December 3, 1995
Even though she’d only been at college in Connecticut for a few months, Julianne could already tell which phone calls were ones she should answer and which she should ignore.
Mostly, it went according to what hour of the day or night the big yellow phone on the wall rang.
Early morning calls were usually okay, not a big deal. Sola often needed advice in bad first date aftermath. Her mother called a few times a week, from Westchester County. “What’s new? How’s my one and only daughter?” Jeanne asked. As if something really could have changed since Julianne left the city. “One and lonely” was Julianne’s typical muttered reply, but it didn’t matter; her mother was already mid-rant about the latest drama programming the VCR or fighting with an ailing vacuum cleaner.
There was little at stake in midday calls. She’d find telemarketers who wanted to equip her dorm room with an ADT security system, despite her pointing out that there was always a fat man at a desk downstairs ready to fight off any intruders, or sign her up to sell Cutco knives on campus, which, to be honest, didn’t really sound like the most glamorous way to launch a career.
Rarer these days she picked up and heard Joey’s voice saying hello back. He was still in New York on his last-minute gap year. She was still kind of pissed off about that. It was Joey’s idea that they all go to the same college, but for now Julianne and Vince were the only ones here. So much for the three of them blood brothers and sister and doing this together, all for one, one for all. Sometimes Joey had Vince on three-way. Even though Vince was just across campus from Julianne, he somehow sounded even farther away than Joey in the city. Vince didn’t say much during these calls. Maybe it was because he let Joey do most of the talking. If Julianne really concentrated and blocked out Joey’s voice, she thought she could hear Vince smoking or flipping channels on TV. He might as well have been a telemarketer at that point. From time to time, he’d put his hand over the receiver, as though there were someone else in the room he didn’t want to reveal.
Calls to or from Meghan, her roommate that semester, also came in during this time. Julianne tried her best to take messages and give messages, but never quite succeeded at this pretend-grown-up task, always managing to disappoint Meghan, who came from Old Lyme, whose parents sold used books, who was the first girl in her family to take her education beyond the twelfth grade, who was going to go out for the basketball team, who was marginally pretty but not by Manhattan standards and had just the faintest degree of a lazy eye. She always spoke to Julianne as though she’d concluded Julianne was to be regarded as an enemy. It seemed unfair because Julianne could never be too sure when she was being observed.
She disliked the late-night calls. These were the ones that she never saw coming, the ones that took the longest to recover from. She tried her best to avoid them.
Case in point: a few weeks ago, Vince called to say he was taking some finals early and going to the library to study and did she want to join him, since it had been a while since they’d last seen each other. This was code, of course. Vince had been trying to get her to hook up. She never objected to falling into bed together, it was familiar, a healthy dose of nostalgia, but lately he hadn’t been playing by one-night-stand rules, which made her apprehensive. She knew he wanted to get back together, even though he’d claim he didn’t want to.
But something about being here, in Connecticut, though, these last few months had made her start to give his calling her up to get down a second thought, and another second thought, and lately even a third. She didn’t like how he tried to make her feel guilty about pulling away, holding her hostage with the fact that they were supposed to be best friends, which of course implied that since they could never be this close with anyone else, they might as well get back together. It was nonsense. So why, then, would she always relent, meet up, and have sex?
She didn’t want to get back together. Even from opposite ends of campus, it felt like he was too close. He needed her, he was always chanting, and he knew she needed him just as much. It was true, for a long time, it was all she wanted to be his girlfriend, but that was middle school, high school, it had all worn off. There had to have been more to life than this, and she’d maybe known it once, too briefly, before it slipped away.
Struggling to want to have a relationship with Vince for the billionth time, forcing a closeness with someone who was more in love with the idea of commitment than he was in being committed to her, wasn’t pretending like doing things exactly as they’d always done them was going to produce a different result this time the definition of insanity?
Then it seemed like he’d finally gotten the hint. He called one night to say he’d met another girl, this slight seventeen-year-old blonde thing from Intro to Poli Sci.
Maybe it was best if they started being a little more casual. “How much more casual could things be, Vince?” She shouted this in her head but sighed it into the receiver, almost a whisper.
That call came in late October, leaves already beginning to cover the ground in rough strokes of green and brown and gold.
She was eighteen, in the middle of her first semester of college, and, when she let her guard down, from time to time, she actually liked it, being there, learning, really learning, for once.
There was a vague idea about going to USC for film school. It would have put some space between them. She needed a break from high school and all the drama, the disaster that was prom night, the yelling, the shouting, the fighting. Fuck it. She had the catalog in the pile with the others under her bed. But she never completed an application to mail in, because Vince insisted they only apply to schools they could all get into, which meant they’d all end up going to whichever school he got into, so they could be together. Joey, just as bad, was in on the triad meshugas, too, but at least Joey had enough sense to defer a year.
After that call, Julianne decided that things would really be over, and, you know, not like all the times before. This time the pact she’d make was with herself. The first step was to stop answering the phone at the times when she could sense that Vince was going to be on the other end, good news or bad. If she happened to pick up by accident, she’d simply tell him that she was going out, that someone was coming over to study something. In time, he would have to let her go.
