All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go

THESIS

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

David E. Yee

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2017

Dissertation Committee:

Michelle Rae Herman, Advisor

Lee Martin

Copyrighted by

David Edward Yee

2017

Abstract

“All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go” is the story of Jonah Huang, an Asian American man in DC who is obsessed with . The novel follows him through the six years of his life when he faces the choice of following his passion at the cost of financial stability and coping with a love that is unavailable to him.

ii

Acknowledgments

For my friends. For my family. For my teachers. For my mother.

iii

Vita

2004...... Sherwood High School

2012...... B.A. English, University of Baltimore

2017 ...... M.F.A. Creative Writing, Fiction, The Ohio

State University

Publications

2018 Juked Three Poems

2017 American Short Fiction “Heaven for Your Full Lungs”

2017 Seneca Review “Baptism”

2016 Gulf Coast Online “Wildflower”

2016 Hot Metal Bridge “Once You’ve Gone Back Home”

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

iv

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iii

Vita ...... iv

All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go ...... 1

v

All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go

Remember, first, Jonah was a coward. Before he rose from the belly of the whale, he fled the word of the lord on a ship, forced god to make a storm to strand him. He became a great prophet, but that wouldn’t be possible if not for the fear born into him—this was how I understood my name for the first time, six-years-old at Sunday school. Our teacher was a kind woman who, for a decade, thought I was Hawaiian even though my last name was Huang. Each hour-long lesson on the Sabbath covered one of the great Bible figures—Daniel and his lions, Job and the curses, Lot and his salt—until finally we came to Jonah. When the teacher said his name, the class turned to me as if I was that long reborn. I didn’t like being called a coward, didn’t like being associated with it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the attention. This is the anecdote I liked to tell someone I’m getting to know, offering the negative connotations of my name and the small, almost illicit admission of my reaction as a child.

I told it to my boss back in my interview. For a year, since the fall of 2011, I’d been working as a personal assistant for a consulting firm in Dupont, managing the life of

Robert E., one of the firm’s partners, doing everything from running his calendar to helping decorate his new apartment in Foggy Bottom. One of my first assignments was to oversee the redesign of his wardrobe. His recent divorce had put a rift in his confidence— as if before, his god awful square-toed and boxy Jos. A Banks had been

1 adequate, but as a bachelor, being that out of fashion was untenable. I was never sure if this amount of involvement was a literal part of my job description. The vibe I got was

Just keep him happy and the raises will come. I didn’t really mind, though. I’d grown up the middle son, rhythm guitarist, office admin. I’d become accustomed to being told what to do. And shopping was something I found pleasure in. I hadn’t yet realized that I didn’t need to be living paycheck-to-paycheck if I could just cut back on my spending. I took pride in my attire, and sure, I was making a better salary in this new position, affording me the pieces I’d been saving for: five hundred on brand new Alden dress shoes instead of pre-worn off eBay, a pair of 21oz Iron Heart , an excess of American made T’s and boxer , and that Flathead chambray with the dots and diamonds that I hadn’t been able to justify spending $325.00 on before. I bought shit built to last. And under the guise of needing more work attire, I amassed sets from J Crew, usually on sale because even with my shitty spending habits, I never liked paying more for an article when I knew I could get it cheaper. I had a knack for knowing what would go on clearance, what would go out of stock, that sort of thing.

It was on one of these work expeditions that I met Elle in Crate & Barrel. I mistook her for an employee and asked her for assistance. She tucked the bundle of printed hydrangeas on the front of her into the waist of her jeans, said, ‘It’s Elle, like the letter.’ I was on an assignment for Javier, my boss’ decorator, to buy new glassware that was Elegant but not ostentatious. Javier handled the major purchases, the new furniture, artwork, et cetera, was supposed to be hand selecting everything, really. Robert gave him the authority to send me on pick-ups, and after that meeting about the kitchen

2 renovation, when it was just me and Javier in the office, he looked me up and down—that day I was in navy slacks, spread collar shirt, knit tie and tan shoes, slicked back hair neatly pinned behind my right ear—and said, ‘I trust your judgment.’

In my car, on the way to the store, I’d been annoyed. It wasn’t right that he got paid for something when I was doing the leg work, but I didn’t want to be the one to put tension between Javier and Robert, didn’t trust that I would come out of it professionally unscathed. I figured that if either of them didn’t like what I chose, they’d just have me return it, and Javier couldn’t blame me without Robert knowing he delegated more than transportation. I walked around the alcove of the store dedicated to dishware and then she was there—prescription Ray-Bans, bleached hair hanging from six inches of brown roots, that vintage flower print shirt and black, matchstick jeans. Her silhouette put an ambient sort of cautiousness in me like an open blade on a table, but I swallowed that nervousness, said, ‘Do you know if this is all the stemware? Is there more in the back?’

It is important to say—I’m often called a metrosexual, a hipster, occasionally a fashionista, but I find these terms lazy catch-alls meant solely to diffuse an uncomfortable tension between me and someone who cares less about their appearance. I don’t purchase expensive things because I think they are better than others, although technically speaking, if you want to try and make me feel stupid about buying a pair of $395.00 jeans that I will wear every temperate day for three to four years, and after they’re too beat up to stitch or patch, at the start of another humid Maryland summer, I’ll cut them at the knees and roll the frayed edges into cuffs, getting three to four more seasons out of them as —if you want to make me try and feel foolish about that, then go ahead. But I

3 see a lot more sense in ethically hand-stitched Japanese denim than buying pair after pair of sweatshop shit that tears in the crotch or pockets after just one season. I bought this denim because I understand it, the breadth of the garment. I know it speaks to me in a different voice than others. Let me be clear—I don’t think there is one correct style for everyone. Clothes give the opportunity to create a fingerprint. There is a way to look purely you, to be yourself. Don’t call me some supposedly pejorative term because you don’t feel at ease—under thirty, Vera Bradley purse, or over fifteen in cargo and flip-flops, no ocean in sight. You want to wear that and pre-torn jeans? Fine, but it’s not my job to own it. So when I saw Elle in her oversized floral, her skintight jeans, leather Chelsea with a suede heel, I was in awe of how natural she looked. A good outfit does that to you, puts you perfectly at ease, gives you an aura—the embodiment of trouble, a cowboy coming into focus through the blur of desert haze. It’s a declaration—

How else would I look?

She glanced into my cart filled with sets of the essential beer , everything from pints to Belgian goblets to 10oz chalices, the stuff that is typically standard cut between the retailers. I was having problems with the wine glasses—never drank it— couldn’t tell the difference between the tasteful or gaudy designs, couldn’t tell which were used for white or red. Placing her hand on the front of my cart, she said, ‘Let’s have a look.’ We discussed Javier’s parameters, his design for the kitchen and dining room— all Brazilian rosewood and local marble cut into long rectangular surfaces. Elle pulled demo glasses from the shelf, asking me what I thought, and there was something instantly ordinary to it, how we made jokes about each cup. How this stem-less one looked like it

4 belonged on a spaceship. How the square-based one would fit right in at a Lego house.

She selected two brands, one middle-of-the-road and the other high-end. Told her money wasn’t a problem, then immediately felt embarrassed. I said, ‘This is for my boss, I actually have quite reasonable ceilings to my bank account.’ When she smiled, her mouth showed both rows of teeth between her squared lips that were coated in cherry lipstick.

She said, ‘I wasn’t making any assumptions.’

I’m not sure why I had thought she worked there. It might’ve been the way she’d been walking in the adjacent aisle, bored and straight-legged, scuffing her heels on the tile as she went. Maybe it was the black sharpie and click pen she kept in her breast pocket. We’d moved onto coffee mugs and tea sets. She picked out slim ceramic painted slate. ‘To offset the rosewood,’ she said. When I got in line, the cart stacked above the rim and a box of brandy snifters under my arm, she was already at the exit, and I wanted to call out after her, but I never was one for raising my voice, and she hadn’t looked back.

I rushed through the checkout, stuffed my boss’ credit card in my , almost lost the cart over the curb out front.

The urge to find her leaning against the brick, a cigarette dangling between her fingertips, was clearer than the actual words I would’ve said to her. The obvious was to ask why she helped me, sure, but I was more interested in where she bought that shirt. That sounds silly, of course, but it is hard to articulate the feeling of seeing a striking piece of and not being able to recognize the retailer or designer who made it, to see a new look in the changing season and feel like you are missing out.

5

What was the harm in asking? Best case, we could get dinner or drinks, and maybe I get to know her, to become who knows her best, and I knew I needed that at twenty-five. It’s not like I was worried about being married or having kids. I didn’t put a penny in my 401K. I just wanted someone to sleep in with on Saturdays, someone whose coffee order I’d have memorized, both winter and summer iterations. I wanted to know that she was less afraid of thunderstorms if the windows were open, then be the one that got up at one in the thin hours of night to throw back the glass, placing towels on the sills to catch the water. Her face, half-covered with the pillow, she’d say, ‘Always protecting me.’

Worst case, she could give me the name of a new vintage store to out. I was into that.

It took some effort to get the cart up the parking garage ramp, the rolled cuffs of my shirt damp against my elbows. The boxes barely fit in my car—that old Accord with the sunroof stuck slightly tilted, the way the cloth cushions smelled like Swisher Sweets from the nights the band took it to shows. I filled the trunk, the backseat, would have to drive to the office with one of the wine sets on my lap. The heat of the noontime sun made my eyelids heavy, the muscles in my shoulders relaxed, and I decided to get an iced

Americano from the Starbucks on the corner before I drove. Through the tint in the door, she appeared as if surfacing from below murky water—at first, a cream oval that grew until I could see the pink and blue flowers pocking it, how the combination of bleached tip and chlorined root turned her hair to kelp. As I opened the door, the words leapt from my mouth, ‘There you are.’

6

That red box smile, the glare on her glasses. She hid something behind her back, said, ‘Here I am?’

‘I’m embarrassed. You didn’t have to help me with all that,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’

‘You looked like a man in need.’

For a moment, we congested in the doorway, standing as if she couldn’t pass without me being pushed from the cusp of the coffee shop, and I couldn’t enter without keeping her in. Eventually, someone approached from the street, and she took a step back to let me enter. As she pivoted, she kept her arm pinned behind her, and I followed her shirtsleeve with my eyes. ‘Don’t judge me,’ she said, bringing a large strawberry

Frappuccino between us, keeping eye contact over her frames as she took a sip.

I shrugged, ‘I mean, it looks like Pepto Bismol, but I’ve never actually had one.’

‘Well then, you must,’ she said, and raised it to my lips, and thinking back to it, I must’ve looked oafish standing next to her, a good four inches taller, glancing nervously to my left and palming my tie to my chest as I craned my lips to her straw, sucking a line of the cold sugar over my tongue. It was cloying and creamy and I said it tasted good with a pained look on my face. ‘More for me,’ she said and took another sip. I couldn’t help but think of her lips on the plastic mine had just wetted.

The next hour before I found out about the man she lived with is still crystalized for me. It remains the only time I’ve let myself believe, profoundly, in fate—the new job,

Javier, an unfamiliarity with wine and my assumption that the thin girl in the good outfit worked at C&B, how it all led me to that parking garage. She told me she’d gone to

7

SCAD for grad school to study textiles and had just left a position sourcing fabric for a local boutique. As we moved around the spiral of the garage, leaning into the ramp, I complimented her jeans and we talked about denim, about warp and weft, and she explained the difference between twill and other weave patterns. I was in awe of her mastery, felt like a dilettante next to her, standing against the barrier on the roof of the garage, looking out over Northwest. If only she hadn’t turned to me, our elbows on the concrete, and said, ‘I’m in love with the way you dress.’ To our right, the Washington

Monument stood behind the shoulders of a blue windowed office building. Below, the street was full of Prius cabs stuck behind a UPS truck. I should’ve just said thank you, the two of us, steely-eyed on the rooftops in the distance, the breeze picking at us. Instead, I turned, my hand moving so slowly between our hips, and I pinched a flap of her shirt already freed from the waist of her jeans, as if my fingers on that fabric conveyed the words, I like your shirt. After, I shook my head, said, ‘Sorry, I was just curious about the texture.’ She hadn’t moved her arms, but her eyes followed my hand before returning to the monument. In the sunlight, they lit up caramel.

She said, ‘I always tell Christian he needs to dress smarter—a man in a tie has authority.’ I remember the air came out of me in this exaggerated way, like my disappointment in her having a partner would’ve been manageable had I not, for that instant walking up the parking ramp, let myself feel that our meeting was purposeful. I spun the ice in my now-empty Americano.

I looked at my , said, ‘Shit, I should’ve been back a half hour ago.’

‘Do you have a card? So you can return the favor. Professionally, I mean.’

8

‘I’m a personal assistant. A gopher, basically.’

She pursed her lower lip, and I wanted to lean forward and nip that ruddy flesh, but instead, I took my card from my wallet and gave it to her, told her if she needed help organizing her calendar to give me a call. She didn’t look at it, just strummed that backs of her fingers with it as if it were a pick and her knuckles were guitar strings. I could tell she was looking directly at me, our shoulders, our hips pointed over the street in parallel, but I couldn’t look at her to be sure. Instead, I kept my gaze on the expanse of buildings over the barricade, saying, ‘DC really is such a short, crawling city.’

#

A few months prior, at the start of the summer when my lease ended, I’d decided against staying in the District and finding a spot closer to the Red Line, and instead moved out of

Columbia Heights into a house in the county with the guys from my defunct band. We’d all just finished our degrees a couple years late, splitting time between community college, work, a lingering interest in music. The house in the suburbs was a piece of shit but inexpensive, and the money saved in rent lessened the social blow of being commuters. That first month we got drunk and laughed about back in the day—the short tours to Philly or Richmond, getting ripped off by booking agents and stealing liquor from that one spot in Baltimore, then setup our unused equipment in the dining room playing our old songs and favorite covers—the Hives, the Strokes, Refused.

9

I’d been moderating a well-known style blog in my free time, met a few girls off

Tumblr, the occasional fling—talk of music and TV while drinking at bars, then sex, the

Metro back to Silver Spring at 6AM to shower before work. Nothing lasted more than a few dates, and it wasn’t entirely about the clothing then either—that I felt, sometimes overdressed. But I dreaded that dynamic of visibly caring about my appearance, and though I gave more weight to personality, to aspirations, to humor, it often colored my decisions to break it off, knowing I wasn’t being fully myself. I spent the winter ordering custom suits from a tailor in California, hand-stitched, made-to-order. They were about the same price as the rotating J Crew but American made, not dubiously sourced from factories in China. I joined OkCupid then Tinder, found myself constantly rushing home from work to change for a new date, sleeping too little and in strange beds. Still,

Robert E. was pleased with my work, and I’d become accustomed to my tasks, setting up his appointments, booking his travel accommodations, could do it between catnaps at my desk, the taste of hops creeping past my esophagus, my third cup of coffee trying to push it back down.

By February of 2013, I’d lost five pounds through sheer exhaustion. My suits arrived—a herringbone two-button with a center vent, a houndstooth one-button and charcoal slacks, the essential classic black with peak collar. I had to get the taken in, but otherwise, I was pleased with the quality. I still wear them every now and again in my rotating wardrobe. Robert E. was leaving town on a Thursday to go on vacation to

Montauk with his son. I’d been sitting on one of the Barcelona chairs in reception, spreading out paperwork for filing when he left for the day. He looked at me in the

10 herringbone suit, navy tie, cordovan Shortwings, said, ‘You look smart today. When I get back, I want you to set me up with your tailor.’

I said, ‘Robert, this wouldn’t look good on you.’ When I glanced at him from behind a stack of papers, he was straightening his in the reflection on the window.

He said, ‘My father used to say it wasn’t the suit that made a man, it was how you wore it.’

‘True, true,’ I said, though, I was trying to placate him more than agree. ‘It’s just that this color wouldn’t go with your complexion. You need sharper lines, bolder tones.’ I didn’t tell him that he was too pale for this pattern. I had him in a RL Black Label. The slacks, alone, cost as much as my rent.

He said, ‘I just feel a little plain is all. Your outfits always look, I don’t know, clever.’

From the corner of the reception table, I picked up his itinerary, his boarding passes, handed them over, saying, ‘When you get back, I’ll have some new options ready.

We’ll find a way to give you that flare.’

He read the timetable, and then, as if my words had been queuing in his ear, he smiled, ‘Sounds good. And Javier will be stopping by a little later. Give him the check in my drawer.’

Javier didn’t arrive until 4:50pm, and at that point, I’d finished my tasks, was just refreshing Tumblr, waiting for the clock on my computer to tick to five so I could thread through the post-work rush on the street and hop on the Metro. He pulled the door open

11 with one hand, the other cradling an eighteen-inch Reclining Buddha statue molded out of dim copper. ‘For his desk,’ he said. I followed him into Robert’s office, which, I must say, was pretty sharp if only a little dated. Robert was not much for the contemporary— the minimal or streamlined—he preferred his giant walnut brick of a desk, a standalone wooden globe in the corner, bonsai garden by the window. Javier placed the Buddha on the desk on the far corner from the iMac, facing the leather-backed swivel chair. While he adjusted the angle of it, one inch this way, half an inch back, he said, ‘Does it bother you that Robert prefers Asian ornaments?’

I said, ‘Are you implying that’s the reason I’ve got this job?’

‘No, god no. It was just a question. A curiosity.’

‘I don’t care. My family is from Taiwan. That’s Indian.’

Robert’s office overlooked a traffic circle and showed the expanse of two unparalleled avenues stretching away from it. Javier stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, folding his arms, the lapel of his chino billowing under the pressure of his forearms. He said, ‘Do you think I can pull off an ascot? I want to bring it back.’

I said, ‘You’re too skinny. And too tall.’

He touched a finger to his chin, ‘Well aren’t you prickly today.’

I slid the check across the desk to him and apologized.

I wasn’t a depressive—the kind of person anchored to their bed by regret, never had that problem—but in the dead of that winter, I’d taken to being blue, to being entranced by negativity, letting my responses veer at a meanness I generally found unproductive. Maybe it was because I never talked about Elle with my friends, figuring it

12 was silly to let myself be down about a woman I hadn’t gotten to know, to dwell on what was less than a missed opportunity. Yet, that lack of disclosure had grown spores in me. I was constantly in that parking garage—my last thought of before sleep, the floral fabric between my fingers as I showered for work. And my roommates were less popular in the dating world—they couldn’t understand my confusion as anything other than an extension of hunger. Around that year, they’d started poking at me for the number of different dates I went on, saying that I wanted to fuck the whole world, and sure I liked the attention—went a little stir-crazy without regular sex—but I like to think even back then, I did want that intimacy with someone I felt respect for, someone I was in awe of. I just couldn’t articulate it yet. Javier asked if I’d be interested in going to a gala at the

Newseum. One of his other clients was throwing it, and he had a mess of extra passes. It was the following night, and all I had to do was dress up and give his name at the door. I asked him what it was for and he said, ‘Who knows. But it’s a party. Bring someone.

Lighten up.’

I keep a photograph from that event in my desk drawer—Elle and I, standing just off the dance floor, big dumb look on my face, her mouth slightly agape. It felt important, at the time, that we kept being put, randomly, under the same roof. I learned that night the string of acquaintances we shared was small enough to allow us to be pulled toward each other. She’d been standing with a group of older women as I came in, and I was wearing one hell of a suit that night, had just checked the layering of my cuffs in the dull reflection in the night-lit windows of the front hall—simple navy two-button, a white shirt and eggshell tie, pair of limited edition tan suede Longwings. I never had much

13 reason to wear them after that, sold them on eBay the following year and recouped most of the $600.00 they’d cost.

My plus-one was a woman named Deidra, whom I met on the internet. She lived in DC, had heard of this gala before I invited her, knew other people there, so I didn’t feel that guilty when Elle and I kept coming back to each other, stealing conversations in the hallway by the bathroom, the drink line, walking the lower floors of the museum which held a catalogue of a hundred years of famous newspaper headlines. Navigating the crowd of the party, it wasn’t clear what the fundraiser had been benefitting, maybe Cystic

Fibrosis awareness or Lymphoma research. Elle’s peep-front conjoined with her pencil showing the span of her shoulder blades. When we danced, she had to lift the hem of that maroon wool above her knees as she bent them.

The party was scattered across all five stories of the museum, centering on a DJ in the ground floor of the atrium where the balconies of the other levels overlooked. Deidra wasn’t much for dancing. She found some friends at the second-floor cocktail bar while I shimmied in a circle with Javier, his boyfriend, a handful of total strangers. Javier leaned over his partner’s shoulder, said, ‘You look like a pistol.’ Full of bourbon and compliments, I was a pot boiling over, and a moment later, Elle sifted through the crowd and took my hand. As we made our way off the floor, one of the party’s photographers shouted something that sounded like Smile. Then she pulled me into an elevator. Her palm felt cold and damp, and as the doors shut, a man yelled for us to hold the lift. We hid in the cab as it closed, hit the button for the fifth floor. I said, ‘God, I’m tipsy. What are you drinking?’

14

She said it was soda water then spun her plastic cup, whirling the ice.

‘Sober?’

‘Just bored with drinking.’

It was one AM when the elevator doors slid open, and we heeled through the empty seating. The crowds had flocked to the makeshift bars set up on the levels below or were sweating the booze out on the dance floor. We leaned against the round metal railing, looking down at the mass of bodies step-touching. I asked her what brought her, and she said she’d been volunteering for a nonprofit that independently organized fundraisers for other charities. They put on this event. Her hair had been bleached recently enough that only an inch of her natural brown had grown out. She told me I looked like the bell of the ball and straightened my tie clip. I said, ‘Need any help with your calendar yet?’

‘I haven’t left him.’

This time when she mentioned Christian, I didn’t shrink away. I turned on my elbow, propped up, facing her profile. The light coming up from the strobes under us, lit the transparent hairs on the base of her jaw. I said, ‘It’s not the worst thing, running into you.’

‘It’s not unpleasant.’

‘In another life, maybe we could make it through a drink together. Even stomach a meal.’

The upper half of her body was suspended over the ledge. From the kaleidoscopic blur of blue and yellow lights on the dance floor, she must have looked like a splinter in

15 the glass wall. She balanced her waist on the rail, and for an instant, her pumps lifted off the tile, the back of the black leather sliding off her ankles to reveal the dirty heel of her left foot. I put my hand on her lower back, steadying her. The fabric of her skirt was hot and wet with sweat. She pushed back from the metal. Her face was pale and her glasses slid down her nose. I touched my middle knuckles to her forehead, said, ‘You’re burning up.’

‘I had a fever this week. I’m still getting over it, I guess.’

When she put her hair up, I could see pit stains webbed under her sleeves. She said, ‘He wouldn’t forgive me. Not again.’

‘There were others?’

‘We’ve been together for twelve years. Since we were fifteen.’

‘What if you didn’t need him?’

Elle returned to the railing, looking at the flat white ceiling. Narrowing her eyes, she said, ‘I don’t need anyone. That’s not why we’re together.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I guess I’m just confused.’

She raised a hand toward the roof of the atrium, wilted it back and forth like a dead leaf drifting free of a branch, said, ‘It is confusing.’

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I edged closer to her, elbows on the metal, my blazer sleeve against her bare arm. Can’t Tell Me Nothing bumped on the sound system, and we didn’t speak. My hair had gotten long enough to part diagonally and tie behind my ear. Elle flicked the black knot and said I looked like a samurai. I asked if that was an

Asian joke and she bit me on the bicep, hard and wide-set, teeth digging through the wool

16 into my skin. The muscles in my back flexed at her touch. As I took a step back laughing, she held her jaw open and put her clawed hands on my shoulders. She leapt forward, wrapped her legs around me, bunching her skirt between us. Before she nipped me on the neck, before she let loose a low, trembling laugh, I held her weight in my arms, my hands locked along her spine, her left arm snaked over my shoulder, engulfing my face, my nose in her clavicle. The smell of honey soured by sweat clung to me, and I was relieved at how easily I could carry her. Those teeth latched to the left tendon of my throat, she spoke over the flesh, ‘I should take this home with me.’

‘I could live without it.’

‘So dramatic,’ she said, then hummed, vibrating my skin with her lips. She said,

‘Sit me on the rail.’

Adjusting her weight so that it was square on my hips, I shook my head. Elle leaned back, held her hands, fingers intertwined, behind my neck, pinning me down with a look—how I wanted to know, right in that moment, what it would be like to remove her glasses, to put my forehead on hers and breathe the air she’d just dismissed. She said it again, humorlessly. ‘Sit me on the rail.’ At first, I pushed her lower back to the curved metal, hesitating, until gradually, with one hand under her left thigh, the other clutching her to me, my chin on her shoulder, I lifted her onto it. Chest to chest, my soaked up all the sweat on my sternum. My right hand held my left wrist looped behind her, and she whispered in my ear, ‘Look at me. Look at me.’ The tips of my shoes dug into the corner where the carpet met the glass barricade. In the seconds it took to loosen the slack in my arms, to right my posture so that I faced her, our features mirrored, in that

17 brevity, I pictured a dozen times—her toppling out of my grip, upending, flailing and falling those fifty or so feet, the cold slap on the concrete reinforced tile, the instant shattering of bones. But then there was just her wild eyebrows, those three freckles under her left eye, the perspiration on her forehead shimmering, and she was serene—how she sighed, shoulders sagging forward, singing the hook in a whisper. Only her balance and my hands kept her from toppling, and she was content to bop her head to the rhythm of the song. Below, the four lower balconies made a ladder toward the dance floor, men and women in a myriad of suits and , wool and linen, nylon hose and Chup . I was ashamed of my fear, how I had her finally in my arms, and what could I do but imagine I was the only thing that stood between her and danger, what could I do but turn this closeness into a burden. In the pit below, the heels and toed oxfords stomped, hands clapped, drinks raised into the space between us. She said, ‘Be here with me. Be here.’ She removed her glasses and put them in my breast pocket. With her forehead, she nudged my chin upright, her hairline sticking to my lip. Her pupils dilated, and as I watched that black overlap the ridged brown, she kissed me, once, softly, saying, ‘Good boy.’

‘I’m not a dog.’

‘No, I know. You’re a real boy.’

‘The fuck is that supposed to mean?’

Her fingers undid the button on my blazer, snaked between my lapels and landed along the ribs over my heart. Our faces were close enough that I could smell garlic and

18 lemon pepper on her breath. She said, ‘I find that every man is either a Peter Pan or a

Pinocchio. You’re definitely the latter.’

‘I’m not sure if I should be insulted.’

‘I just don’t think you know what you’re made of. Then again.’

The grip between my hand and opposing wrist had loosened, my fingers unfurling onto the divots of her back. I looked below, the dance floor nearing capacity. Not a single face was turned up toward us. Excitement for this closeness began to build in me, the curves of her body in my hands, and I tried to quell the idea that the quick pace of this night pointed to an impending intimacy—I remember thinking it wasn’t that certain, that

I didn’t want it to be. I couldn’t read her, yet as I held her hips to mine, I didn’t stop myself from picturing my fingers pinching down that bobtail zipper on the back of her skirt, sweat gluing the fabric to her legs, how she might tease me as I fought to get it off her. Her hand retracted from under my blazer, index finger pointing at me. She said,

‘Then again, I don’t really know you. You could be made of almost anything.’ A rush of air parted her lips, she flared her eyes and pushed her finger off my chest the way a swimmer kicks off the wall when turning a lap. Her hips only slid a half-inch back on the rail, but panic seized me and I clutched her to my torso, to that panic. My hands shook as

I took her from the rail and began walking through the unoccupied tables and chairs, full of dirty napkins and empty glasses, to safety. Her laughter slipped over my shoulder and trailed behind us.

I said, ‘You might be too wild for me.’ But I’m not sure if I believed that, or if I did, I didn’t care. She was seated now, crossing her legs, the maroon fabric of her skirt

19 ridged over the muscle of her thigh, and I was swallowed up by that one kiss still lingering, my bid for nearness. It felt like a birthday wish or some other vow that, when spoken, becomes impossible. And so I willed it away, saying that she was too wild and then, ‘What the fuck. What if you fell?’

‘I doubt you would have allowed that.’

‘What if I wasn’t paying attention?’

‘Are you that clumsy?’

‘No.’

Elle rubbed her palms together and then presented her hands to me with all ten fingers outstretched, as if to say Tada! As she stood, she said, ‘Trust is a funny thing, isn’t it? I suppose I was being optimistic.’ She took her glasses from my pocket, looking through the lenses for smudges. When she had them on, she looked me from to shoulder-pad, and I felt strange as she took me in, as if I was being judged for quality. I raised my chin to square my jaw. She leaned forward, said, ‘Take me home.’

Walking to the elevator, her elbow looped through mine, I swallowed those words, hid them, protected them, wanting them to remain untouched. If nothing else, I was that person, soaked in perspiration and well dressed, doing enough right to catch her interest. Take me home. They came on the tail end of an exhausted breath, as if she could simply say the command and relax, letting me do the work. As if her home were a place I was already familiar, a station we somehow shared. But it was also that odd familiarity which I questioned, which made me cheapen the moment, saying, ‘He’s not home?’ It took us ten minutes to get her and purse from check, another five to hail a cab.

20

She didn’t speak, just pulled me with her, all of the humor now exhaled. In the backseat of the taxi, she put her cheek on my shoulder, pinched the button on my cuff between her fingers, saying, ‘Don’t mention him. Just let it be. Please.’

#

In the morning, I woke to find her sitting at the foot of the bed bending forward so that her spine bowed, her vertebrae ridging her skin in increments, reminded me of a fishing pole pulled taut, a catch snared to the line. The analog clock on the nightstand read some time after eight, and I smudged the sleep from my eyes, sitting up along the low headboard.

It was Saturday—had I been home, my ritual involved my laptop in bed until midday, leaving only to relieve myself. My bedroom in the suburbs was the master off the back of the house, facing east, away from the street. I rarely got to see the sunlight as it swelled through my curtains, was always up in the pre-dawn for work, or after a night out on the weekend, sleeping clear through till noon. There was something to being in the presence of that glow, reading articles and writing emails to friends who’d moved away.

When the sun was up over the gutter and my lower back felt sore from lying prone, I’d rise and make a breakfast of eggs and toast, a pot of coffee, sometimes going for a run if the weather wasn’t too humid. Truthfully, I’d rather iron my shirts, soak a pair of jeans, read at the kitchen table or work on the style forum, waiting for my roommates to wake up. We’d run errands together, get an early start to the bar. It was nice, then, all the drama

21 of playing in a band diffused, just living in de facto brotherhood—the four of us driving around in a pack, always an issue to talk about, an imperfection to fix in each other. I knew when I got home, they’d give me the business, all the jokes about where I’d been, saying you dog, asking if I even remembered her name, and yeah, I’d be lying if I said I never discussed the details of the date, the sex, the person. I reveled in it, that moment when they were rapt in the story of my night.

The image of them sitting on that beat-up couch in our living room, those quick smiles and hellos, the feigned disinterest—it all flashed through me as Elle dropped her purse back to the floor and reclined beside me. She spun the off a prescription pill jar, thumbed out a tablet and replaced the lid. It didn’t feel right to ask her what the medication was for, so I didn’t, but after she swallowed it with a sip from the water she’d placed on her end table, she could see my curiosity and said, ‘I’m really very ill.’

The wall behind her bed was just plaster fitted to brick—the chill, February morning seemed to breathe right through it. She peeled the top sheet and duvet back, got under alongside me, and I tried to focus on how she added to the warmth under the blankets, but I kept thinking lymphoma, breast cancer, Lyme. I tripped on the beginning of three sentences before she said, ‘My doctors tell me that I suffer from a severe deficiency of attention.’

‘You’re a dick.’

‘It’s a very serious disorder.’

22

She smiled and I pushed her head away. Her chewed-up hands grasped for my wrist, and I pinched her along her sides, saying, ‘You’re not supposed to joke about things like that.’

She said, ‘Hey, it’s my illness.’

We poked at each other until she rolled to the other end of the full mattress, lying on her stomach, clutching a pillow lengthwise to her bare chest, giving that canned movie come hither look—head tilted, eyelashes fluttering. I put my face in the crevice beside hers and the duvet, the geometric cyan and burnt orange print pressed against my cheek.

My fingers drew invisible lines, tracing the ridges of her ribcage, over and over again, as if I could add the pattern to my muscle memory, this map of her back.

The night before, the wood heels of my Aldens clattering on the lobby stairs, her door opening to complete blackness, I struggled to trust her hand in mine. Every unknown detail needled fear in me, like I was somehow leading myself into a trap. I kept questioning whether she was taking me home so that her and her partner could rob me, or maybe something less dubious, a simple mix-up of schedules, and she would flip on the light to find him watching TV. And, god, how I didn’t need that awkward encounter at two in the morning, sobering slowly, wanting just to lay with her, to talk with her with no one else around. Of course, I didn’t say any of this. I never expressed my doubts. I wanted her, and I knew that drawing attention to our shortcomings—that we knew so little about each other, that she was in a committed relationship—only risked the opportunity to reach some sort of intimacy, whatever that intimacy could look like, stout and mangled.

23

Her living room was fresh off the centerfold of a designer catalog—charcoal mid- century couch and loveseat, turquoise tables with opal highlights, cattle hide rug. No clutter. Everything just so. When she flipped on the light switch, three low-watt bulbs in large paper orbs suspended in the corners threw light from wall to wall, turned the paint from off-white to butter. The length of the room leading to the hall, the kitchen, the bedroom, was lined with bookshelves staggered in height, no two alike, alternating rows of books with shelves of globes, of cast statues, drawing workshop figurines in ballet poses. She said, ‘This is my nest.’ She dropped her keys into a brass bowl on the foyer table. Above it, two engraved wood panels flanked a gold framed mirror, and she checked her makeup. I walked into the body of the room. Behind the couch, a console table racked crates of LPs on the bottom shelf, a record player on the top, two speakers pointing in opposite directions. I thumbed through them, said, ‘You have quite the collection.’

‘My parents never owned vinyl.’

‘Neither did mine.’

I don’t know if she heard me, already in the kitchen, her heels clicking on the tile.

A squeaky cabinet opened and closed, followed by the faucet. She came back with a large glass of water, a bowl of banana chips. As she collapsed onto the couch, she said, ‘Put something on. Something loud. Keep me up.’ I held up a record I loved by The Marked

Men, and she stuffed a fingerful of yellow in her mouth, mumbling, ‘Of all my music, you picked one of the only things that’s his.’ She flared her eyes at me, and I used the cardboard sleeve to wave off the hidden meaning she was trying to imply, said it was a

24 good album. Replacing it in the crate, I shifted a few LP’s back and saw a familiar purple triangle, tan header collaged with black and white photos—The Shape of Punk to Come by Refused.

I said, ‘Is this safe?’

She toed off her pumps, used her right heel to scratch a spot on her left shin, saying, ‘Sure.’ I put the needle down, hung my blazer on the back of the architect chair in the corner, its seat under a drafting table. When the first guitar lick hit, I was on the other end of the couch, her feet in my lap, plucking chips from the bowl now balanced on her belly. She had her eyes closed, reached over the back cushion and rolled the volume down. This casual familiarity—how I thumbed the insole of her sweaty foot, how my arm still tingled where she had bitten me—felt exciting in its comfort, its newness. Then I thought about how little she’d said since sitting on the ledge, and maybe I was just grasping at threads of her. Maybe this affection was momentary, was only what she had to spare. But by the time the title track played, we were in the bedroom, a lamp on the desk by her closet pointing a cone of amber toward the ceiling, her fingers unbuttoning my shirt, peeling the linen over my shoulders. When I reached for her, she parried my hand with her wrist, clicking her tongue on her teeth three times. She stood close enough that her toes butted against mine. I never would’ve tossed my button down on the bed the way she did—would’ve hung it before sleep—but she drew a line with the tip of her nose along the crest of my jaw and the crumpled cloth passed from my mind. As she unbuckled my , pulling the gold pin free from the tan leather, I said, ‘What’re you doing?’

25

‘Let’s go to bed.’

Then it was just burgundy American Apparel trunks, my Everlane undershirt, the fabric no longer damp but limp in the collar, my socks slick on the hardwood. I put my hands where her skirt overlapped her bodysuit, thumbed under the cusp of the wool in a ring around her waist until my nails met at the zipper in the back. Pinching the metal tab, she looked at me over the top rim of her glasses, bounced her eyebrows, saying, ‘Go on.’

Wordlessly, we decided we wouldn’t see each other naked. The record had finished, the soft purr of white noise coming from the speakers through the open door, an intermittent clicking of the needle at the end of the groove. She’d skinned my shirt from me, threw it across the room, and for the first time, seated on her bed as she put one knee across my lap and the other leg posted on the floor, we kissed with hunger. Later, we rolled across her bed, taking turns leading, gradually less timid. I placed my hand between her legs, and she said, ‘Don’t treat me like some one-night girl.’ We separated and she propped her elbow on the mattress, facing me. I protested, said that I didn’t know what she meant. She said, ‘I told you—he wouldn’t forgive me again.’

I began to understand it wouldn’t be give and take, but give and retract, that I would only ever have access to the portions of her person that she’d convinced herself, however momentarily, could do her no harm in the offering. And I don’t mean sex. When we were still sitting on the couch talking under the music, she demonstrated how easily she could brush off a question with a gentle , as if the words didn’t breach an ear. In her bed, I mirrored her posture, reaching across the foot between us, pinching the see-

26 through nylon that composed the cleavage of her bodysuit. I said, ‘I’m not treating you like anything. Let’s go to sleep. It’s almost four.’

‘Just sleep?’

‘Just sleep.’

‘I just want to go slow. Like high school slow.’

‘I can put my suit back on. It’ll be like prom night.’

Her lips hinted at a smile. ‘You’re fine. I’m going to get comfortable.’

While she was in the bathroom, I considered whether the side of the bed I reclined across was his side of the bed, whether he put the base of his skull on the headboard, bent his legs to shape a four, waiting for her to appear in the doorway. His clothes hung in the closet, his garments in the drawers, and I can’t say that part of me wasn’t ashamed of being the other man. I wasn’t incapable of imagining being away from home, my partner falling into our bed with someone else. I’d lived with a girlfriend before, had known this same brand of insecurity. And I knew the other end of infidelity—the shame, the peril, the time it takes to relearn trust or discovering how to live without it.

Three years prior, when I was twenty-two, when my band had just gone on hiatus,

I dove into a relationship with a girl I used to chat with at shows. She was the T-shirt tucked into high-waisted shorts type, cameo tattoo on her thigh, short bangs, blue eyes, bartended at a place musicians frequented. She always got guest-listed at shows. I didn’t know it while we were together, but when I rushed in, I was clinging to her to hold onto the scene that was leaving me. The band dispersed, and I wasn’t talented enough to get picked up by another, at least not one that I liked enough to play in. My fundamentals

27 were solid, and I had good gear, good tone, but I never had that knack for writing. My parts were always getting rewritten, and I checked my pride—the melodies, the chords I was given by the other band members sounded better, so why not just go with it? The other guys found gigs quickly, and I replaced music with her. It felt, at first, great in giving up the pipedream of being in a band that made it. No more rushing from work to practice four days a week, no more Get it right, Jonah, no more jokes at my expense at shows, the making a circle in the bar, Jerome, our lead singer, saying how I had the amp of a rock star but the chops of a roadie. Those days of V necks and pedal boards,

Onisuka Tigers, Bud Heavy and Jim Beam, never taking girls home from shows, never making money—those days were gone, but I had her, and she was getting tired of the routine, too, said it she felt like she had heard every bands’ songs too many times for it to be fun.

