I hover above the toilet, my thighs rock hard as they hold my body in a seated position. The walls are covered in yellowing images of women from the 70s. Half-clothed, their nipples are big and their bushes unapologetic. There is a lot of denim. There is a lot of graffiti written in permanent marker over these women and their pouty lips.
I’ve brought some other boy here tonight. Most of the men I’ve slept with have passed through this place. It’s almost never a good place for a date. Too loud or too quiet. The band will have just stopped playing if we wanted live music or just begun setting up if we wanted to talk. I shake off a little bit and stand up, wash my hands in the sink with the plain smelling Dial soap they have here. Fix my hair in front of a non-existent mirror. I do this by running my fingers through it. It’s long and straight so it doesn’t change shape much, anyway.
Do not, if you can avoid it, fall in love with someone who has already told you they will not love you. They are usually not kidding. This is usually a very serious thing to say. I have fallen in love with someone who has already told me they can’t love me. I am not here at the bar with him, of course. I am out with someone else. I haven’t decided if I like this other person mostly because I am too busy contemplating how I will let the loveless man know that I love him.
This man that I am with is named Dennis. He is a tall gangly artist and I’ve only just met him earlier tonight, when I was out with Frannie at a bar around the corner. She’s ditched. She always ditches and goes home before the fun stuff really happens. The problem is she’s so tired all of the time. Her boss runs her ragged during the week and by the weekend she’s so burned out that if her head tips the right way, she’ll fall asleep like it was nothing. My problem is that I’m not even close to run ragged and by the time the weekend comes I’m so heavy bored I’ll do anything just to keep myself interested.
My beer is sweating against my palm. The band has started playing and I grab Dennis by the hand—we had been standing at the bar, in the corner farthest from the band—and we go out to the dance floor. The dance floor is really just an expanse of concrete where there are no chairs. I need him to want to dance with me. There are only a few people in the bar. Behind the bartender’s head is a big yellow sign, a movie marquee with the names of the beers they have on tap, and its gold light makes the whole place shimmer. At least that is what I think. There are peanut shells under our feet that crackle. Dennis pulls me close to his body and then he slouches down so his head rests on my shoulder like he wants me to hold him up. He relaxes his shoulders until he’s made of putty. We have the kind of physical intimacy that can only come when you don’t really know someone.
I giggle and raise his arms out to his sides like he is a puppet and I move one to my lower back and hold the other in my hand. I take him by the torso and straighten him back up. I raise his head to look over my head. He is tall, taller than the man I love, and I find that I like it.
There is a tattoo of a mushroom in the space right by where Dennis’s elbow folds. He’s a mushroom forager, he tells me. I think immediately of magic mushrooms, Dennis in a room with his long arms with their ropey muscles spread out jelly-like, his curly hair mashed against the Berber carpet of someone’s parent’s house. But, no, it’s not that. He collects mushrooms at the wet root bases of trees, plants shaped like ears listening in the forest, swollen dead fingers, flat porous things that have a world full of chambers in them. He sells them to restaurants. There is nothing more romantic to me than someone who just barely manages to pay their bills every month.
The man I am in love with—the one I am not out with—is a freelancer. When we talk he lets out his nervous energy about not having enough work. One day he is hunched in the bottom of an ice cream truck directing a reality show and the next week he is writing corporate sketches. He doesn’t like it. He says he’s been sad for three years running. I say, should you start to take anti-depressants? I take them. He says no he doesn’t believe in them and I regret saying I take them. I want to be pure for him.
To Dennis it doesn’t matter if I am pure or not. What kind of pure girl picks up a man at a bar, anyway? I am wearing jeans with big holes in them so you can see my knees. I am so tan this summer, tanner than I’ve been in years. A few new freckles have popped up on my kneecaps. I think that is mostly a sign of impending skin cancer but they are so pretty. I look like a fawn. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be: a beautiful deer.
