a bird on bowery

It was a cool sun that shone down on Bowery. It was not nearly noon yet, though the streets were already crowded with delivery trucks and taxi cabs. Suddenly, the corner of Chloe's eye caught a red object barreling down towards Grand Street. She turned to look just in time to catch a woman in a red dress tumble off her bike, the contents of her bicycle basket spilling out on the road, chief among them a whole rotisserie chicken, which continued rolling, sans its clear plastic shell, with such force that it hopped the curb and stopped at Chloe's now-stopped feet.

Not sure what the proper social protocol would be in such a situation (that is, one that involves a bicycle accident, some produce, and a rotisserie chicken), she went to help the woman, who appeared to be in her mid-40s, with straight brown hair and a huge straw hat. But she had already gotten up, and so Chloe picked up the herbed bird carcass in her bare hands, its homey fragrance an alien amid the noise and chaos of the street.

She stood there as the woman walked her bike to the curb and sat down there, laboring an exasperated "thank you." Chloe sat down next to her in solidarity, her hands outstretched and dripping with chicken fat, as they both stared in silence into the middle of the street where the taxis and trucks made garbage of the woman's lettuce and Gouda.

strewn owls

Once, Chloe asked Ewan how she and him met (she and him being, of course, not that famous singing duo, but Ewan and his girlfriend, Heather.)

"That's a fine story!"

They were sitting at the bar at Clandestino, awaiting the arrival of said girlfriend.
[How nice it must be, thought Chloe, to be called upon, somewhat regularly, to tell a personal story that is so upliftingly positive, emotionally, for the teller, that his eyes become one thousand percent more bright and his posture that of a proud robin on a spring morning. To say the least, Ewan certainly did enjoy telling the story.]

"The fact that she was once Laurel's roommate was not by accident!.."

"Really?..." [How was Chloe unaware? She had just thought it mere coincidence..]

"Absolutely, you didn't think it was mere coincidence, did you?"

At this, Chloe thought that "mere" was a strange word. After a moment, she thought to answer him, which came out in a rather dejected tone, "yes."

"Well! So, you know that Laurel and I were friends (quite platonic, you understand, for quite some time)..."

[Yes, and I also know that meantime Laurel fell in love with you and your charming ways and still is to this day, much to her detriment.]

"..Well, you see, the first time I came to visit her at her apartment, I had the first inkling of Heather. Laurel played that Magnetic Fields album The Wayward Bus while she made me some dinner. I had asked, ' is this your music?,' because, really, I didn't believe Laurel would be playing Magnetic Fields.."

[It was true, in all honesty, Laurel rather preferred bands like Animal Collective and TV On the Radio. Chloe hated this about Laurel.]

.."And she said, no, it's Heather's. And I thought, 'Heather, who is that?' Heather, who was not home at the time, was, as I quickly discovered, a ghostly roommate, and I did not see her the next ten times I visited Laurel, even though I tried to make it happen. The next time I visited, I peered into Heather's room and caught sight of her guitar hanging on the wall next to her bed, and the various incarnations of owls strewn about her room. I loved the things she owned. The artwork, the furniture, the kitchen utensils, I would come soon to find, were all hers, and I loved it all! And it all just snowballed from there. I believe it was the fourth or fifth time, when I saw that Eric Rohmer VHS sitting on a shelf under the TV, that I felt a strong connection to this person I had never met. I knew that the Rohmer movie wasn't Laurel's, and I didn't even have to ask her this time, because I now felt that I knew Heather, and I was in love. Can you believe it? I could even picture her, without ever having seen a photo of her! I kept this all to myself, you understand, because I wasn't quite sure how to bring it up... So really it's a story not about how we met, but about how I met her."

Chloe was speechless. It must have shown in her face, because Ewan went on... [or maybe it didn't show in her face, and Ewan was as self-centered as Chloe feared him to be...]

"And the craziest part about this whole long, drawn-out story, is that, when I finally met Heather, in human form, not as a summation of all her belongings and tastes, she was exactly as I imagined her. And at that moment, I knew. I knew that there was, and there would be, no one else for me."

