Jellyfish
The roof of William’s Harlem apartment building fell in on a Wednesday, three weeks before he was due to renew his lease. Everyone seemed to think it was a sign of something. Janice in 2F thought the landlord caved the roof in on purpose, to chase out the last of the rent-controlled tenants. Ed, the eighty-something widower two flights down, thought it was an accident on the part of the city, something gone wrong while they were covertly practicing riot-control tactics. The kids next door pasted fliers around the block, claiming the damage was the result of a minor earthquake caused by global warming. Phil, the landlord, said it was a pipe bursting in the empty apartment beside William’s, but in any case, when the wall went, it took the chunk of roof directly above William’s living room with it, leaving a large pile of rubble atop the remnants of his glass coffee table and a thin film of white dust over all of his belongings. He barely had time to get home from the office and survey the damage before the city showed up and declared the whole building structurally unsound and an asbestos hazard. He was given forty-eight hours to take what he could and be elsewhere before they sealed most of his life behind yellow tape. After turning down Phil’s offer of a temporary basement apartment ten blocks uptown, William broke out his emergency credit card, relocated himself to a midtown hotel, and reluctantly called a broker about a new apartment.
“I don’t know why you didn’t move a long time ago,” said his ex-wife, Debra, when he called to tell her about it. “It’s a wonder it’s only now falling down. That rat trap was only supposed to be temporary when you moved in twenty years ago.”
“Twenty years ago, I was still under the impression that our marriage was not supposed to be temporary,” he snapped back. “Besides, welcome to the new Harlem. I’ve lived here so long that everyone wants to live in my neighborhood again.”
“Not without roofs, they don’t,” said Debra, and after a week of stubborn resistance to everything the broker showed him, William was forced to concede the point.
Two weeks after her father’s roof fell in, Eva woke up to the blaring alarm of her cell phone, reminding her of the lunch date she’d programmed into her phone a few days earlier. She blinked at a crack in the ceiling, momentarily worried that her own roof was caving in out of solidarity, before rubbing the sleep from her eyes. It was not her ceiling she was looking at, she realized. It was not her bed that she was in, and it hadn’t been her apartment in over a year. Cheese was still asleep, and though it occurred to her to wake him so he wouldn’t be late for his shift at the coffee shop, she tiptoed to the shower instead, hoping to be ready to leave by the time he woke up so they wouldn’t have to talk about what she was doing there for the third time this week. After a few minutes of futilely turning the shower dials in search of heat or water pressure, Eva stumbled out smelling like another woman’s grapefruit and lily soap. Her damp curls made her grateful, at least, that she hadn’t bothered straightening her hair for her father’s benefit.
After fumbling through her backpack for something that wasn’t dirty, flecked with clay from her studio, or otherwise likely to offend her father, she gave up. Eva started on Cheese’s wardrobe, looking for something that didn’t scream that she’d spent the night at her ex-boyfriend’s apartment. When that didn’t work, she reminded herself that Cheese’s current girlfriend was in another state, ostensibly working up the energy to break up with him, and went through what was left on the girlfriend’s side of the closet, finally finding a button-down dress that was clean and high-collared and respectable. She noted, with equal parts contempt and admiration, that Cheese’s latest girlfriend was the sort of girl who ironed and kept things creased where they were supposed to be. She noted also, while buttoning, how easily the dress slipped over her hips. There had been a note of genuine concern in Cheese’s voice when he pointed out how thin she’d gotten and asked her if she was still eating OK. She told him that she was, a mostly honest answer: she was eating less lately only because living alone made the awkwardness of keeping to regular mealtimes almost unbearable. The soft worry of his voice when he’d asked was at odds with the present. Cheese, now awake, was demanding to know why Eva was wearing Kate’s dress.
“Oh, come on,” she said, turning around to stare pointedly at his bare chest above the white bedsheet, the faint red tooth marks she’d left beneath his collarbone last night.
“You can’t take her dress,” he said.
“I’m not taking it, I’m borrowing. And I’m running late. You can yell at me later.”
“Is there going to be a later?” he asked. He climbed out of bed, stopping to pick up the armful of bangle bracelets she’d left on the nightstand and hand them to her. “And what are you in such a hurry for, anyway? I thought you said your dad was always late.”
