Days passed.<\/p>\n
Weeks passed.<\/p>\n
Months passed.<\/p>\n
The “thing” with Josh continued. Nothing so easy had ever happened to her before. He didn’t seem to be getting tired of her. There was no drama, no games. They never ran out of things to discuss.<\/p>\n
Seven months.<\/p>\n
Eight months.<\/p>\n
Nine months they had been seeing one another.<\/p>\n
But: “seeing one other” was not exactly the right phrase. He would squeeze her around the waist, as they walked down the sidewalk, and say, “I love hanging out with you.” They were “hanging out”. He never said “girlfriend”. Any time they came close to declaring themselves, Josh got skittish. He would say things like, “Okay. Way too fast. Way too fast.” He openly resisted permanence. “I’m just not into getting too serious. It’s not my thing. But I love hanging out with you. I don’t want that to stop.”<\/p>\n
She curled up in bed alone, on their off-nights, falling up into the thundercloud, surrounded by bruised purple.<\/p>\n
____<\/p>\n
Occasionally, he wouldn’t call her for a week, two weeks. His freelance jobs paid well, and so he had tremendous freedom with his time. He traveled. He took road trips. He flew to Boulder to see a band he had loved in college.<\/p>\n
He would disappear and then re-appear, telling her, “I spent a couple days in Atlantic City with my brother.” Alice never asked him if the disappearing-act was a test, a way to shake her up. When he called, her heart leapt at the sound of his voice.<\/p>\n
Friendliness from him, on the other end: “So what’d you do over the past week?”<\/p>\n
Blinded, panicked, Alice invented activities.<\/p>\n
____<\/p>\n
But during those times when he was in absentio, in actuality Alice wilted, her features pinched, collapsing in on each other.<\/p>\n
Her inner life diminished to a tiny pinpoint. Nothing moved.<\/p>\n
She went into a fugue state, brain fuzzed by blank noise.<\/p>\n
Nothing different ever happened.<\/p>\n
She was dragging her shadow in a circle.<\/p>\n
She always had one weak moment when she would cave and leave a message on his cell phone, forcing her voice to be fanatically casual. As though she didn’t miss him at all, she was so busy with her own life, she barely noticed he was gone.<\/p>\n
“Hey Josh … it’s me. Listen, there’s a documentary film festival this weekend downtown … a couple of Iranian filmmakers I want to see. Anyway. Gimme a call. Hope you’re well.”<\/p>\n
She never left more than one message like that.<\/p>\n
____<\/p>\n
And then he would re-appear unannounced on her doorstep at 3 o’clock in the morning. The doorbell buzzing yanked her up from the black; she struggled to surface, arms pushing helplessly through the water, swimming up reluctantly.<\/p>\n
Regaining consciousness was traumatic for her, always had been since she was little, the effort to switch worlds sometimes left her in tears. Josh learned very early on with her that he should not wake her up in the middle of the night for sex, something that he loved to do. He would kiss her and caress her for twenty minutes with no response on the other side; nothing, nada, she<\/i> was not there<\/i> – and then her eyes creaked open, the touch of his soft hand finally getting through, and then, uncontrollably, tears of loss. The tears terrified him at first. But not so much now.<\/p>\n
And so at the terrible sound of the buzzer, deep in the night, Alice, disoriented, stumbled to let him in, heart pounding, her walls unfamiliar to her, the tub changing position on its own during the night. Josh, an emissary from the waking daylight world no matter what time he arrived, entered, having not seen Alice in a week, his hands gentle, his lips on her face, his voice soothing, “All right, dream-girl, let’s go back to bed.”<\/p>\n
Her other world compelled, beckoned, the dream-scapes washed empty and clear, waiting, shadows crowding out from behind marble buildings, reaching for her. They climbed up into the loft, and Alice plummeted back down into the clamoring darkness, into the embrace of the merging shadow-forms. Josh’s body huddled up next to her, warm, big, his hands in her hair an echo of something else, his touch melding into her dream-world, Alice unsure which world was which.<\/p>\n
_____<\/p>\n
Her daily thought, “Soon I’ll start” changed at some point to “Now it’s begun.” But the “it” was baffling to her, indistinct. She squinted, trying to see. What is “it”? What’s begun?<\/p>\n
