I ripped into the paper bags on the walk home, threw away all the printed materials, and sunk the medicine bottles deep into the pockets of my coat. The pills rattled like maracas as I dragged myself back through the snow. I shivered violently in my ski jacket. My face, hit by the wind, felt like it was being slapped. My eyes watered. My hands burned from the cold. From outside the bodega, I saw the Egyptians putting up the Christmas decorations in the window. I went in, ducked under the fluttering red tinsel, got my two coffees, went home and swallowed a few Ambien and went to sleep on the sofa watching Primal Fear.
* * *
? ? ?
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, thoughts of Trevor called me out of sleep like rats scrabbling inside the walls. It took all the self-control I had not to call him. It took Solfoton and a bottle of Robitussin one day, Nembutal and Zyprexa the next. Reva came and went, blathering about her latest dates and heartaches over her mother. I watched a lot of Indiana Jones. But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything now was somehow linked to getting back what I’d lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.
* * *
? ? ?
MY LAST RENDEZVOUS WITH Trevor had been on New Year’s Eve, 2000. I invited him to come to the party with me in DUMBO. I’d sensed he was between girlfriends.
“I’ll come for a while,” he agreed. “But there are other parties I’m already committed to. I’ll stay at yours for an hour and then I’ll have to leave, so don’t get sensitive about it.”
“That’s fair,” I said, though my feelings were already hurt.
He had me meet him in the lobby of his building in Tribeca. He very rarely asked me to come up to his apartment. I think he thought that seeing the place would make me want to marry him. In truth, I thought his apartment made him seem pathetic—status seeking, conformist, shallow. It reminded me of the loft Tom Hanks rents in Big, huge windows along three walls, high ceilings—only instead of pinball machines and trampolines and toys, Trevor had filled the apartment with expensive furniture—a narrow gray velvet sofa from Sweden, a huge mahogany secretary, a crystal chandelier. I assumed some ex-girlfriend had picked it all out for him, or multiple ex-girlfriends. That would have explained the mismatched aesthetic. He worked as a portfolio manager in the Twin Towers, had freckles, loved Bruce Springsteen, and yet the wall above his bed was decorated with horrifying African masks. He collected antique swords. He liked cocaine and cheap beer and top-shelf whiskey, always owned the latest video game system. He had a waterbed. He played acoustic guitar, badly. He owned a gun he kept in a safe in his bedroom closet.
I buzzed him when I got to his building and he came down wearing a tuxedo under a long black coat with tasteful navy satin accents. I knew then that inviting him to the party had been a mistake. He clearly had somewhere more important to be, and was going to go there to be with someone more important than me after my hour with him was up.
He pulled on his gloves, hailed a taxi. “Whose party is this again?”
A video artist represented by Ducat had invited me to her party because I’d handled an important rights situation when Natasha was overseas. All I’d really done, in fact, was send a fax.
“She’s going to be projecting live births from a video feed some guy set up in a village hospital in Bolivia,” I told Trevor in the cab. I knew it would horrify him.
“Bolivia time is an hour ahead of New York,” he said. “If they really think they can coordinate births, those babies won’t be born until eleven, and I’m not staying past ten thirty. Anyway, gross.”
“Do you think it’s exploitative?”
“No, I just don’t really want to see a bunch of Bolivian women bleeding and moaning for hours.”
He fiddled with his phone as I recited language from the gallery’s description of the videographer’s work. Trevor repeated words sarcastically.
“‘Tectonic,’” he said. “‘Quasi.’ Jesus!”
Then he called someone and had a very brief, yes-no conversation, said, “See you soon.”