The Not Wives

PROLOGUE

She swung one leg and then the other over the lip of the rooftop. The leafy canopy of trees swayed back at her. She tried to focus her eyes on the individual leaves, the branches holding them up, and the birds who made homes there.

But she couldn’t. She was dizzy and her eye sockets pulsed with a static, sticky ache.

You suck.

You’re a failure and a whore.

The voices again. The ones that had driven her out to the roof. To see the view? To jump off? You need air, she told herself. You want to be higher.

She looked up at the sky. Just one or two stars. Crisp crescent moon. A fish hook, her mother used to say.

She stared down at her feet and clutched the scratchy asphalt of the roof tighter.

It was as easy as sliding into the deep end of a pool. An underwater swim through the midnight sky.

She heard the roof door open behind her. A voice calling. She didn’t answer. She’d wait until it was close enough. To witness? To stop her?

Watch out for the dead bird, she said as she turned her head around. It was a warning. It was the best she could do.

PART 1

SUMMER

YOUR MASCOT

Perhaps fucking was a road map for those of us who no longer believed in directions. Or maybe it was just another way to get lost. If nothing else, it got me free drinks and a bedroom-eyed view into the apartments, bars, and neighborhoods of a new New York—one that was building glass condos next to brick housing projects, replacing bookstores with twenty-four-hour gyms, offering its homeless cash incentives to leave the city, and opening stores so fancy I sometimes couldn’t tell what they were selling. Um, is this a café or a barbershop? Do you sell fedoras or honey made from Brooklyn rooftop bees? Both? Great.

Where were those mythical rent-controlled one-bedrooms in South Williamsburg and how much did they cost? How do people find curtains big enough for those giant green glass windows of their new co-op apartments? What was it like to walk the quiet night streets of Bed-Stuy after getting spanked hard by a man who called himself a wolf? Were there actually any single men still living in Park Slope? Did a father of three who had a studio in the same building as his ex and kids and who was starting a digital media firm have time for a girlfriend? How would you describe the decor of a railroad apartment in Red Hook shared by three men in their forties? Was the owner of that organic hair salon really as crazy on a date as the lesbian network said she was?

South First between Hooper and Grand. $914.

The internet.

Exhilarating.

A couple, but they were teenage boys, living with their parents.

No, but he kept trying.

Bench press, ticket stub, beer cup, early modern.

Crazier.

Fucking, it turned out, was still the most reliable way to split myself in two, especially since I’d mostly given up on drugs, and good fucking was the closest to unlocking the doors of perception as I thought I might get. The orgasm’s rush of dopamine opened me up, gave me purpose. Sometimes, while riding some stranger’s cock, I imagined myself stepping out of my body like a person out of a mascot suit where I was fake cheering for my life.

Like every indie girl who grew up in the nineties I took a lot of acid and still smoked pot whenever someone offered it to me, but those tripping days were over. I was afraid of the psychic revelations I might have on acid, and I couldn’t bear the time commitment, the stomachache, the jaw-clenching comedown, so I fucked to better see myself. Even when the fucking was bad, I saw important things that my body kept secret from my brain, which was too busy lesson planning or writing sentences for a revealing personal essay or keeping track of the week’s obligations on a giant Staples wall calendar that I stashed in a drawer because its paperness made me feel old. Sometimes I saw that I was actually quite sad or that I was, in fact, very drunk. Sometimes I believed that the extreme tilt of an Avenue A sidewalk was a bad metaphor for how the city was trying to slough me off, and like most renters and artists and teachers, I could fall right off the side of it and wind up in New Jersey or Long Island or Westchester if I wasn’t careful. Sometimes I understood that it was time to go home and clean the kitchen and to vacuum up the sequins my daughter had sprinkled over the forest in her room. Other times, I saw that I liked myself after all these years, and so I could actually bear to disentangle my limbs from that smoky, bearded man who’d grown up in Bay Ridge and was a bartender without any dreams, and walk home in the middle of the sweaty night and eat pasta over the sink at two a.m. and feel just fine about it.

