The Illest, page 3
“So you and my aunt must be pretty close if you gave her a copy of your favorite book,” he said between bites of his food.
“She’s one of my best friends.” Eris allowed the words to hang in the air, giving them full gravity, which only made Troy more curious.
“How did you meet Aunt Flo? I have to admit I’m pretty surprised that the two of you even know each other.”
Eris burst into laughter, lowering her face and covering her mouth with her hand. She laughed hard, rocking back in her seat, the corners of her eyes moistening. Troy stared on in befuddlement, having no idea of what he had said that would elicit this kind of response. Was she laughing at him or something he said? His insecurities emerged and thickened the air around him.
“I’m sorry,” she finally managed. “It’s just that I’m not used to someone saying ‘Aunt Flo’ about an actual person.”
Troy shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t get it.”
“Well, you’re a guy, so maybe you wouldn’t. To a woman, Aunt Flo is a monthly visitor.”
He thought about it for a second. Then he blurted out, “Oh, a period?”
In the moment he heard his voice and saw the huge, embarrassed smile on Eris’s face, he realized that he had missed the cue to use discretion on the topic. He mumbled the words “Aunt Flo” to himself quietly, deciding then that he needed to have another name for his mother’s sister. He reasoned that he would call her Flo when talking to Eris, as it was awkward for him to say Aunt Florence, a name that only put him in the mindset of The Jeffersons TV show and the sassy maid of the same name. Plus, the name Florence felt too formal for such a laid back and cool woman.
Eris inhaled deeply, her laughter petering out into light exhalations. “I met Flo about six years ago. At the time, she was married to Dante Wilbourne over at Viacom. We were at a party down in SoHo and were introduced by a mutual friend. Truth be told, I just thought she would be someone I knew in passing, but that night we were both wearing handbags by the same designer, so we got into a conversation about that. By the end of the night, we had moved on to talking about books and what it was like for each of us moving to New York from The South. We just hit it off.
“After that, we would get together for lunch sometimes, and I guess we just got to a point where we trusted each other. When her marriage to Dante was on the rocks, I did my best to be there for her. Then later on when I was going through a situation with this guy I was dating, and things were pretty ugly, she was there for me, helping me through it. We’ve been through a lot together, and she’s one of the few people on this planet that I actually trust. She’s like an older sister to me, and frankly, at this point in my life, I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“Is that why you took me up on the tea this past Sunday?” Troy asked.
“You kind of put everything out there when I was leaving, and I thought to myself that you seemed like a nice enough guy to talk to for a few minutes. But I’m not gonna lie. If you had been anyone else’s nephew, I probably would have kept it moving right along.”
He nodded, for once appreciating his proximity to Flo, while feeling slightly deflated that her kindness was more the result of nepotism than his own charm.
Once the bill came, Troy offered to pay.
“I told you earlier. I got this,” Eris said, sliding her hand around his and gripping the leather-encased bill.
“Well, thank you,” he responded. “At least let me pick up the tip then.”
Eris chuckled, her voice almost musical. “I take it you’re not used to women paying for the meal.”
“Truthfully? No.”
“Well, sit back and enjoy it. I’m sure you’ll be back to paying for meals in no time.”
He laughed to himself. “Probably.”
They walked outside into the warm night air, and Troy glanced down at his watch. It was almost 1 a.m., but he was not ready for the evening to end just yet. He waited for a moment to see what Eris wanted to do, and when she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Feel like going for a walk?”
“Sure.”
As they walked past the brownstones lining either side of the street, Troy began to wonder if this was in fact a date. It felt intimate and comfortable in the way that a date in Atlanta would have felt. The last date he had been on was a week before graduation and it was with another graduating senior named Beulah (a name he couldn’t seem to match to her face). It was more of a “farewell/sorry we never hooked up in college” kind of date that ended with awkward, regrettable sex. Needless to say, he was still enjoying his evening with Eris and things were going ten times better than they did at the height of his date with Beulah.
“I can’t see how Bad Boy is gonna survive without Biggie. You can’t possibly mean that Puffy is gonna sell any records off his new album,” Troy said.
“Puff is an entertainer, if ever there were one. Watch and see. He’s probably gonna sell more records than any other artist on Bad Boy,” Eris responded.
“But he can’t rap!”
“I have a feeling that won’t matter too much if his tracks are hot.”
