Early Work_A Novel Read online

  As I was transferring the ground coffee into the stovetop thing, Leslie padded into the kitchen wearing the same rumpled, smoky clothes as the night before. She examined the front of the refrigerator, the baby announcements, wedding invitations, and scrawled reminders about Kiki’s tick medication held up by magnets depicting our musical heroes. The household gods.

  “I recognize Hank and Bob, but who’s the blind guy again? I know that I know.”

  “Roy Orbison,” I said. “He wasn’t blind. His family died in a fire.”

  “That’s horrible,” Leslie said.

  “He was a sad motherfucker,” I said. “‘Crying’ really messes me up.”

  “I feel like I can’t really hear songs like that as music anymore, you know what I mean?” Leslie said. “I mean, I know it’s good, but they’re so familiar they just make me feel depressed.”

  “It’s a problem, for sure.”

  “I need better writing music,” Leslie said. “Or maybe I need to just stop trying to listen to music while I write. Or, probably, I just need to find some other way of living.”

  “It seems like you’re doing fine to me,” I said.

  “Right, you don’t really know me.”

  “Well,” I said. She had a point. “Do you want anything to eat?”

  “I’m not really a breakfast person,” she said. “Though I kind of wish I was, because breakfast is fucking amazing. Breakfast for dinner? That’s my thing.”

  There was a moment’s pause, and then she stepped forward abruptly and kissed me hard on the mouth. I put my hand to the side of her face and kissed her back, the taste of our sleep-musted mouths canceling each other out, I hoped. It lasted only a couple of seconds, and then she leaned back against the refrigerator with a hint of a smile.

  “Let us never speak of it again,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?” I said.

  “It was just one of those crazy mornings,” she said.

  I stepped forward and kissed her again, more thoroughly this time. Her mouth tasted like stale milk. I pulled her toward me by her hip. She was so warm, so familiar. She ran her hand through my hair, down the back of my neck. I kissed her ear, her cheek, her collarbone.

  “You shouldn’t be doing this,” she muttered near my ear.

  I kneaded her ass through her jeans.

  “Fuck, man, it’s been too long,” she said. “Don’t tease me like that.”

  “Like this?” I said. I unsnapped the top couple of buttons of her shirt and kissed her chest.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  I opened the rest of her shirt and kissed the tops of her breasts, pressed my mouth against the maroon fabric of her bra. I got on my knees, kissed her belly button, her stomach spilling out over the top of her jeans. I unbuttoned her jeans and kissed the zipper. I was trying to remember if there were any condoms in the house; Julia had announced the presence of some when we first moved in, half-jokingly explaining where they were “if things got weird.” I hadn’t touched them …

  “Hey, hey,” Leslie said. She grabbed my collar and when that didn’t work, my hair, and yanked me to my feet.

  “You’re being crazy,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We’re in your kitchen, your and Julia’s kitchen. With your fucking dog in the backyard, man.”

  “It’s not ideal,” I said.

  I stared her down to see if she’d laugh, or kiss me again, but it wasn’t happening.

  “No, dude, it’s not. It’s really not.”

  “I feel a little bit insane about you right now,” I said. “This isn’t how I usually am.”

  “We’re having a moment of mass hysteria or something,” Leslie said. “Not about liking each other. But I don’t think we need to fuck in your kitchen this very second.”

  What I liked about this statement was the implication that we might need to fuck in my kitchen at a later date.

  “It would have been fun,” I said.

  The coffee had been bubbling away for a while now, scorching. I took it off the burner and poured it into cups.

  “I heard you guys last night,” Leslie said. She was holding her mug to her still-bare chest, not drinking it.

  “I’m not saying there’s any problem between me and Julia. I just … I feel kind of overwhelmed by you.”

  “You’re very sweet,” she said.

  “I mean, you kissed me,” I said.

  “And you confirmed my suspicions.”

  “So your line on this is that you were conducting some kind of experiment?”

  “Look, no,” Leslie said. “There’s no scheme, you know? I’m in a weird place, and I realize I’m way too cavalier about things and I’m sorry.”

  “We’re adults,” I said, the universal verbal marker of childish behavior. “This doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “I mean, stuff like this can happen and it doesn’t have to change the course of our lives.”

  “I wasn’t planning to change anything, bud.”

  “Can continue to happen, I meant.”

  She set her coffee cup down on the stove and buttoned her shirt.

  “I think we should be friends with intense, unspoken potential,” she said. “And if something changes in whatever direction, we can reassess.”

  “That seems really hard,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, life is full of challenges. Buck up. You just got some sweet action before ten a.m. I’d say you’re having a pretty great day.”

  “Shit, speaking of which,” I said. “I’ve got to go, like, now. Are you ready?”

  “All I’ve got is the clothes I walked in with. Do you mind if I borrow your Blood Meridian?”

  “As long as I can think about you reading it,” I said.

  “That’s dark.”

  I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face, ran my wet fingers through my hair in a futile attempt to make my bedhead present as respectably disheveled. I threw on some dirty clothes—no jeans at the prison!—and tried to remember what I needed to bring for class. I racked my brain for what I’d assigned them to read—we’d already done “Notes of a Native Son” and “Consider the Lobster,” so it was probably … the Rwandan genocide. Happy Thursday.

