She’d look incredible on film, I think—because apparently I can’t help viewing everyone through a mental camera lens.
“Hi!” she says. “Are you Elisheva?”
“Hey,” I say, pushing off the railing and stepping toward her, holding out one hand to shake hers. “Yeah, I’m Ely. Ophelia Desmond, right?”
“That’s me! Where’s your stuff?”
“Lost.” I grimace. “They said they can get it to me by tomorrow, but I guess we’ll see.”
She makes a face. “Yeah, good luck with that. It’ll be at least three days.” She pauses. “Come on. I’ll show you the apartment.”
We climb three flights of stairs to get there. We lived in a fourth-floor walk-up when I was growing up in Crown Heights, but that was a long time ago; it’s May, it’s hot, and I’ve been living in an elevator building for almost a decade. I hate it, and my thighs hurt by the time we step out onto the final landing. On the upside, by the end of summer, I’ll have an incredible ass—just in time to cover it up with heavy winter coats.
That’s another character flaw of mine: I’m perennially pessimistic.
I should probably try to get over that.
The apartment has a green-painted door, and the welcome mat outside reads OH, HI MARK—a reference to the cult-classic best/worst movie ever made, The Room.
Somehow I gravitate to a very specific kind of person, even if that person is a Reddit stranger living on the opposite coast. It’s a talent.
“I like the mat,” I say as Ophelia lets us into the apartment.
She arches a brow at me. “You’re my favorite customer.”
“Anyway, how’s your sex life?” I quote back, and my timing, as ever, is impeccable, because the shirtless guy draped over the living room sofa moans, “Nonexistent,” and covers his face with a throw pillow.
“Aaand now you’ve met Diego,” says Ophelia. “He still thinks it’s 2006 and emo is cool.”
“Emo is cool,” Diego mumbles from behind the pillow.
I smile despite myself; whatever Reddit Ely was thinking, she made good choices. I can already tell we’ll all get along just fine.
“Diego, make yourself useful and put some tea on,” Ophelia commands, then moves deeper into the apartment, gesturing for me to follow. “Ely, your room is back here. It’s a little small, which is why we were advertising it for lower rent, but our ex-roommate didn’t complain too too much, so I presume it’s livable.”
“I’m sure it’s just fine,” I say, although when she shows me the room in question, it turns out she’s right. The place is about the size of my bathroom back in LA, barely large enough to fit a twin bed and a tiny desk shoved against the window. There’s no space for a dresser and no closet; I’ll have to use a portable wardrobe, one of those metal contraptions on wheels with a bar and hooks.
But it’s kind of cozy too. I can imagine it in candlelight, warm and flickering, the bed draped in a pile of blankets, and pillows littering the floor. It’ll be even nicer if—god willing—I do well enough at Parker that they ask me to stay here past summer and into the fall, into winter.
“You know what?” I say to Ophelia. “I fucking love it.”
“You better,” she says, but when I look at her, she’s grinning; she has a gap between her two front teeth, I notice, and it serves to make her even prettier than she looked before.
When we emerge back into the living room, Diego has acquired a shirt and is standing in the kitchen, assembling a cheese and charcuterie plate.
“I know you’re moving in here,” he says, “but this seems hospitable.”
“I love cheese,” I admit, and he stabs a cube of Gouda with a toothpick and holds it out to me.
For a moment I feel the reflexive twinge in my gut, from some old and buried part of my mind. I stare at the plate for a moment, at the cheese cubes nestled right up against the soppressata. But as I decided after two years in LA, what’s a little treif when you’re already so far off the derech as to be swimming in the metaphorical ditch?
Of course the guilt’s back, now that I’m in New York. That makes sense. But it still makes me feel fucking weak.
I eat the cheese.
“You should try this properly,” Diego tells me, and begins layering a cracker with a fruit spread and prosciutto and Brie. I eat that too.
It’s been a long time since I kept kosher. Almost as long as it’s been since I felt bad about breaking kosher—which says a lot, I think, about how nervous it makes me to be back in New York. But it’ll be worth it, of course. It’s got to be. I’ll have the chance to work with Wyatt Cole, who is only my single most favorite photographer of all time.
And it’s easy, here with Ophelia and Diego, to forget everything else I’m afraid of. I used to dream about living in a place like this, with people like this. I sat through classes with my books open but my mind among the stars, fantasizing about eating cold pizza on the floor and watching bad sitcoms with friends who didn’t care what religion the protagonists were or what gender they preferred to kiss. But even in my most florid fantasies I didn’t imagine Diego’s hot-pink stiletto nails or Ophelia’s taste for ambient music that sounds like a slowly evolving minimalist tone but turns out to be the Windows start-up chime played in slow motion.
“This is the sound they play when you die,” Diego says.
“You’re fucking weird,” says Ophelia.
They’re both fucking weird, but it turns out I like that. “Fucking weird” is what I thought I’d be when I moved out to LA—as if living on the West Coast would somehow transform me into a svelte and sun-glazed bohemian with too much style and too little money. Instead I just turned into one of the emaciated Venice Beach junkies who used to beg me for cash when I first moved there.
It took me four years to crawl my way back out of that hole. But ever since getting clean, I’ve existed in this liminal space where I’m afraid to have a personality, like if I think too hard or feel too deeply I’ll find myself spiraling down, down, and this time I won’t come back up again.
“It’s the sound that Quicksilver hears when he starts up his computer,” I suggest, and Ophelia smacks both hands down hard on the island, the sound loud enough that I jump.
“Oh my god,” she says, her voice rising in pitch. “Finally. Finally.”
“Um…?”
“Ophelia’s been pining for an X-Men nerd to come into her life for like three years,” Diego informs me.
Ophelia nods effusively. “Yes. Diego literally couldn’t tell you the difference between Magneto and the Juggernaut. I’ve been dying here.”