Ten Girls to Watch (21 page)

Architecture grad school was cool. He was working on designing a theater in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Cool again, and I had loads of questions, but before I could ask them I had to stretch the collar of my T-shirt way down so he could paste electrodes to my chest. The awkwardness of this derailed my ability to sensibly continue the conversation.

“What’s with the guys in the orange jumpsuits?” I asked, leaping to the first thing that came to mind.

“Oh, that’s a jet lag study. They fly folks in from Hawaii and keep them here for a week. But the deal is that they can’t leave the sleep lab while they’re here. Orange makes them easy to spot so we know if they’re up to anything.”

I nodded again, which, it turned out, was the last time I’d be able to nod for the next half hour, since Raymond was about to begin cementing electrodes to my head and taping others to my face. To complete the process, he twist-tied all the electrode wires together, a braid of wires coming from the back of my head, and plugged each of them into a master switch box.

“Let’s give this a test run,” he said, taking the switch box and leading me by the electrode cords to the bed (what girl doesn’t have a romantic led-by-electrode-cords-to-the-bed fantasy?). I sat down on the edge, and he plugged the box into a docking station on the wall.

“What happens now? Is this when I start feeling electric shocks?”

He gave me a halfhearted laugh. “If everything’s working, I’ll get feedback from each electrode on my computer.” Off he went to the control room and a minute later returned to redo the electrode on the back left of my head.

He checked his watch and returned with my little blue pill. “Gulp this, and then you can go to the bathroom down the hall and brush your teeth or whatever. You’ll have a half hour till lights-out.”

I gulped and joined the ranks of sci-fi characters walking the halls with their head cord tentacles in hand. Even though I tried, I couldn’t quite keep an amused smile from creeping to my lips, which, if anyone was looking, probably made me and my electrodes look even scarier.

Back in my room, I read the latest Patricia Marx shopping column in the
New Yorker,
and just as I finished and was about to turn to the movie reviews, Raymond returned to hook me up to the wall. As he left, he abruptly flipped off the lights and closed the door. A few seconds later I jumped as his voice crackled through the box on the wall—tinny, like a drive-through window. “Okay, now try to go to sleep. Just speak up if you need anything.” Apparently, in addition to transmitting my brain waves, the box was a personal two-way radio system.

Although “now try to go to sleep” sounded like a taunt, I did my best, holding very still and counting backward from five hundred, and unlike every other night when this got me nowhere, it worked. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but a few hours later, sometime in the middle of the night, Raymond opened the door and flipped on the lights, leading me to wake up, immediately sit bolt upright in bed, and in a weirdly delayed reaction, scream a full second later. Not a somebody-help-me scream, more of a holler, an instinctual little hoot, a halfway-to-singing “hooaah!” I stared at him with eyes that I’m sure looked like the huge nervous eyes of those lemurs they catch in photos at night.

“Whoa, sorry about that,” he said. “I have to reattach your leg electrode. It fell off.”

I was now awake enough to check my face for signs of drool or, equally bad, residue from dried drool. I was apparently drool-free for the moment. Raymond unscrewed the cap of the glue tube, and I pulled back the blanket and pushed up the leg of my pajamas. There it was again, my pasty calf—there’s nothing quite as sexy as a glimpse of just-above-the-sock, just-below-the-knee stubbly, super-glo-white leg.

He reglued in silence, then went back to the computer room to check. “We’re good,” his voice came through the box behind the bed. A second later he leaned back into the room, flipped off the light, and closed the door. I put my head back down just as Raymond clicked into the box again. “Okay, now try to go back to sleep.”

Thank you, Raymond. Thank you. Fortunately, it didn’t take terribly long, maybe twenty minutes. And then it was morning.

“It’s seven a.m.,” Raymond announced, turning on the lights. “Time to get those electrodes out of your hair. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to scrub for a few days. The glue is like cement.”

After my shower in the bathroom’s oh-so-cozy stall proved Raymond right, cement clinging despite my scrubbing and clawing and picking, I returned to my room for a quick once-over with the vital signs nurse. Check check, I appeared to be functional and safe to leave the facility. Another nurse popped into the room and gave me a bottle with a six-week supply of pills and printed instructions for calling my sleep times into the study’s automated system every morning.

