“Let me guess,” she said, tapping the spoon against the tablecloth. “He beat you up a little bit, called you a slut, and you thought that was really edgy, another spoiled white girl who wants to get slapped around because she always got everything she wanted.”
“Fuck, Ari.” I shook my head. “It must be hard. To have already sized up the world, to already have written it off completely. Is it just so fucking boring all the time?”
“Pretty much, Skip.”
“I would rather be called a slut by him than deal with the shit I get from the women here.” I picked up my bowl. “Also, you’re fucking white. By the way. And you don’t get a medal for being gay.”
“Listen,” she said, her voice calmer. She pouted out her bottom lip. “I am looking out for you. Don’t start measuring your life in sex, it’s dangerous. Great sex is not a big deal.”
I sat back down. “What is a big deal, then?”
“Intimacy. Trust.”
“Okay,” I said. Those words floated out above me, abstract, romantic, and I wondered what they looked like on the ground. Maybe they were already happening, maybe they were embedded in the sex. Years of wondering if there was something wrong with me. Wondering why sex drove people insane. Years of mimicking porn stars, trying to arch my back in the most flattering way. Years of sex that was empty, never held its shape.
“Isn’t sex something?”
She shrugged. I realized she had no idea what I was talking about. When we went to the dish station I put my bowl down and hugged her from behind. I wondered how there was any room for the guests, with all of our hopeful faces and our imposing loneliness.
—
LET ME TRY this again: it was changeover. He was coming in for the night and I was the beverage runner from the day. It had been snowing off and on, spidery flakes brushing the windows, salt rims on the sidewalks, a tinctured light from a weak sun. I was making macchiatos, but really I was watching Enrique as he stood outside in a huge parka wiping down the windows. His gloved hands held a squeegee and pulled long draws of soapy water up the windows and opalescent patterns slid down.
Jake stopped at the door to take off his cap and shake out his hair. When he touched his own cheeks from the cold it was humbling. All of the most thoughtless gestures were exotic on him. Pulling his keys from his pocket for his front door, hanging those keys—with precision—on a hook inside his house. He looked different today—it wasn’t as simple as us having been naked together—after all it had been two a.m. and dark in his room so I didn’t know if that counted as actually having seen each other naked. No, it was that he was amplified, each vision of him laid on top of another in translucent sheets. Like the collection of Oriental rugs in the lightless cave of his apartment, each rug overlapping another, an uneven terrain of rug on top of rug on top of rug, you only imagined touching the ground. Like his tattoos, none of them quite touching, his skin an image of white space between the images, the private mosaic of him, the sound of his breathing becoming harassed, his uneven teeth, his smells coming loose from skin. I could still smell him in my hair.
I made him an espresso. He stopped to talk to Howard, standing directly in front of me, not looking at me, but when he finished he turned.
“For me?”
“Yes.”
He shot it back and walked away. Contentment filled me and I watched Enrique as he scraped the windows into total invisibility.
—
SIX-MONTH REVIEW: I bought a dresser from the Salvation Army on North Seventh and Bedford. I had to pay two big kids from the corner to carry it up my stairs. I unpacked my suitcases. I found a Laundromat with two old Korean ladies and an obese orange cat. I tipped them. I got the Saturday night beverage-running shift, with Jake and Nicky on the bar.
We sat down in restaurants after midnight. We went to karaoke in Koreatown when Ariel wanted to sing. Ariel sang them all but her true calling was Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” Will sang “China Girl.” One time Jake came and I was sure he was just going to sit in the corner and break my brain, but then he stood and in a low mumble he sang “Born to Run” and I screamed like a teenager.
I could place an order at SriPraPhai with my eyes closed. Nicky knew to pour me a big glass of Pouilly-Fuissé as my first shift drink. Simone said I had a palate for “broader” whites, which to me meant they stretched across the width of my tongue. I bought myself a cashmere scarf. I was on track to making $60,000 in a year. I took a lot of cabs.
—
I WALKED ACROSS the park in numbed, clipped steps. I was going to wait for Jake at the kitschy Irish pub that none of us went to. Jake and I went there now. Paulie, the bartender, was beginning to know us. I was always cut earlier than Jake, and if I didn’t want to get dragged to Park Bar I had to leave immediately. Then I sat with Paulie and nursed a beer until Jake came. We were usually still there when the cockroaches crawled out by the beer taps. We batted them away and Paulie swung towels at them like a matador.
That night was the coldest I’d had in New York—Nicky told me he dropped his coffee on the sidewalk and it froze. He said it looked like glass. I wasn’t taking my time across the park, but I stopped when I saw Robert Raffles sleeping on a bench. Will used to buy beer and chips at the bodega to hand them off to Robert when we got on the train.
At first I didn’t think it was a person on the bench. And though I tried not to look too closely, as I walked I got the vibration of something human, and then I saw Robert’s shoes, or the duct-taped and shredded coverings on his feet that passed for shoes. I thought of the coffee on the sidewalk.
So I went and roused him. I gave him fifty dollars. I walked him to a shelter.
No. I didn’t.
I sped up to a confused shuffle and stepped past him. I told myself he was sleeping. I told myself if he was still there when I came out, I would call the police. But what would they do? Put him in a hospital? A shelter? If I gave him money, would he use it to get warm? Will said Robert had been living in the park for thirty years. He must be aware of the options, the emergency rooms, the subway stations.
I hit the far end of the park and stopped. My toes were numb, as if I were standing on ice. He was obscured by a trash can, if he was still there, or had ever been there. I ran the rest of the way to Paulie’s, my breath in frozen puffs behind me. I ran into the flat yellow light like I had been chased.
“I don’t know,” I said, “if he’s still there when I leave, I’ll do something. Maybe…actually, do you guys have any blankets? Maybe there are some blankets at the restaurant. But it’s like, on a night like tonight…” I shrugged. “It’s not a blanket kind of night, do you know what I mean?”
Paulie nodded, a small, friendly man well into middle age, light on his feet, a charming Irish accent. Exactly what you wanted in a place where shamrocks hung above the booths.
“It’s a jungle out there,” he said, filling a small beer for himself. “Kitchen’s closing—you want anything?”
“Can I get some fries? Just the basket thing.”
I wasn’t hungry. But I had cramps in my stomach, like small alarms. The fries came out damp, and took two extra doses of salt, but they were reassuring.
“Fuck,” Jake said, slamming the door behind him. “Fucking shit fuck it’s cold.”
We nodded. He pulled the stool out next to me and I felt guilty about Robert Raffles. But willingly so. It was a jungle. I had to protect my life, my bank account, my commute, my bar stool, some were cold so others could be warm, I didn’t create this system, I said, or did I every time I made those little running steps?
“Did you see Robert Raffles in the park?”
“Who?”
“Robert Raffles, the homeless guy that Will is friends with.”
“Fucking Will.” Jake grabbed two of my fries and ate them automatically. He saw that I was still looking at him, and he pressed his fingers into my temples. “No one was in the park.”
Jake slid his cold fingers down the side of my face and started to unwrap my scarf.