Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 8)

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Chapter 8

The plan was to meet Sophia at some café on President Street, in Park Slope at 6pm. I had to take the 2 train at Lenox and 125th, where I almost always got on the train to go downtown (never uptown). I’d ride to Grand Army Plaza, at the northernmost tip of Prospect Park. From there I could walk to the café. (The name of which I no longer recall.)

Here it was: Saturday. If she canceled on me a third time, I told myself, I’ll delete her number and block her on phone and email and forget it all.

In order to get to the 2/3 train on Lenox/125th I had to walk six blocks, one of which—my block, 130th—seemed to never end. One of those painfully, epically long New York City blocks. The street was made up on 130th of side-by-side little brownstone apartments. They all seemed crammed together. A few properties were abandoned, windows out or cracked. My building—five floors—stood right against 5th Avenue. All day and some of the night cars rushed one way south along 5th. (Though it wasn’t as loud as my first Air BnB on 2nd.) There was a Turkish-owned deli down the street which I started frequenting often for food, toilet paper, and ice cream. The guys behind the counter were friendly, a rarity, I’d so far found, in this city.

If I needed to get somewhere downtown on the eastside, I’d walk the eight blocks to Lexington and 125th and catch the 4/5/6 trains. The 2/3 trains ran through the park to the west side. The walk to the 4/5/6 station was significantly sketchier than to the 2/3. Lexington uptown was rougher than Lenox uptown, at least where I lived.

Either way, each time I left the apartment my head was on a bobble: I developed eyes in the back of my skull. Young local men had a habit of sometimes eyeing me in a vicious way which seemed to be a warning. Again I understood and experienced shame: I was so white. So white Southern California upper-class. I was in their world. I had to respect that. And yet, even then, before the lockdowns started, a tiny smudge of fear and resentment at that feeling of objectification poked my insides. This must be a taste of what it’s like for black people, I thought, when they’re surrounded by powerful whites. Or, I imagined, what it’s like for women around men. Always careful; always on your guard. Always to a minor degree afraid. I’m not suggesting that I understand what it’s like to be black or to be a woman. I’m only saying I think I got just the tiniest taste of what those realities might be like. I constantly looked around, behind, to the side, ahead, when I walked anywhere. I had considered buying mace or a knife.

At a tad before 5pm, that day, I locked my apartment and headed down the stairs. The stairs and walls had peeling paint, and there was a perennial smell of dust and dirt. They seemed to rarely clean the place. My OCD kicked on, and my mind flashed with irrational worries that I’d left the door unlocked, that the stove was on, the oven was on, Lucius didn’t have food, etc. Rolling my eyes, annoyed, I stopped and, shaking my head, turned, nearly at the bottom, and ran back upstairs. I unlocked the black door with the gold-colored lock—it was of course locked, as always—and walked inside. Lucius’s food bowl was filled. He had water. I checked the room: He slept, tail curled under his chin, on my queen-sized bed. Above the bed were two large windows—filthy—overlooking 5th Avenue and more apartment buildings across the street.

In my room there was an old brick fireplace, now closed up. There was a metal radiator pole (known colloquially as a “riser”), from floor to ceiling, typical of old NYC apartments. (There were so many ancient “pre-war” buildings all over Manhattan, with terrible plumbing and disastrous internal issues.) The walls were bare, white and smooth. I’d put up a few posters on the walls, and a printed-out quote by Tolstoy and another by Dostoevsky. I had an open, expansive little kitchen with huge fake black tile flooring. A spacious (for New York City) bathroom which also had a big window which I liked to open while I used the toilet and read in the mornings.

Then the office room, a room the same size as my bedroom with windows on two sides, one also facing 5th, the other facing the basketball court across 130th. Already I’d found it humorous and yet enraging trying to write at my big, wide wooden desk shoved up against the wall just below the window facing the court. That seemed to be where the desk belonged. My bedroom seemed better in the other space. All was great…except the basketball games got out of control. Young men played seemingly all day. Many times they played serious games against each other. That was no problem. The problem was when they started yelling, cursing, and shoving each other. I won’t put down the language I heard, but needless to say it equated to myself as a teen when I was drinking, and it was loud, constant, and seemed to never cease. The only thing that quashed it was darkness. But: This was part of living in the city. In Harlem, anyway.