Because there are found objects along forgotten paths. Because a pilgrimage is a journey with its own sacred rituals. Because I believed in walking on my own. Because I no longer understood the complex algorithms and intimacies of couples. Because I had broken my home. Because it had turned out this way. Because one day, I looked up from the couch and he was gone.

STITCHED TOGETHER

He showed me his scars—the four-inch one along his arm and the six-inch one across his belly that snaked down to the waistband of his jeans. I saw where the needle had entered and exited his skin, and I traced my finger back and forth along the stitching of his stomach.

Don’t, he said. It feels weird.

We’d met at a bar in East Williamsburg. A first date. Some shots. We talked mostly about bands.

I think we have the same nose, he said, and rubbed the tip of his against mine. I breathed in the smoke from his one-hitter outside the bar and then I followed him home.

I moved down to his waistband. I undid his belt buckle and tugged at the zipper.

I was lucky, he said. I lived in a good neighborhood so the police came quickly. My neighbors came out with blankets and they waited with me. My cat, Cleopatra, even came out and licked my face, and I was lucid enough to say to my girlfriend, ‘Who let the cat out?’

I liked this story and the way he told it. The faraway look in his eyes as he remembered almost dying. I saw that he was a broken person like me, and so I slid my dress over my head and put his cock in my mouth.

I had my own scars—the deep seam where my belly button would have stayed if I hadn’t had a hernia—but I’d never been shot or had a gun in my face. My grandma left Cuba in 1946 and married an Army colonel thirteen years her senior so that her children might pass for white. All of those cold Swedes on my mother’s side—the way our pale skin burned and freckled in the sun, bruised at the slightest pressure. The privilege of that burn.

I remembered the one time I’d been stitched up. The doctor, who pulled Sasha out of me and untwisted the umbilical cord from her neck, sewed my torn vagina with a needle and thread. The birthing mirror was still there and so I could see it all, until the doctor moved it away with a flourish and a laugh: No new mama needs to see this! I was numb from the epidural and holding Sasha, who was struggling to nurse, but I marveled in that clinical way you sometimes can when you’re high on drugs and adrenaline, at what doctors could do—the simple hands-on work of it. Sometimes it was just a needle and thread, stitching a body back together again. The body is a cloth, a stitched-together garment, I thought as he slid in and out of me and tried to stay hard.

Stop looking at me with those eyes, he said.

What eyes? I said.

Sometimes I just can’t, I have to rest, he said, and flopped down next to me.

It’s okay. I don’t mind, I lied. I looked around his room. A big TV stacked on top of a dresser. The giant poster of Sun Ra. Several old turntables on the floor. I was happy he had a bed.

How long have you lived here? I asked.

Since 1998. The landlord is an asshole, won’t fix a thing, but it’s rent-controlled.

Lucky. How much do you pay?

914 a month, he said. But I’ve been out of work for a year, so I’m behind on rent. He sat up on his elbows and squinted in the dark at me.

Sorry, I didn’t know.

Lie down on your stomach, he said, eager to change the subject.

I touched myself while he fucked me, but I couldn’t come. I lay there for a while and then got up to pee. I didn’t look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to see my own face in the harsh, bare-bulb light of a stranger’s bathroom. The bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. There was no towel. I splashed water on my face and wiped it off with toilet paper.

I’m going to head back to my place, I said when I walked back into his bedroom and started to root around on the floor for my underwear and dress.

Just stay, Stevie. He patted the sheets. I was surprised he remembered my name. Don’t leave in the middle of the night.

I’m a terrible sleeper. I just need to go home, I said.

Fine, be that way, he pouted.

I hailed a cab outside of his apartment and wondered if I had the look of someone who’d just been fucked badly on my face. I said hello to the driver, called him sir, and settled into the blue fauxleather seat. On the Williamsburg Bridge, the lights from the East Side did not comfort me like they usually did. I didn’t feel lucky that I lived in New York, and that I had escaped the small town where I grew up. New York was cold and brutal in the same way it was alive and pulsing, and I knew that I couldn’t count on it to take care of me because it never would. It wasn’t a person or a dream. It was just a city, and in that way, forever indifferent to the people who lived in it. And so, I whispered at the skyline, New York, my love for you is not unconditional. You can’t kick my ass forever.

