There was a silence, and I reached onto the passenger seat for my purse and got out my wallet, where there was an old picture of him, his school picture from senior year of high school. He was grinning his school-picture grin, wearing the blue shirt I’d helped him decide on. I’d been behind him in line, and I’d watched him perch on the stool and then stand again so the photographer’s assistant could twist it lower. Before he sat down again he called to me, “Come on, let’s both be in it,” and I had a moment of thinking there was no reason on earth for us to be photographed separately.
“Anyway,” he said on the tape, “everything’s pretty much the same. Harvey says we have to make our minds as active as our bodies used to be. My roommate, did I say his name before? He has his wife reading philosophy to him every night, he says he’s going to spend the rest of his life getting the education he was too much of a fuckoff to get in college. She was reading him Plato last night. That’s Pla-to, not Play-Doh. Remember Play-Doh? The smell?” A pause. “He had her bring in a Charles Dickens tape for us to listen to.
A Tale of Two Cities
. You know, just an hour or so a night—it’s like ten hours long or something. So we’re going to start it tomorrow. Kind of different from the days of Jeff, huh? What?” There was some noise I couldn’t identify. “Wait a sec, wait. I’m talking to Carrie. Yeah. Say something to her, say hi.” More noise. “Hear that, Carrie? That was Harvey saying hi. Hey, say it again but louder, OK?” There was
silence and then a faint new voice saying, “Hi, Carrie. I’m Mike’s roommate. Nice to meetcha.” Then Mike again. “Well, that was Harvey. His tape’s over. I guess maybe I’ll stop now, too. I told Mom fifteen minutes so she’ll be back in a sec to stop the tape. Well, I guess I should keep going till she comes back. Uh, how’s the weather? Ha, ha. Hey, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? I might be home by then. Well, who knows. Oop, here’s Mom. No, no, I’m done, I’m done, it’s OK. Bye, Carrie. Bye.”
There was a final click, and then the blank tape whirring in the machine. I reached over and pressed rewind, then rested my forehead against the steering wheel. I felt bright and strange, floodlit around the edges and dark at the very center.
That afternoon I was meeting Kilroy at McClanahan’s after work. He liked six o’clock there, the bar only half-full. Fewer yuppies.
Out on the sidewalk in front of the brownstone, I buttoned my jacket and headed east. I’d spent the day thinking about Mike’s tape, then trying not to think about it. I’d used the upright vacuum cleaner to vacuum the entire ground floor of the house and then the stairs, until suddenly I’d felt like Mrs. Mayer. She was a ferocious housekeeper, and I put the vacuum cleaner away and made myself some tea, then dumped it out because that made me think of her, too. Then I made some more, because damn if Mrs. Mayer was going to keep me from drinking tea.
Walking along the crowded sidewalks to McClanahan’s, I thought about Rooster getting married. How could Rooster be getting married? He was Mr. Guy—I couldn’t see him giving up all of that, his rat-hole apartment with the couch that smelled like dog, Kraft dinners with a couple hotdogs cut up in them. I couldn’t see her wanting that, beautiful, cool Joan: wanting him and the things he was good at, fixing stuff and being the one to drive all night while everyone else slept, and belching the loudest after a beer.
Then there was how they’d met, in the Intensive Care unit while Mike was unconscious. Forget love and fate and all that: I kept coming back to the simple question of how they could build something on the back of Mike’s bad luck.
And also to the simple question of how I could.
Kilroy was sitting at the bar when I arrived, wearing his leather jacket over a brown shirt, a half-finished beer in front of him. He looked up and gave me what I thought of as his amused smile, as if he were amused by me, by the fact of us. Mike had always greeted me in a physical way, with a
one-armed hug, a kiss to my forehead, a hand snaking around my waist. And a smile that said
I’m glad to see you
.
“What news?” he asked as I climbed onto the stool next to his.
I shrugged.
He gave me a quizzical look, then reached for a pack of matches and fiddled it between his fingers. “No news is good news then, I guess. Beer?”
“Sure.”
He waved for the bartender, Joe, a fiftyish man with a perfectly bald head. Joe ambled over and raised his eyebrows.
“Carrie here will have a draft,” Kilroy said.
Joe smiled. “I think that can be arranged.” He moved to the taps, and I watched while he filled a glass, holding it at an angle while the beer streamed in. At the other end of the bar a man in a suit sat by himself, holding an old-fashioned glass.
