“I Go Through People”
A Very Short Story
Gilberte was like one of those countries with which one dare not form an alliance because of their too frequent changes of government.
— Marcel Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained)
She warned me upfront. “I go through people,” said Jillian.
My comeback should’ve been: “I obsess on people.” Instead I nodded.
There was no need to reply; I knew what she meant. I was struck by her succinct phrase, though not particularly surprised or disappointed by its content. Well OK it was a bit disappointing, if I’m being honest. Jillian infatuated me for several months during early 1986. This felt embarrassing on a personal level. At age 28, having an unrequited romantic crush seemed somehow inappropriate not to mention emotionally immature.
We both swam laps at the public pool up on East 54th Street, lived near each other down in the East Village. I had spotted her long before we officially met, taking note of her smooth breast-stroke in the water and supple long-legged figure on the pool deck. How did we start talking? Most likely Austin the lifeguard introduced us. He was friendly and outgoing, also slick and slightly arrogant, a handsome ex-cop and self-confessed pothead who killed time conversing with the regular swimmers while clocking his way-too-generous city employee hourly rate. He called Jillian “Jilly Jill,” in tribute to the lead rapper in Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I liked that.
*
“Do you swim every day?” she asked. “I’ve seen you here before.”
“Oh maybe three times a week. I used to just swim on Saturday morning but now that I’m freelancing, working at home, I come more often, it helps clear my head.”
Leaving the pool together, more or less by accident, we chatted on the way toward Second Avenue. On dry land Jillian wore a primary-colored skirt and plain white blouse topped off with a black leather jacket; her hair was mostly dry, almost shoulder-length, vaguely curly. Definitely not a yuppie. It occurred to me that she could be biracial? I would never ask because who cares. After a congenial bus ride to St Marks Place, we agreed to meet later at a newly opened cafe on Avenue A. Her suggestion.
“Do you ever go to Mogador, that’s my favorite, I can spend hours there.”
She wasn’t expecting an answer which was a relief. While I’d occasionally join friends for lunch at Cafe Mogador — one block away from my apartment — or the Cloisters on Ninth Street, I was emphatically not a fan of the pre-Starbucks espresso-sipping scene.
Sporting a fresh shirt and blue jeans under my own black leather jacket, I entered the half-empty cafe at the appointed hour. Jillian came in right behind; we gravitated toward a table for two near the back. Nameless to me now, this corner spot was brightly lit inside, like an all-night diner, with big windows framing the semi-seedy sidewalk traffic.
Ordering the opening round of what concluded as an Olympic event of cappuccino consumption, we began to talk. Initially at least, our dialogue resembled a diplomatic exchange, less spontaneous conversation than a quietly escalating series of guarded statements and careful queries.
Which isn’t to say it was boring. We seemed to enjoy each other, from the start.
I don’t recall either one of us asking the excruciating “what do you do” though we quickly revealed our respective avocations as photographer and writer. I gathered Jillian worked in the fine art realm; she was unfamiliar with the photographers I knew from my travails in journalism.
“I haven’t shown anything yet, there aren’t many galleries for photography, even in the East Village right now it’s mostly about painting or sculpture or uhm performance.”
I mentioned fashion photography and she immediately brightened, allowing she LOVED the unknown-to-me Horst P. Horst and went on to say she was supporting herself as some kind of vaguely defined assistant to an unidentified fashion designer.
“It’s not too taxing but I don’t like working for her. Actually I don’t like her.”
When I mentioned my work as a journalist covering pop music (sorry I irrationally loathe the shorthand terms “music writer” and “music journalist”) she expressed only moderate interest which suited me just fine. I played it low-key: proud of my recent success but not wanting to sound egotistical about writing for national magazines. Jillian was clearly part of the self-consciously parochial East Village bohemian scene.
“My father was — is — an opera singer.”
“Really? That’s amazing. Though I don’t know much, well anything, about opera or classical.”
“Neither do I.” She laughed. “We’re not on the best terms, he split from my mother. He lives in London, I grew up there, came over here to the States for Brown University and decided to stay.”
“Whoa I never would’ve guessed you were British. Actually I’m kind of an Anglophile; uh, as far as my taste in music and books. Until very recently, I worked for an English magazine publisher.”
“Ah see that’s very good that you didn’t know. Because I more or less hide my accent. I can speak seven languages, so American is sort of, well, just another tongue for me.”
“Hey that’s impressive, seven. Like most Americans, I can barely speak English.”
“Growing up in Europe it’s not such a big thing at all. If people in Connecticut or New Jersey spoke different languages, you’d be much more likely to learn.”
“Hmm maybe. Sometimes it seems like people with heavy New York accents, you know from the outer boroughs or Long Island, they speak a different language from us. But that’s another story.”
