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“You saidpoofalready,” I said, and he chuckled. It was a cheerful sound, but it made me uneasy. I thought again of how he’d made thatdig about my mother’s appearance within minutes of stepping into the house: he’d laughed the same way then. Because it was all in good fun, and if you got upset, you were the weird one. Oversensitive. He was good at knowing just what to say so that you felt like you wanted to cry but knew you had to laugh.
“Do you want to know what I think?” he said.
I made myself hold eye contact. “I’m sure you’ll tell me whether I want to know or not.”
Another chuckle. He flashed me a sly, fox-like grin and said, “I think it was that guy. The one with the curly hair. A good old-fashioned New York heartbreak. That’s why you left, isn’t it? Am I right?”
I guffawed. I hadn’t planned to, but I wasn’t sorry when I saw Richard’s eyes narrow, the look of a man who had overplayed his hand and ended up the butt of the joke.Well, good, I thought. Let him think he was wrong, so wrong that all I could do was laugh.
“Well, Dick,” I said, “you tried.”
He didn’t need to know he’d succeeded, sort of. There had indeed beena guy.But to say that what happened to me in New York was abouta guywas like saying that theHindenburgdisaster was abouta blimp. Of course there was a blimp. But the important part was, the blimp exploded.
At first Colin was just my roommate, a stranger from Craigslist whose ad I responded to when I decided after a couple of lonely years that I didn’t like living by myself (and when my therapist, the isn’t-that-interestingone, said that maybe I should see this as a chance to expand my social circle). The apartment was a four-bedroom floor-through in a north Brooklyn townhouse, and the other residents were all a few years younger than me, fresh out of college and embarking on big lives in the city. I was offered the biggest room—which cost twice as much as the other, smaller ones, but half as much as the studio I’d been living in before—and this put me next door to Colin, who had cemented my acceptance at the place when he said I seemed like “a chill girl.” He was charming and boyish, not too tall, witha wild mop of sandy hair and a beautiful jawline and a shelf full of poetry books that he seemed to have actually read. His room was a tiny space, possibly a former closet, that had once been connected to mine by a narrow doorway, but someone had made it into a fourth bedroom by covering the opening with plaster, a substance through which you could see nothing but hear everything. That was how I learned without asking that he was single, having recently broken up with a college girlfriend he called “unadventurous.” She’d apparently moved back to Texas after graduation and wanted him to come, too, but Colin was young, hungry, angry, and anxious to taste all that life had to offer—and he knew that if he went to Austin, the girlfriend would see it as a step toward marriage, which was just sough, conventional. (This last thought was expressed in a full-on sneer, followed by a pause, after which he said, “No, of course not, obviously I’ll still fuck her if she’s in town.”)
In other words, Colin was the worst.
Even I could see that now. But if you were me in that moment, socially adrift, no professional ambitions, aimless in every possible way and looking for something to latch onto, he sounded like something else: an opportunity, and maybe a challenge. The kind of girl Colin would have admired was the kind of girl I’d always wanted to be, fearless and cool and too interested in the world to ever be clingy. A “not like the other girls” kind of girl. If I could catch the interest of someone like Colin, it would mean I’d made myself interesting in a way I’d never been before—and I’d get a cute boyfriend in the bargain.
Of course, all of this was perspective I’d gained later, after everything fell apart. At the time, I was mostly thinking about the jawline.
In some ways, Colin seemed like my perfect match, or at least like I could be his, if I just rearranged myself into a slightly more compatible shape. We bonded over our complicated feelings about coming from money—feelings I had admittedly never had, but magically discovered shortly after he shared his—which he claimed to find revolting. His parents lived in a beautiful brownstone on the Upper West Side, but they were estranged, he told me, and he wouldn’t accept a dime of their support even if they wanted him to (apart from the bajillion dimes in his trust fund, which didn’t seem to count). He said the recession had awakened him to the vulgarity of his own existence, that people like him could have so much when others had so little. He said that Obama was overrated and Stalin was misunderstood. He told me he valued my perspective as “an older woman” (an ancient twenty-six to his twenty-three), and that he dreamed of dismantling both capitalism and the patriarchy in equal measure. He told me we should backpack in Peru and do ayahuasca together—or maybe he just said he wanted to do this, and I assumed I would be there, too.
It was hard to know afterward whether he had lied to me, or if he’d simply created a series of blanks that I could fill in by lying to myself. We never discussed the relationship, except to discuss how great it was that we never had to discuss it, but I thought that was because we both knew it was something special. After a couple of near misses, he came up with the idea to push our beds up against the shared wall between our rooms and use a knocking code so that the other roommates wouldn’t know we were hooking up. The secrecy made it feel sexy and urgent, like we were having an affair; sometimes he’d text me at work,Everyone’s gone, and I’d drop everything to run home and jump into his bed. He’d plant himself between my legs, lick his lips with a wink, and tell me to scream his name—until we heard someone on the stairs. Then he’d theatrically clamp his hand over my mouth lest we be discovered.
