The Longest Distance

The girl slams the door. 

Tears cut rivulets of kohl eyeliner chiseling her cheeks and jowls; some leap from her chin to her white satin shirt. She’d done a stellar job keeping them in on the subway ride from midtown to the Upper West Side. She doesn’t remember getting off at 96th Street, or feeling the wind toss her copper curls during her walk to the apartment on Columbus Avenue, but they burst out the minute she unlocks the door to 6F. She doesn’t want her roommate to see her in this state, so she locks their bedroom door. They share their two bedroom apartment with two other twenty somethings, but now all the girl wants is to be alone with her loneliness. 

“He doesn’t like me enough,” she says to the framed poster of Robert Smith playing at the Ritz on East 11th. Through viscous tears Smith is striations of black and red on stark white walls. He stares through his 80s Greenwich Villages eyes at a black and white Cafe Society print, directly across the room. They seem to be in conversation: the seated 1938 crowd enjoying a singer in the basement of One Sheridan Square.They were so close, but sundered by time. 

“What’s wrong with me?” looped in her mind. “I’m never enough.” 

The girl learned, fortunately at the end of her workday at the Theatrical Publicity Group where she was an assistant account executive, that while the asshole was dating her, he was also dating someone else. The mass of this was greater than it should have been. It was weighted with primal feelings of lovelessness that she would not understand for years. They hadn’t been together long and she certainly had no spoken commitment from him. They just had fun. He’d made her laugh, in fact, that was what she liked most about him: his witty, clever sense of humor and general bonhomieness. 

She’d always been single and assumed she’d stay so. Romance wasn’t her thing and apparently, the universe concurs. She is in her twenties, working in the city where she’d done much of her growing up. She and the Twin Towers rose at the same time. Shed later travel every weekday by van, for nearly two hours to high school. She’d taken ferries, busses, and trains and now she has a place of her own. She has a routine, a job, a schedule, her train, her route, her home. She has a roommate who is her best friend. She has youth, which she does not value. She has freedom. For a short time, she had another person to think about, to look forward to seeing, to party with, to make something that she didn’t know was missing, no longer missing. 

A cascade of memories shower her. Walking in the village with her man. Trying the new sushi place. Lying on a blanket in Central Park. Ice skating in Rockefeller Center. Taking him to opening nights and press events for shows she helped promote. Feeling the phrase “my boyfriend” fall from her lips.

When had she become that nauseating cliche?

She is still crying on her bed, her arms wrapping a pillow, her body curled up in itself, her eyes staring out the window, across Columbus Avenue. The man is there, in his apartment. The curtains are up. He is watching TV. She and her roommates had seen him there many times before, and sometimes, he did things that he probably should have closed the shades before doing. They’d been horrified and amused.

Two stories up lived a young married couple. Or maybe they were simply living together, but she thinks of them as married. They both worked during the day; she’d actually taken the 1 train from Broadway and 96th with the husband a few times. He’d read the business section, specifically, the advertising notes on the back page. 

The wife left the apartment earlier than him, at least, on occasion when she was spotted with her coat and briefcase at the door, stopping for a kiss goodbye before disappearing from window. The girl once waited to see him leave from the sliding doors at the entrance. She recognized his deep widow’s peak, which reminded her of a younger Grandpa Munster.

Now the apartment was dark. Maybe they’d gone out for dinner.

The girl stares into nothingness, and nothingness stares back. She knows in the most desperate place in her heart that she will always feel alone. Green Day has not yet written Boulevard of Broken Dreams, but it is already her truth. 

A firetruck screeches down the street. 

________

The boy opens the door. 

He had waited all afternoon for her visit. He pays little attention, usually, to the way his apartment looks, but now he wants it to be perfect as she is seeing it for the first time. He prefers everything simple and geometric. He’s comforted by neutral tones and natural elements. Her taste runs dramatic, he knows. And god, does she love flowers. He’d bought her a lily once. 

She is smiling when she walks in.

He introduces her to his roommates. They are all out-politing one another, gliding about a conversation about furniture, wall art (if it could be called art, he didn’t love the pictures, but they were meaningful to his roommate.) She spends the most time by the bookcase, examining their collection of important works. He hasn’t read most of them. He wants to, feels he should supplement his personhood with a respectable knowledge of canon. But, mostly, the eclectic collection was curated for effect. 

He is sure she knows that, too.

After the tour ends, they sit down in the small eating nook. The four roommates had all prepared something for dinner. The boy expects she will love the soup he made, after all, she taught him how to make it. 

The octagonal dining room table is in the back of the main room, a large space that wings off with hallways to the left and right. The hallways lead to four bedroom. They had originally been two bedrooms but the apartment was sliced and diced so that the renters could enjoy small private spaces instead of shared larger ones. The bookcase stands immediately on the right past the hallway, then the sofa and chairs divide the room into visually distinctive sitting and dining areas.

The boy invites the girl to sit in the seat facing the window, which offers a view of Columbus Avenue, the purple and pink sky visible in patches behind the apartment buildings.

Less, the roommate with the hipster beard, uncorks a bottle of Moet, and pours dexterously into the plastic flutes. He hands her one. He toasts their roommate Harry’s new job at Peloton. Harry is a computer science engineer, and a fitness junkie, so this is a dream job, although the girl wonders if spinning at home will catch on again, as she’d told the boy, before.

The boy works for Facebook. He tries to explain to the girl what he does; he knows she doesn’t understand, but is impressed by it all, especially the part about there being a private Facebook for Facebook employees. 

Judah, the third roommate, has disheveled blond hair, curlicues running alongside cheekbones so prominent he looks like an exoskeleton, the boy thinks. He could have brushed his hair. Although he hadn’t explicitly said so, this dinner is important.

Less is in medical school and talks a lot about his cadaver.

The girl tells them of the van ride from school, down the FDR Drive, from where she could see bodies in the morgue every afternoon. 

They eat and talk about spotting Jerry Seinfeld in Central Park. They talk about getting tickets to Saturday Night Live, and the Knicks. They talk about Citi Bikes and whether or not it’s dangerous to bike down the West Side Highway to Hudson Yards. The girl says nothing about it but the boy knows she is umcomfortable with it. 

They talk about dating, but it gets awkward, so the boy changes the subject and asks the girl if being there brings back memories. 

“A few,” she answers. “It was a long time ago.”

“You know that reminds me of a quote I read,” Less says, motioning toward the bookcase. “For time is the longest distance between two places.” 

“Tennessee Williams,” the girl finishes. “The Glass Menagerie.”

“Temporal coordinates,” Harry adds.

“I told you my mom is really into theatre,” the boy says. “She even worked in PR for some of the biggest Broadway shows in the 90s.”

Now, the girl’s smile is a thunderbolt. Could he actually be boasting about her?

“That’s so cool.”

“Wow.”

“Must have been fun.” 

- they say.

“It was before she met my dad, but they got to see a ton of the shows together and hang with celebrities all the time.” 

“And you gave it all up to raise this prince?” Judah asks. 

“And his brothers. And there was nothing to give up” she answers, but he knows this isn’t exactly true.

“I lived in this building,” she continues. “6F. I met my husband there, at a party my roommates threw to cheer me up after a bad breakup.”

The boy had known how and where his parents met, but not that dad was rebound guy. Wow. He sips champaign he doesn’t love, but he’s happy in the moment. He rakes his free hand through his copper curls, glances over at the girl, but can’t tell what she’s thinking or feeling. She’s staring across the window at that couple in the apartment across the street. They’re about her age. He’s noticed the man before because he looks like Ted Cruz.

A firetruck screeches down the street.