The Year of Yes (18 page)

A few other people checked into our conversation, apparently to see what my opinions were on the subject. I could see heads turning.

“Yes,” I said. “I have. So you don’t really need to tell me about it, okay?”

“Whoo! Don’t tell your mama!” he said.

“I need to go,” I said, trying to be gentle, but then he turned and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Hey,” he said. “I don’t mean to offend you. Maybe I’m a little rough.”

“Maybe you are,” I said, “but I’ve probably seen worse than you. Just cool it on the cock stuff, okay?”

“No problem, Maria, Maria, Miss Madame Maria. Want me to sing your song again?”

We sat on a bench, and looked out over the fall. Leaves still green, fountain still running. Things not too bad, though Bob Dylan wasn’t coming to
my
house.

“What do you think, Jimi?” I said.

“About what specifically? I think lots about lots.”

“Living happily. Like, are
you
happy?” Even though he was living on the street, even though he thought he was
Hendrix, and even though Hendrix was dead, I meant. Even though he was out of his mind, I hoped that maybe being out of your mind didn’t feel too awful. Maybe he didn’t even know he was gone.

“Happy is relative. Happy, I’ll tell you exactly one thing about happy.”

“Tell me.”

“Happy’s a choice. You can be fucked-up over the shit the bastards do to you, or you can decide to get over it.”

He didn’t look like he’d gotten over it, but what did I know? Maybe he would have been much worse without his happiness policy. Maybe he wouldn’t have survived.

“All you can do is give out your love,” said the Rockstar. “And hope that somebody can take it for what it is.”

I looked at him. I smiled, but he was gone again, gone as fast as he’d put his finger on exactly what my question was.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like you know shit you don’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Fuck that,” he said.

A cop walked up to us. He was youngish, his hairline beating a swift retreat, but his gun at the ready.

“This guy bothering you?”

“Why don’t you ask if I’m bothering
him
? Because I probably am. He’d probably be having a nice day if I hadn’t tripped over him, and then forced him to have lunch with me.”

Okay, so this wasn’t the wisest thing to say to a macho cop.

“Because
you’re
the pretty girl,” said the cop, with some definite sarcasm. “And
he’s
the motherfucker. But hey, let me just ask. Is this girl bothering you?”

“Nah. She’s cool,” said the Rockstar.

“I’m watching you,” said the cop, and strutted away. Not too far away. Ten feet.

Fuck the cop, I thought. Fuck me. Fuck all the judgment I had about bad luck, and inability to climb back up from it.

I LEANED IN, AND KISSED the man beside me, the man who thought he was Hendrix, the man who knew he’d come from a cannery and hopped a train. And maybe it was disgusting. Maybe his lips were chapped from the Great Out There, and maybe his skin was covered with dirt from the city. Maybe his clothes were stiff with living. Maybe he was crazy. And maybe I wanted to get my heart broken, because after all, what are hearts for?

But I kissed him, and he kissed me, and that was all there was to that. Love was precious, however fleeting. I was kissing a ghost, the ghost of more than one person, the ghost of all those I’d never see again, the ghost of those who had changed me.

Maybe my dad would get on a ship and go out onto the ocean and be cured of his troubles. Maybe the water would put out the fire in his head. Maybe my Hitchhiker had stuck out his thumb and hailed a ride to heaven. Maybe nothing was as sad as it sometimes seemed. Maybe. Or maybe it just hurt to grow.

“When I died, I was in London,” said the Rockstar, his smile crooked.

I decided that I’d just believe him. It wasn’t that far from the truth. We all had to reincarnate ourselves, and that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. My whole life was a reinvention of how I’d started out. If I hadn’t thrown myself headlong at change, I’d still have been in Idaho, married to one of the boys I’d never wanted to marry. I was my own creation, in many ways, even though I’d been affected by everything I’d done, and everyone that had helped me along my way. So was the Rockstar. And here we were.

I knew too much to think that I could save him. All I could do was give my love.

The Rockstar waved at me as he walked away, his knapsack over his shoulder, his song carrying back to me.

I stood on the street corner, and I let him go.