We’d moved in after two months because we were each other’s type and the sex was good, and that combination felt safe to invest in. We ended up settling in for too many nights on the couch, in terse conversations at restaurants, refreshing sites on our cell phones—a mutual boredom. When I got home from work, I found myself savoring the moment after dinner when she left to go to work a shift at the bar, and I had the apartment to myself to talk with friends on the phone without feeling like I was ignoring her. Some nights, I sat on the fire escape of our third story walk-up, watching groups of young professionals gather at the corner brasserie, but as much as I envied the pleasure of their unknowable conversations, I never went without her, like being social while separate from her was somehow duplicitous. During that first year, on Easter, Father’s

28

Day, July 4th, any holiday, no matter how small, she’d said she wanted to spend it with her family. Though I reveled in the days alone, I eventually became suspicious of her eagerness to see her relatives, remembering our first dates, how she complained about their constant meddling in her life. I didn’t need to follow her on Labor Day as she walked to the metro, didn’t need to see enter an apartment building in Dupont, shouldn’t have sat on the curb across the street for those hours before she emerged. Almost unconsciously, I knew she was lying in someone else’s bed, but I followed, I witnessed, I waited. Later, there was relief—the freedom from our incompatibility—but just then, watching her come down the front steps, it was impossible to remember the good beginnings of our relationship now tainted with that infidelity. I never knew whose apartment she’d spent those days in, never learned a name, a face, had no figure to bury this blame in. It was enough to know that there was a room in that building housing whatever it was that we lacked. I didn’t want to see its composition.

The sound of from the living room scratched and came to a stop. The light in the hall cut off, and Elle was standing in the doorway, Target brand paisley pajama shorts and no shirt, her bare upper body all angles and perk. The night air touched my shoulders, made me feel suddenly exposed. I was comfortable with physical intimacy, perhaps too much so, and yet, watching her sway with each step from the doorframe to the desk lamp, then the bed, the chill air stroked every pore of my skin, and I raised my forearm to cover my nipples. In the now-dark room, she collapsed across the mattress and kissed me on the wrist. Before my eyes adjusted to the low light, I tried to push this strange anxiety from my mind, focusing on the temperature of her skin in my palms.

29

When we shifted and I rocked atop her, my hands posted under her armpits, her thighs forming an arbor for my hipbones, and she came into focus. Her features relaxed, lips parted, eyes unwavering as they looked into mine—I mistook this expression for an absolute acceptance, that she could somehow see through me, through those missteps, my fear, and shame, and remain unbothered. It wasn’t until the next morning, drawing lines on her back, that I realized how impossible this reverie had been. I’d been proud of how

I’d matured since that first relationship, recognizing that our knowledge of each other had been limited to a short afternoon and one night listening to records. But there was something there, maybe not acceptance, but a willingness to seek it out, and it wasn’t clear how much I was starved for that willingness.

In her unlit bower, my weight across her, dawn rushing toward us, I said, ‘I think we had different experiences in high school.’

She snickered, had her fingers in my hair. I kissed a line from her neck to her waist. When I hooked a finger into the waist of her shorts, she yanked on my hair tie, yanked my face back, repeating Slow. So I kissed the cotton of her , breathing into them. In a moment, I would crawl back up to the pillows, and she’d turn to me, run a hand under my neck, the other across my chest, and we would drift to sleep where she would snore gently in my ear. But first, there was the fabric on my mouth, the warm air pushing past my throat, and I could feel the prickle of fresh stubble through the weave. She pressed my face into her, and I inhaled the mix of laundry detergent and perspiration.

30

I could feel her warmth meeting the heat of my breath, and I concentrated on the tremble to her voice as she let out a moan, to the shape of her legs over my shoulders, but some fraction of my mind wandered to the bus stop, ten years old, too proud to tell my mother the thrifted Lands’ End jacket wasn’t thick enough to keep out the chill of a frigid

December morning. I knew there wasn’t enough money for it, so I pulled my sleeves over my hands and used my mouth to push hot air into the material. My stiff joints quivering, chapped lips, mismatched beanie pulled down over my eyebrows. I just had to make it until the school bus showed up. That knit , how the neon turquoise clashed with the faded orange coat.

In the morning, after I’d finished tracing her ribs, I kneaded her muscle with the heel of my palm, pinching the tension from the cords on her shoulders. She said, ‘I could get used to this.’

It was a dare, and I said, ‘Like you’ll actually let me come back.’

She said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

Rolling onto my back, the sun cut through the blinds and drew a line on my stomach. I said, ‘You don’t mean that.’

She grabbed my crotch, saying, ‘Persuade me.’

I removed her hand, asked to use the bathroom. I didn’t see the marble sink, the fountain-style faucet, the wooden toilet seat and rolled hemp floor mat, didn’t notice the pressed lilies and roses, crowned with baby’s breath and framed between two sheets of glass hung above the towel rack. I wouldn’t notice the perfect angles of the design, how the candle holder on the back of the toilet raised a tier for a basket of rolled wash clothes,

31 didn’t see any of it until the next time I came over. I focused on my features in the mirror, long slender nose, thin eyes and jet-black irises, hair like ink, shiny with two days’ worth of natural oil. I turned on the faucet and cleaned the crust from my tear ducts, gulped down two sips and then cupped my palms to submerge my face completely. I had to relieve myself, sure, but what I’d fled for was a moment to collect myself away the angle to her hips, her ovular face. Her eyes were more prominent without her glasses, and all morning, the sun flecked them with gold. I asked myself—Do you really want to do this?

Do you want to be the other man? There is no real shame in being the victim of adultery, only pity. But to be the one that inflicts the pain, to be an interference in someone else’s pursuit of comfort, of closeness, is that who I wanted to be? It was a simple question, sure, but it didn’t matter how many times I asked it. The water pooled for a moment before slipping from my cheekbones down my jaw, and I didn’t see it as a choice, or if there was, I wasn’t willing to entertain picking against her.

I half-hoped, half-expected to find her dressing for the day, but Elle had removed her pajama shorts and perched back on her elbows, tawny skin collecting the soft light, black lace , the thread pattern spun to form roses. There was a sleepy quality to the

District that morning—no noise or traffic but the hum of faraway airplane engines climbing out of Reagan National mixing with the cars gliding unfettered through green lights. She was painted across the mattress, her weight dimpling the down in her duvet.

Maybe it is crass to admit there was nothing more pleasing to me than a woman in her underwear. It wasn’t entirely about the garment, the cut or style or fabric to, it was about bearing witness to this intimate layer of her attire and in that momentary closeness—one

32 knee on the mattress, one foot on the ground—being allowed. It almost hurt to have this fraction of her, all but nude and yet not completely. Before I bit the elastic waist, I said,

‘Flowers?’

She laughed, ‘It is redundant, isn’t it?’

We’d both known how to kiss for long enough that we’d learned other comforts like pushing, gently, our foreheads into each other’s temples. That sex didn’t always need a mouth or a hand or a crotch, that sometimes the pleasure came from simply trying to exist in the same exact space at the same exact time. After, we cocooned ourselves in the blanket, my arms across her shoulders, holding her chest to my stomach. I could feel a layer of sweat thinning between us. I said, ‘Are you okay?’

Her chin dug into me as she nodded.

‘What made you change your mind?’ I said.

‘What if we never got the chance again? I guess that didn’t sit well with me.’

‘I thought you said—’

‘I know what I said.’

She hid her face under my jaw, forced me to keep my eyes on the white, tin ceiling, the circular indentions forming a grid, strings of dust hanging in the corners of the impressions. I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t need to hear her reassure me she wasn’t going to leave him. When she brushed the question away, I found relief in the mercy of her silence. As the minutes slipped from us, the rhythm of our breathing began to overlap every fourth exhale. Our

33 bodies, nude and intertwined, invisible to us under the blanket. When she unraveled it, she stood to go to the bathroom but paused to rest her cold palm on my belly.

I closed my eyes, covering her hand with mine, and her voice appeared in the not- quite black, saying, ‘You know, before I would drive myself crazy trying to decide— should I just I go? Should I leave? It drove a wedge between me and Christian. That’s how he knew. I couldn’t do anything to hide it. It felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff, and he could see my anxiety. It’s just the choice, though. Like, I never felt guilty. I still don’t. I wanted what I wanted—where is the wrong in that? We’ve been together since we were fifteen. Fifteen. Our relationship has seen an entire zodiac calendar. I cherish him. But I didn’t know any other life. I still don’t. Not really. So I don’t feel guilty for wanting it, it’s just the choice that gets in the way, the choice to have this life or to have another. And you know, you know what I’ve never realized until just now?’ Her hand slid out from under mine, my fingers settling on my bare stomach. There was no trembling to her voice. She said, ‘There’s no reason I can’t just have both.’

#

Christian worked as an audio engineer with contracts at studios spread across the DMV.

Throughout the year, he travelled with a few touring acts to do live sound. That’s when she invited me over—when he was on the road. I’d get a brief call, and she’d say when and knew I would oblige. A couple times, I had to cancel long confirmed plans with friends, and Elle told me, ‘You know, you don’t have to put me first.’ Only my

34 roommates knew where I disappeared to, and they made like they understood the adultery—we’d always had this us first mentality. Our drummer, affectionately named

Thump, was a year younger than me yet was the older brother I never had—he said over breakfast one day, ‘Shit, I could never be the other guy. But then again, you have been different lately. A lot less anxious. Happy even. So what the fuck do I know? Life is funny like that.’

Thump had gotten me into the band. We’d met in high school—two lanky Asian kids in Mars Volta T-shirts, and when he found out I played guitar, he started having me over to his house to jam. He and Jerome, the singer/lead guitarist, were the only ones who kept chasing music, who didn’t give up trying to get a living out of it.

I lost a lot of my DC friends that year, first with the manic dating, second by pursuing Elle. People already annoyed with me for that year of disappearing into that first rushed relationship, got fed up with my cancelling and stopped adding me to their list of invitees. I ended up spending more of my week in the suburbs instead of getting back on the metro and attending gatherings at the usual spots in Columbia Heights. Those friends had been moving out of the neighborhood as well, closer to U Street and Shaw for cheaper rent, or over into Arlington or Alexandria to buy property. It’s strange how those years in music had been so meaningful to me, and now my friends from the scene had all but fractured and scattered across the District, almost as if it never existed. If it took so little to disappear, how meaningful could it have been?

I learned about Christian’s occupation by assembling the fractions of details I distilled from Elle’s anecdotes. She’d never speak about him directly, would never tell

35 me stories specifically about him, but sometimes it was necessary for her to lend details regarding his person for her narrative to gain some logic or context. I didn’t learn about his wardrobe, his attire by snooping in their bedroom—I was asking Elle about her sense of style, her collection of loose fitting vintage men’s shirts, of old school Levi’s, a closet rack of knee-cut . About the vintage stuff, she said, ‘The majority of it was

Christian’s parents. They didn’t like to throw stuff away, and his mother knew I had an interest in textiles.’

I’d shown up at her apartment around nine with falafel wraps from a place near my house. It was a Saturday night months after the Newseum, she called me on her way home from a fundraiser, and I left the bar in Burtonsville where Thump and I were watching an O’s game. Baseball was second only to drumming for him. Right before my phone rang, I said, ‘Shouldn’t you like the Nationals? I mean, we’re closer to DC.’

He tugged the brim of his harried orange and black cap, his long hair hanging out the back like a mud flap, eyes trained on Manny Machado, replying, ‘Fuck the Nationals.

They’re just the Expos and everyone knows it.’ I bounced my eyebrows, not really understanding the insult, and answered my phone.

She said, ‘Do you want to come over?’

‘Should I bring anything?’

‘Food. I’m starving. Not literally. I could eat.’

I was only two beers in, so I gave Thump twenty for a cab, hopped in the Accord and grabbed the wraps on the way. She kissed me in her foyer, said that I tasted like a bar, and I just shrugged. I was wearing my Iron Hearts—the first pair of Japanese

36 selvedge I’d ever bought, deep indigo with gray weft—and a simple white oxford shirt.

She said, ‘I’ve never seen you without a tie.’

She was wearing torn jeans, a cream linen shirt unbuttoned enough that I could see a Crayon red bandeau bridging her cleavage. We ate on the couch, facing each other, the food on the coffee table. I’d asked her about her clothing, some of which was folded on the ottoman, the laundry basket beside it, and this toppled into the story of Christian’s parents, her saying, ‘We’d been dating a few years and were living with them in St. Pete before Christian started at Full Sail. She told me she’d been helping his mother organize a storage room off of the family garage when she stumbled upon the garments. Christian wore nothing but tapered jeans and shirts designed by the bands he’d recorded. He didn’t want anything to do with the button downs his father had outgrown—floral, Hawaiian threaded, Arrow oxfords. Though he was—as Elle described—a wiry man, the hand-me- downs were a little loose on her, but she made do. The dresses were Christian’s mother’s, and at first, Elle hadn’t liked most of them, found them kind of gaudy, but over the past decade she’d discovered that there was a circulation to it—some prints or cuts coming into fashion, others falling out. After a little time, she saw each dress differently, as if every time she flipped through the rack, its contents had changed. She said, ‘My favorite part, though, is they kept all of Christian’s childhood shirts from vacations to Cocoa

Beach, Lake Tahoe, the Rockies. They’re way too small for him, but they fit me so well.

And they’re broken in.’

She got up to grab water from the kitchen, then put a record on—Teen Dream by

Beach House. When we kissed, the flavors of dinner perfumed between us, the tabouli

37 and tsitziki, chickpea and chopped cucumber laminating our lips. That night, we moved with less urgency, as if the apartment was just hers and his clothing wasn’t in the hamper, his records in the bin, his toothbrush in the cup beside hers.

I said, ‘Where’d you meet?’

She dragged a piece of pita through the oil pooling on the hummus, and I could tell she was debating whether she should ignore the question. ‘He was my friend’s older brother. I used to go to her place after school, and he was always there, brooding over a guitar, recording stuff on a four-track. The three of us hung out a lot.’

‘This was in Florida?’

‘Yeah, we didn’t move up here until after school. I went to UCF. Before SCAD’

‘Business Studies? Wait, no. Communications.’

She pinched the haunch of my thigh, fingers bracing the rough denim, said, ‘I’ll have you know I majored in English.’

‘Oh, same.’

‘I can’t see that.’

‘Yeah. I’d done a lot of Gen Ed stuff in community college before I took a break for band shit. When I went back, my advisor told me it would be the quickest route—less prereqs. I was trying to get in-and-out.’

‘Sounds very passionate of you.’

I chewed. The speaker was pointed at my ear and the vocalist’s breathy drawl, how her timbre felt relaxed yet full of some swirling hurt or nostalgia, distracted me. I hummed along with her, the words coming back to me just as she loosed them. I said, ‘I

38 haven’t heard this in a while.’ Elle said that she wanted the next track—Take Care—to be the slow dance at her wedding. I nodded, looking away. Setting my fork on my plate, I turned the speaker to project behind me, into the room.

She said, ‘Don’t do that.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t make everything about you and me. Or the future. We’re just talking.’ She undid her shirt the rest of the way, put her plate on the table and knotted her hair above her scalp. A road opened up before me, one where I asked her a question about us, one tiny thing about what we were doing, where we were going, a question about purpose, and that path led to the humor coming right out from under us. There was peril there, an image of her face looking at me as if I were just another person, her expression with no charm or grace or hint of desire for something she’d tease me with but never say. I nodded at the black vinyl spinning beside us and said, ‘Oh no, Victoria’s just making me sleepy.’

She said, ‘Oh is that right?’ and began singing along hyperbolically, her mouth bent into an O, grit in her throat, pretending her fork was a microphone.

‘You sound more like Elvis.’

She stood up, her socks gliding on the hardwood, the lyrics dripping out of her as she swayed to the rhythm of the beat driven by a tom drum and a tambourine. The song ended, a moment of silence, then the harpsichord intro of Take Care, and even though I had a wad of food half-chewed on my tongue, I got up and went to her, trying to catch her hands, trying to get her to dance with me, but she laughed and ran to the record

39 player, yanking up the needle. She said, ‘Don’t you have any sense of timing? I just told you it was my song.’

I said, ‘I’m an opportunist.’

She fanned her fingers through the LP’s, and I held her low around the waist as she picked Etta James, set the vinyl down and replaced the other in its sleeve.

Past midnight, in her bed, she held her hands on her stomach, bulged it out, saying she’d eaten too much. Lying next to her in my jeans and undershirt with my head propped on my elbow, I noticed how easily her lips slipped into a smile, as if she were unable to hide the reaction to any pleasing thought. She took my wrist and placed my hand on her navel, groaning. I asked her what her favorite food was, and she pretended to wretch. She said, ‘You’ve been asking me questions all night. Talk to me. Tell me things.’

I said, ‘That’s a very broad request.’

She told me not to use my admin vocabulary with her. She said, ‘Let’s talk about firsts.’ The windows in her bedroom were open. Car horns and sirens punctuated long intervals of the crooning, clever Etta James and the strained exhales of Elle’s too-full body. Her first love was Michael Jackson, her second Michael J Fox. She grew up thinking she wanted to be a librarian but changed her mind when she learned that didn’t mean simply reading all day. I put my forehead against her temple, rubbed circles on her stomach with my palm, holding an image of her as a girl with a floral skirt and a too-big sweatshirt, neon and gaudy. The questions advanced, aging her, and as a teenager, all early 2000’s angst, tight jeans and striped shirts, then her answers became singular—

40

Christian. First real kiss. First sex. First person she’d lived with. Confided in. That she’d told she loved. The record had ended, the shuffle of needle on the rim of the wax, turning and turning, and she groaned at the weight of food in her. ‘Tell me about your first kiss,’ she said. ‘The very first peck.’

Maybe it was the sleepiness of the thin, pre-dawn hours, and the lethargic drain of the beer passing through my system, or maybe because I hadn’t thought of it in long enough that I required a moment to reconstruct the face, the person, the setting. But once conjured, the memory slipped easily off my tongue, details springing to mind atop each other, and I remembered, in a breathe while telling it, that I used to meditate on the afternoon of that kiss through my adolescence, an unanswerable quality in it fascinating my naivety. Elle stretched her limbs out toward the corners of the room, as if she were being drawn and quartered. Her left elbow fit into the space above my shoulder, and she wrapped her hand behind my scalp to swaddle my head in the bough of her arm.

I told her I grew up in daycares until my older sister, Mary, was old enough to watch over us. This one was small, only a half dozen kids, run on the main floor of a

Wheaton split-level. Mary’s best friend was the daughter of the babysitter, so my mom got a good rate, and that was important enough back then for her to overlook the barbs to the place. Elle asked what I meant, and I said that, for starters, it was littered with porn.

An obscene amount of it. Magazines. Little tacky collectibles like pens with naked women or a calendar where the name of the month was spelled out by tiny cartoon characters mid-orgy. The babysitter, Meryl, had a husband always in and out of jail for dealing coke to bikers. He was one of those mechanics who worked out of his home

41 garage. This was in like ‘94 or ‘95, and Meryl had this hair-sprayed blowout, bangs with a hard curl. Only saw the husband a few times, but he was in the expected over-washed jeans, leather vest, steel-toed boots and grease stains. He liked the aesthetic of the house in the style of—what I only recognized when I was older—that kind of backwoods bar that believes Nirvana killed rock, that a woman’s beauty starts at her tits, with patrons that look down into the mouth of their beer bottles the moment a person of color walks in.

Meryl’s husband had her keep the house decorated the way he liked it, even when he was in on a stint, said it made home something he could fantasize about coming back to. The main floor—the kitchen, the TV room, the dining room with that hutch full of Richard

Petty adorned porcelain, all the places the kids were supposed to stay—was relatively normal, but pocketed around this portion, Meryl’s husband stockpiled smut. The walls inside the garage covered with taped up centerfolds, string ’s and nylon shorts pulled up to show the outlines of pussy lips, the piles of porn magazines stacked under the bathroom sink, the playing cards on the shelf with nude woman instead of kings and queens.

Elle said, ‘That sounds sticky.’

I smelled her hair, saying, ‘I used to sit on the toilet in the bathroom and flip through the magazines. And these weren’t Playboys, they were Hustler and other magazines with bold, single word names. The type of hardcore stuff that doesn’t just fall under the of general pornography. Close-up blowjobs, anal, cum. And I was seven, so it confused the shit out of me.’ At this, Elle laughed and I adored her for not coddling me, for not saying You poor thing or feeling sorry for my youth in these

42 moments I wasn’t being watched over. I wanted to be able to share them without appearing feeble.

So my first kiss was with a girl named Iris. She was one of the kids in our daycare, a year older, not a regular though, just a day or two a week. She used to wear this Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt that drove Meryl crazy, being a Redskins fan and all.

When it was nice out, Meryl had us spend the afternoons in the backyard—this big, fenced-in triangle of crab grass, with a garden forgotten in the far corner. On that afternoon, it was just Iris and me, playing on the playground with its rain-thick wood that gave you splinters if you slid your hand on it wrong. There was this plastic yellow and royal blue see-saw beside it which we were getting too big for. Iris liked it cause she said it was like flying and all she ever wanted to do was that.

I was a shy child, always felt like the odd man out. There were other Asian kids in my grade, but they were the real kind—had another tongue to speak, could read it, knew the places their family had come from, and sure people teased them, too, but it must’ve been reassuring to understand that another world exists where you don’t stand out. My dad never taught me his culture before he left, so I a little Chinese kid with divorced parents and a white mom. We used to have this game whenever my mom came into school to meet my teacher or a new doctor or dentist—as we were walking in, my mom would bet on how long it would take for the person to ask if I was adopted. There was always at least an insinuation of it.

Anyways, Iris had braces and freckles on her neck, chocolate hair with this curl to it, thickened by humidity. She wasn’t the prettiest girl, but she seemed entirely

43 comfortable in her skin, and I admired that, maybe because I didn’t understand it. She was talkative, unafraid to say what was on her mind, even if it was unrelated to what came before. So we had a good dynamic when it was just the two of us—her loosing all her thoughts and me appearing in my timidity as an avid listener. On that see-saw I said that I bet she would get tired of it first. I couldn’t really tell you why. I guess I’d thought if I could do something she loved better than her, then I had worth. But maybe I’m giving myself too much credit. I wanted to impress her. We must have been out there half an hour, trying to bounce each other off the seat. I don’t recall exactly how but the wager became a kiss—if I got off first, I had to kiss her on the cheek and vice versa. Meryl kept yelling from the porch for us to come in for our snack, some scrap of food we usually sprinted toward. Eventually she poked her head out, asked us what we were up to, and

Iris said she was trying to win a kiss from me. Elle rolled into my side, adjusting her arms, asking how Meryl reacted. I said, ‘She just shrugged.’ And eventually, I realized that kissing her on the cheek was no worse than receiving it. So I gave up, and when I went to give her that peck, she turned her head to me so that, with my eyes closed, our lips met.

Elle let out a fawning sound, Aw, and put her hand on my ribs. She said, ‘I bet you were cuter when you were young.’

‘Her lips were cold—it grossed me out. Couple days later, I overheard Iris ask

Meryl if she thought I was handsome and Meryl said I was very handsome, just too too clever. I’m still not sure I get what she meant.’

44

Raising her chin off my shoulder, looking me in the eye, Elle said, ‘Yeah, I can see that.’ I squeezed her to me, and she groaned, saying, ‘Is it okay if we don’t fuck tonight? I feel like a hot air balloon.’

I said, ‘Of course,’ and we got up, turned out the lights, cut off the record player, went to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth with my finger. We had a way of sleeping, never discussed but comfortably arrived at, where we both slept on our stomachs, hips pointed in opposite directions, mirroring each other’s raised knee and embraced pillow.

The length of us—our rear shoulder to waist—was wedged into each other. From above, we must’ve looked like a spider smashed into the mattress. I fell asleep to the rhythm of her lungs against my side and didn’t wake the rest of the night, which was unusual. I was prone to waking fits every couple hours, sometimes slipping easily back under, other times needing to splash warm water on my face to relax before returning to bed.

In the morning, she was already looking at me while I rubbed my eyes to focus.

She said, ‘You look like such an old man in the morning. All squinty and stiff.’

‘I’m always squinty.’ I covered my eyes with my forearm.

She touched her knuckle to my ribs, said, ‘And usually stiff.’

‘Is that a dick joke?’

Our sex lacked urgency, but that’s not to say there was no passion. We never fucked like the bed was going to disappear, like someone might walk in—there was no rush to come, no worry placed on the pleasing. We stopped often to talk, to kiss, to look at each other, naked in the curtained sunlight. We knew how to be with each other. In that way, it is the most satisfying touch I’d felt in the adult years of my life, desperately

45 seeking the embrace of women, chasing that moment of acceptance in the act of falling into bed, under garments tangled over hips and knees, hoping the post-coital deflation doesn’t suddenly appear—when I want suddenly to be alone. I’ve never been unaware of my superficiality, that I’ll go on dates because I want physical intimacy, that I so rarely develop an emotional bond strong enough to outlast those few encounters preceding my boredom—I know what kind of creature I am. My confusion is in the moments when I no longer want to be that thing, when I want to focus on someone else, to have patience and learn to know someone genuinely. Even as I think I’m walking that path—the first date, that excited conversation, when I put the energy into being charming, approachable—I’ll wake next to them, wondering what it was that lured me there, wondering how many days I would desire sharing this particular bed. And so I’d learned to fuck as though the fun might come out of it as soon as I came, wanting genuinely to get my partner off before myself, just in case I’m suddenly sullen or boring when the pursuit is over, so I could at least be, in the physical sense, fulfilling. Each time after, I was surprised by a gradual decrease in even that simple enjoyment. I’d follow it a few more times, then less frequent, until I was chasing someone else’s attention.

So rarely was it this: Elle and I, mid-morning, two hours of sweat, of appreciating her every pore, learning that she is ticklish on her sides but loves to have her hipbones held. I was rubbing her back after she came, thinking that if there wasn’t anymore more to my life than this, it wouldn’t be an unpleasing existence. I could be poor, eating white bread and peanut butter, wearing Dungarees and plain , but if I came home to this, I

46 could fall asleep without being harrowed by fits of unfulfilled desires, of questions—is this really what I want? I’ve always imagined that one absence to be a good life.

She said, ‘I don’t want you to leave.’ In the breaths before she spoke again, I could’ve burrowed, could’ve surrounded myself with the strings of my contentment holding me to her, the cool embrace of the down comforter, the skin-warmed sheets, the honeysuckle smell of her conditioner. ‘He’s coming home tonight,’ she said. The way we stood, inflexible and ambling around the room, must’ve looked like machines coming to life. We decided to share the shower, and while I dressed, my cotton undershirt limp with yesterday’s sweat, the familiar embrace of my now broken-in jeans, she watched, leaning on the doorframe to the living room.

I said, ‘Do you have time? There’s a Nordic restaurant near here. We could get brunch there—hash potatoes with eggs and pickled fish.’

‘Domku?’

‘Have you been?’

‘My friend is a waitress there.’ Her voice held a note of fatigue, and I didn’t need to dig to know this meant she couldn’t risk being seen with me in public on anything that resembled a date. The Newseum was an exception, something that only happened because of happenstance. Standing in the entry in her faded black UCF , a loose fitting tri-blend V-neck, her shoulder braced against the off-white wall, she appeared to me as almost captive—uneasy with her surroundings yet her wildness resigned to search, here, for safety. I could sense the transition of worlds in her, Christian approaching, and her need for me to leave draining the charm out of our banter. I could

47 still hear her words from that first night, us leaning into the rail, the back of her bodysuit thick with sweat because of the excess of her dancing, her fevered skin cold in my hands.

He wouldn’t forgive me. Not again.

I said, ‘I get it.’

The first hint of summer heat made my car stifling. The drive home was a repetition of red lights, weekend traffic on 29, men standing on the medians, gray hands wrapped around cardboard signs. I had the windows down, tapping my thumb on the steering wheel. My commutes that spring, I listened almost exclusively to Toro Y Moi’s new record, Anything in Return, entranced by the dynamics of the drums, the whir of the synths, punctuated by round bass riffs and those 90’s style vocal samples. I’d decided that as the weather brightened, I wanted to fill my days with upbeat music. It wasn’t until I knew the lyrics by heart that I discovered their eagerness, the trails of pensive hurt hidden beneath the dance rhythms. So it was the summer that followed and the autumn proceeding, that I listened to it still, understanding better the message, and letting those somber notes carry me with the levity of the music itself.

As I drifted north on the highway, I was thinking of her past relationships, sneaking someone else into her apartment—that cage for her disloyalty—and I positioned myself beside a tableau, an image of her dressed to relax, arm outstretched bracing the open door, the last barrier that separated the man in the hallway from her home. And that man, I couldn’t picture his face, his stature, only the motive rolling through his head, aware that there was no other reason for this night but sex, and she’d look at him, her expression unsure, flickering like the wick of a candle steeped in a pool of its own wax,

48 the flame diminished to the brink of extinguishing, then finding another pocket of air and flaring into a grin, her arm dropping, creating a passage. That man in the hall who wants nothing from her but relief, steps inside. As I pulled into the cul-de-sac where my shit- brown house backed up to a shallow grove of unspectacular trees, my stomach knotted around my hypocrisy. I was that same man, no matter if I wanted more than I was getting, no matter how fulfilling it might be to me otherwise. The details were the same. Every hour I spent in her bed was an hour of pain I was complicit in committing to a stranger.

And I was hungry for it, impatient for her next call, jealous of the time he was home and she acted as if I didn’t exist. And functionally, I didn’t exist, not in her real life. She’d call, and I’d come running, appearing at her door like a fucking pizza.

I shut the car off, opened the door, and put my feet on the driveway. The unbarred sun heated the denim on my knees. The pretense of hunger sapped the sturdiness from my joints. The whine of a lawnmower plodding in the distance cast a net over the street. The neighbors’ kids threw a stick to an Australian Shepard. When I exhaled, my discomfort drained from me, leaving just the image of that square, lip-sticked smile. That knot in my stomach unwound and tangled again around this memory of her. The idea that we could only exist in that apartment troubled me, but not as much as the desire to exist there with her, sequestered from the other elements of our lives. It was a warped sort of happiness, but happiness nonetheless. Sitting in my car one last instant before entering the house and stripping my clothes to their respective hampers, taking a tepid shower and catching up on the style blog, I weighed all of my uneasiness toward this fledgling thing against that mangled happiness. There was no gratification available to us that did not charge an

49 expense to her relationship. She would of request me, again and again, to confront this ugliness—Be here—and I would acquiesce. It was a form of gravity, not choice. Yet, I couldn’t imagine her brand of confusion in this same afternoon, reading on the couch or napping in newly cleaned sheets, waiting for him to arrive home. Would it be difficult transition or did she easily back into the garb of their relationship? They must have their own language. I’d been in a dozen short relationships where the first uncouth moment toppled them. I was not fluent in that expanse of familiarity—historic and corrupted but still standing. I spent the rest of the afternoon, and so many portions of each day until she called, drafting in my mind the proportions of their nearness, finding myself in the shadow of it, bewildered in my ignorance. But given the choice to change places with him, to be the one unwittingly standing on that rotting structure, to be losing her every time I turned my head—I’m not sure I would. I’m not sure I could survive the toppling. I was more suited to be the man apart, the one who pines but never holds, and the coward in me was thankful for empty hands, for distance.

#

The next time I saw her, it was early June. She’d called me the night before, said she was free until noon, told me to spend the morning with her. Her voice had been quiet and slightly panicked, but I figured she was sneaking the call in, that he was close by. I’d come over just after dawn, brought her black coffee and a croissant from this family- owned bakery that Jerome showed me when we first moved to the county. We went

50 straight to her bed. Her was knit lace, not worn for support, but she didn’t need much of that. We coiled our limbs into each other’s, and she asked me where I got my name, and I told her my mother picked it from the Bible—had always wanted to name her children from the book, wanted to ensure them the deference this provided—but when that story didn’t satisfy Elle, I told her about church. Then the conversation wore down, and as things often happened for us, any pause in a moment of familiarity turned to sex. I used my bottom teeth to pull up the cream-colored yarn of her bra. I always thought about eating roasted artichokes when I did this, how you scrape with your jaw to get at the meat on the leaf. I kissed her on the sternum, looking down toward the soft filaments of hair on her stomach.

She had hipbones like the spires of a bridge, the skin of her waist a taut, hair- flecked curve around her navel. As I fell into her, I thought that she looked entirely natural, restful yet sharp—a thorn on a branch typically hidden by the brush, then I teased myself, silently, for lapsing so thoroughly into these romanticized views of her body. It was this exaggerated sense of luck—how a little gutter-punk kid like me could be here to witness, to live this moment, her lips cooed around a breath. Those self-conscious and abstracted voices that whisper judgment in me while my good sense does the real living—mine were loud, always telling me what I deserve. In their opinion, I deserved nothing. Well not nothing, just nothing this pleasurable, this intimate, nothing worthwhile without killing myself to get there. When she inevitably stops turning to me, that voice will chime in as I wallow in that new loneliness. This. This is what you get. But not yet, and I perched over her, one arm on her side, the other posted by her ear. The construction

51 of her features quieted me—parted lips, brown eyes unbothered by the smudged lenses of her glasses. It drew me into the present, still draws me back into those seconds now, and I said, ‘This is good, right?’

‘Of course.’

I shook my head, ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean that to sound so nervous.’

‘No, it’s okay to worry.’ She thumbed the tattoo on my bicep, the red stars and two bars of the DC flag dull against my maple skin, said, ‘Silly boy, you’re just another bridge-and-tunneler now.’

The blinds behind her bed held back the first glow of that June morning, and behind them, in the small, shared backyard of her apartment building, a cicada rolled its wings. By the time we got to eating, the food was cold. She walked around in nothing but the short sleeve denim shirt I’d worn that day, and I was just wearing my cut-offs—an old pair of coated black Nudies clipped and cuffed at the knees. The central air in the band house didn’t work. I woke that day laminated by sweat but excited for the transition to summer. Maryland seasons are fickle like that—you go to bed freezing and wake up ready to sit by the pool. I sipped the coffee, watched as Elle moved around the room, all angles and strut. She seemed unready to sit, to eat. I figured it was because we didn’t have time. Finally, she sat down beside me, pulled my hair from its tie. I shivered to her touch as she mussed my hair, pulling it through her hands, and I could feel how pliant it was as it submitted to her fingers. She smelled it and said, ‘How often do you use shampoo?’

52

‘Only when I see you,’ I said, told her I’d go back to my house in the suburbs and surrender to a cleaning, how the shampoo made my hair dried-out and bulky for a day until the oil came back to it. I said I had to wash her away, the shame of it all. It was just a joke, and she squeezed my face between her hands, and I loved her hands, the chewed nails and coarse palms.

She ripped the end off the bread, told me that when I left, her routine involved washing the sheets, her duvet, using her lint roller to collect all my stray black hairs, too unlike her fading ombre to explain away.

Soon, I knew she would will me through the door to pass under an exposed sun— its warmth like a fevered hand on the back of my neck, the crevices of my body flush with sweat.

She said, ‘You know, the first time, he asked why I changed the sheets, and I said they smelled like mildew. Thankfully, he doesn’t trust his sense of smell. Now I have to switch the bedding before you get here and put it back when you leave.’

‘That sounds like a lot of work.’

‘It is.’

‘You know, we could just fuck on a bare mattress. That would save you some time.’

She flinched at the curse, pushed my head away, said, ‘Oh that’s so kind of you.

Thanks dick.’

As she packed the pastry wrappers back into the brown bag, I grabbed her thigh, said, ‘I hate that I don’t get to stay over. I sleep well next to you.’ She didn’t turn before

53 she padded to the front door and set the refuse on the foyer table so that I wouldn’t forget to take it with me. When she came back, she sat across from me on the coffee table, and I couldn’t help but think about her bare ass against the wood, the oddity of those two surfaces meeting.

She said, ‘I think you should start seeing other people.’

‘How do you know I’m not?’

‘Jonah, I’m serious.’

Leaning forward, I rested my palm on her knee, wanting her to crane her neck and close the space between us. After a moment, she put her forehead on mine. I was looking at her tawny legs, the string of freckles on her shin. She’d told me she’d been lying out recently, and the way the sun darkened pockets of her body was beautiful to me. I said,

‘I’m okay.’

‘How is this enough for you?’

We were whispering, our voices only grazing the stillness of her living room. I said, ‘I feel good with you.’

‘There isn’t enough of me.’

‘I’m not unhappy.’

We’d never fought, never even disagreed on anything that wasn’t part of a game—one of us the bystander to an impassioned opinion, teasing the other just to hear their defense of it. I didn’t know how to navigate this mood. Her sullenness was radiation, invisibly wearing on me even as I tried to focus only on the cool compress of her skin to mine. I was used to her being the buoyant one, steering my attention to

54 different memories and sharing her own. I hadn’t realized how reliant we were on this rhythm.

‘Christian is recording in Toronto this summer,’ she said. Before I could connect this statement with her mood, the thought of us living unrestricted by the adultery felt like new flesh, like removing a bandage to find yourself fully healed. It was absolution, but a fleeting cleanness.

I said, ‘Wouldn’t that just make things less urgent?’

Lifting her hands to my cheeks, she held my face as if it were some fruit she was inspecting for imperfections, for ripeness. In this scrutinizing glance, I felt stupid, and not in the bemused fashion I typically enjoyed, that I’d always sought. I’d told her once while we sat at her breakfast table, pulling the skin off a pair of grapefruits, that I liked to feel outmatched in a relationship, that the pairings I’d cared the most about had been with women who made me feel tiny, untalented, obscure. She’d asked if it was about admiring someone or whether it was just a challenge—rising to the occasion, becoming their equal.

Told her it was a little of both, and she bit into the fruit, the sourness of it contorting her lips. She’d said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it’s healthy appraising people.’ But that’s not how I saw it. To me, it was just a matter of gauging similarities, determining the qualities and interests you share with someone and the level to which they are superficial.

Her hands fell from my face. ‘I’m going with him,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure when we’ll be back. Probably not until September.’

What followed was a form of volleying—my hopes parried by her revelation of decisions she’d already made.

55

‘You have a job here. Why wouldn’t you stay?’

‘We can’t afford both rents. We’ve already sublet the place.’

‘Why don’t you rent a room here, then?’

‘Because it wouldn’t make sense for us to be apart that long. Plus we’d have to pay for travel between the two.’

‘I mean—’

‘I already quit my job.’

