5 - Highrise

Highrise

             Five stories below us, people were scurrying along the busy weekday sidewalk like cockroaches across a dirty kitchen floor. A blob of saliva hung dangerously from Luke’s mouth, threatening to plunge a hundred feet below where it would land into a beehive on the unsuspecting head of some affluent woman lunching at one of the cafes below. 

             “No, don’t do it!” I said in a girlish voice, unwittingly betraying the flirtatious undertones I had been trying to repress all afternoon.

Luke’s air conditioner was broken, but the open windows allowed a breeze to invade the quiet room, lifting the white opaque curtains and fluttering the pages of the magazines scattered across the coffee table.

He sucked the glob of spit back into his mouth and then imitated my previous words in that falsetto voice men always use when they want to sound mockingly feminine.

“That was attractive,” I scoffed. I looked across the ledge of the window into the apartments and offices of the hundreds of nameless faces I passed on the streets everyday.

“Well, I was trying to entice you to make mad, passionate love to me. Most women can’t resist a man who spits. At least that’s what I've heard.”

Evidently, Luke was the kind of man who still called it “making love.” He had used the phrase several times within the span of the four hours I had known him. “Making love” meant nostalgia of more romantic days, the days when movies were still in black and white and women were filmed close up in soft focus, the days before they simply called it “doing it,” or worse yet, “screwing.” He even looked like the kind of guy who would call it “making love.” He had a certain Bohemian appearance about him, though he was well-groomed; he was intelligent without being pretentious; he was sophisticated without seeming prudish. He had a habit of biting one side of his lower lip whenever there was an awkward pause in the conversation; he ran his hands through his tastefully-long brown hair whenever he was trying to look confident; and whenever he smiled, which was rare, a small dimple formed in his left cheek. It was when he smiled that I could see the little boy he must have been at one point in his life.

Even as we sat on the window ledge of his beautiful downtown loft, I sensed that he was one of the many people who would drift in and out of my life, leaving behind only a subtle memory or two. His overall impact would be minor. I knew that in a matter of months, I would have difficulty even recalling his name. But maybe one day, as an old, wrinkled woman lying in my warm bed, looking back on my life, I would remember Luke, along with the beauty and carefree liberation of my younger years. And maybe one day, Luke, as an old, withered man hidden away in some obscure corner of the country, would remember that summer in Houston when he met—What was her name? Maggie? Or was it Maddie?—and wonder what had ever come of her, if she was still alive.

But at the present moment, we were in denial of anything that might remotely resemble human vulnerability, including romantic sentimentality and the distant but ever-looming threat of old age. Right now, we had neither pasts nor futures; we were simply two twenty-somethings hanging out a window of an apartment, flirting beneath the covers of witty, acrimonious banter.

“Sorry about my air conditioner. You’d think as much as I have to pay for this place, that they could at least keep the air up and running, especially in the hottest month of the year.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping to keep the topic of conversation as far away from “the weather” as possible. Nothing kills conversation like the weather. “So . . . do you bring girls up here often?” I asked nonchalantly as I walked over to his coffee table and mindlessly tossed around the strewn magazines.

Though the question was ambiguously flirtatious, it was something I had often wondered about the guys I met at parties or at clubs. In some minor way, it mattered to me whether or not I was simply one of many, even though I, myself, had a terrible habit of dating a man for a week or so before growing bored with the relationship and springing to the next prospective guy-of-the-week a few days later. I found that in the matter of a week or two, it was possible, if not altogether unavoidable, to exhaust all resources of conversation, interest, and sexual attraction intrinsic in the initial connection between two people. I had become one of those fabulous metropolitan women on TV I'd always envied. I blamed it on my youthfulness, or my upbringing, or the culture, or whatever other justification I found readily available and at my disposal. Though the pattern of my romantic life probably accounted for my ability to interpret a person in the matter of a few short hours, it also resulted in my failure to achieve true intimacy with a member of the opposite sex, though love, I felt, existed out there somewhere. It was waiting, and one of those days, I'd find it, probably when I least expected it.

“Hardly ever,” Luke said with more seriousness than I had heard him speak all afternoon. “I’ve lived in this apartment—let’s see—about a year and a half, and you’re only the third girl who’s ever been inside. And the other two were whores, so I guess you should feel pretty honored.”

“Yeah, I guess I’m in good company, aren’t I?”

“You most certainly are. In fact, I’d rather the prostitutes were here with us. They sure were a lot more fun than you.”

