Wreck and Order Read online

  Only when I was two-thirds of the way across country did I let myself call Jared. He started crying as soon as he heard my voice. We said almost nothing, just sobbed into our respective phones for close to an hour, when Jared finally dragged himself away. I knew exactly where he was going.

  BROOKLYN

  I spent my first few days in New York shaky, jumpy, and wide-eyed, like a drug addict going through detox. There were no doors in the fourth-floor walk-up I shared with a filthy kleptomaniac and her elderly, one-eyed Yorkie. Barnes and Noble was the only bookstore that responded to my application.

  The day before I started clerking there, I decided it was time to wear clean socks again and set out to conquer the Laundromat. I watched my wardrobe drown in murky water for a while before I realized that I hadn’t put in detergent. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the elderly Chinese woman punishing strangers’ garments at the back of the Laundromat if she sold detergent and if it was too late in the cycle to add it. I let the wash run its course and then transferred my dirty, sopping clothes to the giant cauldron of a dryer. I pretended to read a magazine in imitation of the people around me. “Dryer number seven!” the Chinese woman bellowed at increasingly hysterical volumes before I realized she was telling me to remove my clothes from the dryer so someone else could use it.

  I dropped my warm, dirty clothes on the floor of my room, decided to go to the Met, took the wrong train, ended up in Queens, walked past a group of black guys wearing Afro picks and addressing each other as “My nigga.”

  “Hey baby, you dropped something,” one of them called to me. As I looked at the empty sidewalk around my feet, he said, “My heart at first sight of that fine body of yours.”

  “Why you wearin’ all black, sweetie?” another boy called. “Someone die on you?”

  I hadn’t encountered many black people growing up in western Mass. I didn’t know if the jeers were threatening or enjoyable, an innocuous thread from the land of human contact. I took the train back to the Lower East Side. It was pouring. I sprinted into the first café I passed, brightly lit and Polish and filled with tiny, empty square tables. I ordered borscht with rye bread. The waiter nodded and walked away. He met my eyes as he put down the steaming, maroon soup. “Okay?” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I picked up the bowl with both hands and gulped the salty broth. Onion and mushroom dumplings were hidden at the bottom. I ate them lovingly. I spent the next two hours in the café, drinking cup after cup of Lipton tea and watching the world outside the rain-streaked glass. A gray-haired man in soaked mesh shorts jogged past, squinting and making fists. A drunk leaned against the storefront, smearing the glass with his oversize denim jacket. A well-dressed, overweight woman held an umbrella in one hand and a phone in the other, gripping each so tightly her knuckles were white. A group of teenage girls passed by in high, high heels, walking slowly, feeling themselves walk. A man with a cane and a fedora took the table next to mine. He sipped a beer and carefully sliced his kielbasa. A white woman and a black woman shared a plate of pierogies in the front of the café, laughing loudly and eating with their hands. I could just make out Luther Vandross’s voice from the rear of the restaurant, telling the cooks and dishwashers that he just didn’t want to stop loving them. I had changed my life.

  The next day, I woke up depressed by the thought of returning to the Chinese laundry and afraid of my comfort in the café. What if being alone doing nothing was the only way I could feel okay? I’d grow old drinking bad tea, listening to ’80s R&B, and overtipping immigrant waiters.

  —

  I met Brian a few weeks later, when we were forced to share a table at a crowded coffee shop. He had large green eyes that stared into his mug when he spoke, wire-rim glasses, carefully considered facial hair. He’d gone to UCLA for college—undergrad, he called it—and we chatted about the standard differences between the coasts. As he put on his leather jacket to head back to work, he said, “So, what’s your romantic situation?”

  Jared and I spoke on the phone every day, but he didn’t know where I was. “I don’t have a romantic situation,” I said. Brian smiled and typed my phone number into his device.

  He took me to a movie the following weekend, and then we shared his umbrella on the walk back to his apartment. Brian said he liked how the heroine was beautiful but was never sexualized. The comment had its intended effect. I smiled at the glistening sidewalks; it was really going to mean something when this trustworthy man sexualized me.

