Luster

by Raven Leilani

“You’re kind of aloof,” he says, and all the kids stacked underneath my trench coat rejoice. Aloof is a casual lean, a choice. It is not a girl in Bushwick, licking clean a can of tuna.

As I climb the stairs to my apartment, I have already resolved to call out of work tomorrow and spend all night furiously masturbating to Top Chef.

My roommate and I have been supporting a family of mice for six months.

When I go back inside, I think about how little the mouse wants. I think about the chicken grease and peanut butter. I think about how before lunchtime, one of the bodega cats will rise from a crate of Irish Spring and welcome the mouse into its jaws.

Now I am social. I show my teeth to my coworkers and feign surprise at the dysfunction of the MTA.

I almost lose a seat to a woman who gets on at Union Square, but luckily her pregnancy slows her down.

Kieran from bodice rippers taking me from behind and going on and on about severing my body from my limbs and the whole time I’m laughing and I don’t know why.

They have passionate debates in the elevator about embossing and Verdana and Courier New. They have their own hours and their own dress code, each in that chic, dorky limbo that is the domain of the old art school kid.

I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

He is infinitely more talented in the thing I most want to do, and he seems to prefer it that way. It is silly how late this occurs to me, the carrots he dangles in his boredom, how casually he reaches for the stick.

My laugh, the real one, is a robust, ugly thing that has, on occasion, startled the drink right out of a date’s hands. So full credit is due when there is only the barest inclination on her face that she has heard it.

She is, I suppose, sexy in the way a triangle can be sexy, the clean pivot from point A to B to C, her body and face breaking no rules, following each other in a way that is logical and curt.

I load up on the free hand lotion the publisher started putting out after it was revealed that the women in the company (a whopping 87 percent of the employee base) are still making less than the men.

I close my eyes and will myself not to cry, but I was so close to being able to spend eleven dollars on lunch.

I throw in some blatant lies and make sure any inconsistencies are small enough to explain away once I have a foot in the door and am armed with enough recon on my interviewer to either have talking points on the company culture or a five-point plan to suck dry any available reservoirs of white guilt.

I ask my customers to confirm my name, at times to be sure I have the right address, but mostly just to hear the sound.

He may be the only man in recent memory to make me come, but he is not even on Twitter.

I imagine what it might be like to ride exclusively on NJ Transit, which has significantly less feces than the G. I read through requirements for entry-level jobs that are not requirements so much as requests that the applicant have “a good sense of humor” and basic tech literacy for 41K a year.

He opens the window and puts the radio on, and we smoke a flat joint I find in the bottom of my purse. He keeps saying he doesn’t feel anything, but then he takes a comb out of his briefcase and spends a while putting different parts in his hair.

I go on StreetEasy and look for studios in Bedford Park and Gravesend, and when I do a Google Street View of one of the apartments, it is just an enormous crater in the ground. Newly Renovated! it says,

On the radio, every station is muddied by the echo of an approximate frequency, and it is only when we reach Crown Heights and Rebecca kills the engine that I hear a voice say, Tonight only, before we climb the stairs to my apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up with a brand-new toilet and too-friendly cat.

After, the water pressure is better, but I cannot help feeling that any attempt to improve this situation, the indelible ruin of New York real estate, is absurd.