“I’ll bet they were. And they were probably a little more pricey, too, I imagine.”

“Well, it was money well spent.”

“Well, maybe I’d be more entertaining if you paid me a little better. I mean, a girl’s got to have some kind of incentive to hang out with a guy like you, especially in a hot, smelly apartment like this.”

“Touché.”

Luke was evidently the kind of guy who said things like “touché.” He said things like “making love” and “touché,” and, though I had only met him at the Rothko at about ten that morning in front of an abysmally dark canvas, I felt as though I had known him much longer.

“You know,” he said with a sober face, “I was joking a second ago. I made all that stuff up about the prostitutes.”

“I know that,” I smiled. I felt like I already knew him well enough to tell when he was joking and when he was serious. He was growing on me. Part of me hoped that I would still be in his apartment this time next week. Maybe it’ll be different with him, I allowed myself to think for a moment. But even then, I knew that a week or two later, I would find myself rejecting Luke’s call on my cell phone as I sat in a candlelit restaurant with some guy named Alex or Charlie or Matthew. In a way, I felt sorry for Luke already.

“How rude of me. We’ve been sitting here sweating for half an hour and I haven’t even offered you a drink.” He stood up and crept toward the refrigerator in his kitchen, which was larger than my entire apartment. “See, I guess I’m not used to having girls like you up here. Prostitutes don’t require too much watering,” he said, disappearing behind the refrigerator door. Then he added thoughtfully, his head rising above the refrigerator door, “At least I don’t think they do. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why they began to wither after a few days.”

“Enough with the prostitutes already,” I said, half in earnest.

“What, is someone jealous?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s it. You got me.”

“I knew it. The prostitute story always gets the girls jealous.”

“What girls?” I asked. “I thought there were no other girls.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “So what’ll it be? Bud or, uh, Bud?”

“What? Beer? You don’t have anything else? I’d be happy with a water.”

“Nope. Beer’s all we have. You could get water out of the tap, but at your own discretion. I wouldn’t trust the pipes in this place. This building’s kind of old, I think.”

“Um, beer it is then, I guess.” I was slightly troubled by the fact that his refrigerator was packed with nothing but booze. It seemed unlikely that anyone who called it “making love,” or said things like “touché,” or meditated in the Rothko, or decorated his windows with white, lightweight curtains would stock his refrigerator entirely with twelve-packs of cheap beer.

He opened two beers and walked toward me, handing me a can. He looked perfect standing there with the sun coming in on one side of his face and the wind stroking his brown locks. I took a sip and smiled. “So. Do you always drink at two in the afternoon?”

“Do you always go home with complete strangers?” He turned his head and spat out the window.

All I could respond with was, “Touché.”

  

             The rest of that afternoon is only a series of faint images, which, in all likelihood, are only fabrications invented by my mind in its effort to piece together that fragmented day, to make sense of what happened next, or maybe simply to bring comfort or justification through some kind of narrative structure. At any rate, I have learned that memories are only superfluous remnants that overstay their welcome in the mind. It is possible to know without remembering anything at all.

             All I really remember is waking up alone, naked in the white sheets of a stranger’s bed. It was dark. An alarm clock on the nightstand read 11:34 in red block-numbers. The roar of the city outside had quieted to a soft, almost sensuous purr.

             I turned on the bedside lamp and searched the sheets for a note. I had grown accustomed to waking up next to notes. But I was completely alone. I waited, watching the time change minute by minute on the alarm clock. After about half an hour, I grew nervous. The loneliness of the room closed in on me. I had to escape it.

             I got out of bed, gathered my clothes from the crumpled pile on the floor, and dressed myself before walking over to the window ledge where we had sat flirting earlier that afternoon, where several empty beer cans now sat abandoned. My purse still lay where I had dropped it, under the window, but my billfold lay beside it, open. There was nothing left inside—no money, no credit cards, not even my driver’s license.

Without a word or thought, I picked up my purse and my empty billfold, stepped out of that beautiful but sparsely decorated apartment, and walked down the hall where I took the elevator five stories down into an empty lobby.

             Outside, the warm city air was still, and my mind could think of nothing except that it would be a long and lonely walk home to Montrose. As I walked, I stared down at the dirty sidewalk, watching the lines in the pavement pass me one by one. Each slab of cement was speckled with its own unique design of dark stains, which had once been soft, pink blots of bubble gum, spit out by some naïve schoolgirl.

I watched my feet move slower and slower, until they refused to move at all. I dared not raise my eyes to the faceless strangers who brushed past me.