Fourth Comings (6 page)

fifteen

I
’ve defended this choice before, and I’ll do it again.

Yes, I’m well aware how the only thing more unlikely than Hope and me sharing the rent with Manda Powers, our promiscuous Pineville High classmate, is sharing the rent with the promiscuous Manda Powers and her lesbian girlfriend, Shea. Or rather, her
genderqueer boifriend,
as Manda prefers, that is, if I
insist
on using
labels
because I am
brainwashed
by the
heteropatriarchal paradigm.

For someone so devoted to hedonistic pleasures of the flesh, Manda sure has a knack for lecturing us in a self-righteous tone that instantly drains the fun out of everything. Case in point: On that very first afternoon outside the apartment, she showed up in her
I HAD AN ABORTION
T-shirt and asked, “Would you be making jokes if it were the African American Men’s Sporting Society? The Puerto Rican Men’s Sporting Society? What is it about the Swedes that makes it okay for you to be racist with impunity?” Manda has subverted the classic female dilemma by being both holier
and
whorier than thou. And yet, as you’ve repeatedly pointed out, I am voluntarily and hypocritically living with her.

The city’s stratospheric rents make for bizarre living arrangements. And I know you’ll disagree, but by New York standards our story is not at all unusual. One of the twins’ two mommies is Manda’s aunt, the out-of-the-country academic. Manda and Shea met posing in an all-nude photo shoot for
Rut,
“the high-minded hard-core magazine for the Rutgers University community.” After graduating in May, the former sexhibitionist offered the latter the opportunity to share bedroom #1. For a little more than a month, the second bedroom (ours) was occupied by a barista of Swedish stock and his vegan-chef boyfriend, until they suddenly decided that they’d rather tour the country promoting alternative fuels in a VW bus pimped out to run only on recycled vegetable oil.

News spreads fast around our small hometown, especially around college graduation time. All parents want proof that the diploma they paid for was a smart investment, and they need to find out whether the neighbors’ kids have better post-college prospects than their own. My mother will shamelessly grill any Pineville mom on how and where her child is making a living, which is fairly infuriating because my parents stopped paying for my Columbia education after my sophomore year. But if it weren’t for that Pineville parent-to-parent gossip hotline, it’s unlikely that Manda would have discovered that Hope and I were tired of living with my sister (me) and crashing on floors and futons (Hope) and were looking for an affordable (ha!) apartment just about anywhere in the city. Manda texted me:
apt 550 mo. r u/hope swdsh?

Yes, I needed an apartment. And $550 was a price I could sort of afford, that is, until my student loan payments bumped up to match my “elevated earning potential,” as the loan officers very optimistically put it. But was I or Hope…what? Single White Divorcees Seeking Husbands? Swinging Women Doing Sexy Homos? Single White Dick Sucking Heteros?

It’s indicative of my desperation for affordable housing that I didn’t ignore Manda’s cryptic and possibly kinky message altogether.
ok. wtf swdsh?

After Manda explained Ursula’s Swedish clause via e-mail, I called Hope in Rhode Island to give her the bad news.

“We can’t get the apartment unless you just so happen to be part Swedish.”

“I
am
part Swedish,” she said. “On my mother’s side.”

“No way.”

“Yes way,” she said. “Her maiden name is Johansson.”

I loved that I didn’t know this about her, as it hinted at all the other things I had yet to discover about my best friend of ten years.

As I just documented, one week later Hope and I traveled to Brooklyn and fell in love with SAMSS. We were nervous about the prospect of moving in with Manda but figured it was safer than finding someone through Craigslist. (“Better the nympho you know,” was our motto at the time.) We moved in two weeks later, constantly joking about how Manda and Shea might try to seduce us into their ominsexual union.

Manda and Shea work the eight
P.M.
to four
A.M.
shift at Cave, a hipster sinkhole in Bushwick known for hosting a retarded carnival of pointless posturing known as Fuckyomomma.

