Room for Love (17 page)

I reach home with a sigh. I wish I had a pet that would wake up from its nap at the sound of my key in the lock and cock its head adorably before running over to demand some affection. If I weren't so broke and unsettled, I'd adopt a dog tomorrow. I wonder if Larry's mom would let him come play, but can't even muster the energy it would take to walk down one short flight of stairs to find out, and if they weren't home, I might not survive the disappointment. I've been avoiding finishing my roommate-hunting piece because I don't have a satisfactory ending. Right now it basically makes the odds sound about as strong as they are for Internet dating: You can meet some nice guys, but it's hard to find the real thing—or at least I haven't found it yet.

I sit down at my computer and write, “In three weeks of hunting for men through the real estate ads, I've made forty-nine phone calls, sent thirty-eight e-mails, seen the insides of thirteen guys' apartments, and gone on three bona fide dates. I've turned down five additional invitations and developed an unfortunate crush on a guy who wouldn't pay attention to me even if I tap-danced naked on his Pottery Barn coffee table. Which adds up to a lively love life but no real love. Now let's look at Samantha.” What about Samantha? How does her experience relate to my article? She randomly met Charlie when she answered his ad in the paper and rented his spare room because it was clean and affordable and because Charlie seemed like a trustworthy, reliable potential roommate. They also both worked in the film industry and had mutual acquaintances and similar interests, backgrounds, and tastes. It was a natural connection. But what if she hadn't moved in? What if they'd had that initial interview and she'd decided not to take the room? What if she had a cold that day and didn't look her pretty, perky self, or he was in a bad mood because his latest film got turned down by the Venice Film Festival? They might have slipped quietly out of each other's lives, rather than fallen in love. Maybe my hypothesis is full of holes and this scheme is no better than Match-friggin'-dot-com. Or maybe it's not the looking at someone's apartment that makes a match, but the living together, the accumulating of daily, shared experiences. I write all this down, simultaneously having an epiphany: Finding love is completely random.

Samantha just happened to move into the home of the man she would eventually marry, while Courtney met the love of her life bleary-eyed in an eight
A.M
. German literature class. I'll probably bang foreheads with the man crazy enough to ask for my hand while we're reaching for the same watermelon at the corner deli. There is just no way to figure out the mystery of who and when and why, even if you are knocking on three doors a day, and there is certainly no way to force it.
Goddammit,
I think, getting up out of my chair to take a trip to the refrigerator. I have no idea what I'm looking for, I'm not even hungry, but I'm frustrated with the piece. I don't have any idea if this roommate thing works. It did for Samantha and Charlie, but maybe in their case it was a fluke. Or maybe it was destiny, for God's sake. I grab a peach yogurt, slam the fridge, pull a spoon out of a drawer, and go back to my desk to stare at my screen.

“What's my point?” I scream. “What the hell is my point?” I put down my snack, spring out of my chair, and start doing jumping jacks, then drop to the floor and do twenty curls. I'm just starting to break a sweat when the phone rings.

“Hey, it's Anthony,” says a husky voice on the other end. I search the file cabinet in my brain for an Anthony. “I left you a message a couple weeks ago. I was out of town so you couldn't come see my apartment. Well, I'm back, finally, and still haven't found anyone. You still looking?”

The thought of seeing any more apartments instantly makes my temples throb, but I go into autodrive. “Actually I am still looking,” I hear myself say.

“Cool, what's your day like?”

“I'm working, but I can find the time. Where do you live again?”

“Williamsburg, just off of Bedford.”

I'd rather let Larry lick the soles of my feet until I die of excess tickling than haul my ass back to Williamsburg, but I feel like I have to keep up the search.

“Look,” he says. “I'm totally open today. Any time that's good for you.”

“Okay,” I say, summoning the energy to get back on the subway. “I can be there in around an hour.”

“Sounds perfect. Gives me time to throw my mess under the bed.”

Bedford Avenue is just one stop from mine on the L train, which crosses the East River under water and deposits me in about five minutes, even though I've entered a whole new borough. It's a sunny Sunday, so the hipsters are out in full force, selling their old leather jackets and last season's iPods on street corners, hunching over steaming paper cups of strong coffee, laughing loudly at one another's witticisms.