I nodded at the night guard in the lobby of the dorm where I had a faculty apartment, rode the elevator up to the seventh floor, and opened my door. I shrugged off my dress and stared at the clock. 3:45 a.m. I was still stoned from the one-hitter. I looked over at the comforter I’d left arranged in the shape of my body on the couch and jumped. It looked like someone was in there, still sleeping, but it was just the husk of my body from earlier that day, the woman who wallowed on the couch, and who was lately more passive than active.

My cat, Rudy, leaped up and rubbed against my leg. You are very bad, I said to him, but we both knew I was talking to myself.

I walked down the hallway and into Sasha’s room. She was a tiny hoarder. There were piles of beads, drawings overflowing out of her play kitchen cupboards, necklaces stacked up on her nightstand, old linty stickers reaffixed to her bedposts, and sparkly headbands all over the floor. On the blue Ikea kids’ table by her bed, I noticed a pile of broken things—the heads and torsos of several Lego people, the slack loop of a stretched-out gummy bracelet, a legless stuffed-animal cat with giant eyes, and a Matchbox car with one missing wheel. I should fix those, I thought with a pang of guilt. I pressed her pillow to my face and breathed in. I smelled her orange detangling spray, but not her skin. I wanted to hold her, so that I could remind myself that I wasn’t completely untethered. I wanted to smell her hair, her mouthy cracker breath, and the salty dip in the back of her neck, but I’d just washed the sheets and there was no trace of her.

I curled up against the pillow and choked out a tiny animal sob.

SCORE

Smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, a dealer cooed at them from the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Like he knew they had money, like he knew they were desperate.

Johanna pulled the rumpled dollar bills out from her short pockets and dumped all of the change out of her sock and into Butch’s lap. Fuckers were greedy today. It took me twice as long, she said as she flopped down onto the grass next to him.

He counted the change, smoothed out the couple of dollar bills. End of the month, people are tighter, he said. Johanna liked that he always had an explanation for what she’d already decided was random. These insights helped when you were homeless punk anarchists with a shifting code of ethics and semiserious drug habits.

You’re short, he said, and leaned over to kiss her chapped lips.

No, I’m not, she said, brushing his lips away.

I want to get the good stuff from the guy in Brooklyn, not that tourist shit, Butch said.

I’m tired. Can’t we just buy here?

Butch sighed and pulled at his patchy beard. You’ve got to do your share, he said. Also, the shit is fine for you because you’re a lightweight. I need the good stuff.

Johanna stuck her tongue out. Can’t I do something else for the dealer? I’m tired of begging today. It’s degrading.

Bad girl. Butch grinned.

An hour later, in a basement apartment in Bushwick, Johanna followed a tall white hipster into a dirty bathroom. He gave her a line off the tip of a key. She snorted it, sat down on the lip of the toilet, and pulled at his belt buckle. It’s big, she lied, and closed her eyes. He held on to the back of her head too tight, but she told herself she didn’t care.

To Johanna, blow jobs were mostly transactional—gendered bitcoins in the dark economy she and Butch sometimes dipped into. She’d read sex-worker manifestos and she knew there were far worse ways to make money. Once in a while, no biggie, she told herself.

It was her choice. She did it for Butch, for both of them really. She loved him. He’d saved her from a small-town death. She’d never forget that.

Back in the park, high and full from the ramen they bought on the way back, she stared up at the trees in a hidden woodsy corner where they kept their cardboard box and sleeping bag, and then turned to look into Butch’s dark, almost black eyes.

See, sometimes it’s really perfect, she said.

Sometimes, he said. But he had that faraway look, like there was a plan she wasn’t in on. I don’t want you to do that anymore, he said, rolling on top of her, pinning her down. The sound of the Friday night bongo circle behind them and the hot buzz of August heat. Tourists and students everywhere.

What? She didn’t really want to talk about it.

With that guy, Butch clarified.

