“Ah yes, the most inaccessible part of Brooklyn. Love it. How do you get there from here again?”
The answer is a route that involves more effort than any trip to Brooklyn is worth, in my mind, but I also understand I’m biased. You have to take the W or the R to the L and then switch to the Gtrain, which is—in fact—theonlytrain that goes to Greenpoint. Like, at all.
Greenpoint sits at the northern tip of Brooklyn, cut off from Long Island City—and the rest of Queens—by a slim creek, crossed by the Pulaski Bridge. It’s an old Polish neighborhood, the kind with short, narrow streets arranged in alphabetical order and little bakeries selling luscious marbled babka for prices half what you’d pay at Orwashers. It also has what might be the best pizza in New York. Hence it being an exception to my “never setting foot in Brooklyn again” vow.
It’s rush hour, of course, because rush hour is really like rushthreehours in New York. That means Wyatt and I are crammed together on the train, shoulder to shoulder, his hand gripping the gross subway pole just above mine. I’m hyperfocused on that point of near contact, on how easy it would be for him to slide hishand just an inch downward and cover mine. The way it would feel illicit somehow, in public like this. My whole body aches to just…lean back against the firmness of his chest and let him envelop me.
Okay, be cool be cool. Look at something else. Someone else.
Only, fuck, no, don’t do that either.Awkward. It’s an unspoken rule that you don’t look at other people on the train. You’re supposed to just gaze blankly into space, absorbing without seeing, as if in a trance, until your stop. And even if you might talk to someone you know on the train during normal times, when it’s this busy, it doesn’t feel right. It’d be like clipping your nails in public—doing something that everyone does but that’s weird in this context.
I shift away from the rest of the train to turn toward Wyatt, not that staring at Wyatt’s broad chest improves my predicament. He’s wearing a navy-blue shirt that puckers slightly at the base of his throat. The color is heathered, intertwined with threads of gray and gold. One of them has come loose just over his heart. I stare at that thread like I can cauterize it with the heat of my gaze alone.
This close, even on the train, even surrounded by the stench of body odor and urine and someone’s McDonald’s fries, I can smell the low, warm scent of Wyatt’s shampoo.
Ahhrgjgjgjhgsd.I’m going to die here. I am going to perish, and on my grave they will write,Died horny for teacher.
Two transfers later, we emerge onto street level, and I take in several steady breaths of air that doesn’t smell like Wyatt. And I immediately dig out my phone and pull up the address on Google Maps.
“Okay,” I say at last, once I trust my voice to remain steady. “It should just be a couple blocks from here, if we head south.”
“This isn’t weird, is it?” Wyatt asks abruptly. “Michal’s my student. I probably shouldn’t be here.”
“It’sfine,” I insist. “I told you, I already talked to her about it. She’s excited. She wants to make you eat challah.”
He laughs weakly, but then we pass by a bakery, and his gaze tracks over to the plump gold paczki in the window. “Should we bring something? Aside from the…”
He means the grape juice I have stowed away in my bag. I don’t really anticipate that our hosts will have anything nonalcoholic for kiddush, so I brought our own.
“Probably,” I say. “Sure. Just not this bakery, though; I don’t think they’re kosher. Do you like babka?”
“Can’t say I’ve ever tried it.”
“Oh, man. Okay. Well. Come on. We’re gonna fix that.”
When we finally make it out of the adjacent kosher bakery, we’re laden with far more bags of baked goods than we intended to come out with—kolaczki and babka and rugelach and apple tart and a steaming-hot Americano for me because these things can go late. Really late. And I’m old now.
“Is this extra?” I ask, lifting one of our brown bags of pastries.
“Where I come from, this is the bare minimum. If you really want to impress, we could pick up flowers from the bodega on our way.”
I flap the fingers of the hand that holds my Americano, waving him off. “Okay, I clearly would not survive in the South. My idea of a host gift is a six-pack of nonalcoholic beer.”
“See, personally I would love that host gift.”
“It’s really more of a gift for me. I mean, nobody else drinks it.”
We turn the corner onto a side street and I pause, glancing back down at my phone. I’m not used to being back in a neighborhood where streets have actual names.
“Is that it?” Wyatt says, peering over my shoulder, then pointing at the brick building on the corner.
I double-check the address. “Yeah. I think so. Hopefully we aren’t too early.”
“Unfashionably prompt.”
The nerves are back. They scratch at the inside of my sternum as we cross the street. Wyatt rings the bell, and we stand on that tiny stoop, my knuckles going white around my Americano and my heart in my mouth.
What am I even afraid of? That Michal’s friends will take one look at me and declare menot a real Jewand kick me out? That it’ll be the opposite—that they’ll somehow smell the Chassid on me and declare mean extremist Jewand kick me out? Because now I’m out here imagining that total strangers can tell intimate details about my past just by looking, and that’s what my therapist back in LA would call magical thinking.
