“Yep.”
“Good.” He nodded somberly, as if he had been personally worried about my novel. “I have a feeling it’s going to be really good. Don’t stop working on it.”
He cares about my writing, I thought, but he doesn’t even know my writing. He hasn’t seen it. He cares about my writing, but not about me. Which I recognized, even in the moment, as a stupidly self-pitying thought.
But now we were in another silence. His eyes flicked around the bar. He was bored. Misery stamped me. I bored him. What did Lacie say to him? What did they talk about? I could feel the word earthy like soil in my mouth. How I longed to spit it out.
I took another sip of wine—like tasting sky—and said, “Do you think I’m earthy?”
“Earthy? No. What are you talking about?”
“Just this girl.” I told my latest Isabel story.
Ian snorted. “Why?”
“I don’t know! That’s exactly the thing. How could she tell?”
“No, I mean, why did it hurt you? Why do you even care what she thinks?”
Why did I even care? Oh boy, could I explain that one. “I thought I had shed my old dirty hippie persona, and it totally freaked me out to think it was still visible on me. Like everyone can see this thing, that I’m earthy, that I’m not sexy, like I don’t register as sexual, but I can’t see it, I’m completely oblivious to it.”
“I think you’re sexy.” He was serious.
“Well, that’s nice of you.”
“No, I mean it. You’re sexy. You’re totally hot.”
Exactly the phrase Lacie had used. Lacie. She was sexy. Even back in seventh grade we knew it. “I remember,” I said, “being at a school dance in middle school, standing on the edge of the dance floor, and not knowing how it started. How to begin.”
“How to become a sexual person.”
“Yeah.” I dug my eye sockets into my palms. “Like how to announce it. Maybe I still need to announce it.”
The rec center. Shellacked pinewood floors, a long, low room, a tiny stage up front. Blue and pink lights. The crooning harmonies of mid-’90s pop. Sitting on a vinyl bench, waiting and waiting for a boy to come over to me. Watching Lacie on the dance floor. Watching Jesse Grogan’s hands cup her butt. Her blue-jean butt. How could she stand it? Other girls were asked, girls who were as nerdy as me, who got grades as high as me. Girls with glasses. Girls with braces. But nobody came for me.
Why did that ignored girl still live inside me? Why was I still carrying her around? Men had wanted me since then. Men had chosen me. But still I felt like the girl who hadn’t learned the trick, who was marked as a child, gawky-toothed, small-eyed, unsexual.
Ian regarded me carefully. Then: “Watch this,” he said, and sauntered over to the bar.
All night I’d been tracking a cluster of young men in polos and fleece, clean-shaven, their elbows on the bar, looking around like What can you do for me? They were here—I knew—in this odd jazz club as a kind of adventure. Tourists. Young bucks who lived in Murray Hill, made six figures, and thought Brooklyn a lark.
Now Ian nudged one on the elbow and made some comment. He got a smile, then a nod. I watched, amazed. Ian was good with strangers. It had to do with his beauty; even men responded to it. It was a weight, a force. You just gave in.
Then Ian was motioning, and they were looking over.
Furiously I studied the pale carbonation bubbles of my wine. Was I mad? No, more dazzled. Thrilled he would fish a man for me. Looked back: sure enough, Ian and a fleecy finance bro were trundling my way.
I shot Ian daggers as he slid into our booth. “This is Franklin,” he said calmly. “He’s never been to Red Hook before.”
“Hey, so.” Franklin was stocky, with square hipster glasses, a crisp navy fleece embroidered with the words Credit Suisse in white. “Does anyone actually live out here?”
“My studio’s right over there.” Ian didn’t point.
“Word,” said Franklin, still looking at me. “What about you? Are you an artist too? Everyone here’s an artist.”
“She’s a writer.” Ian lifted his glass in a toast.
“Guys. I’m right here. I can talk,” I reminded them.
Franklin’s buddies at the bar kept glancing over and smirking. “I’m going to buy you a drink,” he announced.
“Me too,” Ian shouted to his retreating back.
Left alone, we smirked too. Ian hit my thigh under the table. “He thinks you’re my sister. You’re visiting from Pittsburgh.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“You go to Carnegie Mellon.”
When Franklin returned—with shots for both of us—I nodded at his pec. “Do you like it? Credit Suisse?”
He looked self-consciously down, as if he had forgotten the words over his heart. “It’s okay,” he said cautiously. “The work I do is actually kind of creative. Not creative like what you do, but I like it.”
“Oh, I’m not creative,” I assured him.
“You are.” He sounded almost petulant. “You’re writing a novel.”
“How do you know I’m writing a novel?”
“What else would you be doing?”
He looked so confused I genuinely felt bad for him. We had probably grown up in similar kinds of middle-class families, gone to similar kinds of upper-tier schools, and now lived in the same city. But somehow we couldn’t comprehend each other. I could see—from his clear plastic glasses, his plaid, even the fact that he was in this bar—that we liked enough of the same things. But we couldn’t find each other.
To comfort myself I reached under the table and pinched Ian’s thigh. God, the texture of his thigh was just so interesting—so ropy with muscle. To investigate I crept my hand up.
Then Ian, just as Franklin was explaining his deeply creative work, snaked his arm round my shoulder and kissed me deeply on the mouth.
“Shit,” Franklin cried. “That’s your sister.”
Ian didn’t answer. He kept kissing me. I tasted whiskey, burger fat, and the metallic tang of turpentine. When I opened my eyes again Franklin was gone. The blue Christmas lights of the bar spun dizzily.
“Let’s go home,” Ian said, and we were out the door in a shuffle of jackets and scarves, on the cobblestones of Van Brunt where, crazily enough, a yellow cab was idling.