I can if I want to, she said, instantly defiant when anyone told her what to do. Besides, you were fine with it when you wanted the good stuff.

He kissed her neck and shoulders and then rolled off of her again. He was spacey from the heroin and wouldn’t be interested in fucking anyway. He turned away from her toward the fence that gated the park. I’m ready for a revolution, he said as if he were talking to the squirrels and rats, not her.

Me too, she said, and traced her pointer finger along his sinewy back muscles. He didn’t turn back around, and so she got up and took their dog Tipsy to walk the perimeter of the fountain. She waded in and stared at the lit-up arch. She let anyone pet Tipsy who wanted to and didn’t even ask for a dollar in return. She felt woozy from the lights and sweaty, and so eventually she sat down in the water and let it wash over her. Tipsy splashed next to her with her three good legs. She rubbed her finger along the scar on the inside of her left forearm—a coin-size burn from a cigarette lighter. She remembered the snaking coil of fire and the smell of her own burning flesh. Later, there was wound and scab and ridge. Topography. Map made out of skin.

We’re explorers, she said into the top of Tipsy’s wet head. We’re hobos and runaways. We’re totally free. Like Dean and Sal, we’re on the road.

Never mind that Butch hated Kerouac. It was still her favorite book.

ETHICAL

Hello?! I’m in here! Mel shouted from inside the walk-in freezer. The safety latch was broken, and she’d forgotten to prop it open with an ice bucket. Hey! she shouted louder, and pounded her fist against the door several times.

Oh, what’d you do, lock yourself in there? The chef’s voice from the other side. The owner hired him a week ago. His name was Carmine, and they’d been shooting each other significant looks ever since.

She set down the case of limes she’d come in to get. Oh my god, let me out!

What do I get if I set you free?

I don’t negotiate with terrorists. Mel laughed and then shivered. Come on, it’s fucking cold in here.

Is that making your nipples hard? he said, pulling the door open just a crack.

Mel wedged her foot between the door and freezer wall and pushed past him with her crate of limes. She tried not to look him in the eyes because she already knew they were brown with long lashes and that they would make her weak.

Too soon?

She turned around and shrugged. How to explain to him her complicated situation? She hadn’t yet tried it out, though she’d rehearsed the words in the mirror. Above them the sounds of an artisanal farm-to-table restaurant and bar that was set to open in an hour. Chairs and tables dragging against the floor, shouting from the kitchen, waitstaff wrapping silverware in napkins at their stations, and Tommy the general manager yelling at Greta the hostess about a lost reservation. It was in the fucking system! How could you lose a ten-top? Mel wanted to help her—to pull aside this gorgeous twenty-five-year-old who had amazing, perfect tits and lips like a blow-up doll and give her some advice—but she didn’t have the time. Collaborations and allegiances happened by accident and surprise in restaurants. This was one of those moments.

I’m complicated, she said.

I can handle you. Carmine walked closer to her and took the crate of limes out of her hands. Down here, in the cramped hallway stairs that led from the back of the kitchen and into the freezer, it was just the two of them.

You think so?

He put the crate down on the floor. Definitely.

Mel pulled at the strap of her black tank top and pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. Here goes nothing, she thought. "I have a girlfriend. We live together and I love her, but we are open and I see other people. But I can’t like ever be your girlfriend—she stammered for a second—because, well, I’m taken."

You think that makes you special, don’t you? He smirked at her.

She untensed her shoulders and laughed. That’s your response?

What? You think you’re the only weirdo in this place?

Mel stared at him. He was wearing his chef whites, checked pants, and rubber kitchen clogs. She saw the muscles of his arms through the cotton. She wanted his hands on her body—her back, her ass, between her legs, anywhere he wanted to put them.

I just want to be ethical about this stuff.

Ethical? He laughed.

Shut up.

No, you shut up, he said, and took a step forward. He leaned in and ran his tongue along her lip and then pulled her closer. She opened her mouth wide and he slid his tongue on top of hers.

Incoming! the manager shouted from the back of the kitchen. Mel pulled away and picked up her crate of limes. The manager would freak out if he saw it on the floor.