Noon approached, and unsure of how to spend our last thirty minutes, we succumbed to silence. To avoid the dismissal, I focused on the smoothness of the hardwood floor on my bare feet as I returned to her bedroom, my tank top balled beside her dresser, my cherry leather Quoddy bluchers on either side of it. Dressing felt like subtraction, each garment adorned pulling me from her, until she was standing in the doorway, my button down draped over her shoulders. She handed it to me, standing nude between the two rooms of her third-floor walk-up, flatfooted, hands raised to her hips, knuckles turned out. Shadows bruised her eyes, the jagged peaks of her joints, the ruddy flesh between her collarbones and breasts rouged with such a particular claret, as if her skin masked the very blood of the earth. I couldn’t stand to look at her.

In a couple minutes, I would be walking, weak-kneed up her street, the tall sun and humidity, a sudden realization of my subordination—all those decisions I was entirely unaware of—weighed on me, fixing pressure on my sinus. I turned off into an alley in case I needed to weep, crouching between a dumpster and the delivery door of a

CVS. No matter what the movies try and show you, the books try to teach you, the music

56 tries to sing you—there is no action, no contact of hands or lips, no words that capture the feeling of forfeiture that accompany an unsure goodbye.

In her doorway, I crumbled the brown bag that’d held our breakfast into a ball in my fist. She unbent my collar. I took her hand in mine, kissed her bitten cuticles, her calloused palm, said, ‘Be seeing you.’

She said, ‘Don’t wait.’

In the alley, I seated my weight on my ankles, the balls of my feet flat on the cement, my arms wrapped around my bent knees with my hands joined at the fingers, digging into the wrinkled paper bag. I used to sit like this at my bus stop, not wanting to soil the seat of my pants, unsure of when they’d be washed again. Thump was practiced this same stance. Once, while we were backstage, ten minutes from going on, he told me in the lull between the other bands’ songs that it was called the Chinaman squat. We’d been in it—elbows on our knees, beer in my hand, drumsticks in his—and he said his uncle taught him how to do it. When Thump was in little league, his uncle came to his games, squatted on the hill behind right field and drank Bud Heavy. He’d been copying him ever since.

I said, ‘I’m not sure where I learned it, just never liked to get my pants dirty.’

Thump said it was in my blood, and in those anxious moments before we stood with a groan, stretched our backs and setup our gear to perform for the half-full club, it was pleasant feeling born into something. My tears pocked the alley floor as my nails ripped holes into the bag. At the far end, on the corner of the next street, two Hispanic women wearing smoked cigarettes. I was thankful they didn’t see me, or if

57 they did, that they hadn’t stared. The kids at my bus stop had sat four-wide on the curb,

Walkmans in their pockets, asked what I was doing. I ignored them, and after that first day, they made a point of telling me what they’d noticed about me. Said, ‘Joanie is wearing those pants. Again. What, Asians don’t like jeans?’ I loved jeans, but the only pair I had shrank in the wash. I was worried the cracked yellow paint on the curb would rub off on my charcoal khakis, that they’d need a wash and then they, too, wouldn’t fit my fluctuating ten-year-old waist. I was too ashamed to explain this, too meek to draft insults of my own. My circulation used to pool in my feet. By the time the bus came, I’d have to rise slowly or risk being light-headed. They weren’t my only pair of pants, but the few others my mom had gotten from Goodwill never fit me right, either too high on the ankle or too baggy on the knee. I couldn’t bear to be seen in them. I had the choice between unkempt or unflattering, and I decided it would be easier to hide my dirtiness.

It’s funny how, as an adult, I folded up my jeans year-round, bare ankles showing between the red selvedge cuff and the mouth of my Aldens, how having ‘high-waters’ was no longer something people snickered at but my preferred style. I tossed the bag in the dumpster, dried my face with my palms.

At my exit from 29 where the road snakes around a swath of trees surrounded by unkempt grass, there was a stop sign with a panhandler stationed underneath. He’s usually seated on an overturned milk crate, his backpack beside him, or standing with his shoulder on the metal post. His cardboard sign, propped against his shins or held idly at his waist, reads: Have a family. Anything helps. He didn’t pay attention to it, never looked me in the eye as I pulled to a stop or queue behind the line in rush hour. He had

58 his head down, the curled brim of his John Deer ball cap shielding his face, his attention solely on the book in his free hand. Almost every day, on my commute home, he was there, tearing through another paperback. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone give him money. A line of cars moved steadily on the cross street, and when it was my turn to sit at the stop sign and wait for a break in traffic, I rolled down my window, the words from his sign repeating in my head—Have a family. Anything helps. I took a five from my wallet, said, ‘Hey man, this is for you.’

His head listed slightly, eyes dragging the pages. He scratched his blonde beard, said, ‘Just a sec.’ The car behind me tapped its horn. He said, ‘You can just drop it, this part is too good to skip.’

In that instant, as I stomped the accelerator to clear a gap in traffic, I hated him and his rejection to this random moment of kindness in me. I crumpled the bill in my fist and held it in my lap as I made the left at the light onto my street. Have a family.

Anything helps. And I’ve never been someone to judge another persons’ life based on what is showing in one insular moment. Yes, I cannot help internally critiquing attire, but that evaluation ends at the unflattering top, the too-loose slacks. Yet I despised him, his laziness, his disregard for the charity I hardly ever brought out of myself. He probably didn’t have a family, or if he did, was this his way of caring for them? Losing himself in books. I wanted to stuff that bill in his mouth.

In my room, I blasted Glassjaw, laid on my floor dragging my hands on the stubble percolating on my cheeks. I’d slipped back into a fit of angst, regressed to a teenager. Oh poor, poor Jonah. Rolling the volume down, I sat on the carpet in front of

59 my IKEA desk, mounted to the side of one of those cube bookshelves, the 4x4 chamber version, black birch finish. I used it as a wall divider, my workstation on one side, and behind it, my bed veiled by hardcovers and LP’s tilting against each other. When the guys and I moved into this house, I opted to take the burden of the largest rent so I could have the master bedroom’s closet—two racks on each side, six feet in length, bevels for shoes beneath. And I filled it, wooden hangers from wall to opening, formal attire on the left, on the right, organizing by color—reds to blues, neutrals on the far end.

I lined boots next to bluchers, oxfords, then loafers, from blacks to browns to tans to gray, leather and suede, and across from them, a cavalcade of canvas , plimsolls, and slip-ons. My dresser filled the dead space along the wall between the closet and my private bathroom, and in its drawers—cotton trunks and . YouTube videos taught me the department store fold, my T-shirt collars topping a perfect square of fabric.

I’ve spent a white-collar paycheck on American made underwear, chambray ties, pebbled leather belts and coordinating pocket squares. My dirty laundry, if sold, could feed a family. My dry cleaning bill competes with my grocery tab. This is me—the hours of my life chained to the desk, phones answered, data entered—work hard to look good. Sweat to have something worth sweating in.

I looked into the full-length mirror at the far end of my closet, saw the endless procession of outfit combinations, my uniform for living. I remember my dissatisfaction that day upturned the comfort I’d found in looking at the order of my wardrobe. It was good, but it could be better. There was always something new to round out your style,

60 some way to set yourself apart. Reinvention is never being exactly the same any two days. I could be better. I had to be better.

That afternoon, in spite of her, I tore through my closet, picking shirts that didn’t fit well enough, colors that didn’t combine thoroughly, shoes that looked too busy. Good enough before, but no longer. Back then it was a matter of performance, like an athlete, opportunity was defined by readiness. I wouldn’t let this failure, however obvious it looked in that sudden retrospection, stop me. One day, I would meet a woman whose confidence and stature would make the memory of Elle stretch and thin, and I dressed, insatiably, for this apparition. It wasn’t about being one of those idiots who ‘peacocks,’ who wears something gaudy or aggressive to attract attention. It was about ease, about taking in that person adorned in clothing so subtle and seamless they could’ve been born in that very garb. Nothing so effortless is ever an accident. I would improve, would be that man who heels into the bar, makes you think, How could I not? I remember imagining, while I positioned garments on my duvet to take pictures and upload onto style forums for sale, how it could conceivably, one day, be Elle—years later, single for the first time since she was a teenager. It was an oppressive thought back then, all those days in between the summer and an imaginary reunion, the possibility it would never happen.

I was being wistful to momentarily escape the knowledge listing around in me that I’d soon turn to drink and skin, wanting to pacify those hungers slightly before giving into them. Even then I knew the depths to which I would indulge, fixing my unhappiness by smothering it with nights in the bar, a string of dates, the sweat-condom-

61 cum smell of new sex. I’d always been afraid that my loose behavior was what brought me bad luck—my failed relationships, all the superficial snags in my character. But I could only ever struggle against them until the sun went down. Then my roommates would suggest a bar, and I’d fill my stomach with bourbon and Guinness, coming home in a stupor to activate my online dating accounts. How many nights had I spent scrolling through the procession of faces, skimming preferences and reading traits, thinking, Yeah I could be into that. I could be into almost anything to get back there—the look on a woman’s face as she lets me undress her. I used to think it was about the arousal, the quick breaths and wide-eyes interlocked with mine, the desire to have that closeness saturated in the warmth of our hands meeting at a hem, a clasp, an elastic waistband. I didn’t know what I needed was trust. Just a soft-lipped smile saying that this, here, was something we share in giving up, and with you, that’s okay. I’d been greedy, feeding off that exchange without returning that confidence. Not sure why I never realized that to feel fulfillment, all I had to do was give it in return, that following this desire would pair me with someone who could give me the same sense of contentment I shared with Elle.

Or maybe I did know all of it, but I was impatient, so hungry to find balance. I am a man who needs relief. I am not unaware of my hunger. There is part of me that wants to take and take and take. Just tell me I’m worth something, and I will give you any unspeakable thing.

###

62

There’s a style of forgetting in which you overload yourself with new gratifications to topple old, unreachable pleasures from your memory. I spent the summer attempting to perfect the art of fucking regret out of my system. It’s difficult to recall the particulars of lost intimacy with your face buried between the legs of a paralegal, a surgical assistant, that waitress from the bar below my office. The nights I wasn’t on a date, I watched baseball with Thump and Jerome, got loaded in the lifeless suburb bars near our place and texted women I was waiting to meet or others I’d recently seen. I’d lost a bit of tact, of grace, was mixing up the origin stories I’d chewed through over dinner, thinking someone went somewhere for school, confusing tastes of one woman with another. At first, I’d gotten into the habit of telling people I was forgetful, acting the part of the overworked young professional. It happened often enough that I began to think the weeks

I’d spent not letting myself dry out—drinking constantly after each day at the office— were having lasting physical effects on my memory. But I’d gotten glowing marks on my quarterly review, a raise from Robert E., hadn’t made a clerical mistake since before

Christmas—no double bookings or misplaced paperwork. I could recall, clearly, the nights my roommates and I shut down the bars, could remember the individual moments with a woman leading up to that moment of disrobing.

It was that I didn’t care.

63

I’d let my aloofness with regard to physical intimacy bleed into my ability to connect with people. My poor behavior was not a mystery to me, I just couldn’t muster up the will to change it.

In September, I talked Deidra into giving me a second chance by admitting that I fucked up, said I was going through some shit back then, but I still wanted an opportunity to get to know her. We hadn’t spoken since our failed date at the Newseum, where I left with Elle without so much as a goodbye. This fuck-up was a popular story with the guys.

We were on the way to Camden Yards for a double header against the Rays. I drove and let Jerome and Thump drink in the car, passing a pint of Jim Beam between the seats.

Told them that I left with Elle and didn’t realize what I’d done until I turned my phone on the next morning on my way home, how Deidra had narrated her annoyance over a dozen text messages. I hadn’t responded, was caught up with Elle, with how that whole thing felt. When I mentioned Elle, they rolled their eyes. I’d burned up their patience when it came to the topic—the two of them in agreement I needed to move on, unwilling to say, but unable to hide their belief that I was overreacting to the outcome of the affair. I veered the conversation away, said, ‘If I can actually convince Deidra to go on a second date, I’d be pretty impressed with myself.’

They didn’t think it was possible, even after Deidra relented and set a time. We sat in the upper deck behind first base, Thump hunched over his knees on the fold-down seat, Jerome clapping his hands as Chen worked himself out of a jam in the fourth. They guessed Deidra was only going to see me so she could berate me for my rudeness. I was afraid they were right.

64

By the time we drove home, Deidra and I had agreed, via text, to meet me out in

Silver Spring, halfway between our houses. The O’s split the double header, and the guys were wasted. I pulled off on the shoulder of 29 so Thump could vomit. Jerome stretched out across the Accord’s backseat, head propped on the opposite door’s armrest, said,

‘You lose, . You lose.’ He wielded the near-empty pint like a crucifix, thrusting, upright, the gold fluid repeatedly into the gap between us, as if the liquor could exorcise the nausea from Thump.

His ball cap in my left hand, I turned from the pool of vomit and looked out across the asphalt, the occasional fingers of light dragging across us as another car heading south moved around the bend. Thump heaved and I patted him on his back, said,

‘C’mon buddy, get it out.’

A line a drool caught the collar of his jersey—a home-team white and orange, #8

Ripken Jr.—and he smeared the fluid with the back of his hand, drying his knuckles on the knee of his Zara slim-fit khakis after. Squatting now with his weight on the balls of his feet, his black-on-black chucks bending mid-sole, Thump said he just needed a minute.

I crouched beside him, said, ‘Take your time.’

In front of us, the brush along the median road lit up in intervals with the yellow strobe of the Accord’s hazard lights. ‘You’ll never be able to hold your liquor if you let yourself puke,’ Jerome shouted from the backseat, then, ‘Can we stop at McDonald’s?’

65

I helped Thump upright, and he kicked gravel across the puddle of organ-pink liquid, trying to hide it. After a minute, sobered, he gathered his hair into a ponytail, saying, ‘You really going to go on a date with her?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘It’s a little fucked up.’

I handed him his hat. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong.’

‘You are.’

‘Is he done?’ Jerome called out. ‘Thump, are you done? I’m fucking starving.’

Thump fitted his hat, squared it over his brow. Pinching one nostril, he cleared the other in the grass. He said, ‘You let people think you’re available and you’re not. You’re not willing to be.’

‘I didn’t promise anyone anything.’

‘Sure,’ he said, patting gravel off his cuffs and smoothing the Orioles script on his chest.

In the McDonald’s drive-through, I bought Jerome a twenty-piece nugget meal, fries and a fish filet for Thump, a water for myself. The odor of salt and the wet sound of molars sinking into grease-thick food, turned my stomach. I said, ‘How do you guys eat this shit?’ Next to me, Thump closed his eyes and bit into the side of his sandwich, the tarter sauce blooming between the bun and breaded filet, a moan rolling in his gullet.

I pulled the Accord onto the road and Jerome said, ‘Jonah’s body is a temple.’

Thump reached across the console, crossed me with a French fry, saying, ‘Praise, praise. Teach me your holy ways. Cleanse me of this filthy habit, you wise soul.’ He

66 chewed the fry in my ear. I could hear the oil sluicing through his teeth. When he laughed, he burped, and the sour yet sweet scent of bourbon filled the cabin of the car. I had to throw his arm over my shoulder and carry him to his room when we got home, put the leftovers in the fridge, went back out and wiped the crumbs from the upholstery. As I brushed my teeth, I pictured Thump and Jerome in bed with unclean mouths, how I weighed that one night of untidiness against what Thump had said was poor in my behavior and somehow justified them as equal.

My date with Deidra was the following Thursday at a cocktail bar too small for the pool table at its center. The bartender rocked her hips to the Beyoncé playlist thumping in the speakers as she gave my drink a hard shake. It was just after eight, and the seats were half taken, a good murmur of conversation under the music, some laughs unadulterated by modesty. I said, ‘This place feels like it gets a little rowdy. I like that.

Can’t stand an uptight cocktail bar.’

Deidra had cropped her wavy brown hair since the last time I’d seen her, letting it hang just below her ears, her bangs in uneven tufts against her forehead. She said, ‘I usually don’t like cocktail bars in general. This one’s alright.’ She kept spinning the rocks in her glass with the garnish pick now absent of the Marasca cherry she’d eaten straight off. I said,

‘I’m not going to lie, I’m surprised you responded.’ She shrugged, brought her drink to her mouth, so I continued, ‘I wasn’t trying to blow you off. I was just going through some shit. Wasn’t really over someone, I guess.’

‘I figured.’

67

‘Didn’t mean to take it out on you.’

‘So you’re over them now?’

‘More or less.’

Her laughter had a meanness teaming underneath it.

‘Is that a problem?’

‘No.’

I could hear the ice catch against her front teeth as she pulled hard from her drink.

She swallowed, said, ‘Most of dating is trying to convince someone that you are better than the person in their head anyway.’

I didn’t think to ask who she had floating in her imagination, was too busy looking at the frayed ends of her denim vest, trying to figure out if she cut the sleeves herself. She wore a tri-blend T beneath it, black high-waisted jeans about her sturdy middle, cuffed over Doc Martins. Around her neck she had this stained brass necklace with turquoise gems—an interesting accessory—but I couldn’t look too closely without it seeming like I was staring at her cleavage, something she said happened quite often because of her, for lack of a better term, endowment. I was a head taller than her—when we made eye contact, her green irises bobbed up to her eyelids. We shot a couple games of pool. When she won, she bumped me with her hip, tipped me off balance. There was something bullish to her prowess, a certain toughness that I found attractive. Deidre went rock climbing three times a week, could bench-press her bodyweight easy. She said she wanted to feel strong, and now she was, said it helped at work—a guidance counselor

68 straight out of grad school, had recently been promoted to vice principal at a high school in Northwest. I said, ‘I wouldn’t fuck with you.’

She was racking at the far end of the table, looked over the lip of the felt, said,

‘Unless I made you.’

I was on my third Toronto, the anise flavor coating my mouth. A couple sitting on the stools nearest our game heard the conversation, let out an Oh! when she said it. I’d found the comment attractive, drawing up that cheap-loose blood in me. But for it to be witnessed, for someone to see that rise, I shied away from her and fell quiet, waiting to lean into the break, the crack of the cue ball erasing that overheard laugh. The rapport between us shifted, our flicker of banter snuffed out by my diminished mood. The man at the bar wore a suit too long in the sleeves, had brown hair receding at the temples. He threw his arm over his date’s shoulder, turned away from the pool table. I could tell by their body language they’d been at it for a while, something about the calmness they shared. There was no contempt in their reaction to the trade in dialogue between Deidre and me, just a laugh at the quality of the retort, and yet it made me withdraw into myself, catching every word in my throat. I was unable to restart the conversation, and it left us tripping over the beginnings of a dozen versions of small talk. So it was that when she got tired of the bar a couple rounds later, I figured we’d retreat back to our respective places, no promises of a future meetings, another date between us foiled by my shortcomings. I’d parked my car in the metro lot since work reimbursed my SmartTrip card, and she’d rode up on the red line. We walked back together, three blocks accompanied by the steady whir of Georgia Ave traffic, interrupted only by lifeless trades about work schedules,

69 weekend plans. When we got to the station, she said, ‘So do you want to come back?’ I let my car keys slip from one hand to the other, clipped my carabineer key chain to the belt loop on my Iron Hearts.

‘Do you want me to?’

‘That’s why I asked.’

She lived in a historic building on the north end of Columbia Heights, near the park. Few years after that night, the building was sold, and the company who purchased it, in order to renovate and sell the apartments off individually as condos, bought the tenants out of their leases. Deirdre and her roommate split 50k, and she used the money to move to Seattle, took a job as principal of an all girls’ school. I found this out at a time when I was retracing old flings, sorting out whether anything real had occurred and gone unnoticed. I was hoping to prove to myself that the attention I got back then was only fleeting because of my inattention.

As we approached her stoop, I said, ‘Figured you thought the date went terrible.

By no fault of yours, I just’—I glanced back toward the intersection we’d just passed through, the Don’t Walk sign throwing orange on the asphalt, the metro station a hundred feet back—‘I just felt a little off.’

She said, ‘You don’t have to be here.’ The front entrance of her building was recessed from the street, the mailboxes and call buttons in an alcove beneath two rows of hanging balconies. We stood in the mouth of it, her knuckles on her hips. The walkway light coming from over her shoulder overstated the shadow under her cleavage.

‘I guess I just didn’t think you were into me,’ I said.

70

She snickered, ‘You are pretty boring.’ She had her key in her hand, used it to scratch her thigh through her jeans. She said, ‘Pretty boring. But handsome. And I’m trying to get mine. Is it that big a deal?’

When she let herself in, she didn’t turn to see if I followed. Then I was full of it— that same cheap blood, that loose pulse, a desire to occupy the space between her arms. I found that embrace to be surly, shoving me where she wanted, digging nails into my shoulders, grabbing a fistful of my hair, pushing me lower. Her roughness was refreshing, not that this sort of coarse fucking was new to me—the number of hands around my throat, of slaps to my face, or woman who’ve demanded to be choked is, perhaps startling—but in this particular moment, I’d been drifting back to the bar, the man in the too-loose blazer overlooking a behavior I hadn’t yet realized I was embarrassed by. I’d always known that it had been a game to me—seeing how little I could give and still be allowed to earn this kind of familiarity. When she’d said it, had said that she would make me, that’s what was in my mind—a flash, that it would be easy. For the laugh to arrive as if at the punch line of my shallow thought was startling. So I was thankful for that hand yanking the hair about my scalp, pulling it from its knot, thankful to be pushed and tossed, to be at the end of her wanting. She grounded me in that moment, and I got to trying to satiate it. The look on her face as I put my mouth to her—unrefined satisfaction in mid-exhale. It must’ve been three when we finished. She set her laptop by the bed, had

Jose Gonzalez playing on repeat, told me she had to sleep to music. I asked her if it had been good for her, and she said, ‘Yeah, it was alright.’

‘You came, right?’

71

‘I mean, yeah.’

‘But it was just okay?’

The gentleness of the music, her shaded desk lamp painting the walls champagne, provided the room an aura of calmness that her laughter cut through in a series loud bursts. I said, ‘You’re messing with me.’

Snapping the elastic band of her underwear to her hips, she said, ‘It’s not that I feel unfucked. But good is, well, difficult. It isn’t that.’

I pulled the blanket over my stomach, her dampness still coated me, and I dried myself on the underbelly of the comforter, saying, ‘Isn’t what?’

‘A few positions, some oral, a clit orgasm?’ She donned a loose shirt with holes in the collar, ‘That’s perfectly adequate. But not good. You’re going to have to try a little harder than that. I want to have trouble standing up. I want to feel like I got hit by a car.’

When she came back to bed, teeth brushed and hair pinned, she put her face in the pillow, and I rested my hand on her back, pressed my forehead toward hers, trying to kiss the periphery of her lips. She met me with a turn of the head. To the wall she said, ‘I appreciate the effort, but not tonight,’ repeated that sentiment in the morning when I tried again. Then I was on the metro heading north to Silver Spring, wondering whether I’d always been less than thorough in my ability to satisfy a woman. I’d taken pride in my willingness to lead, to let my partner sit back, to be the one invested in trying. I’d never questioned, fully, the depths to which I’d been successful or not, and I knew that there was not one way for everyone, but as I got in my car and sped home to shower and change for work, I let myself entertain the notion that I was always failing, that my

72 arrogance had spared me the embarrassment. That inner voice said, What Asian men have you ever known that are legendary lovers? And, You wonder why you’re twenty-six with no huge loves behind you? I hadn’t learned satisfaction and trust were bound. I didn’t want to say to myself that Elle could have been that great love, but her face smeared itself across the backs of my eyes as the sun put its glow in the top of the woods along route

29. There was nothing magnificent about the lifespan of it, but knowing her held weight in me, had left gaps that I was compulsively seeking to fill. I knew that there was something to that, to living as if wounded—the hurt over the absence proved that what had been there was meaningful. I wasn’t entirely unmoored.

I went straight from the car to the shower—wasn’t running late but had no time to linger. The drain was choked with my black hair. Standing in the ankle-deep water, I rubbed conditioner onto my scalp and could hear Deirdre from the night before after she’d pulled it loose from my hair tie, after I’d climbed back up her, placing my face in the area between her shoulder and the bed. She said, ‘What’re you, Fabio?’ then gathered my hair behind my head, our hips locked, her left leg curled around me. Her mattress was directly on the ground, bare upholstery on crushed carpet—as we rocked, it shifted from the wall and back.

I said, ‘I look better with long hair.’

She had the mass of it wrapped in her fist, said, ‘According to who?’

I told her about a dozen woman, and she pulled my face from hers and slapped me across it, the inner curve of her rings knocking against my teeth through the flesh of my

73 cheek. But she didn’t push me from her. Instead she brought me closer with her feet, locking them at the ankle behind my waist.

I said, ‘Fuck I was just kidding,’ and flicked her on the tit. In turn, she bit me on the jaw, saying, ‘You can take it,’ and we inflicted these small hurts on each other until I came shortly after.

In the shower, I rubbed the bits of broken skin on my chin from where she’d dug her teeth, repeating what she’d said, words unheard until just then—You can take it.

If I’m being honest about the length of my hair, I’d started growing it the year before for a few reasons not arrived at entirely by myself. Thump had kept his long for years, and we were always getting each other into things—he’d drawn me into music, I’d shown him good denim. As a teen, I’d been indignant about every component of myself being original, but through those band years, as less of my writing made it into songs and the band itself thrived, I began to rely on that camaraderie—the group of us being better than our individual selves. It no longer felt cheap to give credit to others for the ideas that weren’t my own. I liked the way my profile looked with my hair pulled back from my face. Before, when I had a simple barber’s cut, I slicked it sideways to keep this effect, figured I could still do that when my hair got long enough, could knot it to the side in a style that was getting ever more popular in my menswear circles. And yet, the moment I decided to let it grow had little to do with either of these more rational beginnings. I only arrived at these motivations later when asked.

The real reason came from a moment when the guys and I had just moved into the house and were sitting on boxes in the living room drinking Natty Boh. Thump’s friend

74

Andy was in town for a few weeks. She taught Art to kids in Korea, had known Thump and Jerome since they were kids. I knew he had some complicated feelings for her, but

Andy was the type of woman I couldn’t help but imagine at least a fraction of intimacy with—her tan skin, her lean frame, the way her green eyes seemed to rest on the podium of her high cheekbones. And more than her beauty, she was confident with her humor, often had the sharpest wit in the room. So I let myself imagine how it would be with her, let myself picture it every time we hung out, to be the one she turns to at the end of the night, tired and ready for our bed, the other exhausted eyes watching us leave. That night, we’d just finished unloading the bulk of our boxes out of the U-Haul and were all in various stages of sweat-soaked clothing and sore muscles. I’d missed an appointment at the barber, and my typical side-part had run unkempt. As I sipped that gold and white can, I pushed my fingers through it, slicked it back to keep it from my face, and Andy said, ‘Jonah, you ever think of growing your hair out? You’d look good.’

The way she said my name made me flush, and I replied, ‘Yeah I’ve been thinking about it.’ I hadn’t been to the barber since. Wasn’t much longer after that that

Andy and Thump got together. She moved back to Baltimore, wasn’t ready to settle down but came out with us often. It took some time—it wasn’t until one night after Thump had played a set, the chest of his shirt dark with sweat over his lanky frame, his thin eyes arcing as he wrapped an arm around Andy’s waist. All that wet hair shining in the low light. I was glad I never let it slip—those guiltless thoughts of mine.

At work, Robert E. had meetings through lunch, and after, he arrived in the afternoon in good spirits. He was overseeing a committee that managed the merger

75 between two architectural firms and had mediated a set of terms that could be agreed upon before the end of the fiscal year. I’d spent the majority of my free time that morning picking a barber, a manic sort of urge resolved in me to fade down the sides and keep the top at five inches, slicked back and to the left, away from my natural part. No more hair ties or hairdryer when I’m running late. No strands breaking free from their knot as I’m doing something active or caught between the mouth of a woman and my own, the birch musk of my conditioner bitter on my tongue.

Javier came by with plans for the waterfront home Robert had purchased on the river just north of Annapolis. He was wearing an olive blazer and slim-fit khakis, a linen shirt the color of a robin’s egg crowned with a golden ascot perched on the collar. I hadn’t seen him in a few months after the home remodel finished and before this new renovation was planned. He looked pleasant, and I said, ‘I see you didn’t heed my advice.’

He spun on the wooden heel of his Chelsea boots. Tugging the cuffs of his shirt through the sleeves of his blazer, he said, ‘Admit it. I look gripping.’

I nodded, ‘You proved me wrong.’

He turned toward the office door, peaking his head out as he went into his meeting, said, ‘Damn right I did.’

I’d narrowed my choices down to two shops in DC, called the first to make an appointment, but they were booked solid for a couple of days, so I settled on the other. If

I got out at five sharp, I would make it easy on the metro. It was warm beginning of autumn, and the repetitiveness of Tumblr, of scrolling between a thousand images so

76 often the same, had begun to bore me. I’d spend hours on more dedicated style forums, even reading years of back-posts in order to track style changes, but I’d recently caught up on the one’s that still interested me, so instead, I wiped my desk down, my computer, shutoff the monitor so I could clean the splotches and fingerprints from the screen.

My reflection the now-black glass, the triangles of amber skin between my cheekbones and jaw pulled taut. That year was the thinnest of my adult life, too preoccupied to eat steady meals, often drinking my dinner. I freed my hair from its tie, fingered it straight about my head so that framed my profile. As a kid, my sister, Mary, used to be the one to cut my hair. She’s four years older—when I was six or seven, she ran the house when my mom got held over at work. I sat nude in the bathtub as she trimmed the top of my bowl cut with school scissors. Sitting in four inches of warm water, I held my knees to my chest as she tried to crop it evenly, careful not to nip the cartilage of my ears. The loosed fibers landed on my shoulders, my spine, and I tried not to squirm, resisting the urge to splash the water on my back, clearing away the itch.

When she got the top something like symmetrical, the length of it parted in the middle and level with my eyes, she’d pile it atop my head and pin it in place with one of her butterfly clips, then ran the faucet slow, lathering soap in her hands and coating the exposed flanks of my head. The disposable razor trembled in her hand as she removed the protective cover with her thumb, saying I’ll go quick, okay? The cheap blade nicked me when she couldn’t keep it steady. The dull gray water flecked pink where she dipped the razor to clear it of hair. She sat on the edge of the tub after, rubbing cocoa butter lotion on my raw skin, a towel on my shoulders, reminded me that if she didn’t cut it now, it would

77 be overgrown for school pictures, or Christmas, or the first day of back after summer vacation. My mom came home as I was about to go to bed, forcing a smile, saying My handsome little man, and I was young enough not to recognize the pained tint to her expression as she peeled the tabs of toilet paper stuck to dry the blood.

Javier emerged from the office toward the end of the day. As he started for the door, he said, ‘Jonah, I’ll give you one more chance, and be honest with me—should I grow a beard?’

I shook my head, turned my monitor back on, erasing my reflection, said, ‘You’re too handsome to hide your jaw.’

‘Aren’t you sweet,’ he touched the pads of fingers to his chest. ‘You know— small world—I ran into your friend a couple weeks ago.’

I’d stood to walk him into reception, on my way to grab a cup of coffee from the lounge. As I held the door for him, I said, ‘Who’s that?’

‘She didn’t mention me?’ He let out an ironic scoff. ‘That bitch.’

I knew he was speaking of Elle, understood it with the same logic that overwhelmed me as I cleared that pillar near the side entrance into the Newseum and she was standing in a circle of older woman, her weight on her right foot, following the volley of their conversation with her eyes. How one chance encounter could be meaningless, but two felt almost unearned in weight. In his joke, I felt that adrenaline- fueled tightening in my gut—a quick kind of anxiety that momentarily arrested me with the idea that everything in my entire life is misguided—an emotional free-fall. I said, ‘Oh

78

Elle? I just haven’t spoken with her in a bit. Conflicting schedules. Where’d you run into her?’

‘Marcus took me to dinner at that Ethiopian place on U street. They passed us on the way out. You didn’t tell me her boyfriend was such a looker.’

We crossed through reception to the front door. I’d never seen Christian, had no grasp on his features. I pictured a tall white male, probably athletic, short hair and unmemorable tattoos. Sure, I hadn’t been the most dependable bachelor, never really looking to settle down, but when I had been, when I was dating with a more serious undercurrent, I’d found that majority of the women I’d been attracted to usually ended up falling into something serious with these sorts of healthy, handsome and nondescript men. Even if I never saw myself as less than for being of Asian descent, I recognized that my appearance was something not sought after, not held in high regard by women. I might be out, tight black suit, leaning into the bar, my jaw squared as I stared into the rocks in my bourbon, poised to wait for whatever interaction approached, my prowess the portrait of Paul Newman. But I couldn’t be Paul Newman, not for most people.

‘Anyway,’ Javier said, ‘I just said hi. But I thought of you when I saw her. You should come to dinner with Marcus and me sometime.’

I barely heard his invitation, distracted by a hundred images of Elle, the way her hips bridge her underwear, the tip of her index finger on my chin. Told him I’d like that, then took the business card he offered.

On the metro, holding the pole that framed the burnt orange seats, the slick metal still warm from the hand before mine, I caught a glimpse of myself in the slot of glass on

79 the door, the soft light throwing shine into my black hair. I could feel the sweat pooling under my arms as I entertained the idea of skipping the haircut, thinking I might see her soon and wanting to be exactly as she’d last seen me. I switched trains, picked some lint off the lapel of my blazer, thinking not of the two stops left until the barber, but instead fending off the idea that, like Samson, if I cut my hair, I might lose some of the esteem she’d held for me—if any of that remained at all. Half a year since I’d seen her, yet even a prediction of what she might want, what she would prefer, held possession over me. If I were to see her again, I didn’t want her to think in the time we were apart I wasn’t living, didn’t want her to understand that weakness in me, even as I barely have lived, even as I am sure that weakness is there. As the barber sheered my hair, cutting inches from the mass of it on my crown, as he tapered the flanks of my head, I figured—what was that hint of powerlessness if not a form of love.

#

Elle told me when she was twelve, her mother uprooted her from Atlanta to live with her grandparents in Orlando. She’d been to the doctor for a routine check-up, and after the

EKG, those four electrodes placed about her torso, the doctor was concerned with an irregularity in the reading—an elongation in one of the spikes of her heartbeat.

‘My heart has rabbit ears,’ Elle said. ‘I got to see it beating on a scan. For some reason I thought it would be bigger.’ When she spoke, she held her gloved fist between our chests, pulsing it in pairs. Bump-bump. Bump-bump. We were sitting on the edge of a

80 park bench, every inch of skin except our faces layered in clothing to keep in the warmth.

She wasn’t wearing lipstick or eyeliner, and it was pleasant seeing her face up close and raw of color—how I remembered her in the mornings. She wore a waxed canvas wrapped around a Donegal , those same black jeans tucked into military boots. I’d gotten to the park early, walked the circle brick path that surrounded a cement fountain with the water drained out. Four wooden benches were stationed like compass settings around it. We sat looking where I thought was south. I could feel the warmth of her knee through my slacks. I had on cigar-brown chukka’s, kept glancing at the toes of them as she spoke to me.

She said, ‘They thought I would need surgery, and my mom couldn’t handle it.

She didn’t have the money—that’s the reason she gave me, that she just couldn’t afford it.’ I had my hands inside my jacket pockets, the cashmere lining of my driving gloves chill against my skin. Picturing her torso, I couldn’t remember any scars, and that was something that wouldn’t escape me. I held onto the idea that I could recall every angle of her. She adjusted the tilt of her wool cap, rubbed her palms together, the leather crunching between her hands. When she’d entered the park, I didn’t recognize her. It was just after Thanksgiving, and it took me a moment to realize we’d never been together in the winter. All I’d asked that prompted this retelling was, ‘How was Canada?’

After Javier’s visit to the office, it took two months and a drunk night out in DC to work up the will to call her. Thump was going to see Andy’s friend DJ at UHall, and

Jerome and I decided to tag along. Thump offered to drive, so the three of us passed a fifth of Buffalo Trace in the dark interior of his Corolla, lit green by the aftermarket CD

81 display. It’s strange—if I concentrate, I can remember every drink. There is a weird, over-thought logic that passes over me when I search out a bottle wherein I decide which spirit will provide what I need for each occasion. It’s how I know in that black-walled club with the sub vibrating my chest, I ordered a Budweiser because I wanted to coast.

We’d played Sip-Sip-Pass the whole way down Georgia Ave, and I had a notion I might meet someone while we danced, didn’t want to be wasted for it. Cheap beer never hit me until the third or fourth bottle, and by then I’d have sweat out enough of it to even out. It didn’t bother me to remember these small decisions. I was just worried about what I forgot in order to make room.

At the end of the night, on the ride back home, Thump and I were the only ones up. Andy had her head on his shoulder while he drove, and Jerome was next to me, snoring over the St. Vincent album playing low in the car. It was a clear night—the trees outside the window were thick with shadows under the deep indigo of a starlit sky. When

Javier told me he’d seen Elle, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for her to call, that this desire passed over me constantly. I wanted her to be weak for me. If she missed me it signaled, in a perverted way, that I had some lasting value to her. As the four of us elbowed our way around the dance floor, I’d tried to suppress this thought, and at moments while I searched the club for someone sharp enough to catch my interest, I’d been successful. But in the car, on the forty-minute drive home to collapse into my bed alone, I kept imagining the reasons she hadn’t reached out, concluding each time that whatever the cause, it was rooted in this innate and unknowable thing that makes it impossible for me to be wanted. Or that was what I feared about myself. Thump

82 drummed lightly on the steering wheel with his thumbs. He looked in the rearview to see if I was passed out, and I said, ‘Am I a shitty person?’ The song ended and the grit and howl of a guitar through a fuzz pedal started the next. Thump rubbed his knuckles on his chin. I said, ‘The length of this silence is not reassuring.’

‘I think,’ he said, then lowered his voice as Andy shifted, ‘I think you have shitty habits. And you’re good at ignoring them.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Just that,’ he said, smoothing his long hair back across his scalp. ‘I think deep down, you know how certain things you do can be seen. You just know how to justify them for yourself.’

I could tell he was checking on me through my reflection, so I concentrated on refolding the cuffs of my denim work shirt over my elbows. I said, ‘I want to call her.’

‘Who?’

The window was cold as I rested my temple to it. I didn’t speak, and after a moment Thump said, ‘Oh. I thought you said she moved.’

‘She did. Found out she’s back.’

He exhaled through his nose, reached over and rolled the volume back. We were ten minutes from our house on a stretch of 29 that’s riddled with cops, and as Thump steered into the right lane, he pumped the brakes. ‘As your friend, it’s hard to think about you putting yourself through all that again.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Sure.’

83

‘I am. I have been.’

‘Hey, you don’t have to convince me. I’m just saying. Do you think it’s going to be any different?’

Next to me in the backseat, Jerome pressed his shoulders against the cushion. I said, ‘It would be nice to find out.’

‘Then call,’ Thump lifted his hand off the wheel and looked at his palm. ‘It’s not like you’re the one that has something to lose.’

‘I know.’

Our exit approached, and he set the blinker. He said, ‘I didn’t mean for that to sound cruel.’

