I Guess You Like It Here

When we wake up in the morning Sam says, “Okay, get up, let’s go. Before you start distracting me.” Before I start distracting him. Like it’s my fault he just wants to get me naked all the time. By the time I’m putting on my pants he’s on the couch checking his email. I’ve already decided that this isn’t happening again. I make sure to take the t-shirt I keep at his apartment to sleep in. The shirt is the only thing I leave there usually. I stole it from a guy I was seeing before; keeping it at Sam’s is like a little joke I have with myself. Sometimes I like to hold onto things. As for Sam I already brought all his stuff back, a little at a time so he wouldn’t notice. I don’t want any of it.

He walks me to the subway. It’s cold outside but the snow from three days ago has already melted. Sam is describing how it looked piled up on the tree branches as if I’ve never seen snow before. He grew up in southern California. If anyone here should be explaining snow, it’s me. I know for a fact that he’s never seen the sun rise over a frozen world like I have, those mornings when precisely the right amount of melting and freezing suspends everything in an icy shell, and the sun, low in the sky, gets caught in it. Los Angeles doesn’t have that. Los Angeles has palm trees. And smog.

When we say goodbye he kisses me and I tell him I’ll see him later. This is a lie. And also one of those jokes like the shirt, because Sam is always saying “later” to me. He’ll talk to me later; he’ll see me later. Never, I’ll call you tonight. Never, I’ll see you tomorrow. Just later. At first it didn’t bother me. Then when I brought it up he thought I was being ridiculous. And so when I tell him “later” by the subway entrance I hope he can feel its venom.

***

I don’t want anyone to touch me anymore. Since Sam moved into his new apartment I’ve spent more time at his place than the other way around, and when I’m there I can’t sleep. It’s too hot, the walls are thin and one of his neighbors is always up doing something at three in the morning. Sometimes when I can’t sleep he wakes up a little bit and holds me, running his hand down my side, making sure to touch all of me. But I’m tired of being a body to him. Sam says: Other guys don’t deserve you. He doesn’t deserve me either. You don’t deserve other people like they’re some kind of award.

The whole thing with Sam began with an espresso machine. About a year earlier, when I had just entered grad school, Sam, already in his second year, started up a conversation with me before class. We were both always early; this was perhaps my first mistake. Whenever I got to the classroom he was always already there, reading a book. Black t-shirt, jeans, nondescript, practical sneakers—his general uniform. Later, he would explain that he wore the same thing every day because that’s what Steve Jobs had done. If you don’t need to think about what you’re going to wear, you apparently have more mental energy for all the other decisions you’ll need to make that day. “Wasn’t Steve Jobs also a fruitarian?” I ask, doubting his aggressive wisdom. But it wasn’t actually about Steve Jobs. The uniform was armor. No one can make fun of you for wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, because no one could possibly have any opinion about it whatsoever.

I don’t want anyone to touch me anymore. Since Sam moved into his new apartment I’ve spent more time at his place than the other way around, and when I’m there I can’t sleep. It’s too hot, the walls are thin and one of his neighbors is always up doing something at three in the morning.

“I guess you’re always early too,” he said.

“Well I don’t like to be late,” I responded.

I looked at him, this person who never said anything in class, who would take out an apparently empty notebook and a black pen when the professor arrived, but who, as far as I could tell, never wrote anything down.

“So,” he continued. “How do you like the city?” For some reason people were always assuming I must have just moved here.

“Oh,” I said. “I’ve lived in the city for a while now actually.”

“I guess you like it here then.”

“I guess so.”

After class, Sam intercepted me by the elevators: “I always take the stairs,” he said. “We’re only on the fourth floor.” I supposed he was right. After all, I used to be one of those stairs people, too. It’s just that recently I had been feeling so very tired. I wasn’t sure what the point of taking the stairs was anymore.

“Sure,” I nodded.

At some point between the fourth floor and the lobby, I told Sam I had just moved into a new apartment by myself, and he offered to give me his old espresso machine, since he didn’t drink coffee anymore and never used it. “It’s a pretty good one,” he said.

“I’d love that,” I replied. “Thanks.”

“Do you know how to use it? Like do you know how to make espresso?”

“I mean I’ve worked in restaurants, I’ve made espressos before.”

“Espresso is pretty complicated,” he said. “Like, good espresso.” I nodded. “And you’re definitely going to use it? I don’t want to give it to someone who’s not actually going to use it.”

“I’ll use it,” I said. “But you don’t have to give it to me if you don’t want to.”

“No, no, I want you to have it. I’ll come by on Friday to drop it off. Is that cool?”

“Friday’s good,” I said.

