“Shapeshifter” by Maggie Love
To hear a neighbor through the walls in my building, they need to be yelling, and we need to be right on top of each other. When I hear my downstairs neighbors fight, I’m usually in my breakfast nook. This morning, as I sip my coffee, the man’s voice booms through the floor. “You’re mad? Do you want to know what I’m mad about?” I set my mug on the table without a sound. In the silence that follows, it’s possible the woman answers. Her voice rarely carries past the 1950s hardwood and plaster. They fight a few times a week. It is disturbing. Then again, whenever I’ve had a screaming match with a man at his place, no one ever checked in, and things turned out fine in the end.
The couple moved in a few months ago. They have a kid. Sometimes through the kitchen floor I hear him running around. I know what they look like because I’ve seen the man open the mailbox with their number on it, and once I saw him with the woman and their son, just outside the building. They were laughing and talking about ordering Chinese for dinner. The woman is fair-skinned. She has a dark brown birthmark on her cheek that’s about the size of a quarter. If I hadn’t been able to hear the couple’s private arguments, I’d have been jealous of them all. For the most part, I only cross paths with the man. When we see each other in the lobby, he says “Hello, how are you?” He often smiles, and I respond in kind. It’s a reflex that makes me hate myself.
I’m careful never to be in an enclosed space with him. It’s not so much that I’m afraid of what he’ll do to me, more that I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself from being friendly. If he’s waiting for the elevator, I’ll take the stairs, even though I live on the seventh floor. I don’t know if he knows my apartment number. He has caught onto the fact that I avoid riding with him, and to protect his ego, I guess, if we’re both approaching the elevator, he’ll say hello and reach for the stair door instead. He has pale, waxy skin and I’ve noticed, walking behind him, that he steps on the outer parts of his feet.
Today I cross paths with the man and the kid when they’re coming home and I’m heading to the grocery store. The kid looks to be about five. He has big ears, and he’s missing a bottom tooth. He says something I don’t catch, and the man yells, “If you don’t cut it out, I will leave you in the car.” The kid’s quiet after that.
Back from the grocery store, I’ve just placed the butter into its compartment in the fridge when my phone buzzes. It’s still buzzing as I shelve the yogurt and pepperoncini. Only two people ever call me, and the main one is my mother. I’m shocked to find, after I dig my phone out from the bottom of my purse, that this time it’s Graham. We haven’t talked on the phone in years. When I pick up, I resist the urge to ask if it was a pocket dial. The line is quiet for a few seconds. “Hello?” he asks. “This is she,” I reply, teasing him for not calling me by name. “Please excuse my lack of phone etiquette,” he says, then adds, “How the hell are you?” Though he went to boarding school and I wore the same Halloween costume—cat ears and a tail—all throughout my childhood, our running bit is that I’m too rich for his blood. It’s a little after one p.m. on a Monday, which is my Sunday. Suddenly the afternoon, which had been nothing more than a long stretch of hours before bed, opens up.
I close the fridge door, take a seat at my kitchen table and put Graham on speaker. The afternoon sun coats the room and me in a layer of warmth. I spread my hands on the white Formica and gaze at a blue table leg while he talks. “I just passed by that mural you hate.” “The one with the uncanny valley Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z on it? I can’t believe that’s still up there.” “A child designed it,” Graham says. “Still.” It didn’t seem like the men on the mural were actually meant to be celebrities, more like whoever painted it used their likenesses to fill out the scene of people hanging around a stoop playing cards, jumping rope, and listening to music. The mural is on the Lower East Side, near a bar we used to go to when we worked together.
I ask, “So, what are you doing over there on a Monday afternoon?” I feel the familiar mix of anticipation and anxiety. We used to be intimate, but never physically. He says, “Just running an errand.” I can picture his hunched walk, hands in his pockets, wired earbuds in. His prematurely graying hair and his endearingly snaggled right canine.
I almost call him out on his vagueness, but enough time has passed since we last talked that it would feel more needy than friendly. He asks where I’m working these days, and for a split second I consider lying. “I dance,” I say. “At a bar.”
After a couple of seconds, I ask, “Hello?”
“Which bar?” he murmurs. “I gotta see this.”
I think maybe this is why he called, to see me. Blood rushes to my face.
“Plus I’m planning a bachelor party.” My heart races. I ask, “Yours?” “Don’t sound so surprised,” he says. My stomach drops. “You’ll love her. Everyone does.”
I congratulate him and ask how they met.
“I’m going into the subway, the connection’s about to drop. But it was great talking—let’s get drinks soon, yeah? I’ll call you.”
