Chapter 2 #2
It’s my turn to round on him. “Why do you think you can act like that?” I yank my arm free of his.
He looks perplexed, like he can’t possibly imagine why I’m not kissing his shiny loafers right now, thanking him for rescuing
me, the damsel in distress.
I’m already furious with myself for going along with such a story, but I couldn’t resist how different it was from my Redstocking
life. There’s no greater bait than the allure of the opposite and the way its hook snags my skin, leaving scars I’ll brag
about later.
“I didn’t need saving,” I tell him. “And just for the record, I don’t believe in marriage.”
“What do you mean you don’t believe in it?” he asks.
I explain how I’m part of a feminist pact to never get married. “So if you were hoping that little engagement story back there
would come true, so sorry, you’re out of luck.”
He puts on this injured expression. Guys like him love playing the victim card. He says he was just trying to help, he really wasn’t hitting on me. I sort of believe him, which pisses me off even more, so I slice him with my fiercest glare and march off into the crowd.
He follows me nearly as closely as the pig did, but I’m not half as bothered by it. Beneath his banal face, an inquisitive
energy flickers. It’s like he’s gotten bored of himself and wants something else but just doesn’t realize it yet.
“Why don’t you believe in marriage?” he wants to know.
I think about freezing him out, but I’m hit by a spontaneous burst of generosity and indulge him with the quick facts.
“Marriage is a cage,” I say. “The best possible outcome is contentment, and that’s really just a synonym for complacency.”
“And what’s the worst outcome?” he asks. “Divorce?”
“No, of course not. At least divorce provides the opportunity for new beginnings. The worst outcome is total invisibility
or maybe total indifference. Take your pick.”
He considers it for a moment. Impatience presses on me from all sides, seeking out the friction, creating some itself. “That’s
a dismal view,” he finally says. “My parents are still crazy about each other.”
It’s so typical that this golden boy grew up in a picture-perfect family. I could choke on the cliché of it. “Chances are
they’ve had affairs,” I say, hoping the phrase will soften the prick, throw a blanket over the barbed-wire fence I’m scaling.
“No, they haven’t,” he says, sounding very defensive about it, like I’ve crossed a line. It makes me want to cross the next
one too.
“You can’t be sure of that.” I try to sound like I have the evidence to prove their infidelity. Life is all about projecting
confidence. Fake it till you make it, Hal is always reminding me. I’ve just about mastered the trick.
He asks if my parents are still together, and I say no, I’m actually an orphan who was never adopted. I deliver the lie convincingly,
but he doesn’t seem to buy it.
He reaches out his hand. “I’m Chris,” he says, as if I asked for his name, as if I gave him the faintest sign that I was interested. I am sort of interested, though, not in him, just in how I can press his buttons. It’s not like there’s much else to do at this hoax of an art show.
As I shake his hand, there’s a light shock when our palms touch. It’s not a spark of chemistry, just a by-product of his static-collecting
suit. I squeeze his hand as hard as I can, trying to crush every bone in his knuckles to make up for all the women before
me who’ve shaken hands too lightly and given men all the power right from the start.
“EJ,” I say.
He asks how I spell that, and I half expect him to take out a fountain pen and write it down. He has that look of someone
who’s never caught without his spiral notebook and stack of business cards.
“E-J,” I answer. “Very phonetically difficult, I know.”
A toothy smile tumbles onto his face. Once it has landed, it’s perfectly symmetrical, down to the mini dimples on both sides.
I’m filled with an urge to reach out and pull one side of his mouth downward, just so it’s not so balanced.
He asks what EJ stands for.
“Ever Joy,” I say dryly, making it up on the spot and pleased with the outcome.
“You’re lying,” he says. “I can see it in your eyes.”
I’ve got to admit this scares me for a second, especially since I’m wearing colored contacts. But then it fills me with a
bizarre relief, the idea that a complete stranger can call me out on my bullshit. Usually people just gobble down whatever
feces I feed them.
“Emily Jane,” I tell him because it almost feels like he’s earned it somehow. “But those are the two most boring names ever.
My parents lacked a certain creativity.”
“Well, you seem to have inherited a lot of creativity from somewhere.” Chris’s even-keeled voice should lull me right to sleep, but it seems to be waking me up instead. Or maybe I’m just wired from the drink that I guess I’ve chugged in the time we’ve been talking.
“I got it all from my friends,” I say, looking around the gallery to locate the rest of the Redstockings. Three shooting stars
in a room full of space junk. I feel a tug to join them, but it’s overridden by the tug to stay and put another wrinkle or
two in Chris’s ironed-out life.
“You’re an actress?” Chris asks, not in a way that implies he recognizes me from anything before, but as if he expects to
someday.
“Actor,” I correct him, though I’m pleased that he sees the star potential in me. “But no, I’m not. I leave that to my roommate.”
I nod over to Tara. “I’m an Uber driver,” I elaborate, which is actually true.
I whiz around the city a few times a week, raking in a hundred dollars a night; it’s not bad. We kept the old Ford Focus that
Jenni drove out from Michigan—the Red Rocket, we call her, even though she’s a rusty brunette by now. I love the rush of racing
taxi drivers along the avenues, edging them out. Few things are more satisfying than provoking others’ road rage. So many
people think they have to sell their souls to corporate America to survive in New York, but there are actually unlimited alternatives
if you’re not burdened by the weight of other people’s expectations.
Chris seems to be carrying a lot of expectations. I ask what he does, if he’s a bond trader on Wall Street. He has that look
about him.
“Close.” His eyebrows wiggle slightly. Self-effacing or arrogant, it’s hard to tell. “I’m a tax accountant.”