“Eris, as much as I want you to be right, I think you’re overestimating him. He’s a business guy, not a rapper. That album is gonna tank like the Exxon Valdez.”
She laughed. “We’ll see.”
“You know,” Troy said, pacing his steps to correspond evenly with hers, “this has been really cool—spending time with you.”
Eris nodded. “You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Do you think maybe we could do this again—soon?”
“Okay.”
At that moment, he reached for her hand and stopped her in her tracks. Standing beneath the overarching canopy of a small tree, he said, “I have a question to ask you. Is this a date?”
Eris chuckled and looked away, shrugging her shoulders. “Aren’t we just hanging out? Two people enjoying each other’s company.”
“It feels like more. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I feel like I should kiss you right now.”
“Oh, you do? What’s giving you that vibe?”
“I don’t know. This. Here. Right now. If this isn’t a date, this would definitely be the best non-date of my life.”
“You like to overthink things, don’t you,” Eris said, continuing to walk down the sidewalk.
Troy quickly caught up to her, now feeling slightly embarrassed. Was he supposed to have not said anything and just kiss her? He didn’t know, but he was determined to find out.
He reached for her hand again, and when she turned to face him, he leaned in and kissed her softly on her lips. She chuckled softly to herself, her eyes registering a mild surprise. For the life of him, he could not tell what she was thinking now that he had acted.
“That was nice,” she finally said.
He leaned in to kiss her again, but she placed a hand on his chest, pushing him back. “Easy, Loverboy.”
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked.
“No, but I think we need to call it an evening.”
Troy waited for her to say she was just kidding. After all, they had only walked two blocks from the restaurant. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to kiss her after all.
“Are you sure I didn’t do something wrong?” he asked again.
“You’re cool,” she offered nonchalantly.
“Can I get your number and call you some time then?” he asked.
“Don’t worry. I know how to contact you.”
She stepped between two parked cars and lifted her hand, hailing a passing taxi. When the vehicle stopped, she looked back. “I enjoyed dinner.”
“Yeah, it was nice.”
Troy was stunned as Eris got into the cab and it rolled off into the night.
Standing there on the street with nothing but the muted sounds of the city around him, he wondered what had gone wrong. Why had she left him all alone on a dark street? She had picked him up, fed him, and dropped him off on the corner like a used-up, snot-filled rag, and while a part of him would have rejoiced in being a part of her world for the few hours of magic they shared, the other part of him felt betrayed, let down, and disappointed.
By the time he reached the train station and took a seat on the bench to wait indefinitely for the next train to come, he almost believed everything he had just experienced was a dream—a really bad dream—but he knew the truth: he was awake, in a tunnel below ground, and Eris, in all of her glorious splendor, was now gone.
5
Perspectives
Troy awoke, stretched out perpendicularly across his bed, the sun blazing through the room’s blinds. He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, surprised to see that it was nearly 1 p.m. He could scarcely remember how he made it home. All he could make out was that he had waited nearly half an hour for the train and had fallen asleep on the ride home, nearly missing his stop. How he made it up the stairs to the his bedroom on the second floor of Flo’s brownstone was beyond him.
As soon as he placed his feet on the floor and stood up, the thought of the dinner with Eris filled his head. It had all ended so weirdly. Even as he stumbled into the shower, he still had an “out of sync” feeling about all that had happened. He had totally misread her body language. Still, she had allowed him that first kiss. Maybe there was much more to it than she was willing to tell him.
Flo had a computer in one of the bedrooms that had been converted into an office space, so Troy logged on to the Internet and went to Yahoo! to search for anything he could find on Eris. Mainly, he wanted to know if she was romantically involved with anyone. He didn’t know if they put those kinds of things on the Internet, but he imagined it would be pretty cool if they did. When his search came up empty, save the few things about her films, he resigned himself to the fact that he would just have to let the situation play out on its own. Maybe she would call; maybe she wouldn’t. Either way, he would have to be okay with that.
Once he had brushed his teeth and gotten dressed, he walked downstairs to the library, picked up the copy of Mama Day he had been reading, the one Eris had given Flo, and stretched out on the chaise lounge.
