Actually, I liked the heat. Everyone was vulnerable in it, we all had to endure it the same way: slow walk, late to work, sweating, small gasping, half-lidded, searching for shade. It felt mammal. There was nothing to do about the speckled wet patches on the back of a cotton shirt, or the pit stains in an Oxford, the sliding of your feet against rubber flip flops, the bake of leather totes. Nylon did nothing—even the unitards couldn’t save us, even the portable silicone dog bowls were scalding to the touch. The only people who seemed to enjoy it were the shirtless men running on Second Ave, mouth open, AirPods in, hoping the word “hardo” returns to you with a shy glance toward their soaked chest.
I take a car back to Lincoln with a 20-pound ice bucket and a dead phone and my driver is doing everything he can to cool the car, but the air conditioning smells like dog breath and ethanol and it’s blasting room temp. He’s sweating through his whole shirt. When I ask if we can roll down the windows, he says “yes, yes, thank you.”
The movers show up at 8am. Bobi, Greek, “my name is so many syllables you wouldn’t be able to say it,” chides me for my unreported storage bed and tells me we can work out a deal under the table. He invites me to have dinner with him in Astoria, anytime I want, he knows everybody there, everything, anything I want to eat will be free. He refuses a sandwich as we encroach on 1:30pm and he’s completely soaked through from carrying my ugly cabinets up two flights of stairs. He tells me my eyes are a different color in every room of the house. I tip him $200.
I take an Amtrak to Virginia for the weekend to shop for wedding dresses with Maureen, which requires a trip to Penn Station in midday heat—the first summer day of the year, people are saying.
What that means is traversing through Midtown between streets that smell like fish and sulfur and Jamestown, swamp and gunpowder, a place made for running the most inconvenient errands of your life, to stare blankly into the dark purple buttholes of white dogs, alert at the crosswalk; hustling through long blocks behind slow walkers with never less than 40 pounds hanging off your body. Sour, mucosal smell of the passersby, some in literal rags with eye and mouth and hand ticks, sudden blast of AC from the Peloton building. I get to the station 90 minutes early, so I walk to a cafe four long blocks away and pay $19 for an avocado toast. As always, I spend most of the Amtrak ride doing nothing but looking outside. As always, I forgot my headphones.
Maureen’s new house in Virginia is huge and beautiful and has a towering oak in the backyard, a long back porch the width of the house, a garden room, three bedrooms, a pebbled walkway on which I sit and watch bugs in the sun while other people get ready. I feel so restless all weekend, like I have to be in the sun as much as I can, like I have to swim somewhere or touch grass, smell deeply, have a cold beer every day, because after 72 hours I’m back to dog butthole sulfur smell and no hot water or kitchen electricity or WiFi and my bed frame delivered but unbuilt. We walk to the river and I tip toe around on the wet rocks and I can sense that Maureen is quiet because she’s missing her fiancé, because she’s always missing her fiancé—even 10 minutes without him and her mood changes.
My AC unit is stolen from the lobby on the morning the heat wave begins. I text my building group chat and they assure me, as a new tenant, no one would do that here. Someone would, evidently, but for some reason, I actually don’t care that much. I’m more stressed out about other things like: receiving a dozen texts and four emails a day about an event I’m hosting on Friday—How many sign-ups now? What’s your press plan? Do we have a photographer? Have we confirmed floral budget? Has anyone seen the space yet? When are you going? Can you coordinate?—like the very tense state of my security deposit from my last apartment, like a disciplinary talk at work about my Substack’s transparency, like dating a writer equal parts reticent and exuberant and having nothing in the fridge but beer, one very old steak, and shredded carrots.
I lie awake during the heatwave, for three nights in a row, with a Dyson fan on 10 power, completely nude and spread like a starfish with my window open because the airflow helps, even if the airflow is 93 degrees. I have no window screen until Peter notices six or so varieties of bugs flying around my room—“where’s the leak, Harrison?”—while bringing me an ice water. He locates a screen from somewhere else in the apartment and kills a roach-looking thing on the wall with tongs and a paper towel on his tip-toes.