Later, when I tell him I’m done with this, I’m done with him, he will ask me to return the espresso machine. “That was a gift,” I say. “It’s a nice machine,” he replies. A week later he still hasn’t let it go, so I pack it up, put on a tight dress, do my hair. I don’t want him to see my sadness. I try to just drop the machine off and leave, but Sam insists I stay for lunch. “You wouldn’t have dressed up like that if you didn’t want to stay,” he says, smirking. After we eat, while he’s pulling off my underwear and I’m trying not to cry, he whispers, “You wouldn’t have dressed up like that if you didn’t want me to fuck you.” I close my eyes and wonder if maybe he’s right. I close my eyes and try not to come but I can’t help it. I can’t help anything anymore.

***

It’s a long story. A year and a half earlier, I had become increasingly concerned that the man I’d been dating for the past several years was going to kill me in one of his increasingly frequent episodes of blind, jealous, alcoholic rage. We lived together, we worked together, and there didn’t seem to be any way out. I was 26. I did not know what to do. And so, when a few opportunities to sleep with other men presented themselves, I took them. In some ways, perhaps, this man had so consistently accused me (falsely, then) of sleeping with other men that eventually it seemed natural to just do it. But my real motivation, I think, was to seduce another man into rescuing me.

My first attempt brought me to Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood that had not yet, in 2011, experienced the wave of intense gentrification leering at it from the horizon of the near future. It was summer, and it was hot. I had been texting with a guy from my restaurant job, one of the line cooks. He was tall, handsome, and could talk, kind of, about books, which were all qualities the man I was dating lacked. The line cook had approached me in the walk-in refrigerator, site of so many kitchen flirtations, and asked for my number. I hesitated, then slipped it to him on a carefully folded up piece of paper a few hours later while he was trimming asparagus.

One morning he texted me that he was free, alone at his apartment, and I responded that I was free, too, I could come over, what was his address. As I was walking to the train station, he called me. “Um, I have a girlfriend,” he said. “Just thought you should know that first.” I was surprised, given his obvious interest in sleeping with me, but given that I, too, was in a “relationship,” this new information failed to alter the calculus. “That’s fine,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

When I arrived, my line cook was nervous. He didn’t have a lot of time, as it turned out, since he had to meet his brother for lunch in the city in an hour. “I didn’t think you would actually come,” he said, with a look that communicated a certain disappointment I had. It appeared that everything in the apartment had been selected by the girlfriend, from the purple couch to the frilly bedspread to the precious arrangement of Christmas lights strung up around an artful piece of driftwood in the corner. “Do you want to see the place?” he asked, walking me through the kitchen and into the bedroom. He looked at the bed, then at me. “We shouldn’t do it here,” he said. Back at the purple couch, now naked, he leaned over me and asked, “Is this okay?” I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.

We took the train back into the city together. I suppose I had been hoping for some kind of affection, some kind of conversation, some indication that there would be more than just this. But my line cook was racked with a guilt I had no interest in trying to assuage. We had entered into this pact together, I thought, had made a solemn and unspoken vow of secrecy and silence, and now here he was on the Manhattan-bound 1 train with his head in his hands, feeling sorry for himself. All of a sudden I despised him. I didn’t have the heart, or didn’t know how, to tell him—“Do you realize that I might die for this?”

But my line cook was racked with a guilt I had no interest in trying to assuage. We had entered into this pact together, I thought, had made a solemn and unspoken vow of secrecy and silence, and now here he was on the Manhattan-bound 1 train with his head in his hands, feeling sorry for himself. All of a sudden I despised him. I didn’t have the heart, or didn’t know how, to tell him—“Do you realize that I might die for this?”

He was not a man who could help me.

Every so often though, in the months that followed, this line cook would get in touch. Mostly innocuous questions—how are you, what are you doing these days, where are you living. One morning a year later I even woke up to a text message, sent at three in the morning: “When do I get to see you naked again?” I responded: “Do you still have a girlfriend?”

“Yes,” came the reply.

Later that summer I tried my luck in Sunset Park with a different co-worker, Memo. When he first started at the restaurant, I’d sometimes walk past the lockers at the beginning of his shift and he would be standing there shirtless, his torso covered in tattoos, as if he were waiting for me.

“Hey, ma,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied, feeling my pulse catch in the back of my throat.

“What are you, like Colombian or something?” The new guys at the restaurant were always confused because although I spoke the fluent, Mexican-inflected Spanish I’d learned from the man I was dating, I didn’t really look Mexican.

“No,” I shrugged. “I’m from here. Just a gringa.”

The first time I met Memo outside of work, I was afraid. This was the time he drove to the apartment I shared with the man I was dating; I was alone, and I think Memo had expected me to invite him in. I’d been expecting him to take me somewhere, anywhere. But no, he only drove further down the block, parked, pulled me into the back seat, lifted up my shirt.

Sitting in his lap, buoyed by this sudden and unexpected feeling of safety and belonging, I imagined running away together. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Let’s go away somewhere.”