He had to stop and reread every other paragraph because his mind kept drifting. Was Eris thinking about last night like he was? What did she want from him? The dinner had been her idea. In fact, every major element of the time they had been around each other since they met she had overseen. Maybe he was just a temporary escape from the life she knew. Most of her friends and associates were probably connected to the entertainment industry. He was just a mass communications grad from a small black college in Atlanta, and for the moment, at least, he was unconnected to her world. He was just a guy on vacation taking in the beauty of New York.
Unable to still his mind, Troy stood up, tossing the book on the chaise. He returned to his bedroom and packed a notebook and camera into his backpack. He would just go exploring today, he figured. Grabbing his wallet and keys from the dresser beside the bed, he headed downstairs, locked up the brownstone, and started his trek across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.
“What exactly is celebrity?” Troy pondered, as he navigated the streets of the financial district. Was it the fact that your face and your art were ubiquitous to a particular population? Did it make those people really any different from people who did not have the same level of exposure? After all, celebrities were just doing their jobs, and it just so happened that those jobs were just more high profile than others. But if celebrities were just high profile workers, why did so many people clamor for fame or the chance to be scrutinized by the general populous? Maybe it had to do with money—or better yet the misperception that fame and wealth were conjoined. Just a glance at many of the rappers perpetuating the illusion of wealth because their record labels forced them to do a Hype Williams video was enough to make one wonder if there was some form of social security plan for the celebrity whose fame had expired before his bank account birthed a positive integer.
Troy cared increasingly less about Eris’s celebrity and next to nothing about whether her talents had netted her a healthy income. All he knew was that he was becoming more enamored with her, the same as he would a sista he had been heavily scoping on the yard at Ellison-Wright. This was a difficult notion to juxtapose with her awkward departure from the previous evening, though.
If he were to focus on everything from the moment he saw her on the corner of 49th and Broadway until the moment they walked out of the Italian restaurant, he would have slept soundly, blissfully even, but those last minutes were impossible to ignore. For every minute he sat in the bowels of the Metro station waiting for a train to come in the wee hours of the morning, he felt the compounding sting of her abrupt departure. Maybe the kiss was too much.
The kiss was probably too much.
But hadn’t she kissed him back? And hadn’t she said that it was nice? Wouldn’t that have been an invitation to continue?
As Troy removed the SLR camera from his backpack and attached the zoom lens, it began to dawn on him that maybe he had not done anything wrong after all. Maybe Eris’s conflicts were of a more ambivalent and personal nature and had little to do with him. Troy considered this for a moment, but it did not provide him the kind of relief he so desperately craved.
Pointing his camera at the Brooklyn Heights promenade, he began snapping shot after shot. From the other side of the East River, it was easy to think the entire view of things was Manhattan-centric. Seeing his neighborhood from Manhattan, however, provided him a fresher perspective. The view was different, low-key. Beautiful.
He could hardly make out the people on the promenade and wondered briefly if perhaps Eris was walking along the brick path looking casually across the East River to where he stood. He would need binoculars, definitely something much stronger than his lens, to know if that were true, but he doubted it. After last night he was unsure of whether their paths would ever cross during his remaining weeks in Brooklyn.
It had been magical, yes. Brief and inviting? Yes. But was it destined to be more than an incredibly surreal, yet singular, occurrence? Probably not.
Once Troy finished taking pictures, he caught a train up to the Village, had a slice of pizza, and returned back to Flo’s place, content to spend the rest of the afternoon reading and listening to music. He was, after all, on vacation, and he knew that USC would provide him with little time to rest in the fall.
6
Heat
As Troy climbed the steps of the brownstone, he noticed a folded sheet of paper taped to the front door. He quickly peeled it away and opened it.
Troy,
I was in the neighborhood and just dropped by to see if you were around. Call me when you get a minute. (718) 555-2235.
Eris
She had come back after all. And she had left him a phone number.
Troy had been mentally preparing himself to accept the fact that he would never see her again, except maybe on the big screen, but the note, in its beautiful cursive penmanship, begged to differ.
He examined the sheet of paper looking for a time. She might still be in the neighborhood, he thought, as he trotted down the stairs and over to the promenade. Had she really been there while his lens was pointed in this direction?
He scanned the length of the promenade looking for Eris and then for people who might have been Eris in disguise. The only people he saw, however, were the usual people from the neighborhood, the regulars who walked their dogs, jogged, or lazed about the benches daily.