Walking that day west on 130th, towards Lenox, I encountered the usual: Brownstones; young men eyeing me boldly; others who kept their eyes straight ahead; some guys near Lenox who sat on their stairs, lazily, drinking forties, listening to a blaring boom-box screeching gnarly, ruthless hip-hop. (Conscious Hip Hop always made me feel like it was the black punk rock. Bad Hip Hop made me think of shitty death metal.) Occasionally a lone kid would stroll by holding a boom-box on his shoulders, the music destroying anything around it. They at times did this on the subway, even here and there at rush hour. It seemed to be a plea to be recognized, to be seen, to be heard. I’d done obnoxious things in a similar vein in my teenage punk days.

I reached Lenox and headed south, crossing the street and staying on the west side of the road. I passed the African bead store; the Mexican restaurant; the laundromat; the music venue/coffee shop Lenox Sapphire, where live jazz bands played; the nail salons and hair-braiding spots. A gaggle of male teens rode by on bikes doing never-ending wheelies; one guy’s bike didn’t have a seat or even a front wheel. At 125th I crossed the street again—ironically, across the street there was a Whole Foods—and, seeing the 2/3 train subway entrance, I jogged like an impatient New Yorker down the concrete stairs into the bowels of Manhattan’s underground rail system.

Immediately I was surrounded by swarms of frantic people, everyone crisscrossing around each other with scowls on their faces, trying to get from one place to another, getting on, getting off. I was still anxious when I rode the train, feeling embarrassed if I slid my yellow MTA card through the machine’s card-reader and it said I didn’t have enough money. I’d have to back out, inevitably pissing people behind me off—again that feeling of people constantly being “up your ass”—and retreat to the ticket machine where I’d swipe my Chase debit card to add more money.

This time I was good to go. I passed through the metal arms, then went downstairs to the trains. It reeked down there of the warm rush of shitty, rat-infested subway air. The humidity was unbearable alongside this bad air. The humid dankness down there was like a knife to your throat. People clustered around the edge of the tracks. It was fascinating to me, the tracks. The two sides—heading uptown and downtown—were separated by dark black wood two-by-fours. It seemed like an urban jungle, exciting somehow. Rats the size of Lucius scurried along the shiny silver tracks; you could see their long, nappy tails, their pink noses, could hear their little wheezing high-pitched screeching noises. At times, depending on the station, you looked up and saw metal grates separating the subway station from above ground. It was like two distinct cities existed. The Bay Area had BART, but this was somehow completely different. Magical and terrifying, thrilling and obscure. That Disneyland feeling rushed through me still, though less powerful now.

The 2 train pulled up, that profoundly loud, rumbling, screeching noise of steel wheels rolling along tracks. The doors opened abruptly the moment the train stopped. Trains arrived every few minutes, more or less, during the days. At night they slowed down. But they ran 24 hours. The City that Never Sleeps. I got on with the hordes. The train trembled and started and soon we were moving south. Immediately there was a homeless man—Hispanic, young, dark-skinned, bearded—who started loudly announcing that he was homeless, had AIDS, and needed money for shelter and meds. He began slowly pacing down the narrow aisle, people getting out of his way as much as they could.

The train was fairly packed. I held onto the silver pole as the train shook, swaying lightly back and forth. I closed my eyes, allowed the dozens of conversations around me to meld into a blur of nonsensical white noise. I couldn’t read or listen to podcasts on the trains yet—I was too highly stimulated, and worried I’d get pickpocketed. Then two men started playing music live in the middle of the train: Accordion and acoustic guitar. A couple next to me yapped about the New York Times. Another couple talked about moving to Prospect Heights. Two young men discussed Magic the Gathering, an old card came I’d once played in grade school back in the nineties.

I got off at Grand Army Plaza. When I came upstairs I saw the glorious, massive Prospect Park. I’d been to various parts  of Brooklyn several times in the past—Williamsburg, Crown Heights, downtown—but I didn’t really know Brooklyn in a real way. I’d heard of it as the Hipster-Artist Capitol of the World. There was Philly. Oakland. Portland, Oregon. And Brooklyn. Most artists, writers, musicians had been more or less run out of Manhattan by rising rents and higher cost of living. Ditto the same crowd fleeing San Francisco for Oakland. Thus you saw the rising influx—begun in the nineties—of middleclass white kids living in the urban ghetto. And then those ghettos transformed over the years into expensive enclaves for rich white patrons. (Trust-fund kids, many said.)

