She sat down on the toilet. “Try closing the door.” I tried, but her knees protruded past the threshold and the door bumped into them.
I turned to Hector. “Small bathroom.”
Hector came over, and we both considered Viktoria as she sat on the toilet. “But you have very long legs,” he said.
“Taking a shit in this apartment would be a public act,” Viktoria said. “It’s okay, I don’t mind.” She got up, keeping her bare knees together.
“I will ask the landlord what he can do about that,” Hector said, making a note.
Apartment hunting in New York City, I came to learn after Hector had shown us the others, is a special kind of hell. Each was more depressing than the next. If Viktoria hadn’t been with me, I would have quit after the first two. She was sweet and game and helped me see that, yes, I could build shelves over here or have a loft made over there and put a desk right under it. She showed me the cool thing about this place: a safe, built right into the wall! Or that one: roof access! Or: Couldn’t I just picture a cross-legged, candle-lit cocktail party in here?
By the end, six turns deep into the realtor’s labyrinth, I began to see these apartments not for each one’s objective awfulness but for the way each stacked up against the others. It was a trick of the eye that fooled me into believing that maybe number 4 wasn’t so bad after all.
Only to be told that if I was interested, I would need to act fast.
“What does ‘act fast’ mean, in this situation? Me saying, ‘I’ll take it’?”
“And filling this out completely.” He handed me a form that required my divulging all of the relevant information that the initial application hadn’t, including bank account numbers, landlord references, and a signatory waiver for a credit check. “Get it back to me as soon as you can,” Hector said. “And confidentially,” here he handed me the faxed copy of the form I had filled out earlier, “I would suggest putting something steadier sounding on your final application than ‘filmmaker’ and”—he pointed to the number I had listed for income ($300,000/year)—“make sure you have a figure here that can be verified.”
After parting ways with Hector, we strolled back west, toward Viktoria’s apartment. Now that the sun had gone down, it was much cooler, and she hugged herself against my arm as we walked. We stopped at the front window of the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a storefront I’d passed dozens of times on my way to the movie theater, never once having the urge to slow down, to take in what was on display.
We went inside. I took pleasure in losing Viktoria for a short while as I wandered the store — to discover her again, at the far end of an aisle. She’s with me, I thought, just to make myself flush. I showed her Arthur’s book, which was on display. “I know him,” I said. This didn’t seem to impress her, though.
She said, “Is it any good?”
“Very good.”
“Reading isn’t really my thing. I’ve got nothing against people who read, there’s just so much else to do in life. Do you think they have any books on BPD? I need to figure this thing out better.”
She went to the counter and asked. Even the hipsters who worked here in their tight flannel shirts and horn-rimmed glasses were not immune to Viktoria. She shook them from the heights of their affected boredom to the very core of their once brace-faced, high school selves — stammering, tripping over their own feet to show her what she was looking for. It was a joy to watch.
She brought a book to the register. Girl, Interrupted. “I hope it doesn’t suck,” she said.
I offered to pay for it. In my head while she was picking something out, I practiced a line about how paying for her book would be my contribution to the fund for her enjoyment of reading, but all that came out was “No, seriously. I insist.”
The clerk had already rung through her credit card. “Do you want me to void this transaction?”
“Forget it,” I said.
We continued on our way, through a crowd outside a velvet-roped place on Ninth Street. Viktoria looked at her watch. “What are these losers doing out so early? It’s not even eight o’clock! Remind me to tell you about that place one day. Crazy story!” As we passed the crowd, I noted the slight shift in Viktoria’s gait, taking on a bitchy catwalk.
As we approached the corner where I would have to turn left and she would have to turn right — trying to work out in my head how to land the good night kiss, practicing it, visualizing it — Viktoria invited me over for dinner and a movie.
“It’s my turn to cook for you. And by cook I mean order pizza. My treat. It’s what normal people do, right? They order pizza. They don’t snort coke off a guy’s asshole on a dare. Not me, a friend of mine. Logistically, it’s hard to picture. But he swears it happened, and I believe him. He’s a crazy motherfucker.”
She dialed ahead for the pizza. We took our time at the video store. We chose a Hollywood drama about recovering alcoholics and watched it while we waited for the food to arrive, listening to her puppy yap in the kitchen. When the delivery man appeared, I paid and brought the box into the kitchen and put two slices on a pair of new plates. She played with hers but didn’t eat it. When I asked she said, “I don’t really like pizza.”
“But you suggested it!”
“I was thinking about what normal people eat.” This would become a common refrain for her, what normal people did or did not do.
Neither of us was really paying much attention to the movie. She kept turning the volume down, inexplicably, whenever she would scream at the dog. “Shut! The! Fuck! Up!” she would scream, and then pick up the remote and turn it down a few notches.
She lit a cigarette and went over to the window. I joined her. She said, “I used to only smoke a couple cigarettes a day, but at rehab that’s all everyone ever does, is smoke. So now I’m up to two packs a day. It’s sick.” We finished our cigarettes, stubbed them out on the sill, and tossed them out the window. She said, “I need to take things very slow. Do you think you handle that?” It was something she had said on our first date as well. I said I could take it slow. “Good,” she said and squeezed my hand.
We went back to the sofa and watched as the film drew inaudibly toward its conclusion, which clearly was imminent because the main character had hit rock bottom and seemed to be in the middle of a teary reunion with an estranged son. Viktoria leaned against me, and as the credits rolled, we kissed. Her face smelled like peach candy. The television screen, once the credits ended, bathed us in blue. We went on kissing for a while like this. I reached into her shirt and unhooked her bra. I brushed my thumb against her nipple, back and forth, until it became firm. Her eyes were closed, her breath a string of sighs, one after the next. She did not stop me, and the dog, miraculously, was quiet except for some scrabbling now and then at the gate, a stray whimper. With my other hand I felt my way along the long path of her leg, up the inside of her thigh, and into her skirt. I reached into the humid warmth of her underwear, then reached up farther, with two fingers, and held her like this, my palm against her bristly mound as she rocked herself to climax.
We lay there for some time afterward, and from the way her head was turned, away from me, I could tell I had gone too far. I got up to pee, and when I came out, she was in a pair of boy’s pajamas. Without saying good night she went to her bedroom and closed the door.
I let myself out silently, so as not to disturb the dog.