The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, page 12
She looked at her phone again and still nothing, so she sat down on a bench and called Mike. A girl answered, which confused Veronica into silence. The voice said, “Do you know what time it is?”
It was a little bit past nine, maybe nine-thirty but Veronica didn’t answer because she was thinking. It dawned on her that it was earlier in California (which she’d forgotten . . . again). Like. A lot earlier. “Is Mike there?” Veronica asked.
The voice didn’t answer, just said, sort of annoyed and sleepy, “Are you the one who’s been texting all morning? Who is this?”
“Who’s this?” Veronica said, with more confidence than she felt.
The Voice just sighed, like Veronica was bothering her.
“Why are you answering Mike’s phone?” Veronica started to sweat everywhere, even in the crook of her elbows.
“I live here,” she said, “with Mike.”
“With Mike?” Veronica asked. “With Mike Carpenter?” Maybe The Voice was mistaken. “Like as his roommate?”
“Jesus. Like as his girlfriend. Is this Veronica?” How did she know Veronica’s name? The Voice yawned and said, “I assume this is Veronica? Maybe you should stop calling.”
Veronica watched the guy with the accordion fly past again. She did not like him anymore. “Is Mike there?” she said.
“Seriously,” the Voice said, “you should stop calling him probably.” She waited and Veronica waited, and then they both clicked off.
Veronica hit re-dial, sweating now in earnest. She got his voice mail (thank God) and said, in a stupid, fake-light-hearted voice, “I just had the weirdest conversation with someone who says she’s living with you.” Pause, pause, pause. “Call me, ok?” Pathetic. Her heart was racing.
She put on her sunglasses to give herself distance. She was sweating through her T-shirt and leggings and right through her sun-dress. Fifth Avenue seemed shitty now, like it was where she had been stupid and happy, so she walked over to Sixth, going from anger to shame to denial in jagged little circles as she walked. She told herself, “I’ll never speak to him again,” even though she was holding the phone in her sweaty hand, in case he called.
As she walked up Sixth she told herself that she could probably sleep with Mr. Andre if she wanted to, the way he had been rolling his eyes at her, and he was just the kind of guy who’d sleep with his nanny. The thought of other guys wanting to sleep with her made her feel, momentarily, less disposable.
The buildings on Sixth Avenue seemed taller, like they were keeping the sun from her. After a while she looked up from her feet and there was a park filled with pots of overflowing pink flowers, like a mirage.
People were playing golf (crazy!) in this tiny park, and people were sitting in big brown chairs like they were at their cabins in the Adirondacks and not in the middle of New York City. She walked into the park and past the people in chairs, past all the people lying on blankets on a green lawn, and up a few steps and, what the hell? There was a sea of people doing yoga. So odd.
She watched, leaning against the pedestal of a statue of Gertrude Stein, and remembered the line “A rose is a rose is a rose,” which she’d read in AP English. It had seemed pointless then, but with what had just happened, Veronica felt like she finally understood what the poem, and everything else on Earth, meant. Totally. A rose is a fucking rose, she thought.
The people doing yoga were on identical pink mats, with the yoga instructor teaching them how to do a Sun Salute. Then someone was handing her a rolled up mat. She thought she had to pay, but the guy (who had braids in his beard) said, “It’s free,” so she unfurled her pink mat.
“Now for Downward Facing Dog,” said the instructor-lady, who wore a little microphone headset so everyone could hear her. “Breeeeeathe.” She stretched out the word. “Let’s get down on our mats on our hands and knees.” Veronica’s dress was in the way, so she lifted it off so she was in her leggings and T-shirt. She took off the necklace with the key on it, too, realizing how much she had always hated that necklace, with its cliché interlocking hearts. It was so totally impersonal. God, Mike was an idiot.
“Your hands,” the instructor continued, “should be ahead of your shoulders.” Veronica looked up to make sure she was doing it correctly. “Goooood. Now curl your toes under, and when you exhale, lift your knees from the ground.” Up her butt went with everyone else’s. “With your next breath, push your heels down to your mats and feel the stretch along the backs of your legs.” Veronica pushed her heels down, trying to be careful, knowing that focus was the thing with yoga. “Breathe into your belly button,” the instructor said, and Veronica breathed into her belly button with complete concentration, as though it might change something.