He walked back around to Henry Street and headed for Montague, but once he reached the ice cream parlor there, he knew that he would never be able to find her among the hundreds of people scattered sporadically down the street going toward Fulton Street. He had simply missed her.
Still, there was the phone number, something that assured him that they would be able to reconnect regardless.
He trotted back to the brownstone, raced upstairs, and picked up the phone.
The phone rang several times before Eris answered.
“Troy?” she said.
He blushed at the thought that she had been anticipating his call to the point she would answer with his name.
“How did you know?” he said, more as a play of modesty than anything else.
“Flo’s number is in my phone already. It came up on the screen.”
Troy chuckled to cover his embarrassment, reminding himself that he was still on the phone talking to Eris—which had to be pretty damn spectacular, given the situation.
“I just got back to the house. When did you come through?” he asked.
“Oh, I passed through around noon. I was just in the neighborhood and decided to drop in and check on you.”
She said it like she was doing Flo a favor and had no personal interest invested in the situation. Troy found this a bit difficult to believe, though.
“I hate that I missed you. It would have been nice seeing you again.”
“Yeah,” she said.
He could not tell if she was being nice or genuine.
“I’m free for the rest of the evening—if you wanted to hook up and hang out,” he offered.
“Hold on,” she said, stepping away from the phone.
He waited for nearly two minutes before she returned.
“Wanna go to this event with me tonight?” she asked. “It’s a fashion show for Fila or something like that.”
Troy grinned so widely that he felt his face aching from the stretch. “Sure. Just tell me when to be ready.”
“The invite says seven, but I know the show won’t start until closer to eight. I can have the car come by and get you around 6:30.”
“But how should I dress?”
“It’s a fashion show. Just wear something chill. There’ll probably be a DJ, an open bar, and a lot industry people there. I’m wearing a designer tee, jeans, stilettos, and one of my bags.”
“Oh,” Troy said, suddenly realizing that this was the kind of event that was actually several levels above his present social station. There would be celebrities there, he knew, and with him arriving with Eris, he would need to really dig into his vault of confidence to pull this off. For a split second, he almost asked if he could bail out, but he knew she would never present him with the opportunity unless she really wanted him to go. He would just have to suck it up and pull himself together. “I’ll be ready,” he finally said.
“She’s one of my best friends.” Eris allowed the words to hang in the air, giving them full gravity, which only made Troy more curious.
“How did you meet Aunt Flo? I have to admit I’m pretty surprised that the two of you even know each other.”
Eris burst into laughter, lowering her face and covering her mouth with her hand. She laughed hard, rocking back in her seat, the corners of her eyes moistening. Troy stared on in befuddlement, having no idea of what he had said that would elicit this kind of response. Was she laughing at him or something he said? His insecurities emerged and thickened the air around him.
“I’m sorry,” she finally managed. “It’s just that I’m not used to someone saying ‘Aunt Flo’ about an actual person.”
Troy shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t get it.”
“Well, you’re a guy, so maybe you wouldn’t. To a woman, Aunt Flo is a monthly visitor.”
He thought about it for a second. Then he blurted out, “Oh, a period?”
In the moment he heard his voice and saw the huge, embarrassed smile on Eris’s face, he realized that he had missed the cue to use discretion on the topic. He mumbled the words “Aunt Flo” to himself quietly, deciding then that he needed to have another name for his mother’s sister. He reasoned that he would call her Flo when talking to Eris, as it was awkward for him to say Aunt Florence, a name that only put him in the mindset of The Jeffersons TV show and the sassy maid of the same name. Plus, the name Florence felt too formal for such a laid back and cool woman.
Eris inhaled deeply, her laughter petering out into light exhalations. “I met Flo about six years ago. At the time, she was married to Dante Wilbourne over at Viacom. We were at a party down in SoHo and were introduced by a mutual friend. Truth be told, I just thought she would be someone I knew in passing, but that night we were both wearing handbags by the same designer, so we got into a conversation about that. By the end of the night, we had moved on to talking about books and what it was like for each of us moving to New York from The South. We just hit it off.
“After that, we would get together for lunch sometimes, and I guess we just got to a point where we trusted each other. When her marriage to Dante was on the rocks, I did my best to be there for her. Then later on when I was going through a situation with this guy I was dating, and things were pretty ugly, she was there for me, helping me through it. We’ve been through a lot together, and she’s one of the few people on this planet that I actually trust. She’s like an older sister to me, and frankly, at this point in my life, I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“Is that why you took me up on the tea this past Sunday?” Troy asked.
