Miss Misery (23 page)

“Hey,” I said. “I'm sorry to make you talk about this. That wasn't fair of me.”

She didn't listen. “I have dreams now, you know? I have dreams of him dying, and it's the scariest thing in the world to me—it literally makes me unable to breathe to the point where I think
I'm
dying too. But I could never say anything about it to him. And I'm still living here doing stupid things like making dip.”

I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were flushed and hot. “Sometimes it's hard to say stuff to the people who mean the most to you,” I said. “Sometimes it's easier to say it to total strangers. It doesn't mean you're wrong, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't try.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

“I mean, why else would you be telling
me,
right? No one is stranger than me.”

She laughed. “Great party, huh?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I've barely seen it.”

“Let's go upstairs. I'll show you the roof.” She started to stand. “Wait, are my eyes all red?”

I looked up at her—at the sharp chin, the tendons in her neck, the tiny wrists. It was a marvel, really, that she'd made it this far in life without snapping in two. “A little bit, but no one will notice.”

She rubbed at her face. “Great—now everyone will think you made me cry.”

“Nah,” I said. “Just tell them it was the dip.”

She smacked me, and I knew that everything would be OK.

 

Up on the roof, the party was, indeed, in full swing. People I recognized from the VSC and dozens of others I didn't were scattered everywhere, drinking beer and margaritas, and listening to the Chameleons play from a dinky boom box wedged on top of an exhaust grate. From this vantage, the East Village was a giant game of Q*Bert, all diagonal boxes and squares that appeared—in the fading summer light and mild alcoholic haze that enveloped me—eminently jumpable. All across the neighborhood, young and old had taken to the roofs and were celebrating and waving to one another in a gregarious manner they would never repeat on the grimier streets below. Cath was beside me, taking in the scene, balancing her homicidal dip on her bare knee. I gestured at the humble balustrade that edged the roof, intended to keep us from plunging to our deaths but instead drafted into service as a buffet table. Jesus' homeboy and other scraggly sophomores were manning a tailgating grill in the shape of a football.

“Is there anything for me to eat over there?” I asked. “I'm a vegetarian.”

Cath rolled her eyes. “It's the twenty-first century, dude,” she said. “We don't have anything here that wasn't slaughtered out of soy.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope the beans were killed humanely.”

“Always,” she said. “Always.” And then she went off to add her dip to the food offerings spread out before us.

I drank another beer and then a third and watched happily as the evening eased its way into night. I got into a conversation with a nineteen-year-old Korean girl named Sunny about collegiate topics I knew nothing about, like eighteenth-century French painting and the benefits of study abroad. I let Jesus' homeboy—whose name was actually Keith—ruminate at length about the relative merits of nylon guitar strings versus steel. Andre ambled over, shook my hand with a firm grip, and called me Ryan Adams. We all laughed at that. I had another beer, ate some potato chips, and then downed still another can—Tecate this time, watery and sweet.

Standing on a rooftop, talking to these kids made me feel caffeinated and nostalgic, as if I had stepped through a wormhole and were back at one of my own gawky freshman parties, clutching an illict can of Beck's outside the only fraternity that didn't check IDs, sneakers toeing a clumpy root underneath a maple tree. Feeling out which of all these strange new people would be friends for the next phase of life (those with Guided By Voices boxed sets in their rooms and Replacements posters on their walls) and which would merely be faces in the alumni magazine for decades to come. Flirting shyly with the curly haired girl from my American Literature course who had a My Little Pony pencil case and liked Adrienne Rich a little too much. Finding out if the high-school charm still worked in the new setting or if college required advanced placement in wooing.

This time, however, I was older than everyone else: I had all the answers. I could see the game; I could see the strings. I knew which comments would provoke laughter and which would provoke nods. I knew which girls thought I was cute and which weren't listening. I was in control of it, so when Keith brought me another beer I accepted it gladly and made a joke, and Sunny laughed and they all laughed and I laughed too. This was all so easy. It was all so clear.

I was drunk and happy and the city air felt warm and clean on my face. I was funny. I was on. I was, in fact, so enraptured by the moment that when I felt my phone buzz in my pocket, I actually picked it up and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Holy shit, the enigma lives!”

It was Bryce. I should have guessed.

“Hey, man,” I said.

“Don't ‘hey, man' me, you great big crazy person. Where the hell have you been? I haven't heard from you in weeks!”

I heard his voice in my ear, but my eyes followed Cath Kennedy as she strode across the roof, empty beer bottles gathered in her hands, and made her way back down the stairs to the apartment, Ben There following somberly behind, his arm perched lazily and worryingly on her shoulder.

“I've been…well, all over the place, really.”

“Yeah, no shit! Country mouse is suddenly city mouse!”

My head felt thick. “What?”

“Nothing. Where are you? I hear other human people. That doesn't seem like you.”

“I'm at a party.”

“One of the ones you ‘promoted'? You bad boy rock writer, you?”

“Ha. No. A friend's.”

“OK, OK. Now we're getting somewhere.”

“Good.”

“So you have friends now.”

“What the hell do you think
you
are, dude?”

Bryce chuckled. “I don't know! You tell me!”

“Bryce, you're my best friend.”

