Leaving

Aaron climbed the stairs to her 8th floor apartment for the last time. He opened the door and found Anne standing in the middle of a tower of boxes and tissue paper with her hands on her hips.

"Hi."

He approached as she backed away, until she was trapped against the window. His coat was wet with rain and she pealed it back from his shoulders. It fell to the floor. She pressed three fingers into the middle of his heaving chest. Her eyelids closed, squeezing silent tears down her cheeks. Aaron followed the tributaries softly with his lips.

Goodbye bye bye. She scratched "New York" with black sharpie on box after box.

And she suddenly felt relief that she was getting out.

Apt 3d

Upon concluding her twelfth hour of serving pasta, Anne climbed the stairs to her apartment on a Sunday midnight. There was a clamor from the third floor, and she peered around the wrought iron railing with trepidation.

Jim the Super. Always a nightmare apparition at that hour.

"Young lady, young lady... you goin' up to 4c? Uh, I'm doing a little work up there. There has kind of been a bathroom emergency."

"Emergency? Can I use the shower?"

Jim chuckled and rubbed his palms together. "Um, you could maybe wash your hands if you wanted to.... but that's about it. You see, the commode is kinda in the middle of the floor."

Behind Jim, the door to apartment 3d opened and produced a light-haired Irish man. He stepped into the hallway and put his hands in his pockets.

"You can come use my shower."

Anne reddened. Though she stood three steps above him, they were practically eye-to-eye. She didn't respond.

Jim preceded her into the bathroom. He crouched over a hole in the floor where the toilet had been and shouted down to the plumber in the apartment below.

Anne guffawed. The commode certainly was in the middle of the floor, resting on a wooden plank. Large chunks of tile were stashed in the bathtub for safe keeping, along with the trash can and myriad electrical equipment. Still crouched, Jim wheezed and wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve. He appeared to Anne as lankly perched at death's door amidst a war torn Gaza Strip.

"Well, what did you think of him?"

"Who? 3d?"

"Yes, my man, 3d! He asked me if you were seeing anyone. I said I did not think so, I did not think so!"

Delightful. Simply delightful to be set up by the Super.

As water washed over Anne's shoulders in a vacant shower down the hall, she mentally composed a note that began, "Dear Irish 3d."

Alone

His middle finger touched the long scar on her forehead.

"How did you get that?"



She couldn't feel the pressure.

Anne opened her eyes. He wasn't there and the snow was falling heavily outside.

Still, as she turned over, he kissed her between her shoulder blades.

No. She extended the liquid liner past the end of her eyes. She pulled on black leggings and a sweater.

She was the only soul on Fifth Avenue at 4am. She opened her arms to embrace the darkness and shouted, "I want to Play Doh wave forms in the hideaway!"

Sometimes New York was exhilarating. When it was her New York, observed between her finger and thumb. When she was in love in her bed or on the inside of a window and a latte or propped up in a train. When she pulled out purple flowers from the bodega. And when she could see the clouds in the darkness, above the juxtaposed old and new buildings on Second Avenue.

MacDougal

It felt like Europe down on MacDougal Street.

No, rather oddly, it felt like a stylized set for A Streetcar Named Desire. The street was so narrow and the opposing apartment buildings were attempting to steal kisses from each other: leaning either in poverty or sexual necessity. It was balmy and she could almost see Blanche crawling onto to the fire escape and wiping her brow. Or Stanley Kowalski approaching her from the pub across the street. If only Stanley Kowalski were approaching her from the pub across the street...

"It looks like so much fun in there," she accidentally said out loud.

Didn't matter. No one was listening. She sang to herself as she rocked back and forth on her heels.

"What ya got got got to lose..."

The breeze ruffled her skirt, exposing two skinny, stockinged legs.

Anne dreamed another dream with her eyes open.

Dry grass itched into the exposed bit on the small of his back. He didn't mind. It was one of his favorite feelings. It meant that it was warm enough to sprawl outside under a blanket of sun. A knee had displaced his hat so that it fell at a loose angle across his forehead. Suddenly, it was her knee that his head rested upon. And she swept off his hat. Linking her hands under his chin, she blocked the sun and kissed him upside down.

"Well, hello."

She traced the line from the top of his forehead down his nose to his lips. And there her fingers took a right turn to the edge of his mouth. Where she lifted them and kissed where they had been.

"Anne!" A couple of sticky menus were thrust into her hands.

Right, she was fishing for customers. Fishing, fishing, fishing.... ugh, accidental eye contact with an unsavory man. She frowned and flattened her bangs with her palm.

The illustrious King of the Kebab Carving (donning his customarily bizarre hat) placed his massive hands on the windowsill and hollered across the street to a trash vendor (Doner $5.50.) Three Irish men poured from the adjacent pub and lit cigarettes. The sky was a false pink and purple technicolor.

Pippin

Something of interest would inevitably blow in behind Anne and Summer before midnight. When the tightly private conversation of an earlier evening was extended to the length of the bar and their rolling eyes had been checked. Then would something good appear.

