Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 5)
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Chapter 5
Two major developments occurred in mid-June: I moved to a second Air BnB, in Hamilton Heights, on the west side; and I met Sophia Motte.
Sophia was an artist who hailed from Pittsburgh, PA (quite common in NYC I discovered) and had lived in Manhattan for about twenty years. She’d had an eccentric, theatre-actor mother (who Sophia, as a child, once walked in on after a suicide attempt with pills), and an angry, alcoholic father who’d died long ago, when she was in her lurid, alcoholic twenties. She’d initially been a corporate architect (she’d gone to architecture school at Pratt) but had always had a passion for painting. Over the years she began dipping her toe into the artists’ world in New York, working at and attending art galleries; painting on her free time; and eventually getting her MFA in painting from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, on 8th Street in Greenwich Village.
She painted feverishly, constantly inspired. She submitted work. At last, after her MFA, in 2018, she began painting fulltime and surviving more or less on her art. (She did have some part-time side gigs, such as waitressing at a restaurant sometimes.) She struck me—California Boy—as the quintessential, cliché NYC artist I’d observed in old films taking place in Manhattan. (Think old black-n-white Woody Allen movies.) She was passionate, driven, kind but ambitious, soft yet determined, and absolutely certain she’d one day become a famous painter. Her work was in the general vein of contemporary impressionism; some compared her work to Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn. Portraits; landscapes; realistic depictions of nature and people with slight blurred alterations making the figures and environment seem not quite totally anchored to the world we know.
Yet her work seemed to show us something deep and penetrating about ourselves.
I met Sophia at an AA meeting. Unsurprisingly—as so many other driven artists are in the world—she was, like me, an alcoholic. She had four years sober when we met in June, 2019. The meeting was in a church basement in the East Village, Stuyvesant Town, right in front of Stuyvesant Park, on East 15th. Another sober friend—Aldous—who was incidentally also from Pittsburgh had invited me to the meeting.
Aldous and I had met randomly at Think Coffee in Union Square a month before. He was two inches taller than me, square-headed and square-jawed, with buzzed hair, a freckled face, a mellow demeanor, and a fierce, if sometimes misdirected intelligence. He and I could talk for hours and hours. We’d go to meetings and then hit a 24-hour diner and debate politics. Aldous was a rabid Trump supporter. (The first I’d ever connected with.) I didn’t understand his point of view at first. He spoke of Trump as “the greatest orator and political strategist of our time.”
I shook my head and laughed when he said this. But he was always kind. He never disrespected me. He never made it personal. We were able to talk and debate and clash in our opinions yet still see each other’s humanity. This was more than I could say for some of the young, white, usually female radical left Woke people I’d interacted with, who often came off as haughty, hyper-judgmental, critical, and mean-spirited, deciding you were a “racist” or “sexist” if you used one “wrong” word. I’d always seen politics as I’d seen everything else in society: As layered, nuanced, complex. We were living in a completely black-and-white-thinking moment. Everyone reverted into their respective tribes. Critical thinking was at an all-time low. Thinking in general was having a rough go of it, it seemed. Political division was stark. The casual racism and sexism and villainous absurdity of Trump didn’t help, of course, and the far left was only a sensical, if not absurd, overreaction to his administration.
When I walked into that basement, slick from a warm June rain—the humidity had finally arrived—she was the first person I saw. I mean really saw. Aldous was there, across the large room, pouring himself a Styrofoam cup of black steaming coffee. There were dozens of massive classroom desks, four blue plastic chairs behind each one, people sitting in most of them. It was a funny, ironic image: Adult alcoholics in “class” again. Everyone was chattering at once, smiling, laughing, gesticulating, eyes wide, teeth gleaming. It smelled like coffee grounds and doughnuts. Two white scrolls hung from the blackboard: One, “12 Steps,” and the other, “12 Traditions,” the writing in red against the white scrolls.
The first thing I noticed—about Sophia—was her blond hair. Hyper blond. Down way past her shoulders, to the middle of her back. Her hair was slightly wet, too, from the rain. There happened to be a seat at the desk right behind hers. The meeting would start in three minutes.
