Carrie Pilby (29 page)

Now, at Kara's, I'm in a similar situation. “His sideburns have gotta go,” a girl in the circle says. “His girlfriend's a witch,” someone else says. “In real life, or on the show?” “Both!” “She should have stuck to movies.” “But she got to work with so-and-so.” “He's scrawny, though.” “I think he's cute.” “Doesn't he have his own band?” “Yeah. He's about as good a singer as he is an actor.” “He looks like so-and-so.” “He's so good-looking, and he does all these movies where he looks like a Neanderthal.” Kara comments, “His forehead's too big.” She seems engrossed in this. I feel silly standing there, not knowing what to say. I decide I'll pass the time by getting another drink. Maybe by the time I'm done, Kara will be bored with these people. I head into the kitchen.

The kitchen is very narrow. People are standing against both walls as if in a police lineup, facing each other. There's a bottle of wine on the stove top. I pour some into a plastic cup.

A tall guy finishes talking to the girl next to him and watches me pour, then gives me a line about how following hard with soft liquor makes you drunk quicker, or get sicker, or get sicker quicker, or something. I'm amazed at all these drinking rules. When did people learn them? Again, must have been eighth grade.

I settle into a spot along the wall.

“So, who do you know here?” a girl asks me.

“Kara,” I say.

The girl looks at the guy questioningly. “Who's Kara?”

“I don't know,” the guy says.

“This is her apartment,” I say.

“Oh. Right!”

Another guy says, “What do you think she pays for it?”

“I heard someone say eleven hundred.”

“I
love
that,” the tall guy says. “I love it when someone gets a good deal on an apartment. It's like good sex.”

“In New York, it is.”

The girl whispers something in the tall guy's ear. He nods. He leans in and tells me, “We're going to go get a hit. Want to come?”

Of course, my first instinct is to say no, and I don't even know what they're going to get a hit
of,
but I also
want
to know. I want to watch them do this, since I've never seen anyone take drugs. I'm not even cool enough to ever have been given the
opportunity
to do drugs. Except in Washington Square Park, where they used to always whisper “Smoke, smoke” in your ear as soon as you walked in, and you were supposed to know that that meant pot. You'd think that the cops could have busted all of them, but I guess saying “smoke, smoke” isn't against the law. Some of these dope dealers are so ingenious you'd think they could put it toward something legal.

“Sure,” I say, with more couth than I have.

The tall guy gives me a nod. He's got wavy short hair that's matted against his forehead, and some sort of beaded wooden necklace around his neck. The girl takes his hand and leads him out, and I follow.

We pass the circle of people that includes Kara. I wave to catch her attention. “Leaving?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “I might be back.”

“Okay!” she yells. “Well, happy new year if you don't. Call me! I mean it!”

I smile. “Happy new year!”

“Call me soon—ow! Get off my fucking foot!”

I grab my coat and head into the hall.

In the hall, I see a few people waiting to get into the apartment next door. Among them is a familiar face.

“Carrie!”

My eyes narrow, and then I remember. “Douglas P. Winters!”

“Oh, it is so great to see you,” he says. “Hug!” He hugs me. The guy he's with, who's wearing a black bow tie, looks at us both strangely. “She's really a man,” Doug tells him.

“Work it, sister,” his friend says, and he slaps me five.

The girl and the guy from Kara's party stop in the hall. “I'll meet up with you,” I say.

“Three B,” the guy says. “Don't bring any cops.” He smiles, and the girl winks.

Doug brings me into Stephen and Pat's apartment. People are dancing, and one guy is sitting on a wooden dresser singing. Doug puts one arm around me and the other around his date, and we join in. It feels good to sing. He shows me around. “This is my girlfriend,” he tells someone at one point. The person responds, “Yeah, and I'm Elvis Costello.”

It occurs to me that during the day, at work, some of the people at this party have to hide who they are. Now they're among friends, and they can let their guard down and revel in the freedom. There's something appealing in that.

I make my way to the alcohol table and pour myself a glass of something pink. It ain't lemonade. The smoke stings my eyes, and I look around for Doug. But I imagine I'm not the one he's there to see.