Since dating Julian, I’m seeing his type everywhere: across from me at a cafe’s high top a man in a tight black t-shirt with pierced ears is telling his friend “imperialism is gonna do what it’s gonna do.” Reading Chomsky has made me particularly alert to the vocabulary men are using to discuss politics, always with a practiced political correctness that irritates me—like they need me to know they’re milling around behind the NYT paywall, they play a little cerebral game on their phone during their morning commute, they’re up on the local elections.
When Eddie talks about politics, he’s so effusive, and he’s funny, and everything has three data points.
Everywhere I go, people are checking in about mayoral ranking which feels so much less like genuine interest than it does a social pressure to stay in line. When I get drinks with a girl Vyanka she asks me what a democratic socialist agenda is and I’m surprised I know the answer. I walk past the stairs of Brooklyn Museum on Monday night, a crowd of people are cheering and clapping while a man says something indiscreet into a megaphone to the rousing crowd.
A few nights ago Braedan looked me dead in the eyes and said: no, America really does have a democracy. He’s Canadian. I don’t say so, but everything I’m reading right now would suggest we don’t have one: “Achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled—because it’s radically anti-democratic.”
They could still elect a Republican mayor, Maureen reminds us in the group chat. At the crosswalk I see a D.R.E.A.M. sticker—Don’t Rank Evil Andrew Mayor.
I tell Braedan that reading political science for the first time feels like I just found out about movies. An entire lexicon exists that I hear everywhere around me all the time now. I’m sort of chuffed with myself that I actually knew most of this and just didn’t have language for it. It’s sort of isolating, isn’t it, the language—like actually I knew a lot of this stuff, as anyone who’s been supporting themselves for 10 years would—but then it turns out we have all this vocabulary to talk about it like free trade and free-market capitalism and free enterprise and mixed economy and a bunch of high-level concepts for the regular shit we’re doing every day to exist. It kind of leads things into the hands of intellectuals, don’t you think, because then anyone even marginally uneducated, like even me, doesn’t know what the fuck anyone in power is talking about, really. So then it sort of becomes a thing of like: well, they’ll handle it. I guess also like going through public school and then to a private university, taking on federal and private loans at 19 years old, navigating APR through your 20s, buying $10 free range eggs, COVID and two Trump elections, anti-abortion litigation, a social group where most have multiple homes, writing daily about renovations done to “feel something,” and you start to get a sense of how things are awry, or at least don’t make a lot of sense.
For 6 days in a row I call Abdul, my super’s assistant, about three to four times a day, begging him to come fix the electricity and water heater. National Grid leaves us a hazardous warning slip relaying that a hole has been blown in the flue pipe, at risk of leaking carbon monoxide into the basement. I’ve been showering at the boy’s house for three days. Around 9pm each evening Abdul calls me: My car broke down, I’m too busy today, today is so busy. Once, he calls me and says “Julia, I have the funniest story to tell you—I just woke up. I went to the mosque to pray and laid down, and it was so comfortable, Julia, I fell asleep! And now I’m late to the bakery to deliver treats to my daughter. My wife is calling me, my daughter—I can’t come by tonight.” I tell Peter I sort of love Abdul. I mean, I won’t pay the six days of rent we didn’t have electricity or hot water, but I do love him.
On day six, I say: Abdul, I’m hiring a Taskrabbit and the management company is footing the bill. He says: I’m coming, so sorry, you’re a very patient woman. He arrives at 8:30am the following day. He spends an hour fixing everything and another hour telling me about the Qoran, and another half hour about everything he likes to get at Smoothie King.
When I sleep over at Braedan’s, he says he’ll just run across the street to get me a toothbrush. I feel sort of paralyzed by the gesture, and when he returns he says “you’re kissing me like you hate me.” On our next date he asks me what I look for in a partner and I don’t know, really. I feel like I’m usually dating someone sort of helpless and unhelpful, I say. He says I’m sort of a take-charge person, maybe I don’t give opportunities for my partners to be helpful. I say totally, maybe, and think to myself: I begged my boyfriend to make me dinner for Valentine’s Day once. I had to walk him up to the fish counter at Kroger and then order the filets myself. “I’ve never done that,” he said while we walked to the car.