  I put a bowl of water in the backyard for Kiki, who put her head on her paws at the daily disappointment of being abandoned. Then Leslie and I trundled out to the car, the stale day-after air of which finally triggered my latent hangover. As we drove away I realized I’d left the front porch light on, but I wasn’t about to go back.

  Neither of us said anything. The Kendrick album had rolled into the awful fake Tupac interview at the end. I hit the FM button and we listened to Diane Rehm talk to a CDC doctor about Lyme disease.

  “Where’s your car?” I said when we got downtown.

  “Right behind the wrong Subaru,” she said. Look at this: we had a past.

  I pulled up next to it, a green Camry or something, with Texas plates and a ticket under the windshield wiper.

  “Oy, sorry,” I said.

  “Worth it,” she said.

  She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned over the center console. I did everything in my power to keep facing forward, and she kissed me demurely on the cheek with a daughterly smack.

  I wound my way slowly out to 64 and then gunned it, late, to the prison.

  Julia and I started dating in our third year of college, in a Latin American literature class at Columbia. We had been assigned to the same grad student–led seminar, which consisted of the kind of mind-numbing roundtable “discussions” that, in fairness, made the idiocy of my future PhD cohort’s comments sound like the fucking wisdom of Socrates.

  I first became aware of Julia when I caught her rolling her eyes across the table during an earnest young man’s soliloquy about how One Hundred Years of Solitude had awakened his soul to the higher truth of human existence. I loved the book, too, of course, as did she. We weren’t monsters. But I was gra
teful to see someone as fed up with condescending piety as I was.

  “God, I assumed you hated me,” she said as we walked down Broadway back toward the main campus.

  “Why would you think that?” I said.

  “You sit there glowering the whole time. And smirking.”

  “That’s just my face,” I said.

  “You should work on your face.”

  We started sitting together in the lectures, and bullied each other into talking during the seminars by saying things like, “Well, Julia was just saying before class that Fuentes is actually parodying this sense of a national stereotype. Or, no, do I have that right, Julia?” and so on. And whatever I’d said, even if I’d made it up on the spot without having read the book, she would improvise a clever response, because she was brilliant, the smartest person in the class, the smartest person I’d met at school, the smartest person I’d met. She was five foot nothing but looked taller because of her long neck and excellent posture. Under that neck, she was all breasts and hips—there was no room for anything else. She had long, curly blonde hair, colored, I learned later, a few shades lighter than it was naturally, and defiantly puffy cheeks that went from a default rosy pink to bright red when she was even mildly embarrassed or drunk. She sang in an early music group, despite the fact that she was a half-Jewish atheist. She was in it for the tunes.

  One day after class, I invited her out for a drink. First I had to work at the school newspaper, where I barely edited the arts section, and she had singing rehearsal, but we agreed to meet at 10:30 and walk to the dark punk bar on Columbus that didn’t card. At the appointed time, Julia was leaning against the school’s front gate. When I got close I could see she was wearing pajama bottoms and a green sweatshirt advertising “the world’s largest open pit mine” under her puffy coat. This was, I guess, the cool new nonverbal way of saying we weren’t on a date. It brought me down a little, but it also took the pressure off of things. It could be a practice date.

  “I actually haven’t been to this place,” she said as we walked down Broadway, back the way I’d just come. “I know I should have.”

  “Apparently it used to be heroin central,” I said. “Back when the Upper West Side was all fucked-up. You know, like The Panic in Needle Park?”

  “Good title,” Julia said with an odd twinge of regret. It was a good title despite the sad fact that she’d never heard of it? Julia was visibly dragging her feet, stopping at crosswalks even when no cars were coming. In my peripheral vision, I saw her searching my face whenever I was talking.

  “Would you rather … not do this?” I said finally. We stopped in front of the place that served pizza slices larger than an adult human head.

  “What? No!” she said. “I mean, unless you want to switch it up. I’m down for whatever.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You don’t seem happy.”

  “I know,” she said. She sighed heavily. “I don’t really know what your expectations are. I know I’m probably overthinking it. I mean, I definitely like you, you seem like a good guy. I just have way too much shit going on.”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty busy, too,” I said. “I’m not really asking for some, you know, time commitment.”

  “No, I know. I just … this is so awful, but as we’re walking, I’m timing how long it’s going to take us to get to 103rd and Columbus, and how long it’s going to take to walk back, and even if we just have like one drink I’m going to go to sleep at one, and I’m supposed to meet my stupid friend Jessie for yoga at like the crack of dawn for some reason. Sorry, this is unbelievably rude.”

  “No, I get it,” I said, though I didn’t, really. It seemed totally ridiculous. “Do you want to just call it a night?”

  “Not if you’re going to, like, hate me,” she said. “Maybe you need to just soothingly convince me to have one drink at a place that’s a little bit closer. Tell me it’ll do me good to chill out for a few minutes.”

  “The Abbey doesn’t card,” I said. “And it’s right here. I think a beer’ll be good for you.”

