Hipster Love Stories: Jane and the UBS Boy Part II

Jane saw him in her peripheral vision as she boarded the Manhattan bound train.  Tidy brown hair and shaved skin.  Tall.  Narrow jeans.  A blazer and a tie.  She couldn’t see his face but she was getting less picky as fall made its sudden descent into winter.  She took a seat across from his place at the door, his large hands grasping onto a pole surely covered in germs.  As the train moved, the bodies in front of her parted enough so that through them she saw it: the UBS bag.

Her heart leapt.  She had managed to find him again.  Not that they had shared any real connection or even a true, singular intimate moment; Jane had merely stared at him for the better part of four minutes a few weeks previous in an unrequited and unreciprocated moment of infatuation.  This happened a lot on trains, she found.  And in bars and coffee shops and streets and…That was the problem here: there were too many beautiful people everywhere.  Boys and girls.  So many options that it seemed no one was ever happy with what they had because they could always want so much more, all of the time.  Love and Lust in New York City was like a diner open 24/7 with a menu the size of the Bible.

The L Train lurched and the bodies in front of her parted again, his face coming into view.  His hair was a work of art, combed so precisely and meticulously that all Jane wanted in the world was to sit in his bathroom, the tile chilling her from her seat on the floor, and watch him create these stiff waves in his hair.  That was all she really wanted out of boys – these small moments that nobody else got to see.  Jane didn’t want flowers or jewelry or dinners; she wanted to see how a man got dressed in the morning, she wanted to know what his favorite shirt was, she wanted them to give that to her – accidentally and unknowingly – nonreturnable and nonrefundable keepsakes.

Jane noticed that he was reading a new book, though she couldn’t tell what book it was.  Obviously a particular person, UBS Boy covered his books with a rubbery black sheath that she had only ever seen used to protect iPads.  In real life – and not the made up, idealistic one in Jane’s head – he was probably anal retentive to an extreme, sterile in an annoying way that Jane would grow to find unattractive.  But here on the train, she found the care for his book endearing.  She watched him read, his brow trapped in perpetual concern.

Union Square came too soon and he had not looked up to catch Jane staring at him, something that was both good and bad – saving her from equal parts awkwardness and possibility.  The doors opened and he took to the stairs, his midnight blue, patent leather sneakers flying forward against the terminal floor.  Jane quickened her pace, moving aggressively through confused foreigners and glacial old people.  She couldn’t keep a fast enough pace, catching him just as he rounded corners, his perfect head of hair disappearing from view.

As Jane ran/walked, she contemplated making a giant poster to place on one of the walls leading out of the L train platform reading: Attention Beautiful Boy with the patent blue sneakers and the UBS bag.  I love you for nothing.”  She could either leave her number or not, making something that was already weird even weirder.

By the time she reached the top of the stairs, he had vanished entirely.  Jane craned her neck in a silly attempt to spot him out of a crowd of surging bodies.  Coming and going, bumping and pushing, while an African drum beat played out on empty paint cans provided a soundtrack to her increasingly pathetic romantic life.

Hipster Love Stories: Terry and Nora

Terry buys her a piece red velvet cake and a decaf coffee to which Nora adds one creamer and three packets of Splenda.  She would kick this habit eventually, she thought, but no amount of research about the correlation between cancer in rats and artificial sweeteners served as inspiration enough to use real sugar.  She wasn’t much for cake, either, which was filled with plenty of the stuff, but a boy had never bought her a piece of cake to share before and she wasn’t going to say anything.

He is wearing black pants, a black shirt, and a tan jacket.  His skinny, Cool Kid uniform.  Nora’s brain is fuzzy from three hours of sleep.  They went back to his place after a show last night.  Terry made her take two ibuprofens and a sip of water to cure what she woke up with the next morning anyway.  He didn’t need to take care of her and it had made her uncomfortable and apprehensive about the inevitable end.  She was used to inevitable ends – that’s what happens when you’re young and Love still loves you and doesn’t love you with equal measure, but at least Love is still interested, Love still flirts with the idea of you.

They leave the restaurant after cake and caffeine, heading back to her house and putting on 3:10 To Yuma though neither of them will actually watch it.  Not that night, not ever.  All Nora wants to do is fall asleep or kiss him until she does.  She can’t stop kissing him.  In the faux wood-paneled elevator of his building, quick kisses at red lights, getting in and out of their cars.  Their cuteness is stupid and it makes her nervous.  She feels like the cow befriending her butcher.  That’s how it always feels.

