Symptomatic Page 4

  I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him in the dark for a moment, thinking of all the different answers to this question I had already given. You know how it goes. The disclosure, followed by the edifying speech. My body, the lesson.

  But I just rubbed my eyes, yawned. “It’s late. I’m tired.”

  I slept on the couch that night—shivering under a scratchy plaid blanket. From behind Andrew’s bedroom door, I could hear the drone of a grunge band he liked. The music played over and over again on auto repeat until morning.

  MY FATHER’S SUBJECT: the relationship between history and the individual. He believes everybody is an “excretion” of his or her environment. That’s the word he uses. Excretion.

  6

  I T WAS NOT YET DARK in Brooklyn, drizzling slightly, a netting of moisture that lent the neighborhood an impressionist softness as I made my way up DeKalb Avenue. I followed the directions I’d scribbled on a napkin.

  The neighborhood was “transitional,” as Greta had described. Behind every ghetto façade lurked subtle hints of gentrification. A soul food restaurant had posted a sign advertising its new vegetarian menu. The bodega I passed sold The New York Times. A gated community garden had sprung up in the shadow of a giant housing project. Sprinkled amid the bald-headed b-boys were dreadlocked intellectuals wearing tiny, wire-rimmed glasses and kente-cloth scarves. And a few nervous white people, too, walking swiftly toward the light of the subway, hunched over as if hiding something in their coats, eyes twitching back and forth, on guard against phantom muggers.

  I was meeting the hairdresser, Jiminy, at six. I was a few minutes early and stood in front of the red brick building shifting my feet and staring across the street at a drug transaction in progress. A cluster of art student types were chatting nervously with a slender, dark-skinned boy who held a brindled pit bull puppy on a thick chain leash. I watched the secret handshake, glimpsed the baggie passed between them, before the students all climbed into their battered Toyota Corolla and drove away, their eyes wide with nervous excitement. The dealer stuck the money in his pocket, got into a gargantuan silver Jeep with tinted windows—the dog in the back—and put on some music. I listened to the bass thudding against the glass and felt a pang of longing for Andrew’s warm alcove of an apartment. I tried to imagine coming home to the stern brick building behind me every night after work.

  Just then I heard somebody say, “Yo, son, you ready to see this shit or what?”

  I turned to see a young man—platinum blond hair, pale, pugnacious face—standing before me. He wore a huge parka with a fur collar, jeans three sizes too large bagged around his legs like empty sacks. His skin was ruddy, pink, his features coarse and belligerent. He cupped his hand around a cigarette and looked nervously over his shoulder at the rocking, thudding Jeep. “We gotta do this quick. ‘Cause I’m in a hurry. I got to meet this motherfucker at seven and his ass is gonna go ape shit if I’m late. Know what I’m sayin’, son?”

  INSIDE, I followed Jiminy up a drab staircase, while he explained the situation to me. His cousin, Vera, whose apartment it was, had left the country recently. She had moved to London to try to make it as a singer.

  “She been trying for years here, but motherfuckers don’t be payin’ her on time, and her band members be pullin’ all sorts of trifling shit, so she just got the fuck out. She knew somebody in London and so homegirl just up and split. Without telling none of them mofos.”

  “Sounds like a smart move,” I said, just to say something. “Hope it works out.”

  “Shit, I hope it works out too,” he said. “Hope she stays there and gets rich and fucking famous and remembers her lil’ cuzzy-cuz, Jiminy. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  When we got to the sixth floor, he fiddled with his janitor-sized ring of keys in front of a door marked 6C. “She owes me,” he said. “That’s for damn sure. That bitch always be leaving me to clean up her shit. Ever since we was little. Just last week, she called me from the fuckin’ airport askin’ me to find her a subletter. I said, yo, son, you gots to be kidding. But the bitch wasn’t kidding. So here I am.”

  He finally found the right key and unlocked the door. We stepped into the darkness. I noticed a smell—like curdled perfume. It overwhelmed me for the briefest moment—then faded into something more bearable.