Somewhere a man I’ve loved is telling the same kind of story, revealing I’ve never parallel parked, never properly used a wall anchor.
On Sunday morning a black Cadillac picks me up from my house and drives me to the Mayflower Inn in Washington, Connecticut. My driver is PK—you couldn’t pronounce it, he says, it’s too long, so: PK. There’s sparkling water in the cooler between the seats, and WiFi. I spend the day among big tents with sweeping block-printed textiles, women in head-to-toe Tuckernuck, maxi dresses, gingham details, children named Mackenzie, big straw hats, hugo spritzes, picnic baskets full of grilled vegetable sandwiches. Feels like a really tone-deaf way to spend the day after we declared war on Iran, I tell my boss on Monday.
During my lunch break the following day I’m outside a Tribeca cafe cooking my body in the heat reading about the Bolsheviks, and reading it twice because I have to then go and find out what vanguardism is.
Sometimes when I read other women’s writing my age I felt like we were all trying to be deep thinkers, but there wasn’t anything wrong, really, not for us. It was like we just didn’t know what to do with an education after school, we were in the wrong line of bureaucratic work for our creativity, and men were never chasing us outside of three dates, or ritual and spiritless sex. Small mango chunks at the Whole Foods were $9.99/lb. I didn’t want to post about Zohran on my Instagram story and then go have lunch at the Whole Foods hot bar for the same reason it didn’t feel right to educate myself about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the backseat of a Cadillac.
I forgot Whole Foods has that pay with your palm thing, which reminds me of a trashcan I nearly kicked in Midtown this week because I had to scan it with my phone to open the chute. I can imagine with perfect clarity how quickly that would ruin an entire day of my dad’s life, if that happened to him. That happened once, too, when he visited Sewanee. He literally couldn’t handle the collared shirt of it, the paunched, affluent weekend-long party. When he visited me for the second time years later, to drop off the Elantra, I asked him to come by and meet my friends for a drink at the Inn. My dad spotted us outside and instead of entering through the portico, he shimmied through the hedge, the branches tearing at his cargo shorts. Jackson looked at me like: of course this is your dad. On the way out, he did the same thing to exit, leaving a completely mangled indent in the hedge, and I followed him. The following day, he left me a bag of Gala apples on the passenger seat as a parting gift.
Everyone just put their trash on top of and around the app-access-only trashcan.
I get onto the 4 downtown with two women and a baby. One holds the baby against her chest and an application for a U.S. passport in her hand. The other woman holds a bag of Burger King. They’re both big women, and their feet spill out of their slip-on shoes. When the baby cries they shuffle through their bags for a bottle and while he drinks from it in the arms of the passport-keeper, he reaches his little hand out to touch the Burger King-keeper with his fingertips, which don’t move for the duration of his bottle-drinking. He has huge eyes and never blinks. He just stares up at the subway lights while he knocks back eight ounces of milk. I watch the Burger King-keeper fight sleep. One eye closes continuously and involuntarily while she tries to keep the other one open.
Meanwhile my kombucha is leaking out of the bottom of my Leland Francis tote into my eyelet skirt, and soaking the Peugeot salt and pepper shakers I brought in for work.
I spend a couple days thinking about shame, and how useful or useless it is, with no conclusions: shame as a private versus public act. I guess I wonder how much of my shame feels actually personal, and how much of it is a way to signal a conscience more than have one, to exonerate privilege by indicating at least you’re feeling guilty about it.
On my way to Olmo, the bus passes Second Chance Worldwide Ministries, and along its facade is an automated marquee with blue lettering: Just something to consider…they start missing you when they fail to replace you…
Every summer it occurs to me just how vacuous things feel when there’s no one to whom you can say I love you in that warm way that burns your cheeks and stays in your throat. It’s kind of like being a magnet without another magnet.
oh damn you're such a good writer
Reading this made me want to write!