Really Good, Actually(39)
“Maybe . . . wait on that,” said Lauren.
I told her I couldn’t imagine ever wanting them again, that surely if I did it would be a sign I’d succumbed to full derangement. What could I do, string them on a chain and make a miserable necklace? Repurpose them for a second time around when I finally gave in to everyone’s pressure and decided to get married again? Anyway, the entire set had cost under $400 from a pawnshop near Jon’s office. I did not like to guess the resale value of a twice-used wedding ring, but it felt safe to assume: not high.
Lauren touched my shoulder, then reached in and fished out the small box. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll keep them for a bit. You can tell me if you want to do something with them later.” She slid them on the ring finger of her right hand. “Okay, these look great on me. Maybe I should call Jon?”
Emotional Lauren screamed, which made Lauren cackle. I threw a pillow at her and told her to keep the rings. They did look pretty on her, and someone should get something out of them.
“Will it bum you out to see them?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Dope,” she said. “Free diamond. When I helped my brother move, he just gave us pizza.”
We kept sorting until Merris arrived with a box of welcome cookies. “Children are always coming to our door with something or other,” she said. “The only way to get rid of them is to buy whatever little trinkets they’re selling. Cookies today, so here you are, bienvenue.”
The cookies were the superior mint chocolate kind, and we were happy to have them. Merris and the Laurens got along great, though she departed after her first cookie, promising not to come downstairs often.
“Your space is your space; your business, your business,” she said. “I don’t want to learn anything that might make me view you differently.”
I told her she was more confident in the wildness of my lifestyle than I was. Lauren made a joke about hosting an orgy and inviting the gals upstairs for an air of authenticity. Merris rolled her eyes and shut the door, yelling over her shoulder that those only happened in the suburbs. The Laurens left soon after, headed to the launch of some doomed magazine, and suddenly I was in my new apartment, alone.
I looked at my boxes and bags and various piles. I sorted through some general misc. I applied a face mask and sat in different corners of the room and thought, this is a place to become yourself. Then I saw a mouse, cried, peeled the mask off with great effort and not insignificant pain, and went to sleep.
The next morning, the unfamiliar setting had me awake early and disoriented. I made coffee, climbed back into bed, and drank it while attempting some “morning pages.” I abandoned this effort almost instantly: journaling felt embarrassing and pointless. Why write my feelings down when I could tell them to my loved ones or write a too-long, fake-deep caption under a picture of some clouds? At least then there would be feedback. Keeping a journal seemed like a slower, somehow more tedious way to think about the things I had already bored myself with by overthinking. No.
The apartment was really a studio, compact but bright. Big double doors led to a backyard covered in a thin layer of six a.m. mist. Unlike at my old place, the quiet felt intentional here: the sound of an apartment for one. I did not feel an absence; there was only room enough for me.
I went upstairs and called for Lydia, who came bounding around a corner, toweringly large and covered in drool. I attached her lead, and we wandered around my new neighborhood—quieter than my old one, with weirder coffee shops and expensive independent clothing boutiques that seemed to exclusively sell outfits for aging psychics heading out of town on a cottage weekend.
Lydia was a well-behaved dope with no idea how huge she was, deferring instantly to the much smaller, more confident dogs that strolled right up to get in her face or sniff her butthole. I bought a coffee and a cardamom bun from a cash-only place decorated in black-and-white pictures of lattes.
When I got home, I let Lydia off her leash and said hello to Betty and Inessa, Merris’s housemates. They were old and vaguely bohemian and politely uninterested in me; Merris had told them all the relevant details, and they were engaged in a heated argument about whether an arborist needed to be called about a concerning fungus Inessa had found on the big tree in the backyard. Betty, to whom Lydia belonged, had her foot in a plastic boot.
I went back out the front door, walked around the house, and entered the basement through my dingy little side entrance. I filled a large trash bag with several pairs of size 33 jeans and some other old clothes and headed to the secondhand store.
The shop door made an aggressive honking sound when I opened it, and the woman behind the counter looked up. She was tall and slender and had a bunch of little tattoos on her long, graceful hands. She looked like she lived in a pottery studio on a boat, or a van she’d painstakingly renovated with her freelance model boyfriend, or maybe just an enormous downtown condo her parents had purchased. I did not really want to show her my clothes.
There was no one else in the store. I considered pretending to browse for a few minutes then leaving, but was conspicuously carrying a translucent bag full of old clothing, which made it implausible to suggest I was on my way somewhere else. I reluctantly heaved the bag onto the counter and began an Idiot’s Monologue about how I’d never done this before, wasn’t quite sure how it worked, and hoped she’d be interested in some of my wares. I said “wares.” Actually, I said “wares, as it were.” I wanted to die.