The Overlaps (excerpt)

I met Don at Payday, back when it was at the Ukranian Home on Second Avenue.

Payday was a floating weekly party, so you had to know the right people to find out where it was being held, which meant that, if Don was there, he was already pre-selected as someone I would want to know. So even though he was radically short – 5’ 4” at most – when he pulled me over to dance with him one night, I let him. Why not? He had a cute face and body. They were just on a very short man.

Don was 27, nine years older than me at the time, and he worked at an investment bank called Bear Stearns. So I got to tell people that my boyfriend was an investment banker, which made all the drunks we hung out with look like dogshit.

Don had an apartment in the new building by the South Street Seaport. The building had its own gym. He wanted to go to some restaurant to eat squid ink pasta, and I laughed at him. So yuppie, I said. So cliché. It’s like Mapplethorpe.

He was annoyed. It’s Maypplethorpe, he said, correctly, and then we were even.

I was in school for accounting. I can’t even believe this happened, that I went to school for accounting, but my first year of college was spent as a business major. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I wanted to make a lot of money, so I figured I’d learn accounting.

It soon became clear that I gave a negative number of shits about accounting, or business school in general.

Don encouraged me to stay with it. He was adamant that I had to get my shit together and stop running around at clubs if I wanted to get anywhere in life.

So why could he go to clubs and not me? Because he’d already graduated college and found a job. Besides, he wasn’t even that interested in going to clubs anymore, because now he and I were together, and people only went to clubs to meet other people to have sex with, so he didn’t think either of us really needed to be there.

OF COURSE I needed to be there. We had an argument at 40 Worth one night; I showed up and he was like, What are you doing here? You should be home studying. And I was like, What are you doing here? You should be home doing the Jumble in your bathrobe over a half a grapefruit, you old fucking man.

I belonged at these places. I’d been clubbing since I was fifteen. He was the arriviste. But he had a suit, and confidence – you have to, when you’re a man of that stature – and those hinted at money, and while everyone had been so anti-yuppie at first, now it was the late ‘80s, and money had started to outrank artsy outfits. So who did and didn’t belong there?

Don knew that I was actively looking for a better deal, that I had been since go, and that I’d leave as soon as one came along. But I couldn’t be alone in the meanwhile. I phrased this to myself as “I don’t want to hurt him.”

I’d promised him love, and I thought this was like a binding contract in court. Even if you didn’t want to fulfill the terms of the contract, you’d signed on the dotted line, so fulfill you must. This was fair, as I’d learned while standing on the other side of the fence, in the yellow grass of being the one who was promised love and then denied it. But it chafed, and we argued, and eventually I became bratty and petty, and I’m ashamed to remember too much more.

Except this: two years after that, Don called me out of the blue and asked me why I’d had to be such a bitch when we were breaking up. I said, “Because I was nineteen.” I was irked by the years-later call. There was nothing to discuss. Why had our relationship not worked? Because we were wrong for each other, the end.

I wanted to cheat on Don. I thought if I could have sex with someone else, it would automatically break us up. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. Don would do all the work.

Scott Harris was not a good choice, but not the worst choice either. We’d known each other for years. All my friends had fucked him and all his friends had fucked me.

One night at Alyssa’s house a few months prior, I was on mushrooms laying up in her loft bed while everyone was drinking in the other room, and Scott came in and tried to put the moves on me.

He climbed halfway up the loft ladder, standing on it with his folded arms on the loft floor, and he’s like, Whatcha doin?

And I’m like, Tripping. Laying down.

And he says, Why don’t I lay down with you?

So many answers to that question! He took my intense stare of disbelief as an invitation, pulling himself up and slithering into the loft exactly like a reptile.

We bullshit for a minute or two, as he got closer to me on the bed. Then he laid his big line on me.

Janice, what do you wish for?

I said, I wish you weren’t such a man-whore. I cracked myself up.

He frowned, then he was like, No, I’m serious, and he tried to look sincere, and then I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing really hard.

Scott looked aghast, and I apologized, catching my breath and wiping my eyes. It was the mushrooms, I said. But seriously, go bark up another tree, I’m just going to lay here and laugh to myself for a while.

He didn’t leave. Don’t you want to know what I wish for?, he asked.

And I was like, Oh my god, are you kidding me? REALLY? Okay! What do you wish for?

And he turned his head to the side so he could gaze out the window into the night sky, and he said wistfully, I wish people could know who I really am inside.

And I didn’t want to hurt his feelings any more than I already had, but he was just killing me with this shit, and I laughed until my stomach hurt, until I could feel the tears sliding into my ears, and he was like, Fine, I get the point, and he went downstairs.

The weird thing is that I have some impossible memory of hearing him go into the other room and all the guys cheering him and asking how it went, and him saying, “Seven minutes in heaven.” There’s no way I could have heard that, though, because I was in the loft bed laughing.

Maybe I’d found out later that he’d said that. He said that? How weird was that? Why did he have to pretend we had sex, when he had so much other sex with so many other people? I think it was that I said no.

Scott and I had known each other for three or four years at this point. At that age, that’s like half your life. People become important by proximity. Scott had fucked Alice, Alyssa, Celine; I don’t remember him fucking Hope but I assume they eventually got around to it. That’s what it was like with me and him. We’d known each other for four years, and now we were going to get around to it.

I can’t imagine why I did this. I knew Scott Harris was not going to fall in love with me, nor could I fall in love with him; I knew him too well. But one fallow Friday night when the club we’d all gone to was dead, he sidled up and quietly suggested cutting out and going to his place.

I wondered, Why me? Why now? Then again, why not?

He could be my ticket out. Don wasn’t the thing and I knew it but the next thing hadn’t arrived yet. Scott wasn’t the next thing but he was something while I waited for the next thing. He was a better way station than Don – well, no he wasn’t. He was nothing, he was that night only, but I must have been feeling very flattered or very lonely because I said okay, and we left together.

As we were going down in the old loft elevator, he took a second to smile to himself. Janice Erlbaum, he said, relishing it. I thought, Don’t remind me.

He had a nice place in Loisaida, near The World, where he tended bar. We walked along Houston. I may have been dragging my feet a little. Sex was not all it was cracked up to be. I was starting to notice, actually, how much I resented penetration. I was not dying to have sex tonight, and definitely not dying to suck a dick, either, though that was often the lesser of two stupid things I didn’t feel like doing, and therefore something I’d learned to acquit.

So why go to Scott Harris’ house, where just last week we’d all watched the SuperBowl, an afternoon of incredible boredom for me until we hit on the idea of cheering or booing really loud every time Scott went out of the room, then laughing at him when he ran back in? Because I’d said I would.

I do know that we discussed, whether before or after the very perfunctory sex, his upcoming trip to Greece. He told me his dad had given him a new toothbrush, a Robert Ludlum novel, and a tube of lubricant, and said, There you go, Son, you’re all set now. That’s my dad, said Scott, as though that were a good or funny thing.

If I’d been on mushrooms I would have probably said, Wow, I understand so much more about you now, and why you’re as promiscuous as I am. Even more so. Of course he was male so it was a whole different thing.

I didn’t understand back then that a lot of guys were imitating or competing with sexually voracious fathers. I didn’t understand the emotional voracity underneath, how much sex it takes, like a laxative, just to clear out the shit every day. I did however feel this was sad, and that Scott’s attitude about it was one of recognition but also one of resignation, and how fucking old was he, to have given up already?

(2014)