1125 PM Sasha #2
It took them three hours to do what Wally instructed, which involved moving the photographs to one end of the gallery, and then moving them back again to where they had started, and once that was finished, Sasha decided the only way to get over her anger and humiliation was to go for a walk.
This was not what she had come to New York to do.
Before moving to the city, she had dreamed up a glittering future for herself—one of literary salons and fashion shows and dinners at secret restaurants hidden behind hot dog stands.
No one would think she was a freak for being so tall, because if you were this tall in New York, it meant you were probably a model.
She had grown up in a suburb of Atlanta, in a gated community where residents lived in one of four models of tract homes that were all designed to look like French chateaux, and everyone had the exact same white mailbox.
The prompt for her college essay had been to write the 237th page of her autobiography, for which she made up a story about her mother teaching her how to make pajeon as a fourteen-year-old; in reality, her mother had been adopted by a white family in Charlotte, North Carolina, didn’t know a single word of Korean, and frequently said “y’all.
” It wasn’t that Sasha wanted to return to some unknown roots so much as she was embarrassed by how little had happened to her.
She figured when she got to New York she would meet artists who knew Andy Warhol, and dance on tables at nightclubs, and have torrid affairs with swarthy Italian diplomats when they were here to visit the UN.
But none of that had happened. The only art openings she was going to were the ones she was working at—boring, pretentious affairs where she was invisible to everyone around her unless they were asking her to pour them a plastic cup of wine.
There were no swarthy Italian diplomats, fucking her like madmen and treating her like shit—only her very considerate boyfriend, asking her if he should speed up or slow down.
There was only Wally Roebling, calling her a used condom.
Leaving the gallery, she made her way east to Fifth Avenue and then turned north, passing the Empire State Building and the smug lions outside the public library.
Blisters formed on her heels. Still she kept going, walking farther and farther north, until her frustration began to melt away.
On Fifty-Seventh Street, she made a right toward home, and it was only then when she realized she was outside the hotel.
Watching people go in and out its doors, Sasha smiled: she liked hotels—she always had.
The way you could sit in a lobby and have no one notice you; the pleasant sound of room service carts rolling on carpet.
Standing in front of the Four Seasons, she felt her mind settle a little. She decided to go in and get a drink.
In the lobby, she was presented with two options: a bar with red leather seats filled with men in suits, and a sunlit restaurant, lined with acacia trees.
She chose the latter—it had great windows—though as she was about to cross its threshold, she noticed her path was blocked by a red velvet rope.
Next to it stood a small sign: CLOSED FOR A PRIVATE EVENT.
Reading the words, Sasha scowled. There was something about the sign’s pretension that pissed her off.
Who the hell did they think they were, telling her to stay out?
Who the hell did Wally Roebling think he was, who the hell did any of them think they were?
With the tips of two fingers, she pushed the sign until it wobbled on its base, then pushed it a bit harder, causing it to fall to the floor with a crash.
The sound made Sasha jump, and laugh. After looking over both her shoulders, she tossed her hair back and went inside.
It was a bar mitzvah. It took her a few minutes to put two and two together, but once she did, she saw it very clearly.
Girls congregating in one corner of the room, and in the other a bunch of boys in kippahs, staring at Sasha like they’d eat her alive.
A tangle of limbs that had grown too long overnight, of feet that were suddenly too big for the bodies they supported.
Sasha considered leaving, but at that moment a woman passed in front of her with a glass of white wine, and she was reminded that what she had come here for was a drink.
Looking over the tops of teenage heads, she saw the bar on the opposite side of the room, past a cluster of tables with elaborate centerpieces of hydrangeas, dyed gray and shaped to look like the Millennium Falcon.
When she got there, she ordered a gin martini, which she drank half of before ordering a second one.
By this point, she could sense people beginning to look at her—a group of mothers in particular, who tapped their wedding rings against their champagne flutes as they drew their heads together to whisper.
The tips of Sasha’s fingers tingled, and her wrists began to sweat: she was nervous, and drunk, and excited.