Why hadn’t she ended it first with Mike? This is what she was thinking about. That sleepy woman on the phone was closer to Mike already than Veronica had ever been—had answered Mike’s cell phone—probably didn’t care whether Mike held her hand in public or not. Life must be so much easier, Veronica thought, when you didn’t care. When had they moved in together? Jesus. They were living together? It was hard to believe. “Breeeeeathe,” the instructor was saying.
When they lay down on their mats and looked up at the sky, Veronica had a thought that seemed to telescope through to her future self, as though she could almost predict that lit cigarette in the Plaza carpet too. She hoped, as she lay there, that this thing with Mike wouldn’t somehow ruin her, while knowing that it already had. It was one of those injuries, though, that you couldn’t see. She wouldn’t know for a long time how it had fucked her up. God, the whole thing pissed her off and hot tears fell down to her ears and onto the pink mat. It pissed her off so entirely.
She did her best to stay in her body and breathe, but she kept seeing herself as an old lady, still haunted, like Miss Havisham who died a spinster in her rotting wedding dress in Whatever-That-Book-Was that they’d read in AP English. As they crumbled up into Child’s Pose, Veronica was relieved to hide her face in her knees.
Everything felt ruined.
Afterwards she went back to Fifth and into St. Patrick’s. She wasn’t religious, but church sounded comforting. Inside, the light was blue from the sun coming through the stained glass windows. She watched someone pray, then got on her knees, put her hands together and bowed her head. Not knowing what to say, she asked, “Why?” which seemed like a sort-of-a-prayer, but the question just hung in the cool room like a dust mote, unanswered.
She knelt there, aware that she hadn’t been perfect either, not as bad as Mike, not like moving-in-with-someone-new-while-still-calling-yourself-someone-else’s-boyfriend, but somewhere on the spectrum of unkind. Cruel world, she thought. Sad, cruel, stupid world.
Then she lit a candle for herself, which she was pretty sure was not how it worked. Those candles were for people who had died, but it was all she could think to do. She slid a quarter in the box to pay for the candle where it made an echo-y little metallic plunk as it fell to the bottom with the other coins in the locked brass box.
She took the subway back up to the Andre’s only this time the guys taking up two seats seemed like real assholes. There was a baby crying, and suddenly his mom just lurched him up in the air out in the aisle facing away from her, and he threw up on the floor while everyone watched. The people nearby tucked their feet under their seats. What else could they do? The mother got off at the next stop without even trying to clean up anything. People really sucked.
As Veronica walked from the subway, she kept checking her phone, but nothing. She passed a guy asleep in a doorway with a big gray beard and a winter coat. She imagined all of the sweat that had probably collected in that coat, and what the water would look like if she washed it for him, how dark the water would be with everything he had been through, how she’d have to rinse it and rinse it before the water came clear—if the water ever came clear. She slipped a dollar under his elbow.
She checked her phone again, as if Mike calling me might re-animate her. But he didn’t call. Could thinking that Mike had loved her when he had been in love with someone else make her un-reanimatable? That’s what no one seemed to understand—that people could be broken beyond repair, that not everything bounced back like they did in cartoons.
When she got home, the doorman smiled and put his hand up to his hat. At the mirror in the elevator she lifted up her sunglasses and looked at herself to see if it was obvious that something delicate had been crushed to death in her, but no, she looked the same, only she had more freckles now from all the sun.
When she got in the apartment, something Mozart-y was playing. Prima said, “Hey there,” and Veronica noticed Prima’s faint mustache. “I’m putting her down for her nap,” Prima said, “and then let’s have some coffee.” She was probably the same age as Veronica’s mother.
Veronica sat at the kitchen table, lay her head on her hands and wished she wasn’t the kind of person who lay her head down on a kitchen table when people were cruel. Pathetic.
