XI

“Can I buy you a drink?”
Just what I had been afraid of. Two days before the New Year: 1997 and my best friend said I needed a new outlook, a new lease on life. So she dressed me up like a doll and dragged me to the skuzzy bar on the corner that we usually complained about, calling to the drunkards from our porch. Now she’d abandoned me to a club full of rabies-ridden college boys for the one halfway decent catch in the whole place. So much for fake Ids. On top of that, now I had to fend off the advances of one of these frothing-mouth assholes.
“Why? So I can feel obligated to let you walk me home? No thanks.” Before I could stop the words from slipping past my lips, Adam met my eye. He was supposed to be in London for the semester. He was supposed to be out of my life. I was supposed to be over him.
“How have you been Janie?”
“Sorry. I’m fine. How are you?”
“Well I’m a bit taken aback by your allegation, but other than that not bad.”
“I thought you were going to London.”
“I’m leaving in a couple of weeks. You know, I wouldn’t expect you to be here.”
“It was Carrie’s idea. Anyway, I’m glad you’re doing well. I should be getting home.”
“Let me walk you.” He grinned mischievously.
“I think I can manage the one block. Besides, you didn’t buy me that drink.”
“Well then why don’t you let me?”
I winced, knowing that I would let him. His bright blue eyes pierced right through me still, and there was always something about the way his glasses sat on his larger than average nose, just slightly lower on the right that I couldn’t help but find endearing. A friend of mine once told me that there is a fine line between endearing and repulsive. I don’t know what it is about Adam that kept him on the endearing side, but a mere half an hour later we were back in our familiar routine: laughing, talking, flirting, touching. I pleaded internally with myself to stop, but the message was intercepted somewhere in between my mind and my fingertips, which were inching their way toward Adam’s carefully worn in jeans. I used his knew to steady myself as I leaned closer to him.
“I’d like you to walk me home now,” I whispered, slightly slurred, and regretted it before I’d even finished.
I woke up the next morning (to use the term loosely, it was nearly one in the afternoon) with a massive headache and an empty bed. When I went into the kitchen to scrounge up some nourishment, Carrie was sitting at the table with a mug of hot chocolate and a disapproving look on her face.
“Oh, don’t give me that.”
“What? I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. It’s all over your face.”
“Hey, if you want to fuck yourself over again, that’s fine. Just don’t come crying to me next time he sneaks out in the middle of the night, non-committal bastard.”
“Hey, I’m the one that broke up with him.”
“Rightfully so. He wanted the best of both worlds. You to cuddle up with, and any other girl he could get-- and he’s a charmer-- to fuck on the side.”
I sighed. She was right, and I was in no mood to argue a losing point.
“Do we have any ibuprofen?”
“Top shelf.”
“Thanks.”
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I knew he was leaving in two weeks, and he’d made it very clear that nothing I had was enough to make him a one-woman man. I wanted to think that maybe he’d changed, but that was impossible, we’d only broken up a month and a half ago, and his psychosis was too far embedded to solve in six weeks. Mine as well is apparently going to take years of therapy. I still can’t even look at another guy without instantly comparing him to Adam.
So I let my charade go on for two weeks, each night hoping that he’d stay until the morning. Maybe we could go for a jog or make breakfast. Every morning I’d wake up to find that he’d carefully untangled himself from my sleeping death grip and made a safe and speedy escape. Three days before he left for London, I caught him in the act.
“Where are you going?”
“Babe, I have to finish packing. I’ve got tons left to do before Sunday.”
“You’re going to pack at…” I glanced at the clock. “Four thirty in the morning?”
“I have to get some sleep.”
“Why can’t you get some sleep here?”
“Because it’s not familiar. It’s not my bed, okay?”
“You’ve spent nine out of the last twelve nights here.”
“But not to sleep.”
“Yeah…”
“Oh come on, Janie, don’t pull this.”
“Don’t pull what?”
“You knew what this was, you knew I was leaving.”
“Yeah, but…” He was right, but there had to be something. Didn’t he feel anything at all? “Don’t you feel anything at all?”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“For me.”
“Janie, you know I care about you.”
“But not enough.”
“What’s enough?”
“Enough to spend the night. Enough to stop sleeping with other girls. Enough to miss me when you’re gone for a whole semester in fucking London.”
“Do you think I won’t miss you? Do you think I haven’t missed you? The month that we spent apart was hell, but now I remember why I didn’t stop you the last time you told me to fuck off. Why I didn’t come after you when you got on that train.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I care about you, but I can’t deal with this co-dependent shit.”
“Co-de-fucking-pendent? You think I’m co-dependent? Fuck you Adam. Get out of my house.”
“I was on my way, if you’ll recall.”
“Good. Have fun in London.”
“I will…” He turned on his heel, then paused a moment. “You know, I haven’t slept with anyone else since that night in the bar.”
“Do you want a cookie or a medal?”
“I just wanted you to know. Goodbye.” And he left, without ever turning around or meeting my eye.

I

I remembered the first time I met him. It was easier than sleeping then, to just reminisce. Sometimes it’s all you can get, thoughts. Sometimes it’s easier to deal with the idea then the person… sometimes it’s better, no fuss no muss. Sometimes… sometimes I worry that I could be content with that. I wondered if maybe I was sub-human. Co-dependent??? Was I really co-dependent? Well he’d been gone three days now and I was still sleeping with his shadow, careful not to roll onto his side of the bed, where he couldn’t be bothered to sleep. Nine days of not sleeping there, and his imprint still remained. He never could spend the night.
The first time I saw Adam he was in the cafeteria, talking with a group of upper middle class sorority girls. He was always surrounded by girls. It never seemed threatening somehow, though, as if I were being silly to even imagine that he would think of trying to nail any of them. Of course that’s how he nailed me… he snuck right into my comfort zone, and he didn’t even want in. He didn’t want me so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night without clawing my pillows and wishing they were him.
We met our second semester at school, at a party at a mutual friend’s house. Mutual friend’s rather vague, but the details are unimportant. It was one of those girls that we both would say “oh yeah, I remember,” but would never really be bothered to call up and see how they were doing. Even now, I can remember distinctly the vibrant colors of the apartment, all of the appropriate pop-culture posters adorning the narrow hallway between the bathroom and the common room. I cannot, however, remember her name. She invited Adam to the party because she wanted to nail him. That was not to be. In fact, I’m almost positive she never slept with him. That night, specifically, I know she did not, because I did. Not screwed, not shagged, not fucked… but for the one of the few times ever, slept with him—next to him at least, on the common room sofa in our freshman dorm after staying up all night talking.
Despite having spilled most of my tequila laced orange juice on him (and the vague-nameless friend’s sofa), I was feeling a pretty heavy buzz. Enough of a buzz to want to take him back up to my double single and have my way with him. I held myself back then, somehow, between spilling my dinner and my thoughts and dreams, and after about a pack and a half of Parliament Lights we knew more about each other than anyone else at that party.
I knew that he was a chain smoker for one, but rarely when not in my company. I had the same affliction with him, and as such, much of our early relationship revolved around wildly flailing cigarette-laden hands in the middle of the night on one empty quad or another. We found a common ground in entertaining each other, and told rich stories of former “loves,” (neither of us really had any idea what that word meant), miserable classes, and unbearable roommates. We shared books, movies, music, and food. Soon, our middle of the night deviations led into daylight excursions to share in each other’s many passions. I introduced him to the wonders of tofu, and together we explored the many small specialty restaurants in our trendy college section of Bean town.
We toured the world in one week. Monday we went to India for Samosas, Tuesday we had Pad Thai in Thailand, Wednesday to Greece for goat cheese and spinach quiche, Thursday to Italy for wine and dessert, and Friday night we had sushi in bed with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. That night we made love for the first time while I introduced him to Sarah Vaughan. We had Summertime in the dead of New England winter and never fell asleep that night, just sat on the steps of our dorm, smoking our Parliament’s and staring silently at the full moon. We’d never run out of things to say to each other, but somehow none of them fit into that moment. It was big enough with just the two of us, inches apart, feet grazing each other lightly, as though making sure of each other’s presence.
When the sun came up he went back to his room and napped for the day. I went back to my room too, and stared at the ceiling for many hours. I made a list of all of the books, and movies, and albums he had recommended to me, and made him a list from me. I read Sexual Perversity in Chicago, watched Fellini’s 8½, and listened to an early bootleg Nirvana recording that I was able to download. When it started getting dark out, I took one of the pills that the girl across the hall had given me and a shower, and figured he’d be calling soon. He was sitting on my bed when I got out of the shower, and we spent the next twelve hours locked in my bedroom.
Two weeks earlier, however, on our first official date, both of us had acquired a nervousness that prevented us from even reaching for the other’s hand in the theatre. We had dinner at a hip café a few blocks from the small liberal arts college that we both attended. It had recently been revamped, painted bright shades of cantaloupe and honeydew, as the formerly dark green cave-like walls were no longer what the “scene” necessitated. We ate and drank quietly, as though we’d run out of things to say after sharing so much the night before. He was the perfect gentleman, holding the subway door so that it didn’t close on me, and then offering an old woman that got on with us a seat that could have easily housed both of us.
We went to a recently renovated fifties era theatre that showed artsy college films and a small selection of classics, and decided on a popular French film that everyone in my film classes had been talking about. It was, in many ways, the perfect first date. I was glad that he didn’t try to kiss me, I was so wrapped up in the movie, which turned out to be every bit as good as the too hip kids in my classes were saying. Two hours and three Kleenex later, we were on an empty late night train back toward campus. He finally got up the nerve to lace his fingers in between mine, somewhat unsure of himself, but I was sure enough for both of us. I rested my head on his shoulder, and could have fallen asleep right there. My mother always told me that was when I would know it was right. I was sure that Adam was “the one.”
We stepped off of the train into the deserted station next to our school, and in my three quarter length skirt and vintage shoes, I felt like Vivien Leigh under the skilled guidance of an older man. I was so lost in my own dream world, that when my heel caught in a subway grate and I lost my balance I almost missed him sweeping me safely into his just strong enough arms. In that perfect moment we shared our first kiss and I surrendered any chance I had of ever getting out unscathed.
We were much too much for each other right from the beginning. It was foolish to think that either of us would be bound to the other anymore than we could be anyone else. Looking back on journals I’d written at the time, I know that I was just that foolish. I believed in love for a brief moment, and that it really could conquer all, even two neurotic minds, manic depression and a fledgling speed habit. Then again, at 20 we all think we can have the world. It truly is that year, that odd year where nothing seems to change, that it all really does, right behind your back while your waiting with bated breath to be a grown up. It’s like when you’re 13 and all of a sudden you have hair where you don’t seem to remember it being. It had to have grown at some point, but it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere. My infatuation for Adam seemed to grow overnight and after I, foolishly, tried to trim the unfamiliar growth away, it quickly returned, more feverishly than before.
The first month that we were together was, I assume, much like anyone’s first month together. All we wanted to do was have sex and gaze longingly into each other’s eyes. Despite neither of us being virgins, we seemed to be under the unflappable impression that sex had never existed outside the context of “us.” It was our very own special discovery, our dirty little secret, and for a month I didn’t even tell Carrie that I was seeing anyone.
Our freshman year was my first time away from home, but like every other 20 year old in the world, I was sure that I was more grown up then the rest of them. I had my own dorm room (my roommate had left just late enough to secure me a single for at least one semester), a strong focus on my future, and the perfect boyfriend. All of my pillars were in place, and I felt like a strong, solid structure. This was also around the time that I had started getting into pills. Some people call it crank, speed, meth, which I guess makes me a speed freak, but to me, it was Desoxyn, and to my naïve 20 year old mind, it was just something to help me stay up and study from time to time. Soon time-to-time became a daily ritual, and that’s where it got messy, and the girl across the hall with ADHD was no longer able to satisfy my need with a fraction of her weekly meds.
Two weeks after our first kiss and our first night together, Adam surprised me by taking me to see my favorite band, which I’d tried to get tickets for months earlier, at no avail. I remember, It had been a particularly neurotic, first month kind of week where I questioned everything about us and whether or not we would make it because he had three solid days of exams, so I didn’t see him and barely heard from him for that time. On the afternoon of the third day, at which point I was religiously checking my voicemail every hour on the hour in case I’d somehow not heard the phone ring in my nine by twelve high rise cubicle, he knocked on my door.
When I answered the door, he was wearing the same thing he had been three days earlier, and despite the fact that it was rumpled, messy, didn’t match, and smelled of three-day-old dorm room, it is still my favorite memory of him. That night answered any questions I had about us. As was customary of crowded club shows, we held hands to weave our way through the crowd without losing each other. Once we’d found a place, he rested one hand in the small of my back (it fit just right, like the two pieces were molded to fit together), and the other on my left hip, leaning a bit so that his chin rested just on the top of my head. He said I smelled like candy. He made me feel sexy and interesting and wanted and loved, and that was what my fragile writer ego needed. Similarly, his stage-hesitance (he wouldn’t call it fright, he wasn’t afraid), was eased a bit by a few encouraging words before and after a play reading or a stand up routine. I even set up all of my stuffed animals one night so that he could practice with a real audience. That night, at the club with it’s purple swirling smoky lights and clove cigarette air, we were the only one’s there. Crammed in to regulation like sardines, we felt like we were at our own private show. Speaking strictly for me, it was the most perfect night of our young lives.
In reality it was one of the many stages we shared. We were both performers, both artists, and both required too much attention to pay enough to a lover and ourselves. We liked the attention we were able to give each other for a short period of time. Thriving on the intensity that both of us felt, we were able to drive each other through a very creative time. An affair of such intensity cannot last for long, however, and soon we were plagued with more troubles than our lack of experience had equipped us to handle.