I walked south along Prospect Park West, paralleling the park. It was a little before six. Sophia. Sophia. I’d nearly forgotten we were even meeting, I’d been so distracted by my still-new-but-by-now-usual walk to the subway and then ride on the train experience. Still, each time I did it it was like a new experience. There really was nowhere like New York City. And I was a part of it. It was both healing and scary. Everything in my life now seemed so open and expansive, a million paths available. Where would I be in six months? A year? I had no idea. It didn’t matter. What mattered was being in this city.

A few blocks south I hit President Street. I headed west. Four blocks later I arrived at the café. I stood outside a minute. I checked my phone. It was two minutes to six. I thought of my new friend Sammy, a sober newcomer who I’d met at Sober Authors. I thought of Lacey, the woman in all black, the 27-year-old I’d had a fling with. I thought of seeing live jazz at Smalls, located at West 10th Street and 7th Avenue South in Greenwich Village. I’d gone with Matthew, the screenwriter from Sober Authors. I’d also befriended Kurt at an uptown Washington Heights men’s meeting on Monday nights. Kurt was a large, hilarious gay man a few inches taller than me who’d grown up Mormon in Utah; had done his “mission” for two years in Russia; and then had moved to New York City after realizing his strict Mormon parents rejected his sexuality. He was highly intelligent, socially awkward (he self-deprecated in a very funny yet uncomfortable way); and had a tendency to say loud, brash, inappropriate things at the wrong times. We got along well.

I stepped into the café. I looked all around. She wasn’t there. There were little round tables everywhere. The place was about half full. I ordered an English breakfast tea with half and half. The place smelled of Colombian coffee grounds. There was a consistent whirring sound from the espresso machine, and the thunk thunk thunk of the metal espresso spoon dumping out old grounds. In the background, Bono sang With or without you…with or wiiiiittthhh ooooouuuutttt you…I can live….with or without you…

I chose a little round table in the back. I sat and waited, blowing on my beige-colored liquid, watching tiny ripples roll across the surface. I watched the tattooed, cool-kid white hipsters working behind the counter. Caught some minor clips of conversation. I checked my phone. It was seven minutes after six. No text messages. Anger bubbled just below the surface. I swear to God: If she shows me up? I’ll go berserk. She could at least have canceled like the first two times.

She walked in fifteen minutes late. She seemed flustered. She opened the door and she looked amazing. She wore another short skirt, this one green silk. A V-neck blouse one shade lighter green exposed her chest. Her blond hair was combed well and fell down her back. She had just a tad of lipstick on. On her feet she wore Converse. Her sharp bangs reminded me vaguely of my old punk rock days, those Chelsea girls in the late 90s.

She searched around, finally found me after I waved, the sparkle in her eyes as before, that first time.

“I’m so sorry I was late,” she said, approaching my table, out of breath. “I swear. I didn’t mean to be. It was just. Well. Ugh. Chad and I got into a stupid fight. God. What an asshole.” She placed her palms against her hips. Her energy was all California softness with a tinge of New York ambition. Before I could respond she added, “Seriously. I try to never be late. Fuck.”

“It’s ok,” I smiled. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?” she said, as if I’d tell her anyway.

“Definitely. All good. You’re here. That’s what matters.”

“Thanks,” she said, blushing, crimson spreading across her pale cheeks. I could relate.

“Mind if I grab a coffee?” she said, gesturing with her hand to the counter.

“Go for it.”

She grinned at me, gazing into my eyes for a second, and then zigzagged around the tables to the front counter.

Alright, I told myself. Relax. Calm down. Chill. Just roll with it, whatever “it” is here. I took a long, slow breath. This wasn’t a girl. She was a woman. Age was irrelevant. She was sexy, driven, talented, a long-time New Yorker. But what about Chad?

Then she was back, scooping the rear of her loose skirt in order to sit down across from me at our little round table. We stared at each other a moment. Finally, unable to take it any longer, I said, “Did you paint today?”