Setting the beer in front of me, Joe gave Kilroy a funny look, and I wondered how long Kilroy’d been coming here, whether Joe had seen other women come and go from the spot where I now sat. I took a sip of the beer, cold and grainy with fizz. My arms felt tingly.
“So?” Kilroy said. “Talk to me.”
“I got a tape today.”
“A tape?”
“From Mike.”
He raised his eyebrows, and I said, “Well, he can’t write.”
“I know that,” he said. “I know.” He took a sip of his beer, then wiped his fingers on his jeans, the holey 501s he changed into after work every day. “You seem upset.”
I shook my head.
“What, then?”
“Sad.”
“Got it.”
I felt a kind of fury rise through me, and I gripped my beer until the cold hurt.
“What did he say?” Kilroy said.
I stared straight ahead. “Well, for one thing Rooster’s getting married. To Joan, the Intensive Care nurse. And he has a new roommate—Mike, I mean. In rehab. He’s in rehab, you know—his mother had to press the buttons on the tape recorder for him.” I stopped talking and faced Kilroy. I wanted him to feel what I was feeling, the same wildness. Or I wanted him to reach in and soothe it, tame it down. He didn’t speak,
though, and after a moment I turned back to my beer glass and lifted it for a long swallow. “Why is it,” I said, “that you don’t want to tell me about any of your old girlfriends? When was the last time you were involved with someone?”
A weary look passed over his face. “Does self-involved count?” He sighed. “Sorry, that’s a line from a movie.” He scratched his jaw. “I don’t have old girlfriends the way you have your old boyfriend, OK?”
“Then how do you have them?”
“I don’t.” He laid his forefingers side by side on the bar. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Joe leaned against the bar sink, his arms crossed over his chest, and I thought of what Kilroy had said to me our first evening together—
I’m just a guy who likes bars
. I wondered if over the years he’d laid out his life for Joe, bit by bit, or if liking bars meant laying out precisely nothing. I faced Kilroy again and found him watching me with an odd look on his face, a look on the edge of becoming something else. In a small, crowded voice I said, “Which tree should I bark up?” and when Kilroy looked away I couldn’t help it, I had to press harder. “Well? Which tree?”
“Why don’t you try not barking?” he snapped. He stared at me with a terrible sneer capsizing his mouth, and finally I got off my stool and slunk away, past the bar, between the empty tables, through the heavy door, and out into the night.
I set off down Sixth Avenue, skirting idlers and saunterers, walking fast. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me, to have put up with what I’d put up with so far, the secretiveness of him, the fortress? Oh, he was kindness itself, he was compassion, understanding, but it was all coming away from him and there wasn’t a single way in.
A block or two before 14th Street I cut east, through dark canyons, past old warehouses and stalled, waiting trucks. I saw a couple pressed against a building, both tall, both wearing black leather jackets. Three guys about my age, walking fast without talking. A skinny black man wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat, standing in a doorway saying, “I’m
waiting
for the
moment
, I’m
waiting
for the
moment
.” A lumpy old woman in a bathrobe, standing under a low roof of scaffolding, a dazed look on her face. And a beautiful girl who climbed out of a taxi and stepped up onto the sidewalk just as I went by, her hair a silk sheet, her pants fashionably short over square-toed boots, her face tranquil but covered with tears.
I thought: If it doesn’t work out with Kilroy, I can stay in New York anyway, I can become a New Yorker.
New Yorkers were different. Old or young, crazy or brilliant, plain or
gorgeous—they didn’t just walk outside, they made a presentation, they presented themselves. They said,
This is who I am, today I’m someone wearing these boots, I’m walking with this look on my face, I’m having this intense and troublesome discussion with this difficult but beloved friend
.
I walked for a long time. I went down Broadway, took in the parade along St. Mark’s Place, followed Avenue A until I’d crossed East Houston and entered the narrow old streets of the Lower East Side. The city was lit up, the streetlights, the windows of people’s apartments, curtains or blinds open so that looking up you could see the top of a picture, a doorway leading to darkness. I’d forgotten my gloves, and I pulled my arms inside my jacket and walked with my hands tucked in my armpits, my empty sleeves dangling.
I didn’t get back to the brownstone until nearly nine. Simon, Greg, Lane, and even Alice were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking red wine and eating from a platter of sliced peasant bread and marinated vegetables, the reds and purples glistening with oil. A quick glance at the whiteboard told me Kilroy hadn’t called.
“Pull up a chair,” Simon said. “You look like you could use some wine.”
