“I don’t know. Is that not the right word? Is that like, what a hipster would say?”
“No, cool is fine,” he said. “Yes, it’s a cool place. It was much cooler seven years ago, and it was actually cool ten years ago, before I even got to the city. You see, what those kids over there”—he pointed at the empty booth—“don’t realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them. There was just the present tense: there were bills, friendships, messy fucking, fucking boredom, a million trite decisions on how to pass the time. Self-awareness destroys it. You call something cool and you brand it. Then—poof—it’s gone. It’s just nostalgia.”
“I see,” I said, though I don’t know that I did.
“Those two—to go back to our apt illustrations—they want to play dropouts, want to live ‘La Vie Bohème.’ They want to eat at blue-collar diners, ride their bikes like fucking apes, tear their clothes, discourse on anarchy. And they want to shop at J.Crew. They want dinner parties with organic artisanal chickens and they want their fucking Southeast Asia sojourns, and their jobs at American Express. They come here, but they can’t finish their plates.”
I took another leaden bite. “You can’t have all those things?”
“Sweetheart, you can’t make a set of aesthetic decisions without making an ethical one. That’s what makes them fake people.”
I forced my sandwich down.
“Don’t worry. You’re not like them.”
“I know.” It sounded defensive.
“None of us are. Even if you grew up in a country club—which I can tell you did—you’re in the struggle now. That’s authentic. And whatever your story is, I don’t see mommy-and-daddy all over you.”
“You think I grew up in a country club?”
“I know you did.”
He drained me. “You don’t know me.”
“Maybe I don’t. And you don’t know me. And none of us know anything about each other.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s useful. Sometimes people…I don’t know…go out to dinner or get coffee or whatever the fuck…and get to know each other.”
“And then what happens? They live happily ever after?”
“I don’t know, Jake. I’m trying to find out.” My head hurt, I propped it on my arm and took a big drink of flat beer.
“Don’t get drunk.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re sloppy when you drink.”
Enough. I opened my throat and chugged my awful beer all the way down. It leaked out of the corners of my mouth and ran down my neck. When I finished I said, “Fuck you and good night.”
“Hey, firecracker, give me a second.”
A normal man, in this rough pantomime of a date, would put his hand on my hand and apologize. He would reveal just enough vulnerability to convince me to stay and keep digging. Jake of Chinatown, Jake of greasy diners, Jake of exuberant hair in an umbrella-less city—he put his hand under my shirt, right on my ribs, and pushed me onto the stool. He took his hand off me, his fingers had been freezing but I felt branded.
“You’re incandescent when you drink. That too.”
I exhaled. “A consolation.”
“It’s the truth. You can take it.”
“It’s something.”
I had my purse in my lap but when the waitress came back I ordered another beer. My ribs, my life, my train.
“You read too much Henry Miller,” I said to him. “That’s why you think you can treat girls like this.”
“You’re a decade off, but yeah, I used to read too much Henry Miller.”
“Who do you read too much of now?”
“I don’t read anymore.”
“Seriously?”
“You could call it a crisis of faith. I haven’t read a book or even a newspaper in two years.”
“Is that why you quit your doctorate?”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t know. Simone?”
“Simone did not tell you that.”
“Yeah, she did.” She hadn’t. But I could tell by his sudden attention that it was true.
“But then you’re the Ana?s Nin type, right?”
“Not really.” I was, or had been, or always would be.
“We’re both a couple of imperfect types.” He smiled, and it was soft.
“You missed me,” I said, not quite believing it as I said it, but knowing it.
“You want me to tell you that I missed you?”
“No, I want you to be nice to me, actually.”
“I’m mean because you’re young and need discipline.”
“I’m sick of that,” I said. “Young, young, young, that’s what I get, all day every day. But I know your secret.” I lowered my voice and pushed myself toward him. “You’re all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you’ve taken as you’ve grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined. I don’t have to compromise yet. I don’t have to do a single thing I don’t want to do. That’s why you hate me.”
He looked at me and I knew he was thinking about disciplining me.
“Do people tend to underestimate you?”
“I have no idea. I’m too busy trying not to fuck up.”
He was still looking at me, my shoulders, my breasts, into my lap. To be turned over by his eyes was like being paralyzed.
“You know,” he said, and leaned forward. Our knees touched. I could see his pores, the tiny blackheads around his nose and I remembered his up-close face. “I get this sense that you are extremely…powerful. I felt it when we kissed, I felt it when you were speaking just then. Like I had tapped into an electrical current. But then I watch you and you spend most of your sober hours holding it back. Maybe you don’t have to compromise yet, but you’re going to have to choose between your mind and your looks. If you don’t, the choices will become narrower and narrower, until they are hardly even choices and you’ll have to take what you can get. At some point you decided it was safer to be pretty. You sit on men’s laps and listen to their idiotic jokes and giggle. You let them give you back rubs, let them buy your drugs and your drinks, let them make you special meals in the kitchen. Don’t you see when you do that, all the while you’re…” He reached out and wrapped his hand around my throat. I stopped breathing. “…choking.”
I held my head as still as a vase, something breakable that had a crack, and the crack was spreading. I said, “I felt it too. When we…”
His phone rang. It was the most intrusive sound I could imagine. Even Jake looked annoyed, but he looked at the number and jumped off his stool and walked to the bathroom and I continued to hold perfectly still.
The waitress came to clear the plates. She stacked them in the most disordered, haphazard stack I’d ever seen. Even I could do better. She threw them roughly in the bus tub. The plates landed with a crack and the silverware slipped with a slight splash into the juices that lived in the bottom of bus tubs. I had pitied her when we came in, but now I realized that we had the same job.
“Debbie,” he called out to the waitress. “Nancy? Sandra?” He didn’t sit back down on the stool, he was leaning against the counter now, and I knew our night was over. “I have to go,” he said, “I was supposed to meet someone twenty minutes ago.”
I nodded, perfunctorily. But I heard this: It wasn’t some undeclared rule that kept him from taking me home all those nights I was practically begging for it. He was interested. It was that I wasn’t living up to my potential.
“This is my treat. A belated holiday dinner. I heard you had a wild Thanksgiving. I’m sorry I missed it.”
He pulled cash out of his wallet. He sent off a text while he drank his beer. I spun around on my stool, watched people duck into doorways out of the fluorescent rain.
“I’m different,” I said, not caring about how simpleminded I sounded. I knew how he saw me—grasping, lost. I didn’t know yet in which ways he was right or wrong.
But what he didn’t know was that I had escaped. That I had gotten myself here. I helped myself to his beer. “I don’t have to choose between my looks or whatever. I’m going to have everything. Didn’t you say that the aesthetic and the ethical must coexist?”
I hit him with my knees. “Now. Where the fuck am I and how do I get home?”