Not Weird About Brooklyn

[ed. The Saturn return]

I had to put my leather loveseat up on Craigslist three times before someone answered the ad, and then that someone, in all of New York City, was the guy my closest friend had been sleeping with a few months earlier. I’d never met him, but I knew that he’d once had to leave her house late at night to go take some kind of medication, and that he got really, really sweaty during sex. Also that he didn’t have Internet access at home, kissed exclusively in chaste little pecks, and had two alarmingly close friends who were women. He and Marie were both writing novels about angels. They’d met at the university where they both taught writing and had both earned MFAs in fiction (at different times), and after they’d written together at a coffee shop one winter afternoon, they relocated to his kitchen table for what Marie called “the download”: a pre-hookup conversation about family and spirituality that lasted for hours.

Comfy, well-loved small couch/loveseat, I’d posted. Has a tear in one of the cushions (see photo) but otherwise in good condition. VERY comfortable. Free if you can help me carry it down from my third-floor apartment (it’s not too heavy). Should fit in the back of an SUV; we’ve done it before. I’d taken the pictures haphazardly, in a spasm of sudden anxiety (couldn’t possibly start packing before I made some space in the apartment!), and now, as I considered the coincidence of Eytan having been the first person to respond, I wondered whether the fact that there had been books in the photos (a copy of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and a notebook lay beside the cushion-rip for scale; Eating Animals, Revolutionary Road, and The Lost Origins of the Essay were strewn in the foreground) had somehow limited my audience. It seemed typical of New York that the person to answer my ad at last would be someone of my precise demographic, as if the ad’s imagery and syntax (was it the semicolon?) could communicate only with people exactly like me.

Because I was moving away in nine days, such New York typicalities were aggressively making themselves known. I recognized the reaction as a defense mechanism, a sort of mental packing-up, but still it freaked me out. For years I’d rolled my eyes at those gullible plebes and out-of-touch patricians who called New Yorkers busy (I’d never worked full-time!) or the city expensive (I’d saved money while making $24K a year!) or the life there hard (my job was a scenic ten-minute bike ride away!)—but then, in July, my first subway trip after a long vacation had subjected me to just such a stereotype, producing the unpleasant and unshakeable sensation of acting in a bad SNL skit about riding the subway. Pressed to my left was a woman putting on makeup and violently sneezing, while on my right another woman dozed, her head periodically thunking my shoulder and then jerking away. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to feel disdain toward the city, or relief about leaving, and it felt like betrayal. As I’d confessed to Marie one night that spring, when the move first became a possibility, I’d always thought of my friends who left New York as the ones who had failed.

Now I called Marie to confirm that Eytan was Eytan and to ask whether we could meet in Red Hook a little later that afternoon—she and I had plans to knock out another item on my NYC bucket list, a last swim at the neighborhood’s public pool followed by food from the ball park’s food vendors. How crazy is that, we agreed about Eytan being the only person in the world to want my couch; “It’s like Craigslist is better than OKCupid,” (...)

I guess that’s part of what it means to live in a place, too—to share a story with the other people who are there. In late spring, after I’d decided to move, when Marie said to me that she’d always need to live somewhere with the stimulation and stuff-to-do-ness of New York, I would mostly believe her—certainly she was someone capable of being busier, and more gracefully busy, than me, and I knew she’d once spent a summer being unhappily un-busy in Wisconsin—but I’d also wonder whether this wasn’t just one of those stories we tell ourselves to keep ourselves where we are, sort of like how Didion says “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but in this case a story in order to die, to kill off the other lives we might lead, the same way that most people who give advice are forever saying Do exactly what I did. We have the conversations we want to have, say the things we want to be saying, and even as I write this, I am aware of how much it is the story I want to be telling: a story to shed my New York self, to leave it behind.

by Helen Rubenstein, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Criagslist (uncredited)