‘It’s fine.’

The off-ramp made a wide loop under the highway, and as the Corolla went around the bend, the four of us slid in our seats. Andy righted herself in front of me, stretching her arms out over the dash. She said, ‘Fuck I’m hungry.’ We decided to hit a late-night spot up the way from our place run by a Vietnamese family—the kind of carry- out that serves everything from burgers and subs to fried rice and Bahn Mi. Jerome is half

Black, half Vietnamese, and the first time he brought us there, Thump asked him if he knew the owner. It’d been an innocent and absent minded inquiry, but it sparked an on- going joke—whenever we saw a Chinese family in public, Jerome would ask us if we were related. In turn, Thump referred to this carry-out as ‘Jerome’s Cousin’s Place.’ It was one of the spots we frequented after the bars. Not fine dining, but it was better than

McDonalds. The owner liked us—three Asian boys out late and a little tore up—filled

84 our styrofoam containers to the brim with extra rice or fries, made the food spicier than normal.

When we had our orders in, Jerome stayed at the counter, talking to the owner.

Thump and Andy sat in the car, and I was alone in the parking lot, pacing, pretending to read something on my cell. It was just past two, and I knew Elle turned her phone off when she slept, figured calling now and leaving a blank voicemail would be my safest option. It seemed ridiculous—this would be the first time I called her. Before, she’d forbidden it, saying for us to carry on as we were, I had to wait for her to reach out. It was odd seeing her name on the LED screen, the word Dialing… below. I was curious what sort of voicemail she used, whether I would get to hear her voice or if it was the preprogrammed kind. After a moment, when it didn’t immediately answer, I panicked, debating whether I should hang up, but when the ringing started, I figured I’d come this far, I might as well see it through. The call only lasted fifteen seconds, the line coming to life with a wash of sound—a distorted hiss of too-loud music, an abstracted mess of conversation—then, a faint thread of her voice, a vowel, and the call went dead. It was a relief to have fulfilled this desire, this grab at agency, and for to end harmlessly. We didn’t talk, but wherever she was, there was no ignoring that I’d broken the silence. The certainty of that filled me with a high like euphoria, or maybe that was the beer catching up to my hunger, my exhaustion.

We got out food and ate it on our coffee table, seated on the hand-me-down couches. A rerun of Mad Men on the big tube television turned the living room tobacco brown and cream. I hadn’t eaten dinner that night—the oil and salt scent from the fried

85 rice, the spice from the chicken wings coated in the sweet maroon of Mambo sauce tipped my hunger as if my stomach itself was being gripped by a fist. After I finished, I reclined into the back of the beat-up cushion and stretched my midsection against my undershirt. Andy ate potstickers with her bare hands, said, ‘So Jonah. Who’re you calling at two in the morning in the parking lot of a Vietnamese restaurant?’

The couches made an L, Jerome and me on one, Thump and Andy on the other. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I didn’t know you had a lady?’ Andy raised her fingertips to her cover her lips in faux-intrigue.

‘Ladies,’ Jerome said, chewing a bite of his Bahn Mi. The crust of the bread made a crunch between his molars. ‘Jonah is not a man bound to any one lover.’

Thump was the only one still drinking. He had a Natty Boh propped between his knees. He said, ‘He is our very own Casanova.’

Jerome almost choked on a fry trying to say, ‘Chinese Casanova.’

‘He is pretty handsome,’ Andy said. Thump turned and stared at her, and I felt proud that I had, as an onlooker to this conversation, made him jealous. After a moment,

Andy acknowledged Thump’s look with a dismissive wave of a dumpling pinched between her fingers. She said, ‘Control yourself. It’s just a statement of fact.’

I tipped an invisible hat to her.

Thump said, ‘So you called her.’

Jerome asked who we were talking about, and when no one answered, he let out a groan.

86

‘Now I have to know,’ Andy said. It took ten minutes for them to tell her the details of it, that I’d spent the last year sleeping with someone who was cheating on her significant other. ‘Who she lived with,’ Thump added. When they related the rest—the day she left, how I had moped after, the excessive foray into single life that followed—

Andy said, ‘Do you want her because you can’t have her or because you actually like her?’

‘I’m not that immature,’ I said.

‘What’d she say?’ She bit a potsticker in its middle, and while she chewed, she fed Thump the remaining half.

‘She didn’t answer.’

Thump leaned into the back cushion of the sofa, and as she nestled into the crook of his arm, I could tell her interest in the subject waned. She said, ‘Well at least you tried.’

I excused myself to brush my teeth and climb in bed, and a week later, Elle called me back. There was an odd tone to the conversation—she said she was alone, walking to work, but the timid volume of her voice sounded as if she was afraid someone might be listening. Robert E. was on holiday vacation already, and my tasks that week were just fielding the phones, checking his email for pertinent work, forwarding anything dire and otherwise compiling the rest into twice-daily status reports. When she called, I was intermittently sipping seltzer with an espresso from the lounge downstairs, trying to decide whether I needed a raw denim chore coat.

87

This was the season right before the ranch wear movement became a major facet in menswear, when men on their way to cocktail bars dressed as if they were ready to wade through a country bog in their Redwing Heritage boots and Carhartt jackets to retrieve the duck they’d just shot. It wasn’t a bad look, it just didn’t feel right on me, a five-foot-eleven Taiwanese man who worked in an office. Except that chore coat, but what drew me to it was—like the jeans I preferred—how it faded from deep navy to stone-washed at the points of wear, and yeah, it was $300, but once ordered, I’d wear that thing for five to seven years before retiring it with all the other raw denim I’d wrapped in dry cleaner plastic and stowed in the back corner of my closet.

Our conversation was a bit dawdling, and after trading unfamiliar small talk, I asked if I was allowed to see her. When she said, ‘Of course,’ I exhaled with fervor, as if the six months since I’d seen her was some physical weight I could expel. I felt myself drifting back to that casual, subordinate mindset I’d had in that last spring, wanting her to come into my life as she pleased. I could feel myself unspooling until she said to meet her at the park a few blocks from her old apartment, and I caught myself, the unusual place for our meeting confusing this desire to return to what we’d had. We hung up, and I tried to raise my guard back to where it’d been, but if I’m being honest, these stations of my mental security were half measures from each other, at best.

Sunday, the morning we were to meet, I woke early knowing I would struggle to dress for the occasion. I had lain awake the night before, styling myself mentally while grasping the down in my pillow, waiting for sleep to relieve me. I wanted to wear a suit but couldn’t think of a feasible excuse as to why I would be over-dressed. Still, I held a

88 wool tie in my hands, inspecting the maroon weave. I figured I could say I was on my way to church and trusted she would laugh. Really, I just wanted Elle to see me at my best, how I was dressed when we met, how I wanted to be remembered, pacing the aisles of Crate & Barrel, letting her pick the decorations for a house I would never actually see.

That whole month had been the kind of cold that kept people on their couches posting pictures of their delivery food and Netflix choices on social media. At ten Fahrenheit, I should’ve worn my jeans, wool socks, layer upon layer of shirts, from undershirt to sweater. But I’ve never been a man to wear a tie with jeans, so I put on my thickest slacks, an oxford and cashmere . Walking into the park, the wind cut into the lower half of my legs left unprotected from my three-quarter-length overcoat. As she sat down next to me, I realized she wouldn’t see my tie through my jacket collar. My ankles, shielded only by chup socks, were so licked by the winter air that my skin felt hot. Elle asked me how I was, and I said something pursed, then I asked her about Canada, and she dove into the story of how she came to live in Florida as a child, the questionable condition of her heart.

I said, ‘Did you have it? The surgery, I mean.’

‘No.’ She rubbed the leather palms of her gloves together. ‘No, it ended up being an overreaction. But I stayed with my grandparents. Just being somewhere new made things better for me back then.’ Hidden by her wool cap, I couldn’t see her hair, couldn’t tell if she’d changed it. She said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that since I got back. When we went to Toronto, it was like starting over. We needed that.’ For a moment, I thought that I was part of that we. She said, ‘I’m trying to keep that going.’ At the edge of the

89 park, a man in a fake down lead a pair of small dogs on leashes around a patch of bushes. Even the dogs were wearing .

The cold formed a tickle in my throat, and I tried to swallow it as I watched the animals lift their legs. I said, ‘So why did you bother seeing me?’ If I had been looking at her face, I might be able to tell you the depth to which she smiled at the question, but I left my attention with the man and his pets, could only see a hint of her teeth as I turned back.

Elle said, ‘I wanted to tell you in person.’

Her leg, near mine, provided a small warmth, and I said, ‘Well I want to say that you should let me know if anything changes, but I don’t want you to think I’m wishing for you to fail.’

‘So kind of you.’

Shifting on the bench, I pressed my knees together, hunched my shoulders forward, stuffed my hands into the pockets of my overcoat. I was trying to compact all my body heat around me, and Elle turned so that her shoulders were parallel with mine. I couldn’t see her, save the black curve of her knee, the worn tread on the toes of her boots.

She said, ‘It’s not like part of me wasn’t in love with you. And you deserve to know that.’

The winter air coming through the I had pulled back across my hairline put a hum in my ears—I didn’t quite hear what she had said, didn’t react to it until later, on the car ride home. The word repeated in my head like a pulse, and I focused on it that whole quiet drive, clinging to it as some small evidence of meaning. But in the park, I kept my shoulders pulled up toward my ears, unflinching. She said, ‘You know what’s funny?

90

Before, when you were coming over, I used to spend so much time getting ready. Like, I almost panicked trying to make sure my makeup was perfect. Not my going out makeup.

It had to look like I wasn’t trying, like it was just there. We never even left the house.’

The road that circled the park busied with cars. Sunlight peaked out from between two apartment buildings, dulled by a sheet of thin clouds.

I said, ‘I wouldn’t have cared.’

‘But you would have noticed.’ She rocked on the bench, nudging my shoulder with hers. ‘I know you well enough to know you would’ve registered it. You’d say something innocent, sure, but somehow you would’ve brought it to my attention. You can’t help it.’

On the car ride home, I pictured what it had been like to wake up in her bed—her face naked in the morning glow, the colors of her hair knotting together against the pillow. Before we went to bed, she’d rise in the dark and pad across the hardwood to the bathroom. I remember fending of sleep to the sound of the faucet running. On those nights, sleep meant surrendering to a quicker passage of time, and I wanted to savor those minutes we stole for each other. With my head against the seat, I realized this habit I had of naming each article, of each shade of her eye shadow, her lipstick, wasn’t meant, for me, as a means of critique. What I wanted was for her to see that I was paying attention.

But in the park, reacting to this discomfort in her that I’d been unaware of, I said, ‘I like how you look without makeup.’

‘Maybe so. But it doesn’t matter. I had to do it.’ She leaned back, spread her arms across the backrest of the bench. ‘Today, I woke up, I didn’t even shower. I just threw on

91 some clothes I had lying around. I almost forgot to brush my teeth. And I’m completely comfortable. I’m sure I look like shit, and I don’t care.’ Before we parted, she put her hand on my shoulder, and through my clothing, through the cold, I could hardly tell it was there. She said, ‘It’s nice to feel that with you. To feel like you’re not here. Even though you are.’

###

92

There is a style of forgetting in which you simply do not give yourself the time to delve into whatever thought or memory or regret that is keeping you leashed, keeping you from change, from moving forward. I started working at Barneys two weeks before

Christmas—four-hour closing shifts when I got out of the office, eight-hour shifts on the weekends. Working at a high-end clothing store appealed to my skillset, namely my instinctual ability to decide whether an outfit suited a person, and my aptitude for following orders without allowing my ego to bruise. The discount for employees was something I took advantage of a little too often, but with a seventy-hour workweek, I had cash to burn. Financially, I was fine—I didn’t need the money—but I wasn’t donating the paychecks either. That’s what the guys thought I needed the extra hours, that my spending habits had finally caught up with me. When I bought them both a pair of organic cotton Nudie’s for Christmas, the ones with the white pocket stitching, they asked me if I was sure I could afford it. I told them it was boredom with my office job that made me branch out. If I’m being honest here, I got the second job because I’d spent two weeks staring at my phone, waiting for Elle to call. After our meeting, I’d entertained the idea that she would cave, that like addicts, seeing me was enough for us to relapse into the affair.

The Monday after the meeting in the park, Thump dragged me to the brewery near our house. The hoppy beer got old quickly, but the bartenders gave free shots of

Grand Marnier to regulars, so Thump had gotten in the habit of watching games seated at

93 the long counter—baseball three seasons of the year, football in the winter. For him, a comfortable chair with decent food, a cold pilsner, and a game were enough to satisfy. I had a hard time ignoring the other patrons in their black North Face jackets and too loose jeans, shouting about every little disagreement. I liked a rowdy bar, but I guess I required a certain amount of sophistication. Let’s be loud, sure, but when I am with company, I saved my volume for good quips, for interesting revelations, for honesty. I didn’t like their small excitements. I didn’t like that, for four quarters, I was no different than them.

The Ravens were up, but it was only the first half and as Thump had said to me—

Baltimore has a knack for finding ways to lose. So it wasn’t a surprise he had the bill of his cap pulled low over his eyebrows, staring up at the screen, that he didn’t face me when he said, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘There’s not much to talk about.’

Thump nodded. On TV, Flacco threw deep for a first down, and the bar applauded. Thump’s glass was full to the rim, and he lowered himself to sip, like a hummingbird, from its lip. He said, ‘Well now you know.’ He wasn’t at all smug as he said it, but I hated him just the same. He’d been with Andy now for a few months, and a sense of contentment had settled over him, as if their relationship had given him an endless reserve of patience to draw from. I had half a beer, and I downed it in a sip. Three downs and a punt later, the game cut to commercial, and Thump ordered me another beer, saying, ‘All I mean is that you don’t have to let it be a loose end. It didn’t work out. Now you know.’

94

I started to speak, but the bartender set the beer in front of me, and as she smiled and asked if I needed anything else, it felt improper to continue the conversation. I told her we were fine and she said, ‘You’re drunk is what you are. You sure I can’t get you some food?’

Thump said, ‘Order some food, Jonah.’

‘I’m good.’

The bartender said, ‘Jonah is a nice name. A lot prettier than Thump.’

‘That’s no way to treat your favorite customer,’ he said. She rolled her eyes, and he ordered a pizza, and we settled against our seatbacks, spectating. He asked me what I thought of our bartender, and I told him she was very capable at her job. And he said, ‘No you idiot. Like as a person.’ At the other end of the bar, she sipped a glass of water, her lips smiling around the straw as her coworker made a joke.

I pointed at the television mounted above the top shelf liquor, said, ‘Watch the game.’

Thump refit his hat about his hair, still damp at the roots from the shower. As he smoothed the length of it over his scalp, missing that chill feeling of wet ends on the back of my neck, missing even more how we must’ve looked like brothers, the black mass of it limp about our thin faces. We knew each other well enough that we could sit and let time pass uninterrupted by needless conversation. Halfway through our food, the Ravens had extended their lead but not by much, and I said, ‘You ever think about the past. I mean, the reality of it.’

‘You’re drunk.’

95

‘Think about it like this—what if you and Andy broke up today. You’d live your life, and then in like three years, what would make your relationship real?’

‘Do you really want to have this conversation in a bar? Relax, man.’

‘I’m serious.’

He folded a slice of pizza in half and made a show of the pause in the length of his chew. The complexion of his expression stiffened as if he was considering a reality where Andy left, and I felt a pang of guilt for injecting that into his mind. Wiping his lips on the back of his forearm, a line of grease and marinara painted across his skin, and he dabbed it dry with a cocktail napkin. He said just, ‘Memories, dude. Sometimes that’s all you have. And that’s good enough.’

I know I wanted to ask him what it meant that so few people would have any memories of my relationship with Elle, but I could tell he was tired of this line of dialogue. I shouldn’t have soured his mood, shouldn’t have let my discomfort bleed into this time he set aside to make sure I was getting better. I said, ‘Maybe I am drunk.’

Baltimore held on for the win, and the bar did shots. I’d been a bummer all night, so I decided to buy the next couple rounds, and when we were finally home, I went straight to bed and found it spinning. I turned the light out hoping if I couldn’t see the room, I wouldn’t feel it turning, but the dark only worsened my unsteadiness. Under the weight of the booze, I admitted to myself that all I wanted was for her to call, to reach out. I wanted sex and comfort, but what I needed that night was some signal that the image of me illuminated in her waking thoughts was as bright as mine was for her. My back to the mattress, I struggled to unbutton my jeans, my oxford, struggled to get myself

96 under the duvet. When I finally managed to sleep, I woke two hours later just to check my phone. I found myself stirring, heart racing, to look at the finger-stained screen, found myself dreaming of untrue worlds in which she finally gave into the desire I kept caged in me. In the morning, she hadn’t called.

The next few nights were similar, but the lost sleep wasn’t the final push that drove me to spend whittle my life away with an oppressive workload. It was a week or two later, when I went back to the brewery with the guys, and when that same bartender asked for my order, she smiled at me in that way women do when I can tell, from the softening of their eyes, that they think I am handsome, or at least handsomely dressed.

I’ve never been one to hit on a bartender, and I’ve rarely ever gone home with a woman from a bar that I hadn’t planned to meet there for a date. Only occasionally did someone approach me with this look, and our conversation developed into a number, a date, sometimes a bed. I never got accustomed to this, though, was never the kind of guy who draws attention like gravity—chalked that up to being Asian and thin in ten years of rooms full of white men with gym regiments. But I’m not complaining, either. It is a hard thought to realize there are some people who go their whole life without getting this look, without feeling undeservedly desired, and given the choice between seldom or not at all, I wouldn’t trade my station.

It was a Friday night, and we were just drinking to be drunk, hoping something interesting would happen in the fray. By the end of the night, I was propped against the far end of the bar, talking to her as she polished pint glasses. When she turned to close a tab, Thump nudged his shoulder to mine, said to Jerome, ‘It’s good to have our boy

97 back.’ After she got off and texted me from my driveway, I poured her a glass of Four

Roses and gave her a tour of the house—the living room with the beat-up couches, the dining room furnished with a drum kit and speaker cabinets. I’d been lying down, thinking of the excuse I’d use to cancel if Elle happened to reach out. My thoughts had become claustrophobic with her presence, so it was a relief to sip whiskey with the bartender on my bed, watching as she picked through my paperbacks, commenting on things she’d read or heard about. That respite was only momentary though, and later, when I couldn’t get up for her, I said it must’ve been the booze, or maybe it was my lack of sleep, and she soothed my embarrassment, told me it happens, not to be hard on myself. Still, we never did get back in touch, never hung out in that way again. When I walked her out, the guys asked me how my night went, and I was coy in the way I would’ve been had it gone the right way.

I tried turning my phone off while I slept, but found myself unable to deny the temptation of waking, of starting it at three and four and five to see if I had a missed voicemail. By the time I seated myself in the office on Monday morning, I must’ve looked particularly beat down. Robert E. came into the office wearing a herringbone blazer, black slacks, a cream silk tie—pieces I helped him pick out individually but never taught him how to assemble. It was odd, seeing him so put together, seeing him in an outfit sharper than mine. I’d woken bloated, pale, threw on an older J Crew cotton suit that fit a little loose, let my waistline breathe, and as I handed him his mail, I caught a glimpse of myself in the bent reflection of his Oliver Peoples glasses.

He said, ‘Is everything alright? You look ill.’

98

Though I knew I could’ve done my tasks just fine, I didn’t protest when he sent me home for the day. I organized his itinerary, had my email forwarded to one of the other PA’s, and started walking toward the Metro.

It was just after 1030am and the foot traffic in Dupont had thinned. For the day, winter loosened its grip on the District. The sun was loud, and though I wasn’t about to lie out with a book in the park, the cool air felt healthy on my skin, and the clop of my bluchers on the asphalt ringing out over the street noise felt pleasing and important.

Stuffing my hands in my pockets and turning the collar of my overcoat up under my ears,

I headed west toward the river. I was already in Georgetown by the time I realized it’d been years since I’d walked in the city without having a direction. The image of Robert

E. was fresh in my mind, the mix of heather gray, bright cream, the understated black oxfords punctuating the break of his slacks. Stopping in front on a corner, I checked my appearance in the reflection of the glass storefront, adjusting my cuff about my driving glove, changing the angle of my collar under the lapel. My suit was simple black and matched my brass wool overcoat. The outfit was agreeable, sensible, had it been the first time I’d worn it, the mix of neutral colors capped with my plum tie could’ve pulled a smile from me. To me, a well-fitting suit is the pinnacle of mens’ fashion. Sure, the cut or collar or fabric might change, but the simple pant and jacket stays, in essence, the same, and has been the same for a hundred years. What’s always fascinated me about a suit is— the outfit lacks all utility besides creating an elevated appearance for business. It is a uniform, a marker of status, and on the left end of my closet, I’ve dedicated the top rack

99 to matched sets of two-button and slacks, a schoolboy style one-button jacket, even a tuxedo.

The first suit I’d ever worn was cheap navy blue and too tight in the armpits. My parents had met in the Mormon single’s branch but stopped going sometime after Mary was born. When my father left us with a mass of credit card debt and a foreclosed house, my mom refused to go on welfare, but church charity was something she could take with less shame. She’d always been conservative in that way, believing that community with god is somehow viable in a way that charity based in government is not. She started taking the three of us to the branch in White Oak. This was when we lived in that two bedroom in Wheaton, my sister and I splitting the master bedroom while my mom slept on a twin in the other. I was about to turn eight, the age that Mormons get baptized, and she said I needed something special to wear for the ceremony. For church I had a blue shirt I tucked and belted into a pair of pleated khakis that she’d hemmed herself. Looking back, I don’t know why she went out of her way to get the suit. It was not uncommon for other kids in my ward to wear their normal Sunday best to the pre-Baptism ceremony, but then again, those kids had a rotating set of miniature clip on ties and matching belts, different colored garments for the change in seasons. My mom insisted we look for something at Good Will, and by the third one, she settled on the suit I would outgrow not even a year later. I’d stood in front of the three-panel mirror as she tugged on the back flaps, adjusting the shoulder pads about me.

She’d been working for the FDA as a secretary, and it was a federal holiday, so while my sister went to school, she picked me up before lunch. It was so rarely just the

100 two of us. Since she’d filed the divorce papers, the three of us were bound together in our routine as a family. Every trip to the grocery store, every errand, each Sunday at church, we loaded into our set stations in that Suzuki Sidekick with its window plastic torn and retaped, Mary in the front seat, me buckled in behind her, my mother at the wheel. When

I got into the car, I instinctively put the seat down to climb into the back, and my mom called me silly as she pat the worn passenger cushion.

My mother was a tall, pale woman. She’d told me her father had been over six- three, said this is where I got my height. Her blood was British, but her family had been in America long enough that she identified as nothing more than proper Carolinian. At eight, I was stick-thin, and she seemed so huge to me in a way I found comforting. My mother, the silent giant, how she used to crouch down to look me in the eye. In the thrift store, she asked me how the suit felt. The fabric stretched across my back whenever I bent forward, but she told me not to fidget—stillness leads to comfort, and comfort is the foundation for confidence. I asked her if it looked right, and she said I was born to wear it. When we were at the checkout, her first card was declined, and I can’t unsee the precious and gutted look she gave the other as she handed it to the cashier, as if the card itself was the last thing she owned.

She let me wear the blazer out of the store. In the car, I discovered its liner pocket.

I’d wanted to put something in it, so I took the free-lunch ticket from my pants to replace it by my breast. My mom asked me what I was doing, and when I told her, her tone ignited, and she said I couldn’t afford to lose that. When it came to issues of money or food she had this wild edge of anger in her eyes, her face reddening, the yellowing ends

101 of her back teeth showing as she scolded my poor behavior. We didn’t speak the rest of the trip home, and I remember trying to dissuade her mood by telling her it was okay, that this ticket was extra. She shook her head, not understanding, and I said I hadn’t used it that day. She said, ‘You didn’t eat lunch?’ and I told her that she picked me up the period before.

Seated at the head of our kitchen table, she put the heel of her palm against her forehead and let out a sound I didn’t yet recognize as a whimper. I was too young to know that those school meals were guaranteed, and that I’d missed one meant she had to provide for me with means she didn’t, at that moment, have. I remember watching her root through the cabinets, searching for something that might constitute a meal. Finally, from the freezer, she removed a box of fried clams, the colorful and name-brand packaging so different from the generic labelling on all the groceries we picked up from the church food bank. I’m still not sure where they came from, but I know she’d secreted them away for herself—my mother always had a vocal love of seafood. She heated them in the oven, and sat with me while I ate. The salt and brine of the clams on my tongue as I sat across from her in my blazer felt pure and tender. Careful not to mess my clothing, I swallowed one after another. When I was full, she picked through the remaining few on my plate, used her nails to pinch the breadcrumbs to her mouth. She said, ‘Was that good, honey?’ The grease in my throat felt like love. She told me to go put my new clothing away, and I gave her a hug and a kiss on the way to my room. It’s cruel to know she must’ve been able to smell the clams on my breath, that hint of delicacy so rare in her life. The ocean was a couple hours away. I wonder if she ever had a chance to taste it.

102

After a moment standing in front of the window, I became aware of how narcissistic I appeared, adjusting myself in my reflection. As I walked deeper into

Georgetown facing the wind, the length of my side-part flapping with a passing breeze, I assessed the weaknesses in my work wardrobe, deciding a new suit would be an overreaction, but maybe some ties, some varied pocket squares to tweak each outfit could help. I passed in front of Barneys, stopping for a moment to consider entering, and in doing so, I made eye contact with the woman unlocking the door. I’d always been apathetic about this store. They carried a lot of the brands I liked, but many other

European companies I didn’t know or trust the quality of, and so I only went when I needed something faster than I could order online and occasionally when I was curious about the fit of a garment I would later buy elsewhere. But I was particularly curious that morning, or maybe it was more of a defeated feeling—wanting, suddenly, guidance in a portion of my life that I’d been in control of for so long.

The woman, Olivia, taught English at a private school, but in the summer and holiday breaks, she buoyed her income as a personal stylist for the store. I told her I was looking for new accenting accessories for my formal attire, and she complimented my outfit. She said, ‘It is quite nice that you know exactly what you want. It’s too early in the day for a dawdler.’

For a while, we were alone in the store, and she walked me through the men’s section, asking after my desired color profiles, about my tastes, my avoidances, uncertainties. I picked through ties fanned out across the display, saying, ‘I feel like silk is coming back.’

103

‘Did it ever really go anywhere?’

I pursed my lips, holding up an olive tie with small, maroon diamonds patterned across it. Folding it across my forearm, I gathered a few more then stood in front of the mirror, dangling each color under my collar. When I had settled on three, I set the rest back in their places on the shelf. Olivia commented on my prowess, moving about the store with confidence, how I reorganized the items I’d unsettled. She said, ‘You know, we do hire holiday help, if you are interested.’ Against my instincts, I didn’t flirt with her as I checked out, didn’t comment on her A-line skirt or split-back , her kitten heel.

Instead, I leaned against the counter, filling out the application and inquiring about how flexible my availability needed to be. I’d just pulled into my driveway when the manager called to schedule an interview, and like that I was back on the Metro, back in the winter air, finding comfort in the movement, the distraction. I’d spent autumn encumbered by dissatisfaction. Having no time to worry, again and again, this idea of Elle felt like I was finally catching my breath. I knew I was still carrying the weight, but to heft it to the side and move forward was liberating, and better still, I felt stronger with each foot I relearned how to place beneath me.

#

Our house had been in a state of disrepair since we moved in—the bathrooms thirty years from an update with drains prone to clogging, the tile in the kitchen came up in the heat.

Every time it rained, the upstairs smelled sour, as if mold lined the back of the drywall.

104

But for the three of us, the price had always been worth the low standard of living. We’d been getting notices in the mail for months with unsettling words like ‘Eviction’ and ‘Tax

Evasion’ in bold print, but we figured they were scams and threw them in the trash. Our landlord was part of a managerial company and not the owner of the house—when we brought the notices up with him, he told us to disregard them, to keep paying rent, that everything was fine. It wasn’t until notices of auction started arriving in the spring that we did some research and found out the owner hadn’t paid taxes on the property for years, and after a recent court ruling, it was being sold. Jerome’s mom worked in real estate, and she told us to save up and wait for the notice of eviction—we were fine until then. We debated whether to keep sending checks to the landlord, and Thump said we should skip a month, feel it out.

Coming home from work, I flinched when I opened the mailbox, expecting a letter from the new owner telling us to leave, or a notice from the realtor to pay them our late dues. But on April 1st, a full month after the house had been sold to a bank in NY, a month after we stopped paying rent, we hadn’t heard from anyone. We kept waiting for something to go wrong, and when it didn’t, we had some friends over to grill and drink

Natty Boh, a party for our new life as squatters.

In early May of 2014, the chill of a cold spring had broken like a fever, the air brightening with heat and never dipping back. At the end of the night, when everyone left and Andy had already gone to lay in Thump’s bed, the three of us gathered the empties into a trash bag and picked at the leftover hotdogs and hamburgers already forming a layer of grease on the plate. Jerome asked Thump what he was going to spend his

105 newfound wealth on, and Thump replied, ‘Rent.’ He told us that Andy and he were saving up, that they were getting a place in Baltimore by the end of the summer.

I said, ‘Well, you’ll always have a room here.’ We patted him on his shoulder and said we were happy for him, but the final bit of levity had deflated out of the night, and we threw tinfoil on the meat and went to bed.

It’d been six months since I started at Barneys, and this gathering in our rent-less home had been the first time I’d consumed more than a couple drinks after a shift. For the first half of the year, I committed myself to working both jobs to the best of my ability, not letting my long-term commitment to the office or the financial stability it provided undercut my ability to sell, and in return, I kept my lengthened hours from affecting my performance of Robert E’s essential tasks. To preempt my bad behavior, I deleted my online dating accounts, only went out with women from the store who left me their numbers. Olivia cut her hours back to four days a month when the school year started, but we went to get drinks every now and again, flirting through the end of the night but going our separate ways to sleep. At the beginning of the summer, my hours got cut back to two shifts a week to help support the full-time employees through the slow season, and the reintroduction of free time in my schedule created space for my habitual loose behavior to creep back like an itch—lying in bed on a night off, unable to sleep and curious how many new people had populated Tinder in the past six months. ‘

Before I let myself slip back into filling my evenings with a series of uncommitted encounters, Olivia told me she was throwing a party, told me to bring the guys. Her apartment was in Columbia Heights, two blocks from the rowhouse I lived in

106 with my ex, back when I was finishing my degree. When we showed up, her friends looked like they’d already weathered a full night of drinking, so the guys and I caught up by shotgunning beers in the kitchen, discarding the punctured aluminum with the dirty dishes in the sink. Olivia said she was, in her heart, a tidy person, but the combination of a turbulent work schedule, and her roommate with a penchant for partying kept her from her nature.

She said, ‘I surrendered to the mess. It’s easier that way.’

I’d told Jerome and Thump about Olivia as a means to hide the fact I was still thinking, constantly, about Elle. I wanted to dissuade them of the notion I was lashing out, that I was spiraling. One of Olivia’s friends was drunk and crying on the bedroom floor, and when she went to attend to her, Jerome kept egging me on, calling me

Casanova, saying tonight should be the night I make a move. And it’s not that I didn’t have a thing for her. Olivia had a certain modesty about her appearance which I found appealing—a mass of curly hair pinned behind her head, square shoulders and hips accenting a pinched waist, all of which she kept subdued in an assortment of conservative, almost androgynous pairings of collared shirts and skinny jeans, loose and wool . Beyond that, when we went for drinks, our conversations had this unraveling effect, one topic leading to the next and the next before, almost incidentally, circling back. Two twelve-dollar cocktails in her company felt like they passed too quickly for their worth. I was hesitant to push our relationship beyond that casual friendship because it felt like a turn I couldn’t retrace—if I committed to someone else, how could I defend my feelings for Elle as genuine? I didn’t want to believe life

107 could be complicated in that way, that love and trust could be potent for more than one person at once. I wanted it to be either pure and undiluted or false. I wanted to believe

Elle and I had both spent too much time being dishonest to make anything real work.

Later in the night, Andy got off work and Thump kept edging closer to the door. I was standing in a circle discussing when we would leave, and Olivia said I was welcome to crash on the couch if I wanted to stay out. Jerome winked at me, amused by the offer, and in his buzzed state, he wasn’t quick enough to sneak it by her unnoticed. I said I didn’t want to intrude, and she put the tab from her beer in my breast pocket, said not to be ridiculous. Her friend had pulled up from her crying fit, was smoking cigarettes by the window, and Olivia went to her.

Thump shook his head, ‘I really don’t know how you do it.’

I could feel the beer in my neck, my shoulders. I knuckled him on the arm, said,

‘Am I that unlovable?’

‘The way you date, it just seems exhausting.’

We crowded the foyer, our shoulders forming a triangle, and the rest of the party was just a murmur at our backs. I threw an arm over Jerome, said, ‘We can’t all be in love, Thump.’ They said they were going to leave me to it, and I told them I’d catch up with them at the house. I was hitting that station of intoxication when it feels like the negative ceiling comes off my thoughts and everything is friendly and full of potential.

Someone passed around a fifth of Bulleit, and we sang 90’s rock into the night. I wanted to throw fire on that feeling, so I pulled double from the bottle, and it wasn’t until I woke up on the couch some lost hour before the sunrise, my pits and crotch hot with sweat, that

108

I realized I’d pushed past the boundary of my liver. I peeked through the cracked door into Olivia’s room but couldn’t make her out under the mass of blankets on her bed.

In the morning, she woke me by placing a cup of coffee on the table by my head.

She sat on the rim of the couch, and I was pinned between her hip and the back cushion.

It felt good, the warmth of her against a portion of my side, and when she asked how I was managing, I said I never really got hangovers. I just felt a little worn out. She told me there wasn’t a difference, and I rested my forearm over my eyes, blocking out the sunlight tilting through the living room blinds. The steam from the coffee carried its scent across me, the acidic aroma causing my stomach growl. Though I couldn’t see her, Olivia placed her palm on my belly, and that small contact was as potent as a kiss in its intimacy. She said, ‘Let’s go get some breakfast.’

‘I don’t know if I’m ready to move.’

‘I’ve got food, but I’m not cooking.’

We ordered Chinese and spent the afternoon working through the ache with the help of a half-flat bottle of champagne she had leftover from earlier in the week.

Absently, we watched television, positioning ourselves on the couch in different arrangements, a head on a shoulder, a lap, then reversed. We let the television fill the gaps in our conversation, let the day slip by us, and her company was easy and comfortable. It wasn’t until late in the evening when I was standing by the door that we kissed. I can’t remember what we were talking about as she assembled my leftovers in a plastic bag, but as she handed them to me, I leaned in for a hug, and instead of turning her head to occupy the gap between my neck and shoulder, she tilted her face and pressed her

109 lips to my dimple. She felt light in my arms as I wrapped them around her waist and carried her to the bedroom, how it surprised me in contrast to her height. And after, when our clothes crumpled together like villages on the landscape of her bed, she said, ‘You don’t have to go.’ I’m not sure I was really wrapped up in the moment, so to speak, but I knew that being allowed get closer to Olivia after knowing her for some time felt important. Or maybe it was that I wasn’t thinking, even latently, about Elle. Her skin against mine wrapped under the warmth of the duvet was like burrowing toward to the surface to reach, finally, fresh air, and god, it felt good to breathe.

#

At the end of that Summer in 2014 when Thump and Andy moved into an apartment in

Charles Village, I began seeing Olivia exclusively. I spent half the week at her place, and when winter came around, Jerome said, ‘You know, it’s not right that you’re gallivanting around DC and leaving me to rot with this house.’ He was kidding, but I could tell he resented me and Thump for choosing to move on without him, abandoning the household we built in the glory of our forgotten band. The timbre in his voice had this bitter edge as he raised a bottle of craft beer from the high-end liquor store he worked at. I told him he was always welcome to come hangout, and he waved his free hand, tried to reassure me he was just kidding. Though we weren’t paying rent, the house was a sieve for electric and water. The utility bill we split was always exorbitant. I wanted to keep my budget as fat as possible, and it’s not that I didn’t care about him as well. I started having Olivia up

110 more often to make up for the months I spent away. That’s most of the reason we started dating officially—after making the trek up 29 a few times, she began to get restless with the situation. The night before I asked her out, so to speak, she said, ‘I’m not going to keep driving thirty minutes into the county if this is just a fling.’

What’s important to know about Jerome is that he is an exceptional musician crippled by self-doubt. Given the opportunity to achieve some small amount of success at the risk of even the slightest embarrassment, Jerome had consistently chosen inaction.

Back when we were in a band, I spent most of my time after practice trying to convince him to let me book more gigs at smaller venues. I wanted to build a fan base organically not wait for interest to appear. Performing for Jerome was a matter of anxiety bandaged with booze. When we did take a show, we had to make sure he didn’t have more than three before we went on. The same pressure that hindered him was, to me, a thrill—an opportunity to sweat it out under the stage lights, heel stomped, jaw jutted. We weren’t anything groundbreaking, but our music had a groove you could move to, and after we stepped back into the crowd, even the people who hadn’t come to see us told us how much they enjoyed it. Thump and I would try and flirt with the girls from the scene we admired. Jerome returned to drink. It didn’t matter how well it went, he was hard on himself—every slightly misremembered lyric, every slip of intonation in a solo lick. The way he played guitar made me feel like I didn’t know a damn thing. There was this smoothness to his transitions, a cleverness to his chord choice. If he couldn’t play something, by the next time you saw him, he’d have mastered it. Eventually, our bass player got antsy about how much time we wasted humoring Jerome’s insecurity, and

111 when he quit, Jerome said it was best if we went on hiatus. With the band no longer acting as a distraction, I went back to college.

At times, as the year faded through autumn into a temperate winter, it was like

Thump never actually moved out. He’d known Jerome since they were kids, had come to music together. When Thump’s mom passed away when he was just eighteen, he moved in with Jerome’s family, crashing on their basement couch until the two of them could afford a place of their own out past the suburbs in a small town off 70. I wasn’t surprised that Thump came over every couple nights whenever Andy was with her friends, or whenever the two of them just wanted something outside the city to do. That’s the funny thing about the suburbs for people like me—while you’re there the weight of consumerism and convenience over culture has a sterilizing affect, but after you move away, you miss the small respites you managed to find in the corners of that dull life. The barely remarkable dives, the mom-and-pop coffee shops employing the people who, like you, tripped on the way to an education and middle-income job, the old carry-out with the decent, and more importantly, cheap food you relied on—all of which provided no interest, only relief, and when you leave, you will miss that feeling of finding a fraction of the life you want while surrounded by the one you don’t.

After spending months trying unsuccessfully to get Jerome onto an online dating site, I persuaded Thump to help me, arguing that finding Jerome a person to invest himself into might help him do the same for himself. Thump was an understanding man, patient, accepting of people for their flaws—if I left it up to them, Jerome might spend his entire life alone while Thump supported his passivity. It took a couple weeks of

112 prodding to get him to help out, but I convinced him that finding Jerome someone meant we could see him with our significant others without him being the odd-man-out, and when we needed space, we could have it. This tension was false though—the inconveniences that snared me were completely inconsequential. So what that Jerome wanted us around? It’s hard to know he simply missed us. That’s what I wanted to fix, even if I spent a real effort putting space between the three of us.