It was true, she had said that. Her father was never where he said he’d be when he said he’d be there. When she was small, she would wait on her mother’s kitchen windowsill for hours on visiting days, nose pressed against the glass. Her mother would linger in the kitchen looking disapproving, reminding her that it could be hours. It was before everyone carried a cell phone and was always and every minute reachable, and even now Eva hesitated to call her father when she couldn’t find him. She preferred when he materialized without preface. Back then she’d leave the windowsill before he arrived, partly out of embarrassment and partly because she knew it would make him sad to see her there, waiting. Once she’d curled up in the window and slept there, intent upon looking pitiful when he arrived, a day later than he had said. When the yellow cab pulled up the next morning, she watched her father exiting the car, saw the genuine smile on his face as he approached the house, and abandoned the operation. She told Cheese this story while she pulled her hair back into some semblance of order and dabbed herself with the perfume vial in her purse, noting that it clashed with the lingering lily scent of soap.
“You sound like me the week after you left me the first time,” said Cheese. “I thought every woman walking beneath the window was you.”
“Well,” said Eva. “Here I am.”
“You are,” said Cheese. “And I’m sure your father will be there on time today. You said he really wanted to see you, right?”
The worried tone of his question made her want to kiss him, and then to laugh at him, but mostly it made her want to call Maya, the woman for whom she’d left him. It had been two weeks since she’d gotten the last of her belongings from the apartment she and Maya had shared, and they hadn’t spoken since. Cheese’s tolerance exhausted Eva sometimes. She knew Maya would tell her when she was full of shit. Avoiding confrontation because you’d rather take shit than deal with it doesn’t make you a martyr, Maya had said to her once, and probably would have said to her again if Eva had tried that windowsill story on her. But Eva didn’t bother trying to explain her childhood to Maya; it hadn’t been happy exactly, but it hadn’t been sad in any way Maya would have understood. On Maya’s scale of childhood tragedy, Eva didn’t register.
Usually, Eva thought of herself as a good person. She stayed up at night worrying about the human condition in vague and specific incarnations. She made herself available to the people whom she loved, and some whom she didn’t. She gave money to every other homeless person and stopped to let stray kids remind her how much Jesus and the Hare Krishnas loved her, more for the benefit of their souls than hers. Still, she wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.
William was uptown, arguing with Phil about a blender. William had known Phil since moving back to the city in the eighties. Back then, his had been the only building Phil owned, and Phil had lived downstairs and done most of the maintenance himself, but the rapidly rising rents over the past decade, the slick face-lift of 125th Street, and the influx of people no longer scared to live north of it, had made it possible for Phil to expand his operations. He now owned a few older buildings on Convent Avenue, and one on St. Nick; he had moved himself to a brownstone and grown a belly, now that he no longer climbed the stairs to respond to tenants’ complaints. William liked Phil, always had. After all those times going to see an available apartment, only to be told the second the owner saw his face that it was suddenly rented, it had been a relief to have a black landlord. Over the years, he and Phil had developed a friendly rapport, met for a drink from time to time even after Phil moved. But now, as Phil stubbornly refused to let him back into the old building to get the blender he’d left unopened in a box in a closet, William was reminded of what Phil had said about the black contractor who’d ripped him off once: Used to be you could at least count on your own people.
“I understand,” Phil was saying, which of course he did not. “I’d let you in if I could, but it’s not up to me. Right now, the city says, Jump, I say, How high? And the city says, Nobody goes into that building, and nobody takes anything out, and I don’t take that padlock off the door. Structurally unsound. Breathing hazard. You name it. I start handing out keys because people want to get in and get stuff, next thing you know, the rest of the roof’s collapsing or people are squatting in their old apartments, and then the city’s shutting down everything else I own.”
“Phil,” William said, “that’s nonsense. You know I’m not moving in. What I just paid for the deposit on my new place, they’ll have to bury me there. I just want my stuff. Just the little stuff. I’m late for lunch with my daughter.
“I forgot you had a daughter,” said Phil. “I remember her now. Pretty girl.”
Eva had not been running late for lunch, so much as running away from Cheese. She knew her father would be at least twenty minutes late, but her arrival at the restaurant fifteen minutes early gave her time to order a gin and tonic. The waiter was young and aggressively charming. Eva asked for extra lemon for her water; he brought her a dish of lemons, and a fresh mint leaf, along with her drink. He hovered. Eva envied his eyelashes. It was not quite lunchtime, and the restaurant was quiet and near empty. It had been a favorite of her father’s when he worked nearby, before he’d left his job at the downtown EEOC office for work with a private firm. It would have been easier to meet in midtown, but even after winning several big cases her father didn’t seem quite comfortable in his new office, with its smooth burgundy leather and gold-plated doors. He’d liked it better downtown. He used to bring her to this restaurant on visiting days. Eva remembered tapping her Mary Janes against the hardwood floor, getting free Shirley Temples from the old owner. The name of the place was the same now, but the menu had changed from solidly Greek to vaguely Mediterranean, and when Eva asked the waiter how the old owner was doing, he seemed apologetically confused by the fact that the restaurant had ever been anything different.