II

We had only been together two months when I found out I was leaving. I’d been given the opportunity to intern at a small production company in New York City through a fellowship with the school’s film department. Boston and New York were only four hours away, and we figured, four hours and three months would be a small challenge, but nothing more. We still had two months before I left, and the closer the time drew to my leaving, the more it seemed like I was approaching a prison sentence. Was I insane to be leaving behind someone this wonderful?
He decided only two weeks before I left, that he was coming with me. Not for good, but over his vacation to help me settle in. We’d turn Manhattan into an aisle of joy. I had never been to New York before, but he’d practically grown up there. I fell in love with the bright lights and bustle just as he said I would. We were both village people, he said, and our two weeks together in New York were spent in coffeehouses, bookstores, art house theatres and record shops. I bought a real record player my first night in the city, and from then on was on a mission to find Rhapsody in Blue on vinyl to play the way it was meant to be heard. We found it at the Annex in Chelsea for three dollars, and spent our first Saturday lying on the floor of my empty studio with the record player on the floor next to us, feeling Gershwin’s notes with every part of our entangled bodies.
I have a hard time now, trying to describe him without including myself. Maybe it’s because I’m a self-absorbed twenty-something writer, but I think it’s more because at the time it didn’t seem like we existed independently of each other. Beyond the confines of my dream world he didn’t exist, and without him, I had a hard time defining myself. Of course, that was where the trouble began. After the first week of “settling in,” I was to start at my new internship. It was everything I’d imagined it could be and more. I was making connections, and I got to work with real film, not just video. I got free passes to check out upcoming releases, and started getting invited to trendy upscale parties that no one else knew about. I was leaving Adam behind.
The second week that he was in New York, I only saw three times. He didn’t seem to mind though, that I was leaving before he’d even rolled out of bed, and coming in long after an appreciable bedtime. He was excited for me, and I loved him even more for that. I didn’t see him at all on Monday. That night my new boss invited me out to dinner. We didn’t get the whole group out of the office until long after ten, which he explained was an early night (I quickly learned that was an understatement), and didn’t arrive at the trendy SoHo Thai restaurant until almost 11. By the time I got back to my apartment, it was just past 2am.
I had left a message for Adam, who said he’d spend the day at the batting cages at Coney Island, around 11, and wasn’t sure how upset he’d be when I got home. What I found was him, asleep in my favorite t-shirt on my salvation army futon. The way he was curled up, he somewhat resembled a toddler who was a bit tuckered out from an afternoon at the waterslides. He’d fallen asleep reading and still had his glasses on. I closed my notebook, which was to be my great opus, my first novel, and was about to remove his glasses as well, but thought better of it. I quietly rifled through one of my unpacked boxes, and removed a disposable camera that still had a few pictures left on it. I still keep that picture in the back of my notebook.
I quickly changed and slipped underneath his outstretched arm, where he’d saved my place, but could not fall asleep. I climbed back out of bed, and tore a few pages from the back of my notebook. On them I wrote Adam a long letter about how much it meant to me that he had come with me, and stayed even when I had no time for him anymore, about how much I’d miss him when he left on Friday and about how he made me feel more intensely than anything in my life ever had. I didn’t care if it scared him, there was nothing that I felt I couldn’t say to him. When I was finished with the letter, I folded it carefully, and left it on the bathroom mirror, where I was sure he’d see it the next morning.
I sat on our fire escape with my notebook until the sun came up, drinking coffee and scribbling inspirations. I tried smoking a couple of cigarettes, but never got past a couple of drags before stubbing them out against the brick building. It just wasn’t the same. At seven I crept back inside, took my daily “vitamins,” hopped in the shower, and rifled through my tiny closet and the little dress up clothes that I owned to find a suitable outfit for the studio. Once I’d found one, I sat on the edge of the bed, carefully pulling on my colorful stockings without leaning back too far as not to wake Adam. I felt myself falling, however, and quickly realized that it was Adam, pulling me close to him, only half awake.
“Morning sunshine. Let’s go get breakfast.” I sighed, deeply. I didn’t want breakfast, but at that moment I didn’t want to leave that bed either. I kissed him quickly, afraid that the longer I did, the harder it would be to pull myself away.
“I can’t, I’ll be late for work. Meet me for lunch.”
“Deal,” he said, and kissed me again, this time harder, and I couldn’t have let him go if I’d wanted to. He pulled me on top of him and my towel quickly fell away, leaving me naked except for my neon knee-high stockings. I was a half hour late for my second day of work.
I called Adam before lunch to let him know I was working through my break to make up for my tardiness. He understood, just wanted to know when I’d be home. My boss told me I could duck out around 6 because there wasn’t too much to get done, so we made plans to meet at the apartment around seven and make dinner. We went shopping at the natural food store at the end of our block, and made salad and tofu stir-fry, drank Manischevitz wine until we were lightheaded from the sugary sweet syrup, and collapsed into bed.
We didn’t make love though; we just lie there, staring at the ceiling, his arm around me and my head on his chest. He told me again that I smelled like candy and I told him that he smelled like a drunk Jew, and he said he kind of was. We lie in silence for a while, just breathing each other in. At the very same moment, we both found the stillness unbearable and simultaneously made the move to break the silence.
“I--”
But our unison caught us both off guard and neither one of us finished that sentence. I smiled.
“You can go first,” I said, not sure that I had anything really important to say. He brushed a stray curl out of my eye, and let his bat-toughened hand linger on my cheek.
“I love you.” He didn’t hesitate, didn’t explain any further. Just said those three words, and that was enough to knock my breath out of me.
“Wow,” was all I could muster for a response.
“Wow?”
“I mean, do you really?”
“Well I’m not saying it to get in your pants,” he quipped, clever as usual, those two blue darts staring me square in my baby blues. I kissed him, long and hard, until he pulled away, laughing a bit. “Is that a yes?”
“Was there a question?”
“Do you love me?” I kissed him again.
“That’s a hell yes.”
It seems now that that moment should have a fade out and the next scene would rise with sun casting early morning shadows on Adam and I, still in our clothes, still awake. I wonder in retrospect, whether the movie-like qualities of our relationship were inherent to it, or completely contrived by two adolescent romantics who had seen a few too many Woody Allen films. Either way, that morning, on my way to work, I felt like the birds were singing, the flowers dancing, the subway serenades were especially delightful, and I walked into the office floating on stardust.
“Looks like someone’s in love,” remarked a fellow PA on the vampire slasher movie that was the boss’ current pet project. I smiled innocently.
“What’s on the agenda for the day?”
“For the day? Not too much. However…” She let that hang in the air, tossing a production schedule my way. The next two nights were going to be filled with blood, gore, and all night shoots. Great.
I spent the entire day doing data entry for production costs, running back and forth to the copy shop, and directing caterers toward makeshift woods in the basement of our abandoned warehouse office complex. It was past dinnertime before I realized that I hadn’t called Adam to tell him I wouldn’t be home. I could tell then that he was losing his patience. I took the cordless phone into the bathroom so that no one else would hear me yelling.
“I came here to be with you.” It sounded like whining to me. I knew that I’d neglected him, but he knew I would be busy when he decided to come here with me. This wasn’t my vacation.
“You knew I’d be working. It isn’t my fault that you have nothing better to do than sleep all day!”
“I sleep all day because I’m up all night waiting for you or being with you, because you can’t make any daylight hours for me.”
“I’m a nighttime person.”
“You’re an all the time person, and if I was choking down speed I could be too.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m worried about you Janie. What are you doing out here?”
“Where is this coming from? I’m out here because this is an amazing opportunity. I’m making connections and working on real films. I’m sorry that it doesn’t happen to include you. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
“What about your writing? You haven’t written anything since we’ve been here.”
“What are you talking about? I was up all night writing two nights ago.”
“I haven’t seen anything.”
“Listen, I have to go. I left you something in the bathroom. I’ll see you when I get home.” I splashed cold water on my face to counteract the redness of my burning tear-streaked cheeks and took a few deep breaths before going back to work. I spent the next seven hours throwing around buckets of fake blood, directing half naked women to curtained off areas for them to change from one thong bikini to another, and trying to keep the grip from eating all of the bagels. By the time I was in a cab home, I was feeling tired for the first time in days.
I remember reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar in high school, and specifically how she talked about not sleeping for a month. I remembered thinking that she must have dozed off at some point, even if just for a few hours, but was now realizing that I hadn’t even done that in about four days. I climbed the four flights to my door, and could barely keep my eyes open. When I opened the door, I saw that Adam had once again fallen asleep in my Red Sox t-shirt, even though he was strictly a Yankees fan (a fault my father could never forgive). On the bed next to him was my notebook, and folded inside it was the letter I’d written him. On the table was another piece of paper from my notebook and a single blue rose. The paper said, simply, “I love you.” I turned it over, and on the other side, Adam had written the lyrics to one of my favorite songs:
“Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there.”
I fell asleep for the first time in four nights, firmly holding that piece of paper. I slipped into the familiar crevice in between Adam’s shoulder and chest, and kissed him on the chin before falling deeply into slumber.
The next day I didn’t have to be at work until the afternoon, so I thought that Adam and I would spend his second to last day in the city together. When I woke up, however, he was nowhere to be found. He’d left a note saying that he had some errands to run before he went back home. I went back to sleep until about eleven, and hoped that he’d be back before I had to leave. When I stepped outside at ten past one, he still hadn’t returned, and I was resigned to only seeing him off at the train station the next afternoon. I was going to be working straight through the night, but would be getting home about two hours before his train left. We’d have enough time to get lunch. That would be nice.