Dennis is a wind-up toy and he lets me guide him around the dance floor. The hand on my lower back is also the hand he is holding his beer with. The Naragansett sweats into the waistband of my jeans. It is hot in the bar and it feels good, like ice down your bathing suit in the summertime. We dance and dance and do not talk and suddenly it is four in the morning and they are turning on the overhead lights, turning off the glimmer of the yellow sign.
“Well,” Dennis says, “I guess we have to go.”
“Well,” I say, “ I guess you’re pretty right about that.”
We laugh. No one has to say anything intelligent unless they want to and neither of us wants to right now. The beer has made me feel light. The night is breezy and kind and Dennis slings an arm around me. Though I have been here so many times, I’m turned around. I’m not always out so late.
“Let’s take a cab,” I say, thinking of the loveless man and how I want to get home sooner so I can wake up sooner tomorrow morning, so I can not be hungover because I have agreed to go see his comedy show.
“Anything for you,” I had said to him when he asked me to come. He asked me and put a hand on my shoulder and I knew I shouldn’t think anything of it, but I did. He was wearing a black polo shirt. I usually hate black polo shirts—they’re such a schoolboy look—but on him it looked perfectly right.
“No, no, NO CABS,” Dennis says. He’s so adamant, I don’t ask why. My head feels cottony and I wonder if it was a mistake to leave with Dennis. Then he grabs my hand, all easy, and I think, no, no it’s all fine.
He steers me down a street that’s usually totally lit up with shops. But that would have been hours ago when the shops were actually open. Now they’re all boarded up for the night. We do see a sliver of light coming from a slightly open garage door and a cracked door next to it.
“Let’s investigate,” Dennis says. He, as he has told me, is in town only for the weekend. He wants to stay up as late as he can. There is marijuana at his friend’s house. If he ever feels too bad tomorrow, he can smoke that. He believes so deeply in the high fixing him that I think he’s already solved the whole hangover; he knows the pot will help.
“Ok,” I say, because his arm is over my shoulder and it’s already four am so what is there to lose now? There have been a lot of nights like this.
The two of us crouch down to the sidewalk so we can look under the sliver of the open garage and wonder what this place is. It smells good. The scent of a mother’s kitchen or something else I can’t place.
A man opens the door next to the garage and we stand up quickly and walk over to him to peer in hungrily like little kids in a forbidden closet.
“What is this place?” Dennis asks. We can see now that it is a factory of some sort.
“It’s a pita factory,” the man says, “we just opened for the day.”
“I want to buy some!” Dennis says, “ a whole factory bag, please!” He’s being theatrical and I like it.
“You can’t buy any like this, we have to send it to providers.”
“Can’t we just buy a bag or something, like wholesale or something?” Dennis’s big gesture is getting the air knocked out of it by the second. The bread will help my inevitable hangover if we can get it. His big theatrical grin now makes his mouth look too big, like it’s going to crack his face in half. I don’t love standing in here anymore. My arms don’t look tan in the harsh light of the factory.
Just then, to save us from more embarrassment, a man comes out of the back in an apron dusted with flour. He’s holding a plastic bag full of pita bread that’s steaming from the inside. It’s homey and perfect.
Dennis’s face breaks into a real smile. He’s really lovely when he smiles. His teeth are crooked on the bottom and his lips are rose pink. The man I love has teeth that sit straight in a row. I know he had braces as an adult and it’s one of the many things I find inexplicably charming about him.
“This is for you,” the man says and he extends his arm towards Dennis, “my name is Marcos.”
We take the bag as the little miracle it is. I swear to myself I will always remember his name: Marcos. Back on the sidewalk Dennis opens the bag and the steam comes rushing out, condensing on both of our eyelashes. We eat the bread with drunken abandon, tearing at it loosely. With his mouth open, Dennis tells me which way to his friend’s house. The directions are all wrong.
On a street corner a few blocks from the bar, Dennis droops his arm on my shoulders. He’s got the pita in one hand. There’s a guy in his pajamas walking his dog near us and on the next corner the light from a 24 hour bodega spills into the street.