In Which Our Heroine Looks at Real Estate…

THE DAYS PASSED LIKE TRAINS. I’d fly uptown to whatever temporary job would have me, and then downtown to class, then home to write my fingers down to stubs. I wasn’t making enough money, but I was making more than I ever had before. I wasn’t finding love, but I was finding more than I’d ever found before. Little scraps of it, in every person I met. Everyone had something to give me. Maybe I had something to give them, too. I hoped so. I was collecting. It seemed like my cup was starting to spill over, and so what if it wasn’t just from loving one person, but from loving all of them? Maybe I wouldn’t find everything I was looking for in one place, but the world was wider than I could have imagined, and everyone’s path seemed to lead to New York.

I met men from Ghana and Georgia, ate Ethiopian food with a good ol’ boy from North Carolina, rode around in an ice-cream truck with a guy from Mexico City, handing out Popsicles and nut-covered cones to surging children. A Japanese student took me to a dance club, and then listened to his Walkman the whole time we were there. A Hare Krishna swung with me on a swing set, but said absolutely nothing. A city bus driver ferried me all over Brooklyn, late one night, when I, with some ridiculously blistered feet, due
to a pair of evil turquoise cowboy boots, flagged him down from the stoop I’d made my crippled way to. I sat in the seat next to him, and he showed me his city. At four in the morning, he dropped me off at my door, and I watched his bright, empty bus drive away.

All of my writing started to be about people I’d barely met, who had, for some reason, given me their best bits. Sometime in high school, I’d read a quote from a famous author, about whether or not he actually knew about what he was writing. He’d said that if you were really a writer, you should be able to walk past a bar full of sailors, and stand outside for a minute, absorbing their talk, their catcalls, their songs. Then, you were qualified to go home and write an entire novel set at sea. I agreed with him, but I was doing it one better. I wasn’t just walking past. I was getting to go inside all these other people’s lives and look around. I was insanely lucky. The more I left my apartment and wandered into someone else’s story, the more I thought that maybe I was making myself worthy of being loved.

Not right now, however. I had the flu. Not just the flu. Something more pitiful. This flu had an emotional component, and so I was suffering from something that might as well have been called the blue or the rue. The flu had made every bad thing that had ever happened to me come back in full force. I was in my apartment, wearing my bleakest kimono, and sipping NyQuil. The only thing that made me feel better was that I knew that my neighbor nemesis, Pierre, was just as sick as I was.

I’d come home a couple of hours before, basically crawling up the stairs, and Pierre had opened his door a crack, and sneezed a bitter sneeze.

“You gave this to me,” he’d rasped, apropos of nothing.

I hadn’t even seen Pierre in days. There was no way I could have given him the flu. It wasn’t like I’d done what we’d done as kids, when one of us had had a communicable disease: flung ourselves into sibling beds and wallowed poxily across the sheets. I was innocent. I’d never even seen Pierre’s bed.

I hadn’t known I was sick until I’d started seeing halos over the heads of the other morning commuters. My body ached all the time anyway, and I was always sleepy. It hadn’t occurred to me that anything out of the ordinary was going on. But a train full of angels, while beautiful, was too implausible. I’d bought a thermometer when I’d gotten off the train. Fever of 102. It was midterms, though, and so I’d gone to school anyway, squinting through a watery aura to see the slides that comprised my Art History midterm. I was living paycheck to paycheck, and so, after school, I’d had to go to work. I was regretting that now, nine hours later. Normally, I just denied illness, until I was so sick that I couldn’t get out of bed. This one wouldn’t be denied.

“You probably gave it to me,” I said, equally irrationally.

“I’m going to die,” said Pierre, clinging to his doorframe.

“Me too,” I said, lying on the stairs like a Slinky. I slithered up to my door, and hung from my doorknob to unlock it. When I opened it, Big White catapulted himself out.

“No,” I said weakly. “Please.”

“It’s okay,” said Pierre. “He can come distract Pepe from clawing me.”

Big White, obviously self-destructive, had already thrown himself into Annie and Pierre’s apartment.

Pierre’s roommate, Annie, and I, like the kind of idiot parents who arrange playdates between the class geek and the class bully, had for a long time firmly believed that if our cats only got to know each other, they would be comrades. Alas, Annie’s cat, Pepe, was batshit. Whenever Annie opened their apartment door, a black-and-white blur would fly up the stairs, claws extended like switchblades, and leap hissing at our door, leaving scratch marks up to the ceiling. Woe betide the person who responded to his knocks. There would be Pepe, crouched like a tiny, warlike cow, his icy blue eye glittering and his red eye radiating malice. You had to dodge before he went for your throat.