And with that, Chloe quickly requested the check from bartender and promptly made a gracious exit out the side door.

red plastic bags

Chloe and Laurel walked down Baxter Street, on the sunny west side. It was a bitingly-cold day and Chloe couldn't wait for it to be over. The compacted ice from the snowstorm had formed islands of peril around every street corner, and Chloe thought it was dreadful. But she had needed to buy these lychees and bok choy, and it was good to get out. Their red plastic shopping bags weighted them down towards the sidewalk, their arms outstretched to form four straight vertical lines.

Laurel suddenly realized it was four o'clock. She needed to "go make her peach cobbler so that it will be ready in time for the seven-thirty dinner party at Jody's house. [pause]... Are you sure you don't want to join us?"

[Just as she said this, Chloe glanced over to catch that expression on her face that said, "I half want you to come because you're my friend, but I half don't want you to come because I only have enough peaches to make a cobbler for six."]

"No, thanks," responded Chloe. "I think I'll have a relaxing night at home with some red wine and shumai dumplings."

"Ah! Another Chloe-evening!," exclaimed Laurel, clearly exhaling a relief-ridden breath. She bade goodbye as she crossed the street into the cold shadows.

The sun was beginning to set and Chloe turned to face south again, to carry on their walk's trajectory alone. "Just to feel the sun on my face, " she said to herself, as if Laurel were still there.

Between Canal and Bayard, next to the State Detention Center, the sunny yellow sidewalk was met with the ominous shadow of the towering courthouse. Here, Chloe spun around on her heel and went home.

pancakes and pork buns

Chloe awoke peacefully early on Saturday morning, just as the sun was breaking over the tops of the Lower East Side high rises. Sunlight flooded her bedroom, and she lay there, well rested and relaxed, luxuriating in the soft cloud of her bed covers, like she used to do as a child on similar Saturday mornings in Florida. There, she would lay until the smell of the pancakes her mother was making for breakfast wafted into her room. But there would be no pancakes today. Only a baked pork bun and 60 cent coffee in a paper cup.

dichotomies

Chloe and Laurel strolled arm in arm around the clay track in the park on Chrystie and Canal, like the teenage Chinese girls who shuffle lazily down sidewalks in patent leather heels with hands at their mouths to stifle their giggles about boys. They circled the green astroturf, populated by a few tai chi groups, a practicing boys' soccer team, mothers with their babies in strollers, and old men contemplating the birds. It was late morning on the first warm day in April, and the sun shown down warm on their countenances.

Laurel had been, for a good fifteen minutes now, harping on a recent scientific study that reinforced the notion that red wine prolongs life, based on the administration of loads of the sweet poison into the mouths of poor, unsuspecting mice. She was now knee-deep in detail about the various controls and variables presented in the study, explaining how remarkable the positive results were. (Laurel was taking her facts directly from the JAMA. The chief topic of her personal interest was wine, and she often spent a long afternoon in the library in order to add to her knowledge.)

"That reminds me," said Chloe, "did you read that really entertaining short story in the New Yorker by Noah Baumbach? It was based on that study, I think."

"No, who's Noah Baumbach?"

This was typical Laurel. Chloe had always been fascinated by Laurel's ability to know everything and nothing all at once. Like a full encyclopedia with surprise blank pages here and there.

"You know, the director of The Squid and the Whale, one of your proclaimed 'favorite movies of all time'?"
(Of which there were many.)

"Oh, right... I knew that name sounded familiar. Did I tell you about the boy I saw in the subway the other day?"

That was another thing about Laurel. Not only did she simply fail to answer posed questions, she also possessed an uncanny ability to jump from one disparate topic to another with great ease. Chloe figured this was the way it went in Laurel's brain, that her mouth was simply the funnel through which every thought in her head simply poured out as it was produced. "No, you didn't mention it."

"Oh! Well... I was standing on the N train and in walks this tall, handsome boy dressed in a rumpled plaid shirt and jeans. He had this great messy brown hair and green eyes and was reading N + 1..."
(Her favorite magazine.)

"...But then my eyes had the misfortune of finding his shoes...oh, his shoes!"

"His shoes?"