WILLIAMSBURG=HIPSTERS WITH TRUST FUNDS

BUSHWICK=HIPSTERS WITHOUT TRUST FUNDS PRICED OUT OF

WILLIAMSBURG

I have kindly declined Manda’s invitations, but I’ve bled out the eyes as she’s shown me digital picture after picture of wannabe or slumming Williamsturdburgers trying too hard to outdo one another in their kaffiyeh neck scarves, scraggly crustaches, and Jheri-curl mullets. This morning Manda was wearing the omnipresent terry-cloth headband with a red velour strapless booty-short romper. It’s an altogether frightening standard that’s being set when this American Apparel–Nymphette getup comes across as one of the less exasperating aesthetics du jour. I don’t need to pay a twenty-dollar cover charge to suffer ocular hemorrhaging in person. No. Thank. You.

(I know. I’m forgoing the Four Abodes. Dissing the
dharma.
Deepening my
dukkha.
For someone who doesn’t claim to be a Buddhist, you’re damn good at
dokusan.
But come on, if I can’t hate on ridiculous hipsters, who can I hate on? Now, that’s a Zen koan worth riddling.)

Manda’s and Shea’s jobs require them to lead a nocturnal lifestyle. They spend most of their daylight hours in bed, but not always
sleeping,
if you get my horrified drift. This is why
I
rarely work from the apartment even though working in one’s pajamas is supposed to be one of the greatest benefits of being a freelance editor. (Though I’d trade that in for medical benefits because on January 19, 2007, I turn twenty-three and will be officially removed from my parents’ health plan. Without that protective coverage, I am destined to contract a hanta virus on January 20.) Manda also works some afternoons at Planned Parenthood while Shea works similar hours at a video store. If I do my editorial work for
Think
from Ozzie’s coffee shop all morning, then go straight to Bethany’s to babysit Marin in the afternoon, I can time it so Manda and Shea are heading out the door for work just as I’m coming home. I’ve arranged my schedule so I hardly ever see them, which is the only reason our roommate situation works. As for how they spend the rest of their nonsleeping daylight hours while I’m out of the apartment, I don’t really want to know. It apparently requires a lot of lubrication, as indicated by the Post-it reminder stuck on our bathroom mirror:
BUY K-Y.

The one thing I will say about Manda is this: She’s always been an unrepentant sex maniac.

sixteen

S
hea sullenly dragged herself in behind Manda and greeted me with a dip of her baseball cap.

“’Sup.”

To which I replied, “Hey, Shea.”

And she said nothing else as she headed to the kitchen table and huddled over the Automobiles section of the
Times.
Even in her hooded sweatshirt, calf-skimming cargo shorts, and dingy white Vans slip-ons, Shea isn’t exactly butch. No, I’ve come to the conclusion that her gender-blending aesthetics and attitude are modeled after those of a sixteen-year-old boy. She looks no different from the dozens of teenage skaters grinding all over Prospect Park, fueled by ADHD and megadoses of caffeine and testosterone. She even smells like a high school boy, a ripe combination of a fermented hamper and AXE deodorant body spray. So it’s no surprise she acted just like a surly adolescent when Manda took off her baseball cap and playfully nuzzled the charred-black buzz cut beneath.

“Daaaaaaamn.”
Shea has a talent for stretching four-letter words into four syllables. “Dinja gettanuff lasniiite?” Her tone could only by the very loosest definition be considered affectionate.

“Mmmmm…Never…,” Manda cooed.

“Daaaaaaamn.
Why you gotta be such a pain-in-the-asshole rapeface?”

Shea also has a talent for such wonderfully scatological outbursts. (Though I can hardly blame you for not embracing
cumchugger,
though I swear she meant it as a term of weird endearment.) I’m not at all freaked out by Manda’s Sapphic tendencies, but I do think it’s peculiar how her pangender partnership with Shea exemplifies the kind of cruel misogyny this self-described “fourth-wave feminist” has so aggressively fought against since high school. Manda would have never dated a guy this offensive back then, and is only dating one now because
she’s really a girl.
Let me put out an apology to the entire GLBT community, but I just don’t get it.

And yet I kind of can’t blame Shea for being so…pissed off. I mean, all but the most genetically blessed go through periods of squirmy discomfort in our own skin. But there’s a big difference between
my
kind of discomfort (“Boo-hoo! I don’t have any boobs!”) and Shea’s (“Boo-hoo! I have boobs! And where the hell is my penis?”).

