I Don't Have a Happy Place (13 page)

The kitchen was galley-style, delineated by a thin chrome rail covering the linoleum, over which I tripped hourly. I was thankful for the television, though it housed a poltergeist that turned the thing on and off for sport whenever the mood struck. The one window did not let in any light but was generous with the sounds of the hookers outside who, after midnight, laughed or fought or splattered vomit onto the sidewalks below. I often thought of my mother turning her nose up at a bellboy showing us to a perfectly fine room on a family trip—“Uch, this is not what I asked for,” she'd say, annoyed by the wrong view or unacceptable bathroom—as I sat on my borrowed multipurpose bed/couch/chair, eating cold sesame noodles with my fingers while trying to ignore the International Male undies hiding in the drawer, and watching the television as it turned itself on and off.

Buzz was living with his sister in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side. She was in the advertising game and got paid quite well while wearing suit pants and heading to an office every day. Naturally, we thought she was a sucker. To us, it was like looking at our parents, who'd chosen boring lives, not cool ones like ours would be once they got off the ground.

Mitzi resided in Chelsea, with her gray cat and boyfriend, where she hosted parties for the new friends I didn't care for. My sublet was in Murray Hill, which, at the time, had a few Indian spice shops, an Irish bar or two, one Chinese restaurant, and an overall depressing quality that made every hour of every day feel like 4:30 on a November Sunday.

Since I wasn't allowed out in the hallway, I stayed in a lot, as did my neighbor across the hall. I had moved to Manhattan to look for a job, but I spent the first two weeks as a New Yorker doing nothing but keeping my eye on the peephole of my door lest my mystery neighbor emerge. When it comes to things that do not matter in the slightest, I am nothing if not tenacious. For five days I kept watch but there was no movement. On the sixth day, I saw a skeletal appendage sticking out of the door and a sliver of bordello-style wallpaper, deep red and possibly textured. The light inside was yellow and dim and I felt the presence of a kindred spirit, someone who understood the value of staying home and also loathed overhead lighting.

I watched as the arm collected a paper bag from Meals-On-Wheels. I'd come to figure out, from going through the mail too large to fit into his mailbox, that he was a vintage-instrument enthusiast and also in the midst of dying at home. This put a damper on my plan for him to emerge and be the Rhoda to my Mary. With that hope dashed, I had nothing left to do with my days except send out a few resumes and watch
Rudy
on an endless loop, weeping each time at the end as if I never saw it
coming. When Buzz called with a job opportunity, I knew I had to say yes.

Mitzi had somehow already gotten herself a job at MTV where she was in a position to hire, and she recruited Buzz to work on various lip-syncing and sometimes spring break–style gigs, where he'd spend the week in Lake Havasu, Arizona, wearing a headset and sleeping with random coworkers. But the jobs were finite and sometimes Buzz found himself out of work, like me.

The stint Buzz called me about had something to do with the
New York Times
and data compiling. Some corporate babble I had no understanding of, but it would be a few days' work for $200 and I needed more Chinese food money.

I consulted my bus map for the stealthiest way to get to Buzz's place on the other side of town. Sure, I was still too scared to take the subway, but I found the bus the city's most pleasant surprise. It had a way of making you feel six and eighty-six at the same time.

Slow and steady up the five flights, I stopped at each landing to catch my breath and also see if any pigeons were hanging out on the windowsills, waiting to flutter. Buzz's sister was moving on up and getting her own apartment in three months, and I was slated to move in as the new roommate. I spent nights in my sad sublet wondering how I'd handle the birds taunting me in the stairwell. At least my typical uniform—denim overalls with one strap unfastened—was like a bear bell for those damn birds.

“Nice suit, Mr. Green Jeans,” Buzz said when he opened the door. He couldn't resist mockery of any variety and his specialty was clothing one-liners.

“Shut up,” I said, squeezing by him, since two people could not fit into the skinny front hall of the place.

