Homesick for Another World(57)
For the rest of the afternoon I watched more DVDs, checked my e-mail, and pined for Britt Wendt. I fantasized about our life together. We’d get a one-bedroom in Flushing, fill it with her furniture, cook roasts, and drink expensive wine bought with the money we saved by living in Queens. Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing. I could imagine Britt Wendt lying beside me in bed, her frothy blond hair flattened into a fuzzy halo. We’d be like dope fiends for each other, reaching out our swollen hands for one more hit, her body pale and freckled, nipples pink as sunsets. “The worse your morning breath, the more I love kissing you,” I’d say, slipping my tongue into her hot, bitter, velvety mouth.
I think by then I’d been single longer than is healthy for a young man. I’d had just one serious girlfriend since graduating from college. Postbreakup, there was a consequent jag of failed sexual reprisals (including the one with Lacey), a two-year dry spell, then a single and only semi-interesting encounter with a completely hairless Taiwanese girl I met at Bloomingdale’s. Next came a few standard Brooklyn bar hookups with insecure twenty-five-year-olds, then three more years of nothingness, not a drop, not a cloud on the horizon. By my Jesus year I was practically a virgin again. My father told me to focus on my career. “Women are attracted to money,” he had said over the phone before leaving for Tahoe.
“I’ll die alone,” I told my father. “I don’t care.” This was all before I’d met Britt Wendt, of course.
“There are plenty of girls who would be interested in you,” my father said. “You’re a long-term investment, they’ll think. Women are good about the future. They can see further down the line. I’ll mail you a check when I get back from Tahoe.”
When the sun went down, I checked my e-mail one more time, found nothing, got dressed, pinned my hair back, jogged through the snow, bought a can of soup and beef jerky from a bodega, and walked back in the dark feeling heroic and despondent. Mine was not the usual self-pity, but the kind of fearful admiration one feels watching footage of young tribal boys performing dangerous rites of passage.
I passed by Schoolbells and Soda, a bar where all the young, hip gentrifiers of the neighborhood congregated and, as they tended to do, ignored one another every evening, taking advantage of the Tecate-and-tequila special and the plein air seating with fire pit out back. The interior was all old, weathered wood sourced from Navy Yard scrap, the lamps Edison bulbs hanging from thick ropes, the glasses jam and mason jars. At the time, this was considered innovative design. I’d been a regular there until mid-November, when I got caught refilling my beer glass from the tap myself. I’d actually been stealing beer for weeks and could refill my glass one-handed by then. All I had to do was rise slightly from my barstool, get my glass under the spout, hold the rim with my fingertips, and lower the tap with my thumb. It took two seconds. When the bartender, in his suspenders and bow-tie neck tattoo, caught me in the act, he turned red, shut his eyes, and began to inhale and exhale dramatically, his lips moving as he counted each breath. I recognized this practice as an effort to reduce violent rage. I couldn’t imagine him beating anybody up. He looked like one of those portly, nebbish types who if you shaved him and scrubbed him and dressed him in Van Heusen, you’d discover your cousin Ira, a tax attorney in Montclair. The whole bar hushed. Joanna Newsom yodeled and harped from the speakers. After ten breaths had gone by, I felt I had to do something. So I pulled three dollars out of my wallet and waved them in the air. “I’m happy to pay for the extra beer,” I said. The bartender simply shook his beard and pointed to the door.
Mark loved to convict me of being an alcoholic. The Schoolbells story in particular seemed to arouse him. I made the mistake of recounting it a few days later. He listened attentively, said, “I feel like an opportunity has presented itself,” then made a big fuss about silencing his phone. He went on to explain how embarrassed he’d been at his bachelor party two years ago when I’d made a joke of calling his cousin Daniel “Herr Schindler” in front of all the groomsmen.
“I’m Jewish, Nick. That means something to some of us. And why Schindler? How is that even funny? Do you even know what Schindler looked like? Or were you thinking of the actor in Schindler’s List? Ralph Fiennes?”
“It’s pronounced like ‘rape,’ but with an f,” I said.
“Fuck you,” said Mark.
I nodded. “It wasn’t a great joke, okay? But Dan had been making a big deal about paying for the stripper, blabbing every chance he got, being a Schindler,” I said. “It was a joke about self-interested generosity, the glove-on-the-invisible-hand thing.”
“What invisible-hand thing?”
“Like when people tell you they gave money to a homeless person. The invisible hand of selflessness, only it’s wearing a glove so everyone can see it.”
“You could have called him Queequeg or Alyosha,” Mark said. “But did Schindler really brag? Was he blabbing? Is that the takeaway, that he was a blabber?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was insensitive. I get it. Who is Queequeg?”
“The cannibal from Moby-Dick, idiot.” Mark turned the ringer on his phone back on. “In all seriousness,” he said, “please get a grip on the drinking. Have some self-respect.”