As he walked away, Eva emptied the contents of a sugar packet onto her teaspoon and swallowed. She assumed this was only rude when someone was watching. Her father was not watching, because he was, according to her intuition and the metallic clock on the wall, still a good fifteen minutes away. She sipped her drink and studied the salad page. A woman in heels walked into the restaurant. Click, click, click. The sound of her reminded Eva of Maya, who thought herself short and wore heels even in her own apartment. Maya, whose steps had a perfectly measured rhythm to them. That was what Eva had first noticed when they’d met in the bookstore: the sound of her walking. Maya was brilliant, had a dot-shaped birthmark in the center of her forehead, and was one of the few people Eva knew who still believed in anything, but Eva would have loved her on the basis of sound alone. She instinctively looked up from her table when the woman entered, but only the sound of her was familiar. This woman was skinny and mousy, where Maya was all curve and bravado. The woman sat at the bar and whispered something to the bartender, who seemed to know her. There was a television at the bar, tuned to CNN. A man in a lab coat stood over a kitten, who chased the string he dangled. The kitten was calico and unnaturally small. Eva squinted at the caption.
“Pretty soon they’ll be cloning us,” the waiter said, while refilling Eva’s water glass.
“Well, that’s a shame,” said Eva. “It’s dying.”
She did not know this to be true. She remembered reading something about sheep dying. Cloned cells were as old as the parent cells they’d come from. But she had read this in college, some years ago, and it was possible that things had changed since then. Progressed. She watched the kitten swatting at its toy, and bit into a piece of warm bread. Run, damn you, Eva thought. The kitten kept swatting at the string. The newsmen pretended to be awed. Eva winked at the waiter and asked for another drink. He nodded, taking the opportunity to glance down her dress.
The blender is not just a blender. It cuts and dices and purees. Eva liked to cook, William had thought when he bought it. When she visited him, which she hadn’t recently, she opened his refrigerator and looked disappointed to find it full of take-out cartons. She’d walk him to the downtown grocery, though left to his own devices, if he shopped at all, it would be right down the block at C-Town, the fluorescent light and big red discount signs less disorienting than the cramped aisles, dark lighting, and six-dollar heads of lettuce at the store Eva preferred. She’d make him buy food for himself, remind him that it had been a long time since he couldn’t afford to eat better. By the time she’d finished filling baskets with dried pasta and fresh vegetables and jars of floating artichokes, they had so much food they had to take a cab back, food it took him months to entirely dispense with.
Back at his apartment, she’d make elaborate salads and stir-fried vegetables and pasta that always seemed to him a touch undercooked. She ’d cut vegetables into thin slivers and squirt them with fresh lemon and tahini. It was watching her cut that made him think of the blender a few months ago. He’d searched for the right one online, evaluating the photos and assorted specifics of blender after blender the way you might compare real estate or personal ads. It would make her life easier. Maybe she would cook at her apartment and think of him while pureeing soup. She would pick up the phone and invite him for dinner. He’d imagined arriving just in time for dinner, finding the table set with her mismatched and brightly colored dishes. He’d imagined eating salads with perfectly julienned carrots.
Thinking it through, though, even if Phil let him in, he should probably leave the blender. Contamination, and all that. Besides, Eva was the type to dwell on things: she’d look at the blender and start talking about the old apartment, or gentrification, or the way they were all slowly dying of chemical poisoning. She’d never cook with it. She’d put it in a closet, or she’d take it to her studio and mount it on one of her sculptures, fence it in with chicken wire. Better that he just buy her another and hope she didn’t remember it was a replacement for the first one he’d promised her. Besides, he’d be buying himself a whole new set of kitchen supplies anyway; if Eva would come to stay with him for a bit, she wouldn’t need her own. He’d make sure she had everything she wanted; the kitchen in the new place was small, but sunny, and he’d let her pick what it was she needed. Better that he wait to see what she said this afternoon before he gave her one more thing to cart to Brooklyn.
The waiter returned with Eva’s second drink. Her father had told her this was a celebratory lunch, she reasoned, though he hadn’t said what it was a celebration for. Eva was still watching the television, but between the volume on low and the woman at the bar tipsy and giggling, she couldn’t hear a word. The president was mouthing something from behind a podium, and she supposed she didn’t care.
“What happened to our kitten?” the waiter asked.
“Dick Cheney ate him,” said Eva.
The waiter laughed.
“Are you still waiting to order?” He nodded toward the empty chair.