The fling lasted only three months. But in New York City, in that magical, romantic time when the days are lengthening and the trees are blossoming and spring is warming into summer, three months can feel like a blissful eternity. This was what I’d tell myself, anyway, when it was all over and I needed some kind of explanation for how I could have been so stupid, so blind. It was early on a Sunday morning when I heard his knock on the wall, the one that meant I should comeover. But when I opened the door, he wasn’t waiting for me: he was lying on his back, naked and thrusting, with his eyes squeezed shut and his crotch obscured by something bright pink and furry that he was holding in both hands—and in my confusion I thought,Stuffed animal, he’s fucking a stuffed animal,a fetish that I immediately decided I was going to be totally cool about, cool and understanding like the chill girl that I was. Stuffed animal fucking? Sure, I could roll with that, and then the pink furry stuffed animal lifted up its head and looked at me and said, “Um, hi?” Because the stuffed animal wasn’t an animal at all, but a girl with a bright pink punky pixie cut that looked absolutely great on her, a fact that was all the more enraging considering she was currently giving my boyfriend a blow job.
Colin opened his eyes. “Oh,” he said. “I guess I hit the wall with my elbow, sorry. Uh, this is Claire?”
I closed the door.
I was back in my room, still trying to decide if I intended to be cool about this, too—or if I even had a right to be mad, although Iwasmad, and getting madder by the minute—when I heard Colin’s door open and the soft thump of feet as Claire-with-the-pink-hair headed to the bathroom. A moment later, there was another knock on the wall. I waited, and then heard his muffled voice: “Delphine?”
This time I knocked on his door and waited for him to open it. When he did, I was relieved to see that he’d put some pants on, and that he looked at least a little chagrined.Okay,I thought.Here comes the apology.
“So, I’ve been thinking we should just be friends,” he said.
I felt my mouth open and close, goldfish-like, no sound coming out. Finally I managed to squeak, “What?”
“It’s just, I’m me,” he said. “And you’re... you.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, and that’s when he said it. Sadly but dutifully, like he was a doctor telling a patient the cancer had spread to her brain.
“You’re just kind of basic, Delphine.”
Of course I didn’t tell Richard any of this. I also didn’t tell him that Claire had become Colin’s girlfriend and moved into his room after what seemed like five minutes, and that the sound of their moaning and thumping kept me awake all night long, and that he not only revealed to everyone that we’d been involved but told them I’d practically forced myself on him, so that for the next few weeks he avoided me while everyone else looked at me with a mix of disgust and pity every time I left my room. I didn’t tell him that I got fired from my job, because I’d left work early to run home and sleep with Colin on the one day that my boss had some sort of flavored water marketing emergency and didn’t believe me when I said I’d gone home sick. And I didn’t tell him how I’d come home one day to find my roommates all waiting for me in the living room to tell me I had to pack my things and leave, or about how I’d started to cry when I asked where I was supposed to go and my worst roommate, a girl with a septum piercing named Clarissa, said, “We really don’t care, as long as it’s not here.”
There’s a saying about New York: you’re always looking for a job, an apartment, or a boyfriend. If you’re lucky, you’re looking for only one of these things at any given time. If you’re missing two, it’s an emergency. If it’s three, as it turns out, it’s easier to just pack up and leave. So I did.
I peed in Colin’s shampoo before I left.
I didn’t mention that, either.
Richard was still staring at me, his face quizzical and annoyed. I was grateful when my phone buzzed.
“Excuse me,” I said. Richard raised his whiskey in salute as I walked out of the room and toward the front of the house, pulling up the messages app as I did. Someone had dimmed the lights in the foyer down to their lowest setting, and everything was drenched in shadow—but I could see the mirrors on either side of the open dining room doors, the umbrella stand just inside the door, the outline of the staircase with its spindly woodwork. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, one patch of shadow stayed deeper than the others. My breath caught in my throat. The door beneath the staircase, theone to the weird little powder room, was standing open. I crossed quickly to close it, but as I reached for the rosette knob, a hand snaked out of the darkness and grabbed me by the wrist—and then another pressed hard over my mouth before I could scream. I made a muffled squeak as my heart beat wildly in my chest . . . and then I relaxed, giggling, as he stepped out of the dark.
“Not funny,” I said, and Adam smiled.