III

The night before Adam left there was a huge accident on the set. One of the lighting rigs crashed into our “forest” right in the middle of a take. No one was hurt, but it set us back about three days. The forest had to be completely reconstructed, and I had to go through all of the old takes with the set designer to make sure that the new set looked enough like the old set to blend seamlessly. I called Adam right after the accident to tell him I missed him and loved him and all that jazz. He loved me too, and wished that I were with him (he was watching the Red Sox get trampled by the Yankees and wanted desperately to rub it in). I wanted to be there too, with a big box of chocolate cookies and his hand running through my hair. I sighed.
“I love you too. Good night.” I still had about six hours of footage to get through before I could begin to think about the next day’s schedule. At some point around six in the morning I fell asleep at the soundboard. When I woke up, it was twelve thirty in the afternoon. Adam’s train left at one. After two poorly timed subway transfers, I hopped a cab to Grand Central Station, and ran in my rumpled work clothes down to his platform, just in time to see the train pull away. There was an old man in an orange vest next to me.
“Missed your train? There’s another one in the morning.” I turned to face the rail worker, but realized he hadn’t addressed me at all. I turned quickly to find Adam, grinning at his clever rouse. I was so happy to see him that I nearly cried right then and there. I think he knew that because right then he brushed away my invisible tear and drew me up into his arms the way that he had that first night in Cambridge. When I pulled away I really was crying, but I covered it quickly with mock scolding.
“Don’t pick me up like that you’ll hurt yourself.”
“Oh, please.”
“Hey, I’m heavy,” I warned.
“You’re perfect,” he said, and kissed me again.
We didn’t go to sleep at all that night, and spent our last night together roaming the streets of New York. We went to Coney Island to watch the sun set over the city, and walked barefoot on the beach until dark. When the lights of the boardwalk were on, he took me to the batting cages, and despite his warnings, I opted for the fast curve balls instead of the medium pitch softballs. I only hit two, but I was proud of myself for making it out alive.
We went on the Cyclone and ate Falafel, but sadly not in that order, which found Adam in sad shape for about a half hour. After making a quick recovery, Adam said that he wanted to take me somewhere. I still didn’t know New York very well, so I had no choice but to trust him, finding myself headed back toward Manhattan on the Subway. When we got off the subway, he made me close my eyes, and despite my prying eyes, I still couldn’t figure out where we were. When I was finally allowed to open them, I looked around and found that we were in the middle of Washington Square Park. He took my hand and leaned in close to whisper to me.
“I know that it’s too hot for our breath to make white clouds, or to hang in the air… But I thought maybe this would be nice.” At that moment, he had the piercing blue eyes of Bob Dylan, and I didn’t care that the song was about a lost love gone wrong. He held me close, and I imagined that we were in Paris.
A week later I found myself back in Washington Square Park, sitting on a bench, wondering where Adam was at that very moment. It seemed that I hadn’t gotten anything done, but somehow had been the longest week of my life. I kept that moment under the arch, the lights of the city around us, in the back of my mind to comfort me when nothing else could. The first few nights, I tried sleeping in my Red Sox T-shirt. It still smelled of him, and I couldn’t wash my sheets either. Nothing helped me to sleep though, and eventually I gave up on it all together, save dozing off here and there when the pills wouldn’t do the trick.
I found myself wandering back through the park every couple of days, and even though I was doing great at work, and was writing better than I had in months, I still couldn’t get Adam off my mind. He was busy with summer classes, and I was even busier on the vampire film. We emailed when I could get some computer time at work, and I almost always came home to a message telling me how much he missed me.
After a couple of weeks, the messages had faded a bit, and we only spoke a couple of times a week. I was beginning to wonder if it was stupid to think that it would last between us. I carried on with work, letting it consume my waking hours, which were all of them, now that I was up to two pills a day easy, and was lucky to stumble upon a connection through a girl at work. I’d started on the pills toward the end of my first semester at school, just on nights when I needed to stay up late to work on a paper. Needless to say it was a habit that had grown quickly on me, and had worsened since Adam had gone home. I had barely slept since I’d left him at the train platform and gone straight to work. I listened to “Rhapsody in Blue” every day, lying on the floor like we had that first Saturday. Sometimes I listened to it four or five times over, not even realizing that I’d reset the needle.
For three weeks, I’d been waiting for the upcoming weekend. Adam was coming for 24 blissful hours wherein neither of us had anything to do except for each other. Three hours before I was supposed to pick Adam up from the train he called me from Boston. He had to go to a conference with his Faculty Advisor that had just “come out of nowhere,” and he was “really sorry babe,” but he’d see me soon, he promised.
I cried myself to sleep, Friday afternoon, and when I woke up it was Saturday night. Adam had called twice, and Carrie had called once. I didn’t feel like talking to either of them. I put on my favorite dress and ran a wet comb through my hair. Unsatisfied with this result, I scrounged through my closet for a small make-up bag that I hadn’t used since I came to New York. After applying a bit of mascara and lip-gloss, I put on my jacket and headed down to the village.
Prior to my brief stay in New York, my knowledge of the Big Apple was limited to movies and pop-punk cultural references. As such, there were only two places I knew that I wanted to visit in the village, and I wasn’t sure that my fake ID would fly at the Bitter End. So I opted for the amateur night at CBGB’s, where my real ID got me in, and the cute guy at the bar got me a drink or two. His name was Brady and his band was playing the next night, and would I like to come? I politely declined, but after another hour or so of conversation, and another long island iced tea, I gladly accepted his invitation.
For some reason the next night found me particularly flustered, and none of my clothes seemed to be what the evening’s punk show called for. Eventually I settled on my favorite jeans and a too low cut halter-top that showed off the sprinkle of freckles I had on my shoulders. I wasn’t sure why I cared, but for some reason I had butterflies in my stomach like I hadn’t had since before I’d met Adam. It was nice.
Brady’s band was horrible. I’ve never been a fan of screaming vocals that you can’t make out the words to anyway, but this tested my limits. Of course that’s not what I told Brady.
“That was really great,” I said, wanting to vomit at my own impression of a groupie.
“Yeah, the new singer’s really amazing.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty great. You were good.”
“Eh, you can barely make me out back there behind the drums.” But you could make him out pretty well back there behind the drums. And he was sexy back there behind the drums. He wore jeans that hung just low enough that his stomach was exposed a bit when he lifted his arms, and it was perfect. He had a dark tan, which I couldn’t imagine he’d gotten in New York, deep brown eyes, somewhat unruly brown curly hair, and a devilish smile.
“So what are you doing now?” My tone was innocent, with just enough sex kitten to make him wonder what I meant.
“Well we were going to hang around and have a couple drinks. After that I was going to head back to my place. Wanna come?” I raised an eyebrow, but spoke before he could explain himself, and before I could stop myself.
“Sure, let’s go.” He had barely introduced the other guys in the band before we were saying our goodbyes. His place was only a few bocks away, in the Lower East Side, and at some point during the brief walk he took my hand. By the time we got up to his twelfth floor, we were making out so heavily, that he barely got the elevator door opened. We tumbled into his apartment, and luckily his bed was right near the door.
I think the alcohol counteracted my pills, and when I woke up, I looked around the tiny loft where I’d broken my own heart. Tiny was an understatement. I hadn’t thought that there were apartments smaller than mine in New York. The walls were spray painted with at least three generations of band tags, and the hardwood floors were scuffed, leading me to believe that at one point there was furniture in this apartment. Now, however, there was a futon mattress, a couple of beanbag chairs and stacks of books and CDs littered the small spaces in between.
Just as I was getting my bearings on the events of the previous night, Brady came out of his closet sized bathroom in nothing but his boxers. He was even more perfect than I’d remembered. I was a bigger fool than I’d imagined. I didn’t know what I’d tell Adam.
“Hey tomcat, wanna get some breakfast?”
“I really can’t.” Quick. Why couldn’t I? “I have a hair appointment.”
A hair appointment? Did I look like the kind of girl who had hair appointments? On a Sunday??
“Cool, well give me a call later on, maybe we can catch a movie or something.”
Did he think we were in high school? Was he courting me? But I smiled and nodded while gathering my carelessly strewn clothes, carefully recollecting the caution I’d clearly thrown to the wind the night before. I quickly dressed, and made my exit.
As I was making my walk of shame to the Delancey/Essex subway station, I put my hand in my pocket and found an unfamiliar piece of paper. I took it out and opened it. It was, of course, Brady’s phone number, and a date for an upcoming show they were playing at the Bitter End. I crumpled it up, but just before throwing it in the Metro Card recycle box, stuffed it back into my pocket.