“You kind of put everything out there when I was leaving, and I thought to myself that you seemed like a nice enough guy to talk to for a few minutes. But I’m not gonna lie. If you had been anyone else’s nephew, I probably would have kept it moving right along.”
He nodded, for once appreciating his proximity to Flo, while feeling slightly deflated that her kindness was more the result of nepotism than his own charm.
Once the bill came, Troy offered to pay.
“I told you earlier. I got this,” Eris said, sliding her hand around his and gripping the leather-encased bill.
“Well, thank you,” he responded. “At least let me pick up the tip then.”
Eris chuckled, her voice almost musical. “I take it you’re not used to women paying for the meal.”
“Truthfully? No.”
“Well, sit back and enjoy it. I’m sure you’ll be back to paying for meals in no time.”
He laughed to himself. “Probably.”
They walked outside into the warm night air, and Troy glanced down at his watch. It was almost 1 a.m., but he was not ready for the evening to end just yet. He waited for a moment to see what Eris wanted to do, and when she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Feel like going for a walk?”
“Sure.”
As they walked past the brownstones lining either side of the street, Troy began to wonder if this was in fact a date. It felt intimate and comfortable in the way that a date in Atlanta would have felt. The last date he had been on was a week before graduation and it was with another graduating senior named Beulah (a name he couldn’t seem to match to her face). It was more of a “farewell/sorry we never hooked up in college” kind of date that ended with awkward, regrettable sex. Needless to say, he was still enjoying his evening with Eris and things were going ten times better than they did at the height of his date with Beulah.
“I can’t see how Bad Boy is gonna survive without Biggie. You can’t possibly mean that Puffy is gonna sell any records off his new album,” Troy said.
“Puff is an entertainer, if ever there were one. Watch and see. He’s probably gonna sell more records than any other artist on Bad Boy,” Eris responded.
“But he can’t rap!”
“I have a feeling that won’t matter too much if his tracks are hot.”
“Eris, as much as I want you to be right, I think you’re overestimating him. He’s a business guy, not a rapper. That album is gonna tank like the Exxon Valdez.”
She laughed. “We’ll see.”
“You know,” Troy said, pacing his steps to correspond evenly with hers, “this has been really cool—spending time with you.”
Eris nodded. “You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Do you think maybe we could do this again—soon?”
“Okay.”
At that moment, he reached for her hand and stopped her in her tracks. Standing beneath the overarching canopy of a small tree, he said, “I have a question to ask you. Is this a date?”
Eris chuckled and looked away, shrugging her shoulders. “Aren’t we just hanging out? Two people enjoying each other’s company.”
“It feels like more. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I feel like I should kiss you right now.”
“Oh, you do? What’s giving you that vibe?”
“I don’t know. This. Here. Right now. If this isn’t a date, this would definitely be the best non-date of my life.”
“You like to overthink things, don’t you,” Eris said, continuing to walk down the sidewalk.
Troy quickly caught up to her, now feeling slightly embarrassed. Was he supposed to have not said anything and just kiss her? He didn’t know, but he was determined to find out.
He reached for her hand again, and when she turned to face him, he leaned in and kissed her softly on her lips. She chuckled softly to herself, her eyes registering a mild surprise. For the life of him, he could not tell what she was thinking now that he had acted.
“That was nice,” she finally said.
He leaned in to kiss her again, but she placed a hand on his chest, pushing him back. “Easy, Loverboy.”
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked.
“No, but I think we need to call it an evening.”
Troy waited for her to say she was just kidding. After all, they had only walked two blocks from the restaurant. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to kiss her after all.
“Are you sure I didn’t do something wrong?” he asked again.
“You’re cool,” she offered nonchalantly.
“Can I get your number and call you some time then?” he asked.
“Don’t worry. I know how to contact you.”
She stepped between two parked cars and lifted her hand, hailing a passing taxi. When the vehicle stopped, she looked back. “I enjoyed dinner.”
“Yeah, it was nice.”
Troy was stunned as Eris got into the cab and it rolled off into the night.