  He turned on the lights, then went and stood by the living room window with his forehead pressed against the glass, jingling his keys noisily around in his pocket and listening to his Walkman. The sounds of a manic rapper leaked out from his headphones. I waited for him to lead me on the tour, but he just stared, forlorn, out at the street life he no doubt yearned to be a part of. I moved on to explore the space alone.

  Hardwood floors. A mantelpiece over a fireplace. A kitchenette looking into the living room. An ordinary one-bedroom walk-up. The décor was unobtrusive. And in fact, as I looked around, the entire apartment had a half-finished quality. I imagined the girl moving in with hopes of a robust social life—raucous dinner parties around the kitchen table with friends, romantic Sunday mornings spent curled on the couch with a lover. But these hopes had been abandoned and what was left was a blunt space meant to serve single lonely desires. A plywood bookshelf sat half-assembled in a corner, a screwdriver resting on its lowest shelf. One wall in the kitchen had been painted a cheery terra-cotta orange, but the rest of the walls had been left white. A set of expensive pots and pans sat on the stove, but they looked as if they had never been used—the largest pot serving as a container for a handful of takeout menus. The silverware drawer was filled with ketchup and mustard packets, disposable chopsticks, fortune cookies, plastic forks and knives.

  A two-cup coffeemaker sat on the kitchen counter, with a ring of darkness around its glass bottom. In the refrigerator, I found a half-empty bottle of cheap Chilean chardonnay, a moldy lump of brie in Saran Wrap, a can of condensed sweetened milk.

  I thought about Andrew’s refrigerator. Since the day I’d moved in, it had been stocked to the gills with fresh fruits and vegetables, fine wines, cheeses. Frozen hunks of meat in the freezer. The sizzle of oil in the pan and the sound of Thelonious Monk greeted me each evening when I approached his door.

  Living here, would I resort to a diet like the one in the refrigerator before me—a permanent cocktail party nibbled alone in front of the television set each night?

  In the bathroom, I found more vestiges of the other girl’s life. Tampons rested beside the toilet. A clutter of drugstore makeup—crumbling Maybelline eye shadow, Revlon Toast of New York lipstick—sat abandoned on the counter. There was a tangle of dark hair in the bathtub sieve where she had not bothered to clean before she left town. In each corner of the tub was a votive candle, and for some reason this fact made me sad, thinking of the girl pampering herself in the dark.

  The bedroom was the least lived-in. A stark, white duvet was thrown over the bed. All the sheets were white, too. A single dying white orchid sat beside the bed, in a white ceramic holder with holes in it that revealed the soil. It rested on top of a book, The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships. I picked it up. It was a library book. I opened it. Three months overdue.

  There was a tackboard with postcards, receipts, a Map to the Stars’ Homes, the kind you can buy all over Los Angeles, and an expired gift certificate for Estée Lauder stuck to it, but no pictures graced the walls.

  In the closet I found a pair of scuffed black leather boots with rings of last winter’s salt around the toes and ankles. Clothes she’d left behind: a corduroy blazer, a red acrylic/wool scarf, and a leather motorcycle jacket with metal studs on the shoulders. And something funny: two silver wraparound dresses, exactly alike, only in different sizes. They were cheap quality, and the smaller one had the price tag still hanging off of it, showing she’d bought it on sale. She must have bought it for a smaller friend. Or maybe for herself—incentive for when she lost weight. I had a friend who did that—bought two of everything. It never made
much sense to me, and as far as I knew, the smaller ones always ended up going to waste.

  I sat on the bed with a slump and stared out the window.

  I didn’t know when it had begun to rain, but it had. The outside world looked fuzzy, white, like television static, bad reception.

  I thought about Sophie’s birthday party. It was beginning to blur with other moments that cluttered my memory. It didn’t matter. The questions it posed were the same: Was it possible to fall out of love in a single moment? Possible for somebody to turn from lover to stranger in the glimpse of a smile? Maybe. I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He’d said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of us from one another. Humor was the great moment of truth. What we thought was funny was how we defined ourselves, and revealed ourselves, whether we knew it or not.

