“Do you like living alone?”
I laugh. “Yeah, but . . .”
It seems to register what he’s just said and he laughs, too. “I promise to stay out of your way.”
“No, no. I like it,” I clarify, “but I’m not someone who needs to be alone, if that makes sense.”
Calvin looks over at me, smiling. “It makes sense.” He hesitates. “I make decent money for what I do. Probably make fifty bucks every time I busk. Make a couple hundred for the bar shows. But it’s not a real job.”
I look over at him. He’s got his face tilted up to the sky, like he’s inviting the shock of the cold.
“What do you mean, ‘real job’?”
He laughs. “Aw, come on, Holland. You know what I mean. I like that, actually, that you know exactly what I mean.” Looking straight into my soul, he says, “I make money, but it feels like cheating, like I have this ability I’ve worked so hard for, and I’m not doing shite with it.”
“Well, now you are.”
A smile spreads over his face and I wish I could describe it. It’s the expressive equivalent of an eraser, wiping away any doubt I had about this.
“Yeah,” he says. “Now I am.”
Because there was no way I could sleep before the wedding, I cleaned the hell out of my apartment last night. I’m not a slob, but I’m not meticulous, either, and cleaning kept me occupied for a solid two hours until there wasn’t even a bit of dirty grout left to scrub with an old toothbrush. So I started writing out a list of pivotal moments in my life.
To date, my longest relationship was with a guy named Bradley. He was from Oregon, and I met him during undergrad at Yale. We dated for two and a half years, which I now know to be the point when you’ve heard most of the stories and some of them you’ve heard a few times. But with Bradley—who was a completely nice guy but sort of boring (also his penis turned dramatically to the right, and as much as I tried to pretend it wasn’t a big deal, it always felt in my hand like a bone that needed to be reset)—I learned those things gradually, over time. Our getting-to-know-you had happened in sleepy doses during pillow talk, or at a bar, as we got progressively drunker and more physical. We broke up under completely pedestrian circumstances: I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. After a week of quasi-dramatic begging, he gave up and within a month was dating the woman he would eventually marry. Two and a half years, and the entire thing—from start to finish—was completely unremarkable.
I’m thinking about all of this—the strange way we’ll spew out our histories almost as if we’re downloading data—as I walk inside with Calvin, so when I see the list on the counter, I want to burst out laughing.
“Wow.” Calvin steps in, eyes wide as he looks around. My place is tiny, but it is pretty great. I have a giant bay window in the living room, taking up the majority of the wall. The view isn’t postcard-worthy or anything, but it looks out over rooftops, and into other apartments. I have a sleeper sofa, a coffee table, a television. Beneath the coffee table is a rug with swirling oranges and blues that Robert and Jeff got me as a housewarming gift (despite my protestations that the apartment itself was the housewarming gift). There are two bookcases loaded with books that bracket the television, and then nothing. That’s all I have in here. It’s clean, and simple, and cozy.
“This is so nice,” he says, moving closer to read the spines of my books. “Mark’s place is amazing, but he’s got twin two-years-olds who visit, and it’s super cluttered.”
I mentally file this bit of information away in my Immigration Interview Bank, and he runs his fingers along the edge of a book by Michael Chabon.
“This . . . I like it sort of simple, like this.” He wanders to the tiny kitchen, peeks in at the minuscule bathroom, and then stops, turning to me. “It’s really nice, Holland. Well done.”
He’s being so adorably awkward, I can’t help but say, “You can look at the bedroom.”
Beneath his olive skin, blood rushes to the surface. “That’s your space. That’s all right.”
“Calvin, it’s just a room. There aren’t, like, naked posters of me in there or anything.”
I can’t tell if the sound he makes is a cough or a laugh, but he nods, joking, “Well, that’s a shame,” as he moves past me into my bedroom.
It’s my favorite space. I have a wrought-iron-framed double bed with a white coverlet, a dresser, an antique standing mirror, a couple of lamps on the nightstands, a few photos of my family, and that’s it.
It’s bright and sparse.
“I think I expected it to be girlier.”
“Yeah.” I laugh. “I’m not super girly.”
He picks up a pair of pink scissors from on top of a pink photo album. Sets them down next to a pair of rose gold sunglasses. He glances dubiously to my doorless closet; it’s clear that pink plays a leading role inside there, too.