Vince seemed to have actually moved on, even if only temporarily, and so her phone calls during the week started to be just her mother, or Sola calling for calc notes, or other people. New people. Guys she met on the quad, in the library, in the dining hall, in bars on Bedford Street or Broad Street, so many of the Stamford street names made her smile, reminded her of New York. She met guys in parking lots, on coffee lines. There were guys hanging around in front of the frats or in the dorms, and she met them on the way inside for parties or study groups or SADD or Greenpeace UConn chapter meetings, scribbled her phone number on the corner of subscription cards that fell out of magazines, on the backs of their hands, on the foil she’d just extracted from a new pack of cigarettes.
By the time December came and finals rolled in, she found herself going days without thinking of Vince. She’d see him walking around campus or in a hallway and when they made eye contact it would startle her, for a second, as though she was supposed to recognize him, understand what he was doing there, but didn’t know who the hell he was.
The Sunday before reading week began, the morning’s call from her mother out of the way, she decided that it would be a good idea to get her life in order.
She sat down in front of a stack of two-pocket folders filled to capacity with notes and quizzes and readings from classes, on the brink of imploding, but somehow keeping it together long enough for her to make the next move. She organized the notes, recycled what she didn’t need to keep, three-hole punched assignment sheets, secured them into the metal clasps in the middle of the folders. She updated her Huskies assignment book, started to feel a sense of calm come over her.
If she could memorize a few Greek drama terms for History of Theater, portion off her chem chapters into manageable sections to read and reread over the next days until the exam, she’d do something nice for herself as a reward.
She could go out, get a beer or a slice of pizza on Bedford Street, maybe find a way to casually bump into this preppy Roy guy who’d asked Meghan for Julianne’s phone number. He’d approached Meghan at a house party, lightweight sweater over a blue oxford. How cold it wasn’t yet outside didn’t seem to matter. The guys throwing darts beside the corner they stood in were wearing T-shirts and jeans.
At first, Meghan thought that Roy was flirting with her, so she naturally started reciprocating. Nothing attracts a flirt faster than a flirt. Then when Roy asked her if she lived with Julianne, which of course he already knew but pretended like he didn’t, it crumpled Meghan and she wanted to three-point-shoot herself into the garbage and not get out until finals.
She rebounded after a couple of Jell-O shots. They played an impromptu round of Asshole. She teased him about whether or not Julianne was single and whether or not she liked him and whether or not Meghan would give him their phone number. He’d have to beat her at the next round or outdrink her or throw eight bullseyes in a row to get it out of her. Ultimately, she’d let him have it, but she kind of liked drawing out his agony, having something he wanted so desperately and holding it just out of reach.
Julianne was amused to hear the play-by-play. Being wanted from afar lifted her spirits. How was it that she could become the center of attention without even being at the party? She didn’t want to be the center of attention. Probably the real reason why she’d skipped the party in the first place.
Guys, guys everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
The pleasure was muted, fleeting, bittersweet. If only she’d felt moved, felt swept. Instead of feeling like a total fucking failure who needed to pack up and run away and back to New York in the middle of the night.
When Meghan came home, it was already Sunday before reading week, which would precede finals week, which would precede the end of their time together as roommates, as acquaintances, as rivals in matters of the heart, as anything ever again, Julianne was lying in bed, thinking about Vince, missing the Upper West Side a little. The summer and Mister Softee trucks. The American Museum of Natural History. How even-numbered streets meant traffic went east and odd-numbered streets meant traffic went west but 95th Street was a one way in either direction off of Amsterdam Avenue, a grid outlier. The guy who slept sitting up in three sleeping bags underneath the father, son, and the holy scaffolding of West-Park on 86th. They always referred to him as the Marlboro Man when they saw him. She even missed the leeks in their bin at Westside Market though still had no idea what they were or what someone who knew what they were and how to cook would make out of them.
“You’ll never guess who was talking about you tonight,” Meghan started. The lights were off. It was dark. She started talking before she even knew whether Julianne was awake or not.
Julianne knew who she was talking about immediately, but for a millisecond wished it had somehow been Vince.
“I told him you were waiting for him to call you.”
“You did not,” Julianne said. “I mean, I don’t care if you did. It’s not like it’s a big deal or anything if he calls me.”
But even as she was telling this to Meghan, she decided that she would care that Roy was going to call her, that she would let herself like him, because what was the alternative? She imagined coming back to Connecticut after the holidays, trapped once again in this tiny dorm room, her folders stacked neatly on a little pathetic desk, the adjustable tiny watt table lamp she sometimes read beneath, sleeping across from a roommate who used too much conditioner and whose hair always looked flat, someone she was never really going to be friends with, reading and staring out the window and doing little else than that and getting calls from her mother and from Joey, occasionally, because he had better things to do, but not getting any calls from Vince, because he now had better girls to do, and nothing good for her coming out of any of this?
