Three years ago there was a city that we lived in and in my mind we lived on the cobble stoned streets looking out towards the statue of liberty and eating key lime pie. That’s what we should have been doing. But instead you lived in your father’s old office turned your studio on the upper east side in the same building where you grew up. The way the doorman looked at me always made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t tell if it was because I was young, or not as well dressed as the other people in the building, or if he knew I was going to visit you, but he seemed to take what I did very personally. So did I. His attention made me feel suspect, which stood in relief to how I felt when I was in your apartment, which was something closer to not like anyone at all.
To get to your apartment I took the elevator to the 11th floor. Sometimes I’d find myself next to a woman the age and ethnicity of my mother, Jewish like my mother, really, but silent, less friendly and richer than my mother. I would inevitably get a look that I took to indicated – not suspicion of my character, exactly- but the opinion that there would be something else she would do if she were me. Walking into that building made me feel iterant and uncanny, like the home I was in was undeniably some place I shouldn’t be.
Once I got into your apartment everything changed. There was just us and your wall of windows. I would look up to the tops of skyscapers and down to the busy street with the pizza place on the corner and the Chinese food restaurant. Pizza and Chinese food have the power to revive my cannyness. And you wouldn’t question me about anything, a situation I found to be very different than my home.
Though both your mother and mine hired Carribean ladies to help them raise their children, in most other respects they were very different. For one, you came from old money, paleo-conservative wasps and I came from upwardly mobile Long Island jewry. Maybe this is why I so appreciated how you demonstrated a certain respect for the inner life, really an entire lack of curiousity about it, which the doorman and the old Jewish ladies in the elevator couldn’t help but expose even in the short time we spent together. This points to a fact rarely recognized due to a prejudice towards recognizing people by skin color, as opposed to by history, or by the size of their nose. The upper east side is very diverse, actually, a practical Utopia of Jewish and protestant diversity. Like most integrated neighborhoods, one could attribute this possibility to the observation that money and diversity, at least in this day and age which is apparently post race and gender in the name of being all about the benjamins, go hand and hand.
The point is, I’d sleep on your couch weekly. I’d sleep on the green corduroy couch which you brought there from your apartment in Chicago and which you had originally brought from the apartment you grew up in 4 floors underneath this one. This is another thing about wasps, there’s a limit to the quantity of items they want new. Now when I imagine the couch I want for my apartment, the one I just moved into, where all the furniture is inherited from whatever was already around, I imagine something corduroy – something substantial enough to make my living room stop reflecting sound.
I never would have slept over if we lived in another city, a city like Chicago. But in NY your house on the upper west side was an hour away from my house in Brooklyn by subway and I never wanted to take it after a certain number of joints after a certain time of night. It was the kind of inertia problem that was only a problem if you happen to live in a place that requires a certain kind of je ne sais get up and go. That’s why we should have lived together where there were cobble stones, where we could have walked out and looked at the statue of liberty, where our ancestors had came in. If that were the case maybe I would have stayed. But it’s better here, anyways. I don’t have to confront my heritage here. Here I sit on my sun porch looking across the yard at the ivy changing color on the factory my friends live in where I never sleep over because my apartment is just across the yard and I can think of you nostalgically, like my home. That’s easier.
Your sister has been sending me your short stories. If you knew you’d think I had betrayed you. I had. I am. I’m cheating on you with your sister. Her stories are beautiful. Full of admittances, but not allowances.
So I slept on your couch once a week. For whatever reason, you rarely slept on mine. Maybe it was less predictable there. I also always called you, always asked you out to lunch. I was the man in this relationship, I guess. So it makes sense that when you fucked the man I had fucked the week before, my best friend, next to you, when you fucked him and he left you and me, which he was always liable to do, you still let me sleep over, as opposed to him, who lived in my neighborhood and wouldn’t even invite me to the bar.
When you fucked him and became impregnated with his child you decided to keep it. You always thought you would, which was easier for you since your parents are pro-life, which has always seemed to me less like a religious belief and more like a pro-not-making-overly-determinate-decisions-about-life perspective. I also had the tendency to go with the flow, but for me that position was sort of against the grain. So was being overly responsible to people who don’t owe you anything. But when you decided to keep it, you needed help in a way that a man would never give. So I became your babymama, your de facto man, a cuckholded woman, because I decided I would keep you. Once you gave me earrings as a thank you present and they broke a few weeks later. They were pretty though. You’ve always had good taste in things.
When you got pregnant, I called you on the phone right after you had taken the test. I had a nice bedroom then. There were hundreds of roaches in the kitchen and homeless man on the steps and a crack head across the hall and a boy who was trying really hard to sell me pot and fuck me, also across the hall, but the bedroom was nice. I think my roommate resented me for it though. I called you on the phone eating my favorite Carribbean food on the fireescape, the black metal kind they have in Brooklyn, watching the sun go down. It was pretty there. I called you and you told me that you were pregnant and you were crying. I immediately looked up planned parenthoods and the amount of time under which you can still take the morning after pill, which had recently become the month after pill. I had no idea you would think about keeping it. I didn’t know you as well then. Later you wrote about this incident in your book. I think you were a little mad about it. But listen, I never promised to provide the kind of help you wanted, or even the kind of help that you need. I never promised anything, except to be there when your baby was born.