The compiling station, as we'd come to call it, was set up on a small foldout table in the middle of the room. On it was a stack
of Xeroxed sheets, two barely sharpened golf pencils, and a
New York Times
tucked into the blue plastic bag you saw all over the city on Sunday mornings. The actual work was mind numbing, involving one of us reading data aloud and the other one jotting it down. About eight minutes in, Buzz suggested we take a nap. I should note here that Buzz and I had napped together a few times at school because we were often very tired. And college was sometimes boring.

We got into Buzz's bed-in-a-bag sheets, the factory seconds set his mother had gotten him at an outlet center. He might have made fun of my clothing choices, but I found his attempt at an adult's room high-rolling comedy. The dry-mounted Picasso's
Flowers
and Van Gogh's
Starry Night
to let the ladies know he dug fine art and was sensitive but not gay. The oversized Michael Jordan
Wings
poster above his bed, just because he was “the greatest athlete who ever lived.” Every piece had been selected to get a reaction from an overnight guest. The black milk crate housed a digital clock radio he'd pilfered from his childhood home (
Awwww
, they'd think,
he's nostalgic
), a CD player with a Tuck & Patti disc all queued up (
Wow, he really is romantic
), and a candle for mood lighting (
This guy cares about details
).

We got into his bed, organizing ourselves in a platonic tangle.

“Do people really fall for this?” I asked, staring at the posters.

He closed his eyes, settling in for our two-hour nap. “Every time.”

•   •   •

When Buzz kissed me, with his Tiny Tim face all crunched into mine, I didn't pull one of those movie moves where after a few seconds I realize what is happening and push him away and tell him he had the wrong idea, mister. I mean, he did have the wrong idea—a weird, mortifying, awkward-beyond-belief idea—but
the work was tedious and it was February and he did have the better apartment, which was also all the way across town from mine, and so it just seemed more convenient to stay where I was.

The compiling work lasted a few more days, but our mutual unemployment and general ennui kept us together for random afternoons and a handful of nights over the next few months. Out of sheer languor, we'd become the dog-eared pages of a squirreled-away copy of Judy Blume's
Forever
. There was no way I could share the news with friends that I was now part of the group who lay under Michael Jordan's arms and fell asleep to the musical stylings of Tuck & Patti. I told myself that it was fine—hilarious, even, which was usually how I chose sweaters, not men. I made a mental note to quit this new hobby in another month when I was slated to move in.

I moved in and the extracurricular activities didn't stop and so we were forced to have words. We covered the casual nature of our dalliance, how our friendship came first, and, of course, how we should and would be seeing other people. I assured him I was fine and totally seeing other people. Plenty of other people. He started staying out later and later, sometimes not returning home at all. I knew his new schedule because I stayed in my room for a month listening to Paula Cole and crying to Mitzi, who tried to help me even though our friendship was also in the midst of fizzling out because she, too, was seeing other people.

One Tuesday evening, Buzz and I headed to our local supermarket. The Associated was two blocks away and smelled like rat pee, but it was closer than Fairway, which required one of those red wheelie granny carts to bring home the seltzer and bulk rice, and our wheel had recently fallen off. We were standing by the freezer case when Buzz yanked me down to the ground.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

I watched Buzz crane his neck but still try to hide in plain sight. I stood up and noticed a cute Semitic faux bohemian with long, dark, wavy hair and a patchwork suede coat straight out of
Rent,
who was picking change out of her shiny, hot pink Kate Spade wallet. This was every girl Buzz dated at summer camp. Buzz begged me to crouch down again, which I did, wondering when I'd turned into Lucy Ricardo. I'd like to say I marched out of there, head high and all that, leaving Buzz to deal with the Jewess at the checkout, but I leaned against the freezer until she left, paid for Buzz's three bottles of seltzer, and carried them home in silence.

It was grim in the apartment over the next few weeks. But it was rent controlled and people in New York City lived under all kinds of weird circumstances to keep their housing. I knew of at least two couples in the midst of divorces, still living together in a classic six.

