Читать книгу Floyd Harbor - Joel Mowdy - Страница 9

Golden

One summer I dyed my brown hair blond and combed it in a Caesar style, and I roasted in a tanning bed twice a week, twenty minutes at a time, cooking perfectly around like a rotisserie chicken. I owned three identical white silk shirts and blue jeans that hugged my ass, the legs gradually widening so that only my toes sticking out of leather sandals showed at the selvage. I clasped the two buttons at the top of the shirt and left the rest open.

Oryn thought it was sexy that way. He gelled his hair back and wore only black except for his socks and undershirts, which were matching pastels that splintered from the bottom of his pant legs and over his collar. He’d dropped out of FIT when he landed a job with this company that designed and manufactured caps for toiletries, from shampoo bottles to aftershave, including big-ticket fragrances from the same designers of his wardrobe. He had an office on Fifth Avenue, leased a lofty apartment in Astoria, and on a whim dropped a few thousand dollars on a new sofa that became my favorite place to sleep. I loved it while it lasted.

Before Oryn, I’d knock on James’s door in the dorms and say, “Come out, shit-head, let’s play the game.” We’d hit the bars along the Long Island Rail Road in search of an easy target, a fatty or a butter face. (“She has a nice body, but her . . .”) I had James on looks, but he could get her to trust him. He’d look her in the eyes. He took her by the arm with a hand on her back, told her to watch her step as he guided her around the pile of broken glass that had been a drunk sophomore’s bottle of beer, tell the sophomore to give up his stool for the lady. He borrowed the broom and dustpan from the barman to sweep up the shards and resumed talking to Kim, standing by her, gesticulating and looking her in the eyes.

Then I walked over from across the bar.

“Jared,” James said, “you have to meet Kim. Kimberly, this is Jared.”

I leaned in close to her. “What’s your name, Kim?”

Kim had been considering James. Maybe she’d imagined waking to him in sunlight under crisp, bleached sheets, but then I came along, so she felt guilty for getting his hopes up. Now she had to let him down. (Girls like that know how it feels—happens to them all the time.) In the same stroke, she didn’t want to lose the prize, which was me.

I wanted to buy her a drink and I was holding my and James’s money, or I thought I was. Someone had lifted my wallet. This sucked for everyone because we had only had one drink apiece so far. Kim felt sorry and offered to buy me one. She offered James a drink, too, because she didn’t want to make him a third wheel—she knew how that felt. The girlfriend she had come with had left with her boyfriend an hour earlier.

We ran out of cigarettes. Kim bought us a pack. She bought rounds and we toasted her every time, me slipping my arm around her waist and sliding her quarters into the slot on the pool table, James caressing her hand, both of us talking her into taking us to breakfast when the sun came up, fretting about the train fare going home, and digging into her backseat for change while she got out to pump gas into her hatchback.

I had Kim in her car while James smoked in the train station parking lot. Another time, James hooked up with the girl.

Once, we shared a girl in her dorm room.

Everybody won. James and I got a night out. The girl got to feel like a princess. Sure, she probably felt duped when she called the number I gave her and got a Pizza Hut, but for one night in her sorry young life she felt like gold.

Once, I was in love. It lasted four years. I thought I was in love three times, but the last time told me the other times were a joke. Her name was Shelly. She had freckles, and black hair like those women in shampoo commercials. It was the kind of hair a girl could wrap up in a sloppy bun or tie into a loose ponytail, and it was always perfect. The holes in the knees of her favorite jeans were perfect, too. She made me feel like I could do anything I wanted if I set my mind to it, that I could do so much better than working in restaurants out east. That was what I did before Shelly. I started as a dishwasher in the Hamptons and had worked my way through salad boy and line cook, teetering on the edge of sous chef. Shelly was the reason I went to Suffolk Community College and then transferred to a university close to hers in Nassau County when she graduated high school.

“We’re going to be poor,” I told her. We were lying in the darkness of her bedroom. We were talking about university, about how we could survive for a few years on student loans and state aid. Too many girls she used to be friends with had dropped out of high school. Her sister got married and became a mother right after graduation. And then there was this girl Rebecca, Shelly’s best friend in middle school, who would graduate high school with a baby in her arms, a few contenders for the role of father. Shelly wanted something better for herself. Her family wanted better for her. Her father sold the boat he’d saved up for to help pay her first-semester tuition.

