I was moving from this apartment into one with strangers, a room in a fifth-floor walkup where mice skittered through the pipes and appeared at four in the morning as you padded down the musty hallway for a glass of water.
Johnny helped me move out since we were staying friends and he owed me one. It was nice of him not yelling or throwing things, but that wasn’t really ever his style. He’d just disappear into our bathroom with the high ceiling where his bowels would explode, something you only knew if you lived with a person. Something you never wanted to have known if you one day leave.
I hefted one suitcase; Johnny, the other, and we entered the silence of the elevator. He’d gotten skinny in those last months and seemed to droop under the weight of the luggage, his fancy sneakers slipping on the icy sidewalk. I was moving just a block and a half away, to the Bowery, so I hadn’t hired a van. It was late at night, around one, timed so other tenants wouldn’t see – for Johnny’s sake. “You sure about this, Sarah?” he asked, his breath puffy white. “What if you never find the person you think you’ll find? You really want to go through all this and a few months from now think, shoot, why didn’t I stay?”
“Oh, come on,” I said breezily, glimpsing his bleak expression under a street light. “I’ll visit a lot. No one will even know I moved out.”
We just tiptoed over the ice and the grimy late snow, me with a pillow under one arm or Johnny with a popcorn maker under his, the few pedestrians not really noticing since this was New York and we were probably just ripping off someone’s apartment. They’d just glance out of the corners of their eyes to make sure it wasn’t their stuff. On our first trip an ambulance swept by – from St. Vincent’s, for this was in the days it still existed – I remember that, how the siren wailed in my crimson ears.
We took four trips. The little things I brought back one by one after visits. I’d tuck a box of Swiss Miss into my tote when Johnny wasn’t looking, to spare his feelings since we used to drink hot chocolate at night while watching his favorite Fred Astaire movies. I’d steal back the hand-held electric mixer, the lemon-scented floor wax, the tiny jade plant my mother gave me.
The night I moved, Johnny said, “You’ll see, Sarah. You’ll get bored with the next guy, too.”
I remember how he stopped at the edge of my new room and I was glad he didn’t enter. But then he did step inside. He turned around three hundred and sixty degrees, slowly, as if trying to orient himself. He shook his head at how tiny the space was, how dingy the walls. “Whatta room! This is all you could find for five hundred? You’re throwing your money away.”
I didn’t want to have a memory of him in the room so I concentrated on unpacking the suitcase resting atop the lumpy mattress the last tenant left. I took out my grandmother’s lace tablecloth and unwrapped her brass candlesticks from my tee-shirts. I glanced up; Johnny was still there. I began fidgeting with a key chain I had hung onto forever, one of those plastic viewers fitted with a photo of my parents before their divorce.
“Don’t worry,” Johnny said. “I’ll be leaving.”
He kissed me on the cheek. After I shut the door behind him, I wiped off the kiss with my sleeve.
I’d never called him “Honey” or “Sweetie” the whole time we were together. I realized that only later.
*
What made me leave? The moment came in a Chinese restaurant, after I ordered the Buddha’s Delight; and Johnny, his usual Beef and Broccoli. “What do you want to do this weekend?” I asked to make conversation.
“I don’t know.” He crunched some dried noodles.
“Why do I always have to decide,” I said, sitting back in my chair. I folded my arms and wondered if, for the rest of my life, making plans would always be my job. I looked at him and decided I’d count to myself. How long would it take him to say something? At 79, I poured myself tea. At 192, the waiter came with a refill on Johnny’s duck sauce. At 304, I stopped counting. Instead, I turned my head and started listening to our neighbors’ conversation, a double date. The redhead was grinning in amusement. Her boyfriend was describing a show he directed with life-sized puppets, the sound effects and the lighting, lots of violets and reds. Then the blonde’s date spoke of working with penguins at a zoological research center.
“Sarah?” Johnny said. “The food’s here.” He tapped my arm.
“Do you know how penguins keep their eggs warm?” the man was saying, causing me to turn further.
“Sarah, I’m going to dig in,” Johnny said.
I gave a nod without turning back, listening to the man’s explanation: “The male balances the egg on top of his feet, so the egg won’t touch the ice.”
“Really?” I blurted.
“That’s right,” the man said. He smiled at me, then looked over at Johnny. “Would you two like to join us?”
I apologized and, face flushed, turned back to Johnny. He was eating a strip of beef, his mustache twitching.
*
It was my twenty-fifth birthday on June fourth, three months after I moved out. A friend wanted to celebrate at a lake in western Jersey, where we could drink wine and have cake, swim and watch canoes glide over the water until night fell. She was taking her live-in boyfriend, so, for symmetry, I thought of Johnny. The plan was to drive from my friend’s place in Jersey City leaving by ten to get a full day in, since the lake was a couple of hours away.
“Sure, see you then,” Johnny said when I called from my friend’s apartment where I would be spending the night before the outing.
We waited for over an hour, until after eleven. I tried calling his place and got his answering machine with my voice still on it, though I had kept asking him to change it, to use his own voice. I did manage to have a good time after all. It was just me with my friend and her boyfriend, but we swam a lot, climbed a tree, ate hunks of chocolate cake and drank cool white wine. On the ride back to my friend’s place, though, I kept wondering what happened to Johnny. It was unlike him. Plus, it was my birthday. I hadn’t seen him in a week and I thought anything was possible. Maybe our breakup had killed him. I remembered a med student acquaintance who worked at St. Vincent’s telling me about “Floaters” found in the East River and the Hudson. Some were indigents whose deaths were on land, whose buddies weren’t able to afford burial or cremation; some were suicides spurned by old lovers. I tried Johnny from my friend’s apartment but got my own voice again. I dreamt that night of Johnny’s body floating in the East River, face up, eyes staring at me like full moons.