So much for her psychic powers because in the morning, when Joey rang, she thought it was going to be Roy instead. She’d already started to imagine the conversation before she picked up and it took a second for her brain to pause the track and take in the new information. Then it was quiet and she could hear what Joey was telling her, process it, comprehend what was going on, even though what was going on was and would forever remain incomprehensible.
“Julianne, something really bad happened,” he said.
Her mind jumped first to Vince, because that was always a call she imagined receiving: that Vince was in jail, had been in a skiing accident or a car accident, sped a borrowed bike into the driver’s side door of a Volvo station wagon that was heavier than he was and was now lying in a full body cast in a hospital bed somewhere.
But this time Vince was safe, at least as far as she knew, on campus. Since Joey was in New York and Julianne was here in Connecticut it was a safe bet that she would know sooner than he if something had happened to their roguish friend.
The phone in their dorm was moored to the wall, with a fifty-foot cord attached to the handset. It was yellow. An ugly yellow Julianne couldn’t stop noticing, like a dried mustard stain on a white dress. “What’s happened?” she asked. Then, “I miss you, Joey. You never call me back. What’s up with that?”
“I’m sorry I haven’t called, Julianne,” he said.
“Are you okay?” she asked, sensing that now was not the time to try to be the center of attention.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I mean, no I’m not. Something’s going on. Something happened. I don’t know how to tell you this.” His voice tapered off into nothing.
“Is everyone okay?”
“No, not really.”
“What happened?”
“Ethan died.”
“Ethan? Birnbaum?”
“Yeah. He got killed last night. This morning, really. Shit, is this Sunday? Yeah, this morning.”
She didn’t know what to say. The five words, even after Joey spoke them, continued to pummel her brain. It felt like she was slowly being packed into a sausage grinder. She could feel parts of herself, fingers and toes, growing cold and getting smashed up into bits.
“Jesus,” she said. “Tell me what happened.” Her throat was already completely dry, and the words she managed to get out came all jagged and corrosive up her throat.
He began to tell her the story. A party on the Lower East Side. A bad party. NYU kids. They stayed too late. Keg dried up. People said goodbye and took the A train because there was never a taxi to be found below 14th Street. Ethan didn’t want to go back uptown and got a pint from somewhere. Vince decided to go with him. Waiting for an F train that was never going to come, because it was too late, to take them to Columbus Circle so they could get on the 1. Standing on an empty platform. Eventually forgetting the train and finishing some whiskey and laughing and having a good time because they were college freshmen done with finals and home for Christmas for a month.
When had Vince made this plan to take finals early and stay in New York after Thanksgiving instead of coming back for these first weeks of December? He’d only mentioned the part about finals to Julianne, and only as an aside. It was the kind of thing he would have run by her in the past. But what did she expect? She’d spent a semester trying to demagnetize their lives. She didn’t ask Joey because he was in the middle of telling a story that was about to get bad and irrevocable.
Then there was a bad guy, a kid really, a lost kid from broken windowed Dyckman Houses on Tenth Avenue, up by Inwood, way out of his depth this far below 14th Street, and a give me your wallet, and Ethan asking, “Why, why are you doing this?” even as he handed it over, and not like he was refusing or anything, but still shot and killed and dead. Dead.
It was starting to be all over the news. NY1 led with Upper West Side prep school student gunned down. A wake and a funeral service probably later in the week. Vince was stunned but okay. He held Ethan’s head and told him he was going to be okay even though he wasn’t and then had to relay the events to MTA police and then NYPD and FDNY paramedics and on and on, when they descended, after the token booth guy woke up, saw what was going on, and called in the 12-1 and the 12-7. All these acronyms and codes, like reading someone else’s life hammered out in shorthand.
“Can you come home?” he asked.
“Yeah, let me call my mom,” she said. “I’ll come back.”
“Good,” he said. “I don’t think I can do this without you.”
“You don’t have to. Where is Vince now?”
“I don’t know. He went to the police station or maybe the hospital and then disappeared. He’s not answering my pages.”
“Does he have his phone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, he’ll turn up. Maybe I’ll try calling him.”
“Okay. Will you call me back?”
“Yeah, I will.”
After they got off the phone, Julianne was still having trouble moving. She couldn’t get up from her bed to hang up the ugly yellow receiver with the very long cord, because she wasn’t entirely sure if her feet still worked. She couldn’t wiggle her toes. Her fingers were very cold.
She was in shock. She hadn’t been in shock since she was fourteen, since her uncle didn’t come back from Desert Storm.
She knew she’d start crying at any moment, especially as soon as she saw any of her old friends, but right then she was just too detached. Nothing was sinking in. When she woke up this morning, life was still the same as it had always been, even though all of this had already happened by then. The information she had learned since was putting her farther away from the situation instead of pulling her nearer to it.
Last summer, she’d see Ethan sometimes at Smalls, a jazz club on West 10th. It was a schlep down to the Village on the 1 train, but worth it because they didn’t card. One night, she took Sola with her. There they found him and Vince and Alex Fader, the three of them each trying to outdrink the other two. Nobody won these contests, no prizes handed out, but everybody, including spectators, succeeded in getting totally plastered. Ethan took Julianne aside that night.