Big White, despite being three times Pepe’s size, hid quivering beneath Vic’s futon whenever Pepe came over. This annoyed me. They were the same species, damn it, and there was no reason why they could not be friends. Besides, they were neighbors. Annie and I thought that neighbors should like each other.

Unless, of course, the neighbors happened to be me and Pierre.

It was beyond me why Big White Cat should suddenly want to throw himself at Pepe. It had never worked before. Whatever. I made for the medicine cabinet.

After a couple of hours, I heard Pierre sneezing his way across his apartment, and knew that Big White Cat’s playdate was ending. Dragging myself out of bed, NyQuil in hand, I prepared myself for the usual: a bloodied nose or ear, a cowardly Big White with tail between legs. I looked down and saw Pierre standing outside his door, pink with fever, holding onto Big White as though onto a life preserver. Big White was purring. Weird.

“Hey,” Pierre rasped.

“Hi,” I croaked. “Want NyQuil?” Another minute of swaying at the top of the stairs, and I’d fling myself down them, just to get the inevitable over with.

“But it’s daytime,” he moaned. “NyQuil is for night.” Pierre was swaying, too.

“It’s dark somewhere,” I told him, and raised the dosage cup like a shot glass. “C’mon. Have some. You’ll feel better…”

“Okay,” said Pierre. “You want me to climb the stairs?”

“Yes,” I said.

There was a sudden warp in the time-space continuum, and for reasons that I still cannot explain, the next thing we knew, Pierre and I were making out against the ladder of the fire escape. We pulled away only when we both succumbed to coughing fits.

“Oh my God,” panted Pierre.

“What’s wrong with us?” I gasped, and then Pierre ran a finger across my clavicle, and I grabbed his clammy bicep, and talking became futile.

Half an hour later, we got another couple of sentences out.

“Dude, I don’t even like you,” he said.

“I don’t like you, either. Get inside before someone sees us.” I grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him into the apartment.

Vic was out for the evening. Not completely, though. She was halfway single, and therefore scheduled to come home at some point. Zak, however, was in the Bay Area for the week, in rehearsal for a play. I figured that if we just went into his room and shut the door, Vic would think I was
getting some obscure revenge on him by blowing my nose on his sheets. It would never occur to her that I was sleeping with the enemy.

We couldn’t even converse. We were too busy kissing. And even as we kissed, I could imagine Pierre’s analretentive nightly vacuuming, his psychedelic chef’s pants, his sabotage of me with the Handyman. I could lay brain on all the reasons he made me crazy, but there was no way to resist. It seemed he felt the same way.

Finally, we paused. Both of us were so stuffed-up that kissing was almost enough to make us pass out.

“This is sick,” Pierre said, blowing his nose.

“Seriously, seriously sick,” I replied, daubing cold sweat off my face. “Could you feel my forehead?”

“Feels okay to me,” he said. “Feel mine.”

“I can’t tell if you have a fever. I have a fever, too, remember? You feel cool to me.”

“Question. Am I missing something here, or are we totally incompatible?”

“Not totally,” I said. “We’re just
mostly
incompatible.”

“Then why am I hot for you?” Pierre grabbed my left breast, looking bewildered.

“Why am I hot for
you
?” I grabbed Pierre’s chest, bewildered, too.

“Ow,” said Pierre. “Nipple ring.”

“Sorry.” What was the matter with me? Nipple rings grossed me out.

We heard the front door open. I put a pillow over Pierre’s face and covered him in blankets.

“Maria?” Vic knocked on Zak’s door and opened it slightly.

“Hi,” I croaked. “Don’t come in. I’m really sick. I don’t want you to catch it.”

I also didn’t want her to catch me with Pierre. I hoped his feet weren’t sticking out of the blanket. At least he was skinny enough that he was almost invisible. I knew Vic would be pissed, despite the fact that she had, for almost a year, denied having any sort of crush on Pierre. They’d gotten their nipples pierced together, though, and that was apparently an aphrodisiac. I’d come home one day and Vic had thrown open the upstairs door, yelling, “LOOK!”