____<\/p>\n
It was her firm belief that people are, for better or for worse, shaped by circumstances beyond their control. An exposed tree on a wind-swept field cannot help but warp its shape to accommodate the storms. Josh, however, seemed relatively undamaged by life, unbent. He was an adult, he had gone through his share of crap (divorce of parents, best friend from high school dying in a car accident when they were sixteen), but his capacity for enthusiasm and human connection was untouched. He talked to everybody. He seemed to like everybody. Josh engaged the Burmese deli guy in deep (and informed) conversations about his home country. He flirted with the sad-faced girl behind the counter at his local coffee shop, bringing a smile to her lips. His social life was so ever-constant that he could have used a personal assistant to manage his schedule. Best friends from grade-school were always spending hilarious group weekends in New York, camping out at his cramped apartment in Queens, cutting a wild swath through the nightlife of the city. He never seemed to lose touch with anyone he had ever spoken with, ever. He had no curiosity about the inner workings of his own personality. His curiosity was almost completely outward-driven.<\/p>\n
He introduced her to the concept of Manhattan-as-playground. He read Time Out New York <\/i> with purpose, looking for fun cheap things to do. He used <\/i>the city. “Let’s go to the Museum of Film and Television. I’ve never been, which seems completely stupid.” “Seamus Heaney is reading tonight at NYU. It’s only 5 bucks to get in. Let’s go.” “Wanna go see if people are playing pick-up Frisbee in the park?”<\/p>\n
Josh would call Alice late at night, and they would sleepily recount the events of the day for one another. These conversations had moments of glowing intimacy, like the time he said to her, as she drifted off, phone pressed to her ear, “G’night, you sweet thing.”<\/p>\n
Alice pined to be labeled. To achieve classification. But Alice sensed that to press for this would have meant to lose him. She turned their moments over in her head, compulsively, until they were as smooth and luminous as moonstones. On the nights he didn’t call her, she lay in bed, whispering to herself, “Good night, you sweet thing … Good night, you sweet thing…”<\/p>\n
_____<\/p>\n
When she was with him, everything tasted good. Burritos, Guinness, ice cream, cantaloupe.<\/p>\n
____<\/p>\n
Her phone rang at 11:30 at night. She picked up. “Hey.” she said into the receiver.<\/p>\n
“Turn on the TV right now.”<\/p>\n
“Okay – what channel.”<\/p>\n
“E. Sharon Tate True Hollywood Story <\/i>is on.”<\/p>\n
They watched together, phone receivers to their ears. Sometimes commenting, but more often remaining silent, waiting to talk during the commercials.<\/p>\n
_____<\/p>\n
Alice hadn’t been with anyone in a couple of years and was a bit anxious about sex, but Josh had no shyness, no embarrassment, and he viewed sex with the same friendly curiosity as he viewed everything else: architecture, music, celebrities, history.
\n_______<\/p>\n
After sex, they would tiptoe out to the kitchen for leftover Chinese food, whispering so as not to wake his roommate, the light from the refrigerator spilling a pathway across the dark tile. Everything seemed hilarious. Random bursts of laughter. They lay together, coming down, his arm around her, and they talked. Mostly nonsense talk. They quizzed each other on what they would do if they won the lottery. They discussed which character in “The Breakfast Club” they related to the most. They made up limericks. The rule was to begin the limerick with no forethought, no planning, and to have no idea how it would work ultimately, or what the punch line would be.<\/p>\n
“It’s like skydiving,” Josh said. “Okay – GO!”<\/p>\n
Josh always managed to wrestle ridiculous rhymes out of thin air, which astounded Alice, who tended to freeze in the headlights during her turn. One night, overcome with frustration at her inability to limerick improvisationally, jealous of Josh’s casual rhyming of “kitchen” with “From the baseball mound he was pitchin'”, Alice burst out angrily with her own limerick. It was a protest against the tyranny of rhyme, against her own embarrassment.<\/p>\n
“There once was an asshole named Josh
\nHis head was shaped like a fence
\nHe had eggs in his shoes
\nAnd a tie in his nose
\nAnd his bedroom was filled with red cabbage.”<\/p>\n
After a stunned silence, Josh said, “I don’t think anyone has ever described me so perfectly.”<\/p>\n
______<\/p>\n
Alice had a recurring vision of the two of them in their after-sex rambunctions as a pair of disgruntled mischievous putti, the ones who perch on the margins of Renaissance paintings, glancing up at the main action, rolling their eyes at life, murmuring to each other, “God, everyone takes everything so seriously.”<\/p>\n
She had always envied those putti, envied their nonchalance, their detachment, and had never before felt that she could inhabit their irreverent sexy bored little world.<\/p>\n
Now it’s begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed. The “thing” with Josh continued. Nothing so easy had ever happened to her before. He didn’t seem to be getting tired of her. There was no drama, no games. They never ran out of … Continue reading