After downing the rest of her second martini, she wiped her lips with the back of her hand and sought refuge at the other end of the bar, where four fathers stood in a loose huddle.
She greeted them as if she knew them, grazing her hand along the smalls of their backs and tossing her arm over their shoulders.
Within minutes, she had forgotten all about Wally Roebling and the hi-res detritus of Indiana dumps.
Instead, she cracked jokes about Mike Bloomberg, Jesus, Iraq, and Accutane, and when the fathers tilted their heads back to laugh, she looked at the mothers and smiled.
“Where were you?” Theo asked her when she got back to the apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street.
She had forgotten that she’d told him to meet her there at five o’clock, and now it was half past six.
Mia was lying on the couch, eating french fries from an aluminum takeout container.
A little wobbly on her heels, Sasha watched as her roommate dragged a fry through a pool of ketchup. “I called you, like, eight times.”
“Wally needed me to go to Hoboken. I forgot my phone at the gallery.”
“What was in Hoboken?”
“There are many things in Hoboken.”
Theo stood up from the couch and wrapped his long arms around her. “You smell like gin.”
“Gin is one of the things they have in Hoboken.”
She kept a pair of cheap black heels beneath her bed, and at night, when Mia and Adam were sleeping, she went out into the city, looking for places she didn’t belong.
She danced with Amazonian models during fashion week, and threw axes with bankers in Brooklyn; when one of them complimented Sasha on both her height and her perfect aim, she told him she had grown up in the circus.
The night before Thanksgiving, she pounded Manhattans next to a giant taxidermized jaguar at the Explorers Club.
She got good at charming bouncers and, once she slid past them, even better at being invisible.
Or, no, not really being invisible, but rather fitting in—which was, Sasha figured, a safer way to disappear.
Waiting in line at a bar, or in the shadow of a stuffed cat, she felt her mind slipping into a liminal space, a sort of psychic DMZ that existed between who everyone expected her to be and who she knew she actually was.
It was thrilling—she couldn’t remember a time she’d felt so invincible.
She was twenty-four and living in New York City, and in her mind there had never been such a perfect combination.
She wasn’t going to let some prick like Wally Roebling ruin all her fun.
She could be anyone, have anything. All that mattered was how much she wanted it.
Adam said, “I graduated magna cum laude. I obviously don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Obviously.”
“But, Sasha, on Wednesday I swear I actually heard something.”
She pressed her lips together, feigning thought.
She knew she could tell her roommates what she had been doing—neither of them would care.
If anything, they would probably want to go with her, but that was precisely the reason she intended to keep her little adventures to herself.
Between Mia and Adam and Wally and Theo, she was starting to feel as though who she was had already been determined.
She was a roommate, a girlfriend, a used condom in a garbage dump in Indiana.
There was no room for secrets, no room to discover the parts of herself that were still a mystery, that she hadn’t known were there.
Sasha lifted her eyebrows. She said, “You know what, I just remembered: I think the guy upstairs has family staying with him. People keep clomping around up there.”
Adam ducked his chin to his chest again.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably it.”
Sasha heard someone yell that they were out of ice.
She held the quarter between her thumb and forefinger and scanned the room, looking over the tops of heads.
People were drunk now, their bodies reconstituting themselves into weird, uncomfortable shapes.
Mitch Reynolds had his back pressed up against the wall, his hips jutting forward; Courtney Paulson was doing this weird chicken-wing thing with her elbow. The year was almost over.
“I don’t think I can drink any more,” Adam said.
“You’re going to be fine.”
“I feel like I’m watching a movie about people playing quarters at a party, instead of actually playing quarters at a party.”
Sasha threw the quarter.
She said, “I have no idea what that means.”
Adam drank. Sasha tried to pour more beer into the cup but her bottle was empty. She reached for a handle of tequila on the opposite end of the table. Her phone vibrated against her thigh with a new text.
“Where’s Mia?” Adam threw the quarter and missed. Sasha watched as he bent down to pick it up. The text was from Theo: Tucked in bed and drinking fluids =)
Sasha didn’t respond. She set the phone screen-down in front of her and looked at Adam.
She said, “That’s a very good question.”