Finally we drink the tea, which is cold now, charmless except for its burst of caffeine. Indigo pulls a small bottle from her purse and squeezes a few drops of liquid into her tea. “I’m doing a cleanse,” she says. “I want all the toxins out.” “Me too,” I say. “Give me some of that.” She squeezes a few more drops in my cup. We both sip.
There we sit, cleansing.
“How are you?” she says.
“I’m the same as always. Except now I’m forty.”
“That seems impossible,” she says.
“You can’t stop time,” I say.
I don’t tell her about anything else that’s happening in my life. Nothing about the dates I go on, nothing about how much I hate my job, how every day of work degrades my soul, how sad my brother seems on the phone lately, how I’ve been thinking about my dead father more than seems healthy, how much I miss my mother but nothing will ever bring her back to New York City. Those all seem like things I should tell her, but it’s sort of nice not to have to think about my shit for a second, and also I don’t want to wear her down. If I talk about these minor tragedies to her, then they will exist in yet another realm, the Indigo realm. And today is not about me. Today is about her.
Instead I tell her about some art I recently saw in a small gallery in Chelsea. The paintings were rough and beautiful. The colors were from nature. The man who made them was born and raised in Louisiana, and he lived on a farm with his family, and his subject matter was the nearby swamps. I read his artist’s statement. It said that he floated on these swamps in a small motorboat every day at sunset for a year and that’s what inspired him the most, more than anything else in this world. Not people, not politics, not war, not love, not money, not life or death. Just cypress trees and swamp water and peachy skies and the occasional threatening swish of an alligator tail.
I am shocked when she gasps suddenly. I ask her if she’s OK, and she says, “That was just the first time in a long time I went somewhere else in my head. I went away and I came back.” “What about all your meditation?” I say. “It hasn’t been working,” she says. “I can’t get out of my head. Do you know what it’s like when you can’t get out of your head?” I nod. “I’ve been stuck until right this moment.” Her breathing calms. “It was so nice to go away for a while,” she says. “Thank you.” I hold her hand, and I think: This is a thing we could do for each other. Here, at last, is the way to make this work.
Girl
2003, I move into an apartment, and I’m in my late twenties, and it’s the first time I’ve lived in New York City on my own. First I lived with my mother and my father and my brother, and then just my mother and my father, and then just my mother, and when I went to Hunter I still lived with her, to save money. Now I feel like I can start all over again. Make new friends, construct a different life, set out in a new direction. We’re in the same city, but the new apartment is far enough away from the old apartment to seem like a different place. Brooklyn versus the Upper West Side, a river separating the two homes. Every day I wake up and stretch my arms and feel two inches taller because surely I am more of an adult.
I befriend a neighbor, Kevin. He lives in the exact same apartment as me but one floor up. He plays loud soul music early on Sunday mornings and the bass comes through my ceiling and wakes me up, and after a few weeks of this I go upstairs and knock on his door and ask him to turn it down. He’s making blueberry pancakes and he’s got running shorts on and his shirt is off and he looks pretty great half naked, not musclebound but just fit, tight, like his flesh is tailored to his bones. He apologizes, puts on a shirt, and offers me pancakes, and that’s how we become friends.
We see each other mostly on Sundays. Sometimes he has me over for breakfast, sometimes in the afternoon I knock on his door and ask him what he’s doing or I leave him a note that I just bought a bottle of wine and he should come down and join me right around sunset. I try not to make it sound romantic. I try to be his buddy. I am trying to have this thing with a man where I don’t have sex with him and then fuck it up.
We have great conversations. He’s a tax attorney, which sounds sort of boring but he’s really good at it, he loves it, and he has big, important clients. He also has this vision of buying houses and renovating them and then flipping them, but he wants to do this in Philadelphia because he likes it there and he sees a better market for his purposes. This is not the kind of thing I ever think about but he makes it all seem interesting and it’s exciting to be around someone who has actual hopes and dreams and a specific way to enact them.
We start to get closer. He is my Sunday-night whiskey and wine friend. I begin to count on seeing him. Sometimes we take walks along the waterfront. When he gets really drunk he tells me his favorite things about a woman. He loves the way they smell. He’s all about pheromones. “I don’t even care about perfume, although I like it. It’s just that basic woman smell that comes off the skin. Ooh, it makes me crazy.” But also he wears great cologne himself. If he likes the way a woman smells he wants to return the favor. Like: Thank you for smelling the way you do, I respect and admire it, so let me give you a gift back.
For a while I think I love him, or at least I could love him, but at some point he mentions he could never bring a white woman home to his mother, or more specifically, he could only bring a black woman home. He complains about his mother trying to fix him up, wanting him to go to church with her to meet a few girls, when Sundays were obviously made for morning runs and blueberry pancakes instead. But his singleness offends her. He tells me: “She said, ‘You want a skinny black girl? You want a big black girl? What kind of black girl do you want?’?” So I kind of forget about loving him because no matter how hard I work on myself, I’ll always be a white girl, and a Jewish one at that.