"They were those leather dress shoes that are pointy-toed and square-toed at the same time!"

Chloe knew these well, a curious phenomenon of unexplained, insufferable ugliness.

"And then it was ruined!"

Certainly, this struck Chloe as very superficial, but legitimate, nonetheless. To Laurel, this knight in shining armor was not so anymore, ten seconds into seeing him, all because of his unfortunate shoes. He was at once enticing and grotesque, like a bowlful of delicious, creamy chocolate ice cream with a generous sprinkling of asparagus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Baumbach

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/01/26/090126sh_shouts_baumbach

Aunt Matilda

Chloe's Aunt Matilda lived in a low-stuccoed-celinged high rise in Midtown. She had 13 cats and a yappy poodle, who she dragged alongside her beat up red pushcart when she went on her Sunday morning trip to Gristedes. Her place always smelled of a mixture of cat litter, piss, and oil paint, the physical elements of which would also be found mixed together, when Chloe would come to visit.
It was always a depressing trip up the 6 train, alighting onto the sidewalk into a busy, noisy city canyon, and then walking the few blocks to the building with the sleeping doorman and the dingy elevator, up to the 18th floor. Aunt Matilda, though, seemed to enjoy her life of 40 years there, in the same apartment her mother, Chloe's grandmother, had bought for her when she first moved to New York at 23, with big ambitions and even bigger hopes for the future.
Over the years, she had once told Chloe, from one disappointment to another, Matilda began to falter. Job after job, date after date, her friends disappeared to marry off, sometimes with one another, and her cats continued to multiply, Matilda growing more weary year after year. By her 40's, she had finally resigned herself, becoming infinitely numb to all that the modern world's society demanded of her. She reveled in the New York City ballet performances, had affairs with Courbet at the Met, interludes with Stravinsky at the New York Philharmonic, and brought T.S. Eliot from Bauman Rare Books back to sleep with her. She was happy, nonetheless.

Nicolette's jump

Nicolette was one of Chloe's best friends. She had moved to New York in the years of the Williamsburg heyday, when everyone was moving there across the East River.

[Some people would refute that statement; say that they heyday actually occurred way before that, in the early 90's when part of your morning walk to the L train involved tripping over industrial debris on the sidewalk (those people don't live in Williamsburg anymore, or they still do and wallow in all of their nostalgia-ridden melancholy amid throngs of pretentious wannabe hipsters). And some people would refute the other way around; say that the heyday never ended and that it continues.]

Either way, they weren't glorious times anymore, at least not for Nicolette, who weathered the gentrification onslaught in her ramshackle loft on Kent Avenue, even as the star architects' glass dildos stretched into the sky all around her.

The truth of it all was that Nicolette had had enough. Not just of the Williamsburg scene, but of life in general. She had confessed to Chloe, one snowy day at that coffee shop on North 11th, that she was lost; that she lived in the one city she could think of that offered the most chances at a useful/meaningful/satisfying/fulfilled existence compared to all others. And why ever wasn't she happy? She had cut all of the fat from her life. Severed ties with friends, enemies, or otherwise who sucked the life out of her, who exasperated her, or who just plain annoyed her. She was a freelance graphic designer, working on her own terms, for projects in which she held a more or less vested interest. She had a huge, gorgeous, fluffy persian cat named Daphne, who found her on the street. Like should have been good, shouldn't it have?

Well, it wasn't.

One day, Chloe phoned Nicolette seeing if she'd "like to see Dean and Britta at Union Hall?"

"I'm afraid not. I have something to tell you, Chloe. I'm leaving. For good."
"What?"
"I'm going away. I've sold my things. All I have now is this backpack and my mother's jewels."
"Where?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'm thinking Belgium first - Bruges. Then we will see..."

[a long, awkward pause.]

"...I know what you must be thinking. But.... well, it was either that, or put on my favorite dress and all of my mother's jewels [her favorite dress was that vintage rose silk one, with the fabric covered buttons and the pleats up the bodice], walk to the exact mid-point of the Brooklyn Bridge, and hurl myself over the edge into the East River.
That reminds me - will you take good care of Daphne for me? I know how much you love her."