“Where’s Hope at?” Shea asked in a slightly more pleasant tone, opening a jar of peanut butter. Shea is always very interested in Hope’s whereabouts. If only Hope were right here, right now, we’d all be
that much closer
to having an orgy. Or so Shea would like to believe.

“Sleeping.”

“She need comp’ny?”

“I doubt it,” I replied. I then watched as Shea scraped out what was left of the peanut butter with her forefinger. I was placing bets on how long it would take Manda to start licking it off.

“How’s Marcus?” Manda asked.

The sudden interest in my life was unprecedented. I hadn’t prepared an answer I’d be willing to share with Manda on this subject.

“Uh,” I replied.

“Shiiiiiiiiiiit. You buttplugs break up or what?”

“What?”
I asked. “Why would you ask that?” I hadn’t given Shea or Manda any indication of, well, anything.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Manda said. “It just seems like you were having some troubles right before he left.”

“He has troubles with New York,” I said, repeating a familiar excuse. “Not with me.”

“All the more reason why I thought you might be having second thoughts about the long-distance thing,” Manda said as she overfilled her mug, spilling coffee over Mary Wollstonecraft’s ceramic portrait.

“Oh.”

“Sooooo?”

I didn’t want to get all touchy-feely in a figurative or literal way. So I figured the best strategy was nonchalance.

“Well, I was thinking that it might be easiest for both of us if we just do our own thing….”

“Break up,” Manda clarified.

I was still very suspicious. Manda and Shea were way too interested in my emotional life. “Well, I tried to break up with him, but he wasn’t convinced and…” I stopped there. Manda and Shea could not be the first to find out about your proposal, even if it was an elaborate inside joke.

“And…?” Manda asked.

“And I’m taking time to think.”

“So you’re technically still together?”

“Yes,” I said. “More than technically. We are—”

“Hellyeah!” Shea slammed down the peanut butter jar and leapt up from the chair to engage in an elaborate touchdown dance: her baggy pants thrust up and down, one hand flat on the floor and the other smacking an imaginary ass.

I asked the only logical question. “What the hell?”

“Hellyeah! Hellyeah! Hellyeah!” Now Shea simulated wild, rearentry copulation with an imaginary strap-on.

“We had a bet about your breakup,” Manda said. She beamed as she said this.

“You are so owned! You thought Marcus was breaking up with her! Ownage! Ownage! Ownage!” She was still thrusting her pelvis.

“Puh-leeze, I am so not owned!”

“Ownage! Ownage! Ownage!”

Living with Shea is like living with the zitty, Ritalin-tweaked little brother I never had. Only she’s twenty-three years old.
And she has a vagina.
Oops. There I go again, getting all caught up in the heteropatriarchal paradigm. Shame on me.

Manda squealed and positioned herself in front of her boifriend to complete the faux-porno tableau. “Give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me!”

I retreated back down the hall before the simulated act could be authenticated.

seventeen

H
ope was sitting straight up in the top bunk when I opened the door.

“I’m
so
sorry,” she said.

“Are you kidding? People pay good money to watch what I just saw for free.”

“I meant about you and Marcus.” Her head hung low, but her curls still teased the decorative squares pressed into the tin ceiling.

“Oh, you must have heard wrong,” I said.

“Heard
what
wrong?”

“Marcus and I didn’t break up,” I explained.

Her head jolted with this news. “Really? I thought…”

“Manda and Shea had a bet about our breakup.”

“I know that,” she said. “They actually asked if I wanted in on it.”

“What were the stakes?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Hope replied, a wry smile sneaking across her face. “But it involved something called a Jaguar Harness.”

“A what?!”

“I told you that you didn’t want to know!”

And then we both laughed. Joking about the sexual imprimaturs paying half our rent never gets old. The oppressive mood had been lifted, but I was still surprised by how rattled Hope seemed by the prospect of us breaking up. Perhaps she needs to believe in us because it helps her feel better about her own long-distance relationship with Wynn.