The day is shot. I pour myself a glass of wine and pull up his Instagram. Did I miss the fact that he has a girlfriend, much less a fiancée? I didn’t: most of his grid consists of blurry close-ups of his ugly dog and screenshots celebrating Knicks and Giants wins. No fiancée in sight. I look at his tagged posts. A few weeks ago, the fiancée posted one of those engagement photo carousels, the phony kind that’s meant to be candid even though they’ve hired a professional to document the moment. From her public profile, I learn that she’s twenty-eight, almost ten years younger than Graham and me. She’s a freelance branding consultant who’s worked with big box stores and local businesses alike. She’s thinner than me, with expensive-looking highlights. In another photo she tagged him in, a sun-drenched brunch table is covered in bacon, eggs, and mimosas. Across from him, she’s having salad with grapefruit and feta. All you can see are her pale hands, her oval nails painted translucent pink, and her tasteful engagement ring.
Graham and I used to work together at a start-up that sold produce that was discolored and misshapen but still edible, at a discount. I worked the front desk, Graham was on the marketing team. He’s a gossip with a natural ability to pull things out of women, a deadly combination. Most people who are good at getting you to talk reveal things about themselves, but Graham could somehow do it by telling other people’s secrets. He once told me he’d seen every woman at our company cry, something I wrote off as an exaggeration until it happened to me.
I assume he’ll call the engagement off. He once said to me, as if it were a compliment, that he and I were “not the marrying kind.” At that point, the longest either of us had been in a relationship was nine months.
I look up Jamaica Noll. In the last few months, she unfollowed but didn’t block me. She hasn’t posted to her grid since before I met her—the last picture is of her father, a man with thick gray hair and her same squashed nose, standing in front of a low wall, the ocean behind him. In the caption she wishes him a happy birthday. There’s no sunset-colored ring around her profile picture: she doesn’t have a story.
Jamaica and Graham worked on the same team. She filed a harassment complaint against him, accusing him of rape. A week later, Graham was gone.
He told me she was unhinged. They’d dated for six months, which I knew, and he’d cheated on her as a cowardly way out of ending things. He said Jamaica called him the day before she reported him, saying no one would believe him.
This was six years ago. I believe Graham. The man bought me coffee at least once a week. He might be a scumbag to the women he dates, but he’s not a rapist. I even offered to talk to HR on his behalf, but he said he didn’t want to drag me down with him.
In 2020, when we went virtual, the produce company laid off the majority of its staff, including me. I don’t know anyone who works there anymore; Amazon has since bought it. I was unemployed for over a year. Money issues aside, getting laid off was a relief. The produce company was my first office job, and I appreciated the stability. I tried to like it. But one day as I was rinsing off tumorous strawberries for my afternoon snack, tears came to my eyes. I didn’t want to spend so much of my life under fluorescent lights, eating out of compostable paper bowls. I was a server before I started at the produce company. I used to think my coworkers at each new restaurant were the most fascinating collection of weirdos I’d ever met. Now I think everyone’s interesting, it’s just that people in service tend not to hide that part of themselves at work. I knew I’d go back to service when I left the start-up.
A few months into the pandemic, when things began to open up again, I started taking pole classes for something to do. I used to love dancing as a kid—contemporary, jazz, and tap: it was the one extracurricular I had on my college applications. I ran up my credit card bill so I could take multiple classes a week. After a few of my teachers, who all made money stripping, rightfully clowned us for paying to dance, I started thinking about putting my new skills to use.
These days I work at Open Bar in Williamsburg. I dance there Tuesday and Wednesday nights and early Saturday evenings. And I gig when I can, dancing at holiday parties or covering when a friend’s sick. I live so far south, I’m an hour from everything, Open Bar included. But it’s worth it for stabilized rent. Even if I wanted my neighbors to be my audience, this area’s too Muslim and family-oriented to have any strip clubs.
Now I’m on my way to work, walking to the Q when the town crier bikes past me. I’m on the main drag of the neighborhood, with the grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and shops. On one side are the old Victorians and the park, and on the other are apartment buildings. The town crier has biked up and down the street every day for as long as I can remember, yelling something in a language I don’t understand. It could be a call to prayer. Or a warning. I can hear him all the way up in my apartment on the seventh floor, even with the windows closed. It took me months to match his face to his voice, because he’s often not yelling, and sometimes he’s on foot. When I finally did catch him biking and crying out, it was like a celebrity sighting. The skin on his bald head is patchy, in shades of pink and brown. In the summer he always wears the same thing, a t-shirt and sweatpants with sandals. Now, when I pass him standing quietly on the street, it’s as if he’s a famous actor trying to blend in.
On the train, I listen to a podcast about how, after a woman went missing, her family was frustrated by the cops’ inaction and launched their own investigation. Evidence the father found by breaking into his daughter’s boyfriend’s apartment was deemed inadmissible.
Open Bar’s a ten-minute walk from the L. It’s a neighborhood spot, wedged between an auto repair shop and a car wash. The street reeks of gasoline. When Danny, the owner, bought the place, it came with a light-up sign—the same one that hangs over the bar to this day—that reads, simply, OPEN, above a number for a landline. The number’s been disconnected for years, not that anyone would ever call it. Why would you, when you’re close enough to just walk in? He figured he’d save money and name the bar to match the sign. The slogan printed on all the menus and in the Instagram bio is: “Buy Your Own Beverages.”