“‘We thought maybe you were in the plot,’” he said.
“What plot? Plot? What?”
“It’s a line from Tender Is the Night,” he said. “The Fitzgerald novel.”
The paperback he’d left at her apartment doorstep. She was embarrassed to admit she hadn’t even flipped through it and so didn’t.
“I still think about you, you know,” he whisper-confessed.
His rendition of seriousness was absurd enough to make her laugh. “You always have to make everything into such a big production, don’t you?”
“You tell me,” he said, no longer whispering. He took one of his big hands and touched the side of her head, then a cheek.
“Ethan,” she preempted. But she only pulled away a little and was smiling.
“Do you want to get out of here?”
She knew she shouldn’t want to go home with him, though her heart kept chanting, Yes, Yes, of course I do. Vince would see them leave together. “I can’t,” she said.
“Come on,” he said. “We can listen to records. My parents aren’t home.”
That line might have meant something to her if she didn’t know that his apartment was always full of people. His parents had a duplex at the Morleigh. It was made up of combined adjoining apartments stacked over two floors and was as big as a townhouse. Here they raised foster kids, adopted kids, Ethan, his brothers, rooms upon rooms of them, stacked up like a boarding school dorm, rickety hardwood floors, and cluttered with furniture.
She’d only been over once or twice. In all the time they’d both lived at the Morleigh, they mostly only met up in the stairwells to smoke cigarettes. After Ethan got kicked out of Dwight, weeks and months could go by without their seeing each other. She thought about him from time to time, sometimes almost felt like she was in love with him. But it was all too late now. She’d graduated and he had another year of high school ahead of him and she was with Vince.
Julianne felt like she didn’t really know Ethan anymore. He was kind of a nerd now. Maybe he’d always been. Read a lot. Classics she wouldn’t encounter until college. And something he called “Contemporary American Fiction.” Always scribbling something in a notebook. Diary entries? Short stories? Was there even a difference?
When she’d see him with a pen in hand, she couldn’t make out what he wrote but did notice that whatever it was spilled out quickly, like stream of consciousness in novels he’d tell her about and that she’d someday read herself, when she thought she could find him somewhere in between the lines, after he was gone and she couldn’t find him in the stairwells or the lobby or at Smalls anymore.
They’d had this kind of love affair, almost, when they were sophomores, for a couple of weeks. There she was, eating Snackwell’ses in his kitchen, plants all around, bright afternoon light streaming in through big windows, almost giving her the sensation of being in a greenhouse. They could hear the advance and retreat of footsteps of foster brothers and adopted brothers overhead. Maybe Ethan’s apartment was a greenhouse, adjacent to Central Park, where people and plants grew faster and bigger than their street-level counterparts.
She always wondered if she and he could have had something if life, if other people, hadn’t gotten in the way. He had such strong hands. Such a firm hold he would have over her in those weeks when they danced together in the back of Amsterdam Billiards or on somebody’s terrace, barely large enough for the both of them and their beers.
But it was doomed because Vince had the stronger hold over her. As soon as she’d let herself stop thinking about Ethan for a day or two, and then a week, and a couple of weeks, because she was getting back together with Vince again, there she’d find Ethan on the elevator. She’d claim she had homework to do or that her mother needed her to help with something, sort laundry, unpack groceries, but it didn’t matter; he always saw right through her; he’d simply say Come on.
“I like this,” he said to her. His statement brought her back into the dim light and smoke of Smalls. Either he was taking no for an answer this time or was trying a different approach to get her to go home with him. She couldn’t yet tell. Frank Hewitt was in the middle of a long set on the piano with Art thrumming bass and Jimmy drumming behind, and Julianne hoped he’d play “I Can’t Get Started.” She had a feeling he would, because it was Ethan’s favorite of Frank’s songs, hers, too, and he’d probably given Frank ten bucks and bought him a beer at one of the breaks in case it wasn’t already on the set list.
“What do you like?” she asked, even though she knew she shouldn’t have.
“This,” he said. He opened his hands and made a broad, sweeping gesture that seemed to take in Frank, the music, the dim, the firefly light the burning cigarettes made and the smoke that rose and clung to the air over their heads and over the stage, the drunk jazz enthusiasts at little tables, the kids he and she knew from growing up here in New York, looking like little adults with the beers they got without a fake ID and continued to sip even after they’d warmed. But then, instead of naming any of these things, he brought his hands together and said, “You.”
She laughed. Not only did that feel like a line, but she also knew very well that he had used it before, on Jennifer. He’d started talking to her one night, here at Smalls, as a matter of fact, earlier in the summer. He moved on quickly, but she hadn’t, and was still so convinced that Ethan really cared about her.
Julianne knew about others, too. There was this chick Lindsay at Ethan’s new high school. Julianne struck up a conversation with her at a Trinity party. It turned out they knew people in common, including Ethan. At one point, Lindsay had actually claimed to have dated him. Later that night, Julianne found Joey having a cigarette on a terrace, told him about meeting Lindsay. The two could see Lindsay through the glass door, as though conducting an experiment in a lab. They mocked her for being so naïve and thought her pinned plaid skirt and Doc boots combo looked ridiculous.
