A Thing Completely Unlike a Girl

Initially, his profile said he was one mile away. She thought he must live in Fort Greene; there was nowhere else within a one-mile radius of her apartment in Brooklyn that she felt suited someone of his age and stature. As for his age, it wasn’t listed, but she assumed 50s. He worked in finance but dabbled in composing for film. He was handsome: in his first few photos, his hair was quite literally windswept, with blonde and silver ringlets fanning delicately across his face. She was impressed that he was able to get an anonymous cameraperson to capture such an organic, perfect movement more than once, and she pictured his hair as being constantly in motion. 

It was possible that he lived near Prospect Park. Or he could own a unit in one of those big old buildings in Clinton Hill with pillars and gargoyles and a name like “THE COLONIAL'' or “VANDERBILT MANOR.” But she had already decided that he lived in Fort Greene, because she recalled a brownstone on St. James Place and mentally designated it his. It possessed a motion-sensing alarm that sounded an unbearable, piercing ring whenever it detected a passerby. She thought he must’ve had it installed to indicate that he owned not only the house, but the air that hung around it.

She had just gotten home from a hostessing shift at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea, and was swiping while in bed. Lights from a police car outside her window flashed blue and red into her room. She hadn’t bothered to take off her tights; she found the process of unpeeling them from her sweat-sticky thighs and feet grotesque and wished to delay it for as long as possible. She also had to pee, but was holding it. She had been accruing dishes in the sink for days, and could not risk an encounter with her roommate, who was almost certainly waiting to hear the twist of her door knob so she could emerge and deliver a lecture on “respecting the space.”

She imagined the man inviting her to the St James house. It was a walkable distance, but far enough that she had time to contemplate her own oppressive boredom—how it drove her to do things like see men at their residences without any prior public meeting and without telling a soul where she was going. She would think about her appetite for danger before a backdrop of tree-lined streets and manicured gardens, a soundtrack of clinking glasses and the hum of conversation from nearby bars. It would all make for a very poetic and interesting scene.

When she entered the house, she might notice a thin layer of dust over everything, feel the chill of a family that once was. Maybe the man’s ex-wife and him had divorced emotionally when the kids were young, but only made it tangible once they were all out of the house. Perhaps his habit of inviting young women over stemmed from a desire to regain the authority lost along with his nuclear family. It wouldn’t phase her if this was the case. In fact, she felt that beneath the frivolity of being a woman in her twenties, she possessed a very serious and masculine quality, and thought it possible for a man like him to sense it in her. 

She thought of him ushering her to a worn, leather couch. He would definitely have a home library—the kind with a wheeled ladder, a feature she’d always deemed the epitome of wealth and intellect. He would offer her a drink. She made a mental note here that she should nail down the particulars of brown liquor before their meeting, so she could request one and speak to its smokiness. He’d prepare it for her on a brass bar cart and as he did, she would study his back in his button-down shirt, how it untucked slightly as he bent down, how the movements in his shoulder blades transferred a crease in the fabric from one side to the other. For a moment, she thought of all the muscles in the human body and how clothing often pulls against their motion, because we were never really built to wear anything, except maybe animal hides. She recalled a video she’d seen earlier that day of a man training himself to run on all fours.

The man would invite her upstairs. She thought of an antique wooden bed frame with detailed floral carvings. Then, of their bodies intermingling intuitively, the details of their sexes overlapping and blurring until they were one being inhaling and exhaling in sync. Afterwards, she’d lean her face on her hand and imitate a deep and far off look, and he’d think she is so tortured and complicated and gorgeous. At this precise moment, the fan on his nightstand would hit his hair, and she would have the same thought about him.

Even if they never saw one another again, she would occupy a space in his memory, however slight. But should their affair continue, she might gradually coalesce into a real person in his eyes, an intellectual equal even, a thing completely unlike a girl.

But first he would have to message her. She assured herself that it had only been a few minutes. He likely spent little time on his phone; he was probably reading or sleeping. Not tonight, she thought. But soon.

The need to pee was now dire. A message appeared. 

Are you around tonight?

It was a twenty-four-year-old DJ, less than a mile away. He could offer her lodging away from her roommate, and most pressingly, a bathroom. She reminded herself that she was a person ruled by utility, not desire.

