Before Peter, all my boyfriends had been older men. I suspected there was a father-sized hole inside me. I called Ogden “Daddy” when he fucked me.
I loved Ogden’s crow’s feet. He walked fast and talked like Lou Reed. He smoked cigarettes, and instead of using an ashtray, he would leave half-smoked cigarettes standing upright on bookshelves. He was such a New Yorker, the way he talked about leaving New York all the time.
One time I saw Ogden ash on his jeans and wipe the ash into the material. He owned drills and saws, and picked up boxes of stuff and moved them around. I liked men who moved stuff around.
It was my mother’s idea to buy the apartment. I loved it because it was old and cheap. Just like me one day. I didn’t care that it was on the ground floor and received no light. I didn’t care that it was far from the train. It was a cave. It was a womb. I didn’t want one of those shiny, crappy, parquet-floored drywall apartments in those new, flimsy motel-looking buildings the broker kept showing me. My apartment had plaster walls. It was solid. It cost 250,000 dollars.
It was cheap because fifteen years ago, a man broke into the apartment across the hall and shot the elderly couple who was asleep there, and then broke into my apartment, drank a beer, jerked off to porn tapes, and shot himself. Later it came out that his girlfriend had dumped him.
That dude was fucking nuts.
The broker told me they used to have real fish in the fountain, but then people in the building started abusing them (her words), and they had to get rid of the fish. She probably said this to me, a potential buyer, to illustrate how she knew every quirky detail of the building’s eccentric history. But what she was actually relaying to her clients, and what I had to consider every time I passed that fountain, was that this was a building filled with people who would abuse fish if given the chance.
The day was dreary. I wore the weather like a torn shirt.
Grand Street was buzzing. The regular trio of weirdos in front of the bodega. The girls with their gold chains and tight-ass jeans. Teenagers pushing strollers. A Hasidic woman in black with three yarmulked boys running ahead of her, their faces framed by ringlets. Like a Diane Arbus photo, two little girls, hand in hand, skipped down the sidewalk in perfect unison.
A white yuppie woman with a baby slung over her shoulder. The children looked like trophies. The women were mocking me, Haha, we got a man to have a baby with us!
I was pissed at Peter for not having a kid with me.
“My mom is so cool. She smokes pot with me, and she’s always encouraging me to do whatever I want,” my future kid would say.
I would be one of those sick mothers who was fat and forever complaining. “I spent my childhood taking care of my mother. She was always sending me to the store to buy two-liter bottles of Diet Coke with her disability checks,” my future kid would say.
Women with kids talk about how they are so busy and tired, but in their eyes they are saying, “Envy me.” I did. I wanted to be so tired and busy.
If I believed in God, I would think he was waiting for me to get my shit together.
It didn’t seem that long ago that I would freak out every time my period was late, running into the all-night pharmacy to pick up a pregnancy test and ending up in a girlfriend’s bathroom, where we would chain-smoke and then gasp with relief when the plus didn’t appear in the oval. And now every second week of the month, I was met with the familiar disappointment when confronted with the smear of blood on toilet paper. A marker of yet another thing not happening. All those years imagining the horror of a screaming red-faced alien forcing its way out of me somehow morphed into the ultimate climactic conclusion of my biological longing. To lie there with a baby sucking on my nipple in a symbiotic bubble of warmth and love. To never be alone again. To have a reason to take care of myself. To love something more than myself. To have a clear and understandable answer to the question, “So what do you do?”
I wanted to erase myself. Where there was a picture of me, there would be a picture of a snotty, pudgy infant, new to the world, with its tiny hand out, grasping at nothing. On my Facebook page, above my name, there would be his or her little face. Take the best of me, take this genetic line further, and then a little further, till the sky turns black and we freeze and we melt. We are all babies. We will always be babies. All the babies will die. And one day they will be dead forever. But it was nothing to get stuck on. It was nothing to get snagged on. Enjoy the rolling skies of your time-lapsed world: This was where you crawled out of the ocean, and this was where you walked. That was where you were running, and then you were lying, and now you’re looking up at the ceiling, and above the ceiling is the same sky that rolls ahead and will keep rolling on after you are gone. Say, “Look at that.” Think, I can do that. Don’t be scared. It will all be over long after no one remembers you.
When I was in India to scatter my father’s ashes, I saw children just crawling around in the garbage. Better that way — set the standard low. So you could think, At least you’re not crawling around in the garbage, if you ended up fucking up the kid’s life somehow. But of course, you would never say that.
“What size is your shoe?” a hunched-over woman asked me. I thought of that film The Conversation. How everyone was once someone’s child. Someone once loved this woman more than anything else in the world. Or maybe someone didn’t, and that’s why she was fucked-up.
“Eight,” I said, looking down to avoid her stare.
“Looks bigger,” she said. Was she crazy or lonely? Crazy people could be lonely. Loneliness could drive you crazy.
I put my bus pass in the slot. The driver smiled at me. Hot black guy. He had a shaved head, and I could see how muscular his body was through his blue MTA shirt. I imagined lying flat on my belly. How he would spread my ass cheeks so he could get a good look at his cock going in and out of me. Take out all his aggression about his stupid life driving in circles. The smell of potato chips hit me as I walked toward the back of the bus and sat next to a window. Someone’s headphones were too loud.
My phone was ringing.
“Have you heard back about your thesis?” my mother yelled into the phone.
“No.”
“You should e-mail him.”
“It’s only been three days since I turned it in.” This was a lie. I hadn’t turned in the fucking thing. It was another cloud hanging over me.
“If you don’t hear back by the end of the week—”
“I will, I will,” I said, regretting I’d picked up the phone.
“Did you read the story I sent you about the baby eagle in Mexico?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, feeling guilty I had deleted the article.
“There was this boy named Miguel,” she started.
The guilt instantly turned into annoyance. Not now. Not now. “I’m on the bus,” I said, digging around for ChapStick.
She kept saying, “What?” and I kept screaming into the phone, “I’m on the bus, Mom. I can’t talk right now!” Why did the whole bus decide to be completely silent while I was on the phone? No teenagers laughing, no cell phones ringing, no mothers yelling at their kids not to touch the gum squished between the seat and the window. That feeling of embarrassment that fills you when you see people be mean to their parents. “I can’t talk to you! Because I’m on the bus!”