I laugh out loud. “Hardly,” I say. I know I’m going to like this woman already.
“I’m Candy, let me help. I have a few minutes. The manager told me you were moving in today—2A, right? Danielle and Alex?”
“You can call me ‘Dani.’ ”
“Dani and Candy, how cute,” she says, and I laugh.
I hope she’s not nosy. Candy seems like one of those hummingbird type of people, so she probably is. Always in motion, talking, chewing gum, fidgeting constantly, to the point where you think if she stops moving, she’ll die. She’s thin. I notice her pink scrubs have little tiny bananas on them and her badge says,CANDY LEE, RNabove the emblem for Verdugo Hills Hospital.
I point to her badge. “Ah, my husband does one day a week there.” It immediately hits me that I called him “my husband” and she is never going to see us together. Do I explain this weird situation to her? Do I call him my ex, or soon-to-be ex?
“Oh yeah? What department?” she asks.
“He’s a physical therapist.”
She winks. “I’m in the ER. I probably never see him.”
Of course she is, the ER requires her kind of energy.
We put the last of the boxes at the bottom of the stairs going up to my new apartment. “Well, it was nice to meet you. I know you have to run…”
“Same to you. I’ll give you my number in case you guys need anything. They keep this place real nice, and it’s safe too. By the way, where is the fella?”
I guess I’m not getting out of this one so easily. “He’s…um.” I don’t have it in me right now. “He’ll be here later.”Dammit, why didn’t I tell her?
“Well, good luck with unpacking.” And she’s off, humming along.
Once in the apartment I flip on all the lights. LEDs everywhere. It’s stark. I hate the lighting, I hate the gray furniture, and I hate the gray wood floors. This place definitely needs some life—plants, art, music, macramé. No one will drop dead from a little splash of color and a few tchotchkes.
I take a deep breath and plop onto the sofa, which looks and feels like a solid granite slab. There isn’t much I can do at this moment. It’s too late to go out looking for furnishings, so I get up and begin unpacking. The record player fits perfectly on the built-in shelves in the corner. I manage to rig the speaker with my MacGyver skills, which I know Alex will criticize if he notices I didn’t use the proper hooks or a stud finder to hang the speaker. There are no babies here, we can operate like college kids, so unless it falls on his head, it should be fine.
I start putting the records on the bottom shelf, when one of the sleeves pops out. It’s a Mazzy Star record. Not exactly a classic passed down from generation to generation, but I guess it will be now. I laugh to myself at the memory of buying that record. Alicia had made fun of me, saying it wasn’t the type of band you got on vinyl. She had bought the CD, but look now, I doubt she’d be able to find her old CD collection, and here I have this little time machine to take me back to the late nineties. Music and smells are the senses that evoke memories for me more than anything else.
I started to continue my father’s tradition around the time I bought this album. The white sleeves on the inside of some of my father’s records would be covered with his notes. Some were just lists of things happening around that time, and some were in the form of short narratives. I had done the same for many years after he passed them down to me.
I put the Mazzy Star album on and set it to the song “Fade Into You.” As I read the note on the sleeve, I’m instantly back,twenty-two-plus years ago, to the first night Alex and I were together. I was so light then, in every way emotionally. Nothing was serious to me yet. Ben was still alive, my parents were together, and I was breaking in as a writer. I was living a dream.
On top of all the good things happening, I was also dating Alex. We had met at a mutual friend’s house party, exchanged phone numbers, talked on the phone, and gone on a couple of group dates, both of which concluded over a pile of cocaine on a picture frame and drinking until we passed out. Those two nights, Alex and I ended up chatting on the friend’s porch into the early hours of the morning. We didn’t even kiss, but looking back, I credit those two nights to the solid foundation we formed as friends. We hadn’t gone on a proper date at that point, but somehow the cocaine-fueled evenings had led to some intense conversation. We knew a lot about each other from those talks. We knew for sure that we liked each other and agreed on practically everything in the world news.
In messy blue ink, the Mazzy Star album sleeve reads:
Alex was here last night. Alex was everywhere.
I remember writing it. It was after our first real date. We had gone to dinner and my roommate was out of town, so Alex had come back to my apartment. We didn’t sleep…and there was no cocaine. I guess when I wrote the phrase on the sleeve, I wasn’t thinking about handing the record down to my children. It wouldn’t matter if they saw it anyway, even at their age now; they’ve been exposed enough to the inner workings of my mind from watching the shows I’ve written. They wouldn’t be surprised I wrote something like this on a record sleeve twenty-something years ago.
That night, so many years ago at my apartment, I saw Alex’svulnerability for the first time…he was a little insecure, unsure of himself. Prior to that night, he’d been nothing but confident. He had that kind of confidence that’s never mistaken for arrogance. It was the thing that attracted me to him from the start. He was funny and kind with me, and with our mutual friends. He moved in a way that made him seem coordinated and smooth, but not slimy. He had spatial awareness and self-awareness, and he was intelligent but not immodest. Physically, he was by far the most universally attractive person I had ever dated. He still is, after all these years, a man who turns heads but doesn’t really know it.
But that first night we were alone at my apartment was different. He was softer, more timid. I had put the Mazzy Star album on, poured two glasses of wine, and sat next to him on the couch.
“So your roommate is in Europe?” he asked. Something unspoken was lingering between us. We were either going to have sex or we were going to be friends. I don’t think he knew with any kind of certainty which it would be, but I definitely had a clue.
“Yeah, she’s in Spain for a month visiting an aunt.” He watched me closely, which made me uncomfortable. I was fidgeting. He put his hand over mine and smiled.
“I can’t believe we haven’t kissed yet,” he said, before laughing. Instantly the mood lightened. He had pointed out the elephant in the room and things felt easier. He was staring at my mouth.
“I guess that is weird,” I said. “Not attracted to me, or what?” I teased, knowing that wasn’t the case.
“You’re beautiful and I’m very attracted to you. The most attracted to someone I’ve ever been, I think. I just don’t want to blow it.” He was sincere, but cautious.