  “Do you really think so?” she said. She sounded, somehow, like she was genuinely asking.

  “Definitely,” I said.

  But when we got to the bar, they were, in fact, carding at the door. We told them we’d forgotten our IDs and paused to see if we might be granted entry anyway. We were not.

  “I’ve got some whiskey in my room,” I said. “Let’s buy some ginger ale. You’ll be in bed before … before you would have been.”

  “Whiskey in a boy’s room?” she said. It was clear from the way she said it that, despite the ironic topspin, it was not something she had done with any frequency, if at all. We bought the ginger ale at the bodega on 110th Street and I signed her in at the front desk of my dorm. The moment the doors closed on the very slow elevator, I remembered how disastrously messy—borderline personality disorder messy—my room was. (This was a trend, you see.) When I opened my door, conditions were dire, but not as bad as they could have been. Yes, there were clothes and books everywhere, but I hadn’t left out any rotting food covered in cigarette butts, as I had before a previous unfortunate rendezvous.

  “So this is the dojo,” I said.

  “Only a little worse than mine,” Julia said. I figured at the time that she was just being nice, but her assessment turned out to be accurate. When I visited her room a week later, the messiness was the inverse of mine. The books were on the shelves, the clothes in the drawers, but there was actively rotting fruit on two surfaces, with swarms of flies hovering over them, and something mildly unsavory wafting from the squat garbage can in the corner.

  I took the half-full bottle of Jameson down from the top of the bookcase. I remembered that I owned only one filthy glass.

  “Let me go wash this real quick,” I said.

  Her eyes were already scanning the books lined up across the dorm-regulation shelf attached to the desk. Books for school, books from my mother. Boy shit. Dead people.

  I ducked out of the room and knocked on Colin’s door down the hall. He answered in just his boxers, clearly already in bed.

  “Hey, can I borrow a glass?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Like, a cup? I have a guest.”

  “All I have is that giant one. The stein.”

  “It’ll do, pig.”

  “Whatever,” he said. He picked it up off his desk and handed it to me. “Better be a good guest.”

  “Very promising!” I said. I hurriedly washed the glasses out in the sink in the small communal lounge, then rushed back down the hall to my room. Julia was sitting on the bed with a book open on her lap.

  “What that?” I said.

  She held it up so I could see the cover: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

  “Eh,” I said. It was 2007.

  She set the book down on the bed. “Should we have this much-promised drink or what?”

  “Yes!” I said. “Sorry there’s no ice!” It really was stupid. I poured myself a healthy fifty-fifty split of whiskey and ginger ale, which still filled only the bottom third of Colin’s giant glass, but gave Julia more manageable measurements in my more manageable cup. We clunked our drinks together and drank.

  “Are you dating that girl from the newspaper?” Julia said, as if that first tiny sip had given her immediate mental license to speak freely. “The one I always see you with at the library?”

  The girl in question was Edith, who was the film section editor. We weren’t dating, but we had slept together. Edith was a hardcore leftist, the kind of person (I didn’t learn that this “kind of person” existed until I went to Columbia) who had grown up singing folk songs about the importance of unions, the kind of person who still gathered for protests against the war in Iraq.

  “We’re just pals,” I said. “She’s awesome. I think you’d really like her.”

  “Does she know you’re just pals?”

  “She’d probably say comrades,” I said.

 
; “It’s none of my business,” Julia said. “You just seem … interested. And I guess maybe I’m kind of old-fashioned, or uptight, or however you want to put it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay, well, I like you,” she said. “I know I’m being a freak about it, but I do. But I also don’t want to interrupt whatever you’re already involved with, and I can’t do the, like, hookup thing.”

  “I get that. Really. I’m happy to just hang out.”

  “I think you know that’s not what I’m saying. Don’t be obtuse.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “I don’t know, do you want to, like, go out? With me? For lack of a better term?”

  “I do. That’s why I invited you out.”

  “Well, cool. Good. I guess let’s drink this drink, then.”

  It remained a pretty bad drink, but she didn’t seem to mind that much. I want to say that I fell in love with her then, saw her sweatshirt and her big glasses, which kept sliding down her nose, in some beatific new light, but I didn’t. I was, at that time, more annoyed than excited by her assertiveness, and mad at her for not looking as good as she did to go to class. What was her point? That I had to consent to love her at her worst, even before we started dating? I couldn’t tell if it was the ultimate in self-assurance or just the opposite, a failed attempt at self-sabotage.

  She told me about her trip to Turkey the year before, when she’d stayed with her roommate’s grandparents during Ramadan. They’d been awoken before dawn to eat huge, elaborate meals before the days of fasting.

  “I probably gained weight in the end,” Julia said.

  “I love eating, but I forget to do it sometimes. I’ll realize I’m hungry and it’s like, oh right, lunch. At five o’clock.”

  “I guess it beats the treadmill,” Julia said.

  “God, I fucking hate to exercise. I’m really going to try harder.”

  “I mean, you’re not fat. But it is, you know, good for you. And good for burning off stress.”

  “Do I seem stressed?”