It’s a small space, with just enough room behind the bar stools for people to walk single file to the back room, where there are a few tables. There’s a pole in the bar, bolted to the ceiling. Late Friday and Saturday nights, people line up along the wall, and the back is standing room only. They crowd in the doorway to watch you dance. So I hear. I don’t have the seniority to work those shifts.
Tonight I open the door to the familiar, chipper bass of Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.” The music is always ’70s rock, aside from the songs I dance to. It’s March, already getting dark as I start my shift, but still, inside the bar, with its single tinted window and dim lights, it’s much darker than outside, where the street lamps are on and so are the fluorescents in the storage facility across the road. The walls and bar are covered in layers of stickers and graffiti. I relax into the warmth and the smell of beer.
The clientele is half blue-collar Black and brown men who live and work in the neighborhood, half Connecticut-born white boys wearing Carhartt. There are three bartenders, but Danny, the owner, works six of the seven days Open Bar is open. All three bartenders are men, and only one of them works at a time, without a barback. Danny’s around 5’8”, not much taller than me. He’s got a thick head of black hair and the saddest blue eyes that bulge out a bit. He wears the same thing every day: black T-shirt, black leather jacket, black jeans, and Docs. He has a record player he hooks up to the speakers, and the bottom left half of the bar is all albums.
The pole in the bar was Danny’s ex’s idea—she dances too. They split before the bar opened. The counter’s wide enough that behind the men’s drinks there’s space to walk or crawl, and there’s just enough room to move in a tiny circle around the pole. But most of your space is vertical. Because there’s no room for floor work, dancing at Open Bar is harder than it is at other spots.
My routine tonight is a crowd pleaser I could do on autopilot. I’m wearing my favorite heels, the ones that light up like the roller sneakers I had when I was six, and my lilac set with the thong that pops against my skin. I have glitter on my temples and across my collarbone. Danny plays my song, “Goodbye Horses.” I feel good. I even nudge Connor’s shot glass with my toe box. He always gets the beer and shot special for five bucks, tequila and Tecate. He throws the tequila back without taking his eyes off me. His long, stringy hair is still wet from the shower. He’s harmless, a regular who works at the thrift store down the block. He once brought some poor girl to the bar, and I heard him yell over the music, “Sex work is work.”
I try to picture Graham here, sitting next to Connor, shooting the shit with Danny. Sticking out like a sore thumb in his nondescript clothes that somehow still make a statement. I want him here, and I don’t. I’m worried if he comes, it will change the way he thinks of me.
On the spinning pole, I shapeshift from crucifix to brass monkey to goddess. I flirt with certain men, winking at them through the V of my legs, and ignore others. Up and down I go. I fold and unfold, holding on for dear life with the back of my knee, the curve of my waist, or my armpit, always a smile on my face. Nothing in my head but the music, the good pain in my muscles, my men. My legs float.
I flirt with certain men, winking at them through the V of my legs, and ignore others.
There are no TVs in Open Bar. The only thing for men to look at besides each other is me. A magnified version of what I wanted those times I went to a sports bar with a guy and he kept staring at the TV. I’ve been told I’m attractive. Sometimes pretty, never beautiful or gorgeous. I have the kind of face where lighting and makeup make all the difference. The kind a man might look at a second time when he sees me in the street, but won’t linger on. But in Open Bar, it’s all eyes on me.
Upside down, off comes the top. Money. I used to hate my breasts. They’re small, the left one bigger than the right. I have thought this is a reason I don’t get the Saturday night shift. But my regulars don’t seem to mind.
As Connor slides a twenty into my garter, I finally look at him again. He says, “I’d drink your bathwater.” I laugh in surprise. It’s like he read my mind. Not that I want him, but I want someone to want me that badly.
I crawl on the bar toward the other men waving money, kneel as their rough hands graze the soft skin under my thong. A baby-faced boy I’ve never seen before holds his bill out so I’ll take it with my hand. I say, “Thanks, hon.” An old man in a trucker hat, with yellow stains on the beard hair around his mouth, makes like he’s about to kiss me. Danny moves from the other end of the bar so fast it’s like a jump cut. His hand is pushing the old man’s shoulder away. “No,” he says, like the man is a toddler, or a dog.
I have a whisky sour for my shift drink. Danny says I drink like a college girl. “Do you know your neighbors?” I ask him. Jefferson Starship’s “Jane” is playing. I raise my voice over the music.
“That’s like a campaign slogan, right?” he yells back.
I say, “No, this is me, asking.” My eye catches on a sticker on the bar. It’s a woman in a bad wig, blond with pigtails, shot from above, holding a large hotdog up to her open mouth. Those stickers are all over Brooklyn. I hope she got paid.
Danny says, “I mean, someone added me to the building’s group chat, where people plot against our slumlord, but I only know Mike who lives next door. I keep that chat muted. I pay next to nothing, so I’m not trying to rock the boat. Why?” He glances at me, but he’s always watching the bar from the corner of his eye.
