“Okay,” I begin carefully. “I have to ask you something.” This is humiliating, but if I’m going to be banished to the friend zone for all eternity, I may as well go for it. “Can I come over?” I smile weakly. “Don’t worry, I won’t try anything. I’m just not entirely ready to go home yet. And for what it’s worth…” I touch the tip of my nose with both hands. “Instantly sober. Ish.”
He seems amused. I try not to read it as pity.
“Look,” I tell him. June or Jeremy aren’t options right now. “I’m between homes.”
“So, you’re asking if you can move in?” he deadpans.
I laugh gratefully. “I’m experiencing some roommate turbulence. Me and June live together. We had a real barn-burner earlier tonight.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding, and a strange look passes across his face.
“That’s not why I called you,” I assure him. I’m rummaging around in my purse for a piece of gum I know isn’t there. “I wanted to call. Honest. I’ve wanted to text for a week.”
I take a beat, lean into his whole sincerity thing. “I got scared of how accomplished you were. The whole art school, Yale…” I gesture widely. “I was embarrassed because I have no idea what I’ve been doing for ten years. But I wanted to see you.”
He nods evenly. “I feel like maybe it’s an ESL thing, but I never know if a barn-burner is a fight or a party.”
I locate a cough drop and pop it in my mouth, training myself to look at him when he looks at me. “I think it’s a political thing,” I tell him, rolling the lozenge with my tongue so it extinguishes my breath. “Or sports? Every trending topic I don’t recognize is a politics person or a sportsperson.”
“That’s me with most famous people at this point. It’s a running joke with my friends.”
“Well, that’s ’cause you’re old.”
The corners of his mouth tug upward. “Yeah, we can hang out at mine,” he relents.
In the car, he’s silent. Seemingly lost in thought as he looks out the window.
“Do you want to split the ride?” I pray he won’t take me up on it—I can’t remember what card I have synched to Lyft.
“Don’t sweat it,” he says. I wonder if he regrets inviting me already.
chapter 23
The car stops on Ninth and A. Right across from Tompkins Square Park and around the corner from a gelato bar. It’s a part of New York that I wish I knew better. The part that you read about in books and see in documentaries about kids and drugs from the eighties. I know it’s changed a lot, but I’m impatient to recognize it from my own memories.
“Wow, so it’s you who gets to live around here,” I tell him, looking up out of the car. “Sick.”
“Yeah,” he says, getting out and holding the car door for me. “The first time we stayed here, back when me and Kiki were in grade school, it was so different. In the last few years, it’s gotten unrecognizable.” He points over my shoulder as he handles his keys. “All those high-rises are new. My mom said that when she bought the place, Tompkins was choked with drug addicts. Syringes everywhere. Called it Tetanus Park. But now…” He up-nods at the pristine artisanal café on his block with an Instagram-bait mural about love.
He leads me into the narrow foyer of his building, and we trudge up to the second floor. “I’m right here.” He gestures to the left. It’s an older building, with patterned tilework on the ceilings, and the hallways are cool stone and smell a bit like basmati rice. My buzz from the drinks is wearing away at the edges. I feel as tense as I ever do walking into a guy’s house for the first time, but I remind myself that this is Patrick. He’s my church pal. Also known as a man with whom I have successfully extinguished any possibility of romantic entanglement. Patrick’s seen me puke. We’re good.
He holds the door for me.
His apartment is tidy. A little stuffy if anything. I peek into the cramped galley kitchen on the way in. The walls are lined with bookcases, with additional stacks of books on the floor under the windows. On the windowsills there are rows of the smallest flowerpots I’ve ever seen, with miniature cacti standing sentry. The furniture is old. And stylish in an aggressively retro way. Probably his mom’s. His sofa is enormous, cushioned in mustard leather, an overstuffed, oversized freestanding futon mattress that stays bent by some trick of interior design magic. It’s concertinaed at its hinge and almost resembles a giant catcher’s mitt. It’s ugly in a way that speaks to its expensiveness. It’s jolie laide. The Marni of sofas. We take off our shoes.
The coffee table is see-through plastic, an upturned U, and he doesn’t have a TV. Instead he has a projector mounted to the ceiling above his couch. The far wall, the one with the windows, is exposed red brick.
“Do you want anything?” he calls out from the kitchen.
“What, other than this apartment?” I clear my throat, standing in the middle of the living room, wishing I could brush my teeth. On the walls hang old movie posters, huge ones, seemingly from actual movie theaters, framed. The hardwood floors are dark, and out the windows behind the couch, I see the guard railing of a fire escape. It’s so gloriously, enviably, unmistakably New York.
I look down at his feet when he reappears.
He’s wearing what is tantamount to Uggs.
“Um.”
He opens a shoe cabinet crammed with sneakers and pulls out another pair of fur-lined boot moccasins. They’re conspicuously smaller. Either his mom’s or dedicated for overnight guests from dating apps. “I highly recommend them.”
“Thanks.” I slide my feet in. I wish I could take off my socks, but I don’t know whose feet have been in these. Still, they’re toasty. “Nice place.”
He takes my coat, hangs it up, then walks across the living room. “Thanks,” he says, and cracks the window.
Even the honking of the cars outside sounds New Yorkier than usual. I take a closer look at the movie posters. Truffaut, Kurosawa, Maya Deren.
He has a Wong Kar-wai In the Mood for Love poster. Of course he does. “I love that you have the French edition.” I’ve stalked the poster on eBay since freshman year. It’s the one that features Maggie Cheung on one side of a brick alley and Tony Leung on the other. Both with their eyes downcast, and Tony’s shadow doing what his body can’t and touching her. It’s devastating.
“I can’t take credit,” he says. “If you’re feeling a commotion in your loins, it’s my mom you’re attracted to.”
“Commotion?” Loins?
He smiles and shrugs. “This is mostly her stuff,” he explains. “Except the books.
“Okay,” he says, washing his hands in the kitchen sink and drying them on a red-and-white-striped towel. “Not to be all, I’m going to slip into something more comfortable, but I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.”
He pads into his bedroom and closes the door partway.
“Hungry? Thirsty?” he asks when he returns in gray sweatpants and a hoodie.