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.