A man at the end of the bar lifts his chin at Danny, and Danny goes to take his order.
Walking to the subway after work, I take the residential streets. I come to a group of people standing in the middle of the road. “Let her have fun,” a woman says. A girl breaks off from the group and heads toward an idling car. She’s wearing a bodycon dress and three-inch heels. “Have fun, Mari!” the woman yells. She’s dressed casually. “These niggas ain’t shit!” a man in the group calls after the girl. The woman who said to have fun puts her hand on his chest. “I know because I’m a nigga and I ain’t shit!” The car pulls off into the night, and the group heads off the opposite direction of Mari. I walk the same way as the car, between vinyl-sided row houses and trash cans at the curb. The car turns a corner, and I’m alone on the quiet street.
The usual thoughts cross my mind. I’ve been raped before. Not brutally, by a stranger holding a knife to my throat. By men I knew, nothing violent about the act but the act itself. A man has entered me while I was half asleep. Another pulled off his condom and pushed into me in one swift motion while I watched, frozen.
I make it back in one piece. It’s good to be home with my wall of plants, my framed covers from old issues of Jet, Vogue, and Ebony, my dining room wallpapered in green and white stripes. I wash the subway off my hands and brush my teeth. I turn off the faucet. Under the ringing in my ears and the sound of the toothbrush lathering the paste, I hear the water moving through my downstairs neighbors’ pipes. I spit and return to the living room. After I tried and failed three times to find the right blinds, my windows remain untreated. In the apartment catty-corner to mine, the light is on, but no one’s home. I lie on the couch and watch Law & Order SVU until I fall asleep.
Today is one of those early spring days when hardly anyone knows how to dress. People on the street wear bomber jackets over T-shirts, winter boots with light spring skirts, shorts and hoodies. Spring is ugly like puberty. It’s a transition unlike fall, when you’re settling in. In the spring you’re preparing to take off for the summer, shedding your winter weight and layers. It’s a time for striving, the season of anxiety. I was born in spring.
I meet my friend Chantal for bagels. She insists on getting hers scooped, defeating the whole purpose. We met a few months back at SoHo House’s New Year’s Eve party, where we were cage dancers.
We eat in a crowded postage stamp of a park. We’re not far from where she teaches pole. I interviewed at her studio, but during the mock lesson they said my spotting wasn’t safe: I wasn’t bending my knees, and I wasn’t ready to catch the student on the correct parts of their body. Chantal says I should take the pole teaching class she took and reapply.
We finish our bagels and walk to an antique shop nearby. The woman at the register looks familiar, but it takes me a minute to place her. I recognize the birthmark on her right cheek. It’s dark brown, about the size of a quarter. She’s the woman who lives downstairs. I never see people from my building outside the neighborhood. I keep glancing at her as I pretend to look through a wooden tray filled with old buttons. She wears a pristine, long-sleeved white shirt and a black bow in her hair. I pick a button that says NOT JUST PEANUTS and take it up to her.
She smiles at me. “Just this?”
“We’re neighbors,” I say. I notice her earrings are small pewter anvils.
“Of course! Hello—”
“Mia.”
I find out her name’s Cindy and that she owns the place. There’s a framed interview with her in The L Magazine, away from the register, thankfully. While she’s ringing someone else up, I snap a picture.
Outside, I tell Chantal about Cindy and the man she lives with and the kid. “I can’t believe she owns a store,” I say.
“You think she’s too successful to be abused.”
“I figured she must be dependent on him in some way.”
“If they have a kid, that’s all the leverage he needs.”
We go into a boutique clothing store, and while Chantal looks around I read the article I took a picture of, zooming in with my fingertips.
It says Cindy moved to Brooklyn from Arizona twenty years ago. She opened the store seven years earlier, around the time I got here. From the way she’s quoted discussing the “industrial” nature of the area, it seems she was a pioneer in this little strip of shops.
Chantal pushes a dress aside to look at another one. She knows I’m still thinking about Cindy. “I’m not saying it’s not abuse, but if all you’ve heard is yelling, I wouldn’t do anything. If you lived with a dude, it’d be different,” she says. “And you’re Black. You listen to too many of those white girl crime podcasts. Statistically speaking, your ass is not getting a Dateline episode.”
Before we part ways, Chantal finds a knockoff Tiffany lamp on the street, with a lightbulb and everything.
Cindy’s store’s called Something Old. It has over 10,000 followers on Instagram, and various posts are screenshots of the store featured in articles by the likes of The Cut and The New York Times. Cindy herself is never in any of the posts. I have yet to find her personal account.
Then one day, I get their mail. An issue of The Economist. The man’s name is Joseph, and he has a different last name. Maybe they’re not married. I try to remember if she wears a wedding ring, but I can’t picture her hands. Chantal’s voice in my head: “You think feminists can’t be abused.”
Google only turns up Joseph’s LinkedIn. His profile reads “B2B SaaS Professional.” I could log in to try to see where he works—I still have a LinkedIn profile, which says I work the front desk at the imperfect produce company—but I don’t want him to see my view.