  I could not hide my shock at how nice Brian’s apartment was. The only other New York apartments I’d seen were those of my coworkers, who shared railroad three-bedrooms in Bushwick between four people. Brian had a duplex with hardwood floors and exposed brick walls that overlooked Prospect Park. I put my hand on the spiral staircase that connected the living room to the upper bedroom and let my jaw drop. “My dad owns the building,” Brian said, looking at the floor. “He’s in real estate. But I pay rent.” I understood his embarrassment at parental help. But it made me feel even more confused by finances. Every once in a while my father sent a check, which made me feel rich because I never bought anything, since I also felt poor. I made ten dollars an hour at Barnes and Noble, working half-time as a way to signal to myself that translation was my real work. When my coworkers worried about student loans and maxed-out credit cards, I almost wished I too had the boundary of debt to help describe my place in the world. It was lonely to be both spoiled and blue collar, just one more way I was a stranger to what most people considered the real world.

  We sat on the edge of Brian’s bed for a long time, staring at the wall a few feet in front of our faces. I was thrilled to feel myself blushing. It had been so long since I was nervous for a first kiss. “So, I got you back to my room,” he said finally, rubbing his hands on his corduroys. I helped him tuck the hair behind my ears. And then the black bar on my roller-coaster seat snapped in place over my legs—complete freedom, nothing to do but surrender to the grip of a machine whose sole purpose was exhilaration. He didn’t try to take off my underwear and eventually the ride slowed to a stop in a breezy, unmown field.

  As soon as I opened my eyes the next morning, I willed myself to stay awake. My body yawned and rolled toward Brian. “Get up,” I commanded it. The clock on Brian’s desk told me it was seven fifteen. It was a Saturday and I had nowhere to be. I dressed silently, kissed Brian on the cheek, and slipped out his bedroom door. As I clanked home in my high-heel boots and one earring, I grimaced against the thought of the long black hair in my right nipple, which I’d forgotten to tweeze before I met Brian the night before. Maybe that was why he hadn’t tried to take off my underwear. I crawled into bed when I got home, hoping to sleep off the shame of a new attachment. He wouldn’t call me and I would stop liking him. I put my left hand on my breast and my right hand between my legs and slept until noon.

  But he did call, and kept calling. He courted me perfectly, waiting a dependable two or three days after each of our dates before inviting me to a concert or a movie the following weekend. All that was required of me was to say yes. If he waited longer than usual to call, I felt relieved to be alone in my own bed, instead of hyperconscious in Brian’s, where I waited for my new need to crash over me in the dark.

  —

  Brian and I had been dating for weeks before I let myself stay in his bed until late morning. He yawned and rolled on his side toward me. “You’re still here,” he said, and kissed me once just above each of my nipples. I bit my lip to keep from moaning. I wanted his sleepy lips on my breasts again and again and nothing else. I felt sad knowing I would have sex with Brian one day. Sex was the cracked, pink, mammalian tongue of a stranger who had promised me a line of coke in the bathroom of a dive bar; the pointy coarseness of the unknown cock between my legs when I woke up facedown in an unfamiliar room; the pair of hairy, pudgy thighs imprisoning my torso one cold, grainy morning on a secluded beach that had seemed exciting a few hours earlier; Jared’s
stern voice telling me not to move, he was almost done, he needed to be relaxed when we met his father for brunch. I wanted sex with Brian to salvage my body from memory. So the first time it happened while we were drunkenly making out, a voice in my head said, “Tell him to stop. Make this stop.”

  The good voice in me is always male. Not because men are wiser but because men are calming, before you get to know them. You ask a man a question, he answers. He asks you one back or doesn’t. End of story. I listened to the unknown male voice telling me to make this stop until Brian said, “I’m gonna come.”

  “No!” I said—aloud this time, but it was too late.

  “Sorry,” he said. I kissed him lightly. “Sorry.” I kissed him again. He sat up and reached for his tissue box. “Sorry.”

  “Stop saying—”

  “Sorry.”

  I curled my chin toward the solid redness of his comforter. He asked me how I felt.

  “Tired.”