“You know what, Brenda? Everyone will disappoint you,” he says. Clear out of the blue, like it was part of some larger discussion we’d been having. Then he feeds me a piece of bread, cluck cluck into my beak like a baby bird.
There wasn’t anything to say back to him. I thought of the man I had pinned my hopes on and how he was older than me and more guarded. I didn’t know if he could be silly like this. I don’t know if he would ever sling his arm around me like that. Everything seemed so pointless right then.
We can’t find his friend’s house so we go back to my apartment (of course we do) and we take our clothes off and the sex is fine. There’s this one transcendent moment, though, when I close my eyes. His hand is holding my head tight to the side of his, his fingers pushed up and tangled in my hair and our legs are intertwined and we’re about to fall off my small bed, and I forget for a second who I am. I could be anyone; he is just another someone. But of course we are not just anyone, we are us. Not the loveless man and not another girl.
When we wake up in the morning, we get eggs and it is fine. I like Dennis’s hair as much in the morning as I did the night before which is a relief. But still, in my heart, I carry around this other stone heavy love. Dennis says goodbye and goes to his friend’s house to smoke the weed that will save him. Hallelujah. I go back to my bed and roll around in the sheets we had sex in and think of this man I love and his scruffy brown beard and the way his jeans hang around his waist. We were sitting on my stoop as he said he wouldn’t, couldn’t give me the love and care he thought I wanted. It was a breezy late spring night. We were both waking from a long winter, blinking into action.
“I’m not asking for much of anything,” I said, “I just want to spend some more time with you.” He could see need burning bright behind my eyes that I didn’t know was there.
“You’re smart and beautiful,” he said. “But I can’t be that for anyone.”
He got in the back of a cab and stuck his head out the window to look at me until he was out of sight. It was a certain look that I would come to recognize, a mournful look on the face of a man asked to be someone he’s decided he can’t be. No kidding around.
I bury my face in the pillow. Some of the pita is still left in the bag on my bedside table. I go back to sleep and dream of nothing. I wake up and eat some of the pita. It’s gone stale and chewy overnight because Dennis left the bag open. Through my bedroom window I see birds flying in and out of the branches of the Oak tree on my corner. None of them stay for very long. It’s just one stop on a journey to their nest. I eat and eat until the rest of the pita is gone.
“Only if you let them. Everyone will disappoint you only if you let them.” I think of this response days after Dennis has left town. I want to call him and say that to him but I don’t have his phone number, so I say it while waiting on a subway platform. If there was a way to get the message to him, it seems sending it on the wind from the A train is as good a messenger as any.
I don’t want to be disappointed anymore and so I decide to mourn the love for the loveless man. I think I’ll probably carry him around with me for a bit longer. That mouth. The way his one canine tooth curves in his otherwise perfect smile. I think I loved him, but I’m not sure.
If the A train is carrying messages today, I hope it will take one to my loveless man and let him know I’m moving on. I hope it will take one to Frannie and tell her to get ready because we will go out tonight and she is not allowed to be tired from her job. I hope it will take one to me, to be waiting on my doorstep. It’s ok, it will say, it’s ok. You’ve known love.
There will be more men and there will be more nights. This bar or some other bar just like it will continue to exist and so will I. Maybe in the future I’ll look back on this as an important summer of my life. The evenings before I knew the loveless man actually really did love me or before I realized how happy I’d been in the pita factory with a new man. But now I am just here again, dancing, and Frannie has finally been able to stay out the whole night and we dance together. She’s blonde and her hair is beautiful in the golden light. I’ve filled in my eyebrows so they are dark and sharp and dramatic. It looks a little homespun but both of us agree: it’s interesting. The band stops playing and we go to get another drink. Frannie rolls the cold can across her forehead. It looks so cool I do the same thing. It feels good, like ice down your bathing suit.