She thought how her sorrow would seem like failure to her parents, who had done what they could to set her up for happiness with their Tiki-Cups and knowing the names of the library lions. Veronica didn’t want them to know how totally she’d screwed up the happiness thing they’d wanted her to inherit. She thought about the careless people in Gatsby (high school again). There weren’t enough Tiki-Cups in the entire world to inoculate a person against the human tsunami of carelessness. She would forever be knocked down by that stuff. Jesus.
She finally stood up and looked into Maddie’s room. Maddie was smiling up at Prima, and Veronica, thought, Maybe she hasn’t been ruined by her parents yet.
When Prima came out to pour the coffee, Veronica handed her the necklace. “You want it?”
“You don’t want it?” Prima asked.
“No,” Veronica said. “It’s from my ex.”
“Oh,” said Prima. “That explains your face.”
Veronica laughed. “Your nails are incredible,” she said.
“Sick, right?” Prima put two mugs of coffee down, and stirred like six spoonfuls of sugar into hers. “Wait,” she whispered, “you want some?” She took a joint out of her uniform pocket and wiggled her eyebrows.
Prima lit up and passed it to Veronica. “So when did it end?” Prima asked.
“Like an hour ago.”
“Ha!” She saw Veronica staring at her phone. “Seriously, m’ija, you should turn that thing off for a while.”
“I know, but what if he calls?”
“Right,” Prima said, “but even if he does call, he can’t unbreak your heart, right?” They sat there for a while, staring. “Listen,” said Prima, putting one hand (warm from her coffee cup) over Veronica’s, “some broken things never get fixed. I’m serious as a heart attack.”
“Right,” Veronica said. “Right.”
Prima got up to refill her coffee cup.
The apartment felt warm and quiet with just the three of them there, Maddie asleep, Prima fussing with the coffee. Veronica felt like she’d never been as young as Maddie was, and knew she’d never be as old as Prima. She felt their heartbeats around her, smelled the coffee and the pot in the air, but knew in her deepest heart that what she was going through was unique.
Prima sat back down holding the coffee pot. “A heart that hasn’t been broken isn’t worth shit, anyway. Trust me. Turn off the phone.”
“Right,” Veronica said, not completely understanding. “I’ll turn it off,” she said, slipping it into the pocket of her sundress. It was on vibrate, so she’d feel it when he called.
Next Time
By 6:30 in the morning, the streets of midtown Manhattan were roiling. May, who hadn’t been in the city for months, stood on the stoop, stunned, while her mother slept upstairs. In a few hours they’d be settling her father’s estate, surrounded by lawyers, and May, as usual, hadn’t been able to sleep.
She hesitated, trying to figure out how to enter the river of men and women rushing past in their suits and sneakers, their earbuds in, staring down at their phones, taking up the entire sidewalk, purposefully oblivious to the world around them. The doorman stood next to her, drinking his coffee. “They are in such a rush,” he said to her, smiling, lifting his paper cup to indicate all of humanity.
She didn’t want to leave the doorman’s side. It was upsetting lately, the depth of the unkindness around her. May felt terribly vulnerable ever since her father had died, as though good and bad had tilted precariously when he had gotten off the see-saw and gone wherever people go.
May thought about going to the new bakery over by Fifth. She’d seen their pistachio éclairs in the window many times but had never gone in. Next time, she kept telling herself. Next time. But they looked expensive covered in a pale green glaze the color of matcha tea and caked with toasted pistachios. They wouldn’t be open yet, and anyway, an éclair at 6:30 in the morning? It seemed indefensible. Being in New York City made her want things she hadn’t even known existed, and made her want them with force.
It was still so early that there was time before her mother got up. You would think that Le Pain Quotidien would be open. But no. May had forgotten all of the schedules in the months since they’d been to the apartment, so she read the sign in their window. They wouldn’t open until seven, which didn’t feel soon enough. The wait staff stared out the window like drowned cows, looking at all the customers-they-wouldn’t-have who would go somewhere else.
