Chapter Six
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It had been five years since I’d driven that stretch of highway.
Five years since I’d stopped at a Buc-ee’s, billed as the world’s largest gas station, with its rows of bathroom stalls, a barbecue station, and several aisles of Jesus-themed bric-a-brac.
I pause a Zadie Smith novel on Audible, fill up the Nissan, and walk inside Buc-ee’s to pay, taking in the seventy-thousand-square-foot rest stop.
I toss a brick of Eager Beaver Selection Box of saltwater taffy, the kind that Roman devoured when I brought them back to him when we were dating.
The cashier asks if I want to round up for the Voices of Hope Ministries’ boys’ services.
“Why not?”
—
I drove away thinking that Roman would’ve rounded up.
I never envisioned myself ending up with someone like Roman, but that is because I never knew someone like Roman.
For one, he was employed. And not just employed, but employed in the most sensible of careers—accounting.
He had a 401(k) and parents who were still married.
He was so normal, it was radical. A tattoo sticking out of a Brooks Brothers button-down.
A look of nothing that said everything. It said that he didn’t care about your approval.
I’d been so desperate to be this idea of a girl I hardly resembled.
But with Roman, I didn’t have to try. We could just be.
I am certain there had been men before him, but I can’t remember any of them.
Oatmeal for breakfast. Everyone before Roman had become bland mush in my brain.
—
I met him on a Saturday night in March in the living room of a brand-new seven-story condo building in Red Hook that felt held together by Scotch tape and drywall.
It had a disco ball and was packed with a dozen or so girls whose midriffs showed under puffer coats.
Roman was in a corner talking to one of the midriff girls.
I wasn’t one to pursue men, especially not men at a party with a pile of Canada Goose thrown on a Craigslist sectional, but I was bored and he had the alcohol.
So I walked over and asked if he was playing bartender.
The “bar,” in this case, was a folding table covered with a floral waxed tablecloth by a window that didn’t open.
It wobbled and was covered in jugs of lukewarm Jarritos and a couple of bottles of cheap vodka.
Limes for the Jose Cuervo, all sucked dry. Glossy lip stains on plastic cups.
“What can I getchya?”
“A Chablis.”
The thing about Australians is that they always know when you’re taking the piss. “I’ve got the finest box of that in the fridge.” He had a crooked smile and smelled like Old Spice and ash. I asked if he had a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke.”
“You don’t smoke anything?”
Ten minutes later, we were on the roof sharing a joint that I’d just rolled.
Pot wasn’t legal yet in New York. Now the entire city smells like a hippy’s armpit, but in those days, it was still like fresh turf burning in the Irish countryside at Christmas.
The weed was stronger than I expected, and we weren’t so much talking as sinking into ourselves.
There are two types of stoners: the kind who cracks everyone up and the kind who laughs their ass off. Roman and I were instantly compatible.
“What do you do, Chablis? Besides roll an impressive joint.”
“I’m a poet.”
“Well, fuck me, read me a poem.”
“Absolutely not.”
But he begged and pleaded, and I felt the cold March air and the marijuana, so I recited the poem I wrote about the first time I saw snow. “Winter of ’99.”
I know it will only last a day,
but still I build myself a sled,
saw away at a rotting water ski,
and transform the slalom
my oldest cousin fractured her femur on
into something useful.
Roman made a listening face that made me cackle. He shushed me. When I finished, he was silent. Then, “That’s it? That’s the whole thing?”
“It’s about snow.”
“I got that.”
“You hate it. It’s dumb. I wrote it years ago.”
“I don’t hate it. I just—didn’t expect you to be good.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“No, I mean—fuck. It’s brilliant. Who knew I’d be getting high with Emily bloody Dickinson?”
I averted my eyes. How to tell him that I was actually a half-employed temp?
I’d hardly written anything new since I moved to New York.
I’d dabbled in a part-time MFA program at CUNY, but I didn’t have the undergrad credits and I needed to pay for rent and cold brew.