“Can you handle being poor until we have degrees?” I said.

Yes, she could.

But in the weeks before she broke up with me, Shelly complained that I never took her out anywhere. A few days later, walking back from the diner down the street from her college, she said her feet hurt and she wondered out loud why everyone had a car except for us. Only days after that, her friend from acting class squealed about a bracelet her boyfriend had bought her, and Shelly threw me this look like I had done something wrong. She had to be massaged, the lights off, her radio set on some slow jazz with the volume low so the singer sounded nailed inside a box somewhere far away. She spread a bath towel over the sheets to keep them clean. Then she had headaches all the time, menstrual cramps. Then she just didn’t feel like sex. She wasn’t in the mood.

“You don’t do anything romantic,” she said two days before she broke up with me. We were lying in her bed, watching Oprah. She always wanted me to watch Oprah with her.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Like what? Can you name even one time?”

“That time I walked into Hempstead at three in the morning to get you Nyquil. You were sick. You couldn’t sleep, remember?”

“That’s not romantic, Jared. That’s standard.”

“Hempstead,” I said, “at night. It’s a bad neighborhood. You want me to die for you?”

She took the remote, flicked through channels. “No, just something different.”

Four years together ended on a cold October night at the start of my junior year. Wind tore the leaves off the trees outside her window. She was too young to be so serious, she said. Pacing her floor between the closet and the door, Shelly sitting on the bed and crying and holding out to me the silver promise ring I’d given her, I looked back to three weeks before and saw it coming. I was too frustrated to unpack the slow, plotted route she’d taken to sever herself from me—too choked with disbelief that it was happening now.

“I guess I’ll see you around,” I said. I slammed the door behind me. Then I stood in the hallway, waiting for her to come looking for me, but after a long time nothing happened.

One night, about a month later, I saw Shelly in front of her dorm building. The parking lot had just been repaved. She clicked in heels to the passenger side of a black Lexus with tinted windows. Her dress was flimsy black. Her pale cheeks were colored with blush. She never wore blush.

I found a job at a Greek restaurant after Shelly dumped me. Craig, the manager, was in his thirties. On Sunday nights, after closing, when the boss left, Craig and I sat at the bar and had a few drinks. Conversations turned to sex if they went on long enough. I told him that Shelly had been a virgin and I’d had to be patient with her, but she came around eventually, opened to me, even asked me to spank her a few times. He told me about his lady (that’s what he called her) and how he’d watched her jerk off a stranger in a dark corner at a nightclub.

“I don’t care what anybody says,” Craig said one night. “The ass is full of nerve endings. It’s supposed to feel good. The toughest guy will admit that taking a shit feels good. It doesn’t mean he’s gay, just human. What’s wrong with a finger? What’s wrong with two fingers if it feels good?”

I nodded, sipped my beer. The top three buttons of his shirt had come undone over the last three drinks. The lights above the bar were dim and the liquor bottles glowed like church windows at sunset.

Craig fixed his eyes on me, leaned in a little. “I’m not ashamed to say that. Play with my prostate. Massage my anus.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said. I remembered when Shelly started loosening up in the bedroom, finally touched my balls, and before long I could talk her into grabbing anything—her hairbrush—and pushing the handle against my ass just as I was about to come. When she did this, I could imagine a hard penis pushing against me—an organ detached from anything human, like a rubber dildo, yet at the same time having the human capability to take pleasure in me offering myself to it.

Craig said, “Do you need to label yourself just because something feels good?”

“No.” And right then, I knew what would happen. “If it feels good, just go with it.”

His face was relaxed, his mouth slightly open. I could see his tongue pushing against the back of his teeth.

In the daytime, I sliced strips off a thick tube of gyro meat. First, I would slide a poker into the cylinder-shaped meat, and then it went into this vertical rotisserie that sent waves of heat into my face as I worked the knife along the side, shaving quarter-inch-thick lengths from the top to the bottom. Juice dripped from the meat and collected into a puddle at the base of the rotisserie. I jerked the knife back and forth. Back and forth. It was sweaty work.

If I had the chance, I would step out the back door to cool off, stick my hands in the snow if there was any around.