It started with a couple blind attempts in which Andy, Thump, or Olivia brought along a single friend, and after eating or drinking as a group, we stepped back conversationally to watch for a reaction between them, as if it were a science experiment.

Thump asked why I never brought a friend from the office, and I told him none of them were single. In reality, I didn’t know many women as friends who I hadn’t already pursued. It was around this time I realized that besides the guys I’d lived with, my closest friends were women I’d slept with or wanted to sleep with. In December, I got a cartographical tattoo of Taiwan on my tricep, the word Island underneath. I clung, socially, to Olivia, maintaining our relationship with a focus I hadn’t given a partner in years.

Since my mother passed when I was twenty-one, I’ve spent Christmas eating

Chinese food and watching movies in my room. Mary always invites me to spend it with her husband’s family, and occasionally I’ll tell her I have other plans, or else I’ll just ignore her texts the few weeks leading up to it, explaining later that I got busy. Olivia had gone home to Richmond, and I was thankful she hadn’t asked me to come. Really, it felt good to be slow, to let go of my responsibilities temporarily.

113

That year, Jerome’s family went to Puerto Rico, and he opted out, saying he had to work. I knew it was because he couldn’t afford a week off. Over the years since the band broke up, Jerome had told me that the mundane routine of regular jobs made him miss even the anxiety of performing. I was glad to see him getting back into music, but annoyed it took some other responsibility to find his passion, that I’d wasted so much of my time waiting for that change before. He’d been playing in a wedding band recently, doing backup vocals and guitar, standing in the shadows in the rear of the stage, and though this padded his finances, I knew he had lingering debts as well. The three of us had borrowed every dime of our college tuitions. When Jerome came down from his room mid-morning, I was already on the couch with a bottle of champagne chilling in a water pitcher full of ice. We ordered lo mein and moo shu and egg rolls and wonton soup, watched Die Hard and Home Alone, only left the couches to piss. When Thump showed up sometime after nine, we’d napped off the midday booze. Jerome asked him how it was over at Andy’s, and he said, ‘It was good. Just too many people.’ He took a breath, and as

I handed him a beer, he seemed to notice, for the first time, the wreckage of carry-out containers, bent napkins, and empty bottles populating the table. He said, ‘It looks like you boys have had quite the day.’

Jerome said, ‘Merry Christmas,’ and there was something about the genuine cheerfulness in his tone that I found funny. Or maybe it was that he had entered my ritual and not been repulsed, and that small acceptance filled me with so much liveliness that I was overcome with a fit of laughter.

114

Andy spent the rest of the holiday weekend at her parents in PA, so Thump decided to crash at our place. Friday night, Jerome said it’d been a while since we went out, just the three of us, and I offered to drive us to the bar, to drink slow so I could get us to and from. I didn’t tell them I wanted to break out of our suburb, to drive into the

District for a night spent in the pulse of the city. It wasn’t until I merged onto 29 going south that they looked up from their phones and realized we weren’t heading to one of the shitty bars that circled the mall. Jerome groaned at the thirty-minute ride, complained about the five-dollar minimum drink price in DC, but we stopped at a beer store for some tallboys and I put on old albums that used to get us hyped—Death From Above 1979,

Bloc Party, Convoj.

Before we crossed over 495, we had the windows cracked, letting the freezing holiday air fill our singing lungs. I spent the fifteen dollars to park my car in a garage just to avoid the inconvenience of a random DC parking ticket. We shot pool at Black Cat, drank our way up U Street until we happened upon The Velvet Lounge—the dive with a stage upstairs that we played our first show on. It felt like the night suddenly had an actual purpose, and I pulled back the front door to a mass of bodies coated in thick shadows, somehow darker than the night we entered from. The lights in the room were out and shoving through the crowd of bodies in the dark made it feel, to me, like every beating heart on the dance floor was connected to the Latin rhythm kicking out the speakers. Thump or Jerome were never the most enthusiastic dancers, especially when

Andy wasn’t around to rile them toward the carefree sort of fun that I often sought, but the unlit room provided a momentary safety that let us move together with the mass

115 around us. The bartender used her cellphone to find the round of DC Brau’s Jerome ordered. I took a piss in the bathroom aided by a lighter I borrowed from a stranger. With the floor trembling below my worn-in oxfords, I could’ve moved to the music through last call, but when the guys got tired, we went down the street to a new beer bar on the corner that took the place of a coffee shop whose name, as we approached its replacement, I could not recall. It was just before one, and we leaned into the counter talking about women in the club and remembering when. I said, ‘You know, it’s nights like tonight when we should be finding Jerome someone to date. When it’s just us.’

He said, ‘Shit, Andy is a better wingman than the two of you combined.’

Thump jutted his bottom lip out before pulling a sip from his pint glass. ‘She used to try and set me up with people back before. She always had an eye out.’ He raised his index finger, waving it back and forth over the bar. We turned on our stools, put our elbows on the curled edge of the rail, facing the room.

That night in that non-descript bar, lost in the ever accumulating series of days devoted to work, it felt like the mystery of life cleared away and the world set its gaze on me. I’d been staring at a scuff on the toe of my shoe and how, if I’d worn my new bluchers as I’d originally planned, a mark as deep as this one would’ve filled me with the sort of agitation that interrupts my entire night—every thought burdened with the latent desire to buff and polish and repair. But this pair of Alden Shortwings had been the first

I’d ever bought—black stitching on a wood heel. Though they were loose in the toe, they fit well with thick socks in the winter. The years of wear had accumulated with nicks in the stitching, scratches and fades along the heel creating a rugged and earned look, and so

116 this new mark along my big toe only added to the handsomeness of the surrendered leather. Because my attention was at my feet, my thumb rubbing the rough edge of the scuff, I was slow to respond to Jerome’s voice as he said, ‘God damn,’ watching a group of women enter the bar.

The lofted room had a decent crowd in it, though maybe thin for the weekend, but

I didn’t make an effort to bend my neck to get a better look. When Jerome turned back on his stool, we instinctively mimicked him, and I sipped hard on my beer, noticing I was half a pint back. There was a stripe of mirror above the liquor shelf, and the collars and chins of this new group filled it as they approached to order. Thump was never one to comment on a woman’s appearance, but when Jerome said, ‘Lord—the one in the white shirt,’ I saw him raise his eyebrows, saw him dip his head in agreement. I downed my beer and rested it on the counter, watched the dregs of foam form a ring and slide to the bottom of the glass. Our conversation became suddenly tongueless as they settled in a few stools down, hanging their jackets and purses on the hooks below the bar.

When I decided to glance over, I didn’t see her first. I saw the three older women, tall, sharp-jawed and clad from blouse to heel in the close-cropped, thin stripped style of

White House: Black Market’s winter line. And then there was Elle, draping a Norse

Projects parka over the seatback, her white T tucked into tapered Japanese selvedge. I almost didn’t recognize her—ombre hair now a solid coffee brown, a thinning about her jawline revealing a steady weight loss. In the refracted light of the room, the slight hairs on her cheekbones turned soft white, and my thoughts confined themselves to that

117 morning in her room before she left, the look on her face as I fell into her, that momentary closeness.

Though I’d only looked over for a few seconds, I felt a sudden embarrassment as if I’d been staring, so I decided not to greet her unless she noticed me, turning instead back to the counter, waiting for the bartender to realize we needed new drinks. I ordered the round, staring into the amber liquid to quell the fear that because of my forced ignorance to her presence, we would somehow miss each other, or worse, we might inescapably make eye contact, and rather than acknowledge my company, she would return to her conversation, disregarding me until the end of their drink, until she left. And what would I have done when she settled her coat over her shoulders and made her way to the door? What would I have said to break the quiet we had suspended between us? I knew I relied on countering—come to me and I can move, but forced to set myself in motion, I’m not sure I know how. When we were teenagers, my sister told me that, in this way, I’d make a mediocre ghost—all linger, no haunt. It’s so easy to recall the warmth of

Elle’s palm as she took my hand in the Newseum, leading me to and from the dance floor, up the elevator, the weight of her hips in my arms as I raised her to the railing. The three of us sat facing the taps, Thump on his phone, Jerome studying the condensation on his glass. The lighting in the bar projected from industry bulbs hung on brass cables, and as I followed it up to the ceiling and into a network of other like wiring, I leaned back from my roommates and into the standing space behind our section.

It had been over a year since that park bench two Metro stops over, a year since

I’d let myself be held up by her presence, so when she looked over at us and slid off her

118 stool, it felt like my face was betraying me as it turned from stoic to smile. I’d wanted to hold onto just a touch of the lingering hurt I’d felt when she dismissed me, wanted to use this to level out the dynamic of our illusory relationship, to give me some control, but with each step she took closing the distance between us, I felt these plans waver and fall away. Jerome and Thump half-turned as I stood up to face her, righting the waist of my jeans about my hips. She had on black, side-zipped boots, the kind with the sharp toe and a slight heel, and as she stopped in front of me, I could hear the hard leather sole knock on the floor as she rolled back from the balls of her feet. She said, ‘You’re back.’ The way her hands raised up to briefly occupy the distance between us, her eyebrows bouncing to force surprise upon her expression—I could tell she was either nervous or just uncertain of what to expect from my mood.

I’d managed to get my face back to its usual pinched appearance, my cheeks taut, forehead narrowed. I said, ‘I didn’t go anywhere.’

‘I meant DC. You’re back in DC.’

To my left, I could see directly into Thumps ear, the curve of tan skin framed by his black hair catching shine from the lights. ‘For the night. Have to schlepp home later.’

She nodded slowly as if she’d just relearned how to move her neck, her mouth agape almost mockingly. I didn’t notice she wasn’t wearing her glasses until I looked her directly in the eye and could see the faint circle of contacts around her irises. She said,

‘Still in the county.’

‘I’m less embarrassed by it now.’

119

‘That’s really very brave.’ As she spoke, she reached up and corrected the fold of my collar. It must’ve turned in while I was dancing, but I couldn’t feel it until she turned it right-side out, the twill grazing my neck. After, she rested her palms on my chest for a second, and I didn’t move, didn’t want to scare her touch away by responding to it. A pause in our conversation arose, and with it, I could feel the anxiety radiating from

Thump and Jerome as they pretended they weren’t listening in, that they weren’t paying attention. Jerome was beside me, and to get his attention, I put my elbow in the meat of his back. When I introduced them to Elle, she said, ‘Oh, the band guys.’ All three of us slipped looks containing varying levels of wonderment—the guys surprised they were already known by an attractive stranger, and myself pleased she remembered their names from the small anecdotes I’d told her.

The bartender came and set the mixed drink Elle had ordered in front of her, and in return, Elle slid her check card across the laminated counter.

I said, ‘These are my roommates.’

She said, ‘Are you boys enjoying your night in the big city.’

They turned on their stools, and the four of us together made a misshapen circle. I said, ‘Elle is a snob.’

‘I’m only teasing.’

I could tell from their expressions that Thump and Jerome were debating what they should say, looking at each other, then me for guidance. I put my face to the beer, and finally, Jerome said, ‘Oh wait, you’re Elle. The Elle?’

‘I’m not sure how I should respond to that,’ she said. ‘What’ve you heard?’

120

The guys turned to me, loosing empty vowel sounds that made Elle laugh. I swallowed my sip and gestured at her drink with mine, saying, ‘I thought you didn’t drink?’

‘Are you my dad now?’ she said, holding her glass, with both hands, to her chest.

‘What I said was drinking was boring. Which it is.’ She shrugged. ‘Sometimes it’s nice to be bored.’

Jerome raised a pint into the circle, saying, ‘Here here,’ his voice breaking loud over the mood music. For the next half hour, we had a conversation in which little was accomplished—Elle learning meager things about our old band, about the quotidian details of Thump or Jerome’s life, and in return, she told us about the recent changes in her work, her position as an event coordinator for a not-for-profit hospice center. At first,

I’d been pleased the guys got to meet her, that they had a concrete image of this person whom I’d worn their patience thin talking about. But as last call crept closer, as her friends down the bar greeted us on their way out the door, I ached to have even a minute alone with Elle, to speak with her in the candid language that I missed, free of the secrecy that deluded our relationship simply by being out in public. I realized, watching the inflections of her face as Thump and Jerome spoke with her, that as much as I resented our coupling only existing between her apartment’s walls, unseen, I missed being confined there with her even more. It must’ve been this internal tension that kept me relatively quiet, only chiming in to smooth out rough transitions during their conversation, saying things like, ‘A lot of Jerome’s family is from Florida,’ or, ‘Thump, you should see Elle’s record collection. Puts yours to shame.’

121

Sometime after two, the lights in the room brightened, revealing a pattern of trampled cocktail napkins stuck to the hardwood floor. The bar backs carried bus tubs of dirty glasses toward the sink in the back corner, and the four of us held on to the bottom halves of our drinks, now warmed by our palms. Jerome asked Elle why she hadn’t invited her friends over, and Elle said they were hardly that close, colleagues really. She said, ‘Trust me, those aren’t the kind of women you want to meet,’ strumming the underside of her nose with the middle knuckle of her index finger.

Thump said, ‘Coke heads?’

We laughed, and as a smile birthed wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, she said,

‘Nancy, maybe. But no, they’re just real stuck up.'

I said, ‘How can you work in hospice with that kind of attitude?’

Elle shrugged and set her glass on the bar, picking her coat up off the chair back and draping it over her forearm. I wondered if, as she lifted her arms into its sleeves, her midriff would peek out from under her T-shirt. She said, ‘It’s kind of a shame. They do good work, but they know they do it. I guess it’s too easy to buy into your own holiness.’

I wanted to drag the night out, said I was too tipsy to drive, suggesting we get food somewhere open late. I said, ‘I’m sure you have to get back, but you’re more than welcome to come.’ It caught me off guard when she squared up with me, taking a half- step forward, looking me directly in the eye. She said, ‘I’ve got nowhere to be.’

Huddled in our , we turned off U Street, away from the foot traffic emptying out of the clubs and restaurants, onto a thinner road whose houses had Christmas lights on the gutters, the bulbs blotting out the cloudy night with soft greens and reds, the

122 occasional cream white. Jerome and Elle walked on the sidewalk and Thump and I were in the street. I nudged him on the shoulder, told him I’d noticed he’d been quiet tonight, and he just said he was tired. He had on a peacoat from the Navy thrift that Andy had picked out for him, and as he turned the collar up around his throat, he said, ‘I’m not trying to be somber. It’s good to be out with you guys.’

We didn’t have a destination in mind, the four of us walking, a row of parked cars between us. When I asked Thump if everything was alright, he said, ‘Nah it’s nothing.’

The heat from the cashmere lining of my gloves had all but faded. Thump said,

‘Sometimes when Andy’s not around, I get lost thinking about what my life would be like if things hadn’t panned out.’ When he spoke about their relationship coming together, he made a loose fist and tapped his knuckles on the crotch of his jeans, an old superstitious joke we had—knocking wood when there wasn’t any around. ‘I mean, I spent so much time waiting and hoping that when she got back from Korea, the timing would line up.

Like, I stopped going on dates a few months before because I knew I wanted to be single when she got here.’

He was looking at his shoes, so I did the same. I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

The O’s cap he had pulled low over his brow hid his eyes in shadow. After a moment, he shrugged, saying, ‘I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done. This is fun—the drinking and dancing and whatever—it’s still fun. I’m glad I came out tonight.

But I can already feel myself growing out of it.’

‘We’re all getting a little older.’

123

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But if I wasn’t with Andy, what would I do, you know? It’s bugging me out that I can’t see the other life, the one where she took another contract and went back overseas.’

We’d fallen back a little bit, and up ahead, I watched Elle trying to explain something to Jerome, using her hands to shape her point. I said, ‘Who knows. Maybe that’s what romance is. A lack of responsibility.’

Thump chuckled, raising his head up, all the light around us playing on his features. He turned to me to say something when Jerome called back, asking what the issue was. Whatever Thump was about to tell me got pushed away by the interjection, and I said, ‘Thump’s just complaining to me that he’s too sober.’

We came together at the next intersection and Jerome told Thump he should’ve chugged another one with him at last call, even though it’d been me breaking in to say that was a bad idea, recalling all the nights spent on the side of the highway, one of us throwing up. Thump said, ‘I’m not that drunk.’

We threw out a couple ideas on where to grab food, and Elle said, ‘If you did want to have another, I know a place.’

On the corner, I hailed a cab, climbing into the back alongside Elle, my hip to hers. Thump had offered her shotgun, but she insisted he take it since he was half a foot taller than the rest of us. She gave the driver a cross street near Shaw, and the guys started talking about a show coming up at 930 Club, their breath fogging the passenger side windows.

124

Elle and I hadn’t spoken to each other exclusively since she’d greeted me, and in the backseat, we just sat as the cab rocked our shoulders together, waiting for the other to end the streak of silence. While Jerome was going on about whether this band he liked would actually be good enough live to justify the ticket cost, I looked across the backseat toward him and met Elle’s glance halfway.

I said, ‘How’re you?’

Her head swayed, lips pinching and releasing as if my question was something she was trying to taste. I wanted to know what had changed—what in her life had come apart that allowed her to see me so willingly now. Or maybe it was that she’d finally married Christian, and the security that bond provided in name allowed for a less constricted social life. In the dark body of the taxi, I searched her hands for a glint of metal, but when I found them, interlocked at the fingers around her knee, they were gloved in knit wool.

She said, ‘I dropped my phone in the toilet this summer.’

At this, I cringed, asking her how she fished it free from the bowl. She laughed and I said, ‘Does the rice trick work for toilet water? I mean, I’m sure it might dry it out, but I couldn’t use it. It would never be clean again.’

‘I just bought a new one.’ Her laughter faded to smile, to simper, and repose. ‘I didn’t have my numbers backed up.’

I’d never lost or broken a cellphone myself, but unthinkingly I said, ‘Ah. That’s always a pain.’

‘You were in my phone as Moby.’

125

When she turned to pin me down with a look, the way she always did when she wanted to make sure I understood her underlying point, all I wanted to hear her say was that’s why I didn’t call you or I had no way of getting ahold of you, anything to show me she had a desire for my company, a desire she was willing to submit to. She said just,

‘I’m surprised I didn’t run into you earlier.’

Because I’d come to know her through uncertainty, not knowing the specifics to her life felt normal. We arrived at a street that looked like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be hip or an industrial park, half the businesses boarded up, the other half newly renovated. I put the fare on my card, and Elle took a moment to get her bearings, alternating her attention between the map on her phone and the street sign beside us. The guys had turned their conversation to something about an off-rhythm in a song they’d been working on, and Thump was tapping meter on the thigh of his khakis.

I asked Elle if she meant Moby, like the DJ, said I wasn’t okay with that, and she said, ‘Jonah and the whale. Famous whales. Moby Dick. My phone is full of lovers secreted away behind associative pseudonyms.’

She expected me to shrink at this statement, to show some physical discomfort at her suggestion that knowing me was not unique, and even though I tried to laugh my way through it, to make like it hadn’t me squirm, a pained expression swept over my face for just the fraction of an instant. I turned to look back at Jerome who was singing the vocables of a melody while Thump tried to speak over him, bickering about the progression of it. In the time it took me to turn back, I considered the fact that, even if she was kidding, the idea of being inconsequential to her bothered me wholly, and in

126 recognizing this discomfort, I acquiesced to it, settling my mood in to something like neutral. We walked along the windows on the block of closed businesses—a bail bondsman, a tax clerk, a flower shop. It was late enough that even the neon lights had been turned off. Just before the next block, there was a Chinese restaurant, the bulletproof kind, with bars on the window and, I’m sure, an unmistakably sweet quality to all the dishes. As we passed it, she took me by the arm, leading me down the alley while the guys followed a ways back. Though we’d made the turn and arrived at a door out of view behind a dumpster, Elle kept her fingers in the ditch of my elbow. Her knuckles through her gloves made a muffled knock on the metal door, and after a second, a low voice called out from behind it, saying, ‘What up?’

The sign beside the door said Deliveries 8am-3pm, and in the middle of the worn metal, a peephole punctuated a dent. The guys were silent as they caught up, looking around, one whispering, ‘Where the fuck are we?’ and the other letting out a subdued laugh. Elle cupped her hands about her mouth and said toward the crevice in the door,

‘Cold tea.’

After a moment, the voice from inside asked how many, and when we told him four, he said to wait. In the distance, an ambulance siren skirted the roads around us.

Jerome asked Elle how she knew about this place, and she said her friend was sleeping with someone who helped run it. It took five or so minutes before the scrape of metal on metal sounded the door’s release, coming open just a crack, then the hinge groaned as it swung the rest of the way open to allow us to enter. I found out from the bartender the wait was part of the process—if you weren’t cool enough to have some patience, you

127 weren’t cool enough to come in. The room was only big enough for a few folding tables, a vinyl booth in the corner, a couch along one wall. A six-person bar butted up to the entrance of the kitchen. This space off the back of the restaurant used to be an office for the owner, but since he retired, his son turned it into his personal clubhouse. The door guy was the body building kind of Chinese, a tan five foot eight and bursting out a black polo. When we entered, he asked us if we were cops, and when we, flat-lipped, shook our heads, he thumbed us away. Two of the tables were populated by people who didn’t mind our presence, looking up a moment and then going back to their drinks, their conversations. A woman with graying hair flipped through the Times on one end of the couch, and seated against the opposite armrest, a man nearer my age read his phone and talked to her in Mandarin. At least I thought it was Mandarin—my experience differentiating between it and Cantonese had been quite limited. Besides the door guy, and the man and woman on the couch, the rest of the room didn’t appear to have a familial connection to the restaurant, which is my way of saying they weren’t Asian.

They looked like they just arrived—six packs of beer in plastic bags in the middle of the tables. On the one nearest the door, three older men in tieless suits and a woman in a bodycon dress were dealing a hand of Hearts. Though I couldn’t see a sound system, that popular Phoenix album from almost a decade earlier was playing, giving energy to the windowless room.

Elle led us to sit in the vacant stools in front of the bartender as he poured

Chartreuse into a tumbler, knocking the cans together to give the drink a hard shake, keeping his eyes on the makeshift counter that separated us, one sink to his right, the

128 assorted liquor on an old cabinet behind him. As we sat waiting to order, I took in the accumulating nature of the room, how there was no obvious design—mismatched chairs, no repeating glassware, as if all the portions of the room arrived out of convenience or availability. Even the bartender looked a little out of place, and winter scruff, blue eyes that didn’t fit the color wheel of the surrounding space. He poured the drink into a coupe, took it to the woman on the couch, and when he’d toweled his hands dry, he preempted asking us what we wanted by telling us the liquor price, by saying cash only.

When Elle ordered a Toronto, the bartender stopped and narrowed his eyes at her.

He said, ‘You’re Haylie’s friend, right?’ She said she was, and his demeanor softened, smiling while he mixed the drink, asking us how we washed up here. Elle said that Haylie had been telling her to come by, that she’d been meaning to but she wasn’t sure if it was even real. The bartender cringed a little, said, ‘It’s real, alright,’ nodding toward the group invested in their card game, flaring an eyebrow. Jerome chuckled, and the bartender pointed at me, asked what I was drinking, so I asked if he could make me a

Gold Rush. It was my cocktail of choice back then—the honey and citrus was pleasing even in the dead of winter. Jerome and Thump weren’t big into craft cocktails, making a point to order one of the bottled beers from the cooler. For a while, before the people at the tables finished their drinks and came up to the bar to order, we sat in congress with the bartender as he explained how barely made anything at this speakeasy, but the owner was the GM of his other bar, and closing here a few nights a week was a good favor to have, to cash in on later. He said he liked to keep his nocturnal sleep schedule consistent

129 through the week, and left to his own devices, he’d get into too much trouble. With our drinks distributed, he poured himself a Fernet and offered a cheers.

The salutations and swallowed liquor restarted the conversation. Elle’s stool was the closest to the wall, and I turned to her, my roommates at my back. We’d all draped our coats across the seatbacks, but Elle kept her parka on, pulling the collar up about her throat. Her scarlet lipstick had softened, rubbing off her lower lip onto the glass. She told me to catch her up, to tell her who I was, and as I related the details of my life, I was surprised at how many of them hadn’t changed—spending my week at Robert E.’s desk, living in the same house with the same guys, the fashion blogs, the rotating wardrobe. I told her I’d started picking up shifts at Barneys and she feigned interest at this, nodding once, pursing her lips.

I said, ‘Maybe I am just another boring thing.’

‘You sound comfortable.’

As the bartender mixed drinks, Jerome and Thump asked him about the liquors, about the process. While I considered what Elle had said, I listened in on the volleys of their conversation, Jerome asking about the measurements, the techniques used to differentiate one drink from another with similar ingredients. I could hear an edge in the bartender’s voice, not quite annoyance, something closer to disinterest. I said, ‘I don’t think it’s that. It’s just safe, really. It’s dependable.’

She asked if I was another young professional who missed adventure, and I asked her if she’d been reading Tinder profiles lately, which made her laugh, and there was security in hearing it, how it defused the seriousness implied by my unchanging lifestyle.

130

We stayed for two rounds, half the crowd in the room left around three-thirty, and when we were about to order the next drink, Jerome asked the bartender to make him his favorite cocktail, said he was willing to quit beer for a round. We watched as he lifted a rocks glass to the counter, scooped in ice and poured an eight count of Jameson, setting it on the bar. Jerome asked him if he was serious, and the bartender nodded, said that was what he drank.

Jerome said, ‘I thought you were into cocktails.’

‘That’s what I drink.’ The bartender had posted himself on his arms, hands on the counter. I knew Jerome had made a small offering by letting him pick his next drink, and for it to go in this unexpected way probably hurt his sensibilities, especially while drunk.

For one, long, moment no one said anything, and the two of them stared at the cup between them. The bartender reached to take it from the bar, but Jerome beat him to it, snatching it over his lap, spilling a little on the wood.

The bartender said, ‘Just being honest, man.’

Jerome pulled down half the whisky. Thump pat him on the shoulder and the bartender went to cleaning the bottles. Jerome finished the drink, and as Thump checked his face to make sure he was alright, he kept repeating under his breath, ‘It’s cool,’ but the levity had come out of the room, the night. At the end, after some minutes unfilled with conversation, when we’d settled up and got our coats on and buttoned, we all shook hands with the server and went toward the door. It was odd to me—the way the mood had wrecked itself over one small misunderstanding. Even if there’d been no maliciousness

131 implied by the gesture, Jerome took it like a slap on the cheek, and the rest of us let him, let his discomfort ripple out while we stood in its wake.

Outside, Jerome and Thump went to piss on the brick wall that dead ended the alley. I stood facing the road, and beside me, Elle tilted her head back, watching her breath coil into the night air. I asked her where she was staying, and she said her place wasn’t a far walk. I wanted her to invite me over, but I didn’t want her to think I was desperate for it. To ask about Christian felt uncouth, or dangerous considering the fragility of the night, how we’d just happened upon each other. Part of me was still hearing what she’d said to me in the park last winter, how she felt like her true self around me, as if I weren’t there. I said, ‘We could drop you off on our way out. Once we get back to my car.’

‘You don’t need to do all that. It’s not too far.’

‘It’s late.’

Stuffing her hands in her pockets, lowering her chin to her jacket collar, she said,

‘This is my neighborhood.’

The guys were heading back toward us, and I kept waiting for her to give me just one thing to parry so that I might find some way to reach her. Thump and Jerome passed us without breaking stride, and we followed them to the street. The drinks had settled into my blood, warming my face. In my stupor, I’d like to think I felt my heart beating unignorably in my ears, or that there was a pressure in my shoulders, some tension in the hairs on my neck to be the one to close the distance, but what I felt pulsing through me

132 with each step was desperation—that all I wanted was more time with her, and that was a small thing, and why couldn’t I have it?

We stood on the corner while Thump raised his hand, trying to hail a cab on a street where the only cars were parked. We must’ve been there for some time before a

Prius turned our way. Before climbing into the backseat, it felt like my knees might give out from standing so long in the cold. While Thump lingered in the street, Jerome hung back with Elle and me, and I didn’t want to be rude, but when we made eye contact, I made a face, prodding him with my pupils, maybe too stern, that I wanted to be alone.

The cab approached and I said it had been good to see her, and the look she gave me, her brown eyes turned black in the night, was one of disbelief, as if I’d been untoward. She said, ‘Is that it?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I want you to,’ she raised her hand and made a fist, reaching forward as if she were about to jab me on the shoulder, but before she made contact, she pulled back, loosing her fingers and letting her arm fall. Behind me, Thump and Jerome said goodbye, and I could hear Elle exhale through her nose after she returned a farewell. She lowered her voice, said, ‘Just take my new number.’ As I pulled my phone from my pocket, updating her contact file, I didn’t realize I’d disappointed her, that she expected me to rise, in some way, to meet her, and I hadn’t. I was too busy savoring her voice as she said each number, the way her teeth pulled back her lower lip as she said four.

In the cab, I sat in the middle hunched forward so that our shoulders weren’t wedged from door to door. Tired and stretched thin by drink, we were halfway back to

133 the parking garage before any of us spoke. Jerome said just, ‘She seems cool.’ The cab driver was drinking coffee with a flavored creamer, the sweet smell of it stirred through the car by the heat vents. Thump, to my right, had his chin on his fist, and I could tell he wanted to say something, could feel it like electricity rising off him. I considered asking him what was on his mind, not that I couldn’t guess his hesitation, but I wanted to hear the specifics of his discomfort. Before I could decide either way, I got a text from Elle asking me to come over, and as that permission passed from my screen into me, I broke into a full, open-mouthed grin. Thump asked me under his breath, almost lost in the street noise, ‘Was that Olivia?’

Jerome, leaning his head against the window, had nodded off, his mouth ajar enough to see the bottom row of his teeth borrowing the moonlight. I told Thump that I hadn’t done anything yet, that I didn’t plan to. I said, ‘It was nice seeing her. That’s all.’

Thump removed his ball cap and placed it on his lap. His hair had tangled behind his ears, and after he freed the knots and used his palms to flatten it, he refitted his cap with the bill hanging back from his forehead. When he didn’t speak, I started to send Elle a text, but she’d already sent another with her address. I’ll be up. Come if you want. The cab stopped outside the lot and I swiped my card to pay as the guys lumbered out. Before

I shut the door, I asked the driver if he minded waiting a moment, and when I turned around, Thump was standing with his arms crossed. He said, ‘What’s the holdup?’

I wondered—if I’d been more forthright from the start, had I admitted that when it came to Elle, I felt both desperately in need of pursuing her and powerless to stop myself from doing so, had I explained this to Thump, if he would’ve understood why I reached

134 into my breast pocket and handed him my keys. I’d been candid before about her absence impacting me, but I’d also turned to my vices, to drinking and directionless dating, so I understand why he didn’t see this decision as anything more than a return to that immorality. I’d isolated the Accord’s key between my thumb and forefinger, extending it to him, and he just looked at it, his face beneath his cap dipped in shadow. Jerome had been walking toward the staircase into the garage. He turned back, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Thump said, ‘Don’t pull this shit. Let’s go.’

He didn’t need to remind me that I said I’d stay sober, that when we set out for the night, I’d taken them twenty miles south with the promise of leading them back. I knew that the lingering booze in his system must’ve felt like betrayal, but I’d already weighed this disloyalty against reuniting with Elle, and I’d chosen to let him drive. I said,

‘I’ll be home tomorrow.’

Behind me, the taxi driver tapped the horn, and I extended my elbow until the joint locked, taking a step forward so the keys were suspended over the ledge his folded arms made against his chest. I remember thinking that if we were truly friends, the guys would understand I needed them to allow me to strand them here, to overlook whatever dishonesty it implied in my relationship with Olivia. It had always been us, and that meant allowing each other moments of selfishness. I deserved this reprieve.

Thump said, ‘You haven’t thought this through.’

‘If you’re not good to drive, take the cab. I’ll give you cash tomorrow.’

‘What’re you going to tell Olivia?’

135

Jerome started back toward us, and as he passed between Thump and me, I said,

‘You don’t need to worry about that.’ I didn’t see the gesture Jerome gave the driver, but

I could hear pebbles crunch under the tires as the cab pulled away. It didn’t annoy me that they were meddling in the decision I’d made. It didn’t bother me that now I had to walk a couple blocks toward a busier intersection to grab a ride. What put the clench in my jaw, what made my hands turn to fist was I’d decided what I wanted, and because they wouldn’t accept it, they’d delayed me.

Thump said, ‘Don’t be so cheap.’

I pushed the keys into his chest, didn’t mean for their teeth to catch the fabric of his jacket, widening a button hole with a tear. He shoved me back, the heels of my shoes sliding on the pavement, the keys rattling as they hit the street. Before either of us could commit to harming each other further, Jerome was between us, arms outstretched. In my pocket, I felt my phone vibrate with another text message. Jerome handed me the keys, saying, ‘Come on Jonah. Just drive us home.’ I wish I could say we arrived at a moment of mutual grace here—each of us conceding to understand a fraction of the other’s perspective, and in doing so, forgiving that one moment of anger that crept through our friendship. Instead, I tossed the keys at Thump, let them hit him in the chest, saying, ‘I’d rather walk.’

#

136

It would be too cheap a description of my time with Olivia to say so little about the year we spent together, limited to the ways in which she tempered my mood or occupied me until I ran into Elle again. Much of that year was spent in the winter of a relationship— the quiet and comfortable time when you aren’t alone, not happy in the infectious sense but not simply tolerating another person either. We developed a routine that was uniquely ours, sleeping in each other’s bed half the week, brunch in DC on the weekends, the occasional movie at the mall by my place. For a while, that was good enough not to question whether I felt a future for us was possible. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important.

Olivia is a strong and elegant woman I didn’t appreciate because I was incapable of letting myself know her. Even when Elle wasn’t on the forefront of my thoughts, she lingered in them, and this presence kept me from opening up to Olivia. But this is just another deluding of the ways in which I’ve harmed others in pursuit of my idea of love.

I’ve always believed it to be the kind of feeling that you have to both want and need to give someone, but once those portions of yourself are in congress, they can create the pure sort of selflessness that a person is occasionally capable in giving to another.

But if I’m being honest, I’m starting to think that selflessness is a bit of a silly concept. To give everything down to those portions of our livelihood that are fundamental to survive is a noble idea. To jettison the physical, relational, even desirable pursuits we create for our futures to another person with no expectations on receiving that same love in return is the precarious situation required to let ourselves welcome, deeply, another person into the circle of our being. But the thing about selflessness I caught onto

137 was it doesn’t end at the border of the self. What I mean is, because our lives are so irreparably knotted to the people around us, to push forward in the name of the ones we love means intruding on the pursuits of others. In that way, Olivia is someone I harmed because that intersection of what I wanted from Elle and the sensation that filled me while I was around her. This love allowed me abandon a year of my life with a flick of the wrist, with the ease that would make you think I never lived it at all, that it was just rumor or falsehood.

When I got out of the taxi, it took me five minutes to find the alley door to Elle’s apartment, obscured by the fence surrounding a redbrick Cathedral. The sun wasn’t quite up, but one edge of the sky had brightened, directing me to the east. I’ve always been decent at keeping my bearings, but in DC, going up and down so many escalators, dipping into the earth to get on the Metro, or relaxing in the back of a cab as it winds through the one-ways—it’s easy to lose North. She answered the door in nothing but her white T shirt, her hip bones catching all the light coming in from the street behind me, and between them, a patch of pubic hair that I won’t bother comparing to this or that, but was memorable in its unexpectedness, the small curl of it arresting my attention. I couldn’t help but peek, and when I did, she reached out and took a fistful of my hair, pulling my head down, leading me into the room. It was lovely—this rejoining, finally, in the seclusion of her place—how uninspired we were around each other. I was rubbing the pain in my scalp, and she kissed me, saying, ‘Do you mind if we just go to bed?’

She practically dove into the duvet, crawling up into the mouth it made against the sheets. Settling in beside her, she turned her shoulder into mine, facing away. From

138 the dark, her voice rose, asking me if I remembered, and it took me a minute to realize she meant the way in which we configured ourselves into sleep, our bodies joined along the side, arms reaching toward the perimeter of the mattress. Almost as soon as we were comfortable in the dark, she drifted off. I expected to go right behind her, having been up since seven the day before, but I found myself studying the room as my eyes adjusted. I rolled onto my back, kissing her on the arm as I turned.

On my way in, I hadn’t realized how cramped the room was. She’d downsized into a studio on the ground floor of a recently renovated building, the low ceilings doing nothing to help the stifling lack of space. Some of the decorations were recognizable from her last place—the sketching figurines, the record player, a wall length mirror. The furniture—what little furniture there was in the twenty-by-twenty room—was all mismatched pairings, real wood, that secondhand look. There was a nice sensibility to the way she’d organized this small space which I admired. The bed and the front door, stationed at the furthest corners of the room, were joined by dressers and a wardrobe on one wall, a couch and a bookshelf on the other. Lying there, waiting for sleep to beckon me, I pictured her waking to follow one path toward the bathroom to dress, and in the evening, returning along the opposite route, relaxing on the couch to read before bed. A boiling sort of excitement filled me then, realizing there wasn’t enough storage in the three-foot wardrobe for Christian’s clothing. I’d been telling myself all night that by not asking the status of her relationship, I was continuing to honor the arrangement we had before—the allowances of intimacy reliant on my lack of prying. But in the safety, the

139 relief I felt when I found this place was too small for two people to live, I knew I’d simply been afraid to ask for fear of hearing nothing had changed.

The only window in her ground floor apartment was by the backdoor in the galley kitchen, so when we woke before noon, it was too this small glow tunneling from beyond the foot of the bed. Elle said, ‘I live in a shoebox.’

We’d positioned so that my cheek was on her collarbone, my arms around her waist. I said, ‘It’s not that bad.’

‘I wasn’t complaining. Just stating a fact.’

During sleep, we’d slipped in and out of sex as if we were moving through dreams, proceeding to a point, and then, a time later, beginning again with no memory of how that last portion of contact had ended. We woke both sweat-touched and dehydrated, daring each other to get out of bed for water. She said, ‘The tap tastes awful. But I’ve got bottled in the fridge. It’s just on the other side of that wall.’ Her arm, looped over my shoulder, raised up, but I couldn’t see where she was pointing. There was a picture frame on the nightstand with a flower pressed between two panes, and behind it, the color- swirled glass of a bowl poked out. I asked her when she’d started smoking weed, and she said it was just to help her sleep, for pain mitigation. I’d noticed, the night before, that she seemed thinner, but she’d told me she had a history of inconsistencies when it came to her eating habits, nothing dire, just varied, and I figured she was in a season of decline.

But this mention of pain put tension in me, and though I didn’t ask, she must’ve felt my anxiety in the way I shifted about her, stiffening. She cooed in my ear, saying, ‘I don’t remember you being so serious.’

