trying to steer the conversation away from NYU’s most famous coeds and back to me, me, me.

“I know,” Bridget said, grabbing the back of her naked neck. “And I was only trying to point out how Marcus and Kieran are like, of the same . . .” She paused, trying to find the right word. “Archetype.”

“Wow,
NYU
has made you really smart.”

“You know it’s true but you don’t want to admit it,” she said, ignoring my gentle teasing. “They’ve got the same stonah lovah man thing going for them.”

On cue, Kieran flip-flopped over to us.

“You look like you’re having an intense conversation,” he said.

“With this hair? Not possible,” Bridget said, running her hands through her platinum locks. “Do you think I should get it dyed black so I’m taken seriously?”

I loved seeing Bridget like this. She had ditched acting altogether and was studying Art and Public Policy. She’s particularly interested in the development of theater and music programs for kids who, like her, have nothing but an empty house to return to after school every day. She had gained so much confidence in her intelligence at
NYU
that she could now mock the whole dumb blonde stereotype. It made me wonder what my mother, and to a lesser degree, my sister, would be like now if they had ever allowed themselves to have even a vaguely intellectual thought.

“So Kieran, do you have a girlfriend?” Bridget was a little drunk.

Kieran coughed, looked away, and rubbed his eyes before answering. You don’t need to know a damn thing about microexpressions to interpret his desire to avoid the question.

“We just broke up,” he said with a ragged edge to his voice.

“What a shame,” Bridget cooed, looking at me instead of him. “Why did you break up?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, his eyes drifting away. “Maybe because she’s still in high school and I’m here. I’m not the one who did the breaking.”

“You’re the one who’s broken!” Bridget said brightly.

Kieran and I waited for her to explain why such a sad statement would bring such glee.

“You’re just like Jess!”

“Okay, enough about breakups,” I said, cutting her off before she said anything more incriminating about my past with Marcus. “Let’s talk about what a thrilling example you and Percy are setting for monogamy.”

“I love him,” she said, gazing at him adoringly. “So I don’t sleep with anyone else. He loves me, so he doesn’t sleep with anyone else. It’s not too difficult.”

Sometimes Bridget and Pepe’s love for each other can be so . . . annoying.

“But what about a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now?”

“Jess doesn’t believe in marriage,” Bridget said, slightly off topic.

“You don’t?” Kieran asked.

“Nope,” I said. “All marriages are ill-fated. The biology is boring, but humans just aren’t hardwired to be with one person our whole lives.”

“You don’t believe in love . . . ,” Bridget began.

“I think my girlfriend and I were in limerence, not love,” Kieran cut in.

Bridget grabbed her hair again. “Like, hello? Duh! Explain!”

“Limerence is that euphoric, almost obsessive feeling you get when you can’t stand to be away from someone. It usually occurs when you first meet,” he said. “But in some relationships it can last for years. It’s rare, though.”

“So limerence is mostly about lust,” Bridget said. “Love is deeper.”

“But how deep is it really?” I asked. “When most relationships go bust?”

“Oh, not this again,” Bridget groaned.

“So you think people should just jump from person to person, from limerent state to limerent state,” Kieran said with an amused lilt to his voice.

“I didn’t say that,” I replied, a bit boozy myself, and woozy with words.

“Then what
are
you saying?”

“Do you really think that people are capable of loving only
one
person?” I asked.

“One,” Bridget answered softly, almost reverentially. “If you’re lucky.”

I barely considered this before pressing on, dismissing her loyalty for Pepe as an anomaly, a glorious exception to the disappointing rules of romance.

“Well, I think it’s possible to love someone and still be curious about someone else. And I think you should be able to act on that impulse without impunity. But in our society, where monogamy rules despite all the evidence that it doesn’t work, a person is demonized for wanting to break from that traditional model of relationships. I think you can love someone, truly love someone, and still be drawn to someone else. Enough to want to kiss that other person, just to see what it would be like. Or maybe to help confirm that what you’ve got is better than what else is out there. Because isn’t the desire alone a form of betrayal? So what further harm does it do to put those thoughts into action? Ideally, you would be able just to go back to the person you love after you’ve kissed that other person and discovered it wasn’t as interesting as you thought it would be, which I would imagine would be the case most of the time. And in the event that it
is
unexpectedly amazing, isn’t it better to have experienced that moment of bliss rather than imagine what it
could
have been like?”