I met James in the bathroom of our second-floor dorm that December, a few weeks before I quit my job at the restaurant. I was back from work and had just finished showering. When I opened the curtain to the stall, James was lying on the floor. He had an openmouthed smile and his head slowly moved from side to side, his long hair fanned out behind him. I’d seen him before on those restless nights when I’d pace in my room, smoking cigarettes, writing crappy love sonnets on a whiteboard with my red dry-erase marker, counting the syllables with my fingers. I had a habit of peering through the spyglass on the door whenever I walked by it, as if I was expecting to see something in the hallway.

Something to take me away.

A few times, way past two in the morning, I saw James unlock his door.

Lying on the bathroom tiles, he said, “Hey, you live on this floor.”

He smelled like wet cigarettes and beer, a hint of cologne. I stood in the shower stall in my towel, my hand still on the open curtain. “Yeah,” I said, “I live in two-sixteen. You live in two-thirteen.”

“Yeah,” he said, still smiling and almost laughing to himself. “Dude, you should come out some night.”

“Yeah, I will. Sure. Sometime.” I stepped over him and walked out of the bathroom, not yet knowing his name.

I saw him again the next day, Saturday. I was tired of my job. I called in sick and figured I would get some reading done for psychology. I had to leave my room to do this. When I stayed in my room for too long I turned into a mad poet, my detachment from Shelly spilling out ugly onto my whiteboard.

James called from beyond the door. “Dude from the shower, come out tonight.”

I didn’t think he would remember. “Hey,” I said through the door, “listen, I’m flat broke, man. I get paid every other Friday, so if you catch me next Friday—”

“Don’t be a shit-head. Come out. We don’t need money.”

I didn’t see Craig again after I quit the restaurant. James would call or stop by my dorm room to see if I wanted to play the game. Mostly I was good to go, but sometimes I just didn’t feel like kissing up to some dog. I wanted someone to kiss up to me. I wanted to do something I wasn’t supposed to do, just for a night, and then I’d be good for weeks.

I hit the Bunkhouse. I could feel the men looking at me: skinny boy-faced men in their silver V-neck shirts, queens, bashful young ones out looking for the first time. There were always the guys looking for love, dressed in a polo shirt or knitted sweater; these men were tired of the scene. They had disillusionment stamped in their faces. They complained into their drinks that all anyone wanted was a random fuck. I stayed clear of them.

An older man in an expensive suit sat at the bar, nodding his head to the music and scanning the crowd. A gold watch peeked out from under the cuff of his jacket. He was a vulture, looking to impress a stringy-muscled boy—any one of them—as they came off the dance floor to wedge between the barstools for a drink. The boys were like me, except I wasn’t going to end up someone’s bitch. The suit could buy me all the drinks he wanted, but I was more like him than some gold-digging pretty boy.

My summer with Oryn started out like this: a lingering glance, a smile, a casual trip to his car in the parking lot. It was near the end of my junior year, and I had withdrawn from all my classes—dropped out, according to the school. I had no plans, no job. I had nowhere to go except home, and who wants to go there, admitting defeat? I sold my stereo and my computer and spent most nights crashing in James’s dorm room, where I kept my stuff in bags on the floor of his closet. Some weekend nights I’d go home with some butter face, or I’d make it down to the Bunkhouse and hook up, spend a night in a motel room at someone else’s expense. But the semester was coming to an end, and James’s dorm room wasn’t going to be an option anymore.

“Do you want to go to my apartment?” Oryn said as we left the Bunkhouse.

I thought about it on the short walk to his car. Waking up next to a man in his apartment: what was that like?

“I live in Astoria, but I can give you money to take the train home in the morning. I can drive you home in the morning.”

I spent the night, the next night, and came back a week later because Oryn had tickets to Porno for Pyros at Roseland. My things moved from James’s dorm room to Oryn’s apartment. Soon there was an empty drawer for my underwear.

I imagined the other clients dreamed about the beach while lying in their tanning beds, wearing Speedos or nothing and those little eye protectors while bright heat emitted from bulbs inches from their skin, but I saw only black with flashes of white, like a freshly paved wet parking lot, its shallow puddles reflecting light from a streetlamp, or a girl in black in the same desolate parking lot, her skin and her string of pearls standing out in the darkness.

