Apartment, page 8
“He’s a talented writer,” said Billy.
“Did you see Ethan Hawke here before?” David said under his breath. “I’d kill to be publishing his novel.”
“It’s good?” I asked.
“I haven’t read it yet,” he said, unapologetically craning his head over me at, surely, someone more important. “I should mingle. There are a bunch of up-and-coming young agents here, if you want an introduction later.”
“That’d be great,” I said.
After he left, Billy asked, “How long have you known him, again?”
“Just since the end of college,” I said. “I was friends with his girlfriend first. I’m not really that close with him.”
“That guy has a girlfriend?”
“Not right now, I don’t think. In college he did.”
Billy finished his glass of wine. “I think I’m gonna get out of here.”
“It’ll get better,” I told him.
“No offense”—he took another look at the room—“but this isn’t my scene. I don’t want to spend my time kissing agents’ asses.”
“Fair enough,” I said, though I was disappointed to miss out on David’s connections; Sylvia would probably send Billy to her agent, but I needed all the help I could get. “Want to go somewhere else?”
We found a down-at-heel bar on the corner. Within five minutes a woman with a nose ring and a leather jacket struck up a conversation with Billy. Soon they were sitting side by side, knees knocking under the bar, as if they’d known each other for years yet still had the charged attraction of strangers. Watching her fall under his spell, I wondered if Billy understood how handsome he was and if that was the innate source of his confidence around women, or if he wasn’t fully aware of it, as he seemed not to be about his writing talent. He wasn’t vain; he certainly put no effort into his clothing, and I never once saw him fuss with his hair or preen in a mirror. Maybe that was it: he didn’t even consider his appearance, because it had never caused any problems for him. There was not thinking about something because you wanted to ignore it, and not thinking about it because you were utterly unselfconscious.
One of the woman’s friends showed up, but it became clear within seconds that she didn’t want anything to do with me. Billy nevertheless curled his arm around my back like an impresario touting his performer. “This guy right here’s the next F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he said. “He’s going to stir up an obscene bidding war for his book.”
He’d done a similar routine before at parties. While I appreciated his good-faith attempts to get me involved—our success rates in this department were as asymmetric as possible, discounting his first night in the apartment—it was emasculating, as if I didn’t have the wherewithal to navigate the world of women on my own.
“No, stay, man,” he said when I told him I was going home. “We’re about to do shots. It won’t be fun without you.”
“Nah, I’m tired,” I said. I walked out, but a stout man, with razor burn all over his neck that nearly matched his reddish crew cut, blocked me near the door. “Lemme get a cigarette?” he said. He sounded drunk and appeared to be by himself.
I took out my pack, but it was empty. “All out, sorry.”
“Yo, lemme get a cigarette,” he repeated.
“I don’t have any,” I said, showing him the carton.
He pushed me. It wasn’t forceful, but I was unprepared and staggered back. The people around us either didn’t notice or care. My fight-or-flight response spiked, all the latter. I’d never been in an altercation in my life, let alone a bar fight.
“Fuckin’ pussy,” he said. “Give me a fuckin’ cigarette.”
Before I could react, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and Billy’s body moved in front of mine. “Here, man,” he said, holding out a cigarette. The guy eyed it warily, as if the peace offering were a trap—Billy was stronger, bigger, younger—before taking it and retreating to a barstool.
“Fucking guy,” Billy said as he escorted me to the door. “You did the right thing, not escalating it. You good?”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, feeling both grateful to him and ashamed that I’d needed him to rescue me; we both knew that escalation wasn’t in my physical vocabulary. The subway was right there, but I took a cab home.
The next morning I was awoken by the phone ringing.
“It’s me,” Billy whispered when I answered. “Sorry if I woke you. I’m at this girl’s place, and I don’t know how to get home.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“She’s still asleep. And to be honest, I didn’t”—he chuckled—“I didn’t perform that well last night. It was bad. I just want to get out of here.”
“Happens to the best of us,” I said. “What neighborhood are you in?”
“No idea. We took a cab here and went over a bridge, that’s all I remember. And I have almost no money.”
“So you’re not in Manhattan. Can you see a street sign out the window?”
“No,” he said. “It’s almost like the suburbs. Lots of trees.”
“You’re probably in Brooklyn, maybe Queens,” I said. “Look for a piece of mail addressed to her. I’ve got a map of New York City with a street index, and I can tell you which subway to take.”
He left and returned in a minute. “It says Daniel Low Terrace.”
I located the street in the index and cross-referenced it with the map.
“Shit,” I said. “You’re in Staten Island. Or on it.”
“Fuck me. How do I get home?”
Like most New Yorkers, I’d never been and wasn’t sure. “Take a cab. I’m sure there’s an ATM nearby.”
“I don’t take my ATM card with me when I go out,” he said.
“Ring up when you get here and I’ll spot you.”
“How much would it be, you think?”
“I’m guessing a lot,” I said. “Or you know what? You’re pretty close to the Staten Island ferry. Ask someone for directions, take that, and then the subway home. I think the ferry’s fifty cents. Do you have that on you?”