There's a palpable buzz to the neighborhood that I've always loved (and fortunately I'm a whole subway stop from Jake's place, so there are no immediate visual references to make my heart ache). I suspect that this is what the East Village was like before I lived there, truly bohemian, with creativity coursing through every conversation and a layer of grit that all the expensive boutiques on the block can't quite mask. A pair of old men playing checkers on a stoop says hi as I turn onto a quiet street.

Anthony's building resembles a storage facility, a two-story gray box positioned indifferently behind a heavy iron gate. He told me to buzz when I got to the gate and he would come unlock it for me, but I arrive as one of the other tenants is about to reattach the heavy chain holding it together. He lets me in and points me to Anthony's door on the second floor. I knock.

The door swings open, and standing in front of me is my ideal man. I mean, if I was going to describe my ideal man, this is what he would look like: He is about six feet tall, broad shoulders under a chalky blue T-shirt that leads down to a narrow waist in worn 501s that are slipping off his hips. He has dark hair falling across eyes the color of a late-night sky surrounded by lashes so long that they should belong to a woman, Marlon Brando's nose, a wide mouth, and a square jaw covered by what looks like a week's stubble. He looks as taken aback by my appearance as I am by his. He blinks hard a couple of times and shifts from one foot to the other. Then clears his throat.

“Jacquie?”

“Yeah. I'm Jacquie.”

He steps back, pushing the door open wider with his back so I can move past him. I can feel the heat from his chest as I edge past him—I'm that close and he's that hot. I look down at the floor, wide pine slats that have been getting nicked and scuffed for a good half a century, feeling my cheeks warm under his regard. When I look up at him, he blinks again and raises his face to point across the room with his chin. I follow it with my eyes to a beige, L-shaped couch taking up the corner of a sprawling living room that's piled high with clutter. There are boxes of magazines, stacks of film and photography books, wilted plants that have taken up residence on top of the stacks, camera equipment, videotapes, a laundry basket overflowing with whites and a couple of colored items I fight the urge to remove, a beach cruiser leaning against an armoire that looks Indonesian, a wobbly desk with an old-school tangerine Mac in the middle of it, surrounded by more piles. Almost every inch of wall is covered with photographs, some black-and-white, some saturated in color, and sketchy paintings of nudes with no frames that remind me of early Toulouse-Lautrec charcoals, which are among my favorite works of art. More framed photos are stacked on the floor. I feel like I've entered a Bertolucci film from the seventies and any minute a throng of intense, cigarette-smoking intellectuals will enter stage right arguing about Marxism, the merits of
Star Wars,
and who was doing lines off of whose breasts at Studio 54 last night. It's too much to take in, so I sit on the couch and gaze up at bits and pieces.

“I just got back from a shoot,” Anthony says, picking up a duffel bag off the couch and putting it on the floor. “I'm sorry it's such a mess.”

“Don't worry about it,” I say. “It's a great place.”

“Yeah, I lucked out, moved to Williamsburg with the first wave, back when you could afford to live in big spaces like this. Should have bought back then I guess,” he says.

I open my mouth to tell him that I just bought a place in the East Village, but remember that I'm supposed to be looking for a room and close it again. He picks up the laundry basket off a chair and tucks it into a corner behind the armoire. “Hey, do you want a beer? I kind of feel like one.”

“Sure,” I say nervously. He jogs to the kitchen, which is open like mine, with a concrete-topped island and pots and pans hanging from the ceiling above it. He's wearing no shoes and filthy white socks with a hole in one toe and when he pads across the floor, his feet slip out from under him and he almost eats it. I giggle when he looks back at me through his lashes, embarrassed by his momentary loss of suavity. He bends down behind the refrigerator door and then his head pops up again. I can't believe how beautiful he is. He smiles for the first time when he catches me looking at him, revealing sparkly, slightly crooked teeth. One of the front ones is chipped. He opens the two Rolling Rocks and, holding them both in one hand, grabs a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa from the counter. He seems more comfortable with something to do. After depositing the goods, he opens the armoire and turns on
Abbey Road,
probably my favorite album of all time. I can't speak.

He sits down in the corner of the couch and leans in with his beer. I pick mine up and hold it in his direction.

“Here's to finding the perfect roommate,” he says.