After twenty minutes, my skin felt tight. I stepped out and looked back at the bed. I could imagine myself lying inside, even rotating while my body turned gold to match the color of my dyed yellow hair. The thought made me dizzy. Back at the apartment, all was quiet except for the humming of the air conditioner. This belonged to me until Oryn came home. I stripped and lay on the cool white sofa, my sweat drying to my skin. Oryn would find me sleeping there when he came home from work, the result of his romantic gestures blond and broiled.

According to Shelly, I had been romantic twice. The first time was on our one-year anniversary, November 17. Her mother was out of town visiting relatives, her father was at work, and Shelly was at school all day. I decided I would let myself in and surprise her with a hot candle-lit bubble bath, ready to dip into when she came in from the cold. I cleaned the bathroom. I set up candles on the sink, put a radio on the toilet seat, and found a station playing smooth jazz that floated like steam around the shower curtain. But when I went to fill the tub half an hour before she was to get home, all that came out of the faucet was freezing water. By the time she showed up, I had four huge pots of water heating on the range top and four potfuls already dumped into the tub.

The second time was the following summer. It was blazing hot for over a week, and when I came to Shelly’s house from my line-cook job at night she would moan and wheeze with a damp washcloth on her forehead. On one particularly boiling night she sat up crying in the dark because she felt as though she were suffocating. I told her to get dressed. We sneaked her out the window and walked to a motel on the highway that had air-conditioning.

In early August, when I had just gotten back from tanning and getting my roots bleached, Oryn came home with a big cardboard box. He carried it into the living room, where I lounged on the sofa in my boxers, watching Kids in the Hall reruns.

“I got you something,” he said. He put the box on the coffee table. “Guess what it is.”

“A silk shirt.” He had gotten me three by this time, and the last time I had offended him when I didn’t act surprised.

“Come on, be serious.”

I stretched my leg out to the coffee table and tapped the box with my foot to estimate its weight. The box was heavy. He always brought home samples of shampoo and fragrances that the company gave away. I thought the gift might be that, and I said so.

“No, why would I give you that as a gift? It’s something else. Something you said you wanted.”

I didn’t remember asking for anything. “I give up,” I said.

He opened the box. There were half-used tubes of acrylics and oils, brushes, watercolors, a little bottle of paint thinner, a small palette, and some other painting supplies.

He said, “I know this retired professor who used to teach art history at NYU, and he paints too, and now he’s writing a book on interior design—but anyway, he was getting rid of some old supplies his partner left behind. He said I could have them, so I brought them home for you.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

Oryn seemed disappointed. “You know, that one day when you said you might want to take up painting? That day we were watching that painting show?”

Then I remembered. It was my first week living with Oryn and we were watching Bob Ross paint a landscape on PBS. Oryn leaned in toward me, slowly got his hand under my shirt, and started rubbing my side with the backs of his fingers. He rubbed for about five minutes, finally wedging his hand between my back and the sofa, but I really wasn’t into him touching me right then. I’d told him that I wanted to paint like Bob Ross, just so he would get the point that I wasn’t in the mood.

I sifted through the box of art supplies and felt the weight of a paint-speckled pallet in my hands.

“I guess you don’t want this stuff,” he said.

“Yeah, I think I changed my mind about painting.”

“You don’t even want to try?”

I dropped the pallette back into the box. “I want to finish watching this show, actually.”

He stood there, to the side, by the coffee table, looking at me. The show cut to a commercial and I flipped through the channels.

“Whatever you want.” He picked up the box and carried it toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m putting this by the curb. Someone else can take up painting.”

“No, just leave it here.” I had to say that, or the night would be one of him sulking, of long silences and, finally, me mustering up an apology. And whatever way it went at that point, it would conclude with sex. I might as well make it pleasant.

“What, now you want it?” he said.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m not confident yet. I might change my mind. Are you angry? Do you really want me to have it?”

“I want a talker,” he said. “That’s what you were when we met.”

Weeks later, I stood at a pay phone in Penn Station with two garbage bags filled with my belongings. I was moving out. Oryn had lost his job the week before when the whole company shut down. They were commissioned to make the cap for Calvin Klein’s CK One bottle, and the materials they used caused a chemical reaction with the fragrance, made it smell like dog sweat, and they had to recall a shitload of units. They’d screwed up once before with a small shampoo manufacturer in France. It was a kids’ shampoo with a ladybug cap, and the spout, which was also a spot on the ladybug, would pop off and present a choking hazard. That problem was nothing but a hundred-thousand-dollar loss—big deal—but fuck up with the big boys, and there goes your reputation. No one wants your business.