I walked over and pulled the blue plastic chair out, the thin metal legs screeching along the shiny linoleum floor. I sat and sighed so loudly that the blond woman turned in her seat, looked back at me, smiled, and said, “Long day?”
She had a sparkle in the eyes. Warm, gleaming brown eyes. Her face was slightly round, her skin pale. She had a non-threatening, and very open, expansive, energy. There was something very California about her. I smiled back—sometimes a chore for me; I tended, in my syrupy constant low-level melancholy/depression to maintain a frown—and said, “Yeah. Just tired.”
She laughed, flipping a chunk of her blond hair over her shoulder. She wore red lipstick which accentuated the lines around her mouth. She wore a long-sleeved black blouse. I couldn’t for the life of me gauge her age. “I see you got wet like me.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling embarrassed and not exactly knowing why. I felt my cheeks flush annoyingly, embarrassed, like some kid in seventh grade who’s finally being noticed by the hot popular girl.
“Well,” she said. “I was carrying a gigantic painting all over East 13th which I had to deliver to this woman who wanted to buy it, and I just got soaked.” She laughed raucously. The laugh made me feel instantly included in her life somehow, as if the very sound of it harkened to family. As if I had just become bonded to her in that instant. Possibly this moment represented the first time in my months in Manhattan that I felt truly connected to another human being. It was like crawling suddenly out of a pit I hadn’t even been aware I was in. It made my soul soar.
“You’re an artist?” I asked.
“Painter, yeah.”
“That’s amazing. And you do it fulltime?” I immediately felt foolish for asking that. Fulltime, parttime, who cared: The point was she did it. She was an artist!
“More or less, yeah. It’s not the easiest life, but it’s what I love.”
“I totally respect that. Hey—doing what you love is crucial.”
“What about you?” she asked.
Me? I froze for a moment. How did you respond to a beautiful woman, especially in such an unexpected moment, and at such an unexpected location? Where was Aldous? I prayed he wouldn’t interrupt mid-conversation. Also, the meeting was about to begin. Now I wished I were alone with this woman. We could discuss Art and serious literature. What type of painting did she paint? What artistic school did she originate from? My mother being a museum docent for a decade, I’d always been intrigued, confused and fascinated by visual art, painting in particular. Did she read literature, this Grand Artiste? I had so many questions. Certainly there was a Manhattan-California, Beach Boys meets Van Gogh-type intelligence which wafted from her like a signal.
“I’m a writer. Just moved here from California a few months ago.”
“Oh, that’s awesome! Welcome to Hell.” Here she giggled fiercely, and then threw her head back dramatically and howled with laughter. I couldn’t help it and I laughed with her.
“That bad, huh?”
She shrugged. “Nooooo….welllll…yesss….nooooo…..kinda…?” she said, suddenly (and comically) tight-lipped and serious. “I love New York. But it’s an insane place. It’s definitely not for everyone.”
“I get you there. I can already see that.”
“What do you write?”
The dreaded What Do You Write question, the one I’d answered hundreds of times over the years, at writing conferences around the nation, at literary readings, in writing groups, at random house parties. I hated but understood the necessity of the question. Surely she related: She must have loathed answering basic obvious questions about her art—and probably Art in general from well-intentioned neophytes.
“Fiction, mostly. Heavily autobiographical, gritty literary fiction. Short stories. Novels. Some essays. Some writing How-to stuff. Etc.”
“Cool! I admit,” she said, “I pretty much never read, especially not fiction. Not anymore. But in college—undergrad—I read constantly. The 19th century Russians, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. The 19th century French authors, Balzac, Flaubert. The 20th century French existentialists, Camus, Sartre, etc etc.”
I was in love. Love. A gorgeous, well-read, sophisticated New York artist. Yes. Yes!
Right as I was about to respond to this revelation, Aldous approached. Looking down at me, a dopey grin plastered on his face, his blue eyes seeming to grasp what was happening, his right hand cupping the Styrofoam cup of coffee—it smelled like Colombian brew, steam curling up—he said, “There you are, man!”
