And then he gets a girlfriend, this woman named Celeste who is just stunning, like model-pretty, creamy tan skin and six feet tall and thin, long legs. (The answer, it appears, is a skinny black girl.) I am impressed by how attractive she is. Like: Way to go, Kevin. I kind of want to high-five him. I definitely don’t feel I can compete with the likes of Celeste. Like I’m fine, I look fine, I have big breasts and a tiny waist and good hips, round but narrow, and big fistfuls of curls, and well-manicured eyebrows, and rosy cheeks, and I wear all black, and I have a cool, smart look to me, angled and soft at the same time. I am not an extraordinary beauty, but I hold up medium well under scrutiny. I got my thing going on. But I always see them when they’re coming in from their run, in their athletic gear, her hair in these adorable braids, one on either side, the two of them sweating and happy and in love, and I know deep in my heart I would absolutely never go running with him, so not only am I white but also I’m not fit in the slightest. It just would never work.
Celeste moves in and I don’t see Kevin that much anymore. Then, a year later, Celeste moves out, and I start to see more of him again, but he’s really hustling on the dating front, trying to get over her quickly, so some Sundays there are different women around, although to be fair, some Sundays there are different men around at my place, and Kevin and I start texting instead of knocking on each other’s door because no one wants to interrupt anything. “Girl” is what he calls me. “Girl, where you at,” on a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes he calls me that in person, too. It’s buttery and slow, nearly southern, and I love it, because it makes me feel feminine and doted on and I hunger for signs of affection in the universe, and I know it’s a genuine term of endearment. And I hate it a little bit too, because now I’m in my thirties and I haven’t been a girl in a long time, and even when I was, I don’t think I liked being called “girl” very much. But eventually I decide I love it more than I hate it, so I let it go.
One Sunday when we’re at my place, at the small table by the window, watching the sun set over the East River, waiting for the lights of the Empire State Building to launch, he tells me that he’s leaving town. Some houses he was flipping in Philly need his attention, his office has a branch there, the commute drains him. He needs a change. He never got over Celeste. He’s lived most of his life in New York City. He gets tired of being a black man in this town. He wonders what it would be like to be somewhere else. He promises to keep in touch. I feel myself shutting down to him. This is an act of betrayal: he was my first friend in the building. But what was he supposed to do, be my neighbor forever? I have all of these thoughts at once and I utter none of them out loud. I decide to continue to be his friend, and this feels like a mature act on my part, and I congratulate myself silently. This all happens over the course of one minute and he never knows how close he was to the two of us not knowing each other anymore. “Philly’s not that far,” he says. “You could always come visit.”
But I never do. New people move in and out of the building all the time. The neighborhood changes. Where it was once a scruffy industrial waterfront, now there are shops and condos and bike paths and European tourists asking for directions to where the cool things are, and I vaguely point and say, “That way,” and it’s not a lie but also maybe I don’t know what’s cool anymore. I’ll be forty soon enough, or someday anyway. I read the internet, but then again, so does everyone else. I am distracted by the world around me and my family’s issues and my lackluster career and how all the wheels keep spinning and I have never learned how to steer. I don’t forget about Kevin, but I don’t need to track him to Philadelphia. Weren’t we only neighbors after all?
Still, he’s in my life. “Girl, where you at,” he texts me whenever he likes. And sometimes I am at work and sometimes I am walking out of yoga class and sometimes I am on a date and sometimes I am at a museum feeling nostalgic for my failed past as an artist and sometimes I am with a friend eating a big, delicious, expensive dinner and sometimes I am walking on the waterfront ducking European tourists asking directions and sometimes I am sitting on a park bench in the sunshine reading the paper and sometimes I am at home and it is a Sunday night and I am drinking a bottle of wine by myself, alone but not lonely, but definitely alone. And wherever I am, I text him back right away. Because I want him to know. Where I am at.
More time passes, we’re older, we’re still on our own. Celeste gets married and has a child, the internet tells me. A month after that, Kevin comes to town for a meeting and shows up at my house later that night. “Girl,” he says when I open the door.
Girl.
He hands me some wine. It is an excellent bottle because Kevin has been doing extremely well for himself. I have also purchased an excellent bottle because I’m not doing too bad either, although he is way ahead of me in life. I can’t say why things are different this time, but everything is a little more charged. Like he hugs me and he smells my neck. I don’t even think it’s deliberate. He’s just a man who smells a woman.
We get to drinking, and it takes not very long for him to start talking about his search for a wife. He is still looking for a woman he can bring home to his mother, who has grown no less stringent about her tastes. But, he admits, he agrees with her.
“I’m not talking about anyone but me and my experiences here. When I think about who I want to spend the rest of my life with—my life—it’s with someone with the same skin color as me, who’s had the same experiences, knows why I’m crossing the street when I’m crossing the street, ducking my head, looking the other way or looking straight on—because she’s doing it too. That’s just what I want,” he says. “For me.”
“OK,” I say.
“But I think you’re great,” he says.
“OK,” I say.
“I just could never marry you,” he says.
“No one asked me what I wanted, though,” I say. If I wanted to get married, if I wanted a partner, nothing. Maybe I don’t want to get married, maybe I have never once pictured myself in a wedding gown, not one single time in my entire life.
“All girls want it,” he says.
That’s not true, of course. I’m living proof, right in front of his eyes. But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don’t want to get married: they don’t believe you. They think you’re lying to yourself or you’re lying to them or you’re trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse just for telling the truth. But I don’t want to agree with him. So I end up arguing the other point.
“I grew up here too,” I say. “My father died and we had nothing. We struggled and it was hard.”
“You grew up here, but you grew up white and on the Upper West Side, and I grew up black and in East New York.”
“You grew up in Park Slope.” I laugh.
“I grew up a little bit in East New York, long enough to never forget it, and I lived in Park Slope, and I went to college in Connecticut, and I went to law school in Manhattan, and even if I didn’t live any of those places I am still a black man in America and the only person who could possibly understand what that is like is a black woman in America.”
“Look,” I say, but then I don’t have anything to add.
“Your privilege is inherent,” he says. “You will never understand.”
“All right, I understand I will never understand,” I say, and I’m not angry but I just want him to stop. Stop telling me about myself. Even though he is totally correct, both about me and him, and our personal truths.
“Your context is different than my context,” he says.
“Fine, I know,” I say.