the side of his beer bottle in time with the drumbeat from the stage. He felt that anything might be possible, as long as he watched the redheaded singer and didn’t do what he wanted to do now, which was put his arms around this girl, this waitress, and weep with relief.
He found out that she had come from Kentucky, had worked her way north, to New York, via one boarding school and two colleges—one of which was too small to contain her and the other from which she graduated only after cobbling together credits from her sporadically attended classes, a summer volunteering for a relief organization in Portugal (Bruce, lamely: “They need relief, in Portugal?”), and the plays and student films that she had been able to characterize as independent projects and apply toward a drama major. He found out that she had worked as an actress, an assistant to a floral designer, a bartender, an assistant to a photographer, and, now, as an assistant to a caterer (a friend of hers)—which sometimes required waitressing at events. He found out that she had one sister, one brother (both younger), two parents, many past boyfriends, no current ones. She lived on East Seventeenth. She voted Democratic. She had been bulimic briefly, a long time ago. Her favorite writer was Flaubert. Favorite movie, Delicatessen. She could be self-aggrandizing when she talked—but, Bruce thought, adorably so. Understandably so. She was twenty-eight years old. She had once been photographed kissing Susan Sarandon in a bar, on a bet. She had been flown to Brazil by a philanthropist, on the pretense of being hired to videotape a round-table on the environment. The philanthropist had wanted her in his bed, reserved only one room, of course, of course. There were other stories. She did drink—eventually had a beer herself—she just didn’t like to. It was implied that she had to be with someone she trusted in order to drink. After the beer, and the next, Bruce thought he could hear something of Kentucky in her voice, in the way it started to slide wetly along the vowels.
At three o’clock in the morning they found themselves in the Duane Reade on Charlotte’s corner, rifling through a two-dollar bin full of health and beauty supplies. Charlotte, who had insisted, laughing, that she would need vitamin B to stave off the next morning’s hangover (she had trusted him, after all), had gotten distracted by the bin on her way to the checkout counter and was now enlisting Bruce’s opinion of press-on nails, rouge colors, false eyelashes, rash ointments. They leaned over the bin, and a woman moved toward them. Her head was wreathed in white shocks of hair that floated around her face as if independent from it, held near it by tenuous magnetic force rather than skin and follicles. She was stooped and overly, messily lipsticked. She said, “Fuck fuck fuck, hold on, hold on, fuck, you fuck,” to an apparition she perceived somewhere beyond Bruce’s head. She made as if to rush it, then, just as she drew abreast of Charlotte, turned to her and, stepping hesitantly past, said, “Excuse me, honey,” her eyes as lucid and kind as they were clouded with hostile confusion the moment she turned away from Charlotte and snapped “Fuck you goddamn fuck” again, at nothing, and moved away.
Bruce saw it. He saw that Charlotte was charmed. In a dangerous, dangerous world (in which people succumbed, despaired, got lost) she would sneak through, untouched. No—she wouldn’t have to sneak. People let her through. The universe let her through. It excused itself and stepped aside, afraid to muss her as she stood, her eyes popping at him in mirth and wonder, wrapped up in a glowing corona of Duane Reade twenty-four-hour fluorescence.
He would bide his time for as long as he could. Then, an eternal six months later, he would ask her to marry him.
BRUCE AND KNOX
WE WERE SNOTS, he would say to Charlotte later when he talked of his friends, his childhood. Little preppy shits. Were? Charlotte might say, and grin. She liked to lord what she saw as Bruce’s WASP privilege over him, ignoring the fact that her own family was rich, that for several years running he had attended school on scholarship, that his mother was Jewish and required him to purchase things like Stan Smiths himself, due to her refusal to kowtow to the great American marketing machine. It was as if Charlotte were a sharecropper’s daughter and