Oh my God, what is wrong with me, she thought, stomping up the stairs to the apartment and snapping open the deadbolt. He’s such an asshole. And, yet, a part of her—she saw it now—thrilled to think of the hold he still had on her, that there was some vast repository of feeling within her, largely untapped during her four years in Milwaukee, when she’d spent unthinkable amounts of time alone. Hands shaking, she ripped off her jeans and sweater and bra and shrugged on an old blue T-shirt and a pair of faded flannel pajama bottoms, pulled directly out of her suitcase, and slipped back between the cool, rumpled sheets. Since her arrival in New York, she’d been sleeping endlessly, ten, eleven hours a night. Oversleeping, she’d read, was a sign of depression, but she didn’t feel depressed. Still, she could see herself through her mother’s eyes, lolling around in bed all day, unable to summon the energy even to make herself breakfast. “I’m not depressed,” she said aloud, “I’m just hungry.” And for the second time that day, she tossed back the covers, pulled on her clothes, and threaded her arms into her old suede jacket, her new cigarettes still buried, thrillingly, in the ripped left-hand pocket. Lucky Strikes, she thought, vaguely disgusted with herself, her index finger tracing the packet’s slick edge. That was Dave, too, of course. Heart lurching, she clopped down the stairs again and strode out into the bright sun, and quickly walked two blocks south to the Twin Donut, where she bought a paper cup of watery coffee, a copy of the Times, and a chocolate cruller. Thus armed, she returned, again, to her building, smiling cheerily at the old ladies taking up their posts on the sidewalk as she pulled open the heavy glass door. This was what normal people did in the morning: Read the paper. Ate doughnuts. But she was not, she reminded herself, a normal person. She was alone. Jobless. Friendless. Abandoned. In Queens.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, she thought, running up the stairs, though she knew she shouldn’t, not without her inhaler in hand. Fuck Will. Fuck Dave. Fuck Emily for telling me all that about Will. Fuck Sadie for being so fucking judgmental. And fuck fucking Gail Bronfman. A thought rose, skittishly, to the surface of her brain, slowly taking shape as she sat down at the kitchen table, her breath coming in sharp, jagged bursts, and peeled the plastic wrap off her cigarette pack. She was, she thought, incapable of trusting her instincts. She’d disliked Will when she first began talking to him—though, of course, she found him attractive—but out of politeness she’d ignored her initial impression and given him a chance. And she’d been right, hadn’t she? Yes, he was a cad and an asshole. He’d been wronged by his wife, sure, but that didn’t give him the right to be such a freak with Beth; that didn’t make it okay that he hadn’t called her. And besides, Sadie was right, he’d chosen to marry someone he barely knew, someone clearly untrustworthy and unstable. What did that say? That Beth should have steered clear of him from the start.
But the weird thing was: the same held true for her other friends, her best friends. She’d been skeptical of them—each and every one—at first. Only Sadie had she loved from the start: her large green eyes, the thick French notebooks in which she’d jotted thoughtfully throughout Haskell’s Intro to Jewish Studies. Lil had struck her as gawky and overloquacious. Tal, quiet and remote. Emily, silly and way too cool. Dave she’d hated for the first year she knew him. During their two English classes together—101 (Approaches to Literature) and 200 (Introduction to Drama)—he was one of those guys who had to argue every point, thinking himself hilarious and brilliant. The worst of it was that others actually bought his act: he had a little following, who backed him up when he began harping on relativism and laughed at his acid jokes, tipping back on their chairs, knees against the seminar table.
It was at the end of that year, her freshman year, that he walked up to her one day, as she sat on Wilder Bowl with Sadie and Lil, the three of them reading fresh copies of Below the Belt—the editor was handing them out to everyone on the Bowl—and said, “You hate me, don’t you?”
“Um,” said Beth, unconvincingly. “No.”
“Beth, meet Dave, a classic narcissist,” said Sadie. “He believes we’re sitting here talking about how much we hate him. When in fact we’ve never even uttered his name aloud.”
Dave smirked. “Beth and I know each other. We’re in Goldstein’s Intro to Drama together. She hates me. I can tell. She gives me nasty glances every time I open my mouth. But hey—that’s fine. I’m hatable.”
Lil rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Beth doesn’t hate you. Beth doesn’t hate anyone.” Beth felt her blood hop and jump, anger slitting along her spine. People always said that about her: Beth is so nice. Beth loves everyone. Beth whistles cheerfully to the birds who land on her windowsill each morning.
“Um, I hate lots of people,” she’d said, surprising herself. “You’re right.” She nodded at Dave. “You kind of drive me crazy in class.” Dave laughed—a loud squawk—and plopped down next to her.
“Aha!” he said. “My plan has worked!”
That night, she found herself in his room, listening, alternatively, to Xenakis and Public Enemy, fiercely debating the merits of Long Day’s Journey into Night (“boring melodrama,” Dave insisted, no matter how passionately Beth attempted to explain why melodrama could be good sometimes). She spent much of the following year in a variation of that situation: sitting around Dave’s room listening to music and arguing or driving off in his dented brown Tercel, Sadie and Lil sometimes in tow (Emily and Tal always in rehearsal), in search of the Lorain Dairy Queen or the art theater in Cleveland. The others deferred to Beth—letting her sit in the front, always, where she and Dave might speak softly to each other. Other men avoided her, for she seemed to bear Dave’s imprint. He was always, in some way, around her: picking her up from class, meeting her for dinner at Tank (though he himself ate at Keep that year), reading at a table in the snack bar at the exact time she liked to pick up her mail. But he was not, most definitely, her boyfriend. He never even flirted with her in the way he did with Lil or Sadie.
Moreover, much of his time—when not at work, or practicing—was taken up with anxious attachments to other women, women Beth and the others regarded with suspicion, all of them tiny and dolllike, with sleek dark hair and upscale Bohemian wardrobes: tattered jeans, halters made from sari fabric, low-heeled suede boots. Often they wore studs, microscopic diamonds or small flowers, of a vaguely South Asian style, in their little noses, which, Beth knew (and Lil, the expert, confirmed), had become more little by way of the surgeon’s knife. And generally they were tan in the manner of girls from the wealthier parts of Long Island or, of course, Beth’s despised hometown: a glossy, rich Caribbean brown. There was a sameness to these girls, a moneyed handsomeness enhanced by a deep-felt security in their own beauty. Dave, mercifully, rarely spoke of these women and when he did, he complained: Claudia had a Long Island accent, Alex was too clingy (“She can’t sleep alone”), Whitney was too bossy and, to his horror, cheated on him with a scruffy-headed Kurt Cobain type, the lead singer of a popular campus band with which Dave occasionally played (“Whitney,” Lil scoffed, “her name is Whitney, Dave”).