140

In the kitchen, I poured myself a glass and drank it down before refilling it to bring to her. I set it on the nightstand, and she asked if I recognized it. The cup was thin and almost too tall, more of a flower vase than a Collins glass, and when I couldn’t guess what about it should be familiar, she said it was from Crate & Barrel. She said, ‘When I met you, I was also shopping for dishware.’

‘You didn’t buy anything.’

‘I was doing research. I had somewhere to be.’

When I left the room, I’d folded the corner of the blanket back, revealing her chest to the cold air in the apartment, and because she hadn’t replaced it while I was up, all the heat from under the covers had leaked out. I wedged myself next to her ribs as she sipped from the glass, I said, ‘We hung out for an hour.’

She’d started to set the glass down, but raised it to her lips again, sipping until, after an exaggerated moment, it was empty. A word got caught in her throat, and then another, the she just laughed as she reclined her neck onto the headboard. By her ear, on the old wood frame, someone had carved their initials. She stared at the ceiling a moment then let her chin fall toward me, her eyes dragging a line before resting on mine, all black except a pinprick of light, and in the dim space between our faces, I felt her shed something invisible. It was as if she’d been wearing humor like a mask, and suddenly, as that fell away, her face brimmed with pain. When met with this unexpected seriousness, one of us usually dissolved it with a joke, a dismissal, or silence. Maybe it was how much of my life apart from her had been spent wanting to be, finally, at the other end of this

141 exposure, but instead of dismissing the look, instead of making a joke or changing the subject, I said, ‘Tell me the truth.’

‘Fine. I’d wanted to buy a few things, but after we spoke, it felt weird to stay and shop, so I left.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

She slid down the sheets, looping her bicep under my cheek until he nose was against mine, until she blurred in my vision. She said, ‘You don’t need to know.’

She made me wait until after her shower, until she was dressed and sipping black tea at her tiny dinner table before she answered. The stove lamp put a glow on the top of her knees. While I waited for her, I sat flipping through an issue of Nylon, the polished wood on the chair catching my , pulling them up my thigh. Without a word, she came out from the shower wrapped in a towel, crossing to the dresser to remove a shirt, a pair of underwear, then returning to the privacy of the bathroom. I made some joke then about her answering the door last night dressed like Donald Duck, and from the other room, I could barely make out her dry laugh. I’d noticed, as she slid the middle drawer open, all the shirts folded were either black or white, no patterns, no prints. After she poured water into her mug, she sat and took the magazine from my limp hand, closing it and setting it down. She said, ‘There is a valve in my heart that leaks.’

Her fingers curled into a circle, and as she held it up to her eye she pulsed her hand, open then shut. She told me she’d had issues with it since she was a kid. The doctors, back then, thought she was too young to operate, that the defect didn’t present a problem dire enough to take that risk so early. They treated her with medicine, and for a

142 time that had been effective. The condition limited her lifestyle, kept her from being too athletic, too adventurous, but Elle assured me those avenues were not of much interest to her anyway. She raised her arm up, her fingers curled as if holding the handle of an invisible mirror. She said, ‘I used to dream about becoming a painter.’ There was a pout to her upper lip just then, and I wanted to lean forward and kiss her, but she sipped her tea and repositioned in her chair so that her crossed legs put more space between us. The base of her mug left a ring of condensation on the tabletop, and she smudged lines through it with her pinky finger. She said that in the summer, her body stopped responding to the medication and she had an incident. We bickered for a moment—her not wanting to tell me the specifics of it, and me insisting that the details mattered more than any judgment she might fear in my reaction. Finally, she told me that she’d been blacking out. She said, ‘Christian and I were having sex. I passed out during.’

I said, ‘That’s it?’

‘I didn’t think you’d want to hear about it.’

‘It’s not like I assumed you’ve been abstinent with him. Or in general.’

She asked me what I meant by that and after I paused, trying to figure the best way to phrase my insecurity regarding her situation, I told her I meant that I have no idea what’s going on with her, playing up how this revelation was affecting me, saying, ‘I’m not really sure what I know about you anymore.’

When she exhaled through her nose, nostrils flaring, it sounded like a hiss. I’d been too bold, so I apologized, explaining the information had caught me off guard.

Steam rose from her mug and she placed her palm on the rim, interrupting. Moving

143 forward with the conversation, then, felt like walking on railroad tracks—trusting I could hear any trouble approaching, yet constantly looking back. Every question passing over my tongue warned that it might be the one to do something irreparable to the mood, and still I pushed on against my anxiety.

Between sips of tea, she told me she’d left Christian about a year before. They’d bought flights to Orlando to stay with his family over the winter holidays, but in the weeks before the trip, she felt this dread—a desire to cancel the flight, to stay in DC, to relax. She said, ‘It felt off. I don’t know. We’d been going down there for years. I kind of wanted to create my own holiday with him.’ When she expressed this to Christian, his face twisted as in disgust. He couldn’t see it as anything more than a rejection of him, of his family. She’d simply wanted to make something that was theirs alone, unique to that thing they created—unpresent in themselves individually—when they were together. Elle didn’t have enough family to fill a table for Thanksgiving. She’d grown up on the cusp of

Christian’s but never felt at ease with them, and that lack of living comfort made it impossible to develop a true bond between herself and Christian’s relatives. She said,

‘Even all that hand-me-down clothing they gave me—his mother only did that because I was getting restless.’ Christian wanted to do a one-year seminar at Full Sail, and she was ready to move on to grad school. They stayed, her acceptance into SCAD had to be deferred. That morning at her table, her voice had this note in it that trembled when her sentences arrived at a point or trailed off, eluding one altogether. Clearing her throat, she’d start anew and a sturdiness returned to her tone, her posture poised, shoulders back, fingers intertwined on her lap. ‘He went without me,’ she said.

144

In the ten days he’d been away, Elle found this apartment on Craigslist, settled in the morning after New Year’s, moving boxes through the remaining wreckage of parties that had spilled onto the street. She only took what he had no claim over—the few artifacts from her childhood, her records, the ornaments of their living space that she’d purchased. ‘The clothing,’ she said, ‘I left it behind.’ She intended to keep the half of her wardrobe that wasn’t tied to his family’s history, but the process of sorting it became exhausting. Separating new and old items into piles, she’d arrive at a t-shirt, a worn-thin flannel, one of those patterned dresses, and the recollection of every day she’d spent dressed in it would collapse on her. In the end, she said she took enough to get by and left the rest for Christian to keep or discard.

‘That’s a bit cruel,’ I said. ‘Making him get rid of your things.’

Elle lifted her hand off her knee, examined a cuticle, then reached across the table to put her palm, still hot from the mug, on my wrist. In her under-lit apartment with the dregs of sunlight leaking in from the kitchen, it felt like we were hiding in the back of a cave. My stomach was pinched with hunger and made a soft growl. She said, ‘I don’t think I would’ve been able to get out.’

We moved back to her bed and spent ten minutes trying to find a way to hold each other that didn’t cause one of our limbs to fall asleep. When we couldn’t, she got up and laid down on the couch, asked me to bring a pillow from her room. She settled her neck against it, and I asked her where I was supposed to relax. Raising her legs, I sat on the other end of her couch, her feet in my lap. I said, ‘How do you like it—living alone?’

‘It’s expensive,’ she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. ‘And unusual.’

145

‘I wish I could afford it.’

‘You could.’

I choked her ankles in my hands, saying, ‘Splitting bills provides me certain luxuries.’

‘I think being by myself has made me somehow lazier,’ she said. ‘I keep wanting to move my bookshelf, but the thought of clearing it off and reorganizing it is a bit daunting.’

‘It looks good there.’

She pointed toward the gap of open wall between her foyer and the makeshift dining room, said that in the afternoon, the light from the kitchen rests there. She said, ‘I love how sunlight looks on book bindings. And that’s the only bit of it there is in here.’

With her feet, she tried to press my lap to the couch, but I slid out from their weight and began removing the paperbacks and stacking them on the table near the kitchen by our empty mugs now empty of tea. Elle’s books had been wedged into every bit of the chest-high shelf—it took trip after trip to clear it, and as I strode across the empty square in the center of her studio, she narrowed her eyes at me, saying, ‘Has anyone ever told you you walk funny?’

She was referring to the unsteady fashion my heel lands directly in line with the toe on my rear foot. I’d never noticed it until Jerome and I were loading into a venue for a show, lugging amps from our back seats fifty feet through a parking lot to the club’s back entrance. I’ve got a few inches on him, a longer stride, and so I was always a bit ahead.

146

He asked me if I knew I walked like a model or if I was just fucking with him. When I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about, we shared a laugh.

Though I had my back turned, I could feel Elle’s eyes as I moved through her space. The shelf had been emptied, and I carried it to the wall she’d wanted. I stepped clear of it, and she said, ‘A little to the left. Perfect.’

Shelving the books, I said, ‘My sister used to be really into runway models when we were younger.’ I told her about the weekends we spent alone in our apartment when our mother was working overtime, how she put on the Miss America contest, and though the screen was laminated by the static fuzz of our bad reception, Mary could see clearly enough to mimic the posture, the step and turn. I must’ve been six or seven at the time, and Mary was my idol—closest friend, sister, caretaker all in one. In the mornings before school, my mom would already be off on her commute, so Mary got me ready. She’d sit with me while I stirred, humming until she decided I was awake enough to move, then took me by the hand to the bathroom to make sure I brushed my teeth and washed my face and combed my hair. I learned how to dress by watching her hold combinations of donated clothing against my chest, my legs. After a while, I gathered which patterns worked with which colors, and when I was older, I just needed her final thumbs up to feel okay about my outfit.

So when, watching that beauty contest, she raised her hand, beckoning me to come alongside her and learn the model walk, it felt only natural to take part. Actually, at daycare, it made me popular with the other kids. I showed them how to swivel, just slightly, on the ball of the back foot, how to pronounce the hip. When Meryl caught me

147 teaching a few of the boys, she made a fuss, wanted to know why I was being so feminine, and when I said, ‘What’s wrong with doing something like a woman?’ she stumbled on the way to a response. These little tutorials brought me closer to Iris, my first kiss—she wanted to be like a model, and my ability to teach her this one, small thing made me valuable. This false step ingrained a shadow of itself in my gait.

When I retold this anecdote, Elle twisted with laughter. She looked up from the couch, her features relaxing into that lovely expression, not quite smile, not quite repose.

It didn’t say I love you but maybe something different, something alternate and unknown, and yet as deeply meaningful to me all the same. In her apartment, I was surprised how far I’d let this portion of myself sink into the unsearched corners of my recollections, but as I followed it down, I found, strung to it, another more obscured one, unbothered for years. The nicotine stained walls of Meryl’s daycare raised up around me, and the unexpected speed of it turned my face from humor to preoccupation. Elle must’ve seen it, even from her inverted place lying on the couch, and she asked me what was wrong, worried that she’d offended me.

I’d told her about the bin of graphic porn magazines that Meryl’s husband kept in the bathroom, but I’d forgotten that one afternoon I’d gotten caught while sitting on the toilet leafing through them. The sheer amount of skin to skin had a profound effect on me as a boy—that close-to-the-bone type of shock that grips you when exposed, for the first time, to the graphic inevitabilities we hope to avoid, like watching someone you respect do something irredeemable or seeing a dead body. In my rush to the bathroom to browse through the smut, I’d forgotten to lock the door, so when Meryl opened it, expecting the

148 room to be unoccupied and finding me seated there instead, she let out a whelp and whipped the door shut, spinning the air in the half-bath. As the pages lifted and settled against the binding on my lap, I hoped she hadn’t seen enough to know what I was doing, but before I could get the magazine into its precise slot in the bin, she barged through the door to snatch it out of my hand. She shouted, her voice booming against the walls of the small room, and I couldn’t hear what she was saying, too focused on my nakedness, my exposure. When I think about that instant, now, all I can recall is the image of her hand knotted into a fist, the bare tan of my thighs against the white seat, my groin darkened under my hunched shoulders.

Meryl dragged me by the collar into the living room, my pants still bunched at the base of the toilet, the last bit of evening sun turning the curtains gold. My mom was going to be late that night—she had to take Mary to an appointment—only a few of the younger kids who hadn’t been picked up yet populated the living room. Free from the grip of her fake nails, I stood in the middle of the carpet, my hands shielding myself from the other children. One of the toddlers pointed at my bare ass and laughed. Meryl said,

‘It’s not so fun is it? People looking at you when you’re naked.’ She made me stand there a while—could’ve been ten minutes or an hour—I was too embarrassed, too young to measure it. Meryl’s sixteen-year-old daughter came in from her room to watch the

Simpsons. She had on and a sweatshirt, her hair in a scrunchy, and I squatted on the carpet, stretching my T-shirt over my knees to hide myself.

149

‘Did I say you could sit?’ Meryl barked from her spot on the couch. She had the remote in her hand, wasn’t looking in my direction, but I could tell in the stare she’d knifed into the television that I had her attention.

Elle turned so that her ear was on the pillow. The waist of her pants revealed the crest of her hipbones.

I said, ‘When it went to commercial, she made me do the model walk across the living room.’ The other children paid attention to their toys, but the women sat on the couch, the window behind them lighting every last blond split-end of their blowouts.

Pantless, I tried to focus on the shag carpet, soft on the soles of my feet, but I couldn’t escape the way the central air needled my legs. Meryl and her daughter let the humor they’d hidden play in their lips, flirting halfway to smiles, and I knew if I cried, they’d get whatever power I had in me at the time. Back then, I wasn’t aware this young confidence was the currency being taken. I strode to the wall, turned, strut back. For a brief second, I thought I was going to stomach it, to take the punishment with the same ease I handled the ruler spankings or the hundreds of sentences written in repetition she typically used, but as quickly as that resolution rose up in me, it deflated. My penis retracted from the cool air, and Meryl’s daughter burst into laughter as she saw it. A flume of spit escaped the hand she’d raised to her mouth, and when I saw it, I faltered, collapsing to the floor to cover myself, hiding my face in my hands.

Elle let my story wither to its end, uninterrupted. She sat up and crossed the room to me, embracing me, one hand on my waist, the other on the back of my neck. I could feel the coil of warmth of her ear on my cheek. My face must’ve been a bit rouged by

150 embarrassment because Elle rubbed her palm in a circle between my shoulder blades as if she were trying to slow my breath, squeezing the fingers of my right hand with hers.

There was something soothing about the wordless moments when Elle and I just breathed at each other. Our intimacy had only ever occurred in a vacuum, and being able to inhabit that space without a constant, unending dialogue made a statement about the strength of our connection.

Finally, she said, ‘I want you to know that I take your penis very seriously.’

I had nothing to give except a laugh, meager and momentary, but under the shelter of her roof, it felt like enough to turn the mood.

I wasn’t used to this lack of restriction on our time together—no Christian looming in return, no work for me until the middle of the week when Christmas vacation ended at the office. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, didn’t want to intrude too deeply into the afternoon she might’ve planned to spend alone, but even as I made up an excuse to leave, I got the impression she would let me stay as long as I pleased. And where I thought that might fill me with comfort, I found an itch in the corner of my mind, a hint of conflict—that I couldn’t enjoy the real opportunity at being with Elle until I’d broken it off with Olivia, and the task of creating that separation wore on me. That’s what prompted me to leave—the option to meet her, finally, on the same plane and wanting to be there before I spent another minute confined by this falseness.

Before I left, she said to call her, and I asked, ‘Is that how it works now?’

‘It works how you want it to,’ she said. We stood in her foyer, the parquet tiles chipping at their corners, her closet door bulging open around the shoulder of a winter

151 coat. A row of small paneled windows surrounded her front door, and with the afternoon sun tilting into them, I could see, for the first time, the depth to the bags under her eyes.

A feeling, unfamiliar to my understanding of her, occupied the moment. She pressed her lips to mine, then cupped her hands along the hinge of my jaw and planted kisses about my face with fervor. Closing my eyes, I thought maybe this strange feeling was desperation—now that she was single maybe she was worried I didn’t want her, as if my existence in her life had any bearing on her decision to leave Christian. It wasn’t until after she’d held the door for me to pass into the winter afternoon, the two of us lingering in the threshold, saying nothing of value but not wanting to part just yet, that I realized this unusual sensation we’d arrived at was choice.

I was two block up the way, descending the escalator into the Metro when I recognized it—the freedom to come together or forget each other entirely was a choice that no longer had motivators, restrictions, nothing besides our personal wills. I touched my pass to the gate and stood on the cusp of the platform, staring down the tunnel for a hint of the next train’s headlights. My phone was off, and I didn’t want to start it just to check the time. Though I wasn’t sure how far into the day it was, I knew it was late enough that my silence would cause alarm in Olivia. My guilt gave way to the convenience of it—this odd communication would preempt the break up. I didn’t want to surprise her, to interrupt. Falling out of pocket for so long would provide a shadow, would call attention to itself and allow her to intuit the change before I was obligated to say it. I figured this for a type of kindness—showing someone the ways in which you are going to hurt them before you are forced to follow through. Wondering whether Elle had

152 sent me something is what drove me to turn the phone on. All the text alerts from Olivia, from the guys, started my cell vibrating. Before I read any of them, I read the one that just arrived from Elle. It said, ‘I don’t need you to worry about me.’

I took the metro out to Silver Spring, paid for a cab to drive me twenty-minutes back to the house. On the way, I rested my forehead on the window, ignoring the top 40 playing on the radio. We’d stayed in bed long enough that my back ached against the seat cushion. There is something to savor about climbing back into your clothes unbathed—a wildness, physical and rising the closer you get to your shower. A lot of my love for raw denim comes from the way it wears, the rest is in its give. In the back of the cab from the metro to my house, I warmed my palms on the knees of my Iron Hearts. The layer of sweat laminating the inside of the legs made the cloth more pliant, and the yield in the waist, the button-fly, cradled my midsection, allowed me to drift to a comfortable half- sleep against the cracked leather seat. When I shut the door and went into the house, I saw a smudge of grease on the glass where my forehead had been. In reverse, it almost looked like a rose.

At home, Jerome and Thump had gone somewhere, and the remains of our

Christmas Chinese dinner had been cleaned off the coffee table. I charged my cellphone, got in the shower, picked the debris of lint from my jeans. I answered some PM’s from the style blog, rotated the clothing in my closet that needed to go to the cleaners, the shirts that should be subbed in when I went back to work. My phone vibrated across the nightstand, and I knew I needed to read what Olivia, the guys, had left for me, but I let more menial tasks delay me. I sorted all my dirty laundry into whites, blacks,

153 miscellaneous, took the first load to the basement to wash. I scrubbed the dishes that remained in the drain sink, vacuumed the crumbs out of the living-room carpet. When there wasn’t anything left to distract me, I took my phone from the charger and crouched at the foot of my bed. It had been a while since I set into the Chinaman squat, my knees creaking as I settled over my heels. I tried not to let the sheer amount of confrontation in the messages overwhelm me. Jerome wanted to talk with me about how ditching them had affected the house. Thump said just, ‘I don’t think I recognize you anymore.’ Olivia had sent over a dozen, starting with sweet inquiries about my holiday, my night, and ending with confusion and worry. Where are you? Kneeling at the food of my bed, my forearms bridging my kneecaps, I could’ve shut my phone off, could’ve shut myself in and slept through the night, fitlessly. The finite world that surrounded me just then was too unhappy, and in response to this displeasure, I could wrap myself in my bed, ignoring it. It’s hard to know I’m capable of such retreat. It’s harder, still, to know that I was on my way into my covers when another text from Elle interrupted. She said, ‘Let me know when you want to come back.’

It would be too cheap to say that I left Olivia with a briskness that is, in reflection, startling. To relive my year with her and then dismiss her—this sort of efficiency deflates any sort of importance we could’ve held for each other. And yet, I did this to her. In the beginning, we went out so many purposeless nights, sharing a meal and some cocktails, then heading back to our homes to sleep alone. Before we even kissed, I knew she hated water chestnuts in her carry-out, that she thought they were the fingernail of vegetables. I knew she once had a denim jacket with a back patch that read ‘Art is for the Rich.’ And

154 when we finally came together, the uncelebrated way in which we cared for each other felt like the way two people were supposed to live with each other. I figured passion was overrated, or maybe that there was passion in that slowness. When I crouched on my bedroom floor, I wasn’t recalling those first dates, I wasn’t recalling the party at her apartment and the way kissing her for the first time felt like escape, before I knew how to define, in words, the feeling of escape. What I was considering, then, was whether I wanted to invite her here and risk not being able to separate quick enough when it was over—whether she would linger. It felt cruel to have her, having just arrived home from

Richmonmd, drive thirty minutes just so I could leave her, to have her come all this way, and then dismiss her. That word—dismiss—lingered in me as I got dressed. I’d built up this momentum from first step out of Elle’s apartment, through the Metro, my shower, and now, in my closet, pulling an undershirt over my still-wet hair, checking the crease on the cuff of my jeans, I could feel the speed of it, the thrill of change.

I don’t want to say that I was in and out of her apartment in less than an hour, or that I went to sleep at Elle’s after. I’d had a key to Olivia’s for a few months now for nights when I’d close Barney’s and make the short trek to join her in bed. Before I let myself in, I removed the key from its place on my ring, hid it in my fist. The woman who lived in her second bedroom was moving out, and Olivia was seated at the dining room table behind a barricade of her shoeboxes. I’d always loved the way she carried her stress, pinched in the muscles along her temples. She looked handsome in spite of the tension. When teaching wore her down, she’d sit on the floor in front of me as we watched TV, and I would rub a line from her eyebrows to her cheeks, her jaw, the

155 unsturdy flesh at the base of the skull. She’d asked me once where I learned to give a massage, and I made an Asian joke, saying that, like dry cleaning, I was born with the knowledge. I could press her blouses and work out the knots in her muscles for ten dollar per half-hour.

I could’ve said that my mother taught me, but for some unnamable reason, I didn’t trust her enough. Or maybe I did, maybe I didn’t want her to see me as the little boy whose mother came home around eleven to find him out of bed, watching whatever syndicated television was coming through the antenna clearest. I knew she was mad, but she didn’t have the will to follow the anger and punish me, could see it in the defeat she let slip through a wince, an exhale. Instead, she sat on the sofa beside me, rubbing the perimeter of her neck under her collar. I climbed up the back of the couch so that I was sitting on the headrest, and she laughed as I karate chopped, softly, her shoulders. After a minute, she said, ‘No baby,’ and reached back to take my hands in hers. My palms were flat against her shoulder blades and she said, ‘Just press.’ It wasn’t until I was older, after she’d passed, when I worked my thumbs through another woman’s rigid back that I discovered she’d taught me something that lasted.

The other chairs at Olivia’s table were covered in books and boxes, their contents half-strewn about their openings. She was wearing set of maroon long-johns she often slept in, her hair pulled back tautly in a bun. There was this agreement between our expressions as I stood beside her, as if she already knew what I wanted, knew how she was going to react, and now she was just waiting for the confirmation of her belief. I set her key on the table, covered by my hand, but at the knock of metal on wood, she looked

156 away. Even if I could recall, exactly, the words we shared before I left her apartment, they’d be unimportant. I was barely listening, my resolve for separation so full-up in me at that moment. How she brimmed with anger but didn’t cry had no bearing on me. And when it was done, as I covered the space between her turned back and the door, that word, dismiss, still rang in me, small and nagging in the pit of my mind. It was worry— that I was being too brash, too confident in giving her up. But also, power. As I heard the lock twist behind me, the fear of the finality my choice had created gave way to the courage it took to make it. Though, that implies being with Olivia was a matter of need or weakness, which it wasn’t. What I’m trying to say is—security is a privilege. And to walk away from the comfort it provided took more from me than even I knew until, bursting onto the street, my wood heels clopping on the pavement, I realized I couldn’t pass back into the life I’d just abandoned.

What I will say about my relationship with Olivia that year is, we existed in a place where the future seemed too murky to truly dread giving it up. For example—at the end of the summer, we’d gone guitar shopping for her brother’s birthday. He was turning fifteen, and had been learning to play on this beat up Les Paul knock-off with a warped neck, the strings always slipping out of tune. She wanted to get him a replacement, something he could use to further his pursuit of music, but knew little about instruments, the quality of them. We’d be hanging out long enough that she’d witnessed the unplanned dining room band nostalgia the guys and I cranked out whenever we had too much drink and too little to occupy us. When she asked where she should go to look, I volunteered to help.

157

There was this shop called Chucks in Wheaton, near the string of apartments I grew up in. When we were playing shows, we frequented the thin aisles to restock on strings or picks, goofing off between the amps, the guitars and basses hanging from wall hooks. Being back felt like youth, fervently—I kept making fists as we stopped in each section. I wanted to pick up each piece of strange wood and strum the untuned strings. In one of the backrooms, with all the vintage Fenders, I took down the seventies Tele

Deluxe I’d wanted since I knew enough about equipment to have taste. Olivia had gone to the bathroom, so I was alone in this closet of a room in the belly of the store. The AC never worked too well, and pressed between the glass door and the mirrored walls ornamented with boutique equipment, I felt sweat pool in my armpits. I sat on the Double

Reverb that’d been set in the corner for customers to use, plugged the quarter-inch into the input. It took a minute to get the guitar close to tuned—my ear had never been that accurate—but when I had it sounding near clean, there was a moment before I hit the first chord where it was if I knew nothing about how to play.

For a decade, I’d admired the deep chocolate brown of the body, the soft butter maple neck, how the humbuckers were greedy with light, glowing in the darkest rooms.

At twenty, the guys and I had gotten credit cards with tiny limits, maxed them out to get gear we thought was presentable. It took me almost three years to pay everything back. A four-thousand-dollar guitar was beyond realistic, it was the embodiment of a dream out of reach. Chucks kept a Tele Deluxe in stock, sometimes black, sometimes natural, it’d been a while since they had one in walnut—my favorite finish. I strummed the chords to a

Bon Iver song I’d gotten stuck in my head, doing the math in the background, and I

158 realized—while I didn’t have enough savings to buy it straight up, I could afford to make the payments. It would just gather dust, hidden under my bed, but I wanted it even still, just because I could.

Olivia entered the room humming. She said, ‘Well look at you, all smiles,’ and I hadn’t realized how drunk on the color of the twang I’d become, pressed from my fingers through the strings into the amplifier. The callouses in my hands were underdeveloped, and yet, as I dug in, the wood came to life in my hands, twang-thick and bright, like luxury at its purest. Olivia turned the tag hanging from the headstock, let out a gasp.

She said, ‘I’m not buying that for Stephen. Jesus, he’s not even that good a brother.’

I told her I was thinking of getting it for me, and she made a face, confounded, as if I’d just volunteered her money to pay for it. We went back and forth about the practicality of a purchase this big, and eventually, with a swivel in her neck, a hand dropped to her side, she said, ‘I don’t get it. What makes it worth so much?’

I hung it back on its peg. When the still-live cable hit the carpet, the amp buzzed.

I flipped the power off and she said, ‘Hey, it’s your money.’

We set out through the store, trying to find an instrument in a realistic price range, that also met her brother’s taste. Our disagreement hadn’t actually registered, to me, as a fight, but discomfort webbed itself between us in the form of an overbearing sense of politeness—I kept checking to make sure she wasn’t bored with how long it took me to audition an instrument, and in return, as I played licks on a procession of middling guitars, she kept reassuring me I’d helped enough, that I didn’t need to see the decision

159 all the way through. In spite of it, we settled on an American made Strat near the top of her price range, classic black finish, all single-coils, no humbucker. In the car, it lay across the backseat, still boxed in the factory cardboard. I drove, and Olivia curled her feet onto the seat, turning on the matted upholstery to face me. She asked what my first guitar was like, and I told her my mom had gotten it for me on my thirteenth birthday. It was nothing special, some knockoff of an SG with a strange headstock, probably the cheapest thing at a pawn shop. The action on the strings was stiff and too high—I got in the habit of playing harder just to get it to sound decent, a habit I had to unlearn to get a better grasp on technique. The first time Thump took me to practice with Jerome, he called me rock hands, said I had the touch of a wrecking ball. I didn’t understand dynamics.

Olivia asked what got me into music in the first place, wanted to know if, like her and her brother, I’d played in the school band. I hadn’t—when met with the choice between a rental instrument and feeding Mary and me, it wasn’t a difficult decision for my mother. I’d only gotten the guitar because of her promotion that year. She hadn’t yet learned to budget a larger income, buying us carry-out and more monumental holiday presents. She even managed to stake a loan on our apartment around then. It’s funny how an influx of money makes you feel like one increase signals another in the future. I don’t think she learned the fallibility of that logic until she fell behind in mortgage payments when the rate bumped up a couple years later, until she had to foreclose.

On the ride home from Chucks, I told Olivia I hadn’t truly wanted to play music until the summer of that first guitar. We were living in a complex of apartments on the

160 outskirts of Aspen Hill, five-story buildings that surrounded a park, a run-off gully for the local tributary. The units were mostly rentals, and so I never really got used to any neighbor kids, always coming or going at yearly intervals. I wasn’t good at making friends with them unless they approached me as I roamed the playground or walked the lot that made an asphalt circle around the neighborhood. The summer before eighth grade, a new family moved into the apartment directly below mine—single mother, older son, younger daughter. The mother was this cloying kind of nice, brought each of the tenants in our fifteen unit building a plate of cookies she’d baked. The daughter’s name was Candace, and the first time I saw her, I was struck by how she resembled Iris, the girl

I’d kissed in my old daycare. I’d almost convinced myself that her curly brown hair, her freckled neck was in fact Iris’, right up until the moment she told me her name.

We were at the bottom of the run-off, a bowl-shaped valley at the edge of the park. In the winter, when it snowed, we’d take the lids off trashcans and brave the steep slope into the well below, but it was summer, and walking through the dip in the earth was just another thing to combat a spell of boredom. Mary had a boyfriend, and being inside our empty apartment for too long caused me to become restless, then angry, and I didn’t like being constantly at odds with my family. I was used to being alone. I liked to walk the neighborhood, imagining all the exciting things that could happen to me only to come home unfulfilled. But time had passed, and that was the point. The grass in the gully was knee deep, but a path through the middle had been worn by deer passing from one outcropping of woods to another. I was halfway from one embankment to the opposite when I saw Candace coming down the slope. I always found it easy to talk to

161 her, but I think that’s because I just imagined I was talking to Iris, and knowing she’d allowed me to kiss her created a sense of comfort, of familiarity that I transposed. We talked about it that first afternoon—how I’d known a girl that looked just like her. She was wearing a Korn shirt, loose jeans, this knit , and I liked the way it stretched across the lines in her neck. Everything fit her a little crooked but that necklace.

It was the summer before 8th grade, and Candace had just moved down from

Pennsylvania. We walked laps around the neighborhood, and she asked me questions about our middle school, what she needed to know to get by. I did my best to help dissuade the anxiety she let slip through small ticks—a nervous laugh, the constant rethreading of her hair behind her ears. When it was close to dark, as we climbed the stairs in our building, she asked me over to watch music videos. I was halfway up the flight, and from that angle, perched on the stairs, her eyes looked swollen and red with the light from the emergency exit sign.

At first, I thought her kitchen had caught fire with how much smoke flumed from the door as it opened. Her brother was bent into the couch, his neck low on the back cushion. On his knees, at the length of his loose arms, he held a Stratocaster, plucking the same two notes and bending the second with the whammy bar. Anthony was seventeen, a few years older than us, and his mother let him smoke. I came to find out she was a pushover in that way—that pleasantness she maintained with her neighbors became a will bendable for her children behind closed doors. Because his mother smoked inside, he was able to convince her he should be allowed to as well, and though she protested, she couldn’t find a way to make him stop. Whenever she went to Philly for work, he’d have

162 his friends over to drink, wouldn’t even try to hide the empty bottles before she got back.

Candace acted as though he wasn’t there as she got two cans of Pepsi from her fridge and led me to her room. There was an unexpected wildness to it—the almost unfamiliar smell of tobacco, the unlit living room, a distinct lack of supervision. As we walked down the hall, Anthony called out, ‘Make sure you leave the door open.’ The way he raised the pitch of his voice higher as he said it, I could tell he was mocking his mother without ever hearing the original command.

Candace had her own television and PlayStation, and I was being baffled by this.

In the living room, video games cartridges and system wires spilled from the mouth of their entertainment center, yet I was more surprised by this access to unshared entertainment. It was pure opulence to me. She put in a game, and I told her, in that rushed confidence, when I was younger, we’d get toys from local charities for Christmas.

The toys were stained and scuffed from their previous owners. The new packaging was fake. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, tossed me the other controller, said, ‘Cool.’ Her tone didn’t lack compassion or express too strongly a curiosity into my poverty. I could tell by the nod she gave when my voice trailed off that she’d heard me. She just didn’t pity me, and I got comfortable being able to share these small pains I was just, in my adolescence, beginning to recognize. I was afraid of the reaction sharing them might cause, and the lack thereof was freeing.

We played video games, and Anthony practiced guitar in the living room. He’d plugged into the combo by the couch, running scales and flourishes. Candace said, ‘He’s trying to show off,’ turning up the volume on her TV. I stayed until it was late enough

163 that my mom would start to worry, and when I left, Candace asked me to hangout again.

She said, ‘I’ve never lived close to someone who’s not awful.’ In the dark of their apartment, even though she’d told me stories of her life before coming to Maryland, about her former school and getting bullied, she still seemed like an older Iris, or a shadow of her. They weren’t the same person, but if I maintained the ease that I had back then, back when Meryl said I was too clever, I found that Candace was entertained by my presence. I got in the habit of taking the stairs a floor down to knock on their door whenever I’d depleted whatever small distractions kept me home. I spent the rest of the summer in their smoke-filled apartment, playing games until we she was bored with them, then searching the boredom for something exciting to do. Often, we found nothing, just brief conversations about the same four memories. There was a casualness to our company. After a while, she stopped getting dressed before I came over, and we’d sit in her cramped bedroom, the cotton ankles of her pajama pants touching me on the shoulder. Candace liked to recline on her made bed no matter what was occupying her.

The comforter often caught the hem of her shirt, pulling it up around her stomach, and I’d steal glances at the points of her hips sticking out of the elastic waistband, the small hairs on her skin like velvet.

The beginning of August, their mother went out of town for a week. Candace and

Anthony whined until they were allowed to stay home, and Anthony threw a series of parties while she was away. The first night, Candace and I just stayed in her room, her closed door bulging against the volume of the music playing in the rest of their apartment. Anthony had moved his boombox to the coffee table, was blasting Slayer and

164 the Beastie Boys. I played her PlayStation for a while before I realized she’d stopped talking to me. She was laying on her bed, staring at a magazine with enough disinterest that I knew she wasn’t reading. I’d seen Anthony’s friends when I showed up, and the thinness to the girls’ necks, the roped muscles in the guys’ forearms made me feel my youth, how my body lacked angle and definition. I asked her what was wrong, the video game paused. In her pupils, I could see the red glare of the television’s light coming over my shoulder. I’d thought she wanted no part in the noise or the plastic vodka, but she said that I was stifling her. Because I didn’t want to drink, she felt she wasn’t allowed to either, and we argued over the specifics of this exchange, arriving at the understanding that my abstaining didn’t mean she had to as well. I asked her why she even invited me over, and she said, ‘I mean, I didn’t.’

I hadn’t accepted that I’d staked so much in my quick friendship with Candace, wanting intimacy before really knowing what that was. Realizing how I’d overstepped, how I’d gotten comfortable in a thing that was, for her, not equally as easy, made me flush with embarrassment. I remember I set the controller down and just stormed out, making sure I turned my head as I passed by Anthony and his friends for fear they’d see the tears racing to the surface of my face.

Olivia and I had gotten home and were sitting in the car parked in front of the house. Sometime before, she’d set her hand on my lap and just let me talk, and the room to speak occasionally unclipped brought us closer—brings any two people together really. What is it to shed every last inhibited measure of conversation we maintain for the means of social grace besides a kind of closeness? I told her I avoided Candace for a few

165 months until the proximity forced upon us by sharing a bus stop wore through my embarrassment, or shame, whatever it was that kept me from facing her after that unsupervised weekend. I know now it was all the charity I’d received coming up, all the strangers arriving at our door to drop garbage bags full of clothing or toys or dinners delivered by other mothers at our church—it was this same shame that opened like a wound when I’d overstepped. I didn’t want to rely on something given, and to think

Candace had been tolerating me rather than welcoming my company was almost unbearable.

It was fall, and the curb at our bus stop was blanketed by a pattern of yellow and brown leaves wetted to the concrete. She was changing the CD in her Discman, and dropped one of the albums, watching as it rolled in a spiral to wobble and settle between us. I crouched to pick it up, and as I handed it to her, she smiled but didn’t breach her lips further to speak. She put the disc in its case and zipped her backpack, and I thought she would just press play, letting us return to comfortably ignoring each other. I started to step backward to my place halfway between the parked cars and the line of kids waiting for the bus, and she said, ‘Where’ve you been?’

In that reflexive lowering I often do when someone asks me a question directed at my place in a conflict, I let my gaze drop to the toes of my shoes, all the variable things to say—the immediate response nearest my heart, the more refined statement that might be wiser—congesting in my throat. I’d like to think I decided on either of those more definitive lines of dialogue but know I said only, ‘I don’t know.’

166

Most days, there were few enough students on our route that everyone got their own seat, but when we boarded, she sat next to me, the beaten vinyl drooping under our weight. For a couple stops, we sat listening to the rattle of the loose windows, the groan of the engine revving, breathing the perfume of the street, gasoline-thick. We’d already been through the first several weeks of eighth grade apart. The only shirt I owned that seemed stylish enough to wear that year was this Ron Jon T, emerald green, logos across the back and breast. I’d gotten into the habit of wearing it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, sometimes masking the repetition with a sweatshirt. She said, ‘My mom got me a bass.’

‘That’s sweet.’

The stretch of road that lead to our school was riddled with speedbumps. When we hit the first, her shoulder rocked into mine, then mine to hers. She said, ‘Let’s start a band.’

‘I don’t play anything.’

She told me the bass player in Anthony’s band was giving her lessons, that if I got a guitar, she’s sure her brother would show me how to get going. Mercifully, she didn’t bring up my dramatic exit, the silence. We stepped off the bus, and I noticed her baggy

Dungarees had been replaced with darker denim, form-fitting, razor-clean slits opened over the tops of her knees. She said, ‘It would be so easy to have band practice.’

What I’m ashamed of is how instantly I resolved to get my hands on an instrument. I spent the day ignoring my teachers, scheming ways to make money. My neighborhood didn’t have yards untended by the landlord’s groundskeepers, and my complexion was too gloomy to be hired as a babysitter. My birthday was coming up in a

167 few weeks, but I figured a guitar was too big an ask of my mother, so instead, I spoke with her about an allowance, about how, at my age, I could find a way to afford buying one. When I said I wanted to learn music, I remember a smile playing on her lips. She wanted to know where my sudden interest came from, and I said just, ‘Music is cool.’