“‘Going to stay all summer?’” he asked then. The way he spoke the words, more Fitzgerald, Julianne imagined them in quotation marks. “‘If you do, you can watch the plot unfold.’”
Ethan didn’t date girls. He slept with girls. He went to dinner with girls. He was charming as hell with girls at parties. He would take a girl to his room and play old Elton John records and dim the lights. She knew the routine. She could see how these girls could be totally hypnotized by all of this.
When he tried to put her under, Julianne would fade in and out. She knew she should tell herself that this was just the clouds in her eyes, that this wasn’t real, that nothing real could feel like this. She’d reach around for other real things, little clues to bring her back, like the sound of children’s footsteps and maybe a basketball passing overhead.
Even though she didn’t mind having a one-night stand now and again, she supposed that after Vince she kind of had a reputation for being kind of slutty. There was no denying that carrying on with Ethan was just inflaming matters.
All the people who had bad things to say about her but pretended to her face to think she was fabulous and so lucky, all these girls who called her a slut, out of jealousy, out of priggishness, and were annoyed with her because it was all the harder for them to find guys to fall in love with them, they were silently keeping score. It was basically the same thing as all the guys who secretly called her a slut but couldn’t wait to get her clothes off. At least they weren’t keeping score. They wanted to score.
She didn’t need anyone to point out that with each night like this, with each time she’d let herself be all romanced up in some guy’s room while his parents were out at dinner or sleeping upstairs, it was one more strike against her. She didn’t want to live her life according to how other people reacted to it, but was this worth it? Sometimes she just wanted to leave it all behind, go to Connecticut, start over, be a prude, fall in love the right way. Everybody here was tainted.
Frank Hewitt took a break, and someone put on a Bob Dylan record. It was a song she didn’t recognize. The lights in the club began to thicken, portending the end of the night. Her eyelids felt heavy like it was two in the morning. A glance at her white Swatch confirmed this.
“I should go,” she said then.
“Get high with me,” he returned, as though she hadn’t said anything at all.
In front of Smalls, he rolled a joint and they began to pass it back and forth before she could object. She was having a hard time getting a buzz. He was pretty fucked up but still cute. When he exhaled, grinning, she was reminded what it was everyone saw in him: he was charming as hell and he knew it. She knew it. She could taste him on the Zig-Zag. But even as she felt her pants being charmed off, she was aware she was merely observing something from afar. She’d been there, done that, déjà screw, and now it was time to move forward with her life.
Nothing happened that night. After the joint was gone, he kissed her. She barely kissed him back.
He pulled away, asked her what was wrong, and she said she was just tired and wanted to go home.
He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Whatever.”
They went back inside, listened to a few songs together, nothing too special, and then he walked away, went for another beer or to smoke another joint with someone else and maybe screw her tonight instead. He left his hat behind, this newsboy floppy cap thing he had on, and Julianne picked it up. She kept it to give back to him.
Six months later she finally did.
It was already late, well after two in the morning, and she’d grown very tired. Not just of being out, but of New York in general. She looked around the room for Ethan, to say goodbye, as she hugged Chris and Pat and Ansel, but he’d disappeared. He was probably in the bathroom or outside or something.
Then when she finally did spot him, she pretended like she hadn’t. She knew what was coming next. He’d try one more time to get her to go home with him, this time under the guise of sharing a cab uptown or needing a token for the subway but not having any money left.
She was bored and lonely, and it was a mistake to let him take advantage of that, but somehow she’d still feel guilty that she was leaving him here, trapped in the Village, without any way home, looking at her with those longing eyes, like she was his last chance. There were a million other people he could turn to. He’d make his way back to the Morleigh fine on his own. He wasn’t her responsibility. But if that were really true, why did she want so badly for this scenario to end with her saying, “Okay, fine, Ethan, get in”?
Vince and Alex Fader were ordering more beers. Sola flitted around the room. If they weren’t enough for Ethan, he could always call someone else. He had a million phone numbers in a little notebook he carried around.
She wasn’t expecting a standing ovation or anything, they’d already done the hugs, but Julianne couldn’t help feeling like she was irrelevant here, somehow, as she stood, literally on the periphery, about to leave. Of course she was no more relevant at the end of the night than she’d been at any other point. Except maybe in those four or five seconds Ethan had contemplated scoring her, if he really even had at all.
She was glad she was getting the hell out, going off to discover new things, shiny, new people, since all of these things and these people here had ceased to do it for her. All of it was just a constant reminder of a life she’d grown out of. Like the “Love Life, Stop AIDS” T-shirt she’d gotten with a class donation to ACT UP NY in eighth grade that no longer fit but that she hadn’t thrown out or given away. It just hung in the closet in her room, at her mother’s apartment, and each time she looked at it, she saw the person who she used to be, recalled what she used to want, and in doing so almost could forget about who she was now and what she wanted now. Sometimes it was just easier if nothing was around her to remind her of anything, since that way she could believe in her New You, without her old you around to press its annoying little nose to the window and ask, “But what would have come of that relationship if you hadn’t fucked it up by having sex too early or too late or with too many other people at the same time?”