Eva blushed, realizing she looked for all the world like a woman being stood up for a lunch date. It had been so many years since Eva had been without at least one lover on call that she was surprised by how quickly awkwardness could come back to her. Now she had the sense again that anyone could just by looking at her see that she did not belong to anyone, anywhere. Until the last few years of her life, when she’d gone flinging herself from lover to lover like a pinball, she’d considered her not-belonging a badge of honor rather than a source of shame. It had been the rallying cry of her motley crew of high school friends—Kim, the purple-haired girl in tortoiseshell glasses and leopard-print leggings; Lenny, who’d known he was gay before most of them knew the word as anything but an all-purpose pejorative; Irene, the only other black girl in her suburban private school class—they’d sit together at lunch and watch the petty dramas of their classmates and say out loud, Who wants that? Who wants those people, anyway? But high school had turned into college and then the handful of years afterward—Kim was living in Cameroon with the Peace Corps; Lenny was a lawyer in San Francisco; and Irene was busy playing Gallant to Eva’s Goofus in their parents’ black professional circles—working for an investment bank, appearing regularly at AKA charity events in designer suits, her doctor fiancé at her side.
While all the others had turned into more self-possessed versions of themselves, Eva felt further than ever from her old self. Where once she’d taken her self-sufficiency for granted, somewhere in a dizzying string of morning afters she had started to feel her aloneness was a mark of incompletion, faintly spreading.
“I’m waiting for my father,” Eva said to the waiter, who seemed ready to snatch away the second menu. “He’ll be here. He’ll be late, but he turns up eventually.”
She pulled out her cell phone and feigned a search for a text message; the waiter wandered off and left her to her pretense of human interaction.
“Phil,” said William, “I lived in that apartment for twenty years. I grew up in the Bronx. If breathing debris hasn’t killed me yet, it won’t, ever. Explain to me why the city that still hasn’t gotten all the asbestos out of its own damn public housing and rents the Bronx out for landfill space is suddenly so concerned about my lungs.”
“I’m not the city,” said Phil. “Explaining is not my job. You really just want a few photographs?”
“That’s all,” said William.
Phil motioned him down the block, and they began the short walk from Phil’s place to the old building. They cut through the City College campus, and when they got to the other side, Phil stopped for a coffee at the corner store and, while stirring three sugars into it, said with his back to William, “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“This irreplaceable stuff you need me to open the building so badly so you can get—why didn’t you take it with you when they told everybody to get what they were going to get and get out?”
William didn’t answer until they were halfway down the block. He considered pretending he hadn’t heard the question. Finally he let out a breath and said, “The truth is, I forgot it was there.”
William told himself that forgetting something didn’t mean you’d forgotten the person associated with it. His own mother, he reminded himself, never could keep up with photographs, wouldn’t have expected a drawing to last a week in a two-bedroom apartment with four kids in it, let alone tried to keep it for twenty years. But then, there were four of them, and she had two thirty-hour-a-week jobs, and still she checked in with them every night, still he remembered the cocoa-butter smell of her kissing him good night, and still he sensed that if something had been the only reminder of how things used to be, she never would have forgotten it—not even during all those trash-bag moves from place to place before they got settled. Yet, he couldn’t remember to take one box in a closet.
Phil cleared his throat; they were standing in front of the old apartment. Phil looked over his shoulder, as if any one of the kids on the steps across the street might be an undercover city housing operative, then released the chain and padlock from the door and stepped aside.
“I’m waiting for you for fifteen minutes,” he said. “Something falls on your head and knocks you out, I’m telling the cops you’re a fool and I don’t know you.”
William walked up the creaky staircase to the third floor, fast for the first two levels, then wondered if one shouldn’t walk gingerly in a building people kept threatening was going to fall. He went straight for the closet, left the blender in spite of himself, and pulled out the box in the back of the closet. Most of the things in the box used to be in his office, but when he’d moved up in the world—literally up—he’d brought the box home, instead of to the new place. In his new office, he had only two pictures of Eva, including the most recent picture she had given him: her in a park somewhere, smiling at he probably didn’t even want to know who, the streaks in her hair a shade of fluorescent red like the color of the lighted trim on an old jukebox.
But the old boxes, they were full of pictures of his daughter the way he remembered her. Debra had sent him one for every school year, plus one for every recital, plus an annual Christmas picture taken on the steps of the church Eva had refused to attend once she turned sixteen. Debra had mailed them meticulously to everyone at the holidays, letting Eva cut the wallet-sized photos along their white lines by herself (he could see the jagged edges on the early photos). He wanted to display these things again, he thought, to display them where Eva could see them.