On the day of, we got delivery Chinese, my mother and sister and me sitting around our dining room table, chop-sticking lo mein and orange chicken from the white boxes to our mouths. My mother reached into the brown bag and handed us our fortune cookies, then her and my sister went to the kitchen. I was sure they were lighting the candles on the cake Mary had baked that morning. While I waited, I broke the folded cookie in half, chewing one corner while unfurling the white slip from inside. The fortune read The sturdy tree bends with the storm, and when I looked up, my family was holding the guitar on a shelf made of their four hands, the bulbs of on our chandelier illuminating the dim brass of the tuning pegs. It came with the most pathetic, ten-inch combo amp— all mids, fake gain—but I loved it all the same. They sat with me in the living room as I figured out how to set it up, as I plucked the strings with hesitant fingers, as if one ungentle move would explode the guitar. It was the first sizable thing my mother had ever bought for me, which is not to sound ungrateful. She spent her life providing for me in the ways that mattered. But as I sat on the couch, hurting the air with the unskilled sound of my playing, she just watched. We didn’t know what to say to each other.

Anthony encouraged me to play loud. When I went downstairs to their apartment now, it took two trips—one for my amp, one for the guitar and chords. I wouldn’t risk dropping them, and I didn’t have a strap to wrap the instrument around my body.

168

Candace, Anthony, and I would sit around their living room while he taught us different scales, and when the bass player in his band came to teach Candace, they’d go into her room to hear better. He was a lot like Anthony, like all the guys in their band—skate shoes that frayed the jeans where the heel caught the cuff, black band shirts that accrued a series of condiment stains before a wash. When they were gone, Anthony turned both our amps up, showed me all the different chords he knew, showed me how to bar the neck, how to play Nirvana and Weezer.

We got caught up in all that noise, stiff in rhythm, me playing the base chords and him improvising on top of it. Most afternoons, when we were free from extracurricular distractions or homework, we filled their home with slightly distorted racket, barely in tune. It felt exhilarating to learn, to have something in my hands that, every day, I went home knowing just a bit more about. So when Candace and the bass player went to her room, I reveled in the attention I got from Anthony, in all the small ways I would advance my skill just by watching him brace the frets. For a few hours, I got lost slamming my knuckles into the sharp edge of the strings, and Anthony got a kick out of seeing me get better, said it was cool to be able to teach someone.

Later, when I was in my early twenties, I ran into him at a show. He’d started teaching guitar after high school, was now the director of a private lesson studio in

Bethesda. He still played out sometimes but had a kid with a girl he’d met in the scene.

He’d told me he had me to thank for the career—those afternoons in his living room gave him the beginnings of a skill he hadn’t had any interest in. His nostrils flared, his eyes, not watering, but draining of color as the rest of his face flushed—this look of sudden

169 gratefulness surprised me into silence. I’d always felt like I owed him, not the reverse.

We were both there to see Glassjaw, but they weren’t going on for another twenty minutes. I asked him if he missed any of it—the shows, the merch, hearing someone sing your songs back to you. He said, ‘Sure, man. But, I get enough of a kick out of being a provider.’

Back when we were kids, it was almost winter break, and Candace and I had devoted most of our fall to learning our instruments. When it was just us, on the weekend or those afternoons when Anthony had his own lessons to go to, the two of us sat on the floor of her room, volume low, showing each other little riffs we’d learned, trying to write our own. Those first songs we came up with were unapologetically bad—three or four arrhythmic notes that fell into sloppy fills, choruses jammed full of bar chords. It took us entire days to come up with the ideas, and by the time we’d agreed on the transitions, we could barely remember the beginning of a progression. It took her longer to learn trickier fingerings, to write bass parts in general, and I used to get frustrated with her. I didn’t understand why music had come to me quicker than it had for her. It’d been her idea. It ran in her family.

The week after Christmas, their mother went away for the weekend to stay with a man that would eventually be their stepfather. Candace made air quotes when she talked about the trip, said, ‘She’s going to Philly for work.’ Anthony’s band brought over a thirty pack of Beast light, and collapsed into the living room furniture, playing Tony

Hawk on the TV and passing instruments back and forth. The guys in his band objected when Anthony tossed me a beer, and I put the can on the table in front of me, looking

170 down at the belly of my Ron Jon shirt where a tiny hole had worn through at the waist.

He shut them up, said I could hang. Candace watched the bass player thumb the strings, her head lowered so that her ear was closer to the amp. The beer tasted sour on my tongue, and Anthony put his guitar in my hands, told me to play Drain You by Nirvana, a song he’d been teaching me from the beginning. I started chugging through the intro, and someone turned the volume on the amp up loud enough that Candace and her teacher excused themselves to her room. I slipped up a few times, but when I got to the end of the song, Anthony said, ‘Better watch out Tim. We might just replace you.’ In reply, Tim snatched Anthony’s pack of cigarettes from his lap and settled back into the sofa to smoke. The drummer was staring into his Nokia, and Tim leaned over, whispered something to him. They laughed but never looked in my direction.

Two beers in and I was the strung out kind of drunk, eyelids heavy, the stain of tobacco smoke lingering in my lungs. When I passed by Candace’s room on the way to take a piss, I noticed the door had been pushed toward closed. She’d always kept coats hanging from the corner of the door, so the hinge couldn’t shut to the jam. I’m not sure why I looked over on the way to the bathroom—be it curiosity or an afterthought—but as

I turned my head, the sight of bare skin shone in the darkness of their apartment. Though

I only tilted my eyes through the slot in the door for a second, time lengthened in that way it tends to when your curiosity meets the precarious chance to find confrontation in a place that, until that moment, didn’t exist. The bass player had his back to me, and beside his bare ass, Candace’s black hair shifted in the darkness. I hadn’t seen a sex act since the porn in Meryl’s bathroom, but even still, what fascinated me wasn’t the small spark of

171 jealousy that I hadn’t realized would occur at seeing her with someone else, it wasn’t the swell of surprise building in me—what made me linger in the doorway before heading to the bathroom, before pretending I’d never seen her mouth him, was the blue hue the bass player’s skin in the almost glowless light of her bedroom, how much space their breathing filled with its volume.

After that, I only ever went over when Anthony was around. And when he wasn’t, or when he had to cut out, I’d hangout with Candace for long enough that my excuse to leave wouldn’t feel too sudden. Anthony’s band started playing gigs at high schools or community rec centers that hosted local bands to play for five dollar covers. One weekend, they played a show in Bowie on a Friday, were playing a talent show in

Westminster the following night. Instead of trekking their gear back to the practice space in Gaithersburg and reloading it the next day, they brought their half-stacks and pedal boards home. When Anthony loaded out that Saturday, I was there to help him lug his amp, his speaker into the back of Tim’s mom’s station wagon. Without instruction, I loaded the gear so it wouldn’t shift, so the hard cases wouldn’t tear the speaker grills, and

Anthony, ‘Well shit, we should bring Jonah to be our roadie.’

I don’t think he expected me to be on board, to shrug and say, ‘Sure.’ My mom spent her weekends collapsed into the coach, trying her best to recover from the grind of her work week, fifty plus hours on her feet running the administrative manager of her branch of the FDA, in charge of the secretaries in her office. She’d been there ten years at this point, and this promotion had given us a temporary financial security but drew on her. So when she wasn’t at work, she hid from the world, recuperating. I learned early on

172 that if I didn’t get into trouble, if I didn’t disturb her relaxation, she didn’t care where I disappeared to. When I went inside to grab the twenty dollars I had stashed away, I told her I was going to Candace’s. She turned away from the television long enough to take my outfit in, to say, ‘Be safe.’ A canned soup commercial lit her raw pink. I gave her a kiss on the cheek, then climbed into the back of the band car, wedged between a mic rack and a box of burnt CDs they brought along to sell. On the way out, Candace had been sitting on the staircase looking out across the shrubs as her brother and the bass player smoked, waiting for Tim to get the directions north figured out. She had her arms folded over her chest, the kind of absent look on her face that I knew meant a bit of anger had begun boiling in her. I zipped my to my throat, asked her what was wrong.

She said, ‘They told me I couldn’t go.’

‘I’m just trying to help out,’ I said.

‘Sure.’

She wouldn’t look me in the face, and for a moment, standing over her, I felt a kind of authority that was unfamiliar. ‘Guess I’ll just watch TV,’ she said. ‘Or something.

If you change your mind.’

I knew a smile wouldn’t help the tension my departure was going to create, but I bent my lips anyway. Then I was cramped in that speeding car, every bend in 29 rattling us, the equipment, against the walls. Tim was blasting a local band whose name I never learned, but I can recall how it’s medium was conveyed through a pissed off tone—open hi-hat driven beats, a wall of fuzz.

173

At the show, we stood in the parking lot waiting for the other bands to play. I figured we’d watch, but Anthony said, ‘The only bands worth seeing were the ones that played after us.’ He already had his guitar out, kept playing a lick he hadn’t quite got a hang of. He said, ‘Even then, it’s just to make sure we’re better than them.’

‘And if we’re not,’ Tim said, tuning the strings on his Les Paul, ‘It’s nice to know what better looks like.’

They bumped knuckles, then asked me to set the CDs up on their table at the back of the venue. Anthony had a wad of singles rolled in his pocket, and he secreted them into my hand as a group of kids walked through the lot carrying food from the 711 across the way. It felt heavy in my hand and had to swallow my nervousness as I crammed it into my jeans. He was half a foot taller than me, had to crane his neck as he whispered,

‘You’re not going to fuck it up.’

Their band was called Shelf Life, and what it lacked in general pop appeal it made up for in swagger—gain heavy bass, drums that made sure you knew where the beat was.

Anthony sang with his guitar slung across his crotch, his pick hand snapping at the wrist.

He liked to sing with that Billy Idol snarl in his lips, bending his spine backwards whenever he hit a solo. I know I am partial to this memory—my real introduction to music—watching them from the back of that rec center room, delivering their songs with no regard to the audience. And when their last song swelled toward its end, Anthony shouted goodnight to the audience and wiped his guitar strap from around his body, like he couldn’t be more ready to be free of it. As Tim, the drummer, and the bass player beat through the last ten seconds of the song, Anthony propped his guitar on his amp, and

174 disappeared into the back hall. The audience loved his disinterest, clapping well after the last beat hit. I hadn’t sold a CD all night, but after they played, a crowd began to gather at the table just in time for Anthony to reappear, his hair slicked back with sweat, the neck of his t-shirt stretch down to show the divot of his collar bone. He sat down in the folding chair beside me, asked me if I knew how to pack his gear, and when I nodded, he punched me in the leg, said he could take over. I was almost out of earshot when he called my name, and looking back, the line of young woman who’d line up to talk to him turned, following his attention. Their eyes were like fingers pressing into me. I felt scrutinized under their gaze—the dozens of expressions shifting with inflection, confused squints, inquisitive tilts of their chins—but also important, and in that importance, beautiful. I had to dig through that pressure, that glory to remember he needed the cash in my pocket to make change.

In the parking lot, the band and a group of people who’d lingered after the show stood in a circle between the remaining cars, talking. I didn’t get home until after midnight, and the next day I got grounded for lying about my night. My mom had gone downstairs looking for me at eleven, and when Candace told her where I was, she went back to our apartment to wait for my return. She’d planned to chastise me that night, but fell asleep before she could.

Olivia and I got out of the car, and I carried her brother’s gift into the house. I said, ‘I don’t know. From there out, I was all about music.’ The guitar—I would do nothing but slam chords through my small amp until Mary or my mother told me to turn it down. Every time Shelf Life had a show, I misled my mother so I could tag along, and

175 after a few rounds of punishment, she saw there was no harm in it. It was ninth grade, and

I’d met Thump and moved my gear to his spot before I realized I’d let the original idea of starting a band with Candace slip through. Or I knew I’d done it, but the wordless way I let the idea dissipate was only a gentle ending to it if I didn’t recognize I’d committed it to her purposefully.

The routine Olivia and I had developed at the height of our relationship was one of mutual comfort fueled by distraction—we’d encourage each other to pursue the tasks or errands we needed to do, but at the first chance to give in to laziness, we enabled each other. Sometimes, we’d make it to Baltimore to get dinner or drinks with Thump and

Andy, but more often over the course of that year, we declined. Even when Jerome would offer to drive, we’d stay in, side by side on the couch, our laptops anchoring our attention, or else in bed reading or watching television, or else having sex, not dispassionately, but with enough routine that it felt less like intimacy and more like we were using each other as a form of masturbation. And in that way, it was still satisfying, but occasionally, pressed between the strange warmth our bodies had sweat into the bedding, I noticed what filled me after my gratification faded was something akin to isolation.

While she washed her face in my bathroom, I sat at my desk and set up the guitar, adjusting the intonation, the action in the strings. She kept a duffle bag of assorted spare clothing and beauty products on the chest by my dresser, and as she moved between it and the bathroom, readying herself for bed, she didn’t look in my direction, even as I’d got her brother’s instrument tuned and opened up a chord, even as I played her favorite

176

Pixie’s at her. In bed, she turned her back to me but let my arm loop under hers, my cheek on the bottom corner of her pillow. In the dark, her voice pulled me back from the brink of sleep. She said, ‘Does it still bother you? Is that why you told me all of that?’

‘That I ditched her?’

Though I couldn’t see her face from behind her back, I could tell her eyes were open. She said, ‘No.’

I asked her what she meant, and she changed her mind, said to forget it, to go to bed. That would’ve been easier, letting this small conflict whimper and die. But I dug in, wanting to know what I’d done to upset her—what could possibly have upset her after I’d spent my day helping her. At first she dismissed what she initially said, but when I couldn’t stop asking, she wound herself tighter, still unwilling to divulge it to me. We were awake long enough that my eyes adjusted to the lightless room. Finally, she told me she thought it was strange that my life in music had begun because I had a thing for

Candace. Even after she’d been so cruel to me during the summer, dismissing me from that party. She said, ‘It doesn’t bother you that this massive portion of your life started out like that?’

Maybe I’d just been annoyed at how long it took for her to voice her hesitation, but I said, ‘Does it really fucking matter how I came to it? It’s not like it doesn’t mean something to me.’

The muscles in her shoulders, her back tensed, and at their retraction, I let her go, rolling to my side of the bed, facing that IKEA book shelf that bisected my room. We lay there, back to back, waiting each other out, not wanting to be the one to turn, to hold the

177 other as a form of a submission. Though it was August, my feet were exposed from under the covers, and the night air was cold where it touched me. I fell asleep.

When I told this same story to Elle, it was June, six months after the Christmas at the speakeasy and the night I left Olivia. It had been raining for a week, and when the storms finally broke, the sun was tall and loud, reminding us that spring in Maryland meant a grinding, wet heat. The night I told this story to Elle, it had been ten days since

Thump had gone missing—he’d played a show on a yacht, and when the ship arrived back in the harbor, he wasn’t on board. This night, after a hanging sunset, they found

Thump’s body. Jerome told me they’d gotten drunk but wouldn’t allow himself to believe he’d drowned until his remains washed up on Kent Island. Thump had no close family.

His funeral was attended by his closest friends—a dozen clusters of acquaintances he’d accumulated over the years that were largely unfamiliar with each other.

I’d been on my way home from work when I got the call from Jerome. I parked in the driveway of my rotting house, where Elle was already sitting in the living room on the sofa. She’d moved in a when her lease ended a few weeks before. I put my head in her lap and told her about the band days, about high school, walking my story back until I got to Candace and Anthony, my Ron Jon shirt and my first show. I talked until my tongue stuck to the floor of my mouth from a drought of spit. I wept twice into the leg of her jeans. Elle had her palm on my ear, used her other hand to massage my scalp. I asked her if it was shallow—the motivation that brought me to music, to Thump—and her voice turned to honey. She said, ‘When I told my grandparents I wanted to move in with

Christian, my grandfather was furious. I was sixteen. He yelled all night, and in the

178 morning he screamed until he went to work. When he was gone, I asked my grandmother if I was making a mistake. She’s always been the patient one in my family, so unlike my mother, my grandfather.’ Elle’s voice slowed here. I could hear her heartbeat drum the muscle in her thigh. ‘She told me life is a maze of long, dark hallways. And we just grope.’

We just grope.

###

179

Elle wore an A frame skirt to the funeral, a cashmere cardigan around a blouse tucked into the dark gray heather. Her hose were the traditional kind—scratchy soft black with a bold seam running down the back of her leg into the ankle of boots. I’d always admired her shoe choices, the sharpness of their designs, the thinness to their shape. This pair had a zipper along the ankle, black leather and a wooden heel. It was two in the afternoon, and the sun had just tipped over from the peak of its glory. I’d worn my Italian chino suit, hoping the black fabric would breathe, but my ribs were already streaked with sweat from my underarms. At my other shoulder, Jerome had managed to pull himself into the only suit he owned that wasn’t designated for wedding band performances. Beside him, his mother dabbed a tissue to her nostrils. Though I was in the front row, exposed to the casket, I could barely hear the eulogy due to the wind rolling through the glade of trees meant to shield the graveyard from the parking lot. When it was over, we dropped handfuls of dirt onto the burnished wood casket after it’d been lowered into the earth.

The reception was at Jerome’s mother’s house on the cusp of Old Towne Ellicott

City, that stretch of bars and antique store in the historic stone buildings preserved along the river. Occasionally, the guys and I would go there to drink in the crowd of kids from

UMBC who’d made the trek across 695 for a change of scenery. It’s abandoned now, sunken by a flood a few years ago, the old earth opening a seam lengthwise of the hill, swallowing the street, the businesses on the first floor. When we found parking, I started up the road to the reception but slowed, waiting for Elle. She’d draped her sweater over

180 her wrist, was leaning into the incline of the street. I knew she didn’t like when I babied her, when I gave her the physical assistance she deemed too hyperbolic of her condition.

Since her medication ceased working, she’d become light-headed when over-exerted, prone to a thinning in her blood. But often, when I put my arm around her, when her I instinctively took her hand on an escalator or while crossing busier streets, her mood soured.

She’d say, ‘I don’t need help.’

‘I know,’ I’d reply. ‘I just want to touch you.’ I’d tell her I was something demeaning, like I was just horny, as long as she’d smile at the joke, as long as she’d let me distract her. Parking in the neighborhood was difficult even when there wasn’t some form of gathering—we had to walk a couple blocks to get to the reception. I crooked my elbow so that she could wrap her arm around mine, so that she could lean on me if she needed to.

Today, she didn’t have any vinegar in her tone. She asked how I was doing and I said, ‘I just want to get this over with.’

I’d been to a handful of funerals, of wakes, the post-burial receptions. Thump’s mother’s, then mine, and now Thump’s. The only grace I found in these gatherings was that a certain form of terseness was not only allowed, it was understood. I’d let some glass of chilled whisky or brandy occupy my hand, staring at the toe of my shoes. At my mother’s funeral, I was surprised how few of the people I knew. On one half of the reception, members of our church whom she still spoke with gathered, standing about refusing drink, and on the other, her work friends—both higher and lower than her in

181 terms of authority—formed a circle of churning conversation based in that work familiarity. Mary hosted them, letting them unload their condolences and affected nostalgia of my mother—the workplace or churchgoing version of her—and Mary was gracious, responding with the touch of sincerity, thanking them for their presence before moving on to the next guest. My mother had a stomach aneurism on her way to lunch, and passed before the ambulance got her to the hospital. We had her reception in the gala room of a restaurant that, as a family, we’d never been patrons of. It came together last second with no substantive planning. We needed a venue that could provide the food, that could host a variable amount of attendees, all on one tab preferably, and while my sister had just started earning at her firm, I was still serving at a bar while going to school. I was twenty-one and lived downtown in an apartment unsuited to the circumstances, and

Mary and her husband were living in one of those cookie-cutter apartments in

Germantown, waiting for their home renovations to be completed.

In the restaurant, I’d become bothered with the fake-art loping its pattern across the carpet—gray and teal lines swirling into amorphous shapes, not quite flowers, but appearing like no other discernable thing either. Jerome and Thump left for California the day before she passed, on vacation with Jerome’s parents. Without them, I sequestered myself to the wall seat at the bar, sipping Bulleit on the rocks. When I saw the bartender ring the eight-dollar pour into the register, I was aware, suddenly, of how every small plate of tapas, every glass of wine and beer passed between the hands of our guests was coming out of my sister’s pocket. I slowed, savoring the liquor, and a man in a charcoal suit settled into the chair beside me. The mirror above the liquor shelf framed his plain

182 black tie, a material too false-bright to be real silk. He ordered a scotch neat, and when the bartender asked what kind, he said, ‘I’m not a decadent man.’ The other dozen seats at the counter were open, but he’d chosen to crowd me. He took his glass between his thumb and middle finger, spinning it one way then winding it back, as if he were opening a padlock. I was vacillating between two methods of relieving myself from this unwanted closeness—dipping my head nearer my drink on the bar, using my shoulders to shield my face from social interaction, or turning on the stool and leaving altogether. Before I could pick which way I was to surrender my position in the room, he cleared his throat. We were two unfamiliar men, not sharing a drink, but drinking in tandem, and this short, grating noise created an odd and intimate bridge to which he crossed by saying, ‘Your mother was a commanding woman.’

From his posture, I could tell he was a few inches shorter than me, barrel-waisted and sturdy. His side-part was gray along his hairline which wasn’t yet receding— surprising for an older white man. The lines in his face did little to help hide his age, deepening the puffed red skin on his cheeks, his brow. I recognized an exhaustion to his appearance that mirrored my own, an exhaustion which I hadn’t thought to call such because—stretched thin by the planning and my inability to fully comprehend my mother was now gone—I couldn’t see it in myself. I gave him my thanks, and he raised his glass from its coaster. He said, ‘She had a great heart. Indeed, a great heart. It was a privilege to know her.’ I’d thought he was wearing a cheap, too-sweet cologne, but judging by the slur in his voice, I understood him to be drunk. His hips hung slightly over the edge of the stool—when he turned to stand, I could hear the rotating joint under the seat squeak. As

183 his hand collected his glass, I shifted to face him, watching the liquor disappear into his mouth, the swell of it wetting the hairs on his upper lip. He set the cup on the counter and then dropped his hand onto my shoulder, the weight of it startling in its heaviness, its conviction. He said, ‘You be well, okay? Be well.’ He nodded to himself and turned, and

I watched him leave the room, sharing farewells with no one.

I’m unsure if my mother ever loved anyone after my father. When I was a child, and we watched whatever romantic comedies the network channels played Saturday afternoons, I’d ask her when she was going to fall in love again, and she’d say, ‘I love my children.’ Some nights she’d come home late, but often that was just overtime. I was hardly ever home as a teenager—whose to say she hadn’t entertained the advances of a hundred men? But she was austere in her mannerisms, tall and brooding, hardly ever prone to humor. It’s hard to imagine her as someone willing to give in to the whims of flirtation or desire. I have brought myself to love many women, not always for the right reasons, but the love, itself, is still the same pure thing—a prioritizing of my wants and needs for another person above my own, and so I regret none of them. It’s hard to know my mother had no one to raise her up, to put her first.

Before we went into Thump’s reception, Elle stopped to sit a moment on the green electric box on the street corner. I could see people funneling into the house up the way, but I wasn’t eager to enter myself. Like most seasonal changes in Maryland, the winter lingered longer than it should’ve, and by June, spring was only a passing temperate thought before summer bruised the days with heat. Elle’s hair lifted with the humidity except the edge of her bangs stuck to her forehead with sweat. I sat next to her,

184 resting my hand on her lap. The wool under my palm was warm, and that morning, we talked about how inappropriate the fabric would be in this weather, but it was her only dark toned skirt that went to the knee. The box seemed to hum against my legs. ‘I’m not sure why,’ I said, ‘I thought everything was going to slow down.’

She started to speak but instead wrapped her fingers in mine and squeezed. We lingered until the trickle of people walking past us toward the house had stopped. She stood and pulled me, lightly, to follow. The gathering of attendees had appeared almost pathetic in size standing amongst headstones in the cemetery field, but inside the reception house, the crowd filled the main rooms from buffet table to wall, occupied the decorative living room, the foyer. Elle had never been a picky eater. We’d both grown up poor and learned early that if we held out for the food we preferred, we’d waste away with hunger. Jerome’s family was from New Orleans where his mother’s relatives ran a farm. When she cooked for us as kids, we never took it for granted. I heaped a plate full of rice and stewed tomatoes, spiced pork and greens. There was an upright piano in the corner of the living room, and I sat on the bench, Elle on my lap, out of spatial necessity but also comfort. The record player in the corner spun Etta James, and the room around us tapped its toes mid-sway. Elle didn’t have much weight to spare, and what she’d lost since we’d been together was noticeable, to me, in the divots of her knees, the severity of her ankles, how light she felt in my lap. She had problems maintaining her appetite which

I knew was torture—all that hunger drawn up and instantly quenched. She was a woman that liked to linger in the act of satiation.

185

Coolers of beer and soda framed the catering table, and in the dining room,

Jerome’s mother kept a liquor cabinet equipped with the ingredients for cocktails—

Peychauds and absinthe for Sazeracs, Angostura and sugar cubes, a variety of rye and bourbon from barrel-aged to twist-top. At our spot in the corner of the living room, I watched Jerome’s sister stir a drink for Andy. I’m not sure how I expected her to behave.

I hadn’t seen her before the service, couldn’t predict if she’d be wrecked with grief or delirious and distracted with medication or booze. As she waited, the stem of an empty glass dangling from her finger, the wrist of that hand propped in the other, her body defined itself by a series of angles, and in those sharp turns, I was surprised to see poise.

Candles on every flat surface in the room lit her cheekbones, the curve of her forearms, the peaks of her shoulders leashed by a black dress that silhouetted her body from throat to lower thigh, and as the light pulled the edges of her body into focus, she appeared at ease, not relaxed, but resigned. I don’t want to say that she was beautiful, but why can’t there be an aesthetic to reduction—the tenants of love and possibility stripped away, and what is left but the body, and the necessity to continue a life budding like a flame behind her eyes. I kissed Elle on the neck, and when she leaned back into me, my spine pressed gently the keys on the piano, played a low chord, soft and dissonant.

It’s hard to define exactly what it felt like to be in the midst of a party for my friend’s death. I can say the dismay that rose in me was slow and resonant, like a chore.

Thump had drowned, and this was a thought that would repeat in me in its own volition.

One day I would sink into a hot tub beside Elle, and Thump had drowned. It will rain for days on end, deepening the street with puddles, and Thump had drowned. Hold my breath

186 to fix a fit of hiccups, and Thump had drowned. Sitting in that house, I’m not sure the reality of it had set in me firmly just yet. I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, when I threw my keys into his chest, when I walked off into the District uncaring whether he’d arrive home safe. This was a guilt I carried, that only Jerome and I have access to. I am thankful

Jerome never brought it up, though I know it must be easy to recall. With a plate heaped in food, Jerome side-stepped through the crowd until he stood in the gap beside the piano and the wall. He set the plate on top of the upright, asked us if we needed anything. I thanked him for inviting us, and he dropped a hand on my shoulder, quick and unswaying, like a guillotine, gripping the muscle, his brow dipping in a look of pain. He said, ‘Jonah, you’re always welcome.’

Elle shifted in my lap so we were all facing each other. I started to speak, to explain how I understood the rudeness that brought around the end of our living situation, the end of this period of our friendship, lost in the relative nothingness of our mid- twenties, but before I could mouth the first word of that cogent thought, Andy broke through the crowd, her left hand upturned in a claw, holding the necks of two

Manhattans, a third in her right. Her attention was committed completely to the task of arriving without a spill. When she extended the pair of drinks toward us, Elle plucked them from between her fingers, loosing one drop of red onto the toe of my cordovan short wings. I bent around her waist, rubbing the liquor from the leather with my thumb. I’d worn, not my best, but my most expensive suit that day—a hand-fit and tailored two- button black alpaca, designed to my specifications by a British clothier I’d met on a style forum. A silk tie with small purple diamonds, a dipped calf-skin belt, my most costly

187 oxfords. Together, the suit had set me back about as much as a semester of community college, but in the embrace of the wool, I felt defined, the angle of my jaw pronounced in contrast to the fabric, my very shadow cut to the exact measure of my ideal self. It was the kind of ease I’d imagined as a younger man that could not be bought and yet, I found that price. The red splotch was painted on my thumb, and Elle kissed me on the ear, saying, ‘Sorry, baby.’

Up close, the lint stuck to Andy’s dress shone in the unaggressive light coming from the candle over my shoulder. I brought the drink to my mouth, let the whisky, the vermouth coat my tongue. It wasn’t until that small burn settled in my stomach that I realized my hunger. In the past day, I’d eaten only a hardboiled egg to break up the alternating barrage of coffee and water I’d managed to stomach in the slow daze of grief.

Elle had slowed in her eating, her fork pressed between her thumb and the plate, and I reached around her waist to pluck a grape tomato from the remaining food. She tried to stand, saying she’d get me more to eat, and I held her hips, saying I didn’t need it.

Elle had this way of subduing me with a look, a kind of gentle stare that I’d never seen her give to anyone or anything else. While flexing her brow, she bit the smallest corner of her lip and set her eyes on me as if I were a flower she could will to bloom. She said, ‘Let me.’ Navigating the crowd would be an undertaking for someone with her stamina, but I knew coddling her would put her in a mood worse than a momentary exhaustion. Without her weight on my lap, I stood and brushed the wrinkles from my slacks, buttoning my jacket. I’d never really reckoned with the fact that I was a few inches taller than Jerome because Thump had always towered over us both, bending our

188 necks into attention when he spoke. My height was exaggerated by the wooden heels of my shoes, and Jerome and Andy tipped their chins back as I joined them in the space beside the piano. We cheers’d with expectancy, not enthusiasm. I brought the glass to my mouth and held the sip, not knowing what to say. Andy set her coupe on the bench and threaded her arms around by blazer, pressing her palms in the recess between my shoulder blades and squeezing me to her. The pressure of the embrace forced the wordlessness from me, and I said, ‘I wish I knew the right thing to say. I never do.’

Her cheek was on my shoulder, my chin on her scalp. She said, ‘There’s no right thing.’

When she released me, Jerome took her place, wrapping his arms around me, trapping my arms in his. He smelled like gin and sandalwood cologne. Leaning away, he grabbed my biceps with an authority I was not used to this fervor from him, told me it was good to see me, told me that he’d missed me. The skin around his eyes was rough and pink. He said, ‘Sorry it’s so cramped. I wish we had a little space to breathe.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see so many people here for him.’

Andy picked her glass of the piano bench as Elle slid out from the group of older women congregated near us. Her drink was down to its dregs. She handed me a plate of food and smiled. I could tell she was tired but would never admit to it, not until we were home on the way to bed, our finest clothing discarded onto chair backs or the floor, the cool sheets catching all the sweat from our skin. I introduced Elle to Andy, and they had an immediate energy in their conversation—Andy relating an excitement at finally meeting her after all the scraps of stories she’d heard, Elle downplaying the importance

189 of those anecdotes, lowering the moment into a lull by offering her condolences. Jerome began to tell me about how he’d gotten promoted in the wedding company, managing one band and picking up guest spots in another. He only worked at the beer store a couple days a week, more for the discount than the money. I caught fragments of Elle asking

Andy about her time in Korea, about the all-boys school she now taught in. Jerome spoke quickly, and when he arrived at the end of his point, exhaling with enough heft that his shoulders rose and fell, he asked after me, about what had changed since we last spoke.

After Olivia and I ended it, I put my two weeks in at Barneys. The manager couldn’t understand why I’d walk away from the job, especially with how much urgency

I brought to the sales floor, with how small a commitment the hours were. She couldn’t keep from trying to fix the fake excuses I gave her for quitting, so I told her I was no longer with Olivia, and after, my last five shifts passed with an awkward and quiet air signaling, to me, that all my coworkers knew about the break.

In April, Javier came through the office to help Robert E. pick out decorations for his engagement party. I’d been growing uninspired by my wardrobe, and in that discomfort, I’d begun taking small risks in my attire. Nothing unprofessional, but choices

I’d considered new age or even uncharted in terms of fashion. Chambray ties or denim shirts, a return to the mis-matched blazer and slacks look of the 70’s. The day Javier came in, I was wearing a black suit highlighted with brown accessories—cigar longwings and matching belt, a brass and maroon silk tie that held it all together—a color combination I’d once found acceptable only on people who had a disconcerting lack of awareness of their dress. I was sitting on the reception couches, proof reading a series of

190 emails Robert had printed out, my feet propped on the corner of the coffee table. Javier said, ‘I can’t tell if you’re trying to get comfortable or if you just want everyone who walks through here to notice your shoes.’

I made a point of keeping my eyes on the paper I held above my stomach.

‘Couldn’t it be both?’ When I got to the end of a sentence, I set the page on the table and stood to shake his hand. He hadn’t been in to consult for half a year, and so, when he pulled me into a hug, our bound hands trapped between us, I thought maybe he was being sentimental for those months we saw each other often after Robert’s divorce.

He said, ‘You look tremendous, young man.’

At this, I blushed, averting my attention to move stacks of papers back to the filing cabinet beside my desk. He had a pair of driving gloves sticking out of his back pocket, a cashmere wound high on his throat. I’m not sure what he expected, but as

I moved about the reception foyer, he pivoted to watch as I sorted stacks of my assignments into their terminal or near terminal locations. He said, ‘My partner and I are moving forward with our boutique. We have a location in Georgetown.’

The reception table was clear, and I patted him on the shoulder as I moved past, offering my congratulations.

He said, ‘It’s bigger than we anticipated. We’re going to have room for an extensive home and office décor section, while still offering a full-sized mens’ wear department. Suiting to casual.’

191

‘That sounds promising.’ I sat in my chair, refreshing my email, waiting for a break in the conversation that I might ring Robert to let him know his two o’clock had arrived. ‘Let me know when you open so I can check it out.’

Javier stepped over to my desk, standing behind my monitor. He’d let the gray in his sideburns deepen. He said, ‘I’ve been talking with Marcus, and I think you would be the perfect person to run the clothing portion of the business. An assistant manager.’

My experience in retail was too limited for a position of that importance. My interest in clothing was in the garment itself, and he said that was fine. What he wanted was a keen eye for fashion, both eccentric and conservative. Someone he knew well enough to trust but who was not close enough for that intimacy to be abused, in a professional sense. He winked, saying, ‘I want your insight, but I want you to remember who’s in charge.’

No tasks remained to busy my hands so I set them on my keyboard as if I were about to type. This sudden proposition—the presentation of a hypothetical future—had put anxiety in me. In less superficial things, I was not good at confronting change. I said,

‘I don’t think you need my help knowing what’s in style.’

‘No, no. You’re right,’ he said. ‘But my tastes are limited to a certain aesthetic.’

At this, he took his hand from his coat pocket, cupping his fingers and sweeping them past his face, as if revealing the end of a magic trick. I didn’t know, specifically, what he meant, and after a moment of quiet, he said, ‘I don’t want to limit my market to gay men.’

‘There’d be nothing wrong with that.’

192

‘Of course. Like you have to tell me.’ He stuffed his hand in his pocket, took a breath. ‘I’m trying to think of the best way to put this.’ Through the reception window, I watched the mail clerk push his cart into the office of the VP across the hall. Javier said,

‘I’m sure I could get by appealing to my demographic. But I don’t want to just make ends meet. I want to grow a business. I want it to be successful.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with saying you want to make money.’

‘Exactly.’ He clasped his hands together in front of him, the rings on his pinky and forefinger colliding with a clink. ‘It really is a ridiculous notion—being humble about your vision.’

‘You shouldn’t have to be.’ As I spoke, the mail clerk opened the door, and I rose to meet him, taking the envelopes with a brief thank you. I’d been here long enough that I could almost differentiate pertinent letters from the junk simply by the heft of the envelopes. ‘I’m still not sure how my inexperience could help you in that.’

‘You possess the rare ability to dress how you like with an air of certainty. That is, you know how to present yourself—to look good—in a way that demands attraction or a desire to imitate.’ He launched into a dialogue regarding the type of DC man who wouldn’t be his current target demographic—the part-time intellectual, or artist, or academic who has high levels of mastery in some fields of their life, but in their clothing they reveal, unaware or otherwise, a lack of confidence. These are the men whose style lags two to four years behind trends, who criticize said trends then invariably submit to them. Javier said, ‘Straight men in DC steal everything. Their memory is either quite short, or their threshold for shame is unimaginably high. I want you to appeal to these

193 sorts. I want you to make them feel like they’re in their own style by putting them right near the actual curve. And then the rest of the section can be yours to manicure. Go high- end. Bring in the customer with the discerning eye.’

‘Can you have both though? I don’t see the dudes who rely on J Crew for their fashion sense just coming off that teat. And people like me—I’m not exactly in a hurry to get lumped in with that type.’

Javier turned his nailbeds to the light. The excitement in his tone, which I might’ve been confusing with eagerness, cooled. He said, ‘I’m presenting my vision incorrectly it seems. I think you’d agree, there are certain benchmarks in the history of men’s attire. Blue jeans will never go out of fashion. Or the suit. The polo. Christ, even the T-shirt.’ There was a venom in his voice that made me chuckle. ‘What I want is a return to the essentials. Like what Uniqlo is doing, but with an elevated quality.

Conscious sourcing. An appreciation and awareness for simplicity.’

‘You can find that online.’

‘But not everyone has the knowledge to navigate the abstractions of online shopping.’ He offered me a vision of the ideal look offered by his store—a man in simple

Japanese denim, a white oxford, a cardigan hand-dipped that lost shade between red and black, the color of horse blood. From wood-sole to 100% cotton color, the outfit offers no loud, distinguishable quality that can set apart, and therein, it is immune from the unfair compartmentalization done, often unknowingly, by the human mind. The man in the Tap-

Out shirt becomes so singularly defined by that shirt. While the ornamental stitching on his jean pockets may be awful, his leather shoes gaudy, he is defined by the almost vulgar

194 aggressiveness of his T-shirt’s design. And to be clear, the person underneath the clothing is, in all probability, not vulgar or aggressive, but the image this sort of clothing creates defines him in the mind of the those perceiving him is groomed based on these superficial features, even if there are discrepancies between the clothing and the person. ‘What I want,’ he said, placing his palms together as if turning to prayer, ‘is to reach toward timelessness, timelessness through simplicity, and if that is impossible, I want to get closer than any other outlet.’

This return to minimalism was not a new idea in menswear. Many of the retailers

I frequented had well-manicured departments of ‘Essentials’—the bare bone basics of a wardrobe. The issue was that no one source ever met all of my demands. Undershirts from one manufacturer might have the best weight and wear, but the socks were made in

China. Or the boxer briefs were flawed, a disproportion in the hem causing the legs to ride up. When I had less money, I got Everlane shirts, but Flint and Tinder underwear. I had yet to find the perfect . And since then, I’d lost my interest in Everlane when they changed the design to a thicker, but less structured one. Whenever I washed them, the collars curled, and this small inconvenience was enough to search out a replacement.