There were other people who’d like her, care about her, need her to be a part of their lives, and really mean it. She just had to find them.
After that night at Smalls, when she ran into Ethan, on the Upper West Side, before she moved away to Connecticut, he was usually drunk or stoned. He would flirt with her, but not in a good way. His affection came through this sort of mass-market generic filter, like an apartment building’s doorman giving perfunctory concern for a tenant about to topple from packages, that really did nothing for her.
She was resolved to play it coy, because that’s what you were supposed to do with someone like him. You had to pretend you didn’t notice or care, even though you never didn’t notice and always cared much more than you should have, because this was Ethan and everybody worshiped him, because he was an eighteen-year-old high school junior god, and that’s what people did in the presence of deities so they didn’t turn into mush.
At least that’s what her Old You always did.
She didn’t say goodbye to Ethan before she left New York, when summer waned and fall semester waxed, and it was time for her to go.
She’d go to school in Connecticut and not think about him very much.
Until Joey called.
Then she’d see Ethan again, this time at his funeral. She’d give him the stupid newsboy hat, and imagined him thanking her for it, in a flirty sarcastic way, but in reality, he wouldn’t know, wouldn’t be able to tell, because he was gone.
And she’d never be the same again.
She also remembered an afternoon when she still lived in New York, when she was shopping on Columbus Avenue and ran into Ethan in front of Lincoln Center. Immediately, she was happy to see him; he was more reticent, caught somewhere between enthusiasm and indifference as he appraised her.
“Ethan, what’s going on?” she asked.
“Not too much,” he said. He looked around her, not at her, as if wanting to make sure nobody was around who might see them and think something was going on, assume that they were there together instead of just having run into each other completely by chance.
“Do you want to get some coffee?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said.
They ended up in a little diner on West 67th. The booth felt small, as though the decades had shrunken it, and seemed to push them together, forced them to sit closer to each other than they might have under other circumstances, like an eager matchmaker.
His face looked different in the light. Not strange, exactly, but different. Free from the usual trappings of coolness, more genuine somehow in this stark light. He could have used a shave. His hair was hidden underneath a backward Camel baseball hat, but she could tell it was greasy, laden with stale cigarette and pot smoke, like he hadn’t showered in a few days. He wore a red and white flannel, ripped jeans, this backward hat.
Ethan leaned toward Julianne from time to time, flirting with her but without fully committing to it, as though debating whether or not it was worth making a move, but then ultimately figuring it was pointless, deciding not to even bother.
Julianne ordered coffee for the two of them. This amused him for some reason.
“You used to be a waitress, right?” he asked.
“A million years ago,” she said. She suppressed a yawn. She didn’t know what she was doing there, why she suggested they have coffee. She inspected a lock of her hair, the ends split but still with hints of blonde from highlights she did way back in eighth grade. Her contacts felt dry and scratchy. She needed a drink.
“I like working at the library,” he said.
“At Fordham?”
“Yeah,” he said, and leaned back, stared at the ceiling. “Circulation desk on the weekends. Nobody bothers you.”
“It sounds kind of nice, actually. Peaceful.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely quiet. Even when people are around everybody’s really respectful of everyone else. It’s not like a restaurant where everybody tries to be the loudest. No stress too. Not like parking cars.”
Julianne laughed. “Whatever happened to that BMW you guys scratched up?”
Ethan smiled. “Nobody ever said shit about it.”
“Convenient.”
“Bossman was the one who hired that kid from Wise Towers without a license. That kid’s the one who dented the mirror.”
“Yeah, not like you and Vince had licenses either.”
Ethan looked at her. “He’s really the love of your life or something?”
His asking embarrassed her, but she laughed like it was no big deal. “About a million years ago.”
“Around the time you and I should have gotten together?” he asked, more of a question than a statement.
“Yeah, probably. Who remembers? That was all so long ago.”
“I miss the times when you’d try to imagine the future but you couldn’t come up with anything. Like there were so many possibilities that you just couldn’t picture any one of them. Now things are clearer. I mean, sure, some of it is sketchy as hell, but a lot of things start to become clearer.”
“Some people probably find that comforting,” she said. “You know, like the less uncertain life is, the more you can do with it. If this were a college essay, someone would tell you to call that a paradox.”
“I don’t know . . .” he said. He reached for her across the booth. There was this wistful look in his eyes. As though he were the only person in the world who knew her, not just at that moment, but like, ever. “Some people don’t want to know. Some people like uncertainty.”
“So much of my life has been out of my hands,” she said. “I keep waiting for the day when it starts to belong to me.”
“You’re going away. The day’s coming.”
“Do you think you’ll go away for college?”
“I doubt it,” he said, “Like, why go somewhere dumb when everything you want is here in New York.”
