When No One Is Watching(38)

When I was young, I’d get so mad at my mom for always making the same stupid mistakes. Now I wonder if there’s any avoiding that pattern. I tried hard as hell to break it, and look where it’s gotten me.

After a few minutes of standing under the lukewarm spray, the panic and anger get shunted away like they have all my life—probably compacting into a tumor in some dark corner of my body—and I turn off the water and calmly step out.

I have a week. I’ll be fine.

We often moved with way shorter notice when I was a kid—I know for a fact that you can pack up everything you really need to get by in half an hour. A week is golden.

Everything will be fine.

She’s probably giving David a handie on the LIE right now.

Whatever.

I head to her fridge, pull the fancy stopper out of the wine Josie had been trying to get me to drink the other night, and take a huge swallow of the too-sweet liquid. Leftovers from the fancy Italian restaurant we used to go to when we were renting in Manhattan sit on the shelf below, and I grab the box out of sheer spite.

Given the short notice, I’ll probably end up in some illegal living room rental with an IKEA curtain for a wall. I deserve this leftover vegetarian lasagna—that’s what she always orders.

I know those kinds of things about her, and she knows nothing about me. Nothing. And not just the stuff I hid from her.

I take another swig of the Riesling—which has gone bad but will still get me buzzed—then carry the box to the microwave and open it.

It’s shrimp scampi.

Well, would you look at that.

After warming the food, I carry the bottle up to my studio and sit at my desk to start searching for a place. I drink. I send a text asking an old contact I’d been trying to avoid slinking back to if he has any work for me, hoping the number is still in service. I drink. I look at more places, and email a couple of them.

I’m still in whatever numb state is preventing me from being really pissed off at Kim—I’m mostly mad at myself.

I’d known she wasn’t my type when we first met at that happy hour—she’d clearly been slumming it at dollar shots night while I was actually trying to save a buck. Our first dates had been in the summer, full of free concerts, train rides to the beach, and cheap beer. It was only when she’d taken me to a fancy restaurant to meet her friends four months in that I’d realized how different our bank statements, and our everyday lives, really were. But at that point it had been an ego thing—the hot rich girl liked me.

She was vibrant, and independent, and she didn’t need me.

Her family was old money and they’d be passing it on to her.

I had to keep her.

Jesus, it’s pathetic in retrospect, and really fucked up on my end. Had I liked her for more than the fact that she liked me when she shouldn’t? That she didn’t mind picking up the tab, after all? That she liked putting my life in order and pushing me to reach for things a guy like me would’ve never even known about?

When she’d told me I needed to get a better job . . . I’d reached a bit too high. Part of me resents that that particular Jenga block was tugged from the bottom and brought everything crashing down only after the ink had dried on the deed for this place.

The ping of an email response sounds from the computer—one of the rental ads has already responded because it’s a scam. I delete it and the previous email fills the screen.

Tour Basic Overview

I click the link to the shared document Sydney sent earlier, her research opening in a new tab on my browser. A circle floats in the right-hand corner of the screen, a picture of a cartoon string bean. When I hover over it, [email protected] pops up. I try not to be goofy about the fact that she’s on the other side of my screen in a way. I just get to work.

I scroll past the pages she already showed me and go to a section entitled “Black home ownership.”

Owning property was seen as pivotal to obtaining full citizenship status; abolitionists and activists over the course of Brooklyn’s history have suggested that efforts to block home ownership and/or devalue property in Black communities can be seen as an attack on Black citizenship and general well-being.

I’m not sure if these are Sydney’s words or someone else’s, but it occurs to me that all those nights I saw her taking notes on her couch, between crying bouts and glasses of wine, this is probably what she was working on. Even though she’s been acting like this is something she’s doing on a whim and hasn’t given enough attention to.

I open another tab and type “Dutch West India Company + Brooklyn” in the search bar, then skim through the preview text that pops up for each hit, seeing if anything catches my eye.

After the establishment of New Amsterdam, the Dutch set about what would be one of their most lasting contributions to the five boroughs—the importation of Africans to work on farms and public works.

The preview text for another site reads: . . . with the end of slavery in Brooklyn, many of the Dutch West India Company slave owners turned their eye to a new industry: banking.

I snort. Yeah, having just been fired from a bank job, I know why some lazy asshole would turn to that business. Easy money, made from other people’s hard work.

I should keep looking for a place, but instead, I grab the bottle of wine and start to read.

I COME TO with half my body slid off my office chair, the low grunt and moan of porn buzzing from my headphones, which lie across the desk. Some weird shit that I can only assume is the result of autoplay and someone else’s eclectic video playlist is happening on my screen. I don’t remember pulling up any porn. I don’t remember anything after staring at an ad for a shitty basement apartment in Mill Basin. The giant bottle of wine is mostly empty, but my head is spinning like I don’t regularly crush a six-pack a night by myself.