Once I run into him when he’s with another woman. It’s a Sunday, and I’m having breakfast by myself in a café after reading the paper in the park. Last bit of coffee in the cup, sweet and milky. It’s a sunny day. In an hour I’ll call my mother, in another hour I’ll call my brother and his wife and ask about their sick child. Sundays are the days I am the most me I will ever be.
Then he walks in with her, and they are in old T-shirts and jeans and her hair is a mess and they are casual and comfortable with each other. There is nowhere else in the café to sit. I see him see me, and I see him suggest they find another place, and I see her say, “But there’s a table right there.” She plops down next to me, a freshly fucked innocent. I just wanted an omelet, not an assassination attempt. I signal for the bill. I wave that waiter down like I’m in the middle of nowhere on the side of a road with a flat tire. Help, I wave. Help me.
“Hi,” Baron says.
“Nope,” I say. The woman watches us both. Never mind the check. I throw down a twenty and leave. Let him explain me to her.
Once he says, “I can’t see you anymore. I’m ruining my life, the shit that I’m doing.”
Once he tries to talk about his daughter to me. Her name is Chloe. I tell him to shut up. “You don’t get to talk to me about her,” I say. And he never mentions her again.
Sigrid
When I was twenty-five years old I flew from Chicago to New York City to visit my brother, David. He was twenty-nine and he was in another band that was doing all right, better than fine, not great, not yet. He couldn’t quit his crappy day job or anything. But I thought he was the coolest person in the world. He’d been in three great bands before that, a musical influencer if not influential. And even though we lived far away from each other, I wanted desperately to be a part of his life.
Everyone in the band was young and good-looking, so they had been in a bunch of magazines, not just reviews but a few fashion shoots, too, modeling spring looks, and then a few months later, modeling fall looks. On one of those shoots my brother met a magazine editor named Greta, who was a few years older than him. She had lustrous blond hair and clothes that designers gave her for free because she looked so willowy and thin and graceful in them, but also she wore these intense, blue-rimmed glasses because she wanted to make sure you knew she was smart.
They began to date and they fell in love and soon after that they moved in together. (My mother, at the time: “What’s the rush?”) This is when I showed up for a visit, two months after they had moved to the Lower East Side. Their street was shit: there was a grimy bodega with crumbling linoleum floors, a group of angry, husky-voiced men hanging around outside it; my brother presumed drugs were sold there, though he never actually bought any, preferring to work only with the same delivery service he’d been using since high school. But the apartment was new inside, all hardwood everything, and the walls were decorated with art from their friends, up-and-coming artists, and a few older pieces Greta had inherited. Everything was framed and very professional-looking except for the tag on the wall outside their bathroom, which Greta assured me had been done by a very famous graffiti artist during their housewarming party, an act that she viewed as good luck for their new home.
That weekend they had another party, a smaller one, for my benefit. I got drunk and also did some coke and slept with one of my brother’s bandmates. We snuck out together but not gracefully and everyone saw us making out on the fire escape first anyway. I realize now this was a pathetic attempt to grab on to a bit of their glamour, this ill-advised fucking. But also he was very handsome, half real Italian, with dark hair in loose waves and chest hair by the fistful. On the surface, who could blame me?
And yet it created a small rift between my brother and this bandmate and ultimately the other bandmates. For a period of time my brother did not speak to me, until Greta stepped into the fray and brokered a peace treaty, resulting from a long phone call during which he asked me point-blank if I thought I was an alcoholic and I said, “No, I’m just young and having fun.” Followed by tears, choking-sob tears, and I made sure he heard it. And he said, “Can you just put a pin in it when you’re in my world?” I agreed to put a pin in it. The band broke up anyway, and my brother ended up forming another band, which, with Greta’s help and connections, ended up being even more successful than the previous one. Half of the songs he wrote were about Greta, and my brother called this band “my new baby,” named it, coddled it, and we were all charmed by his sweetness toward his music and also toward Greta. (By then my mother had decided she liked Greta, perhaps more than she liked me, although she loved me more.) And so his sister’s decadent ways were forgiven, all was forgiven, especially because something good came out of it in the end.
After a series of terrible relationship dramas in Chicago, one in particular involving an academic superior, I dropped out of graduate school, hung out in the city shamefacedly for a while, skimming the bottom of the Wicker Park alcoholic fish tank, until Greta finally invited me to move into their apartment for the summer. David would be on tour and she wanted the company. And my family was worried about me, which was not explicitly stated but certainly understood, especially when I arrived, bloated and hung over, at their apartment to find my mother waiting for me with Greta, the two of them eating ridiculous, dainty cucumber and cheese sandwiches as if that were something they would ever eat. Join us in civilization, they seemed to be saying with those sandwiches. I ate six of them, and blamed it on all the travel, but really it was because I hadn’t eaten anything vaguely normal in weeks.
What followed that summer was a sequence of events worthy of a humanitarian award: Greta nursed me back to health, contending with my (1) minor drug addiction, (2) active nervous breakdown, and (3) discovery of a (treatable) venereal disease, while at the same time securing freelance work for me, a person who’d had, up until that time, only restaurant work on her résumé. Girlfriend of the Year Award goes to Greta Johannson, for bringing the art school dropout cokehead back to life, while the long-term serious boyfriend (but not yet fiancé!) traveled around Europe in a van, spending his nights smoking hash with all of his new best friends he met at rock shows. Saint Greta of the Lower East Side.