When I left Oryn’s place that evening, I’d meant to go to the college and surprise James, but at Jamaica I got on a train going in the wrong direction and slept until I arrived at Penn Station.

I called James to tell him I was coming. “Come out. I want to play the game.”

“Umm, can’t tonight,” he said.

“Fuck you can’t. Come out.” I checked my warped reflection in the metal plate on the phone and was reminded that I needed to bleach my roots. “Come out, come out, come out.”

“Uh, well, there’s this thing. There’s this stuff.”

“Come out.”

“Who is it?” said a female voice on James’s end.

“Just a friend, sweetie,” he said, his voice distant. Then it came back: “Jared, I really can’t.”

I bought coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and sat by the escalator. A woman in heels walked quickly down, digging through her transparent purse with fingernails like tweezers, finally pulling out a Metrocard as she stepped off the last sinking step. She trotted down the corridor and around the bend, toward the subway entrance. And you can always tell the group of kids from Long Island going to a rock concert. They sat on the floor by the ticket window before heading off to the venue, laughing at their stupid jokes and posing as though everyone had their eyes on them, as though everyone wanted to be them. And then there was this couple walking in step like they fit each other, the man in his weekend denim and leather, everything scuffed in the right places; the woman’s stride, draped in shining club clothes, threw back the brightness of the station. Their arms crossed each other’s back, and it looked like they’d been walking that way forever. I wondered how anyone ever stayed that way—two people together unchanged—and while I watched them ride the escalator toward the exit at Madison Square Garden, waiting to see them falter, I spilled my coffee down the front of my shirt.

In the bathroom of the Long Island Rail Road waiting lounge, I changed my wet silk shirt for the college sweater I dug out from the bottom of one of the garbage bags. Paint supplies were scattered all throughout the bag. I’d thought that maybe I could sell them to some art fag once I got to the school.

When I left the bathroom, it hit me: about a hundred and twenty pounds on my back, skinny arms around my neck, and long, thin legs in big pants constricting my waist. I dropped my bags and the force of the weight pushed me forward a few steps.

“Jared!” she said. It was Shelly. She got off me and I turned to face her. I didn’t know what to say. It had been the better part of a year since I’d seen her, but only a day since I’d thought about her, and when I’d thought about her she was wearing a black dress and a peacoat with pearls around her neck, her hair cascading past her shoulders. Now she wore these extra-baggy blue jeans and a white shirt with long orange sleeves and matching crewneck collar, the sleeves ending right after the elbows. Her hair was lopped off to about four inches long and purposely messy, but she was beautiful. She had an eyebrow ring. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

“It’s you,” I said.

Shelly smiled and squealed. “Ohmigod! Jared!” She threw her arms around me. She was too loud for Shelly. “Jared! I’ve missed you!” She stepped back, holding on to my hands. “I saw you and your dyed hair, and I wanted to say, are you going to the concert?”

“No, I’m just passing through, actually.”

“Jared!” She put her arms around me again and put her forehead against my chest. “Rub the back of my neck.”

Without wondering why, I did what she asked. “Like this?”

“God, goodness yes, like that.” She rested her cheek against me.

I thought of Oryn. He was probably wondering why I hadn’t returned from taking out the trash.

“What are you on?” I asked Shelly.

“Oh, it’s so good, Jared.” She backed up and looked me up and down, still smiling. “Come. I want you to meet my friends.” She pointed. “They’re sitting over there.” Her smile vanished. “Wait. Fuck, Rich might get bitchy if I bring you over.”

Without looking toward the ticket window, I knew that Rich was in earshot. We weren’t that far. Shelly was talking as though I were all the way down by the subway entrance. I turned around and sure enough there was a guy wearing pants in the same vein as Shelly’s, leaning up against the newspaper recycling bin and pretending not to look at us.

“Yeah, I should probably let you go, then,” I said. I wanted to sneak back into her parents’ house on Long Island and spend the next day with her in her room.

“Listen,” she said, her smile magically reappearing, “come by sometime.”

“You still in the same dorm?”