She’d been threatening to do this for a long time, but it was still a shock when she flashed me in the doorway. The piercings looked good on Vic, because the rings were big and silver. They made her look somewhat dangerous, which was probably what she was going for. On Pierre, however, it just looked weird. He’d chosen to get a delicate little ring with colored beads hanging from it. And, for some reason, he’d only done one of them. I now knew this for sure, because even as I spoke to Vic, I had my hand on Pierre’s chest. It was so appalling. What was I doing?

“Can I get you anything? NyQuil? Tea?” Vic asked, looking concerned. I tried to bring myself back to Earth. No doubt, I had an odd expression on my face.

“I’m just going to sleep until I feel better.”

“I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

“It’s amazing the kind of conversations you can have with yourself.”

Vic raised an eyebrow at me.

“Have you taken your temperature?”

“Yeah, it’s a hundred and two. I’m eating ice. Don’t inhale. You don’t want this.” I also didn’t want her to smell
Pierre’s cologne. Even though I had no sense of smell, I suspected he was wearing it. He always was.

“Lemme know if you need anything.” She closed the door. I felt bad. She was so nice, and I was so deceitful. Pierre scrabbled from beneath the pillow. I lifted it off his face.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

He coughed, having been deprived of air for too long.

“That sounds bad,” said Vic from the kitchen. “Sure you don’t need cough syrup?”

“I have some. It’s just a deep cough,” I said. “Like, from the guts.”

“Annie says Pierre has it, too,” said Vic.

“Huh,” I said. It was our own little sex farce. Molière, minus the verse and plus some phlegm.

PIERRE WAS FINALLY able to escape several hours later, as Vic talked on the phone in her bedroom. Her conversations with her sister were always raucous, and usually lasted for hours. Pierre tiptoed to the door, carrying his shiny shoes, and I followed him into the stairwell. We kissed one more time and then he fled. I heard Annie ask him where he’d been.

“Sitting on the roof,” he answered. Something none of us ever did. It was black tar paper, and it was precarious. We’d been banned that summer, when Gamma had seen my friend Moon taking in the New York City skyline. She’d thought Moon looked suicidal, despite the fact that the roof was only two stories high. Moon hadn’t been on an urban roof before. All you ever saw in Idaho were cows getting it on. New
York City windows offered much more interesting couplings, even if they were often no more attractive.

“Let me take your temperature,” said Annie. “You must be burning up.”

She was right, obviously. Both of us were burning up, and what had been left postblaze was something very strange. Out of the ashes of our dislike had risen an irresistible attraction. Now it was flying through the air, crowing in triumph, and Pierre and I were left dumbfounded. And horribly, sinfully, turned on.

“We can’t do this,” I whispered the next day, when we were hiding out again in Zak’s room.

“How come?”

“Vic has a crush on you.”

“She never said anything,” he said.

“Of course she didn’t,” I said. “That’s not her style.”

“She said you were utterly unattracted to me,” Pierre said.

“She said the same thing about you,” I said.

We soon established that Vic had been telling each of us how much the other wasn’t worthy of dating. Somehow, the reverse had become the actuality. We’d been dosed with a love potion made of Vic’s attempts to keep us apart. Her suspicion made us all the more perversely inclined to pursue our twisted relationship. I was still laboring under unhappiness from months before, when I’d seen Vic’s diary open on her bed. Being the confrontation avoiders Vic and I both were, we’d never discussed it. I still had hurt feelings and, apparently, I was still a little bit angry at her, too. This wasn’t even really about revenge, though. It was about absurd chemistry. Pierre and I suddenly could not keep our hands off each other.

We felt compelled to play footsie under the dining room table the next week, when Pierre and Annie had Vic and I over for dinner. Vic watched us suspiciously, her eyes flickering from face to face. Pierre and I pretended to be innocent, but all the while, we were holding hands beneath Pierre’s lovely cloth napkins. Pierre’s fingers were stroking my thigh.

Vic, not being an idiot, quickly discerned what was going on, and decided that she would never leave us alone again. She tried to drag me out to a bar, but I said that I didn’t feel well enough to leave the apartment. Pierre told her that she should just go if she wanted to go. Finally, several hours later, Vic left, furious, and Pierre told Annie he was walking me upstairs, whereupon we fell into bed. It wasn’t like we were really doing anything wrong. We weren’t actually having sex. We were just
almost
having sex. As long as that was the case, we could both deny what was really going on.