On my way out I passed the control room where Raymond had spent the night with a monitor full of my brain just as he happened to be putting on his jacket.

“You heading out too?” I said.

He nodded, and we caught the elevator, then walked to the F train together. Turned out he’d settled on an architectural project involving Red Hook because he lived in Red Hook, just over the border from my apartment in Carroll Gardens. On the train home, we talked about the neighborhood, the model he was building, the worst person he’d ever had to glue electrodes to (the story involved flatulence), and whether we’d sign up for the Hawaii–New York jet lag study given the opportunity. (Yes, we would. My “yes” became even more emphatic once Raymond informed me it paid four thousand dollars.)

After we got off the train at the Smith and Ninth Street stop, I was about to turn off onto my street when he said, “Would you like to see the model of the Red Hook theater? I’m almost done with it.”

“Sure,” I answered, and only then did it dawn on me that this would most likely mean stopping by his apartment rather than taking the train all the way back to the city to some model-holding room on campus. Was this sluggish cognition a side effect of the sleeping pill? I couldn’t be certain, but I’d make note of it in my sleep journal just in case. More important for the moment, was going to Raymond’s apartment a bad idea? The last twelvish hours seemed to indicate that he was not a psycho-killer rapist. So that was okay. And then there was the fact that he was hot . . . and that I clearly wasn’t seeing anyone at the moment, despite hopes that I might have been seeing someone sometime around, say, mid-September.

I followed Raymond under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, past the twenty-four-hour Quick-E Lube, to a weedy building across the street from an old brick factory, now loft condos—a combination of derelict chic and actual derelict that typified Red Hook. Up two flights, his door swung wide to reveal a studio that was dorm-room-style squalor at its finest: a futon mattress lumped on the floor in the corner, the sheets rumpled, no bedspread in sight; an open pizza box full of crusts beside the bed; a grouping of camp chairs (he’d sprung for the fancy ones with cupholders in the arms) in front of the TV, which itself sat atop two plastic crates; clothes—T-shirts, boxers, jeans, more T-shirts—strewn about the room, some piled on the backs of the chairs, most deposited on the floor; and beneath the clothes, against the background of the flimsy black carpet, I wasn’t surprised to see crumbs, but I was surprised to see coins.

“Should I be looking out for shards of a piggy bank?” I said. Ha-ha, ho-ho.

“Oh, yeah, that. I tipped over my change bowl one day and then didn’t clean it up for a while. But then I decided it was kind of awesome to walk around on money, so now I just throw my change on the floor.” To illustrate this point, he jammed his hand into his pocket and fished out some coins, then, grinning, opened his fingers and let the nickels and dimes run through onto the floor, like they were sand and this was the beach.

He swept some clothes off one of the camp chairs for me. I took a seat, and he pulled another one right up, so close to mine that the arms touched.

“Yep, so this is the place. Home sweet home.”

“It must be great to live alone,” I said, searching for a silver lining.

When he didn’t say anything, I swiveled my head around in search of the model. A few boxes hulked on the kitchen counter, but they were jumbled in with dishes and crinkled paper towels, making it hard to discern their true nature.

“It is nice to live alone,” he finally said, leaning over. And then, next thing I knew he was tracing his finger around the edge of the red mark one of the electrode patches had left on my chest. This would have been one part sexy, four parts hilarious had he done it with a sense of irony, but I double-checked his face—no irony, in spite of the slightly gummy edges of the mark. I adjusted a little, moving away and trying to laugh off the sexy electrode action. To no avail.

“There’s just something special about a man and a woman,” he said as he leaned in further to kiss me. It was instant make-out regret. Though it’s hard to say something is regret while it’s still happening. I was kissing a man who had just delivered a horribly embarrassing line, a line that also made no sense unless he meant that he usually made out with other men, thereby making this a special novelty. And yet, there I was, still kissing him. He leaned over even further so that his chest was pressing against mine at a strange angle.

I hate rejection, whether I am the rejected or the rejector. My strategy is
avoid, avoid, avoid.
If someone I’m not sure I want to go out with starts getting stammery and mentioning ideas for things to do, I start talking about the weather, check my watch, and then flee the scene. To my cowardly mind, this is somehow preferable to saying the word “no.”