•   •   •

Two years after the compiling job, Buzz and I were still up to the hijinks. Sometimes I'd call it off, sometimes he would, but eventually we'd end up back together. We rented ‘70s movies and ordered in Chinese and hung our heads in shame together when our racist dog barked at anyone who wasn't Caucasian. We ate silver-dollar pancakes and bacon at corner diners, where we'd end up on the street in a fight, yelling at each other, often pausing to note Matt Dillon walking across the street, or C. J. Cregg from
The West Wing
approaching, then carrying on with our shouts. We were a contradiction, and sometimes our differences were a balance, other times a tug-of-war. We were forever calling it off, then returning to our shared apartment, each taking to our bedrooms on opposite sides of the ring, agreeing that this time we should just end it for good. At one point, we decided that I should
move out, so I took the dog and relocated to a friend's apartment down the street, since she spent weekends in the Hamptons.

Morose, I called my mother, who, when I told her, sighed in my ear and said, “Well, I'm not going to tell your father. It will kill him.”

Even with our enforced separation, Buzz called me every day to see how the dog was or what I was eating for lunch, and by the end of the weekend I was back under Michael Jordan's wingspan. A month later we resumed with the pancakes and the outdoor fighting.

“This is ridiculous,” Buzz said. “Either we break up or go on vacation together.”

His logic was a pretzel but, somehow, in your twenties, this stuff makes perfect sense. We marched down the block to our local Liberty Travel, where a zaftig woman in a floral sundress assured us she could put us in a lovely property in Naples. Florida. In July. After some gentle prodding, we agreed to a week on Captiva Island, Florida, in a resort called South Seas Plantation, where we saw manatees and rode bikes and ate at restaurants with names like Cap'n Al's.

And then, because it was July, Buzz went and got first-, ­second-, and third-degree burned and could barely take to the bed since even the crisp white sheet was too much on the damage he'd done to himself. I watched TV and applied the aloe. The whole trip was comical. And restorative. And repellent. And lovely. And ridiculous.

We returned home vacation drunk, sobering into business as usual in the weeks to follow. The night before Buzz was to take another trip to Florida, this time with friends, we ate cheap sushi we'd brought in from Teriyaki Boy.

“I think I love you,” he said, holding a sliver of faded pink ginger.

I rolled up the paper chopstick sleeve. “Um. I might love you, too.”

“Should we give this a real try?” he said.

“Like, now?” I said. “Or when you get back from Florida?”

“Now.”

“Okay.”

And then, like seventh graders, we were officially going out.

“Why are you moping?” Buzz asked, watching me poke the small lump of wasabi resting on its fake grass.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“No. I mean, you know.”

“I know what?”

I could hear our neighbor's Jack Russell terrier running in the hallway. Probably chasing a pigeon. “
This
is our story?”

Buzz chewed, mouth open, and stared at me for clarification.

“From here on in, this will forever be our story.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“I mean, we made out because we were bored and then I moved in and you dated people and I cried and then we brought in bad sushi and now we're a couple.”

Buzz took a sip of beer. “So?”

“So, this goes on our permanent record. If we ever get married or have kids, this is what we will have to tell them. This is all we got. It's not that good a story.”

“Ah, don't worry about it,” Buzz said, his sleeve dipping into the small tray of teriyaki sauce. “I don't think I'm the marrying kind.”

I stared out the window, at our view of the brick wall.

•   •   •

Many people ask how they will know when the right person walks into their life. My question was always, How will I know when it's time to walk out? The question and level of optimism are different, but the answer is the same for both:
You'll just know.

•   •   •

We sit in the open-air restaurant facing the dazzling Mexican beach, and I find myself hostile at the beauty. The beach is just showing off. And then come the stupid birds. They coast and swoop and I think,
If I wanted to see goddamn birds I could have stayed in the stairwell
of my apartment building.
At least the sky is on my side. The weather is turning (
signs
), and I am grateful for the support.