Instant Love (24 page)

On the bus she is surrounded by these so-called neighbors, the Dominicans from the projects, young women in sharp lip liner gabbing on cell phones while their children in tow suck quietly on hard candies, older women smoothing back their hair and sadly fingering the buttons on their coats, and young, agitated men who seem wired, pacing the aisles sometimes, checking pagers, waiting for information, waiting for something to soothe them.

Then there are the Hassidim, mostly men, they’re allowed mobility more than their wives, she’s noticed. They’ve got places to go, people to see, while the women seem to have children to raise, maybe some grocery shopping here and there, shuffling around the neighborhood, but it’s the men who are free to fly throughout the city on short-term missions like homing pigeons, across the bridge and back again.

When Sarah sits behind them on the bus she stares at the backs of their heads, on occasion pulling out her sketch pad to draw them. She is mesmerized by the ruddiness of their skin, grubby stubble on the back of the neck and sometimes higher, how the folds of flesh (they are almost always overweight) bubbles over in layers on the collar of their shirt and jacket, like the lower part of her belly does onto her upper thighs after she has eaten too much pasta and drank too much wine. She has dozens of drawings like this, grainy black textures on heads of wavy pavement, all leading toward a stopping point, a block of black, the hat. Those thick black hats, conduits to their God, but also, she feels, protection from the world around them. They wear them to let everyone know they’re in a posse, don’t mess with them, because there are more, and they will take vengeance. Like gang colors, she mused. But there is only one color. Sometimes you only need one color.

     3.     

IT IS COLD.
She blows on her hands to warm them, hugs her arms close around herself. She has been cold for days in her cursed sublet. There are three huge windows in the loft, and they face the East River, so early in the mornings and late at night the wind blows off the water and turns the apartment into a giant icebox. During the day it’s better. There’s sunlight, and it streams through the windows like a golden river.

     4.     

SARAH LEE
goes where the sublets take her, she has for the last decade. Up and down the West Coast, starting in her undergraduate days at art school in Oregon, and then back up north to Seattle, down to Eugene, wherever she could find work, mostly as a seamstress, and a quick-and-easy furnished place to live. Everything she owns she could fit in a few boxes with the exception of her sewing machine and her sketchbooks and other artwork, much of which she still keeps in three storage units outside Portland. (Besides her cell phone, that’s her only regular bill for 387 a month. Everything else she pays up front.) She briefly lived with a man in Mendocino, a hearty crabber who had moved down from Alaska, for one lost summer of love, but when winter came and he headed back to work, he told her she’d need to move on or start picking up the rent herself. He’d be on his boat most of the time, and even though he’d be back on occasion, he didn’t anticipate wanting to see her.

“I can’t just have you staying here for no reason, can I?”

Why not?
she thought.
Why can’t you take care of me?

Good for the summer, but not for the year. She’d heard it before.

She didn’t mind this life at all, she liked the freedom, of course, but sometimes she thought about settling down in one place. She didn’t even have a plant. She took care of other people’s plants awfully well. Maybe if she had her own it would grow twenty feet high like in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” If she had the time she could make things flourish. If she had the space.

But sublets were so simple. She didn’t need to do a credit check, most of her moves were through word of mouth, so the references were covered, and she often didn’t need to put a deposit down. The rent was never exorbitant—most folks just wanted someone who would take care of their stuff, their animals, their plants, their record collections, who would somehow even leave their house better than when they left it. Sarah sometimes stitched up tears in blankets, or sewed loose buttons back onto shirts or coats. She had hemmed a few curtains. Simple, easy fixes. Her references came easily. And then there was always someone who needed to sublet a new place. There was always someone on the go, waiting for a reliable young woman like Sarah Lee.

Use any of the spices you like. Just don’t touch the liquor.

