the habit of being

We had been to a show, a performance. There was a girl and then a boy on a stage being more than what they were. People sat on pillows at their feet, wanting to get some of what they had. I sat in a chair next to him, wanting the same.

He had brought along his wife and two of their friends. This was the first time his wife and I had seen each other since the affair. There was that one time I came over to their loft, but she had stayed in her room. We did not speak to one another, but sometimes she looked at me and sometimes I looked at her. I had forgotten how pretty she was. She was wearing red nail polish, which made me wonder why I never paint my own. Later he said the color didn’t work for her.

After the show was over the wife and the two friends vanished quickly. It was just him saying hi to all the people he knew and me taking pictures of all the people I didn’t. Mostly just their feet and the pillows they’d been sitting on. I shook hands with the girl who had been on the stage but she wasn’t anything more that what she was by then. I was still nervous, because what she was was a lot. When it comes to meeting people I don’t know, what I am shrinks to almost nothing.

Outside it was Chelsea and it was cold and it was raining and neither of us had any umbrella. It was my first day wearing a scarf and I wrapped the scarf around my head. He put something yellow and plastic on his, something that came out of his backpack and looked ridiculous but sortof went with his cat-hair-covered fleece.

A convenience store appeared and he wanted to get the least girly umbrella but got the most girly by mistake and gave it to me. I said he could get under the other side but it was a pretty small umbrella. We went to Union Square on the L. We went to Coffee Shop and he gave the man my name. At the table I ate Ceasar salad and we kept touching hands and he said my chi was different, it was more and it was cute. I did not like the idea that my chi was cute.

He said he had had an epiphany yesterday. A revelation about who he was. At first he couldn’t say but then he managed to explain and he was still explaining when we were out in Union Square again under the girly umbrella. After he had finished telling me the epiphany he said he felt like kissing me, and I said What are you, resisting? So he kissed me and we were kissing and people were walking by but it was okay because we were under the umbrella.

We had to go home and he got on the N with me even though it’s not his train and we kissed some more on the N until we got to Lex. He got off to transfer to his real train and I took out my book and read it.

1. For a week I watch the bruise on my thigh change colors. Purple plumage to yellow rot to gray afterthought. I got it by running into a stationary car.

2. I go to a dance in a giant glowing swimming pool. I go to a dance in a gleaming theatre. I go twice to the same restaurant. I go once to get espresso in the middle of the night. I go to a staged reading, and, in the dark, a fat woman breaks her chair, falls on the floor, and says “shit.” Then she tries to sit in the chair, which has no seat, again. And she falls, again, and no one can pay attention to the voiceover. When the lights come on and the actress begins to read, an old man says, out loud, I can’t hear a word she’s saying, can you? He gets up and walks slowly down the aisle and across the front row, taking a seat directly under the actress giving her monologue. All of us smirking. Next, we learn that even the most brilliant women write sappy, trite love letters. You can sleep with whomever you want, says Simone to Nelson. I won’t stop you. But as for me, I cannot help but be faithful, all the while spending my life with another man. And the best thing she mentions is that love on holiday is easy, but for a relationship to work you have to be able to continue your writing when he is there.

3. I sit in the tub to write. My notebook and my pen are carefully arranged on the porcelain ledge. The water is too hot. I balance on my ankles, turn on the cold, tiptoe to the faucet in a squat. I will not retreat. I suck in air. I ease the rest of myself into the water, just a centimeter at a time. I wait out the scald, I comfortably lean back, but by that point I am too dizzy to write. I detub without washing.

4. A man with no legs is begging on the 6 in a NY 00 jersey. He holds his coffee can of change in his teeth and drags himself down the aisle on his hands. A man in a suit opens the door between cars for him.

5. Last night, I was up until 3 playing MahJongg solitaire and reading about bipolar disorder.

6. It’s raining out, been raining for days. Drops stick on the window and run races with each other like in the car on the highway. The funny thing about living here is that I haven’t been in a car on a highway in months, maybe a year. Cars and highways are nostalgic memories for me, throwbacks to my childhood.

7. The apartment is cool and messy. R. has arranged scarves on things - on the radiator, on the microwave. She moved the table in the kitchen over a foot to make a “breakfast nook” we never eat in. I pour the goldfish into a flower vase to clean its bowl. I keep it from dying by not calling it a name. The trick is not to invest yourself.

8. Again, I have my mother’s dream - birthing kittens. Only mine are twins and they are Siamese.

9. Our favorite things to say in the lab are “mapped out” and “the full gamit.”

10. A pretty Dutch girl asks me about my photographs, which are taped to a wall. She wants to know what they are about, what they have in common. I mumble, I fluster. Is this you? she asks, pointing to a nude. Yes, I say. A question I can answer. And this? Yes. You know you have a beautiful body she says, and I thank the floor, blushing.

11. It is still pouring, and we are watching the train going by out the window of the Neptune Diner. It’s the subway but it isn’t underground yet out in Queens. The waiter tells me which vegetable sides are fresh and which are from the can. They have cocktails under five dollars but I order a vanilla ice-cream soda. Everything is sea green and there’s a Triton stained-glass window and a nautical stearing wheel and backlit shelves of pie. Our booth is big enough to hold a family, but that is exactly what we’re not. This must be one of those romantic moments he says.

12. I am up at six am, feeling like a Real New Yorker. Not a free square centimeter in my planner this week.