I hope me getting their mail doesn’t mean they’re getting mine.
I don’t see either of them, or their kid, for weeks.
There’s a total solar eclipse in North America today. Apparently people have traveled to Buffalo to see totality. There won’t be another one for twenty years, and at that point the state of New York won’t be in the path.
When the eclipse is supposed to start, I head downstairs. I come out the side door, the one with the faded old signs labeling it a fallout shelter. Dozens of people stand outside our building by the playground across the street, looking up at the sky through their cardboard-and-plastic glasses.
The last time I saw an eclipse, I was at the imperfect produce start-up. It was late summer, and sweat rolled down the backs of my thighs under my midi skirt. The whole company stood out on the sidewalk waiting for the main event. There were barely fifty of us: we only took up one floor of an art deco building in the Financial District. Graham and I waited to borrow eclipse glasses from our coworkers who’d come prepared, the engineers and the parents. I got a few pictures of my coworkers wearing the glasses and looking up, and I posted them on Instagram, because that was part of my job. When it was my turn to look through the glasses, I didn’t feel any different after I saw the moon blot out the sun. Graham leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “The day’s pretty much over. Let’s call out sick. I could really go for one of those big, cleaner-fluid blue fishbowl drinks from that karaoke place.” This was another way he got you to let your guard down: he made you feel like his co-conspirator.
Now, standing outside my apartment building, I spot a neighbor I’m friendly with. We’ve talked before, but I don’t know her name or the name of her dog, a Pomeranian I love. She’s wearing a silk bonnet and Crocs. Clearly, she falls into the camp of Black women who, if they give a thought to white people, think they’ll be racist anyway, and wear what they want, when they want. Tracee Ellis Ross once said fashion gave her control over how others saw her. I agree. I never leave my apartment in sweatpants, much less a bonnet, even if the only place I’m headed is the bodega. I try not to do things a Parisian wouldn’t do, though I fail all the time because I’m an American who lives in America. I always wear lipstick in public. I make my own salad dressing. I air dry my hair.
My neighbor is looking up at the eclipse through glasses. Her Pomeranian sits on his hind legs and waves at me in his special way, to get me to pet him. One paw crossed over the other, he pushes the air down over and over. I scratch the top of his head and my neighbor looks at us, takes off her glasses. She says, “Someone gave me these. I didn’t know what was happening today. He went over to the window and was looking out.” She imitates her dog’s bug-eyed stare. “He always knows when something’s off—and then I saw how dark it was outside. My friend texted me, and I cleansed myself and my apartment before I came down.” She lends me her lenses. Through their opaque filter, the sky is much too dark. All I can see is a little orange nail clipping of light as the moon creeps through space. It feels about how I remember the one from a few years ago. Guilt at the absence of a feeling, really. Maybe it would be different in totality. I take the glasses off, hand them back to my neighbor, and thank her.
“Did you hear this was evil?” my neighbor says.
“I mean, I just found out about it a few hours ago,” I say.
“Yeah, it’s evil because they made the earthquake a magnitude 4.8, then they made this on 4/8.” I don’t ask her who they are. She goes on, “I believe that because I’m connected to the spiritual.” I look at everyone looking up at the sky and wonder what they’re all feeling.
“I’m spooked,” she says. “I’m going inside. You let me know what happens. I should have charged my crystals.”
“You still can,” I assume. I don’t know how crystals work.
In a comforting tone she says, “And you can still cleanse.”
A few days later I hear Cindy and Joseph yelling again. Their voices move back and forth from one end of the apartment to the other, his angry deep one followed by her screams. It sounds like he’s chasing her around the place. I do something I’ve never done before: kneel down and put my ear to the living room carpet. Cindy cries, “Not in front of Jacob!” Then Jacob screams.
I call the police. After I hang up, I don’t hear anything else through the floor.
The next day, I pass Joseph in the hallway as I’m leaving the building. He’s standing in front of his mailbox, keys dangling from the open door, talking on the phone. He says into his cell, “Because she lies. That’s the whole reason the cops were there to begin with.” I glance at him, and for an instant we lock eyes. I can’t tell if he’s paranoid, surprised, or angry at me, if it’s a threat or a coincidence. For the first time, I don’t smile at him. I hold his gaze until he drops his eyes.
I keep walking past him, past the stairs, through the fire doors, past the trash room and the boiler room. The hallway smells like cigarette smoke. My hands are shaking as I emerge from the old bomb shelter entrance into the daylight.
I fantasize about revenge, about Cindy and her kid making their escape like Francine Hughes. Except I don’t want her burning down the entire apartment building with me in it. Maybe I’ll run into her alone outside the building, at the grocery store or the park, and we’ll have a chance to talk. Or maybe I should go back to her store and hand her a note, something to let her know I’m here for her—but what does that really mean, and who am I?
Or maybe I should let her know I’m here for her—but what does that really mean, and who am I?