When you first told me that you decided to keep the baby it was in your apartment, your sister was over. You sister and you got along better then. I expressed my doubts. I asked you if you were sure, if you had thought it all through, if you realized what you were doing. I thought I was doing my job, sort of like my mother thinks she is doing hers. My mother used to dress me in embroidered sweaters and when I reached puberty and my hair started to change she had it cut into a bob and I blew it dry every morning. Kids used to tell me they couldn’t see the teacher because my hair was blocking their way. A lot of effort for nothing, is what that was. Your sister told me not to rain on your parade.
When I told my mother you were keeping the baby she was shocked. When I told her you had a trust fund and your parents said they would help, she posed the question “You don’t think we would do that for you, do you?” I didn’t, I wouldn’t.
When you got pregnant you and I worked together, in the city, investigating police misconduct. I got the tip from you. My supervisor was really excited when she interviewed me, I guess, because I had good ideas and could pull off a fairly decent roll play. She had no idea that my ability to think abstractly existed in opposite proportion to my ability to follow direction. She also didn’t know that I don’t work very well in teams. You on the other hand, have always been good at the things you do. That’s why it was so important to you that everything went smoothly, even though your bastard’s child conception made the bastard who was the father bail. Maybe that made it more important. So you worried for weeks about how to tell your workmates. It would be a little strange. You weren’t married. You looked ageless. But it went fine. The one girl who didn’t say anything wore an engagement ring on her finger. Before the ring, we thought we’d be friends. I didn’t make any friends there and neither, really, did you. Do you see why I needed you then?
I also had no idea you had been fucking my friend for months. I went around telling people that you had only fucked twice and omigod you got pregnant. Who could blame you for that? When you corrected me it was because I told you that I had been telling people this story and you felt betrayed. You felt betrayed and I felt deceived. What was private for you wasn’t private for me. It made me feel better to tell that story. You took that away from me. You fucked my best friend and had his baby and now the baby is three and he and I aren’t friends because he thinks you ruined your life and I can’t stomach it. Telling the truth has always been my job.
I guess I did it though, because you took care of me too, for those years, maybe I needed you to take care of me. Or maybe I needed someone to kick me out of my stupor. Either way, you did what I asked, even though I had to ask for it, so I did what you asked. It was an exchange, the kind of exchange that no one else owed me or really has owed me since. In the mornings we would wake up and read your paper which you had delivered to your door and drink coffee and then we would take a walk and in the park and we wouldn’t go to the MET, even though you lived just a few blocks from it, because you didn’t like museums and I didn’t go alone. That was never in the deal. I don’t remember what else we did. I don’t remember much, in general.
But as you got more pregnant that got taken from me anyways. It forced me to grow up, too. You got mad at me for typing on the computer in the kitchen after you went to bed. You got black out shades and a sound machine so you could sleep. This was the opposite of what I needed. I needed light to wake up and silence to fall asleep and the comfort of someone doing something that was just to pass the time. You had become entirely objective oriented. So it got uncomfortable for me. I stopped sleeping over.
I went to the bookstore and bought books about natural pregnancy and brought you to experts, like my roommates mother who delivered babies in Africa and my cousin who was bringing up two kids in the city and sometimes I arranged little dinners and brought around your good-for-nothing childhood friends. That wasn’t your phrasing. You just complained and wished they’d be better. You were suspicious of me too, though, even though I always tried to be as unsuspicious as possible.
Eventually, the baby’s father started coming around and we would go to your apartment to practice natural birth techniques and he would start massaging you and I would leave. I didn’t care anymore, by then, who it was massaging who. You would still let him fuck you and then complain that he was mean to you in the morning and you would cry in front of him and I wasn’t there, thankfully. I made plans to go to Indonesia, even though before I did it I sat on my couch for 6 hours, in a new apartment, sans roaches and crack heads and thinking about all the ways I could die there.
All that work went to naught and you were worried I’d give the doctors a hard time. On the day the baby was born they started the pregnancy at 6AM with a shot of petosin and by 8:30 I was pushing on the back of your head with all of my strength and watching its blue bloody head emerge from your vagina and I was probably the only one around with enough wherewithal to remember that. Your mom waited downstairs, in the lobby. It was after about a twenty minute update that I came back to the room to find you getting injected in the spine and crying. That’s how fast you dilated, 20 minutes. Later you said it felt like getting shot in the stomach repeatedly.
The father sat in a chair with his heads in his hands. Right after the baby was born he decided to take a walk and told me I’d make a good nurse and the nurses there told him he was a man who knew his limits and at that moment I knew my nursing days were over. Ironically, you became a nurse just a few years later, because you needed a good profession with good hours and benefits to support your baby and even though you could have gotten a PhD and become an academic and spent your life thinking about all the things you though about anyways, you wanted to do something of use. I wanted that too. I became a social worker. Someone whose job it is to guide people through their problems. The main difference between what you do and what I do is that I think that verbalization will lead to change.
A girl in my group at the psychiatric hospital I work in told the saddest story the other day. The prompt was to tell a story about something you wanted feedback on, having to do with your hospitalization. She told a story about how she had once almost married a man whose baby she had become pregnant with but then she lost the baby and lost the man. Then her mother cheated on her father with him. The girl said she had thought about it very hard, but she couldn’t figure out how to let it go. “How could a mother do that to her daughter?” she asked. The group went mum. After the group she asked me what I would do, as if I had been withholding this information from her, as if I had some answer to this question that I just hadn’t told her yet. I had just gotten yelled at by another patient who thought I had slighted her because she talked too much and I didn’t know how she felt because I had a family and I had friends and I could never know how she felt, so she was punishing me, I guess. I told that woman I was sorry and I told the girl that she shouldn’t wait around for the answer, because she might never know.