“Hey Aldous,” I said.
“Looks like you met Sophia,” he said, casually, as if she were not some stunning wunderkind.
“You guys know each other?” I said.
They both laughed. It didn’t sound malevolent.
“Sophia and I are both from Pittsburgh. And we’ve both been coming to this meeting for years.”
“Interesting,” I said.
Just then the bell dinged and the secretary sitting behind the front teacher’s desk announced that the meeting was starting. The sound of chair legs squeaking on the polished white linoleum; shoes shuffling around; desks being moved an inch or two; coughing; throat-clearing; and a member reading “How it Works” ensued. Aldous planted his palm on my shoulder and said, “See you after the meeting, bro.”
Sophia had turned around, facing away from me. I leaned forward and tapped her shoulder. She flipped around. Cupping my mouth I whispered, “I’m Michael.”
“Sophia,” she whispered back, smiling. We held each other’s gaze for a significant moment which seemed to last a long, long time. I didn’t want it to end. I felt very present. Everything else, for a moment, just sort of faded away. Tunnel vision.
We shook quick, fast hands. Her hand was small and pale and soft, delicate in mine.
About halfway through the meeting, after the main speaker had told his epic, devastating, inspiring story of his alcoholism (“what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now”) Sophia raised her hand to share. An electric thrill raced through my whole body. I was cosmically connected to her already, somehow, as if we’d met before in a previous life. It was as if I knew her. Maybe we’d known each other in another realm.
The main speaker called on her. She started sharing. Her share was a little disjointed. I was sort of half listening, engrossed in my fantasy of talking to her after the meeting, perhaps, if I had the guts, asking her out. Generally speaking, this is more or less frowned upon in AA—people came here for their alcoholism, not for dating—but, as with just about everything else in my life, I did what I wanted. Like most men I was driven largely by biology. And curiosity.
Over my nine years of sobriety at that point, I’d gone through various stages of recovery: Rejector of AA; militant AA-member who wants to “convert” everyone; Semi-involved but not completely; detached totally from The Program; and, ever since Adinah and I’d broken up in 2018, my sweet spot: Involved but with some distance, doing AA the way it worked for me. I “took what worked and left the rest.” There were of course the old-time hardline AA “crocodiles,” as David Foster Wallace calls them in his magnum opus from 1996, Infinite Jest. I had always been my own man, blazing my own unique path, living my life the way that made the most sense to me. I was a free-thinker, an independent individual.
My attention cleaved apart and focused entirely on Sophia’s share when out of her mouth the word “boyfriend” emerged. I listened:
“…yeah…I dunno…my boyfriend just isn’t doing what I want him to do, ya know? We’ve been together for a year now and I just feel like he’s not interested in me in the ways I wish he was. I know I’m powerless over him and his actions. I guess I’m sort of co-dependent, too. I mean sometimes he just seems really distant…or like he doesn’t even like me. He treats me like crap sometimes, honestly. We don’t even have sex anymore. I guess I’m resentful. I mean duh, right?” There was a spattering of laughter around the room. “I know I have to dial back my expectations, look at my side of the street here. I should probably do a fourth step inventory around this. Look at my part…”
This hit me like a brick to the eyeball. Boyfriend? But…we’d just been blatantly flirting! Then my deep usual insecurities crawled up from the depths of my solar plexus, where they hid until it was time to strike: C’mon, Michael, do you REALLY think this beautiful woman, this New York artist, was actually interested in YOU? You’re dreaming, buddy! She was just being friendly. Kind. Nice. You’re short; you’re bald; you don’t make enough money; you don’t even have a literary agent! You are a total loser. A waste of space; a waste of time. Who wants you? Nobody. Your mother, maybe. The truth is: You’ll never get The Girl. Not the one you want. You’ll be alone for the rest of your life. You are worthless. You are an unstable piece of shit. A drunk.