Standing there on the street with nothing but the muted sounds of the city around him, he wondered what had gone wrong. Why had she left him all alone on a dark street? She had picked him up, fed him, and dropped him off on the corner like a used-up, snot-filled rag, and while a part of him would have rejoiced in being a part of her world for the few hours of magic they shared, the other part of him felt betrayed, let down, and disappointed.
By the time he reached the train station and took a seat on the bench to wait indefinitely for the next train to come, he almost believed everything he had just experienced was a dream—a really bad dream—but he knew the truth: he was awake, in a tunnel below ground, and Eris, in all of her glorious splendor, was now gone.
5
Perspectives
Troy awoke, stretched out perpendicularly across his bed, the sun blazing through the room’s blinds. He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, surprised to see that it was nearly 1 p.m. He could scarcely remember how he made it home. All he could make out was that he had waited nearly half an hour for the train and had fallen asleep on the ride home, nearly missing his stop. How he made it up the stairs to the his bedroom on the second floor of Flo’s brownstone was beyond him.
As soon as he placed his feet on the floor and stood up, the thought of the dinner with Eris filled his head. It had all ended so weirdly. Even as he stumbled into the shower, he still had an “out of sync” feeling about all that had happened. He had totally misread her body language. Still, she had allowed him that first kiss. Maybe there was much more to it than she was willing to tell him.
Flo had a computer in one of the bedrooms that had been converted into an office space, so Troy logged on to the Internet and went to Yahoo! to search for anything he could find on Eris. Mainly, he wanted to know if she was romantically involved with anyone. He didn’t know if they put those kinds of things on the Internet, but he imagined it would be pretty cool if they did. When his search came up empty, save the few things about her films, he resigned himself to the fact that he would just have to let the situation play out on its own. Maybe she would call; maybe she wouldn’t. Either way, he would have to be okay with that.
Once he had brushed his teeth and gotten dressed, he walked downstairs to the library, picked up the copy of Mama Day he had been reading, the one Eris had given Flo, and stretched out on the chaise lounge.
He had to stop and reread every other paragraph because his mind kept drifting. Was Eris thinking about last night like he was? What did she want from him? The dinner had been her idea. In fact, every major element of the time they had been around each other since they met she had overseen. Maybe he was just a temporary escape from the life she knew. Most of her friends and associates were probably connected to the entertainment industry. He was just a mass communications grad from a small black college in Atlanta, and for the moment, at least, he was unconnected to her world. He was just a guy on vacation taking in the beauty of New York.
Unable to still his mind, Troy stood up, tossing the book on the chaise. He returned to his bedroom and packed a notebook and camera into his backpack. He would just go exploring today, he figured. Grabbing his wallet and keys from the dresser beside the bed, he headed downstairs, locked up the brownstone, and started his trek across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.
“What exactly is celebrity?” Troy pondered, as he navigated the streets of the financial district. Was it the fact that your face and your art were ubiquitous to a particular population? Did it make those people really any different from people who did not have the same level of exposure? After all, celebrities were just doing their jobs, and it just so happened that those jobs were just more high profile than others. But if celebrities were just high profile workers, why did so many people clamor for fame or the chance to be scrutinized by the general populous? Maybe it had to do with money—or better yet the misperception that fame and wealth were conjoined. Just a glance at many of the rappers perpetuating the illusion of wealth because their record labels forced them to do a Hype Williams video was enough to make one wonder if there was some form of social security plan for the celebrity whose fame had expired before his bank account birthed a positive integer.
Troy cared increasingly less about Eris’s celebrity and next to nothing about whether her talents had netted her a healthy income. All he knew was that he was becoming more enamored with her, the same as he would a sista he had been heavily scoping on the yard at Ellison-Wright. This was a difficult notion to juxtapose with her awkward departure from the previous evening, though.
If he were to focus on everything from the moment he saw her on the corner of 49th and Broadway until the moment they walked out of the Italian restaurant, he would have slept soundly, blissfully even, but those last minutes were impossible to ignore. For every minute he sat in the bowels of the Metro station waiting for a train to come in the wee hours of the morning, he felt the compounding sting of her abrupt departure. Maybe the kiss was too much.
The kiss was probably too much.
But hadn’t she kissed him back? And hadn’t she said that it was nice? Wouldn’t that have been an invitation to continue?
