Retro

Come Away with Us

Summer 2017

The bar stranger's apartment was very clean, so clean it was alarming, as if he had recently scrubbed it to cover up evidence of some messy, violent crime. The décor could have been anybody's. Midcentury modern furniture with shiny black accents. Neutral fabrics everywhere. A grid of framed black-and-white photographs of city scenes Ash couldn't place, and a larger print by his bed of abstract art that would've fit in a dentist's office waiting room or the lobby of a Marriott Express. Ash felt a surge of disdain, laced with envy. Had this person ever had an original thought in his entire life? Then again, she couldn't have afforded most of it, and though she liked to think she was the type of person who wouldn't have gone for such a pre-curated life in the event she could afford it, she had yet to be in a financial position to test this theory of her unimpugnable individuality.

She walked barefoot to the bathroom. All smooth, opalescent surfaces, aseptic as an operating theater. Sans serif fonts on all his personal grooming products. She squeezed a blob of white toothpaste onto her index finger and rubbed it across her teeth. Then she closed her eyes and pictured her own bathroom, where the Softsoap she got at the CVS was the tacky, acidic green of a gummy bear, and whorls of her hair stuck in spirals to the shower tile until they slid into the tub and eventually clogged the drain.

When she walked back out he was already making coffee. It was Monday and he was getting ready for work. He looked up from scooping grinds and said, Well, hello there, smiling at her like this whole interaction was some elaborate inside joke, which she guessed it kind of was? It was funny that she could go home with a stranger and not be murdered. She felt like this was what they'd marched for. This is what Susan B. Anthony lived for and what Joan of Arc died for. It was all so she could have the freedom to do exactly this. Probably this isn't quite how they (Susan, Joan, et al.) imagined it would be, but life was full of these kinds of surprises, Ash figured, and that's what made it all-waking up, being alive-such a relentless thrill.

She'd met the bar stranger at a dive where the rainbow string lights stayed up all year round and the playlist was only songs from the '80s or before. After a few drinks, they'd gone outside to flirt without having to shout over the music, and she was struck with a sense of déjà vu: She recognized the building across the street. She'd performed there when she was in this theatre company that did pop-up Shakespeare productions on "found stages," spots in the city that were in some state of transition, usually demolition or construction sites or docks that would soon be swallowed by the sea. The actors were supposed to apply the concept of constant change to their characters: to see the plays and everything in them as existing in perpetual flux, as if the texts were still works in progress.

Ash had been the lead in Romeo and Juliet at a skyscraper-in-the-making. The church where she'd wed had been a heap of rubble christened by a cross of caution tape; her balcony the exposed scaffolding of what would become a luxury condo, though at the time of her performance it still looked like it could have become anything. Its skeletal beginnings had not betrayed its destiny as the eventual address of an investment banker or absent Russian oligarch, just as her then-ascendant stardom had not seemed, yet, like something that would fizzle into nothing. As she'd told the bar stranger about the play, she could only just make out the Capulet house's outline in the glass-walled, foreboding tower looming over her.

"I had this whole theory about my Juliet," Ash had said. "That she knew who Romeo was the whole time."

"Oh yeah?" The bar stranger sucked on a black vape pen whose tip glowed green against the night. "How's that?"

"Verona's not that big. And he's Romeo-the boy from the family blood feud. Plus he's cute. He gets around. Girls talk. She knows."

"So?"

"So she picked him on purpose, because she wanted to blow up her life."

"Blow up her life? Sounds extreme."

Though Ash wasn't quite sure how they'd done it, somehow she and the bar stranger had decided, silently and in unison, to abandon the bar together and walk to his apartment. To her left, the East River glimmered under the moonlight. In the dark it hadn't looked polluted at all. It had looked clean enough for Ash to scoop it into her mouth with her hands.

"Okay, so when she's getting ready for the party-the one where she meets him-her mom comes in and tells her that they're marrying her off to some guy she doesn't even know. And right then, Juliet sees the truth. Her whole life is just beginning and it's already over. There's nothing she can do. She has no agency, no options, no freedom. Right when she's on the cusp of everything really opening up, it's all going to snap shut around her. She's trapped."

