Chapter Five #2
“Also, you draw on the grocery list,” he says.
“Oh. Right.” I would call those doodles more than drawings, but sure. Sometimes I draw a little tomato next to the word tomato.
You’d think this would be a catalog of my failures as an artist, but actually, the fact that Vin could identify a drawing done by me, because he’s seen so many of my drawings, makes me feel way more yeah, I draw than those damn art school boots.
“How in the what?” I hear Lauro say, so I swivel back toward the boys.
“What?” I ask.
Lauro is studying Raff inquisitively, his eyes narrowed.
“We just had a little competition to see who could get the bartender’s number,” Raff says innocently, sipping Lauro’s former drink.
I can’t help but laugh. I already know who won. Lauro just fell for the oldest trick in the book. “Oh, don’t let the Jimmy Buffett shirt fool you,” I tell him. “Raff is lethal when he wants to be.”
“I’ve never lost that game in my life,” Lauro says with a frown down at his mesh-covered nips. “The headlights are on and everything.”
“Don’t feel bad. Lebowski over here always wins,” Vin says.
“We all have our little gifts,” Raff says. “And I have the number of a very handsome woman.”
Lauro checks his phone. “Look, I’m about to meet some friends for bowling in Queens…” He lets it hang there for a moment, looking between the three of us.
“I’m too old to go to a different borough at midnight,” I say.
“I’ll come,” Raff says easily.
“Oh, great!” Lauro says. He seems genuinely glad for Raffi’s company.
Raff gives hugs, Lauro gives pounds, and then they’re out the door together.
“Is he going to break Raff’s heart?” Vin asks, watching them go.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
My drink is sweating and watered-down now.
“So…” he says quietly, his eyes on his beer. “Tequila?”
Ah. He wants to know why I wasn’t drinking my usual glass of house red. Tequila is extremely unusual for me. Pretty much reserved for that one time that Vin, Raff, and I went to Atlantic City together.
I shrug. “Lauro ordered one and it sounded good.”
“…Is it?” he asks.
“Is it what?” I’m confused.
“…Is it good?”
My brow comes down. I can tell what he’s really asking me, but if he wants to ask, he’s gonna have to ask. “I mean. It’s new. Different.”
“Right.” His eyes are on his beer again.
“So…” I can’t help but fish. “Sorry Raffi just bailed on your plans.”
“Oh.” He’s frowning down, avoiding my gaze. “It wasn’t really plans with Raff. I…knew you were going to be here.”
My stomach swoops on an updraft. He can be frustratingly evasive, yes. He can also be very, very blunt.
My mouth has gone dry.
“You were gone last night,” he says.
Ask me where I went. My heart is pitter-pattering.
“I figured…our conversation…”
Now my stomach plummets. Oh, right. He hasn’t tracked me down because he wanted to see me. He’s tracked me down because he wants to finish what we started last night.
I’m sure my face betrays the dismay I wish weren’t threading through me but he’s not looking at me anyways. He’s looking for answers in his beer glass. He’s lifting it to his lips, and then a Great Dane of a man bumps Vin’s shoulder on the way past.
“Sorry, dude!” he says with a friendly wave, his eyes popping out of his head when he sees that Vin’s beer has just upended itself onto my shirt. Which is now basically translucent. My blue lace bra waves hello to Vin and anyone else who cares to look.
He immediately bands an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into his chest, covering me. I’m stiff with the shock of his arms suddenly around me.
“Bathrooms are back there,” the bartender says with a point.
Vin quickly swims me along through the crowd and then we’re in a beautiful single-stall bathroom with a silvered-blue mirror and a wingback chair in the corner.
It’s spooky-sexy in here. Like a Victorian powder room where the duke ravishes the maid he’s not supposed to have fallen for. Or the other way around.
Vin is cranking paper towels like he’s trying to qualify for the Olympics. And then he’s there. Blocking out the world and pressing the paper towels to my stomach and chest. I can see his broad back reflected in the mirror.
His hands are huge and firm and gentle and the wet fabric lightly abrades my skin.
This bra doesn’t hide a damn thing and his movements get a little less businesslike when he sees the points forming under his hands.