“Yeah, well, I mostly write grants, some freelance articles for magazines.”
“What kind of articles?”
My eyebrows knit together. Did he really care? My last assignment was to track down things that cost a dollar for the New York Daily News. “And it couldn’t be sketchy.”
“No hand jobs?” He sipped his beer, his eyes cocked at me, mischievous.
“Those cost more than a dollar. They don’t call it a job for nothing. I tracked down a goldfish, a one-minute foot massage…”
“Go on, ya. That is some intrepid journalism.”
“…and a one-dollar slice.” I leaned my torso over the balcony. “Actually, I think Dom’s Dollar Slice is right near here.”
Roman extended a hand to pull me along with him, until we were floating down the stairs, right past the party, something out of an Esther Williams movie.
I liked watching Roman take his first bite of greasy, mediocre pizza that tastes like the best slice in Naples when you’re that stoned. “Damn, that is delicious. I’m new to New York. See, this is the kind of news I can use.”
“What? Your girlfriend didn’t tell you about the one-dollar goldfish?”
“She did not.” A breath, an admission. “I’m Australian, Chablis; we hardly have to open our mouths to do very well for ourselves in New York.”
“Not with me. See, I prefer swarthy, hirsute men. No interest in Australians. You’re like an entire nation of the football players who teased me in high school—except beefier and drunker and you watch crap soap operas and it’s a damn crime what you did to the Aboriginal people.”
“I take issue with that…Home and Away is not crap.”
He inched closer. That crooked smile again. His blue-green eyes so intensely focused on mine. An attraction that hit me like a crowbar.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“The East Village.”
He tilted his head, grinning slow. “So why the fuck aren’t we there?”
I don’t remember Roman flagging a taxi. I only remember his fingers inside me, and the window cracked, and gasping for cold air as we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge.
The way Roman pulled down my tights and touched me under my dress and winter coat, not like the guys I met on dating apps.
I mean, does anyone really enjoy getting fingered?
This was different. It was as if he’d taken an anatomy class of only my body.
“Where’s this bloody apartment?”
I’d forgotten we were even in a taxi, headed anywhere but toward each other. “Just up here. By the Whole Foods…and…the TD Bank,” I said through heavy breaths.
We were both still wearing our jackets when we hit the bed and his head was between my legs.
He pulled down my tights and slicked out of his peacoat.
I unwrapped my scarf, still dotted with pizza crumbs and ash.
Then he was on top of me, and I was on top of him, and when it was all done we both fell back on our backs.
The radiator gaped. The room was a wreck, a pile of sheets and winter clothes and sweat.
We looked at each other and laughed. Sex wasn’t something I did that often.
Much less sex with a stranger. He opened his arm, signaling for me to move closer.
I lay my head on the fleshy part of his chest. I fit perfectly, a memory foam pillow.
I rubbed my finger over his sandy chest hair. “Hmm. You’re hirsute enough, ya know.”
He ran his finger over a horseshoe of a scar under my breasts, kissed my forehead, then realized something. “What’s your name?”
“Emily,” I said. “My name is Emily.”
We spent every night together after that.
On weekends, we’d hardly leave the bed, except to see a Bill Murray movie and Midnight Cowboy at the Metrograph.
I always thought that in order for me to be attracted to a guy, he needed to be aloof.
To tell me not to sleep over because his girlfriend would be back in the morning.
Or to dump me on my birthday, like the junior editor of an online men’s magazine had done.
I’d even gotten a spray tan for the occasion, and there I stood on a West Village sidewalk wondering what I’d done wrong, my palms the color of a traffic cone.
Before Roman, I dated a freelance photojournalist with a studio apartment in Harlem with a mattress on the floor who would not stop talking about how much better life was in Guatemala.
(He was not Guatemalan.) We were eating arepas in Morningside Heights one night when he told me his ex-girlfriend was moving back to New York, and he really wanted to give it another shot.
He paid for his share of the eleven-dollar check and then slid it my way, noting that my two strawberry-lime licuados actually cost more than his “cerveza.” Roman did not do any of those things.