She lifted the black coffee—steaming—to her lips, which hovered just above the dark liquid a moment, before she took a tentative, careful sip. “Oh. Fuck. Too hot.”

“Careful,” I said, feeling foolish for saying it. Careful? What was I, her father?

She set the paper to-go cup down. She closed her eyes a second, and sighed. “Sorry. I just need to, like, compose myself for a moment.”

“I understand.” I swallowed and drank some tea. It was hot and lovely washing down my tight throat. Half of me wished I were alone in my apartment, safe. The other half was desperately wanting her attention.

At last she opened her eyes and said, “You asked me about painting. I generally try to paint every day. My studio on 66th is way, way too fucking small to get much done, at least if I want to use large canvasses, which I do. That’s why I tend to paint at Chad’s. He lives like a quarter-mile from here. Convenient.”

“What have you been working on lately?”

She sighed, the Tired Artiste. “Well recently I’ve been painting this series about a trip to this lake in upstate New York I took with some friends in spring, back in March. Lake George. You know, the group of us sprawled around on the dirt and grass near the water; swimming naked during full-moon nights; standing around lazily on the dock.”

“Yeah, actually I saw a few of those on your website. Isn’t the swimming one called Full Moon at Lake George?”

“That’s right. You checked my website, huh?”

I blushed. “Of course. I really like your art. It’s very…” I searched anxiously for the right word. “Profound.”

She stifled a laugh. She sipped some coffee. It had cooled now. “Oh yeah? What makes it ‘profound’?”

I smirked. “I dunno. It’s surreal yet realistic, totally identifiable as human and real…and yet it also feels sort of surreptitious, kind of alien somehow.”

She laughed. “You could be an art reviewer.”

“I doubt that. My mom used to be a docent at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She specialized in 19th century French art.”

“Wow. Really? That’s interesting. Wild.” She paused and took another sip of coffee. “I confess that I, too, looked at your website. I read one of your stories.”

My heart thundered against my chest. Multiple fears rose up like a phoenix.

“Oh boy,” I said. “Dare I ask which story?”

“The…Marilyn Monroe tattoo one. About Main, LSD, shooting the gun…”

“ ‘Marilyn Monroe. Fat Girls. Freedom. Death.’.”

“That’s the one,” she said, pointing at me.

“And?”

“What’s there to say? I loved it. You have a real skill at telling a story. Your settings are fantastic; you really placed me there. I could see it, taste it, smell it, hear it, touch it. Very sensual. And the internal struggle of the narrator, his alcoholism and desire to be seen and heard and understood and loved…that was powerful. Of course as a drunk I relate.”

I didn’t speak for a moment. Like before, at the meeting when we first met, everything seemed to narrow down to just me and her. I yearned for her so badly in that moment that I felt I could almost cry. It wasn’t sexual need; it was something much deeper than that. I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to discuss art and literature for eternity.

“Thank you, Sophia. Seriously. That means a lot.”

“So we’re both talented.”

“And better than everyone else…”

We both howled with momentary laughter.

“What does Chad do?”

“He’s a regionally well-known sculptor. His father was famous in the 1970s sculpture world. Some of his dad’s stuff is in MOMA. He doesn’t have to work a real job. He sells his work and anytime it gets financially sketchy he just sells one of his father’s paintings.”

“Wow. Now that is The Artist’s Life.” I slurped more tea.

“You’ve got that right,” she said, her voice that sensitive, feminine, high pitch I loved. Everything about her was a mix of soft and tough, but it was all very traditionally feminine.

We both averted our eyes, awkwardly, unsure how to proceed. The seconds ticked annoyingly by. Save this, Michael. Save it!

So I said the only thing I could think of: “I’m glad you decided to meet. What changed your mind?”

She seemed to slightly flush in the cheeks again. She swallowed, then sipped her coffee. “I dunno, honestly. All my girlfriends told me to delete your number and email.”

This made me feel irritated at her friends, which I knew was irrational and unfair. “And yet you didn’t. Instead you wanted to meet.”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “It’s probably a bad idea, honestly. It’s unfair to Chad. It’s not the most honest or ethical thing. But, then again. There’s just something about you.” She pointed her finger at me again, jestingly. “I can’t articulate it properly. It’s your intelligence, for one thing. Your intelligence is like a thin, bright blade that cuts easily; I picked that up the moment we met. You’re a passionate, driven writer, and that also gets my goat. Haha. Plus you’re handsome.”