  I was supposed to say something about having unprotected sex. That was my job as the girl. But I didn’t want to make the accidental sex real by speaking about it. Brian curled his long body around me. “I don’t know how you work yet,” he whispered.

  But he didn’t ask me to show him, and I couldn’t bring myself to volunteer unsexy lessons in my anatomy (“Just a little softer. Just a little higher. Here, let me show you”), complicating my easy attraction to Brian’s long muscles and smooth skin and the adolescent jumpiness of his perfect penis. One wants to be free during sex, to let go completely, to feel and not think. But every time I did…

  After Brian came, he would kiss me softly and wipe us off with tissues and fall asleep holding me. The bathroom was the only place to go. Sometimes I touched myself as I lay on his dirty bath mat, curling my toes against his cold tile wall and filling my mind with images of busty secretaries servicing CEOs or high school teachers taking advantage of their students—the kind of cliché sexual manipulation that Jared and I had enjoyed enacting. My self-inflicted release in Brian’s bathroom left me small and shallow, a yellow bruise on a flat universe.

  In bed afterward, empty enough to sleep, I would hate Brian’s arms around me and feel an ugly satisfaction when he rolled away from me in his sleep. Finally one night, I returned from the bathroom and said his name. He was on top of me right away, smoothing my hair back from my face. “Talk to me,” he said. “Please.”

  I didn’t want to tell Brian, as I’d told many men, that I needed him to make me come if he came first. I didn’t want sex to be that crass and simplistic. I did need to come, but I also needed something else. Even on the rare occasions when we came together, I’d ache for Brian as soon as sleep softened his grip on my shoulders. So I said nothing in response to his pleas, knowing any attempt to put my longing into words would depress and shame me. I let Brian kiss my eyelids, quiet my spine with his fingertips, murmur that everything was all right. My high school boyfriend told me he hoped I would never cry in front of him because people look ugly when they cry. But Brian was good enough to take on my ugliness in the middle of the night, even if he had to work for ten hours the next day.

  He was a Web designer for philanthropists and human rights groups. I respected his work and liked listening to him talk about it. His good work made my aimlessness acceptable. I hadn’t worked on Fifi since Brian and I started dating, as if I were now preparing myself for a different kind of success, one that was both easier and more successful: to marry well. It still seemed like enough, for a woman. Apparently Brian thought so, too, although I don’t think either of us was conscious of the thought. He didn’t seem the least bit troubled by my meager professional prospects. This probably should have concerned me, but all I felt was relief every time he laughed when I said that a mentally retarded and physically impaired monkey could do my job, which mostly involved alphabetizing and making change.

  Given his family’s obsession with money and success—his lawyer sister calling him at midnight to talk about a big client meeting she had the next day, his father asking Brian to look over his investment spreadsheets—it was odd that Brian found my excesses endearing. He bragged to his friends that I had lived alone in Europe instead of going to college, that I drank canned beer in bed before going to sleep, that I wanted to order pizza three nights a week. I suppose it was a relief for him to know he would never have to compete with me. He would always be the successful one, the provider, the solid man taking care of the pretty, damaged woman. It was a dynamic that appealed to me as well. I also wanted to be safe, at least in theory.

  —

  I tried to open myself to Brian. I stopped hiding in the bathroom after sex. He would hold me and tell me to take deep breaths. “What’s going on?” he begged one night. I mumbled something about how everyone tries so hard in all the wrong ways. My voice was a little girl banging on a metal bed frame in the dark, refusing to go to sleep.

  “What does that even mean?” He clenched his fists at his sides. “I can’t stand it when you do this. I care about you so much and I have no idea what you’re upset about.”

  My breathing slowed, my tears stopped. Here was the hidden part of Brian that I needed—some urgency, some insecurity, some sense that he did not know how everything would turn out. I let my lips fall on his cheeks, his forehead, the sharp V between his eyes. I told him I was scared. We talked about our parents’ failed marriages—just because his parents were still together didn’t mean they had succeeded, he said. We promised each other we would not end up like that, two people unknown to each other, forced to share a house, a blanket, a toilet. When our bodies came together after these talks, my thoughts about my life unraveled inside me like a trapeze artist’s rope after the tent has folded, hanging from the sky unobserved, pulsing with the breeze.