I still had the key on my chain, so the next morning I opened right up when Johnny called in a low voice, “Come in.” He was dozing on the bed, the comfortable one we’d picked out together.
The apartment was dark, though it was nearing high noon and a shimmering, cloudless day. The blinds were closed and our cat Herman walked the window ledge behind the blinds, rattling the dusty strips I’d always wipe clean. The smell of animal urine permeated the air.
I saw my old dresser and mirror set. Cracker crumbs and browning newspapers littered the dresser top. I thought of how my dad had painted it olive green for me when I was in the eighth grade, replacing the knobs with shiny white ones. I glanced up at the matching mirror but didn’t peer in. I thought of all the hours of my life I had lost doing just this, trying to be happy with myself as a young woman. In a way, I was glad I hadn’t hired a van and taken the set with me.
Johnny wished me happy birthday. He apologized for not making it to the lake. He had gone back to get the float I asked him to bring – a blue blow-up mattress. He hadn’t wanted to disappoint me. Then he missed the PATH to Journal Square in Jersey City and had to wait for another train, but got on the wrong one. He wanted to call but he had left my friend’s number on the dresser, as well as her address and directions to her apartment. Later, when he finally got to Journal Square, he had stood in front of the station from twelve until three.
I didn’t bother sitting down in the apartment. My arms stayed crossed while I stood beside the bed. I listened to the story, nodding. Johnny was sniffling and seemed to be suffering from his summer allergies. The corners of his nostrils were swollen and red. A roll of single-ply toilet paper stood in for tissues atop the wooden crate that replaced the bedside table I had taken with me.
“How long do you think you can hold on to this place?” I asked, spotting a rent notice atop the crate.
“As long as I can.” He rolled away from me.
My eyes lingered on this room that had once been mine, returning to the dresser. I walked back over. Behind the newspapers was a photo of me, framed. I was holding clear-eyed Herman, so close that his pale, powder puff face was against my cheek. I looked down, hearing a mewling beside me, feeling him brush against my bare leg.
I hurried to the apartment door. “Johnny,” I said, over my shoulder. “I’m not coming back. Understand? I’m happy where I am.”
“In that dump? Jesus, Sarah, the hallway smells like mold.”
“Yes, in that dump.”
In the silence that followed I saw him glance at the blue float propped up against the wall by the bed. I had gotten it for the trip we took to Maine, but since we lost the box and no one got around to deflating it, we kept it stored inflated in the back of the closet. At the cove, we took turns pulling each other, one of us shoulder-deep in the water and walking on stones while the other floated, face to the sun. The float was slouching now; the air, half out.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Johnny said. “Anyway, you can take the float. You bought it, it’s yours.”
“That’s alright,” I said. Whatever I’d left behind I no longer wanted.
*
I don’t know why we started living together. It was cheaper that way, that was one thing. And I knew I didn’t want to be married. I felt sorry for Johnny too, I guess. He was soft-spoken, had a pudgy face, bug eyes, a ponytail, not the type to manage well alone. He’d get freelance work building sets or driving vans or motor homes for video shoots. He made good money but the jobs were on and off. I worked ten to eight, overtime, word processing for a lawyer.
But I had doubts about Johnny even at the start. I remember a college boyfriend came to visit me for New Years, right after Johnny and I started going out. I knew this guy from freshman year, we would see each other about once a year and sleep together. I told Johnny I had previous plans and would see him in the new year.
My roommate, who would soon kick me out to move her boyfriend in, threw a New Year’s Eve party. Me and my college boyfriend were drinking tequila from each other’s glasses and making out, and it felt like I was floating, back in my freshman year when you could just fool around, you didn’t ever have to think about future plans like living with the guy. I wished we could just go on seeing each other once a year forever. The phone rang as if from far away. It was Johnny. His voice sounded sloshy. He was saying he missed me, he was alone in his place in Jackson Heights. Was that a party he heard in the background? Could he come over, please?
In Times Square, on TV, the ball fell; three then four in the morning beeped on Johnny’s metal wristwatch while he stayed on the couch with a beer in his hand, except for regular trips to the toilet. He didn’t talk to anyone but me. As the party thinned out, he started nodding off. I tapped his shoulder, my old boyfriend having retired to my bedroom.
“Johnny,” I said.
“Sarah, look. Mind if I sleep here?” he said. “Sorry, really. But it’s going to take me two hours to get back to Queens. You know what the trains are like this hour. I’ll be gone in the morning. Promise.”
I brushed his hair from his cold, sweating forehead. “Oh hell, I said. “Alright.”
His eyes flashed a signal, a plea over my face. “You’re going in there now, aren’t you? To be with him,” he said.
“Just go to sleep,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut so I wouldn’t have to look into his.
I wear a wristwatch my husband gave me for our sixth anniversary, his initial engraved on the band against my skin. Even the key chain I use now is a big Lucite “G” for Gregory, which can still make me smile when I unlock the door to our house. But at night when I look up, brushing my teeth and making goofy faces with him in the mirror, it’s not his face I see.
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