That morning Terry woke up next to Nora, petting her hair and saying how she was hard to read.  Nora’s stomach hurt and she said something about being burned a few times.  What she didn’t mention was the two-and-a-half years of being habitually disappointed, she didn’t tell him how badly she just wanted to love somebody and no one would ever love her back, she didn’t admit that she had pretty much wallowed in that sort of burdened brain until eight days ago after another dinner party with too much food and a bottle of wine when he told her she deserved better and that she was “kind of amazing.”  She couldn’t believe it but she wanted to believe it, which was kind of how she felt about God and heaven and hell.

As Nora had made her way through years of the single life in Los Angeles, a depressing feature film about boys who never grew up and douche bags who owned Aston Martins and points in restaurants, she had becoming increasingly disheartened about her prospects in love.  Terry represented a possibility she was beginning to think insurmountable – the idea that every day she would wake up and there would be someone that wanted to wake up next to her, that a person would want to know what she was doing at any odd point during the day.

“It’s a strange addiction I’ve developed,” he said, which was likely the most poetic thing he would ever end up saying to her, whether he intended it to be or not.  He wasn’t much for words, frequently misusing them and misspelling them, all of which only made Nora love him more.

Hipster Love Stories: John

John sat on the train across from a pale, brunette couple holding hands and mouths and he felt the pang of loneliness he had been so diligently trying to avoid.  Dinner with friends, movies with friends, dancing with friends, drinking with friends.  It kept going and it had been going on for the last three months.  He left her in June for a Single Summer in New York.

They met in LA because that was where they both lived at the time.  On their first date he picked her up in his friend’s old Mercedes with a missing back window.  He wore his gray pants made out of a nubby wool that would end up being her favorite pair, that was in course, until he broke up with her, at which point they were her least favorite pair in the whole world.  In fact, whenever she saw gray pants with a dropped-crotch and skinny legs she would shudder and avert her eyes.  She knew it was ridiculous but she couldn’t help it.

That night John took her to a bad club, the kind where girls wore spandex dresses and hooped earrings and danced to things like 50 Cent.  His friends came, too – two shorter boys that reminded her of elves.  But it didn’t matter that the club was terrible; they had fun anyway.  And when he danced, hopping on one foot and pretending to throw a pair of dice, she laughed under the changing lights.  He watched her as he did this, this hopping around thing he’d been doing since he was fifteen, he watched her face under the purples and blues and pinks and knew that he could love her already.

They kissed in a dark alleyway off of the main drag where his little elf friends were walking.  Neither of them was drunk and they would remember it later and it wouldn’t embarrass them.  Though now that moment had happened so long ago – years, nearly – that neither of them could remember the specifics or even the feeling.  It was all evaporating – everything they had.

He slept over at her house that night, and many nights thereafter until they ended up prematurely moving in together – something that happens when you’re young and don’t know any better, before you know what endless amounts of exposure to another person can do to a relationship.

In the morning she would make him eggs and each time she set the plate down in front of him she would apologize because she wasn’t good at making breakfast foods, especially eggs.  She was better at dinner, she would say, which was true.

If she slept at his house, she would wake up in the morning and make coffee with a little French press to quell the hunger while waiting for him to make breakfast, which was tastier than her own.  He always had asparagus in the fridge, so they would eat that.  And he was recently into turkey bacon, so they would eat that, too.  They sat at a small table next to a window overlooking Korea Town, drinking coffee and watching each other, sometimes not talking at all.

Those were the good times.  Times when they made each other mix tapes and were still nervous when they held hands.  The first time he went to hold her hand, she didn’t trust him because no one had ever wanted to hold her hand before.  Eventually, he stopped holding her hand when they crossed streets together and this made her terribly sad.  It made her remember what it was like to not have someone want to hold your hand, and it was worse because you were living with the person who didn’t want to hold it.  That was the worst part, the handholding, how it stopped.

The subway lurched to a halt in between stations and John felt awkward sitting across from the couple he had unintentionally been staring at this whole time.  He shifted in his seat and looked out the window next to them at the unintelligible graffiti made by teenage children who thought they could outsmart trains.  Love, he thought, love was such a thing.