IV

I didn’t ever call Brady, but as the show at the Bitter End approached, I felt my ID itching to be used. Half of me knew better, that once was more than enough and that I loved Adam. The other half of me saw Brady’s perfectly chiseled stomach and devilish grin every time I blinked. Maybe it was just that he was fresher in my mind. It had been nearly a month since Adam had left, and his scent had faded from all of its familiar places. I had to glance in the back of my notebook to remember the details of his face, but I never forgot the feeling of him, his arms around me on all of those sleepless nights, and his feet edging toward mine on the pavement in front of our dorm. I decided it had been too long since I’d heard his voice. He answered on the third ring.
“Hello?” He sounded groggy.
“Adam?” I couldn’t keep down the excitement that had welled up in my vocal chords.
“Janie?”
“Hey, how are you?”
“I’m good, good. I miss you. How’s the vampire movie coming?”
“It’s ok… We’re in post now, so it’s down to all the technical stuff.” I heard a door open and close in the background.
“Hey Muffin, who you talkin’ to?” That was a new voice.
“Muffin?” I wasn’t jumping to conclusions. Surely there was a logical explanation for the sultry all too familiar female voice in the background. I was going to be patient and understanding and let him explain.
“Janie--.”
“Who the fuck is that MUFFIN??” I was cool, calm and collected. “Well,” I demanded.
“Hey, calm down babe.”
“Do NOT call me babe. So Adam, what’s the story? Study group? Is that it? She’s your study buddy?”
“Listen, I—“
“You know what BABE,” I paused. What did I have to say? I couldn’t think. “Forget it, ok? I’m late for a thing.” I slammed down the phone. A thing? What thing?
A half an hour later I was standing outside the Bitter End, scantily clad with my Fake ID ready.
“This isn’t you.” Damn! I’d forgotten about my recent haircut. Long locks had been the only thing that gave me a remote resemblance to Sharon K. Bergman, the twenty two year old on my ID. I tried to play it cool.
“Excuse me,” I asked, in a not too challenging tone. But before my fantasy confrontation with the bouncer could go any further, I was interrupted.
“Tomcat!” Brady emerged from the small pack that had formed around the entrance to the club.
“You know her?” The bouncer looked me up and down skeptically, but Brady stepped around him and slipped his arm around my waist. Apparently, this was enough for the scary bouncer guy, who quickly stepped aside, sharing some sort of handshake with Brady as we passed.
Once inside, Brady escorted me to a stack of equipment next to the small stage. He spoke in a quiet, shy sort of voice that I wouldn’t have expected to come out oh his sulky confident exterior.
“I didn’t think you’d come.” I wasn’t expecting him to say that. Somehow his interest reverted me to the third grade.
“Yeah, right,” I said, rubbing my right foot self-consciously against my left calf.
“God you’re sexy,” he breathed. That definitely caught me off guard. It was all I could do to giggle nervously. By the end of the set, which was even more horrendous than the CBGB show, I’d regained my composure. I was absolutely fuming at Adam, but I was also mad at myself. Maybe he did have a good excuse. Maybe I was overreacting. Besides, I had slept with Brady, how hypocritical could I be? All of that aside, by the time Brady got offstage, I was convinced that not only was going home with him a good idea, it was the perfect revenge. When he put his arms around me and pressed his sweaty body against mine, I knew it was also inevitable.
The sex that time was… completely non-descript. It wasn’t great, but I can’t say it was bad. In fact it probably would have been great if I’d been able to stop thinking about Adam. When we (and by we I mean he) had finished, I politely excused myself to the tiny bathroom. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. Once I’d collected myself, I went back out to the room where Brady was sitting up in bed reading. As I got closer, I realized it was my notebook that he was so engrossed in. Apparently my re-entry startled him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, scrambling to close the notebook. “It was hanging out of your bag, and… This is really good stuff.”
“You think so?”
“Are you kidding me?” He looked at me intensely for a moment, and I was frozen in the doorway. “Janie…”
I winced. Adam was the only person that had ever gotten away with calling me that. Quickly, I gathered my things.
“Hey, what did I say?”
“Nothing. I have a re-shoot early tomorrow, and I should get some sleep.” He loosely grasped my fingers as I smoothed my skirt.
“So sleep here.”
“It’s just not a good idea, Brady. You’re a great guy, but this just… It’s not a good time for me.”
“So… will I see you again?” I picked up my shoes and swing my bag over my shoulder. With my free hand I collected my notebook from Brady’s outstretched hand.
“I really don’t know.”
I walked up the six blocks to my apartment. It was just past three, and the summer night was cool on my bare feet. I was ready to call it a night. As I got closer to my corner, I could see a pair of feet dangling from my fire escape. I kept a cool head until I’d gotten to my door, having slipped in the front entrance unnoticed. When I unlocked my deadbolt, I opened the door very slowly, and saw Adam with his back to the large window. He turned to face me as I turned on the light to the one room. After closing the door behind me, I dropped my shoes and bag and grabbed a sweater and a pack of Parliaments.
I didn’t say anything when I climbed out onto the porch, clenching my fists inside my oversized Yankees sweatshirt, just offered him a cigarette and a light. We sat like that for a while, silently inhaling and exhaling, stubbing out cigarettes on the metal grates.
“So where are you coming from?” I tried to think of a good answer to that question, but couldn’t.
“Do you really want to know?” We sat in silence again for a few minutes, staring out into the city lights, just close enough to be sure the other was there without touching.
“So I guess we both fucked up pretty bad, huh?” At the end of his sentence, Adam inched his hand a bit closer to mine, tentatively.
“Yeah,” I said numbly, “I guess we did.” I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to ask him what next, who was she, was it better, was I not good enough? But I knew it wasn’t that, because there was nothing that Brady had that Adam did it, and somehow the two nights we’d shared made me more sure of Adam than I’d been that night in “Paris.” When he squeezed my hand, I knew that he understood, and that there was nothing else to say.
“Did you come here just to tell me that?” I couldn’t help but ask for the affirmation.
“I forgot how you smelled.” I leaned my head against his shoulder, and breathed in deeply. “Still like candy.” And he still smelled like a musky combination of sweat, smoke, and the aftershave I’d bought him for his birthday. He smelled like home, and I didn’t know what I’d do when he left again. We sat on the fire escape like that for what seemed like a matter of minutes. When the lights of the sunrise began to loom in the sky, we went inside, and climbed into bed. It seemed like I hadn’t slept since he’d left, and I almost didn’t want to now, afraid I wouldn’t be able to savor it in the same way. Against my better intentions, I quickly fell prey to the comfort of that familiar crevice between his shoulder and chest where the rest of the world melted away.

V

V
At the time I was so relieved to have Adam back, to have myself back, that I didn’t see the blinking traffic lights ahead. How could we go back to the way things had been when we’d both strayed so far? The simple answer was that we couldn’t. After that weekend, with the ecstasy filled hours upon hours of making up, things never seemed the same. It’s true what they say, the best part of fighting was indeed making up. The problem was that we hadn’t fought, hadn’t had it out, screamed at the top of our lungs, broken dishes, stubbed toes. At first I thought that it was a sign of how strong our bond was, in retrospect I realize that it was a testament to how little we really knew each other at the time. All we were really doing was walking on eggshells trying to hold on to the one thing that made us feel human.
The summer dragged at a snail’s pace. I went to Boston the next weekend I had off, figuring that Adam had done enough traveling for now. It really was my turn. I loved New York, but I hadn’t realized how much I missed my hometown. We did the kinds of things that we’d done at the beginning to kill time between bedroom romps: bowling, pool, strolls in the community gardens, people watching on Newbury St. He bought me a book of poems by E.E. Cummings, and we lay out in the common reading them aloud until the last skateboarders had gone home, and the only other company left in the park was the squirrels. At the end of the weekend I didn’t want to go back, but comforted myself with the idea that I only had four weeks left in the long hot city.
I took a bus back to New York at 1:30 in the morning that Monday. I had to be at work at 7. I dragged myself into the office, and by noon had thrown myself head first into booking test screenings of “Nympho Blood Suckers II” to try and keep our perfect weekend off of my mind. The theory of relativity had never held such meeting. It seemed to me like the time I was able to spend like Adam was like trying to drink from my own cupped hands. No matter how quickly I swilled the liquid, it seemed to escape through the tiny cracks in between my fingers. The four weeks until I could see him again however had a non-permeable seal around them, and I couldn’t even see ahead that far.
I spent all of that night on my fire escape, slipping my legs between the rungs, and letting my feet dangle over the five stories. Once again, I found myself unable to finish an entire cigarette, but still proceeded to stub out an entire pack of half cigarettes, letting them fall to the street below when no one was looking. Around 3am it started to rain, lightly at first, and it was nice. I had always liked to play in the rain when I was young, taking off my sneakers and stuffing wet socks into them, playing under drain pipes (even when it was pouring, the water came down harder there), and splashing in puddles. It started to pour, and for a few minutes I didn’t make the effort to move, letting the hard droplets sear my skin and roll off. Eventually, I got up and went inside, peeling the wet clothes from my body. I left the window open though, and stood near it for a few minutes, naked, letting the sprinkles of wind blown rain that trespassed into my apartment dust my cool, damp skin.
After a hot shower a sat cross-legged in front of my “bookshelf” (in reality it was three stacked milk crates) with a cup of herbal tea, and took stock of my unread selection. There was nothing in the shelves that I both hadn’t read and wanted to read. In fact, I took note, most of the books on the shelf were not there because I like them, but because I was supposed to like them. Sartre, Hemingway, Kerouac, Faulkner. It read like a hip, how-to guide for young trendy artists. Who the hell was I anyway? Certainly not “The Sound and the Fury.” I’d never seen the Deer Hunter and I didn’t want to, I didn’t really like the Rolling Stones or the Clash, and I hid a copy of “Hangin’ Tough” inside my un-used copy of “Synchronicity.” I was a fucking poseur. Fuck this, I thought to myself.
“Fuck this,” I said aloud, and wondered if that changed anything. And what if it did? What if it changed everything? What if Adam only loved me because he thought that my façade was an interesting alternative to the bottle blonde Psych majors that populated the well-worn streets of Cambridge each fall? Maybe though, maybe he was just as ambling in his quest, maybe you’re supposed to copy others a bit in order to get your bearings. Maybe it’s a good way to weed out the unworthy. Maybe Adam was just as unsure of his Velvet Underground box set and the too cool for TV “full series” DVD that he’d bought after everyone’s favorite dramedy was cancelled after a season and a half. What if the only thing we really had in common was insecurity and pretension? I stopped making lists that night. I resolved not to nod my head in conversation anymore when I didn’t know a song I was supposed to or hadn’t seen a movie that everyone else had. Fuck them, I was going to bask in my ignorance. I decided that I thought too much about things that didn’t matter. I worked 45 hours a week and had too much time on my hands. The next morning I ate breakfast and skipped my vitamins. I was going to sleep that night.
I had good intentions, but my plans were not as well mapped as I’d imagined, and by the time I left work I was gnawing on my fingers like a teething infant. It had begun to get dark and had cooled once the sun set, but I was sweating like it was midday with no trees. I welcomed sleep, thinking that maybe then I could stop thinking about the 29 days that still separated me from Adam. Sleep never came though, and even though I’d climbed under my covers at ten thirty, when two rolled around I was still wide awake. The blankets were rolled into a ball at my feet, and there were beads of sweat all over my nearly naked body.
I tried counting sheep, but they all came out looking like the stuffed bear I’d had as an infant, and it was kind of creepy. I tried making patterns on the flaking ceiling in my mind, but that just made me more awake. I was somewhere in between wake and sleep, so tired that my entire body ached with the kind of heaviness that takes over your chest after a long day, but unable to get the satisfaction that drifting off into slumber brought. I had a small welt on my wrist where I’d been scratching with my gnawed, ragged fingernails. I figured that if I lie still long enough in that bed I’d have to fall asleep. I may have done just that, but not for more than about a half hour, and at six thirty when it was time for my shower and pill, it took every inch of resistance I had to skip the latter once again. The shower helped a bit, but by lunchtime I had that heaviness in my chest again.
I went downtown for a fruit smoothie, which was usually all I could stomach for lunch, but found myself craving more once I was finished, and marveled at my newfound appetite, opting for a large falafel wrap, and eating every last bite.
I was still groggy when I got home from work that night and thought that maybe I could finally get some sleep. I didn’t know much about amphetamines, despite having been taking them since I’d started college, but I figured that it couldn’t take that long for them to run their course through my system. What I didn’t take into consideration was that my reliance on them had grown such that I was taking them at least twice a day as substitute for both food and sleep. The nausea hit me hard. I’d eaten more in that single day than I had in weeks, and my stomach was hating me for it.
Just as I’d gotten into my sweats to settle in for the evening, the first wave of nausea hit me like a lead pipe. I’d just eaten a samosa from the Indian place on the corner and washed it down with a glass of cheap white zin, which probably didn’t help matters. A few minutes later it was all I could do to make it to the kitchen sink, hunched over it as the international cuisine I’d consumed writhed my body violently. Once I’d rinsed my mouth and face, I sunk onto the floor. My head was throbbing and I didn’t realize it but I’d been sobbing. For some reason I had not control over my own salivation, and I felt another wave of nausea welling up in the back of my throat.
Three days later, I’d hidden away the rest of my stash in a locker at Grand Central Station, partly because I’m melodramatic, and partly because I couldn’t bear to blush them down the toilet and was afraid I’d fish them out of the trash. I’d also called out of work for the week, claiming a terrible case of mono. Somehow I had a feeling that the vampire chronicles would get along all right without me for a few days. I had spent three days and three nights practically crawling the walls of my tiny one room apartment. Adam called everyday, twice on Thursday. For some reason, I didn’t want to tell him about what I was going through; I kept it my own private battle. It was as though I thought that the speed made me more interesting, and that just like the books and movies and music, losing it would also make me less appealing to Adam.
By Friday morning, the phone was ringing in my ears so much so that when it did ring, I answered it, half from fright, and half from desperation.
“Hey babe,” he sounded excited to hear my voice. “Where ya been?”
“Adam?” I sounded frail, frightened, and sick. Instantly I could hear the smile on his face fade.
“Janie… Janie, baby, are you okay?” I didn’t answer right away; it took me an extra second to concoct a persona that would scare him less, a silly problem that I could be crying about.
“I’m fine,” I said, trying out a small nervous laugh while choking the rampant tears and a bit of bile.
“Work been tough this week?”
“Yeah, you know how it is.”
“Getting to the end of things though, right?”
“Yep, I’ll be home before you know it. You’ll be able to see me in no time.”
“Even sooner than you think.”
“What do you mean?” I didn’t know whether to be excited or terrified. If I felt anywhere near as bad as I felt, well, let’s just say “it wouldn’t be pretty” is a staggering understatement.
“I got myself booked at the Boston Comedy Club tomorrow night.” The Boston Comedy Club was a huge springboard for up and coming stand up comics, which held a weekly amateur night, and was, ironically, in New York. I remembered then the night that he performed a private show for me and Mr. Wiggles, my stuffed dog, and the little stuffed monkey that had showed up in my mailbox after our first fight.
“That’s fantastic!” I was genuinely excited, and for a brief moment was able to focus on something other than the bullet train in my cranium. “When is it?”
“Monday night, so I’m taking the day off of classes.”
“So when are you coming up?”
“Well I wanted to come up tonight, but I really have a lot to get done with missing a whole day of class, so I won’t be able to make it out until Sunday afternoon.” I debated internally whether that was good or bad news. “Are you mad?”
“No, no. Do what you have to do, it will just be good to see you.”
“I can’t wait. But right now I have to get to class, and I don’t want to make you late for work.”
“Yeah,” I said, sounding sheepish to myself. “I’ll see you Sunday.”
“Yep, can’t wait. Love you.”
“Love you too.” Click. I had two days to make myself presentable. Fuck. I decided to take the look in the mirror that I had been dreading. Once I’d stumbled to the bathroom, I wished that I hadn’t. My eyes were sunken in; purple circles underneath them looked like welts and made my usually bright blue eyes look charcoal gray. My hair, which was usually uncontrollably curly, was stringy and hung limply to right below my chin. I wondered when it had gotten that long. The freckles that sprinkled across my nose from the summer sun stood out brightly against my ashen skin. I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life, and now matter how long I lie still, eyes closed, blankets held tightly around my shoulders, I couldn’t dose off. It was the worst feeling in the world-- Almost as bad, maybe worse, than not seeing Adam. It was close.
I had to weight my options at that point. Was it better to be miserable for now, and get a good night’s sleep tomorrow (if that happened) or maybe even today, and be refreshed and a new woman when Adam came on Sunday, or to get instant gratification right now? There was an emptiness in my stomach gnawing at the bare lining. I wasn’t sure if it was begging for drugs, food, sleep, Adam, or a little bit of all of those. A half an hour later, I was on a Queens bound 6 train, headed for the lockers at Grand Central Station. I shouldn’t have kept the key.