Fine, May thought, she’d go to the corner of Sixth, to that fluorescent PAX with all of its cut up fruit in plastic boxes. It was the grapes that brought home the sadness of store-bought fruit salad, their navels brown and beginning to rot the minute they were plucked from their umbilicus. And the lighting at PAX was harsh, too bright and cheerful, like tourists trying to blend in while standing in the middle of the sidewalk always looking up, in everyone’s way.
When she got there, she remembered the way the cashier at PAX was way up high like she was on a throne of fruit salad. May had to reach way up to pay for her coffee, which she couldn’t pour herself but had to ask the throne lady to pour for her. “One coffee light with half and half.”
“Size?” the woman asked. Clearly, she hated May. Size? Oh God. There was a line forming behind her.
“Medium?” May asked. The woman on the throne sighed deeply without looking at May. “Small or large?”
“Small,” said May smiling, wishing this woman would like her. She couldn’t really win anymore. People hated her before they even knew her, before she even walked in the door.
And then came the receipt. Receipts. Jesus Christ. Now you got a receipt for a cup of coffee, for a pack of gum, shoved at you, hundreds of them a day, aggressive helpfulness.
What were customers supposed to do? They were supposed to order loudly and immediately, and then pay right away, and then take the change, the receipt and the cup of boiling hot coffee and get the hell out of the way so that the next person in line, who already hated them for taking so long, could scream his order at the woman on the fruit salad throne while she looked at her cuticles or the ceiling, or rolled her eyes at a co-worker. How could old people survive like this? May thought of her father being handed receipts, and him moving so slowly those last years, when he was still able to walk at all. How could anyone rush an old, sick man like that? She hated to think of him, vulnerable as those naked baby hamsters she’d seen at the pet store, alone in this city. She almost couldn’t bear it.
The receipts made her feel constantly, frantically inundated with tiny things that didn’t matter, a distraction from the fact that the world was falling apart. If May left the receipt on the counter, it was an act of aggression, wasn’t it? She was not the kind of person to litter, and leaving it on the counter felt like littering, like saying to the woman on the throne, “You clean up the mess.” Then again, taking the paper felt like succumbing, like she’d agreed to something she’d never meant to agree to.
Today, she left the receipt on the counter, exhausted already, her heart pounding, defeated and it wasn’t even 7 a.m. when she crossed back to the park. She could see the park employees in their green uniforms waiting for the last minutes to tick by before removing the chains that barred her entrance.
May held her warm cup in both hands and breathed. She saw a man asleep on one of the park’s steps. He was well dressed in khaki shorts and a pink, seersucker, short-sleeved shirt, a lot like the one her mother had purchased the day before at Orvis, on sale for forty-nine dollars. But his feet were bare, and May could see from the caked dirt and thick callouses there that his life was not in any way about pink seersucker shirts, as he lay curled in the fetal position on this chilly-ish October morning. She looked to see that he was breathing. He was. The morning had already been too much for her, and she felt like if she could be a kid again, if she could just have a do-over, a lot of suffering could be avoided if she were only more thoughtful this time around. Her heart was pounding. Thump thump thump. She wanted to see the man’s face, but worried that he might be someone she knew.
Finally one of the green-shirts unhooked the chain separating May from the park. She took her first step up toward the enormous planters, overflowing with pink and green begonias, and her shoulders fell an inch. She’d watched the pigeons eat every flower off a box of begonias the last time she’d been in the park. Who knew that pigeons ate begonia flowers? Her shoulders fell another inch as she stepped up into the park’s atmosphere. Oh, thank God the park was open. She wiped at her eyes with her free hand. Thank God for this park, for all parks.
May plunked down where she and her mother liked to drink their morning coffee, in a plastic Adirondack chair near the fountain, the South West Porch, it was called. There was a blond couple standing in front of the fountain taking pictures of themselves. Tourists, she thought, pulling back the plastic lid of her coffee. Their sneakers and camera looked expensive and they were very tall. German tourists. They were the worst, all “me first,” all elbows and no humor, striding around the city like gods.