“I know that. Just wanted to hear you say it. So where the hell have you been?”

I took a deep breath and walked away from the crowd of people who stood chatting around the cooler of beer. I walked to the opposite side of the roof and looked out over Eighth Street. One of the families had provided its children with bottle rockets and noisemakers, and they were making liberal use of them in between the parked cars below.

“Bryce, have you ever felt split—like there are two of you and you don't know which one is right?”

“All the time, dude.”

“Really?”

“Except that with me there are like four or five people, and one wants to go for a drive and one wants to eat and another wants to call that girl who winked at me in the bar on La Cienega the other night and one just wants to go play tennis. Oh—and the fifth one is happily getting shitfaced with you in New York right now, glad he never left to move to this crazy place.”

“So what do you do?”

Bryce laughed again. Behind his voice I could hear traffic noises: cars accelerating and decelerating, honking and steering, braking and swerving on the other side of the country. “Depends on the day, dude. Depends on the day.”

“I guess so.”

“What the hell happened with Amy?”

The name was like a knife in my heart. “She left.”

“I know that, nimrod. And you stayed.”

“Yep.”

“And that's all there is to it? You aren't speaking to her anymore now too?”

Then the words tumbled out. “What am I going to say to her, Bryce? What do I have left to say? All I did was talk for years and I never once backed up any of the bullshit I said. So I could call her and pretend to be in fantasyland and still hopelessly in love, but the simple truth of it is that I'm here and she's there and that's it.”

“Hit a nerve, did I?”

“I guess so.” I was out of breath.

“But David…”

“Yeah?”

“You do love her.”

I sighed. “I know I do.”

I heard a car door slam; Bryce must have gotten to where he was going. “Listen,” he said. “Do you remember the Fourth of July four—no, Jesus,
five
years ago?”

“What?” I said. “In Philly?”

“Yep.”

“When we went to the baseball game and sat out on the field to watch the fireworks afterward? That was great.”

“Do you remember who my date was?”

“Sure—Stacy Ackerman.”

“What a cow!”

“She wasn't that bad—but you only liked her because of her dad's car collection.”

Bryce snorted. “And the marble floors in her parents' house.”

“Of course. How silly of me. Marble floors can be very important to the life and general well-being of a recent college graduate.”

There was a pause. All of America rotated and buzzed between us. “I miss you, buddy,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a catch in the back of my throat. “I miss you too. I could really have used you out here this summer.”

“It sounds to me like you've got it figured out.”

“It does?”

“At least you're doing something, man. Listen—I love Amy to death and I think you should never walk away from something like that. But if you're going to do something, you should do it all the way.”

“Maybe so.”

“Why do you think I moved across the country?”

“Because the women out there are hotter and your sister offered you a job?”

“Yeah—but no, dude. No. I did it because I could sit around with you in New York all year, broke, with my thumb up my ass and daydreaming about going, or I could pack the car and
go.
You fucking think too much. That's why you're smart but that's why you're stupid.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“You know it, chum.”

“Listen,” I said. “I gotta get back to the party.”

“OK, sure. Don't be a stranger, huh?”

“To me or to you?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Take care. Send me a postcard.”

“I will.” Bryce coughed again. “And listen, when you get a chance, I really might need to borrow a couple…”

“Good-
bye
, Bryce.” I laughed. He'd owed me $425 for the last nine and a half years.

“Just thought I'd try it. Stay frosty.”

“You too.”

Click.

And just like that I was back on the roof of a strange party in a dark, festive city. I turned away from the edge of the roof and walked halfway back to the conversation I had left. It was still going, of course, ice-skating from quasi-ironic nostalgia (“Who was the genius who greenlit
The Golden Girls
? What production chief in L.A. was sitting around going, ‘Get me a quartet of menopausal hags and let the comedy ensue'?”) to fully nostalgic irony (“Remember when the coolest thing you could say about something was that it was ‘decent'? What was that about?”). I shook my head. The same conversation, the same party, a thousand times all over the city. I felt old.

After a few minutes, Keith must have noticed me feeling sorry for myself, as he waved me back over.

“Hey, professor, where are the fireworks gonna be? I don't want to be facing the wrong way.”

“Over the river,” I said, helping myself to another beer.

There was a pause. “Which way is that?”

“East,” I said, taking a sip.

Blank stares greeted me.

“That way.” I pointed. Everyone cheered.

I wasn't just the oldest person there, I was apparently also the only person with a sense of direction.

Beer after beer, I bullshitted with the kids. The more empties I piled up on the edge of the roof, the less drunk I felt. It was more like turning up the volume on a radio without an antenna: The staticky hum just grew louder in my ears, helping to mask the thought of anything other than this rooftop, this party, this conversation. Except one thing, of course: Cath. The thought of her itched in my mind, causing my eyes to dart to the door anytime someone new came upstairs. Where had she gone? And why had she been gone for so
long
?

I was busy explaining to Keith why nineties R.E.M. was not, in fact, better than eighties R.E.M. when Stevie Lau burst through the doorway screaming bloody murder.

“Ew!”
he shouted. People turned. Stevie was wearing a burgundy Puma tracksuit and his hair was a thousand points of spikes. “In my bed!
Ew!
”