VI

By the time Adam showed up at the Port Authority on Sunday, I was back to my shiny happy self. I’d gone into the office that morning to tie up some loose ends and invite a few co-workers to Adam’s six minutes of fame the next night. Everyone was happy to see me well and was glad to see that the mono had passed so quickly. That is, they all were glad to take a break from working through the weekend to fuss over me for a few minutes. I was happy that I’d been able to sleep the night before. Somehow the thought of Adam coming to visit had calmed my nerves a bit. That, two Valerian root, a shot of Jack Daniels, a cup of chamomile tea, and I’d slept a full six hours.
As soon as I saw Adam I forgot all about the horrible week I’d had. That was a bad habit that I think we perpetuated in each other—forgetting the bad as soon as the good was on the horizon. I threw my arms around him and breathed him into all of my senses. I didn’t let go until we were safely inside my apartment, and even then it was only briefly. Once we’d quickly disrobed, we re-entangled ourselves underneath the tussled covers of my long unmade bed. I can’t say that even now I understand the force that Adam seemed to have over me. I can’t even say that all of the time we spent together was happy. Every moment we spent together was like a roller coaster, faster than the Cyclone and more rickety than its age should have indicated. That was just the way we liked it, and as it revolved around us, I felt myself taking notes, for every piece of writing or moment of film that I’ve created since. I’m sure he was doing the same, character acting though his first love.
I don’t think we knew each other as well as we’d like to have thought we did. On the surface, we were perfect for each other. Same goals, same school, same interests… It seemed as though life was taking us in the same direction, which I guess it was in a way. It just happened to be the wrong place for both of us. If there were a perfect song to describe our relationship it would be the Go-Go’s “We Don’t Get Along.” That night however, was all “Automatic,” cold and sultry at the same time—our bodies knew each other much better than our minds and instantly they reconciled any doubts we could have had left over from the previous weekend. Belinda Carlisle singing, “Angels sharp, crash together, time and consciousness sever,” stopped short of describing the intimacy of that evening. I slept so soundly afterward that it took Adam physically shaking me awake to get me to work on time.
The workday dragged, despite the fast pace brought on from my week’s absence, but a surprise visit from Adam at lunchtime helped to smooth any of the day’s rough patches. He suggested Indian food, but just before agreeing to that I recalled my night of projectile vomiting and thought better of it. Instead, we settled on the Thai place that I’d been to on my first night at the office. We shared a large plate of the best Pad Thai I’d ever had, and chattered on about the upcoming school year. He was worried about finding someone to move into his apartment in the fall. His roommate had gotten a gig acting in a Spanish-speaking soap opera, and was moving to Florida at the end of the month.
“Too bad you’re not bilingual,” I quipped.
“Yeah,” he agreed, half smiling. He did this thing when he was trying to switch into serious mode. He would look down for a number of seconds, at his feet or hands; whatever was conveniently not my eye. He was doing that now, fiddling with the scuffed face of his stepfather’s watch. After almost a full minute of that, he met my eyes. Their intensity surprised me, and the soft laughter that had permeated until then got caught in my throat. I swallowed it, hard, trying to imagine what was coming next.
“Janie.” He took a deep breath. “I know your birthday’s not until September, but I have something that I really can’t wait that long to give you.” He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a small jewelry sized box. “If you don’t want to take it, I’ll understand.”
He couldn’t possibly be proposing marriage a week after we’d both slept with other people. He pushed the box toward me. I took it in one hand and slowly opened the cover. Inside the box was a small key. I was unsure what I was supposed to gather from this gift.
“What is it?”
“It’s a key to my apartment.” He paused, expectantly. I still looked confused. “I want you to move in with me.” At that moment my eyes must have widened to twice their normal size, bright blue with excitement. It didn’t matter that I’d already put a down payment on housing for the next semester. It didn’t matter that my parents would kill me the second that I told them about my new plan. I was sure it would be perfect. Sure we’d have little fights, who didn’t? Look at what we’d been through already, though, we were rock solid, unshakeable.
That night at the Boston Comedy Club in New York City, Adam nailed every joke in the set. Two of his friends from home had come out, and once we’d bid farewell to the few of my co-workers who’d come, the four of us went back to my place for underage drinks. Eric, Adam’s best friend from high school, and Ben, a mutual friend of theirs from summer camp, were both musicians. In fact, they had a band together back at school in Syracuse. Eric was obsessed with movies, however, and we hit it off right away. I asked them about their band.
“Mostly we play frat parties and small bar shows,” Ben explained.
“So what’s your real life plan?” This was a question I’d formulated as an alternative to the all-too-overused ‘what’s your major?’ Eric looked perplexed.
“Real life plan?” I looked to Adam for help with an explanation, but he just gestured for me to continue.
“Real life plan,” I began,” is like a back up plan. I mean, take the four of us for example.” I looked around the room at the Hollywood director, the movie star, and the two rock stars. “We all want to make it big, the limelight, big time, all of that. But practically speaking, how many people really make it that far? So the question is, and I’m not second-guessing either of your musical talent, if you don’t make it, what else do you want? I mean, what else would make you not want to cry in the bathroom on your lunch breaks?” I wanted to laugh at myself. I sounded like a poker dealer, laying out the cards of life—as though I had any of the answers. I looked expectantly at the three boys.
“Well…” Ben was hesitant. “I guess I’m a shrink then. I mean, I am a psych major.”
“Well then,” Eric began, thoughtfully, “I guess on that logic my backup is producing films.” He looked proud of himself at having cheated the system.
“So wait a second,” I was not going to let him get away with that. “Your back up to being a rock star is being a big Hollywood producer? That’s really logical.” Then I thought about it for a second and realized that my backup to being a big Hollywood director was to be a novelist, which was about equally as likely. But we were still missing one from the consensus.
“Adam?” He looked up from picking at his beer bottle label.
“Yeah?”
“Well, what’s your back up plan?” He shook his head.
“Nope, don’t have one. That’s a defeatist attitude.”
“Oh?”
“Yup, I don’t have a back up plan because I don’t need one.” He was so clever. I think I decided right then that my back up plan was him.
“So what’s this movie you’re working on about?” Eric interrupted my schoolgirl gazing. Hmm… what was the vampire movie about?
“Well it’s not really about anything. It’s your run of the mill low budget occult soft-core porn.” That summed it up pretty well. All three of the guys looked fascinated.
“So what kind of stuff do you end up doing?” Eric was the only one who seemed to be able to get naked vampires out of his head long enough to formulate a question.
“Well I mostly do filing, phone calls, and supervise the sets, kind of like a floor manager. Most days I spend several hours directing seventeen-year-old wannabe actresses in thongs, long black wigs, and fake vampire teeth from one part of the set to another.” I looked around the room at three gaping mouths. “Which isn’t nearly as exciting for me as it is for you,” I added.
Soon the conversation faded to teenaged hi-jinx and high school pranks. The three boys reminisced and tried to engage me in the conversation, filling me in on what a stuff Adam had been in high school.
“There was this one time,” Eric began, setting himself up for a story the same way Adam did, as though bracing himself for a hard pitch behind the plate, “he asked Anne Marie Gauthier to this school dance, and she said that she really wanted to, but couldn’t because she was going to be out of town visiting her grandmother. So the day of the dance rolls around, and normally we wouldn’t have gone, but we figured what the hell, there’s nothing else to do in Greenwich, so we go. Sure enough, there’s Anne Marie, dancing her little sixteen-year-old heart out with Marc Jacobsen. She came up with some lame ass excuse about how last minute the trip was cancelled, but I think Adam was more embarrassed than her anyway. Number on stud, this guy right here—you’re a lucky girl, let me tell you.”
At the same time I felt closer to Adam than I ever had, as though I was let in on a secret part of him that he’d left behind when he came to Boston. On the other hand, I suddenly was jolted back to a reality where I wasn’t the only thing in Adam’s life. Why should I be? I had a family, and at least one close fried from high school. Of course he had these things too, and I was glad that he felt comfortable enough to let me in on them. On the other hand, it pointed out the fact that there was a whole other Adam before I’d ever met him. We’d existed for 19 years without ever knowing the other was out there, and there was no way I could ever get those 19 years that I’d missed. In a way that was difficult to reconcile. I think no matter what, when you come into a person’s life and become that close, it’s hard to understand either of you existing without the other. It’s even harder when you’re forced to.
The next two weeks went by quickly. We were wrapping up post on the vampire movie, and I was so busy that when Adam came back to New York on my last Friday to help me move back, it seemed as though he had just left.
We spent all day Saturday being tourists. I’d been in the city for nearly three months and hadn’t seen Central Park. So we went for a stroll in the park, bought some ice cream at a cart and sat, people watching, for a while. We spent nearly three hours browsing the modern art, photography and prints at the Met, and swept briefly through the Monets, Seurats, and Van Goghs. We were so taken in by the tranquility in the “Temple of Dendur,” that we stayed in there, sitting by the wishing pool for over a half hour. We walked around the room, and I recalled the book we’d read in my third grade class about the two kids who ran away to the museum, collecting change from the pool, and asked Adam if it really was stealing people’s wishes. He changed the subject, doing his best Billy Crystal impression of the museum scene in “When Harry Met Sally.”
When we got back to the Apartment, well after dusk, we ordered take-out from the Indian place on the corner, for old time’s sake. I’d gotten over my fear of their samosas, and after picking up our meal we settled in with a rented copy of “Some Kind of Wonderful,” the most underrated of the brat pack era teen films. We both fell asleep fully clothed, the blue light from the buzzing television screen casting a glow over us throughout the night.