My weakling’s flight mechanism usually kept me out of situations like the Raymond dilemma at hand. But now that we were already kissing, what was I supposed to say? “Excuse me, I believe I’ve changed my mind”? Probably, but that was hard for me. I started practicing saying something along those lines in my head while he continued his work with his tongue. After another minute, he took my hands, stood up, and started to pull me toward the futon mattress on the floor.

“No, no no no no no no.” The word just spilled right out as I pulled my hands from his. “I mean, I think we should just be friends. You watch my brain waves. Doesn’t that make this wrong?”

“How can this be wrong?” he said, his nonironic smile gleaming.

“Oh my goodness . . . I have to go.” I grabbed my bag and jacket and waved from the door.

After I crossed back under the BQE, I ran the rest of the way home, my overnight bag banging awkwardly against my side. On my way up the stairs, I fixated on the thought of showering. I wanted another go at the electrode glue cemented in my hair, but I also felt rather biblically unclean. Maybe making out with a hot lab tech in a filthy apartment is part of what you’re supposed to do in your early twenties. Maybe I was supposed to be stocking up on stories like that. But it didn’t feel like awesome fun I’d be dying to recount later. It felt yucky. I felt yucky. I hoped some hot water could steam it all away. I also hoped there were more lab techs in the rotation so we wouldn’t have to talk about—or worse, not talk about—my flight next week while he glued electrodes to my scalp.

But, as is often the case when you have roommates, the time you most want and need the bathroom is always the time it is unavailable to you. Sylvia had the shower and her shower radio going when I walked through the door. She sang along with Celine Dion, sputtering out here and there, but really holding the long notes with fervor. I might have found it sort of sweet had I not been a millimeter of patience away from pounding on the bathroom door.

Instead of pounding, I collapsed on the couch and checked my e-mail. And wouldn’t you know it, there he was: Secret Agent Romance. The first time in a week I’d checked my e-mail without thinking of him, and ta-da, he appeared.

“It’s Fall,” read SAR’s subject line. The entire body of the e-mail was the single word “Hello” visible next to the subject in the preview line. That was it. I didn’t even have to open the message to read it in its entirety. American Express, up next in my inbox, much more dotingly wanted me to know that they valued me, so much so that they wanted to bring my whole family on board—why not earn more SkyMiles by linking additional cards to my account? It was a love fest compared to Elliot’s three-word message.

That weak little “Hello” certainly didn’t require an immediate response. I waited out Sylvia’s shower and then shook off my clothes and turned the water up as hot as I could take.

When I got out of the shower, I had a text message from Robert. Really, wasn’t today just the day? “U free tonight?” he’d written.

“Why?” I replied, feeling both savage and petulant. Not that he would pick up on my mood from that single word.

“Lily’s in Chicago. I need dinner company.”

Was this constant mentioning of Lily really necessary? The NYU freshman hadn’t always been mentioned. She’d existed, but during that period Robert and I had had dinner, gone to movies, gone shopping, all sorts of things, and we’d both conspicuously avoided mentioning her. And though we didn’t touch each other during the entirety of her stay in Robert’s life, our silence felt like it signaled her future dismissal. Now, Robert’s Lily dropping felt like a bullhorn announcing her permanent dominion.

“Fine,” I typed, as if my lack of enthusiasm would crush him. Clearly, it had no impact, since he replied right back with a time and place.

I spent the rest of the day consciously not e-mailing Elliot.

When dinnertime finally approached, my feet weren’t dragging; I actually felt feathery with anticipation. Maybe Robert irked me, but there had never been a time I didn’t want to see him.

Sandra Seru,

Duke University, 1989

_________

THE JOURNALIST

The Editor in Chief of the Duke
Chronicle,
Sandra recently accepted the Associated Collegiate Press’s prestigious Newspaper Pacemaker Award honoring the
Chronicle
’s excellence. “I’ve practically lived in the
Chronicle
’s offices for the past three years, but it’s been worth it!” Sandra says. Her dream job: reporting for the
Washington Post.
Other surprising talents: Sandra is fluent in Spanish and plays a mean jazz clarinet.