My heart grinned. I felt soaked in luck. There was a silence and then I said, “What did you and Chad fight about?”

It sounded, to my ears, nearly like an attack. It was none of my damn business, that was clear. We didn’t know each other. I had a tendency to overshare, go too deep too soon, ask too-personal questions too fast. Great, I thought: You’re going to scare her off. Idiot.

But then she said, “Well. It’s a lot of stuff, really. Like the fact that when his friends call he doesn’t refer to me as his girlfriend. He says ‘friend.’ It’s bizarre, as if he’s embarrassed by me somehow. He criticizes me constantly, puts me down. He thinks I’m an idiot; he talks to me like I’m five. Like I don’t know anything.” She paused. She was looking off into the middle-distance. “Sorry. TMI. That’s more info than you want to know, I’m sure.”

“No,” I said, instinctively reaching my hand across the table and briefly squeezing her palm. Her skin was soft and pale and cold. It sent a shock down my spine. Everything inside of me leaned towards this woman. “Tell me. I want to know. The way you describe your dynamic reminds me a lot of my ex and I. Only unfortunately I was like Chad.”

Shit, I thought. Again. Dude. Michael. You idiot. Why did you tell her that?

“Well, the latest, current thing is that in mid-October I’m going to Europe for seven weeks. I was awarded this big artist’s grant from my old school, The New York Studio School, where I got my MFA last year. It’s this huge opportunity. I won’t have to work the whole time. Just travel and paint. I have to do a presentation of my work after, back here in New York.”

“That’s incredible, Sophia,” I said. I liked how her name sounded coming out of my mouth.

“Thanks. But. The issue is that I asked Chad to go with me for part of it. Or at least meet me there for a week or something. And he said no. He won’t go. He won’t meet me. He’s not even supportive of the fact that I was awarded the grant. I dunno. Some weird competitive thing I think.” She gazed down at the table, seeming embarrassed and insecure. I knew that feeling well.

“I’m sorry. That sucks. That’s total shit. Hell—I’ll meet you in Europe.”

She looked up at me, smiling. “That’s sweet. I don’t even know you though.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why do you stay with him? I mean, I get the basic idea. But it sounds like you can do better. Much better. You are clearly a rising star in the art world. You’re obviously physically attractive. You’re ambitious and driven. You live in Manhattan. There are men everywhere. Why Chad?”

I wanted to say: Why not me?

“Why didn’t you leave Adinah? Didn’t you say you knew the relationship was over way before it ended, and that she had to leave you in the end?”

I grinned but it was forced. The truth was her question—totally accurate—cut me straight to the bone. She was of course correct.

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I was a coward. And an asshole, honestly. We fell into that nasty, predictable pattern: I was the critical, controlling alcoholic, and she was the thoughtful, sensitive codependent. We both wanted to end it. The last year was absolutely miserable. But we just couldn’t. I didn’t have the courage. I was gutless, truthfully. Eventually she had to do it. Which was shocking because she’d always insisted if we broke up I’d have to do it. God, thinking back on it now, the whole relationship had become like a bad Flaubert or Balzac novel.”

“Sounds like Old Father Goriot, the Balzac novel. I read that senior year of college.”

This broke my reverie on the past. I looked up at her. “Yes. Exactly. It was exactly like that.”

We stayed at the café for an hour. Then we left and walked around for a while. She filled me in. She was—shockingly—forty-eight years old. Twelve years older than me. I hadn’t guessed that old. Forty-three might have made sense, barely. She certainly didn’t look forty-eight. She’d moved from Pittsburgh to Manhattan around 1998, over twenty years ago. She’d been living with a boyfriend very close to the World Trade Center when the towers went down in 2001. She and the boyfriend had evacuated and literally never returned to the apartment. It was a moment, she said, she’d never forget. She said she vividly recalled looking out her window and literally seeing people throwing themselves in desperation out of the windows from thirty, fifty stories high. She’d worked as a corporate architect and had done fairly well but her passion was painting. Back then she’d dated highly ambitious, wealthy established male architects, investment bankers, stock brokers, hedge-fund managers, and generally any rich men in suits who were tall, well-off, and had massive penthouse suites. Men who paid for everything all the time. It was hard to imagine it, seeing as Sophia was such a unique, eccentric artist. But everyone has a past. Lord knows I did. I’d gone from the wild, drunken freight-train-hopping mad man to who I was now. Things change.