"Here they go," muttered the bartender.

"What's your name?" Summer extended a hand in the direction of a James Mcavoy face while Anne buried her nose in a Stella glass.

Pippin. His name was Pippin.

Anne flushed crimson and rearranged her knees on the stool. She narrowed her eyes at the Scotchman and began to diatribe Great Expectations.

Observing that her work was done, Summer clutched her vodka, soda, and orange and angled for the jukebox. She was quite beautiful. Though small, she squared her shoulders and walked with confidence. Her mile long divine wine and black hair was pulled up in a knot at the top of her head, and she looked like she could be a dancer.

Summer's face was delightfully complicated. But her eyes defined her beauty. Inconceivably large and thick-lashed, they flashed and commanded and sympathized.

"The Drifters... The Drifters..." She flicked through the album pages and punched in "Saturday Night at the Movies."

Turning on her sequined heel, she saw Anne off her stool and backed up to the bar in a questionable embrace. A lusty Pippin had silenced Estella's Dickensian mouth with surprising dexterity.

"It looks like our friends are getting along quite well."

An entirely bald, Irish Mr. Clean placed a large hand on Summer's olivey bare neck, and she accepted her wingman duties with grace.

Mr. Clean owned a pub on 52nd street, and he promised Anne a real live full pint.

"Come on!" Anne grabbed Summer by the hand and dragged her outside. In the exit lights of the bar, she saw Mr. Clean's face smeared with red lipstick and she doubled over with laughter. Summer tried to light a cigarette, but Anne required both hands to dance her down the sidewalk. "Look what you did to Mr. Clean! Pippin, that's his name right? Yes, great expectations Pippy Pip won't tell me what he does! Don't you think he's James Mcavoy's brother?"

It was only too delicious to hide from the snow behind stained glass windows and a beer. Or ten. Their bar was transporting and touched upon an insatiable nostalgia for any time but the present. A euphoric vision of New York City.

Martin

Summer grasped Anne's collar and hissed in her ear, "The man behind us is staring at you."


Anne shrugged. Doubtless disgusting.

"No, he's truly adorable. Completely your type. Go to the bathroom and I'll start the conversation."

Anne rearranged the black curls over her shoulders in the luminescently complimenting light of the bathroom. After staring into Summer's complexly beautiful face all night, her own eyes seemed small and insignificant. And her little nose perfect for a patronizing finger tap. Wretch.

She craned around the jukebox. Tall and slender, there he was willowing over Summer. A black scarf was tightly wrapped around his neck, framing quite a boyish face, profusion of dirty blond hair, and strangely dark eyes that called to her mind Romeo's Ethiop ear.

The conversation happened in a dreamy haze of barroom bliss. The stool became a nest which she nestled into while looking up at a bright face. Anne was filled with an insatiable warmth of glass mug grasping and cool grays and greens and porcelain whites.

Martin's friends left. He asked her if she would mind if he stayed. He touched her apparently supplicating lower lip with his thumb.

Most moments he seemed more French than German. She found herself abstractedly wondering if she could ever love someone who wasn't defined by the English language? Through translation... she always felt that she must not be reading what was intended. Those couldn't have precisely been Dostoevsky's words. Was she reading Tolstoy for plot instead of nuance? She could not express herself or experience someone else as plot. No, no indeed.

Their arms intertwined as he walked her home. He embraced her and her tired neck collapsed for a kiss. His palm on her cheek and his fingers in her hair made her feel quite small.

"I want to show you where I lived when I studied in Paris."

She let him in.

"You really do have Goethe and Mann on the shelf over your bed. You are not what I expected to find tonight."

Anne surveyed her find. He sounded funny in the quiet.

Start

Nestled between precarious shelves of cascading poetry volumes, Anne stared at the bald head of her professor.

"I'm moving to New York after graduation. I've decided."

"Well. Good. Is that good? How do you feel about it?"

He adjusted his glasses and put his finger tips to his lips in wait of her response. It was her customary agitated reflex to cross her arms over her chest and clutch her shoulders.

"Are you cold?"

"No... no."

Un-clutch.

"Yes, it's good. I think. I don't know."

Clutch.

"I'm hoping, thinking that I will grow to love it. But it's not London. I tried to make it feel more like home the last time I visited. It didn't. But maybe it could be. I don't know. If I can't be in London, it's the only other place I can be."

He frowned. And then recommended Sylvia Plath's New York memoirs. She nodded while immediately mentally vetoing the idea; she didn't need a like-minded companion under her bell jar.

It was, at least, raining as she climbed the hill to her apartment.

Once safely sequestered on the 8th floor, she sank into the doorway of her bathroom. There she could best hear the rain rattling the metal air vent above the shower. But it was never loud enough, never! She was always craning her neck, resting her head on windows... and the rain was never loud enough!

Anne's eyelashes were already wet. She didn't mind crying.