The Hypothetical Girl (20 page)

At this late hour, the Empire Diner is partially lit by candlelight, and you have always looked your best in candlelight. There are four important zones of light on earth, you have determined. One is sunlight, which can be very harsh on the skin but grants most people a ruddy and healthy complexion after exposure (although skin cancer later on, alas). Two is starlight, which makes most every girl on earth look a little bit like a fairy
queen. Or a ghost. Take your pick. Third is fluorescent light, which is the light of choice in most workplaces on earth and makes almost every human being except for Cindy Crawford look like death warmed over. Last comes candlelight. This is the kindest light there is. It makes you beautiful even if you are not and accentuates your beauty if you are. The most lovely thing one could ever see would have to be Cindy Crawford by candlelight. And you, well, you look pretty darn good in candlelight, too, which would explain why your three most romantic moments in life have occurred in restaurants with those little red glass candles on the tables.

Lizzie leans over the bar, neatly pulling her long braid away from the candle, avoiding every girl’s worst nightmare—candle hair incineration—and whispers: “I heard all about it, hon. Jim slept with all of us, Ona. If Amanda makes that her criteria for friendship, she won’t have a friend in New York.”

“Oh, Lizzie, thank you,” you say,
thank you
, you think, for the drink, the words, the caring, the involvement in your actual life, for calling you “hon.” It is your philosophy of life that one must have someone to call one “hon” at four in the morning in every town one spends time in. To have such friends is priceless, golden. And now the blond winking man is moving over to sit next to you. He asks what you are drinking and then, before you can protest, he orders you another.

“So what,” he asks, “is your favorite thing to do?”

You pause and look hard at him. Now is your chance to get something right in life. You must speak the truth, not tell him what you think he wants to hear.

“Where do you wish you were right now? This very second?” he continues.

“On a chairlift,” you say, “with you.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and then we could ski and go back to a little cabin, where I would make you the best pasta Alfredo you ever had. It would be like eating silk.”

The man, named Stefan, smiles. “I would like to kiss you,” he says.

“Be my guest,” you say. In this manner you flirt and kiss until dawn.

You are assuming that your best friend will forgive you your trespasses and that, in addition, you have found new love, at least of a temporary nature, which can be satisfying, if not ultimately fulfilling, when one is twenty-nine years old and living in New York. You will take it.

C. You Survive, Sort Of

Because it is very late and you are still quite drunk and feeling very melancholy, you flip away from the love quiz to your favorite social networking page, where you see that both Jim and Tate are online and chatting. You flip a coin and it comes up Jim, of course. Jim is the male theme park of the evening, and you think there is some
sort of serendipity going on. You must face it. You must confront it so you can move on.

“Hi-hey,” you type, into the little rectangle. And push “send.”

“Hey girl,” Jim writes back. “Watcha doing?”

“Same as you, on here …”

“Well, I am doing more than that.”

“Of course you are, so what, or WHO are you doing, if I may ask?”

“I am doing a huge doobie with Alex and John and wishing I was doing you.
”

“Really?”

“Sure, go grab a cab.”

Your heart races. In fact it drag races. Your heart is going NASCAR on you.

Well, here is an opportunity to perk up the evening
, you think. (But also neatly place a nail in the coffin of your friendship with Amanda.)

“So you coming or what?”

“Do you still live …”

Damn, you can’t remember where Jim lives. Was it that walk-up on Rivington Street or the loft on Canal, or was it the huge building in Williamsburg? You must be really drunk; you can’t remember.

“Yes, I do, right here in Red Hook. You know it well, Ona. This is where we …

“Oh I remember.
”

“I bet you do.”

It is all coming back to you. Red Hook. Of course. Back when you lived in Carroll Gardens. Three years ago you practically lived in his place, full of his motorcycles and sculptures made of car parts. It was always a party at Jim’s. That you remember best. He is sort of a walking party, more party than man. If he were a car, “Have party, will travel” would be his bumper sticker. And what sort of car would he be? A vintage pickup on its way to a party!

A 1959 Chevrolet Apache, turquoise blue, to be specific, a little beat-up but oh-so-retro-cool. That is Jim; you remember him well suddenly, in a sort of soft-focus way.

If you were a car, you would be a Ford Falcon, 1963, also turquoise blue. You would have the original seats and fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. You would also be retro cool. That was what Jim saw in you, you think. The fuzzy dice Ford Falcon–ness of you.

But right now you are a girl who has had too many daiquiris being invited over by an old flame.
What the hey
, you think, and you throw on your purple boa and your motorcycle jacket and go out your door to catch what is likely the last cab in Manhattan on your street, which happens to be an old-fashioned one, fat and comfy with wide faux leather seats, and an Indian driver who smiles to show he has no front teeth.

You are in a movie. The movie of you, and this is the scene where the sun is close to rising and you are
crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and it looks like a diamond necklace, strung as it is with headlights. You are twenty-nine years old and your best friend hates you because of a man you will soon see again. But is it a movie you would actually go and see? That is the question.

