“Were we supposed to kiss back there? ” he asks. It’s a plain, fair question. A lot has happened in the past few days; it’s the kind of situation that brings people together (the Titanic sinks, and Rose runs to Jack, etc.).
“I don’t know. A lot has happened.”
He moves to kiss me. I pull back. “C’mon,” he says, and it’s jocular, cute even. Romantic. I kiss him. It’s dry and quick. We part.
The next day, he apologizes via email. I say it’s okay, but I’m guessing, really.
If I make it at all...
t’s not uncommon to find yourself somewhere familiar here, all of a sudden. I begin to love the backbite of it: I am a stranger to this city, but it is not altogether strange to me. All I had to do to know this place was spend years watching it on a screen. I am walking, and I find myself outside an upscale tennis club, where Annie Hall offers Alvy Singer a ride home. I am walking, and I see the pink neon sign of Tom’s Restaurant, where Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza sit and talk about nothing. I am walking, and I am under the Washington Square Park arch, where Harry dropped off Sally. I am walking, and I pass the doorway of Fifty-five Central Park West, where the portal to the netherworld opens in Ghostbusters. I am outside Radio City. I am inside Rockefeller Center. I emerge from a subway into Times Square. These moments work wonders.
cross from my brownstone is one of the largest Baptist churches in New York State. I learn this the first Sunday I live there, when a computerized church bell plays “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” waking me up. I yawn and stretch my arms out into the cold room.Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows but Jesus.
One, two, three. Bedbug bites, but I don’t know this yet. They barely itch. I ignore them. Where have I heard that song?
Nobody knows...
Oh, yeah — I know where. Spaceballs. The princess is locked in jail. The heroes, searching for her, hear a deep, manly voice singing. It’s classic Mel Brooks: the voice belongs to the princess. Jesus, my brain. A vault.
I shower. I dress. I want coffee, but there’s little in the way of such comforts around here. Since my late-night arrival, I have discovered that a) there are no coffee shops here, b) my new nickname is “Lovejuice,” and c) I live around the corner from the Marcy projects, where Jay-Z grew up, and where he filmed the video for “Hard Knock Life.” I am the only white person I see on a regular basis. There was another white guy in my house, but he quickly tired of all the fighting in the owners’ suite, below his. The landlady wouldn’t give him back his damage deposit. He moved out overnight.
I try to make friends. To sit on the stoop. My neighbour is a kind older lady who informs me without prompting on our first meeting that her son is married to a white girl and that they live in Cincinnati, where he teaches high school math. I don’t know how to respond. The woman has a pit bull that barks at passing cars. The dog’s name is Meat. m-e-a-t. We sit on side-by-side stoops, staring out. Meat barks at a car with black tinted windows. “You will hate it here, girl,” my neighbour says.
n my downtown life, I do become quasi-friends with a famous writer who writes a pop culture column at the magazine and has published several books. I actually met him when I was still in school, at a reading in Vancouver. I interviewed him and wrote an article about him, and then sent him that article with a request that if he liked it he endorse my bid for an internship at the magazine. He did.My desk is stationed right outside his office, which has the effect of making me seem like his secretary, à la Mad Men. He appears sporadically and blasts metal music. On my first day, when the boss reintroduces me to him, the Famous Writer says, “You made it.” This is a statement of fact, not of enthusiasm. I comment on his newly grown beard. He shifts a little in his chair, and I sense, as I did when we went out for beers with a few of my friends after our initial meeting, that I make him nervous. I may be reading into this based on some of his writing, which details his awkward, yet prolific, interactions with women. I think he thinks I want to sleep with him. I don’t, but I’ve never had a man who is older than me and who is also a famous writer think that. I get a little excited about it.
(My suspicion is confirmed when, a few years later, F. W. returns to Vancouver for a reading and we end up drunk in a cab together at the end of the night. I direct the cab driver to his hotel, and he hesitates before exiting, as though I have initiated a situation in which he is expected to invite me up. I say good night, but in my confusion it sounds like “Good night? ” and his eyes widen a little before he dashes out.)
F. W. dates a lovely woman who also works at the magazine, and the two of them have a communal birthday party. There I meet many other famous writers I have read over the years, and I feel highly contented when I am introduced to these people by F. W.’s girlfriend as “a great new writer.” I also feel I am deceiving everyone, so I drink more than I should, speak too loudly, and corner myself with F. W. and some of his famous friends.
By way of introduction, he begins telling a story I’d once shared with him, while his friends’ heads bounce back and forth from him to me like it’s some weird tennis match. The abbreviated version goes like this: My father was on safari in Africa when a water buffalo came out of the bush and trampled him. Apparently, they pursue vendettas. “I was going to write about that,” F. W. says, which is both flattering and awful. I am crying a little bit, but I lean back into the darkness of the bar to hide the tears. “I already did,” I murmur.
Later I go outside for air, and F. W. is sitting on a bench covered, comically, in heaps of gifts; these are mostly flowers for his girlfriend, who deserves them. He is clearly very drunk now, as am I. I sit on a little corner of the bench. No one else is around.
