Room for Love (16 page)

“Well,” I stutter, ready to defend myself. Then I realize that he's right. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Wow. You and I met, like you've been meeting all these other guys, and a bunch of them ask you out, including me. I guess that's the point.”

“No, it's not really like that. I haven't met that many, I mean, I haven't gone out with very many, only the ones I liked.”

“Jesus Christ, isn't there enough duplicity in the world? You're playing right into it. You know, I spend my whole life trying to create something honest. I try to surround myself with people who have those values. And I thought you were cool.”

“Jesus, aren't you overreacting? I wouldn't have told you if I didn't like you and feel bad about lying to you.”

“Whoa, I feel really special now.”

I feel like crying. It doesn't help when he stands up, reaches deep into his pocket, pulls out some bills, throws them onto the table, and says, “I gotta get out of here.” I bite off a split end, flick myself with my rubber band, and start whimpering like a spoiled starlet whose Jimmy Choos got swiped from the edge of the dance floor.

Then I do what I usually do when I feel like shit: call Jake.

“Can I come over?”

“What, like right now?”

“I'm in a terrible mood.”

“Okay, see you in a few.” I jump in a cab. When I get there, the place is hopping. Jake moved to New York just under a year ago from Boulder, where he was snowboarding and running a successful bar. He came here to focus on his art and, I suspect, to create something as popular and thriving as his bar, but with an artsy, urban bent. He's run up against a host of unforeseen challenges, namely a city full of equally talented, energetic young people who are equally eager to make art and friends and a big, loud, dazzling splash that forces everyone in New York to stand up, mouth agape, and listen.

I give Jake the kudos he deserves for trying. He moved into an enormous, unfinished warehouse space on the south side of Williamsburg, a largely Hispanic neighborhood that's only recently begun to catch up to the more gentrified part of the ‘Burg, which is already booming with the swanky bars, shops, and eateries that have transformed “Billburg” into a bastion of youthful appeal to rival the East Village. Jake single-handedly knocked down and threw up walls, wired and decorated and demolished to create a trippy, multifunctional space that goes like this: You enter into an art gallery with fire-extinguisher-red walls covered with large-format paintings by Jake that do a sort of disturbingly annoyingly confusingly abstract Bacon-meets-Pollack thing. Tear your eyes away from the dizzying display to pass behind a black curtain thumbtacked over an opening in the back wall, and you enter the equally red living room, a cavelike space in which the only furniture is a thrashed black futon facing a big-screen TV, a turntable and accoutrements in the corner, and a chunky plywood bar dividing the entertainment area from the kitchen. Not a soft or pretty flourish in sight. It is painfully obvious that no women live here and the girlfriends don't last long enough to make a mark. The kitchen, however, looks remarkably like any other kitchen. There's a microwave, fully stocked fridge, cupboards, toaster oven, stove, coffeemaker. Besides the front of the gallery, there are no windows.

When you move through the next thumbtacked black curtain, you enter Jake's studio and workshop, the lab where Maestro makes art. His tiny bedroom—loft bed, dresser, white shag carpet, that's it—lies beyond, where those daring to enter remain high on the fumes emanating from Maestro's laboratory. There's a plunging cement staircase to the left of the bedroom that leads to a basement, in which there are two eight-by-eight cells that Jake rents out to like-minded souls, an office housing his impressive computer setup, and an honest-to-God functional recording studio that Jake also buffed out with his own pretty little two hands. It's got a drum set, a range of guitars and keyboards, and all the gadgetry that pro studios offer, including two large bongs and a wet bar. It looks very professional to these untrained eyes, anyway. I try not to go downstairs very often. If the upstairs is a virtual dungeon, the subterranean recesses are the netherworld, from which I fear no one returns with their faculties intact.