“Yeah. But not enough for the subway, too.”
“Take a cab after the ferry. I’ll cover you when you get here. It won’t be too expensive.”
“Thanks, man,” he said.
I went back to sleep, and when I woke up again a few hours later, Billy still wasn’t home. As I read the Times and waited for my French press to brew at the dining table, he opened the door, sweaty and disheveled.
“I didn’t hear you ring up,” I said. “Is the cab still downstairs?”
“I walked from the ferry.” He pointed to the French press. “Can I have some of that?”
I poured it for him. He took a sip and closed his eyes.
“Oh, Jesus.” He opened his eyes, clapped a hand on my collarbone, and released an exhausted breath. “I am so fucking happy to see you.”
“Welcome home, sailor,” I said.
I was walking to the Eagle’s Nest the next Saturday night when I noticed the Russian and Turkish Baths were just a few storefronts away. People at NYU had spoken highly of them, but I’d never been despite living ten blocks away. I was about to go into the bar when I realized that it would be unlike anything Billy had been to in Illinois, a novel New York experience disconnected from money and status, the opposite of a poseur-filled publishing party.
I bought two eighteen-dollar admissions for Sunday, the only available day in the near future; the two owners were in a longtime quarrel, apparently, alternating weeks on duty, and neither would honor passes purchased from the other. At the Eagle’s Nest, I asked Billy if he wanted to go.
“How much does it cost?”
“I have two gift cards that I have to use by tomorrow,” I said.
The next afternoon we made our way to the building. A sign outside read THE STRAIGHT PLACE.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” Billy asked. “In terms of what bathhouses are known for?”
“I think so,” I said. “A little Eastern European homophobia.”
Sunday turned out to be a men-only day. In the locker room I stripped down to the bathing suit that I’d worn under my jeans, but Billy, his back to me, completely disrobed and wrapped a towel around his waist. I turned away until he was ready, and we padded out to the Russian Room, heated with a rock-warmed oven. A passel of hirsute Russian men reposed on the benches, nude and chatting in their mother tongue. Billy kept his towel on as we sat on the lowest bench, the least stifling level. It hurt when I inhaled, but the heat felt purifying, and I savored the rare time and place in which profuse sweating was fully sanctioned.
I’d seen his bare torso as he went into and out of the shower in Stuy Town, but not up close. He had a broad chest with a black knot of hair at the sternum and would have looked at home standing over the sink in a shaving cream commercial, marveling over the smoothness of his cheeks. I’d watched part of The Silence of the Lambs while channel surfing earlier that week, and Buffalo Bill’s attempts to create a bodysuit of female skin inspired a brief, less gruesome mental scenario in which I somehow wore Billy’s body like an exoskeleton, moving through the world in his impervious chassis.
We spoke little, conserving our energy, until I suggested we switch to the steam room, where we sat a foot apart. He reclined against the wall and sighed. The steam pumped out with new vigor, choking the room in a uniform fog.
“This was a good idea,” he said. As another cloud of steam came out, he flapped his towel open to cool down. It had been tied on the side closer to me, and I saw an indistinct blur of his flesh. I looked ahead at the tiled wall.
“You ever hear from Naomi again?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said. “You in touch with Claire?”
“No.” I inhaled deeply, allowing the steam to gather and sit in my lungs. “I wouldn’t mind seeing her again, though. We had fun.”
The following week I received my second and final workshop for the semester, for “Camp Redwood.” I went in with guarded optimism; it couldn’t be worse than the last time.
“This feels overly programmatic,” Sylvia said after some faint praise for the story’s concept, “and written more out of an idea than anything else.”
Everyone else agreed—other than Billy, who was once again my sole defender. Their remarks were more courteously delivered this go-round, perhaps in recompense for the lashing from The Copy Chief, but it was another discouraging showing for me.
“Fuck ’em,” Billy told me later at the Eagle’s Nest. “These morons think good writing has to be filled with lists of flowers and shit.” (One of the other stories discussed that week had contained a page-long paragraph with nothing but a paratactic catalog of the landscape’s flora.)
“They’re probably right about mine,” I said, fishing for a compliment but also believing it.
“Want me to take another look at it tomorrow?” Billy asked.
I told him that I planned to forget about it and move on. But the next day he asked for his line-edited copy back, insisting that a few small changes might make a big difference. After a while with it in his room, he returned to mine.
“Can I edit this on the computer?” he asked. “It’ll be easier, and then you can decide what edits you want to keep.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“Just let me take a crack at it,” he said.
I saved it to a disk, and he went to work on his machine, typing all afternoon. By the time Friends started, he still wasn’t finished.
“I appreciate it, but this is unsalvageable,” I told him.
“Nothing’s unsalvageable,” he said with surprising conviction.
I didn’t argue any further. Finally, just before he left for the Eagle’s Nest on Friday, he handed back the disk. I read while he was gone. The story I’d workshopped was nearly unrecognizable. He’d preserved the setting, general narrative arc, and characters’ names but rewritten the entire thing from scratch; hardly a sentence was undisturbed. Solely through the power of his prose, he was, once again, able to pull off the kind of termite-art approach I wished I had in my repertoire.
