Tales from Brooklyn: Short Stories About Love (Actually Sex): Part 11

by T. J. Clarke

The bar is over. Law school is over. Everyone else is off on their post-bar vacations: Bali, Greece, Miami, Kentucky. I click through some photo albums on Facebook: happy faces and landmarks. Ryan Murphy didn’t do much better with Eat Pray Love. The destination matters less than being some place else before the unemployment depression kicks in. I am hanging out at Andrew’s. Midtown Manhattan is exotic enough.

Stranded is the better word. I had rented my apartment to a French couple for the week and half I was in California for the bar. Two days before my return flight, Guillaume, the male half of the couple, called to ask if they could stay for an extra week. “We adore New York too much,” he cooed. “Sure,” I said. I told him he should pay for my inconvenience, an extra hundred dollars on top of the additional week’s rent. Guillaume agreed readily.

The stay-cation has its perks. I speak the local language, know the good cheap eats and hotspots. I never went to Time Square when I lived in Brooklyn, but now the lights and shows and grime others travel thousands of miles to see are mere blocks away from my perch atop Andrew’s big leather sofa. I don’t need maps or guidebooks. I know that Junior’s has awesome mouse-dropping cheesecake and the Disney Store has the best princess Halloween costumes. Where I am the tourists come to me.

“What you don’t want to believe is that I like you,” Nan had said.

I was standing in the handicapped-person bathroom stall at San Francisco International Airport when I heard her words. It has been a week and I am still hearing them, every syllable intact. Words punctuated by flushing toilets. “I like you,” she had said. “You don’t want to believe,” she had said. “What.” “Is.” “That.” Flush.

Andrew is good company. He leaves for work at nine-thirty and usually doesn’t get back until eight or nine at night. His first words to me every night are “have you found a job yet?” When I answer, “no,” he pours me a glass of vodka and hands me a box with food-a half sandwich or pizza or stir-fried noodles. Then he pours himself a vodka and a glass of diet Sprite. I spend the next two hours watching him play Final Fantasy or Halo.

During the slow parts he asks me questions.

“So why did you go to law school?” he says, maneuvering the soldiers in the game to jump over ravines and shoot at alien combatants. Blue orbs of light and energy expand to fill the screen. There are failures and mistakes and resurrections, but never death.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Because I got accepted.”

“Why did you take the California bar?” he says, orchestrating an attack on some very large salamanders.

“Can’t we talk about something else?” I say. “The vodka is giving me a headache.”

“Have some Sprite,” he says. Then he gets into the fighting and surviving and forgets about me.

Eventually I lose interest in the flashing lights and explosions on TV. There are only catalogues on the coffee table: Jensen-Lewis, West Elm, Crate & Barrel.

I should have asked Guillaume for two hundred dollars.

Then last night, before shutting off the television, Andrew turned to me. “You’re depressing,” he said.

I was just about to finish my vodka, my sofa-bed all ready and I was in my pajamas, as I had been for most of the day. “Why is that?”

“Just do something,” Andrew said. He was drunk but still coherent. He spilled Sprite on the floor as he brought the used glasses back to the kitchen. I worried that he will break a glass and cut his finger and I won’t be able to convince him to put on a band-aid. It would have been an opportunity to be a useful houseguest.

Nothing like that happened. Andrew turned on the dishwasher but changed his mind and turned it off again.

“Go on a trip or look for jobs or go out to get drunk. Sleep here, but get off the couch,” he said.

“Good night,” I said.

T. J. Clarke is the pen name of a struggling writer. She lives in Brooklyn.