Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,59

women all day, you’re going to have to be more gentle about getting rid of them.”

“Look, she won’t be back tonight. But tomorrow—”

“So I can stay until the replacement gets here?”

“Eva—”

“No, fair is fair. But you might have at least been more original. Really, another artistic brown girl? It’s like—”

“It’s not like. It’s not like anything.”

“Right, she’s a painter. And a different kind of brown. Watch, though, Arab is the new black.”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

Now? Eva thought. She could not remember the last time things had not been ridiculous.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

She could have stayed, she knew that. She was Cheese’s first Meaningful Girl, and she had left him. She could have stayed the night and been sitting there eating breakfast when the new girlfriend came back if she’d wanted to. When she’d left, she’d thought of it as a grand gesture toward Kate, the kind of supercilious magnanimity that was usually out of her reach. She came back again a week later. The silence of her sparse Washington Heights studio had been driving her crazy, and the noisy parade of life outside was no relief. She’d been expecting Cheese to awkwardly ask her to leave, or worse yet, to awkwardly invite her in and expect her to awkwardly socialize with Kate without letting on that anything had changed. Eva was surprised by the intensity of the relief she felt when Cheese told her Kate had gone to California for a few weeks to think about their relationship. She preferred not to focus on what it meant.

William wondered if there was a way to tell Eva how badly she needed him without insulting her. He worried that the best years of her life were going to look like the last few decades of his, that she’d be too proud to admit she needed him now, needed someone to let her put herself together, get a real job, go back to school maybe, find a decent boyfriend she could present in public, one who didn’t leave her looking so disoriented all the time. While he was phrasing and rephrasing the invitation in his head, the waiter appeared with their food. He leaned over Eva a little too closely when putting her pasta in front of her, and gave her an overly friendly smile. Watch it, that’s my daughter, William wanted to say, but he had never been able to say that about Eva. He didn’t know what to protect her from, and anyway, she seemed to have taken her protection into her own hands some time ago.

He thought maybe he would show her a picture of the new place, though from the outside it didn’t look like much. He’d been skeptical when the broker showed him the listing, not to mention skeptical of Brooklyn in general. As a child in the Bronx, he’d hated Brooklyn on principle—too much boasting on the part of its inhabitants, too low to the ground, too many trains involved in visiting anyone who lived there. But the apartment, the converted upper half of a Fort Greene brownstone, had won him over. There were two levels, and three bedrooms, and windows everywhere you looked. He had taken to walking around the neighborhood in the evenings. He ate roti one day and giant hamburgers the next. He was becoming a fan of Brooklyn’s parks. He had once seen a young man in a T-shirt that read BROOKYLN. YOU KNOW BETTER. He wondered if this was the sort of person Eva would know.

The apartment had cost him the better portion of his savings, but it was a good investment, and good for him, after all these years of living a life he pretended he could leave at any minute, even as he got more and more settled, to own something, to put down roots. Besides, he had been making, for almost a decade, far more than he’d been spending, what with his ascetic lifestyle. He needed a place—and this was a good one, a place where they could rebuild things, a place where he could see Eva living, her art in one room, her in another, until she was on her feet, until whatever sad thing that surrounded her had been lifted.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve moved to Brooklyn. I got a real place to live. It’s beautiful. Lots of room.”

He did not mention the lack of furniture. He would get new furniture. He was fifty years old and he had never bought a piece of his own furniture.