"Is that so bad?" He'd smiled at this. "Being trapped with a man?"

I'm ignoring that, Ash had decided. "Her mom tells her that there are girls younger than Juliet who are already mothers. Like Juliet's supposed to get excited about having a bunch of babies with some guy she doesn't even know."

"What makes you so sure she doesn't want to have babies?"

"She's thirteen."

"Sure. But like, in her society. Wasn't that the normal thing to do?"

"Do you really think thirteen-year-old girls ever wanted to have babies?"

"I think most people want to do whatever it is that most people are doing."

I'm ignoring that too. "What Juliet wants is control over her destiny, which is the one thing she doesn't have. So when she sees Romeo at the party, she realizes: That's the ticket. Run away with the one person her parents would never allow her to marry. She knows it's doomed. She's basically signing her own death warrant. But at least she's taking her life into her own hands. This one time-which turns out to be the only time it really matters-she decides."

As she'd said this aloud, Ash remembered how she'd felt when she first came to this conclusion. Up until then, she'd been self-conscious about her performance, struggling to make her dialogue lose that rehearsed, expected quality it seemed to carry no matter what she did. But then she'd thought of this, of Juliet deciding, and the whole play burst wide open, like her thought was the swing that popped the piñata, and candy-sweet clarity rained down around her. When she opened her script again every word shone new as the dawn.

In the elevator of the bar stranger's building, the cold, mirrored walls had reflected warped images of their bodies back at her. He'd placed his hands on the wall on either side of her face and touched his forehead to hers. "So what happens?"

"What do you mean, what happens?"

"Do they live happily ever after, or what?"

"Well, no. It's Romeo and Juliet. They die."

"I thought you said the point was that you guys changed everything around."

"It does change everything around." Had she not made that clear? Ash felt like her brain was floating in a pool of alcohol, suspended in a jar as if for scientific study.

"Except it doesn't really change anything," he'd said. "If they still die at the end."

Ash had steadied herself against the wall, feeling a faint hum on her temple as the elevator climbed and dinged at their arrival. "She makes up her own mind. It changes everything."

"Sounds like the same story to me," he'd said, leading her down the hall and into his apartment.

"It is the same story. But she's different in it."

He'd kissed her collarbone. "If you say so."

She could tell he didn't get it, and she wasn't sure whose fault that was. But as she'd trailed him into his bedroom she had the ambient awareness that he was already flattening her into an anecdote for later evaluation and possibly mockery. She had experienced this as a physical sensation, like the flattening was something he was doing just then with his hands against her body: pressing her down until she was petal-slender. He would forget her name; she knew this as if it had already occurred. She would just be "Juliet" or "Shakespeare Girl" or "some actress," when he told this story to his friends. As he'd slipped her bra straps from her shoulders, she erased his name from her brain, to keep things even between them.

Watching him now as he readied himself for work-as he fumbled to separate two coffee filters that were stuck together-Ash felt like she was prying, almost, by witnessing this mundane routine, as if they were a couple. To kill time while he got dressed, she imagined that were true. She mentally filled his closet with her clothes, covered his countertops with her clutter, collaged his refrigerator door with their candids. She saw herself becoming a smug dispenser, rather than the enraged recipient, of unsolicited dating advice; an occupant of the master bedroom with the en-suite bathroom instead of the bunk-bed basement dungeon on group trips. Felt the weight of a ring around her finger, wedding-cake icing smeared on her nose, her stomach swelling with pregnancies, rapid as time-lapse photography. She could see it all: late nights at the kitchen table cutting construction-paper hearts for valentines and kissing better the scraped spot where the Band-Aid would go and tiptoeing into soft pink bedrooms to swap baby incisors for silver dollars and making that happy-dopey eye contact with the bar stranger over their children's slumbering heads like: Can you believe they're ours?