A New York Number

This is fiction.

As I was saying, the party wasn’t for her birthday at all. I had gotten the details of the invitation mixed up with the ones for a different party. Who can ever tell, now that my calendar is kept on my phone, and when I enter an event into it and someone talks to me while I am tapping on the screen, I forget that I was doing it and I stop and don’t remember to finish what I was entering. It happened just this morning: I was answering a text that Robin sent me. A question. What should I order for you? She was waiting for me at the coffee shop, a meeting we had set up in advance that in my calendar looked like this: RCOF. When I looked at my phone after I got up out of bed – I never leave the phone in my bedroom because its voices of unfinished business and unanswered questions keep me awake at night – I had to think very hard to remember what those letters meant. I only confirmed it when I texted her first. Coffee? 

At least I was leaving on time. But as I composed my answer—I meant to say non-fat vanilla latte—the neighbor from the third floor, you know the one who always smells like mildew, as if she didn’t get her laundry out of the washer on time before it spoiled, stopped in her tracks as we were walking down the stairs and naturally I bumped right into her, almost sending us both tumbling down at least one flight.

“You’ll get us all killed,” she snarled. I thought that was an overly vicious reaction to an accident, but then I realized she thought I was texting while walking down the stairs on purpose, and that wasn’t my intent at all. In any case, my reply to Robin came out as Non, and when I showed up at the coffee shop I had to wait 20 minutes for my latte.

That wasn’t a big problem. I’m just saying.

What is a problem is all this interrupting. I have half-finished food, loads of laundry that are only somewhat folded, ideas that are quick to come but slow to reveal themselves fully. It’s like wandering around in the fog of morning, forgetting where you put your coffee.

And I only brought half a present to this birthday party that wasn’t a birthday party. It was a work thing. Olivia had asked me to be her plus one at a fancy cocktail party, and I had known this at one time but of course my phone calendar only said O. B. which I took to mean Olivia’s Birthday but in fact it turned out to be Olivia’s Business…thing? I can barely remember my own codes to myself. I suppose I showed up a little underdressed – I wore a miniskirt and a backless sequined tank top because I assumed there would be sweaty dancing. Olivia loves nothing more in the world than to dance. When we were in college I often had to wait until the last terrible slow song was played at the bar across from campus on Saturday night because she refused to leave until after the notes died away and the house lights came on, revealing empty glasses and peanut shells and stinking puddles and God knows what else on the black floor that in the dark you didn’t even realize was there.

So of course as I have done every year I bought music for Olivia, although now instead of giving her something physical that I can wrap up like a proper present, all I can do is send an email with a download code, which isn’t nearly as satisfying and robs me of the thrill of anticipating her opening the gift. Remember cassette tapes? Nice little packages to wrap. Before those, albums. You always knew what that flat square would be, but until you tore the wrapping paper off, you couldn’t know what music you’d be applying the needle to, the grooves in the vinyl that you’d have to memorize so you could play your favorite song over and over again.

The half of the present that I brought to Olivia’s not-birthday party was the information only. “I got you a present,” I eventually said, even though I knew it wasn’t her birthday (and of course I should have known since her birthday isn’t for months now, come to think of it I did wonder about the odd timing, also why wasn’t I involved in planning it like I have been every other time she’s had a birthday party). She looked at me funny and I would have told her about the mix-up but I didn’t want her to worry about my odd habits of half-finishing things, it’s not like it’s a new phenomenon, and it’s not like it’s only me. Even now as I was telling you this story the phone rang and I answered it, didn’t I? Well you would have too if you’d seen the number that came up on my screen.

It was a New York number. Everybody knows you answer the phone if the number is a New York number.

I didn’t get to explain myself to Olivia because some work buddy of hers touched her elbow, very lightly and then he moved his fingers away, I noticed. She glanced over at him and just like that I forgot the rest of what I was going to say. I remember it now—I was going to tell her that I would give her a birthday card when I saw her again, that was the other half of the present. But the moment had passed and Olivia seemed to feel obligated to introduce me to her work buddy who said his name is Jay but that’s short for Jonathon, he never liked being called John or even Jonathon so he started signing things with just the initial “J” and that’s what stuck when he was in school so that’s how he introduces himself. I laughed and said the obvious, which was “You didn’t have to give me all that information in our very first conversation.”

He laughed back and said that he gets nervous when talking to tall people, and that’s when I noticed that he was shorter even than Olivia herself. She shook her frizzy curls and sat back against the bar and I knew she was watching to see if I would flirt with J., which is how I started to think of him. Don’t you do that sometimes, learn a thing in the world and imagine it as letters in the gallery of the inside of your head? I do that with the calendar, imagine time as a neat grid of days and weeks.

I wish I could use that trick to get events right. No harm done, even though I’ll have to get Olivia something else in a few months, because now she just thinks I got her some music for a “just because” present, and that’s not the worst thing you can do for a friend. We didn’t dance at all, just had drinks and got into Lyfts at the end of the night, I by myself and Olivia with her gaggle of work buddies, one of whom was J. As we were talking somebody else came over and our conversation was cut short so I never learned where he came from and now I wonder if he used to live in New York because he has a strong enough accent from somewhere else. It might as well be New York, right?

 

 

Artwork found here.