We almost got caught, Carmine whispered into her ear, and then he turned around and disappeared back up the stairs.

Where the fuck have you been? the manager shouted at Mel, more curious than angry.

I got locked in the freezer and Chef had to save me.

You gotta prop it! He brushed past her. Fucking Prince Charming, everybody is in love with this guy.

Back upstairs behind the bar as she cut limes and lemons, and stuffed the giant olives with blue cheese and garlic, she toggled back and forth between two images—one hot and one guilty. Chef’s tongue in her mouth as he pressed against her in that cold hallway and Jenny dutifully at home with the dogs, wrapping a dinner plate in saran wrap for Mel so that she could have something healthy to eat when she got home at five a.m.

THE BRIDE

In my nightmare, Sasha is in the sliding car in front of me on the Wonder Wheel. I watch her scream and squeal, until the metal girder snaps off and she falls, cage and all.

In my nightmare, I lose her on the subway. I have her hand and then suddenly I don’t. The doors of the A train slide shut and I shuttle away from her.

In my nightmare, we are homeless and living in a dumpster.

In my nightmare, I have two children, and we live in an apocalyptic high-rise on the edge of a teeming sea. They fall into an empty elevator shaft. Down into nothing I can see. Down into dust. Down into the end of the dream.

In my nightmare, all of the men are turning away from me, toward other women and other rooms.

In my nightmare, I am not gay enough and the lesbians kick me out of the Dyke March.

In my nightmare, I am naked in a pool. I am thirteen and everyone is pointing at my few pubic hairs and budding breasts. I can’t remember how I forgot my bathing suit. You stupid, stupid girl.

In my nightmare, my father pounds on tables and grabs my brother by the neck.

In my nightmare, I do nothing.

In my nightmare, I am underwater. I can breathe. I have gills like a fish.

In my nightmare, my gills stop working. I am too deep to make it back up to the top.

In my nightmare, there are guns lying around on tables and in the streets. They pick them up. They shoot them.

In my nightmare, there are crowds that smother us. Protests gone wrong. Police on horses that trample small bodies. Stampeding populations. Streams of refugees begging to get in and out.

In my nightmare, there is a border guard. We never have the right papers.

In my nightmare, I am my junkie uncle. I die on a bench in Golden Gate Park.

In my nightmare, my brother drives his SUV into a wall. His blood alcohol level is .225.

In my nightmare, I fall and fall and fall and fall. There is no bottom to it, no floor to catch me, no dirt to break me in half or rattle my bones awake.

My clock radio, set to NPR, turned on. Clipped British voice of the BBC News Hour. We’ve seen global protests this year unlike anything since 1968—Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself aflame, Tahrir Square topples Mubarak, austerity protests in Greece and Italy, Chilean students march against privatized universities, Los Indignados clashing with riot police in Puerta del Sol, and most recently, looting in London after the police shooting of Mark Duggan.

I turned off the radio and looked out the window. Across the park, gleaming cubes of glass stacked on top of one another, a crane, and a makeshift elevator. Construction workers standing on red metal beams, suspended above the park, their sure steps across a bright blue sky. More condos I could never live in.

I left the apartment to meet Mel in the fountain. We didn’t speak. Not yet. It was too hot. My phone said ninety-eight degrees. I felt like a hungover lizard on a hot rock. I could barely flick my tongue. She nodded and I nodded back. We stepped into the ice-cold water and sat on the steps.

Rough night? she asked, squinting at my face. Cool enough now to talk.

Maybe I fucked him because he’d been shot six times, I confessed. She knew I’d been on a date.

Jesus, was it any good? She had on a long, loose black tank dress, with the straps of a red bra peeking out. I admired how casually sexy she always looked.

Mediocre. He couldn’t stay hard. I was kinda checked out.

Awww, boner problems.

He had a limp too, I guess from the shooting, and it made me want to take care of him.

With your pussy?

Yep.

You’ve always had a soft spot for losers.

I identify with them, and I don’t have to try very hard.