She worked and volunteered at art galleries around Chelsea and SoHo and the Bowery and painted night and day and then went back to school for her MFA. She’d won several art awards. Now she had this grant. She was selling her paintings and making the rent. She was clearly on an upward trajectory.

She and Chad had met at a gallery through mutual artist friends. He was sixty-two, fourteen years older than her. That one surprised me. He owned a nice, large house in Park Slope. He sculpted. That’s what he did. They’d been dating for only a year, but she was obviously infatuated with the man. They’d stopped having sex for the past six months. She seemed more of the codependent type. Like Adinah. I’d promised myself after she and I broke up—after the dust had settled—that the next woman I dated would be more communicative; more assertive; less codependent. Sophia, so far, seemed like an interesting mix of many things. Probably not my “ideal,” but then a question I’d wondered my whole adult life was: Did an ideal woman even really exist? Did you find the perfect partner or did you make a lot of concessions, sacrifices, adjustments in order to accept someone you love dearly? Had Adinah and I truly been in love? Or had we just been emotionally attached? There was a difference between the two, wasn’t there?

Either way, it didn’t matter. Adinah was then. This was now. That had been another time. Since then—January, 2018, when she left me—my life had changed dramatically. A lot can happen in 18 months. (Soon we would discover this during COVID.)

Around dusk—8:45pm—after walking around Prospect Park, Sophia walked me back to Grand Army Plaza to catch the train back to Manhattan. She was going to head back to Chad’s for an hour, she said, and then catch her own train. We connected deeply. We were very similar in many ways. We had the same political views—Democratic but moderate—and the same sense of humor. We dug each other’s artistic ambition and greed for success.

She admired the fact that I’d up and left everything in California to come east. We both believed in 12-step recovery but sort of did it our own unique way. We both had a romantic view of art and ourselves. She was deep. Real. She came from a lot of family chaos. Instability. At fourteen she’d been sent away to boarding school, which probably saved her. Like me she’d never been married, had no kids. (She’d once been engaged.) But she craved romantic intimacy. Comfort. Honesty. Respect. Mutual love and honor. She wanted to be with a man, really be with him. Already I felt like we were part Best Friends, part Lovers. And it was our first “date.”

We stood there, in front of the train entrance, close to each other. I rubbed my palm gently along her arm. Again, that spiritual, psychic prick of animal magnetism. Chemistry. It was so blatant, so pungent, so strong. She must be feeling it, too, right?

“Well that was nice,” she said. “We should do it again.”

“Yeah.”

And then we were hugging. I don’t know who went in first. Maybe we both did simultaneously. All I know is that we hugged, fairly tightly, and held it for a few long seconds. When we detached, I clutched her forearms. We stared at each other. Neither of us made a move to leave. Summoning all of my courage, I stepped into her and kissed her cheek. I liked her smell—like apricots, a dash of vanilla again, which drew me to her even more. I went in and kissed her on the lips. It started out a light kiss, but then we moved, slowly, into French kissing. Our tongues massaged one another’s. She tasted right, and good. Like that notion of home again. Time seemed to pause. The people around us were omnipresent but irrelevant. Everything became background noise. My heart thudded. An electric pulse vibrated along my back. My Lord. It was like the mysterious puzzle pieces finally fitting perfectly. A key that opened a door I hadn’t known existed.

After a couple minutes we slowly stopped. We eyed each other. She held my other hand for a moment.

“Well. I better get going,” she said. It was stated quietly.

“Can I see you again soon?” I said. Saying this pushed a thrill through my mind: The badness of it—her cheating—was shameful and riveting.

“We’ll see.”

We’ll see?

“Goodnight, Michael. Ride home safely.”

“Goodnight, Sophia.”

She turned and walked away. I watched her until she was gone, around the corner. I stood there for a whole minute, not thinking, just stunned. Then I sighed, shook my head, laughed, and walked into the station.