On the street in front of the new age apothecary, a parked furniture delivery truck is blocking a line of cars. The light changes from green to red, and the drivers lay into their horns. “Noise pollution! Noise pollution!” yells a woman nearby. She sits on an overturned milk crate between the apothecary and the bodega. Stout, she wears a robe and a silk scarf around her head like a turban. “Speak on it,” I tell her.
I take the subway to Lincoln Center. Instead of transferring, I get off a few stops early and walk the extra blocks. This way I get to do one of my favorite things: eye fuck men on the street. The game is to see how long you can get them to hold eye contact. If they talk, the spell is broken. Sometimes I’ll smile a little bit, but it’s hottest when you don’t. By Columbus Circle, there’s a man with his hair buzzed, sleeves rolled up to show his tattoos. He looks mean. I’m wearing my collared lilac dress from Anthropologie and my Jimmy Choo Mary Janes. We catch each other’s eyes crossing the street and hold contact until we pass. On the other side, I turn around and he’s still looking.
The most fun is when you’re with a friend and she’s going on about something mundane, and the whole time you’re eye fucking a stranger and she doesn’t even know. The thing is, a lot of men won’t make eye contact with you. A lot of people in general. You’ll try but they’ll break it immediately. When I first moved to the City, I told a man on the first date that I liked locking eyes with people on parallel subway trains. He told me as a woman, I should be careful. He was a depressive who stared silently at the bar unless he was answering a question. I never saw him again.
In my fantasies, men humiliate me. It’s the only way I can get off. I think it has something to do with the reality that I’m in complete control. I pay all my bills, the only person I cook—or don’t cook—for is me; I consult no one when deciding what I’ll do on my days off. I like it that way, but it’s exhausting. The eye fucking is different, though. I’m not actually imagining sex. It’s more about the game of chicken. It’s better than sex because it’s pure, there’s no disappointment. Then again, I haven’t slept with anyone in months.
I arrive at Lincoln Center. With its tasteful fountain and its floor-to-ceiling arched windows—divided into rectangles, like that Mondrian painting—it reminds me of church. A church of art. I’m here to see the ballet.
The old white lady at the ticket counter has no idea what freaky little thoughts have been running through my head, and yet she has a bewildered look on her face.
I sit in the mezzanine. I’m the only audience member. I usually am. People don’t realize any New York resident can get into working rehearsals for free, as long as you have the city ID. I doubt the choreographers or any of the dancers know I’m here, or that they’d care if they did. The piece is Ravel’s “Errante.” The dancers all wear neutral colors, beige and white. Their bodies are lithe, a word I’m sure never comes to mind while men are watching me dance. The two choreographers stop them frequently, giving notes I can’t hear.
A calm comes over me, the kind of calm I rarely feel anymore when I’m not on the pole. I sit still for an hour without checking my phone or feeling much of anything besides awe. Maybe this is how some people feel looking at an eclipse. Once again, I am annoyed at my mother for neglecting to enroll me in ballet classes when I was three.
I leave them to it, waving goodbye to the forever-bewildered woman behind the counter. It’s a little after four in the afternoon. Everyone in the city is outside. I call Chantal to see if she wants to chill in the park and drink, but she doesn’t pick up because her phone is always on Do Not Disturb. I get a tall boy at the bodega, go to the park by myself, and listen to a podcast about two women who were killed by a cab driver in North Carolina. Though there was strong circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a survivor, his wife provided his alibi for the night of the murders. Police couldn’t prove it was him.
There’s a woman on a bench a few feet away who looks familiar. She has over-ear headphones on and she’s knitting something big, a sweater or a blanket. It sits in her lap like a cat. She has the same squashed nose as Jamaica Noll, the woman who filed the complaint against Graham. I keep stealing glances, becoming more and more certain it’s her. I’m half-listening to the podcast, wondering if I should go over there, and if so, what I should say. Finally, the woman gets up and walks past without acknowledging me, and I realize she’s a stranger. It’s been three weeks, and Graham hasn’t called.
I’m going through another bout of insomnia. I have the kind where you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep until hours later. At 4:23, I get a notification someone’s trying to DM me on my pole dancing Instagram. I get a lot of DM requests on that account—mostly scammers and thirsty men—so I don’t bother to read them. But I’m awake with nothing to do, so I open this one. All the message says is “hi mia.” My name’s not in my handle, and I don’t have it on my profile. Whoever this is, I don’t follow them. I click their profile. It’s Joseph from downstairs. I screenshot the message, then make sure the front door is locked.
In bed again, I remember the time I cried to Graham, in between him getting fired and me getting let go. He called me up one night—this was another thing I found charming about him, hardly anyone ever calls out of the blue anymore. I could tell he’d had a few. I opened a bottle of wine to catch up. It was a long call, over two hours, but I couldn’t tell you most of what we talked about, we were just shooting the shit. Then we got on the topic of fetishes. Graham was having a hard time finding women who were into choking. I told him I would never let a guy choke me, and he asked me what kind of weird shit I was into. As usual, his voice was pleasant, soft, bursting with a laugh. It made you fall in love with him a little.
