Part I1993
I
“We’re getting married,” Nisha says as we walk to the Jeff Buckley show at Sin-é. I am uncomfortably aware of the crescent moons of sweat waxing at the armholes of my silk slip dress. This is the dumbest thing to wear in ninety-five-degree heat with one thousand percent humidity in the dead center of August, but I uncovered it at Screaming Mimi’s for three dollars and made good on a promise to myself to wear things that look pretty but feel out of range. Trivial, sure, but maybe by taking small risks, I can somehow trick myself into becoming the person I want to be: free, embodied, and not so scared of the world. A little bit more like Nisha.
When I tried it on, I liked how the color of it, a sexy gunmetal gray, lifted the silver from my steel-blue eyes.
“I can’t picture you in a wedding dress,” I say now. I adjust my camera strap. It leaves a slick of sweat across my shoulder.
“That’s because I won’t be wearing a dress,” Nisha responds. “I’ll be wearing a bikini, as Jeff and I will be wed on the white-sand beaches of Bora Bora.”
I laugh. “Your mother will be thrilled.”
“She will be, actually. By that point, I will have discovered a cure for cancer, and that achievement will eclipse any questionable decisions I make thereafter.”
“So we’re going the biochemical engineering route today?”
Nisha grins. I don’t know much about the singer-songwriter headlining tonight. But my best friend does. She’s made it her mission to learn everything about him. He doesn’t even have an album out but has already earned cult fame, in part through his appearances at the local spots—the Knitting Factory, Fez, Cornelia Street Café—and in part because he’s the son of Tim Buckley, the folk-jazz musician who died of a heroin overdose at twenty-eight in 1975. Two years after Nisha and I were both born.
Nisha happened to sit next to Jeff at the SideWalk Cafe a couple of months ago, days after she and I moved into our apartment on Avenue A—a shoebox on the second floor of the building that also houses Two Boots, the pizza joint that effectively sustains us. And also, probably, the small colony of rats and cockroaches I once found peacefully coexisting underneath the warped floorboards of my bedroom.
When Nisha came home the afternoon of the Great Jeff Buckley Sighting, she told me that he drank his coffee black and smelled like cigarettes and peppers and rose soap.
She was sure she had fallen in love. Not that she worked up the courage to talk to him. He had the aura of an immortal, and she was merely a rising junior at NYU whodidn’t even know whether she wanted to major in biochemical engineering or physics.
As we round the corner onto St.Mark’s, I accidentally kick a syringe. I watch it clatter into the street, where it’s promptly run over by a bike messenger. No amount of NYPD officers, glossy condos, or newly opened Gap stores can buff the East Village to a shine.
We reach Sin-é, and my pace slows when I notice a limousine parked in front. A tendril of cigarette smoke curls out the driver’s side window.
“I think your husband’s going to be famous.” I gesture to the car. It’s so slick, just begging to be broken into. Only record-label people would be so arrogant as to bring it down here.
Nisha shrugs. “You don’t think talented people deserve success?”
“Of course I do. I just don’t think talented people need to sell out to do it.”
She opens the café door for me. “Oh, my sweet, sheltered Lili. If only we could all be gifted artists with artistic parents. Life would be so much simpler.”
“Simpler, maybe. But I’ll never be able to afford the lavish lifestyle I truly crave,” I joke. We both know I would happily subsist on cans of chickpeas for the rest of my life if it meant I could keep doing photography.
I gently push my way toward the stage, which is really just a few square feet of floor with a banner reading “Sin-é” hanging on the wall above it. Two years ago, I would have been trailing Nisha, but I’m trying to be bolder. Since themoment she came blazing into my room to introduce herself on move-in day of our freshman year, I knew I needed her kind of energy in my life. She was already glimmering then, and tonight, she is incandescent in her silver-foil minidress with a hot-pink bindi gleaming between her brows.
I’ve been to Sin-é once or twice, but never when the narrow, brick-walled room has been so full. It’s mostly fellow NYU students, moonlighting actors, and some grizzled old Irish men, but over in the corner, at the table closest to the door, I spot two people, maybe in their midtwenties, locked in a conversation. Their heads are bowed over their steaming mugs—they famously don’t serve hard liquor here, only tea, coffee, and cans of Rolling Rock—and the woman has a blood-red buzzcut and a slash of lipstick to match. She looks like a regular.
But the man is clean-cut, clad in a full suit despite the heat. Conspicuous among this sea of denim and facial hair. When he picks up his coffee cup, his watch flashes. He looks like a limousine rider.
All the tables are taken, the walls already lined with spectators, so Nisha and I have no choice but to sit on the floor, right in front of this duo. I shudder to think of dry-cleaning my dress, which will likely cost three times as much as the actual garment.
The toe of the man’s dress shoe nudges my butt cheek. I feel my face burn. He quickly retracts his foot.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. I pick up his scent, distinct even over the aroma of spilled beer that’s soaked into thefloorboards. Something piney. A sharp contrast to the sweltering day.
Nisha taps my knee and gestures to the stage. Jeff Buckley has appeared underneath the banner, his white Telecaster hanging across his chest. He’s probably just come out of the bathroom, but it’s like he conjured himself into being.
Now I understand what Nisha has been banging on about these past few months. This guyglows.
He steps in front of the mic and slings his guitar behind his back. He stomps his boot on the floor in a rhythmic beat. To someone offstage, he says, “Oh, you’re rolling. Goodness. Is there any reverb to roll with?”
Then he begins punctuating his stomps with claps, and the song takes shape: Nina Simone’s “Be My Husband.” Nisha squeezes my knee in silent alarm. This is her favorite song, from her favorite Nina Simone album. This, the squeeze implies, is fate at work.