I love Hope and Wynn. Just the very sound of them is so positive. He won’t be around much anymore because he’s living with his parents in Pittsburgh while he earns his M.F.A. in Multimedia/Visual Communications at Carnegie Mellon. This should make my sleeping arrangement less pervy than it was all summer. There won’t be as many opportunities for third wheeling, that is, suffering in the bunk alone, excruciatingly aware of the entwined lovers above or below.

I always had a single at Columbia, so I was never subjected to the various collegiate indignities suffered when one roommate is getting laid and the other is not. Since we’re older now, and this isn’t a dorm, Hope and I tried to put a “no sex” rule into effect during third wheelers. As you are well aware, you and I violated that rule last week. In our dubious defense, we did check and double-check to make sure Hope was asleep before the bunk started its rhythmic squeaking and creaking. But I can’t say with any real certainty that she was really out cold, or just too embarrassed to say otherwise, as I was all summer long when Hope and Wynn whispered and moaned in the dark. Horny twentysomethings hath no shame.

“So you two are still together,” Hope said slowly, carefully, as if she were trying to find the upper-right corner of the sky in a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

“What would be the polar opposite of breaking up?”

“Um…staying together?”

“The
ultimate
commitment.”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice wandering off in search of the answer. “His’n’hers tattoos?” She politely laughed at her own joke.

“Marriage,” I said. “Marcus asked me to marry him.”

I had expected Hope to respond with a joke. Something along the lines of “But what about Kirk? Won’t he get jealous?” Because what did this sound like but the grand setup to some great big joke? But she just blinked at me from the top bunk.

“I’m not kidding,” I said, wiggling the fourth finger of my left hand. “He got down on one knee and everything.”

THWACK!
Hope smashed her head against the ceiling.

“Holy shit! Are you okay?”

“Sort of,” she said, rubbing her curls. “Are
you
okay?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed.

(
Confessed
isn’t really accurate, is it? Is it possible to confess the obvious? Would I be writing in this notebook if I were certain of anything, even my own okayness?)

“I mean, this isn’t something I ever thought would happen,” I said. “Especially not yesterday. And I’m still not sure what to make of it.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

I climbed up to the top bunk and obliged.

“And so,” I said, finishing up, “he wants an answer when he comes back from Outdoor Action on Saturday.”

Hope’s eyes popped out of her face. “You didn’t come right out and say no?”

“Uh, no.”

Hope rattled her head in disbelief. “Jess!”

“What?”

She shut her eyes and screwed her mouth tight.

“Hope,” I said. “You’ve been my best friend since seventh grade. And you’ve known Marcus even longer than I have. You can’t say the wrong thing.”

Hope was about to respond when I heard the unmistakable sound of muffled whispers right outside our door. I shushed Hope with my hand, climbed over the side of the bunk, then crawled across the floor to the bedroom door. I flung it open so quickly that the two interlopers tumbled cartoon-style right onto the lemon-curd carpet.

“I dint hear nuttin’!” Shea lied.

“But I did!” Manda said, pushing her way past her pangendered partner in crime.

“Invasion of privacy?”

“Oh, puh-leeze,” Manda said. “If you want privacy, you gotta pay more.”

She had a point. Meanwhile, Shea preened behind Manda, winking and wagging her green-stained Sparks tongue for Hope’s, uh, benefit.

“So come on,” Manda said, tapping her foot. “Let’s see it!”

“See what?”

“The rock!”

“There’s no rock,” I said, holding out my hand so she could inspect the silver.

“No rock? Puh-leeze!” she said, dropping my hand as if it were something toxic. “What kind of engagement is that?”

“I wouldn’t have expected someone who has exchanged clit rings to be so traditional.”

Shea guffawed.

“What?” I asked.

“Huhhuhuhuh,” Shea chuckled. “You said
clit.”

This proves it: I am living with Beavis and Sluthead.

“Well,” Manda said, “it’s slightly less humiliating than the three-carat solitaire Sara bought
herself.”

“Ah yes,” I said, recalling our Pineville High classmate’s condition. “A carat for each trimester…”

“When’s she due, anyway?” Hope asked.

“Two weeks ago,” I answered.

“Ouch,” Hope and Manda said at the same time.