When I arrive, Jake's latest roommate—they come and go like the tides—a Jim Morrison look-alike with no personality, is spinning records. Two other guys I always confuse, wearing matching hairdos and short-sleeved T-shirts over long-sleeved ones, are doing coke on the kitchen counter, and Jake is standing over a pot of boiling pasta. I mix myself a vodka tonic, let the alcohol pull me out of my funk, and move my hips to Jake's roommate's groovy tunes, trying to regale the crowd with tales of real-estate-ad dating. Unfortunately, the snorters are almost as offended by my antics as Hunter was; they pronounce the process of judging men by their homesteads “harsh, dude” and keep snorting. Jake's roommate, who takes himself very seriously as a DJ but serves Cosmos and Mojitos to swooning, fishnet-clad gamines on the Lower East Side for cash, loses his headphones just long enough to catch the Javier and Larry episode and return to his musical bubble. Jake, perched quietly on a bar stool hurriedly shoveling spaghetti into his face the whole time, finishes his meal, pushes his unruly bangs out of his face, and turns to me nonchalantly.

“I'm going to bed. You can come if you want.”

“Gee, an invitation I can't refuse,” I say to my public before making a dramatic exit on the heels of my little grinch. I know how pathetic I must seem trotting off after him, but I also know how shattered Jake would be if I didn't. His tough-guy routine is only an act, and I can tell he wants nothing more than to cuddle up with me right now.

I take off my clothes and shiver my way into his freezing bed. He flips off the light and aims a space heater at me.

“That better?”

“It will be.”

He strips down and climbs over me, and I wrap myself around his icy body, warming us both.

“How's it going, mister?”

“All right.”

“Anything ever happen with that gallery owner?”

“Nah.” He's quiet for a minute. “Nothing ever happens with those guys, at least not for me. I'm not sure what I should do, maybe open another bar. It's something I know I'm good at, which is cool, but the bureaucracy in New York might kill me. I looked into it and the permits alone can take months.”

“You'll figure it out. I have complete faith in you.”

“You're the only one. It sucks to turn thirty with nothing to show for it. Last year, everything was, like, great, and I move out here to, like, get my art thing going, and I feel like I have nothing all over again. People aren't buying my work, I don't know anyone, the money's running out.”

In the shadow, I can see the outline of his pretty face, which he turns to me. His eyes look so sad. I squeeze him tighter.

“I was just thinking,” he says.

“That you have no one else in your life that you can talk to about this stuff?”

He laughs. “No, that's not what I was thinking. But I guess it could have been.” He pulls me in closer. “You're amazing, but I can't do this.”

“I know, I know.”

“You're gonna find it, Jacq.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You want it. That's what matters. You're gonna knock on some guy's door who's looking for a roommate and he's gonna open it and not believe how lucky he got to have this beautiful girl standing there, and you're gonna see his face and just know. I'll probably be kicking myself, but I'm just too selfish to put anyone ahead of me right now. You know I'm right.”

“Yeah, I do.” He turns toward me and we kiss. I figure this will be the last time we have sex. As we hold on to each other, my tears drip down my face and onto his chest and neck. He licks them off my eyes and cheeks. I think,
They're all wrong about you. You're not a bad guy. You're just not ready to love me as much as you already do.

7

34-year-old documentary filmmaker seeks female roommate fast! My former partner in crime skipped town with two months' rent in his grubby fist and I'm more than a bit desperate. What can I say? I'm tall, dark, handsome, not-too-dumb, not-too-self-involved or irresponsible. Oh, wait, I'm looking for a roommate, not the love of my life. Hell, if you think you might be the love of my life, you can call, too. The room's $1300. It's bright and big, and I think I have fairly decent taste and housekeeping habits—for a guy. Place is in Billburg. Give me a call. Name's Anthony.

Sunday morning after my night with Jake, I drag myself to yoga. There was a time not so long ago when I went to class four, five times a week. Now I'm lucky if I make it three times a month. Between work, the man-hunt-slash-research for my story, and a general laziness that has somehow crept in, physical activity has dropped significantly among my priorities. This morning, though, my body is begging for nourishment.