I can be at yours in 10.

She left through the fire escape.

The woman awoke in Crown Heights the following afternoon. The DJ’s bedroom was bare, apart from a twin bed with a grey sheet and a too-small IKEA desk that his equipment sat on. The space was most notably missing the DJ himself, and while she wondered what kind of commitments DJs could possibly have during the day, where he went was none of her business.

She checked her messages. Nothing from the man. 

She had time to kill before her shift at 3:00. As she shimmied back into her tights, she thought she might catch the train in Fort Greene. One-night stands reminded her of having sleepovers as a kid—the initial excitement and then the inevitable exhaustion the next day, no matter how many hours she slept. She resented the maintenance involved in having a body, but knew a long walk would shake the aches of sleeping in a bed that wasn’t her own. Of course, there was also the chance of seeing the man, should he actually live in Fort Greene.

Outside, the S train rumbled above her head. As her eyes adjusted to the sun, she looked down at a trail of pamphlets stamped into the concrete, their bold, red “FOLLOW JESUS NOW” headings still legible. Her reflection moved through the windows of harshly lit smoke shops that she’d never once seen anyone enter or exit from, and as she traveled down Fulton, through the glass facades of coffee shops, bakeries, and vacant retail spaces. 

Groups of toddlers in neon vests, holding plushy loops on a rope, waddled across the street with their teachers. Dogs of starkly contrasting shapes and sizes moved in one obedient huddle alongside their walker. There was drilling from a nearby construction site, and distantly, a church or temple emanated an ambiguous yet unmistakable song of devotion. There was something profound about it all that day, something heavenly. 

Maybe, the woman thought, re-adopting Catholicism would not be the worst thing. She’d spent many years lamenting her suburban religious upbringing, but now, as she pushed twenty-five, she longed for an organizing principle. The ache resided in the place in her body where tradition and convention newly resided, and each year, that space seemed to grow larger. It started when babies with their mothers on the subway began making her cry. So utterly biological, she’d thought. It had reached such a point now, however, that when she saw covered women, who hailed from any iteration of religious fundamentalism, her curiosity piqued. It could all be so very simple. The total lack of choice, the complete certainty of one’s role. 

Were there perhaps too many options for women? she let herself wonder now and then. Would it be so awful if someone had decided for her that she’d be a nun, or wife, or typist? Her radical nineteen-year-old-self, the girl who had lamented the breeders and the bible thumpers, bristled at the thought.

She visualized this new tether to convention as an actual growth; she didn’t know whether or not it was malignant. She thought about twenty-five: the year the frontal lobe finally forms, the official start of the body’s slow rot. Then, interjected, memories of the DJ. How he’d panted above her, sweat slicked strands of his hair dipping onto her shoulder. The total white blankness of his walls.

Another theory, the woman thought, of why everything felt so sacred today-- her eye followed the path of a vine crawling delicately across an elegantly weather-worn townhouse-- was that the mind had a way of glossing the times just before everything changes. There could be a romantic narrative to this life. The teen rebellion, the starving twenties, the man. 

The man. She could see herself picking out his drapes. She could see him teaching her what dishes you’re supposed to put scallions in. The woman ducked into a deli and purchased an energy drink with a few disintegrating dollar bills from her jacket pocket. Across the street, a woman in a pastel tennis dress wrestled a chicken bone out of a slobbering pitbull’s mouth. 

She had moved to New York originally for art school; she had been a painter. Her thesis work was an abstract self-portrait, in which she’d painted her nude form as a pale mangled mass of limbs. She’d selected a slight blue tint for her skin, signifying the death of her role as an obedient, Catholic daughter. It all felt so indulgent to her now.

How so very lucky were her former classmates in their downtown galleries. Though, she didn’t even know if she wished she were there with them. Her thesis leaned lazily against her bedroom wall. The last work she’d attempted. 

If she were to paint again, she envisioned a grand oil painting composed of deep reds and flecked with bronzey golds. This, her master work, would be wheeled before every man she’d ever slept with. She wouldn’t be there with them in a corporeal sense, but would somehow loom above them, witness their awe from above.