From just after the divorce until Eva was a teenager, Debra had dropped her off one Friday afternoon each month, spent the weekend with friends in the city, and come to collect her Sunday morning. William still had seven years’ worth of those Friday-afternoon visits stored up in the box. Fridays must have been art days at school; he had all sorts of odd ceramic and papier-maché animals, though he suspected he had only the ugly ones, the ones that Debra didn’t want. Dogs without legs and the like. He was more fond of the paper: years’ worth of elaborate abstract drawings Eva made by coloring over interoffice memos in red, black, and blue pen, the scribbled-on pages she had ripped out of coloring books and left with him.
He pulled out one crinkled page from the corner of the box where it had been jammed. It was from the year of the self-esteem books, the year after he’d showed up for Eva’s eighth-birthday party and found that the guests were all eleven-year-olds. Debra swore she’d get to the bottom of it, and indeed she had. Eva, it seemed, had begun spending lunch and recess with the fifth-graders, after the third-grade bully called her a nigger and told her she couldn’t sit at the lunch table. William, we have to do something about this, Debra had said. Her first solution was to take an early lunch hour and accompany Eva to the cafeteria every day, a plan that Eva had promptly vetoed. Next she swore they were moving. Where, William had asked, to another planet?
In the end, Debra had purchased a year’s worth of coloring books with names like I am Beautiful and Why I Love Myself, the idea being that Eva could learn to be her own champion. He had tried to talk to Eva about all of it once, but all she would say was that she wished her mother hadn’t told the lunch monitors what was going on, because she liked the fifth-graders better. She had given him that page, the page she was coloring at the time. It began: I am special because . . . and had lines, presumably for listing the conditions of one’s specialness . Eva had ignored the lines and finished the sentence: I am just special. I am special because I am just special. There was Eva, he thought, not unkindly. There was Eva, and what did you do with a girl like that? William collected himself, sealed the box as best he could, then went downstairs to assure Phil he was uninjured, and hail the first cab going downtown.
Eva heard the door jingle as her father walked into the restaurant. She took a sip of water so that he wouldn’t smell her breath and know that she’d been drinking. She wasn’t sure why she got that way around him, guilty about things she had no reason to be ashamed of, but that was how it was.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said, kissing the top of her head and sitting across from her.
She smiled across the table, then looked curiously at the box he had set down beside them. She had long ceased to be amazed by her father’s lateness, but admired that his reasons were always surprising, involving some unsuspected feat he had undertaken while most of the late people in the world were missing trains or sleeping through alarms.
“What’s in the box, Daddy?”
“In this box,” he said grinning, “are the fruits of a morning’s labor.” He told the story of his morning uptown.
“Poor Phil,” said Eva. “Bad enough his building got condemned, now he’ll have nightmares about ceramic animals living in it.”
“It was me the building almost fell down on,” her father said. “Don’t go feeling too sorry for Phil.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy. Is everything OK? Mom said they weren’t going to let you get all of your things back.”
“Your mother knows better than to think I’d give up that easy. Like I was going to leave all this for the city to burn?” He reached into the box and pulled out the first solid object, a framed picture of Eva after a tap recital. Her hair was teased into glossy curls, and she was wearing the kind of stage makeup that makes children look garish up close.
“I’m going to put these up in the new—”
“God,” said Eva, staring at the photo, “I look like JonBenét Ramsey.”
She flinched at her own lack of social grace and continued, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean—What were you saying?”
But her father was saying nothing now. He looked at her, confused, and they let the awkward silence sit until the waiter came to rescue them.
“So,” her father asked, once they had ordered, “how are things? You look lovely, by the way. That’s a beautiful dress.”
It was unfair of him to ask how she was doing. William knew more than he let on. He knew, for example, that she could probably use extra money. Eva had put on one gallery show, in a deliberately spare gallery on a side street in Chelsea. The art paid infrequently; she worked other jobs to support herself. She did paperwork for an art museum. Weekends, she worked in a store that sold sex toys. When Debra told him this, he thought she was kidding, but it was true. It’s also a bookstore, Debra said, by way of consolation. He went to the store once, to see it for himself. The windows were papered in red and when he opened the door he was confronted with a table full of vibrators. He shut it quickly. Sometimes he thought her whole life was an elaborate series of barricades against him.
He knew about the girlfriend, though even Debra seemed uncertain about the current status of this relationship. They were not “roommates” anymore, but he was not sure what this meant, considering they were hardly roommates to begin with. He knew that Eva had been living in her own small studio for the past month, though a few years ago when he’d asked why she couldn’t just get a bigger place instead of paying rent in two places, neither especially nice, she’d insisted that she couldn’t sleep where she worked. She’d been living with her boyfriend at the time. When he’d brought this up with Debra, Debra said, She just didn’t want to tell you that Cheese isn’t making her pay rent. He had laughed at the absurdity of this deception. His daughter was dating a white boy with three earrings and a tattoo he said was symbolic of the Great Gatsby, a boy who insisted on going by his high school nickname of “Cheese” when his parents had given him the perfectly sensible name of Charles, and what Eva found most embarrassing was that she wasn’t paying any rent to live with him.