In Oakland Carter Michaelson tracked down Sarah Lee—he was always tracking her down, he’d been doing it for more than a decade—and asked her to come to New York for two months and watch his place. Carter was an old lover from art school who had made it big in New York with his vast, testosterone-infused sculptures that had people calling him the new Richard Serra, which was always funny to Sarah Lee, because the old Richard Serra was still around: Why did they need a new one? But Carter was irresistibly weird: He had a rolling mass of dark curls that stuck out like a thick bush around his head, matched with a plain, calm face, skin the color of a washed-out beach, and persistent blue eyes that popped out against his pale skin, all atop a set of gangling legs and arms. He looked like he should be famous, and therefore he was. It worked that way in the art world, that was always Sarah’s understanding. Not that he needed any money: He had a trust fund that shot out a check for several hundred thousand dollars a year, some of which he blew on guitars and recording equipment for his rock band comprised entirely of aging artists, with the exception of the drummer, a recent art-school grad who kept the band full of weed and brought in young girls to their shows. Carter had a huge loft in Long Island City and two crazy dogs, a bulldog named Sasha and a lazy-eyed pit bull named Marcus. The pit bull hated practically everyone, but he loved Sarah Lee, which was why Carter was calling.

“I need you, Sarah Lee. You’re the only one Marcus loves.”

Carter was planning on going on walkabout in the Australian outback.

“I’m going to need at least two months,” he said. “Maybe more. I need to be in a place where there are no buildings, just sky and land all around me. I need the absence of metal in order to contemplate it.”

Whatever, it was a free place to stay.

On the night Sarah arrived in Queens, she slept with Carter, because she always slept with Carter when she saw him. He was just so
impressive
to her, even though she knew he was also full of shit, the way he mumbled and pretended not to understand people in order to dodge conflict, acted like he was in some sort of artistic space in public, isolating himself from the group, when he was really just stoned or bored most of the time. Or fucking with people, she knew he did that, too. He had admitted it to her before. She was his little sponge, soaking up his personality disorders, and they were legion.

But still, his was a compelling strangeness, and the sex was always so good. And she cared for him. And he for her. It was a twitchy kind of feeling she had when she saw him, like how her fingers felt after sewing for hours.

“Maybe you could stay longer, after I get back,” he whispered in her ear. They were on his couch, naked, clothes everywhere, Sasha and Marcus sitting nearby with their tongues drooling from their mouths. “We could be a happy family.”

She could not allow herself to take his offer seriously. She didn’t want to be disappointed, and Carter had done it before. Yet she promised, “I’ll think about it.”

Her first week was spectacular: She took the dogs for long walks through the dirty but quiet streets of Long Island City, down past 5 Pointz, a massive compound of graffiti-strewn buildings that would send Sarah Lee into a creative frenzy for most of the afternoon. Plus she got an illustration gig with a weekly in town after getting drunk with an editor in an East Village dive. The editor loved her work, said she was just what New York needed, said she knew a creative director at an ad agency who would simply die over her stuff.

“
Die,
do you hear me?” The editor shook her shoulders. Such overzealousness always left Sarah Lee limp and distrustful, but it was affection, it was attention, and she needed it, so she let herself believe her a little bit.

But during week two, random women started showing up at odd times of the day and night, which is to say, at all times. One after the other: the stunning Asian woman in high-heeled leather boots who said she had left her book in Carter’s apartment three weeks before, it was in the living room, it would just take a second, and yes, there it was, the collection of spanking stories that had made Sarah Lee blush when she flipped through it, but she was nice, so Sarah Lee had made her coffee and they had had a nice chat—her name was Mary, she hadn’t known Carter was leaving town, no, no, it was nothing serious—until Marcus’s growls drove her away; his studio assistant, Nina Sprout, in pigtails and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, who stopped by to get her paycheck and was surprised to learn Carter had left town, who started to cry and freak out because how was she going to pay her goddamn rent, he hadn’t said
word one
to her about this, it was just like a male artist, they think they own the fucking world because they have testicles, and then she suddenly stopped ranting when she opened her envelope and looked at her check, three months covered, “Have a nice vacation” written on the memo line, and Nina jumped up in the air and yelled, “I love testicles!”; and the blond German woman who hadn’t needed to knock because she had keys and had crawled into bed next to Sarah Lee, and said, “Guess who’s in town, darling?” and had wrapped her arm around her. Sarah Lee let her hold her for a second because it felt nice, and then she turned on the light and the woman screamed, just like they do in the movies, only it was real, it really fucking happened like that, it really did. The woman cursed her and Sarah yelled, “Wait, I’m just house-sitting,” but it was too late, the woman was gone. And there were more bits and blips; Carter was constantly interrupting her life with his women even though he was thousands of miles away. Just think how it would be if he were here in town.