The cab pulls up at Jim’s Red Hook studio and you can hear the party inside. Turns out it is a party of five. Five guys, and they are drinking Corona from bottles and a lime is on the table cut into nice little slices. They have put on a Nick Cave CD, of course, and there is some kind of movie on a large television. It looks a bit like a porno something, but you choose not to look at it. “Hey, babe,” Jim says, sounding just like three-years-ago Jim, but something is different. He is gaunt and his hair has receded and he seems to be missing a significant front tooth. One of his incisors. It gives him a bad look, a down-on-his-luck look. Which reminds you suddenly of your brother Archie, who is a meth head in rural Pennsylvania. Jim’s eyes look all flashy and weird, like Archie’s do. “Oh God, Jim, you aren’t?…”

“Drunk? Oh, I am. You are, too.”

He sidles over and wraps his arms around you, so Jim-like, like coming home to somewhere you have been away from so long. And you wrap back but all you feel is bones. It is Jim pared down to the essence of Jim. It smells like Jim. It talks like Jim but it feels like less than Jim. Then it occurs to you; it is what is left of Jim, after three years of meth.

He has that methy thing going on and so do all his buds. They light up something that looks like a pipe and you realize then it isn’t meth, it’s crack. This isn’t methhead Jim, this is crackhead Jim. Or maybe garbage-head Jim. At any rate, it isn’t much of Jim.

Then you see, too, the way his friends are looking at you. It is unsettling. They are looking at you like something they will shortly have for dinner. It is a hungry stare, a Hansel-in-the-witch’s-cage stare. Suddenly you recall that comment, about Jews needing to get over the Holocaust, and your heart does a little backflip.

It becomes clear to you, in that instant, that you are deep in the bowels of an industrial building in Red Hook with five guys on crack. And right about then you think,
Okay, I am ready to wake up now, One two three, WAKE UP TIME
, but you do not wake up because you are already awake. And one of Jim’s friends has his hands on your pants and the other has his hands on your shirt and Jim, himself, he of the Amanda-friendship-ending argument, is now pulling down your sweater and someone else you are not sure who puts his hand so tight over your mouth.

You are cooked, girl. You walked right into this one. The room smells of ammonia and vomit, beer and cigarette smoke, and one of the guys seems to be unbuckling. A pit bull walks into the room from the kitchen and bares his teeth; someone throws him a burger wrapper. His eyes are yellow. Get ready for your biggest nightmare, girl. Get ready to pray they let you up for air.

Let you live.

This is not the end of the story you might like, but it is the way things happened. The author has kindly spared you the most unpleasant details out of a sense of propriety and good manners. She has also provided two infinitely more pleasant alternative endings for you, in case you can’t handle this one.

The author, who survived this experience and has gone on to become a reasonably stable mother of two in Westchester, understands if you are not comfortable reading this particular chapter of her life. The author understands that this might not be what you thought you were heading for in a story so innocently titled.

The author apologizes.

F
or some time now Emily has been vanishing.

It began with her edges. The outside ones; arms, legs, back, and so forth. They began to go all soft focus, as seen through unadjusted binoculars. Next to go were her feet. She would look down and half the time they were hardly there. Ghost feet. Then it was her eyes. They looked like sketches of eyes.
Oh dear
, she thought.
And they were such nice eyes. Everyone had said so
.

She was like those islands in the South Pacific that are covered entirely by the ocean at high tide. Or those stars that are sucked up on certain nights by shreds of cloud. Here and then gone. It was troubling to see whole pieces of herself blur.

“I guess some people die and some people just disappear,” she said to her therapist, June. She was seeing her twice a week now. “There is really not much you can do about it.”

Some days she felt just like her old self. Very there. But other days she was not much there at all. She could walk through a mall or crowded street and nobody so much as looked at her. She could say hello or nod to people and they didn’t even glance in her direction.
I am almost gone now
, she thought.

Naturally, you want to know how such a thing happens to someone. You are concerned that this could be something that could happen to you, and you would like to avoid such a fate. Was it something she ate? Drank? A peculiar bout of influenza or something contracted abroad, perhaps, when she went on that little tour of Micronesia with her friend Allison?

Could it have been the entire case of chicken-flavor ramen noodle soup she consumed last winter, after she broke up with Dane? God knows what they put in that stuff. She hadn’t left her apartment for weeks, subsisting on ramen noodle soup and nothing else. She did not answer her phone or e-mails or check her Facebook page. She just lay in bed, feeling her limbs sink down into the blankets like quicksand, and read the entire oeuvre of Henry James. Then she read most of Flaubert and a good deal too much Maupassant. She read in the dark, by the light of a small flashlight. Reading and sinking. Sinking and reading. She gobbled books like someone eating chocolate. Guiltily, naughtily. To the exclusion of all else.

Philosophical query: If a girl reads in a forest and nobody is there, is she really reading? Is she really there? Is there any point to such a girl?

“Mom?” she shouted, into her mother’s answering machine. “It’s me, Emily.”

No answer, despite the shouting.

She was trying to make a date to ask if she could store some things in her mother’s attic, as a precaution, in case she vanished entirely. But how can you make a date if you can’t even get someone on the phone? You can’t.

To be invisible is a special status, and not an altogether bad one, she decided. You can watch other people in a different way. You can stare at them. It isn’t rude if they can’t see you back. You can be a kind of very personal anthropologist. She watched a man in Central Park feed his girlfriend a cinnamon bun in the most sensual way, section by section, letting her tongue lick his fingers at the end of each bite. She was tasting him and the pastry. He was like a spice. She watched a nanny whack a well-dressed child over the head with a newspaper, hard, to punish him for taking off his coat. “You will catch pneumonia!”
Whack whack
.