wearing something you didn’t expect.
We hugged in the station, and Jonathan put a precise little kiss on my cheek. He led me out to the sidewalk. Seeing him hail a cab was my first lesson in how different we’d become. He stepped off the crowded curb and shot one hand straight up, with the calm certainty of a general. It was a small enough act, but the sense of his own entitlement was unmistakable. I myself tended to move like a long apology.
When we were in the back seat of the cab, Jonathan pinched my arm. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.
“Me neither. That’s why I wanted to see Pennsylvania go by, so I’d believe it. I mean, if I just got off a plane, this’d seem like, you know, some kind of hallucination.”
“It is. This city is just a dream you’re having,” he said. And during the time it took us to reach his apartment, we didn’t think of anything else we needed to say.
The cab crept through late-afternoon traffic. I had only been to New York once before, years earlier, when Jonathan was still in school. I’d been interested in it but it wasn’t about me; or rather it was only about me in the most indirect way, like a highway or a battleship. I’d done the tourist things. I’d gone to the tops of monuments and walked through Greenwich Village and had a drink with Jonathan and his friends at a bar where a famous poet died. I’d been comfortable in my tourist smallness, pleased with myself for being in an amazing place and for having a snug unsurprising home to return to.
Now I was going to live here. Now it was a different city altogether.
It shimmered. That was the first thing I noticed. Its molecules seemed more excited; things shivered and gleamed in a way that made them hard to see. The buildings and streets put out more light than the sky sent down—it all broke up in front of you, so your vision only caught the fragments. Cleveland offered itself differently, in bigger pieces. There you saw a billboard, a cloud, an elm standing over its own fat shadow. Here, my first ten minutes in New York, I could only be sure of seeing a woman’s red straw hat, a flock of pigeons, and a pale neon sign that said LOLA . Everything else was an ongoing explosion, the city blowing itself to bits, over and over again.
When we reached Jonathan’s apartment, things settled down and became more visible. He lived in a brown building on a narrow brown street. If Cleveland was mainly a gray city—limestone and granite—New York was brown, all rust and faded chocolate and schoolteacherish yellow-beige.
Jonathan said, “Here it is. The Tarantula Arms.”
“This is your building,” I said, as if I thought he might not be sure about it.
“This is it. I warned you. Come on, it’s better when you get inside.”
Inside, the stairwell floated in a green aquarium light. One fluorescent halo buzzed at each landing. I carried a suitcase and my backpack; Jonathan carried my other suitcase. I hadn’t brought much to my new life. Both suitcases were full of records. The backpack held my clothes, which, I could already see, had nothing to do with life in a city like this. I might have been an exchange student.
“We’re going up to the sixth floor,” Jonathan said. “Be brave.”
I followed him. The landings smelled like something fried. Slow Spanish music hung in the swampy light. As we went up I watched my borrowed suitcase, an old blue American Tourister of Alice’s, whump against Jonathan’s black-jeaned thigh. Even my suitcase looked wrong here—sad and hoarily innocent as an old virgin.
When we got to the sixth floor, Jonathan unlocked three locks and opened the metal door. “Ta-da,” he said as the door swung heftily open, squeaking on its hinges.
“Your place,” I said. I could not seem to shed the habit of telling him we had reached his apartment.
“And yours, too,” he said. He ushered me in with a bow.
The apartment was, in fact, a change from the underwater gloom of the stairs and hall. You stepped straight into the living room, which was painted orange-red, the color of a flowerpot. There was a sofa covered with a leopard-skin sheet, and a huge painting of a naked blue woman twisting ecstatically to reach