“There are times in life when it’s good to live without knowing,” Howard said, interrupting what must have been a look of unruffled idiocy. “I mean that we can allow ourselves to live and not really know what it is that we’re doing. That’s all right. It’s an accumulation stage.”
My eyes welled up. He took my empty glass from me and slid it into the dish rack.
“I’d like you to be a server here. The Owner would like it as well. You will bypass your coworkers in line for the next position, so you won’t be the most popular for a moment. But is that something you would be interested in?”
I nodded.
“Wonderful. I will look for an opening in the coming months and you will begin training. Thank you for your strong work.”
I looked at my hands, which weren’t terribly clean, thinking they had autonomously produced this strong work. I remembered how scared I had been on that first L train ride to Union Square, and I’d said to my reflection words that had been a mantra all my life: I. Don’t. Care. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but Howard had changed that when he gave me this life: I cared.
—
I BECAME OBSESSED by a pair of tennis shoes, the laces spun in the spindles of a tree outside my building. One day while I was watching the lights come on in the construction sites by the river, I looked down and there they were. I had not noticed them until every last leaf fell away, the tree shedding like a balding head, and there emerged these rotten, brown sneakers. It felt like they had been stuck there a long time. They looked ancient. My thoughts about it didn’t go very far, but I was concerned. What happened to the person who lost their shoes? How did they get home? Who on earth was going to get them down? The thought that they would stay there for decades, rotting, gave me an apocalyptic feeling in my stomach.
Spring
I
YOU WILL SEE it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.
When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.
When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.
—
WE TOOK WALKS after work because the winter was relinquishing its fascist hold on the weather. Jake’s sense of ownership of his surroundings incrementally increased as we left Union Square. By the time we passed Houston to the south, or A to the east, he was fully in possession.
He took me to his bars. He grew patient, sentimental, nervous. He hated places where the bartenders were young. All the bartenders he knew had names like Buddy, Buster, or Charlie—anything you would want to name a loyal dog. He hated bars where they bought tables or light fixtures to look antique. He liked bars that were actually old, the gloss completely worn off, peeling paint, chipped tile. No DJs. No cocktail lists. He could visit those other bars, but never inhabit them.
At Milady’s Jake called the bartender Grace, and stools always appeared for us. At Milano’s on Houston, a pit bull asleep under the table, pomaded pro skaters and their model girlfriends lined up by the door. At Mars Bar, the walls were saturated with urine and I was the only girl and no one paid any attention to me. A delicate ecosystem of old men, death metal, drinking, and the most contented kind of anarchy.
At Sophie’s on East Fifth his friend Brett ran things on Tuesday, a friend of Jake’s from “way back,” which I took to mean they were either petty criminals together or in rehab together because neither one of them would talk about it. Brett drank, tamely and grumpily, keeping one eye on The Simpsons episode that played on the TV above the bar. Jake kept giving me quarters to go to the jukebox and every time I chose a song he put his hands on his head and moaned.
“Is it genetic? Can women just not understand music? This is shit, absolute shit, you like this?”
“This is a good song. You could walk down the aisle to this song.” The aisle and Jake. He covered his ears.
“You’re fucking insane, you’re making me want to die.”
As soon as the song was over, he slid another quarter up next to my beer and I was determined—not for him to like a song I picked, that was impossible, but for him to say nothing.
“You know Ian wrote this for Joy Division before he died?”
“Who’s Ian? This is a band called New Order.”
“Brett! Brett, are you hearing this? Who’s Ian, she says! This is a band called New Order!”
Brett took his eyes off the screen for a second and sized me up. He was disappointed.
“Who’s Joy Division?”
“Fuck!” said Jake. The whole bar up in arms, grown men slamming the wood, someone pointing a pool stick at me. When the song ended another quarter appeared next to my beer.
“You’re torturing me?”
He leaned toward me and a lock of hair fell. I pushed it back. That’s who I was now: the girl who got to fix Jake’s hair. He was getting tipsy, loose, his teeth bared, I could feel him coming for me.
“I like it,” he said.
“You like humiliating me?”
“No.” He put his hand on my cheek and our foreheads touched. “I like how hard you concentrate when you’re over there. You chew on your lips like it’s life or death. I like the way you bop on your bar stool even when everyone is screaming at you.”
“You like my bopping?” I bounced and his hands found me and pulled me off the stool.
“You ready?” he asked and I nodded, biting his neck. I don’t think anything gave me as much satisfaction as when he asked if I was ready to go home. To think that we left places together, that we got to leave all the people to their last calls.
“Brett, we’ll settle,” he said, one hand pulling cash out of his wallet for a tip, his other hand crawling into my bra, pinching my nipple. Brett shrugged. It was like that all the time—no tab, no consequences.
—
“ARTISTS USED TO LIVE HERE” it said in graffiti on the plywood covering the chain-link fence around a giant hole in the ground. Demolition crews were inside, breaking up concrete, redistributing piles of dirt and wreckage. Also on the plywood were a series of building permits, and an ad for condos with a computer-illustrated woman in heels and a business suit relaxing, drinking a glass of wine, surveying the Manhattan skyline from her white box in the sky. She was a brunette with vaguely multicultural eyes. Maybe artists used to live here, but this woman was definitely not an artist. Though she was facing west, the ad said, The Dawn of Luxury in Williamsburg.
The wind frothed the river onto the rocks. The grass was brown and bare, the flower beds twiggy. I sat on a bench to look up at the bridge, and felt an acute anxiety. Who was going to buy the condos? Who was going to pay off our student loans? Would our sense of style protect us? And if the poor people used to live here and the rich people were going to live here, where would we go?