VII

The next day was spent packing… and packing, and packing. It’s amazing how much stuff you can acquire over the course of three months in Manhattan. I easily had twice as many things as I had when we’d arrived in the big city at the beginning of the summer. So much, in fact, that we had to interrupt our packing mid-morning to go bag shopping in order to finish our packing. Once we’d packed the entire apartment into a pile of boxes and bags in the center of the floor, we took the train into Greenwich, where Adam’s mother was letting him borrow her station wagon to complete the move.
The 45-minute train ride had me more and more nervous at each stop along the Metro-North route. I’d never been in a relationship serious enough for a meet and greet with the folks. This particular one had crept up on me so stealthily that I hadn’t had a chance to worry about it until after the conductor had already collected our tickets and I was left with the hum of the engine and my thoughts. Adam squeezed my hand and gave me a kiss on the forehead. I clutched my small messenger bag close to me. Inside I had the bare necessities for our night in Connecticut: a clean pair of underwear, a clean bra, deodorant, facial wash, toothbrush and a single green pill. I had cut back on the pills significantly since Adam’s last visit, and was almost positive I could get through the stay without it, but I had it just in case. Suddenly I felt like five-year-old going to visit her long distance grandmother with an extensive list of etiquette rules from her parents. I didn’t know a whole lot about Adam’s parents, and it had never occurred to me to ask. I had no idea what to expect, and suddenly that had me fearing the worst. I wasn’t even sure what the worst was, I was just sure that it involved me messing up really bad.
By the time we’d arrived at the station in Greenwich I’d calmed myself a bit, but insisted that we walk the less than two city blocks to Adam’s house at a snail’s pace to allow me to prepare for the impending doom I was sure that I was about to face. To my simultaneous relief and disappointment, Adam’s mother was out running errands when we arrived at his modest, but charming house. His younger sister was home, however, and happy to regale us with her newly learned Carole King song on the small piano in the family’s foyer. She was 14 but looked about two years older, with the same striking blue eyes and Semitic nose that made Adam uniquely attractive. She was slight, and carried herself like a dancer. Even her narrow fingers on the black and white keys were svelte, and I was impressed that someone so young would carry herself with such grace. When she was finished with the song, Adam took over at the piano, and began to play the first few bars of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” which his sister Maggie joined him in singing along with. It was heartwarming to see how well they got along. My younger sister and I had scarcely spoken since I’d left for college. Half way through the bridge of the song, Adam’s mother entered the foyer through the front door carrying a paper bag with a roll of French bread partially obscuring her from my view.
“I hope that girl of his isn’t as picky as him,” she spoke without looking up from her detailed task of closing the door with her hip and jiggling her keys from the door. When she finally looked up and met Adam’s eyes, she grinned, and put the groceries down on the piano bench. “Come here you,” she said, and pulled him into a warm embrace. I shrunk back a bit, suddenly nervous again. Immediately, I wanted her to like me. She looked like your typical suburban mother, pretty in a natural, understated way. Clearly she was old enough to have a college aged son, but classic looking enough to wear trendy fashions without looking like she was trying to hard. She had brown eyes that were a stark contrast to her pale complexion. Her ash blonde hair fell right below her shoulders and she had fine lines at the outer corners of her eyes that didn’t fade when her smile did, leading me to believe that she did a fair amount of smiling.
“And you must be Janie,” she said affectionately, holding out a hand for me to take. I accepted, and felt a bit more at ease.
“Jane,” I corrected.
“Well Jane, I hope you like Spaghetti, because I’m afraid it’s all I’ve had time to prepare this evening.”
“I’m Italian,” I reassured her, “anything with carbohydrates and tomatoes and I’m a contented woman.”
“Well then it looks like you’re in luck.” She gestured toward the grocery bag on the bench and then looked at Adam. “Help your mother out would you?”
The early evening was spent having dinner and cocktails with Adam’s mother, and his stepfather who returned home from the golf course just before dinner. At one point the evening began to feel like a college interview, but I think I passed their test.
“Ma, Janie just finished work on her first movie,” Adam offered, trying to engage me in the family conversation.
“Oh? Are you an actor as well?”
“No, no,” I laughed nervously, moving my spaghetti around my plate without taking a bite. “I’m a… well, I’m a film student. I guess eventually I’d like to direct.”
“Then you could give Adam a job,” she joked. I smiled, noting in my neurotic mind that even his mother noticed how well we clicked together, like interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
“So what was the movie?” This was the first time I’d heard Adam’s stepfather speak since he’d introduced himself.
“Not one I’d put on my resume once I’m able to get real work,” I admitted, trying to figure out a way to put it delicately. “Very low budget horror film with more skin than my tastes can handle.” Adam’s mother laughed appreciatively and passed me the rolls. I felt accepted.
Once we’d cleared the table and Adam and I had loaded the dishwasher (at my insistence), we went over to Eric’s house to visit with some of Adam’s friends from home. I got even more of a glimpse into the life that Adam had led before me, and tried to remember my own life before him. It was strange, having known each other such a brief time, how we’d become such an indispensable part of each other lives.
It was a small party. Maybe fifteen people, all gathered in small bunches throughout the kitchenette area of the house. Eric and Ben looked happy to see me, and I was quickly whisked away from Adam and introduced to all of the others, names that even if I had a head for remembering them, I wouldn’t have had time to absorb. I was comfortable right away, and was glad that neither Adam nor me felt the need for me to be latched to his hip for the evening. I mingled, finding my safe-haven in the wannabe filmmakers’ bunch, with Eric and two or three other film majors from Syracuse and one from NYU. Eric spoke excitedly about the little information he knew about “Nympho Bloodsuckers II,” and the others bombarded me with more questions, before we moved into appreciator mode, critiquing the latest releases with a slick pretension that only five second-year college film majors could garner. Adam and I traded smiles from across the room, where the drama kids were, and I felt lucky to be in a relationship that had moved to that plateau. We didn’t need to have our feet touching to be sure of each other anymore, and that was a comforting thought.
Adam and I left toward the end of the night, after the party had dwindled to the few people who were visiting Eric from school and would be spending the night there. Before we saw ourselves out, Eric and I exchanged email addresses so that we didn’t have to depend on Adam to relay our film conversation. I was glad that I got along with Adam’s friends, that I didn’t have to be ‘that bitch,’ or a ‘ball & chain.’ My best friend Carrie had only met Adam once, since she went to school on the west coast and didn’t get out this way much. They didn’t seem to get along very well at the time, but it may have been partly my own nervousness at the situation. I wanted so badly for them to like each other that every little barb stuck in me like a knife and I was walking on eggshells for the entire weekend that she had visited. Since then, however, they had only nice things to say about each other, and I was sure that I’d made up the negative tone of the evening.
When we got back to Adam’s house that evening, everyone else was asleep. We brushed our teeth and went to bed, him in his room, and me on the couch downstairs where his mother insisted that I’d be “more comfortable.” I snuggled into the blanket he’d left me, one that was clearly a well-worn piece of child memorabilia, and fell asleep with the scent of the blanket reminding me that he was just upstairs.
While he was in the shower the next morning I abated my temptation, looking through his bookshelf, finding all of the familiar high school reading materials. He still had the contents of his entire senior summer reading list: Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, Hamlet, and the list goes on. Below that shelf was a shelf comprised entirely of little league baseball trophies and Yankees memorabilia. He had a Yankees pennant over his bed and the stuffed bear on his bed wore a small Yankees cap. On his nightstand was the card I’d gotten him for Valentine’s Day, right after our first date. When I looked closer, I saw more evidence of us, a picture here, a knick-knack there, and was somehow proud of myself that I’d joined the ranks of Salinger, the Yankees, and little league trophies.
When we got back to the city, we loaded up the car quickly so that we could beat the afternoon traffic. As Adam took the last load down to the car, I looked around the empty room that had been my home for three months. It still amazes me to think of how much growing a person can do in that short of a time, though I know now that it wasn’t anywhere near as much as I thought then.
We drove the four hours back to Cambridge, and as we approached the city, I realized how much I missed home. I hadn’t seen my parents save the one weekend I’d been up here, and I hadn’t spoken to them at all since Adam and I decided to move in together, somewhat afraid that I’d tell them and I wasn’t sure yet how I was going to do that.
We pulled up to Adam’s apartment building, which was to be our new home. We unloaded the car much more slowly then we’d loaded it, dragging the mattress up to the sixth floor where our little piece of heaven lay in wait for our arrival. I’d only seen the place for the weekend that I’d visited, since Adam had moved in right before summer classes, but already it was obvious that two college boys had been living there all summer. There was some definite fixing up to be done. Just the same, I felt like this was the perfect first place for Adam and I to share.
It was a bit larger than my apartment in New York had been, with two bedroom, one of which we decided to use a study/movie room once we’d moved all of our stuff in and decided that two desks cramped the space in the small “master” bedroom a bit. There was a common room, which divided in half without a closed doorway where the linoleum kitchen faded into a carpeted living room. The bedrooms had gorgeous hardwood floors, and we stacked my mattress on top of his that was already on the bare floor to make a respectable level bed. We wouldn’t have known it on that day, when we first started playing house, but it wouldn’t be long before we were both sleeping on the floor again.
I quickly made my mark on the apartment, and the first weekend we were moved in, our last before beginning our sophomore year’s classes, we painted the common room, bedroom, and “office.” We settled on a red for the bedroom, but that was the easy part. He wanted a dark burgundy and I wanted china red to match the Tibetan prayer flags and scrolls that had decorated my last apartment. I won that fight, but the office was a midnight blue to match his Yankees memorabilia. That door stayed closed when we had my parents over for dinner that Sunday night. It was the first time that they had met Adam, and it didn’t help that I was placing the added pressure of us living together on the situation.
All things considered, that meeting went smoothly, my father and Adam bonded quickly over their love of sports, especially baseball, and once it was settled that team rivalries not be discussed, they spent a half an hour looking through old sports books and the drinking hour found them both on our futon watching a Braves/Angels game on NESN. My mother and I shared a cup of our favorite decaf gourmet roast while we did the dishes, then sat down at the kitchen table for the inevitable judgment.
“Well,” she still hadn’t said anything. She folded her hands neatly in her lap, and crossed one leg over the other as was customary of her “good breeding,” before speaking.
“He’s nice.” That was it?
“That’s it?”
“Well,” she paused to take a dainty sip from her coffee. “He’s a very attractive young man.” She paused again, thoughtfully. “Is he Jewish?” I looked at her incredulously. She looked taken aback. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m simply asking a question.”
“Well thank you mother for letting me make up my own mind, and yes, he is Jewish.” Apparently her good breeding had not worn onto me, and this was quite the faux pas. I struggled to remember that my mother was, at my age, much more rebellious than me. With my summer stay in New York and emergent methamphetamine habit, I wasn’t even trying to hold a candle to her run-away pregnancy and shotgun wedding to my father. At 21, she’d had me when she was barely old enough to drink, and the first five to ten years of my life were filled with libraries, museums, tarot cards, Bangles concerts, organic brown bagged lunches, and punk hair-cuts. Somehow since then, my mother had adopted the sensibilities that had forced her to run away from home when she was my age, and my elegant uptown grandmother was channeled whenever I spoke with her.
“I’m simply concerned, is all. You know how your father feels about the church. Where would you get married? How would you raise the children?”
“Number one, what children? Number two, Dad’s probably much more concerned that he’s a Yankees fan than that he’s Jewish, and he seems to be handling that just fine. Number three, we’ve only been together about nine months, no one, save you, is talking about marriage.”
“Well you certainly hopped right into living together. Living in sin.” That was matter of fact.
“Excuse me,” now I was fuming, but trying to keep my voice down as not to disrupt the boys’ club on the other side of the room. We’d been speaking quietly up until now, and they hadn’t seemed to notice our presence at all between shouting at the television and analyzing slow motion recaps. “Living in sin? I seem to recall that you were about my age when you got pregnant with me.” She glared back at me.
“That was different.”
“Of course it was different, Mom. It’s always different when it’s you. Here’s another difference: when Adam and I are 40 years old, we won’t be driving each other insane wondering why we ever thought it would be a good idea to bring a child into this world together, and why we didn’t just opt for abortion or adoption or gone our separate ways when we’d had the chance, and staying together just for the sheer fact that it’s the easiest, most comfortable thing for both of us even though we can’t stand to look at each other anymore.”
My parents left about a half hour later, and it took a week for either my mother or I to call to apologize. Looking back, I’m not sure I remember who it was that apologized first, but it turns out we were both kind of right. That same week, I found out that I was pregnant. I never told my mother.