And even with all of this specificity, I wouldn’t turn to either of these companies for a button down or a pair of pants. Clothing, for me, was a constant search for ideals—fit, quality, source, durability. I didn’t mind exploring new products. I kept telling myself there was a way to reach perfection, a wardrobe complete with the pinnacle of my personal style, and once I found that, I could turn my attention to maintaining it. My ideal only operated as motivation, a latent incentive I’d used to justify my habit for constant

195 shopping. I’m not sure a perfect version of anything exists, even subjectively. The idea of it only exists to drive itself.

The idea to open a storefront catered to my express needs did fill me with an almost devious sort of energy, the kind I imagine anyone gets when offered a sudden, unearned amount of control. At my desk, I sat letting the thought tumble around, and

Javier leaned over my computer, saying, ‘Jonah, are you going to be working here the rest of your life?’

Making a career of this office job had never been an embarrassing possibility to me, but the way his voice lost its body as he asked the question suggested he considered it so. And I will admit the lack of progression in my position was disheartening, but with four years of quarterly raises, a solid benefits package, I was not just financially stable, I was comfortable. Seeing that direct deposit hit my account on the first and the fifteenth— knowing it would be there for as long as I remained responsible—propelled me. What is required to provide comfort to a person exists in an almost innumerable quantity, but for me, comfort was money. I’m not unaware this stems from growing up poor, but I can’t change that upbringing either. He didn’t need to hire anyone until the fall, when purchasing for their spring opening would have to be done. I stood and shook his hand, told him I would give it some serious thought. He said, ‘Please do. It might be rocky at first, but I want you to understand this is a very real, very good opportunity. For you.’

At the reception for Thump’s funeral, I told Jerome I’d been weighing this new position against my post at the consulting firm ever since. He asked me about the compensation, and I had to admit it would be a big cut at first—forty from sixty-five.

196

What’s worse is the healthcare was a meager substitute with less coverage and higher deductibles. ‘But beyond all that,’ I said, ‘If the store does well, I do well. There are a lot of sales incentives.’

‘Is it something you want to do?’

‘Of course.’

The other conversations in the room began to swell around us. Over my shoulder,

Elle said something that made Andy laugh, the punctuated joy of it rubbing something in me that was still raw from the day’s mourning. I was at the bottom of my drink and sopping the stewed juices from my plate with a brick of soft bread. I said, ‘I mean. I’m not unhappy at the office. I’m not. But, I never thought I would get to work in a field I care about. Not since the band days.’ I nudged him on the shoulder. ‘Not since we were trying to live the dream.’

Jerome chuckled and let his gaze drop to the floor between our feet. ‘We were a little short-sighted back then.’

‘Nah, I think it was the opposite problem. All we could see was the endgame. We didn’t know how to put one foot in front of the other.’

‘I guess a lot of that is on me.’

Anything said to placate his guilt would’ve sounded like just that—a placation.

Thump or I had never blamed Jerome’s shyness, his relative laziness on the disillusionment of our band, but to say they didn’t contribute would’ve been a lie. That failed dream had been the thing that brought the three of us together. To dig too deeply

197 into the reasoning behind it put that friendship itself into question, and now there were less of us to hold it up.

‘It sounds like a pretty clear decision,’ Jerome said. ‘If you’d be happy doing it, if you see a future in it.’

‘Sure, sure. But there’s risk, too.’

‘It’s just money, man.’

Jerome’s mother set her hand on his shoulder—he couldn’t see me flinch at the suggestion that wealth was not a priority as he turned. She said his aunt Marla wanted to hear him sing, and he refused, politely, that old reluctance murky under the surface of his expression. Jerome’s mother had been comically short next to Jerome since his first growth spurt, but there was a sternness to her demeanor that had always intimidated us.

Thump had towered over her, and since we were kids, she’d been sweet on him, calling him bean stalk or string bean, making sure he got just a little extra attention. I’m sure some of that affection was now souring into venom as she set her eyes on Jerome, then the piano, saying, ‘Play.’

As Jerome sat on the bench, we stepped clear of him as if he were about to attempt something dangerous. If he failed, we wanted to be safely outside the radius of that failure. Elsewhere in the room, his mother yanked the needle off the record, causing the conversations in it to build in the absence of music before realizing their own volume and quieting. Jerome pressed the sustain pedal a few times before he set his hands on the keys. Not everyone was listening yet, but those closest to the piano had given him their attention. The skin on his knuckles had gone brown to gray from lack of moisture. He

198 kept forming chords, then resetting. There was no sheet music propped against the chamber, but he stared at the wood of the upright as if reading a score, saying, ‘It’s funny. You can know a hundred songs and forget all of them the moment you’re not playing for yourself.’

Andy, Elle, and I stood along the wall—the best view of his face as he spoke— and we chuckled as he smiled to himself. Jerome said Thump had always loved Jeff

Buckley. He said that after Buckley passed, Rufus Wainright released a cover of

Hallelujah to honor him. ‘That would probably be fitting, right?’ His voice caught in his throat, and he looked up from the piano, searching the room, for his mother or his girlfriend, but when he found me—his eyes ringed red like the burner on a stove left on high with no pan, radiating and unsafe—I felt myself unwinding. An itch in my sinus, pressure in my temples, and Jerome looked at me, not with love but desperation, as if he knew suddenly that friendship could turn to pain, and maybe I could hurt him. I was sore with grief, yet powerful, biting down so that the muscles in my jaw flared. I’m not sure if we were trying to drive our gaze through each other, or holding ourselves up, but in the end, as he pressed, finally, his fingers into the opening chord, he gave me the kind of smile that defused me with its grace.

Jerome’s voice was one of requirement—it might take the height of his breath or range, but eventually, it became impossible to ignore him. When we used to sound check, the venue occupied with only employees and the guys from other bands, I’d watch as

Jerome warmed up into a mic, the people in the room stopping mid-step while he hummed, belted, or trembled in falsetto. I couldn’t sing. I mean, I can find a pitch, but my

199 voice has no body, no character. I’d always wanted the power he chambered in his lungs.

I wanted to know how he bent and shaped it on his tongue.

The crowd at the funeral reception had gone so quiet you could hear the windows rattle when he hit a full chord. Again, he’d closed his eyes, and undecidedly, I shut mine as well, dipping my head to my chest to hide it. From the dark, I felt a hand on mine. In the kitchen, a baby cried. When Jerome rose up in the second verse, the timbre of his voice hit a sharp edge—that near-shrill vibration a violin can have when the tin in the tone gets so bright it feels like it might hurt your ears but instead you only shiver. For a moment, it felt like the song wouldn’t end, or at least, I couldn’t remember how it went even though I’d heard it a hundred times.

When we got home, Elle fell face first onto the mattress, her shoes, her cardigan still on. I sat at my desk, unlacing my Aldens. I asked her if she needed anything, and she just groaned. The way the duvet muffled her voice made me smile, and I was about to collapse beside her when that levity got scared off by guilt, and instead, I set my shoes in the closet and went through the house shutting off lights. Neither of us had enough furniture to fill the now empty bedrooms. We’d filled them with boxes of possessions we no longer wanted to put out but couldn’t, for sentimental or practical reasons, get rid of.

The kitchen and our bedroom felt lived-in, but the rest of the house was closed for repairs. There was even a velvet chair in Thump’s old room with a sheet draped over it.

It’d been Elle’s grandmother’s—the fabric was still good but we couldn’t get the nicotine stink out. When I got back to the room, Elle had flipped onto her back and kicked her heels off. The slanted light from my lamps made her thighs look austere with shadows. I

200 kneeled at the foot of the bed and helped her roll her off. Her legs smelled of sweat and baby powder and I kissed her on the knee, took her feet in my hands. She protested, saying she was gross, but I gripped her damp foot, rubbing her sole with my thumbs. I could feel the bones in her feet shifting tectonically. She draped her arm over her eyes and let out a moan.

She said, ‘You don’t need to.’

‘It’s nothing.’

Her breath bulged the fabric of her cardigan against the button that bound it above her navel, and after a few minutes, she arched her back and removed her blouse and sweater in motion, gripping the base of the shirts and pulling them over her head. I lowered her left foot to the mattress and raised the other. When I was finished, I tried to help her out of her skirt, and this time when she protested, there was a seriousness in her tone, one hand raised up and pressed into my collar bone. She said, ‘Will you get me a drink?’

The frequency we’d had sex had diminished since her body began rejecting the medicine, and I didn’t mind. It was not required in my love for her, but I did fear that if we became used to the lack of passion, we wouldn’t be able to return to it. I was used to the cheaper reverse of this scenario—sex without feeling—and maybe that contributed to the discomfort I carried with me to the kitchen, anxious that I was becoming disallowed to her in terms of physical intimacy, yet knowing, innately, she’d only wanted me to stop babying her.

201

Lately, she’d been drinking gin and dry vermouth over ice. I free poured the liquor over the sink, staring out over the unkempt backyard. Dandelions whispered yellow in the black grass. I filled a wine glass with Carpano and headed back upstairs.

I’m not the kind of person who drinks alone or in private—I liked to consume when I was on the way out or already arrived, but I’d started to drink more at home when Elle moved in. She said she needed a distraction so she’d been steady with her drinking throughout the day—wine with lunch, Chartreuse after dinner, something for sipping in most interims. She’d said once, ‘I don’t ever need to be wasted, but it feels so good to have a little warmth right here.’ She gestured with her finger to the small of her brow between her eyes. It’d been sometime before she’d unpacked, and we sat on a blanket in the living room finishing the last of my rye. Those first few weeks we were rarely apart except when I was at the office. She’d started working from home, doing editorial work for the non-profit. It would be generous to call the pay ‘meager,’ but keeping her mind off the state of her health was more important than the wage. At least, I thought that at the time. I can’t honestly know if she was miserable, alone with those press releases and newsletters, the house coming down slowly around her.

In our bedroom, she’d stripped off her funeral garb. I should say, the AC in that old house barely made it upstairs—we hadn’t turned to nudity as a means of flaunting our youth, more to combat the claustrophobic humidity we were forced to sleep in. I’d gotten used to how the room felt with her naked, how I was constantly aware of this small familiarity that had draped itself between us when she nude and almost unknowingly casual. She lay on her side, propping her head on her hand, and I set the glass, already

202 sweating, on her hip, felt her skin shiver beneath it. She smiled at its touch, and while I held it there as not to spill, she tugged me by the buttons of my shirt, brought my lips to hers. The fan, oscillating beside us, was alone in its song.

‘I feel so relieved,’ I said, finally. ‘It’s awful.’

‘It was a hard day. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

The drinks on the nightstand were staining rings into the finish overlapping a coil of rings already formed. I’d undressed and come back to twine my limbs in hers. The room was so hot that the off-white paint on the walls seemed wet. ‘It feels wrong,’ I said.

‘It’s like, now that the ceremony of it is over, I’m enthused that I’ll never have to go through it again. With him at least.’ We were splayed slantwise across the bed, her head on the pillow, mine at the point of her elbow. ‘When my mom passed, I was gutted. I moved in with my sister. I didn’t leave my room for weeks.’ I reached across her chest to sip from my glass. ‘On the drive home tonight, I couldn’t help but get excited that it’s pay week.’ She turned her chin to the ceiling, began pulling my hair between her finger tips.

She said, ‘People cope in strange ways.’

We’d spent the entire day in the procession of funeral events. Now that we were home, it was nice to breathe at our own pace, to be alone together as the night winded past midnight. We repositioned and drank and repeated, saying little and kissing intermittently. I felt I’d broken something in the mood by admitting my relief, but when we were taking a cold rinse in the shower—one last attempt at cooling our skin before bed—she told me when she was in Toronto, she got a call from her mother. They weren’t

203 close, hadn’t spoken since her grandmother’s death half a decade earlier. Elle had been close with her grandparents by proximity. She hadn’t known them before her mother dumped her into their care—she was slow to realize that innate tenderness that arises between family in the years she lived with them, but she did care. It was the kind of concern that rooted itself more in duty than love, she’d said. She’d come to know them at an age when was too mature and weary to trust, but she understood what it meant for her grandparents to take her in.

In the shower, we kept dialing the water cooler, letting our skin acclimate, then seeing if we could handle more of a chill. We’d taken up this practice before bed on the hottest nights, barely toweling off and letting the sheets soak up the rest of the water. Elle combed her hair back across her scalp. She said, ‘I wasn’t awake when she called. She acted as though nothing was amiss. Like we spoke all the time. I was still adjusting. I didn’t have a job, so I just kind of roamed about the city.’ She said she’d like to think this boredom was what allowed her to be patient with her mother, answering the reaching questions that were pathetic in their attempt to find common ground between them.

‘She’s telling me about this poodle she’s fostering. Then suddenly, she just blurts it out,’

Elle said. I was under the stream and pivoted around her to let her rewet her shoulders.

‘She tells me she has breast cancer.’ We toweled off, the sudden heat outside the bathroom warming the remaining water on my body. Elle said her mother, her voice weakening as she spoke, asked Elle to come stay with her in Georgia for her treatment.

There was no step-dad or boyfriend, no cousins or siblings there to take care of her. She

204 lived in a two-bedroom condo an hour outside Atlanta with a rotating assembly of foster pets—she didn’t want to live through the chemo alone.

We got into bed and exhaustion weighed on me, firmed me to the mattress. I shut off the bedside lamp and Elle put her neck on my shoulder, facing the wall. She said,

‘You have to understand. I’d just uprooted my life. I’d just gotten there.’ I couldn’t see in the now-dark room, could only hear her words filling that new emptiness, the variations in her breath against mine. She said, ‘I stayed.’

Her mother survived. They’d caught it early, and after a rocky beginning to her treatment, her cancer had been declared in remission. Elle’s voice shrank as the room began to grow in focus, the books on the shelf beside me catching the reflection of a reflection of a street light coming through my window. She said, ‘No. That’s not true. I didn’t stay because it was inconvenient.’ Rolling on her stomach, she repositioned to face me, saying, ‘I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t care.’ The words, not the way she said them, prepared me to console her, but instead, she shrugged, her shoulder sliding across my bare chest. ‘What I’m trying to say is, at least you have a feeling.’ The water from our shower had dried on my back and was replaced with sweat. She said, ‘Relief is a feeling that causes you to rise. It means, even if you can’t feel it, you were low. It’s better to know that.’

#

205

In September 2015, Elle collapsed while running an errand at CVS. Summer hadn’t broken, and on the walk to her car carrying two bags of cleaning products and a 24 pack of toilet paper wedged under her arm, she got light-headed. She said the sound of her keys hitting the cement was suddenly like cannon fire in her ears, and while she focused on the metallic clanging, she didn’t realize she was also toppling, landing first on her right hip, then her shoulder colliding with the parking lot and just barely shielding her skull from colliding directly with the earth. The doctors had told her to limit her physical or mental exertion. The reception desk at the emergency room didn’t want to let me through because there was no means to prove the validity of our relationship. When they eventually allowed me to visit, the first thing Elle said to me was, ‘I didn’t think grabbing

TP was really that much of a task.’

She’d been wearing a pair of now loose-fitting jeans and a crew neck shirt, its charcoal fabric stained maroon where her skin had collided with the ground. They were draped over the back of the chair beside her bed, and I refolded them while she followed me with her eyes, waiting for my expression to give some tell of anger or fear. I can say, honestly, that I felt neither. Sure, I’d thought of the cost of the ambulance, of what this meant for her doctor’s ‘Wait-and-See’ method of judging her reaction to new medication against her need for more serious care, but in that cloth-partitioned room, as I rested my hand on the stomach of her , what had occupied me was a superstitious and selfish form of dread—the threat to her life striking me somewhere near my own sense of self preservation. Trouble was coming, and my first thought was how I might get out of its way. Before she spoke, I’d become fascinated with the familiarity of this dread, how I

206 began to feel like I was its gravity. It was my most burdening form of selfishness— thinking the ill will arriving to those around me was somehow my fault.

The skin on her shoulder was plum blue leaking out from under her bandage, the freckles on her shoulders lost in the bruise. The IV in her wrist hadn’t gone easy into the back of her hand, and she kept it at her side to prevent further pain. In the middle of a series of other compartments, her bed was separated by cornflower blue curtains, the windowless hall almost oppressive in its lack of natural light. Fluorescent lights have a way of putting their thumb in your eye. When my mother died, it was almost startling how quickly we’d gotten in and out of the hospital. After what I can only imagine was a summary amount of waiting, the attending doctor came out to tell us she’d passed. He led us back to where she’d been stationed outside of the surgical wing. They’d decided before operating that there was nothing they could do—she’d been gone too long. Her hand, pale and gracefully half-curled at the fingers, hung off the gurney. They let me tuck it under the sheet, then gave Mary the paperwork. You always hear about the drought of life lost seeing to the sick in hospitals—the meals skipped, the incapable sleep. What struck me, heading to the funeral parlor, was how I could’ve made it back to work to finish my shift had I been needed.

This was the first time I saw in Elle what I’d seen in my mother toward the end.

Exhaustion. I hadn’t been ready for my mother to pass—none of us had. She’d always been worked down to the bone, but she was also resilient, so much so that her health was one constant in my early life that I was unaware that I trusted. When Thump had lost his parents, I found solace in knowing my mother, who’d only once had the flu and went to

207 work regardless, was sturdy. Her aneurism bloomed in her unexpectedly. What a horrible way to describe it—to bloom—but this is how I let myself imagine it, the rupturing of blood in her stomach, the hot pain, then nothing. The doctor said she would’ve been unconscious almost instantly and unrecoverable before the ambulance arrived.

The last time I’d seen my mother, I was dropping of boxes of things I didn’t want to move with me into my first DC apartment. I let myself in and found her in her recliner, staring at the television. I’d unloaded my car before she managed to rise, and when she did, the look on her face demanded mercy, the wrinkles around her eyes drooping, her brow untaut. I asked her if she was okay, and she said, ‘Oh sure, sure,’ her lips making way for a smile. She swatted dismissively at the air between us, then placed her hand on my shoulder and followed me into the kitchen. When I came to visit, I’d sit in the table, and we’d discuss the same three things while she cooked—my work, her work, and when

I might settle down a bit and finish school. That last visit, she sat beside me, and after a while I asked her if she was hungry, and she said only, ‘Yes.’ I decided I’d cook for her, but the fridge was nearly empty, so we ordered Chinese. On the way home that night, I’d been worried but not enough to call Mary, not enough to make my trips home more routine. It wouldn’t have mattered. There was no stopping the aneurism. It was inevitable. Or that’s safe to think—that I couldn’t have made a difference.

In the hospital bed, Elle seemed thin compared to the width of the frame, the pillow. Her brown hair was limp with sweat, and the bags under her eyes, in their depth, looked painted on. She placed her free hand on mine, holding it to her stomach. When we were home sleeping in, trying to force each other out into the day and instead clinging to

208 the mattress, she had this way of rolling her forehead against the pillow, meeting me with her eyes and giving me the kind of smile I knew was reserved for me alone to witness.

But as I settled in the chair beside her, the beat-down fabric grinding against my suit, this same smile seemed feeble, and that feebleness annoyed me. I would never admit that to her, to tell her she felt, suddenly, like an anchor. Death, for me, had always been sudden, and so the ways I cowered to it were only reactions. Seeing her at her weakest—her ribs hard against my hand, the halo of sweat on the sheets—I couldn’t help but entertain the reality of losing her, and I feared it. What foundations for strength could be built with the volume of this fear undercutting it?

The next four days, they kept her bed-bound for testing, and when they finally released her, she’d seen a specialist who referred her to a physician who told her she needed a new heart valve. There was no more putting it off. I’d gone with her on the series of consultations that arrived at the decision. He was a small, sturdy man who had a port wine stain forming a cloud above his eyebrow. His breathe smelled distinctly of nicotine gum, perfuming between us in the too-small examination room. Elle sat in another gown on the foot of the table, and I stood beside her, unsure of what to do with my hands. The doctor told her that it was irresponsible of her previous physician to keep her on the medication for so long, that the risk of the procedure only increased as time progressed, and Elle sank under the scolding, as if the fault was on her alone. He left the room, and when he returned, he pulled the stool to sit in front of us, his feet barely on the ground, hands tucked into his lab coat. We’d been the last appointment before the office closed for the day, and he talked to us for some time about nothing at all related to Elle’s

209 health. He asked her about her work, about her schooling, told us he’d done is residency in a hospital in Atlanta. They discovered a mutual affection for a barbecue spot just inside the loop. My tongue dried in my mouth—I hadn’t spoken since before the exam. Finally, he said, ‘The procedure is a real, potentially permanent fix here. I will not lie and say there is not real risk. But in the end, there you’re out of options.’

The day she’d collapsed had been sweltering, and since I hadn’t been home long enough to adjust down the AC to match the now temperate weather, the living room was freezing as we entered. I’d brought her something comfortable to wear home, her bloodied clothes in the duffle bag I carried. She folded her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt, made her way upstairs to change while I attended to what I’d neglected in the house—the thermostat, the dishes growing mold in the sink, the pile of mail bulging out the holder nailed to the siding by the front door. I put on a kettle for tea, and while I looked at a Chinese menu to order in, Elle picked through the envelopes seated at the kitchen table, discarding coupon mailers and credit card offers. I had my ear to the phone when Elle said, ‘Oh shit.’ She used her pinky nail to open the throat of the letter, and I stood over her shoulder trying to read while dictating the order. I turned over the envelope she’d discarded, the bold black and red-edged font printed by the address read

NOTICE OF EVICTION. The bank that now owned the house, previously unaware the property was not vacant, had been alerted to our presence when the rental license expired.

We had sixty days to vacate. I don’t think we spoke a fleshed-out sentence to each other before the food arrived. I set the bag on the table and Elle said, ‘Well that fucking sucks.’

‘Real great timing.’

210

On the table, the letter resisted being flattened and started to fold back along the creases it’d been bent into. The smell from the Chinese began to emit out from beneath the paper bag and its stapled lip, the plastic bag knotted around it. She exhaled and stood, and we readied ourselves for dinner without another word of the eviction, without a plan for the future. While I set silverware and napkins on the table, she forked chicken and rice and vegetables onto our plates. We had a bottle of sparkling mineral water in the fridge and I cracked that in lieu of wine or whisky—the doctor had advised against any sort of excess, be it sex or booze or recreational drugs, a phrase that caused all three of us to chuckle. For a few minutes, we ate accompanied only by the sound of metal on porcelain, exhaled breath and the clank of glasses resettling on the wood.

‘Tell me,’ Elle said. ‘Something terrible. Tell me something you’ve done that’s awful.’

I used my chopsticks to corral a scoop of lo-mein into my mouth, dragging out the chew to buy myself time. ‘I’ve never done anything that bad.’

‘If you think my opinion of you is in danger, you don’t know me.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘The worst thing. Let’s trade our worst moments.’ Her eyebrows bounced in rhythm of the suggestion, and the eagerness glowing in her eyes softened me.

I said, ‘One time, I was dating this girl. I was like twenty-three. I didn’t like her, not really. I was just kind of sleep walking through it, but she was cool and we had similar schedules.’ I rewet my tongue with some water, cleaning my hands with a napkin.

211

‘Anyways, a few weeks into it, she shaved her head to donate her hair to charity. And I kind of just stopped calling her.’

‘That’s not the worst thing you’ve ever done.’

‘It’s not?’

‘You’ve got a smirk on your face.’ She snatched a piece of shrimp from my plate and spoke while chewing, ‘I think you’re a bit proud of that, to be honest. You’re a shallow little boy.’

‘Nothing wrong with being a touch shallow. It’s why we’re dating.’ She had a spec of soy sauce on her upper lip, and I leaned off my chair to kiss her mouth clean, saying, ‘Your turn.’

I could tell she was already full, but she kept folding rice into the onions and chicken on her plate. ‘Well I cheated on my long-term boyfriend multiple times with multiple men.’

‘That doesn’t count.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too unspecific.’

‘Okay.’ She pushed her bowl an inch into the table, raising her legs in front of her on the chair so that her knees were guarding her chest. ‘The night I took you home from the Newseum, Christian had just flown to Florida to see his father in the hospital. They thought he had a stroke.’

‘Was he okay?’ I think I surprised even myself by asking.

212

‘He was fine.’ She turned toward the corner of the table, toward me, dismissing the rest of the meal. ‘He had Bell’s Palsy. It was treatable.’

The days I’d been a captive of the hospital, the ones I’d driven her to the specialists for overnight stays after, I’d distracted myself into starvation, and now, with the smell of salt and grease wafting up from the table, the taste of soy and grain on my tongue, I found a deep and unnourishable hunger. While we talked about more mundane organizational or life functional things, I finished my plate then poured the remaining rice into the stir fry, stirring them together and working my way through it, then the lo-mein, then the scraps of Elle’s plate. I said, ‘Your worst thing isn’t really that bad. Christian’s dad is not your dad. And the cheating is still just cheating.’

‘How awful do you want me to be?’

‘Truly.’

I was wearing unbroken raw denim jeans—a pair of straight-legged Samurai’s that had drawn my interest with the subtle crosshatch in the indigo weave. I’d seen them around for years but always dismissed them because of this pattern in the denim, then a few weeks ago, I came across a series of photos from an internet acquaintance showing the wear he’d achieved with them over the past few seasons. I ordered them almost absently while at work. My stomach, full from overeating, pushed against the waistband.

When I rubbed the heels of my palms against my thighs, the slick finish on the jeans made my hands feel almost damp with heat.

She said, ‘Before I ever cheated, there was a long time when we just stopped sleeping together. And I mean we literally never slept at the same time. He’d stay up all

213 night editing for this album he’d been working on, and I’d be getting up to go to work before I realized he was in the bed. We’d never been spontaneous about sex. Not since we were teenagers and we had to sneak it in when his parents weren’t home. That kind of thing. We were in a pretty set rhythm of a few times a week on the way to sleep, or maybe in the morning on the weekend. So needless to say, while he was working, that all fell away.’

It was pitch black outside, and the inefficient lighting in our kitchen gave the room a vintage glow. The napkin I’d crumpled in my fist was now unwinding on my plate. As Elle spoke, she crossed her legs at the knee, bent forward and twined her fingers together across her shins. I strummed my thumb across her knuckles. She said, ‘I mean I definitely resented him for it. I’m not sure if resentment is the right word. I wanted him to get work done. I pushed him to work on songs to the point where he thought they sounded good, not just when they were good enough. I always encouraged him to do more. So, I don’t know, it wasn’t that I hated him. What I felt like was his mother—like I had been supportive of him to the point where he’d almost forgotten that I was something that needed a little focus every once and a while. I knew that then, and I hated feeling like that, like I was supposed to be hands-off in his life, like I was some onlooker. It felt selfish to want attention, and it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t feel wrong to want that. I wanted him to focus on his work enough to make him happy. But I thought pushing him to do that was at least a subtle nudge that he needed to do the same with me. Anyways, he finished that record eventually, and things got back to normal, but we didn’t find our old rhythm. I think I was expecting him to meet me well past the middle, to like woo me or

214 something. So we would kiss and stuff, but I’d just roll over and go to sleep. He never chased.’

‘And that was okay with you? I mean, you didn’t get tired of waiting?’

‘No.’ Elle lifted her hand from her lap and placed it on my forearm long enough to notice her fingers lacked a certain human warmth. I could tell from her expression that

I’d interrupted her as she was about to arrive at her point. She said, ‘One night, I was sleeping fitfully. When I woke up sometime around three or four, I was horny as all get- out. So I did it. I masturbated, right then and there, while he slept. Don’t get me wrong, I used to pretty regularly back then, just not when he was around.’ Outside, a police car with its siren running drove by, and after the whine of its alarm faded, Elle shrugged, said, ‘That’s it. That something pretty awful I’ve done.’

‘How long did that go on?’

‘A few months. Until I started cheating, I guess.’

I got up and cleared the table. ‘It always comes back to the cheating.’

She’d taken to clearing the dirt from under her fingernails. The poor lighting turned the frailty in the lines of her neck, her cheekbones to that starved-out model sheik so common in . I said, ‘It always comes back to the cheating. Every bad thought. Was that outcome really that terrible.’

‘It always comes back to you, every mention of infidelity.’

I was rinsing the dishes in the sink, the water and oil messing my hands. As she stood behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist, I set the pile of silverware over the drain, unable to turn and embrace her. She craned neck to rest her chin on my shoulder,

215 saying, ‘Maybe my life is just uniquely pure except for this one recurring sin. But no, it’s not terrible.’ I ran the garbage disposal and the whole sink shook. She said, ‘Maybe the next place will be a little nicer.’

In our bedroom, she stripped and got straight into bed. I brought her toothbrush to her as she pulled the covers to hide her nakedness. There was an empty coffee cup on the night stand, and she spit into it when she was finished. On the way to sleep, she said it was my turn.

‘I didn’t realize we were still playing.’

‘I don’t want to be the last to go.’

I’d been lying on my side facing her, and she turned to the bookshelf that divided my room, wrapping her hair below her cheek so that it wouldn’t cling to my mouth. Her neck smelled of shampoo and latex. Enough time passed that I asked if she were still awake before I spoke. I told her, when I was twenty-one, the guys and I had gotten bored with DC and started riding the MARC up to Baltimore a couple nights a month to crash on the couches of other bands we played with. Sometimes it was about playing shows at the Talking Head or Ottobar, but usually we just went to drink and meet girls, the aspect of being in a band that I had become most enamored with. Generally, between Jerome’s timidity and Thump’s general lack of interest, I was alone in this rowdiness.

One night, we went to a dance party at in the small room at Sonar. We’d been drinking Natty Bohs at our friend’s, so by the time we got there around midnight, I had a good buzz going. The bouncer stamped our hands, and I dragged the guys straight to the middle of the dancefloor. The room was black except the neon strips backlighting the

216 liquor bottles, the beer coolers. It was dark enough that the bodies bobbing to the music around us were defined only by their silhouettes—you had to get within arm’s reach to tell if someone was worth pursuing. I could be pushy with Thump and Jerome, getting them to drink when they wanted to stay home, getting them to dance through their discomfort, but I like to think there was at least a little bit of gratitude after the fact. Yes,

I could be almost aggravating in how I motivated them, but the end of that motivation let them arrive somewhere they wouldn’t have been on their own.

By the time I’d sweat out enough beer to need another, it was one in the morning and the DJ was playing the assorted shuffle snare and heavy kick Baltimore Club favorites that’d kept the room packed. This was before the crowd got younger and somehow worse, and regulars stopped coming, and the dance night couldn’t fill the room and we stopped making the trek. Sure, we were part of that young crowd, but in our lack of bravado, I liked to think we were harmless. After waiting my turn, I elbowed my way to the bar, hoping I wouldn’t miss too many songs before I got a drink. I tried never to make eye contact too directly with the people chomping this same bit, so it was odd when someone jerked my wrist. I thought I’d somehow unknowingly overstepped a boundary with my presence. But it was Candace, though it took me several moments to recognize her—bangs sheered to an inch, her thrift store T-shirt so baggy over her tapered jeans that I couldn’t tell where her shoulders ended and the fabric hung free from her arm. She said my name, dragging out the J as if she, too, was just starting to remember who I was.

217

I’d like to say that after I joined the band, Candace and I became strangers to each other, the time we spent as neighbors crystalized in its youth and naivety. When we were in tenth grade, her mother moved them to a ranch house on the outskirts of the school district. We hadn’t kept in touch. Like my family, it’d been decades since they owned land, and that prospect in the early 2000’s was too tempting for her to pass up. Like my family, they ended up losing that home to foreclosure. But sometime after high school, when the guys and I were living on the edge of DC in a shitty walkup we could barely afford, I ran into her at a show at the Black Cat. By then, the guys and I had taken to skinny jeans from H&M, plain white shirts, Leather Pumas. What we didn’t spend on rent or gear or we spent on enough sweatshop clothing to give us the appearance of a defined style. It was uncomfortable back then, wanting so badly for everyone to look at you without outwardly admitting this want. But when I think of Thump, now, it is the version of him from back then I picture—the tight T-shirts showing the entire leanness of his arms, the slumped inward turn of his posture that he hadn’t yet outgrown. There is something to the thirst for individual style that is so awkward and admirable in teenagers.

The ineffable risks of young fashion—the exposed skin wrapped too tightly in bright colors, the desire for direct matching—these often gaudy compilations of an outfit define, to me, the frenetic quest for correctness in physical comfort the younger mind finds so important. And gaudy as they might be, these looks are only feasible to people in this age demographic. God help the twenty-six-year-old still holding onto his acid wash jeans and graphic T.

218

At eighteen, with X’s markered onto the backs of my hands, I’d been alone at the venue because Thump didn’t like the act and Jerome had the flu. I’d tried to bribe

Thump, offered to buy his ticket, his dinner, but he wasn’t in the mood. So when I saw

Candace standing by the merch table, I lingered until our eyes met, until she recognized me. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I didn’t want to be there by myself—still too ill- equipped for solitary confidence. When she saw me, she closed the space between us and touched me on the elbow. We ended up cramming to the side of the stage together, catching up between songs or when one band ended and roadies switched the backline.

Since I fell into it with the guys, she’d stuck with the bass but hadn’t found anyone she liked playing with. Mostly, she’d go over to her brother’s place and record with him in his downtime. It took half the night, but I became aware the she was hitting on me— placing her hands on my lower back, my bicep in intervals, touching her sternum with her fingernails as she laughed. When the concert let out, she invited back to her place near where we grew up. The freckles in her neck had darkened over the years. As the invitation met me, I felt, if I’m being honest, nothing intimate enough to catch a thirty- minute ride out to Montgomery County. It wasn’t for lack of attraction—in fact, the potential shape of our relationship, the history to it, seemed important. Just not enough then to head so far from home. I said, ‘I’m over in Columbia Heights if you want to come back.’

What we had was short and purposeful. We fucked like people trying to find meaning in each other, and when I found that impossible, we fell again, out of touch. Of course, I can’t speak for her. I can’t say she didn’t feel something genuine for me, and to

219 say I was unmoved by her company would also be reductive. We would grab drinks, talk about people we both once knew, and stumble back to my apartment to sleep clumsily.

She’d leave early, before I woke for work, and one morning, after a particularly raucous night where I blacked out during sex and the bathroom smelled irrefutably of vomit, I called out sick and lay there letting the alcohol seep out my blood. I texted her to make sure she got home okay, and after an affirmative, the conversation ended. I realized this shared history was the only thing we had in common, that besides talking about back in the day or the world directly around us, we had no mutual ideas to share or unpack. What we had was comfortable—it required little effort to maintain—but ultimately, it wasn’t enough to hold onto.

So at the club, four years later, I noticed, first, that the old ease, the means with which we’d carried on, was still present. But now, instead of talking about our old, mutual acquaintances, we talked about the month we’d spent together. She said, ‘Buy me a drink.’ When it was my turn to order, I bought four Natty Boh’s and gave her one. It wasn’t until we’d stepped clear of the crowd congesting by the stools that I noticed she’d already had too much—her feet bowing in her heels as she walked, the strap of her purse falling from her shoulder to the crook of her elbow on its own. We stood in a circle with

Thump and Jerome, but Candace turned to face only me, and in response, the guys made no effort to be polite to her, focusing instead on the rest of the room. Candace said, ‘You never told me what went wrong.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said. I had to shout through the music. ‘Nothing went wrong.’

220

‘Then what?’

I raised my beer to drink, and she caught my wrist, too firmly, in her hand, sending foam across my knuckles and the front of her shirt. The brown in her eyes seemed to swallow the neon light, giving her face a glazed over and wild look broken only by a laugh at the beer stain above her breast. On the dance floor, I let her attempt to persuade me with this look, forearms on my shoulders, hips beneath my thumbs. It was easy to forget she’d had too much as I concentrated on how she moved in front of me.

Without me to propel them, the guys posted up in a corner, one hand in their pockets, the other wrapped around the beer. When the lights came on at the end of the night, they appeared beside me, Jerome saying, ‘Yo, let’s go.’

I missed a step then fell out of rhythm. I was only drunk on the attention, on being in a room surrounded by men and women wanting to find some approximation of closeness, and being one of the few who, for an hour or so, did. Candace had finished her beer and crushed the can in her fist. When the music stopped, she kept swaying. I know it’s hypocritical, but I can’t help but find an inability to hold your drink unattractive. It’s not a matter of toughness, but control—to know your pace, your limit, to be able to skirt it when you want to get a little wild—to me, lacking this power is an indicator of something uncouth that I can’t overlook. So when Candace said, ‘Take me home,’ I told her I was making the trek back to DC, that I didn’t drive.

She said, ‘Drive me back tomorrow.’ As she spoke, her left foot faltered and she had to stomp to catch herself from slipping.

Thump said, ‘C’mon, we have to get moving.’

221

I didn’t want to wade in the moment, to linger long enough to raise her hopes or further diminish them. On the way out the room, I threw an arm over her shoulder in a collapsed hug, tossed my beer in the trash and stepped out into the street, the wood heel on those first Aldens scuffing the concrete as I went. We weren’t even halfway back to

DC when Candace called me. The first few times my phone rang, I didn’t answer, but on the third call I picked up, surprised to hear the voice on the other end wasn’t Candace, but another woman. She said, ‘You need to come get your friend. She’s drunk as shit, sitting on the curb.’

In my bedroom with Elle, the quiet from the neighborhood surrounding our home made every word of the story sound like an interruption. Elle had rolled onto her back as

I spoke, my head propped in my hand, my arm across her belly. She said, ‘What’d you do?’

‘I said I wasn’t in charge of her. We were already on the road. I couldn’t exactly turn back.’

Elle’s stomach felt hollow under my fingers. I settled in on my back beside her so that my shoulder was to hers, so that we couldn’t see each other. I told her a week later,

Candace called me. She asked what happened at the end of the night—she couldn’t remember much after dancing, but had woken up in a stranger’s bed. She didn’t know where she was or how she got there, but the one feeling that swept over her immediately was fear. The room was dark save a line of yellow underlining the bathroom door. She wasn’t wearing pants. Searching the dark, the floor was littered with empty beer bottles.

The room smelled of mold and cigarettes. When the light in the bathroom went off, she

222 ran. In her underwear and oversized T-shirt, she got four blocks before a car stopped long enough for her to use a cellphone, to call the police. By then, she’d gotten so turned around she couldn’t retrace her steps. I said, ‘If I’d just let her come back with us, it never would’ve happened.’

Elle said, ‘She made her choices. You aren’t responsible for that.’

‘I could’ve been,’ I said, staring at the ceiling overhead. The game that sprang these stories felt suddenly so far away. ‘I could’ve been nicer to her.’

‘That’s not on you.’ She turned to wrap an arm around me, and I shifted so that my shoulders were to her chest, so that she could hold me. I didn’t know what to say next, didn’t know what line of conversation could possibly turn my mood, so I waited for sleep to fix us. Her shoulders raised off the mattress, turning me onto my side. She put her lips to my neck, not a kiss, just rested them against my skin. Time passed slowly—it could’ve been a minute or an hour before she spoke. ‘Jonah,’ she said. ‘Tell me the best thing you’ve ever done.’ I’d had my eyes closed, and I kept them shut, hoping to feign sleep, hoping to preserve this fake quiet, at least for as long as it took for a real silence to overtake me. As I drifted under, she said my name just barely loud enough to register in my ear. Jonah. Jonah. Are you there?

###

223