It was strange to recognize how much better he was and not sink into my customary feelings of envy or inadequacy but instead be flattered that of all the students in our program, I was the one he was choosing to help.
I popped down to the Eagle’s Nest to thank him. The man in the tweed cap was at his usual post.
“It’s so much better,” I told Billy. “But it should have your name on it now, not mine.”
“You laid the groundwork,” he said. “I just fine-tuned the language a little.”
It was obvious he was downplaying his contribution, but I tried to accept his statement. Maybe this was just what a good editor did. Or a good friend.
“Well, thank you,” I said. “No one’s ever given this much attention to something of mine.”
“It was fun to edit,” he said. “You’re John Stockton, I’m Karl Malone.”
My confusion must have shown on my face.
“The Jazz players?” he said.
“I’m not really into jazz,” I said.
He laughed. “The Utah Jazz. In the NBA.”
I forced my own laugh.
The next week, without telling Billy or anyone else, I made twenty copies of the story at the neighborhood print shop to mail off to as many places, from the New Yorker and Harper’s and the Paris Review on down to some small university journals listed in Poets & Writers.
After I dropped the envelopes off at the post office, I thought about how I could repay Billy. He didn’t need my editing and was uninterested in the legwork of pursuing publication himself, but maybe he could still benefit from my network. When he was on campus one afternoon, I found, among all the archived copies of his edited workshop submissions and critiques in his file cabinet, clean versions of the first few chapters of No Man’s Land. I xeroxed and mailed them to David Lankford, thinking optimistically of how it might someday change Billy’s life.
“By my roommate (and the best writer in the MFA program at Columbia),” I wrote on a Post-it. “Maybe you’ll preempt him before he starts a bidding war?”
After I picked up some Chinese food, a man entered my building behind me. As I held the door for him I noticed the Stuyvesant Town badge pinned to his blazer pocket. I crossed paths with someone from management once a month or so, and though it wasn’t as if he could tell from looking at me that I lived there illegally, it always triggered a flutter in my heartbeat. He joined me in the elevator and reached out to press his floor button but stopped when he saw eight was already illuminated. When the door opened, he exited first and looked both ways before making a left.
“Don’t go out for a little while,” I whispered to Billy inside the apartment. “A guy from Stuy Town management’s on the floor.”
He nodded as his finicky computer growled with indigestion from backing up his work to a disk, which he then placed inside his file cabinet. “That reminds me—I think you accidentally threw out a letter with some junk mail that looked like it had something to do with the apartment. I put it over there.”
“It’s the renewal for renter’s insurance,” I confirmed after opening the envelope. “My great-aunt keeps it going.”
“What’s the point, if she doesn’t live here?”
“I guess to protect her furniture from fire or theft, in case she ever wants it back,” I said. “She’s on the neurotic side. I’ll forward it.”
“So now I don’t have to worry about accidentally breaking her insane glass bottle collection,” he joked.
Magic-hour rays of October sun were slanting into the living room, casting a reddish glow on his back, where the thin ribbed cotton of his white tank top hugged his body like a second skin. Aside from the computer, his outfit and the dingy walls produced an old-fashioned tableau of the writer at work in his oubliette. He even had an issue of Time from 1974 out on his desk, featuring Nixon’s special prosecutor on the cover, that he’d found in the recesses of the entryway closet in a decaying magazine stack. All he needed was a dangling cigarette, a derby hat, and a tumbler of bourbon.
From my bedroom closet I retrieved my Polaroid camera, unused for a long time. “Let’s take a picture of us writing,” I said. “The light’s good right now.”
“Why?”
“Evidence,” I said, “of our transient youth. We’ll be nostalgic for it someday.”
He looked apathetic. “I’ll be too aware of you to write while you take the picture, so I’ll just pretend to.”
From a three-quarters angle behind him I pressed the button and waved the photo after the camera ejected it. Even in fuzzy resolution, the muscles in his shoulders were articulated, and a groove demarcated his deltoids from his triceps. I snapped another and asked him to take a couple of me at my desk. We divided up the photos so we got one of each. I ignored my picture and studied his. Despite his knowing I was taking a picture of him, despite his writing pose being just that, he appeared to be in deep concentration, concerned only with the screen in front of him—or not even with that, just his mind, the keyboard and monitor its mere input and output, a virtuoso musician’s instruments. When I wrote, a speck on my monitor could distract me. My normal self-consciousness in photos was doubled in this one. I wasn’t immersed in my thoughts; I was doing anything I could to get away from them.
Here was a real writer, his photos said, not only because of his single-mindedness, but because that focus suggested he was undaunted by the darkest corners of his psyche—that when he wrote, he wrote something true.
Billy had the night off for Halloween, and we went, sans costumes, to a Columbia party in Morningside Heights. The students who hosted it had the standard tight-squeeze railroad apartment for university housing. Seeing up close how my contemporaries lived—with multiple roommates, in a cheaply constructed building with windows that didn’t seal out drafts and tacky linoleum—made me feel guilty, as always, for having Stuy Town at a fraction of the rent.