“Even more thrilling,” I deadpan. “How’d you end up in Brooklyn tonight? Did someone kidnap you?”
He says the owner of the gallery is a client of his.
“Yup, checks out,” I mutter.
“You’re a writer,” Chris says, staring at me like he’s trying to pin down the real color of my eyes. I thought he’d let the career topic drop after I gave the Uber line, but I guess not. Guys like him think that what you do is who you are.
“No, I’m not.” But I grow tired of the lie as soon as it’s out of my mouth, so I backtrack to the truth. “Okay, sure, I write
plays but I’ve never sold anything. The theater kings don’t think I’m very good at all.”
I say this with defiant pride, like I’m not scared to look myself in the mirror and see the mascara sinking into the early
stages of eye wrinkles that I refuse to buy night cream for because the whole anti-aging industry is rooted in misogyny. The
truth is, I actually hate looking at myself in the mirror and nearly always pee in the dark, but that’s not because of the
wrinkles. It’s because I don’t want to send the wrong messages to my brain that my looks are tied to my worth.
Chris asks what I’d write about if I was going to come up with a play about tonight.
“That’s easy,” I say. “It would be about a conventional man falling in love with a modern woman who finds monogamy monotonous.
And him not hearing her when she says that she doesn’t do commitment, so he tries and fails to get her to change her mind.”
Chris seems to find this answer amusing, which wasn’t the point at all. “And how would the plotline end?” he asks.
“Depends if it’s a comedy or a drama,” I say. “It would probably be the former because my comedic talent is really too good
to waste. But either way, it would involve significant pining on the man’s behalf.”
“Nothing like some good male pining to please an audience,” Chris says.
“I don’t care about writing an ending that pleases the audience,” I say, a little more sharply than I mean to because it hits
a nerve. “I care about writing an ending that pleases the characters.”
“Can’t those be the same?” he wants to know, and I have to explain that no, audiences want the characters’ fates to neatly tie together in the end, whereas characters want to break free in the end.
“But can’t those outcomes overlap?” he presses. “Things tying together and also breaking free?”
“Of course they can’t,” I snap, but it’s weird that I’m not fully confident in my answer. The Redstockings are at the door
now, waving me over. I tell Chris I have to go, my soulmates are calling. He asks where we’re off to, is it the House of Yes?
The infamous Bushwick club is our social calendar staple and I’m annoyed that Chris guessed it. It makes me feel like he thinks
he knows me, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I defy every stereotype, you just can’t always tell right away, and
I like it that way.
“Care to join?” I ask him. I know he won’t, but I’d give a lot of things to see him in that place, the sheer juxtaposition
of it. He predictably declines but then asks for my number, which actually makes me laugh aloud, a chunky syllable adding
some texture to this two-dimensional gallery.
“Believe me,” I tell him, “I’m not your type.”
He seems to realize I’m probably right. “Okay,” he says, fiddling with the buttons on his blazer, making sure they’re lined
up just so. “Well, maybe you could base a character off me in one of your future plays. Just make sure he’s not the villain.”
“He won’t be.”
I don’t tell him what I’m thinking: that he’s not interesting enough to be a villain, or a hero either. I just kiss his cheek
and leave a flaming orange lipstick stain, a souvenir for him to remember me by.
Following the Redstockings out of the gallery, we hop on the L train at Bedford and skid off at Jefferson right across the
street from the House of Yes.
The club doesn’t look like much from the outside, just another graffiti-streaked warehouse with a falafel food truck out front.
But when you walk inside, it’s a different world—trapeze artists and strobe lights and glitter and flesh. It’s unapologetically loud and accepting. The only place in the city that still dazzles me every time.
I fall in love more than once that night, locking eyes, locking lips, locking legs. The reason most people are so miserable
is that they buy the myth that love has to last in order to be real. The trick to love is letting it flow in and out, not
trying to trap it or freeze it or morph it into the mold you think it should fit. Ordinary people choke love to death, that’s
the problem.
My knack for plunging into love and bursting out of it again, drenched in its holy water, is all part of the playwriting thing,
I guess. Experience the full range of human emotions, break the bounds in all directions, then spill the excess onto the page.
At some point in the night I realize I’m wasted. This frees me even more because I’m no longer constrained by any bad habits
I’ve learned over the years. I’m back in touch with my primal instincts, floating up to the stage and taking my place as the
rightful lead of the dance troupe, rearranging the choreography like I was always destined to do.
I can’t pick out the Redstockings and don’t try to. But I feel them with me and we’re dancing, swaying together, changing
the angles of our galaxy and every other galaxy too.
Then I’m popping some pellets with the mannequins in the bedazzled bathroom, and next thing I know I’m up on the roof in the
hot tub. The air is cold, but it’s got me sweating and my thoughts are spinning in a gorgeous non-pattern. Sideways, upward,
outward, then backward to Chris and how stiff he looked in that suit.
I wonder if he wants to take it off. I wonder what his body looks like underneath, if his skin is so taut that his spirit
can’t dance, if his spirit wants to dance at all. It probably doesn’t because a person who’s lived under a candle snuffer
his whole life wouldn’t know what to do if he were suddenly on fire again.
I’m on fire now, and I flip over so my other side can burn too, and then I’m back on the stage, wrapped around a new body.
Our energies sync as we sink into each other and tangle on the trapeze bars, crossing in and out of the big birdcage that’s suspended above the stage.
We fly into the sky, liberated in this single moment and therefore liberated for eternity.
And it’s so clear in the haze why I’m never going to let myself be locked to loving one person forever. I mean, what kind
of a prison is that?