So Sarah knew she wouldn’t be able to stay. But she wasn’t ready to go back west, either. This editor seemed promising. And so when Carter returned from Australia, it was on to the next sublet.

     5.     

TODAY SHE
’
S
taking the bus into the city to get some money together, money she desperately needs. She’s been on rice and beans for weeks, and had barely scraped enough together to pay her phone bill and rent, just two bills and she couldn’t even cover that. She shakes her head: thirty-two years old. Am I going to live this way forever?

But she was holding on, thinking that maybe this was the year she’d break through. Maybe today would be the day. You never know. At least she’ll put a little money in her pocket—she’ll pick up a few checks here and there, drop off some work, maybe get a coffee over near Tompkins Square Park, sit outside, not smoke any cigarettes, but just be around them for a little bit. Pretend like she’s still there with the smokers, still part of the scene.

She stops first at Morris Juno’s studio, a silk-scarf designer she sometimes assists with office work. He had called her a few days before and asked her to visit when she had time. She was hoping he was going to give her some sort of bonus check, that his holiday spirit spread straight through to January.

It seemed like she mostly got paid to be there and not talk; he was always telling her how much he liked her because she knew how to keep her mouth shut. Sarah Lee is used to being silent, a state she had cultivated initially because of her stutter, but had maintained even as she had progressed in life because she had so many things in her head to deal with first before she could speak. She has learned the lesson too many times that when she speaks too quickly it gets her into trouble.

“I don’t know how you turned out this way, but god bless you,” he had told her.

Morris lives on Rivington Street in a tenement with a depressing exterior—cigarette butts gathered on the front stoop like rain in a gutter and a paint job that had surrendered to the New York weather years ago—but the guts of the building were vibrant and alive, each floor housing a different artist who had knocked down walls and built in showers and archways and new doors, painted and nurtured and constructed, took the space and, like pioneers conquering new territories, carved out comfortable, rent-stabilized homes for themselves. (Sarah Lee was most impressed by the sense of permanence there, that people could do it, they could really stay put somewhere.) The tenants, all skilled carpenters and artists, were perfectly capable of transforming the front of the building, but they wanted to keep the place a secret, maintain the illusion of pregentrification for as long as possible.

“The minute they know you’ve got something good, they want it for themselves,” said Morris. A short, hairy fireball of mysterious ethnic descent (some said Israeli, others Italian), he was obsessively protective of his personal space. He only took visitors from 10:00 to 11:00
AM
daily, after his morning coffee, in his kitchen, unless you worked for him, in which case you were only allowed in his workspace—a spare bedroom off the living room he’d converted into a design studio—from 3:00 to 5:00
PM
. If you came late to visit, you were not allowed in, and you were asked to leave promptly at 5:00, even if you were in the middle of something. But during his sample sales, he was a glorious host, and he had a reputation as a charming dinner companion and had a beautiful singing voice. He scoffed at the karaoke bars his friends tried to drag him to, but one or two bottles of wine into the evening, on the streets of Manhattan, if you linked arms with him and asked nicely, he would sing you love songs that would bring tears to your eyes. At least this is what Carter had reported to her before he left town. Morris had made Carter cry miserably, thinking of all the loves he had and lost in his thirty-four years, but then he felt free suddenly, and then full of something, love he supposed, and he had kissed Morris on the street.