He wondered if Eva really thought he didn’t know these things, whether the charade was for his benefit or hers. Aside from being her father, he dealt with liars for a living, and Eva was no actress. He was not certain whether Eva had fully come to terms with her mother’s inability to keep secrets. Most likely, she just didn’t imagine that they still talked as often as they did. It made him sad sometimes to think that Eva maybe couldn’t understand this, the kind of bond you never lose. It was true, he had blamed Debra for things. He had plans, rules, which were disrupted in the first place by Debra leaving him, and in the second place by Eva herself. He’d had speeches and punishments prepared for the normal things: dating, drugs, slacking in school. Eva never seemed to get in trouble for the normal things. In high school she’d been arrested at a protest for standing too close to a group of kids throwing eggs at the cops. He didn’t have a speech for that. Only once had he gotten a call from the school. Debra was away at a conference and he had taken his vacation time to stay with Eva for the week. Could someone come get Eva? the secretary had said. She’d been suspended for biting another student.
“Biting?” he’d asked. Eva was a sophomore in high school. He hadn’t known fifteen-year-olds bit people.
“Biting,” the secretary had confirmed, so he’d gone to the school to sort things out. There wasn’t much sorting. Eva confessed to the biting and could offer no better reason than that the boy had been getting on her nerves.
“I value silence,” she’d said, “and he wouldn’t shut up.”
He’d had no choice but to take her back to the house and wait for Debra to get back that evening. Debra had gone to the school the next day, the first day of Eva’s suspension, and demanded further questioning of the boy. He eventually admitted to having grabbed Eva’s behind earlier in the day. Debra threatened the boy, the school, and the parents, and Eva’s suspension was reversed.
“Why didn’t you tell me he touched you?” William asked Eva later.
“Didn’t matter,” she’d said. “That wasn’t why I bit him.”
The arrival of her salad saved Eva from further strained conversation about the state of her life. She’d already claimed, “I like living in the studio,” and “I’m getting so much work done.” She crunched on a crouton.
“I’m glad to see you eating,” her father said.
Eva sighed. “Daddy I’ve been eating for years. We eat together sometimes.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m just saying. You look good. Healthy.”
She was certain that her mother had encouraged him to say this sort of thing. Eva wished there were a Bat-Signal for the waiter, something to invite him to disrupt them. She hated the inexplicable things between them, the secrets her mother had given away, even though they weren’t hers to keep. She remembered all those school picture days and holidays and recitals, and she liked it better when her father thought of her that way. These days she couldn’t be around him without feeling that, without thinking he was waiting for her to win something and smile pretty.
She stabbed a tomato. She’d been eating normally since junior year of college, since she’d broken up with the last boyfriend her father had actually liked, the charming premed who’d told her she had cellulite and pretended not to hear when she threw up in his bathroom. He’d asked about that boyfriend all the time she was with Cheese, and twice as often when she was with Maya, until one day she’d said without explaining, Do you want me to hate myself? after which he’d never asked again.
When she was being honest with herself, which was more often than she was honest with other people, she admitted that Cheese was the first boy who’d ever made her feel beautiful, the first man in her life she was sure was never going anywhere no matter what she did, not that it kept her from testing him. When she talked to Lenny on the phone, or replied to Kim’s sporadic e-mails, or met Irene for drinks, dinner, and conversations that felt increasingly obligatory, she gave them a host of quite rational reasons for why she and Cheese would never really get back together. He was twenty-eight years old and seemed content to be a barista forever; he claimed to love her art but resented the time she spent on it; she had been the first of what was now a line of four artsy ethnic girlfriends in a row, making her feel a bit like he was collecting them the way her old ceramics instructor collected dolls of the world. But the truth was there was something about his availability that unsettled her, that made her want to know what it would finally take for him not to be there when she showed up unannounced.
She’d done it a month ago, the night she and Maya had broken up—thought maybe this time he would finally tell her she couldn’t do this to him anymore, that they both had to move on—but he’d opened the door and let her in. The girlfriend was still living in the apartment then, but she’d been gone for the weekend, meaning Eva got to curl herself into the corner of the saggy orange sofa she and Cheese had gotten for free off of craigslist two years earlier, and drink the cheap bourbon he poured her a shot of, and tell him what had happened.