A guy comes over and sings with me. I feel surprisingly unselfconscious. In fact, I can barely see the other people. Everything looks a little fuzzy. All I know is there's some guy in front of me, and the music sounds good, and the drinks taste good, and everything's good. I drink more. The room is packed, and it's smoky. And I don't care much, because for the first time in a while, I'm too numb to think about myself.

The guy who was singing with me leaves. I walk around a little more, but I suddenly feel strange. I look around and notice
that I'm one of only three girls there. Correction: two. I just noticed the Adam's apple on one.

Oh. Correction, one.

I walk past the front door and hear someone who is entering the room say to someone else, “Well, maybe I'll
keep
my jacket and throw
you
on the bed.”

I finally spot Doug. He's busy having his shirt yanked off him. I go over to him and yell goodbye, over the music. He leans over and gives me a kiss on the cheek and tells me to come do some insider proofreading soon. He seems much more loose than he ever did at the firm. What do all of us have at our core that we spend most of our time hiding?

 

The hall floor is bare, shiny and white. My shoes squeak as I walk across it.

I forget which apartment number that couple said.

I feel funny. I don't want to be around drugs. It doesn't feel like me. I can accept that maybe some things that are dangerous might not be wholly immoral, although they can be stupid and a pointless risk to take, but it doesn't mean I have to do them if I don't feel comfortable. Then again, I can watch. This is the night to see what it's all about.

That feeling comes back: that hollow feeling in my stomach, that funny, kind of sad feeling. I realize that when I get it, it's usually because I don't feel right about something, particularly myself.

I think the couple said 3B.

Against my better judgment, I take the stairs and knock. No answer. I wait, and knock again. Nothing.

Good.

 

I take the stairs down, finishing a cup of pink liquid. I feel keyed up, too keyed up to head home. I wonder if I should go
back up to Kara's party. But what is there to do if I go back? Drink some more?

I feel like dancing through the darkness, jumping off the curbs like in
Singing in the Rain,
which I rented last week. I want to grab someone's hand and spin around. I want to ride the top of a subway car like it's a mechanical bull.

I leave my empty cup on the stairs and take a step out into the cold, loud world.

The streets are packed. Everyone is moving in groups, some in costume, all talking loudly. New Year's Eve is like Halloween meets freshman year.

It's frosty out, but not windy. I float into the middle of a pack and let myself get carried along. Still, I know I am alone. The people I saw upstairs were okay, but I didn't feel close to them. I'm not saying I can't like them, or that I didn't have a good time with them, but there is a difference between friends you have fun with and friends you feel a close connection to. I wouldn't put anyone I was with tonight into the second category yet. In fact, I would hardly put anyone into that category.

I stumble west and head up a small street, passing an elementary school. Upstairs, a soccer ball is wedged in a horizontal push-out window. Downstairs is a taped flyer advertising a hamster that needs a home; there also are bake sales and a play coming up. I feel like I'm in the suburbs for a minute.

I continue west. I suddenly realize where I'm going: Times Square. Just to say I did. That oughta shut Petrov up for good.

As I reach Sixth Avenue, I hear something I have heard many times in my life: backwards bass. Backwards bass is the thumping sound that comes from another person's party, one to which you are not invited. The loud muffled thump is the sound of speakers aimed at other people, people who are part of the group. It fills the air and makes your eardrums throb. People's laughter is wafting over, along with their smoke and the smell of beer.

The alcohol floods me again. I feel good. There was a momentary lapse of liquor. Now I'm ready for whatever the night has in store. I stumble along. In front of me is a girl with magenta hair and pigtails. The freaks are out tonight. Even among freaks, I am a freak. Among normal people, too. What category do I fall into? D.P. Displaced Prodigy.

I hit Sixth Avenue and begin heading north. Some of the blocks have managed to miraculously retain their old-time Village charm, with faux gaslights, brick alleys, iron railings. The brownstones are four stories tall, with stone stoops wide like mothers' laps. The painted garage doors were, I'm sure, stables only a few decades ago. But as the numbered streets pass from the single to double digits, the retail stores encroach and the buildings get taller and taller.

