John Kenney - Talk to Me

A voice from inside a stall said, “Yeah, well, I’m trying to take a dump here so maybe shut the fuck up, okay, pal?”

The voice startled Ted and he managed to finish urinating, at least in part, in the actual urinal. He washed his hands aggressively and exited.

Now he hustled toward the door, steering clear of the meeting. He walked with his head down, a boy without a date at prom making his way to the punch table.

“Excuse me.” A woman’s voice. Loud. Strong.

Ted knew it was directed at him but pretended it wasn’t. He quickened his step.

“Excuse me.” Louder. It startled Ted. Fuck. He knew what was coming.

“You’re Ted Grayson,” she said.

Ted stopped, turned. They were staring at him now. He was a man so used to people staring at him, most everywhere he went. That’s wrong. You never really got used to it, Ted thought. It was unnatural for people to stare at you. You thought sometimes you knew them, the way they smiled at you, the way they wanted so much to make a connection with you. They felt they knew you. They’d spent so much time with you, in their home, alone, sick, naked, at dinner in a restaurant. You had told them things. But they didn’t know you, of course. And yet they thought it was okay to stare. To talk with you. Interrupt your dinner in a restaurant. Stop you on the street. In the airport. Now he stood facing the AA meeting. He wanted to flee. He wanted to scream. When she judged him he would explode. He would begin throwing folding chairs, upend the coffee table, hurl the donuts.

DO YOU TAKE CREAM WITH YOUR CRAZY? the Post headline would surely read.

ANCHORS ANONYMOUS!

“Yes!” Ted said, though it came out too loud, too angry. “What of it?”

Here it comes, Ted thought.

“I just wanted to say,” the woman said, “hang in there.”

Ted waited for the punch line. The mean line. It never came.

She smiled. “It gets better.”

They were all smiling. Kind smiles from strangers who knew real pain. Ted felt his throat constrict, felt the tingle in his eyes. He tried to say something but nothing came out. He nodded, turned, and left.

It had turned cooler and Franny had a chill after she left Ted’s building. She bought a coffee from a cart on the corner. Her mother had texted and wanted to know how it had gone.

Fine. TTYL.

She stood by the cart, holding the coffee, taking small sips, trying to warm up. Crowds moved around her. The traffic down Broadway, up Central Park West, along Fifty-Ninth Street. Everyone in a hurry. Meetings to attend, children to pick up, job interviews, auditions, an affair to keep, classes to attend. There goes a woman writing a memoir. There goes someone who’s thinking about suicide. There go four tourists speaking Dutch.

She needed to write the story. Henke had emailed the night before to check on her.

A woman who looked to be about Franny’s age walked by, holding a four-year-old’s hand. In the other hand, she held a pair of ice skates. They must have been heading to Wollman Rink. Franny wanted to follow them. She wanted to go skating. And then go home. Not to her apartment. Not to the sparse one-bedroom that cost $3,400 a month. But home.

She wanted to call someone. She didn’t know who, though. She tossed the coffee in a trash can and took the C train downtown, back to the office, where she helped out on a story about the fifty times celebrities had worn underwear as clothing.

She had her Bose wireless headphones on, staring out the window, listening to a Tycho song called “Coastal Brake.” Henke came up behind her, tapped her shoulder too hard, startled her, and ruined her moment of bliss.

“Where’s the story?”

His grating German accent and shiny face, too round and plump, hair too short on the sides and too long on top, the style now, too much pomade, too much cologne and expensive clothes that didn’t fit him quite right. The way he looked at her. The thing a man could do with his eyes, his expression. Franny stared back, dead cold.

The scheisse holiday party. Four months ago. The Bowery Hotel. Henke was drunk. He bragged he’d taken Ecstasy and he was touching everyone and he was making a beeline for Franny, who was talking with friends, and he pulled her by the arm, smiling, and said, “I need to confer with the great Frances Ford.” And he walked her to the end of the bar and smiled and said, “Let me fuck you.” At first, Franny wasn’t sure what was happening because of the shock of it, the did-he-just-say-that surprise, and also he was smiling so maybe he was joking. But he wasn’t joking. He was grinning and so confident, the confidence of the very rich, and she was disgusted by him and also by herself for working at this place, tired at being disgusted with herself because that was what men like Henke did to women, made them feel bad for his behavior, made them question how they dressed, as if the problem involved cleavage and not personal responsibility. Have I egged him on? Have I given him the wrong message? Why was he staring so openly at my breasts? Why did he wink at me? Who winks? Why do men think they can do this?

She needed to leave. To be clean again. She was going to Vermont for Christmas break. To Stowe. She had to change everything. She had to get out of here. Except in the moment, as she stood there, Henke leaning in, she was afraid. The panic-fear from as long as she could remember. She blamed herself, hated herself, didn’t trust herself. She wanted to scream but she also didn’t want to make a scene. She was frozen. It was like a dream where she couldn’t run. In her dreams, she couldn’t run. She had to crawl. Over bridges made of rotting wood, high above black water. She was afraid and felt weak and bad but she had to climb out of it. But she knew how. She’d been doing it her whole life.

Franny stared back at him and said, “Your breath smells like meat and cheese and vomit. Also why don’t you go fuck yourself. Merry Christmas.”

“What story?” Franny said to him now, standing, pulling her headphones off, gathering her things, putting her MacBook Air into her bag, putting her coat on. “The story about Britney Spears’s custody battle? The story about underboob selfies from celebrities? The celebrity wife-swap story? We do a lot of stories here at shit. I mean scheisse . Isn’t that what it means in your lovely-sounding language?”

“What crawled up your ass?”

She could feel it coming on, shaky and electric, and she hated it. She’d always hated it. Since she was a child. The trapdoor fall, the energy drop. It felt out of control and terrifying. The moods. The therapists since she was eleven and the overheard conversations her parents had about her, the arguments and shouting about her, the fights and the bullying in school that she never told her parents about. What had ever become of Joey Staley, Franny wondered, the meanest girl in Bedford? She played a game at recess. Who do you like better? Franny or Lila? she’d ask to a recess crowd. Lila! they’d shout.

“I want it tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow, please ,” Franny said.

“What?” Henke said, clueless, Teutonic tit.

“Don’t bark at me like you’re ordering a coffee.”

He stared, all bluster, secretly intimidated by her.

“Tomorrow,” he said, then turned and walked away, “ bitte, mein Fräulein .”

She tried to do a SoulCycle class but it was full. She didn’t really want to do a SoulCycle class.

She stood on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, the young and fortunate streaming out of Google and the tech companies, the ad agencies and talent firms, the editing houses and music studios, New York fast walk. Where were they going? she wondered. To Equinox, to yoga, to tai chi, to Rolfing, to a spa treatment, to sushi, to the newest and hippest overpriced bars and restaurants on the Lower East Side, to Contra, to Dirty French, to Stanton Social, in buildings once home to Judaica shops and butchers and tailors, whose upper floors contained overcrowded apartments, cold-water flats, one toilet at the end of the hall, long gone, long forgotten.