She’d managed to walk to Fort Greene. She marveled at the brownstones, at the same band of beautiful people who had nowhere in particular to be at 1 p.m. on a weekday. She knew, logically, that the man was at work, but still it thrilled her to be in his potential vicinity. Her brain imposed his features on every man that passed her, her stomach turned at every potential match. Distantly, she felt his gaze, and it comforted her. 

Though he didn’t appear to be here, she felt glad she’d come. Perhaps, theirs would be a whirlwind romance. He’d ask her to move in. She’d set their table with taper candles. She’d keep their curtains open always, and passersby would envy their original ceiling medallions. She could feel it all, the quiet, the swank, the park, her home. In time, she’d show him her self-portrait. 

A group of college kids spilled giddily out of a diner, and the woman felt a familiar, implacable sadness. If only, she thought, this feeling was ever attached to some real tragedy—an unplanned pregnancy, a death. Instead, always, she was haunted by the melancholy of a woman without aspiration.

When she pinched her skin, she felt nothing.

The crowd at the restaurant most nights was composed of gallerist couples in all beige. Depending on the shift, she either wanted to ask them if they were looking for a third or pelt them with lightly oiled gnocchi. Tonight, she was conflicted. 

As the hostess, she was the scapegoat of the entire operation. Her interactions with servers were limited to their complaints about her over- or under-seating them, sentencing them with notorious non-tippers, or not watering table 21 while simultaneously seating table 3. To spare her own wellbeing, the woman tried to turn off her humanity upon clocking in. She cycled through her script of basic phrases for customers—for two… you can follow me… have a good night—and placidly apologized to servers for her infinite sins.

There was, however, one coworker of hers, who would visit the host stand just for pleasant conversation. She was a native New Yorker who had been serving there since before the woman was born, and who felt a vague, maternal affection for her.

“That Tesla dealership in Meatpacking,” the server told the woman at the host stand, “you know it used to be a leather club?”

The woman took this opportunity to inform her co-worker that she was fascinated by BDSM people, in the same way she was to devoted goths or Catholics, because people who were so committed to their thing seemed to possess self-knowledge and a sense of purpose that she envied. In fact, just the other day, when she was killing time before work, she’d followed a group of leather daddies all the way to West Street, where it turns out they were having some sort of convention. The woman found something oddly poetic about these men looking out at the river sparkling in the summer sun while ruthlessly flogging one another.

“It’s like, I don’t desire it personally, but I don’t not get it.”

On her co-worker's face, a look suggesting that all of culture ended with this one, insufferable girl.

The native New Yorker returned to her table. The woman’s phone illuminated.

Contained in the first message from the man:

Are you busy tonight, beautiful?

In the second, an address to an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

She could make midtown work. They could be theatergoers. Maybe his building was Art Deco, maybe it had a lovable doorman. At the very least, her commute would shorten. Then again, she wouldn’t have to work for long. She could be a kept woman in midtown; she could start dressing like Gloria Vanderbilt and dealing gaudy gold antiques. In any case, it didn’t matter where they resided. Only that it was her and the man, the man and her. 

But as she revised it all in her mind, something rose in her throat, hot and acidic. She tried swallowing it down, but still it threatened to eject itself. 

She reached into her tote bag for an abandoned water she knew must be there, but she and her arm were fundamentally out of sync. It seemed to flail around independent of her, some ungraceful, numb, dead thing knocking between mascaras and lighters until finally her fingertips, pins-and-needles, found the plastic bottle. Her grip sticky and weak around it, she tried to take it to her lips and a few drops, stale and salt, fell on her tongue, but the rest emptied down her chin, soaked her shirt, adhered the fabric to her torso, and she became suddenly aware of her heart, its exact location in her rib cage, and she could see him, the man, above her. 

She was eye level with his chest, his pink chest, the web of dead skin scaling across, every coarse, spiral of hair sweat-glued to it. She could feel his gut sinking into her pelvis and hear his breathy, wheezing efforts in her ear.

She thought: I am dying. She thought: they’re going to find my body on the uptown E train. She could hear the passengers’ groans as the conductor apologized for the inconvenience: some nothing girl died and now you all must suffer for it.

The train, indifferent, rolled loyally along its planned route. People all over the island moved in homogenous blurs down into and up out of the station’s mouths, their chests all rising, their hearts all beating.