I said, “Freaks. Like social outcasts, kind of. When I was in high school there was this grocery store cashier, probably around 45, wire thin, with greasy hair that went down to his shoulders. I used to see him smoking outside the store all the time. In the summer, he wore cutoff jean shorts and construction boots. Or there was one of my friend’s dads who was bald, with a gut and halitosis.” Graham asked if I did anything with either of them. I told him I just thought about them. “Nice euphemism,” he said. Then, “Do you think you’re into freaks because you don’t think you deserve better?” And he sounded so earnest it didn’t even piss me off. That’s when I started to cry. Not because he had revealed some deep truth about me, but because I realized he’d seen this all along, my own low opinion of myself. I wondered if that was why we were never anything more than friends. Now I go to his Instagram. We didn’t follow each other until after he was let go. When I really want to feel bad, I know the exact right post to scroll to. A black-and-white photo of his younger brother, who died four years ago. In the caption he wrote about how much he misses him. He’d never mentioned a brother to me. I thought we were close, but I hadn’t really known him at all.
To drown out the bad thoughts, I stream the rest of the podcast about the serial killer cab driver. His wife admitted her alibi was false. Though there was never any hard evidence proving he killed the two women, DNA testing did link him to a cold case that matched the MO of those murders. This is why I listen to so much true crime. It offers answers, if not closure. I finally drift to sleep when it gets light out and the mourning dove on my fire escape begins to sing.
The next time I see Cindy, she has a black eye. It’s on the opposite side from the birthmark on her cheek. I’m on the elevator when I hear heels clicking down the marble hallway. Unsure who it is, but confident it’s not Joseph, to be polite I jam the package I’m holding in between the elevator door and the frame.
“Sorry,” I say, meaning sorry for forcing her to ride in the elevator with me. She doesn’t say anything. When she faces the elevator doors, I can no longer see her injury. Just as I’m about to press the button for her floor, it occurs to me there’s a chance they don’t know that I know where they live. The ride up is so slow, I check the lights on the numbers to make sure we’re moving.
On her floor, the doors open out onto an empty hall. From the corner of my eye, I watch her walk out with her head held high.
I’m working tonight. I’m not in the mood, and I would have called out, but I need the money. I do miss that about a desk job, even the front desk. If you don’t feel like being there, you can phone it in. I could phone it in at Open Bar if it was a real strip club with room for floor work. Dancing vertically, there’s no chance to catch your breath unless you’re in a sit, and even then your thighs are on fire.
Chantal got me into a pole showcase at her studio. It’s a one-time thing that might get me some exposure, which might get me more gigs. If I don’t pick up more work soon, I might need to start thinking gentlemen’s clubs, places in midtown with neon pink signs, private rooms, and tourist clientele taking advantage of their anonymity. If I’m going to be somewhere multiple nights a week, I’d rather everything be out in the open. I’d rather know all the customers, even if some of them are creeps.
It’s funny, tonight I don’t flirt with anyone, barely make eye contact, go through the moves listlessly, and I make more cash than ever before. Men are so fucked it almost makes me feel bad for them.
I see him when I’m in my layback. Right away I feel sick in the pit of my stomach, but it takes me a couple turns to place him, upside down. Joseph. He stares without smiling. I’m not about to take my top off for him. I keep everything on and finish the routine perfectly and heartlessly.
“That’s it?” Hector says as he tucks a tenner into my garter. He’s one of my favorites. He always takes a stool at the end of the bar closest to the door. He has a long, bushy beard and a shaved head. He works at the car shop next door. He used to creep me out because he never says anything, but turns out he’s just shy.
“You’ve seen it all before,” I say.
“That don’t mean I get sick of it,” Hector says. He scratches at his beard. This is the most words I’ve ever heard him string together.
I swing my legs over the inside of the counter and stand behind it, watching Joseph without facing him. Danny’s at the other end of the bar, shooting the shit with a man who has a cleft chin.
Joseph comes over and, instinctively, I take a step back.
“Tequila soda,” he says.
“I’m not the bartender.”
“Funny running into you at your place of business. So far from home, too. You know, Cindy said the same thing happened to her.” I want to turn and signal to Danny somehow. Joseph studies my face. “She tells me everything.”
“It was a coincidence that I ended up in her store.”
“You seem to be ending up around Cindy and me a lot these days. And coincidentally, I’m starting to have some problems.” He moves his jaw from side to side. I shiver. “How many times do you think a man has to show up in the same place as a woman before the police can determine the difference between coincidence and stalking?” He says it like it’s a riddle.
Finally, Danny comes to my side of the bar. Joseph leaves.
“Are you okay?” Danny asks.
“No.”
I spend money I don’t have on a car home.