  “So, yo, you want it or what?”

  I sat up abruptly. Jiminy stood by the door holding a cell phone in his hands.

  “’Cuz I gotta get goin’. My boy just paged me.”

  I hesitated, but not for long.

  “Yes,” I said, rising. “I’ll take it.”

  BACK AT ANDREW’S APARTMENT I packed my things in the living room while he stayed locked in his bedroom, listening to the same album he’d been listening to the night before. Every object appeared to me already as a memory of itself: The jazz albums stacked against the wall. A framed poster for a long-gone theater production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. The humidifier by the window. The typewriter on his desk with his half-written play beside it.

  On his refrigerator hung a black-and-white photograph strip of us. We had taken it months earlier in an old-fashioned photo booth—the kind that makes everybody look glamorous. I guess something about the way the ink settles, the high contrast it creates. We looked good. Not like ourselves but like movie stars who had been chosen to play us. In a drawer somewhere were a lot more of those same photos of Andrew and me. Our first few weeks together we’d been obsessive about getting them taken in the booth on Avenue B. At the end of every date, we’d end up back there, in that photo booth, staring into the darkened glass, waiting for the flash. As if we needed proof that we really existed.

  In the strip he’d hung on the refrigerator, I am looking off to the side in each shot, frowning, as if there’s some third party off-camera who is beckoning to me. Andrew is looking directly ahead into the lens, wearing a beatific smile.

  When I was finished packing, I went and knocked on his door. I heard a bedspring creak, but he didn’t answer.

  “Andrew,” I whispered. “Take care, okay?”

  I waited for a reply, but there was nothing—just the grunge music playing its endless dirge.

  I had the fleeting wish that there were two of me. I could leave one of them behind for him, a parting gift. Instead I left a check for half the rent on the kitchen table (he hadn’t asked for it, but it felt cleaner that way), then let myself out.

  MY FIRST NIGHT in the new place, I woke to the sound of a voice. It was three in the morning. The orchid sat beside me like a glowing white fist. Somebody was in the front of the apartment, weeping, raving. Around me, the bedroom was shrouded in a thick gray light. The voice was a woman’s. Her muffled sobbing came to me from somewhere out there in the dark. I thought Vera had come home early from her travels. I scrambled out of bed, threw on my T-shirt, and stumbled down the hall, searching for the source. Only when I reached the living room and found it empty did I realize that the sound was not coming from my apartment at all, but rather from outside, on the street. I peered out and saw a woman ranting to herself at the subway station a half a block away. She was thin and dark, and her pregnant belly poked out like a tumor. She staggered around, clutching her hair, and yet the weeping had an aura of theater—like an echo of something real—the way drugged-out emotions sometimes do. I watched her until she had staggered off down the street and out of sight.

  Afterward, I was restless. There were still a few hours until I could sanely leave for work. So I filled up the bathtub and lit the votive candles before stepping into the hot, bubbly water, wincing as it scalded my toes. I submerged myself slowly, and after a while my body adjusted, and the temperature grew comfortable. There in the candlelight I stared at my body. I took note of its features like a doctor examining a patient for the first time: broad shoulders, narrow hips, teardrop breasts that didn’t quite match. One breast was small, prepubescent, with a pale pink nipple, the other slightly fuller, with a deeper mauve nipple. Like they belonged to two different women. I ran a hand across my mismatched breasts, then down across my belly, my thighs, and through the dark hair between my legs. I felt a surge of pity for this body—as if it were something separate from myself rather than something I lived inside. I pitied it as if it were a child I had just taken a dangerous toy away from, to spare it some potentially lethal accident. It’s for your own good. Someday you’ll see. I lay there thinking such thoughts until the water turned cold, and I was shivering, and it was really morning.

  7

  G RETA HICKS WAITED FOR ME just beyond the revolving doors. I watched her for a moment from the lobby. She wore an old brown wool coat that had pilled up from use, and on her feet a pair of sneakers. Twisted around her wrist was a drugstore bag that held her work shoes—a pair of black low-heeled pumps, visible through the plastic. She stood with her back to me, and the smoke from her cigarette twirled up from her head, like steam from a spout.