VIII

The simple act of the matter is that neither Adam nor I was ready to have a child. I knew that without even talking with Adam about our unborn child. I made the mistake, however, of thinking that meant that I shouldn’t talk to him about it all before going through with the abortion.
As soon as I sat down in the sterile white waiting room at the Planned Parenthood I wanted to bolt. My feet felt like they were glued to the floor though, or were weighted with lead, and I wished that I’d said something to Adam. Even then though, it wasn’t as though I thought it was important for him to know. It didn’t even occur to me at the time that he would have an opinion one way or another. The important thing to me at that moment was that I desperately needed a hand to hold, and in those days, even now, when I need a warm body, his is the first that comes to mind.
I should have gotten up and left right then, when the shadow of a doubt crosses my mind. In the back of my mind somewhere I did just that. I got up, calmly, and walked out the front door. I called Adam at work and met him for lunch where I told him everything and we worked through it together.
“Jane Nielson?”
It was like that space between awake and asleep when you have to go to the bathroom, but don’t want to get out of bed or even wake up. And in your dreams you’ve gotten up, gone to pee and gotten back to your bed before waking up again to realize that the intense necessity to urinate is still there. I snapped back to reality just then to find that I was still sitting in the ugly maroon chair in the Planned Parenthood waiting room, and that a nurse was waiting for me to follow her down a long white hallway.
The actual procedure was over quickly, and after about an hour in the recover room I was allowed to go home. The cramps were unbearable, and after taking more ibuprofen than I should have, I fell asleep until Adam returned home from play rehearsal.
He’d been at rehearsal every night this week for an upcoming student director’s showcase. He’d been so scarce that I’d barely had the time to ask him how his first week of classes was going. It had made it easier to avoid telling him about my little secret. That night, however, he arrived home earlier than usual with takeout tofu burritos.
“Hey babe,” he whispered in my ear, nudging me awake. “What’s wrong?”
“Hey,” I smiled, “nothing.” I tried to sit up in bed casually, but my body would not cooperate. “Just tired, you know?” But the pain was evident in my strained voice. He placed his arm behind me, gently supporting my back as I propped myself up.
“Hey, I’m not as stupid as I look, what’s up?” I didn’t say anything. “I brought you dinner,” he offered sheepishly, holding up the bag from my favorite Mexican restaurant. I should have been grateful and thrilled at his attention and concern, and fallen into his arms and told him everything. Instead I shrugged him off and padded into the kitchen. He followed me, but was stopped short when I closed the bathroom door behind me, right in his face.
“Janie.” He was right outside the door. I didn’t know what I was doing. He was trying to be there for me and I was shutting him out. “Come on Janie, tell me what’s wrong, you’re starting to scare me.”
“I’ll be out in a minute.” I had to put in a new tampon. There was more blood than I could have imagined, and I was considering going back to the clinic before my two-week checkup. That was probably irrational, I decided, considering that the procedure I’d just endured was akin to forcing three or four periods on my body all at once. I was lucky a tampon was enough to keep the blood flow at bay. The full impact of what I had done had yet to hit me, but the tears were beginning to well up. I left the bathroom crying.
“I’m a horrible person,” was all I could manage through stifled tears.
“Babe,” he reached out for my hand. I batted him away.
“Don’t touch me,” I whispered fiercely, “I killed our baby.” I had thought extensively about how I was going to tell Adam about the abortion, but none of the scenarios turned out quite like this. He shrunk back a bit and I slumped against the wall, just out of his grasp.
“This morning…” By now I was hyperventilating. I took several deep breaths and sunk to the floor. Adam sat down across from me at the kitchen table. He was at a three quarter angle away from me, which was easier because at that moment I couldn’t even look him in the eye. He was beginning to piece things together. I had betrayed him, and his vulnerability frightened me. He looked like a wounded animal. At that moment I realized just how bad I had messed up. We sat in silence for what seemed like forever. I wouldn’t have wanted to say anything even if I thought that I had words to offer him that were of any consolation.
“How long did you know?”
“About a week,” I responded quietly, without looking up. I had begun scratching at my wrists nervously, and was trying to focus on the particular patterns of freckles on my forearm. Anything would have done at that moment. Anything to keep my mind away from this horrible place that I’d dragged us both into. I heard him take a deep breath across the room.
“How far along?” I didn’t want to talk about this right now. I never wanted to talk about this. I wanted to forget.
“About six weeks.” He was staring hard at the ground, wanting to be understanding, but having a difficult time with the concept. When he turned to face me his eyes were iced cold, and the vibrant blue that I’d fallen in love with had been replaced with a slate gray.
“You didn’t talk to me about it,” he said coldly. It wasn’t a question it was a challenge, and one I wasn’t prepared for. I didn’t know why I hadn’t told him. My silence angered him even more. He wanted answers and I didn’t have any. He wanted to hold my hand and I wouldn’t let him. So he did the only other thing that he knew how to do. He got angry. “Fuck it,” he said, more nonchalantly than I was equipped to handle, “why should I care?” Now I was confused. “How do I even know it’s mine?” I was stunned silent. He had every right to be upset, but that was just callous. He had a point though, and I knew it.
He stood up and went into our room. I couldn’t move. He left our room a few minutes later with his gym bag, and didn’t even look back at me as he slammed the apartment door behind him.
He’d left the burritos in their Styrofoam container on the kitchen table. When he still hadn’t come back the next morning, I tossed the box into the garbage, wondering what else I’d thrown away.
I was exhausted, but didn’t sleep at all that night. The next morning when I took a little green pill with my breakfast I wondered what that would have done to the baby. Could I give it up if I had to? I was sure I could. I was only taking it because I hadn’t slept. What about the rest of it? Beyond the pills, could I handle having a child? Adam and I were both so self-involved we could barely understand what the other wanted, how could we cater to a child?
I daydreamed a bit about what could have been. We did have an extra room in the apartment, and we could work our class schedules so that they were opposite. I had all kinds of romantic notions of walks on the Common with a little stroller, and afternoons at the library story time. I could pack little Apple & Eve juice boxes for day care. I started to cry. I had broken down into sobs when I felt a familiar hand on my shoulder.

