I had been living with Manzoor for a handful of years.
Not the kind of living people imagine when they hear that. He had a place, and he had found a couple of roommates to help pay the bills. A generous if frugal man, Manzoor had never asked me to contribute a dime. He saved every penny, cooked for both of us on weekends. Meanwhile, my days were spent drinking alcohol, smoking and watching reruns on the portable black-and-white screen. Kindly put, mine was a numb existence.
“You know the electronics store on 96th and Broadway? I got a job there,” I told him.
He was getting ready to leave for a month-long trip back to his country of birth. I was annoyed by it, though I couldn’t say exactly why. I had always known he was married. That he had children there. None of it had mattered to me.
If anything, it felt oddly flattering when he told me he wanted to take me as his second wife.
At the interview, I sat across from two managers and told them, without hesitation, I was there for the assistant manager position.
Looking back, one of them must have mistaken my naivete for chutzpah. They gave me a job behind the Walkman counter.
It definitely wasn’t chutzpah.
Soon after Manzoor left, I met Joe. And Rita.
That’s when things began to tilt.
A couple of months in, Joe called me one night to declare his undying devotion, insisting he was done with Claire. As in completely done.
Claire, however, had not received that update and firmly believed she was about to become his wife. She didn’t take kindly to me moving into his apartment, just a few blocks from where I still technically lived with Manzoor.
It was wrong, but I did not even pause to question it.
Around that same time, Rita started working the register.
I remember the first time she looked at me, it was not in passing, not the way coworkers do, but with a kind of quiet insistence, like she had already decided something.
She didn’t rush it. I pretended not to notice her subtle approaches, building a kind of anticipation I hadn’t felt in years.I was flattered.
And little by little, she made her way into my days, and then into my thoughts, until there was barely a moment she didn’t occupy.
The day came when I saw Manzoor off at the airport and, as we embraced goodbye, I cried uncontrollably. I remember his face, the way he looked at me. I think he believed it meant I loved him.
As I write this now, I hope he didn’t.
Because what followed doesn’t match that kind of love.
By the time he called me, as he promised he would, I felt… nothing I could name. I spoke to him easily, kindly, but without longing. Like speaking to someone just a few doors down.
I cried when he left. I didn’t miss him when he was gone.
What unsettles me now is not that I left. It’s that I had already left before he ever boarded the plane.
So while Manzoor was away, impulsively, I packed my few belongings, met Joe downstairs and off we went to look at hues of sunset off the brick wall out his kitchen window.
Joe, to his credit, not even once tried to force things between us; we just settled in like two old beer guzzling buddies while I fantasized of Rita’s fragrance and how it would all be like.
We found a rhythm. It didn’t last.
Rita got fired for theft and I made an ass of myself by staging a ridiculous, pompous exit, right there in front of everyone. And within minutes, there was Joe running down Broadway:
“Hey, hey, wait for mee!” as though unhinged.
What can I say, three clueless people just going about aimlessly.
Not long after, we were behind.
Claire was ecstatic.
Rita soon asked me to move into her small apartment, much to the displeasure of her teenage son whose opinion was never even asked.
We lasted ten years.
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