  This had been my idea. I was taking her out to dinner, a small token of appreciation for her having found me the apartment. But now I wasn’t sure I had it in me. A stranger. A night of polite conversation. I considered making up an excuse: I was coming down with a cold, would she take a rain check?

  “Greta,” I said, stepping out into the cold.

  She turned, smiling, bluish gray smoke leaking out of her nose and mouth.

  She looked different. It must have been the makeup. She wore a color scheme from another era. Slashes of pink blush, pearlescent coral lipstick. Her eyes were decorated with sparkly blue eye shadow.

  She flung her cigarette into the gutter and smiled widely.

  “There she is. Working late?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I lost track of time.”

  “That’s okay. I’m just glad you’re here now.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her I couldn’t do it tonight, but the combination of her eager smile and the heavy makeup made me change my mind.

  I brought her to Le Zoo, a French bistro five blocks south of the office, where the publisher had taken me my first week on the job—apparently a Riggs Fellow tradition. Then I’d been too nervous to taste the steak frites and flourless chocolate cake he’d treated me to, and I’d always wanted to come back.

  The maître d’ took our coats. Beneath hers Greta was all gussied up: a midnight blue silk blouse, a white polyester skirt and matching blazer. A cloud of gardenia perfume surrounded her and now me. On her ears, tiny diamonds glinted. She’d made a real effort. I was glad I hadn’t canceled.

  She did most of the talking over dinner—a steady stream of gossip about our fellow workers. In her short time at the magazine, she’d learned everybody’s business. She told me which editor was vying to take over the helm. Which one was alcoholic. Which was divorced and dating a woman half his age. Which overweight food critic had been caught having sex in her office late one night with a certain chatty Latino mailman.

  I half listened. All around us were older men in suits, red-faced, corpulent. My eyes settled on a young man across the room—a thin blond waiter who reminded me a bit of Andrew. He was reciting the specials to a geriatric couple, who stared up at him with rheumy eyes. His cheeks flushed the way Andrew’s did when he was embarrassed or too warm.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Greta making a gagging gesture with her finger in her mouth. She was imitating somebody. She was telling a story. I’d missed the
beginning. She pulled her finger out of her mouth and wiped it on a napkin. “Well, she sure didn’t get that skinny by dieting.”

  I tried to sound as if I’d been listening. “Oh, really?”

  “Really really,” she said, and took a gulp of wine. I saw she’d almost finished the bottle.

  She leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “How are you holding up?”

  In her eyes brewed sympathy and hunger. She wanted to play big sister.

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  “Honest?” She stared at me with a sort of jutting intensity.

  “Yeah, honest.”

  The truth was, just that morning I had woken up unable to move. My eyes had blinked open, but my body was as if paralyzed. I lay completely still in that other girl’s stark bedroom for what had to be ten minutes. I sent my body messages from my brain, but it didn’t hear them. I tried to speak, but my voice muscles weren’t listening either. And then, after what seemed an eternity, my body jerked into gear like a car engine finally catching, and I lay there gasping, as if I’d been held under water.

  Greta was still watching me.

  I cocked my head and put on my best reporter’s voice. “So tell me about yourself, Greta. Who are you?”

  It worked. People always preferred to talk about themselves. “Ah,” she said. “The forty-thousand-dollar question. Well, for starters,” she said, “I don’t look like what I am.” She went on to explain that she was the daughter of a German woman and a black GI. Her father had, she said, liberated the Jews from Buchenwald in World War II. Her mother had lived in a village on the outskirts of the camp, and he’d liberated her, too, in a way.

  As she spoke, I laughed inwardly at the coincidence. It was funny. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now that she’d said it, I could see it—what we had in common. In fact, we bore a slight resemblance to each other. Nothing obvious, but yes, we could have been related. We had the same straight brown hair and olive skin, and the same vague look about our features.