“That’s the problem with growing up in a big city. You go from being able to buy beer on a Sunday morning from a deli two steps away—”
“—For your grandmother—”
“For your grandmother, who also needs a pack of cigarettes, and rent Hal Hartley and Kurosawa movies at Kim’s, to some town that’s only claim to fame is the college and a Blockbuster that has eighty copies of The Lion King.
“But it’s hard to meet new people when all you do is see the people you know, the same ones you’ve always known.”
“I’ve met people. I always meet new people,” he said.
“Yeah, you sure have.”
He pantomimed punching her in the shoulder. “I’m not talking about sex, Julianne.”
“Yeah, yeah. That’s what they all say. I think you most definitely are talking about sex.”
He gave her a weird look. “You think that I’m sitting here with you now because I want to have sex with you?”
“The thought did cross my mind, yes.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
“Definitely.”
“So, this is just us talking? Just having a conversation?”
“Appears so.” He lifted his mug. “Lukewarm coffee, too.”
“You’re funny,” she said.
“I try,” he said.
She watched a waiter with a coffee pot pass their table. He didn’t stop to refill their cups.
“I think I’m going to miss you when I go,” she said, still watching the waiter.
“Same.”
Long minutes passed, and still no more coffee. She grew restless and didn’t want to sit here any longer. She told him she had a nail appointment in Soho. She didn’t really have an appointment, but after saying it decided she could use a pedicure after all. She went back out onto West 67th to look for a taxi rounding the block after dropping someone off on Broadway, but none came. Before she walked over to Amsterdam to try her luck there, she looked at Ethan, still in the diner booth, his back to the window. If it turned out to be the last look, was this how she wanted to remember him?
The weekend before Julianne left, Vince called to invite her to a party. He never invited her to anything. They weren’t really friends when they weren’t seeing each other, and the summer kept them even more distant. From time to time, people told her that he’d been talking shit about her. Up until then, she thought they could be friends, but now she was just kind of really over him.
She didn’t even know why she answered the phone. She was expecting a call from Sola to discuss going to Stamford together, figure out how they were going to get a lot of shit up there. She was listening to the Stones on her stereo and smoking a cigarette. She had the window cracked so the smoke could escape.
From another apartment, she could make out a low din of chatter. When “Wild Horses” came on, the noise suddenly went quiet, as though whoever was on the other side of the wall, like Julianne, thought the song was beautiful and heartbreaking and felt like it could make her cry any time she ever heard it.
“What are you doing tonight, Julianne?” Vince asked.
“I don’t know . . . packing, trying to throw out a bunch of shit, listening to CDs.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Yeah. Tons. What are you doing?”
“I wanted to go to this party.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. Some Stuy guys.”
“Current or former?” She pictured him shrugging in the silence. “Who else is going?”
“I don’t know…probably me, Carrie and Lizzie and those girls . . . Fader, Ethan Birnbaum . . .”
I have my freedom, but I don’t have much time . . .
“I don’t feel like drinking tonight.”
He took a drag of a cigarette she hadn’t heard him light. It crackled. “We could go together.”
“I don’t like what I’m wearing.” She had jeans and a T-shirt on, a flannel wrapped around her waist, nothing too exciting. Also, her hair was wet from a shower and pulled back.
She saw she only had three cigarettes left and would eventually need to get more but didn’t feel like leaving the apartment with wet hair and definitely not with Vince who hadn’t called in so long and then when he did wasn’t even asking her out.
“Julianne, I’m sure you look fine,” he said.
“Fine is a nice way of saying shitty,” she returned. “Seriously, though, not tonight. I don’t really feel like a fuck and run at the moment.”
“Is that why you think I called?”
“Yes, it is why you called. Do you think I don’t know you?”
“It’s not why I called. It isn’t. Okay, you want to know why I called?”
“Jesus, I guess so. This is incredibly fucking boring.”
“Ethan wants to see you.”
She considered this for a second. It was probably Vince just bullshitting her, but what if it wasn’t? “So why didn’t he call me himself?”
“He’s shy.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t think you just magically end up fucking every private school girl in the borough by being shy. Sorry.”
“He hasn’t had sex with that many girls.”
“Oh my god, I don’t really want to debate this with you right now.”
Vince didn’t say anything, like the keg of banter had run dry and was now only tiny eruptions of foam. Her other line beeped in. “Hey, call-waiting,” she said. She clicked over.
“Come tonight.” It was Ethan.
She laughed. “How did you know I was talking to Vince?”
“His line was busy. I took a wild guess.”
“Yeah, pretty wild,” she said.
“What are you wearing?” he asked.
The flannel hung limply on her waist. “Just a red bra.”
“Just?” he asked, drawing out the word hungrily.
“Maybe some shorts, too. Ethan, seriously, I’m working. I’m packing. I have a lot of shit to do. I don’t think I can see you tonight. You and Vince are just going to have to find someone else to tease.”
“Stop teasing me,” he said.
“Right. What’s your deal anyway, don’t you have anything better to do? Where’s Jennifer?”