His breath washes over my face, his eyes are doing that thousand-suns thing again, and I look anywhere but at him.
We’ve been here so many times. I’m dizzy with the déjà vu of it. Vin’s shoulder close enough to bite. The only difference? All those times were borne on the back of our wedding vows. Our forever. Our till death.
But this, wet clothes, his hands firm on my hips—he’s leaning back on the sink, trying to read me—this is borne on the back of that lease. His emergency exit. I get the reverse of déjà vu. I’ve never had this feeling with Vin before. Like I’m standing in wet clothes with a stranger in a cold room.
His hands are still on my hips. There’s an infinitesimal press, him moving me slightly closer. Muscle memory, probably, from a time when he’d have already been unbuttoning my jeans.
Time passes between us like a veil. For a moment I glimpse a different Vin. Like there are two of him.
The one I married and the one I’ve been living with for the last year.
He must read something in my expression because his hands fall back to his sides.
A thought occurs: I wonder if there are two of me, too.
“Roz—”
“It’s fine. Really. I just wanna go home.
” I push past him and back out into the bar.
I’ve got cash in my hand, but I’m not fast enough because Vin’s already leaving some next to our half-full drinks.
And then he’s falling into step beside me.
I can feel his eyes on the side of my face.
It isn’t until the noise of the bar cuts out with the closed door that I realize exactly how close this bar is to my art class, to the dreaded Nine Five Four.
Just around the corner from Vin’s residence in less than eight weeks.
I wonder if he’s thinking about it. Imagining his new spot.
I wonder if it’s furnished. Oh, God. I wonder if he’s going to ask to take half of our furniture with him when he goes.
Also he doesn’t know I’m in an art class in that very residence, and still will be after his move-in date. Also he doesn’t know I’m in an art class at all. With Lauro. Who he probably thinks is just some guy Raffi picked up at the bar.
I’m itchy with nerves. I’m looking at a negative of my normal life, where everything has changed to the opposite of the color it used to be. Everything, and I mean everything, feels like a lie.
I suddenly hate this neighborhood. And I hate that bar.
With all the brass and the sexy lighting.
I bet people get laid courtesy of that bar all the time.
What a reprehensible neighborhood bar. Where all the soon-to-be-divorced newly arrived tenants can go and mingle.
They should have neighborhood confessional booths instead of bars. This city is going to shit.
“Oh, shit, we’ll miss the bus.” We both start running, and we do, indeed, miss it.
“Long way from Sal’s,” he says eventually, after a long while, after our breathing has evened out again and we’re waiting for the next bus.
Sal’s is the bar that is exactly an eight-minute walk between our house and Raff’s.
What he means is, why the hell did me and Raff meet for a drink on the Lower East Side?
I shrug.
He opens his mouth, obviously about to say something. But then he just…doesn’t.
So we don’t say anything at all while we wait for the bus. Or while we board the bus or while we sit and watch the city pass by.
So look, I know that we obviously—painfully—are not on the same wavelength anymore. I know that we are at the furthest possible point from in sync with one another. But I know Vin. And I can feel him turning over and over whatever it is he didn’t say.
He waits until I’ve got keys in our apartment door, about to let us inside. He’s behind me, hands in his pockets. I bet he recognizes his very last chance. Once we’re inside, I’ll be behind my bedroom door faster than he can blink.
“Roz,” he says, in the same tone that he used in the bathroom at the bar.
“Yeah?” I’m pausing. Ask me about this Lauro guy. Ask me why I was on the Lower East Side. Ask me what I did tonight.
“…I’m sorry,” he says. About the shirt? About leaving me?
“I know.”
And then I push through the door.
Tonight I’m going from paper.
(Overachiever!)
You told me to write them down before I read them aloud! Can’t win with you dorks.
(Finally he’s starting to get a little sassy!)
Okay, here I go, it’s called The Cat Doesn’t Come Back.
(Cat story!) (We got a cat story, people!) (Ring the cat bell!)
What’s the cat bell? Oh, my God. You actually have a bell you ring when someone tells a cat story?
