The party was in a big, weird loft on Ninth between C and D, built out with lots of plywood dividers to make bedrooms for all the roommates, detritus hanging from the ceiling as decor, low light concealing general filth, and a big stand ashtray next to a rotting velour couch whose springs poked Laura in her bony butt as she sat on it, smoking and drinking more than she wanted to because she was both bored and nervous. She tried not to glance at the guitar player too often. He stayed in another corner of the party having an intense one-on-one conversation with the bass player, but she still looked at him often enough that he had to have seen her and sensed her attention. Hadn’t he?
As the party wore on, getting louder and later and smokier, she became more and more sure that she had imagined the whole thing, or maybe he just did that to girls at random, testing his eye-contact powers the way you’d press the blade of a knife into whatever was around to see how sharp it was. She hovered on the edge of a conversation that was happening near her, pretending with her head movements to be part of it, but there was no one she wanted to talk to besides him.
A joint kept getting passed to her. She smoked without thinking, then was unpleasantly surprised when she stood up and her head swam. She hadn’t eaten since the Juicy Lucy smoothie she’d had for lunch. Of course this was the moment the guitar player chose to begin to make his way toward her, but now Laura’s breathing was speeding up and her mouth was watering in an ominous way and her number one priority was to leave the party without throwing up. She said goodbye to Callie, who gave her a puzzled look and quickly turned back to whoever she was talking to. Being full of incipient barf and the threat of humiliation made Laura feel artificially sober; she noticed every detail of the stairwell tile, the uneven texture of the sanded-down stairs under her feet. She ran out to the street, and the stinking breath of the hot summer night hit her straight in the face. She crouched on the curb between two cars, and wine vomit spewed out of her in a torrent, foamy and pink. She stood up shakily and felt immediately better, then gasped as she realized that the guitar player was standing right next to her.
“That was impressive.” His speaking voice was deep and smooth, unexpected in a skinny, boyish person.
She shook her head and fished around in her bag for a tissue, but she’d borrowed the purse from Callie, and there wasn’t anything inside it that felt familiar. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
He produced a packet of tissues from his pocket. They were clean and new-looking. She must have looked surprised.
“I have allergies,” he explained, waving them toward her. “My throat is so sore right now I can barely talk.”
“It’s brave of you to party in that condition,” Laura said, taking a tissue and dabbing at her mouth in what she hoped was a casual yet effective way.
He shrugged. “Davey said we had to. There were supposed to be important industry people here. There’s always some reason you have to go to a party, you know? In Davey’s mind, anyway.” He paused, and she wobbled slightly on the uneven pavement. “Sorry, are you actually okay?”
“I think so. Just humiliated. I’m Laura, by the way.”
“Oh, the musician!”
She looked at him suspiciously; he had to be making fun of her. No one had ever referred to her as a musician before.
“Callie told us about you.” He was clearly trying to put her at ease.
“Us?”
“Davey, the rest of the band, my roommates. Callie’s a cool girl.”
“Oh! Yeah, she’s … she’s cool.” The post-puke reprieve from nausea was wearing off, and as much as she wanted to keep talking to this beautiful yet vulnerable (allergies!) guy who thought of her as a musician, she knew she should leave before she threw up again.
“I should go home,” she said, backing away so that he didn’t get the opportunity to do what it seemed like he wanted to do, which was reach toward her and touch her arm. The possibility that he would touch her was too exciting to deal with at her current level of shaky queasiness. It made her feel like she might explode, and not in a cute way. He shrugged and lit another cigarette as she slunk off down the block, hoping that her instinct was leading her in the right direction, away from the East River and toward her strange, filthy, exciting new home.
* * *
The next day Laura woke up with a disgusting hangover that made her head feel like a black banana. By 1:00 p.m. she’d managed to ingest a coffee and a chocolate croissant and was feeling much better. She was absolutely sure she would never smoke cigarettes again, until Callie woke up at 2:00 p.m. and started smoking her American Spirits in the kitchen, and without thinking about it Laura lit one, too. Callie was wearing her beautiful teal kimono, deep in the process of removing last night’s makeup with almond-oil-soaked cotton balls that she placed in a growing black-and-red pile on the table in front of her, studying her own face in the mirror with infinite fascination.
When Laura walked past the door of Callie’s room on her way to the bathroom she noticed that the drummer was lying asleep in Callie’s bed. Laura cocked her head toward the bedroom as she reentered the kitchen as if to say, “So?”
Callie looked away from her reflection for a second and smiled. “They’re a good band, right? They’re going to be famous soon. That’s definitely the last time they’ll play a venue that small; it’s almost for sure that they’re going on tour, opening for the Strokes. Did you end up talking to Dylan?”
“His name is Dylan?”
Callie smirked. “His parents picked his name, not him. Okay, so … let me guess. You either hooked up with him but were too drunk to remember his name—which, since I’ve met you, I know is unlikely. Or maybe you were too shy to even speak to him.”
Laura slumped in her chair and ashed into her empty cardboard coffee cup. “Worse. We did meet, but it was right after I threw up in the gutter.”
Callie’s naked face shone with oil. She was still beautiful without the makeup, but it was weird to see her without it. She looked pink and unfinished. “Well, he’ll remember you next time, for sure!”
“As the girl who barfed. Great.”
“So you’re into him! That’s good. We’re going to a party tonight that he’ll probably be at.”
“Except I have to work.”
“Come by after.”
“It’ll be late, though.”
“Well, still come, you’ll be sober and you’ll be able to swoop in for the coup de grâce with all your wits about you.”
Laura rolled her eyes. “That’s me, swooping in. Always very slick.”
* * *
Laura waded through the crowded darkness at Bar Lafitte, leading people to their tables, smiling and leaving them there, then strolling slowly back to the podium by the door. Whenever she was bored, Laura thought about the album she had been slowly assembling in her mind over the course of the past couple of years. She had a handful of tunes that needed words, and this was why she’d moved to New York—to live the kind of life that she could write songs about, instead of a life in an apartment above a music store that she rented at a discount rate from her mother. Aside from “I Want My Tapes Back,” she hadn’t mined great material from her utility boyfriends. Inspiration had to come from somewhere else—New York, she hoped. She wanted to be like the artists who’d enshrined her new neighborhood as a place for the dissolute and beautiful and doomed.