“Yeah, so come by, like, whenever.” She threw her arms around me again and kissed my cheek, then walked backward over to the booth, the whole time facing me and smiling, her Rich an insecure blur in the background.

Smoking in front of Madison Square Garden where the warm night air smelled like car exhaust and fried food, I remembered the first time I went to the city, and the air had had that same smell in pockets of heat along the sidewalk. On the way home from that trip, Sinatra’s “New York, New York” came on the radio while I looked at the collage of city lights through the back window of my parents’ car as we passed over a bridge, probably the Williamsburg. I remember thinking that since it was the city, “New York, New York” probably always played on the radio when you were leaving, as though the city were saying, “Farewell, and come again.”

When Shelly had hugged me, I could smell her deodorant, which was the same brand she wore for as long as I’d known her. The first thing she would do when she came out of the shower was put her deodorant on, so when she hugged me at the station I had an image of her naked and wet in her bedroom, which made me think again of the bath I drew for her on that cold day in November years ago.

“No, really, I’m an artist. Look in my bag.”

She was sitting alone at the Irish pub in Penn Station, fifty or so with sun-spotted skin and long, muscular fingers. She held a Marlboro Light like a wand. A big red kiss was embroidered on her white tank top, smack across her breasts, which moved freely under the fabric when she swayed. She was drunk—either that, or on some pills. I couldn’t tell which.

“You don’t look like an artist,” she said.

“What does an artist look like?”

“Well, for one, they don’t usually wear college sweaters. You look more like a fraternity boy.” She reached her arm across the bar, held her cigarette above the ashtray, and tapped the ash off the head. The ash landed on the bar.

“But I’m a different kind of artist,” I said. “I paint things to be their opposite. This way, I myself am a work of art because I’m wearing a college sweater. It’s unexpected.”

She looked me up and down. If she were younger, her sunken cheeks might have been exotic, but now they made her look emaciated. “Where do you show your work?”

“All over the place. I give it to my friends, and they hang them up in their apartments.”

“It doesn’t sound very lucrative.”

“I’m not in it for the money. I paint for the love of it. I’ll set up in someone’s apartment, and they’ll let me crash on their couch for a week, maybe feed me some, and at the end of the week they get one of the finest works of art they’ll ever own.”

There was a critical moment here, and I missed it while it happened, but a change came over her. In hindsight, I recall her looking off in the distance, then looking at me. She stamped her cigarette in the ashtray, her movements now suddenly languid.

“You’re not super eloquent,” she said. Then she leaned forward, conspiratorially. “I can tell you’re raw. Your talent must be raw, too. I know, because let me tell you something.” She slipped a little off her stool, caught her balance, and repositioned herself. “Artists are attracted to me—always have been, always will be. I’m a muse.”

“That’s the word I was going to use. You look like a muse.”

“And rightly so.” She smiled in that fashion-model way, where the lips flatten, as though she were about to apply liner. “Of course, you know Andy Warhol.”

“The great Andy,” I said. I’d heard of him.

“Yes, the great Andy. And I can say so from firsthand experience. He discovered me when I was fifteen. There are photos of me—photos Andy took. They’re quite controversial and you could find them out in the world, in museums . . . private collections, I suppose.”

“Really? Which museums?”

“I’m sure you’d find them at the Met. Look in the archives.” She had another cigarette out. She slid the package over to me. “Controversial because”—she leaned in closer—“my genitalia are in the photos. My fifteen-year-old genitalia.”

“He took pictures of your—”

“Yes. My pussy. My name, by the way, is Vanlisa.”

She lived in Williamsburg. She insisted on sitting across from me on the subway, so I could study her. She arched her back, parted her legs, put a hand on each knee, and threw her head back, but her eyes, the whole time, were cast down on me. People stopped before crossing the invisible thread connecting us across the aisle.

After a few stations, she said, “Are you going to sketch me?”

“It’s too bumpy,” I said. “I’m taking mental notes.”

Outside her apartment door, a young girl with a backpack slouched on the floor. The dim hallway was lit by tiny track bulbs lining the tops of both walls. The girl looked up to Vanlisa expectantly. A telephone rang inside the apartment.