(You got a lot to learn, kid.) (We get a lot of cat stories around here.)
All right. Well. The Cat Doesn’t Come Back.
I rescued a cat when I was about ten years old.
And I really mean rescued. It was stuck on a third-floor windowsill of an apartment building in my neighborhood in Marine Park.
I climbed up on a fire escape, knocked on the kitchen window of the unit, had the grandma who lived there let me in and walk through (she made me take my shoes off), open the window, and get the cat.
I’d never had a cat and didn’t know a lot about them.
But I knew when they didn’t like you they’d claw and bite, so I expected to get the hell scratched out of me while I brought it back down to the street.
But the cat was actually really sweet to me.
She just kind of curled up in my arms and started purring with her eyes closed.
I actually recognized her too. She was cute, but sort of weird-looking for a cat.
Really big, ragged ears, splotchy brown fur, and one of her pupils was super dilated.
I knew where she lived. In this dodgy bodega my mother and brother and I avoided because of the crowd of guys that stayed in there all day.
I was pretty sure they kept her there as a mouser.
Anyhow, she was sweet to me and I could tell she was in bad shape. Up close, her ears were ragged because she’d been fighting, or attacked or something, and one of them looked infected. So I walked straight to a vet that I knew of, where we’d taken my brother’s pet parakeet when it had a virus.
Turns out, the dilated-pupil thing was something she just needed medicine for, it happens to a lot of street cats, I guess.
And they put her on antibiotics for the ear, and cleaned her up, and by the time I left, with her in my arms, still purring, I had a new pet cat.
And there was a bill that was about to be mailed to my mother’s house that was so high I knew that when she got it I was going to get smacked with a wooden spoon.
But it was worth it. Because the cat was purring.
Anyways. My mother actually really liked the cat and honestly, it’s not a bad idea to have a mouser in Brooklyn.
(What was her name?)
Oh. Well. My brother named her. It was, uh, Puma. Puma Thurman.
(YESSS.) (Couldn’t love it more!)
(What about the parakeet?)
Oh, the parakeet? His name was Rick. He’d died the year before.
We’d gotten him from our cousin when she moved to California.
He was super old when he died. Anyways, my mom liked the cat and so did Raff.
My brother. And me? I really liked the cat.
She slept on my bed, played with a feather on a string that I made for her.
She ate high-quality cat food I bought for her with my pocket money, and she got to lick the extra tuna from the can when my mom made tuna sandwiches. It was a good life.
One day, when I got home from school, though, she wasn’t there.
(Oh no. The title of the story wasn’t ironic!)
Yeah. Well, I looked everywhere, but she’d escaped somehow.
So I went looking for her in the neighborhood.
And I found her in the bad news bodega. The guys there were mad at me for taking her, but she was wearing a collar now, so they didn’t give me too much trouble.
And she seemed happy to see me, in that cat way. I took her home.
A few weeks later, the same thing happened again. And again. And again. We never did figure out how she was getting out of the house. But every time it had been a few hours since we’d seen her, it would be time to go down the street to the bodega and get her again.
I didn’t get it. She had tuna from the can and a warm bed at my house. And me.
At the bodega she had to hide under the chip display so she wouldn’t get stepped on and a bowl of dry food they kept on the sidewalk that she had to fight other cats for. She never fought me when I brought her home. In fact, she’d twine around my legs whenever she saw me. Purr when I picked her up.
It was Raff who had the idea. “Let’s see if she’ll come back on her own,” he suggested.
So the next time she disappeared, I didn’t go get her from the store.
I waited all through the night. And the next morning.
And then I couldn’t wait anymore. And I went down to the store and got her.
Maybe if I’d waited long enough, I’d have gotten to learn that the cat comes back.
But also, maybe I’d have learned that the cat comes back…
to the bodega. But not to me. And I didn’t want to learn that.
So what did I learn? I learned that she would leave, again and again.
But I also learned that if I went and got her, I got to have her.
So, what’s worse? Having a cat that leaves you? Or having no cat at all?
Thank you.
(Woot woot!) (Okay, Vin!) (Damn good cat story, Vinny!)