Cult Classic(24)

“What you see,” she translated.

Vadis gave her a look like she knew better, like she was just here to price things out. She waited for a better answer but the woman wouldn’t budge. Then a bell chimed and she walked away to greet a new customer.

“Ready?” Vadis asked me, texting as she spoke.

Outside, the air was saturated with the smell of decaying garbage. Two cab drivers were parked at a light, berating each other out their windows while their passengers texted through the disruption. I smiled. Uber drivers didn’t yell at each other, they couldn’t.

“On to the next one?” I asked Vadis.

We had not walked four steps before I noticed her staring at me. Her eyes were a kind of accidental blue, the color of sink water after washing something navy in it.

“What?”

“Do you feel weird, being around here? Or different?”

“I mean, I’m hungry.”

Eating out multiple nights in a row was bad for the wallet, bad for the metabolism, but I needed to shove bread into my face. Wine on an empty stomach had become pathetically damaging. Vadis surveyed the landscape and began ruminating on restaurants as if she could see through the buildings. I bent down and stretched my legs. Then, on the way back up, I screamed. I surprised myself with the sound of it.

“Jesus Christ,” Vadis said, rubbing her ear.

I squatted and tugged at her sleeve, forcing her to squat with me.

“What are we doing?”

Was it possible to hallucinate after two glasses of wine? Is anyone’s tolerance so low? Running past the fruit carts was Dave Egan. I’d gone on a handful of dates with Dave more than a decade ago. Part of me wanted to be rewarded for recognizing him at all; he was such a brief interlude. Though he didn’t look markedly different. Perhaps on account of all the incessant jogging.

Dave was in the market for a type, not a person. What Dave needed was a hearty sex maniac who could play blackjack and fix a carburetor, someone with no neurosis or limitations, someone with no nerve endings except for the ones in her clitoris. He needed a certain kind of guy disguised as a certain kind of girl, someone to make him feel like he’d finally gotten everything his thirteen-year-old self had wanted. If I’d known Willis when I knew Dave, I imagine Dave would’ve worshipped Willis. The more Dave forced me to say no (No, I really have no interest in polar bear plunges. No, I really have never driven stick or used a butt plug), the more he accused me of digging my heels into the soft padding of my “comfort zone,” the more I revolted.

“This is New York,” I explained. “Everything is outside everyone’s comfort zone. Why push it?”

By date five, I found myself claiming to be riddled with physical quirks, sensitive organs, pulled muscles, intractable habits—a disagreeable child who barely used her legs. And still I thought: This could work? That’s what really stuck with me about Dave, not Dave himself but how I felt that if only I’d been more game, more apt to commit, he’d have pledged his loyalty to me. If I really wanted to be over and done with dating, to have a life like Eliza’s, all I had to do was flick the switch. But I didn’t even know where my switch was.

Dave was one of the few blond men I’d ever been with, an Aryan slate that belied his Jewish heritage. On the last of our encounters, I suggested that he would have survived the Holocaust, passing for gentile, whereas I wouldn’t have. Unfortunately, this comment harmonized a little too well with the “I’m weak” advisories I’d been issuing. All I meant was: One humid day in Warsaw and the jig would be up. But Dave took my implication to be that the Jews who died in the Holocaust did so because they were too frail to survive, because they didn’t want to go kayaking in the Hudson. He draped his arm around me and told me he would’ve gladly snuck me out of a camp. Or brought me “scraps of food.” I smiled weakly at this, which he took as an invitation to elaborate.

“I would’ve forged your papers,” he went on, “gotten you out of there … for a price, of course.”

I pushed it out of my mind as we walked into a movie theater and shook our popcorn. But there was a shift when we had sex that night and neither of us dared speak of why: He was playing prison guard. I did not suspect nice-guy Dave Egan harbored secret desires to make Holocaust victims fuck him in exchange for their lives. It was not so much the fantasy that bothered me, as his lack of understanding that he was having it. Even more bothersome was his inability to unhook his jaws from an off-color joke. As I was leaving his apartment the next morning, he tossed me a chocolate bar. He referred to my departure as “the liberation.”

We never spoke again.

Dave hopped on and off the sidewalk, treating the streets like an obstacle course, swerving around clusters of tourists. I tried to remember if he’d showcased such joint dexterity naked. As he trotted off into the distance, I signaled to Vadis that it was okay to stand. In a way, I was grateful for the Dave Egans of my life and the indifference they triggered, if indifference is, by its nature, triggerable. I did not want Dave Egan to get hit by a truck or lose his job. Nor did I not want him to win the lottery. I didn’t want anything for him. Not every breakup is acrimonious. Not every relationship has to end with a stab wound. Most of these things don’t work out.

I told Vadis the coast was clear. But her eyes were fixed on Dave. She stood on her toes like she wanted to run after him.