Vanlisa stepped over the girl, unlocked her door, and bade me to enter. The two windowed walls were brick, the wood floors polished to a wet shine. In the center of the room a slab of petrified wood was the table, and the seating arrangement consisted of green fur draped over structures in all stages of becoming sofas and chairs. The windows along one wall glowed softly with Manhattan’s skyline. Vanlisa left me standing there while she went to answer her phone, which was in a room behind a wall made of smoky panes of glass.

“You weren’t at the station,” she said into the phone. “Yes. No. Your problems. I . . . Yes, Bartos, I’m being a bitch for very good reasons.”

There was no art on the walls. It looked as though she’d just moved in.

“Then come tomorrow.”

When she came back into the main room, foot in front of clacking high-heeled foot, I asked her if her place was new.

“That is the wall you’ll paint,” she said, gesturing toward the one white wall that took up half of one side of the apartment, the other half opening to a kitchen.

“That’s a big wall.”

“Then you’ll be a big painter,” she said, walking toward one of the smaller couch-like masses. She plunked down and took her shirt off. Her breasts sagged and rounded out. She kicked off her shoes, lifted her legs, pushed her pants down, and kicked them off. She opened her legs and placed her feet apart on the sofa structure.

I couldn’t make sense of her genitalia.

“Andy was fascinated, too,” she said.

“Did he really take your picture?” I didn’t know what else to say. It had dawned on me that I was to paint her right then—that she expected this—and I had no idea what I was doing.

“I went to his studio with my older sister. He wanted us to piss on some paintings of his.”

“Why would he want you to do that?”

“Oxidation: paint reacts chemically with piss.”

“Oh, yeah. Of course.”

“Andy was photographing men having sex on the floor. Then he took some pictures of me.”

“Pissing on his work?”

“After I pissed on his work.”

I couldn’t comprehend the white wall I turned to face, nor the tubes of paint I then took from my garbage bag and lined up on the floor while Vanlisa sat there watching me, waiting for my magic. All my brushes were too small. I stepped back and did some looking up and down along the wall. I stepped closer and crouched, looking up the flatness. The ceiling was so far away.

“So,” I said. “So how did Andy do his work with all that distraction? Because for me, I work alone. It’s sort of a private experience. I can’t start if you’re watching me, I mean.”

She took a cigarette from the pack on the petrified table and lit it. “This is what I thought about you in the station,” she said. “That you are a fraud. You are a harmless and gutless little fraud. Is that true?” She got up and walked over to me. She squeezed a tube of red paint into her hand and smeared a giant red V on the wall. Then, with black paint, she patted a forest of handprints over the V’s crotch.

She stood back to admire her work, her hands painting her hips where she rested them. “There. Finished. Now get out of my apartment.”

In the hallway, the girl with the backpack slept.

The last girl I went home with before I met Oryn was busy in the nose department—the kind of girl James would say was best taken from behind. The lights were out, and she started making these sounds like she was having an asthma attack. I asked her if she was okay. She started all-out bawling.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

She heaved, and then her breath came out in jolts. “I don’t know what I (huh!) did wrong. I don’t know (huh!) why he left me.”

Her crying grew louder.

With the smell of our sex in the dark, with her crying, with that loneliness between us, I could only think of Shelly holding out to me the ring I’d given her, returning it.

The girl talked into her pillow. I think she said, “I love him so much. I can’t believe I love him this much.”

“Don’t cry, don’t cry.” I sat next to her. “You’ll get over it, you know? It takes some time.”

She cried louder into her pillow. I rubbed her naked back and she let her ass fall onto my leg. I lay next to her and continued rubbing her back, letting her soak her pillow until she settled down into a sniffle.

“We all get over these things,” I said.

After a while, the girl fell asleep. I put my clothes on and left. Naked, unabashedly crying, wiping snot on the sheets in front of strangers: shit like that brought me down.

Shelly had said whenever—come by whenever. There was a transfer at the Jamaica station. Thirty minutes later I was on the university’s commuter bus, churning toward the dormitory towers.

Shelly answered her door wearing pajamas. She let me in. Her hair was flat against her head from sleep.

I dropped my bags and hugged her.

She put her arms around me and patted my back. “Hey, what are you doing here?” She stepped away.

“You said come by whenever, right? I thought I’d come to see you.”

“Yeah?” She walked over to her bed and started fixing the covers.

“It was weird seeing you last night,” I said. “Penn Station of all places.”