I dig my hands into my pockets, trying not to bump into anyone, which is definitely not easy, and proceed north. The buildings reflect a hodgepodge of zoning. One contains white columns, pink fire escapes and sea-green paneling; its neighbor has bricks so stained they are nearly black, with a pair of fat gray water towers on top looking like overfed twins in conical Chinese hats; then, sandwiched between these architectural calling cards are gaudy video stores with signs lit up in seventies Technicolor, and walls that double as jeans ads. I bristle and continue on, ducking under blue scaffolding branded with
Post No Bills,
past palm readers, jewelry stores, and an electronics dealer who advertises that he fixes VCRs and microwaves, where surely a previous sign referenced radios and TVs. I descry a white mansion-type building with a zillion crevices and alcoves, and I wonder who lives there, but moving in for a closer look, I see it's inhabited by retail. I vacillate between being transported back to a simpler time and smashing headlong into that unbreakable windshield that is the future.

There's something I notice more and more. On the brick
buildings, running down the sides, are faded painted letters telling which businesses used to occupy them. Many are garment businesses, and I can make out some of the letters. Probably because I'm now in the garment district. I begin noticing so many of these old ads, in fact, that I wonder how I missed them growing up here.

I walk slower, getting lightly bumped by people, so that I can read.

On 26th Street is Goldstein Furs & Skins. On 27th Street, Hollander Co., Ladies Underwear. At 28th Street are Brucker Bros. & Aronof / Dresses And Costumes / Furriers / Freedman & Clotzer / Manchurian Furs. Near 29th are Maid Rite Dress Co. / Hoffman & Horwitz Suits & Coats. Farther up are more furs, skins, silks, suppliers and dyers. One building says, in yellow, For Space In This Area Call Berley & Co., Inc., 11 East 36th St., with a phone number. I'm disappointed to see that it's a regular number, not a number that starts with two letters like MU6-5000. I love old phone numbers.

Where are Mr. Aronof and the Brucker Brothers today? Are they appalled by women wearing blue jeans? What ever happened to the old business partners Freedman and Clotzer, and Hoffman and Horwitz? Do their families still speak to each other? Do their grandkids pass the buildings and realize that those are their grandparents' names there? I wonder what types of stories these men could tell, if they were still around.

I also wonder if anyone else ever thinks about these things. I look around and notice that no one else is staring up at the buildings. They're all looking straight ahead.

I get elbowed and I move on. Cabs honk at each other, people curse out of rolled-down windows, dogs yelp. Now I am out of painted-wall territory and into a shopper's Shangri-la. I pass a toy store and several clothing stores. High above 32nd Street, running from the tenth floor of an office building to the
tenth floor of a department store, is a beautiful enclosed verdigris walkway whose origin and purpose are, I suppose, known to those who work there. I pass a blue bank of freestanding payphones, against which a couple is making out. The third payphone is off the hook. When I first moved back to New York after college, I used to put the phones back on the hooks all the time. Then, one time, I put a phone back on the hook and a guy came out of nowhere shrieking about having someone on hold. I got a pretty good idea it was drug related, and I apologized and got the heck out of there. Now, when I see a phone, I let it hang, and when I see someone putting one back on the hook, I wonder just where that person is from.

I continue on, marveling at black streetlights, which are M-shaped like seagulls, their clear bulbs hanging at the ends as if dripping from wings. I travel through a cloud of perfume that has some sort of off-pickle undertone that makes me happy and must remind me of something from my childhood.

I spot the clearest wall-sign on a building yet: Style Undies Mfg / Children's / Distinctive / Underwear / Gowns / Pajamas / Bo-Peep Mfg Co / Brother / & / Sister / Individual & Companion / Clothes / Play Togs. What is a play tog? I'll have to look it up. That drives me crazy, a word I don't know. After my perfect verbal SAT score, there shouldn't be a word I don't know. I try to figure out if it's supposed to be a
Y
instead of a
G,
but someone jostles me. There's no stopping or standing on New Year's Eve.