There were ten-year-old boys running around the circular steps shooting each other with water guns, five-year-old girls in tutu bathing suits on their bellies in the shallow water, two homeless punk teenagers with a pit bull on a rope sprawled out on the fountain steps, and the steady camerawork of tourists from all over the world.

How’s your chef?

He’s so hot, I want to lick him, Mel said. It’s dangerous.

I wiped the sweat from my upper lip and splashed water from the fountain onto my hair. The dog from the punk teenagers wandered over to us and licked the back of Mel’s calf. We both petted her. She was white with black spots on her back and around her eye.

You’re like a little cow dog, I cooed.

Do you want to come live with me? Mel scratched behind her ears.

She’s the sweetest dog. The girl from the couple walked over to us. She had on cutoff Carhartt pants and a grubby neon-pink tank top. Her hair was dirty blond, matted, and clumped in parts and braided in others. She smelled like Deadheads and wet hay.

What’s her name? Mel asked.

Tipsy, the girl said. You can’t see it unless she walks, but one of her legs is shorter than the rest and it makes her look a little drunk.

The dog kept at the salty palm of my hand.

Are you guys a couple? The girl looked back and forth between us. We got that a lot. We’d had one night together in college, a drunken but fun accident that we processed for a couple of weeks, and decided not to repeat.

Best friends, we singsonged. We’d been saying it for years.

You live around here? the girl asked, shielding her eyes from the sun. There was no getting rid of her.

Yeah, I teach at the University, I said, waving in the direction of the buildings that lined the park. I didn’t tell her that I lived in a dorm. It was always hard to explain. People sometimes thought I had a room like a student or that I was a dorm mother.

I live in Brooklyn. Mel gave me that look, like, Do we know this person?

I’m gonna go there someday. To study social work.

It’s a good school, but too expensive, I offered. I thought of my students who’d left school in the last year because they couldn’t afford the $50,000-a-year tuition. There were the ones who stayed too, and got deeper into debt. I had graduate school friends who had defaulted on their student loans and were now mired in bad credit and harassing phone calls. I dreamed of defaulting, of channeling my monthly $557 payment toward Sasha’s nonexistent college fund. Instead, I dutifully paid those evil twin bitch aunts, Sallie and Fannie Mae, on the second of every month.

But everyone wants to go there, the girl countered.

Hype. Branding. I shrugged. I couldn’t get into my own ambivalence about teaching there. I was lucky to have my contract faculty position and to have avoided the fate of so many of my adjuncting friends, but I still lived paycheck to paycheck. I had believed so fervently in higher education in my twenties and thirties. Lately, I wasn’t so sure.

You got a dollar? the girl redirected.

I shook my head. I didn’t bring my wallet. It was true.

Mel reached into her tote bag and gave her a crumpled dollar. Tip money.

Now you can keep petting my dog.

Her boyfriend, in worn black jeans and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt, walked over to us, pulled out a flyer out of his back pocket, and handed it to us. I scanned it quickly: The People’s General Assembly! It’s time for the people to meet and to take the bull by the horns! September 17th, Occupy Wall Street.

It’s time for a revolution, he said, and lay back down on the steps of the fountain.

The working class is notoriously resistant to revolution, Mel said, just to be a pain in the ass, I knew.

This is going to be different, he said.

Look! The girl nudged my knee with the back of her hand and pointed at the horizon of the fountain. Tipsy and Mel looked up too. A bride!

People still get married, Mel said as if it were a marvel.

The girl rolled on top of her boyfriend. He lifted one of his hands up and slid it into the back pocket of her shorts. She giggled and kissed him and then sprung back up like she was in chaturanga and he was her yoga mat. He growled at her and nipped at her neck. Tipsy barked too—excited or protective, I couldn’t tell. He wrapped his big hand around the back of her neck and kept it there like a collar. She tried to shrug him off, but his hand stayed, locked in place. He looked older than her by maybe ten years. Still handsome, but tired around the eyes.

The bride was a glittery thing on a sunny day, and the tourists trained their phones on her. The new sliver of condos gleamed behind her—the