Every time I leave my place, I imagine Joseph waiting outside my door when I get back, or tapping on my bedroom window, having climbed the fire escape. He hasn’t returned to the bar, but he took my flow. I’ll be in the middle of a move and forget how to finish it, or suddenly become so terrified of breaking my neck I can’t make myself go upside down. I’m dancing when doubt about Graham creeps in. I make it upside down, but when I hook my ankle on the pole for a brass monkey, it unlocks something in me.
What I know about Jamaica Noll: she always got to work on time, she rarely took days off. Her job paid well, and she lived alone. She kept to herself. She was born in Guadeloupe but grew up here. I pull myself up into a figurehead. I don’t know if she went to the police. It’s not as if Graham would have told me if they’d questioned him. I’m shapeshifting, floating my leg behind the pole like I’ve done a thousand times before, when I slip and land on my ankle.
There’s blood: I cut my hand landing on a beer glass while trying to catch myself. Someone makes a crack about drinking and dancing. “Shut it,” Danny snaps. I barely register words. I cry, out of embarrassment. I can’t feel my ankle, which is ballooning like crazy. Danny lifts me up off the bar like he’s carrying me over the threshold between our past and our future. “You’re all right,” he says. He sets me right side up and I lean on Connor’s shoulder. Danny gets my clothes and calls a car. My toe barely grazing the leg of my jeans sends a wave of pain through me that makes me cry harder, so we abandon those and Danny gives me his leather jacket to hold around my waist. He also gives me a shot of whisky and the bottle to take with me.
At urgent care they give me crutches and a cast. Of course, I never broke a single bone before this year, when my income depends on my body. The doctor says it’ll be two months before I can walk on it again. At least I have marketplace insurance; shitty as it is, it’s better than nothing.
Chantal comes over when I get back from urgent care and stays the night. Otherwise I’m alone. I have yet to leave the building. The only way out for me now is the elevator.
After a week straight of nothing but delivery and PB&Js, I’m cooking myself a real meal. Chantal brought groceries when she visited. Cooking takes twice as long as usual on crutches. I do all the chopping and prep sitting down, but even so, I’m sweating by the time I slide the sheet tray into the oven. It’s simple, just chicken and carrots with rice from the cooker. I’m just about to sit for a few minutes when there’s a knock at the door.
I think it might be Chantal surprising me. But on the other side of the peephole is Cindy. I open the door.
The bruise on her eye is healing, mostly yellow now. When she sees my cast and crutches, she seems confused, but then she resets her face into a look of determination. She asks if she can come in. “Smells like home cooking,” she says, which makes me think of Kurt Cobain and body odor.
She declines my offer of water or tea. “I can’t stay long.” She looks around at the disco ball over the dining table, the pink candlestick holders and twisted green candles, the orange couch. She says, “You live here alone.” She goes on, “Every time I see you, you’re alone. You don’t have a boyfriend. Or girlfriend.”
The timer on the microwave goes off, and I hobble to the oven and take a mitt off the counter. “Let me,” Cindy says. I pause with the oven mitt in hand, maybe because unannounced or not, she’s my guest, or because I don’t know why she’s here. But I’m so tired, I hand it over. She pulls the chicken and carrots out of the oven. “Those could use another five minutes.” She slides the tray back in without consulting me. “Let’s sit,” she says, motioning to the breakfast nook. I move the yellow carnations from Chantal so we can see eye to eye. Two broken women. She asks me what happened to my leg.
Again, I hesitate. But out of fatigue or a last-ditch effort to connect, I tell the truth. “I was dancing, but I was in my head. Thinking about my friend who did something so fucked up that for the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. The moment I accepted it, my brain disconnected from my body.”
“That must have been some dance, if you broke something doing it.”
“I’m a professional,” I say, wondering how much she knows.
The timer goes off again, and she gets up and motions for me to stay seated. From around the corner, she asks if I have a meat thermometer.
“I usually just eyeball it,” I say.
She announces she’s going to let the meat rest and rejoins me at the table.
“I remember when my friends were the loves of my life. Then once we started marrying off, I realized that what I thought was love was actually circumstantial. The only people you can count on are the ones who see you day in and day out, at your worst, and never leave.” I search her bruised eye for a plea under the words, but her look is unyielding. She gets up again, and I peer around the doorway into the kitchen, where she’s plating the chicken and carrots. “That’s okay,” I say. “Thank you, though.” I don’t want to eat in front of her.
“What are neighbors for,” she replies. She walks back to me and sets the plate down on the table. She stays standing. “Joseph is an excellent cook. He can tell if meat’s done just by touching it. Not that we eat much meat these days. When I met him, I didn’t eat anything that wasn’t white or brown. Now we go to the farmer’s market every Saturday. We’re on a kumquat jam kick. Anyway, we have a meat thermometer. He can bring it to you when you’re cooking and pick it up when you’re done. Full service.” She smiles.
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
“It’s really no trouble. He works from home.”
I’m thirsty, but I don’t want her to get me a glass of water. “I can manage,” I say.
“Well, good. So can we.”
After she leaves, I sit in silence for several minutes. The walls don’t talk.
From down below comes the voice of the town crier. I strain to listen, wishing I could understand.
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