I found a chair against the wall and dragged it over to the table, next to Lane. She wore a baggy thermal T-shirt, and her pale face was pink across the nose and cheeks, as if she’d dipped a fine paintbrush into her wine and tinted herself very faintly.
Simon poured wine into a tumbler for me. “So, Carrie,” he said. “How abjectly pathetic do you think I am?”
I glanced at the others and saw from their suppressed smiles that they knew where he was going.
“On a scale of one to ten,” he went on. “With ten being, you know, the kid in fourth grade who smelled weird and never got invited to any birthday parties, and one being Kevin Spacey.”
“Kevin Spacey’s not pathetic,” Greg exclaimed. “He’s totally cool.
He’s God.”
“That’s my
point,”
Simon said, rolling his eyes. “Jesus.”
“Simon,” Lane began, but he waved her off.
“This is between me and Carrie. How abjectly pathetic?”
“Three?” I said. “No, two.”
He looked at Alice and they both burst into laughter. “You are
way
too nice to live in New York,” he said to me. “Greg and Lane probably wouldn’t give me more than a five, and Alice—” He tossed her an arch look. “I don’t know, doll, what do you think—eight? Or nine?”
She smirked and ran a hand through her short, bleached hair, which she wore in a stylishly disheveled flip, the bangs flopping onto her forehead. “Sweetie,” she said. “Gosh. I had you at seven, easy.”
He smiled and turned back to me. “It’s a question because of what I did today.”
“What?”
“I called Dillon.” He gave me an ironic smile. “From the gallery, remember?”
I remembered: Dillon of the gorgeous face and the bored condescension and the pseudo-intellectual talk. “Wow,” I said. “Are you going to meet him for a drink?”
His face went pink, and he started laughing again. Lane frowned a little and looked down at her hands. He laughed harder, his face redder still.
“Careful,” Alice said. “You’re about to drool.”
He shook his head, but he was laughing silently now, convulsively. He wagged his hand at Alice in a kind of summons.
She took a sip of her wine and looked at me. “Dillon said, and I believe I’m quoting accurately here, ‘You know, I’m reorganizing my file cabinets right now, and I just feel really, really overextended.’ ”
Greg giggled, and I looked at Simon. “Really?”
He nodded dramatically, still laughing noiselessly. “In other words,” he managed at last, wiping tears from his eyes, “ ‘Would you please take your revolting self and cease to exist?’ ”
Alice shook her head. “I think it’s more like ‘Would you please go pick up my Prozac refill for me?’ I mean, reorganizing his file cabinets?”
“Alice,” Greg said with annoyance. “Don’t you get it? He’s saying he’d
rather
reorganize his file cabinets than go out with Simon.”
A look of impatience passed over Alice’s face, and she opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it.
“Thanks for the exegesis, Greg,” Simon said.
“You had a bad day,” Lane said suddenly. She looked at me for a moment, then turned back to him. “Just, you know—”
“What?” he said. “Shut up about it?”
“No,” she said softly. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
He sighed. “I know.” He reached for a piece of bread and dipped it in the olive oil. He took a bite and then set what was left on his plate. “So,” he said to Alice. “Where’s Frank, anyway? I don’t know when you were last here at this hour.”
“Having dinner with his asshole cousin,” she said. “I came down
with a crippling headache at the last minute.” She smiled. “Hey, did I tell you guys? He wants me to move in.”
“Move in?” Simon said. “You already live there.”
“Officially,” she said.
Lane studied her. “Are you going to?”
Alice shrugged. “Maybe. His place is so tiny, if nothing else having me and my stuff there all the time would probably make us break up sooner.”
Simon and Greg laughed. “You’re psycho,” Simon said.
“Plus think of the great material,” she went on. “I could do a one-act where the whole thing took place on a bed.”
She wrote plays, or maybe just wanted to: day after day I went by the open door to her empty room and saw her unused computer sitting on her desk, covered by a Barbie beach towel. I’d mentioned it to Kilroy once, and he’d made some remark about my living in a wannabe house. I remembered what he’d said of Simon—
He’s trying to be something he isn’t
—and my fury at him intensified. What was so terrible about wanting to be something other than what you were? How could you become anything without having wanted to be that thing first? All at once I was ashamed of having written off Alice’s writing. For all I knew she also had a laptop, or wrote longhand, or just
thought
about it a lot! Shut up, I thought at Kilroy, and then something fell in on itself and I felt myself sink into despair. What did it mean that I was yelling at him in my mind? Was I even in his?