Christopher Hacker - The Morels

She came out. “Thank God. A man with cigarettes!”

The following day, and every day after for the next seven days, I found excuses to be on Spring Street so that I could pass the bakery and catch a glimpse of her through the swinging door beyond the glass display cases. She’d flash in and out of sight in her starched chef’s whites, red bandanna around her black hair. I’d stand at the front window pretending to look at the menu but really watching the swinging door. Each time it opened, I scanned for her red bandanna. I could have done this for hours. I could have done nothing but this for an entire day. Invariably, she would see me and come out wiping her hands on her apron to give me a hug. We’d sit on the bench outside and smoke and talk.

“I keep going back to that day,” she said. “You were there. He handed me the damn thing. Said read it, tell me what to do with it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I saw the look in his eyes. He really did want me to read it. He wanted me to stop him. And what did I do?”

“It’s not your fault he wrote that book.”

“I told him to go forth and publish . Those were my exact words. I should have read it! I should have thrown it across the room, thrown it at his head, told him to shred it! Shred the damn thing! I should have told him that if he published it, I would divorce him. But I let him go forth , even though I knew there was something wrong. I could sense it. What stopped me? And what stopped me when he did publish it, when I did read it, from immediately kicking him out of the house? I should have told him that he was crazy, that he was too toxic for Will to be around, and filed for divorce.”

“Well? What’s stopping you?” The air was frosty and damp — the forecast called for snow — yet under her apron Penelope had on only a T-shirt, and her clogs exposed her bare heels. She hugged herself against the cold. I unzipped my down jacket and draped it over her, feeling even as I did it the awkwardness of this chivalric gesture. I could feel Penelope’s eyes looking me over, appraising me — maybe wondering what I was up to. She thanked me and pulled the jacket’s flaps around her.

“Who else would have him,” she said, “if not me?”

Then there was Viktoria. After our night on the couch, I was respectful of her need to take it slowly, happy to enact a chaste domestic bliss with this gorgeous and troubled girl. Lying next to her at night, I would imagine that I had found my Penelope, my other half, who would come to love me as much as Penelope loved Arthur, despite the havoc I might cause in our lives. She would see my failings as an essential, even lovable part of who I was. But in this relationship, unfortunately, she was Arthur and I was Penelope. I pictured meeting her German parents, winning them over, and perhaps even forgiving them for being so criminally neglectful of their daughter. I pictured Viktoria bearing me a child whom I would love absolutely, for whom I would give up all notions of art making without a second thought.

She talked about a man, her “best friend.” He was her dealer and had once raped her, she said. But she also had sex with him willingly. The chronology of their relationship was confusing. She had broken off contact after getting out of the hospital. He would call her, but she wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t return his calls.

Viktoria was at her best in the presence of gawkers. When we were out, even though she was talking to me, it seemed she was playing to some other person at our periphery listening in. She didn’t seem to know how to behave when it was just us, alone in the apartment. She was always telling me how nice I was and how she didn’t deserve someone as nice as I was. Nice was new to her, it seemed. She wasn’t used to it. I got the feeling I annoyed her with my niceness, that she was doing all she could not to bait me into an argument, to get us on footing that was more familiar to her. Our tame evenings with takeout and a movie and the barking dog must have felt, in comparison to her previous life, like just an extension of the white, antiseptic flatline of the hospital. She said that I was good for her. As though I were a kind of root vegetable.

She brought me to a certain Midtown nightclub— her nightclub, she called it. It was one of those places whose advertisements I would come across while browsing the housing listings in the Voice , ladies in fishnets, disembodied DJ turntables floating above them — I’d pass these ads and wonder who on earth actually went to places like that. Answer: Viktoria. Nightclubs are excruciating when you are sober. It seemed like she was doing it to punish herself — or maybe tempting herself back into a relapse. She told me to go ahead and have a drink — she didn’t mind — but I wouldn’t.

There was a friend, a girl, but I don’t remember what the friend looked like. Who could tell what any other girl looked like in the presence of Viktoria? She eclipsed all other girls. These two would dance for hours, and Viktoria would shout to me places in the club that were meaningful to her — the bathroom stall where she used to do blow, the stage where she would be invited to dance, and the time she was dared to take off her top in front of the orgiastic crowd, the bar where they’d sometimes hand out glow-in-the-dark necklaces. It was hard to understand what she liked about these places — they were so loud — big empty black-painted rooms that stank of stale beer and cigarettes. It was all noise, a noise that tried to fill the void. Or maybe it was meant for something else entirely; maybe I fundamentally didn’t get clubs; maybe it was a space for people to be their sexiest, to show off their ideal selves.

We met up with Rich, the best-friend-drug-dealer-ex-boyfriend-rapist. Rich. He was, somewhat unexpectedly, old. Old and fat and poorly dressed. He kept calling her darling . He spoke with an affected lisp. He had red hair and a beard. He looked me up and down like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to stab me or fuck me. Rich took her aside and talked to her while I waited, watching them.

After that encounter with Rich, Viktoria changed.

We would go to a club and now Viktoria would have a drink. Or two. I wouldn’t go home with her. She would tell me to go on ahead, she wanted to stay a while longer. I didn’t know how to react to her drinking and felt parental and judgmental when I said anything about it.

She started classes at NYU and would bring home her course books and line them up neatly in her empty bookcase. She bought enough stationery supplies to turn over a new leaf and color-coded her schedule with highlighters. She talked about the new people she was meeting — teachers and fellow students — and this gave us something to talk about when I came over and ate takeout with her.

I should have broken things off. I don’t know why I persisted. Domestic routine comes so naturally to me. I have always had a nesting instinct. I fantasize future life histories with girls I barely know. I love homemaking, burrowing in. An and I, when we both were freshman and living in the same dorm, would sign out the party room — we both had roommates — and lock the door and build a fort out of the couches and cushions and chairs.

One evening I came over and Viktoria was dressed to go out, a short skirt with sparkling earrings. She had a nose ring — a single tiny diamond sparkling on her nostril — and a belly ring. Her stomach was firm and flat. Her top exposed this part of her. We were supposed to eat at home and watch a movie. I had rented a couple of new releases and brought them in my laptop case. She suggested we go out, meet a few of her friends instead.

We went to a lounge in the East Village and sat on a low couch and drank cranberry vodkas with one of her new NYU friends, a girl, a total blank to me now.