I hated this self-loathing internal voice. But it had been there forever, since I was a child. Once, I’d blamed my mother, and certainly there was that angle. But, given who my parents were and who their parents were, I suspected it was also genetic. And my own unique nature to some degree. Plus, I was an alcoholic. That was part of the package of alcoholism: Sensitive; intelligent; angry; narcissistic; low self-esteem.
I managed, at last, to move beyond it. I focused on the rest of the shares. I did not raise my own hand. Generally, I shared maybe 25% of the time. I was insecure about sharing in front of a roomful of strangers; I always worried they’d judge me or reject me or “kick me out of AA,” which of course would never happen.
After the meeting ended the room exploded with sound: Chair legs screeching along the floor; desks moving; everyone talking loudly and raucously at once. It always seemed like people had little cliques they belonged to; people walked to their special little units and talked easily. I stood there, alone, feeling self-conscious. (Another part of the deal of being both an alcoholic and a writer.) Aldous finally came over and we chatted for a bit. Another guy drifted and joined in our conversation. Slowly, people started filing out of the basement, heading up the twisting stairs and through the church to outside. I hoped the rain was over. I’d watched for Sophia but she’d been talking with a cluster of concerned, warm women. Emotions were so much easier for women. They could handle them; express them to each other. For men it was different. We were taught to suppress our feelings, be “tough,” shove emotions down into the depths. It never served us. And it always came out sideways.
All my life I’d been confused—in some ways attracted to men and yet fatally pulled in by women. I’d experimented sexually in my early twenties, solidly confirming my heterosexuality. I was an unusual mix of sensitive and emotional; tough and soft. I liked pillow-talk. I liked talking in general, if I liked someone. Sex, yes. But the talk after sex was in some ways even better. I wanted to express myself, to communicate. I wanted to understand you and I wanted you to understand me. In my teens and twenties I’d worn a punk rock/writer/Jack-Kerouac-traveler mask, acting ten times harder than I was. But the truth was that I was mixed-up inside, a tangle of concrete and soft clay, mostly just a weird combination of female and male and just Michael.
Aldous and I walked up the stairs, through the church and outside. It was a little before dusk. I gazed at Stuyvesant Park across East 15th. No one was in the park. It was a rare moment of calm, and then multiple cars honked loudly on a nearby street, and it settled again.
I stood there on the little patio where people walked out the door onto the street. Aldous was talking to me but all I heard was wah wah wah wah. I was zoned out. My heart thumped like some tiny child was inside of my gut, punching out, trying to break free: Ba-boom; ba-boom; ba-boom. Where was she? I started to realize she might have already left. This hit like a hard punch to my solar plexus; disappointment surged through my stomach.
A gaggle of people came out through the white door, laughing, a girl saying something like, That’s ridiculous, Alex, I’d have drunk those kids under the table if I still drank now…
And then, at last—thank God!—the white door opened and there she was.
Sophia.
My first thoughts were recursive and painful: She’ll reject you; she’ll reject you; she’ll reject you; she’ll reject you. It was my Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Self-diagnosed. It seemed like the real thing. It’d started when Adinah and I first began looking for a house to buy. It was spring, 2015. I was temporarily living in a second-floor studio on Rand Street in Lake Merritt, Oakland. Later, one of my Jungian therapists would point out that it might not be coincidence that the OCD started then, when Adinah and I were looking for a home. My childhood had at times been unstable and unsafe, emotionally as well as physically, and the anxiety of returning to the symbol of “home” could have been what was driving the OCD. It was a strong argument. I still wasn’t sure if it bought or not. But I took her point.
She saw me. We stood facing each other on the patio. I breathed slowly. Aldous, I thought, please do not interrupt this; please do not fuck this up. I almost turned around to glance at him, talking to some members down on the sidewalk, but I resisted.
“Hey,” she said, joyfully, “I was looking for you.”
“You were? I was looking for you.”
Standing, I could tell she was about 5’3. Perfect height for me. Five inches shorter. Her hair was bright and straight. She had sharp bangs cut an inch above her hazel eyes. Her arms were thin and attractive. She wore a yellow skirt; how had I not noticed that before? We’d both been sitting down. The skirt was somewhat short. Her legs were smooth and perfect.