She smiled in agreement. The waitress brought more coffee. Paraphrasing Martin Amis: unless I inform you otherwise, we’re always ordering and drinking more coffee.
“Anyway that’s pretty er interesting that you don’t want to register as English. Not me, but lots of people would automatically think speaking with an English accent makes you cool.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t want. It’s being judged — thoughtlessly judged.”
“Yeah now I get it.” I didn’t say — didn’t have to say — this made her more cool.
The conversational tide rose and receded naturally; after awhile I relaxed and stopped expecting her to announce an imminent departure during pauses in the action. If the increasing levels of caffeine coursing through our veins elevated any anxiety or tension, it wasn’t apparent.
Naively I brought up the local art gallery scene, then either in full flower or possibly past its peak. I was fascinated by painting and frequented the East Village galleries even before I moved across town in 1985. Right after moving east, I marveled at the conspicuously well-heeled groups of middle-aged white women who wandered lost on Avenue A every weekend. Of course they were searching for the galleries: Gracie Mansion, PPOW, International With Monument, Civilian Warfare, Nature Mort and so on. Fascinated or not, I remained a lurker on the edge of this new art underground. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to write about it as a critic, and despite my soaring confidence, I wasn’t socially secure enough to insert myself into the surrounding scene.
Jillian responded to my story about escorting a member of Duran Duran to a group show on Avenue A for a magazine article by unsubtly one-upping me. Maybe I asked for it? With a knowing look, she solicited my opinion of “her friend” Jean-Michel Basquiat. Once again I knew what she meant, by implication. Even in my circles, his reputation as a ladies man (pardon the expression) equalled his artistic rep.
“He’s good obviously but what I love is the record he produced a few years back, ‘Beat Bop’ by Rammellzee and K-Rob. Jazzy rap meets freestyle beat poetry, there’s nothing else like it.”
“He’s great when he’s not doing drugs. Sometimes I go over to his loft and he’s sitting in his rocking chair, smoking heroin in a tinfoil pipe. That’s when I don’t stay.”
Another story she told that bugged me was even worse, in its way. I forget how we started talking about people getting their apartments burglarized; alongside all the drug dealing, and drug consumption, the Eighties Lower East Side was rife with petty and not-so-petty crime in that era — tons of muggings and rip-offs.
“I know these kids on my block, teenage boys. They break into apartments,” she stated matter-of-factly. “But they leave me alone because we’re friends.”
Whatever her ethnic makeup, Jillian made for an unlikely homegirl. This sounded more like slumming: nostalgia de la boue. Ugh. But I held my tongue; it was a passing moment in an otherwise pleasant, often promising evening. Sometime after midnight we finally asked for the check, right before they kicked us out and closed up shop.
I banished all thoughts of a goodnight kiss or hug when we parted ways on St Marks Place and First Avenue. Our time together didn’t resemble a seduction ritual but it wasn’t sexually null either. A spark neither fanned into flames nor stamped out. But my subsequent sleepless night was due to all that coffee, not starry-eyed whatever.
Staying awake until the I Love Lucy reruns aired at dawn didn’t upend my schedule too much since I didn’t have to go into an office the next day. After several brain-dead hours spent slowly transcribing an interview, the phone rang and much to my surprise, it was Jillian. We hadn’t exchanged numbers. She invited me to go see a movie; we met in front of a theatre on 34th Street. It was either the Brat Pack epic Pretty In Pink or Woody Allen’s Hannah And Her Sisters. You’d think I’d remember the film, but no.
As soon as we sat down, Jillian extracted a pint of Haagen Dazs from her cloth shoulder bag, handed me a wooden spoon, and declared that she couldn’t abide people who talked during movies. So I remained silent for the next two hours and in fact, on the longish walk back downtown, we awkwardly didn’t have much of anything to discuss, as though all that caffeinated verbal almost-intimacy from the night before was now forgotten or vaguely embarrassing. Back at home alone, I kicked myself for well I don’t know what. I guess she went through me even faster than I anticipated.
In retrospect, I went through her too, in my earnest and less self-aware way.
Our long conversation in the cafe was a version of the interviews with musicians that I conducted every week in those years: a concentrated probing, an attempt to extract some sense of my subject’s personality along with details of their personal history in a constrained period of time. Perhaps I slipped into my professional mode without realizing it, forgetting to just be myself instead of being impressive or oh you guessed it, cool.
*
One night during the early Nineties, Jillian and I momentarily crossed paths again. Recognizing each other across a crowded restaurant in the just-starting-to-gentrify Meatpacking District, we sustained eye contact for a spell. She returned my smile and I sensed something unexpected in her eyes, something I couldn’t identify: vulnerability, regret, uncertainty about what had passed between us on that long-ago night. I turned my head to answer a question my wife asked. When I looked back, Jillian was gone.