“Well,” I amend, “except for a few things, I guess.”
He motions to my arm. “Purple cast.” And then, quieter, “And you were wearing pink the night you were shoved.”
My fingers tingle in this weird way when he says that, like blood has evacuated my extremities and rushed to fill my chest. He meets my gaze head-on, like he wants to cover this now, first, before we do anything else; our conversation at the bar was such a scratch of the surface, and now I know that he didn’t intervene because he wasn’t here legally.
“Tell me what happened that night,” I say. “I don’t remember much.”
“Well, yeah. You were rather unconscious.” With a little beckoning tilt of his head, he turns, leaving my bedroom and heading out to the sofa. He pats the seat beside him.
For a few seconds filled with blinking embarrassment, I realize this means he saw me in complete disarray.
My saggy tights.
My skirt at my waist.
And, later, my shirt unbuttoned to my navel.
“Oh God.”
He laughs. “Sit.”
“I was such a mess.” I drop down beside him.
“You landed on the subway tracks and knocked your head.” He looks at me quizzically. “Of course you were a mess.”
“No,” I say, groaning into my hands. “I mean you probably saw my saggy crotch and my boobs.”
A strangled laugh comes from beside me. “I wasn’t really thinking about crotches and boobs at the moment. I jumped up, telling the bum to wait, but he ran. I tried to reach you but couldn’t. I worried if I tried to fetch you, we’d both be stuck down there. I called the paramedics, called the MTA. The ambulance arrived, and that was that.” When I look back at him, I find him studying me. “It happened so fast. I wasn’t sure what he was doing at first, but then he came for you. I don’t have a legal ID or residence. I was paranoid. That’s really it.”
“Okay.”
He nods to my cast again. “How much longer do you need to wear that?”
Tracing a finger along a line in the hardened bandage, I say, “I get it off in three weeks.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore.”
He nods, and the silence swallows us.
We look around. At the dark television, the window, the bookcases, the kitchen. Anywhere but at each other.
My husband.
Husband.
The more I repeat the word in my head, the more it sounds fake, like it’s not a real thing.
Calvin clears his throat. “Do you have anything to drink?”
Booze. Right. This is the perfect situation for some booze. I jump up, and he laughs, awkwardly. “I should have thought to get champagne or something.”
“You bought the dinner,” I remind him. “Obviously the champagne was on my list and I dropped the ball.”
Pulling a bottle of vodka from the freezer, I set it on the counter and then realize I have nothing to mix it with. And I finished the last beer the other night.
“I have vodka.”
He smiles valiantly. “Straight-up vodka it is.”
“It’s Stoli.”
“Straight-up mediocre vodka it is,” he amends with a cheeky wink.
His phone buzzes, and it sets off a weird, giddy reaction in my chest. We both have full lives beyond this apartment, which remain complete mysteries to each other. One difference between us is that Calvin likely doesn’t care about my life outside of this. Yet I care intensely about his. Having him here feels like finding the key to unlock a mysterious chest that’s been sitting in the corner of my bedroom for a year.
Buzz. Buzz.
Looking up, I meet his eyes. They’re wide, almost as if he’s not sure whether to answer.
“You can get it,” I assure him. “It’s okay.”
His face darkens with a flush. “I . . . don’t think I should.”
“It’s your phone! Of course it’s okay to answer it.”
“It’s not . . .”
Buzz. Buzz.
Unless, maybe, it’s some Mafia drug lord and if he answers his ruse is up and I’ll kick him out. Or—gasp—maybe it’s a girlfriend calling?
Why had this not occurred to me?
Buzz. Buzz.
“Oh my God. Do you have a girlfriend?”
He looks horrified. “What? Of course not.”
Buzz. Buzz.
Holy shit, how long until his voicemail puts us out of our misery?
“. . . Boyfriend?”
“I don’t—” he starts, smiling through a wince. “It’s not.”
“ ‘Not’?”
“My phone isn’t ringing.”
I stare at him, bewildered.
His blush deepens. “It’s not a phone.”
When he says this, I know he’s right. It doesn’t have the right rhythm to be a phone.
I lift the vodka to my lips and chug straight from the bottle. The buzzing has the exact rhythm of my vibrator . . . the one I tucked beneath that cushion on the couch days ago.