  But one night, I started to say something after Brian turned out the light and he snapped, “No talking.”

  “I’m not—I just wanted to tell you one thing.”

  “I can’t take it anymore.” His hands flopped around on the mattress, desperate to be calm. So these nighttime conversations, which I believed were carrying us toward a new intimacy, were a burden to him, one of the unpleasant compromises of a relationship. I never told him the one thing. I stopped crying in his bed. I asked him to make me come if he came first.

  —

  I met Brian’s family for the first time over Labor Day Weekend. On the drive to their home in rural Connecticut, Brian gently coached me in what not to say to his parents—swear words, jokes about suicide or depression, anything in any way, however remotely, connected to sex. I mocked the last directive—just how sex crazed did he think I was?—until I remembered our recent weekend at my father’s house. It was pouring and we’d been stuck in the house, drinking too much coffee and wine. My father told us about my mother’s abortion over dinner, a story I was sick of hearing: She’d gotten pregnant again when I was only three months old. “I wanted to keep it, of course,” my father said for the hundredth time. “I said we could use formula. I would do all the late-night feedings. But Elsie’s mother always made her own decisions—absolutely nothing I could ever say to sway her. Hey, what kind of birth control are you guys using? The fastest way to kill a relationship is to have a baby before you’re both ready, trust me.” I’d tried to laugh at my father’s inappropriate divulgences, teasing him for successfully scaring away my boyfriend within a matter of hours. But Brian blanched and stammered out a question about the Manny trade, hoping my father would be a Red Sox fan because he happened to live in Massachusetts.

  As we pulled down a dirt driveway lined by careful stone fences, Brian said, “Oh, and don’t mention you didn’t go to college. I mean, just until they know you and realize how smart you are. I kind of implied you went to school in Paris, which is sort of true, right?”

  “If you count drinking a bottle of wine by yourself and crying in public parks as going to school in Paris, then yes, I definitely went to school in Paris.” Brian chuckled and told me not to
worry, just be myself. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and bit the insides of his cheeks as he pulled into the driveway.

  I felt his parents straining to like me as we stepped out of Brian’s car in front of their pastel three-story home, Brian looking at the ground and me squeezing out a smile in my hopeful sundress and sandals. His dad shook my hand with vigor and sized up my face as he called out, “Here’s the brave girl at last! Come meet Elsie.” Handshakes, names, more jokes about my courage. And then I felt his family—parents, sister, brother-in-law—turn away from me as we ate dinner at the picnic table outside, and I kept oohing and aahing over the pink smeared across the sky instead of entering their conversation about an eminent-domain lawsuit over one of his father’s rental properties and the feasibility of adding commuter facilities to the parking garage in the Boston suburb where Brian’s sister lived with her husband. I did not know how to talk about the things one must talk about; this never stopped being a painful surprise.

  Brian shoveled food into his mouth like a teenager after basketball practice and refilled my wineglass with waiterly attentiveness. While the adults ate tomato pie, grilled lamb, and buttermilk rolls, Brian’s nieces played in the overgrown field in front of the house, throwing crab apples and running around with a garden hose, pretending to put out fires.

  “It’s amazing how parents do it with the little ones,” Brian’s dad said.

  “We did it twice. Or don’t you remember?” Marianne flicked her husband’s wrist with her cloth napkin. Brian’s father had cheated on Marianne soon after they were married and in addition to raising two children only eleven months apart she’d had three miscarriages and one stillbirth. Brian told me that his mother “practically lived” in the clapboard shack behind the main house, where she kept the canvases and watercolors that she referred to as a hobby. Watching her slice pie and dart in and out of the kitchen for missing utensils, my breath got short and shallow the same way it did when Brian spoke confidently of our future—asking me where I’d most like to honeymoon, fantasizing about settling down in a farmhouse near his parents. When this anxiety seized me, I wanted Brian to hold me and tell me it was all right, but it seemed he might take offense if I asked him to comfort me for my fear of being bound to him.