As Troy removed the SLR camera from his backpack and attached the zoom lens, it began to dawn on him that maybe he had not done anything wrong after all. Maybe Eris’s conflicts were of a more ambivalent and personal nature and had little to do with him. Troy considered this for a moment, but it did not provide him the kind of relief he so desperately craved.
Pointing his camera at the Brooklyn Heights promenade, he began snapping shot after shot. From the other side of the East River, it was easy to think the entire view of things was Manhattan-centric. Seeing his neighborhood from Manhattan, however, provided him a fresher perspective. The view was different, low-key. Beautiful.
He could hardly make out the people on the promenade and wondered briefly if perhaps Eris was walking along the brick path looking casually across the East River to where he stood. He would need binoculars, definitely something much stronger than his lens, to know if that were true, but he doubted it. After last night he was unsure of whether their paths would ever cross during his remaining weeks in Brooklyn.
It had been magical, yes. Brief and inviting? Yes. But was it destined to be more than an incredibly surreal, yet singular, occurrence? Probably not.
Once Troy finished taking pictures, he caught a train up to the Village, had a slice of pizza, and returned back to Flo’s place, content to spend the rest of the afternoon reading and listening to music. He was, after all, on vacation, and he knew that USC would provide him with little time to rest in the fall.
6
Heat
As Troy climbed the steps of the brownstone, he noticed a folded sheet of paper taped to the front door. He quickly peeled it away and opened it.
Troy,
I was in the neighborhood and just dropped by to see if you were around. Call me when you get a minute. (718) 555-2235.
Eris
She had come back after all. And she had left him a phone number.
Troy had been mentally preparing himself to accept the fact that he would never see her again, except maybe on the big screen, but the note, in its beautiful cursive penmanship, begged to differ.
He examined the sheet of paper looking for a time. She might still be in the neighborhood, he thought, as he trotted down the stairs and over to the promenade. Had she really been there while his lens was pointed in this direction?
He scanned the length of the promenade looking for Eris and then for people who might have been Eris in disguise. The only people he saw, however, were the usual people from the neighborhood, the regulars who walked their dogs, jogged, or lazed about the benches daily.
He walked back around to Henry Street and headed for Montague, but once he reached the ice cream parlor there, he knew that he would never be able to find her among the hundreds of people scattered sporadically down the street going toward Fulton Street. He had simply missed her.
Still, there was the phone number, something that assured him that they would be able to reconnect regardless.
He trotted back to the brownstone, raced upstairs, and picked up the phone.
The phone rang several times before Eris answered.
“Troy?” she said.
He blushed at the thought that she had been anticipating his call to the point she would answer with his name.
“How did you know?” he said, more as a play of modesty than anything else.
“Flo’s number is in my phone already. It came up on the screen.”
Troy chuckled to cover his embarrassment, reminding himself that he was still on the phone talking to Eris—which had to be pretty damn spectacular, given the situation.
“I just got back to the house. When did you come through?” he asked.
“Oh, I passed through around noon. I was just in the neighborhood and decided to drop in and check on you.”
She said it like she was doing Flo a favor and had no personal interest invested in the situation. Troy found this a bit difficult to believe, though.
“I hate that I missed you. It would have been nice seeing you again.”
“Yeah,” she said.
He could not tell if she was being nice or genuine.
“I’m free for the rest of the evening—if you wanted to hook up and hang out,” he offered.
“Hold on,” she said, stepping away from the phone.
He waited for nearly two minutes before she returned.
“Wanna go to this event with me tonight?” she asked. “It’s a fashion show for Fila or something like that.”
Troy grinned so widely that he felt his face aching from the stretch. “Sure. Just tell me when to be ready.”
“The invite says seven, but I know the show won’t start until closer to eight. I can have the car come by and get you around 6:30.”
“But how should I dress?”
“It’s a fashion show. Just wear something chill. There’ll probably be a DJ, an open bar, and a lot industry people there. I’m wearing a designer tee, jeans, stilettos, and one of my bags.”
“Oh,” Troy said, suddenly realizing that this was the kind of event that was actually several levels above his present social station. There would be celebrities there, he knew, and with him arriving with Eris, he would need to really dig into his vault of confidence to pull this off. For a split second, he almost asked if he could bail out, but he knew she would never present him with the opportunity unless she really wanted him to go. He would just have to suck it up and pull himself together. “I’ll be ready,” he finally said.