“Well. I guess we found each other.”
I swallowed. Damn it: Say something! I scolded myself. There was no way I was letting her go without trying. I had to try. But what about the boyfriend? Wasn’t that bad? Wasn’t that sort of unethical? Creepy? Aggressive? Predatory? What about the principles of AA? We were at a meeting, after all.
But then my biology, my instinct kicked in. “Hey. I wanted to tell you. Your share. Your relationship. I mean. I totally relate. My ex and I were together for four-and-a-half years. We bought a house together. Had a cat. She left me in 2018. But we had all the issues you mentioned: No sex; couldn’t communicate or connect; weren’t getting our needs met.” Now I was using an AA member’s anonymous private share as ammo to seduce her??? What was wrong with me? Don’t answer that, a voice in my mind said.
“Yeah,” she said, flicking her bangs gently with a finger. “It’s tough, huh?” She sighed. “I dunno. Chad’s a good guy. He’s fourteen years older than me. A semi-famous sculptor. He lives in Brooklyn. I love him. He loves me. I mean. I think he does.” She bit her lip, averting her eyes from me for a moment. I heard a car rush down East 15th, along the bumpy cobblestone. The sun was down now; early night surrounded us. “Sometimes I just don’t know anymore. I’ve had so many boyfriends.” She paused. “Sorry—that sounded vain.”
“No, just the truth, I’m sure. You’re very attractive.”
Her cheeks bloomed to a crimson color. “Oh my god I think I’m totally blushing.”
“You are, it’s really cute.”
Nervousness jacked up again like vomit.
“Well, look. I know I’m not supposed to do this—because it’s the program and you have a boyfriend—but I can’t resist. I would love to take you out for coffee or dinner sometime.”
A rush of terror and simultaneous relief flooded my vascular system. Now I partially wanted to run away and never return. I was embarrassed. And yet I desperately wanted her to say yes. There was even something alarmingly, red-flaggingly engrossing about the idea of a “secret relationship,” behind her boyfriend’s back. Bad. Bad!!!
She cleared her throat, playing absent-mindedly with her hair. “Yeah, I mean. You’re handsome. And I feel like we connect and we’re both artists.” Here she paused, looking away again. “But. You know. I do have a boyfriend. He trusts me. I love him. I don’t think it’d be right to, you know, get coffee with a guy.”
I was disappointed. A little ashamed. I sighed, trying to conceal it under my breath.
“Sorry,” she said. She squinted at me, crunching her thin lips together.
“It’s ok,” I said. “I had to try. I hope you don’t think I’m aggressive or anything.”
She placed her hand on my bicep, and slightly squeezed. Her eyes with that sparkle, she said, “Don’t worry about it, Michael.”
This reinvigorated my courage. I pulled my wallet out. Snagged one of my writing/editing cards. It was Adinah, at the restaurant, in 2013, all over again.
“Look. Um. I know you’re taken. But can I give you my work card? It only has my email on it.”
She laughed, throwing her head back briefly like before. I loved this trait, this movement of hers. “You certainly are persistent, aren’t you?”
I grinned dumbly. “Here.” I extended the card. She took it, glancing at it for a second.
“I love the black and white photo of you on here. Really professional.”
“Thanks.”
We looked at each other for a good ten seconds, without talking.
“Alright,” I said. “Aldous is waiting. We’re going to argue politics for two hours at the diner a few blocks away, up on East 25th.”
“Have fun with that,” she said, smiling.
I stepped forward. She stepped forward, too. We hugged. We held it for a moment. Her arms around my back, I smelled her vanilla perfume. She smelled so good. When we detached I stood close, looking down at her. The chemistry was obvious. I wanted desperately to kiss her. To hold her hand. It was that chemistry which is so rare it always feels highlighted in your brain when it happens. That feeling of home in some spiritual sense. Like a brand-new glove that magically fits like an old one you’ve had your whole life.
“Goodnight, Sophia. Email me if you want.”
“Goodnight.”
I turned, walked down the stairs, grabbed Aldous, and we walked off to argue about Trump at the late-night diner.