“Jennifer is at Syracuse already. She’s completely irrelevant.”
“Well, that’s pretty obvious,” Julianne said, “whether or not she’s in town.”
“Funny. She’s just a friend. You know that.”
“Yeah, I do know that. But I don’t think she does.”
“I don’t really want to debate this with you right now.”
“You’re funny. You should let me go on my way. I have a lot to do.”
“What have you gotten packed so far?”
“Some T-shirts. A few CDs. So, it’s pretty obvious I have a lot more to do.”
“What else do you really need besides T-shirts and CDs? That’s basically all I own.”
“I’m staying in tonight, Ethan. Tell Vince if you talk to him.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah, do that,” she said and hung up the phone. She expected it to ring back right away with Vince, but it didn’t. He must have given up waiting on hold.
When the Stones CD spun through the last song and came to a halt, she swapped it out of the tray for Fleetwood Mac.
Something Vince had said to her, earlier on in the summer, came back to her. He said he felt more certain about his decision to leave New York for UConn because he knew that no matter how far he went off on his own, he could always come back to this world, this time in his life, in a way.
The people who’d inhabited these scenes alongside him might or might not always be around, if he could ply them with food and booze, when they were all back in the city for a holiday, he could gather them around a living room again, like a scene out of Metropolitan. People were always willing to reprise roles and reenact what had come before. You just had to ask.
But Julianne couldn’t picture herself in that living room. If nostalgia was all they’d, someday, have to show for those days, she’d rather not show it. Bringing them back together in the present would be nothing more than a mirage: just like strangers waiting for a 2 train, unaware it was at that moment inching along all the local downtown stops. Every minute that passed without the train appearing at Times Square, more people collected, the crowd grew dense, it would look like a mass of people with something in common, but they didn’t actually connect. They were just fifty or sixty or a thousand separate people with their separate newspapers and shopping bags and radio headphones, tired, cold or damp. They didn’t need to commiserate. They just needed to get to 96th Street.
She thought she was going to throw up and made for her en-suite bathroom, but the nausea passed when she got there. She sat on the floor, forehead perspiring, and lit a cigarette from a smushed pack she found in her shower caddy. She took a few drags, but then flushed the rest down the toilet. On instinct, she reached for perfume to spray, but then thought fuck it, I’m eighteen, I should be allowed to smoke in my own bathroom. Her mother never really cared anyway.
Did Ethan really mean it when he said that Jennifer meant nothing to him? It was pretty obvious that he didn’t care for her, but it was kind of weird hearing him say that.
The phone rang again, and Julianne answered the cordless. She had a few days left, but they were just delaying the inevitable. She was ready.
“Ethan—”
“Fine.”
“Fine, bye.”
And that may have been the last time they ever spoke to each other.
The next time she spent any serious time thinking about him, it was because she was trying to figure out who could drive her to the train station so she could get an Amtrak out of Stamford and back to New York for the funeral. How fucked up is that?
While she sat in that bathroom, after she’d made her first giant step toward letting go of the past, even if only moving her heart forward a little bit, the weather changed.
As she plotted the subsequent steps, the summer faded, fall came out, sweaters were lifted out of storage, long sleeves abounded, hats and jackets and gloves dusted off and readied for battle.
She didn’t know that leaving that time would permanently sever certain ties. Of course her going off to college didn’t cause Ethan to die, but maybe if she’d stayed, if she’d been in New York that night, she could have protected him somehow, been there for him, kept him out of harm’s way. But she hadn’t.
She went to Stamford, enrolled in classes, got to know her roommate, started to become enamored with the library and Main Street and cafés and a world that looked entirely different than anything she’d ever seen before.
Ethan was in New York, doing his fifth and final year of high school, working his circulation desk shifts at the Fordham library, on the phone with Vince while the two watched the same reruns on TV, listening to jazz at Smalls, sleeping with Lindsay and whoever else, and then suddenly one night he no longer existed.
The other weird part was that nothing seemed to look the same to her after he died. The old looked new and strange; the new was even harder to make sense out of.
Now nothing made sense. Someone was gone.
It wasn’t the first time in Julianne’s life she’d lived through death. She lost her grandparents when she was in fifth grade. Her uncle, her mother’s only brother, died four years after that, in 1991, when she was in eighth grade. She’d always had to have mourning clothes.
At those wakes and funerals, her mother acted like she wasn’t affected by anything. It was a stunning display of dissembling. Her only parents, her only brother, her only daughter left behind and with whom she’d have to settle for family. There’s no way something like that can happen and not mean something to you. For it not to change you. She couldn’t have been okay.
Maybe it would be that false portrait of strength that Julianne adopted to get through those days, when she’d return to New York for the funeral, deal with her friends and the media, someone wanting everything from every angle in the room, everything black and gray and distraught. It was probably her mother whom Julianne would find herself channeling, but nothing she’d ever witnessed could possibly have prepared her.
She was breaking inside, broken bones breaking a second time, and so it just wasn’t meant to be an act she could keep up for very long.
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Excerpted from The Morleigh and Me