“Yeah, I was so fucked up.”

“I know. You have the same comforter.”

“Listen, you can sit for a while if you want to.”

“Oh . . . I thought maybe we would catch up.”

She put her pillow down and faced me, and then with her arms at her sides, she held her palms out to me. “I’m so sorry, Jared. I should have told you to call first.”

“Well, I could wait here for you if you have to do something. We can hang out when you get back. I could use a nap anyway, you know? I don’t mind, really.”

“I’m going to kind of be in here,” she said with this sorry look on her face. “It’s my fault. I should’ve told you.” She’d had that same look when she broke up with me, where her head was held down and tilted to the side as if she were looking at my feet but still looking at my face, though at the point farthest away from my eyes.

“You know what? I’m tired of playing games.”

“Who’s playing games, Jared? I’m not playing any games. I just can’t break plans right now. I just can’t drop—”

“Stop it, Shelly. Fucking Christ.”

“I just can’t—” She looked up, blinking tears off her eyelids. “What can I do, Jared? I don’t know what you even want from me.”

“Why the fuck do you always cry?”

“Because I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Then why do you? Because I don’t have any money.”

“I never even said that. Where do you get that?”

“Yeah, you said you were too young—”

“I said—”

“—but I got your clue. We have no car and we have no money and you don’t buy me things bullshit, but you can’t say it because that would make you the shallow bitch you are, you fucking—”

“I wasn’t in love with you! All right?”

The room was quiet except for the sound of geese flying by and cars on the highway, noises that crept in from the outside world and seemed as far away as Shelly. A slate of clouds had blocked out the sun. She sat on her bed, looking at the floor. Once more, I slammed the door behind me.

On the train, I had a dream of Shelly, but she looked like Vanlisa, tall and sinewy. She was naked, facing away from me. I reached between her legs and cupped her genitalia in my hand. But she stepped away, and it came off in my grip. It was made of rubber.

The transfer was at Babylon. I stood on the station’s platform and waited for the train to Floyd Harbor. I had a notebook and a pen in hand. Before I dropped out of college, I had the idea that maybe I would be good at writing. I felt like I might want to write something now—not poems—but I didn’t know what to say.

A man with lips so wet I could see them shine from across the platform tried to start a conversation with some girl standing off by herself. The man looked maybe sixty, and he had a belly like a leaking sack full of mud, leaving a brown stain on the front of his shirt and pants. He held a dirty pizzeria cup. The girl saw him approaching and she turned and walked the other way with this tense expression on her face, her eyes widening.

Then he saw me.

When he talked to me, his spit hung like a loose thread between his parting lips, some of it dripping down and getting trapped in the grayish brown stubble on his face, some of it collecting in white foam in the corners of his mouth. He said, “You writing a book, buddy?” His breath smelled of whiskey.

“Brainstorming,” I said. The book was empty.

He responded with a blank stare.

“I’m just putting down a few ideas.”

“You want to see some ideas? Give me some paper.”

I tore a page out of my notebook and gave it to him.

He forced his pizzeria cup into my hand and grabbed my pen. “What’s your name?”

“Jared.”

“Okay, Joey. Watch this.” Then he wrote something down and handed me the paper and pen: women = cunts

He laughed loudly at this. “Do you like that?”

“Yeah, that’s really good,” I said, taking a step back as the breeze carried his scent to me.

“Watch this.” He grabbed the pen and paper out of my hand and, using my shoulder for a writing table, he wrote: Dear Joey, be cunts.

He laughed again.

“Yeah, that’s cool,” I said. “Neat.”

Suddenly serious, the man said, “Hey, you take care of yourself, Joey.” He hugged me and leaned his head on my shoulder. His spit slid from his mouth onto my skin, and some of the drool stretched out as he pulled back, breaking off and trailing as thin as floss onto my sweater.

On the train east, I thought about what he had written, and first decided it was nonsense. He had no idea what he meant, either. What I understood was that he’d been hurt by a few women. I could tell by the pleasure he got from calling women cunts. The two times he wrote the word, this tremendous smile came across his face and he laughed as though there was nothing funnier in the world than calling women cunts—the kind of funny where you laugh from deep within your belly because you believe it’s true.

But later, when I got off at Floyd Harbor in the rain, I realized something else. Unwittingly, he had told me to be a woman.