Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [20]
Something about The Life Beyond.
She touched each book on the shelf, as if it would speak to her. None of them did.
“Can I help you?” a young woman asked.
Julie smiled, shrugged a little. “I guess I’m looking for a book. I thought it would be in self-help. It’s called The Life Beyond. At least, I think that’s the title.”
“Let me look it up,” the clerk said, and then retreated to the cash register counter. She emerged a few moments later. “I’m afraid we don’t have that one in at the moment. Michael Diamond’s books are a little hard to get these days. We could order it for you, if you like.”
Julie felt normal for the two minutes or so it took to order the book, but when she was on the street again, it was as if she were afraid to run into her old self. The sky, seen between the overhang of buildings, was shadowy with clouds. She smelled rain in the air. Rain and the exhaust of taxis and buses.
2
She wandered neighborhoods, remembering how it had felt to be younger and living in the city. She glanced in shop windows along Greenwich Avenue, crossed over to Ninth and passed by Electric Lady Studios, thinking of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, the legends who had recorded there, past the Barnes and Noble that had, when she’d lived there, been a B. Dalton’s, past Gray’s Papaya and moved through other stops along her memory’s lane, and there she was, outside her old apartment building. It was as rundown as it had been then, when she and Hut had their trysts, when she had just finished getting over a heartbreak of her twenties and decided that there was no such thing as romantic love, and then, suddenly, she had met Hut, and she believed in things again. She believed that love and romance and happiness were in the world for her.
She sat down on a stoop outside a junk shop on Breton Street, which conjured a scene from her twenties of buying funky lava lamps and scratched-up coffee tables, and she thought of her old friends—Alicia and Joe, whom she used to go to hang out with, see movies, explore the city, cry over relationships that didn’t work, and laugh when life just became too absurd, or the time Joe asked if she’d be the “Best Woman” at his ring ceremony with his husband, Rick, and she had stood on the corner of Bleecker and Cornelius and just wept with happiness for him because she felt someone should be happy and in love. Those were her old days, and then, Hut had come along, and she’d left it all behind. She’d called Joe and Rick less and less, and then Alicia had grown cold (or had it been me? Julie wondered). Alicia had an art studio somewhere now, and Joe was writing novels about the gay community. She had meant to read them, meant to follow up on Alicia’s shows and installations, but Hut had brought her out to Rellingford, and they had quickly built a life, which seemed at times beyond their means. She glanced up at the window that had been her apartment, across the street. Then down the windows to the Chinese laundry, and the overpriced Ethiopian Restaurant next door to it, and beyond that the best deli within three miles. She had loved this neighborhood. She had loved her too-tiny place with its weird neighbors and elevator that worked twice per year (the holidays, because the owner of the building got it inspected then), with its inner walls that Joe had called “birth canal pink,” and the crumbly ceiling in the bathroom.
She remembered Joe’s number. She’d surprise him. It had been at least two years since they’d talked. And now, here she was, a block away from his place. Opened her cell phone. Tapped in the number.
He picked up on the third ring. “Julie?” he asked. Caller I.D. ruined her surprise.
“Hey Joe,” she said, feeling as if she were not midthirties but mid-twenties.
“Well, we thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth. How the hell are you?”
“I’m in the neighborhood.”
“Want to come on over? Or we can go over to Starbucks.”
“I just was remembering. Remember when we all got tickets for Phantom?