I barely make it to a class taught by my favorite teacher, Gwin, a forty-something rocker with long, red hair and the hardest yoga body in town. Ten minutes in, and my body is screaming at me. The simplest downward-facing dog feels like medieval torture, and I have to suffer through an hour and forty-five minutes, pushing my body through a seemingly endless series of poses. I guzzle water. I rest a lot in child's pose. I vow to go at least two times a week for the rest of my life. Clearing my mind has always been my biggest yoga challenge, and today my head is cluttered with Jake withdrawal, cheesy attempts to keep myself positive, various possible endings for my piece.

When we're finally relaxing in the prostrate position fittingly called “corpse pose” at the end of the class, Gwin starts talking about clarity. She says that when we are silent and look within, we find that in fact we already know everything we need to know. “Call it intuition, call it your gut, but it is true that we already have all the information, knowledge, and wisdom we need inside ourselves. When you leave class today, rather than letting the world crowd in on your mind, you might think about using a simple mantra to bring yourself back to the sense of calm you're feeling right now, to tap in to your internal wisdom,” she says. “I was thinking about it this morning and came up with something simple and quite beautiful for us all to repeat to ourselves when our minds are racing around like they so often do in this city. It's ‘sut nam.' Think ‘sut' when you breathe in and ‘nam' when you breathe out. It's a mantra that's used in kundalini yoga and it means, ‘Truth is my identity.'”

That's just great. Even my yoga teacher is mocking my lying ass.

Gwin ends the class by telling us to put our hands together in front of our hearts and take a moment to think of something for which we are thankful. I think of my wonderful, soothing apartment.

As I'm walking home, I try to think “sut” when I inhale and “nam” when I exhale. I make a valiant effort to ignore the distracting thoughts performing an avant-garde opera in my brain, the scruffy mutt who sniffs my shoes when I tie my laces on a stoop, the white buds bursting from the trees in the park, so pretty that they make my heart race, the drunk, presumably homeless man I've been passing for years, who's shouting at no one in particular, “You don't know nothing about love! You ain't never gonna know nothing about love! All you know is having sex and counting your money.” But trying to focus on my breath is useless in the face of so many things to see, smell, touch, especially now that spring is bringing color back into the landscape. I run my fingers along the side of the building on my corner as I pass, watch a woman laughing to herself about some private treasured memory, drink in the fading sounds of the homeless guy's angry lament, squeeze the smooth, moist trunk of a scraggly tree.

God, I'm bad at yoga,
I tell myself.
God, I need yoga.

I feel desperation growing in me like a pair of chubby twins squirming restlessly in my belly. Vague anxiety about my future, both professional and romantic, has been simmering for a while and now feels like it has hit the boiling point. Sure, I experience a pang of loneliness and fear every time I kiss a boy goodbye for the last time, but this time the panic is exacerbated by my article and the onslaught of wrong men I've been meeting.

For years I've done what for me felt like the normal thing: meet guys, sleep with guys, fall in love (lust, infatuation) with them, drive them crazy, get driven crazy, dump them, get dumped. College was a series of back-to-back relationships with brief periods of sluttiness in between. Then, in the real world, there were longer relationships broken up by shorter, intenser ones—and the inevitable periods of sluttiness in between. I've never gone without sex or affection for long. So, why do I feel antsy and desperate, like if this scheme doesn't work, I'm going to be doomed to spend the rest of my life living in misery in a one-bedroom apartment full of greedy, smelly cats?

Courtney insists that human beings want to fall in love. By nature, we do not want to be alone, so sooner or later we all pair off. It was reassuring the first time she said it to me. But I was also twenty-four years old and bopping around arrogantly dumping near-perfect guys because of some minor flaw (leaves used dental floss in the shower, loves me too much), under the assumption that there were more near-perfect guys where they came from. But now it's almost a decade later and I still haven't met anyone as great as the boyfriend I dumped at twenty-four, and I have begun to doubt the wisdom of her words.

But this article is messing with me. Even as I run around saying it's just for fun and two dollars a word, even as I craft witty sentences proclaiming that it doesn't matter if the scheme leads to love or not, I know that it
could.
I mean, why couldn't I walk through the door of an apartment that happens to belong to the love of my life? My sister suggested that I'd meet my husband this way, and part of me hopes that and wants that and believes that the only reason I'm still single is that I didn't come up with this plan earlier.