“It’s our property, Carol,” the mother shot back. “We can do what we want!”
* * *
I decided to write them a letter. I didn’t write the DJ or the pianist or the newborn baby a letter. But for all my disgust, I still believed we were made of the same fundamental stuff. I had seen the mother grocery shopping and she didn’t cut the line or snap at anyone. She exchanged pleasantries with the cashier and left. Be kind, I thought, for some of the people you meet are using the same organic dishwashing liquid. I believed that if they understood the impact of their actions, if they really understood, we could live in something like harmony.
I edited the letter for typos and insanity and crept around the block. I stood, looking at their gold mail slot, double-checking to be sure I hadn’t flubbed the geography. The letter hated to bother them. The letter suggested that due to acoustics, it was possible that the residents of my building heard their music better than they did. An easy thing not to realize! The letter wanted to make them aware of the situation, lest they accidentally recite their bank account numbers. Ha! The letter emphasized that it had never been written before. The letter signed off on behalf of the residents of my entire building. This was quite weaselly of the letter.
I returned to my apartment just in time for Jared and his mother to arrive home from taking the dog for a walk. What a stroke of luck, I thought, to be able to witness them open it, to see the distraught looks on their faces. The mother held a dog leash in one hand and the letter in the other. Jared read over her shoulder. Both our windows were closed, so I could not hear the peals of their laughter.
* * *
“What if he goes to NYU?” asked the emotionally unavailable man. “Or Columbia?”
We were standing at my living room window. Jared’s parents had covered the yard in grass earlier that day. When Jared got home from school, he sprawled out like a Middle Eastern child who has never seen snow. A group of his peers, whom Jared referred to as “the cavalry,” had come over to admire the grass.
“Maybe he won’t get in,” I said.
It was too horrible to contemplate. Besides, Jared never seemed to study or demonstrate flares of brilliance.
“You realize that’s irrelevant.”
Takes one to know one, I thought.
“Looks like fun,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t,” I replied, even though it did, it looked very fun.
“I don’t think this is going to work out,” said the emotionally unavailable man, his back to the window.
He broke up with me that night, moving from emotionally unavailable to regular unavailable. Even at the height of our romance, I knew it would end like this. I could sense that I was a novelty, one of the many life experiences he was collecting en route to something else. But knowing didn’t soften the blow. If anything, it made things worse. In my grief, I started hating Jared on a heretofore untold level. Jared was the raw, unadulterated version of this person who had hurt my feelings. These were people with too many escape valves built into their lives. There would always be another party, another school, another house, another country, another woman. I felt the moral responsibility of a time traveler. If I could just stop Jared from being the person he is now, I thought, he could become a better person later. Sure, he might break a heart or two, nobody’s fault, but maybe he would be more torn up about it.
Armed with this larger sense of purpose, I became less preoccupied with cajoling Jared into silence. This was a good thing. But I also became vengeful, which was a bad thing. I’d figure out what song he was playing and play the same song twice as loud on a three-second delay. I’d pretend to be an emergency room doctor, lifting my window and announcing that I had to be at the hospital in two hours. They were putting other people’s lives in danger. Once I egged his house after he went to bed. “Maturity” and “legality” were abstract notions behind my threadbare eyelids. A couple of the eggs landed on lawn chair cushions without cracking. If only I could be more like those eggs.
As Jared barreled toward graduation, he somehow got worse. The neighbors on his side of the street chimed in, their fuses growing shorter as well. The chastising was more effective coming from people who didn’t have to shout from a different tax bracket. But these temporary silences could no longer satiate me. I wanted more. I wanted dark things. I wanted the parents to lose their jobs and sell the house. I wanted the kids to go to military school. I wanted to tase the dog in the throat. I wanted monsters to rise up from the earth and munch on their bones.
* * *
Jared is not keeping me from my work. Jared is my work.
* * *
Sensing I was not, in the classic sense, “hinged,” my friend Charlotte attempted to cheer me up. I assured her that I was not as torn up over the emotionally unavailable man as I appeared to be. She didn’t believe me. I was a wreck. Just look at me. I shouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over some immature guy. She was more right than she knew.
She insisted I accompany her to an opening at an art gallery, where I didn’t know many people and I didn’t feel like meeting anyone. Which led me to drink. Which led me to spend a whole three minutes contemplating a sculpture that turned out to be a folding chair. Maybe I really should move, I thought. It was an emergency option, but what do you call this? My tree house