What had happened, first, was that she and Maya had redecorated, taken to painting the walls in brightly contrasting colors, and then hanging brightly printed fabrics on the wall: red against the kitchen’s deep purple, orange against the green of the bedroom. What had happened a few days after the apartment’s transformation was Eva thought of the stark, yellowing walls of her father’s cramped apartment, the faintly moldy smell of them, the way he shrugged off her gentle suggestions that there were plenty of nicer places he could afford to move; he didn’t even have to leave the neighborhood. He would offer some excuse about the hassle of getting the couch down the narrow stairwell without ruining it, as if he couldn’t afford new furniture these days, or about liking his landlord, as if Phil would hold it against him if he moved out of a building that Phil himself had left years ago. But she never pressed, because under the flimsy excuses she guessed her father’s reasoning was something along the lines of Why bother? He saw most of the people he wanted to see at work, had built a network of friends who spent more time at the office than at their own homes anyway. The only person who came to see him on a semi-regular basis was Eva, and although there were only thirty blocks between them—eight subway stops, counting the back-tracking, but walkable, if you were in the mood for walking—it had been over a month since she’d last been to visit, and she almost never invited him to visit her.
When Maya floated in from work, click-clicking against the floors, smelling vaguely honeyed from her shampoo and mildly sweaty from her bike ride home from the after-school center where she was a social worker, Eva had already been shopping, planned a menu, bought decent wine instead of the cheap stuff she and Maya usually drank, and was a minute away from inviting her father over for dinner the next night, giving him time to get home before she called.
“What’s the occasion?” Maya asked. She dropped her shoulder bag on the kitchen counter and held Eva around the waist, planting a soft kiss on the side of her neck.
“I’m inviting my dad over for dinner tomorrow,” said Eva. She could feel Maya’s arms stiffen, then drop from around her.
“Great,” said Maya. Her shoes clicked backward, away from Eva. Eva turned to face her, watched her arms fold across her body. “Does that mean I have to make plans elsewhere?”
“Who said that?”
“Your father hates me.”
“He doesn’t. He just doesn’t understand—us.”
“Maybe he’d understand better if you stopped introducing me as your roommate. He knows you’re bullshitting him.”
“Maya—I’m trying. Everybody’s parents aren’t so awful that they can tell them to go f*ck themselves and move on with their lives, and everybody doesn’t have a foster mom who owns a berry farm upstate and makes her own tie-dye skirts and is thrilled to meet her daughter’s girlfriend. He’s lonely, and he’s my father, and he’s never done anything bad to you. To me, either, for that matter.”
“Is that the standard for parenting these days?”
“Maya, don’t. I don’t need you to fix this. I’m not one of your kids at the center.”
“No, you’re not. For one thing, my kids at the center can admit to themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, their parents will never love them the way they are. But you sit there and make garlic bread like a moron if you want to—he’s still going to look at you like the last time you did anything right, you were eleven years old. You will never be what he wants.”
It didn’t matter how many times Maya apologized, or how much she’d cried when Eva came with Cheese to move the handful of things in the apartment that actually belonged to her. It didn’t matter that Eva admitted, when pressed, that she’d been out of line bringing Maya’s parents into it. There were moments when you knew things about what was inside of people you didn’t want to, knew how deeply they could disappoint you. There was love, and then there was suicide—and then there was whatever it was she had with Cheese. A place to go whenever she needed it, but where she’d never feel good about being. They’d spent the night she left Maya, and most of the following morning, in bed together, until there was the sound of the phone ringing, and with a glance at the caller ID, Cheese took the call and headed into the living room with the phone. Eva had been ignoring the new girlfriend all morning, but the bedroom suddenly seemed full of things that belonged to her: a woman’s belt, a paint-splattered T-shirt, a bottle of orange nail polish on the dresser. She turned the sound up on the television. On CNN, green bombs were falling somewhere, and Eva felt more chastened by the blurred night vision carnage than she had by the token reminders that another woman lived here now.
Cheese came back into the room a few minutes later. “Kate,” he said. “She’s upset about something. She was visiting her parents for the weekend, and I guess they had a fight. Eva—”
Eva exhaled. “If you’re going to console distraught women all day, you’re going to have to be more gentle about getting rid of them.”
“Look, she won’t be back tonight. But tomorrow—”
“So I can stay until the replacement gets here?”
“Eva—”
“No, fair is fair. But you might have at least been more original. Really, another artistic brown girl? It’s like—”
“It’s not like. It’s not like anything.”
“Right, she’s a painter. And a different kind of brown. Watch, though, Arab is the new black.”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
Now? Eva thought. She could not remember the last time things had not been ridiculous.