“To finding the perfect roommate,” I repeat, and we click beer bottles.

“What's your sign?” I ask, immediately wishing I could take it back.

“Do you believe in that shit?” he asks.

“Not really,” I say. “But I like it. And if it can help me find someone I can live with, I'll take it.”

“I'm a Leo,” he says. “Headstrong, intelligent, passionate, a born leader.” I relax into his couch cushions, relieved that he's not an Aries. He doesn't ask for my sign.

“What do you do?” Anthony asks.

“I edit
Flicks
magazine, so I interview actors, directors, and watch way too many movies.”

“Most excellent,” he says,
Bill and Ted
style. “I'm a filmmaker myself, docs. Right now I'm working on this TV show about these three college students trying to figure out what they're doing with their lives. It's so compelling, really digging deep to get at the truth beneath the surface details of these lives that, you know, superficially could belong to anyone.”

“So, it's reality TV?”

“Well, yeah, but not the lame kind.”

“I guess I still think of reality TV as anorexic girls in bikinis eating slugs for a million dollars or eccentric urban dwellers ready to kill each other to be named the next big designer, filmmaker, chef, cover girl.”

“That's how it became popular, a bunch of attractive people living in an apartment together, a surprising mix of strangers trapped on an island and forced to do outrageous tasks. That's the hook—the competition, the allure and humor of its banality—but it's become so much more. At its best I believe reality programming can be like the old-school doc guys, cinema vérité, Pennebaker, the Maysles, you know, turning a camera on and letting the truth unspool. Great stuff. Great stuff.”

It sounds good to me. And the way his lips look while he's spouting it is even better. I can't take my eyes off them. Quite suddenly, Anthony stops talking and puts his bottle down on the table. I watch him as he leans back on the couch and stretches his legs out to rest his feet on the coffee table, and imagine that he reaches over, takes my face in his hands, and kisses me. Heat rushes into my cheeks as I picture him drawing me on top of him, my leg wrapped around his thigh, pulling him against me, one of his hands on the ass of my jeans, the other lost in my hair. He pushes himself back up to the edge of the couch, looks into my eyes, and clears his throat. I put my beer down next to his on the table and blink nervously, imagining us seated together on a nighttime beach, the splash of the waves crashing onto the hard, cold sand for our entertainment, his strong arms wrapped around me, my face hidden in the neck of his warm, wool sweater. He leans toward me, his face very serious, and I think,
My God, he's actually going to kiss me.

But just then the sound of a key in the door alerts us to spring apart, and Anthony jumps off the couch as if caught doing something forbidden. A gangly blond guy walks in with a young, fat bulldog at his feet. The puppy spots Anthony and gallops across the room to passionately rub up against his leg.

“This is Lucy,” he says, getting down in her face to kiss it. “My little angel.”

He has a dog.

“How's my angel?” Anthony asks Lucy, as the little fatty rolls over onto her back so he can rub her tummy, her back leg kicking furiously. “My little Lucy belle! Lucy, this is Jacquie.” I rub her tummy along with him and she gratefully moans and barks a couple of times before rolling onto her feet, awkwardly hoisting herself onto the couch, and squirming around on Anthony. “This is Barrett,” he says, indicating the lanky guy, “the man who's been taking care of my home and my baby in my absence.”

“Hey, man,” says Barrett.

“You hanging around tonight?” Anthony asks.

“No, heading to Clarissa's.”

“Cool, say hola.”

“No prob,” Barrett says. He waves at us and heads for the door.

The magic interrupted, we return awkwardly to the chitchat. I'm preoccupied as Anthony tells me about his show, which is currently focusing on a woman from rural Pennsylvania who got married just out of high school and is now back in college trying to figure out if she should major in psychology or law. I keep wondering how to break it to him that I'm not really looking for a room; I really like him and wish I could tell him the truth. Anthony tells me how the point of his show is to invade every nook and cranny of the students' lives, following them around almost 24/7. His subject's marriage is on the rocks and her seven-year-old has been acting out and wetting his bed ever since she went back to school. She's begun taking yoga classes to calm her constant rage. I laugh out loud as I remember that I began the day at yoga, breathing in on “sut” and out on “nam,” a constant reminder that truth is my identity. I'm such a hypocrite.