“I can’t,” he said simply. “I got my son, I got my moms. I can’t just leave. And I got fish, too. Who’s gonna feed my fish?”

Later, when I went to his house and saw the fish, I thought about how I would have liked to push the tank over onto the floor. One less reason to stay here.

On another afternoon I took the long train ride to Sunset Park, arrived at his building, called, and got no answer. I called again, no answer. I sat on the stoop and waited, safe in the knowledge that here I was far from home, here I was somewhere where no one else who knew me could find me. When eventually Memo opened the door and let me in, he was still wet from the shower, still smelled of hot water and good soap. “You’re looking skinny, ma,” he said when he saw me. “You taking care of yourself?”

When we wandered back into his room and undressed, we were dutiful in our attempts at something resembling pleasure. We were both recovering, that much was obvious—I from the violent unraveling of the man I’d been trying to escape from, he from the disintegration of his relationship with the mother of his son. There were times when we would move against each other and nothing would happen, neither of us could get anywhere, so we’d just give up and talk instead, lying in his bed with the afternoon sunlight or the early-morning street lamps throwing shadows against the curtains.

***

After the summer with Memo and the line cook, after the same summer when the man I was dating crushed my cell phone into a million tiny silver shards, after he tightened his arm around my neck until I couldn’t see, after I ran out of our apartment, in the rain, in my socks, without my wallet, without my keys, and hid behind the counter at the bodega on the corner, sobbing while the very kind but rather bewildered deli guy let me borrow his phone, after a different evening when the man I’d been dating punched the fridge so hard I thought it might topple over in the middle of the kitchen, saying, “Is this what you want me to do to your fucking face,” after his hand turned swollen and purple the next morning, after he pushed me onto the bed when we came home from a party and pulled my hair so hard I thought my scalp was actually going to peel away from my skull, a feeling I hadn’t known was even possible, after I screamed for help in an apartment surrounded by other apartments on all sides and nothing had happened, no one had come, after I finally left to stay with a friend, after my friend’s husband put his hand down my dress one night and told me she wouldn’t mind if we fucked because she was “already asleep,” after I finally found an apartment to be alone in, after the man I’d left broke into the apartment while I wasn’t there and attacked the walls with a kitchen knife, after I found the blade of the knife broken in half in my kitchen sink, after the police told me I needed to wait to file for a restraining order until “he’d actually done something,” after he called me two hundred times and filled up my voicemail inbox screaming PUTA, after he repeatedly showed up drunk at my door in the middle of the night, asking me to let him in as my fingers were shaking too much to even dial 911 to ask for the help that never came anyway, after I started drinking every single night until I passed out on the floor, after all this had happened, I met Sam.

***

He rings the doorbell even though I asked him not to. The sound of it terrifies me, although I hadn’t told him that. He carries the box up one flight of stairs and in through the door. He unpacks the espresso machine along with a bag of coffee beans.

“Stumptown,” he says, “is the best.”

“I have tequila,” I say. “Do you want some?”

Over the course of the evening, Sam will nurse a single tequila while I will have three, four, five. I become increasingly uncertain about what this man—who just carried an espresso machine from Brooklyn to Queens to give to a person he barely knows—is doing in my apartment. Is he gay? I wonder. Did I totally misread this whole situation?

Sam stays for hours. We talk. We listen to records. “I don’t really get the point of records,” he says, “if you’re not listening on really nice speakers.” I pour myself another tequila.

Much later, when Sam is surprised at how late it is and says he needs to head home, he notices the way I’m looking at him.

“What?” he asks, stepping towards me.

I narrow my eyes. “Nothing,” I say.

“No, what?” Another step.

“Nothing,” I repeat, shaking my head.

In some ways it reminds me of the first time I had sex with a man, standing in his kitchen wondering if this was going to happen or not. I was in college and desperate to have sex with someone, anyone, to finally become a member of the club it suddenly seemed like everyone else was already in, but I didn’t know how we were supposed to get from the kitchen to the sex. Suddenly he spoke up: “Do you want to come look at my wall? It’s in my room.” He smiled at the inane transparency of this invitation. “Yes,” I replied, deeply relieved. That’s it? I thought to myself. That’s all it takes?

But I wouldn’t have sex with Sam for another two weeks. That was his waiting period. “It takes two weeks to get to know someone,” he explained.

He kisses me before he leaves, wrapping his arms around me and squeezing so I can feel his muscles tighten underneath his black shirt. “I have to tell you something,” he says.

I step back. “Okay,” I exhale. “What is it?”

“I have a girlfriend.”

“Um—”

“But we’re open. She knows I’m here.”

I do a quick calculation: Since I’ve just escaped from a relationship that was so dangerously closed, perhaps it makes sense to now attempt openness. Maybe this is a kind of low-stakes way to re-enter the world. Maybe this is just what I need. Maybe this is a gift.

“Mm, that’s fine,” I say.