IX

Somehow we got through that episode, and so of course I thought that we were invincible. The night after the abortion, Adam’s play was having the first of two dress rehearsals and asked me to come. The next day, Eric was coming for the weekend to see the show, and to check out some schools around here. He was thinking about transferring out this way. So after making up the futon for Eric’s impending arrival, I made my way over to the campus auditorium.
Adam’s nervousness was apparent in his first few minutes on stage, and I hoped that it wasn’t my presence that was kicking him into full on Woody Allen mode. He was using his hands way too much, and his exaggerated inflection made his character less than believable. After he’d settled in, however, he was fantastic, catching all of his cues, and hitting all of his jokes dead on.
“You were great,” I said, throwing my arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek as I met him backstage.
“Eh,” he said, his hand in his back pocket and his shoulders raised and pulled in close to his ears like a little boy. “After I got comfortable. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be better. Listen, I’ll be home in about an hour, Stan’s got some stuff he wants to go over with us, but I’ll be out of here as soon as I can, okay? Maybe we’ll get a movie.”
“Sure,” I said, shrugging. I walked the couple of blocks back to our apartment, figuring that I’d work on some reading until Adam got home. When I arrived at our five-story walkup, however, my plans were immediately changed, when I found Eric sitting on the front steps smoking a clove cigarette with his backpack at his feet. He looked happy to see me, and I wondered how long he’d been sitting there.
“Hey,” he said enthusiastically, stubbing out his cigarette and greeting me with a warm hug. “How have you been? Where’s the boy?”
“The boy has another hour of play rehearsal.”
“And you?”
“And I have reading for class that I probably won’t finish.”
“That’s the spirit.” He held up his finger, indicating that I should ‘wait a minute,’ and produced a twelve-pack of Blue Moon from behind his backpack. “I come bearing gifts.” He grinned.
An hour later when Adam returned home, Eric and I were both well on our way to plastered, and hadn’t left much for him to catch up with.
“Hey buddy,” Adam said, not too surprised to see Eric here a day early. Apparently, Eric was the punctual of the two, as Adam was notorious for being on average about 2 hours late for anything in his life that someone else didn’t drag him to. Eric got up from his place on the couch next to me, and he and Adam shared a guy hug, patting each other on the back. Adam grabbed a beer, and Eric moved over a bit on the couch, after he’d sat back down next to me, to allow room for Adam to sit between us.
“So how’s life in Syracuse,” Adam asked, half-joking, as he took a sip from his beer.
“Eh, you know… I’m not going to be sorry to see it go.”
“Eric looked at Emerson today,” I offered, letting Adam in on the conversation we’d been having before he arrived home.
“What’d you think?”
“I liked it.” Eric paused and took another swig of his beer. He was less dainty than Adam, but their time together had clearly rubbed off on each other, and many of their mannerisms faded into each other. Even Eric’s smile reminded me of Adam’s, but his brown eyes did not glow the same way that Adam’s azure irises could light up a room. “It’s down to that or NYU,” but I really like this town. Maybe I just spent too much time in Manhattan growing up, but I think Boston would be a nice change of pace.”
“What about Ben, and the band,” I asked, a bit slurred on my third or fourth beer. Eric shrugged.
“They’ll get along without me. I’m just the bassist, and I’m sure I can find some people to jam with up here.” I nodded, and finished the last sip of my almost warm beer. I stood, collecting myself.
“Well, you boys catch up well I hop in the shower. Eric, there’s more blankets in the kitchen closet if you need them.
“Thanks Jane.”
As I was I was brushing my teeth after my shower, I kept the water running at a trickle, partly because I’ve always been a bit environmentally conscious, and partly because I was curious as to what the boys were talking about. I was pleased with the results of my search.
“She’s a great girl,” Eric observed. “You are a lucky man my friend. If I cheated on a girl like that, I don’t know if I’d let her take me back.”
“I know I am,” Adam said, pausing for what was probably another sip of beer. “We’ve been through a lot, man. That girl, I don’t know she just knows me like no one else. She’s crazy and fun and intense and inspiring, and if things for some reason don’t work out between us, I can never imagine wishing anything but the best for her in whatever else she does.” He paused again. “She can do anything she wants, too, she’s just that kind of person. Doors open in front of her. She’s the best thing for me… drives me nuts when I deserve it, but if I don’t have elbow digging into my rib, I just can’t sleep right.” Adam was the feelings type.
“Wow.” Eric didn’t have anything else to say for a moment. “Well when I find a girl whose elbow I want digging into my rib, I’ll be sure to let you know.” I rinsed my mouth and same out into the living room/kitchen area, towel secured tightly in a knot at my breasts. My hair was still wet, and I’d forgotten to bring another towel with me to the shower. I probably looked like a drowned rat.
“Hey sexy,” Adam said when he looked up. “We were just talking about you.” I tried to look surprised.
“Oh,” I said, raising an eyebrow and putting my arms around his neck from the back of the couch so that my wet shoulder length hair was brushing wet marks across his shoulder. “Good things I hope.”
“Of course not,” Eric contributed, and I could tell that a joke was on its way. “Mostly about your dominatrix business and how it’s getting a bit tiresome: guys coming in and out at all hours of the night. Quite frankly it’s getting to be a bit much for our boy Adam here.” I laughed.
“Well I told him he’d be a better bet, but he just wasn’t down for picking up newbies at the gay club. At least I can take one for the team. We can’t live on our love alone.” I had taken on a mock mother tone. “God knows our work study jobs won’t pay for the station wagon I have my eye on.”
“Hey,” Adam said, mock-offended. “You liked my mom’s station wagon.”
“Yes dear.” I kissed him on the cheek. “But you’re mother’s 45 and I’m just shy of 20.”
“That’s right,” Eric said, raising his beer a bit in an effort to get our attention. “You’re birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?”
“Next week.” I looked in Adam’s direction. “And I’m sure I have a fantastic gala being planned in my honor, right honey?”
“Only the best for my girl.” Adam turned his head to kiss me, and pulled me over the back of the couch into his lap, practically making me lose my towel. I giggled and was probably blushing a bit, wondering if I’d given Eric a free show.
“Alright, I’m going to go make myself presentable.”
“You do that, you big hussy,” Adam said in a mock-grandmother voice, slapping my ass like a football player as I got up to go to our bedroom. As I closed our door behind me, I heard the conversation fading.
“You got it made my friend. You are one lucky bastard.” I waited a moment before pressing my full weight against the door, as we had to do to get it to close all the way. Adam didn’t say anything.
That night I was woken up at about three in the morning by the phone ringing. Adam had crawled into bed next to me, and our bodies had instinctively intertwined. He could sleep through a fire, so I was only so careful when I untangled myself from his arms.
“Hello?”
“Jane, thank god.” It was Carrie. It was three AM.
“Carrie, what’s wrong?” She didn’t speak for a moment, and when she did, it came out like flood, quick and heavy, so that by the end she was panting with breathlessness. There was no punctuation, no pauses, no breaths.
“I’m sorry to call you so late I know it must be three in the morning at home but I really needed to talk because tonight was the worst night of my life and when I got home he was here outside my room and I didn’t know what to do and now he’s in the hospital and I don’t know if it was my fault and they don’t know if he’ll make it and I really didn’t know who else to call and…” by now she was sobbing, and I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Carrie. Carrie,” I said again. “Stop, breathe, and start from the beginning.”
It turns out that her boyfriend, James, who we both suspected of cheating on her, had in fact, been cheating on her. When she found out she immediately broke up with him. This was yesterday, and she’d been too busy to call. When she returned back to her dorm from class, he was outside her room to plead with her to take him back. She refused, and once he’s pushed his way into her single room and the door had been closed he revealed an empty bottle of pills. She called an ambulance and wouldn’t let him leave. By the time that the ambulance had arrived he was in sad shape, and now they couldn’t tell her much more than that. He was her first love, and she really would have taken him back if he’s stuck around another half hour. In fact there wasn’t much he could do that would have caused her to not take him back. I talked to her in the bathroom until about four thirty. When I opened the door, Eric was sitting at the kitchen table in his boxers, picking at the label of a new beer.
“Everything okay?”
“I’m sorry.” I hung up the cordless phone. “Did I wake you up?”
“Eh.” He shrugged. “I’m a light sleeper.”
“Yeah, I don’t usually have to worry too much about that with him.” I gestured toward our closed bedroom door.
“He says you don’t sleep much.”
“It’s been better lately,” I lied, to an extent. It had been a little bit better. That was not to say, however, that I’d kicked the habit entirely, which was what I meant.
“So are you an insomniac?”
“Kind of…” I thought at that moment that maybe this was just beating around the bush. I got the deep impression that he knew exactly what caused my sleepless nights. “What has Adam told you?”
“Not much, just that you used to take some pills to help you study.” I was quiet. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” At this point I had sat myself cross-legged on the floor at Eric’s feet.
“It’s okay, it’s not a big secret or anything. I don’t take them that much. Anyway.” I tried to think of a way to change the subject. “What are you thinking about school?”
“I’m thinking Emerson’s probably the way I want to go. I really don’t like the film program I’m in, and there’s a lot more of an arts community here in general. Plus, I’d be closer to you guys…” He cut himself off, and let the last sentence hang in the air. It was strange that he’s included me in that, not just glad to be close to Adam, but happy to have me around as well.
From then it became apparent that Eric kind of idolized Adam in a way. There was a bit of mutual idol worship between the two of them, but it was clear that Eric saw us as a golden couple. He romanticized our troubles and the depression, the pills, probably the abortion if he’d known about it, and I realized I’d have done the same thing, it was just the personality we all had. We were miserable artists and Sid and Nancy were our Prom King and Queen. We stood around in corners poking fun at those who had the misfortune to be happy, which clearly made them uninteresting. Only suffering could last, and we were all determined to make ourselves suffer as much as possible.
I excused myself shortly after that, and lie awake until my alarm went off for my first class, wondering about the validity of all that. I wondered if maybe I had gotten a bit better about the pills. I had been sleeping better, and I was convinced at the time that it was because I was so in love and was cleaning up my act
Just the opposite in fact, I’d lost my Desoxyn contact when my old floor mate had gone back home. Apparently, she’d voluntarily committed herself to MacLean, joining the ranks of Sylvia Plath, James Taylor and my uncle. In any case, the loss of that associate forced me to seek out illegal meth connections, prompting even less sleep. When I complained to my mother about this, she insisted that I take the sleeping pills that her doctor prescribed for her.
“They’re an absolute life saver,” she declared, with a hint of the southern accent she’d acquired in two years of college in Virginia, but had somehow not rid herself of in about 20 years in New England since. I think she fancied herself a bit of a Scarlet O’Hara, and I didn’t want to spoil her fantasy. She was right about one thing, after all, the pills were an absolute life saver, and soon I was taking the depressants nightly to get a little bit of shut eye. Between that, the abortion, and my family history, I should not have been at all surprised when my days became increasingly shorter with the season, and I began to retreat more and more into my own little world.