Yet he still exuded an air of mystery that frightened me just enough.
For one, it had been a month and I’d never seen his apartment.
I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to seem insecure.
In Roman’s mind, I was still the cool poet who got high at parties and knew where to get a one-dollar foot massage (Waterlily Spa on Forsyth).
So I lied. I said there was a bedbug infestation.
“They’ve got to fumigate all the apartments. Sleep at yours tonight?”
“I’m not itching.”
“It’s Randy’s place, two floors up. They’re treating the whole building just to be safe.”
“Emily. You’re a shit liar,” he said, chuffed at himself for catching me.
“Fine. Why have you never invited me over? What are you hiding? Do you collect human skulls or Beanie Babies or something?”
“No,” he said. “It’s way more gone than that.”
That night, Roman was lying on his back on the bed, staring at the ceiling of the apartment on East Thirty-Eighth Street that he shared with two Scottish guys who worked at Citibank. Or was it Pricewaterhouse? And I was staring into the aquarium of his emotional-support turtle.
Roman got Turtly when he was ten. Something to comfort him after all the “unpleasantness”—that’s what they called it—with the priest at the Holy Cross School for Boys.
It only happened once. He hardly remembered it—or even really knew what it was—until teachers and adults and the police and then the media all started asking questions.
A pet was the child psychiatrist’s idea.
Roman’s eldest sister was allergic to dogs, but nobody realized turtles live a human lifespan.
So, here was Roman, twenty-two years later, sharing a bedroom, hardly big enough to fit a double bed, with a living reminder of the worst thing that ever happened to him.
I lay on the bed next to him. “Why not just give it away? Or let it go in a pond?”
“Her. She’s a girl. Not an it. A pond? That is some cold-blooded shit.”
“Sorry.” My stomach sank. I’d fucked it all up. Here he’d opened up to me and I’d been insensitive. Then—
“I’m messing with you, Em. A pond is actually a good idea.”
I lay next to him. Took his hand. Let the silence sit there, until he was ready.
“I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of…It’s like…
” I watched Roman’s math brain search for the right words.
His eyes scanned the ceiling. “It’s like…
none of us can get rid of the things that happen to us when we’re young.
So what if mine is…it’s like, instead of mine being this scar you can see or some messed-up shit I tell some fuckin’ shrink, it’s a turtle…
She stinks, but…I don’t know…She’s just part of me now, I guess.
Something I have to take care of, ya know?
” He turned his head, looking at me, realizing.
“I’ve never told anyone that. You think I’m a proper fuckin’ basket case, don’t ya?
I don’t blame you if you make a fuckin’ run for—” I kissed him.
We didn’t leave his bedroom for two days except for when Roman ran out to buy fresh baguettes at the French bakery downstairs.
From that moment on, I knew that we’d always be together.
That we’d be a family: Roman, Turtly, and me.
I told him that things had happened to me, too.
Things anyone else would’ve considered a grotesque stain.
And we left it at that. He didn’t ask any questions.
We lay in bed, laughing and fucking and kissing through warm bites of bread.
When we moved in together, I’d lie awake listening to Roman breathing and shifting in his sleep and think about how your worst secrets can sometimes seal you to a person in the best way.
My love for Roman was so intense then that I wanted to live inside his chest. I wanted him to inhale me and keep me prisoner in his rib cage and never cough me out.
Four years later we thought we might have a baby.
We’d never talked about it before, and even when we did, I didn’t think about it so much as becoming a mother as morphing my love for Roman into a small, squishy human, and how I’d really like to meet that person and dress them in tiny overalls and take them to the Egypt room at the Museum of Natural History on the C train. That mix of Roman and me.
Now I sometimes wake up and wonder, Who is this man? What is a turtle doing in my apartment? When he catches my eyes studying him—studying my new life—in this way, he will tilt his head down a little and lift his eyebrows and say, “Hello, wife? I’m Roman.” And I’ll say, “Hello, husband.”