“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
She could have stayed, she knew that. She was Cheese’s first Meaningful Girl, and she had left him. She could have stayed the night and been sitting there eating breakfast when the new girlfriend came back if she’d wanted to. When she’d left, she’d thought of it as a grand gesture toward Kate, the kind of supercilious magnanimity that was usually out of her reach. She came back again a week later. The silence of her sparse Washington Heights studio had been driving her crazy, and the noisy parade of life outside was no relief. She’d been expecting Cheese to awkwardly ask her to leave, or worse yet, to awkwardly invite her in and expect her to awkwardly socialize with Kate without letting on that anything had changed. Eva was surprised by the intensity of the relief she felt when Cheese told her Kate had gone to California for a few weeks to think about their relationship. She preferred not to focus on what it meant.
William wondered if there was a way to tell Eva how badly she needed him without insulting her. He worried that the best years of her life were going to look like the last few decades of his, that she’d be too proud to admit she needed him now, needed someone to let her put herself together, get a real job, go back to school maybe, find a decent boyfriend she could present in public, one who didn’t leave her looking so disoriented all the time. While he was phrasing and rephrasing the invitation in his head, the waiter appeared with their food. He leaned over Eva a little too closely when putting her pasta in front of her, and gave her an overly friendly smile. Watch it, that’s my daughter, William wanted to say, but he had never been able to say that about Eva. He didn’t know what to protect her from, and anyway, she seemed to have taken her protection into her own hands some time ago.
He thought maybe he would show her a picture of the new place, though from the outside it didn’t look like much. He’d been skeptical when the broker showed him the listing, not to mention skeptical of Brooklyn in general. As a child in the Bronx, he’d hated Brooklyn on principle—too much boasting on the part of its inhabitants, too low to the ground, too many trains involved in visiting anyone who lived there. But the apartment, the converted upper half of a Fort Greene brownstone, had won him over. There were two levels, and three bedrooms, and windows everywhere you looked. He had taken to walking around the neighborhood in the evenings. He ate roti one day and giant hamburgers the next. He was becoming a fan of Brooklyn’s parks. He had once seen a young man in a T-shirt that read BROOKYLN. YOU KNOW BETTER. He wondered if this was the sort of person Eva would know.
The apartment had cost him the better portion of his savings, but it was a good investment, and good for him, after all these years of living a life he pretended he could leave at any minute, even as he got more and more settled, to own something, to put down roots. Besides, he had been making, for almost a decade, far more than he’d been spending, what with his ascetic lifestyle. He needed a place—and this was a good one, a place where they could rebuild things, a place where he could see Eva living, her art in one room, her in another, until she was on her feet, until whatever sad thing that surrounded her had been lifted.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve moved to Brooklyn. I got a real place to live. It’s beautiful. Lots of room.”
He did not mention the lack of furniture. He would get new furniture. He was fifty years old and he had never bought a piece of his own furniture. Even in the middle of the divorce, he had let Debra pick out what later sat in his old apartment for twenty years, and make arrangements for its delivery. This time he and Eva could find things they both liked, make sure she would be happy there. He’d thought of her in the big bedroom over the garden, sleeping safely, putting what she wanted on the walls. He’d remembered her racing through the small apartment he and Debra had shared so long ago, running down the hall with the light behind her. He’d remembered her stumbling into the kitchen sleepy-eyed on Sunday mornings, crawling into his lap and helping him grate cheese for the omelets Debra was making. He remembered what it was like to be at home in a place.
“Look,” he said. “There’s room for you. Two rooms. You must be so crowded in your studio. Your mother says there’s not even room for real furniture. You shouldn’t be living that way. Come with me. We’ll get whatever you need. Stay as long as you need to stay.”
“Daddy,” Eva said, pushing away the half-full plate of pasta. “Oh, Daddy. That’s wonderful for you, and wonderful for you to think of me. But I think we’d just get in each other’s way. Besides, I like living in my studio, and you need your own space. Everybody needs their own space.”
Eva saw the look on her father’s face and fought the urge to take back what she’d said. He looked almost the way he had looked when she and her mother had first left him. She closed her eyes and could remember nothing but that morning years ago, dull sky, October leaves on the ground. He had taken her to get a last slice of New York pizza while her mother watched the moving men put the last of their things on the truck.
“It’s not so far away,” he’d said. “Remember how much Daddy loves you?”
“The whole world much and then some,” she’d remembered. She’d thought of love being like tentacles, reaching from wherever he was to wherever she was. She’d giggled.
“Is that funny?” he’d asked.
“I am thinking of you like a jellyfish,” she’d said, but he hadn’t understood.